tech specs that actually improves gameplay instead of graphics

When most people think of tech specs and system power, "graphics" pop into their heads immediately. However, I can think of many examples of technical stuff that actually improves gameplay instead of graphics:

1. amount of sprites- allows more things to happen at once, good for more complex platforming

2. cpu speed- allows more things to happen at once

3. animation- helps the control of the game. Also is good for boss fights. I hate when bosses are just still pictures that stand in the corner and do absolutely nothing until you wack them umpteen times. Bosses just need to play their own little game with you, to be fun. Bosses also need a very rewarding explosion at the end. You don't want to beat the crap out of them just to see them go poof at the end and disappear? You want to see them explode like crazy at the end of the boss fight.

4. scaling and rotation and other special effects (thankfully not the Snes kind) - helps animation a lot. Also good for more complex platformming. Allows characters and bosses to be more rewarding to see after you beat/blow them up.

Anybody agree/disagree? Have any others?

While not necessarily improving gameplay, other features often get overlooked.

Anti-Aliasing: The PS2 is pretty much known for having "the Jaggies" in its games. The Dreamcast, Xbox and GC had this feature built into the hardware.

Texture Mapping: Again, the PS2 was a polygon beast, but when it came to texture mapping, it was weaker than the Dreamcast, Xbox and GC.

Drive access speed can make a big difference.

I forgot to mention this one.

System RAM: The Saturn was a 2-D powerhouse, because it had enough memory to store all of the sprite information, for demanding games like Street Fighter Alpha 2. This would fall under the category (animation) Dragonboy mentioned, about missing frames of animation.

I'd say the Vampire/Darkstalkers and the Marvel fighting games were much more demanding than the Alpha games, hence why the latter received great (yet not perfect) ports on the PS1. Can't say the same for the former games on PS1.

Lot of GFX and CPU performance for smooth framerate, which is a must for enjoyable experience for me.

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Originally Posted by gamevet

I forgot to mention this one.

System RAM: The Saturn was a 2-D powerhouse, because it had enough memory to store all of the sprite information, for demanding games like Street Fighter Alpha 2. This would fall under the category (animation) Dragonboy mentioned, about missing frames of animation.

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Doesn't Saturn need the 4MB RAM cart for those games?

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Originally Posted by gamevet

Texture Mapping: Again, the PS2 was a polygon beast, but when it came to texture mapping, it was weaker than the Dreamcast, Xbox and GC.

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Texture Mapping? Texture Mapping is one of the main reasons (along with shading and poly count) people confuse technology with graphics.

This is one of those things I hate about 3D, the technology can only help with the graphics, not the game. Where as 2D, the technology can actually help the gameplay out.

The other reason, 3D games you can just go around the enimies when they are in your way, instead of 2D where you can either jump over or attack the enimies but dodge all the other enemies while you do it.

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Originally Posted by Gentlegamer

Doesn't Saturn need the 4MB RAM cart for those games?

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No not all of them.

Also, there are two versions of Metal Slug for the Saturn, one that does require a RAM cart and one that does not...I have both and they really aren't that far off from each other.

There is just a little slowdown in co-op mode in the non-RAM version.

Dragonforce seems to eat up that RAM though...its a huge game.

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Originally Posted by dragonboy

This is one of those things I hate about 3D, the technology can only help with the graphics, not the game. Where as 2D, the technology can actually help the gameplay out.

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hahahahaha what? Videogames don't have a magical invisible slider with 'gameplay' at one end, and 'graphics' at the other. More 'graphics' doesn't automatically mean less 'gameplay', and more 'gameplay' doesn't mean less 'graphics'.

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The other reason, 3D games you can just go around the enimies when they are in your way, instead of 2D where you can either jump over or attack the enimies but dodge all the other enemies while you do it.

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First person shoot-em-ups. There you go, that's one 3D thing you absolutely cannot reproduce on a 2D plane no matter how much technology you throw at it.

Simply 'making something 3D' does not make it A Bad Thing!

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Originally Posted by Gentlegamer

Doesn't Saturn need the 4MB RAM cart for those games?

