Games That Push Hardware Limits 7 - Game Sack

[Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] hello and welcome to gamesack a few episodes back i was showing you some games that make the consoles that they were running on look rather weak and now once again i'm doing just the opposite showing you some games that are doing some things that you might not otherwise expect from the system now do these really push hardware limits let's be honest they don't in fact the only games that do push hardware limits are the ones that slow down to a crawl but hopefully you know what i mean when i title these episodes the way i do games that are pushing the graphics and audio in ways that you might not have otherwise expected from the console and let's start out with an nes game [Music] you know what let's start out with gauntlet from tangent on the nes that's right tangent has a hard g just like gif this version is one of my favorite nes games from back in the day mostly for nostalgic reasons i love everything about it but have you ever wondered how this game puts so many enemies on screen at once without becoming a flickering mess or even slowing down very much as you may or may not know 8 and even 16-bit consoles of the time couldn't put many sprites on screen simultaneously when more than just a few sprites appeared on the same horizontal portion of the screen flickr would result because the console just can't draw that many sprites on the same horizontal line the console would have to prioritize which sprites get drawn and take turns drawing certain sprites for each frame while emitting other sprites this is what causes the flicker or sometimes tearing that you see but gauntlet here puts a ton of enemies on screen even in the same horizontal space yet no flicker how can this be well simply put the game barely uses any sprites at all in fact the only sprites on screen are the player characters the shots he or she fires from their weapon and any enemy projectiles that's pretty much it almost everything else is a background tile that's right most of the enemies are actually part of the background the game computes where the enemies are for a certain frame and then draws them to that background tile eliminating any chance for flicker this is a really cool trick but it does come with some limitations the main limitation is that the movement of the enemies is very restricted because background tiles just can't be scrolled around like a sprite which can seamlessly glide anywhere this could be overcome with background tile animation but the game would need a substantial increase in raw memory as well as a much faster cpu if there's going to be this many enemies on screen at once all with smooth motion this is a great way to get a game that doesn't flicker and yet still plays well with limited resources but what about gauntlet 2 on the nes from mindscape this one uses traditional sprites as you can see here by the flicker if you're watching this video at 60 frames per second there are some other games though that use this method or a variation of it like the nes version of galaga the enemies are sprites when they fly onto the screen but they're redrawn as part of the background layer once they settle into the formation with the rest of the enemies they turn back into sprites again to swoop down to attack you space harrier on the master system uses this technique for almost everything except for the player character and his shots that's why things have unfilled tile edges around them and move in a very janky manner golden axe on the master system is yet another game that does this and this always kind of impressed me every single thing you see on screen is drawn to the background layer yes even the player character this game would be such a flickery mess if it weren't done this way either that or the characters would be very very small but even when they're small you can still get a lot of flicker like you see here and double dragon unfortunately this means that everything even the player moves around in a very choppy fashion since the tiles are 8 by 8 pixels that means you can only move in eight pixel steps which actually makes the game feel like it might be moving a bit too fast now this really isn't the greatest edition of the game or anything but it's really cool how they pushed big characters onto a system which definitely wasn't designed to do this [Music] jurassic park rampage edition on the genesis from sega and blue sky software is a pretty cool game it's a run-and-gun follow-up to the previous genesis game which was a tad slow you're killing almost all of the dinosaurs you see and every single human being you see without exception aside from running faster and better than the previous game which had a fair amount of slowdown this game puts a decent amount of color on screen there are a few nifty parallax effects as well late in the game you'll be river rafting down some small waterfalls and the effect of the water is pretty dang good for a genesis game i mean look at it it's stretching as it goes down the waterfall your goal in this stage is to work your way down to the bottom this level even has some day-to-night color transitioning that's pretty neat the final level has you fighting a t-rex amidst this awesome looking waterfall again this is a genesis game imagine seeing this back when the genesis launched in late 1989 people would have been blown away had this been an altered beast or last battle actually you're not really fighting the t-rex so much as you're running from him this isn't the best running gun ever but there's some good fun to be had with some cool effects here and there but how about the follow-up game which was called lost world jurassic park from appaloosa also for the genesis this game is mostly an overhead run and gun of sorts with a huge emphasis on exploration run around shoot things find stuff accomplish tasks seems like this one wouldn't offer much more than this right well if you thought that like i did then you'd be wrong like i was check this out here you're riding a motorcycle racing other motorcyclists through dense woods as you do they're trying to shoot this poor dinosaur that's running away with machine guns well i mean the dinosaur's not running away with a stash of machine guns the motorcyclists are trying to shoot the dinosaur with their machine guns yeah anyway not only are you racing into the screen but as you veer left and right the whole screen rotates as well and it all moves at 60 frames per second the artwork is a little rough but the effects are really cool or how about this scene where you have a t-rex chasing you you're attached to a vehicle shooting at it and the entire