I thought this was a good cross section for games that should get an upgrade. Some older, some newer. Some arcade. Others, to give them more room to excel.
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I thought this was a good cross section for games that should get an upgrade. Some older, some newer. Some arcade. Others, to give them more room to excel.
Although I don't like the options (why Rastan Saga 2?), I voted for Shinobi 3. Beyond Oasis would get my vote of any Genesis game.
If we are talking about arbitrary expansion to levels, animation, number of enemy characters and lastly cutscenes/story I'd have to pick Strider. That game just screams to be fleshed out in all of those areas. Aside from that, I'd rather the game be made and the ROM size end up wherever it may.
Panorama cotton.
I'm torn between Strider and Fatal Fury...I love em both....but Im leaning toward Fury
I voted for Gunstar Heroes.
The game is amazing enough as it is, but just imagine what it could turn into if it had that much more room...
The Strider MAME ROM is 5.33MBytes at most. That's only 42Mbits or so. I would demand new levels and better animation at a minimum, plus some new enemies with unique animations and maybe some special weapons. ;)
64M version of Fatal Fury Special, fuck the low color Sega CD version, gimme a cart of FFS!
I voted for Duke Nukem 3D. Hail to the king, baby!
No love for Altered Beast or Rastan Saga 2.
Duke nukem 3D gets my vote.
How about a hybrid of Strider and Strider 2 (Not Return of Strider :p ) . . . like some of the elements of Strider 2 converted more to Strider 1 graphical style (and generally practical for the MD) and built out from the original Strider.
That, or Strider 2's levels in their entirety done in that manner and not Strider 1 at all. (except that's a different topic entirely :p )
Also, why stop at 64 Mbits . . . Sega's own mapper (only used in SSFII) was already designed to handle up to 256 Mbits of ROM. ;)
I put in my vote for Rastan Saga 2. I'd like to see this game arcade perfect. If it only takes half of the 64 MEG, then, how about adding Rastan 1 arcade perfect to the cart as well? We'll get a 2 for 1. Great since the genesis never got part 1. Rastan Saga 2 had a lot of cuts as seen in this video(similar to Strider).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G27r6F3EPUs
While I see Strider, Forgotten Worlds, Ghouls 'n Ghosts, and Truxton are also in the same boat. They suffer from being early releases that would have gotten much better treatment if released a 2 or 3 years later. At least with all of these games, the gameplay and games themselves were left intact. Another good one for the list would be one of the Worms games. Maybe Armageddon? At least a downgraded version of it.
I would like to see Fatal Fury Special on the Genesis,
a 40M Cart not a 64M Cart
disappointed DJ Boy didn't make the list
I voted shinobi 3.
Eh...don't really dig the choices for this topic, but then again I'm probably thinking about it wrong as I'm thinking in terms of at the time rather than now. But even on a quality level....
IMHO, Shinobi III, Gunstar, and Alien Soldier are already all great, and maybe missing one or two things at most (Gunstar's US release could've used a difficulty toggle to have the JP difficulty; Alien Soldier could've used a two-player mode) that probably could've been added without bumping up the size to 64Megs. The others, like Altered Beast and Strider, were mostly older Genesis releases, and, realistically, I wouldn't think they'd get the 64Meg treatment. I don't think re-releases would be warranted either: both ports did their job as early Genesis releases quite well.
Between Fatal Fury 2 and Duke 3D, and in the mindset I have for this topic (again, "at the time"), I go with neither one. Duke was a late release, '98, and that was well after it would've mattered to most gamers outside of Brazil. Fatal Fury didn't get really good until Real Bout, IMHO, so it too wouldn't be worthy. I guess there's Virtua Racer, but...meh.
I vote "other". I think RPGs, strategy games, and, in general, computer game ports would've benefitted most from the upgrade in ROM size. Imagine what could've been added to Starflight, for instance. Or even something like Buck Rogers: Countdown to Doomsday would've retained more of the stuff in the original computer game (the extra character classes, etc.). What would Shadowrun at that size have been like?
