Games That Push Hardware Limits Crunch 1

[Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] hello and welcome to gamestack we're talking about games that really seem to push the hardware limits of the consoles that they're on we've got 10 really good examples to show you here actually 11. we have 11 really good examples to show you here some of them are really cool others not so fun to play but they still show what the developers were able to do for these systems absolutely and as always well not as always but this time anyway i've got the first game so let's just get right to it [Music] [Applause] is red zone on the genesis i mean how could this episode not have red zone in it developed by xerx and published by time warner interactive in 1994 this game was basically made for no other reason than to push to genesis in fact the first screen you see in the game even brags about what it does as for the game itself mostly you'll find yourself flying around in a helicopter blowing things up and stuff like that this part of the game rotates the screen 360 degrees and you can fly in any direction you want yeah it looks kind of chunky but it's still pretty cool sometimes the controls on this part seem a bit sluggish but it's still quite playable you have several different missile types and you can also fire your machine gun all of your ammunition will run out so be careful on that trigger there cowboy at some points you'll land and get some information or an item from people who just happen to be camped out in a war zone you'll also have a few escort missions in this mode where you need to protect the vehicle and the people that are traveling on it but sometimes you'll get to land and run inside the buildings this right here is my favorite part of the game there's a cool sense of depth with the scrolling and i really like how you can see all the sides of the walls as you run around not only that but sometimes you can even see a floor below and even jump down to it and run around way cool these indoor missions are pretty fun but like the helicopter scenes they're also pretty tough some of the levels can be fairly long going up and down elevators and all over the place if you die you have to start all the way back at the beginning of the building but fortunately all of the enemies that you've killed stay dead and any switches you've moved or hidden obstacles that you've uncovered also stay that way the control here may not be the greatest thing in the world but it's fine it's more inadequate the music is by jesper kidd who's done the music for a bunch of assassins creed borderlands and hitman games and stuff like that most people love or hate the music here and i'll say that it's definitely an acquired taste i really do like the music when you're in the buildings running around on foot and all of the music makes great use of stereo separation [Music] overall graphic effects aside this is actually a pretty interesting game and i enjoyed playing it it's really fun to see what a developer could do with the hardware on an actual release title check it out i mean you might as well it only goes for 10 or slightly more complete [Music] street fighter alpha 2 came to the super nintendo in 1996. for some odd reason capcom went straight to alpha 2 and left alpha 1 behind and that's fine by me as i like the character roster much more in alpha 2. if you've played this game on the saturn playstation or arcade then you fully well know that there is no way this game should be able to run on the super nintendo without it exploding the good news is that it does and your super nintendo won't explode the bad news is that it has suffered a bit on the port but the fact that the game is running says quite a lot all characters are represented and even chun-li with a code you can play arcade in versus mode but taken out was training mode in survival mode once you get going and select your fighter it takes you to the stage for your first round battle the announcer starts round one and then there's a pause at first i was like did the game just freeze what the hell after a couple of seconds the battle begins believe it or not the game pauses before each battle to load all the sounds it uses a special chip called the sdd1 which decompresses graphics data on the fly the compression ratio is about two to one with this chip so that means this 32 mig card is actually closer to 64 mega power man why do i keep hearing the echo when i say that that's joe's theme anyway the result is nice as you can see each fighter has a lot of smooth animation the pause before a fight isn't really too horrible all things considered it gives you just enough time to take a quick sip of beer yes i'm looking at the positive side of this the backgrounds are all intact and look great but they're missing lots of animation let's check out dalsim's stage the elephants barely flap an ear and his wife just stands there on the super nintendo version while on the saturn the elephants have more animation and his wife is visibly distraught by the beating i'm giving her husband the music has taken a noticeable hit from the other versions as well it has a unique charm to it but i'd take the cd tunes any day i'm a fan of the super nintendo controllers so to me this game controls really well this was a noble effort by capcom to put this game on the system knowing its limitations well they did it and the system handles it well enough even though it gets absurdly hot and the plastic almost melts this is still a good port to play and it doesn't seem like they gimped it so much that it feels cheap [Music] street fighter 03 for the saturn was only released in japan this is called street fighter alpha 3 over in the us for the systems it did come out on this just may be the definitive version of this game on home consoles it uses the 4 megabyte ram expansion cartridge to store most if not all of the frames of animation from the arcade and from what i've read it's the only console port at the time to be able to claim this that's right it even has a bit more animation than the dreamcast port speaking of which this game was actually released after the dreamcast version as a fighting game it's completely badass the action is super fast and it'll really put your skills to the test well at least it did for me it often makes my thumb feel like jelly after a match but you know what i don't mind it's just so damn fun you start off being able to select from 33 characters including evil ryu and evil guile i think is in there somewhere you can select from three different fighting styles x-ism z-ism and v-ism x-ism is based on the street fighter alpha style z-ism is like street fighter alpha 2 and v-ism is more like super street fighter 2 turbo so which do i like best i honestly don't know is i'm not the world's best street fighter player or anything like that so they're all pretty much equally fun to me and this game is super fun with lots of different stages to fight through it doesn't become boring and i never find myself wishing that the last stage would just get here already like i do with some other fighting games the 2d graphics are amazing and they certainly should be on the saturn super bright colors and of course the animation is awesome as i've already mentioned the only thing that it doesn't have are the polygons that the playstation version supposedly has for some silly reason but i haven't played that particular version yet the load times are quick and the control is flawless especially with the saturn controller oh and the music absolutely rocks and it really helps drive up the intensity of the game the announcer is also overly excited and that raises my excitement too because i like that he's i'm excited that he's excited i don't know go for it man also this version has a dramatic battle mode where you fight against all of the characters with the cpu helper or you can fight against two cpu fighters simultaneously you can only control the player that you pick you can't switch to the other one or anything but it is still pretty fun what a fantastic late release for saturn owners in japan if only saturn owners everywhere else were so lucky so don't play that poopy street fighter alpha 2 on the super nintendo play this on the saturn instead shantae for the game boy color was released in 2002 which was at the very end of the system's life the game boy advance was released in 2001 so this gives you an idea of how late the game came to the market this is the story of shantae and her struggle to get a steam engine back from a female pirate called risky boots it's not often you get to play a game where you take control of a girl and have to battle another female who is the final boss for a gameboy color game this game is huge you'll be traveling through many lands in your quest i really like how everything is set up you have a town that's your hub where you heal buy items and get information all in a really unique third-person style i like this and it should be used more often by game designers when you leave town through a gate you can go to the left or right depending on which direction your quest lies let's say you're making your way to watertown along the way you'll go through fields and force until you get to your goal it really adds a nice sense of depth to the game instead of just showing up at your destination each area is loaded with platforming and enemies to kill shantae uses her hair as a weapon apparently she doesn't wash it very much because it's lethal but i'm the last person who should be talking about hair so shantae is a half genie and as everyone knows genies like to dance she'll meet other genies along the way which will teach her dances that will actually let her transform into other things like this monkey which has the ability to climb walls letting you access new areas sadly that's all she's good for because she can't fight turning shantae into other forms is interesting because it kind of turns into a rhythm game where you must input controls to the beat of music it's not a hard thing to do that's actually kind of amusing as i was playing and looking at how nice the graphics are i had to remind myself that this is a game boy color game and not a game boy advance game the smoothness in shantae's animation is amazing the effects of turning day into night and night into day is really something considering the handheld it was made for even the music is much better than the majority of the games you'll find on the portable hell it even sounds better than a lot of games on the advance this game had a production run of 15 000 copies and was released only in north america finding a copy for a decent price is going to be very hard but it's worth it to keep looking as this is one great game for the game boy color [Music] oh [Music] mega turrican for the genesis is a pretty cool game by factor 5. this is known as turrican 3 on the amiga even though it was made first on the genesis you play as a cyborg guy in a run-and-gun style game you shoot open boxes that are lying around for weapons power-ups and other goodies like that you also have a plasma rope which can lasso you up to higher places using this takes a bit of getting used to but once you do it's not too bad you can also turn into a ball and leave bombs on the ground very similar to metroid of course the main problem with the turrican series is that you can't shoot upwards and you want to so bad so very very badly but nope your arm just doesn't bend in that direction unless of course you're holding the lasso what the hell come on i want to shoot up so it's a good game but it's not necessarily a great game but this episode is about games that push the limit not about which games are the best games ever and this game does quite a lot on the genesis for the time and it doesn't even have an excessive amount of memory helping it or anything only eight migs hell even the box tells you that it pushes the system's capabilities to its limits you've got nice detailed graphics with good parallax scrolling you've got some cool scaling of certain enemies some enemies even have rotation and it looks great hell it even does that thing that the super nintendo loves to do where the graphics get all blocky and low resolution why don't games do this anymore it's only like the best effect ever i kid i'm kidding it's actually one of my least favorite effects and i don't think it's very impressive but still it's here there's even some creepy stretching during the alien stage as well this stage pisses me off by the way all of the other stages up to this point are fairly short and full of fast action but this one sure isn't you have to take your sweet ass time using the rope to work your way towards the exit once you get there you find yourself on top of a train like thing trying to stay alive while still fighting aliens get past that and you're back in the alien caverns again anyway the control works most of the time but often i felt that the game just wasn't reacting fast enough this usually had to do with detaching my plasma rope from a surface while also trying to defend myself from enemies the game is fun but it's turrican i mean how great can it really be you still fight a giant hand but at least it has some variety and some really nice aesthetics speaking of which the music is fantastic it features many of the same tunes by chris huelsbeck that you may have heard in the super nintendo versions but everything sounds absolutely fantastic here no twangy thin poorly programmed fm no muffled staccato instruments with excessive reverb just pure audio goodness believe it or not this game almost went unreleased until data east picked it up it was also never released in japan it's definitely a game that's worth having [Music] [Music] are we at the halfway point already apparently we are crap this episode's going by quickly yeah oh man i played some really awesome games so far and uh the ones that you played aren't too shabby either yeah i was surprised you didn't mention it the enchante when they're like in the indoor level sometimes it has the multi-layer scrolling which i thought was pretty cool yeah that really is cool i mean there's so much stuff going on in that game that may i probably just fail to notice it i don't really think you notice stuff like that anyway we've got more games to cover so you've got the next one so let's just get right on to it all right [Music] gran turismo 2 for the playstation was released in 1999 there were over 9.3 million copies of this game sold worldwide so if you haven't played a gran turismo game then where the hell have you been as you know gran turismo 2 is a simulation racing game the game comes on two discs the first disc is titled simulation mode and the second disc is titled arcade mode i really got my hopes up for the arcade mode disc because i really like arcade racing games and when i say arcade style racing games i mean games that let you race at ludicrous speeds power slide around corners and let you race on fun imaginary tracks check out our old video on outrun as that is probably the best arcade style racer ever anyways when i popped in the arcade disc and started playing i was fairly sad the only arcade thing about this disc is that you can pick your car and what license you want to race and what track once you start racing it's back to the same old boring simulation style racing nothing fun or exciting happened so i didn't play it for very long the simulation disc is just that it's a fairly deep simulation mode where you buy your cars and to start out you don't have much money so you have to buy a used car sweet after that you can start earning your b-class license by doing super fun things like going slightly fast and then stopping after going 1 000 yards somebody please splash water in my face because i'm about to faint from all this excitement after you pass tin test you get your b license and you can enter races with your new used car this is where you earn money to buy more cars for your garage after a couple of hours of play you might be able to buy a new car something real sporty like a toyota sedan family car awesome do you see why i don't like simulation games like this they're very slow to get anywhere and i would rather just jump into a fantasy racing world and have lots of fun this game to me just isn't fun but the main reason i'm talking about gran turismo too is that the game really pushed the playstation to its limits all the car models look really nice with lots of detail true to the real deal they even added a nice reflection effect to the car so that it looks like the real world around is reflecting off the windows and paint it's not accurate but it does look believable racing with all these highly detailed cars causes no slowdown that i've seen after each race is over you can watch a fairly entertaining replay video of your race that's done with in-game graphics and it all looks really cool with multiple camera angles as boring as this game is for me i still like how the game looks and how smoothly it runs i admire polyphony digital for what they've accomplished with this game even though it's not a game i really enjoy playing [Music] cosmic epsilon for the famicom is a game by azmik that kinda plays like space harrier of course that right there alone warns me giving the game a try you fly forward into the screen and blast down enemies just like space harrier but what's really cool about this one is the movement of the floor it may not seem like that much these days but for the nes it's pretty damned impressive it's actually like a primitive mode 7. the perspective and the movement are both correct and you really don't see that often even in 16-bit games well except for the aforementioned mode 7 on the super nintendo the enemies all move around quickly and smoothly as well this game uses an mmc3 basically this chip allows up to four megabits in overall size and slightly more ram however this game is only three migs now while the graphics are really impressive for the time the gameplay really isn't it's nowhere near as good as space harrier and it's really easy to get hit and lose a life because you can't tell how close enemy fire is to you in fact sometimes i even die without ever seeing what hit me often you'll transform into a spaceship and fly above the planet and do battle there these stages aren't that impressive and are actually kind of boring not that the other stages are exploding with fun or anything a lot of the music sounds like it's coming from the sega master system with that distinct high-pitched psg type of sound this is an interesting game but i can only recommend it for the graphical effects i can totally understand why it was never released here [Music] okay this review was fairly short so let's take a quick look at another nes game that's right sesame street countdown in this game you guide the count and you need to find all the numbers he tells you to find so if you pick seven you gotta find everything that's seven now why the hell am i talking about this game well honestly because the quality of the digitized voices here are amazing got it granted he's kind of slow piecing his sentences together but the playback quality is second to none on an 8-bit system find four sometimes you go into bonus areas to find numbers here i try to put seven things in the barrel since i'm after all things seven no that's three crap i was supposed to have seven things in the glass instead of in the barrel now i feel like an idiot what's cool about this game is that i learned to count to ten which is this much more than dave can count to so have you ever heard voice quality this good or better in an 8-bit game let me know because i want to hear them too [Music] that's eight find seven [Music] summer carnival 92 rekka is a shooter for the famicom that was made for a competition in the year of 1992. duh as i booted up this game i was thinking that being on the famicom it would be pretty tame i'm