What's your opinion of the Mega Drive?

[BPzeBanshee]

As I recall the Mega CD was exactly that - a CD drive. I'm sure Wikipedia would have more specifications though, someone's gone to great lengths to provide info on the Sega Megadrive and relevant stuff there.

That statement would be basically true for the PCECD/TurboGrafx CD (there was some extra memory in the System Cards but that's a separate story) but the MegaCD/SegaCD had quite a bit of extra hardware to upgrade the capabilities of the base unit. Extra processor (unfortunately often dedicated to decompressing FMV), extra memory, extra VDP that allowed for "Mode 7" style RoZ layers. It didn't usually feel like as much of an upgrade as the extra hardware would have warranted though, as it was held back quite a bit by the limited palette and sound system of the base console.

Oh, what a shame. Sounds like the Sega Saturn's "dual-core" hardware in that fashion. Pier Solar uses the Sega CD for streaming and playing remixed versions of the inbuilt music when it's inserted (the game itself being a normal cartridge).

[Shatterhand]

I am big fan of Mega-Drive, I think it has more arcadey games, which I like more than RPGs and "Metroidvania" games. I also believe SoR2 is the best beat'em up ever, though I do love ALien vs Predator arcade.

But I want to reply to this:

it blew the crap out of something like the Amiga

The Amiga was already on the market for a while... and while of course it would be inferior at the technical side (And more expensive, since it was a COMPUTER who did lots of other things than playing games), I don't think I ever saw anything as impressive as this in any 16 bits console:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YWDXk7G2_NM


that shit blew my mind away when I saw it for the 1st time, and I still think it's one of the most impressive things I ever saw in a 16 bit system. And youtube doesn't make justice to it, it looks a lot better live

[Nico87]

Best system on earth. Such a huge variety of great games from different genres. Lacked RPG's though.

[louisg]

it blew the crap out of something like the Amiga

The Amiga was already on the market for a while... and while of course it would be inferior at the technical side (And more expensive, since it was a COMPUTER who did lots of other things than playing games), I don't think I ever saw anything as impressive as this in any 16 bits console:

Oh yeah, I wasn't dissing the Amiga (which is easily one of my favorite computers), but was just saying that the Genesis was pretty much the most bad ass thing in the US when it hit-- even the 1st generation softs. It's really easy to lose sight of that because it all looks so primitive now, and so much less vibrant than the SNES in many cases. But, to think back to 1989, it was pretty damn ace.

Stardust is cool

[Specineff]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YWDXk7G2_NM

Jesus. How did they do that? It looks just as impressive or more than Sega's Super Scaling boards, and those things did it through hardware.

[Shatterhand]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YWDXk7G2_NM

Jesus. How did they do that? It looks just as impressive or more than Sega's Super Scaling boards, and those things did it through hardware.

And believe me, it looks even more impressive when you see it for real, not through crap Youtube video compression.


Didn't someone here in the Forum worked with Housemarque on Super Stardust HD for the XBLA? I know that version doesn't have the Tunnel Sequence (And also plays a lot differently from the original game)...

It's funny how 2 of the most impressive Amiga games, Elfmania and Stardust were made by Terramarque and Bloodhouse, and both companies would later merge to give us Super Stardust and The Reap (Even though Elfmania actually sucked, even if it looked amazing)

[Stormwatch]

Good old MD had some extreme eye-candy tricks to show too... check Zero Tolerance, Duke Nukem 3D, Red Zone, and Panorama Cotton.

[Shatterhand]

Good old MD had some extreme eye-candy tricks to show too... check Zero Tolerance, Duke Nukem 3D, Red Zone, and Panorama Cotton.

I'd say You are joking, but Panorama Cotton is a valid one in this list...

Zero Tolerance and Duke Nukem 3D are what I call "Technical Puke". Yes, they may be impressive for the hardware they are running, but this doesn't stop them to look and play like shit. Panorama Cotton is nice but it doesn't have the same breathtaking effect of the warp tunnel of Stardust.

And Red Zone looks like a slower and more boring Seek And Destroy ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iioyMNGlJkM ). I've never played Red Zone though, only saw videos of it.

[Rob]

I don't think I ever saw anything as impressive as this in any 16 bits console:

Well, it certainly is a tunnel.