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Not for Street Fighter Alpha 2 it doesn't.

Physics. New Video cards have powerful stream processors in them capable of taking over physics calculations from the CPU. Little is out there to take advantage of this now but the stuff that does is jaw dropping and really could change gameplay.

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hahahahaha what? Videogames don't have a magical invisible slider with 'gameplay' at one end, and 'graphics' at the other. More 'graphics' doesn't automatically mean less 'gameplay', and more 'gameplay' doesn't mean less 'graphics'.

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What does that have anything to do with what I said?

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First person shoot-em-ups. There you go, that's one 3D thing you absolutely cannot reproduce on a 2D plane no matter how much technology you throw at it.

Simply 'making something 3D' does not make it A Bad Thing!

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As I already mentioned, I like jumping over and dodging enimies instead of just walking around them. And besides it can be done on a 2D plane, just have it a top-down view on a rotating field and have your sprite on the bottom of screen so you can see everything infront of you, but not behind of you, just like in real 3D.

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Originally Posted by dragonboy

Texture Mapping? Texture Mapping is one of the main reasons (along with shading and poly count) people confuse technology with graphics.

This is one of those things I hate about 3D, the technology can only help with the graphics, not the game. Where as 2D, the technology can actually help the gameplay out.

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This is totally untrue. Burning Rangers is an excellent game on the Saturn, but it really taxed the hardware. The game suffered from slowdown and the polygons sometimes had the tearing effect, because the hardware couldn't draw everything the game demanded. The game really didn't have much for texture mapping either. The enemies and character faces were all a single shade, much like Virtua Racing. Compare it to a game like Shenmue, where you see wrinkles in the clothing, smooth frame-rates and a more immersive environment.

Comparing 32-bit texture mapping and polygon count to that of the 128-bit machines like the PS2 and Dreamcast, is about the same as comparing the 2-D sprites of the NES to that of the Genesis.

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Originally Posted by gamevet

This is totally untrue. Burning Rangers is an excellent game on the Saturn, but it really taxed the hardware. The game suffered from slowdown and the polygons sometimes had the tearing effect, because the hardware couldn't draw everything the game demanded. The game really didn't have much for texture mapping either. The enemies and character faces were all a single shade, much like Virtua Racing.

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Burning Rangers didn't necessarily tax the hardware -- it taxed the engine. Keep in mind that it runs on the NiGHTS engine, which was almost two years old and designed for a different type of game. I'm not disputing your underlying point, just saying. Just because a game has issues such as slowdown and/or pop-up, tearing, etc. doesn't necessarily mean it has reached some sort of barrier in the hardware.

I don't think any tech specs could include the gameplay of, say, Charles Barkley Shut Up and Jam or maybe Kobe Bryant Rapist League Basketball.

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Originally Posted by j_factor

Burning Rangers didn't necessarily tax the hardware -- it taxed the engine. Keep in mind that it runs on the NiGHTS engine, which was almost two years old and designed for a different type of game. I'm not disputing your underlying point, just saying. Just because a game has issues such as slowdown and/or pop-up, tearing, etc. doesn't necessarily mean it has reached some sort of barrier in the hardware.

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QFMFT

I always wanted to say that, but couldn't come up with the right words.

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Originally Posted by j_factor

Burning Rangers didn't necessarily tax the hardware -- it taxed the engine. Keep in mind that it runs on the NiGHTS engine, which was almost two years old and designed for a different type of game. I'm not disputing your underlying point, just saying. Just because a game has issues such as slowdown and/or pop-up, tearing, etc. doesn't necessarily mean it has reached some sort of barrier in the hardware.

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You're probably right, but can you think of a (Saturn) game engine that would have been better suited for the title?

The Saturn was never really designed to handle 3-D graphics on the same level as the Playstation. The hardware was originally meant to handle complex 2-D sprites and Sega added the second SH2 CPU to give it a little more room for 3-D.

Ive heard that it can actually do 3d better than the playstation, but that early on the dev kits for PS and the lack of good ones for saturn were what made the difference. Not sure if thats really true or not but looking at panzer dragoon zwei and a few others I could maybe beleive it

yeah I've also heard that it had more 3D power than the PSX but its duel CPU setup was harder to program for. Then again I've heard many people say the PSX was a "polygon monster" for its time!

