The Sega CD vs The Arcade

[Music] launched in japan in december of 1991 as the mega cd sega's new add-on featured some impressive upgrades to the base mega drive hardware it had its own faster 68 000 cpu dedicated sprite scaling and the advantage of cd-rom storage the lead up to the north american release was agonizing for me even though i had my own job the mega cd had been nearly a 500 product in japan which meant importing it would be a hell of an undertaking for my meager income when it finally appeared in october of 1992 for us gamers i was elated to see that it had come down to a much more manageable three hundred dollars the us launch also came with a number of pack in games something the japanese version lacked entirely sega cd ownership had its ups and downs from there but i love the thing overall while many were unhappy with sega's level of support i tried to keep positive and focus on the things it did well with over 200 games released for the platform it had a number of software titles very much worth playing in this episode we're going to take a look at how some of its arcade ports fared we have some fighting games a beat-em-up a few side-scrolling action titles and even a basketball game thrown in for good measure did these conversions do the franchises proud or did they crash and burn leaving sega fans disappointed let's find out [Music] do you guys remember the arcade game g-lock from sega it was sort of a continuation of the afterburner franchise with a few tweaks like a shoot down goal and the viewpoint you played it from a year later sega did a semi-sequel to g-lock called strike fighter which was very similar visually but played closer to afterburner's original style in 1992 cri did a loose port of strike fighter for the fm town's computer in japan called afterburner 3. in turn they ported that work to the japanese mega cd in december of 1992 the problem was instead of trying to make this show off the mega cd sprite scaling capabilities it was just a vanilla port of a very unspectacular game there is nothing here visually the standard mega drive couldn't have done on its own even when the viewpoint pulls out to deal with an enemy behind you it's just animation frames playing out and not the mega cd sprite scaling engine at work the ground features are sparse and unimpressive and the ground rotation featured in the arcade original is nowhere to be found strike fighter had been done on the arcade y board so a port would have needed to be cut back significantly but here they didn't even try it has more in common with the home conversion of afterburner 2 than it does anything else the rest of the world received it the following year but it was virtually unchanged from the japanese release this could have really been something to show off if sega and cri had tried to take advantage of the hardware in spectacular fashion the mega cd was even more expensive in japan than it was in the rest of the world so it desperately needed killer apps and this just didn't cut it at all on the plus side it does have a pretty good cd soundtrack [Music] [Applause] when the sega cd launched in 1992 the neo geo was still a monster of technological power its games were getting bigger with each new release and by the time 1993's fatal fury special made its way out it was a then massive 150 megabits of rom when it was ported to the sega cd the following year i knew the meager ram in it would mean some massive cutbacks but you know what all things considered this did not turn out as bad as i had expected you lose a number of background details the day night cycles animations have been stripped back and the sound effects are kind of shitty but overall this is a very playable version of this game i'm no fatal fury expert but from what i can tell most of the moves and characters are here just take a look at some side by sides of the various stages and fighters considering the massive cut in color the sega cd had to work with i'm reasonably happy with the overall fidelity of this presentation the sacrificed background animation seemed to allow the sega cd to hang on to the large sprites and a lot of their animation the cd soundtrack is solid and the gameplay feels mostly intact it supports the six button arcade pad so that's a huge plus right there it doesn't hold a candle to the neo geo original of course but at the time nothing really did despite being newer hardware the sega cd just did not have the ram or color capabilities to mimic the arcade any closer than this still taken on its own i think this is a very playable conversion that got more right than it did wrong [Music] [Applause] [Music] capcom's final fight was an instant classic when it hit the arcade in late 1989. it took the double dragon formula of beat em up and made it infinitely more playable it used the cps arcade hardware which was a color and sprite pushing monster compared to most of the other games out at the time in 1993 under license from capcom sega published final fight for its cd platform they sought to make this version noticeably superior to the early super nintendo release by including co-op multiplayer all three playable characters as well as the stages and some original content for the most part they succeeded in then some while the sega cd had to work within the limited color of the genesis it still