WTF happen to Afterburner III???

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Originally Posted by kool kitty89

Yeah, but it's not even a port of G-Loc, but the sequel Strike Fighter. (which is arguably worse than G-Loc overall)

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I've hardy ever saw Strike Fighter in the Arcades, and looking over how both games in my view with pretty poor They were great demo's of the Sprite scaling and rotation. Of course there was no hope of the Mega CD game looking anywhere near as good, but this should have been the 1st real showcase game for the Mega CD sprite and rotation effects (and in many ways that would have been good enough) The fact that it didn't use the Mega CD GFX hardware at all and what we saw was nothing the Mega Drive couldn't handle was a bitter disappointment. I remember very well at the time, a lot of the UK Mag's and Importers hyping this game as the game that would show off what the the Mega CD scaling could do, only for the final game to look worse than AB II on a standard 4Mb cart , its was a total letdown and frankly an embarrassment.

It did make people even question was there any extra GFX Hardware inside the Mega CD.

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Originally Posted by Team Andromeda

I've hardy ever saw Strike Fighter in the Arcades, and looking over how both games in my view with pretty poor They were great demo's of the Sprite scaling and rotation. Of course there was no hope of the Mega CD game looking anywhere near as good, but this should have been the 1st real showcase game for the Mega CD sprite and rotation effects (and in many ways that would have been good enough) The fact that it didn't use the Mega CD GFX hardware at all and what we saw was nothing the Mega Drive couldn't handle was a bitter disappointment. I remember very well at the time, a lot of the UK Mag's and Importers hyping this game as the game that would show off what the the Mega CD scaling could do, only for the final game to look worse than AB II on a standard 4Mb cart , its was a total letdown and frankly an embarrassment.

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The Y board doesn't even cater all that well to the Sega CD's advantages though . . . many scaled/zoomed sprites with no rotation (only full-screen rotation on one of the sprite layers), things the Sega CD would choke at simulating directly (low color, low framerate and/or small screen size). Albeit, more heavily modified adaptations could cater better to the ASIC's avbilities (like cutting back on the full-screen rotation effects to cater more to rendering animation to individual sprite tiles, use of textured flat ground/walls -especially with tile mirroring- in place of many cases where large numbers of composited sprites were used -especially caves/tunnels, etc, etc).

And as far as the Y board in general, Galaxy Force or Galaxy Force II would have been much better examples to push. (Space Harrier, After Burner, and Out Run -and sequels certainly should have been in the lineup as well in any case -and easier to optimize for the CD than many Y board games)
Thunderblade would be another good example to promote the system. (especially in contrast to Super Thunderblade)

Pushing for ports of Japanese computer games (especially X68k and FM Towns -the latter in particular due to being CD based and using very similar sound hardware to the MCD) would have been a good plan on SoJ's part as well. (be it pushing for licenses which Sega could publish themselves, or actively attempting to attract 3rd parties publishing on those computers to publish for the MCD)

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The Y board doesn't even cater all that well to the Sega CD's advantages though . . . many scaled/zoomed sprites with no rotation (only full-screen rotation on one of the sprite layers), things the Sega CD would choke at simulating directly (low color, low framerate and/or small screen size). Albeit, more heavily modified adaptations could cater better to the ASIC's avbilities (like cutting back on the full-screen rotation effects to cater more to rendering animation to individual sprite tiles, use of textured flat ground/walls -especially with tile mirroring- in place of many cases where large numbers of composited sprites were used -especially caves/tunnels, etc, etc)

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Ports of any of the Scalier Coin Ups don't cater well to either the Mega Drive or Mega CD , given the huge gulf in spec's and display. The point you seem to keep on missing is this should have been a showcase for the Mega CD sprite scaling and rotation effects (number of sprites would be cut down and happened in most 16 bit ports of Coin ups anyway) If running in a window like that of Batman/Cliffhanger we should at least got scaling on the sprites/bitmaps and nice bit of rotation on the main sprites when in the outside view . It would have mattered if they were horribly cut down from the Coin up, it would have at least been using the Hardware and back in 1992 that would have been good enough for most .

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And as far as the Y board in general, Galaxy Force or Galaxy Force II would have been much better examples to push.

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I really don't how you can say that, when GF II is one of the best looking (if not the best ) Y board game there is, with even to this day the most insane scaling seen . Any Y board port would have been hardware work to be fair. The Mega CD was better able to try and handle them that the stock Mega Drive, and its shame we never got to see any SEGA scalier Coin Up used , even it was just mega Drive code (say Super Hang On, AB II, OutRun) with slightly improved animation all new scaling and Arcade perfect sound - That would have been a big deal for SEGA fans back inthe day

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Pushing for ports of Japanese computer games

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The Mega CD had it's fair share of those, thanks to the likes of Riot and CRI . Better if SEGA made sure the likes of Lucas Arts games were ported to the Mega CD, even if all it was was Amgia/St code with Mega CD audio and speech . I'm still gutted Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis never made it out.

I meant a game like Galaxy Force II generally would have been a much better game to present on the system. Though, as mentioned, there are some interesting exploits that could have been used to replace the raw sprite scaling effects of the arcade version. (using textured planes with perspective for ground effects, doing that with tile mirroring for tunnels/caves, etc -actually, that could have been doen to a limited degree on the vanilla MD like was done in a few games like G-Loc, but using tile mirroring for ceilings rather than just the ground -to do walls, you'd need additional tile animation, but it could still be mirroed horizontally -tiles and sprites can be flipped horizontally and vetically, but not rotated 90 degrees)


And yes, pretty much any high-end arcade game is going to take hits (and need modifications and good optimization to mitigate that) on a lower powered home console, but certain examples would fare better than others (and some that may take bigger hits over the arcade, may still be more impressive than weaker games that lost less in conversion).

Of course, the MCD is capable of some things that those high-end scaler boards simply can't do at all, or would do much more poorly. (they have nothing like the ASIC to handle realtime scanling/rotation effects on a per-object basis -drawn to tiles or sprites- and the CPU(s) of those arcade boards alone would be hard pressed to make up for that)
Then again, the plain MD or even Atari ST is much better at some types of games than the Neo Geo (without added hardware), namely things that absolutely require rendering to a framebuffer. (like polygons, height map engines, etc)