What?
Super Stardust. Xenon. XP8 AGA. Project X. Smooth scrolling, plenty-of-sprites-on-screen shooters.
I won't say much about these games in terms of gameplay, but graphically they don't compare to Thunderforce IV, no, and sound-wise... The Mega Drive is miles ahead when it comes to game background music. With only four channels of sampled sound, while it might be the more desirable setup for many for just music production, the sound effects interrupting the music is so glaringly obvious.
The reason why a Sonic game might be smoother on the megadrive is the same reason the amiga suffered ports that were worse than on the megadrive: the coders didn't give enough of a shit to code them properly for the Amiga, whereas a company like Sega whose mascot was Sonic would have pulled out all stops to make Sonic a flagship title: their survival depended on it. Megadrive ports were farmed off to third parties that didn't optimize the games for Amiga.
There are no Amiga ports of Sonic 2 to compare, but right off the bat I can say that Sonic 2 wouldn't be possible on a stock Amiga 1200 because of its 10 channel crystal clear stereo sound, for example. Some will argue that 4 sample channels sound better (and I disagree) but from a technical point of view, no, the Amiga couldn't handle 10 channels of sound at that fidelity while trying to do what's happening on-screen in Sonic 2. I hate to speak in terms of number of audio channels and number of colors, but there you have it; not possible.
And no, I don't think the programmers were lazy, but they were crippled by the fact that to display more than 8 sprites, all with a single palette, they had to muck about a lot with the copper, and to have parallax scrolling background planes, they had to use a lot of tricks (hogging a lot of CPU), ending up with inflexible results in all practical cases. Getting 80 sprites on screen on a multi-layer multi-directional scrolling background on the Mega Drive is a breeze compared to the Amiga, meaning that developers could focus more on game logic than on getting stuff on the screen through seemingly magic tricks.
What? It was all the stuff Amiga custom chips did with very little CPU power that set the Amiga apart.
That wasn't at all unique for home computers at the time (and it was something game consoles had already been doing for quite some time). What set set the Amiga apart IMO was that it was able to compete with and even surpass game console/arcade hardware at the time of its release, while still being a usable personal computer. By the release of AGA, this edge was long lost, and AGA itself did very little to take it back.
And you'll never see Super Mario Bros on the megadrive, either.
While it's besides the point again, it's funny that you should
mention it.
You implied that Sonic's absence on the Amiga due to AGA's technical inferiority was a contributor to AGA's failure.
I didn't say anything about technical inferiority. I said that a game like Sonic 2 isn't possible on a stock Amiga 1200 as a reply to runequester's list of fallacious "You can't do X on Y" arguments, which doesn't mean to say that I think that the Amiga is inferor. There are things that can be done on the Amiga that the Mega Drive could only dream of. It was an odd move for Commodore, though, not to add features similar or even comparable to those of contemporary game consoles like the MD or the SNES, since most of their user base obviously wanted a machine to play games on.
I can honestly say I don't recall anyone saying: "If Amiga only had Sonic..." Doom, yes. Mario, maybe. Sonic, meh...It was a boring game
Your anecdotal recollection of the past doesn't mean anything in this discussion, and neither does your opinion of Sonic 2. The fact remains that Mega Drives/Genesis systems are still being produced, and Sonic 2 is almost always near the top in "all time best" charts along with Doom and some Mario games.
