Salamander 2 arcade vs Saturn | Life Force | Utterly Pointless Comparisons 

It is and thanks!

Same with the star colors at the end... why change stuff like that?

@@InglebardGaming Might just be different pallets interacting in odd ways

I wonder if they recorded everything at a lower sample rate since it'd result in smaller audio files so the whole game would fit in RAM after a single load.

Yeah, the whole Salamander/Life Force Japan to US to Japan story is a weird one. Not too many games of that era followed that kind of trajectory.

Also Salamander was more of the Japanese original name of the game while Life Force iirc was the American localization especially when it came to the NES where the game really became very popular as a space shooter game so if you mentioned Life Force and Konami in the mid 90s, chances were that if you played Life Force on the NES in the late 80s, you would be fully paying attention especially since Konami's games made to Sega hardware at a much later time and never really got the shooters but when we go into the Sega Saturn there were Sega of America 90s staff created shenanigans where Parodius was originally coming and it was well known that $400 dollar price point or even $300 dollar price was the older age demographic and not some little toddler or twelve year olds begging their parents age demographic that were buying the Sega Saturn in 1995 but even so there were additional shenanigans that even the two major fanboy books who favor Sega of America 90s staff agendas that were basically going to prevent these types of games from being sold here even if a few managed to make it because it just became a thing where whatever games were made for the Sega Saturn in Japan were just facing some gate keeping from being sold here... which was a thing that was actually going on with the Japanese MegaDrive games, especially space shooters that never got here because of the staff who worked at 90s Sega of America.

Really, the main reason Salamander 2 wasn't more popular was that we didn't get an official release outside of Japan (at least not in the US that I ever saw) and the genre was falling by the wayside at in 1996 and 1997 because of the shift to fighting games in the early 90s and polygonal games in the mid to late 90s. It came out at about the worst possible time for a classic style shooter/shmup.

@@InglebardGaming Come to think of it, considering how Gradius III was planned to be a finale, it could be that Salamander 2 was an experimental game to how prerendered graphics will turn out with spin-off being picked in case of receiving poor receptions to not harm the main Gradius franchise, it's kinda like a prototype of Gradius Gaiden and Gradius IV. Frogger had a pretty late revival as well, probably for the same reason to see how the iconic ID would do in later generation.

I dunno about that. The genre was kind of dead at the point they would have localized this back then. The PlayStation version wasn't even brought to the US. Internal politics at Sega were a mess, there was lots of blame to go around and there are so many conflicting reports in different sources these days I don't know who to believe.

Thanks, sorry for the late reply, lots if comments recently! I haven't played too many recent sprite-based style games, but there's lots out there, especially among the indie scene.

Life Force is in all time classic, love the various arcade versions and ports along with the NES game! I have videos up on the NES and PC Engine versions, too. Edit: spelling corrections

@@InglebardGaming awesome. I'll check it out. Thanks!

Yeah, I had seen that too, but I'd been planning this video for three weeks. It seems like any time I pick an obscure game to cover someone gets to it one or two weeks before I do. I don't even mind personally, I just don't want anyone to think I'm being inspired by other people, I've cancelled and moved videos at times when a channel like Game Sack has covered stuff the same week I was intending to.

@@InglebardGaming oh no I'm definitely not accusing of anything, just thought the timing was funny that this wasn't the first time I'd seen the game recently. I was more amused than anything. but definitely a fun watch and one way or the other I'll have to fire it up again even if it's just in MAME!

@darktetsuya Yeah, I know you weren't, I was just putting that out there. If I was the paranoid type I'd swear my computer was bugged and people were looking at what I'm working on in advance, lol. But I'm not accusing anyone else of anything either, if most of them are like me they plan these things in advance.

@@InglebardGaming ah okay that's fair. :P

If I had the money I'd do the same, the motor in my drive is dead and I'd love to throw and ODE in there.

Yeah, there's really only a few standout differences throughout the whole thing. The biggest is the audio.

All my full game comparison videos like this are only 1 version against another. I might look at that PS1 version in another video.

@@InglebardGaming Sure, that would be cool, but I was wondering if you already know how that version stacks up against the arcade/SAT releases, I imagine the PSP collection is the PS1 emulated version, is that correct?

@roberto1519 I haven't played it on PS1, but it's supposed to be really close to the arcade game, too. The PSP version is NOT the PS1 version, it's a new release and it has a lot of cool extras, that one I do have and it's really nice.

Is the PSP release a proper port, rather than the arcade ROM emulated, is that correct?