[louisg]

On the Amiga, there's also Unreal, which had some pretty amazing scaling: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GPpMYBDEgAQ#t=6m20s . That might have been exploiting a coprocessor on the board called Copper which I think has the ability to automatically reposition sprites every few pixels without any interaction from the CPU. I've seen it used to do flat perspective: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qm7Tz44Qn6c#t=3m40s too. Oh, and check this demo out: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=71LSRifgkbc \o/ (I also love the way he scratches up You're Gonna Get Yours by Public Enemy at the end and it's got that faked textured cube)

I'd love to see some graphics demos on the Genesis. I don't think anyone's really done any serious ones.

EDIT: A couple more :
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_SBJn71fvL8
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GH2GyQQIBNo#t=4m30s (skipped the lame intro), and part 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4l1ESPjAyPk

[Stormwatch]

Zero Tolerance and Duke Nukem 3D are what I call "Technical Puke". Yes, they may be impressive for the hardware they are running, but this doesn't stop them to look and play like shit.

DN3D, maybe, but Zero Tolerance is a fine-looking and very enjoyable game. It has more depth than some recent games of this genre...

Panorama Cotton is nice but it doesn't have the same breathtaking effect of the warp tunnel of Stardust.

Stardust looks awfully repetitive, I'll assume the background it's just a prerendered looping animation. So I think Panorama Cotton is more impressive.

And Red Zone looks like a slower and more boring Seek And Destroy ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iioyMNGlJkM ). I've never played Red Zone though, only saw videos of it.

Slower? Red Zone is quite fast, and crazy hard! And it has a ton of subtle detail, unlike Seek And Destroy's bare levels. By the way, the CD32 was supposed to be a generation ahead, so a fairer comparison would be that versus this.

[Shatterhand]

I posted a CD32 video because I couldn't find an A500 one.

The CD32 version is identical to the A500 one, is one of the many shovelware the CD32 got. I doubt developers used even half of the power of the CD32.


ANd like I said, I haven't played Red Zone, that was my impressions by just looking at videos. Seek & Destroy was utterly awesome, as far as massive destruction + adrenaline pumping action goes. And it certainly looked worse than Soviet Strike, but it was a way better game



The thing with Stardust is not just the Tunnel, which probably is a pre-rendered animation indeed, but how everything looks amazing AND extremely smooth on a real machine.

There was an article in a magazine back in the day (The One) who ran an article with Andrew Braybrook (A famous game developer from the 80s and 90s who was famous for pushing the hardware he coded to its limits) dissecating some of the most impressive Amiga games to date. He was explaing how the tricks in games like Turrican 2 and Elfmania were made.

When he went to analyze Stardust's warp sequence, he said the Tunnel animation could have done in Dpaint, make it bigger and then scroll it to different directions when the ship moves, though this probably would take a big heap of memory to be that smooth. The scaling could be done via some smart coding, though it would would be kinda slow, and not as fast and smooth as it's in the game (And it seems to be real scaling, not like Panorama Cotton quickly changing sprites of diferent sizes to make it look like it's scaling). And the other thing he noticed is that the WHOLE sequence only takes 96kb , which is something he scratched his head over and had no idea of how they did it. He even said that 96kb is like what he would use for just an enemy sprite set of Uridium 2.

I can look for the magazine and scan it or retype the article if anyone is geek enough to be interested in this kind of stuff. I loved reading it back at the time

[ST Dragon]

I was always an AMIGA fan back in the day, but I liked the Mega Drive & SNES equally. Both had some awesome exclusive titles.
Some great Mega Drive games:

Alisia Dragoon
Contra Hard Corps
El Viento
E-Swat
Gynoug / Wings of Wor
Kujaku-Oh 2 - Peacock King / Mystic Defender
Mega Turrican
Mega Man - Wily Wars
Insector X
Jewel Master
Rocket Knight Adventures
Risky Woods
Streets of Rage II
Super Shinobi II
Sparkster
Strider
Valis Series

How ever I was always fond of the SNES' wider colour palette and better sound capabilities. Axelay was just jaw-dropping and even now it can easily be compared with some NEO-GEO shooters.
Also some of the Arcade ports on the SNES were excellent and better than what the Mega Drive could achieve imo.

