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I really enjoy reading the technical discussions on this board, particularly when system capabilities and software are dissected and analyzed.
I would like to see the community list the games you consider to be most technically adept, and include analysis to justify and illustrate why you have chosen the game? I would like to see not only Genesis, but 32X, Sega CD, and even SMS titles. You can skip Pico games..
For Genesis it is strung between 3 for me.
Ranger X- Large amount of spites, supposedly more colors than the allotted 64, the sheer size of some sprites. And the fact that they made it control smoothly was a plus.
Panorama Cotton- Huge amount of sprites, supposedly there is scaling but I have yet to see prite scaling. What was most impressive was the environment changes and colors. It was a trip without the acid.
Red Zone- It even stated on the game that there was "scaling and rotation". Also there was a very fluid fmv in the begining, granted it was in black and red, but for a cartrige I don't think we should complain. Colors weren't so impressive, but the effects were incredible.
The Lawnmower Man! Just look at this scaling! There are some nice effects in the status bar at the bottom in the side-scrolling stages too. :ok:
most impressive games for me:
Alien Soldier
Gunstar Heroes
Panorama Cotton
MUSHA! Scaling & Rotation!
Flink - Just look at the detail!
Well thats about all I can remember.. :p
TOY STORY!
Any game can get more colors from using tricks liek scanline palette swapping (still limited to colors per scanline though), or using shadow/hilight, but the latter puts heavy limitations on the system.Quote:
Originally Posted by GriskaGyoran
Also note that "64-colors" is kind of a misnomer, yes, in theory, you could have the 4 16-color palettes arranged with each having 16 unique colors, but in practice, far less than that will be used as the layers will be overlapping, meaing the upper 3 layers will be limited to 15 colors plus transparent, plus there will usually be several colors used in all the palettes, further limiting th eoverall number.
Yeah, the sprites are psudo-scaled supposedly, just like most other Genesis games liek Space Harrier II or After Burner II, th edifference being that there is a lot more ROM space in PC dedicated to sprite animations, making the "scaling" smoother. The impressive parts come from th ebackground though, with some software scaling and texture mapping, which are impressive.Quote:
Panorama Cotton- Huge amount of sprites, supposedly there is scaling but I have yet to see prite scaling. What was most impressive was the environment changes and colors. It was a trip without the acid.
I beleive Tomaitheous explained why this isn't nearly as impressive as it looks on the surface, but they certainly did a good job of making it look impressive to the layman.Quote:
Red Zone- It even stated on the game that there was "scaling and rotation". Also there was a very fluid fmv in the begining, granted it was in black and red, but for a cartrige I don't think we should complain. Colors weren't so impressive, but the effects were incredible.
As of Toy Story, other than the prerendered 3D sprites (like DKC or 3D Blast), I assume you mean the crane game 3d maze level, which tomaitheous pointed out mirrored th etop and bottom halves of the screen, so again somewhat less impressive. (and more impressive for the SNES if anything, with its more limited processing power)
Then there's Zero Tolerance, with Wolf3D-ish raycasting, with shading/varying light levels, but a very tiny window and very choppy. (the controlls were a bit funky IMO, the link cable was a cool feature)
And Battle Frenzy, which might be the most impressive in this respect, non mirrored rendering, much larger screen and somewhat higher framerate than ZT, better looking textures (but no shading), 4-sided enemy sprites, and a 2-player split-screen mode! (granted the framerate drops closer to ZT, but it's 2-player w/out the need for a link cable)
There's also "Cyber Cop" or "Corporation" which seems to use flat shaded polygons (with a very low framerate and short draw distance) to generate th eenvironment, with sprite based enemies. (probably not the best idea, but it wasn't a Gen/MD exclusive, being on the Amiga and such, and an older game on top of that)
Then there's there's the polygon based games like F-22 and LHX, but supposedly using the Z80 in parallel with the 68k, and F-22 being an exclusive. (and it shows IMO, with better controls than any other flight sim on the console, and with only 3-buttons at that -enhaceed 6-button conreolls with rudder control and weapons selection outside of the menue would have been nice though) The classic Hard Drivin' (the inspiration for computer games like Stunts), which some people still find playable, and others chuck in the crap pile along with most other choppy 3D games. (there's the sequel Race Drivin as well, which also went onto SNES, which was even slower -though with properly colored cows ;))
Now, Kawasake Superbike actually managed to use a limited number of polygonal graphics in-game and retain reasonably smooth gameplay, carefully balanced and quite an acheivement.
