Genesis The "What is the worst SEGA game?" Official Off-topic Spin-Off Thread (Aka "Sega Game Toshokan Revenge Land II" or "Shenmue 4" for friends)

[Deleted member 111615]

Ok, I will do what I promised in that other thread called "What is the worst SEGA game?" made by Miles, so visit it, and give your opinion about the worst SEGA game, THERE, not here. Do it. It is a threat. With "T". Mine. Not from Miles. Miles did the Thread, with "D". It is not the same. "ENGLISH, madafaka! Do you speak it?!!"

Okeeey.

So... what I promised? to answer UnDubious, in another thread... that means here, like the title says VERY clear.
Why? Cause aliens.

(Aliens)

But first...

It's important to note that 1 megabit (Mb) is the same as 128 kilobytes (KB), and thus 1 megabyte (MB) is 8 megabits.

It's entirely possible the games were listed in Mb as opposed to MB

Sonic Eraser is 256KB or 2Mb

Yeah, back then they advertised games by the number of "megs", meaning megabits. "Mb" wasn't used. For example, the back of the Phantasy Star IV box says "24 megs of role-playing challenge!". But ROM was still very expensive in the late '80s and early '90s, so it took a few years before you started seeing bigger 16-bit games, so the point remains - early Genesis games were still rather small, and SegaNet games were smaller still.

Sega also used Mega Power a few times. Space Harrier on Sega Master System was "Twice the Mega Power" to say that it was 2 megabits

That "Mega Power", was in fact just 128KB. But yeah... "Mega" Power.

I, always use the MB (MegaBytes) now, not the Megabits mesure system, because it is easier to understand if you try to download anything from the internet, which, btw, is not a big truck.

(It's a series of tubes. I hope this forum REALLY understands that. It is important to understand.)

Megabits (which is the same as "Megs") were really only used in the cart-based consoles of the 80 and 90s, which includes Master System, NES, Mega Drive, Super Nintendo, GameBoy and Game Gear... and Nintendo 64.

It was never a serious thing to use bits instead of Bytes, and as much as we have great memories talking about "Megs" and "Megabits"... they are dumb. Started to have no sense to use "Megabits" when the CD format arrived to consoles with their HUGE capacity of around 600 MB to 800 MB, LOTS of MB. Imagine to translate that number, to Megabits: "4,800 to 6,400 Megabits"? stupid as hell, and destroyed Neo Geo forever. So, nobody did that, for respect to Neo Geo users.

(Ha-Ha! Mega-CD games had 6 times more megs, 12 years earlier! ... and were a lot cheaper)

But forgetting about the looted poor Neo Geo users, Nintendo 64 extended the practice of the "Megs" use instead of MB, until its very end, in the early 2000s..

Those below are the original "Megs" (or "Megabits") in "official" Cart sizes, for the Genesis/Mega Drive games.
In Bold, the most common sizes.

Sizes (Megabits) = ROM size in your PC Examples of games
1 Megabit = 128 Kilobytes (128 KB) -----> Columns / Fatal Labyrinth / Flicky
2 Megabits = 256 Kilobytes (256 KB) -----> Alex Kidd / Rambo III / Italia '90 / Klax
4 Megabits = 512 Kilobytes (512 KB) -----> Sonic / St. of Rage / Thunder Force II and III
5 Megabits = 640 Kilobytes (640 KB) -----> Ghouls 'n Ghosts (very unusual size, only 3 games)
6 Megabits = 768 Kilobytes (768 KB) -----> Road Rash / Wonder Boy in M. W. / Phant. Star II and III
8 Megabits = 1 Megabyte (1 MB) ----> Sonic 2 / OutRun / Roc. Kni. Adv. / TMNT: Hyperstone
10 Megabits = 1.25 Megabytes (1.25 MB) -> Romance of the Three Kingdoms III (unique) [only the US ver.]
12 Megabits = 1.5 Megabytes (1.5 MB) --> Shining Force / Flashback / Rolling Thunder 3
16 Megabits = 2 Megabytes (2 MB) ----> Sonic 3 / Streets of Rage 2 / Aladdin / Shining Force 2
17 Megabits = 2.2 Megabytes (2.2 MB) --> Legend of Wukong (unique) [unlicensed game. Translated later]
20 Megabits = 2.5 Megabytes (2.5 MB) ---> Sega Sports 1 (unique) [Compilation of 3 games]
24 Megabits = 3 Megabytes (3 MB) ----> Ph. Star IV / Lion King / S. of Rage 3 / Eter. Champions
32 Megabits = 4 Megabytes (4 MB) ----> Sonic 3D / Toy Story / Ult. MK3 / Slam Masters / Virtua Fighter 2
40 Megabits = 5 Megabytes (5 MB) ----> Super Street Fighter II (unique)

