What you said sounded like they were using samples for bass. You said use DDA / samples, so I just figured they were using sampled bass. I didn't listen, because I was on my phone. I expect sampled drums, because they almost always sound f*ckin cool. Sampled bass is like "eh"
After listening, that bass is weak as shit compared to what you can get out of a Megadrive.
PCE just doesn't really do the good Rolandy synth bass thing. It's not very phat. This sucks, and I've just learned to accept it.
I wish PCE could crank out that stuff.
Maybe you all misunderstand what I mean by bass. I just mean, the bass timbre sucks. It might be able to create stuff that ends up being thumpy where you can feel it in your sack if you crank it and fiddle with it, but it never really has the right sound quality.
It can do plucked, punchy bass really well. See: Devil's Crush. However, even in that regard, the Megadrive's bass sound shits all over the PC Engine. The rest of the song doesn't, but, the bass sure as hell does.
It really just sucks at trying to make those phat roland-esque synth sounds. I can't think of any games that do it, and I've never been able to get that bass sound out of it. It ends up weakening out.
Sampling bass will not give you a good synth sounding bass. You'll get Amiga sounding bass, or like Fighting Run, you get Seinfeld Slapbass (TM). Sampled bass is often very rigid, or sounds too percussive. There's a reason SNES has plucky/slappy bass almost always (See: Squaresoft).
Synthy bass doesn't really jive well with the constant retriggering of samples unless you exclusively use like, a New Order style setup where it's filtered and the ADSR envelope cuts the notes off because it was meant to be sequenced.
but even in this case, it's kind of shrill compared to even listening to a C64 version of Blue Monday.
Fighting Run does better with the envelopey bass that isn't sampled, IMHO.