Out of this World is another interesing one to mention. (and for some reason the SNES verion has load times)
THere's also a Japanese MD game called Satar Cruiser that uses polygon graphics for a first person perspective shooter of some sort.
Aladdin, Vectorman, Sonic 2, Sonic 3 & Knuckles, Gunstar Heroes, Alien Soldier, ToeJam & Earl Panic in Funkotron (Yes, it is impressive, looks better even on the Retrogen's small screen than most GBA 32 bit games on a 32 inch screen), Virtua Racing.
SMS: Phantasy Star or Sonic Blast
Genesis: Sonic 3D Blast or Virtua Racing
32X: Shadow Squadron
Sega CD: Soul Star or Adventures of Batman and Robin
Basically what kool kitty is saying is that nothing on the Genesis is impressive because of the "tricks" that Tom pointed out. When using tricks, it makes it unimpressive. You are not allowed to be impressed by such effects.
Alien Soldier and Gunstar Heroes for me.
It's more like a stage magician - you're impressed until you learn the trick behind the illusion, at which point it's no longer as impressive.Quote:
Originally Posted by Joe Redifer
It doesn't matter how the trick is done, just that it is achieved. Again, it is like saying that basically NO Genesis game is impressive technically. The Genesis is a piece of shit. Tricks done on the Genesis (and ALL technical effects are tricks, make no mistake about it) are not impressive. Tricks done on the PCE however...
I think it is funny how people say that this and that is not impressive, yet we've seen nothing that exceeds it from homebrewers so far. Basically, put your money where your mouth is, folks.
No, that's not at all what I'm saying, I should have been more clear. ;)
The scanlie palette swapping technique is something possible on pretty much any raster-based game system (it was used quite a lot on the Atari 2600), and I probably shouldn't have mentioned th ehilight/shadow thing in that context, as I understand it, it's most useful for displaying higher color static screens. (maybeuseful for displaying thingd in conjunction with the Sega CD?)
It's not that that trick isn't useful and can't but put to good effect (even the 2600 did that), it's just that it's a fairly common thing to do, not something specific to the Genesis hardware.
I thought Red Zone was impressive, managing to milk the 68000 for atll it was worth and do some really nice software scaling/rendering effects, but Tomaitheous explained it and it kind of lost some of the magic. ;)
I don't know, to me th emost technically impressive would be ones pushing the hardware to do things that weren't intended for it, hence the games I mentioned.
But impressive games in general, in terms of asthetics and such would be much broader, like games with really beautiful, smoothe, 2D environments and sprite animation, or amazing music. But to me, that's different than "technically impressive" Tech demos don't necessarily convert into great games. ;) ... Well, muic would probably go in there too, part of that is obviously technical, along with the compositions themselves. (a lot of TmEE's music demos in his sound engine are definitely impressive, Guile's theme for example) For that matter, games that use GEMS and actually manage to sound pretty good are impressive given how porr that sound engine is.