(released after the official MD commercial life)
64 Megabits = 8 Megabytes (8 MB) -----> Pier Solar (unique)
80 Megabits = 10 Megabytes (10 MB) ----> Paprium (unique)

And now, the actual thing:

1MB was more than the first wave of commercial Genesis games. Revenge of Shinobi is 512kb or so. Those SegaNet games are half that - a quarter when compressed. They're really just mini-games. The novelty of downloading games was crazy for the time but retail games were in a different league. I think Fatal Labyrinth started as a SegaNet game, though? That's basically the precursor to the Mystery Dungeon series, the original Japanese roguelike.
Pyramid Magic is an okay puzzle series too. Nothing amazing though.

Yeah, you are right, until 1990 a 1MB cart was a "big" game for MD. In fact, Sonic1 from 1991 has 512KB and was a BIG release. And something like 1/8 of those KB are dedicated to the "SEEEGA" audio of the start. Which in 1991 was very cool, so, my SEAL OF APPROVED. Probably all the games in the Toshokan service were about 128 and 256 KB.

I've seen some places calling the Toshokan service "SegaNet", like you do, but I don't really know if this is correct Apparently the service had some sort of "News section" called Sega Net News, so maybeeee..., BUT "SegaNet" is much more related and remembered as the Dreamcast internet service in US years later.

And a wild off-topic appears!
In Europe, the "SegaNet" equivalent was the "Dreamarena" (a surprinsingly successful service in a time many europeans did not even had internet in their PCs, or even a PC... So, literally, many Dreamcast users connected for the first time to the internet thanks to its console. Sega Europe did a lot of effort there, doing agreements with the big ITs of the biggest european countries, to make sure europeans got internet with their Dreamcasts, and NOBODY, CURIOUSLY, NEVER, SEEMS TO FUCKING REMEMBER THAT IN THE MEDIA. Only retarded people repeating stupid fake propaganda mantras like "hahah SeGa always sUckEed And dID all the THings bAd and I'm retAAaard". Shut the F U Retard! YOU GO FULL RETARD.

(Never go full retard)

Meanwhile... Sony did just the OPPOSITE, and happy neglected the online gaming in Europe during years in its new PS2, literally erasing the PS2 BIG MAGNA OPUS Online game (a colossal project) Final fantasy XI, forever from its european catalogue. Wow. I can remember some HUGE imbecile magazine editor in "some console gaming magazine" rambling about "it is not that important the online gaming in consoles"... YEARS AFTER DREAMCAST ALREADY HAD ONLINE GAMING in EUROPE, with games like Quake III or Phantasy Star Online!!! What a fucking disgusting piece of crap of an "independent" editor.
So, FFXI was finally released only for PC in Europe and "nobody cared" because like that editor said: "online gaming is totally overrated, trust me, bro". Cheers.

("Bro, really, online gaming in consoles? it is not a serious thing")

More than 20 years later and FFXI continues to be an amazing game. I love that game.
Of course, years later, the same people did an special report to show "HOW amazing is the NEW online gaming in PS2, OMG, buy it!", when Sony finally decided to release the PS2 broadband adapter there.
LOL.
-----

Anyways... Toshokan had some "cart released games" in it. Some like Fatal Labyrinth or the MD port of "Flicky" were in fact only released in this service in Japan, and then got their western "cart versions". Which partially explains why they are so "meh" in graphics (Flicky almost seems a SG-1000 game. I like a lot its european box-art, though).