Out of these choices I'd go with SOR 3. I think that this one out of the poll choices is the most deserving from a combination of it being the best playable game with also the biggest need for an upgrade. Also in a beat'em up there is more opportunity to use the larger size. Never ending back rounds, enemies, long level play times for more music, etc. Next would be Duke Nukem 3D. So impressive is what they did with their 3D with no extra chips and also the smooth save function. Imagine that no big bucks was paid to get the crew to make this either. With double the size it would have a good chance to make the game play better as well with larger more detailed levels and enemies. This would be my first choice if it was a guarantee that the could improve. Without the cheat codes I can't even play this mother fucker. Third would be Virtua Racing. The only game to take advantage of the SVP chip and they make it a 16 MEG game? Way to give it room to show what it can do. Good job Sega.
Other. Sega should've went through and ported Virtua Fighter with the SVP chip. And with 64 megs available I think it would've been a decent port, for the Genesis anyway.
I could be wrong, but I think polygonal games don't take up nearly as much memory because the animation doesn't have to be stored in frames. Pretty much just the backgrounds and samples would be all that the ROM would be filled with. That said the Arcade ROM for Virtua Fighter is 29Mbytes, so apparently it needed that space for something.
Wouldn't surprise me if 75% of the romspace was for the sound samples alone.
But yeah I find it weird that people are saying stuff like "omg virtua racing bigger rom, omg virtua fighter bigger rom!"
they are simple 3D models with hardly any textures, that shit isn't too big to begin with.
And you can hardly say lets make more detailed textures that weren't in the arcade version and add them to this inferior console port that is already struggling to run it.
I think Sega made a good choice with the 16M cart, sure they could have had higher quality samples in the game,
but.. rom cost Vs a little bit better sound was probably an easy choice to decide on.
That and the SVP chip cost quite a bit of money back then, making the rom even bigger would have made the game so expensive it would not have sold at all.
How about a 64 meg version of Mortal Kombat? Wouldn't that have made it the definitive 16 bit port of the day?
Not sure how the thread turned into, "back when the games were released what would have been the best". I'm not really complaining. You start a thread and it goes where it goes. It's better than it turning into, "what is the best technique for sucking monkey nuts".
If we are talking in the past, the Genesis was screwed for much of it's life since that was a lot of time spent to make games for the Sega Cd, 32x, and the Saturn. Also, not saying this happened, maybe they didn't want to make genesis games look too good to push people to buy the add-ons or the new console. Also the games that were only x-band with a nice subscription fee. I'm just say'in.
True, Probe would probably still screw things up, but for the sake of discussion let's assume that a seasoned development group like Watermelon decided in 2013 that they would remake Mortal Kombat for the Genesis from the scratch. All the licensing issues have been sorted out and there's no publisher breathing down your neck to have the game ready for release by Mortal Monday. Watermelon's only job is to make the best version of MK that they can using every ounce of power and creativity they can muster out of the Genesis. You could almost call it a "re-port" if you will. Hopefully Zebbe or some of the other WM developers who frequent these boards can chime in on how different or improved their modern day port in graphics, sound samples, speed, sprite size, and the like would be compared to the original one.
