The Crash Bandicoot guys really had their whole act together. On the other hand, if you want to reimagine Sonic Xtreme's history in a way that makes it a success, you really have to go back to the beginning and start all over. Oh Sega...
I'll have to look up that story, it sounds interesting.
While they certainly did bet everything on the FMV playback, just how better it is than the competition is quite debatable. I took some screenshots of FMV from the Saturn, PS1, 3DO and PC-FX, including two games that were ported to multiple systems.
That's a very, very long thread! I'd seen it before and really appreciate your screenshots.
When the 3 consoles were released (which is when marketing want to show the differences), the Saturn used CinePak (horrible), or Duck's TruMotion (much better) ... but both of those were nowhere near as good as the hardware M-JPEG on the PlayStation and PC-FX. Yes, the Saturn's video got much better in later years, but so did the other system's video.
One thing to look at is the Crystal Dynamics releases from the same time ... you can see the same intro video and advertising videos on similarly dated releases for the 3DO, Saturn and PlayStation, using TruMotion, TruMotion and M-JPEG.
It looks to me as though Hudson's early compressors weren't very good, not that the hardware on the PC-FX was necessarily bad. The video on 1997's Zeroigar was much better than the video on the 1995 releases. Or maybe they kept their best compressor "internal-only" for a while.
I know that the PlayStation can do an extra 64 pixels of width ... but that's also an extra 64 pixels of data that needs to come off the same double-speed drive as the PC-FX. A classic problem of tradeoffs.
Whatever the reality, or perceived reality, of the situation ... the marketing dept has to trumpet
something, and marketing has very little connection to reality!