It also seems that Columns had its Toshokan version, apart from the japanese cart one. Columns 1 is, in fact, a GREAT PUZZLE GAME, with great music, colors and aesthetics, and amazingly, only occupies 128KB. So it was probably one of the VERY BEST games you could play in that service. For sure better than "Sonic Eraser".

(Left: One of the beautiful 2 Title screens "Columns" have, along its fantastic music tunes. Game have various modes: Arcade and original ones for MD. In 128Kb, one of the smallest in the MD catalog. Crazy, uh?)

The thing is Mega Drive got an interesting official digital service, much before than SNES an its "Satellaview", and like 10 years before Dreamcast, which was the very first online gaming console thanks a great job from Sega, which NOBODY never recognizes, because there is no money to buy useless butts in the media. And history becomes a travesty if nobody explains what really happened.

 

[Ferik]

Megabits (which is the same as "Megs") were really only used in the cart-based consoles of the 80 and 90s, which includes Master System, NES, Mega Drive, Super Nintendo, GameBoy and Game Gear... and Nintendo 64.

It was never a serious thing to use bits instead of Bytes, and as much as we have great memories talking about "Megs" and "Megabits"... they are dumb. Started to have no sense to use "Megabits" when the CD format arrived to consoles with their HUGE capacity of around 600 MB to 800 MB, LOTS of MB. Imagine to translate that number, to Megabits: "4,800 to 6,400 Megabits"? stupid as hell, and destroyed Neo Geo forever. So, nobody did that, for respect to Neo Geo users.

This is entirely incorrect. Bits, and its various subforms like Kilobits and Megabits have always, and still are today, used for eeprom chips. You can go look at eeprom chips on a site like Mouser Electronics right now they're all listed by bit size, not byte size.

You know, rom chips, like the ones in cartridges. Carts are measured in bits because the chips inside them are measured and sold in bits by the manufacturers. CD's use megabytes because they are measured and sold in megabytes by the manufacturers. It has nothing to do with opinions, and it was and still is a serious thing.

 

[diet_orange]

The whole "MEGA BITS" thing is still very confusing to me even to this day. Just because a game has a ton of stuff inside the cart doesn't mean it plays well

Also, I wish the Genesis had more puzzle games. Loved me some Columns and Mean Bean Machine, even though I'm still kind of learning how to play them competently even after 20+ years

 

[UnDubious]

The whole "MEGA BITS" thing is still very confusing to me even to this day. Just because a game has a ton of stuff inside the cart doesn't mean it plays well

Also, I wish the Genesis had more puzzle games. Loved me some Columns and Mean Bean Machine, even though I'm still kind of learning how to play them competently even after 20+ years

It was all about portraying growth. Bigger games, better graphics, "cd soundtrack"!, 100 hours of gameplay (a claim RPGs used to have a lot back when they were 25-40 hours at most - which is good, btw, because 100 hours is too long for 99% of games). Also when space was a major limitation, more ROM allowed for more ambitious games in every way. It was a pretty big deal. ROM was so expensive at times that some games had to be sold for more cause their cartridges contained more.

 

[Ferik]

Yeah, cartridge size doesn't determine whether or not a game will be good, but a larger amount of rom (and ram) will allow for a lot more to be done with a game in the audio/visual department and the sheer amount of content.

Super Mario Bros was only 32kb and managed to cram 32 levels into the game, but it did this by using the same brick tileset in different colors for the majority of levels, reusing other assets like recoloring the cloud sprite into a bush sprite in the backgrounds or the mushroom into the Goomba, and by completely reusing a few level layouts with new enemy patterns and extra hazards like the spinning fireballs. By contrast Sonic The Hedgehog is 512kb, and it only has 19 levels, but with 6 entirely unique tilesets between them. Each tileset is also able to introduce new enemies, and every third stage has a unique boss fight. It also has more and longer audio tracks.

