Sega and the PC Engine 

the libraries of retro game systems were huge

It's just passion

From 2022 - he’s still killing it lol

@@justinm6392 right?! All these years later and he STILL has plenty of topics and ideas!

I thought he’s been doing really well 🤷🏻

Bithead1000 says it's the version of the game that plays the best on any home console from that generation.

it is indeed.

Agreed

@@TheRealJPhillips How dare you, sir!

@@Septer_Sever just kidding. He just always has a cold.

Apart from Bonk, I didn't really have any knowledge if the PC Engine back in the day (I don't believe it got a proper release in Europe). It's been fun learning about it from Sega Lord X and the Happy Console Gamer.

I'd buy it!

Sega and Planning don't really go hand in hand.

Sprite scaling hardware was way too expensive to include in a home console back in 1988. Space Harrier 2 and Thunderblade were very early and rushed games, while Afterburner 2 was an outsourced port. Almost like Sega barely even tried. NEC were just able to put more time, effort and care into their ports. I do prefer the Genesis port of Outrun though. It has better detailed graphics and more accurate FM soundtrack. Of course, nothing software spite scaling on the PC-Engine touches what was accomplished in Panorama Cotton on the MD. That game really shows what could've been is Sega took more care with the superscaler ports. I am also very curious to see M2's new Space Harrier port on the Mini 2.

Worst them sprite scaling are the terrible lack of suficient simultaneous color in mega drive

@@oatmeal7818 You can blame it on extremely volatile CRAM prices around the time the design was finalized.64 colors wasn't bad for the time though. 4x time the NES and better than most micros too. All 4th gen consoles were based on compromises in some ways though. NEC did not include hardware for multiple background layers at a time when parallax scrolling established itself as one of the staples of 16-bit gaming, making a lot of their games look very colorful, but flat. The SFC had the colors, sprites and background layers for a very pretty picture, but barely enough CPU power to move everything around at a decent pace. Of course, most SFC and PCE games ran at a very annoying horizontal resolution, making games look stretched.. At least most MD games are the 4:3 NTSC standard 320x240. Well, Neo-Geo did not compromise when it came to the hardware, featuring the best aspects of all 3 consoles, but this priced it out of the range of most consumers.

Yeah, I could have slipped that in there at some point.

Sega Lord X it's all good man. Your coverage of Sega's past more than makes up for that 😉😅.

Thank you. Glad you still happy with the content.

​​​​@@SegaLordXfun fact: in Brazil, Wonder Boy in 2 of the games (The Dragon's Trap and Monster Land) are replaced with Monica from the successful comic series Monica's Gang. They're called No Castelo Do Dragão (The Dragon's Castle) and O Resgate (The Rescue) and both games were released here by Tec Toy.

Doing that topic and not mentioning Yakuza series :)

@TrueSinister thanks, man

I think the intention was to get third parties to make Sega games on other platforms so they can reach a new audience and to hopefully convert them onto Sega hardware where the best home ports would be developed in-house.

@@InputArchive Yeah, I'm conflicted on Sega's handling of it's IP back then, on the one hand I'm sure it brought them money licensing them to third parties and these ports didn't always show up when the Sega home version did, but on the other hand you don't get customers buying your hardware platforms if they can just get the game on something they already own. There is also the quality factor which SLX mentioned, a bad port on another system isn't going to necessarily have them seeking a 'better' version on the Sega console, you might just leave the customer thinking 'this is not a very good game'.

Lazarus Hernandez You could argue Sega was definitely more known for its arcade titles rather than its console exclusive titles. Experience Sega's biggest arcade titles on your PC Engine, but to get arcade quality in your home, buy a MegaDrive. I mean I could be wrong with that line of thinking, but if they wanted the best ports on other systems, surely they would have done it in-house? At the end of the day what it did do was expose more people to Sega franchises.

@@InputArchive Back then Sega was definitely known for it's arcade titles more than the console exclusives and both the Master System and Genesis leveraged this for their library. Although the SMS spawned some exclusives like Alex Kidd, and Phantasy Star, it was the Genesis that came into it's own for console exclusives. I'm pretty sure you are right with the line of thinking, after all one of the game companies of an earlier generation did this very thing; Coleco would make/port games for various consoles at the time (Atari 2600, Intellivision, and Colecovision) but inevitably their consoles version looked/played the best or was the most complete/faithful to the original. The practice excluded the Atari 5200 which was on par graphically with the Colecovision. Likewise Atari stopped porting some of its games on Colecovision. My conflict is whether this was a good idea for Sega or would it have been better for them if they were a bit more guarded with their IP, like Nintendo is. Sega end up doing both, licensing out some of their games for port duty (a great deal of arcade titles), while certain games (Sonic, Streets of Rage, Alex Kidd) didn't grace competitors platforms until much later if at all.

