What's the most graphically impressive Genesis game?

...and how does it compare to the best looking SNES game?

Everything looks better on the Genesis, thanks to it's infamous blast processing.

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Virtua Racing.
The cart had a built-in Blast Processor though. You could play it on a SNES and it would still be fast.

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Panorama Cotton or Alien Soldier

>>2915912
Came in here to say this.

Except for the "blast processing" faggotry. Not sure if that poster is being ironic or if they're a faggot.

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Red Zone
pic related is one of the very first things that welcomes you when you start the game, although the full motion vido is very limited and only used for two short animations, which together would be ~15 seconds of video. On non graphical notes music was composed by Jesper Kyd, and just like everything else its magnificient.

>>2915875
Comix Zone.

Panorama Cotton

Ristar
Dynamite Headdy
Beyond Oasis
Flink
Gargoyles

Pocahontas
Generation Lost

Trying to think of some other uro-games, since they tend to be rather pretty. Mr. Nutz comes to mind and it's visually very pleasing, but this version doesn't seem to feature as much parallax or sprite scaling and rotating as the SNES. Still a pretty game.
Mega Turrican! Mega Turrican looks good.

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>>2916104
Ranger-X

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>>2916186

>>2915875
Dynamite Headdy or Alien Soldier.

Definitely not Panorama Cotton (slideshow-fps) or Ranger-X (30fps).

Alien Soldier

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Alien Soldier you cunts

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Another vote for Red Zone here. It does things literally no other game does, without slowdown. And it does it all concurrently.

>>2915931

It doesn't have any Sega of America Marketing Chip, but VR on Genesis does have an extra chip inside the cart, the SVP (Sega Virtua Processors), that helps the Genesis render polygons, similar to the SNES FX chip.

>>2915875
I fucking adore the look the of Wrestlemania The Arcade Game.

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>>2916254
>>2916250
>>2916212
>>2915914
>Alien Soldier

Fucking this

Excellent game too. Probably the best 16 bit action game. Nice to see it get some love.

F1/Kawasaki Super Bike Challenge.

Real 3D with an impressive Framerate

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>>2916275
Where's your poster anon?

>>2916381

DUDE

>>2915875
Why no one said Road Rash 3 yet?
Video is Road Rash 2 footage, though.
http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=eP0aWO-ny6Q

Batman & Robin

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Thunder Force IV

The Genesis had a lot of impressive games.

The SNES needed special chips just to do rotations outside of mode 7.

Programmers on the Genesis just brute forced that.

Vector Man

>>2916492

Both consoles had impressive games without the need of special chips, don't bring console war faggotry on an otherwise nice thread.

Are CD and/or 32X games allowed?

>>2916538
That seems like cheating because they have more power so should look better by default.

>>2916545
CD's only difference was the amount of data a game could take up.

>>2916549
Didn't CD add scaling and rotation hardware as well?

Alien soldier. Backgrounds and sprites are absolutely amazing. And treasure used some voodoo magic to make those massive bosses out of multiple sprites and somehow simulate effects like scaling/rotation that the genny can't actually do

Shame we never got it in the US. Fucking bullshit. But hey, that's what flashcarts and repros are for

>>2916557

No

>>2916557
Yes it could. For instance, the special stages in Sonic CD use a mode-7 effect

>>2916565
blatantly wrong. The sega CD was not just a capacity upgrade

>>2916569

It had a faster processor. It had no dedicated hardware specifically for scaling or rotation. It was all done through software.

>>2916569
The genesis could already do that. The sega CD adds another 68k and some dedicated vcd and audio hardware. Sonic CD did not utilize the co-processor however. Most games didn't or they used one of the processors for the HUD or a background layer. It was very difficult to keep them synced. Also mode 7 is not anything special. It's just a nice on the snes that allows for a single layer that can rotate. It's extremely limited. Neither the genesis or sega cd didn't have dedicated scaling hardware and did it all in software. The snes had a huge advantage because of add on chips though, which couldn't be utilized in the same way on the genesis.

>>2916512
>>2916597
> Sonic CD did not utilize the co-processor however.
Any source on this?
You want to say special stages could be performed on a stock Genesis?

Nobody said Shinobi 3 yet? Really?

>>2916649

It can. I remember seeing tech demos achieving the same thing.

>>2916689

It looked nice, but I can't remember a single thing in that game that was technically impressive. everything it did, other games already did far better.

>>2916492
God, you Sega fans are really pathetic. Lovely consoles an' all, but you guys are shit.

As said above, Mr. Nutz on the SNES has scaling and rotation without chip, the SNES version doesn't.
https://youtu.be/arE3hFOQYy8?t=1h7m12s

Super Turrican and SkyBlazer also come to mind.

>>2916538
>32X
That's completly different hardware, what a stupid fucking question.
>CD
Not the vastly larger disk allowed more individual sprites, which could easily make games better looking.

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>>2916734

>Mr. Nutz on the SNES has scaling and rotation without chip

I need to look into this more, but this could just be another Gutstank type deal. The background layer could be used for the scaling and rotating portions and then they just draw a sprite object over it of the same size after it's all done. Notice that the sprite doesn't have any type of animation while it's scaling or rotating.

