Games That Push the Limits of the Sega Master System

pushing the limits of the master system [Music] like the nes but longer and also shorter like the nes but with a hedgehog instead of a plumber and also very popular in brazil yes it's hard to talk about the master system without comparing it to the nes but the master system was a different machine altogether one with a unique library and i'm going to take a look at a few of the games that pushed it to the limits not necessarily the best games to play but the ones that were the most technically impressive so let's start with r type happily both a very good game and a limit pusher as well our type comes heavy loaded with things to recommend it a superb conversion of irem's multi-coloured pixel explosion done by a company who were themselves already shooting game experts compiled you really could not have picked a better team to do the conversion the same group who'd already given us shooting classics like zanak and elest yes they knew what they were doing the game looks superb as close as you could really expect to the arcade original and it plays beautifully too a touch more deliberate than the coin operated wallet warrior it's not quite as fast but it's also mercifully a bit easier for it slightly better balanced for the whole market our tag was one of those games that was posted to nearly everything at the time and it turned out remarkably well wherever it went he must have had some sort of good luck aura about it but the master system is easily the best 8-bit version by far unless we're going to count the pc engine under that banner and even then it's a pretty close run notably this version loses very little from the original all eight levels there it even has a secret exclusive level if you can find it it's remarkably complete something made much easier by the larger rum sizes the master system allowed from the word girl cartridges could potentially be up to four megabytes in size and this game was 512 kilobytes a lot for an 8-bit game in 1988. the sheer amount of enemies and backgrounds sliding past made possible by the amount of space it had available i suppose you could argue that this doesn't really throw up any surprises technically but it does make brilliant use of the resources it has available graphics on this system are made up of backgrounds and sprites backgrounds should be fairly self-explanatory and sprites anything that moves independently of the background the player ship enemies etc the trouble is you can only have so many sprites on screen at once before flickery graphical glitches start to appear something that does happen here well quite often but not as much as you think it would do given the system's limitations our type seems to be constantly skirting the edge of what's possible visually on this system without it having a big hit on the gameplay and the end result is a definite system high point despite coming out relatively early in its lifespan can it be topped well technically maybe by another japanese shooter from 1992 it's sega the conversion of darius ii the arcade game not the 5th century bc ruler of the achaemenid empire just so you know based on the mega drive version of the same game why did they change the name well they must have been fed up with people getting it mixed with ancient near-eastern rulers i suppose stripped down a bit from the 16-bit release there's quite a few less stages in the choose your own path game layout but what there is is surprisingly close to its bigger brother the graphics like our type are colourful and dense there's a lot of action on the screen and not much flicker but there is one thing that this certainly has over our top and in fact well pretty much any other game on this system and that is the wealth of weird scrolling effects on display i would call it parallax scrolling but people will complain so let's call it split screen scrolling different parts of the background moving at different rates to give the illusion of depth the nes may not have been quite as powerful as the master system but it did have the advantage of having hardware upgrades built into its cartridges support chips to supplement its capabilities something sega's baby liked right well yes that's true but much of the time these expansions weren't needed on the master system it already had the relevant gubbins built in and the graphical effects in segaya provide the perfect example these effects rely on a scanline counter something the sms had right from the start and what on earth is a scanline counter you may well ask well let me explain scanlines are the horizontal lines of pixels across the screen that make up the game's graphics drawn one by one as the image is sent to the tv with a scanline counter you can tell automatically which line is being drawn at any given moment allowing you to basically change the image as it's being drawn open the door to a lot of neat graphical effects that would otherwise be much harder to do with a scanline counter you can fairly easily split the screen up into different sections and use the old sms's built-in scrolling capabilities to move them along at different rates giving that split effect as shown here in this section a particularly nice application of this trick can be seen in the first level that swirly flaming gas cloud thing going on a recreation of the arcade originals opening it looks a bit different than it does on some levels but the technique is the same just applied in a slightly different way using a debug feature of the emulations emulator we can view just the background as it's stored in the system's video memory and see what's actually happening yes it's really just a static image the swirly effect given by moving different parts of the screen back and forth at different times those white lines represent the edge of what's being shown at the top where the status bar is it all stays still the very bottom moves along at a constant rate and in the middle it inches back and forth in a wavy pattern giving the swirl we see on the screen the nes could do this sort of thing quite a few games did but not without those add-ons in the cart something that was totally unnecessary in sega land now let's move on to another game one that looks entirely different but actually uses some of the same techniques it's road rash released in 1994 a conversion of the mega drive hit that birthed a lot of sequels through the rest of the decade quite a name on the scene back then this version was developed by probe and published by us gold a cursed union surely two companies whose business model seemed to revolve around monetizing disappointments but well once in a while they dropped the ball and an occasional good game slipped out this being one of them a pseudo 3d 2d over the shoulder arcade racer if there's a genre that's died