King of Monsters
Saturday Night Slam Master
King of the Dragons
Final Fight
Street Fighter II
Super Street Fighter

[TVG]

Basically MD is better for things playable in one go, and SNES is better for games where you save.
That's about it haha.

SNES has awesome games like super metroid, SMW (which aged much, much better than sonic games IMO, sonic games are just not interesting to play today), the megaman X games, odd games like actraiser, RPGs out the wazoo etc etc.

Genesis has shmups, SOR, "one go" platformers like alisia dragoon, jewel master etc, some sega arcade games, and in 99% of the cases, more sprites and faster gameplay, as SNES tends to slowdown after more than 3 sprtes are onscreen, even in great games like megaman X.

Yeah, I know, there's super aleste, but compile shouldn't count really, they squeezed R type out of the SMS and later power strike, they are just awesome coders and you can't judge a console capability by a compile game because 99% of devs back then couldn't do what they did.

Genesis did suffer from the lack of capcom and konami games in the beggining, though, that's a huge edge for nintendo.
SNES also has one thing over genesis: it doesn't have the "genesis laser sound". Holy shit that is terrible. Sometimes I feel like avoiding thunderforce 4 main shot powerup because the sound is so grating.

[Obiwanshinobi]

Yeah, I know, there's super aleste, but compile shouldn't count really, they squeezed R type out of the SMS and later power strike, they are just awesome coders and you can't judge a console capability by a compile game because 99% of devs back then couldn't do what they did.

I'd say hardware capabilities are worth as much as games you can play on it, which in case of Super Aleste is rather a lot. Don't blame the hardware for coders' indolence. Also, was Sparkster on the SNES technically inferior to the MD Rocket Knight Adventures? More slowdown? Less sprites? I didn't play either on real hardware, hence the question.
Besides, the PAL-only Super Turrican for the NES (yup, NES) left me under impression that it was faster paced and more arcadey than other Turricans. If NES actioner could be this intense...

[Rob]

Genesis has ... "one go" platformers like alisia dragoon, jewel master etc,

Yes, this is probably my favorite thing about it.

Genesis did suffer from the lack of capcom and konami games in the beggining, though, that's a huge edge for nintendo.

Konami made up for it with Castlevania and Contra switching over, RKA/Sparkster and Snatcher. Capcom's absence was made up for by Sega's ports of their arcade games. MD Strider and Ghouls N Ghosts are still good. A timelier version of Final Fight would've also been great, but would Sega have made Streets of Rage then?

[Drum]

]A timelier version of Final Fight would've also been great, but would Sega have made Streets of Rage then?

Can you think of a time when Sega didn't have an answer to the latest big thing? I guess they never really did a vertical shooter of note, but they were always kind of a reactive company.

Not on topic but I was just playing it so it popped into my head: You might like the Bonk arcade game. Challenging, with an emphasis on score based mechanics. Nothing at all like the dull console Bonk games.

[Despatche]

Also, was Sparkster on the SNES technically inferior to the MD Rocket Knight Adventures? More slowdown? Less sprites? I didn't play either on real hardware, hence the question.

Sparkster on the SNES is a completely different game than either Rocket Knight Adventures game on the Mega Drive.

Besides, the PAL-only Super Turrican for the NES (yup, NES) left me under impression that it was faster paced and more arcadey than other Turricans. If NES actioner could be this intense...

Play the original Turrican.

[Obiwanshinobi]

Sparkster on the SNES is a completely different game than either Rocket Knight Adventures game on the Mega Drive.

You don't say. What I wanna know is whether or not Sparkster on the SNES felt more sluggish, slower etc. (since it shares the gameplay formula with Rocket Knight Adventures on the MD, i.e. is the exact kind of game MD was allegedly better for). Because strength of the SNES (colour palette) is pretty apparent in Sparkster, but I'm not sure if emulator recreates the real thing's performance perfectly, with slowdown and all.

Play the original Turrican.

I suppose the NES Super Turrican was closer to the C64 original as creator of both preferred 8-bit platforms. That said, I doubt the original had smooth scrolling of Super Turrican on the NES. Choppy scrolling is the most off-putting feature of ancient computer games for me. That's why I'd rather play Pippols than Parodius for example.

