sdelfin

I looked down on Pokemon when it was new. I was several years older than the target audience. When I stopped caring so much about those things, I eventually got around to trying some Pokemon as the monster designs kind of grew on me and the gameplay seemed like it would be relaxing. I appreciated how straightforward it was as an RPG. I started with Diamond on the DS, but switched to FireRed due to an extended power outage. FireRed helped pass the time without power. I dug out my original 2001 GBA, the worm light I got with it in a bundle, and had a pile of batteries on hand so I was ready. I did run through one set of batteries by the time the power came back. It was a fun way to pass the time under the circumstances.

Personally, Double Dragon 2 arcade was a disappointment. I enjoy the first one still. The second one felt less balanced(aside from the elbow smash in the first game, which I try not to use much), and had major performance issues. The home ports were more fun for me. The NES version is pretty good and one of the best beat-em-up games on the system, probably. The PC Engine version is my favorite version of Double Dragon 2 and the best version in my opinion.

@KingMike from what I've seen, Saturn sold about one million in Europe, and 1.8 million in North America. Of course, much of that would have come after aggressive promotions to try to salvage the platform. I read that the Saturn was at 1.2 million in NA at the end of 1996. PS1 was already close to 3 million at the time and about to pick up even more momentum. Even though the numbers are higher than you guessed, they're still not high enough to be good for software publishers. It's hard to have a million seller in NA if more than half the user base has to buy it.

Sony really did their homework in how to approach the console market. They did a lot right from the very beginning. They also spooked Sega and Nintendo into making some big mistakes.

First of all, just a good piece here, Damien. This is something I've thought about before at various points. I'm not particularly driven by nostalgia as some are. I do acknowledge that the time during which I grew up shaped my taste in games, so there might be some amount of subconscious nostalgia, as I refer to it. I don't seek nostalgia like some do. For example, my brother started certain rituals as a young adult to try to recreate feeling like a younger kid at Christmas. That's not me at all. So as I mentioned, I don't seek nostalgia, but my tastes were shaped in the '80s and '90s. I play older games because I enjoy them more. I like the approach to game design more, despite some of the downsides(difficulty spikes, lack of continues, etc.) Some games are just a joy to play the moment I pick up the controller, and many of the best games are easy to figure out, even if they have a lot of less obvious features. Many of my current favorites are games I missed back in the day, so I have no prior connection to them. For example, I discovered Shatterhand a decade or so ago on Youtube. Seeing it in action, I had a strong reaction thinking that it looked very much like the kind of game I would love, though sometimes that expectation doesn't pan out. In the case of Shatterhand, I was absolutely right, as the game was as good as I hoped it would be.

I was a big arcade gamer in the '90s, so I preferred systems that brought the arcade experience home as much as possible. The Saturn was my favorite system of the late 1990s. After the Dreamcast's short life, I just wasn't particularly interested in where video games were going. It was the GBA that excited me the most(I had previously been a big fan of the Neo Geo Pocket) and I really enjoyed that period with it. I eventually got a Gamecube and enjoyed some of the more modern games, but the GBA was my priority because it was a throwback to the 16-bit era. There was a period when I was not gaming, but it was games like Street Fighter 2 and Shinobi 3 that brought me back to gaming. Perhaps it was a nostalgic connection that got me to return, but the fun was real and in the moment, not in the past.

I sometimes wonder if I prefer the old games because they feel more human in how they were made. I wonder that about a lot of pop culture. I have long preferred older media of various types. I like older movies and TV shows(60s-80s), older music, cel animation, comic books when the art was done with inking and the four-color process as opposed to digital. Much of those are before my time, so there's no nostalgia with that. In all those cases, I get a feeling that the human element is much stronger. The limitations of the times helped shaped how those things developed. To use movies as an example, CGI does nothing for me. But more than that, it allows for some very unnatural shots that just wouldn't be possible with an actual camera, and that really takes me out. Plus, shaky cameras are a thing now for some reason. My point is that limitations played a big part in shaping things and creative choices tended to be well considered to serve the work as opposed to "wouldn't it be cool if...". I think the same applies to games. The limitations bred creativity. In modern times, the popular games tend to be open-world, many hours long, with an emphasis on exploration and discovery, and lots of narrative excess, and that's just not what I'm into. So that's how I see it with media in general.