jeep or truck or whatever it is can even jump the goal here is to bash the t-rex into the electric fence which can be pretty tough to do the fence itself has a cool 3d effect which is accomplished with animated tiles and the truck has some cool rotation effects when it jumps even the segmented t-rex looks pretty damn cool for a 16-bit system hell even the headlights on the vehicle use the genesis highlight function for a cool effect next we have jeff goldblum himself cruising down a river on a raft his goal is to shoot at everything and of course if it exists it wants you dead swarms of piranhas will jump out of the water to munch you or would that be a school of piranhas giant dinosaurs will surface to eat you and you even have to shoot down friggin bats oh and of course the raft can jump why couldn't it also the dude row in the raft he's going like really really fast he's barely animating though he must have some really powerful strokes seriously just look how fast they're going down this perfectly straight river i'm amazed that anything can even keep up in order to attack you what's most amazing about this segment though is that jeff goldblum himself is inside my genesis lastly we have this helicopter flight where you're carrying a captured dinosaur and everyone is trying to shoot you down because of course why wouldn't they you basically control the cursor trying to defend yourself look at the billions of pterodactyls everywhere they even reflect in the water below this one sucks to play but it looks really cool this game really surprised me by having these crazy levels in here okay this next segment is perhaps a bit sega heavy so you weirdos who only like nintendo for whatever reason may want to skip it you will be missing out on the super nintendo game though you real gamers though who like video games no matter what platform they're on well you might enjoy this next segment as much as game sack can be enjoyed anyway because well [Music] let's take a look at a few first-person shooters on the genesis starting with cybercop from virgin games because the name robocop was already taken i guess most of you know that this isn't my favorite genre but these games still do stuff that this console was absolutely not designed to do at all cybercop here is ported from a computer game called corporation and it preceded the doom craze that was still yet to come this game builds the world with polygons that have no texture and they don't move too badly the genesis certainly isn't a polygon monster there is actual sprite scaling in here though and that's nice though a little slow remember that the genesis has no hardware scaling at all so for the time this is pretty impressive i kinda sorta like the music in this game too [Music] next is zero tolerance from accolade this one features a first first-person world with a lot more detail and even moves pretty smoothly unfortunately it's all presented in a rather small window still the game plays fairly well all things considered i like how enemy blood splats stick to the wall lots of scaling stuff going on here there was an unreleased sequel to this game as well you could even link two genesis consoles together for multiplayer i'll be honest i never expected much in the way of technical proficiency in a game from accolade but hey they gave it their all in this one [Music] [Music] next is battle frenzy which is also known as bloodshot it's called battle frenzy in some regions like germany because the word blood is bad and scary the population there just isn't ready for that yet this game features a much bigger screen but with choppier motion still the graphics are pretty clean and it's fast enough to be playable i never would have thought that i'd see graphics like this on the same console that i was playing arnold palmer tournament golf on with my dad back in the day this is not a particularly enjoyable game which shouldn't be surprising it's also on the mega cd but really the only difference is that it has better music i saw on youtube years and years ago where this one idiot made a video showing off all the scaling examples from the sega cd in that video he included bloodshot yeah he thought the sega cd was responsible for the scaling what a fool that guy was be sure to go and leave a whole bunch of nasty comments on this video tell them i sent you [Music] lastly here's duke nukem 3d from tech toy which was only released in brazil this is an official port of the game and is pretty impressive even though it's rather dirty looking it's not like the actual duke nukem 3d game it's more of a straight up corridor shooter i feel that the control and design could both be much better but the fact that this screen is so large and moves this smoothly blows me away this one's pretty complex and you can even call up a wireframe rotating map as you explore it's a really impressive game for the console until you actually try to play it for yourself then you will have a big old frown on your face [Music] some of you were asking about doom for the genesis sometimes referred to as mega doom get it because it's on the mega drive this one is kind of cheating since it uses a helper chip you saw me insert a mega sd into my genesis at the beginning of this segment because i don't own a copy of cyber cop but mega doom here requires a mega everdrive inside of that is a cyclone 4 fpga and that is literally running the pc version of doom though the controls and whatnot have been adapted for the genesis it uses the mega everdrive's mega color mode which is capable of brute forcing hundreds of colors on screen simultaneously at 30 frames per second from what i read mega color is able to put 61 colors on each scan line this game doesn't quite run at 30 frames per second but it's more than playable also you'll notice this column of dots over here from what i understand when the genesis is doing this this can't be masked off by the other background layer or sprites the game plays fine but again it's [Music] cheating [Music] oh now let's talk about travelers tails for a little bit they've been known to do some pretty awesome stuff with the graphics in the 16-bit and even 32-bit eras let's start off with pugsy on the genesis which sadly is a game that i absolutely loathe it's a puzzle platformer and that's bad enough but the design and physics of this one really great on me like nothing else if you're british you'll probably like it though but there's no denying that the graphics and audio are absolutely top-notch which is often the case with games from travelers tales there are plenty of things going on here but the only one that i can really show you is this cool rotation effect on this boss here it looks pretty