I pretty much agree with Keranu. I am a big fan of smooth color gradients. I'm not sure why I don't find most SNES games appealing. I guess I like detail in my color gradients, like on Rayxanber 3. Lookeee nice! I also like the use of shading and whatnot since I myself am a super-awesome artist. However I am also impressed with depth, animation and motion so parallax is very important to me as is color and detail. Seeing the scrolling in the SMS Choplifter was a major turning point in my life artistically. I started noticing depth and how things behaved as I moved much, much more. Parallax just for the sake of parallax adds next to nothing, but it can help make a game look cool. The first time I played the arcade version of Atomic Robo Kid I was blown away by 3 independent BGs. It just looked so darn cool and detailed as a result. Neither the Turbo or the Genesis versions match it. Crap game, though.
Many SNES games look weird to me as well. Too often, drab colors are used, particularly on sprites. I'm guessing that it has something to do with the palettes to choose from, because even some cartoony games have cool or warm/pastel colored characters that look out of place. I think that the PCE's color appears so vibrant because it has a good set of colors for its limited display(compared to modern technology).
An overall palette of like 32000 colors can be put to good use in an image of hundreds or more colors. But when you're working with objects that are shaded with a few colors at a time, you'd need to pick the best ones to stand out. Its no good having 50 colors of a particular shade of blue if you have to pick one near either end plus one in the middle for best results. When you can only put around 100 colors on screen in a video game, vibrant ones look best since they stand out.
I think that the Genesis's on screen color limit isn't much of a handy cap, since 40 colors makes a really nice image. I think that its sub palettes are more of a bottle neck. Many ports feature unusually colored sprites or bg sections, even though the games won't be pushing much past the 40 color mark. It doesn't come into play so much in original Genesis games, which are taylor made for the Genesis' palettes and look as good as colorful games on SNES and PCE.
I agree that parallax should only be put to good use. Lots of games in arcade or 16-bit consoles have "flat" sections in the middle of parallax heavy games that look just fine, because extra scrolling wasn't necessary in those areas.
Personally, I didn't like the over use of h-sync scrolling in Air Zonk when I first played it. Much of it looks cool, but much of it looks too gimmicky. Kinda like Coryoon's tunnel vision. Although I don't think that Dead Moon is the best looking game around, it did a much better job shamelessly exploiting that effect.
As for Sonic on PC Engine. Aside from the different ways I can think of to keep some bg scrolling intact or improved, even a completely flat bg version would look very cool taylor made for the PCE, shaded with vibrant tiles like the nicer parts of Knuckles Chatotix-
If anything, anyone doing a PCE Sonic or tech demo should be working with tiles from that game.
Also when people say it required developers more work and time to create parallax for the Turbo than it does for the Genesis, I think the same can be said about the Genesis in terms of color. When you're limited to only 32 colors per background and sprite layer, that's a real killer as a graphic artist in the 16-bit era.
I think that the dithering that developers did in later Genesis games must've been a lot of work and very time consuming. Although many people use it as a dig at the Genesis, I like good use of dithering. Its only the games with large two tone sections dithered to shit that look ugly.
The SGX was like Sega's 32X, only it was an entire system unto itself. A similar analogy might be made that the Genesis can play SMS games, but the Genesis was an entirely new platform. The SGX wasn't. It was a PCE with an extra background and some more memory. Not much else. It would have been better as a System Card (if possible). The SGX, like the 32X, was a mistake. There was no reason for it to exist other than for us collectors and geeks to awe in how awesome it is even if it only had a handful of games.
Although its not the same kind of hardware upgrade, I think of the Arcade Card as the PC Engine's equivalent of the 32X, since it was new format with a few great games that was the victim of the emerging of the next gen and we never got to see its full potential.
Malducci: I agree that they should've incorporated the SuperGrafx hardware when they made the Duo. Hudson and NEC could continue to pump out some decent SGX games until the Duo sales numbers were high enough to convince other developers to give it a try.
I think that if the SGX was in the Duo and Hudson made a few quality SGX CD games, then it wouldn't take long for others to at least give SGX CD development a try. We probably would've seen a bunch more bicompatible games too. I think that even if NEC still did a shitty port of Strider, it'd be cool to see how it would turn out as a SGX ACD game.
haha...yeah, me too, when i first started playing the turo grafx back in 1990 i didnt think it could do any type of parallax scrolling until i started playing the same turbo games again in 2001, now if i had played something like rondo or legend of xanadu back then i damn well would have noticed parallax srolling.
I actually had the
opposite experience. Back in the day, if a game made good use of parallax like Drac X, it was cool. But otherwise, I didn't think much of the odd scrolling bg effect. But today everything stands out.
