Military Madness reviews & comments from when it was new (1989-1990)

[Joe Redifer]

Herzog Zwei was an RTS.  Military Madness is turned based, isn't it?  Either way it isn't an RTS so I don't really consider the two similar.  Instead look at Master of Monsters on the Genesis.  It is far more similar.

As far as the Dolby Surround Sound goes, it should be fairly easy to fake it.  I'm not sure the Genesis can do it, but the Turbo might since all 6 of their sound channels are identical, are they not?  Anyway the only thing you need to do in order to get sound out of the back speakers is take a mono sound and make one side out of phase with the other when played back over a stereo output.  Unfortunately this would take two sound channels for one sound coming out of the back when it would only take one channel to play it through the right, left or center speakers.  I think the surround sound thing is accidental and the person who wrote that was just hearing sounds leaked into the back speakers.  It happens all the time on non-encoded stuff.  Matrixing sound is very tricky and far from perfect.

[spenoza]

It wouldn't be hard, probably, to create pre-programmed surround with, as you say, only half the available channels as a result. But trying to get the system to dynamically decide which sounds are where and then do the timing on the fly would waste a lot of CPU cycles. That kind of work is better suited to a DSP. Further, surround sound is much more useful for 3D games, IMO. Why do you need to know what's behind the player when left and right pretty much represent the spectrum of sound locations quite well?

[handygrafx]

Herzog Zwei on Genesis is only compared to Military Madness on TG16 because they came out at the same time
(within no more than a few months of each other) and were the only strategy games out on those consoles in the U.S. in 1990.   In Japan the Mega Drive got Super Daisenryaku in 1989 and Advanced Daisenryaku in 1990.  They're turned based hexagonal strategy games, much more comparable to MM.