1993 interview with Treasure

[turntablist1210]

Hmmmm so many flame wars recently, guys chill out, both consoles kicked arse it was the 90's thats what we had and they both ruled, better for different reasons. END OF

[sheath]

^ Hey, any hip fractures from the MMA yet?

[old man]

Is this the Gamefaqs-16 forum?

[turntablist1210]

^ Hey, any hip fractures from the MMA yet?

????

[sheath]

????

Sorry, it was a joke about somebody else who got banned recently. He really loved Van Damme.

[turntablist1210]

ok i must change my avatar, suggestions please!

[sheath]

You might need to modify the size, but I'd go with this.

[Sik]

Well if we're dumping on a console because of the shittiest games for it, I have two words for those of you with your heads firmly planted up the Genesis's butt: Dark Castle.

Time Killers. It can't even do sound playback properly, most sound effects are outright broken. Also the controls lag in the title screen menu, dammit.

Didn't Pier Solar have mode 7?

In software, only covers half the screen, has a low resolution, isn't full framerate... (though granted, if the SNES was forced to do that in software, then it'd have fared much worse)

[magicalsoundshower]

I don't know if I'm the only one who feels this way, but the problems with the SNES hardware is the reason why I hardly play any SNES games anymore. They might look amazing in screenshots, but if you actually play them, things usually get ugly: a lack of variety of tiles, slowdown, choppy animations and awkward mode 7 sequences. It's as if everything the SNES tried to do, i. e. replicating that arcade look, subsequent platforms such as the PSX or the DS did better.

Most Genesis games, however, have a unique look and feel to them that no console after it really replicated (fast gameplay and tons of parallax but low color count, fluid animation but hardly any transparency, the list goes on.). It's as if the SNES's limitations makes its games look kinda obsolete and the Genesis's make them look charming. I hope I'm making sense and maybe in three years I'll go gaga about SNES games again, who knows?

Oh, one more thing: "Magical Pop'n" is another SNES game with pretty fast gameplay.

[Team Andromeda]

They might look amazing in screenshots, but if you actually play them, things usually get ugly: a lack of variety of tiles, slowdown, choppy animations and awkward mode 7 sequences. It's as if everything the SNES tried to do, i. e. replicating that arcade look, subsequent platforms such as the PSX or the DS did better.

Why are you even bringing in the DS or PS in to this ? I got news for you they did everything better than the Mega Drive too (well some say the PS sucked at Parallax scrolling) and it really depends on what SNES games you played . F-Zero, Axelay, Contra III, Castlevania IV, Yoshi Story, Mario IV, Prince of Persia, Pioltwings, Super Metroid (to which the MD had no answer what so ever) were really a class apart from most Mega Drive games but when it came to polygons , sport games and most shooters the Mega Drive had the advantage

Both systems have good and bad points . Anyway I must say that Gunstar Heroes is one of the most overrated games of all time. A great showcase for the MD hardware but it's nothing special to me as a game , give me Contra III anyday of the week

[magicalsoundshower]

Read my post again. I said Genesis games had a different feel to them because the hardware wasn't as close to arcade machines as the SNES's hardware was and the developers did their best to make do with what they had. The SNES, on the other hand, had games that looked close to arcade games but had nibbling issues that kept them from being arcade perfect, giving them a somewhat flawed feel. With the PSX, Saturn and DS, you have systems capable of fully replicating the feel of 2D arcade games.

Bottom line is, these days I'd rather play 2D games on the Genesis, 32 bit consoles or the DS. And I played A LOT of SNES games back in the day, including Axelay, CVIV and Contra 3. (I still think Castlevania IV is better than Bloodlines, though.)

[Team Andromeda]

Read my post again. I said Genesis games had a different feel to them because the hardware wasn't as close to arcade machines as the SNES's hardware was and the developers did their best to make do with what they had. The SNES, on the other hand, had games that looked close to arcade games but had nibbling issues that kept them from being arcade perfect, giving them a somewhat flawed feel. With the PSX, Saturn and DS, you have systems capable of fully replicating the feel of 2D arcade games.

Bottom line is, these days I'd rather play 2D games on the Genesis, 32 bit consoles or the DS. And I played A LOT of SNES games back in the day, including Axelay, CVIV and Contra 3. (I still think Castlevania IV is better than Bloodlines, though.)

I've read your post and it doesn't make sense on some points , while perfect sense in others . A lot of Mega Drive conversion were in fact closer to being Arcade perfect than their Snes counter parts, but a lack of colour, worse samples and lack of sprite scaling let them down not that it matter that much, has they were close enough . I really don't know how people can fault some of the 2D Snes games and lets face it DKC blew away a lot of Mega Drive games in the graphics debt with colour everywhere, loads of layers of parallax scrolling and stunning sound (such a same the game played like crap) and Contra on it's Japan debt looked better than most coin ups (never mind Mega Drive games) Cybernator was great and even simple ports like Joe and Mac looked pretty cool, Ninja Warrors looked better than the Arcade , Turtles in Time was close and so it goes on.