used to shooters on this system only having a handful of enemies on screen at best and maybe one or two power-ups with tons of slowdown then i went and hit start and was pretty much blown right out of my chair it only takes a couple of seconds of gameplay before you realize that something amazing is happening here right from the beginning of the game enemies come streaming at you it's a relentless armada of ships all help in on killing you basically by running into you or creating enough confusion so that you'll run into them luckily your ship can be powered up there is no lack of power up icons and it seems that they're constantly all over the screen it's the type of icon that flashes different letters letting you know what weapon you'll gain from picking it up so as you're killing and evading hundreds of enemy ships you're also watching this icon cycle through its letters just waiting for the one you want most of the weapons are good and they can all be powered up by collecting more of the same letter there are other icons that appear as well one is a secondary weapon that actually just stays really close to your ship i'm guessing that it's supposed to be a shield of some sort it didn't work well for me and i died a lot then finally there are some bland blue icons that just give you points if you're daring enough and stop firing your primary shot it will build up after five seconds or so and you can unleash a bomb that will devastate a lot of enemies in a small area the problem is that there's so many waves of enemies coming at you that you have no time to build this thing up the only time i found it really useful is when i was fighting a boss as the boss appeared on screen i was charging that thing up and it was great for the first couple of hits the game is very addictive and i found myself always wanting to try harder and get further but it's just insane at least it has some enjoyable music as i lay waste to lots of enemies and adds an extra level to the gameplay supposedly you can play 4 samples at one time i still can't believe that the famicom was able to handle so many sprites and effects on screen all the time without any slowdown there is a bit of sprite flicker here and there but it's just an amazing accomplishment by the game developers [Music] alien soldier on the mega drive is a run and gun game from treasure it was never released in north america for the genesis unfortunately this really is the action game to end all action games it even warns you how much it pushes the system on the title screen visual shot speed shot sound shock now is the time to the 68 000 heart on fire hell yeah you know it's going to be good anyway the story is about a human who obtained supremacy over a earth and eventually planned to assassinate epsilon eagle but zytiger was much confused so the boy converted his body into epsilon who uh hell i don't know what the hell's going on here you just need to know that you're playing as the birdman and saving the entire human race and probably the bird race too this really is a boss rush game mainly it almost seems like there's more bosses than regular enemies there are 25 stages in all it's a tough game and you'll likely hate it initially because it doesn't give you much of a chance if you don't know what you're doing but once you do figure things out you are good to go there's unlimited continues and a password feature so you can keep trying until you get past the stage that's giving you trouble at least on super easy mode and you only have super easy and super hard to choose from there's no super normal difficulty at the beginning of each game you select four out of the six available weapons to take with you and you can choose one of over 20 different menu types for whatever reason but the weapons do not have unlimited ammo some weapons like this fire blaster thing run out of juice really quick but it's also one of the strongest weapons you can obtain more power for your weapons if you pick up an icon that matches the one you're currently using but watch out if you pick up the wrong icon your weapon that you're using will turn into that one you can shoot the weapon icon so that they become the weapon you're using so you don't have to wait around for them to cycle while the game initially feels kind of similar to gun star heroes it certainly doesn't control as well and your character's giant size does not help things either that said it's certainly not horrible and you can change the shot mode on the fly so that you can move while shooting or you can lock yourself in place if that's what you want you can jump and hover and sometimes this is needed to stay out of harm's way you can even walk on ceilings but the move that you need to master right away is the dash this lets you bolt your ass to the other side of the screen through enemies without taking any damage if you don't do this i'd be surprised if you could even get past stage one or two intact when your life is full this move even becomes an attack another thing to be aware of is that some weapons don't really work against many of the bosses but yeah this game plays super fast and rarely ever has any slowdown there's almost always a ton of action going on on the screen the graphics are drawn really well and some of the bosses can look pretty bizarre there's also lots of cool effects in the game for your eyeballs to enjoy the sound is also really good the music sounds a lot like gunstar heroes and that's not a bad thing it even pays homage to that game by lifting a tune from it [Music] and is it paying homage to contra hardcore here it kind of looks like one of the characters this is another very technically impressive game but we'll save that one for next time everything about alien soldier is pretty damn kick-ass i don't know why it never came out here in north america but i'll just assume that sega management was being their normal stupid selves in order to play this game you'll need a japanese mega drive or a genesis with a region switch or you might be able to bypass the region lockout with the game genie check it out you won't be playing anything like this on any other 16-bit system only the genesis can the 68 000 hard on fire [Music] batman revenge of the joker on the nes is a really fun action platformer that came out in 1991. i was very surprised at what i saw when i booted up this game and started playing at first glance you might find yourself wondering if this is actually the nes it really almost looks like an early 16-bit title just look at the first level four layers of parallax scrolling you didn't often see this kind of stuff on the nes it's very nice and really gives this level a lot of depth this game uses a custom sunsoft chip that's also in gremlins 2 and mr gimmick though the chip doesn't have the extra audio channel that gimmick does the game boasts large character and enemy sprites with little to no slowdown and they look great speaking of looking great check out the great use of color in this game everything has a very rich feel to it with lots of dark areas contrasted by really bright colors this is one of the cleanest looking games i've ever seen on the nes granted i'm playing it with s video here but it truly is amazing to watch this game running on my nes so besides the technical achievements there's also a gameplay side for the most part the game plays very well batman controls well but not perfect i found one little animation that drove me a bit nuts you see when you want batman to stop after walking he doesn't stop on a dime in fact he does this little sliding stop and it can get you into trouble and a lot of times you'll even die because of it like here where i was just trying to get to the edge of this pit other than that i really don't have any more complaints about this game the levels are all laid out really well and the platforming is fun and can be challenging at times there's a few cheap spots like having to jump across this broken bridge and an enemy is just waiting off screen to kill you oh well thanks to unlimited continues i'm not really worried about it batman can only use one weapon at a time but he has several weapons he can choose from by collecting icons you pick your desired weapon by shooting the weapon icon don't wait too long to choose because it only stays there for what seems like five seconds or so each weapon can have a powered up shot by holding down the shot button in my opinion the weapon that corresponds with the letter c is the best the music is definitely sense off and you know right away that's usually a good thing from the moment i heard it in the first level it just had that trademark sunsoft sound and feel to it it's not their best soundtrack but it's strong enough to hold its own all in all this is a great game by sunsoft and really a testament to what the nes was capable of [Music] and there you go 11 amazing games that you would have never thought possible had you bought these consoles when they first came out but they are possible they are we showed them they're good games well most of them don't ever touch me again anyways those are 11 totally awesome games like joe said you know a lot of them were fun to play some of them not so much but at least we were able to see what the developers were capable of yeah it was kind of interesting like i think most of yours came out towards the end of the systems live yeah to say almost all of them yeah and well i think mega turrican came out kind of in the middle of genesis life i don't know when the nes games they talked about really came out but anyway what games do you think push some consoles what what should we look at the next time yeah there's tons of ideas i'm sure yeah yeah and let us know and in the meantime thank you for watching gamesec [Music] all right joe you stupid sega fan boy i'm here to prove to you that the super nintendo is just as fast as the genesis and blast processing that's just a myth check this out that's sonic the hedgehog how is the super nintendo doing that it's doing it man blast processing is just a myth the super nintendo's running this just as fast if not even faster than sega well you think that's awesome the genesis can do anything and everything that the super nintendo can check this out what is that granny's three you bet it is and it's running every bit as slow as it does on the super nintendo if not even slower that is awesome so slow [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] hello and welcome to game sack once again we're talking about games that push the limits of the hardware that they're running on that's right a lot of uh you had some really good suggestions last time of course we've taken those to heart and we're going to show you a lot more of examples of developers really taking advantage of a system yeah and i guess i've got the first game this time so let's just get right into it because we've got a lot [Music] in 1993 gunstar heroes was released on the genesis this was the very first game by treasure treasure was a new company made up of ex-konami employees who left because they were sick of making the sequels and other such things that konami wanted him to do and their first outing was really impressive gun star heroes is a run and gun with tons of frenetic action and lots of stuff on screen it's also very colorful and has a bunch of multi-segmented bosses and mid bosses everyone who's played this remembers sevenforce the boss of stage two that transforms into seven different things this entire game was showing people what the genesis could really do and to top it all off it's a fantastic game that's very enjoyable with a great soundtrack as well [Music] this game must have made an impression on konami because a year later they released contra hardcore also on the genesis this one is super tough in fact it makes contra 3 seem like a wimpy kids game as you play this it feels like konami had something to prove it's like they were saying we can still make these kick-ass games without those dirty employees who've left us and as you can see the action is fast and wild just like gun star heroes if not even more so there's tons of sprites on screen and lots of bosses with multi-segmented joints and whatnot it was almost like they were trying to out-treasure treasure there's even a version of seven force here though he doesn't change into seven different things but he changes into enough to bear more than just a passing similarity you also get to make choices during the game and you see different stages and endings depending on what you choose there's lots of stuff to see the overall graphics here aren't as good as gun star heroes and neither is the soundtrack i still think this dinosaur looks stupid die you stupid looking thing and i do like some of the music don't get me wrong it's just not quite as memorable as gun star heroes but make no mistake these are two kick ass run and guns [Music] [Music] i own a few ps2 games that push the limits of the hardware pretty well firstly let's take a look at shadow of the colossus which is a spiritual sequel to eco or ico depending on where you come from this game made full use of the ps2 with this large overworld where you could seemingly ride your horse forever now i know it's not the most lush world out there but it's a large one and it goes on for a very long time that was really cool but of course the best and most impressive part of the game were the colossi or colossus is their name was perfect as they were absolutely huge as far as the story goes you're supposed to kill these things to bring back your lover from the dead killing them is no small task as first you need to figure out how to get on one of these things and they're all different in that matter once you get on one you must find his weak point by climbing and traversing his hulking body the physics were great because as you climb the colossus they would shake and it would be very realistic trying to hold on to their hair of course there are some spots with slowdown sure but the system was handling it as well as it could and it did it all in 480p and 16x9 widescreen as well it's just a great game all around and i will eventually do a proper review of it in the future [Music] another ps2 game that really pushes this system is god of war 2. this is easily one of my favorite ps2 games i love everything about this game from the story to the action god of war 1 did some great things on the system but god of war 2 does it all even better this game had some really amazing lighting effects that you might not have seen before it also had large maps and huge animated set pieces i seriously can't believe how large some of these areas are and look at the size of these horses all this and the game barely slowed down and this was done with lots of background animation to boot the only real problem it has is a fair amount of screen tearing but that's forgivable due to the magnitude of this game and again it's in 480p and 16x9 widescreen which really makes it even more awesome and impressive rendering ranger r2 for the super famicom came out only in japan when you first start playing it it seems like a blatant turret can rip off and let's face it it is well actually it isn't because this was made by manfred trans who also did the turrican games but what's pretty damned impressive is how well everything handles and how fast everything can move there's usually a ton of stuff on screen and there's no slowdown at all this proves that the super nintendo can run a fast paced action game without issues it's all up to the developer anyway as you make your way through the game and reach the end of stage two you board a craft and take off for the sky now suddenly you're playing a horizontal shooter fortunately you have the same exact weapons as you do in turrican mode but you can also get an extension which grants you two satellites which also fire like the turrican parts the shooting action is fast and intense with only a trace of flicker and it plays fairly well too it does seem however that the game puts more emphasis on the shooting segments than the turrican parts the graphics usually have at least three layers of overlapping parallax and there's even a bit of mode 7 here as well i think the graphics could have been designed to look a little bit nicer but they still don't disappoint this game really pushes the system to its limits because when i was fighting this boss it crashed why did it have to crash on that boring horn sound oh well be sure to get your allowance from your parents and pick this one up because it only cost 1 500 or so maybe trade some beanie babies towards it or something [Music] [Music] how about resident evil 2 on the nintendo 64. this was originally released on the playstation as a two disc game and here we have it on a single cartridge granted that cartridge is 64 megabytes or in video game marketing terms wait for it 512 mega power so clearly they had to make a ton of compromises right well not as many as you might think the majority if not all of the voice and even the fmv cutscenes are here yeah the video quality has been gimped a little bit as has the sound quality but it's still perfectly acceptable for a cartridge game from this time period in fact it's damned amazing that the video scenes are even here at all how's the game itself well it's pretty damn good i highly recommend using the d-pad to control your movement instead of the analog stick because the game has those tank controls and using the d-pad just makes them easier to deal with the in-game graphics compare pretty well to the playstation it likes to switch between 240p and 480i a lot so it seems like they increased the resolution to touch in some scenes the creepy music sounds pretty good and not wishy-washy like some of the voices do you might also appreciate not having to switch discs in the middle of your adventure so we all know resident evil 2 is a hell of a fantastic game but is this the best version no but it's certainly the best cartridge version and you shouldn't feel bad for playing it it is damn addictive yeah i'll come back to finish you off later check this game out it kicks ass [Music] kirby's adventure for the nes is a great example of a game that pushed the system to its limits this was one of the last games to be released for the system in 1993 as a lot of people had moved on to the super nes which came out in 1991. oh and it's one of the biggest games for this system coming in at a whopping 6 megabits so what makes this game so great well obviously the graphics this game is loaded with really nice looking stages that are all filled with beautiful art and color so yeah that's nice and all put look at what the nes is doing here i don't ever remember seeing any other nds game doing this and look at this four layers of parallax scrolling here and nothing is slowing down and to top it all off kirby and all the other characters have really smooth animation with little to no sprite flicker what a great game [Music] super mario brothers 3 was another game that i feel took advantage of the hardware it's a really fun game with beautiful graphics that could almost pass for an early super nintendo game it also ran very smooth without any slow down a few of the most notable areas in this game are in world 4. the nes was put to the test with all these large sprites on screen and it handled it with no problems bowser's airships were also impressive with the amount of crap flying around the screen at one time it's easy to see why this game sold over 17 million copies no it wasn't because of the movie the wizard it was because it's just an amazing game [Music] i've always kind of liked tekken and tekken 3 on the original playstation is pretty awesome basically you have a button for each and every limb well your arms and your legs anyway there's lots of polygon pushing going on here all things considered you've got two fighters on screen each with quite a bit of detail there's also the floor in