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Did SFII save the SNES?

Laurent said:
Imagine that girl fighting a clone of herself (with the same black bikini) on a white dull stage. You would need less color than a standard screen of Street Fighter II and it would look better...

Mortal Kombat 1 and 2 are filled with stages with drab backdrops and single-colored skies. They are really ugly games to begin with.
 

jett

D-Member
Ninja Scooter said:
oh, really?

*BAM*
SNES_-_Mortal_Kombat_2.jpg

After you got over the blood, you quickly realized MK1 sucked ass. You genephobes can have it! MK2 is the only one that matters and the SNES port was 100X better than the crap Sega version, with blood, fatalities and all! 1994=MK2, Super Punchout, and Donkey Kong Country within a 3 month span. PLAY IT LOUD BITCHES!

The geneshit just got nintendowned. AW SNAP.
 

Laurent

Member
Instigator said:
Mortal Kombat 1 and 2 are filled with stages with drab backdrops and single-colored skies. They are really ugly games to begin with.
You still have bright green acid-like rivers and very saturated costumes...
 

Laurent

Member
Instigator said:
Whatever floats your boat. :)
Don't worry, I too think that Mortal Kombat II is painfull to look at. Anyway, I thought that your example wasn't really fare, but that doesn't matter, we both did this:

hijack.gif
 
I am not really sure what you were trying to argue.

Take those. Colorful backdrops, far more detailed than those in MK1-2, but limited to only 24 colors:

back12ae.gif

back37il.gif

back55hw.gif


Add two different characters at 16 colors each and you still have 8 colors left for blood, projectiles and text and bang, 64 colors in all.
 

jarrod

Banned
Instigator said:
A matter of perspective, I guess.

I thought 94-96 were weak for 16-bit.
Really?

-Yoshi's Island
-Dynamite Headdy
-Ristar
-Donkey Kong Country 1-3
-Sonic & Knuckles
-Earthworm Jim 1-2/CD
-Super Street Fighter II
-Saturday Night Slam Masters
-Mortal Kombat 2-3
-Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3
-Killer Instinct
-Samurai Showdown
-Street Fighter Alpha 2
-Fatal Fury 2/Special
-King of Monsters 1-2
-Demon's Crest
-DOOM
-Hagane
-Super Metroid
-Super Punch-Out
-Pocky & Rocky 2
-Virtua Racing
-Stunt Race FX
-Dirt Trax FX
-F1 ROC II
-R-Type III
-Top Gear 3000
-Uniracers
-Rock N' Roll Racing
-Lost Vikings 1-2
-Zombies Ate My Neighbors
-Blackthorne
-Captain Commando
-Streets of Rage III
-Final Fight 3
-Castlevania: Dracula X
-Castlevania Bloodlines
-Contra: Hard Corps
-Mega Man X2-X3
-Mega Man 7
-Mega Man: The Wily Wars
-Kirby Super Star
-Kirby's Dream Land 3
-Kirby's Dream Course
-Kirby's Avalanche
-Dr Robotnik's Mean Bean Machine
-Super Return of the Jedi
-Sparkster
-Tinhead
-Ecco 2/CD
-Zero Tolerance
-Garfield: Caught in the Act
-Tetris Attack
-The Punisher
-Ninja Warriors
-Ninja Gaiden Trilogy
-Keio Flying Squadron
-Soul Star
-Heimdall
-General Chaos
-Comix Zone
-Lethal Enforcers 1-2
-Wild Guns
-Mega Turrican
-Super Turrican 2
-Super Adventure Island 2
-Mega Bomberman
-Super Bomberman 2
-Super Bonk
-Metal Warriors
-Adventures of Batman & Robin
-X-Men: Mutant Apocalypse
-Earthbound
-Illusion of Gaia
-Terranigma
-Sim City 2000
-Themepark
-Lufia II
-Harvest Moon
-Aerobiz Supersonic
-Uncharted Waters 2
-Romance of the Three Kingdoms IV
-Secret of Mana
-Secret of Evermore
-Final Fantasy III
-Chrono Trigger
-Super Mario RPG
-Ogre Battle
-Phantasy Star IV
-Beyond Oasis
-Crusader of Centy
-Shining Force II/CD
-Dark Wizard
-Brain Lord
-Brandish
-Equinox
-Breath of Fire I-II
-Lunar: Eternal Blue
-Popful Mail
-Vay
-Snatcher

...doesn't look that bad to me. :/
 

Laurent

Member
Those seems to be better examples, but with no human subject... But it's quite obvious that when you have a library of millions and millions of colors, you will get better results. I was arguing over your example... Anyway, Street Fighter II might have helped sales when it was released, but still it was already available for PC. It's interesting thought to see how different it looked...

sf2dos01.gif
sf2dos02.gif
sf2dos03.gif
 

shuri

Banned
if I remember well, the pc version of sf2 had control issues or sound issues. All I know is that there was a big problem with it.

The MK2 pc port was the saddest thing ever. Arcade perfect graphics (which at the time was incredible), but constant buffering. It would actually go and load sound effects from the hd every time they were used, so the game would have this constant little pause every time a sound effect happened. I think the sound would be left buffered in the ram for about 5 second s before having to be reloaded from the hd again. It was worse than the cd versions of mk games.

