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Post by crisgenjin on Oct 27, 2021 21:09:59 GMT
As we all know, this Capcom classic received a mighty impressive port for the Mega Drive (Aside from the missing cutscene speech). It was also released on PC Engine CD + Arcade Card -many years later-, and it looked promising at first. The FMVs were great, the music sounded very good and NEC Avenue hired voice actors for the cutscenes between levels. But then you start playing...the graphics are much worse compared to the MD version, which really surprised me, and the controls are quite a bit sluggish. I've heard it was originally planned as a Supergrafx game, but I wasn't really able to find clues about this. Anyone can shed some light on it?
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gilbot
Punkic Cyborg
Posts: 137
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Post by gilbot on Oct 28, 2021 1:17:47 GMT
Alongside Galaxy Force (I think it was Galaxy Force II, couldn't remember), this was another game listed in the 'up-coming' game sections of all the magazines at the time. Both had a tiny screenshot (possibly just from the arcade versions) and the medium was SG Hucard. This had continued for quite some time, until... the SG tanked. Eventually Galaxy Force was never released but Strider was released as Arcade Card CD.
I think Chris Covell's site may have some scans of these magazines.
NEC Avenue had a history of hoarding game licenses and a number of the games were quietly cancelled (some were possibly not even being developed at all).
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Post by turboxray on Oct 28, 2021 3:18:04 GMT
The biggest issue with the AC version, is the gameplay. It completely lacks any sort of polish compared to the MD port. This is its biggest flaw.
Some of the graphics are worse and some are actually getter than the MD port - but that matters little because it's horrible to play. As far as an AC game, I was actually looking at it recently. It barely uses any AC ram. And the funny thing is, if you do a save state on the first level, there's actually left over alt-graphics of Strider character and the mini-boss in the tail end of the AC memory (do a save state in mednafen, rename it to zip, uncompress it, and then open it up with YYchar). There are also some literally 'invisible' colors in the graphics (color pixels, but the associated palette just has repeated color), and some palettes are straight up wrong - the first boss counselors (sitting) have a green color skin! And what's with the 'yellow' flames after your defeat the first mini boss? The sprite usages is about as worse as you can get on the PCE, besides Warriors of Fate, where they just stack sprites on top of sprites cause more flicker for no reason. You literally have AC memory for pre-composited sprite frames.. why not use it? It's just overall a horrible port. FMV aren't even impressive. Gulliver Boy HuVideo has impressive FMV. Not this game.
As far as the game history; we do know the shots shown in the magazine was neither the released arcade version nor the MD version. Also, CD games tend to have unused data from other games interleaved inbetween unused parts in the data tracks. This is because they used hard drives to emulate CD data tracks (and CDDA audio tracks too). So left over game data, code, CDDA tracks, etc is often left in - when they uses the HD image as a master for the pressing of the CD. I found some Pakincho game from 1991-ish in the left over areas of the Data track. From other games that I've seen, with this kind of thing, is that they are closely related to the release dates of said game. So, while not an absolute, you could use that for an educated guess that the game was indeed in development for CD in 1991-1992. Given that it barely uses AC memory, it's not difficult to speculate that it started out as an SCD project too. An unfinished game released as an AC game for a quick cash grab? Most likely.
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Post by crisgenjin on Oct 28, 2021 11:51:17 GMT
The biggest issue with the AC version, is the gameplay. It completely lacks any sort of polish compared to the MD port. This is its biggest flaw. Some of the graphics are worse and some are actually getter than the MD port - but that matters little because it's horrible to play. As far as an AC game, I was actually looking at it recently. It barely uses any AC ram. And the funny thing is, if you do a save state on the first level, there's actually left over alt-graphics of Strider character and the mini-boss in the tail end of the AC memory (do a save state in mednafen, rename it to zip, uncompress it, and then open it up with YYchar). There are also some literally 'invisible' colors in the graphics (color pixels, but the associated palette just has repeated color), and some palettes are straight up wrong - the first boss counselors (sitting) have a green color skin! And what's with the 'yellow' flames after your defeat the first mini boss? The sprite usages is about as worse as you can get on the PCE, besides Warriors of Fate, where they just stack sprites on top of sprites cause more flicker for no reason. You literally have AC memory for pre-composited sprite frames.. why not use it? It's just overall a horrible port. FMV aren't even impressive. Gulliver Boy HuVideo has impressive FMV. Not this game. As far as the game history; we do know the shots shown in the magazine was neither the released arcade version nor the MD version. Also, CD games tend to have unused data from other games interleaved inbetween unused parts in the data tracks. This is because they used hard drives to emulate CD data tracks (and CDDA audio tracks too). So left over game data, code, CDDA tracks, etc is often left in - when they uses the HD image as a master for the pressing of the CD. I found some Pakincho game from 1991-ish in the left over areas of the Data track. From other games that I've seen, with this kind of thing, is that they are closely related to the release dates of said game. So, while not an absolute, you could use that for an educated guess that the game was indeed in development for CD in 1991-1992. Given that it barely uses AC memory, it's not difficult to speculate that it started out as an SCD project too. An unfinished game released as an AC game for a quick cash grab? Most likely. Yes, I was REALLY baffled by the color choice. Yellow flames? What the fuck were they smoking? Even the Mega Drive version gets it right, and you can only use 61 colors at most. The PC Engine, which has a much faster variant of the 6502 and a 16-bit VDC, should've handled the graphics better than this. I feel like the extra AC RAM is wasted on such a game
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gilbot
Punkic Cyborg
Posts: 137
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Post by gilbot on Oct 29, 2021 3:00:01 GMT
IMO they probably chose these rusty colours because they wanted to have a Steam Punk look. I too was baffled by the colours at first but eventually accepted them as a stylish choice (yeah, even the green skins), since a Steam Punk feel did match the settings of this game. I wouldn't mind if they kept the colours faithful to the arcade version though (probably for the better).