looked great with huge sprites great animation and very nice backgrounds the redone soundtrack was absolutely brilliant and blew the arcade original away gameplay was still incredibly fun but you will notice a few differences between the two while the sega cd version sprites move around plenty fast your attack animations are considerably slower at times something you'll need to adjust to if you are heavily into the arcade first you will also notice that there are fewer enemies on the screen at any given time particularly as you get deeper in the sega version does have some bonuses like a fully voiced opening cinematic and an exclusive survival mode overall i adore this port it feels and looks different but even in 1993 i really appreciated what it got right i recommend the japanese release of this if you want to own a physical copy it's not censored and is far more affordable [Music] [Music] [Music] you all know the story of the home versions of mortal kombat with nintendo trying to preserve its squeaky clean image they censored the heck out of the first super nintendo game allowing sega to capitalize by including the arcade's blood and fatalities intact in the genesis release nearly a year later a sega cd port was released promising to be even closer to the original arcade of course this was a claim we are talking about here and they just reused the assets from the cartridge version with a few minor tweaks and additions and just like the genesis version compared to the arcade it's not even close you get downsized sprites far less animation muted colors simplified backdrops and of course shang tsung's morphing ability is accompanied by bouts of loading for each new fighter while it does boast some advantages over the original cartridge release it's still a far cry from being anything close to an accurate port of the coin-op but i do not hate this release far from it in fact i enjoyed the cd soundtrack and as far as an actual home port it's the best of the 16-bit generation by a mile it also had a few variations of the famous mortal kombat song as cd music tracks on the disc it wasn't all that it could be but still worth a look if you love the genesis original scorpion win flawless victory fatality [Music] [Music] scorpion wins flawless victory fatality nba jam on the sega cd has much the same issue as mortal kombat did it's basically a straight port of the cartridge with only a few additions next to the arcade you get much lower detail smaller sprites and an announcer that is much less enthusiastic and doesn't speak up nearly as often but like the genesis original it's still a solid port overall and retains most of the magic of the arcade's gameplay it's fast smooth and has four player support if you have the proper accessories still you can't help but feel this could have been better on the sega cd why are the sprites still so small why don't the sprites scale like the arcade why doesn't the announcer speak more on a cd based machine i feel this game suffers what many sega cd games suffered the moving of cartridge-based assets over to save developers time and money the problem there was is that the sega cd versions quite often came out after the genesis release and getting mostly the same game later for your 300 add-on wasn't so appealing acclaim wasn't the only company that did this but the sheer popularity of their license games really put the sega cd in the spotlight for this kind of thing it's still a fun game but like mortal kombat i believe it could have been so very much more on the sega cd [Applause] [Applause] have you ever seen 1987's the ninja warriors in the arcade it was a three screen monster of a cabinet by taito that allowed you to play co-op multiplayer in an extra-wide environment loaded with soldiers tanks and all kinds of crazy enemies there were a number of ports at the time including a 1993 version for the sega cd given that six years had passed sega's add-on actually did a great job porting over pretty much an exact replica of the original of course you lose the triple wide presentation but you still get very similar graphics and faithful gameplay the biggest issue here is not its visuals but its difficulty the arcade version is notorious in its challenge there are enemies that can take your entire life bar in two hits and this was not particularly well managed in the sega cd release it's still hard as hell and they cap your lives so having any chance of beating this will need a ton of practice to make matters worse a vastly superior follow-up appeared on the super nintendo only a year later making you wonder why that version wasn't on the sega cd in the first place on the plus side taito's music team zumtata did the music and it's really good it makes this almost worth playing by itself [Music] [Music] the sega cd received a number of full motion video arcade ports from laserdisc games but i just want to cover one of them basically because what i say here applies to almost all of them of this batch road avenger was my favorite by a country mile beside the arcade you will notice some pretty profound differences in visual quality the arcade had a larger window of video had more color and far less compression artifacts the video was quite a bit smoother as well the other big difference between these two releases was the opening theme song which