IT WAS HORRIBLE WHY PROBE WHY :(
 

Link316

Banned
Instigator said:
I am not really sure what you were trying to argue.

Take those. Colorful backdrops, far more detailed than those in MK1-2, but limited to only 24 colors:

yeah but that's not how the Genesis worked, out of the 64 color palette it was divided into 4 palettes of 16 colors, each tile used one of these 4 palettes so you were limited to working with just 16 colors in each 8x8 tile, you weren't able to just choose from all the colors at any point of the screen
 

DCX

DCX
I paid $75 for SF II when it first came out, was the first on my block to have it for months...it was a system seller, closest thing to arcade perfect back then.

DCX
 

Anyanka

Member
Naked Shuriken said:
The MK2 pc port was the saddest thing ever. Arcade perfect graphics (which at the time was incredible), but constant buffering. It would actually go and load sound effects from the hd every time they were used, so the game would have this constant little pause every time a sound effect happened. I think the sound would be left buffered in the ram for about 5 second s before having to be reloaded from the hd again. It was worse than the cd versions of mk games.


Must have been a problem with your PC. I've had several versions of MK II PC over the years and never had that problem and I've known many others who've played it and haven't mentioned anything like that.
 
This thread actually caused me to sample different versions of SFII through emulation, a game I still have very little interest in. And it's actually kind of funny to me now what little differences are actually there. The stuff is really window dressing when you think about it. Of course, I'm no aficionado of the arcade original, and maybe that's the problem, I don't know, but it seems to me that the essence of the game was captured pretty well in each version. I was actually impressed with what they pulled off on the TG-16 version. Having never played an actual TG, or even known anybody who ever owned one, makes it news to me. That's about all I can add to this argument though.

As for MK, the first one sucked visually on the Genny, but it was pretty playable. The SNES version was visually superior, but was a monster disappointment in how it played. Given that, you have to give the nod to the Genny version. The second one, the SNES version gets the edge. But at the same time, it's not like Genny version was bastardized. It still played pretty well, and I actually liked the music on it more than the SNES one. And yes, the style of graphics that MK used does not hold up as well over time as something like SFII does. The whole digitized thing simply doesn't age well. Part 3 I wouldn't know or care about because by that time I was on the PS1 version.
 

Laurent

Member
Spectral Glider said:
This thread actually caused me to sample different versions of SFII through emulation, a game I still have very little interest in. And it's actually kind of funny to me now what little differences are actually there. The stuff is really window dressing when you think about it. Of course, I'm no aficionado of the arcade original, and maybe that's the problem, I don't know, but it seems to me that the essence of the game was captured pretty well in each version. I was actually impressed with what they pulled off on the TG-16 version. Having never played an actual TG, or even known anybody who ever owned one, makes it news to me. That's about all I can add to this argument though.
I agree with you on that. I recalled seeing huge differences back then, but that contrast isn't as obvious as the differences you might note between PlayStation 2, GameCube or X-Box versions of multiplatform games today...
 

Amakusa

Member
No, but it did turn alot of people to the SNES I know that for a fact, I remember going over a friends house and playing that game on the first day it came out. Everyone there had a SNES within a week with that game, counting me. Then I got Zelda, Mario, FF 2, and afew more. Like I said, alot of people wasn't thinking about getting a SNES into Street Fighters II showed up.
 
Well, did anybody here get an SNES because of the Super Star Wars games? I know that was the reason my friend picked one up, in fact, he bought the first game before he even had a system. Me, Super Off Road impressed me and then Rock n Roll racing had me sooo tempted to gobble up an SNES back then. Being much poorer back then though led me to just game on my buddy's system. Seemed like the smartest thing for me to do. I remember when he plunked down over $70, I believe it was, for the spiderman and venom game. Oh, the college nights of him cursing the difficulty of that game at the top of his lungs.....good times.
 
I got it for SMW and the ability to rent games that I didn't really want to buy.

Super Star Wars games sucked. I understand why they were popular, but they were really crummy games when all is said and done. Hard, cheap, choppy. Bad.
 

Ristamar

Member
I got an SNES for Super Mario World, Link to the Past, Final Fantasy II, and a whole shitload of other games way before SFII came around. SFII was just icing on the cake (a very, very yummy icing).

Admittedly, the summer I got SFII, there were a lot fo people in my basement playing it that I had hardly seen much of before. On any given afternoon, there'd be a half-dozen or more people passing the controllers back and forth between Street Fighter matches for hours. It certainly garnered a lot of attention.

Instigator said:
Super Star Wars games sucked. I understand why they were popular, but they were really crummy games when all is said and done. Hard, cheap, choppy. Bad.

Blasphemy (except maybe Jedi, which was arguably mediocre).

And they weren't even that hard.
 

jarrod

Banned
Instigator said:
I'd say Genesis' best years were clearly earlier (probably from 1991-1993) but the best SNES stuff came from 1994-1996. Without question, particularaly if you imported as well (Tactics Ogre, Seiken Densetsu 3, etc).
 