the backgrounds and although they're simple they still look good all of this is moving at a blistering 60 frames per second and that's why it doesn't look like i'm doing very well here all the blisters the game runs in an interlaced mode but it's not true high resolution like say tobal number two on the same system why they did this i do not know but whatever there's no slowdown at all and everything is extremely responsive i always liked how tekken wasn't overly complicated didn't try to be realistic and certainly didn't take itself seriously i mean where else can you give pandas what they truly deserve i'm glad i picked this one up back in the day used of course [Music] similarly tekken 5 on the playstation 2 looks pretty damn good for the system the jumping quality is obvious and namco has always been pretty good about pushing the systems that they make games for the fighters all look fantastic with lots of detail the backgrounds are even better once again everything moves at a mind-numbing 60 frames per second well the brain doesn't have any nerve endings so i guess that's okay yeah i know that was a dumb joke so plenty of other games on the ps2 look pretty damn good and move fast but most of them don't run a 16x9 widescreen and 480p progressive scan like this one does in fact most ps2 games whimp out and run in interlaced mode which requires fewer system resources but not this one overall this is a good game and a great package with lots of extras [Music] all right guys we're off to a great start and are you feeling threatened by the power that these games are showing off on their respective systems i know i'm not well actually i'm pretty impressed i am so so let's keep going let's talk about some n64 you more n64k [Music] if you couldn't tell this is conker's bad fur day for the n64 i absolutely love this game i laugh out loud at a lot of the dialogue all throughout the story is just that funny have you ever sat on a piece of gothic architecture for 200 years gets right up your ass you know it has tons of great characters that are really easy to get into and enjoy it's on this episode for many reasons firstly you'll notice the rich environment of the game it's very colorful and has a lot of great looking textures then you'll notice that it doesn't look like it's stuck in a fog bank when the majority of the games for the n64 look like they take place in silent hill and conker doesn't then you know that rare is pushing the system's potential the game also has two hours of real-time cussing and at least that much in dialogue this is a quality title that does have moments of slowdown but overall it's just overflowing with visual and aural greatness [Music] f0x is another great game for the n64 i've had many hours of fun playing this game through and through it's a great continuation of the series that looks great and sounds even better with one of the best soundtracks for the n64 period now looking at this game you would think what's so great about it well look again and think of what the n64 must do to have 30 racers on track going at blistering speeds the system has no problems keeping up and everything runs at 60 frames per second it's unwavering in its speed and frame rate every track is fast and fun then sega came along and made the game almost impossible to win but we'll save that for another review [Music] [Music] let's step up to the gamecube and look at rogue squadron 2. this was an amazing game for the time especially since it's a launch game i originally thought it was amazing because it's such a huge leap graphically from the n64 to the gamecube but as i went back and started playing it again for this episode the game still looks amazing today factor v is a very talented developer and it shows in all of their games just looking at this one you can see the gamecube is working hard it has a lot of great lighting all throughout the game very detailed levels and tons of stuff on screen at times it gets a bit confusing with everything going on at once and it almost feels chaotic but it's all very beautiful and not a bit of slowdown and we also get treated to 480p visuals if you have the super expensive component cables or a wii it also has some cool dolby prologic 2 surround which puts sounds all around you to have this kind of quality at the launch of his system almost spoiled me for what was to come throughout the years and this game still holds up in every respect atsds are heading toward the ion cannon stop them yes sir attacking the walkers ever since i heard the voices in the master system version of space harrier i have always been fascinated with digitized voice get ready yeah i know i'm weird but i like being weird the master system didn't do a lot of voices but it did have a few good ones in games like world-class leaderboard can't be too happy about that robocop vs terminator had some good ones as well thank you for your cooperation and damn is this game bloody for an 8-bit game the nes has a few games with really impressive voices i covered one in the last episode we did on the subject but here's two more the first one is called scat yeah i know when you press start at the title screen you hear this you must destroy them the earth is counting on you good luck that's pretty damn cool the game itself is fairly cool as well as it's a shooter kind of like forgotten worlds we'll cover it more in depth someday i'm sure a lot of you recommended wcw world championship wrestling it's pretty impressive just listen to the title screen world championship reckless the game itself is awful though i never felt like i had any control over my character whatsoever i checked and yep my controller was indeed plugged in games like this totally turned me off wrestling game so i just never played them but i hear the nintendo 64 has the best wrestling game so maybe i'll give a few of those a shot the genesis is known for having some pretty crappy voice quality but this wasn't always the case let's listen to a few examples of when developers knew their head from their ass and did things right like task force harrier which is a cool little vertical shooter direct hit target destroyed yeah it talks real good nice and clear even early games like could sound good mission completed or how about even earlier with space harrier 2. get ready or mega turrican presented by data east dynamite heady had some really good ones as well you've got a secret bonus point i cannot believe it and somehow we always manage to find a reason to talk about the horrible strider returns but it has some pretty kick-ass voices here and there tomorrow is the day you die i have you now live for me don't die strider on the internet the super nintendo is known for having absolutely perfect sound that's better than real life with no flaws whatsoever none of course that's not quite true but here are some games where the voices stand out here's star ocean which of course never came out over here it has a lot of voice in the opening scene though it's all extremely muffled in a very low quality but it's still really cool that the scene is played out entirely with voices our ship has completed its mission of deep space investigation right on schedule now we're headed home would you like some coffee captain yes i'd like that captain we've just picked up a huge amount of unidentified energy where mark 301.209 in sector gamma there's a new section get it on the screen even more impressive is tales of fantasia this is an rpg that also never left japan by wolf team or rather what became of wolf team this was the first game in the tales franchise it's a pretty cool rpg and i like it because the battles are quick and so is everything else but what's really interesting is that there's a full opening song with japanese lyrics [Music] [Music] that's pretty damned awesome that they were able to do this i think hell it's worth learning japanese just so you can sing along with your super nintendo [Music] and let's not forget the mighty turbografx 16. this is a system that was not really known for voices and sampled sound at all but there are a few good ones here and there like taito chase hq this is nancy at safe headquarters we've got an emergency here got you nancy the game itself is kind of choppy but it's playable or how about champions forever boxing this one has lots of voices and sampled sounds [Music] in fact every sound this game makes from the effects to the music is all digitized and they all play without cutting off the other sounds that are going on the game itself is pretty weak but at least it feels like i'm somewhat controlling it how hard can you hit and finally street fighter 2 which of course never left japan on the system also has some of its clearest voices they're not as reverb or as muffled as a super nintendo version and they're much smoother than the genesis version but they lack the lower frequencies of both of them so they sound kind of thin tiger uppercut tiger upward tiger uppercut also in case you didn't know this is a fantastic version of the game [Music] the game boy had quite a few games that pushed the system to its limits first let's look at race driving i left when i originally heard that this game was released for the game boy i thought it wouldn't be able to pull off polygons but i was wrong here's the proof and the game actually plays fairly well once you get used to the slow frame rate but for as slow as it runs it runs fairly smooth if that makes sense another thing that takes getting used to are the black and white graphics most of the time you won't have any problems deciphering what's going on here but on occasion your eyes will get fooled and you'll run off the track as stripped down as this version is it's fairly impressive to see it running here i've never been a fan of the series but this was very interesting to play or how about dragon's lair for the game boy color as you can see the game holds very true to its arcade counterpart the game has fluid animation even though capcom had to take out a lot of frames the graphics were minimized but still look really nice and i mean this is the game boy color we're talking about here the control is very responsive and all this wrapped up makes for a great experience the only department that took a hit was the audio capcom did what they could but is kind of [Music] lacking another game that you might have never thought to have seen on the game boy is faceball 2000. yep this game made an appearance on this system and it's in 3d while it moves pretty slow and clunky it's still pretty interesting to see that it's running this game one cool feature is that you can link up 16 game boys and 16 cards for some awesome 16 player battles sadly i bet fewer than 16 copies were ever sold so that feature was wasted [Music] and finally this is zas it's a japan only shooter by t soft yeah the guys that made golf games think you can get it inside mine this is a fun game with some great music the thing that makes this game so great is the very detailed graphics that are on screen at all times plus the game has some nice parallax scrolling that gives it a lot of depth with little to no slow down the boss sprites are big anime fluidly and are very detailed this is a great shooter for the game boy [Music] all right let's look at gran turismo 4 on the playstation 2. this one offers fantastic looking car models amazingly detailed tracks all running at an eye-popping 60 frames per second that sounds painful but what makes gran turismo 4 stand out is that it can run in 1080i hd and that's what you're looking at here can you tell the system was not originally designed to do this like the first xbox was but it maintains its speed and control at this resolution honestly though i would have rather had 720p there are two resolutions i hate 480i and 1080i because they interlace and interlacing is for losers now i'm sure a lot of you probably wonder what the hell is interlacing basically in interlaced mode the screen is drawn in half frames known as fields so a 1080i image will draw a 540 line image for the first field and another 540 line image for the next and with a game that runs at 60 different images per second each of those fields are different moments in time the result is an image that doesn't look as stable or as crisp as a true progressive image and it also runs at half the bandwidth a progressive scan image is drawn all at once at full resolution each and every time interlacing has absolutely no right to exist anymore as a video editor in the real world i hate it more than most people reasonably might but come on nobody actually likes interlacing anyway a lot of people say that the 1080i mode in this game is simply the 480p image upscaled and yes the game does offer a 480p mode as well and that's what we're looking at right here here's the 1080i of the same thing and here they are both together can you tell a difference the 1080i is actually a little better but it's not like a super amazing difference or anything here's some more examples [Applause] one thing that's annoying about this game is that regardless whether you have it set to 480p or 1080i the title screen on the menus always drop back to 480i standard definition so it's constantly switching resolutions back and forth the game can't even make up his mind as for the game itself i can tolerate gran turismo more than dave can but that doesn't mean i get a whole lot of enjoyment out of it but if you do that's fine whatever i'm just telling you that i don't there are some other games on the system that can run in 1080i the same way like valkyrie profile 2 jackass the game of all things and tourist trophy interlacing may suck but i still think it's awesome that they were able to do this [Music] here's star fox for the snes yes i realize that a lot of you are thinking this is cheating since the system is having help via the super fx chip in the cartridge well it might be and i'm going to talk about star fox anyways and a few other games that use the fx chip the reality is that the snes couldn't do these games without the chip but you have to admit that it's pretty impressive to see these games running on the system star fox is easily the most memorable game that uses the fx chip granted the arwing and enemy ships aren't impressive to look at with their single shaded polygons nintendo and argonauts still manage to make a very fun and immersive game to play and it has a lot of replay value star fox is a classic and always will be even if you can beat the game in under 30 minutes the next game i want to mention is doom i actually thought this port of the game was pretty well done well the graphics aren't great they're good enough and all the walls have textures which gives that game the added believability i'm very impressed by how smooth the game runs and i'm also very impressed by the controls they're very precise and the game lets you use shoulder buttons to strafe this is definitely a very playable version of doom and i'd recommend it to any snes collector out there [Music] there's also stunt race effects this is kind of a guilty pleasure of mine hey if joe can like hard driving i can like this and not feel bad i don't want to like this game because it's so damn ugly i mean look at this all the car models are ugly and half the time when you're racing you almost feel like you're guessing at which way the track is going since it's so hard to make out what's going on but with all that it has a certain charm to it and it just seems fun the atmosphere of each track is cool and you'll be racing through a glass raceway underwater to a city at night in the boot there's a lot of good music here that's very catchy like i said it's a guilty pleasure of a mind so don't make fun please [Music] [Music] yoshi's island is one of my favorite mario games i love almost everything about this game except for one thing i'll bet you can easily guess what that one thing is yep making baby mario cry other than that this is one incredible experience the game uses a super fx 2 chip and it shows all throughout the game besides the beautiful graphics where the foreground and background are pretty much alive with motion you have lots of little details sprites can rotate and scale very smoothly and if you know anything about the super nes hardware you know that it can't scale and rotate sprites the super fx2 chip takes care of all that here the bosses are huge and take up most of the screen and the game rarely slows down who needed a 32-bit system when you had games like this around well okay 32-bit systems were cool but seeing innovation like this on a 16-bit system was just awesome [Music] and there you go there's a bunch more games for you that you just would not believe that are running on the systems that they actually are wow and you know what i'm surprised we fit all of those games in this episode that was a chunk well we got another episode that have a whole bunch more that we did a while back check them all out and let us know if we missed any or any that you think push the limits of the system that they run on yeah and we'll verify it and maybe include them in episode three yeah and in the meantime thank you for watching game sack he's got a heart attack doing this episode [Music] all right slaves time to entertain me where did my video game systems go your job is to entertain me on my demand where did you go get back here i need to be entertained right now [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] hello and welcome to game sack once again we're talking about some games that push the limits of the hardware that they run on yeah these are all these really fun episodes to do it's always cool to see how good a developer is with the system and what a system is actually capable of doing exactly that's always fun to see yeah so instead of talking some more why don't we just let you go because i think you've got the first game indeed [Music] f-zero gx on the nintendo gamecube from sega is something that still impresses me to this day this is the third proper game in the series if you don't count the super famicom satellite in the game boy advance games the premise is simple is the post apocalyptic future and therefore you must race and of course you've gotta win it follows the same rules and builds upon what was established in the original and also f0x on the nintendo 64. you've got an anti-gravity vehicle that sticks to the track but it can't fly through the air on its own you have many different cups to compete in all with their own tracks so what sets this one apart technically well just look at it it's running in 480p otherwise known as progressive scan but then again a lot of other games back then also did this however it's also running in proper widescreen which was definitely less common it's an anamorphic image and basically what that means is that it's natively squished and you need to unsquish it with your tv for it to look right it's full vertical resolution not letterboxed like for resident evil on the same system i mean that's what it's called right for resident evil anyway this one cheats at being widescreen is you have to zoom the entire picture in and you lose vertical resolution but f zero gx does it properly and it looks much better as a result and what's more is that the game runs at 60 frames per second and that's all well and good but just look at the crazy pace that this game runs at it's insanely fast there's 40 racers total and not once will you encounter slow down or dropped frames this game is insane sometimes you don't even know what the hell is going on and you can't believe you even survived what just happened it's definitely not for those with slow reaction speeds and along with all of this the graphics look very good even when the game is paused they didn't skimp on the details here and even the draw distance is pretty damn good i'm really glad that nintendo had sega make this game for them if nintendo had made it themselves it would not have