Power Drift thread!

[Ganelon]

Too bad we never got around to an OutRun and Power Drift Sega Ages collection on PS2. Now, that time may never come to pass.

[BIL]

Galaxy Force II's Saturn port was handled by Appaloosa Interactive, which may explain the shoddiness. M2's stellar PS2 collection renders it irrelevant anyway.

[parallaxscrolling]

Galaxy Force II's Saturn port was handled by Appaloosa Interactive, which may explain the shoddiness. M2's stellar PS2 collection renders it irrelevant anyway.

Exactly.

[gameoverDude]

Galaxy Force II's Saturn port was handled by Appaloosa Interactive, which may explain the shoddiness. M2's stellar PS2 collection renders it irrelevant anyway.

Exactly.

Ugh... the guys who did Contra: Legacy of War. Now I'm wondering who developed SS Power Drift.
Where the hell was Rutubo Games when we needed them? Surely, they could've gotten Power Drift and Galaxy Force II to run at 60 on Saturn.
Time for M2 to do Power Drift for XBLA/PSN, especially if the 8 player Communication version can be implemented online. I'd buy it for $10 or even $15.

Imagine how much a 32X version would have had to be cut down to get it to run at 30 FPS, if it weren't possible for After Burner to do 30 there. The arcade PD is about 56 Megabits, which would've probably meant a $90-120 32X game. Porting PD to 32X would've been like putting Crysis on the current generation of consoles- doable with major sacrifices: probably reductions in draw distance/sprite resolution/maximum count of sprites on screen/number of animation frames- and likely even some of the trackside objects being cut from the game (probably to get the meg count down on the home version to avoid a $100 cartridge). If someone were to attempt a 32X port, it would've been a good candidate for a cart-Sega CD combo with the game engine on the cart, and the BGM/data on CD ala Saturn KOF'95.

[louisg]

I really don't think the Saturn port of GF2 is all that bad. It really is handling a lot of 3d transformations and crazy amounts of blitting/overdraw. You can't really compare it to the ports of Afterburner 2 and OutRun which are a lot simpler. So, I wouldn't be too surprised if they couldn't get it running at 60.

Also, a friend was telling me that one of those ports (PD or GF2) rotates the entire screen and one of them rotates each object individually. Apparently there's a pretty large speed benefit to using one of the approaches on Saturn.

I DO really wish there had been a Saturn home port of OutRunners. I would've taken that over a Power Drift port, and I'm sure that's something the Saturn could do well. Also on my dream wishlist is a RadMobile port that doesn't suck (see, THAT'S what a terrible port looks like)

[Deca]

How did I miss this thread! I absolutely adore Power Drift, love what they managed to do with just sprite scaling. The controls are definitely odd, but I think that if you take some time to get used to it they work pretty well. It has its own logic and set of rules as most sega racers tend to, though it's not near as deep as something like Daytona or Scud Race.

Stumbled across a machine in a little town out in the middle of nowhere once during my senior year of college. I saw a cab through the window of a pizza place and told my friend to pull over because I thought it might be an outrun cab. When I got in there and saw it was Power Drift I couldn't believe it, we were there for a while

[null1024]

Galaxy Force II's Saturn port was handled by Appaloosa Interactive, which may explain the shoddiness. M2's stellar PS2 collection renders it irrelevant anyway.

Exactly.

Ugh... the guys who did Contra: Legacy of War. Now I'm wondering who developed SS Power Drift.
Where the hell was Rutubo Games when we needed them? Surely, they could've gotten Power Drift and Galaxy Force II to run at 60 on Saturn.
Time for M2 to do Power Drift for XBLA/PSN, especially if the 8 player Communication version can be implemented online. I'd buy it for $10 or even $15.

Imagine how much a 32X version would have had to be cut down to get it to run at 30 FPS, if it weren't possible for After Burner to do 30 there. The arcade PD is about 56 Megabits, which would've probably meant a $90-120 32X game. Porting PD to 32X would've been like putting Crysis on the current generation of consoles- doable with major sacrifices: probably reductions in draw distance/sprite resolution/maximum count of sprites on screen/number of animation frames- and likely even some of the trackside objects being cut from the game (probably to get the meg count down on the home version to avoid a $100 cartridge). If someone were to attempt a 32X port, it would've been a good candidate for a cart-Sega CD combo with the game engine on the cart, and the BGM/data on CD ala Saturn KOF'95.

I could see PD or GFII on the 32X, 30fps. There might have been tons of sacrifices -- notably dropping everything to a 4MB [32 megabit, also the max amount of directly addressable ROM you can have before you do bankswitching like Super Street Fighter II did -- expensive] cart and using lower resolution sprites. There would probably be less unique art for certain objects.

In terms of getting more CPU time to use, draw distance definitely would be lowered like hell.
In a best case scenario of lots of free ROM and low avaliable CPU time, some scaling could be replaced with predrawn objects, because well, software scaling [remember, 32X is effectively just a framebuffer and 2 SH2 processors, no scaling/3D hardware whatsoever].

Also, does anyone else really like the Genesis version Galaxy Force II? Sure, it was cut back like hell, and the time limit is horrifying, and the sprite limit damn-near kills it, but that didn't stop it from being really impressive.

[gameoverDude]

Also, does anyone else really like the Genesis version Galaxy Force II? Sure, it was cut back like hell, and the time limit is horrifying, and the sprite limit damn-near kills it, but that didn't stop it from being really impressive.

Genesis GFII was OK for the time, given that there was no chance in hell of the Genesis one even being close to the arcade. Now it's obsolete.

Saturn Power Drift could probably have benefitted from the 1M SNK RAM cart.
Another title I'd have liked to see on Saturn is Taito's Super Chase. Ving probably could have beaten out a good 60 FPS conversion of this. These guys knew their stuff.

I wish Sega would've taken a straight up port approach with Gale Racer/Rad Mobile, rather than rendering the cars with polygons.

[Ed Oscuro]

Galaxy Force II's Saturn port was handled by Appaloosa Interactive, which may explain the shoddiness. M2's stellar PS2 collection renders it irrelevant anyway.

The FM Towns port has a terrible border, and was done by CRI (coming fresh out of a TV Tropes post, I feel compelled to post this Sega Retro wiki link: They have motherlovin' prices and days of release for various versions, but completely neglect to mention - assuming they actually could know - the Saturn and FM Towns versions' deficiencies).

It has nice CD music, though.

[BIL]

The FM Towns arrangements are quite cool. You can select them in the PS2 collection ( "HUAH" ♫), as well as emulated or streamed arcade BGM. Now that's service.

I once read over at Gamengai that M2 joked about the 2500 yen price point being a bit low for the work that went into some of those discs... I'd definitely have paid whatever the typical PS2 retail was for the ones I own. Even having all three of Treasure Box's games on cart now, I've kept it for the sheer quality (and killer Alien Soldier superplay). The Dynamite Deka and Fantasy Zone Complete discs are gold standard too.