One thing people often do not realize about the SuperGrafx is that those five or six games weren't even released close together or alongside the launch of the system. Those games came out sporadically over nearly a year and a half. I remember being surprised when I realized that.

@somnambulance Not just you. I view the DS similarly. It's not that it was a bad system, but as Nintendo found successful gimmicks to push, and as new trends developed, the selection of games I'd want to play shrunk. They were still there, but the selection was less and it was harder to find them. For example, around a decade ago, I discovered Wayforward's DS games, Contra 4, Aliens Infestation, and Thor(which is surprisingly fun if you like arcade experiences) which I had not heard of before. During the DS and Wii era, Nintendo pushed their gimmicks so hard that it ended up hurting some games. I think it's telling how they removed the touch-screen stuff after the first Castlevania game. I was really happy with the GBA. The DS just wasn't interesting to me early on, and I didn't get one for several years, and then the games I ended up enjoying most on it were the Castlevania games, Metal Slug 7, and the Mega Man Zero collection to name a few.

@Daniel36 I had the exact opposite experience with Metroid Prime. The original with the Gamecube controller felt connected to my brain as I was in the zone playing it. Very immersive. I couldn't stand it at all with motion controls. I think that's the problem with motion controls. They don't have the effect they had for you on enough people. With that said, as they did add motion control to the Prime games, as long as they provide options(which they didn't do for the first Prime Trilogy release), that's cool with me.

Yeah, I think it's reasonable for Daytona to be in the mix for best Sega arcade game. Of course, it's a matter of taste with anything like that. As far as popularity, Daytona is on top. But I always thought of it as a quality experience too. I liked the way it handled. Sega Rally was great too. I only played the Saturn version. Games like Out Run are worth talking about for the historical significance and the creative course design. While 2D, the car handling in Out Run feels remarkably realistic in some way that other scaling-based driving games don't seem to do right. Space Harrier is another game that was very good and historically significant.

As far as Virtua Fighter, I never played any of them after the second, but VF2 was quite significant and might be worth including in the conversation. Golden Axe: Revenge of Death Adder is another game that, for me, is among the best Sega arcade games(and I didn't like it at first). The original is a significant game and a personal favorite, but it's limited for the purposes of this topic. Another personal favorite, though one that's got the quality to also be among the best, though not that popular, is the Virtual On series. I only played it on console, the first on Saturn, and the second on Dreamcast(one of my favorite DC games). I love them both, but the second one, Virtual On: Oratorio Tangram, is probably better overall and I think is one of the best Sega arcade games. It never stops being fun for me no matter how often I play it. And it was both a Model 3 and NAOMI arcade game, so the DC version is basically perfect(compared to the NAOMI).

I mentioned in my other comment that because class divide is an element in Akira, the decay in one game and a modern design in the other works as both coming from Akira. Looking at that side-by-side, the influence is obvious. It's cool to see the differences as well.

Lovely stuff here. I really enjoyed some of the concepts discussed. I've always had a soft spot for Irem. I had always heard that there was a lot of overlap between Irem and SNK with Nazca being an obvious example. In reading up on Irem in the past, I saw that Irem and Capcom had the same founder. All three were based on Osaka which explains some of the crossover and defections. Most of the game industry in Japan was in Tokyo, as far as I can tell, so this was like a little pocket of outsiders doing their own things. It was good to hear more about what was going on within Irem during that period.

I'm not surprised to hear that some of the shared elements ended up being coincidental. With games using the same designers, it's easy to reuse or rework similar concepts. On the Otomo reference, I'm not surprised that was a big influence. I would say that Last Resort being more modern would also track with Akira as one of the themes within that story is a wide class divide. On checkpoints vs. respawn, as a player, I would say it just comes down to feel. Some games feel right with checkpoints. Some feel right with respawns. Sometimes a game will use one of those, and it just feels wrong, or the difficulty balance isn't right. For example, I love many of the Toaplan shooters with checkpoints, especially Dogyuun and Grind Stormer, which aren't as cruel as the Truxton games, though the home ports are reasonable. Truxton is interesting because of the regressive checkpoints, meaning if you play poorly enough, you can go backwards to a previous checkpoint.

I didn't get on well with Undercover Cops originally, but I did revisit it a couple of years ago with the difficulty turned down and felt it was better balanced and more enjoyable. I really enjoy the game now. It wasn't the only game that I thought benefited from such an adjustment.

Edit: Also interesting to hear that Kodama started K2 as I've recently been playing the two PS2 Tenchu games.

