/vr/ - Retro Games

>>10753123

It made better use of CD, too. PC Engine CD games didn't just have CD music, they actually used the space for more + bigger graphics and voice acting. Some games have so much voice acting and pixel art cutscenes (which aged way better than grainy small FMV) that there wasn't room left for CD music, so there's chiptunes. Sega struggled here, often just slapping cart games on CD with a new soundtrack, often a worse one as in the case of Ecco 2. The whole reason EA didn't support PC Engine is that they got offended when, as a precaution, NEC reps at CES asked them point blank "Do you have experience making games that use CD properly", because many others didn't know what to do with the space, yet felt compelled to fill it with whatever

It dodged a huge bullet by not being cut out to push grainy FMV. Instead PC Engine CD got meticulously handcrafted pixel art cutscenes that have aged really well. We didn't see that sort of thing elsewhere until Neo Geo. Sega CD had some, in Japan, but US titles were FMV slop

The nice thing about PC Engine CD is that it has more colors than Genesis and CD storage for voice acting and music, but not enough power, generally, for grainy FMV like what plagued the Sega CD. So instead it got painstakingly hand crafted pixel art cutscenes which have aged far better.