Man, so many years later and folks are still finding new ways to pick apart SF for the two 16 bitters. :lol :lol :lol

Also, Christ do I feel old...
 
jarrod said:
I'd say Genesis' best years were clearly earlier (probably from 1991-1993) but the best SNES stuff came from 1994-1996. Without question, particularaly if you imported as well (Tactics Ogre, Seiken Densetsu 3, etc).

Didn't import back then, didn't care for RPG's and the Nintendo games were clearly among the best games on the system so when Nintendo started focusing on the N64 while letting some second parties handle some Nintendo game clones (DKC, among others) and other gimmicky products (Uniracers... yawn), I didn't bite.
 

jarrod

Banned
Instigator said:
Didn't import back then, didn't care for RPG's and the Nintendo games were clearly among the best games on the system so when Nintendo started focusing on the N64 while letting some second parties handle some Nintendo game clones (DKC, among others) and other gimmicky products (Uniracers... yawn), I didn't bite.
Sure, but you also had Capcom, Konami, Taito, Hudson and others cranking out fantastic titles around this time, not simply all those amazing Square and Enix RPGs. Nintendo's internal resources didn't shift to N64 until mid 1996 really either, they were still releasing games like Yoshi's Island, Super Metroid, Super Punch-Out!!, Panel de Pon/Tetris Attack, Marvelous, etc. Seriously, if you skipped 16bit gaming after 1993, you missed essentially half the generation SNES wise (not Genesis though, Sega themselves practically abandoned the thing in early 1995... which in hindsight was a gigantic mistake on their part).

PlayStation wasn't really heating up until late 1996/early 1997 anyway (post N64).
 

Ristamar

Member
jarrod said:
...they were still releasing games like Yoshi's Island, Super Metroid, Super Punch-Out!!, Panel de Pon/Tetris Attack, Marvelous, etc.

Don't forget UniRacers! I'd like a GBA/DS port...
 

Reilly

Member
To me, the SNES colors were better, but shit everything looked blurry and washed out. The Genesis looked more crisp. I owned both systems and each had their most play titles. I know I could always count on Genesis to release gory games. :)
 

lachesis

Member
Well at least for me, it was. I bought SNES solely for SFII. It was later that I found there are more gems to the games, namely a lot of RPGs. :)

lachesis
 
jarrod said:
Sure, but you also had Capcom, Konami, Taito, Hudson and others cranking out fantastic titles around this time, not simply all those amazing Square and Enix RPGs. Nintendo's internal resources didn't shift to N64 until mid 1996 really either, they were still releasing games like Yoshi's Island, Super Metroid, Super Punch-Out!!, Panel de Pon/Tetris Attack, Marvelous, etc. Seriously, if you skipped 16bit gaming after 1993, you missed essentially half the generation SNES wise (not Genesis though, Sega themselves practically abandoned the thing in early 1995... which in hindsight was a gigantic mistake on their part).

PlayStation wasn't really heating up until late 1996/early 1997 anyway (post N64).

I didn't skip 16-bit by 1994, I just said that from that point on, 16-bit was weak. To me, 1993 was the peak in terms of quality software, after that, it was downhill. This is reflected in the amount of 16-bit games I bought/enjoyed. I don't remember buying anything 16-bit in 1996. The last games I bought from that generation must have been Yoshi's Island and Beyond Oasis and that was 1995.
 

TheDiave

Banned
ManaByte said:
I still remember standing in line to buy SNES SF2.
I remember instantly gravitating to the Super NES kiosk to give the game a try, even though I was going to buy it no matter what. The first fight still rings in my mind; I was Ryu and Ken was my opponnent. The background music started to play, the round began, I foolishly jumped forward, Ken screamed "Shoryuken," and I was blown away.
 

Sapiens

Member
Ristamar said:
Don't forget UniRacers! I'd like a GBA/DS port...


DMA would have to do it, I guess. Didn't they become a part of rockstar? Oh yeah, crazy. Uniracers people were responsible for GTA.


CRAZY.
 

GDGF

Soothsayer
I had a SNES before SFII was announced for it, but I was sure happy as hell once I learned it was on it's way. Did it save the SNES? No, but it sure as hell helped.
 

Shompola

Banned
94 wasnt weak but I personally went completely to pc gaming... dad bought a 486 dx2/66 for a lot of money... 98 I bought my playstation and more or less abandonded PC gaming.
 
Instigator said:
I am not really sure what you were trying to argue.

Take those. Colorful backdrops, far more detailed than those in MK1-2, but limited to only 24 colors:

back12ae.gif

back37il.gif

back55hw.gif


Add two different characters at 16 colors each and you still have 8 colors left for blood, projectiles and text and bang, 64 colors in all.

Like I said before I don't think the Genny could load up the whole image like that at a time. Those images have to be cut up into something like 8x8 pixel pieces and a piece of the color palette forced into each one. where an 8x8 piece shared the same palette as another 8x8 piece you could overlap the palette but for the most part you are out of luck. Now-a-days with really advanced color management tools I'm sure you could find a way to have it crack the image up like that and do some crazy math to figure out what goes where alot better leading to a nicer looking overall image.
 
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