"Welcome to die!" X-Men arcade is a favorite of mine and my top Konami brawler. It is endlessly fun for me. It seemed so baffling back in the 1990s that this never got ported. Of course, now it's easy to see it was a combination of licensing(arcade and console deals were often separate and other companies had X-Men licenses for console), hardware capabilities in the short term, and poor timing in the long term(by the time PS1 and Saturn came out, all the hype was gone and 2D beat-em-ups had fallen out of favor). A lot of great arcade games from around 1992-1994 never got ports for those reasons.

Interesting how this project is a reconstruction of the game. As such, there will be differences in behavior, which is fine and would have likely been the same with a port at the time. As it is, there are multiple versions of the arcade game, with the US version having a couple of stages that were a bit longer and handled the mutant power a different way. One quirk of the arcade that they probably won't recreate is how, when most bosses are low on health, the game will disable the boss' hit detection for one hit. As most people will be trying to combo the bosses, which usually works fine, one of the hits won't land and the boss will get a free counter hit, often resulting in a loss of life right before the next stage and any health restore. I have verified this many times. I still love the game, regardless.

I remember seeing a bit of this one on TV a few years ago. I enjoy a lot of shows from that time period. Wonder Woman from then is goofy, but I'd say it's delightfully goofy. There's just something fun about it, at least for me. I just picked up the set on disc last week, along with a few others. Fun seeing this here.

Getting fresh air is also not a life goal. Considering he defeated Tetris and he's still 13, he's got lots of time to set and achieve goals. Considering how tenacious he likely had to be to do the Tetris thing, he'll likely do well. That's the thing that people like to leave out when stories like this come up. There are far worse things this kid could be into. Plus, being a Tetris master is probably good for his brain.

It feels like I've heard of this once or twice before in other cases, but I can't be sure. I know there are the hardware purists out there, and that's fine, but it would be wise to make a plan to use some modern alternative just in case there is a widespread problem of failures in the coming years. It's amazing to think of those old systems lasting for over 30 years as it is, without even needing capacitor replacement in many cases. I spent some time playing on original hardware(I already had an old 480p upscaler) and it was cool to do, but I didn't get much extra from it as I was always more about the games. My enjoyment doesn't go up or down based on what hardware is running it. That's me. Software emulation is very good these days, in spite of some of the false beliefs that are still pushed about it. And FPGA is a nice alternative to original hardware. But I hope the purists get a lot more years of enjoyment before it becomes an issue.

That's cool. I was not aware of footage of the game with the jet. I had heard that was the original concept. It seems strange they would have memory issues having a jet in the game, especially on a scaler board which would already have a lot of expensive bits. My suspicion is that the jet would require more animation frames to look good in motion and in perspective than they could fit, while the human character didn't need as many unique frames. Just a theory as nothing seems especially over the top with the jet.

Cool to hear the love for Tenchu. Though Cole seems mistaken about the timing of the release of the DualShock. Still, the game was likely in development too early to incorporate analog control. But the point stands that Tenchu can benefit from some form of updating, especially to the controls. The series feeling clunky and old fashioned has always been a common complaint for the Tenchu series, so it is a good candidate for improvement in a number of ways.

I've just recently been playing some of the Tenchu games I haven't played as much. I last played the first two a few years back and still enjoyed them. I should say, Tenchu was the game that finally convinced me to get a PS1 as I was a Saturn guy back in the day, but releases really dried up in 1998. Been playing through Wrath of Heaven(which is one way to translate "Tenchu" which means the full game title is redundant) over the last week or so and been having a good time. I plan to keep playing the different layouts as well as some of the other games in the series. Clunkiness aside, it's got a lot of what I look for in 3D action games, and is still easily my favorite stealth experience, as I could never get into more popular franchises of that sort.

@SpeedRunRocks Yeah, it was Charlie from Anthrax. You're not my friend who house sat for him, are you? Or his brother that I also became good friends with?

That's cool. I had previously heard he spent time in his final days playing video games, so I'm not surprised to hear more about his interest in gaming. In recent months, I got really into Strider and Strider 2(PS1). I always liked the original, but was never any good at it, but I have since rectified that. Save states make that a good bit easier now than it would have been back then when he spoke about it. The final boss is easy once you see how things work, but I got thrashed for a while figuring that out. But I can 1CC the game now, which is only something I bother with if I really like a game because it's supposed to be fun. Speaking of fun, I did get to see Motorhead live a handful of times.