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Originally Posted by gamevet

You're probably right, but can you think of a (Saturn) game engine that would have been better suited for the title?

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They could have built one from scratch, I guess. By the time Burning Rangers came out, Saturn development, particularly of original 3D games, was next to nil. On pure speculation, I would imagine that the Croc engine would have worked better, but obviously that couldn't have realistically happened. Sonic R is another possibility, but I think internal politics at Sega would have prevented that.

But really, you can't just blame the hardware. Of course the hardware has limitations too, but I doubt the Saturn hardware reached its limits with an engine that was completed when the system was about 1.5 years old. I doubt that happens with any new hardware (not counting "new old" hardware like Game Boy Color etc.). I mean, nobody says that Sonic Adventure ran at 30 fps because the Dreamcast wasn't powerful enough to do it at 60.

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The Saturn was never really designed to handle 3-D graphics on the same level as the Playstation. The hardware was originally meant to handle complex 2-D sprites and Sega added the second SH2 CPU to give it a little more room for 3-D.

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"2D" and "3D" hardware are not mutually exclusive. Both Playstation and Saturn came before the age of "3D cards" and the like, and neither system has an FPU or anything. Sony was simply better at providing developers with the appropriate development tools -- whereas several third-party developers for the Saturn resorted to coding their own SDK's from scratch in assembly. With mixed results. Playstation had its own issues too, particularly with full-screen dithering.

This whole "Saturn couldn't do 'good' 3D" thing is just a posthumous internet thing. People weren't really saying that at the time.

Actually they kind of were. It was more to the tune of "Saturn's 3D isn't as good as the PS's 3D so PS r00lz j00". However NOBODY BUT ME ever noticed or mentioned the PS's full screen dithering which made many games look like absolute dogshit on a stick. There was a big time pro-PS favoritism thing going on in the media.

That dithering doesn't look too distinct with composhit cables... and I'm pretty sure a lot of people used composhit... Dreamcast does full screen dithering too, very notable on PC monitor.

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Originally Posted by j_factor

They could have built one from scratch, I guess. By the time Burning Rangers came out, Saturn development, particularly of original 3D games, was next to nil. On pure speculation, I would imagine that the Croc engine would have worked better, but obviously that couldn't have realistically happened. Sonic R is another possibility, but I think internal politics at Sega would have prevented that.

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The best looking game on the Saturn was Sega Rally and it came out around the same time as Nights.

Companies like Scatalogic were developing decent looking 3-D games on the Saturn, near the end. Scorcher was very comparable to the PSX version of Wipeout, but the draw distance wasn't quite as far and the level design took most of the fun out of the game.

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But really, you can't just blame the hardware. Of course the hardware has limitations too, but I doubt the Saturn hardware reached its limits with an engine that was completed when the system was about 1.5 years old. I doubt that happens with any new hardware (not counting "new old" hardware like Game Boy Color etc.). I mean, nobody says that Sonic Adventure ran at 30 fps because the Dreamcast wasn't powerful enough to do it at 60.

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Why not blame the hardware?

Sega's single SH-2 CPU couldn't handle as many calculations as the one Sony had in their PSX, so Sega decided to throw in a second parallel processor to beef it up. Dave's (now defunct) Saturn page had several stories about how Sega was playing catch up with the Saturn and didn't even let Sega of America know about the project until it was near completion.

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"2D" and "3D" hardware are not mutually exclusive. Both Playstation and Saturn came before the age of "3D cards" and the like, and neither system has an FPU or anything. Sony was simply better at providing developers with the appropriate development tools -- whereas several third-party developers for the Saturn resorted to coding their own SDK's from scratch in assembly. With mixed results. Playstation had its own issues too, particularly with full-screen dithering.

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It's no secret that Sega wasn't forth-coming with developer software. Still, even Sega's own development teams were struggling with the hardware: One example is Sega's Touring Car Championships; The game looks pretty good, but once things start moving, the frame rate jumps from around 15 FPS, down to 5.

