I haven't played the master system version, i heard its pretty good.
Its hard to match these up since the pce port has slightly more varied levels.
Here are a couple pics that are the Super Darius 2 equivalent. It's also hard to do direct comparisons with single screenshots since the PCE version has half of its background off screen due to the detail.
I think that the PCE version looks better overall than the arcade. In places where the graphics are more or less identical, the PCE version uses much nicer colors. The redrawn/different minibosses are
WAY better and so are most of the main bosses.
The MD and SMS ports compare more to each other than to the PCE and arcade, but both are very well done, although an MD port could
always be better. The MD and SMS versions have Air Zonk style bg scrolling in places that it looks like the arcade does as well. After comparing the Saturn version to the PCE version for awhile, I thought that it was an addition to the Sega ports. But for some reason, that particular scrolling effect is only missing from the Saturn & PCE versions, even though it wouldn't take any tricks to enable inthe PCE version that aren't already done in other sections.
I mentioned earlier in this thread how it seems that every developer knew how to do some things, but always seem to miss others. Aside from that simple to implement effect, the CE version doesn't use any adpcm samples and sounds kinda quiet as a result. The PSG sounds are okay and even the arcade is kinda quiet most of the time, but aside from sampled explosion sfx, they could've at least included the dialogue from the first stage.
What the screen shots don't show much of, is how the average enemy sprites are 2 - 4 times bigger on PCE and are pretty much all the same size as the arcade, except many are drawn and/or shaded better. Once the weapons are fully powered they take up half the screen, yet there is very little flicker, even with many screen filling bosses made from sprites.
