1993 interview with Treasure

[sheath]

Oh it has plenty of good slow moving games that's for sure. Lets try fast moving. There's... Sparkster... and... huh... right... I got this....
Hagane, that's pretty fast too...
Space Megaforce! Quite a bit slower than MUSHA... but I guess it works... let's see more... hum... R-Type 3 is fast... sometimes...
That's all I got.

In Super Metroid you can get special shoes that let you run fast in single background environments, that proves the SNES has the real power.

[Kamahl]

The Mega Drive is much easier to program, period, and that alone gives it an advantage.

Not in the audio department, optimizing color usage isn't easy either

In Super Metroid you can get special shoes that let you run fast in single background environments, that proves the SNES has the real power.

Oh how could I ever forget about that? Moving 1 sprite quickly in an almost single screen with 1 or 2 slow moving enemies.
It totally has blast processing!

[Bastardcat]

I'll take quality over raw speed any day.

[Crackdown]

I'll take quality over raw speed any day.

Thankfully with the Megadrive you get both!!!

[Black_Tiger]

So much for the SNES being better =P

All he was really saying is that console A is not superior to console B across the board. Unfortunately, like too many interviews with people involved with the development of games back then, he talked out of his ass so much that it undermined everything he said.

Some things are easier to do one particular way on one hardware than another, but there's more than one way to do most things. Many SNES games feature non-Mode 7 scaling and rotation effects. The SNES can actually do more "screens" than the Genesis and the same techniques to 'fake' more layers could still be used for that many more.

Gunstar Heroes doesn't display 64 colors before any kind of shadow/highlight or dithering, just as that guy from Konami bullshitted EGM when he said that SnatchercSega-CD displays over 100 colors at once. Dithering and shadiw/highlight effects can give the illusion that there are more colors being displayed, but the SNES can add dithering to a game that already has double the number of real colors being displayed in any Genesis game and then increase the total number way more than S/H by using a transpancy layer.

All that this quote proves is that he was tired of hearing the media go on and on about how the SNES was so much better than everything that cane before it.

[Sik]

Not in the audio department, optimizing color usage isn't easy either

At least the chances of introducing a game breaking near-undebuggable bug out of nowhere by doing that are extremely low, while with programming you can introduce a massive bug at practically every code line you enter. I can safely tell you that almost all the issues I have involve programming, not generating data.

I'll take quality over raw speed any day.

With that criteria I'd take the Mega Drive over the SNES just because of ease of programming, hardware capabilities be damned. And take into account the programming aspect has a direct impact on gameplay (moreso than anything else, in fact), which is probably the most important factor in any game.

just as that guy from Konami bullshitted EGM when he said that SnatchercSega-CD displays over 100 colors at once.

Personally I wonder if that game ever makes full use of all palettes.

[Zoltor]

Not in the audio department, optimizing color usage isn't easy either


Oh how could I ever forget about that? Moving 1 sprite quickly in an almost single screen with 1 or 2 slow moving enemies.
It totally has blast processing!

Lol yet Sonic 1, and 2 are worth mentioning as proof of power(with just Sonic, virtually nothing else moving on screen), how are these any different.

Sorry I had to do it, since the Genesis is imfamous for only caring about speed, even though it means they could only handle a few sprites tops at said speed.

To the topic: Treasure is very good, but they are over simplifying things(aka if you can add more colors easily just by shading effects, why didn't every developer do such, clearly It's not as simple as they are making it out to be). Also the genesis had major sound issues, that were so hard to design around, It's a wonder why game developers put music in the games to beginwith.

It would've been much better I'm sure(I mean look at the 1st party games, then look at the 3rd party games on the same system, huge differance in quality), if Sega actually sent out proper development kits(tsk tsk tsk, this has always been a major issue with Sega through the ages, by the time they started doing such, it was too late, the DC seems to have been the only system, they put effort into helping out developers figure out how to code for the system)

To Black_Tiger : Yea mode 7 is a big deal, and was used to great effect with F-Zero.

[TheSonicRetard]

Lol yet Sonic 1, and 2 are worth mentioning as proof of power(with just Sonic, virtually nothing else moving on screen), how are these any different.

Sonic has parallax out the ass, multiple layers, many instances of mid-screen palette changes, and each act is much, much larger than a single screen in super metroid. WTF are you talking about?

[Zoltor]

Sonic has parallax out the ass, multiple layers, many instances of mid-screen palette changes, and each act is much, much larger than a single screen in super metroid. WTF are you talking about?

I wasn't implying that the Metroid game was a proof of power on the system(it so Isn't, there are much better examples), I was laughing because if the statements were reversed, Sonic would be listed, for the same reason.

[Bastardcat]

If I'm not mistaken F-zero was a launch game.

[Kamahl]

Sonic has parallax out the ass, multiple layers, many instances of mid-screen palette changes, and each act is much, much larger than a single screen in super metroid. WTF are you talking about?

Wondering that myself. Also Sonic isn't close to being the most 'blast processing' game in the genesis, but 2 has multiplayer for crying out loud, twice the processing.
Try Gunstar Heroes, Contra Hard Corps, Alien Soldier, MUSHA, ThunderForce IV, Adventures of Batman and Robin, etc...
The SNES would kill itself trying to do any of them, heck the genesis can barely handle TF IV much less the SNES.