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This whole "Saturn couldn't do 'good' 3D" thing is just a posthumous internet thing. People weren't really saying that at the time.

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Yes they were!

The developers may not have outright said it, but they weren't happy with how hard it was to get decent 3-D out of the hardware.

Every 3-D game ported to the Saturn, was inferior to its PSX counterpart. The texture mapping always looked grainy in comparison to the Playstations version and many games were riddled with pop-up. The only 3-D Saturn game I'd heard was better than the PSX version was Grandia, though I don't know exactly why it is.

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Originally Posted by gamevet

The best looking game on the Saturn was Sega Rally and it came out around the same time as Nights.

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You can't be serious. What about Croc and Sonic R?

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Companies like Scatalogic were developing decent looking 3-D games on the Saturn, near the end. Scorcher was very comparable to the PSX version of Wipeout, but the draw distance wasn't quite as far and the level design took most of the fun out of the game.

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Scorcher was pretty good, but it didn't come out "near the end", it came out in 1996.

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Why not blame the hardware?

Sega's single SH-2 CPU couldn't handle as many calculations as the one Sony had in their PSX, so Sega decided to throw in a second parallel processor to beef it up. Dave's (now defunct) Saturn page had several stories about how Sega was playing catch up with the Saturn and didn't even let Sega of America know about the project until it was near completion.

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I don't believe a single SH-2 setup was ever designed. The original "GigaDrive" design was built around an NEC V90 CPU, which was used in the Model 1 arcade board. That design didn't "last" internally, and I could be mistaken, but I don't think the word "Saturn" was ever used until they decided on dual SH2's and dual VDP's. Maybe the "Saturn Control Processor" was added after the fact, but once the SH-2 was brought in, there were two of them.

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It's no secret that Sega wasn't forth-coming with developer software. Still, even Sega's own development teams were struggling with the hardware: One example is Sega's Touring Car Championships; The game looks pretty good, but once things start moving, the frame rate jumps from around 15 FPS, down to 5.

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Sega Touring Car is just one very poorly-done game.

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Yes they were!

The developers may not have outright said it, but they weren't happy with how hard it was to get decent 3-D out of the hardware.

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I wasn't talking about developers. But either way, there's a difference between "how hard it was to get decent 3D" and what the hardware was actually capable of. What I meant by that comment was just looking at the actual games. I don't recall anyone looking at Panzer Dragoon II Zwei and saying it had shitty 3D graphics. When I bought Powerslave and showed my friends (most of whom owned Playstations), none of them said it was inferior to what was on Playstation.

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Every 3-D game ported to the Saturn, was inferior to its PSX counterpart.

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There's no denying that games that were originally developed for the Playstation usually didn't port perfectly to the Saturn. That often happens when games are ported from one system to another. But that goes the other way too -- look at DOA, Grandia, Powerslave, etc.

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The texture mapping always looked grainy in comparison to the Playstations version and many games were riddled with pop-up. The only 3-D Saturn game I'd heard was better than the PSX version was Grandia, though I don't know exactly why it is.

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Grandia was developed for Saturn first, that's why. Other 3D games were better on Saturn too, though. Duke Nukem for example.

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Originally Posted by dragonboy

As I already mentioned, I like jumping over and dodging enimies instead of just walking around them. And besides it can be done on a 2D plane, just have it a top-down view on a rotating field and have your sprite on the bottom of screen so you can see everything infront of you, but not behind of you, just like in real 3D.

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What kind of games are you playing where you are 'just walking around them'? It's perfectly possible to jump over or dodge stuff in 3D! I don't mean stuff like dodging Boomshot in Gears of War, I mean games like Tomb Raider, which vastly popularised the 'serious' (i.e. not Croc) 3D platformer. Do you want me to just agree and tell you how so many games could have been so much better in 2D?

...and that last point doesn't describe a first-person shooter, it describes Alien Syndrome

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Other 3D games were better on Saturn too, though. Duke Nukem for example.

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Don't forget Powerslave.

