Well ... Looks like someone has to post some Capcom stuff to counter that Neo Geo goodness. Too bad fully animated backgrounds from Capcom's games seem hard to find. Here's some Street Fighter Zero 3, which in my opinion has superb stages:
People talk about how much more powerful the cps2/3 are than the neogeo. I question though is there any merit to that. Yes I get that the cps3 surely is more powerful and has better colors but I don't feel like Capcom ever proved anything with the better hardware.
There's no denying that Capcom's backgrounds feel static in comparison to SNK's, but I think this is in part due to the sheer number of SNK backgrounds to choose from. On one side, you have Street Fighter II and all of its revisions, and on the other, you have the yearly releases in the King of Fighters series, all of which had backgrounds done from scratch. Capcom can do background animations, but for some reason they don't make that a priority. Maybe because they feel it's distracting? I've seen enough SF tournaments during which fights mostly took place on the graph paper stage to think this may actually be true.
While I absolutely adore those extremely busy stages in KoF '94, I can see someone at Capcom thinking they're a bit much in a fighting game, since every inch of the screen is vibrating with activity. On the other hand, this is SNK showing their insane skill in the pixel-art department. If Capcom felt they were throwing this in their face, they could probably match it, if not on CPS, then on CPS2, but they went for colour count and resolution with CPS2 and for smooth sprite animations with CPS3. Also, backgrounds on CPS3 are pretty massive in New Generation. You can only see a portion of them during the fights, unless it's some sort of dragon punch meets super art kind of deal, when you do some serious air. But even with that in mind, looking at background rips, I don't think I've ever seen the upper most parts of stages during fights.
Ok. I can't help myself. Here's some KoF 94 gold: