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Post by saturnworship on Nov 20, 2007 10:04:19 GMT
Well, no doubt this is gonna be "spicy". Yesterday i finally played Saturn's WipeOut 2097 , and well, the framerate is there, but the overpixelated, the ugly textured and inferior to psx graphics of the game, made me think a lot.... I know it's told about 2.000.000 times, but hey, looking at those ports, is understandable people feared to buy Saturn, .. and with Sega alone doing good games for the system, we all know the result. Anyways, feel free to talk here about lame ports of Psx to Saturn... and why,,,why,,,,why,,,why,,, WHY NO ONE PUT REAL TRANSPARENCIES ON SATURN PORTS FROM PSX? ? and of course, to shut up the mouth of people,, what are the best transparencies and effects seen on Saturn? let's start the carnage!!!!! ;D
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mick_aka
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Post by mick_aka on Nov 20, 2007 11:15:29 GMT
and of course, to shut up the mouth of people,, what are the best transparencies and effects seen on Saturn? Burning Rangers, true transparency in the fire effects, nuff said.
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Post by segaste on Nov 20, 2007 11:18:29 GMT
Bad ports: Destruction Derby, both Wipeouts, all EA games, more but can't think of any at the moment. Good ports: Castlevania, and others but they escape me too, for the time being. Lets remember there were some poor ports of Saturn games on the PS1 too. WLS 98, Grandia, others probably too. In general though, most developers couldn't be arsed with the Saturn. Nobheads!!!!
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Post by mick_aka on Nov 20, 2007 11:23:53 GMT
Battle Arena Toshinden, I've never been able to fathom why the Saturn port of this is soooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo bad, it's graphically awful and the slowdown and bad collision detection between characters makes it pretty much totally unplayable. Then of course we got Toshinden URA which was just as bad *sigh*
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Post by saturnworship on Nov 20, 2007 11:48:12 GMT
yes, but some people claim burning rangers transparencies (is this spelled right?? ahhaah sorry for my english!!!) are polygons dissapearing (good technique by the way).
I hope someday we can see more shenmue footage, because it makes metal gear and tomb raider look like atari 2600 games.
Yes, there are games originally on Saturn better than on Psx, but that's what happens when a game is designed for a system, and ported to other sooo different (case saturn - psx).
Anyways, D-Xhird was as good as Psx TohShinDen, but the story and the characters is total crap.
More games in the vein of saga, deep fear, shining force 3 and burning rangers could have been really great. but hey, as motorhead would say: too late too laaaaaaate!
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mick_aka
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Post by mick_aka on Nov 20, 2007 13:35:34 GMT
Deep Fear was, and is great IMHO
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Post by superdeadite on Nov 20, 2007 14:31:35 GMT
Ports are usually made quickly and cheaply, hence they have problems. But not always, just look at Langrisser Dramatic Edition, its a Saturn port of the PSX's Langrisser I & II and its far superior. Also Langrisser IV was originaly a Saturn game, a PSX port came a few years later and it is utter trash.
As for good transparencies on the Saturn check out Cotton 2/Boomerang. Boomerang especially has huge transparencies and they look fantastic. Twinkle Star Sprites' Saturn mode is also a must see. The game was nicely enhanced over the Neo Geo version, one level now has a layer of transparent clouds that you fly over.
The Saturn could do transparencies just fine, most publishers were just lazy and went for the "mesh rushjob."
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Post by saturnworship on Nov 21, 2007 11:26:03 GMT
Yes, more examples?
Well, apart from the obvious Panzer Dragoon Saga, Silhouette Mirage and Shining Force 3
Radiant Silvergun maybe??
If you look, for example at the SSF emulator, in those games, there are always problems emulating the transparencies...mmmm emulate those techniques would be really hard!!!!!
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Post by superdeadite on Nov 21, 2007 13:10:37 GMT
Its been awhile since I sold off my copy, but I don't remember seeing any transparencies in Radiant Silvergun... I remember the explosions were solid sprites for example.
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Post by marc on Nov 21, 2007 15:56:02 GMT
Yeah , the Saturn Port of wipeout is pretty poor. The famous comment '"only 1 in 100 programmers is good enough to get the best out of the Saturn" aways sticks in my mind. Sure, the Saturn was powerful...in the right hands.
Most developers limited themselves to using one processor (3D) and left the dual programming alone because it was too difficult. As far as RSG goes, I reckon there's some very clever tansparency tricks, especially the clouds. There are some excellent examples of programming on the saturn, as previously mentioned though, most developers were too lazy. At its best, the Saturn easily trumps the PS1, when it's trying to be a PS1 the Saturn fails due to sloppy programming.
If you turn it round and look at ports of saturn to PS1, it's clear the PS1 has no real sprite processing capabilities. Best to own both consoles really, they both have their strenghths and weaknesses and they are all to apparent with 13 years of hindsight.
I have to say, it is mostly the 3D games from the 5th generation that are now starting to look poor and dated on both PS1 and Saturn, compared to the latest specs, wheras the saturn is one of the pinnacles of 2D games design and is therefore timeless, as the 2D genre, is on the whole, dead.
