Drunk rambling that doesn't deserve a thread

[Marc]

The best home version of SF2 would have the Mega Drive music with the SNES sfx, and the PCE visuals.
Also PCE OutRun smoked the MD

[Hazuki]

I hate how overused the "Creeping Wheeping" theme is in Final Fight 2. I mean, you hear it in the second segment of stage 1, the entirety of stage 3, the second half of stage 4, and then AGAIN in the second segment of stage 6. Why???
They should have at least kept stage 4's unique theme (Bust Up the Railway) through all of it. It's far more fitting for that area and it'd match how stages 2, 3 and 5 (save for the boss fight) had one song each.

[sunnshiner]

OG Sega Rally Championship is the best arcade racer ever and I don't like 2D fighters with 3D graphics. There, I said it.

[Marc]

OG Sega Rally Championship is the best arcade racer ever and I don't like 2D fighters with 3D graphics. There, I said it.

Tied with Daytona and OutRun for me.

[BareKnuckleRoo]

Also PCE OutRun smoked the MD

You're not wrong, it looks really good.

Outrun C64 is not a particularly good version of the game (traffic is way denser, no course selection on-the-fly, NTSC version has a bug and doesn't give enough time to finish), but it has some of the best remixes of Splash Wave and Magical Sound Shower.

I got to play Outrunners recently with someone who was into Outrun but hadn't realized Outrunners existed :O

[To Far Away Times]

Super Hang On is the bee's knees.

Ground Kontrol in Portland has a stand up cab. It's a lot easier to play in the arcade than it is on a joystick. The handbars give you a lot more control, and it vibrates a little bit too. Awesome stuff.

[sunnshiner]

Super Hang On is the bee's knees.

See also: Enduro Racer

[ChurchOfSolipsism]

Most Mega Drive/ Genesis games sound like shit to me. The sound effects in Ghouls'n Ghost for example are rarely anything but scratchy noises. Music often sounds tinny, sterile and artificial (except in Xeno Crisis - jesus christ, imagine every MD game sounded like that ). Each to their own, but I'll never understand how so many people enjoy the MD's soundchip's sound.

[BareKnuckleRoo]

Most Mega Drive/ Genesis games sound like shit to me.

Agreed. Compared to the audio squeezed out of the NES and SNES, I don't really like the Genesis audio chip... or at least not a lot of the music we got from games. A lot sounds slightly gritty or tinny to me. There are a couple of games from that era that standout for doing some miraculous work with it and sound amazing, namely Gauntlet IV and Gunstar Heroes.

[Marc]

Also PCE OutRun smoked the MD

You're not wrong, it looks really good.

Outrun C64 is not a particularly good version of the game (traffic is way denser, no course selection on-the-fly, NTSC version has a bug and doesn't give enough time to finish), but it has some of the best remixes of Splash Wave and Magical Sound Shower.

I got to play Outrunners recently with someone who was into Outrun but hadn't realized Outrunners existed :O

The fact that folk are still unaware of Outrunners makes me sad.

C64 OutRun has a really interesting story- it was a crunch thing for a 16-year old kid snd ut basically fucked him up. There's a great article on Eurogamer.

I still remember getting burned by the Spectrum bullshots.

[BareKnuckleRoo]

C64 OutRun has a really interesting story- it was a crunch thing for a 16-year old kid snd ut basically fucked him up. There's a great article on Eurogamer.

Yeah, I only learned about this last year and it was rather an eye-opener, it sounded like the game was the product of child abuse. O_o I was also interested in who did the music for the game as it's another name on there, but the article didn't shed any light on that from what I recall.

Outrunners is effectively Outrun 2 and is a far more competent sequel than Turbo Outrun's weird changes were (the oil slicks and obstacles you slam through make it way more chaotic than Outrun or Outrunners). It's a darn shame we didn't get more sprite scaler racers on par with Outrunners.

[To Far Away Times]

Most Mega Drive/ Genesis games sound like shit to me. The sound effects in Ghouls'n Ghost for example are rarely anything but scratchy noises. Music often sounds tinny, sterile and artificial (except in Xeno Crisis - jesus christ, imagine every MD game sounded like that ). Each to their own, but I'll never understand how so many people enjoy the MD's soundchip's sound.

GEMS soundfont did a lot of damage to the Genesis' reputation with audio, but I think Streets of Rage 2 and Sonic 3 show what the system could do in highly capable hands. They lean into the FM Synth sound, and it keeps them from feeling dated in the way that an SNES game that tries to approximate an orchestra might feel today.

[ChurchOfSolipsism]

Most Mega Drive/ Genesis games sound like shit to me. The sound effects in Ghouls'n Ghost for example are rarely anything but scratchy noises. Music often sounds tinny, sterile and artificial (except in Xeno Crisis - jesus christ, imagine every MD game sounded like that ). Each to their own, but I'll never understand how so many people enjoy the MD's soundchip's sound.

GEMS soundfont did a lot of damage to the Genesis' reputation with audio, but I think Streets of Rage 2 and Sonic 3 show what the system could do in highly capable hands. They lean into the FM Synth sound, and it keeps them from feeling dated in the way that an SNES game that tries to approximate an orchestra might feel today.

Good points. Yeah, it could absolutely sound good, but even then, to me it sounded and still sounds like it belongs to the 8bit generation of consoles, just totally inferior to the SNES. Gotta admit though I never owned an MD when I was a kid, only a SNES...

[BareKnuckleRoo]

GEMS soundfont did a lot of damage to the Genesis' reputation with audio, but I think Streets of Rage 2 and Sonic 3 show what the system could do in highly capable hands.

Oh wow... I did some reading up on it, so basically the reason so many Genesis games sound samey compared to ones that sound more high-fidelity, with a more FM Synth feel is a lot of them used the same audio driver? I guess GEMS is not well regarded among audiophiles then? I notice that none of the games I can think of with soundtracks I really enjoy are on here.

I imagine some of it was time constraints, but was its use in Western developed games due also to something like the audio hardware not being well documented in English by Sega, making it harder to make custom drivers? I've read that the audio hardware was very similar to other Japan specific computers, giving Japanese developers a bit of a head-start in terms of making custom audio drivers.

[Lander]

Huh, so that's (at least part of) the reason why some Mega Drive soundtracks have a distinctly DOS MIDI vibe to them. Nice to be able to put a name to it, I guess!