Consoles reaching their full potential late in their life cycle...

[HC_O]

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[samanosuke]

For me no machine was pushed more than the Neo Geo. Games like Garou: MotW and Metal Slug 3 look almost two generations apart from the likes of Fatal Fury and Art of Fighting. The fact that the Playstation couldn't replicate perfect ports of later Neo Geo games and that we had to wait for the Dreamcast and PS2 to be released for near-perfect ports is testament to just how far SNK pushed the machine.

[HC_O]

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[Leon Retro]

To use a 'Super FX 2' equipped SNES/SFC game as an example (like the Neo-Geo) the 2D power was more than a enough to match the next 32 bit generation such as the Saturn or PS1.

It's a shame that more devs didn't get to use the SuperFX for 2D games. Konami were doing amazing stuff with the SNES - so imagine what they could have done with the extra power of the SFX.

It all came down to price. Rom prices were already high. You had devs upping the MBs, but.. the SFX must have been too expensive. SETA did develop their own chip for ExhaustHeat2, which helped the 3D look of the game.

Yoshi's is definitely a great looking game - with some excellent effects. MarioWorld was never a graphical showcase, though, and it was only 4mb, so Yoshi's could have been done without the SFX; minus some of the effects. The actual look of the game would work without extra power.

You can only imagine an Axelay2 with the SFX2. The bosses and environment effects could have been mind-blowing.

It is true that you get devs pushing machines near the end of their life. I wouldn't say it's as simple as that, though, because most of the best games are made in the 2nd wave of titles.
ThunderforceIV on the MD definitely shows how a dev can push a machine, compared to previous games in the series.

Samanosuke is right to choose Garou. The difference in quality between that and the first games like Fatal Fury & Art of Fighting, is amazing. Garou is on another level - and it's not just because the cartridge size is huge.

When it comes to the SNES, I think early games like ContraIII, Castlevania, are the best examples of what the machine can do. Konami showed that most SNES devs were very bad at that job.

[Skull Commander]

Good topic. When you look at stuff like God of War 2, and Tekken 5 on the PS2 then you can appreciate how much a machine can be pushed later in it's life.

It's a real shame the first Xbox was killed so abruptly, as it was a cracking machine, and I'm sure it would have been pushed even further than the PS2 given half a chance. Look at Ninja Gaiden on it, and imagine what they could have done had they revisited it three years later.

[Team Andromeda]

For me no machine was pushed more than the Neo Geo. Games like Garou: MotW and Metal Slug 3 look almost two generations apart from the likes of Fatal Fury and Art of Fighting. The fact that the Playstation couldn't replicate perfect ports of later Neo Geo games and that we had to wait for the Dreamcast and PS2 to be released for near-perfect ports is testament to just how far SNK pushed the machine.

To be fair that was really a Memory issue . The Neo Geo CD couldn't handle most of the latter Cart Neo Geo games , due to RAM issues and that had the same Chipset

To use a 'Super FX 2' equipped SNES/SFC game as an example (like the Neo-Geo) the 2D power was more than a enough to match the next 32 bit generation such as the Saturn or PS1.

Saturn 2D was way above that, . To me most of what the Super Fx did in Yoshi (and I'm sure it was just using Super FX 1 chip) was what the Snes could have done , if NCL had given it a decent CPU from the start


I think the Mega Drive was one of the machine pushed to it's limited and more so . So of the latter MD games , were doing insane tricks with no extra hardware inthe carts or Massive carts .
Adv Of Batman &Robin , Yu Yu Hakusho featured perfect multiple sprite rotation and scaling respectively , and while the game might have been pants Vectorman did some amazing tricks

[Grapple Convoy]

To me most of what the Super Fx did in Yoshi (and I'm sure it was just using Super FX 1 chip) was what the Snes could have done , if NCL had given it a decent CPU from the start

True. Always depressing thinking back to the Super Famicom/Super NES, how much more awesome it'd have been with a decent CPU. I may be misremembering facts, but I recall that the crap processor was to enable some kind of backwards compatibility with the Famicom, which as we know was never a feature of the final hardware.

[Flabio]

All consoles get this to a certain degree. Examples I always cite:

Final Fantasy 6 and Chrono Trigger on the SNES.
Ridge Racer Type 4, Vagrant Story and Chrono Cross on the PS1.
God of War 2 and Final Fantasy 12 on the PS2.

(Hmm, Square do seem to be rather good at this don't they?)

[Yakumo]

To use a 'Super FX 2' equipped SNES/SFC game as an example (like the Neo-Geo) the 2D power was more than a enough to match the next 32 bit generation such as the Saturn or PS1.

I wouldn't go that far. It was very good for 16bit but no where near what the Saturn or even the PSX could do. Astel on the Saturn is a very early platformer for the system yet it looks so much better than anything 16bit in colours, animation, sprite manipulation and scaling.

Yakumo

[Lorfarius]

True. Always depressing thinking back to the Super Famicom/Super NES, how much more awesome it'd have been with a decent CPU. I may be misremembering facts, but I recall that the crap processor was to enable some kind of backwards compatibility with the Famicom, which as we know was never a feature of the final hardware.

Why did the BC never happen with the Super Fami?

[Phar]

I think the Mega Drive was one of the machine pushed to it's limited and more so . So of the latter MD games , were doing insane tricks with no extra hardware inthe carts or Massive carts .

Agree, I sort of expected amazing things from the Snes thanks to the extra hardware and chips in the carts but games like Panorama Cotton and Red Zone on MD are doing things that shouldn't be possible on standard MD hardware. I remember with Red Zone, Zyrinx even included a screen before the game started stating all the effects the game had.

I'd probably include Ranger-X/Ex-Ranza as well, it was incredible looking, you'd be forgiven for thinking it was running on a Snes, I think that was mid 1993 though, so not sure if it counts as a title late in the Megadrives life cycle.

[Oldgamingfart]

Indeed it's usually down to the creativeness and skill of the game developer to rinse out the colour pallet to its full potential. Done properly you'd think you were playing the game on superior hardware. There's a lot of artistry in video games that unfortunately often goes unrecognized.

[Yakumo]

Why did the BC never happen with the Super Fami?

Same reason why the Wii isn't hi-resolution. To save money

[112]

Interesting topic............ but wasn't Halo menat to have pushed the cock box i mean xbox near enough to the max when it came out? If that was true then the xbox was near enough maxed out from the get go......

Perhaps its takes a number of years for programmers to develop the appropriate tools to best utilise a console, kinda like trial and error........ It might also be due to the fact that, when you have a console still very much in its prime, and you need a new way to sustain interest, so you tag on bits and prieces so that you can do new tricks, which ooo and ahhh the fan base and potential new adopters........

I dunno, but i tend to find that when a successor is announced and the existing console is on its way out, peeps tend to become nostalgic about letting go......... I know i did with my DC and pretty much every other console.......

112

[samanosuke]

Interesting topic............ but wasn't Halo menat to have pushed the cock box i mean xbox near enough to the max when it came out? If that was true then the xbox was near enough maxed out from the get go......

No way! Soul Calibur 2 in 720p sh*ts on Halo as far as pushing the machine goes.