Samurai Shodown Neo Geo vs Sega CD | Mega CD | Utterly Pointless Comparisons ep 60 

Yup, some memorable classics! I even had a disk with a short digitized sample of a Van Halen song on the c64, it was Why Can't This Be Love.

Ha, yeah definitely, I'll never forget that one.

Yea. They should've did the NBA JAM games 😊

You have problems.

@@ThorStoneGaming Who doesn't? I'd rather be me enjoying a flawed game than be you sniffing your own fart attack.

Despite all the cuts, I think the Sega CD version is still well done overall and the best playing of the contemporary ports, thanks in large part to the 6 button gamepad. And yeah, like I said in the video, Earthquake WAS visually impressive, but definitely just a gimmick to draw people in, IMO. A better, useful, huge character would be Hugo in SvC Chaos - he doesn't mess with the gameplay. In the end, I just wish they'd included a few things they left out and cleaned up a few of the backgrounds. Still overall, they definitely did a good job.

The one thing I couldn't squeeze in, it was there before editing, was that they might have just been compensating for overscan. While the Neo Geo version would have the same overscan concerns, I think SNK cared less because probably because more of their business came from the arcade than their home versions for AES.

@@InglebardGamingI suppose Neo Geo games were used more on arcade monitors, rather than TV screens too, so screens could easily be resized in arcades.

No, they did a great job overall.

Thanks!

Yeah, some odd decisions, but the controls definitely made this one worth playing on real hardware back in the day.

Road Rash CD vs Road Rash 3DO

The Sega CD version was the only one I owned when it was new back in the day. I got it for wither $15 or $20 on clearance shortly after it came out. I'd played the game here and there on Neo Geo MVS units back then, too, but never played it near as much as Street Fighter II.

Small PCM samples could be loaded into RAM. I'm sure that's how they did the voices in stuff like Final Fight CD, Mortal Kombat CD and the new clearer voices in Streets of Rage on the Sega Classics pack.

@@InglebardGaming I'm not sure if there was a around it but the Sega CD had much less ram than the Neogeo and Neogeo CD. From what I know they usually stream music in Redbook and when games attempted both music + speech samples at the same time it caused a loading stutter Streets of Rage didn't have Redbook audio either. Also when it comes to sound samples the Mega drive games were much smaller than Neo Geo games. The NEO was a monster with storage because the carts were huge and ROM meaning fast transfer speeds. Maybe they could have got around it I'm not sure but in this game they did it that way.

A few things on your reply... Lots of games used CD music and PCM samples. Redbook audio playback had nothing to do with any of the sounds produced by the soundchips or game speed. If you look at Final Fight CD for example it has redbook audio playing with PCM sound effects just fine. Other games like Lunar II and Silpheed used the PCM chip for all their music and layered FM sound on top for most sound effects or occasional extra PCM samples. Golden Axe on Sega CD, even though it was a pretty barebones port of the Genesis version (minus the two player mode, oddly enough) also used redbook audio and PCM samples. It specifically used a redbook audio recording of the arcade game's music with new PCM voices and the original plain FM sound effects. Using PCM samples and CD music on the system was common. All of that is why its especially strange that the sound samples are so rough in Samurai Shodown on the system.

Megadrive version definitely wasn't better. Every single character is missing half their normals. (Close attacks were all cut.)

@@MarginalSC I meant more to do with less cuts such as referee, not the way it plays....

Well, cutting moves in the Genesis version was a lot more serious than cutting the ref or delivery guy on Sega CD. Personally, even with the cuts, the Sega CD version is way better overall, IMO. But it IS weird that they phoned it on some of those backgrounds and other stuff. There shouldn't have been anything that was better in the Genesis version, but yet, here we are.

@@InglebardGaming I wonder if it was just VRAM limitations. Retain the close attacks, lose the memory for the ref etc.

​@@MarginalSCAlmost 100% certain it was due to a schedule crunch. Development schedules back then were (Gurney Halleck voice) _brutal_ in how tight they were.

Yup!

Hard disagree on this one. There were lots of great games for the system that get overlooked because so many people tried to say it was just an FMV machine. Just some examples of great games for the system: Lunar, Lunar II, Popful Mail, Dark Wizard, Final Fight CD, Terminator CD, Soul Star, Silpheed, Sonic CD, Snatcher, Thunderhawk, Shining Force CD, Keio Flying Squadron, Monkey Island, Heart of the Alien and more. I never felt ripped off with the Sega CD. Other systems yes, but not that one.