[Zoltor]

If I'm not mistaken F-zero was a launch game.

Ouch, you didn't have to deliver a low blow, this is the Genesis forum after all, hold back your punches.

However since It's been said already, yes it is a launch title.

[Kamahl]

Ouch, you didn't have to deliver a low blow, this is the Genesis forum after all, hold back your punches.

Using a basic hardware feature isn't impressive at all . That's like saying Altered Beast is impressive for having basic parallax scrolling and the arcade doesn't.
F-Zero isn't that great of a game either, there's no depth to it, it's repetitive and lacks multiplayer.

[Sik]

Lol yet Sonic 1, and 2 are worth mentioning as proof of power(with just Sonic, virtually nothing else moving on screen), how are these any different.

Which I find hilarious because Sonic 2 was promoted to show Blast Processing, yet it slows down horribly. The game was extremely rushed (though nowhere near as rushed as Sonic 3 which was literally released in a complete prototype state with half the levels cut out and one character missing... yet plays much better than Sonic '06 >_>).

In practice that doesn't matter much... To make a sprite object move faster you just change a number, the amount of computations doesn't change, really, so in that sense only the amount of objects matters, not how fast they move. What's more interesting is how fast you can draw to the tilemap, since the amount of computations does increase the faster it scrolls (and Sonic falls kind of short there since it caps at a speed of 16 pixels in either direction per frame... which is 3 screens per second x_x).

The SNES doesn't help much either though... Super Mario World slows down when there are more than just a few objects on screen. This isn't an issue in the game itself since it was designed taking that into account, but it becomes a serious issue when hacking. And mode 7 games have dedicated hardware to do the relevant math calculations... and aren't useful for much else. There was multiplication and division hardware, but while it was faster than the 68000 instructions, it also dealt with smaller numbers (multiplication was 8-bit × 8-bit to 16-bit, division was 16-bit ÷ 8-bit to 8-bit - the 68000 instructions use double the sizes).

That said, sometimes I wonder why do games slow down. I can hit the sprite limit in the Mega Drive before the count object is so high the game engine slows down, and that's with naive algorithms. That's 80 objects right there. Granted, you may argue that most of the objects are barely doing anything interesting, but this is the case for most games after all, so that isn't a valid counterargument.

And I think that it was the PC Engine the fourth generation console here known for pushing a ridiculous amount of objects on screen without slow down, moreso than both the Mega Drive and the SNES.

Sorry I had to do it, since the Genesis is imfamous for only caring about speed, even though it means they could only handle a few sprites tops at said speed.

Actually it was infamous for the whole arcade experience crap, which we all know was bullshit even the day it was released - Space Harrier II and Super Thunder Blade are steaming piles of shit in comparison to the arcade games from which they're spin offs (reduced framerate and almost all the cool details gone).

Also the genesis had major sound issues, that were so hard to design around, It's a wonder why game developers put music in the games to beginwith.

Both consoles have completely piece of shit sound hardware, period.

On the Mega Drive side, PCM playback is a giant hack involving some feature that was meant to be used as a last resort and that Sega didn't even provide full connections for, and in fact it looks like they tried to make it as hard as possible to do anything with it. The end result is that PCM playback on the Mega Drive is complete shit because developers couldn't do much with it. At least the Z80 had direct access to the ROM, which made up for its small amount of RAM.

On the SNES side, you have some ridiculous memory constraints that severely limited how samples could be used, resulting in either only short samples being used (not being much better than FM) or really low quality samples (sounding like crap). It didn't help Nintendo only allowed developers to use their own engine and nothing else, and that engine was also crap. That two second pause many games have when switching songs? That's the 65816 trying to slowly load the music data into the SPC700 memory! Had the SPC700 been given access to ROM, there really wouldn't have been any redeeming points for the Mega Drive hardware (except maybe that it sounds less muffled).

It would've been much better I'm sure(I mean look at the 1st party games, then look at the 3rd party games on the same system, huge differance in quality), if Sega actually sent out proper development kits(tsk tsk tsk, this has always been a major issue with Sega through the ages, by the time they started doing such, it was too late, the DC seems to have been the only system, they put effort into helping out developers figure out how to code for the system)

Don't assume Nintendo was much better. Developers had a lot of issues with the 65816 because the only other "major" system that used it was the Apple II GS, so there weren't many tools for developing with it (the 68000 was the opposite case, having tools about everywhere). This gave them serious issues not only when writing code, but also when debugging.

[Bastardcat]

Using a basic hardware feature isn't impressive at all . That's like saying Altered Beast is impressive for having basic parallax scrolling and the arcade doesn't.
F-Zero isn't that great of a game either, there's no depth to it, it's repetitive and lacks multiplayer.

Oh I forgot, any advantages an SNES game has can be discounted if its a single player game.

Too much blue Kool Aid will stain your teeth, but then again, because any flaw on Sega's part is in fact a strength, blue teeth would be all the rage here.

Oh, and if using a basic hardware feature negates a game's features, then Sonic is nothing special either, because it's simply utilizing the fact that the Genesis has a faster processor. Come to think of it, that negates any game that relies on speed, doesn't it? If Mode-7 is a meaningless hardware trick then so is your beloved Blast Processing.