I used to go along with this too . . . but after actually seeing and hearing the various SNES/MD/32x Mortal Kombat games (and taking the various ROM sizes into account), the probe versions were pretty decent overall. Well, at least Mortal Kombat II was relatively well done (both in sound and visuals) . . . unless you don't like Mat Furniss's remixed and (in many cases) replaced music tracks. MK I just sucked all around though . . . ugly color usage in the arcade translating to ugly color in the home versions in general with little they could do to change that without going beyond an arcade conversion. (ie using actual new graphics) MKII on MD is definitely better sounding than the Williams games. (both in speech/sfx -for the most part- and music . . . I'm assuming they used 8-bit PCM with the Krysalis driver in MKII vs what certainly sounds like 4-bit PCM in GEMS on MK3 and UMK3 -the decent quality 8-bit PCM would also partially explain why more samples were cut than the SNES version, opting for quality over quantity -not sure what sample formats Krysalis actually supports, but I assume 4-bit PCM/DPCM/ADPCM wasn't used)
I can't comment too much on the gameplay quality differences since I'm not personally versed in that, though I'd gotten the impression that the Probe games were relatively faithful to the arcade. (if not a little tough on default difficulty)
MKII on 32x was under-optimized though and kind of a waste overall. Lack of 32x graphics in any BG detail kind of killed that (the higher color sprites are barely noticeable), and most of the added sound quality could have been present in a 3MB (24Mbit) Genesis version too. (overall it's very little better than a 3 MB plain MD version could have been)
Or they could have used the reserved address space (later used by the 32x). Even so, 32x games generally didn't go beyond 3MB anyway, and SVP games were already pushing it with the 2MB ROM (by comparison, only 2 2MB Super FX games were ever released, and both in 1995, the others were all 1MB or 512 kB). That's aside from a hypothetical lock-on cart iteration, of course. (where ROM carts would cost the same to build as normal MD or 32x carts)
I thought it was more for show than anything. Remember the Japanese version doesn't even have the heat spreader on it, just a bare chip. (and it doesn't even get as warm as the MD VDP typically does iirc) The western versons got that heatspreader added along with the RF shield (both sheet steel too), for whatever reason. (partially FCC obviously)
I've actually been meaning to redo all the MK1 stages to be more like Sculptured Software did with their MK3/UMK3 ports,
I've never liked Probe's stages, they are so bland looking and lack detail.
Shame it seems impossible to find full Arcade stage rips, most seem to be Snes rips or.. creepy Mugen frankensteined stages.
I was pointing out that 3MB is the limit for the way they designed the SVP. Naturally, had they made it different, the limit would be different. That goes without saying. :D
I imagine that the MAIN reason they made the cart so big was marketing - if you just spent $100 on a game, the cart better DAMN well show it!! However, they probably also were somewhat worried about heat, especially since they would need to add a shield in the US to pass FCC certification, so they needed a bigger cart to allow that shield to dissipate the heat. Once one cart needed to be big, all the rest HAD to be just as big or people would realize that the cart was big for NO REASON.Quote:
I thought it was more for show than anything. Remember the Japanese version doesn't even have the heat spreader on it, just a bare chip. (and it doesn't even get as warm as the MD VDP typically does iirc) The western versons got that heatspreader added along with the RF shield (both sheet steel too), for whatever reason. (partially FCC obviously)
These things can get complicated. :D
I have to agree with the above sentiments: Shinobi III, Gunstar Heroes, Strider, and Alien Soldier are already great titles. Seeing a 64 MEG cart release of Fatal Fury 2, Altered Beast, Duke Nukem 3D, or Virtua Racing are not very appealing to me.
From the list above, I chose Rastan Saga 2. There are quite a number of elements of the game that I would have loved to see improved upon and it would have been nice to see what improvements could be made to the game if it was a 64 meg cart release. Rastan Saga 2 disappoints on so many levels. It has a great story and interesting concepts but sadly Taito did a poor job executing those ideas in Rastan Saga 2. The main character ressembles "Conan the Barbarian" and you expect that he will be equally as nimble. But after you spend time playing the game, you discover that the character's move sets are far too rigid. Simply traversing past a level becomes quite a chore and your only option is to use the jump mechanic in order to quicken your pace. When you finally encounter a boss, the challenge is underwhelming. What also hurts the game are the poor visuals: Although the backgrounds are nice and colorful, they are very simplistic. When you are consistently slashing at blocks in order to progress through a level, you can't help but feel that you are playing an 8 bit game on a 16 bit console. This series deserves a complete overhaul.