been in widescreen here's a fact nintendo themselves never programmed a single game for the gamecube in widescreen on top of all this you have an extremely good game that's tons of fun to play yeah it can get pretty tough at times and you have to keep at it to get good but it's totally entertaining along the way oh and the music is excellent too i hope f-zero isn't dead but if it is it really went out on top [Music] here's the world driver championship for the nintendo 64. this is a simulation racing game developed by boss studios and published by midway due to cartridge limitations this game couldn't compete with other racing sims like gran turismo while that game had a ton of licensed cars tracks and music this game had none of that well let me restate that while nothing here is officially licensed if you look closely enough at the car models you can tell what they're supposed to be like look at this car here in the game is called a ram venom but if you know what you're looking at it's easy to see that it's a dodge viper so they were able to get away with very very similar cars by calling them a different name in the end it didn't matter because as i played this game no matter what car i chose i couldn't do much with it the controls are so freaking floaty that frustration sets in almost immediately i gave the game an honest chance and raised quite a bit but i never got the hang of the controls on straightaways it felt as if a strong wind was pushing me from the sides going around corners if i didn't spin out i felt very lucky and yes i did slow down to take the corners at normal speed i even tried drifting and i still spun out i've heard that once you unlock higher level cars the controls become easier call me crazy but the company should have made the cars easier to control right away this would have actually let me enjoy the game instead of becoming frustrated anyway i'm not here to talk about how annoyed i am or how much i don't like the gameplay i'm actually doing this to show you how impressive this game is in the visual department first off the game is playable in letterbox and this mode runs in high res at 480i if you choose this mode the entire game including menus will be interlaced it doesn't even require the expansion pack which is pretty impressive if you play it in low-res mode you'll be playing in a sweet-ass 240p this mode takes up the full height of your screen and will flip back to interlace mode for the menus one thing that's neat which joe pointed out is the lens flares yeah yeah big deal so the sun gets in your eyes who likes that joe jeez but in the low res mode they're circular as if the scene is being shot with a spherical lens in the hi-res widescreen mode the lens flares are stretched into ovals as if the scene was shot with an anamorphic lens joe says you can notice this on movies as well and see what kind of lenses they use simply by the shape of the lens flares i guess it doesn't take much to excite joe does it but one thing i did notice was the lack of fog if you've played a lot of n64 games like i have then you've also noticed that the vast majority of them have plenty of fog to hide the short draw distances this played so many n64 games that we just got used to it and accepted it as normal boss studios knew the n64 architecture very well in it shows here i mean there is actually some fog in this game but it's here on purpose it's a weather effect and not a programming issue i know i couldn't believe it either so not only do you have great looking tracks to race around you have highly detailed car models to look at while racing all the cars look amazing with some high polygon cam models and i'm really surprised they didn't get sued because they're complete likeness to real cars finally the music is really high quality by that i mean the sound quality the composition is okay and there's not a lot of variety but it doesn't sound very compressed and they used real instruments [Music] it's technically impressive for a cartridge game of the time it's just a shame that this game doesn't play as well as it looks or this could have been the best race around the system even a non-sim racing guy like me would have had a great time [Music] [Music] now we've mentioned the adventures of batman and robin on the genesis before but now it's time for it to shine in a technical episode developed by clockwork tortoise they only ever made two games this one and the sega cd version which consisted of only driving levels and they went all out on this one except for one little insignificant area which i'll get to in a bit the game starts out with four evil criminals breaking out of arkham asylum each criminal has their own stage that's right there are only four stages here but each stage has multiple levels within this is not a game you're going to be beating quickly you can choose to play as either batman robin or even both in two-player simultaneous mode you start out in the streets and right away it doesn't look like most 2d games do instead the view is angled slightly down that means the buildings and even the sidewalk have perspective as batman beats up enemies and moves along the scrolling gives the scene a very good impression of depth there's some use of the highlight mode which is a feature built into the genesis hardware and the enemy's flashlights in the scene make use of it not really a big deal but it's always nice to see in action the game makes great use of color throughout it also uses dithering but it shifts it back and forth 60 times per second to make the clouds at the top of the screen look more transparent if you're watching this on your phone you probably can't even see this effect in action as it requires 60 frames per second playback there's also lots of other cool effects going on there's some pretty bitchin background tilting and rotation when you're fighting two-face on the scaffolding and this fight is pretty damn intense there's almost always tons of sprites on the screen and a lot of them even have rotation applied to them and there's barely any slowdown at all during any of this there's a shooter level where batman is flying for some reason and he doesn't appear to be assisted by any kind of apparatus such as a jet pack but still it looks really really cool with the scrolling even though all the buildings are exactly the same i mean who the hell designed this city there are however levels where batman actually does use a jetpack to fly so i'm a bit confused but whatever i even like the little touches like batman's cape blowing in the same direction no matter which way he's facing in this scene still almost each and every level does something that is very technically impressive graphically for this system even the music is amazing though i think it might be more of an acquired taste [Music] it's done by jesper kidd who mainly does stuff like assassin's creed nowadays but i think his work here is much much better do you watch the show jesper please please please do more music like this so that one little thing that i referred to before that they didn't put as much effort into that would be the level design it's very tedious with some of the stages taking half an hour to complete the shooting stage here never seems to end i've had actual airplane flights that were over sooner than the sub level but hey again at least the music is good the gameplay is also very repetitive you stand on one screen and keep killing the same enemies over and over for one or two forevers and then you move on and do it all again it doesn't really help that batman's weapons are extremely weak his projectiles are really small and that makes them harder to aim as well still the game is really a sight to behold and even to listen to if you have the work ethic required to get through this game you will absolutely love it [Music] so this is crisis force for the famicom by konami this is another great game that failed to make its way to the west i've got to say this is one of the most visually impressive shooters i've seen for the system so you've got your cool looking ship that does awesome shooter type things like kill enemies and collect weapon power-ups your ship is so advanced that it can even kill volcanoes how dare that volcano be alive it's not like they don't deserve it so don't go feeling sorry for it alright there's two main weapons that you can collect a machine gun and a laser type weapon i personally like the laser type weapon the best as it has a greater width when firing each of these can be upgraded several times to make them even stronger you also have a bomb that's very effective there's another item that you collect which at first i was like what the hell is this thing every time i collected one it would tally up on the bottom of the screen after i collected five of them i suddenly realized what was happening my ship transformed into this awesome phoenix looking thing i was invincible and i could destroy everything on site obviously as a time-based power-up and will run out sooner than later still it's really cool though this game is so amazing on what it can make the famicom do take a look at the first level you're flying along and lasers are coming down from the sky ruining the peaceful city down there all of a sudden the ground falls through in the middle of the screen leaving a huge trench it's really cool because the layers of scrolling give it some nice depth enemies are flying out of there and there's not a hint of slowdown this is 16-bit stuff and should never happen on an 8-bit system konami is awesome or at least they used to be there's seven stages in all and each one has a unique feel to it the action is solid and there's always lots of stuff on screen to shoot i'm not great at shooters by any means but i was able to get up to the fifth stage before i started to really mess up and it's always those damn pharaohs that get me first it's pyramids on mars and now it's pharaoh ships in the water what is it about that ancient culture that gets the best of me this one uses konami's custom vrc4 chip which allows for better bank switching of graphics memory which translates to sweet ass scrolling in bosses as you can see the game is beautiful lots of detailed and very colorful graphics almost give this title a 16 bit quality then to round it off you get a better than average soundtrack that just screams a bit konami if it wasn't so damn expensive i'd recommend that you import this game in a second have you played this game what do you think about it [Music] wow dude i am blown away aren't you dude my famicom is literally on fire right now from all that processing power we better let that cool down why don't you cover like a playstation 3 game or something okay i will do that right now let's check out grand theft auto 5 on the playstation 3. this game really stretches the ps3 and what it can do sure it's better on the ps4 with nicer visuals and all that yeah it runs in 1080p and has a first person mode and basically more polish all around but honestly the ps3 version doesn't really look drastically different and to me that's impressive as hell he really went all out on this one you know i've always felt a little guilty playing the gta series you do so much bad stuff in these games that at times i felt like the series is really contributing to the decline and fall of western civilization i don't think that i've ever done a mission or did anything that was morally right in any of these games then i just sit back and realize that basically i'm an adult and i live a good life where i'm nice to people and treat them with respect even though sometimes they don't deserve it then i enter a fantasy world and kill lots of people like this lady who almost ran me over twice after showing no responsibility and just running away from the scene i had to beat her up and put a bullet in her head she totally deserved it i also have sex with hookers and get lots of lap dances just because i can nothing beats a virtual lap dance i was pretty excited about gta 5. i like the california setting and i bought it right after its release as anybody who knows this series the story mode isn't the main draw of the game don't get me wrong the missions are for the most part really fun and some of them are just crazy like this one where you smoke some weed and get a bad high and start killing clowns that are just coming after you one of my favorite ones is this one where you're trying to get a film reel back from this lady you chase her to the airport and proceed to chase her on runways while planes are landing and taking off i played this one multiple times because it's so fun but for me the main draw is the open world rockstar has done an amazing job pushing the ps3 to its limits there's so much stuff you can do in this game hell you can even play a round of golf if you want to besides just randomly killing people and seeing how high of a wanted level i can get i like to just drive around town and look at the city there's so much detail in the buildings and there's people driving and walking everywhere it really does feel like a real environment then of course i like to get into an airplane and fly through the night into the day i love flying at night over the city everything is lit up and you can see cars headlights and taillights as they drive around town then i ended all with a nice parachute to the ground as i watch my plane fall out of the sky and crash onto the city streets probably killing tens of people below no matter how you get around los santos you'll never notice the game loading it doesn't pause or slow down at all no matter how far you drive sure things will pop up in the backgrounds on occasion and as you get closer to objects you'll notice i'm getting texture but it's to be expected of a game this large every time i play this game i'm amazed at what i see and encounter and i just want to experience everything in here there's nothing like getting into a boat and driving out into the ocean to do a little shark hunting the water effects are very realistic and the waves feel real as you're driving your boat one of these times i'll kill a shark with that little knife that i have but not this time hey at least i got a trophy sweet if you don't have a current generation system this is the one to get as it's all on a single disk [Music] let's check out toy story on the sega genesis this one does a lot of things that would have blown my mind if i had seen a game do them in the console's first year or two of life you mainly play the role of woody and you follow the movie's plot and the plot is largely advanced through the cut scenes featuring stills from the movie big deal right well actually yes it is you see the genesis can only put 61 individual colors on screen at any given moment in time and although it may not look like it these screens have over 100 colors being displayed the built-in shadow and highlight function of the genesis is used to cheat its way into more colors basically that means a single color can represent up to three since using shadow and highlight it can also display a darker and brighter version of itself so yeah it's actually going beyond what the genesis was designed for with these screens alone next just take a look at the scrolling it's not just one flat layer on top of another flat layer with parallax objects actually have depth and you can see the size of things as you pass by that's pretty damned impressive and the effect is done extremely well it reminds me of a toned-down version of the scrolling and clockwork night on the sega saturn this game even has a similar concept to toy story anyway the sprites are all pre-rendered donkey kong country style this effect has never really impressed me at all but hey maybe you like it the game itself is not very well designed or fun to play but to its credit it has a lot of different play styles like this one where you're inside the claw machine and you need to find all the little green guys and put them away this was back when doom was all the rage and to see this effect running smoothly on a console that long predated the game is extremely awesome there's also top down segments where you control the rc car i don't like these at all because the car is crazy hard to control but there is a third person perspective scene of the rc car and it has really smooth scaling going on plus it controls much better than the overhead segments overall the game really does a lot with its scrolling and other effects like people walking by and whatnot the music is faithful to the movie but the sound quality isn't very impressive there are a lot of voices though you don't want to be in the way when my laser goes on there's also a version for the super nintendo it's pretty much the same and it has the same cool effects it also has a little bit more color and definitely better music it also has that same first person level and it's cool to see it running on the system without an fx chip however it's smaller it moves slower and it has much more floaty controls than the genesis version [Music] this version of the game also has less content it's missing a lot of the steel screens from the movie which honestly isn't that big of a deal but it is also missing this rc car racing level from the genesis version well i guess you don't actually race but you know what i mean still it's a very impressive game on either system it's just too bad that it's not a tremendously well playing one oh and it's also on the original game boy as you can see it's not very impressive however it does take advantage of the super game boy and it uses the super nintendo to play the music so that's something still play a 16-bit version if you can [Music] this is x for the game boy developed by nintendo and released in 1992. this was a hard game to get into i'm not talking about a horrible storyline or crappy controls i'm talking about getting past the tutorial as you can see everything is in japanese i reached a certain point where i went into a base with a dish on top of it every time i went out and tried to go somewhere else i was taken right back to that base after what seemed like ages i thought to myself that i might not be showing this game off because i can't figure out what to do of course being the stand-up guy that i am i kept going and eventually did what the tutorial wanted me to do the tutorial ended and i started the first mission what that mission entailed i couldn't tell you but the visuals which feature wireframe graphics are quite a technical feat for this little portable system you also move around in a 3d world anyway i was in my ship wandering around the first world it was cool because it was nighttime and i liked the crescent moon that i kept seeing in the background this was a nice little touch there's a map here that i traversed back and forth and tried to cover it all in hopes of making something happen i fought many enemies along the way and gained weapons and gas from their destroyed ships i used this small pyramid that's all over the map like a ramp and that let me fly around in the air this was cool since i could cover more ground flying but it wasn't cool because everything on the ground was going by and i couldn't see what was down there so i ended up not flying very much i found a bunch of those buildings with a dish on them and went inside i turned on a bunch of options or did something and left the building then something else happened and i was inside of a tunnel the first thing that caught my senses was the music wow this is really good stuff i was ready to do battle inside this tunnel with something but i never saw any enemies all i had to do was guide my ship through this thing to the end which completed the mission that was strange and i felt like i really didn't do much the second mission was basically the same as the first and i was having a fun time killing all the enemies and finding the dish bases apparently i was having too much fun as i ran out of time and