The physics and max graphical and audio potential come from the 16-bit CPU and sound chip, but the sheer amount of visual and musical assets comes from the amount of data in the game. Every sprite, every tile, every animation frame, every song, that all takes up space. The amount of megabits (or megabytes or gigabytes with later titles) very directly correlated with what the game could potentially achieve. Whether or not that potential was realized was up to the developers in question.

 

[PhaseJump]

Ok, I will do what I promised in that other thread called "What is the worst SEGA game?" made by Miles, so visit it, and give your opinion about the worst SEGA game, THERE, not here. Do it. It is a threat. With "T". Mine. Not from Miles. Miles did the Thread, with "D". It is not the same. "ENGLISH, madafaka! Do you speak it?!!"

Okeeey.

So... what I promised? to answer UnDubious, in another thread... that means here, like the title says VERY clear.
Why? Cause aliens.
View attachment 126025
(Aliens)

But first...





That "Mega Power", was in fact just 128KB. But yeah... "Mega" Power.

I, always use the MB (MegaBytes) now, not the Megabits mesure system, because it is easier to understand if you try to download anything from the internet, which, btw, is not a big truck.

View attachment 126088
(It's a series of tubes. I hope this forum REALLY understands that. It is important to understand.)

Megabits (which is the same as "Megs") were really only used in the cart-based consoles of the 80 and 90s, which includes Master System, NES, Mega Drive, Super Nintendo, GameBoy and Game Gear... and Nintendo 64.

It was never a serious thing to use bits instead of Bytes, and as much as we have great memories talking about "Megs" and "Megabits"... they are dumb. Started to have no sense to use "Megabits" when the CD format arrived to consoles with their HUGE capacity of around 600 MB to 800 MB, LOTS of MB. Imagine to translate that number, to Megabits: "4,800 to 6,400 Megabits"? stupid as hell, and destroyed Neo Geo forever. So, nobody did that, for respect to Neo Geo users.

View attachment 126102View attachment 126103
(Ha-Ha! Mega-CD games had 6 times more megs, 12 years earlier! ... and were a lot cheaper)

But forgetting about the looted poor Neo Geo users, Nintendo 64 extended the practice of the "Megs" use instead of MB, until its very end, in the early 2000s..

Those below are the original "Megs" (or "Megabits") in "official" Cart sizes, for the Genesis/Mega Drive games.
In Bold, the most common sizes.

Sizes (Megabits) = ROM size in your PC Examples of games
1 Megabit = 128 Kilobytes (128 KB) -----> Columns / Fatal Labyrinth / Flicky
2 Megabits = 256 Kilobytes (256 KB) -----> Alex Kidd / Rambo III / Italia '90 / Klax
4 Megabits = 512 Kilobytes (512 KB) -----> Sonic / St. of Rage / Thunder Force II and III
5 Megabits = 640 Kilobytes (640 KB) -----> Ghouls 'n Ghosts (very unusual size, only 3 games)
6 Megabits = 768 Kilobytes (768 KB) -----> Road Rash / Wonder Boy in M. W. / Phant. Star II and III
8 Megabits = 1 Megabyte (1 MB) ----> Sonic 2 / OutRun / Roc. Kni. Adv. / TMNT: Hyperstone
10 Megabits = 1.25 Megabytes (1.25 MB) -> Romance of the Three Kingdoms III (unique) [only the US ver.]
12 Megabits = 1.5 Megabytes (1.5 MB) --> Shining Force / Flashback / Rolling Thunder 3
16 Megabits = 2 Megabytes (2 MB) ----> Sonic 3 / Streets of Rage 2 / Aladdin / Shining Force 2
17 Megabits = 2.2 Megabytes (2.2 MB) --> Legend of Wukong (unique) [unlicensed game. Translated later]
20 Megabits = 2.5 Megabytes (2.5 MB) ---> Sega Sports 1 (unique) [Compilation of 3 games]
24 Megabits = 3 Megabytes (3 MB) ----> Ph. Star IV / Lion King / S. of Rage 3 / Eter. Champions
32 Megabits = 4 Megabytes (4 MB) ----> Sonic 3D / Toy Story / Ult. MK3 / Slam Masters / Virtua Fighter 2
40 Megabits = 5 Megabytes (5 MB) ----> Super Street Fighter II (unique)

