PCE, SNES and Genesis, screen comparison.

[awack]

The difference in the bosses are extreme.

                 pce                                          genesis

[spenoza]

It looks like the PCE version just seriously curtails the play field, whereas the Genesis version attempts to give you as much space as a screen and a half or 2 screens in only one screen by simply shrinking everything down. The Genesis version looks much worse, visually. I have no idea how play compares, though.

[Black Tiger]

It looks like the PCE version just seriously curtails the play field, whereas the Genesis version attempts to give you as much space as a screen and a half or 2 screens in only one screen by simply shrinking everything down. The Genesis version looks much worse, visually. I have no idea how play compares, though.

Super Darius 2 was completely reworked as a console game. As faithful as most of the graphics are, things were swapped around and added and the enemy patterns are also altered so that everything is balanced. When you're playing it, it seems like your ship is occupying a huge section of the screen, but it never feels claustrophobic and there's also enough room and time to maneuver around. As much as I love Super Darius/Darius Plus, the extra work put into SD2 to make it more than a simple port really pays off.

[Tatsujin]

altough SD2 is a graphical eye candy of the very high class, i remember that it had some tremendous flickers on the big bosses, also it was kinda frowsy developed here and there. have to give it a shot soon again. i didn't play it for years now.

[nectarsis]

SD2 does have some AWFUL boss flicker

[Tatsujin]

awack. can you make a hellfire comparison next please?

[awack]

awack. can you make a hellfire comparison next please?

Yes, that will be next, should be a good one.


Golden Axe.

             pce                                                      genesis

[Black Tiger]

This actually shows how the art side of the graphics aren't really that bad and it'd look alright with good coloring. Aside from the bad sfx, the main detractor is the scrolling problem just like Strider. I don't know if it runs at 30fps, if the pacing is off because of the letterboxing or both, but it really stands out when coupled with lackluster graphics in a port of a famous game. If an original game had "super" graphics and ran a reduced framerate (like WBIII SMS), people would likely be more forgiving. The bird head makes it look like they actually had the original graphics/art to work with. I'd love to know the story behind this games development. Strider is a port that doesn't make any sense, even in the hands of a clueless developer, but this is something else. Maybe their budget got blown on the license and cinemas and they farmed out the game portion?

This will still always be one of my favorite PCE games because of the cinemas & music and how it came to be my first CD game.

[ceti alpha]

Wow, Telenet really crapped the bed on this one. Too bad. It would've been nice to have a quality port of Golden Axe on the Turbo/PCE.

[Joe Redifer]

Why is so much of the screen black?  I see no reason for this!  I haven't played the PCE version (yet), but hopefully it isn't as choppy as the SMS version.

[Black Tiger]

Why is so much of the screen black?  I see no reason for this!  I haven't played the PCE version (yet), but hopefully it isn't as choppy as the SMS version.

I think that their logic was to shrink the background to match the reduced sprite size. It's not as choppy as the SMS version, it's more like Strider ACD.

[shubibiman]

hopefully it isn't as choppy as the SMS version.

Actually, it is much choppier than the SMS version.

[Tatsujin]

hella yeas, the pce golden axe is an unpleasant joke.

[awack]

What the screen shots don't show much of, is how the average enemy sprites are 2 - 4 times bigger on PCE

Yea, i was focusing on the bg, here is an example of the sprites and one more mid boss.
                 pce                                                  genesis





Hellfire

              pce                                                                   genesis

[Black Tiger]

Wow, I didn't realize that the PCE & MD Hellfires were so different. I thought that they were both fairly straight ports from the arcade. I prefer different versions for each shot. I don't remember how much extra variety, animation, etc the PCE version has, but if I were to judge them strictly by these screens and taking into account that (I believe) the MD version has some parallax and the PCE doesn't, I'd say that the MD version looks better overall.

SD2 does have some AWFUL boss flicker

Really? I never experienced this. I only got the game recently and made the equivalent of two runs through each on real hardware and Magic Engine. It really stood out to me how little flicker there was considering the size of the bosses and when it was obvious they were sprites and not tiles. Even a boss like this didn't flicker for me-



Of course, I don't view flicker/break up as an unacceptable or bad thing, only when it affects the gameplay. If the price for getting a screen filling boss is the occasional thin horizontal stripe cutting out or appearing transparent for a fraction of a second, it's fine with me and I'd gladly take that over a flicker-free SNES game with tiny sprites to avoid slowdown.

The only other explanation I can think of is that maybe I just happened to play some flicker-light routes on real hardware and the game has unadvertised SuperGrafx support like Super Darius 1 that automatically kicked in on Magic Engine.