awesome and it's done with a combination of vertical column shifting and line scrolling i can only show you this because it's in a demo [Music] a much better game from travelers tales is mickey mania the timeless adventures of mickey mouse this is also the genesis version while the gameplay can't quite touch castle of illusion the graphics absolutely blew it away it's definitely not a bad game at all though first of all the color and the animation is outstanding especially for a rather small 16 megabit card this game goes through many different eras of mickey mouse cartoons check out the animation of this small crane that's moving mickey over even these swinging ropes kind of impress me i know big deal but these swinging chains impress me even more since they're pretty detailed how often do you see such detailed swinging things in games from this era then of course are the tower sequences you go down and around the outside of this tower and then back up a similar one later in the game the effect is obviously really cool and of course it's animated at 60 frames per second since its traveler's tails no slowdown at all i certainly can't leave out the moose chase scene this part of the game gives the ground kind of a mode 7 with a curve appearance pretty impressive even if it was on the super nintendo but this is the genesis which is a console that's 2 years older there's no fancy mode 7 capable hardware here once again it's completely running at 60 frames per second with ease oh and i absolutely love it when you entered the ghost house look at the house change perspective when you walk inside it's almost like it's a polygon it isn't of course but it kind of looks like it how are all of the effects in this game done mostly with animated background tiles imagine using precious memory for effects like these that's what i love about traveler's tales back in this era their visuals always went the extra mile one last thing i want to mention about this game is surprise surprise the parallax scrolling in this level there's three overlapping layers on the genesis which only has two hardware scrolling layers this game is definitely worth playing the sega cd version is even better with cd music and more voices this game is almost equally impressive on the super nintendo with most of the same effects in each level of course there are 64 fewer lines of horizontal resolution which makes this version cropped and stretched looking in comparison there's also an abundance of loading time this happens a lot i mean this is a cartridge game after all so we shouldn't expect instantaneous access that's just silly right a lot of people complain that the rotating tower level isn't in this version but it is it's just only at the end of the game the colors always glitch out on me here on my super nintendo this seems to be an issue with the one chip variations of the super nes i tried it with my other two super nintendos both of them much earlier revisions of the console and not the one chip and this level looked perfectly fine i tried it yet again on my one chip and yep glitchy colors again this makes me sad because the one chip version of the console generally has much sharper video quality than the earlier units i wasn't able to test this on a super nintendo junior or mini or 2 or whatever you want to call it still this game is mighty impressive on any 16-bit console yes i know there's a playstation version but that doesn't count for this episode [Music] [Music] the final travelers tales game i want to look at is sonic 3d blast on the genesis first it starts out with a pretty cool fmv pretty damned impressive once you realize that this is a cartridge game granted this one has a ton of memory at 32 megabits anyway do you think the backgrounds and axle are cool many people think these are mode 7 even in 2021 but they're not they are cool though sonic 3d blast bonus stages utilize the same effect as you race to collect enough rings to get a chaos emerald not only that but the little bridge that you're running on has some really nice scaling effects granted it's not real scaling it's only animated tiles but that's one thing you can do when your game has 32 megs to work with and the basic gameplay probably doesn't even take up half of that okay so you may be asking joe why didn't you cover toy story on the genesis and the super nintendo that does a lot of things that were crazy impressive for those platforms and what about sonic r on the saturn that did a whole bunch of things that honestly wasn't expected for the system well the answer is i didn't talk about them because i've already covered them in pushing hardware limits episodes so check out games that push hardware limits numbers three and five respectively next up i've got another genesis game from brazil and then after that a whole bunch of games on nintendo platforms but dammit i'm going to sneak in one for the sega master system as well [Music] longtime viewers know that i love voices in old cartridge games well how about show do millio on the 16-bit sega genesis and or mega drive from tech toy yes i know i probably pronounced that wrong and no i do not care this is a tv show in brazil that's similar to who wants to be a millionaire the entire game is in portuguese so i can't read the text or understand the speech but the voice quality is pretty dang good for a 16 meg genesis game there's even a second game which was released in 2002 this was the last game officially released for the console in any region it's the same game but with different questions the problem is is that the game always crashes on me after a couple of minutes i don't think it's been dumped properly [Music] i've never really given the super nintendo a ton of love when it comes to the voices time to change that right here with jurassic park 2 the chaos continues from ocean that's right this episode is games that push hardware limits jurassic park edition the opening to this game is fully voiced just like you'd expect from a cd game from the same era ingen must be eliminated i will have control of jurassic park the voices aren't quite cd quality or anything but they certainly don't sound bad especially from a cartridge game have your scientists ready to go immediately the game itself is an okay side scrolling running gun with some platforming the audio presentation here is pretty dang good all around the opening screens indicate that it's in dolby surround i may talk about dolby surround and super nintendo games more on my soundsack channel someday keep in mind i'm very very lazy go go how about star ocean also on the super nintendo this game from tri-ace and nx was only released in japan i'm playing a copy with patched