Yeah, what was it? A processor 40 times faster than the Genesis? That little mushroom had potential but it seems like no one had the knowledge or the time to really take advantage of the 32X. You know, I'm torn on accessories like that; being able to upgrade your console without having to buy a new one is still a great concept. It just depends on cost and what improvements you get. Gale Racer is a great game, BTW. One of the first import games I got after getting the Action Replay memory cartridge.
I semi disagree about GA3. It introduced branching paths and expanded the move sets. Characters have two special attacks, an enemy trip, a block, some of them can double jump, and all of them have projectiles. The AI was even a bit improved as you can't use the same attack method on *every* enemy like you could in the prequels. The problem isn't so much that the graphics are terrible per se, so much so that the art style is completely and utterly awful. Doesn't help that the ridable monsters are ugly and kind of useless. However, the biggest crime is that there's no playable dwarf! I think if the game had the graphic style of the first game, or just ripped the sprites and level assets from the first game, that we'd all be talking about it still. This would be a cool thing to see from the homebrew hacking community ie: take Golden Axe 3 and replace all the sprites with those from GA1 and GA2.
Well, i decided that if was going to try pokemon again, i'd go to square one: Pokemon Red. The music has an interesting quality. when played on a GB-GBA speaker, it sounds fine, but on a Super game boy, it has an unpleasant screechy quality to it, very weird. none of the other games i've played with the SGB do that.
Well, I think the biggest knock against GA3 is just that it was the third game in a popular series and had a lot to live up to. Taken by itself, it's not bad. But as part of the GA series, it's the red-headed stepchild. I watched a Youtube retrospective of the series, and it pretty much echoed my feelings about it: GA2 was considered too much of the same, and they went too far in the other direction with GA3. It's just too different. I've seen GA3 included on "worst game" lists for the Genesis/MD, and I don't think it deserves that. I appreciate the expanded moveset, and at least it's playable and enjoyable. Now Double Dragon 3 on Genesis, there's a crap game that's nearly unplayable. All this Shinobi talk prompted me to play through Shinobi 3 again. It's amazing how much just plain FUN this game is. There's very little frustration throughout the whole game; 99% of my deaths were not due to "cheap" means, just due to the need to improve my skills, which is a testament to its level design and enemy placement. What's remarkable to me is how EVERY skill you have is useful in certain situations. The jump kick is awesome, and learning how to block effectively is almost required to play at a high level. If I have one slight nitpick, it's that the game is almost too easy. As I've said, I could never beat the arcade Shinobi, and Revenge of Shinobi is balls-to-the-wall insane (though I did beat it legit with the good ending once). Even though I hadn't played through S3 in probably a few years, I really didn't have any major problems until the final level and the final boss. I can tell myself it's just because I'm that damn good Maybe I'll try the hard difficulty next time. But after I finished it, I immediately wanted to play again. There's the sign of a good game right there.
I finally tried out the translated version of the first Star Ocean last night. Between that, Tales of Phantasia, and Terranigma, it's really amazing what was possible on the SNES. It's a shame that North America got exactly zero of those three games...
The "camera" is sort of fixed in the middle of the screen and you move your character around it, the controls are sort of half way between a normal fighting game and beat 'em up. 32X has a quarter of the video RAM and the cartridges are still only 4mb, so I think they would have taken quite a hit despite the processors not being much of an issue. Having said that, I think that downgraded versions of some of those games would have sold more systems and done more for consumer goodwill then most of the other stuff on the platform. Unfortunately not.
That stinks. That means I'll have to unpack my Ps3 in order to play it. I'll have to stack it on top of my ps4. As if my gaming/console area isn't cluttered enough. Oh well, at least it'll allow me to play Simpsons Arcade, Xmen Arcade, TMNT Turtles In Time Re-shelled again.
I grabbed a repro cart of Terranigma years ago and every SNES trick was put into play. It's a really good game (though we should expect that from Quintet) but little things like the animated cutscenes and the mode7 in the underground was icing on the cake.