on its arse it's surely this style of thing even indie developers don't seem to want to bring these games back but it was all over the place at the time road rash spices things up with some combat elements too and it really is amazing just how well it translates over to the master system maintaining down near all the content of the 16-bit original slightly stripped back graphically but not nearly as much as you might think it is a touch slower there is less scenery and few other races to punch the tar out of but the essence of the game is still surprisingly intact the greatest feature though surely has to be that wonderfully undulating kirby track a fine example of how good these super old school races could look when done well yes the frame rate is a bit choppy but it looks pretty great for an 8-bit racer the distant scenery and moving clouds along with the objects on the roadside adding to the illusion how is it done well it's actually very similar to that fiery cloud effect on the first level of say gaia would you believe if we take a look at the background as it is in the video memory once again we can see the effect of work what we have is a straight road the curve added by using the scan line counter to precisely time when narrow strips of the road are scrolled back and forth the white lines once again showing the edges of each strip and how they are shifted relative to each other a simple idea that probably wasn't easy to implement the undulations of the road are created by effectively moving the horizon up and down between frames of animation that dips nearer to the player's viewpoint created the same way but further down the screen a lot of games use this sort of effect of course you'll even see on the speccy but rarely is it done so well even sega's own major games like outrun and hang on never looked quite this good okay then time to strike out in another direction entirely let's make an about face into a game that's its own genre in and of itself it's lemmings a franchise that was a big deal for a while but well oddly out of the picture in recent times created originally by dma design now known as rockstar north yep those guys i think they have bigger fish to fry these days now i've got to admit that this isn't the best version of this game the amiga original or any of the higher end ports would be better but well it's not bad at all really apart from the clunky control pad interface it's a very respectable rendition of this game probe software at the helm once again but well i'm being too harsh on probe they had their moments and this was one of them but nice as it is what's so impressive about lemmings even the zx spectrum managed a fairly decent version surely it's a gentle stroll for the master system well no actually and for one good reason tile-based graphics yes like a lot of its contemporaries the sms used tiles to draw the screen these are ready-made pre-defined blocks eight pixels high and eight pixels wide all of the graphics both the sprites and the backgrounds are made up of these blocks and the master system can store around 488 of them in its video memory at any one time and this is where it gets difficult because those lemmings can dig they can build they can even explode pretty much anywhere on the screen at any old time giving potentially unique patterns in each game and the fact is it's going to be impossible to have enough of these ready-made tails to cover every possible combination so what do you do well the solution in the nes version was just to have the lemmings dig very raggedy square holes in preset patterns but here on the sms something a bit more refined happens instead it generates new tails on the fly as they are needed calculating how they should look depending on what's happening and then pasting them into the video memory so they can be used on the screen unfortunately the system doesn't have enough video memory for each bit of the screen to have its own unique tile some of them are always going to have to be reused but that's not much of a problem here when a lot of the screen is going to be empty space anyway and the game seems to be engineered to avoid gameplay situations where you might run out of tails also worthy of note is the lack of flicker going on even when there are lots of lemmings on the screen again more chicanery with background tiles is happening here to fill in the gaps and make up for times when there aren't enough sprites to go around it isn't perfect but it works well enough to paper over the flickering issues that would otherwise be inevitable it's interesting to note that the nes could do stuff like this but it required extra ram to be present in the cartridge in fact the amazing nes version of elite uses a very similar technique in a different way to draw its wireframe 3d but well let's not get too bogged down in the competition and move on once again [Music] presenting a very late release from brazil is street fighter 2. [Music] yes in 1997 when this game came out even the next gen but won saturn was on a serious decline in the rest of the world but in brazil's unique gaming scene at sega's 8-bit underdog still have a few laps left in it hence this courageous port of one of the decades biggest hits is this a good game not really is it impressive well yes it is the towering hits of the early 90s those densely colourful visually intense fighting games were the final killing blow for 8-bit systems really they just didn't have the power the master system of all the old guard though is the one that held out the longest and gave the fighting game the best try as evidenced here there are a lot of things wrong with this the music is really really terrible the animation is choppy most of the moves are missing the backgrounds are well somewhat sparse i could go on believe me when i say that it plays about as good as it looks which is to say well not great but well not bad for a system like this the two button pad of the master system and the mysterious absence of some major characters meant that this was never going to be the full experience but well it could have been worse one criticism we can't level at this is flicker those are very large characters bouncing around the screen even if you put all the sprites of the sms together it surely couldn't handle all that without becoming a flickering mess could it so how was it done well with some very neat trickery not a million miles away from lemmings yes it uses background graphics to supplement the sprites let's take a look at just the background layer here and we'll see that one character is constructed entirely out of background tiles leaving the other to be constructed with available sprites this is really the only way you're going to get such large characters on the screen without any flicker but doing this wasn't easy because