It is 2023, and though much less hostile than they used to be, the console wars still rage on, inexplicably firing up every time a port of a Capcom game is missing a strand of Leon Kennedy’s silken locks, or what have you. Fact is, even as insufferable as an Xbox/Sony argument can get now, no gaming generation since has known the sheer strife of the 16-bit days–if for no other reason than most games that come out for multiple systems now are, truly, the same game, plus or minus a few performance issues. Back in the bad old days of the 16-bit era, though, not only was it a crapshoot if the same game on a different platform would look the same, sound the same, have the same features, or get censored for some obtuse reason, but there wasn’t a guarantee you would even get the same game. Imagine something like Alan Wake 2, except Saga Anderson’s chapters were on PS5 and Alan’s chapters were on Xbox. That sounds absurd now. Back in the ’90s, this was every Tuesday.
This year, Disney’s Aladdin turns 30. It’s a still-smoldering battlefield of the old console wars, when the Genesis version was a Virgin Interactive title with the full force of Disney’s animators, and the SNES got a Capcom platformer designed by some nobody named Shinji Mikami. But it was far from alone, and with three decades of distance, it’s time to settle some old scores, and figure out which system had it best with 15 16-bit games that shared a name, and not much else.
