Saturn > SNES

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Originally Posted by Barone

You picked a bad example.

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No all he did was make out the Snes was better for Sound and like usual. Anyone that dares to make out the Snes was better or finds fault with a console you happen to like (anything SONY) You hit out to insult them and dismiss anything they say.Your MD list is highly subjective and I love the way you leave out Snes games with better music like Rock N Roll Racing, Smash TV, Earthworm Jim II, Contra, Castlevania Ect. And since you talk of Flashback what was the size of Flashback on the Amiga and I could list quite a number of Amiga games with far better music than their MD versions, despite having nothing like the Rom size. In the end, when one gets past fanboy mode Games ported to other systems always tend to lose out, even if ported to a more powerful system. Games always tend to look and run the best on the host platform that lead the game's development, more when you had such a vast difference of CPU and GPU in the 16 and 32bit days and no standard middleware development tools Ect

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Originally Posted by Team Andromeda

I love the way you leave out Snes games with better music like Rock N Roll Racing, Smash TV, Earthworm Jim II, Contra, Castlevania Ect.

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Yes, of course I should provide a list of SNES games with superior sound when I'm arguing that it's not true that it has superior sound most of the time.
Makes sense to me, TA. You're also very intelligent.

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Originally Posted by Barone

Yes, of course I should provide a list of SNES games with superior sound when I'm arguing that it's not true that it has superior sound most of the time.

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Just because you say or think that way, doesn't make it true, more so when you cheery pick games or pick games that lead development on the Mega Drive. Looking over that how big was FlashBack on the Amiga or the likes of SpeedBall II, Cannon Fodder, Xenon 2 and yet they had better music than the MD ports, but then again games that led on the Mega Drive sounded worse on the Amiga like John Madden or Jungle Strike on both the Amiga and Snes.

Like I say all systems have good and bad points and games always tend to look, run and sound the best on the platform that led their development

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Originally Posted by Team Andromeda

Just because you say or think that way, doesn't make it true, more so when you cheery pick games or pick games that lead development on the Mega Drive. Looking over that how big was FlashBack on the Amiga or the likes of SpeedBall II, Cannon Fodder, Xenon 2 and yet they had better music than the MD ports, but then again games that led on the Mega Drive sounded worse on the Amiga like John Madden or Jungle Strike on both the Amiga and Snes.

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Sorry, TA, I'm not as smart as you. I should be picking games which don't prove my point in order to prove my point. Silly me.

And, yes, go play Flashback on the Amiga. It's amazing when you hear the sfx on the left channel while the action is happening in the right side of the screen.
Just amazing.

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Originally Posted by Barone

And, yes, go play Flashback on the Amiga. It's amazing when you hear the sfx on the left channel while the action is happening in the right side of the screen.
Just amazing.

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No you just insult people and will not it that the Snes had a better sound system and played host to better sounding games. I really haven't a clue about your Flashback Amiga little dig is all about, because it was hardly a game noted for its music. But some like the Amiga music better even thought the Amiga version wasn't the file size of either the Snes or MD version
Me I much rathered play the Mega CD version

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Originally Posted by Team Andromeda

No you just insult people and will not it that the Snes had a better sound system and played host to better sounding games.

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Yeah, I will "not it" TA. Lol.

Dang, that Skeleton Krew track doesn't use any PCM samples? They did a great job.

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Originally Posted by Team Andromeda

No you just insult people and will not it that the Snes had a better sound system and played host to better sounding games. I really haven't a clue about your Flashback Amiga little dig is all about, because it was hardly a game noted for its music. But some like the Amiga music better even thought the Amiga version wasn't the file size of either the Snes or MD version

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Are you sure about that? The Amiga version is on 4 floppy disks.

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Originally Posted by j_factor

Are you sure about that? The Amiga version is on 4 floppy disks.

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Yeah, 4 512 bytes Discs. But the music is better in the Amiga version despite the both using about the same space

To be fair to the Saturn, the SCSP isn't just a sampler, it's a synthesizer, and a very good one at that. But developers just didn't use it that way, and then it comes up short. Personally, I'd *love* to work with it one day, I love classic synths.

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Originally Posted by Lion

To be fair to the Saturn, the SCSP isn't just a sampler, it's a synthesizer, and a very good one at that. But developers just didn't use it that way, and then it comes up short.

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Sound design in general went downhill during the 5th gen IMO.
It's just disgusting that they used the Saturn as a lesser PS1 for the most part.

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Originally Posted by Barone

Sound design in general went downhill during the 5th gen IMO.
It's just disgusting that they used the Saturn as a lesser PS1 for the most part.

