Battle of the Ports

[Yakumo]

Try the Saturn version again after playing the arcade. I think you'll find the controls much better.

[Asura]

Saturn's port of Race Drivin is unplayable garbage, the controls are terrible!!!

I had always thought the controls were terrible, in every version. The Drivin' series was all about visuals, which admittedly were amazing at the time.

[importaku]

In the 80's it might have looked good i never saw it in the arcades but nowdays it looks like total crap, i remember playing it on my friends amiga & it was janky as hell in fact most polygon games of this type were horribl they always seemed to run at 3fps. Some games age well, this isn't one of them, bless the spectrums attempt hehe.

[Asura]

In the 80's it might have looked good i never saw it in the arcades but nowdays it looks like total crap, i remember playing it on my friends amiga & it was janky as hell in fact most polygon games of this type were horribl they always seemed to run at 3fps. Some games age well, this isn't one of them, bless the spectrums attempt hehe.

I think this prompted a debate in another thread some time ago, but this is why I've always considered Virtua Racing and Virtua Fighter as the beginning of 3D gaming. There were many 3D games before them, we all know that (going back so far as stuff like Elite), and I had stacks of 3D games for the Amiga. Even in the arcades there were titles like STUN Runner. I liked them because they reminded me of TRON, and had this weird triangular aesthetic that seemed "futuristic". Consider the ships in Starfox; they suggest being spaceships but really, they're very basic models.

However, for me, Virtua Fighter and Virtua Racing were the watershed. They were the point where I saw 3D games, and I knew then that this was the shape of things to come. I think it's because unlike prior 3D games, such as Mercenary, or Tower of Babel, the track in Virtua Racing (with its ferris wheel, that reminded me of the real-life Suzuka GP) and the characters in Virtua Fighter (that looked and moved recognisably like people, crude mannequins though they may have been) felt like something I could relate to real life.

Stuff like Hard Drivin' always feels to me like a curio. An interesting step up the ladder for those of us that take an interest in the history of video games. Despite that, unlike stuff like Daytona (which is still incredibly playable) I don't think Hard Drivin' has anything to offer a modern player.

[Mayhem]

Poor guy who had to do Hard Driving on C64 didn't have very long... in fact the game was first released on a compilation. Not sure it ever had full price release on the C64.

http://www.gamesthatwerent.com/gtw64/hard-drivin-v1/

[samanosuke]

I thought I'd seen it all after that godawful Snes version, but oh my does that C64 version stink to high heaven.

[Yakumo]

Man, now I feel bad for ripping the C64 version. The poor guy had only 2 weeks?

[samanosuke]

Man, now I feel bad for ripping the C64 version. The poor guy had only 2 weeks?

Excuses, excuses.

In actual reality what this boils down to is that Speccy > C64. Acceptance is what is required here.

[nakamura]

Hahahahaha. Oh you're serious?

[Mayhem]

He is. AND deluded

[Yakumo]

Battle of the Ports - After Burner / After Burner II

Please think about being my patron, Thanks!

http://www.patreon.com/bofp

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It's time to take to the skies in the game that changed the look of 3D flight gaming forever! After Burner!

Video Time Guide

00:25 - Arcade
03:10 - Amiga - US Version
05:37 - Amiga - European Version
06:52 - Sega 32X
08:49 - Atari ST
10:12 - Mega Drive
12:33 - MSX
14:09 - Sega Saturn
17:16 - PC Engine
21:19 - Master System
22:44 - Sharp X68000
25:13 - GameBoy Advance
26:06 - PlayStation 2
29:15 - Famicom / NES - US Tengen Version
30:09 - Famicom - Japanese SunSoft Version
31:48 - FM Towns
33:47 - MS DOS
34:43 - ZX Spectrum
35:58 - Amstrad CPC
37:25 - Commodore 64 - US Version
38:41 - Commodore 64 - European Version
40:58 - Dreamcast

man, that's a lot of Afterburner ports. There's also a fan made PC game but since it's not official I've left it out.

[jonathan_ingram]

My word it actually came out on everything

[Asura]

One thing these videos have really made me appreciate about the Amiga (well, two related things):

1) Amiga arcade conversions were usually quite poor
2) Amiga arcade conversions tended to LOOK good in still images

What I suppose I mean by this is whenever we see videos like this After Burner one, with many formats, the Master System and NES versions often seem far more playable than the Amiga versions, even though the Amiga versions often use very detailed sprites (sometimes the original sprites!) with terrible framerates.

In a way, I guess this is similar to the currently "60fps/30fps" situation where developers are reluctant to insist on 60, because it can't be shown in screenshots and YouTube generally only runs at 30.

EDIT: Oh, also - Yakumo, the Saturn versions of OutRun, Afterburner etc (the SEGA AGES ones), they have a "cheat", something you can do on the options screen (sadly I don't remember what it was). After you do it, the game becomes locked to a 60fps frame-rate, but they compromise some of the visual detail to keep it running at that speed. It seems Sega had this debate too, i.e. whether to keep the game at 60 and compromise or worry more about it looking "arcade perfect" in screenshots for the magazines.

[Nu-Eclipse]

No representation for the 3DS Sega 3D Classics version then? Arguably surpasses the Dreamcast and Saturn ports.

[Yakumo]

Nope, because only my son has a 3DS and I've locked it down so no online shopping with it. That and I don't want to buy a game just for the video

Asura, I remember something about a 60fps cheat for OutRun but didn't know After Burner had it as well.