Virtua Racing would obviously be the most impressive looking 3D game on the Genesis, but th efact that it's got the SVP chip doing all the 3D calculations means it's not as impressive. (though in that context, if there were more SVP games, perhaps we might have seen something that really pushed wat was possible with that chip+genesis hardware, like Doom did on the SNES with Super FX, sure it was pretty limited, but they managed to do it with 2 MB of ROM and only 128 kB of RAM) Wolfenstein 3D on SNES is pretty impressive given the CPU power and with that all being done in software, of course the censoring butched it. (probably could have done somewhat better on the Genesis, albeit in 16-colors -but it looked OK like in the Atari ST version, lack of censoring would have been a big plus, but the Genesis's 64 kB is too small, they would have had to add RAM onto the cart -maybe possible on the Sega CD)
I think getting a reasonably large window with playable (if low) framerate on Battle Frenzy is pretty impressive (including designing the levels such that you don't need to cut the draw distance), same for the backgrounds in Panorama cotton. (the good used of sprite animation cells to approximate scaling was handeled well, so impressive ro the developers, but not really technically impressive, part of it just usign more ROM space)
Anyway, thanks Joe, you made me broaden the context of what I wos considdering.
Ecco ToT: It has 2D rotation, uses shadow, has fake sprite scaling, has "3D stages", the levels scroll fast like sonics, has huge sprites, has very good color gradients...
And with no extra on-cart hardware of any kind: it's just a 2MB-ROM
Hmm...perhaps I should be more specific?
For instance, it certainly appears that some games use an algorithm based "scaling" technique, rather than redrawn sprites. If I'm not mistaken about this, what game would you say features a more efficiently written routine?
In regards to the "tricks": That is more or less what I was getting at. The "tricks", and their proper execution, seem to be part of what separates the men from the boys. I suppose I could program something, by rote learning, that would display extra colors or whatever. But I would have no idea how to incorporate something like that into the existing overhead of a playable game.
The magic analogy was a good one, even for other reasons. A magician could make a car disappear by brute force--distracting an audience for two hours while the car is disassembled, melted down, and poured through a grate in the floor. We are not impressed by that.
A programmer could similarly insist on additional hardware to assist his game in featuring extra colors, high bitrate samples, scaling and rotation, or texture mapped polygons. We are not impressed by that, either.
What does impress with the magician is the lack of visible effort required to produce unusual results. And to the fellow magicians in the audience (who may be aware of the technical details of the "trick"), the facility and fluency with which the stage magician achieves the trick, as well as the coherent incorporation into an "act", are what impresses them.
It sounds like there are some programmers here. What tricks, in what games, do you find impressive ,or simply elegant and well executed?
My take? As an "audience member" and not a "magician", I find Sonic 3D Blast's bonus stage to be impressive. It certainly looks like it requires some creative trickery, and I would expect it wasn't simple to put into successful execution...based only on the fact that I have not seen anything quite like it reused in other Genesis games.
Tricks are what its all about in the old school machines. Look at old PC games. They had no true 3D hardware with "built in effects" or even processors powerful enough to render real 3D environments with any detail.
DooM
Trick? Yes. Does this somehow make it any less of an amazing programming feat? They made the best of the hardware they had.
Now how is the Genesis any different?
So who cares if its a trick? Tricks are just one way of making a machine pull off what others thought impossible. Even if it's just credit for thinking of how to pull off the trick! All good programming should be seen as nothing more than a bunch of great tricks if you ask me. Magic is right.
Red Zone is trick after trick. I guess the most technically impressive game that comes to mind for me.
I'm a homebrewer. So don't mind me if I take this a little personal ;)Quote:
Originally Posted by Joe Redifer
Are you impressed when you see transparency on the SNES. I'm not. It's common place and easy to do. Are you impressed when you see mode7 on the snes too? I'm sure as hell not. Are you impressed by lots of parallax in Sonic games? I'm not. It's sooo common place on the Genesis.
It's relative. If I saw the NES doing some stuff that's normally done on 16bit systems, then I can safely assume I would be impressed. If I saw transparency on the Genesis. I'd be impressed.
Also in comparison, I'm not impressed when I see a system doing something that's dead easy to pull off and/or common place. Am I NOT allowed to be unimpressed? That doesn't mean a game doesn't look great. I *don't* find Ranger-X/X-Ranza to be impressive technically, but I do think the game looks great.