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I agree. It seemed like the more powerful the hardware got, the less effort developers put into things. I remember playing games like Lunar SSSC and thinking wow, the SNES had RPGs that sounded more polished than this. Granted, the Saturn version sounds better than the PSX, but even then I still think it was a step down.

I would argue it was the same thing with special effects too. When I was playing 2D games like Lunar or Legend of Oasis, I was wondering why they seemed weaker than stuff like FFVI or Chrono Trigger in this department. In hindsight, I guess it's because on SNES they had to use those clipping features to create fancy effects like Ultima or the Luminarie explosion and such, actively shaping them frame by frame. It took effort. But in the 32bit era developers could instead take new shortcuts to create similar effects, just using scaling sprites or BG layers, with an overall rougher, weaker result. It wasn't always the case of course, but 32bit 2D efforts often seemed kind of underwhelming to me because of this.

A lot of the sound effects were generic sound banks reused by many games.
Licensed music was a growing cancer at this point as well. And cheapo MIDI-like compositions were also readily available.

I fully agree on what you said about the graphical effects, but not only that.
A lot of the digitized graphics they used were poorly converted; you could notice the edges, all the conversion artifacts; it was nasty. The photo-based backgrounds are also ugly as sin for the most part.

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Originally Posted by gamevet

Black Tiger was. He made the claim that the SNES needed more space for sound, because it uses samples, when it just wasn't true at all.

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It's just not as simple as that. People like everything simple enough to form short dick measuring checklists. If you were to use more or less the same quality and content sound sample on Genesis and SNES, then that exact sample would take up less space on SNES... and if it's in the sweet spot, it wouldn't lose too much from compression and filtering.

But that's taken out of real game context. How often do SNES games contain intact voice/sound effect samples in the first place? Many SNES games are also on Genesis or PC Engine, where they use little or no sound samples. Those games are using more space for sound in the SNES versions. Zero samples will always require more space than actual samples.

It's pointless trying to convince people of what they're actually hearing in SNES games until they finally notice for themselves. SFII is a good example, where people pretend that the difference in voice samples is simply the "quality" of them and SNES is "good" and Genesis is "bad". If you measure the duration of the voice samples in SFII Turbo which didn't have major content cut out of them (filled with dead space instead), they are literally less than half the length of the samples in the arcade, Genesis and PC Engine versions. Clips like screams are 90% shorter. The end result is so unnatural that it is off-putting if you aren't "blindly" telling yourself that SNES "is just better". But when the hardware then shifts the pitch higher or lower, it leaps from uncanny valley into derpblivion. But game mags convinced everyone that the only difference between SNES and competing consoles is "scratchiness".

The combination of gutting and fast forwarded/squished clips all adds up to such a fraction of duration length, that even when you factor in all of the instruments for music, SFII Turbo likely has a much smaller overall amount of actual sample duration than SFIICE.

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Originally Posted by gamevet

My second favorite song from the 16-bit era was from Star Fox. You'd have to be a big time fanboy to not enjoy this masterpiece. It is solid!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dsOEGPLa1Z4

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I take it that the bgm it plagiarizes was your number one favorite?


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JyIIEBMh_2k



The original should put into perspective how derpy SNES sound can be.

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Originally Posted by Team Andromeda

The Snes had the better audio chip it was custom and made by SONY and also unlike the MD is wasn't limited to just one sample channel, most of the time the Amiga handle better music, just a shame it was limited to just 4 channels

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This is the kind of mindset which led to all of the fantastical mental gymnastics by Gamefan editors bitd.

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Originally Posted by Barone

A lot of the sound effects were generic sound banks reused by many games.
Licensed music was a growing cancer at this point as well. And cheapo MIDI-like compositions were also readily available.

I fully agree on what you said about the graphical effects, but not only that.
A lot of the digitized graphics they used were poorly converted; you could notice the edges, all the conversion artifacts; it was nasty. The photo-based backgrounds are also ugly as sin for the most part.

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Great points, Barone!

About the sound, I actually feel like consoles lost a lot of their identity because of the heavy use of samplers. In previous generations, different systems had distinct sound capabilities and thus their own sound. Sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse, but at least they had something unique to offer. 32bit and beyond, it was all the same, just different sampling rates or whatever. I'd like to think that if the SCSP had been used as the synthesizer it really was, actually synthesizing more sound effects and instruments, it migth've have been remembered as the last of the distinct and interesting sound chips.

And yes, I agree completely about the graphics too. It was like there was this general lack of polish, and it makes the hardware seem flawed when in fact it's just the developers cutting corners. Stuff just wasn't optimized well anymore.