The problem is that this is possibly a late decision to change the colours and they did a sloppy job. When it was originally planned as a SG game they definitely wanted to have the game as faithful to the arcade version as possible (like Dai Makaimura). However, after the failure of the SG console they had to redraw the graphics (like, making the sprites smaller) to coop with the lower specs, and a decision was made to have the game different from the original (e.g. all the pre-rendered cutscenes), otherwise there was not a single chance to compete with the MD version. They probably didn't think of changing the colour scheme at first, but (some of them thought) the redrawn graphics didn't look good in the original colours and opted to adopt a more stylish approach at the last moments to use a rusty colour scheme and things went wrong, such as changing different palette entries to the same colours that further reduced details and the green skins.
This game actually contains mostly every thing from the original game, even the yells when the player swings his sword (I think this was only in the original Japanese version of the arcade game; the yells were removed in the overseas versions, which IMO was actually an improvement, as they were quite annoying), but the port was not competently done.
As people have mentioned before, there are a lot of problems, like sprite flickering and sloppy hit detection, and the extra stage is boring and not even impressive in any way.
One specific complain I have is that, there is a powerup that extends the range of your slashes, and it looks impressive in the original arcade game (and the MD port) when it's fully powered, that the slash is nearly half the screen wide and approaching mooks would just explode without even coming close. But in the PCE version, no matter how many of that powerup you have picked up, there doesn't seem to be any difference visually (possibly to limit the width of sprites to reduce flickering; or maybe there are differences, but I really couldn't make that out) and because of the sloppy hit detection I don't even know whether the range of attacks has increased.
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Post by turboxray on Oct 29, 2021 3:30:15 GMT
(yeah, even the green skins) Yeah but the green skin is totally a bug haha. I mean why would the character pic for when the boss is taking, have non-green skin but his sprite and all the others have green skin? Having done my own mock-ups way back, etc - I disagree. This port doesn't take advantage of the arcade card memory. If it did, you'd have even more detail in the BG areas and more animation for everything else. The colors can definitely be increased as well (this port doesn't push anything). The only thing, as with most ports to PCE, is going to be the missing 2nd BG. A lot of the flicker in the game is because they didn't hard-composite the sprite layers. This was a typical NEC Ave thing. So that can definitely be reduced to that of the MD sprite flicker. And with the AC mem, you can stream in new detail in the BGs. It definitely had a chance to compete with the MD version and exceed it in specific areas (in game, not just cinemas), over the 8megabit MD port. I mean it definitely had that potential. I was hacking this game about 10 years ago, so it's been quite some time, but I could have sworn the length does increase. Might need to have turbo fire on or something, but I specifically remember doing a sprite overlay comparison because of the absurdity of it. Am I miss remembering? Now I'm second guessing myself hahah
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gilbot
Punkic Cyborg
Posts: 137
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Post by gilbot on Oct 29, 2021 4:05:53 GMT
Having done my own mock-ups way back, etc - I disagree. This port doesn't take advantage of the arcade card memory. If it did, you'd have even more detail in the BG areas and more animation for everything else. The colors can definitely be increased as well (this port doesn't push anything). The only thing, as with most ports to PCE, is going to be the missing 2nd BG. A lot of the flicker in the game is because they didn't hard-composite the sprite layers. This was a typical NEC Ave thing. So that can definitely be reduced to that of the MD sprite flicker. And with the AC mem, you can stream in new detail in the BGs. It definitely had a chance to compete with the MD version and exceed it in specific areas (in game, not just cinemas), over the 8megabit MD port. I mean it definitely had that potential. I never said that they even tried to push the system, not in the final product anyway. When it was a SG game it was obvious that they wanted to have it as accurate to the arcade version as possible to compete with the MD version (like the case of Dai Makaimura). There was also no proof on that version had started development, even though people kept mentioning the screenshot was not of the arcade version, as it could be just a mock up since all we saw was one single screenshot over the years (unless there were stuff that I haven't seen). When they cancelled the SG version they just considered to still make the game as they had the license (among many other game licenses AV had acquired but never done anything), but because of the lower specs they couldn't follow the original plan to make a faithful adaption (at least that's what people there thought), otherwise the result would be laughed off by MD fans, so they changed directions by making it different (like making new cutscenes, adding professional voice acting and CD quality sound track, a new 'shinny' stage, and later, messed up the colours) to avoid comparison and direct competition with the MD version. That they outsourced the development to non-competent people (or, at least, not experienced enough to use the system up to its potential) didn't help. The Arcade Card requirement was obviously just a late decision, maybe to make people think it's awesome. It won't be much worse if the game was kept as a Super CD. I don't know. Whenever you swing the sword it's flickering like hell and its hard to figure out stuff. Also, possibly because of the reduced sprite size, the range couldn't be nearly half the screen's width (think about it, that means if you're standing in the middle of the screen, the fodder mooks would explode when they just appear on the edge) and it just looked much less impressive.