The B&W FMV on RedZone isn't impressive. It's just 1bit compressed video (if it's compressed at all). It wasn't done before because it comes off as tacky/gimmicky. It's not like the team had this special talent to pull it off that none of the other developers could. And I'm sure they weren't the first developer to think of it either. They were just the first developer to decide *not* to pass on the idea :P
The rotating BG in the helicopter parts of Red Zone are impressive looking, because it's hard to see the tile res they are using. It's just much less impressive once you notice this. If the game was using even half the normal system res and still doing this effect - now that would be fucking impressive at that frame rate. Even at a lower frame rate.
Batman and Robin for the Genesis. There's nothing impressive about blatantly repetitive backgrounds with some hsync linescrolling. Duke 3D on the other hand is pretty impressive. It has a nice optimized buffer layout to minimize shearing effect. Requires a lot of brute force of the cpu. Color optimization with dual pixel dithering is clever too (because EVERY pixel is two pixels, giving a real half horizontal res output).
And for the homebrew comment, what exactly do you want? You don't think it's super easy to replicate that same effects as commercial games? People can and have done it. It's nothing to show off, really. Ouu wow, let me release a demo showing off each trick I can do. Is that what you want from the community? When it comes to the Genesis, everything that can be done - has been done... and usually quite a bit. There really isn't much left on the table to do homebrew or demo wise technically (if anything at all).
And yes, I do think really complex dynamic tile system and software overlaying and complex masking using sprites (PCE), is more impressive than a system with hardware dual layer support(SNES/GEN). The 3rd Batman on the NES is impressive with its dynamic tile scrolls. The Genesis port of that game, in comparison, is not impressive.
Collision Cat: Some of the later 3D levels of the video are actually pretty cool looking. And smooth too.
I thought the third batman on the nes had special hardware, or was that the second one? Anyway, I think the scaling an 3d effects in Contra Hard Corps is neat.
Here is what I am impressed with: What is actually happening onscreen. How it is done matters not, but it is more impressive if it is not a feature that is built directly into the hardware (as you clearly agree with). When I see something like Toy Story, I am impressed. It mirrors the screen, who gives a flying fuck? I am impressed!
My point exactly.Quote:
Originally Posted by mn21653bird
I thought it was pretty impressive in the underwater lab level, where you have tanks or whatever scrolling in the foreground, and a parallax floor, in front of what look like curved windows with large beams that go back towards the foreground in a convincing linescroll effect, and behind the windows is a vaguely Atlantean image with a shimmering effect (to look like water). None of that is beyond the system's normal capabilities but it's unusual to see these things simultaneously. I'm sure the tanks are just sprites, the floor and window beams are one background layer with an irregular linescroll effect, and the Atlantis image is the second background layer with a very standard effect. And if you put it like that, it doesn't sound as impressive, but when you see it in the game, it's impressive looking, IMO.Quote:
Originally Posted by tomaitheous
Although I suppose you could argue that the title of the thread is asking for "technically" impressive games, as distinct from "visually" impressive games...
Valis III -not only CD quality cinemas, but high quality ones with nice touched up graphics of great art done with good color usage... all with better voice acting than the Turbo-CD version.
Phantasy Star IV -although I'm not crazy about some of the character designs (like Chaz), they did such a great job with the comic style cinemas that are well story boarded and fully detailed. I'll gladly take pint-sized pictures if it means this kind of variety and quantity.
Beyond Oasis -as much detailed and smooth hand drawn animation as there is in the game, the most impressive part is the overall quality and how all the elements come together to create a living picture to adventure within.
Super Street Fighter II -no amount of memory can make up for the Genesis' color limitations when it comes to porting a game with detailed non-repetitive backgrounds like SFII. Somehow Capcom managed to make them look colorful and shaded without painful color clashing and still kept all the alternate player colors. It looks amazing for a 16-bit console game and especially against the Special Champion Edition port.
Monster World IV -the Mega Drive's killer app equivalent to the DKC series for SNES, only so much better in every way. It's crazy that Sega didn't bring it over here, even if only to help prolong the Genesis' life. A triumph of pixel art that pre-rendered cgi can't even come close to touching.
