bad hardware or bad programation?

[RedAngel]

We know that our genesis has some weak points but in my opinion many games could have been a lot better.

For example our console displays 64 colours in a normal way, and more with special technics (128 in Ranger X) so programers (at least from the own Sega) could have made more games with more colours.

If we talk about special effects we have the awesome games from Treasure. Some musics were great and even some of them included samples with a good result and in some games digitised voices were more or less decent.

If you look well into the long catalogue you find lots of games that can make you think "our console could really do more things that I imagined", the main problem is that most of genesis games were traditional technically speaking, and the few with went further only do in one or two aspects it was difficult to find a complete game.

What do you think?

 

[IceDigger]

the "enhanced" games came out pretty much towards the end of the system, and often had to drop other stuff or take performance hits to achieve those effects.

 

[archiver]

Fancy hardware is nice (and remember, the Genesis came out in what, 1989?) but I think it all comes down to the gameplay, really.

Let me pick a non-Sega game (to be fair):

Look at Dracula X: Rondo Of Blood for the PCE cd. It has a very limited pallette if you look closely, yet I doubt those that do notice seem to mind if they're enjoying the game.

 

[ExCyber]

Yeah, there are any number of tricks you can pull with limited hardware, but there are only so many clock cycles in a second on any given platform, and only so many ports the programmer's allowed to poke at. The sorts of tricks needed to double color palettes, get more sprites on the screen at once, etc. often come with a performance price as Arakon mentioned. Also, the underlying hardware properties that allow them generally aren't very flexible, which limits the types of situations in which such tricks can be used.

 

[RedAngel]

I agree with all of you but there are some games that were really bad and very far from the typical limits of our console. Some famous games of very famous companies

were not as good as they should, for example, Castlevania, I love the game, musics are very good, playability is very high but those graphics and colours look as a beta version of a game and not a full version.

I think many programmers had to release their games before finishing them and in other systems this event was not as common as in our console.

The great Chrono Trigger of SNES were very good because Akira Toriyama drew the characters, Yuji Horii (write the story of Dragon quest games) wrote the plot, and Square worked for more than two years in the game

can someone tell me a similar effort and dream team in genesis games?

 

[eatpenguin]

hmm.. i thought castlevania looked amazing on genesis. maybe its just me

 

[ExCyber]

Some famous games of very famous companies

were not as good as they should, for example, Castlevania, I love the game, musics are very good, playability is very high but those graphics and colours look as a beta version of a game and not a full version.

I'm with eatpenguin on this one - Bloodlines looks fine to me. I think you underestimate the difficulty of making good-looking graphics at limited resolution *and* with a severely limited palette (MD/Genesis only allows specifying a total of 512 different colors). Also, if you're looking at the graphics on an emulator, turn on interpolation or something, because most console graphics look like crap on a PC monitor.

I think many programmers had to release their games before finishing them and in other systems this event was not as common as in our console.

This happens all over the place, it's just that some developers end up hiding it better than others. Just to follow the example, Castlevania: Symphony of the Night was released unfinished on PSX - if you don't think the extra stuff in the Saturn version is evidence enough, there's a fairly well-known bug that can be exploited to see evidence that was left in the PSX version, or you could just use an XA stream player and notice that there's quite a bit of dialogue recorded on the disc that never gets used...

In the game industry (and when developing software in general), it's often the case that a game has a ridiculous number of bugs during its development, and the developers get in as many features as they can before the "feature freeze", which is the point in development when no new features are allowed to be added and the developers must concentrate solely on bugfixes. Fixing bugs is not what developers generally like to do, so it's sometimes up to the publisher to say something along the lines of "Be done by Thanksgiving, or else you don't get paid.", at which point some developers tend to start working 16-hour days and sleeping at the office in order to meet the deadline (or so I'm told).

 

[RedAngel]

Well, perhaps I'm too strict with games. The best of the genesis version of Castlevania comparing to Castlevania 4 is that enemies were not stupid.

Good colours and good graphics:

Story of Thor

Gunstar Heroes

Dynamite Headdy

Rocket Knight Adventure

Aladdin

Soleil

etc

In my opinion some companies worked very well in our system: Electronic Arts, Virgin, Treasure, Sega (not always!) and others dedicate more resources to other platforms: Konami, Capcom etc.

 

[RadSil]

Quote: from eatpenguin on 1:54 pm on Mar. 2, 2002

hmm.. i thought castlevania looked amazing on genesis. maybe its just me

I agree.

Actually Castlevania Bloodlines *did* use many "special effects" of the Genesis VDP - most notably mid frame raster effects, which allowed for the cool reflective surfaces on that one level (forgot which one it was).