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Post by Anthaemia. on Dec 18, 2007 16:51:00 GMT
While there's no denying just how poor the first WipEout is, by the time 2097 came around Tantalus had learned enough about the Saturn (presumably through co-operation with Sega's own programmers during the Manx TT conversion) to make a port that was much greater in its accuracy when compared to the PlayStation original. However, that's not to say it was perfect - transparencies were still of the lazier "mesh" variety and there was no real excuse for the drop in texture resolution, especially when the coders did so well keeping the overall speed and lighting effects (even if these were also "faked" to an extent). Unfortunately, for their last Saturn project it seems as if Tantalus dropped the proverbial baton well and truly. The less we discuss The House Of The Dead the better, methinks...
The transparency technique employed in Burning Rangers isn't achived by flickering polygons, although I do seem to remember this being used for other games, along with a method of interlacing (as seen in A+M+O+K to name just one example from the top of my head, so to speak) that makes the usual dithered efforts seem almost high quality. Also, it's not really fair to say all ports that utilised only one of the Saturn's processors were bad, since Alien Trilogy did this without being that rough. In fact, there were some single-chip games that managed to outperform those pushing more components within the system. On the other hand, the likes of Panzer Dragoon Saga or even Shenmue and Virtua Fighter 3 (yes, I know those last two are both unreleased and the latter not even seen in public - as far as anyone knows, at least) were pooling resources from as many as eight different sections within this notoriously complex hardware. Considering the likes of VF2 and NiGHTS were out of the PlayStation's reach, I'd love to know how Sony could ever have launched a counter if Shenmue or VF3 had seen the light of day back in the 32-bit era!
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Post by saturnworship on Dec 22, 2007 23:25:55 GMT
I think we need to search for more Saturn related unreleased material...
Things are too calm down in the Saturn scene., would be cool to try to achieve more shenmue saturn footage or finally vf3 saturn footage.
and what about sonic the fighters???
Well, also, if someone was looking internet or japanese saturnags back ago..there wasn't any advertisement for sonic the fighters or vf3?? seems incredible!!!
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Post by mick_aka on Dec 23, 2007 1:27:17 GMT
If footage and/or material even left developers then it's up to whoever now possesses the material, which lets face it could be anyone involved with the company from the CEO to a receptionist, or a random passer by why fished it out of a skip!
One thing that has struck me with independent developers is that VERY few keep any sort of archive of incomplete projects or demo footage created for shows. Aside from that if material is in the possession of a company there's really no reason for them to go out of their way to sort it out and release it.
And indeed if for argument sake an individual collector has some unseen VF3 demo footage releasing it online gains them nothing, the video will be duplicated on YouTube a million times by leechers and then instead of owning something really rare and special they own something 10+ million people have seen.
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Post by wardy on Dec 23, 2007 11:04:57 GMT
Think of all the superior titles the Saturn had though; every last Capcom title on either system was superior (including Resident Evil), especially the spite-based brawlers.
X-Men Versus Street Fighter is one such very good example:
In the Playstation version you could not swap-out an injured team mate, could not do tag team super combos, the animation was poor in the extreme, and it had a limited (and dull) colour palette.
The Saturn was indeed the better console, but of course it was an enormously complicated piece of hardware so only in-house developers such as Team Andromeda had the time, money, and resources to make best use of what they had.
You have to understand that third party developers often don't have the time or money for an accurate port as they almost always have to hand in finished code before a deadline which is why PS3 is suffering yet more agro since all of the ports of two year old games it has are inevitably inferior to their PC and 360 counterparts (though this is not always the case) and again, it's has a complicated development kit. I am informed that an easier to use format was distributed although it apprently costs the developers more money ...
In terms of more games with transparencies ?
Dragon Force has some stunning crystal-clear transparencies you won't see even on Pa Playstation.
Sengoku Blade is another.
Oh, and Zero Divide.
As for VF3 ? It's like the Dreamcast port except with less top-layer detail on the characters, it has the bad sort of motion blur to make up for less frames, plus it has that sort of Nintendo 64 haze to it. There are screenshots out there somwhere, and Sega even have a 20 second rolling demo of it hidden around.
Oh, and something else of interest - I own both a Saturn and a Playstation and I would say Sega Rally Championship visually eclipses Colin McRae Rally, while Virtua Fighter 2 wee-wees a shower of hatred all over any Tekken title on the opposing format.
And as you all know, Panzer Dragoon Zwei is probably the finiest example of what any 32-Bit console was capable of.
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Post by marc on Dec 23, 2007 11:12:04 GMT
Saturnworship said "I think we need to search for more Saturn related unreleased material...
Things are too calm down in the Saturn scene., would be cool to try to achieve more shenmue saturn footage or finally vf3 saturn footage.
and what about sonic the fighters???
Well, also, if someone was looking internet or japanese saturnags back ago..there wasn't any advertisement for sonic the fighters or vf3?? seems incredible!!!"
Things too calm in the saturn scene? It's a dead console, you can't get much calmer than that......I doubt many people have played even half the japanese library though, so there is always something to aim for. It's a collector/players scene and with virtually everything that was exclusive on saturn being re-released and rehashed or sequal-ized poorly for the next gen, it's more hardcore than ever!!!!!! Frankly I couldn't care about unfinished games, finished prototypes, yeah.
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