was infinitely better on the sega cd i really dug the revenge story here as you track down and eliminate the game that killed your bride all of these full motion video arcade ports played the same usually a button or direction being prompted on the screen for you to press time them right and you go on to the next scene get it wrong and you'll play it all over again while full motion video had been cool to see on a video game system at the time these titles were little more than interactive movies with very limited replay value they tried to make them harder to compensate but that just turned away your average gamer endearing the sega cd to few in the long term [Music] [Music] [Music] samurai showdown on the neo geo was a personal favorite of mine i loved its presentation and the gameplay was so different from street fighter it was able to stand firmly on its own unlike a great mini porch to the sega cd the team that did the genesis version of this was not the ones that brought out the cd release in fact it even had different publishers the duo that brought us the sega cd edition was funcom common jvc and i don't care what anyone has to say on the subject it's by far the best of the 16-bit ports of the time while not perfect it retains the feel of the neo geo original in some pretty important ways it's got the best visuals the full intro the original music on cd and the gameplay feels fairly accurate considering the trade-off in power of course all that does come with some pretty vicious concessions you still lose earthquake it's missing voice samples the referee is gone and there are some nasty low times even with all that i still love this version and consider it the best fighting game on the platform the graphics really hold up quite well with bright colors and nice sized sprites of course purist will never see anything more than a stripped down shadow of the arcade original that isn't necessarily wrong but at the time neo geo ports were never 100 accurate and this was better than the genesis and super nintendo efforts in pretty much every way [Music] [Music] [Music] in 1991 namco released its flat shaded polygon shoot-em-up arcade title starblade powered by its most advanced arcade board to date the system 21 it was a technical marvel at the time you were locked to a designated flight path with the ability to move your cursor around the screen and shoot down enemies it was a short difficult epic that was really meant to show off namco's technology when it came to the sega cd in 1994 it had to be scaled way way back in order to make the cut the real-time visuals of the system 21 had to be reduced to full motion video wallpaper in this release and the enemies cut back to mere wireframe models don't get me wrong it's still really cool to see the sega cd doing this but side by side the arcade version just annihilated it starblade's visuals had been its biggest and best asset leaving the sega cd title little to expand on it's still really short very hard and has an extremely limited replay value i appreciated it for what it was at the time but if you have never seen this until now these comparison shots are likely making you snicker a bit surprisingly it was techno salt that did the conversion but i think namco would have been better served going the sill feed route with this one making a rapid decent making a rapid in 1993 konami ported their arcade light gun game lethal enforcers to the sega cd it's essentially the genesis game with vastly superior music and sound effects visually there's little here in the way of improvements which means that it too is really rough next to the arcade original the lower color capabilities of the hardware really hammer the digitized assets washing out both the enemies and the environments heavily to compensate the entire image is dithered to the point where smaller details are completely lost making this one hell of an ugly game of course this is all about the gun and the fun is about shooting bad guys so for everything that it lacks in graphical polish the gameplay is still as good as it ever was it sold well so konami released its sequel lethal enforcers 2 gun fighters the following year it's pretty much the same story it takes the genesis version and improves the sound and music while leaving the visuals virtually the same again this equals a port that is quite a bit uglier than the arcade original but still has the same gameplay these two games are infinitely more enjoyable with two players though finding the pink second player gun has become quite expensive it can be played with two controllers but as you can see from my gameplay it's just not the same experience if you enjoyed it on the genesis the sound improvements here do make for a better time but they are certainly some of the uglier games for the sega cd [Music] 1993 also brought a support of the taito arcade classic night striker it's a super scaler style shooter that has you in control of a hover car doing battles on the streets and in the skies of a futuristic metropolis your job is to take down an evil organization and rescue those they have taken hostage it plays much like the sega arcade release a b-cop with you basically shooting down hordes of enemies and avoiding obstacles along the way the arcade was a beautifully smooth experience that rivaled the best from sega