>Not the vastly larger disk allowed more individual sprites, which could easily make games better looking.

That's not how it works

>>2916573
>It had no dedicated hardware specifically for scaling or rotation. It was all done through software.

Not correct. It had graphics co-processor specifically for scaling - it was the biggest chip on the entire board. As I recall it worked by reading memory pattern and writing it out according to a rotation delta and a scaling %, and then you copy the rotated patterns from Sega CD memory into Genesis VDP.
This was its major bottleneck since you could only upload a low amount of tiles to the VDP every frame; so scaling games either did not scale much stuff, or they ran at a low framerate or lower screen size (or both).

The advantage of it, compared to the SNES, is that you can freely scale whatever you want as long as you have bandwidth to spare. You are not limited to a background, you can do multiple sprites, multiple backgrounds, whatever. As long as you can transfer the scaled tiles fast enough to the VDP, you were golden. It could also do mode 7 grounds by hardware without HDMA, since it could scale and rotate simultaneously.

One game even did very basic polygons with it, the main menu in Battlecorps.


>>2916649
Horse shit. Sonic CD used the scaler chip for the sound test mode and for the mode 7 ground in the special stages.

>>2916758
It's an Amiga port, it could be even software scaling too; Amiga coders were wizards. But my guess is also on loading the scaled graphic as a background.

>>2916690
>It can. I remember seeing tech demos achieving the same thing.

There is a tech demo made in the last year or two that did a mode 7 scaled ground from Mario Kart, on the Genesis.

It did the scaling/rotation the same way the Sega CD did, but in software. Take a set of data from memory, read it out diagonally and at every x step only.

The problem with this is that you need loads of RAM to preprocess the graphics. Sega CD scaler had dedicated memory exactly so it can do its job smoothly. The Genesis-only tech demo instead used 64kbyte of on-cart RAM (think of the battery backed memory, just without the memory) to load the graphics into.

Basically it loaded the entire ground into the cart SRAM and then read it out diagonally and converted it into VDP tiles.

A pretty smart trick and proves just how much stronger the Genesis was in the CPU department. With crazy enough coding, it could approximate just about anything the SNES could.

>>2916809
> It did the scaling/rotation the same way the Sega CD did, but in software. Take a set of data from memory, read it out diagonally and at every x step only.
Could you tell more about it?

I honestly didn't find Alien Solder too graphically impressive other than the vector bosses and that BEAUTIFUL Moth with a faux-3D wing.
EWJ isn't really that impressive regarding hardware limitations, it just had really well hand-drawn sprites and animation.

Treasure games in general had nice tricks. I'd like to bring up Thunder Force IV too in a similar vein to Alien Soldier, many bosses were several sprites acting together instead of a single one. It made them more fluid.
Monster World IV made good use of that in its bosses, too.

>>2916813
I already told you how it works. Or at least the theory behind it, as I understand it:
- put your un-rotated background in external memory
- read out 1 pixel of data, then when you move to the next pixel, instead of directly going to the next address, multiply the next address by your given scale factor and your given degree of rotation. I don't know the exact math formula from the top of my head for the rotation part, but if you've learned Cartesian coordinate systems in grade school, and basic trig in high school, then you can figure it out for yourself.

The Sega CD scaler does the same thing, but it is a dedicated chip for doing this and only this.

The Mode 7 demo goes a bit further to speed up things, it uses a 8-bit graphic and converts the pixel colour to Megadrive format as well. I think it is because it is faster to read out from the memory 8-bits at a time.

>>2916416
This.
The game was litteraly designed as a tech demo first with a game on top

>>2916381
>ESWAT
>Alien Soldier

mah nigga

>>2916734
dude, you don't know the old SNES trick for rotating bosses ?
Boss is the mode7 plane, and background elements are made of sprites. Axelay boss 2 does the same, shoot and you'll see background elements flicker.
Ever wondered why mode7 bosses have very simple backgounds ?

Doesn't Pier Solar employee Mode 7 effects as well as a bunch of other pretty impressive shit?

SNES fags always jump on Genesis for Blast Processing, but the most impressive stuff the SNES can do that the Genesis can't is entirely because of co-processors...

>>2916784
an interesting approach was mega turrican and turrican 3. Both have rotating and scaling sprites.
Mega turrican was made entirely in software, but it couldn't be done this way for Amiga Turrican 3, so they went prerendered with some clever animation preloading

>>2915876
well snes could never do something like this>>2915914 each one of his body parts is a sprite and would bring the SNES to its knees

>>2916381
>JXD on the shelf
found the shill

>>2916839
>>2917437
>>2917446
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SwW5y4rrvwk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wG4V_kLL0NI

>>2915912
Couldnt the superFX chip do the same thing?

>>2917702
That unofficial Sonic racing game reminds me of an unreleased Wacky Races game that was meant to come out on the Genesis which had mode 7 scaling and rotation. You can look it up on YouTube, I'm too lazy to link it.

>>2917715
Pretty much, though I've heard the SVP chip is more powerful.