(released after the official MD commercial life)
64 Megabits = 8 Megabytes (8 MB) -----> Pier Solar (unique)
80 Megabits = 10 Megabytes (10 MB) ----> Paprium (unique)

And now, the actual thing:



Yeah, you are right, until 1990 a 1MB cart was a "big" game for MD. In fact, Sonic1 from 1991 has 512KB and was a BIG release. And something like 1/8 of those KB are dedicated to the "SEEEGA" audio of the start. Which in 1991 was very cool, so, my SEAL OF APPROVED. Probably all the games in the Toshokan service were about 128 and 256 KB.

I've seen some places calling the Toshokan service "SegaNet", like you do, but I don't really know if this is correct Apparently the service had some sort of "News section" called Sega Net News, so maybeeee..., BUT "SegaNet" is much more related and remembered as the Dreamcast internet service in US years later.

And a wild off-topic appears!
In Europe, the "SegaNet" equivalent was the "Dreamarena" (a surprinsingly successful service in a time many europeans did not even had internet in their PCs, or even a PC... So, literally, many Dreamcast users connected for the first time to the internet thanks to its console. Sega Europe did a lot of effort there, doing agreements with the big ITs of the biggest european countries, to make sure europeans got internet with their Dreamcasts, and NOBODY, CURIOUSLY, NEVER, SEEMS TO FUCKING REMEMBER THAT IN THE MEDIA. Only retarded people repeating stupid fake propaganda mantras like "hahah SeGa always sUckEed And dID all the THings bAd and I'm retAAaard". Shut the F U Retard! YOU GO FULL RETARD.

View attachment 126057
(Never go full retard)

Meanwhile... Sony did just the OPPOSITE, and happy neglected the online gaming in Europe during years in its new PS2, literally erasing the PS2 BIG MAGNA OPUS Online game (a colossal project) Final fantasy XI, forever from its european catalogue. Wow. I can remember some HUGE imbecile magazine editor in "some console gaming magazine" rambling about "it is not that important the online gaming in consoles"... YEARS AFTER DREAMCAST ALREADY HAD ONLINE GAMING in EUROPE, with games like Quake III or Phantasy Star Online!!! What a fucking disgusting piece of crap of an "independent" editor.
So, FFXI was finally released only for PC in Europe and "nobody cared" because like that editor said: "online gaming is totally overrated, trust me, bro". Cheers.

View attachment 126067
("Bro, really, online gaming in consoles? it is not a serious thing")

More than 20 years later and FFXI continues to be an amazing game. I love that game.
Of course, years later, the same people did an special report to show "HOW amazing is the NEW online gaming in PS2, OMG, buy it!", when Sony finally decided to release the PS2 broadband adapter there.
LOL.
-----

Anyways... Toshokan had some "cart released games" in it. Some like Fatal Labyrinth or the MD port of "Flicky" were in fact only released in this service in Japan, and then got their western "cart versions". Which partially explains why they are so "meh" in graphics (Flicky almost seems a SG-1000 game. I like a lot its european box-art, though).

It also seems that Columns had its Toshokan version, apart from the japanese cart one. Columns 1 is, in fact, a GREAT PUZZLE GAME, with great music, colors and aesthetics, and amazingly, only occupies 128KB. So it was probably one of the VERY BEST games you could play in that service. For sure better than "Sonic Eraser".

View attachment 126106 View attachment 126111
(Left: One of the beautiful 2 Title screens "Columns" have, along its fantastic music tunes. Game have various modes: Arcade and original ones for MD. In 128Kb, one of the smallest in the MD catalog. Crazy, uh?)

The thing is Mega Drive got an interesting official digital service, much before than SNES an its "Satellaview", and like 10 years before Dreamcast, which was the very first online gaming console thanks a great job from Sega, which NOBODY never recognizes, because there is no money to buy useless butts in the media. And history becomes a travesty if nobody explains what really happened.