it was game over for me i still don't know what this game is about and what my ultimate goal should be but all the stuff i said before isn't really the reason why i'm showing this game i'm showing this to you so you can marvel at the power of the game boy have you ever seen polygons like this on that awesome little handheld i mean this game runs smoother than hard driving on the genesis and that's saying a lot considering the genesis is a much more powerful system is that an unfair comparison i don't know but this little handheld never ceases to amaze me i've got to say that i'm impressed by this game and i'm wondering why it didn't get a us release why nintendo why [Music] battle toads from rare is a really popular game for the 8-bit nes the battle toads themselves are teenage mutant ninja turtle rip-offs one of them gets kidnapped by the local hottie and it's up to the remaining two to rescue him at first it's fairly easy to classify this as a beat-em-up but really it only kind of is mainly really it's a memorization and frustration test but what it does it does pretty damn well it has some really cool sprite animations lots of sprites on screen and even a two player simultaneous mode there's quite a bit of parallax scrolling which the nes has a difficult time doing but this game does it with ease instead of the more common mmc chips this game uses an ao rom chip which adds a touch of ram and some screen mirroring they put it to good use here there's even a level where you ascend up a tower and it spins as you run around it that's pretty cool looking for this system the game is known for being extremely difficult and it really is the turbo tunnel here is usually the main source of complaints i actually find it the most fun and maybe even the easiest part of the game it does take concentration for sure there's a warp near the end that takes you to this level which is more of the same thing but a lot less fun the music is pretty good too however overall i do feel that the game is a bit overrated still technically impressive though how about you do you have battle toads [Music] and let's take a quick look at metal storm from iran also on the nes this is a cool mech game that everyone should try but the reason it's in this episode is because of the insane overlapping parallax scrolling that it pulls off sometimes it can even be really weird looking scrolling like how many different directions do you want to go and the animations themselves are also really cool this one employs the common mmc 3 chip that's used in a lot of games but it's the programmers themselves that were able to make these great visuals happen the parallax is done with animated background tiles that means that certain parts of the background are animated to look like they're scrolling at a different speed from the main background so in reality there's only one screen scrolling though it looks like more it's a really cool effect the game plays like a champ and the cool graphics only add to the enjoyment it's also the easiest game that i played for this episode that is for damn sure but it still puts up a respectable challenge this is definitely a worthy game to have in your collection [Music] all right there you have it eight more technically awesome games joe awesome right yeah totally awesome what was the most impressive for you uh well technically the most impressive was the adventures of batman and robin on the genesis my favorite game to play uh f-zero gx on the gamecube really is it because it was developed by sega probably how about you yeah right um i don't know i mean it's hard to say i like them all i think gta 5 was technically impressive because of all the stuff that's going on everywhere and i didn't notice really any loading times and any of that stuff so i was very impressed with it okay and you like to play it too and i like played yes so anyway what do you guys think what are some games that you think push the limits of the consoles that they run on watch our other two episodes on the subject and give us some more ideas for when we cover this again yes in the meantime thank you for watching game set [Music] [Applause] [Music] dude this pokemon go app is the best thing ever to happen in my entire life dude it's so true i don't know what i did before this app there's one in the middle of the street yeah right there i don't know if it's safe there's cars in the street i don't want to go out there let's check and see if there's cars first [Music] looks safe to me okay i'm gonna go get em [Music] nope nope i got him [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] hello and welcome to gamesack again we're talking about some games that push the hardware limits of the console that they run on yeah this is our fourth episode of this and honestly on i didn't think you'd get past number two because i'm like well there can't be that many games but there are it's we're still finding games that push hardware limits and there are a lot of different consoles which have games that push their limits and with that said let's get right into it [Applause] ginga fu sapphire for the pc engine cd turbo graphics cd turbo duo or any of the console's many names is one of the more technically impressive games for the system this one requires the arcade card but this card only adds extra ram not any hardware power this one is a vertical shooter and it tries to do with this genre what gate and lords of thunder did with horizontal shooters while i'd say that the game isn't even a fifth as good as those it's still extremely fun and pulls off some nice tricks you may even notice some polygonal enemies attacking you in different stages these look pretty cool but they're not actually polygons instead they're digitized sprites yes just like donkey kong country in fact this game is full of digitized sprites like that and they look really really good it's rare that i like this graphical style but here it works quite well largely due to the system's wide color palette it looks so much better than any genesis or sega cd game that tried digitized sprites that's for damn sure they all move around very quickly and some of them are impressively large but that's not all that this game pulls off keep in mind that the turbo graphics only has one page of backgrounds that it can put on the screen at any given time yet this game shows overlapping layers of scrolling from time to time what's more is that sometimes you'll come up against the wall of a building and it'll give a parallax effect that looks like scaling and technically it is but only in the vertical dimension it still looks really cool and it only adds to the impressive features of the game not only that but the detail and the colors everywhere are outstanding the music is also nearly as good as that and lords of thunder if there's one drawback here is that the bosses flash too much when you're attacking them and it can make it hard to appreciate their graphic detail this is a rare game but there are bootlegs floating around all over the place so don't pay more than fifty dollars for it no matter how real it looks i'm serious [Music] [Music] soul star just might be the most technically impressive game on the sega cd i know we've shown this in the sega cd episode and also briefly in the genesis mega drive shoot em ups episode but it definitely needs the spotlight here as well as it really does push the sega cd in fact core design always pushed to sega cd like nobody's business and this was their best effort for sure and what we're here to admire is how core was able to get this kind of scaling and rotation performance out of the system i mean you've got backgrounds and sprites scaling all over the place like crazy keep in mind that the super nintendo could only scale backgrounds in the hardware and the neo geo could only scale sprites that's right this game couldn't be done on either the super nintendo or the neo geo some levels even have mode 7 style scaling and rotation this one for example has a wavy underwater line scroll applied to everything even the sprites you don't see a wavy line scroll applied to everything on screen very often large objects animate as they scale towards you even changing their color palette that doesn't sound like a big deal but for the sega cd it really is the underground level even has a ceiling and walls at the edge of the area and it all runs at a respectable and very playable frame rate as well you've got to keep in mind that the sega cd is processing all of this and simply sends the entire thing as a background page to the genesis which displays it and there's only so much bandwidth here and that really slows down how many frames per second there can be on the system but to have so much going on and still be playable is amazing gameplay wise it's an acquired taste and most people won't know what to do in this first free roaming stage but once you learn it it's a great game they were also making a version of soul star for the 32x here and also for the jaguar that promised to improve on the visuals sadly it was cancelled before development got very far but i would have loved to see how it turned out but the sega cd version is complete so at least you can enjoy this [Music] and speaking of the 32x here's darkseid this one was only released in europe and presumably they love the hell out of it over there this pushes what the 32x can do with 3d visuals all of the polygons are texture mapped and that's almost unheard of on the system there's even some light source shading going on and i've got to say that's pretty impressive too bad the frame rate is so low but i'm still surprised they were able to do it as a game it's absolute crap your goal is to fly around and destroy all of the meteors and aliens indicated by the little dots on your radar do that and then you'll dock back at the base from there you'll probably fail the mission and then be sad that you probably paid a very inflated price for this game but the better 32x game with textures is metal head this is actually a pretty fun mech game yeah that's right a good game on the 32x everything here is textured and it moves at better frame rates than darkseid does it even has some texture warping like the playstation so that's got to count for something the draw distance isn't huge but it's good enough and considering the system everything's pretty good you can play the game from a first person or third person view it's all up to you oh and the game even has a fully voiced intro with several fully armed men the terrorists soon overtook an entire country actually there's a ton of voice here for a cartridge game and that cartridge game has 24 megapower sexy all in all this game delivers in both graphics sound and gameplay it's not perfect but it's one of the best on the 32x and truly a hidden gem a hidden gem well i think that might be my kind of game you got the point i got the equipment what do you want [Music] [Music] for the super famicom if that name doesn't ring a bell then maybe chatting parodius might and if that doesn't ring a bell then i you know i don't know what to tell you firstly i've got to say that i love this game the first time that i played it with the stick figure character soitsu i was laughing so hard i mean just check out his bombs which are just other stick figures on the first level once they hit the ground they start dancing to the music uncontrollably and not doing their job at killing enemies i literally paused the game because i was laughing so hard so what makes this game so hardware pushing you ask well the title of this game chatting parodius should give you a hint you see as you play there's an announcer that talks to you through the whole game now i don't speak or comprehend japanese but from what i gather the announcer's commentary is telling you how you're doing and seeing things that help you out and stuff like that it's all very clear and not muffled and it just sounds great not to mention the sheer amount of voices that have been packed onto this cartridge i guess it's a good thing that it's all in japanese or i might get bored of all the speech but since i can't understand what he's saying everything he says sounds different so it's all good now it's got to be noted that this game does make use of the sa1 chip this offers improved cpu clock speed faster ram which is important for the voices and even new mappers using this chip makes sense since besides the constant voices there's so much stuff going on all the time with this game that the super nintendo would freeze up if it didn't have a little help regardless it's a very impressive game and yes it does have a bit of slowdown but still you'd have a very hard time finding another game on the system with as much action as this title [Music] staying on the topic of great voices let's take a look at a couple of nes games the first one is bible buffet which is an unlicensed game by wisdom tree this game is a mix of a board game and an action game you spin the wheel and your character moves the allotted spaces you then go into an action sequence where you collect food for the food bank all it did was make me want to go to mcdonald's and get some french fries luckily i'm not playing this game for fun because well you know there's really none to be found here i'd rather play green dog on the genesis than this that's how bad it is but it does have one thing going for it and that is the clarity of the voice samples in the game four there's not a lot of them but what is here is some of the best you'll hear on the system player one it's fairly impressive technically three another crappy nes game that has good voice samples is skate or die 2 from electronic arts the title screen has someone saying skate or die multiple times while a digitized electric guitar is being played for the music it doesn't sound like an electric guitar to me but hey it is what it is and i applaud electronic arts for their efforts and using the nes to as fullest there's other voice samples throughout the game that are easily the best part of this dreadful experience yo dude yes the gameplay is just bad and you'll die many times trying to figure out how to get better skateboards so it doesn't feel like you're skating in maple syrup oh great now i want pancakes anyway it's just too bad that this game doesn't live up to the quality of the voice samples or i would have been all over it back in the day skate or die i'll take death please major bummer dude [Music] the last of us from naughty dog is probably one of the most technically impressive games on the playstation 3. you play as joel and some form of airborne virus or something breaks out turning everyone into zombies and of course the game doesn't call them zombies they call them clickers but come on let's face it they're zombies no matter how much the writers try to write their way around that word and of course naturally they're all pissed off and really want to kill the non-zombies the first 20 minutes of the game are very intense as all hell is breaking loose and you're trying to escape town with your daughter and some other dude that you know unfortunately things don't pan out very well we cut to 20 years later and now everything is under martial law different factions have formed and the currency is ration cards you spend a lot of the time walking around and stuff sometimes you get to fight enemies uncharted style but the game actually prefers that you use stealth that's certainly not something i prefer though you can use different tactics to distract your enemies be them humans or zombies joel also has a superpower which lets him hear through walls and visualize silhouettes of people and things on the other side the dude is probably 50 years old there's no way in hell's hearings it's still that good you can do close quarters combat as well eventually you're tasked with transporting an ellen page look alike out of town well at least she used to look like ellen page the last time i played this but i don't know you're not initially told why you need to escort her anyway the game obviously uses a variation of the engine used in the uncharted games on the system the environments are richly detailed and quite realistic looking for the system perhaps almost like an early ps4 game it's stunning to look at and sometimes you just want to take some time to admire things the wrecked urban chaos both inside and out of the cities really comes to life here as typical with naughty dog there's some motion blur applied to the movements which gives it a more cinematic feel it's amazing how far the graphics on the system have come and naughty dog certainly took advantage of every trick they learned along the way the sound design is of course also very well done and sound great in surround if you want to play it for yourself this looks fantastic for the system but a slightly more enhanced version also exists on the ps4 [Applause] elite for the nes by imagineer was only released in pal territories this one is a space adventure game starring you as the commander of a cargo ship there's lots of places to go and things to buy and trade obviously this was ported over from various computer versions and for an nes game it's pretty damn impressive you'll first notice the vector graphics will show 3d models of the ships and whatnot sure it doesn't look quite as good as something you might see on the playstation 4 but it's really really close yes i'm kidding but still it's really cool that this is being done it can get a bit choppy but hey come on this is the nes it's only running at 1.79 megahertz for crying out loud actually 1.66 megahertz since this is a pal system as a game i can't get into it and i really don't want to put forth the effort to figure out what to do but hey maybe you'll like it however whether it's fun or not is not the reason why it's in this episode it's to show you the awesome vector graphics the system is doing oh and don't go expecting this to run on your ntsc nes otherwise you'll get this it only runs on the pal system with this lower refresh rate [Music] all right dave i hope these consoles are not under a whole lot of stress running these games i hope it's not physically imposing for them you know i felt mine they didn't seem to be overheating or anything like that but uh that i don't know if that's a sure sign but whatever anyway let's just get back to these games [Music] here's panorama cotton for the japanese mega drive developed by success and released by sunsoft in 1994 this game sheds its side-scrolling action to be a full-on space harrier style shooter success really pushed the mega drive hard and for the most part the console handles the game very well the background in sprite scaling and warping are some of the best you'll see on the system it's quite impressive but what's even more impressive is that with this plus all the sprites on the screen at any given time there's really no slowdown to mention hell if there is i don't notice because i'm so engrossed in the gameplay another thing that boggles the mind is the fluidity of the game when the levels twist and turn at one moment you're going forward and then you start going right and then forward again and it does it all very quickly and very smoothly whoa or you're traveling in a tunnel and you can choose to take different routes going up or down at certain points and it's all handled perfectly you've even got cool water reflection effects and more not to mention that the colors are extremely well done for the system it really is a unique looking game that stands out thanks to its visuals you think this one has a helper chip in the cartridge but nope it's a late release for the console so clearly the programmers knew a lot of tricks by the time this one was made music is like an opioid for your ears as well with high quality sampled percussion and great melodies that you just can't get enough of [Music] my respect for the genesis went up a notch when i saw this but you know it's