again like lemmings it's not practical to have every possible needed background tile in the memory you can't have every part of every character laid over every part of every background in every configuration that could happen you're going to have to create new tiles as they are needed when you use sprites the graphics chip does the work of seamlessly laying each sprite over the background layer while still leaving it visible around the edges but when you're doing it with just background tiles well you're going to have to write code to do it manually this wasn't all that unusual in the 8-bit world many systems didn't have any built-in sprite handling capabilities at all so i had to do this all the time the zx spectrum for example but on the master system it was pretty rare except in extreme cases like this this process probably explains why this incarnation of street fighter is so choppy it runs at just 10 frames per second doing all this messing around with background tiles takes a lot of computing power and even when you've drawn the tiles you've still got to load them into the video memory in the right place all of this takes time which means you can only update what's happening on the screen at such a limited rate but there was one game that did something quite similar but a bit better so let's wind back a few years and take a quick look at mortal kombat yes it's probe once again but maybe a bit of a return to form for them because this well this is not all that great like street fighter 2 it's impressive for the system but not not the most faithful version of midway's misspent youth filling gorefest if anything it looks a little worse than street fighter the digi test characters not making the jump to eight bits unmolested but it does have one advantage that's the frame rate yes it's not brilliant but it is quite a bit less choppy than what we've just seen the rate goes up and down but the frames per second never seems to drop below about 15 not amazing but a decent bump now was it done well probe's mortal kombat uses the same technique as street fighter 2 but in a more intelligent way if we take a look at just the background graphics once again we can see that one character is made from background tiles and the other sprites like before but it's not always the same one being drawn in the same way it switches back and forth between the two why well i think this is to minimize the amount of background tiles that need to be drawn and put into the video memory in every frame my assembly hacking skills aren't really good enough to confirm this but it seems to have some sort of algorithm that determines how to draw the graphics in a more efficient way requiring less processor time and less memory bandwidth upping the frame rate also i suspect the simplicity of the background plays a part here too lower color depth probably reduces the load as well it's a shame the end result isn't all that wonderful really programmer keith burkhill seems to have spent a long time on getting this right yes pushing the limits doesn't necessarily mean it's a good game even when the tech stuff is on point okay okay one last fighting game before we call it a do yes time is knocking on but if i'm talking about limit pushing fighting games i've got to talk about this from 1994 it's jang pong 3. [Music] jang pong 2 was pretty poor jang pong won doesn't seem to exist but what appears to be the second third and final entry in the series is a little weird but worth a gander the blood seems to involve some sort of nazi robot dinosaur uprising written in the more innocent 90s when this sounded like a truly terrible thing rather than that light relief it would be in these difficult times yes it's got a sort of budget supermarket off-brand air about it a selection of not all that surprising fighter characters with a few oddballs thrown in all from well less well-known world cities so much so the character select screen looks a bit like ryanair's website offbeat but it plays well looks darn good actually and has a whole load of colorful and even animated backgrounds and okay the music isn't great but well it's better than street fighter interesting though this takes a very different tack to the previous games in how it draws its graphics going entirely with sprites for his characters large characters means that the sprite limit is hit very quickly so things do get well very very flickery but actually most of the time it looks okay the result of this is a much much better frame rate though in fact it seems to run at the max 60 frames per second most of the time yes the animations aren't updated so quickly but this was a very common feature of fighting games in this era and as you can see here stuff is happening on every frame it works so well but you might wonder why anybody bothered to do it any other way but the characters here are a little smaller than both street fighter and mortal kombat and must be about the limit of what is practical to achieve using this method by going down the originality route as weird as it was the creators of this game were a bit more free to mix it up and make something that was well tailored to the system rather than desperately trying to hammer something in that won't quite fit and well it's better for it it's probably not going to offer much to true fighting game aficionados but it is a bit of a laugh to play and good for a casual blast a worthy contender in the world of master system games and a limit pusher well yes i think it is fear well that turned out to be more drawn out than i thought it would be and there's still so much that i've left out but it's time to call this journey over for now and well get out and stretch our legs a bit what about the game gear wasn't that nearly the same as the master system well saw it off but it was a smidge more powerful in some ways and a smidge less in others and it had a whole load of exclusives so that one i think is for another video i think some people may be surprised about the games that i featured here i mean i'm sort of surprised about what i ended up putting in because well yeah i've missed out sonic i've missed out those big licensed titles that may come to mind when you think about the sega master system but in terms of purely what was the most impressive well this is what i've dug up but if you disagree if you can think of any games that you think are better of course please do leave it in the comments below so let's wind this one down i will say goodbye for now thanks for watching uh don't forget to subscribe if you've got this far into this video and you haven't and i'll see you next time [Music] you

Channel: Sharopolis

Views: 152,352

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Id: H4Ze11Z8ffU

Length: 22min 1sec (1321 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 09 2020