at the time but the mega cd port suffers some serious downgrades the performance is nowhere near as nice and the graphics suffer from severe pixelation i could tell you the obvious that these downgrades hurt the playability and they do but with so few sprite scalers on the hardware you still want to play it you still want to see what the next stage looks like and when something halfway impressive happens you want to rationalize that this game has its moments so was the life of a sega cd owner even when it had its issues you may do and enjoyed what you could as much as i wanted this game to be better i can't help but admit that i would have been grateful for a port of outrunners at a similar quality the sega cd had so much potential and when you saw a sliver of it you grabbed onto it for dear life [Music] oh the sega cd had a few different pack-in games during its run one of them the five-in-one compilation called sega classics arcade collection on this disc was streets of rage and revenge of shinobi but it also included arcade ports of golden axe columns and super monaco gp unfortunately what we have here are genesis games with cd soundtracks and some redone sound effects all three are identical to their cartridge cousins otherwise with the exception of golden axe which is only one player for some reason the real missed opportunity was of course super monaco gp with the sega cd sprite scaling they could have added a few more details to the presentation to give it a bit more oomph sadly like many games for the platform it takes advantage of none of this and retains the same visuals you already had access to on the base genesis they're still fun of course but sega did as little work here as possible an omen that would dog the platform its entire life [Music] the last game on this list is also a neo geo port released in december of 1993 by sammy sengoku for the sega cd is one many of you may not know about as a japanese exclusive it's mostly been lost amongst the other games in this lineup you see the typical cutbacks here as you do with pretty much any neo geo port of the time less color less on-screen detail smaller sprites and less impressive audio most of the power ups bosses and stage transitions made the cut but we did lose the two-player mode in the process if you are wondering what this one is about it's a side-scrolling beat-em-up about a japanese warlord returning from the dead to conquer the world his warriors can only be stopped by ninja dave and cowboy kev descendants of the original samurai that stopped the warlord's previous efforts you have the ability to transform yourself into a samurai warrior a wolf and a ninja each with different abilities as well as power ups for your main sword attacks it's a simple game but i enjoyed it and while the sega cd port is cut down quite a bit visually it gets most of the gameplay right it's definitely a worthwhile curiosity if you dabble in the mega cd's japanese library oh [Applause] looking back at these games and comparing them to the arcade originals it's pretty damn clear sega made a terrible choice designing the sega cd the way they did they wasted a ton of time and effort on the sprite scaling ability that was hardly ever used instead of increasing the color capabilities that every single game could have benefited from every title in this episode could have used a bump in color to make it more visually pleasing particularly the digitized assets of mortal kombat it's still a sore spot with me all these years later why include sprite scaling and never hardly use it the sega cd was originally meant to be an affordable addition that cost around 150 making it a mass market device within striking distance of every genesis owner instead the extra chips bloated the price to more than double its previous estimates basically pushing it out of range of all but the most dedicated among us while i adored my sega cd for what it was i really do think sega made a tremendous mistake in its design and pricing they marketed a machine with capabilities that were rarely used and worse focused on a type of software that needed none of it had the sega cd launched in 1991 with four megabits of ram and without the extra chips for 150 bucks just imagine how many more sega would have sold and the thing is damn near all of its library would have been nearly the same the rpg still would have been there exclusives like sonic cd would have only lost the crappy bonus stage and how many good sprite scalers did we get four maybe five as much as i loved the sega cd i would have traded batman returns and soul star in a heartbeat for an add-on that was cheaper got a ton more games with cd soundtracks more cinematics and improved sound effects hell that's 99 percent of what we got anyway i'm singalord x thank you guys for watching and i will catch you next time [Music] you

Channel: Sega Lord X

Views: 126,905

Keywords: side by side, sega cd, comparison, segalordx, sega lord x, sega saturn, sega genesis, sega dreamcast, mega drive, megadrive, game gear, 32x, mega cd, genesis, saturn, master system, sega, gameplay, review, movies, retro games, retro gaming, video games, ps4, xbox, wii, nintendo, gamecube, n64, ps1, ps2, ps3, psp, vita, switch, atari

Id: _84oCKyKhnM

Length: 28min 7sec (1687 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 29 2021