I think it's true that Strider's hit detection (or rather, its hitboxes) are kind of awkard and it's often buggy too but those issues aside the gameplay is top notch. Very fast-paced, the better you are at the game the quicker and more fun it becomes. You end up flying through the levels and doing lots of acrobatics.
I don't think it's one of the best platformers ever made, though. I just think it's very good.
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I used to not really get Strider, but I've come to appreciate it more over time. It's certainly a "rough around the edges" game but it feels good to play despite that.
NES music, is much better than SNES music. i'm referring to the general sound, the beat, not the composition itself. its probably a case of because i grew up with nes music but i have just always preferred nes style music. Those faux-drum sounds on the snes, i never found to be pleasing to the ear. give me 8bit sounds and it just makes the game all the more memorable. not to say that snes music sucks, i like the ones in Chrono Trigger, F-zero and MMX games in particular.
The SNES audio chip has 1 major drawback: very small sample size. It's a sample-based chip that has only a very small amount of memory available to it, can't access the cartridge without tying up the CPU, and has a tiny data bandwidth to the CPU, which means the chip tends to use VERY low quality samples. That's why so much music on the SNES sounds heavily filtered or echo-y; those effects are used to smooth out the poor sample quality. Actraiser, for example, has one of my favorite video game soundtracks, and often takes advantage of the echo and filtering, but a couple of the tracks, despite being awesomely composed, just sound like there's a tiny orchestra performing inside a giant metal trash can. And I've heard an FM synth version of the Filmore action stage which purports to be Koshiro's original composition for the work (he apparently composed on an FM-synth+PCM based PC and then adapted the tracks to the SNES chip) and it sounds almost as good, though I suppose that's a testament to the composition quality as much as anything else.
I've head that Nintendo also forced folks to use their sound engine and wouldn't let companies build their own sound drivers. Nintendo is notorious for writing crappy sound engines. Most Gameboy Advance games that used Nintendo's stock sound engine didn't sound very good, either (unless it was Nintendo's own titles).
Heck, if you listen to the voices in the various ports of Street Fighter 2, you'll find that the Genesis sounds the worst (because Sega made using the PCM capabilities of their sound hardware stupidly complicated), the SNES sounds OK, but heavily filtered, and the PC Engine actually sounds the clearest, and in all likelihood uses the highest quality samples. This despite the fact that the Genesis actually has the best sounding music tracks (FM synth was used for the original arcade tracks, so it's an easy fit to the Genesis hardware).