/vr/ - Retro Games

>>4345707
Ranger X had something like a different effect every level. One had half a dozen layers of parallax scrolling, another had lightbeams (that charged up your power!), another had water splashing around as it was disturbed by motion, another one had the light changing as you flew in and out from the forest.
Then there were the bosses.

Dynamite Headdy had crazy multi-part bosses

Contra Hard Corps had some 3d levels.

Vectorman had... just look at the game, easily the most impressive looking Megadrive title. If the title screen alone doesn't take your breath away, you get particle effects, lens flare, lightbeams and shadows, fullscreen rotation, and mode 7, by the time you reach the second level.

Adventures of Batman & Robin has so many visual tricks, it looks like a 32bit game.

>>3609141
They make games that push conventions of genres, with a level of technical expertise that makes the target hardware do effects bordering on wizardry.

Then the internet happened and everyone started jerking off to their renown. Actual retro gamers are so sick of this that they now consider Treasure games the Halo tier of retro gaming, hence "babies first retro game".

Yes, we know their games are great, we have discussed them all to death, and we did it 12 years ago. Can we talk about Battle Garegga or Gouketsuji Ichizoku Chotto Dake Saikyou Densetsu instead?

Incidentally, I'm going to save this post now because I remember saying the same thing at least 5 times now.

>>2482986
The part at 4:40 doesn't do any rotation, just parallax scrolling and moving some sprites around in a circular rail. Nice illusion, though.

The part at 1:40 is more complex. The Megadrive can scroll backgrounds horizontally per pixel (aka line scroll), and it can also scroll them vertically at 16-pixel blocks (aka column scroll). It could also send interrupts whenever a scan line has finished drawing, these are referred to as raster interrupts.

What happens is that both vertical scroll and horizontal scroll is updated at every raster interrupt. For example if you want the tower (a background graphic) to be tilted to the right, then you have that background linescrolled to the right at every x scanlines, and column scrolled down at every y columns. Don't know the exact math from the top of my head, but the x and y values therefore act as the delta for the amount of rotation you want to achieve. You basically apply two trapezoid distortions at the same time, which kind of look like rotation if you use them moderately.

Many other MD games used this trick. Streets of Rage 2 in the pirate ship, Kawasaki Superbike in the backgrounds, Vectorman on at least the first boss, Dynamite Headdy somewhere, and probably lots of others.

Do note that there is a hardware bug where the leftmost column does not have its column scroll updated properly. This is entirely visible on games that do this effect on the real console, but emulators have it "corrected" and hide the bug. Castlevania probably showed a tower in the middle of the screen only to get around this problem; it could have done the effect full screen otherwise.

Ghouls 'n Ghosts
>some of the best level design there has ever been in a 2D platformer, tons of enemies to deal with and they're just random enough to keep things interesting without being unfair
Ristar
>novel arm stretching/grabbing mechanic which is used in a large variety of ways, very replayable with secrets and branching paths
Sonic 3 & Knuckles
>expands on everything Sonic 1 and 2 did right with more, and larger and more complex levels, minibosses, multiple different playable characters, elemental shields, better special stages, and so on
Dynamite Headdy
>incredibly varied throughout, new ideas are constantly thrown your way and nearly all of them are fun and well made
Virtual Boy Wario Land
>not sure what it is about it but it's probably the most fun I've had in any game collecting coins and power-ups and shit, which I usually find a bit tedious

Not /vr/: Donkey Kong Jungle Beat
>unique and surprisingly fun control scheme, nuanced and satisfying score attack mechanics, never played anything else like it

>>1639135
Adventures of Batman & Robin
Dynamite Headdy
Virtua Racing
Panorama Cotton
Ranger X
Vectorman
Kawasaki Superbike Challenge (fully polygons, SNES ver uses scaled sprites only)

Streets of Rage 2 is arguably impressive too, tons of huge sprites, extremely impressive backgrounds, and does its fair share of special effects, even does full screen rotation on the pirate ship. And it's a 1992 game.

if we include expansions, then
some of the scaling games on the Sega CD (SoulStar, the Batman games, Thunderstrike, Joe Montana NFL Football, Night Striker)
Zyrinx 32x demotape

>>1432873
More colors, sure. Better sound is up to individual preference. More than 5 sprites, only if we are talking about Final Fantasy style "animation", while the Megadrive was moving a jillion sprites on screen with raster effects.

>>1257105
Lots of games did this stuff.