When I said more colours I meant "more colours on screen" something like Mayhem in Monsterland is known to have 20 colours on screen at once thanks to various blending tricks.
Another aspect of the SID is you don't have to play music to which you can put any SFX onto any channel at any time, allowing you to have 3 channels of SFX. And if one compares say Robocop 3 NES to Robcop 3 C64, C64 by a long shot. Skate or Die is a bit 50/50 but the samples on the NES lack "raw edge" that the game goes for to which C64. There there is the Turbo Outrun title screen. All of these are commercial games so not "its demo only shennigans apply"
The FM-YAM cart has just been released, there is also the SndFX cart of yore and if you really really want to make YM sound then people who own this cart would love you too, you can then use the SID for SFX with music
just beware the clocks..
The C64s wide pixels only look fat compared to their height, they are not that much bigger than a S/NES. Give then C64 divides the TV into 402x292 pixels of which we than take 320 out of those 402, in multicolour you get 201 pixels vs 256 pixels but we take 160 out of them. So you get a bit smaller than a NES pixel, or a bit wider than a NES pixel. Only you can have wider and smaller on the same screen to use it where it counts
We also get colour per 8x8 not 16x16
which means we can scroll without artifacts
The bitmap is just a bitmap there is not any special Demo effects for it. See Law of the West C64 version which uses hires bitmaps for the the game, compare with the NES for a laugh
Caren and IK/IK+ use multicolour bitmaps, Bombjack does as well I believe, Summer Camp uses bitmaps ( although underused ), Stormlord and Deliverence us scrolling bitmap. Another world ( not that one ) use AGSP to get scrolling bitmaps as well.
Another thing is the C64s 16:10 aspect ratio means if you don't use the border area you can trim the borders and it still works on a 16:9/16:10 tv/monitor without warping. It also makes it easier to port modern games.
Controller there is a standard 2 button ( the GS used it ) which has mostly been ignored, I have made a SNES to C64 adapter which is low impact on the CPU, but there is a commercial 8 SNES pad to C64 adapter people can buy, if you want to really go multiplayer
or you can get carts with 2 extra DB9s on it like the MD micormachines carts for 4 players.
All of the games are English only, however Sam's is translated into Spanish. The Spanish community is quite passionate about it and they fund raise the translation. For the Hunters Moon remaster one of the stretch goals was to add FIGS to the game and Manual. However it is not required to do FIGS.
I'm not sure the C64 scene is a little bigger than the NES. For what I can tell (please let me know if otherwise as that really help sway producers
) but selling 100 copies is a really good run on the NES. On the C64
Hunters Moon remaster KS ~350
Planet-X is 500+
Bear Essentials is 800+
Sam's Journey is 1250+
Although as noted this has nothing to do with the technically prowess of the C64 over a NES.
However logic tells me that a NES and SNES market should blow those numbers out of the water... if only Nintendo didn't make the NES mini and SNES mini "sealed "units....