Sega chose to focus on other aspects of the overall performance and graphics, getting decent bulk deal on the fancy M68000 16-bit CPU and packing things like 3 background layers, crazy amount of sprites per line and ability to combine multiple sprites to form larger sprites in the GPU. Very flexible GPU in general, with a crazy fast system bus access. Took the devs a while to learn the hardware but by the end of the 16-bit gen, Genesis was putting out effects that the PCE and even the SNES could only dream of (e.g.: Red Zone, Toy Story, Panorama Cotton, Batman and Robin).

I get that, but in terms of the attractiveness of games and system perception from the public, colors were a factor which mattered in the 16-bit wars. A 4096-color palette was pretty standard by the late 80's, even the Lynx which was a finished prototype in 1987 featured one. Only the best game developers would make good use of the MD's palette in their limited time, when we got games like Thunder Force IV, Ranger X, Flink and... Toy Story of course! That said, the MD was and still is my favorite console, so Sega must have done something right with their design choices as you described ;)

@@jbmaru I read that the MD/Genesis' limited color palette had something to do with the volatile prices of VRAM, which really spiked exactly at the time when they were finalizing the design. At least, MD/Genesis had a really good default 512 color palette. The whole Genesis hardware architecture was designed by arcade board jockeys and not with ease of development in mind. It did take some talent to get good graphics and sound out of the machine. Luckily, this made only the average and crappy games look and sound mediocre. Because generally, the guys who could design a game worth a damn, were also capable of pushing the hardware in the right direction. When Sonic came out, it was more colorful, fast, smoother and better sounding that anything else out there.

@@Prizrak-hv6qk Yes the first Sonic really was something else when it came out, I was stunned when I saw the first level! What you said made me think of an example of an "early" & not-so-good-looking game; I wonder what constrained the developers of Midnight Resistance to use 16 onscreen colors only, I know it was their first game on the platform but still! Maybe that made it less CPU-intensive or RAM-hungry, like the 1-player-only gameplay. They definitely mastered their subject when they released Chelnov a year later though.

@@Prizrak-hv6qk What did the Megadrive Batman and Robin have over the snes version?

It's from the Sega Saturn game Astal.

Interesting tech info, I was wondering how the hell it was running after burner so well.

Wonder Boy is such a confusing set of games. The way it was released and licensed. The way the names changed. The way it split off into different games. It'd make for a decent topic though.

Yea, that's a win -win situation

I agree. And same here. It's on play_roms.com Can play right off the browser with a contoller. Fantastic game. Same with Thunder Blade. They are just as good as Genesis but have their own great feel.

it's a tour de force given the pc engine limitations but the mega drive version is about as good (despite being rushed but while it has less detailed graphics and less content, it also has better gameplay and better sound) and the x68000 version is better than both (but it's rushed as well, both md and x68000 were made by dempa who went a bit lazy there)

Megadrive is more challenging imo. But both pc engine and megadrive lack a maneuver necessary to win in the arcade. In the arcade/32x/saturn version when an enemy comes from behind you "just like the scene in top gun" you speed up to get em chasing you, then immediately slow down for em to fly ahead of you to lock on and kill. In the 16 bit ports all you have to do is outrun the enemy like you would a missle. I actually like just being able to simply outrun the enemy and focus more on the planes ahead of me, but it definetly takes away a certain dynamic. I've never played the x68000. The original afterburner actually had no enemies chasing you from behind at all, it wasn't until afterburner 2 that was introduced.

I see your point, guys. But I really hoped more from Mega Drive port. They are Sega, they had the obligation to create something very close to Arcade, like Golden Axe did. In Mega Drive the landing scenes has gone. It might not be a big deal, but it charged personality. The PC Engine version, on the other hand, brought all those stuff. Moreover, the melody version of the songs has born there and became very famous (I really don't thing that it was necessary, but it's a remarkable fact).

it's actually kinda overrated (just look at some comments, yours included :P) and there are still some misconceptions going on about it no, the pc engine is not a "8-bit console" but a 4th gen console instead (i.e. a "16-bit console" for those who want to talk in good ol' and misleading "bit fashion") but yes, you can beat the pc engine quality and library. the mega drive and snes did and easily for the most part and even older hardwares of the same generation such as the atari st and commodore amiga did in some ways (just look the racing games or compare jim power on pc engine and amiga) also the pc engine has some weird design choices such as no rgb natively or only one controller port overall it's a decent console in terms of hardware but which has a very good library with a strong personality which, IMO, is the best thing about it. pc kid, bomberman, far east of eden... some very cool and distinctive games

I think you’re right. It’s the most overlooked console. A lost gem

Well there is five years difference between the two.

How ever it helped, I'm glad to hear it. :)