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Post by crisgenjin on Oct 29, 2021 8:28:13 GMT
IMO they probably chose these rusty colours because they wanted to have a Steam Punk look. I too was baffled by the colours at first but eventually accepted them as a stylish choice (yeah, even the green skins), since a Steam Punk feel did match the settings of this game. I wouldn't mind if they kept the colours faithful to the arcade version though (probably for the better). The problem is that this is possibly a late decision to change the colours and they did a sloppy job. When it was originally planned as a SG game they definitely wanted to have the game as faithful to the arcade version as possible (like Dai Makaimura). However, after the failure of the SG console they had to redraw the graphics (like, making the sprites smaller) to coop with the lower specs, and a decision was made to have the game different from the original (e.g. all the pre-rendered cutscenes), otherwise there was not a single chance to compete with the MD version. They probably didn't think of changing the colour scheme at first, but (some of them thought) the redrawn graphics didn't look good in the original colours and opted to adopt a more stylish approach at the last moments to use a rusty colour scheme and things went wrong, such as changing different palette entries to the same colours that further reduced details and the green skins. This game actually contains mostly every thing from the original game, even the yells when the player swings his sword (I think this was only in the original Japanese version of the arcade game; the yells were removed in the overseas versions, which IMO was actually an improvement, as they were quite annoying), but the port was not competently done. As people have mentioned before, there are a lot of problems, like sprite flickering and sloppy hit detection, and the extra stage is boring and not even impressive in any way. One specific complain I have is that, there is a powerup that extends the range of your slashes, and it looks impressive in the original arcade game (and the MD port) when it's fully powered, that the slash is nearly half the screen wide and approaching mooks would just explode without even coming close. But in the PCE version, no matter how many of that powerup you have picked up, there doesn't seem to be any difference visually (possibly to limit the width of sprites to reduce flickering; or maybe there are differences, but I really couldn't make that out) and because of the sloppy hit detection I don't even know whether the range of attacks has increased. Dai Makaimura was quite the great port, but it still didn't take full advantage of the SG. They used less colors for the palettes and backgrounds than they could have, which meant saving on memory -It's not like the Supergrafx itself was cheap though-
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gilbot
Punkic Cyborg
Posts: 137
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Post by gilbot on Oct 29, 2021 12:17:20 GMT
Alright. I've checked Chris' page and indeed the screenshots in magazines were from the arcade version (just that they're of the beta version if they didn't match, possibly the magazines rehashed old pics before the arcade version was released). Many of which even had the "screenshots are from the arcade" disclaimer, so it is highly likely that the SG version hadn't even started development.
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Post by turboxray on Oct 29, 2021 17:48:42 GMT
but because of the lower specs they couldn't follow the original plan to make a faithful adaption (at least that's what people there thought), otherwise the result would be laughed off by MD fans, so they changed directions by making it different (like making new cutscenes, adding professional voice acting and CD quality sound track, a new 'shinny' stage, and later, messed up the colours) to avoid comparison and direct competition with the MD version. I'm gonna be honest here, I'm little confused by this comment. Are you saying developers were afraid that a PCE port of some game being developed was going to be compared to an MD version.. and that what MD fans might say about this??? What hahah. Since when did the fans, or whoever you're implying, of the Megadrive dictate how, or even if, a game is developed for the PCE? If that were true, and NEC or Hudson was worried, PCE games would have been pushed far beyond the bar that was set for standard PCE games (and there's plenty of room to push that bar). If that were the case then NEC Ave, who was the worst offenders for sprite line drop/flicker, would have used optimized art instead of using direct/original arcade assets - they would have put more care into it. I'm pretty sure PCE games were developed without worrying about what Megadrive fans thought, because it was PCE fans buying their games - not MD fans. The Genesis version seems to be doing fine with it. 192px wide, is more than half the 320px width. Also, Chris doesn't have all the screen shots from the magazines on his site. I think there was like one or two more where the shots are neither the arcade or beta IIRC, but most likely mockups (which, at least Hudson has said in interviews, they've done for magazine shots). It's unclear if the AC version has any connection to the SGX development (however far that progressed), but evidence does show that it was most likely the evolution of the SCD port (for PCE) announced back in '91/92.
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keithcourage
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https://www.facebook.com/turbografxfan/
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Post by keithcourage on Nov 8, 2021 21:55:06 GMT
I'm sure it was just a matter of the port being rushed because of the PCE being close to its end of life and the need for the more Arcade systems card based games to try and validate the purchase of the ACD card. There are so many examples of games that could have been better on all 16-bit systems if more time had just been put into said game.
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