english this is an rpg that's heavily influenced by star trek but of course begins in a sleepy town because it's an rpg why wouldn't it the entire opening is again voiced in english captain's law started 346 our ship has completed its mission of deep space investigation right on schedule now we're headed home it's a bit muffled and cheesy but it's still pretty awesome that they did this captain we've just picked up a huge amount of unidentified energy where this game is huge though it's one of only two games that use a special sdd-1 chip to help decompress data on the fly the other is street fighter alpha this game is 48 megabits before the decompression so that means it's the equivalent of a 96 megabit regular game with all of that i think the voices should sound a lot cleaner 346. now through an [Music] is about to unknown is it god's will or the irony of faith and still mankind makes its way where no one has gone before [Music] i've mentioned this before but there are some games like clayfighter which actually have songs with lyrics in them it's pretty limited but still cool or how about tales of fantasia which is another rpg of course only released in japan this one features a much more complex song during its opening in japanese once again i'm playing a fan translated version here it sounds much better than star ocean despite being only a wimpy 48 megabits [Music] this isn't the only japanese rpg with a song though check out down the world mervill's ambition from ascii the voices are a touch muffled but still very impressive for a cartridge game especially when you realize that this is only 16 megabits that makes it even more [Music] impressive the game seems to mostly play itself from what i've seen aside from advancing the text boxes even after 15 minutes the game had yet to hand over the control i'm not even sure if i was controlling these battles things like this can turn a person off of a genre cool song though [Music] the super nes is capable of some fantastic sound quality like this demo from blarg playing back on my console this is playing at 32 kilohertz instead of 44.1 kilohertz which is cd quality but if you're old and i know that most of you are you probably can't hear much above 16 kilohertz anymore anyway so this is basically cd quality to you this demo takes up 32 megabits but it's still fun to hear what the super nes can actually do when it's maxed out like this [Music] here's the flintstones on the original gameboy this one is based on the 1994 movie with john goodman and rick moranis i had forgotten that it even existed and i kind of wish i wasn't reminded anyway this game tries to loosely follow the movie with fred collecting bowling balls and barney collecting teddy bears fred sure looks weird in this game it doesn't look like fred flynn stone or john goodman same with barney anyway this game has some pretty kick-ass parallax scrolling almost every level features this or at least the ones that i endured anyway the scrolling here is the most impressive thing about this game and the [Music] movie sticking with the gameboy family let's check out quad desert fury on the game boy advance from the always exciting majesco games and by always exciting i mean rarely exciting here you race your atv from checkpoint to checkpoint in the desert always following the arrow to the next checkpoint this is not a good game especially because the steering controls are a touch oversensitive it's also quite easy to crash into the obstacles strewn about the landscape but hey that landscape is fully 3d and rendered entirely with voxels now just what in the hell is a voxel well to my understanding it basically is a mess of pixels but each of those pixels exists in a 3d space instead of 2d that's really the most basic way i can explain it hopefully there's a long-winded comment below explaining it in much more detail than i ever could i'd actually like to read that suffice it to say that it's another way of creating a 3d space yes it's pretty chunky looking but i do find the aesthetic kind of interesting i like to drive around the map in this game just looking at the 3d world it's certainly more fun than trying to play the game proper the sound quality here doesn't help the game but hey voxels on the game boy advance now your life is complete [Music] the final title that i want to look at today is california games on the master system now california games isn't something that's exactly renowned for its outstanding gameplay but i'll be damned if this version doesn't look outstanding for the console first of all this is one of the master system games made by mark cerny who is known for designing the vita playstation 4 and playstation 5. the effects in this game clearly got him the job at sony i'm kidding of course the master system rarely had parallax scrolling in its games and when it did it was usually reason to celebrate this frisbee throwing game is a nice example but nothing overlaps here so let's move on the roller skating portion of the game looks good as well but again no scrolling layers are actually overlapping boring but fire up the bmx sequence and damn seriously scrolling like a genesis game not only is there overlapping but there are tiered layers scrolling behind the main playfield i don't even know how they did that with animated tiles plus the detail isn't super repetitive which is usually the case when background tiles are animated it literally looks like there are two background layers here's the nes version just for comparison [Music] okay this probably isn't fair mark cerny told me that there's eight different versions of every cactus and bush in the distance and he can just slide them by on the fly so yeah animated tiles but i've just never seen it done with multiple layers of horizontal parallax like that fake second background layer back there not only that but this game features an fm soundtrack that would be heard by exactly nobody ever until emulator started incorporating that feature well over a decade after this game was released you are one smart mofo mark cerny [Music] there you go more games with impressive audio graphics and visual effects i mean games that push hardware limits anyway what are some more games that push hardware limits and what do they do that make them so impressive let me know in the meantime well thank you for watching game sack [Music] [Music] wow i'm really bored what should i do i know i'll play a trick on myself in the future oh yeah see you soon [Music] i've been in a coma for five years time to play some nintendo 64. [Music] wavery 64 my favorite i love this game what the hell what's going on i played a trick on myself didn't i i'll have to get myself back for this

