Hardware pushed to the limits according to Sega-16 members

[Kamahl]

So, how about talking about some Sega games that pushed hardware limits, especially Genesis, as there was some contention recently with Game Sack's list. Do games like Toy Story really push the Genesis hardware? And if so/if not, what other games do?

Toy Story definitely does on the 3D parts at the very least.

If homebrews count for this thread:

[saturndual32]

Herzog Zwei. When your opponent loaded up his base with a half dozen Jolly Rogers and a ton of ground troops, everything just starts slowing down.

Good call, thats neat for an early game.

Also Awesome Posum. The game runs very jerky all the time, to put such strain on the system, it must be doing something really impressive...i just cant put my finger whats impressive about it .

[Gogogadget]

Awesome Possum requires a lot of processing power to playback those super irritating voice samples over and over again.

[saturndual32]

Really clever, specially how it makes you think that the flickering is to make it transparent. Killing two birds with one stone.

Jim Power on the Amiga is positively crazy. 3 overlapping layers of parallax scrolling (+ linescrolling on top), 50 fps, full 320x256 resolution, transparent UI, music + sound effects. I can count on my fingers the number of amiga games that have even 1 of these things, much less all of them!

The game is essentially built around Amiga hardware limitations. It's a technical showoff with a game on top.

And from what i remember Jim Power is playing more than 4 channels of sound at once, right?. What other AMIGA games do that?. How is that done?.
Thats a down, for me, on the AMIGA. You usually can have great music, but no sound effects. Or sound effects and no music. Or butchered music and sound effects. For all the praise the Paula gets, i feel 4 channels of sound dont cut it on a 16-bit system, no matter how great the quality.

[saturndual32]

Toy Story definitely does on the 3D parts at the very least.

If homebrews count for this thread:

Both look impressive. QUOD INIT EXIT IIm run on the C64 high res mode?, and it still manages to be colorful and moves so smooth. Thats really neat.

[Kamahl]

@saturndual
I dont know if Jim Power does 4 channels + sound effects. Turrican does 3 music channels and 1 sfx channel, which is quite wasteful if you ask me.

Some games, like Yo Joe, mix channels in software to get true 6 channels (largely responsible for the slowdowns in the game).

Some, like the new Powerglove homebrew, just cut parts of the music to play sfx, which is perfectly fine if you have short sounds and you cut the bass + rhythm channels. (Hybris cuts the lead, which is super noticeable and sounds awful).

And yes, Quod Init Exit IIm is full high res. It runs on the very underused extended colour mode which is how it manages to be so colourful while scrolling that fast. The tradeoff is that it can only use 64 tiles onscreen at a time vs the typical 256.

[cleeg]

Some, like the new Powerglove homebrew, just cut parts of the music to play sfx

Does MUSHA do this?

[Kamahl]

Does MUSHA do this?

I don't know. An easy way to test is to see if the music ever uses all the FM channels at the same time on a VGM dump. If that happens then it obviously has to cut them at some point.

[cleeg]

I only ask because it sounds as if some 'layers' of music disappear when shooting.

[GeckoYamori]

Having SFX selectively interrupt music channels is overwhelmingly the standard way of doing things. Only a couple of European devs would flat out reserve channels for SFX. Cutting complementary channels like extra harmony or echo/chorus "overdubs" is usually the least intrusive way of doing so.

[Tanooki]

I really dig this thread, haven't been around in awhile as I'm in an anti-console gaming funk due to reality. Anyway, love that Vectrex clip from one end of it to Rogue Squadron which used old 90s movie models on the other end. But for me the less is more group always astonished me the most. I have some fun suggestions you can all check out which tax the same piece of hardware in four ways and four games and I'm talking about Gameboy Color.

The first is Dragon's Lair for Gameboy Color. This one a friend of mine was (at the time) working for the company and helped pump this gem out. No it's not the ratty side scroller of the 8bit era, it's the laserdisc game. Through insane compression, cutting down on death sequence animations, going into some more basic sound effects and minimal music, plus going with mighty 2bit color they did it in a 4MB chip space. Move wise, it only lacks 8 all during the length Smithy sequence.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XiUvMowedA

The second is Cannon Fodder on Gameboy Color. It gets the nod primarily and really only for its solid FMV/audio core (audio still is buzzy due to compression), it has the best video/audio sequence thrown on a GBC cart outside of the dedicated only movie GB video carts. They took the opening sequence of the classic Cannon Fodder game right down to the full 'War has never been so Much Fun!' tune and jammed it in there. Around the game though it uses some high color trickery modes to pull off more than the 32 colors the GBC would usually plop out on screen too in places and that usually was reserved for non-moving background stills. Also all the sfx are sampled clips as is a crap load of one liners as you play. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4jvG4K5oeeM

The third game is a favorite of the lot here, Warlocked. I'm not going to go into huge detail here, this game is a blatant and outright ripoff of Warcraft 1 with the addition of wizards you find on the map that can do all sorts of devious spells including turning enemies into chickens. You have a dozen maps for both the good and bad side, each larger than the next slowly adding additional units. Oddly enough the controls down to 2 buttons work, with no struggle or confusion, easy to round up a mob or an individual to raise an enemy base or harvest some supplies. It has multiplayer as well too if you got a friend into it. It has a LOT of units on screen and in normal RTS fashion everything is chatty and well detailed. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lSJ5oOmZnbE

The fourth is from those geniuses at Shinen -- Project S-11 put out by Sunsoft as it died in the US, it's a vertical shooter. This game blows out the known documented sprite limitations supposedly the GBC has and tops it, not only that, it never drops a frame. The game has a lot of stages, is a fair challenge, good selection of weapons and enemies, and it's not just 2-3 targets on screen either. ONe of your own guns will spit out probably 50 objects on screen much like water out of a garden hose held high. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sql8H5D75Rk


I loved these games, and quite a few others. Despite the GBC only getting a good 3-4 years on the market due to GBA popping up in mid 2001, it did some stunning work one would never have figured the old GB hardware could handle just having the CPU and ram essentially doubled on it. This thing kept me busy on all my breaks in college.

[gamevet]

Dragon's Lair is pretty impressive.

[Gogogadget]

Dragon's Lair also had a PC port which is pretty impressive for the time too, although kinda broken.

[segarule]

For Maxim (smspower) Lemmings for SMS pushed the hardware to limits:

Lemmings lets you make pixel perfect changes to the scenery, which is not the way the system is designed to work, the 8x8 squares are supposed to be predefined. On top of that it has 20 sprites (plus the cursor) moving around smoothly, without flickering, when the system can only do 8.

[Team Andromeda]

I always thought Shining Force Scenario 2 and 3 did a lot with the Saturn graphically. Then there's also this part I read in this 1up interview http://www.1up.com/features/oh-camelot;



Though I wouldn't know what exactly would be pushing the hardware or just being clever.

Tbh with you I thought Game Arts and their Grandia engine was pushing and asking more of the Saturn myself , that's not to say that SF III isn't pushing the hardware . I must say that Panzer Dragoon Saga is really really working the Saturn hard as is SEGA Rally and VC II . Sega Rally is really pushing the Saturn to it limits as it can't really use the VDP II to help out much and it's a real work out for SH'2 and VDP 1 . And the team even said that only a handful of programmers would be able to get Rally's performance out of the Saturn .