Interesting bit of trivia, back in the day a friend of mine lived next door to someone in a well known metal band and would house sit for him when he was on tour, so I got to spend a bit of time in his house. It was cool to see that among an impressive music collection he had a Simpsons arcade cabinet.

I always enjoy these little glimpses into what was going on behind the scenes with stuff like this. It reminds me of the "Untold History" stuff with Capcom. Whole KOF 94 was rough compared to what came later, I loved the concept and the general character design SNK went with. I suppose they didn't know if the concept would be appealing for arcade players. And around 1994, SNK was still not yet the fighting-game powerhouse it would become as Samurai Shodown was still current with the second game yet to come later on in 1994 as I can tell. So I guess that's where the concerns came from. I loved the KOF concept when I discovered it, but that was with KOF 97. Glad it worked out as I really loved SNK's approach to fighting games and I think Capcom really left an opening for another Japanese competitor in 1994 with how many revisions there were to SF2 rather than a proper sequel.

@skaarj217 Perhaps I have little sense!!! Yeah, I'm aware of it and remember that the PS4 version reviewed very well. It's just that I never had much reason to get a PS4 and have no plans at the moment to get one. Meanwhile, while this is an article about emulation, and I plan to play it that way, I still do have my copy of the game and a PS2 slim as well. It's still good enough to play under those circumstances, for me. If I ever get a PS4, or if it comes to PC, I'd probably pick up the remaster.

I did not realize PCSX2 was started so long ago. I just recently decided to try it out after getting a used mini PC with a Ryzen APU. It sounds like I had good timing. I'm aware of performance enhancements fairly recently that really helped for the computer I bought. It's a very nice emulator. Not too tricky to set up, and it runs very well. I look forward to revisiting things like Shadow of the Colossus, the Katamari Damacy games, along with trying out stuff I meant to play or would have liked to play but missed, like Sly Cooper and the Tenchu games.

@Asaki I see now. Thank you for clarifying. This whole thing has been a lot more interesting than I thought it would be when I first clicked on it.

@KingMike yeah, I've seen US arcade games be changed to be more difficult many times. I've told people to always try other regions before trying the US versions. I haven't played Revenge of Death Adder in a while, so I don't remember if there were differences in the difficulty, but one regional difference I do recall is that the game has branching paths, but in the US version, the paths the player does not take are then tacked on at the end before the final stage. Not only does this make a single play through longer(too long, in my opinion), it also makes the branching paths mostly meaningless.

Didn't expect this, especially with so many announcements at once. The Streets of Rage teaser is interesting since the franchise was already resurrected a few years ago. I only just bought SOR4 a bit over a year ago. It's a curious change of direction. The visual style may not work for me with the plastic-looking 3D models, but I'll want to see more of it. Golden Axe is similar. Not loving the way it looks, but it could play well. Yeah, I'd prefer an old-fashioned beat-em-up, but I get it. Shinobi looks like it could be very good. The art style looks cool, like a light version of the style used in GetsuFumaDen: Undying Moon.

@Sketcz From your earlier post, it sounded like you couldn't see the Zelda 2 cards on Internet Archive and couldn't see the backs at all. They are on there as sheets of nine cards(the last two are with the stickers). That's the only way I could help out here, unfortunately. I see the Flickr galleries are higher resolution. It's a shame the backs are not there, but they are readable on the Internet Archive gallery so you can at least see what's going on there.

I don't mean this as a knock in any way, but I recall reading something talking about how Japanese animation studios were very generous with animation cels in situations like this because they otherwise had to dispose of them in a specific way to meet regulations, and giving them away saved them the cost of doing that. It's kind of a funny notion, but it worked out well for those who received them who might value them. I believe it was Robert Woodhead who spoke about that.

Interesting to hear more about this story and why the console Akira games never were finished. Imagine prioritizing Wayne's World over that. And I wonder what cancelled TV shows they licensed. I've always wondered how to do a decent Akira game on the 16-bit systems. I love the film, but it doesn't necessarily translate to a good video game easily. You could definitely adapt parts of it into an arcade-style beat-em-up game. It seems like it would likely need to be a mixed-genre game, to incorporate things like the bike, but those were hard to do well back then. However, Vice: Project Doom was an example of one of those done well.