still pretty low in general though just kidding i love the genesis panoramic cotton is one of those games that is totally worth playing any way you can and be prepared to be impressed [Music] how about okami hd on the playstation 3 originally released on the ps2 by clover studios this game was amazing and i loved it and played it from beginning to end and never felt unsatisfied back in 2012 a company by the name of hexadrive remastered the game in hd but what they released wasn't just your normal remaster simply making it widescreen with more resolution yes they did both of those but they did so much more and really took advantage of the ps3 the game renders at a native 1080p and has an internal resolution that's almost 4k basically that means it's sampling from a much higher resolution than the game runs at to create its 1080p visuals it's not rendering the scene in nearly 4k and then downscaling it to 1080p it's just that the source is nearly that resolution as a result the textures are incredibly high resolution so that even when you're extremely close to them there's still a ton of detail instead of losing definition like so many other games do and i'll tell you that the end result is just beautiful the colors in this game are the most vivid i've ever seen on the ps3 the deep greens of plants and trees to the deep purples and oranges of backgrounds all look fantastic and vibrant when you do in battle everything here looks so much better than the original and the original was not exactly ugly at all sadly though the game only runs at a constant 30 frames per second but i got used to it pretty much immediately it certainly doesn't interfere with the gameplay in december of 2017 there will be another release of okami hd on the ps4 xbox one and pc and that one will offer 4k support on the non-amateur versions of those consoles there's really no reason not to pick up this amazing title for the first time or even the third time like me yep three times for me and i'm okay with that [Music] [Applause] [Music] this is days of thunder on the original gameboy it's a racing game developed by argonaut which has some vector style 3d graphics and it's pretty ambitious for the handheld your goal in life is to drive around in a counterclockwise oval you'll likely never press right on the d-pad here first you're going to need to qualify and that takes over three laps this determines your starting position in the real race and once you get to the real race you have to compete against actual opponents and be careful because it can be easy to crash when passing here the frame rate isn't bad at all when you're qualifying everything feels responsive if just a touch floaty during the actual race things slow down as there are 19 other cars on the track now these cars are all represented as bitmap graphics instead of vectors days of thunder on the game boy isn't a great game but at least it's better than the movie moving up to the game boy color we've got street fighter alpha 8-bit fighting games that play well are almost unheard of especially ones on portable systems well here's one you have 10 characters to choose from and they're all pretty good the fighting action is fast and very responsive and pretty much all of the moves are here at your disposal you have two choices for control punch and kick or kick and punch there's even two turbo speed options in here though honestly i couldn't tell much of a difference regardless the game moves quickly and is by far the best fighter i've played on such a low-tech device even the graphics and animation are pretty good for what it is you want hyper intense criminal underworld 3d action then look no further than driver 3 on the game boy advance basically this is a grand theft auto rip-off kinda it takes place in a fully 3d structured world with polygons which you don't see very often on the game boy advance you play as an undercover cop don't worry though you can still steal any car you want and kill people without any repercussions you can only run over innocent people though you can't actually shoot them and that might make you sad since the game's called driver of course you're gonna do a lot of driving mainly just to get from point a to point b to accomplish your missions sometimes though you get into intense gun fights with evil criminals and if you run out of ammo no problem just wander around town until you find some more the criminals will be waiting for you right back at the original location to continue the gunfight the fact that most everything in this world is built with polygons is pretty impressive yeah there's a lot of warping going on actually a hell of a lot of warping but again that's got to count for something right the game is completely playable with a surprisingly good frame rate especially for the time the game itself is decent but not insanely great many of the missions are really easy except for the ones where you need to follow a car if it goes over the horizon you fail but they let you keep trying until you get it right and that is much appreciated just be sure to pick this one up if you love warping textured polygons on your game boy advance [Music] this is tetrastar the fighter on the famicom developed by home data and released by taito in 1991. i'm playing a patched version with english tech so i can understand what's going on in the story since it's actually pretty interesting so aliens are here to destroy earth and they're starting off in new york city yeah you won't have any of that so you get in your tetrastar fighter to save new york and retrieve the robot dog navigator omega you then take the fight to the aliens homeworld because that's what badass star fighters do see i told you the story was interesting no oh well anyway it doesn't take long for you to see that the game is fairly impressive to look at for the system i really like the pseudo 3d effects of the scaling ground and things in the background the levels are fun to play and even though they have the same effect on the ground they still feel very different even the stars in the distance of this level are scrolling upwards which just adds to the effects ideas like this one really make the game look sharp and for the most part there's no slow down oh and check out the nice line scrolling effect after you defeat the second boss the poor nes is struggling with it but it still looks like something you're used to seeing in a 16-bit game not an 8-bit one the soundtrack also needs to be mentioned as it has lots of classical music which strangely fits the gameplay so yeah this game was a nice little surprise it's definitely fun and has lots of character on its own but the special effects really make this game stand out home data did an excellent job pushing the famicom and finding out what his capabilities are [Music] here's moon crystal for the famicom by hector which is another game that's quite impressive to take in again i'm playing a patched version with an english translation so i know what's going on all the people in your village have been abducted by an unknown group then at some point your dad gets abducted by count crimson who wants to use the moon crystal to raise the dead so off you go to save your dad and the moon crystal from the count it's a good storyline that's displayed throughout the game even the cutscenes are impressive with their scrolling backgrounds the most impressive part though is how much animation every spray here has for a game on the console when you're used to games that have maybe a few frames of animation for character movement and then you play this game where everything has a lot more it makes you go wow this is crazy well at least that's what i did but of course when you have this amount of animation it's gonna make controlling your character that much harder you can't turn around as fast as you'd like because you have to wait for your character's animation to finish the same goes for ducking and jumping these small actions need to be planned out a bit in advance it's like playing prince of persia with how you have to approach the controls it's definitely frustrating at times but it is something that you can get used to but you know what the game is still fun so not only is there tons of fluid animation but there's levels with lots of layers of parallax scrolling it's very impressive to me to see the nes handling all this with no problems whatsoever whoa this is amazing how is it possible this is one game that i wish i would have known about a long time ago as it's stupidly expensive now so i guess i'll just have to play on my everdrive all right there you go another batch of games that push consoles to the limit i mean will there be a part five of this let us know you gotta list some games down there what do you think we'll have a part five i sure hope so because i really like doing this i like looking at games that just you know squeeze a little bit more out of the console than you'd otherwise expect and take a look at our other three episodes in this series and let us know if there's any others that you feel push limits that we haven't covered yet and until then thanks for watching game sake [Music] [Music] all right dave thanks for coming to this impromptu gamesack meeting yeah sure hey you know i had to take a sick day but whatever i'm here well you know dave i think it's time that i do gamestack on my own the reason being that honestly you're just really really mean to me is that what you think really yes that's exactly what i think well if you let me go i'm gonna cut you buddy and i was also thinking that perhaps we could treat this as a warning and due to your good work these last few episodes perhaps you would enjoy this copy of snatcher on the sega cd i would enjoy that you know what i'll see you next episode [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] hello and welcome to gamesack today i'm going to look at some more games that push consoles to do more than you ever thought they could do these games take these consoles they're like yeah you do this no no i can't yes you can you do it okay anyway a lot of these games were suggested by you guys and there were some pretty good suggestions let's start off with some 8-bit games [Music] this is mitsume go to uru for the famicom from natsume and tomi this is an action platformer and as you can immediately tell from the character design is based on a manga or an anime in this case it's based on something called the third eyed one it plays kinda sorta like mega man except that you shoot your shot from your forehead even though everything is in japanese is pretty self-explanatory and you won't have any issue figuring this one out you just shoot down enemies while avoiding their attacks and pick up the coins they drop after you defeat them there's a shop girl that you'll find around sometimes here you can restore your life power up your firepower and even buy extra lives your new firepower will last until you lose your life as you can see it looks pretty good but not necessarily anything you'd consider out of the ordinary for this system well check out the second part of stage one here not only does it have some awesome overlapping parallax scrolling but the foreground even has a transparent shadow on the background you rarely even see that in genesis games much less on the nes or famicom so that's pretty awesome in my opinion there are some sizeable bosses too oh and the music is great it's a challenging game though it only has five stages but at least it's good while it lasts [Music] [Music] how about segaya on the sega master system this is actually a port of the arcade game darius ii but they changed the name outside of japan because they wanted to make sure that it wasn't very successful at all anyway segaya on the genesis was actually the first darius game i ever played it's okay though i've never really been a huge fan of darius but i think darius gaiden on the saturn is pretty cool anyway my first experience with segaya on the master system was on an emulator in the mid 90s since the game was only released in europe right away i was surprised that they had the wavy flames in stage one here this is pretty good for the master system in fact they managed to keep most of the parallax scrolling in the game none of it ever overlaps though nes games were much more likely to feature parallax scrolling than master system games were thanks to the special chips that often came on the cartridges so it's nice to see here and yes the huge battleships are still fairly impressive for the master system which rarely ever had parallax scrolling in shooters [Music] another master system game that was only released in europe was road rash yeah i know i've talked about this one before but it deserves to be mentioned in a pushing hardware limits episode first off the master system doesn't do hills most master system racing games were on flat land only outrun had hills but they were extremely choppy and poorly done even in this time i was disappointed in outruns hills but look at road rash here handling them all over the place like it's just any other day this game was done almost entirely by one programmer named gary priest he did what yuji naka couldn't do without run it's also a fantastic conversion of the genesis original yes things are smaller and overall the speed is slower but check out the two versions side by side they don't look as different from each other as you'd expect this was even on the game gear and it pushed that system the same way as well the majority of the original game is here and if you can't play it on the genesis yet still have a master system somehow you can't go wrong here cheers to gary priest for an amazing conversion [Music] the last master system game i'll look at is aladdin developed by sims in japan this was only released in europe but the game gear version got a us release and it's mostly the same it's not a port of either of the 16-bit versions it's its own unique game the main thing that's hardware pushing here happens in the first two levels you start out running as the evil guards chase you so they can inflict their evil upon you not only does it have some really nice parallax it even overlaps which is unheard of on the master system not only that but you can see the sides of the buildings change as they scroll past which is really cool obviously these are animated tiles and not 3d polygons or anything but it's still a great effect stage 2 does the effect even better anytime you jump over a gap not to mention the colorful layers of parallax in the background unfortunately they weren't as ambitious with the rest of the game as there's no more parallax but it still looks pretty good for the system overall it's a fun game that's not like the other versions [Music] here's contra the alien wars for the game boy that's right they ported contra 3 for the super nintendo all the way down to nintendo's black and white portable system and considering how much less power the game boy has compared to the super nintendo factor 5 did an amazing job the first thing you'll notice is how well the introduction sequence captures the original with the wavy lines going up and down as the city gets demolished the game itself also looks very good but since the game boy has fewer buttons things have been simplified for example you can only carry one weapon now and you need to press select to use your bomb of course some other things are cut back the hoverbike stage is missing and even a few minor boss fights are missing but man the first few stages are nearly one to one in stage design and enemy placement that's what impressed the hell out of me of course the parallax scrolling is mostly gone and there are fewer colors on screen in fact there are no colors on screen but still they managed to do a great job with the visuals and it all feels about as close to contra 3 as it possibly can even the overhead stages are here though they no longer rotate of course the music is really faithful and it sounds great for the system a truly excellent port all around [Music] [Music] me this is tokitori for the gameboy color which was published by capcom in the beginning someone is stealing all of the eggs oh no but fortunately you hatch just in time to see all of your brother and sister eggs being kidnapped with complete self-awareness already in place only seconds into your new life you decide to set off to save the eggs this is a puzzle platformer a genre i don't really care for much at all so i'm not going to gush about this game being great or anything but hey if you like the genre you might like this you need to rescue the eggs on each screen you have different powers to do this and you have limited use of them in each stage and the game gives you exactly what is needed to complete each stage no more no less and it's constantly introducing new powers but what's cool about this one is that it has some overlapping parallax scrolling which is hardly common for a game boy color game it's done really well though each area generally doesn't move around a whole lot it's likely done via animated tiles which means the background tiles are animated to give the illusion of parallax scrolling even though it's really only a single plane i love it when developers take the time to add touches like these to their games when they really don't need to and the music is really good too even though it's full of arpeggios which i'm generally not fond of in my 8-bit game music sounds great here though [Music] if you remember in the last episode i talked all about the game boy advance well i've got more game boy advanced games to talk about because that system was maybe a bit more powerful than we were initially led to believe gonna get to the bottom of this [Music] this is crazy taxi catcher ride for the game boy advance interestingly this system did have some rudimentary 3d abilities which even included texture mapping and crazy taxi catcher ride here utilizes this it's kind of amazing to be playing a portable version of the arcade and dreamcast game however not everything here is truly 3d as the other cars and the people are actually sprites sadly the game doesn't play as well as you'd hope it feels really slow and there's quite a bit of control lag it also doesn't offer the license soundtrack that we're all used to not really a big surprise there however the crazy box is still in here and the events are just as difficult if not even more so i mean it can be hard to even see what you're supposed to do it's not a game i'd really recommend but it's interesting to see it in action [Music] [Music] here's v rally 3 from infogrames and atari also on the gameboy advance this is a rally racing game and it pushes polygons pretty well on the system honestly i'm surprised at how well it's done yeah there's some texture warping going on here but don't be fooled this isn't the playstation this is the game boy advance make no mistake moreover the game controls really well and it's actually fun it even feels like there's a sense of speed basically you're just racing against the clock all by yourself with none of the evil enemy cars on the track at the same time as you before some tracks you can change your equipment settings based on the track you're about to race and repair the damaged parts of your car the game is really easy in fact i couldn't lose no matter what i always came in first place it does get a bit tougher during the snow and ice stages but you're still gonna win besides the difficulty the only other disappointment is the sound all you hear is your engine and your backfiring when you switch gears it'd be way more entertaining with some sort of euro techno trance music or something because when you think rally racing you think europe and when you think europe you think techno at least i do otherwise it's a decently fun game that's pretty impressive the port of stuntman was made by the same team who gave us v-rally three and it has similarly impressive