Wherever gamers turned in the early-90's, they would see advertising campaigns dedicated to telling them that the Sega Mega Drive or Genesis was the future, and Nintendo's SNES had been left in the dust by the excellent graphical power and speed Sega's machine was capable of. 'Blast Processing' is a term that's often ridiculed today as nothing more than a crude exercise in meaningless phrasing, designed only to sound cool and not actually meaning anything substantial. On the contrary, this attempt to talk up the processing power of the Mega Drive wasn't as silly as it first seemed. The gritty colour palette of the Mega Drive is often regarded as making it the more 'adult' of the consoles, certainly compared to the more cartoon-like SNES, but there can be no denying that Nintendo's system often looked better from a graphical perspective. Where Sega reigned supreme was with speed, Sonic The Hedgehog made Super Mario look painfully slow, something many gamers started to pick up on.