 

[Deleted member 111615]

This is entirely incorrect. Bits, and its various subforms like Kilobits and Megabits have always, and still are today, used for eeprom chips. You can go look at eeprom chips on a site like Mouser Electronics right now they're all listed by bit size, not byte size.

You know, rom chips, like the ones in cartridges. Carts are measured in bits because the chips inside them are measured and sold in bits by the manufacturers. CD's use megabytes because they are measured and sold in megabytes by the manufacturers. It has nothing to do with opinions, and it was and still is a serious thing.

Oook. You are right.
But, in the casual user experience, I can't not recall another moment I saw "bits" as the usual way to refer about "the memory of anything" *(I just Iie, see below).
It was, and still is, that is true, used in the CPUs/GPUs though (8,16, 32, 64, 128... bit), but, although related, it is not exactly the same as the "memory" you have, but the size of the data (instructions) the CPU can process in any cycle, and it probably makes more sense to use "Bit" instead of "Byte" in THAT exact case. Which I repeat, is related but not exactly about memory.

By the way, that use of "Bits" to classify CPUs, was very promoted in the console advertising, creating some confusion in the children minds, because... if you had a 16bit console, like Mega Drive or Super Nintendo... how then a game for those consoles could be... 32Megabit? (for example). It was some confusion there. Consoles and games used the same base unit, and games seemed to be like something "much bigger" than the console itself ¿?. LOL. Obviously, children had no idea what "16bit" in the Mega Drive casing meant, only that it was powerful than a "8bit" NES.

* As I said... I lied: the Modems. Modems were a consumer devices, and used the "Bit" unit as its basic specification. In fact, technically, I think they used the "Bauds" unit, which can be (or not) single Bits. This is a complex telecommunications world topic and I will not touch it here.
In fact, many internet provider companies continue to talk about speed in Megs/second without telling the consumer if they are referring to Megabits or Megabytes. Is a VERY fuzzy world.

Anyways...

Yes, I understand WHY the videogame companies started to use the "Bit multiple units" (Rom chip makers). But... Console videogame companies could have made and easy conversion for the consumers, and translated the Bits into bytes.
So, instead of a 1Meg cart game, you would had a 128 Kilobyte game. But then, obviously, you would never had a "1Meg power" cart for your Master System. So, I suspect it was a lot of marketing there. Nintendo included.
1 Meg sound a lot impressive in the late 80s... especially if you (miss)understood that... for a full Megabyte (which was not, and by a huge margin).

So, that was a massive way to confuse the people. In consoles you had "Megabits"... in PCs you had "Kylobytes" and "Megabytes".

(There is obviously the other topic about those units: they have multiples based in Binary instead of Decimal, and that is a topic never really resolved but even worsened by the invention and official adoption, of the "-bi-" units, to represent the binary multiples (kibi, mebi, gibi...). Prefixes which NOBODY fucking uses. Because they are dumb to say, and because the HUGE tradition to use the metric traditional unit multiples, as a binary units in the computer science (adopted since the early modern computer days).
So... a Kilobyte is not 1000 bytes. Is 1024 bytes. And the same with a Kilobit, which is not 1000 bits but a 1024 bits. And the same happens with Megabytes (and the Megabites), Gigabytes (and the Gigabits) etc...
.

The whole "MEGA BITS" thing is still very confusing to me even to this day. Just because a game has a ton of stuff inside the cart doesn't mean it plays well

Also, I wish the Genesis had more puzzle games. Loved me some Columns and Mean Bean Machine, even though I'm still kind of learning how to play them competently even after 20+ years

It was a marketing thing. Normally, the consoles based on carts used to have "bigger" games (I mean, ROM chips) in their last years in the market, cause the memory chips were cheaper, so they basically could had better animations, graphics and sound. In theory.

