In the review, I said this about parallax: " The developers even pull off a 'parallax-like effect; there is no real parallax scrolling, of course, but the developers do make some clouds quickly move past in many stages to give some of that feeling of movement. It's great and definitely helps. "
I was trying to praise the game, but reading it again it can be improved. It's somewhat ironic that I always get complaints about my writing being too long from some, and too short from others... because if the issue here is saying "real" and "parallax-like", that's just shorthand for "the whole background does not move, only those clouds". That is what I meant there, though some here clearly misunderstand that. So, improved version:
" The developers even pull off a limited parallax effect. The whole background does not have multiple layers in it, but there are clouds which quickly move across the sky in many stages, to give some of that feeling of parallax movement. It's a great effect and definitely helps."
I imagine I'll still get complaints, but it's probably a more accurate summation of what I think of the clouds.
Because this is a very common trend with Black Falcon. He really doesn't understand underlying hardware architecture, let alone more simplistic concepts like parallax. Once he makes this connection from one idea to another, there's no changing it. It is etched in stone in his brain.
By making this quite insulting comment you ruin most value from the arguments in the rest of your post, you know. Insults are rude and unnecessary!
Parallax means just what it is; different scroll speeds for parts of the display to give the illusion of depth. Whether they over lap, made up of sprites, backgrounds, straight pixel driven, or some other method or however complex it is... parallax is parallax. His statement could be reduced to "limited parallax" and that would be very accurate. Instead, he asserts his misunderstanding to go out of the way to point something that ends up being incorrect. It's not just PCE reviews; he does this for other systems as well.
There is no such thing as fake parallax. It's either parallax or not. And if it is, it falls somewhere between complex and simple, hardware assisted and software driven, etc. If it's parallax, then there only exists the attribute of how it was derived. "Fake" or pseudo is not a qualifier.
I'm not "misunderstanding" anything, I'm just using terms in a way you disagree with. Let's look at what this actually should be about, this review. Had this game had full multi-layer backgrounds, as you see in some TG16 platformers (Bravoman, Rondo of Blood, Valis IV, and such), I'd call it parallax. However, Dragon Egg! does not do that; it just has clouds it moves by in the sky and nothing else. You're being too reductive by calling all parallax equal; no, the quality of the effect does matter. Something with a full parallax background (like Valis IV) has more and better parallax than something with only strip-parallax, for example. In my game opinion summary of Valis IV a couple of years ago, I said " Ingame graphics are great — this game has parallax-scrolling backgrounds in many levels!" with no qualifiers. And that's accurate. In this review I say something different because this games' clouds are not on that level.
The other connection that this game was rushed because the SFC? There's no evidence to support that. It's just haphazard speculation, which should be stated as such and not passed off as self evident. Where I come from, we call that talking out your ass.
A conclusion based on a significant amount of evidence is not just a guess that deserves such insulting language. The game released at a time when the system was still selling but was declining from its 1990 peak, and months before NEC released the Duo and refocused onto CDs as SNES sales skyrocketed. The game was NCS Masaya's last HuCard release; they entirely switched over to CDs after this game. It released with the second half of the game only maybe half-finished at best. So you have a better explanation than mine that considers all of these facts?
I'm a huge SFC fanboy but I don't agree at all that the PC Engine was fading in 91.
What would you say, just past peak? Because it was on the decline, though it was still successful that year.
A majority of the PCE's lifetime sales in Japan happened from launch through March 1991, according to NEC's numbers:
http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=981407 Note how in 3/91 the system was at 3.65 million sold (including the CD addon and HuCard systems combined). It finished at 5.84 million, well under double that number. We don't have good separate numbers for the PCE and CD addon before 1992, but we do know the (non-CD/Duo) PCE was at 3.65 million sold in March '92, and finished at 3.92 as of 1994. By '92 the base PCE was pretty much dead sales-wise. Of course, the system did keep selling in Duo form, but the Duo and CD addon combined sold 1.92 million, roughly half for each of them (so a bit under a million each), so the majority of people with a PCE did not buy a CD addon. And most games released in the Duo era were CD titles, not HuCard.
So, based on the numbers we have, the system sold better each year from 3/88 to 3/91, reaching a max of 1.3 million in the year that ended in March '91 (again, base system and CD addon sales combined). Then in the year after that it sold a million, still pretty good though a little bit down... but the year after that saw only 300k sold. So yeah, '91 was a good year, but just past peak.
As for Nintendo and the Super Famicom:
http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=701305 In Japan, the SFC sold 1.4 million in the year ending Mar. '91, 3 million in the year ending 3/'92, and 4 million in the year ending 3/'93. By March '92 the SFC had sold better in Japan than the non-CD PC Engine.