@Sketcz Perhaps you've already sorted this part out, but when I go to that tweet and click the image, it takes me directly to Internet Archive and I see what looks to be all 10 cards for set 1 and all 10 for set 2, including the backs.

Based on the track record of Pyron, it was a smarter bet to believe what he was saying. I'm glad he has come out to explain it. If I could understand Brazilian Portuguese(which I've been around a lot, but not enough to figure out anything but certain basic words) I'd watch the whole thing. But he does some demonstrations and has some visual aids that are helpful. Those big sprite objects like Earthquake and Juggernaut use roughly 25 hardware sprites. It also showed how many horizontal and vertical pixels the characters are. Late in the video, he shows Juggernaut attacking and his arm exceeds the horizontal sprite limit and you can see the sprite flicker, which is something I expected as I figured two Juggernauts would be right on that line limit of 20 sprites for 320-wide mode, or 16 is it's using 256. I think it would be difficult to scale up into a full game. Even if that is possible to some level, it would have been impossible back in the day when cart sizes were a huge factor. Great to see more about this.

@Hexapus Yeah, and that was basically my point, that there's always some subjectivity with such things. I often do point out that all three of the versions I talked about are very good overall. Using the PCE version as an example, for some people the lack of parallax is not a big deal, but others consider it to be a deal breaker. And as the Genesis version has been improved after the fact demonstrating that Capcom could have done more with the game on the hardware, the same goes for the SNES version, so whichever version someone prefers isn't really indicative of the hardware. The SNES certainly could have had voice samples like the PCE version and the music could have sounded more like the arcade if they wanted. And Super SF2 on the SNES is a great improvement in the ways that matter to me(with one odd quirk). Of course, these days, if I play SF2, it's going to be the arcade version the vast majority of the time.

Beyond that, I decided to check into this chain combo after your last post. Perhaps the terminology within the fighting game community is different and the normal combos seem like chain combos to us. The video is about that cancel of the second kick to trigger a punch, which seems to be the key for big follow ups(probably for distance reasons). I was able to do the cancel pretty easily in the Genesis version once I understood the timing. It was a bit tougher for the arcade version, but I did it there too. As expected, I could not do the cancel in the SNES version. I was, however, able to have the second kick hit(which is expected behavior) and follow up with a hadouken, though I don't know if it would be unblockable as a true chain.

The design translates well due to that circular dome of the first model of the system. I wonder how much overlap there is between Genesis fans or those with nostalgia with the type of person who would want an expensive(though not by luxury watch standards) watch. A Genesis theme for a watch seems more of a novelty as opposed to a status symbol than those into expensive watches would be about.

I've been aware of different efforts to translate this game into English for the various platforms. I'd check periodically. It was nice to learn earlier this year of the progress made here, so it was really great and unexpected news to see it today. I was legitimately surprised when I saw that it was complete.

@MoriyaMug thank you for your efforts in doing this. I have no doubt it was quite a lot of work to make this happen.

@Hexapus Capcom did outsource some of their games, and may have been doing so with the beta version of the game that is out there now, but as I understand it, Capcom developed SCE internally in the end. Sega may have insisted. I do want to say that the SNES port of the first edition of SF2 is probably the most important game of the 16-bit generation.

I've looked pretty thoroughly into the differences between the SNES, Genesis, and PCE versions of the game, and there are more differences than it seems, and each version had advantages and disadvantages. I disagree that the Genesis sound was laughably bad as you put it, but I also know your opinion is not unusual. The scratchy voice samples in the Genesis version just never bothered me, even back in 1993 when I rented it, but I'm just one guy. I have to point out that the voices on the SNES are incredibly muffled, so it's not really a huge improvement, at least to my ears. PCE version has the best voices by a mile. As for music, I find the SNES versions all over the place. Some is great, but some not so much. Ken's theme on SNES is really bad for me, and I've seen that view shared by others as well. I think the Genesis version has the most consistent music. The Genesis version also has extra elements in the backgrounds that the others lack. I say all that to show that there are good reasons to prefer any of those three versions, depending on what one prioritizes. And each of those three has their fans. Just to give a little idea of where I'm coming from, while I did rent the Genesis version first, I ended up picking up a SNES and ended up owning Turbo for it, yet I still prefer the Genesis version now.

I agree that Capcom really messed up the sound for Super Street Fighter 2 on Genesis. They probably should have stayed closer to how they composed it for SCE. The SNES version is the way to go there, and the music was much more consistently pleasant for me.