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Originally Posted by j_factor

You can't be serious. What about Croc and Sonic R?

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Sonic R was alright, but I wasn't that impressed with Croc.

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Grandia was developed for Saturn first, that's why.

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I'd meant to ask: what was better about the Saturn version? The PSX version looked pretty good to me.

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Other 3D games were better on Saturn too, though. Duke Nukem for example.

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Duke Nukem looked pretty good, but you can hide alot in a game with corridors like that. I was more impressed with the canyon levels in Wing Arms. I hope to one day play Powerslave though.

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Originally Posted by j_factor

I don't believe a single SH-2 setup was ever designed. The original "GigaDrive" design was built around an NEC V90 CPU, which was used in the Model 1 arcade board. That design didn't "last" internally, and I could be mistaken, but I don't think the word "Saturn" was ever used until they decided on dual SH2's and dual VDP's. Maybe the "Saturn Control Processor" was added after the fact, but once the SH-2 was brought in, there were two of them.

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I might have been thinking of the early design of the 32X using a single SH2 processor.;)

I couldn't copy any parts of this article, but here is a link talking about the sudden switch to 2 CPUs and Sega's early design being more of a 2-D powerhouse. Dave's Saturn page covered it a bit more extensive.



http://www.consoledatabase.com/conso...urn/index.html

The Gigadrive used the V60 found in Sega's System 32 board.

Still, the system was a bitch for just about everyone, because it was just a bunch of parts quickly thrown together. Yu said it best in his interview with Next Generation magazine: "You'll find maybe 1 in 100 programmers that can get the most out of the Saturn hardware."

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There's no denying that games that were originally developed for the Playstation usually didn't port perfectly to the Saturn. That often happens when games are ported from one system to another. But that goes the other way too -- look at DOA, Grandia, Powerslave, etc.

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Tomb Raider started out as a Saturn project, but eventually went to the Playstation as well. I've seen the Saturn version (Demo) in stores and thought it looked pretty much like the Playstation version, but the media thought the PS version looked better.

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Originally Posted by gamevet

Sonic R was alright, but I wasn't that impressed with Croc.

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Croc doesn't "do" anything particularly amazing, but it's a very smooth-looking game.

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I'd meant to ask: what was better about the Saturn version? The PSX version looked pretty good to me.

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Actually, as I recall, the differences aren't that huge. I believe the spell effects in battle were toned down, there are some additional jaggies in the environments, and the Playstation version has a worse framerate problem.

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Duke Nukem looked pretty good, but you can hide alot in a game with corridors like that. I was more impressed with the canyon levels in Wing Arms. I hope to one day play Powerslave though.

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Regardless of the corridors, Duke Nukem for Saturn is notable because it's not only better, it's "more 3D" than the Playstation version (and the PC version). And the Saturn version has much better lighting. Powerslave uses the same engine, Slavedriver, as the Saturn port of Duke Nukem. The Playstation version of Powerslave (for which they ported the Slavedriver engine) had to have its levels redesigned to be smaller, due to the system's lesser amount of RAM.

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Originally Posted by gamevet

The Gigadrive used the V60 found in Sega's System 32 board.

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Same processor as the Model 1. I believe Model 1 added an FPU, though.

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Tomb Raider started out as a Saturn project, but eventually went to the Playstation as well. I've seen the Saturn version (Demo) in stores and thought it looked pretty much like the Playstation version, but the media thought the PS version looked better.

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The Playstation version had some textures replaced with higher-res versions. But it also has a shorter draw distance. Neither version is pretty.

The only reason I miss 2D games so much is because I got into gaming the very last year they were out. See you guys were ready for 3D when that happened. I wasn't. You guys played 2D your heart out because you had enough time too, and was able to enjoy 3D because it was new. Back in 1996 I got a Super Nintendo and a Sega Genesis for Christmas, they both broke in 1997. I had so much fun with them, but I didn't get to play those games nearly as much as I wanted. When they broke, I couldn't play my favorite games ever again. This is why I hate 3D so much. It's kind of like a "my grandma died when I was 3" sort of story, old enough to remember the fun you had with her, but too young for the fun to last long.