driving graphics in this game you're a stunt driver and you need to do stunt things in your car as the movie director tells you what to do yeah because that's how movies are made in real life with no pre-planning whatsoever the director just giving you commands on a whim oh well that's okay it's a video game sometimes you'll need to smash through an item go over a jump pass cars on one side or the other things like that unlike v-rally 3 this one feels a bit slower but it's not bad it's definitely a lot more challenging especially this ice stage where you need to keep up with the car in front of you the voices of the director aren't that great but otherwise this is a technically impressive game i definitely admired the concept [Music] [Music] up next is smashing drive which was published by namco once again for the game boy advance of course this is another car game but it's crazy okay that was dumb i'm sorry but this one does have a pretty crazy concept basically you're a taxi driver and you have to get your passenger to his destination before your rival because the other passenger is going to the same place at least i think that's what's going on the game is kind of a mess basically you drive a mostly predetermined route which has lots of jumps and shortcuts you use these to grab orbs which will let you cut through traffic and do crazy things like blow them away with your horn you absolutely need to grab as many of these as you can otherwise you stand no chance of winning the race and it's often hard to see the jumps or otherwise how to get to some of these power up orbs mainly due to the low resolution still it controls nicely and it moves well enough to be perfectly playable not only that but many stages have a song that plays in the background with some dudes singing to you [Applause] [Music] it can be pretty tough sometimes and fortunately there's a password check this one out [Music] [Music] the game boy advance had a surprising amount of first person shooters it has a fairly decent port of doom with bright green blood and some silly music doom 2 was pretty much the same in terms of his technical presentation and by that i mean not bad at all [Music] even duke nukem made it to the system in the form of duke nukem advance this is an exciting new duke nukem adventure and not a port of any of the originals it's designed for the system and as a result it's pretty impressive at least visually the game runs very fast and sometimes even as quick as 60 frames per second for very quick spurts and it doesn't seem like a lot of detail was sacrificed to achieve this kind of performance it plays like you'd expect a 90s era first person shooter to play because that's exactly what it is despite being released in 2002 you run around shoot aliens pick up weapons and ammo flip switches go through doors and do it all again and again aiming is easy and you don't need to worry about looking up or down you do have a jump button though which takes the game into the next dimension and beyond the only thing that bothered me is that there's no music as you play instead you get constant sirens and clacsons wailing which can be annoying but at least you get a lot of duke's one-liners which will remind you of your angst-filled years as a 90s teenager there are other first-person games on the system like ice 9 here which run nearly as well as duke nukem advance you even get to go outside and see plants and water and stuff which is of course way better than doing that in real life there's also plenty of others like james bond nightfire which do not run as well though it's still impressive for the system it runs slower and at a lower resolution out of all the first person shooters here i'd say that duke nukem advance has the best combination of impressive graphics and fun gameplay hmm okay for this last segment i'm going to look exclusively at some 32-bit games even though the game boy advance is 32-bit however i'm going to focus mainly on the sega saturn with a dash of playstation my shirt says sega saturn on it thus the bias [Music] sonic r on the saturn is a racing game that's generally pretty easy to hate at first i mean it has some of the worst controls in any racing game track designs that aren't really very fun and a big complaint when it was released was the music with the singing honestly the game can grow on you somewhat but i always felt that the controls and a couple of the track designs could have been better like a lot of games from that generation it sometimes feels like it's hard to move in a straight line because you're constantly over steering and trying to correct yourself the game takes too long to respond to your input so you input too much and oversteer but that's not why i'm talking about this game today i'm here to show you what these graphics are doing on the saturn i mean check it out we can see right away in the title screen that we've got some fancy stuff going on here in the reflection in the letter r that's just crazy it even does this during the loading screens how is this possible and as you may recall pop-up was a pretty big issue in games back in this generation however instead of just popping in the polygons here all gradually fade in but wait the saturn can't do that it can't do transparencies remember especially on the polygons what kind of black magic is happening inside of my saturn but here we are witnessing it happen in real time not only that but there are instances of lighting here and there on some tracks and it makes things look nice the final track is completely transparent and it has a cool moving mode 7 like texture gliding over it this is the only level where the graphics don't fade in from the distance and that's because everything is already transparent the programmer who did all of this john burton explains how he was able to accomplish most of these things over on his youtube channel gamehut so be sure to check it out and i can't imagine anyone complaining about the music anymore it wasn't composer richard jock's idea to include the vocals but they're cheesy enough to the point where they're almost endearing however you can turn the vocals off if you want as well [Music] you know you have to survive [Music] how about power slave on the saturn also known as exhumed this first person shooter really puts the 3d capabilities of the system through its paces as it was the first game to use the enslaved engine developed by lobotomy software first of all it moves fast and at a very respectable frame rate for the time certainly more than we were used to seeing in similar games on the console the control feels ultra smooth and precise if you use the saturn 3d analog controller and everything is very responsive i remember back when buying this game when it was released i was really surprised at how well it performed as a game it's unique for its time as it involves a lot of exploration and even backtracking as you get new abilities could it be the first 3d metroidvania the answer is no because it's neither metroid nor castlevania again except for that part where you kill dracula my point is though is that it's not a basic first person shooter of its time where you just run around a maze and open doors though there is a lot of that here too the sound is decent with loud and clean samples though the large majority of the music is in mono they even got don lafontaine to do some of the voices and back when this came out it was very unusual to hear a familiar voice in a video game unknown forces have seized the city and great turmoil is spreading into neighboring lands oh yeah and i almost forgot to mention the cool dynamic lighting that happens sometimes it looks really good and the saturn isn't supposed to be able to do this well they did it anyway and it's a great effect this game was also ported to the playstation and the pc [Music] next is duke nukem 3d which was ported by lobotomy and they used their enslaved engine to do it once again it runs really fast and smooth with very few hiccups sega's analog pad works great and it helps you to kill the aliens who have kidnapped earth's women everything looks amazing for the system including the dynamic lighting of course the game can be pretty crass and you'll have to cover your ears sometimes as there are scary cuss words which will absolutely destroy children's lives if they hear them as a game well you run around a maze killing enemies and grab keys to open doors so you can move on pretty basic stuff i'll be the first to admit that i've always sucked at this game and i'm not really very fond of it i think the game boy advance game is actually more fun but this is pretty impressive for the saturn [Music] oh if you think powerslave and duke nukem were impressive then you definitely need to see the saturn port of quake once again this was also handled by lobotomy and it uses a beefed-up version of the enslaved engine it has identical controls to power slave and duke nukem and it feels smooth and honestly quite wonderful with the sega 3d analog pad the levels in quake are far more complex than those found in powerslave and duke nukem and as a result it can run at a lower frame rate sometimes but it does its best to keep up and is still very impressive there's plenty of examples of dynamic lighting again here in fact there's lighting here that wasn't even in the fancy schmancy pc original it all looks awesome in powerslave and duke nukem the enemies were all 2d sprites but here they're all 3d made out of a bunch of polygons which requires more system resources i'm amazed that this game doesn't bog down a hell of a lot more than it does the game is quite dark and it can be tough to enjoy on a modern display it's easier to see on a crt but even there can be pretty dark fortunately i'm looking at a crt as i'm recording this otherwise i might get lost forever i believe this is an artistic choice and of course the designers of quake didn't have flat panels in mind at the time the music is really eerie and i love it as far as gameplay goes it's your typical early first person shooter you guessed it you gotta run around shoot bad guys get keys or cards to unlock doors to proceed further blah blah blah i'm not a huge fan of first person shooters but i'm always surprised at how much i'm starting to enjoy some of these older ones i think i like quake on the saturn a lot more now than i ever could have back when it was released foreign finally here's driver 2 on the playstation out of all the driver games mentioned in the comments on the last video driver 2 came up the most so that's why i chose this one and if you don't like it blame yourself i listen to the comments it's your fault anyway wow this is basically like a modern grand theft auto on the freaking playstation now don't get me wrong it's certainly not as polished but i'm blown away by what it's able to accomplish you have an open 3d world to wander around in the city certainly feel bigger than they look on the map the game consists mostly of driving missions hence the title you have a damage bar which tells you the state of your vehicle as well as a felony bar this is basically your wanted level and yes you can even get out and steal other vehicles on the road there are multiple cities in the game and it spans two discs as a result the controls take a bit of getting used to for example you need to press up and triangle to enter or exit a car you can't run in a straight line though you can drive in one also the game turned the analog controller off more than once at the beginning of a mission so i'd suggest just playing it with the d-pad the game packs a lot of content that's really surprising for the system and it even manages to have a few nice effects like streaking lights during the night not really my type of game and i much prefer grand theft auto but it's still crazy impressive that they were able to do this on the original playstation can you believe it well he better because here it is [Music] [Applause] and there you go more games that defy the physics of reality to blow our minds into the next dimension whatever that means anyway be sure to check out our other episodes about games that push hardware limits and let me know if you can think of others that haven't been covered that do some crazy things in the meantime thank you for watching game sack [Music] well sonic r it's time for you to go back on the shelf for another 15 years or so but what game should i play that truly exploits the magnificence of the sega saturn oh i know how about street fighter the movie the game let's do it oh man screw this i don't want to play alone who should i play with leave it to me craig stadler oh hell yeah i can see you're going to be a difficult opponent democratic standard quit cheating don't be nervous or you won't be able to play your best i'm not nervous you're just cheating i'm pretty strong at crunch time oh yeah we'll try this on for size you're playing much better damn straight i ruled the sega saturn can you take the pressure of an imminent victory you mean glory yeah i think i can i'm gonna have to lay up oh craig stadler i don't even want to visualize that okay think you can get it inside mine ah no no just just get ready to lose i'm gonna drain this one no no no drained it dear creek stadler i'm done playing street fighter of the movie the game with you don't give up too early screw you think you can get it inside mine [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] hello and welcome to gamesack i'm back again taking a look at some games which push the limits of the hardware that they run on and in some cases the time period in which they were made now all of us old fogies remember how amazing mode 7 was on the super nintendo back when it was released right i know i was certainly blown away with it when i saw a super famicom being demoed in a local store a few months before that anyway let's take a closer look at some of the interesting things a few developers did with mode 7 [Music] ah yes mode 7 on the super nintendo this is a great feature that basically allows the console to scale and rotate a single background layer with 256 colors it works perfectly for racing games like f0 to provide a sense of speed and perspective that really makes you feel like you're on a track in a 3d world the same can be said about other games that use mode 7 like super mario kart but have you ever noticed that mode 7 is always perfectly flat there are no hills or any kind of topography only flatness sure some games like hyperzone would use some minor tricks so at least it looked like there was a ceiling despite it being the exact same background layer as the ground there's also the famous barrel room or whatever it's called in super castlevania 4. this is cool looking though it's not really a hill and it causes a ton of slow down lots of rpgs use mode 7 for their overworld and some of them like terenigma here have a slight curve or a bend to it and sometimes an extreme curve done by stretching different parts of the screen more than others for a cool effect however there are some racing games that actually attempt hills like the japanese motorcycle racing game called tohuge densetsu's saisoku battle how about that hill's using mode 7 well kind of all this game really does is slightly tilt the angle up or down and then shorten the draw distance to give a similar illusion so basically it's still perfectly flat but there's some good trickery here to make it feel like there's some small hills in this game there are a few games which do mode seven hills a lot better though like super star wars the empire strikes back this game is mostly a platformer with you using your lightsaber and your space uzi but there's an exciting 3d snow speeder level which is actually quite fun and look there are hills in the snow to my understanding this was done by separating it into two playfields one which is normal flatland and one which is elevated these are connected with a section that is basically stretched and tilted to make it look mostly seamless it looks pretty cool though if you look close you can see a little bit of jitteriness if that's a word they did a great job here and i feel that it actually adds to the gameplay instead of just being for show [Music] have you ever played super off-road the baja i love the original super off-road and this one uses mode 7 so it has to be better right well it's definitely way worse but it's still kind of playable you're traveling straight ahead picking up money and nitros to help you in your race similar to the original game but now you can hit people riding on atvs if you want to be penalized for a huge amount of money these atvs are all over the place and quite difficult to avoid you can even hit spectators and be fined even more between each stage you can increase your vehicle's powers just like the original anyway as you can see this game is chock full of hills which truly blew me away back when this game was released it seems to work in a similar method as super empire strikes back but with even more nuances to give the hills a slightly smoother shape since you're always going forward the screen never rotates which honestly makes the hills look even more convincing sadly the frame rate isn't 60 frames per second like f0 is hell it isn't even quite 15 frames per second the music is also a huge disappointment compared to the super nes version of the first game still once you get used to the twitchiness it's fairly playable though it's more of a rental than a purchase in my opinion [Music] next is race driving just kidding this doesn't use mode 7. it's using untextured polygons and is doing it very very poorly still it's kind of neat to see the console try this without resorting to the super effects chip is speed racer from accolade god this game is awful but you know what the racing segments have if you guessed speed you'd be wrong but come on nobody guessed that i mean it's not like it's in the title of the game or anything anyway check out these hills yes the frame rate obviously takes a huge hit here but it almost looks like texture mapped polygons it even has rotation it's really really impressive that they did this but i kind of wish that they hadn't the gameplay suffers hugely as a result with a frame rate that's even lower than super off-road the baja and don't forget that this isn't just an awful racing game but it's an awful platformer as well still you gotta admit this is quite impressive for the hardware [Music] no [Music] you know what's even more impressive though moto racer advance on the gameboy advance you can race a motocross bike on motocross tracks or you can race a gp bike on gp tracks lastly there's a traffic mode where you can choose either a motocross or a gp bike in racing traffic i mean motocross not motorcross pronouncing things is hard i definitely recommend you earn some faster bikes before tackling this mode the game is pretty easy to control and you even have a nitro which automatically refills when you're not using it as you win you'll unlock more tracks beat those and you'll unlock championship races beat those and you'll unlock more tracks and bikes each track is a different location like texas san francisco or even italy which is of course the land filled with volcanoes and happens to be overflowing with lava that's italy for you anytime i've been there i couldn't really explore because all of the lava it's everywhere at first it all seems really easy but don't be fooled this game gets quite challenging in the upper levels there are a few bad things about this game like you can't punch or attack your opponents for one also the jumps feel weird it's like you're on a planet with super strong gravity next sometimes it's hard to get back on the road if you go off the side even if you're going slow lastly there's no music as you play and the sound is rather unremarkable even with these flaws though i had a hard time putting the game down as you can see the graphics are