Yeah, but it looks soo repetitive. Ex-ranza did the same/similar effect as well. The part of that same level in B&R that was cool, is the very first part with those probes. That effect is great and impressive.Quote:
Originally Posted by j_factor
hehe , nicely put admin.Quote:
Originally Posted by Joe Redifer
Reminds me of Jaguar homebrew scene, always "pissing" (on other programmers that are less biased towards the machine / or other consoles of the time in general) and acting i-know-it-all
but in the end , they never put out much more than tetris clones or bland 2d vertical shooters which are put to shame by Tyrian ( anybody remember that ?)
but the jag can even power up a space station if you listen to them.
And they have the key! Problem is they don't seem to find a door:D
It's not really a trick though, it's raycasting, like a much more complex Wolf3D with angles other than 90* variable height, textured floors and ceilings, varying light levels etc. The trick is getting the player to not realize there are no rooms/platforms directly above another. ;) (kind of like the tactfully designed levels in Battle Frenzy, preventing the need to clip the draw distance)Quote:
Originally Posted by MN12BIRD
As for un-accellerated 3D, remember the late DOS games like Quake or Tomb Raider, no hardware assistance, pure brute forece CPU driven 256 color renserer. (granted requiring a LOT of CPU resourse) Even Tomb Raider II for windows offered this as an option, for useres lacking a 3D card.
Yeah, getting th e1-bit video clips to actually look decent and stylized was interesting, and th eon foot portions are interesting, but after Tomaitheous mentioned the rotation and resolution of the flying portions I understood what looked wrong. I was impressed initially, but even before I found that out, something felt wrong, I just couldn't put my finger on it. Still, the grand theft auto on genesis comment that led you to that game i interesting. ;)Quote:
Now how is the Genesis any different?
So who cares if its a trick? Tricks are just one way of making a machine pull off what others thought impossible. Even if it's just credit for thinking of how to pull off the trick! All good programming should be seen as nothing more than a bunch of great tricks if you ask me. Magic is right.
Red Zone is trick after trick. I guess the most technically impressive game that comes to mind for me.
Meh, maybe I'd be more forgiving towards it if it wasn't so rediculously difficult and unforgiving, and felt more fluid in general. (even with save states it's just really frustrating, not enjoyable, though I have heard comments of people who love it)
Anyway, that Wacky Racers prototype is something to consider as well. (scaled/rotated track, but rather simplistic like the early part of the first level of Panorama cotton) It's obvioulst a prototpe though, the gameplay isn't quite there.
or Axelay ;) (even wiki mentions it using mode 7...)Quote:
Originally Posted by tomaitheous
Yeah, those are realy neat, and the scrolling textured portion later on too. But also note this, like Toy Story, was also on SNES, so that's even more impressive in some respects. (though you'd need real hardware to be sure about framerates, fusion is pretty good though, not sure about the SNES clips on youtube, but newer versions of ZSNES and 9x seem pretty accurate in this regard as well) The textured scrolling portion wouldn't be as impressive on SNES though as that could just be mode 7. (I think, like in Hyperzone)Quote:
Originally Posted by tomaitheous
Axelay does use Mode7, but not for the "curved" BG layer. Even the shitty-ass unimpressive Genesis can do that! Sonic 3D Blast does it, in fact.
I thought the part in Batman and Robin where you are going down the tower (I think in level 2) as it is rocking back and forth independently of the other BG was pretty impressive. Sure, each level is like 9 hours each, but that doesn't make it less impressive technically.
http://i567.photobucket.com/albums/s...inTheU_000.gif
If this is what your talking about then i agree, pretty good use of horizontal and vertical line scroll from the looks of it.
Toejam & Earl - Panic on Funkotron & Donald Duck in Maui Mallard is what I can come up with now. With so much nice details, cool music and innovating gaming.
Amongst others Red Zone has to stand out for me...
...any game that has the text 'be impressed or else I'll rip your head off and defecate down your neck' on startup wins it for me.