But in reality, the best games are not always related to its size. Columns for MD is a very extreme example. It only has 128kilobytes (so, 1 Meg), being that the smallest size possible for a MD commercial game (few games used that small size, in fact) but it is a beautiful game with great music. And very very fun to play. In fact, I always preferred Columns to any Tetris, which is "the boss" in the puzzle games world. I preffer colours to forms.
Puyo Puyo (or "Mean Bean Machine" in its Western port for MD) is also extremely fun to play, but uses more memory, because uses characters and have somekind of a story to explain.

Everybody remembers Sonic 1, with only 512KB (4 Megs), but nobody remembers "X-Pert" for Genesis, with 4MB (36Megs), a BIG game for the console. Why? because it is just a dumb game (a lot worse than any Streets of Rage), full of pre-rendered characters (and that is why it uses so much memory). But you also have Donkey Kong Country trilogy, for SNES, which also use lots of renders, and they are great platform games. So obviously, the "Megs" thing was never a reliable way to know the real quality of a game in a cart based console. Maybe in RPGs is the only case you would expect to have "bigger" ROM games, because you wanted a long adventure as a kid).

It was all about portraying growth. Bigger games, better graphics, "cd soundtrack"!, 100 hours of gameplay (a claim RPGs used to have a lot back when they were 25-40 hours at most - which is good, btw, because 100 hours is too long for 99% of games). Also when space was a major limitation, more ROM allowed for more ambitious games in every way. It was a pretty big deal. ROM was so expensive at times that some games had to be sold for more cause their cartridges contained more.

Yes, the RPG thing was somekind of special the size of the cart, because you wanted to be long, but also a pretty game. And I remember the "100 hours" thing.

Man... During the PSX and PS2 era, most of the RPGs pretended to last 100 hours or real gameplay, which was almost always a total exaggeration. But nonetheless, it was the "magic" number to sell an RPG, for some reason: The "100 hours of gameplay". It just appeared from nowhere during the late 90s.

An extremely long RPG was considered the fundamental pillar to be able to be a perfect RPG during that era. In truth, many of them needed a lot less to be completed or even to be fully explored. In fact, 50 hours for an RPG was already a LOT. Skies of Arcadia, for example, is and AMAZING RPG, extremely long, with loooots of stories and adventures, and maybe you would need around 60-70 hours to do and discover everything. And that is a FUCKING TON of things. Really. Imagine 100 hours.

Ironically, that idea derived in some modern problem for RPGs, which is, adult players now DO NOT WANT those "100 hours" for an RPG (or an adventure game), because they do not have (or want to waste) all that time to play a single adventure. So the famous "100 hours" turned to be an undesirable thing now.

Only an Online game will suck you more than 100 hours (and a loooot more). Well... with maybe the exception of Gran Turismo 7. If you have the balls to play that boredom fest, and do not throw the physical disc out of the window.

The physics and max graphical and audio potential come from the 16-bit CPU and sound chip, but the sheer amount of visual and musical assets comes from the amount of data in the game. Every sprite, every tile, every animation frame, every song, that all takes up space. The amount of megabits (or megabytes or gigabytes with later titles) very directly correlated with what the game could potentially achieve. Whether or not that potential was realized was up to the developers in question.

It is, but it is also true a more powerful console can do a better game with the same memory: better physics, better movements, new effects, better chip sound... The thing is... with every generation, they obviously also wanted to have more memory space to make new impressive things, of course, because was no need to be always stalled in 32KB games.
The Sonic 1 case, "wasted" 1/8 (64KB) of that game just in the SEGA voice intro. So, in reality has a lot less memory for the rest of the game. But it is fine, because that intro was technically amazing.

(Then, the CD arrived by surprise, and nobody knew how to fill ALL THAT MASSIVE SPACE XD, like happened in Mega CD... with so many "not that memorable" CD Audio tracks instead of chiptunes, lots of crappy FMVs, many "interactive" games with digitized actors... There was good games, but many of them were just Mega Drive games... with digital audio and voices, or some videos... and many others where full of crappy FMVs. Few developers really explored the graphical new system capabilities like for example Core did in its sprite-based "3D" games like Thunderhawk, Battlecorps, or (partially) Soul Star, which were impossible in a simple Mega Drive).