[sheath]

I think I can agree with the essence of MSS's impression really. I disagree that the SNES did better Arcade adaptations than the Genesis in any general sense. But I agree that Genesis games have a gameplay style all their own, and it is usually based on speed while tossing around a lot of (fake) background layers and tons of sprite objects. In fact, it was the lack of numerous enemies on screen and action that made 32-bit gaming less interesting to me. Running around in 3D environments, fighting one enemy at a time just never really impressed me.

[Kamahl]

You guys really need to go back to trolling back and forth, this forum needs that from time to time.
Bottom line:
- The SNES gives you a ton of effects already in hardware, but the processor is so slow that's basically all you got.
- It can do 3 REAL layers of parallax scrolling (not many games did it though, see rendering ranger for example).
- The transparency effect in particular could only be done somewhat on the Amiga (by sacrificing 1 bitplane) and the Sharp X68000 (limited), not even the Neo Geo could do it.
- It can't animate (read, update frames of animation for sprites and such) a lot of things per frame. Ally that with the slow processor and you get SLOWDOWN.
- It does have a huge master palette (lots of shades to choose from) with more than enough palettes for sprites and backgrounds.
- The soundchip allows for an incredibly nice atmospheric sound, but since its lacking in memory and doesn't have direct ROM access the music lacks 'punch' most of the time (due to muffled low quality samples).
- Most of the best games are slow moving aventure/rpgs, filled with detailed low contrast graphics and an orchestral soundtrack. (Makes sense doesn't it?)

- The genesis hardware gives you one thing, super easy, for free: parallax scrolling + linescrolling. Just changing values in a table.
- It can also animate (read this as changing frames of animation) many more data per frame than the SNES.
- The processor is also much better and allows for a lot of complex movements (bosses in GH for example) or complex AI (sports games), not to mention special effects in software (mode-7 in pier solar).
- However the console is greatly lacking in color and doing transparency effects is impossible, which was THE most awesome effect on the SNES (Act Raiser 2... *drools*).
- The soundchip has a lot of problems with PCM, and programming FM isn't easy. This is specially bad for atmospheric sounds which require orchestral instruments. However it was crisp and powerful, with good tracks having a ton of 'punch'.
- Most of the best games were fast moving action/shooters, with shit moving all over the screen, high contrast graphics and a cool pumping soundtrack. (Makes sense doesn't it?)

Get it now?

[Sik]

a lack of variety of tiles

Huh, how so? The SNES has about the same amount of VRAM than the Mega Drive. Granted, it did have some stupid restrictions that gave the Mega Drive a better chance of optimizing VRAM usage, but in practice the impact seems to have been minimal (maybe except on the sanity of the Earthworm Jim developers who hated the SNES sprite system).

(well some say the PS sucked at Parallax scrolling)

Maybe in comparison to the Saturn (which had four tilemaps in addition to the framebuffer, while the PS had to render everything with polygons), but it definitely didn't suck at parallax in comparison to the fourth generation consoles.

- The SNES gives you a ton of effects already in hardware, but the processor is so slow that's basically all you got.

YES. This is what the Treasure guy was trying to say. Jeez...

- It can't animate (read, update frames of animation for sprites and such) a lot of things per frame. Ally that with the slow processor and you get SLOWDOWN.

Um, how so? The video bandwidth for the SNES is just a bit less than that of the Mega Drive (and you can cut some display time to make up for that), and it uses DMA to transfer the data so it isn't hampered by the CPU. Updating the object behaviour has nothing to do with animating them.

- Most of the best games are slow moving aventure/rpgs, with beautiful low contrast graphics and an orchestral soundtrack. (Makes sense doesn't it?)

Eh, that was mainly towards the end of its lifetime where all other genres had already moved on the next generation.

- The genesis hardware gives you one thing, super easy, for free: parallax scrolling + linescrolling. Just changing values in a table.

The SNES can do parallax too (and in fact, it can do more layers than the Mega Drive). Doing linescrolling isn't much of an issue since you can just do a HDMA table... though to be fair, it does eat up hblank time that could have been used for something else, and it forces you to use raster effects to do linescrolling.

- It can also animate (read this as changing frames of animation) many more data per frame than the SNES.

Read what I said above.

- Most of the best games were fast moving action/shooters, with shit moving all over the screen, high contrast graphics and a cool pumping soundtrack. (Makes sense doesn't it?)

Though this was also true of the PC Engine. Let's not leave it out of the discussion =P

And what happened to kool kitty, he didn't reply yet o_O