Non-programmers are often impressed by fancy graphics and sound, even if there's nothing behind them. It doesn't matter if a team of a dozen artists spent six months rendering graphics on a supercomputer if the game behind it is pong. Program-wise, it's the same with fancy rendered graphics as with two lines and dot. Which will "impress" people more? The fancy graphics, of course!
People often whine about how homebrew never comes close to commercial software, but that's often not true at all. It's the graphics and sound that doesn't come close as the homebrewer doesn't have a team of artists spending a year on graphics and sound. Think of that Batman shot above, but without the fancy graphics.
Why do you programmers ruin it for us non programmers? It's like when i'm watching a porno with no condoms on and somebody tell me the dangers of unsafe sex and shit. Wait to ruin the fantasy.
Well, if non-programmers can "ruin it" for us programmers by trash talking our stick figure art, we can "ruin it" for them by telling them how the trick is done. :p :D
Hey Tom, see one boss in B&R, there is real transparency, which is NOT shadow and highlight based :P
B&R and Panorama Cotton are the games that I think are very impressive. Ranger X does quite some nice things too
Here's my opinion on this:
While I agree that any display with 15+ colors can display prerendered graphics effortlessly, it can be impressive in an artistic perspective (or, if it has a more efficient compression scheme, that can be impressive programmer wise). Although, if the "illusion" is flashy enough and done in the most bazaar way possible (like Toy Story's tile mirroring), I'd be impressed. I'm not impressed if the effect is what the hardware manufacturer intended, though. For example, if a SNES game just uses mode 7 for just a floor and a couple of sprites, I would not be impressed. However, if the mode 7 uses sprites in front of the scaling plane to look like another background, that would be impressive, since it is not technically possible to have another background in mode 7, just the scaling plane.
That's it! Great use of cell-shifting or whatever it is called. Add to the fact that there are multiple planes of buildings scrolling down at the same time makes it even more cool.Quote:
Originally Posted by awack
That would be pretty lame. It wouldn't even be worth playing. No game would.Quote:
Originally Posted by Chilly Willy
I think the "programmers" here are only impressed with programming, not graphics, and perhaps think of themselves better people because they are not impressed by graphics. So maybe a simulation type of game where the CPU controls hundred of individual troops in the background while the onscreen menu is frozen would impress them.
I Agree w/ TmEE. now time for something impressive :DQuote:
Originally Posted by TmEE
I always beat the game twice, with Cotton and that fairy creature :3
:notworthy:Quote:
Originally Posted by Black_Tiger
Games I think would be noteworthy:
- Revenge of Shinobi: the entire game is a piece of art but among the most memorable moments would be the disco boss and the waterfall stage
- Streets of Rage 2: similar situation here. Even today I am impressed by the second stage (the bridge) - especially its depth with the city's lights and the water underneath, but also the music is quite breath-taking
- Castle of Illusion: each stage got its own theme and music, perhaps the most memorable one is that one stage where you have to jump from giant leaf to giant leaf and avoid the spiders
- Sonic the Hedgehog: I was really impressed by the phenomenal scrolling, the art direction and color usage, especially with Green Hill Zone and Marble Zone when I first played the game. I am almost as impressed today as I was back then, some 18 years ago
- and let's not forget most games listed here: http://www.sega-16.com/forum/showthread.php?t=8355
Not so much unimpressed as not as impressed. Like my example of pong with excellent graphics - yes, the images themselves might impress folks, but the game as a whole isn't impressive. It's a mistake many game companies make these days - thinking that merely slapping six months of art on an old game will somehow make it the next coming of Christ. By the same token, we do realize that an impressively programmed game won't impress regular people without (at least) decent graphics and sound. It takes both impressive programming AND impressive gfx/sound to make a truly impressive game.Quote:
Originally Posted by Joe Redifer
Programmers just get irritated that impressive graphics seems more important to regular folks. Pong with impressive graphics will probably get ranked MUCH higher than a genius work of programming with less than impressive graphics. :mad:
Skilfully crafted graphics that use a poor palette in my opinion is a pretty impressive feat in its own right.
StarCruiser certainly gets my call