I imported my Dreamcast early, in February of 1999. It was a bit of an unexpected thing. I was already accustomed to importing games for my Saturn, so I just continued doing that. I always felt like it took too long for SoA to get the Dreamcast to market in North America, though I'm sure some of that was due to supply. SoA had almost nothing to sell for a year and a half. DC was a cool system in a lot of ways. The controller was a step down though. I didn't have as much time for the Dreamcast as I did for the Saturn due to other things going on. But I had a good time with it. I picked it up with Sonic Adventure. Other games that stood out for me included: Crazy Taxi, King of Fighters: Dream Match '99(Enhanced port of KOF98), Virtual On 2, Gundam 0079: Rise From the Ashes, among others.

@cakeashi Virtual On 2 plays great even without the sticks, though that sounds like a great experience. I picked that one up right when it came out in Japan after loving the first one on the Saturn. I still enjoy that one. One of my favorites for the system.

There are probably quite a few reasons it didn't succeed. I think, more than anything, it was simply the financial position Sega was in. They needed it to be a smash hit very quickly. If you go back to the Genesis in North America, and I know the market had changed in that 10 years, but it took almost two years for that to take off. Sega didn't have that kind of time with the Dreamcast, sadly. Literally.

@Coolmusic You must be mistaking Burning Rangers for something else as that has only ever been available on the Saturn.

This makes me wonder why is was not included for the SNES but retained for the Genesis. And I wonder about the PC Engine version. There are two versions of Street Fighter 2 on SNES based on CPS1 games. If both of them have that "fix", then that makes it odd that Hyper Fighting arcade wasn't fixed since it came out a bit after the first port. It also seems to be a weird thing for Sega to ensure was included by Capcom for their version. I suppose it's possible they consulted with high-level players. It's an odd situation.

One of my favorite things to point out and laugh about is how this needed to be a low-cost device so as not to be too close in price to current major consoles(which would make it extra pointless than it already was), and they went way overboard with the controller design having their own screens. And how were those things supposed to work, anyway? Just look at those things. If you ever needed a good example of feature creep, there you go.

Excellent feature. Nice to know more of the story behind this game. I can relate to those who sampled the early builds and didn't get it. I didn't get a chance to play Gunstar Heroes when it was current. A couple of decades later, I finally sat down with it. The first time I played it, I just didn't get it. Part of that is probably due to the technical stuff not being so novel in the 2010s. I forgot if I finally understood the game on my second attempt, or if I gave it a third try. But once I finally got it, that was it. I was definitely on the bandwagon at that point. I can see why it might have been overlooked at the time, especially for people whose job it was to sample games in batches. Many times, when I have sampled groups of games, it's easy for a good game to get lost in the shuffle.

I actually ended up playing the GBA sequel first. Even that one I didn't get to until years after I got it(such is life, sometimes). My first impression of it was that it was cool, but it just felt really unusual in its game mechanics and visual feedback. That same unusual feeling was there when I played the original. It made it just a bit tougher to jump into it compared to other games like a Metal Slug or something like that. But it was worth giving it another shot as it really is one of the best experiences on the Genesis. I thought it was chaotic in the best of ways.

Exact seemed to be one of the MVPs as developers on the X68000. Their games tend to be mentioned among the best games, especially original games, for the platform. I'm not familiar with that shooter, but Geograph Seal and Etoile Princess both looked very good from videos and things I have heard. I have tried Aquales and thought it was well made and played great. I'd like to play that one fully at some point.

Very interesting interview. I agree with his approach to game design at the time of the 2D to 3D transition. 3D was cool, but it was also limiting in other ways in those days when polygon throughput was limited and features were relatively primitive. Gameplay is always important, but it was especially important then when there were limits of the Saturn, PS1, and N64. It makes a lot of sense for the time to decide on the fundamentals of the game first, then deciding whether 2D or 3D suited it better. Of course, market trends got in the way, especially when it came time to localize games from Japan.

It's a bit surprising to hear his takes on Alien Soldier and Light Crusader, but I suppose when you have so many more ideas for a game and have to cut them, it's hard to see it a different way. I think both games are fantastic. Alien Soldier is very technically impressive. It was a bit tricky to learn, but it was worth it as I think its gameplay is also great. And while the interview doesn't specifically mention it, it does lead me to believe that I was correct in assuming at least one of the visual effects(the falling moth wing) is using a polygon. As for Light Crusader, I picked that one up used to play on a Nomad. I was aware of the game and heard it was good. I liked it then and replayed it several years ago and still enjoyed it. The music in the game is very good which always helps.