Channel: Game Sack

Views: 147,168

Rating: 4.9356103 out of 5

Keywords: sega, nintendo, turbografx, gameplay, videogames, retro, genesis, snes, nes, msx, gauntlet, golden axe, jurassic park, lost world, first person shooter, doom, genesis doom, mega doom, traveller's tales, mickey mania, puggsy, tales of phantasia, game boy advance, california games, master system, mark cerny

Id: no-HGkbKxUY

Length: 32min 46sec (1966 seconds)

Published: Sat May 08 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/your-opinions-false]

This is a particularly impressive episode, especially the Sega Genesis games. I had no idea about that Lost World Jurassic Park game! Oh, and snazzy Game Sack logo transition. Don't know when that got added but I liked it here.

Joe continues to be overly self-deprecating as usual. I think it's hilarious, but I hope he doesn't actually believe what he says.

[u/KingPenguinn]

A few of the games mentioned in this, Mickey Mania and Sonic 3D Blast were worked on by Jon Burton who has a channel called Game Hut. He explains how these effects were done.

Mickey Mania 3D Rotating Tower

Mickey Mania's "Impossible" 3D Chase

Sonic 3D's scrolling

Sonic 3D Facts

Edit: Ive been informed by /u/EtherBoo that most of his content is now on Coding Secrets

[u/ZombieJesus1987]

Game Sack is a great channel to just binge on. Almost a decade worth of content and their videos are always well made.

[u/danielcube]

I was waiting for him to check out Star Ocean and Tales of Phantasia in this segment. Still suprised they put in voice work for both these games and that both series looks so different afterwards.

[u/KingGumboot]

Mickey Mania! I played the PS1 port so the impressiveness of it was lost on me, but looking back the graphics and 3D stuff in that game are amazing for the Genesis. I'll have to follow and catch up on this series

[u/yaosio]

Him talking about animated tiles reminded me of how they did lighting in Ori and The Will Of The Wisps. Instead of using traditional computer computed lighting all the lighting is handmade. https://www.thegamer.com/ori-and-the-will-of-the-wisps-artists-hand-painted-30000-light-maps/

[u/Gamer_ely]

Id recognize that Lost World boss anywhere. I played that game maybe 1000 times. It was my favorite Sega game.