[Rob]

What I wanna know is whether or not Sparkster on the SNES felt more sluggish, slower etc.

It's been years since I played it, but I'm sure there were some slowdown rich sections in SNES Sparkster that were tedious to play (the ostrich-robo part would be one place to look).

[Obiwanshinobi]

It's been years since I played it, but I'm sure there were some slowdown rich sections in SNES Sparkster that were tedious to play (the ostrich-robo part would be one place to look).

Thanks.
I actually like how the original uses Genny colours. Those melancholic, gunmetal, brick and mortar, early industrial looks. In my opinion on the MD Konami rocked harder than Treasure (sometimes I feel that McDonald's Treasure Land Adventure was the least broken sidescroller the latter made for that console). Sheesh, the menu in Alien Soldier looks flashy, but why can't I change weapons with just one button? And so on.

[Shatterhand]

Choppy scrolling is the most off-putting feature of ancient computer games for me. That's why I'd rather play Pippols than Parodius for example.

While I am a big MSX fan and I love to pick MSX vs C64 wars, the C64 had a pretty smooth scroll in most games I ever played, unlike the MSX. It really surprised me to see games with such bad graphics but such a smooth scroll. I don't remember if I ever played Turrican on the C64, but I would give it a try if you enjoy the game, as I doubt it has a choppy scroll (Even more considering it was coded by Manfred Trenz, who did wonders with the machine).

[Obiwanshinobi]

When I muster willingness to tinker with C64 emulation, I'll certainly play Turrican. On the real thing I liked Boulder Dash best.

[Mortificator]

You're better off going with the Amiga versions of Turrican & Turrican II. They received a major A/V upgrade, including killer soundtracks. The Genesis port of the first game is based on the Amiga's and is also pretty good.

If there's one mistake the NES Super Turrican made, it was removing the timer.

Genesis has ... "one go" platformers like alisia dragoon, jewel master etc,

You mean games like X-Kaliber, Plok, Valken or Metal Warriors?

What I wanna know is whether or not Sparkster on the SNES felt more sluggish, slower etc.

It's been years since I played it, but I'm sure there were some slowdown rich sections in SNES Sparkster that were tedious to play (the ostrich-robo part would be one place to look).

Yeah, that mechanical ostrich part was the pits! Slowdown galore, blurry as hell... the visuals even faded out every few seconds!

I'm not going to check that, since it would immediatly prove me wrong, just go off memories from 16 years ago when I may have been suffering from a head injury.

[Rob]

You posted a link to a TAS.

You mean games like

No, these are not Mega Drive games.

[Mortificator]

I just don't think the Genny's library is so bad like the Dreamcast's that we need to make pretend failings in the competition's to justify it. The only difference between the consoles to me now is which GUI I see in the second before the game loads, and there are certainly Genesis games I'm glad exist.

I sure did post a link to a TAS. They use crutches like slow-mo and save states, but unless I'm mistaken, that doesn't alter the game's speed in the output video. Anyway, that section was as fast when I played SNES Sparkster... though that was also in an emulator. If that section is actually a slowdown-fest on the original hardware, I pledge to play MO HAWK for at least an hour in penance.

[Rob]

You should play Mohawk and Headphone Jack.

Pardon, Mo Hawk.

Opinion of the Mega Drive: it had some cool cover art, didn't it? Even bad games like Curse.

[Ganelon]

On the other hand, the SNES was fortunate enough to avoid Normy's Beach Babe-O-Rama. Still, Mo Hawk and Headphone Jack is probably one of the few games that's so bad you'll literally want to throw up.

[Herr Schatten]

I can look for the magazine and scan it or retype the article if anyone is geek enough to be interested in this kind of stuff. I loved reading it back at the time

Please do.

[TVG]

You mean games like X-Kaliber, Plok, Valken or Metal Warriors?

You posted Valken AND a clone, might as well have posted all of them. I don't even get the point of this post, it's like saying genesis has shining force, phantasy star and, landstalker and thor. Yeah it did have some quality RPGs, but the SNES just had 10 times more.
The positive about your post is that I didn't know X-kaliber. Looks cool, gotta try it out.

Both console shine in different genres.

Also, regarding Compile and Super Aleste, it's not the other developpers that are unable to program, it's just that compile is fucking crazy. They are the exception, not the rule.