@KingMike The North American version had limited continues, but also a password system, which made it easy enough to continue. This hack just simplifies things.

Very interesting. Of course, the one advantage now is not having to worry about ROM size. Still, I'm surprised to see Juggernaut and Hulk look so good and big on the Genesis/Mega Drive. In a way, the Marvel sprites are a good fit for the limited color of the system, because the sprites are drawn to be simple and clean with minimal, but effective, shading. That helps lend the game a comic book or cartoon look, but also means the sprites don't need a ton of colors. With the characters as big as they are, I do wonder how close this would be to the overall and horizontal sprite limit. I also wonder if they'd run into palette issues with other characters. I'd like to see if they go further with this, just to see what's possible as it is already impressive.

I admire the dedication and attention to detail, and I appreciate how loose and casual game design was back in the day. No way that kind of research would get the green light for a game like that. I think it paid off for Out Run as I'm always amazed how convincing the car handling is in that one. I always liked this concept as an arcade game. I remember playing it when it was current in arcades and I was pretty satisfied I was able to park the thing on my first try for the bonus stage. I have been wanting to revisit the game on the Dreamcast.

One correction here. He may have actually driven route 66, but the New York to Florida trip would have been Interstate 95, which is famous/infamous as well. Route 66 goes nowhere near either NY or FL.

@Gs69 Yes. I remember the Hanshin Tigers edition of the Neo Geo Pocket. I kind of wanted one, but it didn't make a lot of sense when that money could go to more NGP games.

I still have never played Mario Kart 64, so I'm not sure what it was about Double Dash that some people didn't like, but I have heard some say they didn't like it as much. Some of that might be track design. When Double Dash was new, I was very into the Gamecube. I got to play a good bit of the game at a Best Buy on a demo unit and liked it enough that I had to get it and it was a great addition to my library.

@AceGrace Considering how that was a trend when it started, I suspect there are some guidelines or suggestions that Youtube provides to video creators on how to catch people's eyes for whatever reason. I recall another time when a whole bunch of people seemed to have a new style of title cards that all looked really similar in terms of font used and text placement.

Something I have pointed out many times on this topic is that the differences in the systems goes much deeper than the surface-level specs, though those are important too. But there are strengths and weaknesses that go beyond the spec sheets. Here, it's areas where the CPU is better in practical ways. To use the SNES as an example, it has some strange limitations below the surface(sprite sizes, VRAM issues, sound RAM) that would add to difficulties for developers. The way I've heard it is that the Genesis/Mega Drive is more flexible. Of course, it had its own limitations. Both systems had great games and solid libraries. But it is good to hear great developers of the time give their opinions. I've heard other developers say similar things. But I've also heard other developers who like the features and color palette flexibility on the SNES, to be fair.

@smoreon yeah. I dreaded revisiting Zelda 2 for a while due to memories of it being so punishing and clunky. When I did, I really enjoyed its core gameplay. The rough edges are there, though modern conveniences mitigate that quite a bit. So something like this that makes improvements is very cool.

I don't normally like grinding for experience in games, but I didn't mind it so much in Zelda 2. It was pretty amusing maxing out early and one-shotting some of the early bosses.

That main image is pretty ugly. I watched the video and commented on NintendoLife. It looks better in motion. Back to the main image, the black outlines on the werewolves and hockey guy against that background just make them look like flat paper cut outs. Backgrounds seem overly bright and clean for a horror game. Same for the character shading. It's very basic(especially the werewolves) but it's missing a focus on light and shadow that you'd expect from something with a horror theme. As I said, the game looks better in the video, and it is a work in progress, so we'll see how it goes.

Definitely a good idea for a book. At times, especially later on, I think Treasure sometimes went too far with odd game mechanics, but there's no doubt they did some great work, both technically and conceptually. Games like Gunstar Heroes(which I didn't quite like at first), Alien Soldier, and Light Crusader are some of my favorites of the 16-bit era.

On the mention of Sega working with various other studios, Gau Entertainment's Ranger X feels a lot like the sort of game Treasure would have made. It's action packed, chaotic, filled with detail, and maybe a little tough for some to get into due to unusual controls. It's one of my favorites on the Genesis/Mega Drive.