Hey Jerry, you don't have to wonder, it's 2016!by JERRY HELPER 10/20/2016, 1:09pm PDT
But I'm too indecisive. wrote:
This used to be my absolute favourite SNES game. Hell, it was the reason I wanted a SNES in the first place. Then one day in 1998 I discovered Callus and never looked back. Now I literally can not imagine ever playing a 16-bit console Street Fighter again outside of, I don't know, maybe an institutional environment like a hospital or one of those horse ranches for at-risk teens? I guess at this point I would have to be working at the horse ranch or getting the kids to hide me out in the barn or something. Even if I were so overcome with nostalgia one day I had to fire it up, I would go for the Genesis port instead just to see how the other half lived. I hear it has less slowdown and colours and more frames of animation. A lot of Genesis games had more animation because the Genesis had way more flexible sprite hardware, the SNES was limited to square sprites of 8x8, 16x16, 32x32, or 64x64 pixels and could only use two different sprite sizes at the same time. On top of that, only 16KB of VRAM could be used for sprites. Meanwhile the Genesis could use any combination of sprites sized 8, 16, 24, or 32 pixels per side, square or rectangular, it didn't matter. And you could use as much of the total 64KB VRAM as you wanted on them! No wonder the kids would keep me around and sneak me food and play Street Fighter with me with stories like that. Hey kid do you want to see some topless pics of Counselor Troi? No she doesn't work here, she used to be on STAR TREK.
Let's check out how the other half lived, together!
You can imagine all the extra frames that might be there theoretically, but the fewer colors and worse sound are overwhelming. One of the reasons flexible but unfriendly options didn't pan out for Sega consoles was because when porting a game developers aren't going to go that extra mile to take advantage of the unique benefits if it means too much basic restructuring. Export the same sprites with different palettes? Sure! Compress the sound samples at different bitrates, OK! Slice up the sprites to different sizes and re-code everything to do with memory allocation? NO THANK YOU.
When their in house teams created something from "scratch" you ended up with things like Sonic and Virtua Fighter 2 for the Saturn, awesome. But almost any multiplatform port was noticeably worse on the Genesis unless blood was important to you (which it was, though it's impossible to communicate that in text today without sounding sarcastic).
The biggest exception to this was Aladdin, thanks to a bizarre alignment of licensing stars where two different developers created a game "from scratch" that shared a common starting design doc from Disney. So it wasn't really a port, but two games from scratch with shared heritage. One made by the people who would go on to make Earthworm Jim, using actual scanned animation cels, and the other, Capcom, run by the guy who would go on to make Godhand and Resident Evil 4. (Shinji Mikami even said he would've bought the Genesis version.)