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>>2915875
I fucking love EWJ but it's def not this. I don't have many games (poorfag) but prob one of it's shooters. I overclocked my system and Lightening Force is brilliant

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>>2915875
like this gut >>2915912 but as far as scrollers go i'd have to say pic related

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>>2917920

Wow, what a coincidence

I uploaded the top video

http://youtu.be/Ly8FqQQ2HIQ

>MFW I realized that a dev from the game made a comment 5 years ago

>>2916381
Im sitting in front of that desk right now, anon

Its a popular one. My boss has it too. Cheers

Rocket knight is pretty Damn intense with the graphics. There's also contra hard corps

>>2916262

You should have posted a screenshot of the indoor sections. That's what really blew me away.

Kawasaki Superbike challenge, which I did not post a still image of as you need to see it in motion to understand what a feat of programming it was/is.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bkcTtW-qzC0

>>2918102
that just uses the same engine from an earlier F1 game

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Star Cruiser

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yND5V85iPHc

>>2915875
Goddamn, i always forget how gorgeous EWJ2 is. I owned an SNES and a Genesis, but EWJ just felt more like a "Genesis" game to me. The sound fonts of the system fit the music better than the SNES version, too, in my opinion.

>>2915941
How fucking pretentious.

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>>2918346

For best visuals and sound, play it on Saturn.

I still find the SNES version of EWJ2 the best though, liked it more than the Genesis version. The Saturn version looks and sounds amazing, but doesn't control as good.

>>2915941
I love these guys, they also made sub terrania. These games are like, brokenly difficult tech demos.

>>2917920
The plane in Wacky Race is polygonal, not mode 7. It also looks way shittier.

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I still wonder how did they do the reflections on those glass ball things.

>>2915875
Earthworm Jim 1 is better on Genesis.
Earthworm Jim 2 is better on Super NES.
Go figure.

>>2917437
The linked video makes it quite obvious
that this was not the technique used.

>>2916758
>That's not how it works
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hvx4xXhZMrU

>>2919635
Saturn has the best version of EWJ2 though.

Not sure which version of EWJ1 is best though. I'm assuming Sega CD

>>2920627
why, because it's animated ? You can animate the mode7 plane by changing tiles, like how coins and power ups get removed/changed in mario kart.

>>2918354
O_O

>>2922670
What's wrong?

>>2922681
O◡O

>>2917463
https://youtu.be/D9qaDgx2Xu8?t=15m3s
There is this boss in Batman and Robin that uses this technique. Not that impressive, but it's there.

https://youtu.be/QAyP2-0u_6c?t=30m6s
I think this boss in Prehistorik Man also does it.

>>2918348
It's a fucking full 3d 60fps shooter on the genesis. With reflections, particles and tons of sprites. Alongside scaling and rotation. It's pretty impressive.

>>2920639
>Not sure which version of EWJ1 is best though
Windows 95 version, it has all the content of the Sega CD version but with better graphics.

>>2925898
There's also the final boss of Super Turrican 2:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5EtYfiR0jXM

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>>2917463
Where do people get this idea that SNES is bad with lots of sprites? The SNES PPU can handle 128 sprites up to 64x64 pixels with at most 32 8x8 pixel characters per scanline, compared to the Genesis VDP which could display 80 sprites with at most 20 (8x8 pixel character?) sprites per scanline. Seems from a graphics hardware perspective SNES is doing better.

Granted the 68k multiply instructinos would be useful for calculating transforms on the fly, but if you used fast ROM and clever programming you could pull off effects like this on the SNES no prob.

>>2927280
Common sense. Most publishers saved money by affording slow roms instead of fast ones, that severely impacted performance on most games. Static sprites sitting on screen don't mean anything, it's the object count that matters and the fact is that the Genny could push more shit at once.

>>2927280
>Seems from a graphics hardware perspective SNES is doing better
Yes, it is.
But Genesis had a faster CPU for everything, so it could make such effects or even process flat-polygon environments a lot easier.

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>>2915875
Shinobi 3 was quite the looker.

>>2915875
Jurassic Park II
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xr03931gXCE

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>>2927441
Not the best screenshot, so here's another one.

>>2927451
This looks pretty fucking amazing, but that's unsurprising considering it came out in what, 97? It was the dead ass-end of the console's life.

Comix Zone aged pretty well visually. The dithered rendering works in tapping into a comic's halftone patterns.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c5EiCfFqZVU

>>2927451
ok, you win.

>>2927451

holy crap

weird to see those amazing graphical effects while hearing all those weak little blups and buzzes

>>2928440
yeah the soundtrack is a bit weak. Fun fact this JP game was developed by Appaloosa/Novotrade who also made Ecco.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Giuw8Q8C4M8

>>2927464
Yes thats why I only buy consoles near the end of their life cycle. Cheaper + more impressive grafix.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HJyVDW_PcoM

>>2928656
It's such a shame that the Saturn never took advantage of its hardware and made interesting games like that.

>>2928746
Yea I would have loved to play the Arcade JP game at home. I dont think the Saturn was powerful enough and the port would have been watered down.

HARD CORPS
I used to play this with my brother and sister and just be amazed as a child
https://youtube.com/watch?v=K8ByGNgkvDs