really really cool the tracks are all good looking and what's particularly impressive is the draw distance look at that oh and it's all running at a constant 60 frames per second the closest competition that this game has is motocross championship on the sega 32x the 32x has dual 32-bit cpus in it in order to produce these high quality visuals go ahead just bask in the glorious motocross visuals of this outstanding game and by outstanding i mean bad now don't you think the game boy advance is doing i don't know about a thousand times better with this game it absolutely is in addition to looking really nice it's also a super fun game so i highly recommend checking this one out if you like racing games [Applause] [Applause] how you doing you hanging in there good good for this next batch of games let's start out with one of the better ninja games of the 16-bit era [Music] we all remember the arcade game called ninja spirit which came out in 1988 right no well it wasn't a tremendously common sight in north american arcades anyway it's a cool game where you play as a ninja and you're doing ninja things you can select between one of four weapons at any time and even power them up you can also get shadow ninjas that follow you around and effectively double or triple your firepower you die in a single hit though so you need to be extremely careful this game even has some cool parallax scrolling you can tell where i'm gonna go with this game right yes indeed the home console ports in 1990 ninja spirit came home to the pc engine and it was also released in north america for the turbo graphic 16. eventually it was even included with the turbo duo this is a fantastic port of the arcade game done by irem themselves everything is here there's an arcade mode and a pc engine mode in the arcade mode you die with a single hit but the pc engine mode allows you to take 4 hits before you die which is kind of nice the number up here on the right tells you how much power you have left but there are still plenty of enemies and bosses that can kill you in a single hit overall the game is quite faithful to the arcade and that includes the parallax scrolling keep in mind that the pc engine slash turbo graphic 16 only has one wimpy background layer but here you go full overlapping parallax scrolling usually when consoles with only a single background layer do parallax they don't have any sections that overlap each other sometimes a game will use sprites to accomplish some minor overlapping not this game though in fact when i first played this one i had no idea how they did this this game uses a method called animated background tiles basically that means there's still only one layer but certain parts of the background are animated as you move as you're moving to the right these trees are animated towards the right to make it seem like they're scrolling more slowly move left and suddenly they're being animated the other way it's a really good trick that still allows you to have tons of sprites on screen and it doesn't eat much cpu power it does eat up some memory though and it also takes some talent and time to pull off well this stage even has parallax scrolling both horizontally and vertically something even the arcade version can't claim to have it only had horizontal parallax this is a fast moving game and it feels pretty short despite having seven stages but it's still worth pulling down and playing through several times per year [Music] [Music] ninja spirit even came to the game boy in 1993 but only in japan where it's known as saigo no nindom i've heard it was also released in hong kong but i'm not sure if that was an official release this one was developed in the uk by bits amazingly this version even has the overlapping parallax scrolling in many of his stages once again it's done with animated background tiles and it looks really good stage two even has the parallax in all eight directions when you jump really high and it's as smooth as silk this game also has an arcade and a game boy mode the ladder gives you a life meter in the bottom right corner in the form of a number the bosses in this one take a ton more hits to defeat however even with that i beat the game the very first time i played it in this mode and i was looking at the title screen less than 20 minutes later after i turned the power on so i might recommend the arcade mode for this one at least for the first few times you play it still it's great to see the more advanced scrolling retained on the game boy [Music] i said i'd mention super spy hunter for the nes in a pushing hardware limits episode so here it is i won't talk about the gameplay much so be sure to watch the criminally underrated games 2 for that which was only a few episodes ago anyway sunsoft loved pushing the nes late in its life and super spy hunter is no exception i mean check out these pseudo-rotation effects as you zip down the road this is all done with line scrolling and it's fairly convincing it's also quite cool but what else does it do besides punish the player for even daring to play it well this stage has some pretty cool parallax effects as you race down the road and view the canyon beneath it later on in the same stage you hit jumps and flies super high into the sky then as you come back down you see the road approaching you as you try to land on it your car must have some really good shocks this effect is simply animated but it's still effective and it looks awesome also be sure to notice the little details like the animated heat waves in this stage or how the bridge suspension is swaying in the wind here or how many dang sprites this game puts on the screen sometimes this is a super tough game with tremendous graphics and fantastic music if you're up to the challenge check it out [Music] another one that's graphically impressive is swordmaster from activision also for the nes i'll be honest this game sucks pretty hard and that's mainly due to the level design and control the gravity when you jump is incredibly bizarre and it feels like you get pulled down hard and fast you basically just walk to the right gaining experience and fighting mini bosses some enemies can't even be killed fortunately you have a life bar but that won't help much after you bounce back super fast after touching an enemy some of the jumps can also be quite difficult the game might be good if you can get into a zone and take the time to really learn the controls still i'm not here to whine about the gameplay but instead praise the amazing parallax scrolling yeah i do that a lot but you need to understand that the 8-bit systems weren't built for this you can see where the talent in this game went i'm super jealous that they rarely ever tried anything like this on the sega master system [Music] everyone knows i like voices and cartridge games right well the sega genesis can do some really bad voices it can also do some really good voices live for me don't die strider it really all depends on the skill of the developer and how much memory is available in the game if a game has a lot of voices then they start to almost sound like a speaking spell pitch out to the back oh hit and stop two yard game that brings up second down on the new york 36 yard line baby toilet dog dog baby but witness the miracle of gaming that is richard scary's busy town this is the most fun game ever they can't put that on the title screen if it's not true richard scary isn't actually very scary and yes that's how his name is pronounced instead he was the author of several children's books and his busy town creation was a thing for kids as you can see this game is no different you just take the controller or the mouse and click on different things sometimes you have to help build a house or put stuff in a ship you know really simple activities for small kids this game also has tons upon tons upon tons of voices hi i would like to have some ice cream and while they're not cd quality or anything they don't sound bad oh hi mateys let's get this put together and what's surprising is that they were able to fit all of this into a relatively small for the time 16 megabit cartridge the green chair is very big that's only two striders just imagine if they had gone totally balls out with a 40 meg cartridge as a game it's really neat i learned lots of things about homes fire stations deliveries and ships learning is fun seriously though it's good for kids the only complaint i have is that the voices are all kind of quiet hi i would like to have an apple and some hot chocolate oh well you have a volume knob the power is in your hands be sure to run down to video exchange or whatever and rent this one right away i am thirsty [Applause] this water tastes great my hands are dirty i will wash them [Applause] my hands are clean i'm kind of excited for this next segment as these games were ahead of their time in one particular way that really nobody was thinking about back when they were released well nobody except for these developers anyway [Music] anyone remember virtua fighter from sega which came to the arcades in 1993 of course you do well you may not remember actually seeing it in an arcade or maybe you do but you likely know what the game is it was the first fighting game ever made wait no that's wrong it was the first 3d fighting game ever made there i'm pretty confident in that assessment anyway this game kept it pretty simple with only a punch kick and a block button not to mention the super floaty jumps there was a lot of technique to learn with this game and is super fun to play even when you lose [Music] so am i here to talk about the saturn version as a game that pushes hardware limits even virtua fighter remix doesn't really push the saturn too hard but seriously check out virtua fighter on the 32x which was released in 1995 well after the saturn version i can't even believe that they bothered to make this for one given that they already knew that the add-on was a huge failure before they even greenlit it not only that but am2 handled the port themselves yeah it looks a bit watered down compared to the arcade with maybe three or four fewer polygons on screen at any given time maybe five but it's not all glitchy like the original saturn version was and it plays perfectly in fact the polygons run at the same frame rate as the arcade version 30 frames per second that's pretty darn impressive for an add-on that can barely handle the simple scrolling in a game like pitfall the mayan adventure but get this in the options there's an actual 16x9 widescreen mode called squeeze when you enable this the polygons are squished anamorphically which means you need to stretch the image to fill your widescreen tv the backgrounds aren't squished but that's fine just look at how much more image you get between the two modes widescreen tvs weren't exactly prevalent back in 1995 and this is one of only three console games in the 16-bit era which supported widescreen and yes i consider the 32x part of the 16-bit era [Music] [Music] the first game was the ninja warriors on the mega cd which was only released in japan in early 1993. now this game used multiple monitors in the arcade to mimic this this game was letterboxed into a 4x3 screen so you have to use your tv to zoom it in and it fits pretty well into a 16 by 9 frame kinda neat but it takes a huge resolution hit since its letterbox instead of anamorphically compressed [Music] the first game to do that was world cup usa 94 on the genesis and sega cd which was released in that very year that's right this dumb soccer title is the first console game with an anamorphic widescreen granted the numbers in the options screen are kind of vague about it 32 is 4x3 and 40 is 16x9 this refers to the two graphics modes on the console called h32 and h40 this is how many 8x8 pixel tiles can fit on the screen horizontally here's the 4x3 mode and here's the 16x9 mode it's not perfect but that's a pretty good increase in your view it's really interesting how they achieved this in 4x3 the game runs in the genesis's low resolution mode at 256 pixels wide this is the same resolution that most super nintendo and turbo graphic 16 games run in for the widescreen mode they increased the resolution to 320 pixels wide which squishes all of the graphics horizontally they also redrew the lines on the playfield but didn't redraw anything else it's very interesting that this option is in here this game was made by the usually not so hot developer tier techs who finally did something right or maybe the scorpions demanded it but this graphics trick also leads to some questions for example earthworm gym runs at 256 pixels wide on the super nintendo and 320 pixels wide on the genesis this gives the super nintendo version a stretched out look in comparison normally a tv will just fill the image left to right and it doesn't really matter what the horizontal resolution is because of this the super nintendo version will always look stretched and cropped compared to the genesis version does this mean that the genesis version is in widescreen [Music] well i can say it's certainly not intended to be that way but it's fun to think about when it comes down to it world cup usa 94 here was the first game intended to be played in that manner and that's kind of cool even though the game itself isn't that great [Applause] art of fighting came to the neo geo in 1992 this is one of the more brutal fighting games that i've ever played at least in single player mode it will absolutely destroy you until you learn the ins and outs of it unfortunately if you're playing with yourself you can only choose to fight as two different characters ryo or robert do you like doing cool special moves well make sure you have some spirit energy remaining which is represented by the bar underneath your life bar not really the best idea ever for a fighting game however there is one thing that this game is responsible for bringing to the fighting game genre and that's how the screen zooms in and out depending on how close the fighters are the neo geo was all about showing off its scaling features and they found a great way to make use of it now whether this is distracting or not is up to you but i think it's neat anyway this game doesn't push the neo geo in any meaningful way but i had to include it for illustrative purposes artifiding was brought home to various consoles and the super nintendo version has the scaling i'm kind of surprised that it does actually since the console can only scale the background image so what they did was take the sprites that make up each character and basically move them in closer together so that they overlap each other by a pixel or two that's a smart way to have limited sprite scaling that still looks great it works pretty well but this isn't the port that i want to focus on [Music] that's right art of fighting was brought home to the pc engine cd in japan and it requires the arcade card which offers some extra memory there it's known as ryuko no kin for one it's incredible how close the pc engine was able to replicate a neo geo game what's amazing with this version is that it kind of retains the scaling of the arcade version when you get close it's way zoomed in and vice versa if you get far apart it's really interesting how they pulled this off when the game is zoomed in it's running in the normal resolution for the system of 256 pixels wide when it zooms out it increases the resolution below the score on the fly probably to 336 pixels wide giving it a wider view at the same time it also vertically squishes the background which is actually really simple to do for pretty much any console see as for the sprites they're simply redrawn for the smaller size but with the extra memory that the arcade card provides swapping out the sprites on the fly isn't an issue at all for the most part the game is pretty darn good with even better music than the arcade however it suffers slightly from two things the first is that like the arcade it's not friendly to new players at all when playing alone but there are unlimited continues so you'll have a good chance to learn your opponent also make sure to increase your health strength and spirit as much as you can in the bonus games the second thing that this game suffers from is the pc engine directional pad it's certainly not the worst pad out there but come on let's face it it's not the best either i have a very hard time pulling off moves consistently in this game still i always manage to get decently far though i've never been able to beat it while this isn't one of the best fighting games of this generation i do like that they tried to keep the spirit of the arcade alive in its visuals round one fight [Music] uh [Applause] and there you go more games that went above and beyond in their presentation in one way or another so what games do you think went beyond what was commonly accepted of the console at the time let me know in the meantime thank you for watching games [Music] so [Applause] [Applause] [Music] yes [Applause] rainbow [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] [Music] you know what let's start out with gauntlet from tangan 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 flickering 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 in double dragon unfortunately this means that everything even the player moves around in a very choppy fashion since the tiles are eight by eight 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] uh [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 is 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 roam 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 so 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] [Music] next is zero tolerance from accolade this one features a 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 shotgun [Music] collected handguns [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 his video tell him i sent you [Music] [Applause] [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] [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 cheating [Music] [Music] [Music] 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 traveler's 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 impressed 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 two 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 enter 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 two 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 traveler's tails 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 in 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 damn it 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 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 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 used 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 stardate 346. now through an unknown a totally new age is about to begin 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 clay fighter which actually have songs with lyrics in them it's pretty limited but still cool [Music] 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 [Music] [Music] 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 marvel'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 impressive [Music] 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 blark 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 game boy 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 movie [Music] sticking with the game boy 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] [Applause] [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 [Music] i know i'll play a trick on myself in the future [Laughter] 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 [Music] 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: 1,476,663

Keywords: sega, nintendo, turbografx, gameplay, videogames, retro, genesis, snes, nes, msx

Id: uxNbRWYCAs8

Length: 203min 3sec (12183 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 27 2022