@InglebardGaming Final Fight was the game that made me angry. Seeing how awful the colors looked made me realize I was still playing on a Genesis (with a CD player on the side). Not a new system. I wasted years worth of birthday money and the games still looked worse than the Snes. I sold it for half what I paid after a few months.

I would agree if the Dreamcast never came to existence. That piece of hardware was a masterpiece and an indicator of SEGA trying it's hardest to redeem themselves for their past sins. Granted it was too little too late due to the constant hardware add ons for the Genesis and mishandling of the Sega Saturn marketing but you can't say that SEGA didn't try with the Dreamcast. Did they screw up? Of course they did but abandoned their customers? I don't agree with that.

@TheyCallMeSledge they game up on the Dreamcast and all future hardware in the middle of it's lifecycle... yet again... 4th time in a row...

@TheyCallMeSledge the problem is they literally gave up on their Dreamcast customers. They abandoned the hardware business and stopped making games for it. They didn't even bother bringing Shenmue II to the US. Also, @Zebra66, every company stops making games for their systems eventually. I don't know what you expected out of the Sega CD, it was an add on CD-Rom drive for an existing platform. Like I said earlier, it has plenty of great games that get overlooked. For the Saturn... there were literally over 1,000 commercial releases for it (all territories). It was around for about 4 years which wasn't that much less time that a typical hardware generation in those days. Longer would have been better, sure, but the Dreamcast was a huge technological leap over it so it was justified, IMO. Now 32X, no argument there. It had few games, it never really had the support of the company, and it was a pain to even hook up (genesis, sega cd and 32x... you needed THREE AC adapters, yeesh). That one also had a shorter practical shelf life. Even the Genesis was only around for about 6 years before the Saturn came out and Sega "gave up on it" pretty soon after because that'd what companies did. It was similar for the SNES and N64. After some generational overlap, the older systems are almost always 'given up' on by their manufacturers. We didn't start to see significantly longer generations until the PS2 came along.

Well, yeah. The point of these comparisons is just to see how close (or not) the devs could get on the less powerful hardware it was ported/converted onto. Still, I did like playing this more on Sega CD than the MVS back then just because of the 6 button controller, even though the MVS version was superior to it in every way.

Yeah and it was 300 dollars.

The Sega CD was $300... when it launched in 1992. By 1995 it was $100 brand new and about $40 or $50 used. I bought the original front loader new for $300 when it came out and got a model 2 top loader used for $40 in early 95. Edited for spelling only.

The problem with the PS1 was that it had only 2 Megabytes of RAM, and loading new data from CD was really slow. There simply wasn't enough RAM to load all the animation frames, which made e.g., Shang Tsung in Mortal Kombat Trilogy such a pain. The Neo Geo also hadn't much RAM, but data access on the cartridges was _instant_, so there was no issue having many more animation frames. The Sega Saturn had a similar problem than the PS1 (not enough RAM and a slow CD Drive), but there was a RAM Expansion that made some of the Street Fighter/X-Men games have more animation frames. So it's not as simple as 16 vs "24" vs 32-Bit, but "How much data is readily available at any given time?".

@@menhirmikeEven with the RAM cartridge Saturn ports of Neo Geo games have reduced animation and worse sound

As said here, its all about the available RAM on the consoles. The devs for the Neo could allocate as much video ROM space as they wanted for animations, and just change the sprite data pointers to show a new image. The home consoles had NO video ROM, and a limited amount of video RAM to hold animations. Uploading new data to video RAM from system RAM would consume your CPU for the duration... pulling it from CDROM was hilariously slow. This is why cuts were made... the Neo version of Samura Shodown had 14 MEGABYTES for just the graphics data, while the Genesis has 64KB of video RAM, 64KB of processor ram, the SegaCD had 768KB of RAM. "Thats 900K of RAM though!"... remember that everything for a frame had to fit in that 64K of video RAM... and you had to also store your game program and sample sound effects in that non-video RAM as well...quite frankly its a technical marvel that they included as much of the original game as they did here.

Was not 24 bit. Was 16 bit.

Imagine if the PS1 had a RAM cart slot like the Saturn had.....

It's too bad that more games didn't find creative ways to use the system's scaling capability. I kind of hated it in the fighting games, but it was impressive in a few other titles.

@@InglebardGaming love it or hate it from a gameplay perspective, from a technical innovation and creativity perspective, it was pretty awesome to see. I first witnessed it in the art of fighting and then later in samurai shodown.

My guess is probably not because of only having the two tilemap layers and the sprite limitations. But who knows for sure?