Retro Game of the Week, Week 1

I played through it again not too long ago. It's a fantastic brawler, by far the best available on 16 bit consoles at the time and only really beaten by late Capcom arcade brawlers like avp. Stunning graphics, soundtrack and a superb co op mode. It might lack in complexity but as a game to throw on every now and then for a quick blast or if a mate is over it can't really be beat.

Also it's one of those few games on the Megadrive along with Gunstar heroes that gave Megadrive owners one of those rare occasions to gloat to their SNES owning friends because the SNES really has nothing that comes close to it in the genre.

It's kind of wrong to say the Megadrive was a more limited machine than the SNES. In some ways it wiped the floor with the SNES.

SoR2 was a perfect utilisation of the Megadrive to show its strengths over the SNES. The beefier processor was used to fill the screen with massive sprites and loads of them and in the right hands the Megadrive could sound fantastic. Since the soundtrack was chip generated it was pumped out at super high quality, far better than the samples used by the SNES which were compressed to an inch of their life.

The Megadrive had a much more limited colour palette than the SNES but good choice of colours used meant you could have mistaken the game for a SNES game.

SoR2 is a game that would be pretty much impossible to replicate on the SNES.

Both consoles excel in different areas when it comes to sound. I wouldn't go basing any opinion on AVGN who isn't really that well informed when it comes to games at all. Yuzo Koshiro who created the soundtrack to the SoR games actually totally defined the SNES style of music with Actraiser (Nobuo Uematsu famously said he threw out the entire soundtrack to FF4 when he heard Actraiser and how to use the SNES properly) said the SNES was a nightmare to work with and much preferred the SNES.

I find there's a lot of misinformation about the Megadrive soundchip. The Megadrive soundchip is actually very advanced for the time being an actually Yamaha synthesizer and the same synth chip used in most games at the time. In the right hands it could produce amazing soundtracks that were much higher quality than SNES soundtracks (as in bit rate not necessarily better). Japanese composers were the best at this since they had experience with FM synth chips on the arcade machines but also mostly from the PC-88 home computer that had the same sound chip as the Megadrive. The best soundtracks at the time were from veteran sound composers from the PC-88 scene, often times composing on the PC-88. Hitoshi Sakimoto, Yuzo Koshiro and Michiru Yamane produced some of the best soundtracks on the system for the likes of Verytex, Gauntlet 4, SoR, Rocket Knight and Castlevania that in ways were better than anything on the SNES. Since it was generated by the chip it also meant it took less memory than the SNES soundtracks.

The main problem with the false preception that the Megadrive sounded worse than the SNES is a program created by the US branch of Sega called Gems. It was a sound composing tool for the megadrive and a lot of american games used it. Those soundtracks with harsh guitar riffs and dodgy drum samples were all Gems and while some games sounded good, the likes of Comix Zone had a decent soundtrack and used Gems, they still sounded a bit rough compared to the soundtracks of the better japanese games.

There were some good American composers though, some EA composers did wonders with Gems and Tommy Tellerico did some amazing stuff.

As for the SNES sounding like real music I kind of have to disagree. It kind of emulated the orchestra sound but poorly due to the low bit rate and compression used on the samples. The megadrive on the other hand sounded like a real synthesiser because... well it had an actual synthesiser in it.

Ah I'm mostly full of crap.

Also I'm not saying the SNES sounds crap but I also wouldn't say it's better than the megadrive, both have different sounds but the Megadrive gets a bad rep because of that Gems arse. Both are capable of amazing soundtracks, just for the best ones I couldn't compare them because they are both so different. The Megadrive excels at electronica that the SNES could never produce but for that orchestrated sound the SNES is the superior sound.