A valid concern if porting from Saturn. Do we know how much these arcade boards had? That's without any bank switching. Super Street Fighter II was 40 megabits (5 MB). So I guess it's a question of how worthwhile the cost of an extra memory mapper and a larger ROM would be to Sega for these games. I also don't know offhand how big these arcade ROMs were in the first place though.
Fun fact: the 32x Hardware (Codename Mars) was originally going to be the Saturn, until they scrapped that idea and reworked the specs, to compete with PlayStation. I wish they actually released the Neptune at least. I planned on replacing my Mega Drive II and Mega Drive 32X with that.
Mars/32X was never the Saturn, it was a separate project that stared out as a proposed Mega Drive upgrade that quickly turned into a 32-bit expansion when the Jaguar was announced and SOA got involved. Saturn had already been in development for a year at that point and the change in response to the PS1 specs was the addition of the second video chip. There was another 32-Bit project called Jupiter, but there's conflicting reports on what that actually was. The most common story is that it was a cheaper version of the Saturn that just played cartridge games and could possibly be upgraded Mega CD style, which may be the original reason why the Saturn we got was originally designed with a cartridge slot. I meant a quarter of the Arcade board which has just over a mb, it's even worse next to the Saturn as that has 1.5mb. Had a look in my MAME folder and the ROM sets for it are around 25mb uncompressed. Some of it must be blank/padding as the games arn't all going to be the exact same size, but even then it's still loads for the early 90s and you can see where it's gone with the huge sprites and backgrounds in some of them. I think your the first person i've seen that actually wants to be allowed to play the Turtles in Time remake again.
Yeah, there's no way they were gonna make a 200 megabit cart for home use! Still, I doubt it would be the most severe downgrade they ever did for a home conversion. It's not like we got better versions on Saturn either (apart from Gale Racer). And they converted OutRunners for the Genesis/Megadrive without the 32X, so...
I read that back then in several video game magazines. Also I did not say that Project Mars was going to be the Saturn, only that the hardware used in Mars was originally meant for the Saturn. At times when they still called it the Giga Drive. Regarding the Jupiter, the prototype was revealed some years ago: Unreleased Sega Pluto Revealed
We have a lot more information now from insiders who were there. The older stories were certainly adjacent to the truth. But it's more like the Saturn and 32X both emerged from the same executive discussions. The initial idea was to make a console that would be to the Megadrive what the Megadrive had been to the Mark III and Master System: A new console, but incorporating the guts of the previous generation console. Megadrive was developed under the name "Mark IV" so the Gigadrive would've essentially been the SG-1000 Mark V. It was to be built around two SH-2 RISC chips, using the 68000 CPU for co-processing or secondary tasks, much like the legacy Z80 in the Megadrive. The US side of Sega thought that this was silly, and that if the new console was going to basically include a Megadrive inside it anyway, then it should be an add-on for the existing console. It should maintain backwards compatibility and save costs for both Sega and the consumer. This reinterpretation of the plan became the 32X. Saturn received some design revisions, but followed the original plan outline. Both consoles used dual Hitachi SH-2 processors in conjunction with a Motorola 68000 or custom variation (we don't think of Saturn as containing a Megadrive since there was no "Power Base Converter" equivalent, but it's basically there). But it's not the case that 32X was meant to be the Saturn. Rather, it was a divergent offshoot of the early plans for Saturn.
Thank you for the detailed write up. But I still think that's basically what I said that I read, just with more details of how it actually went down. If they did not have the details over 20 years ago, the core of the information is basically what I said.
Probably. The way you wrote it, it could be read as if 32X was the original plan and Saturn diverged from it, rather than the other way around. It's just trivia either way though
That's not how I meant it, I tried to clarify that with my second post. I don't know why I could not make that clear? But it lead to you getting into further details that I think I did not hear before, so it was fruitful =)
Yeah, I got that it wasn't what you meant I just figured I'd toss all that out there just in case: a) it was interesting, or; b) it shed any light on the possible miscommunication/misunderstanding. Looks like it did at least half of that, so I'm satisfied.
