Are Sapphire's Graphics overrated?

[PukeSter]

Don't mean to sound like a troll, but I've always been curious about this for years.

Sapphire has some cool looking boss fights, and the first stage has some crazy effects. But to be honest I think Nexzr and Gate of Thunder both look nicer. A lot of Saphire's later levels are somewhat plain and lack parallax (I don't wanna sound like Black Falcon but it's true.)

Do people put Sapphire on a pedastal due to the price tag? Is it because the Arcade Card had not much on it? With Fatal Fury Special, the pce port is still better than the snes one because of sound, sprite size and difficulty level, but FFS snes definitely has nicer backgrounds overall. It's not a total wash.

[soop]

I think it's because Sapphire pulls off a lot of really neat tricks that the PC Engine "can't do".  On the first level, there are wireframe graphics, what look like 3D models, and faux mode 7.

Nowadays some of the once cutting edge stuff hasn't aged well, but back then it would have been seriously impressive, coupled with the fact that it's a decent shooter.  I still think it looks pretty good, but maybe I'm biased

[NecroPhile]

If you mean they look nicer based on art style, that's entirely subjective.

In terms of unique enemies, sprite frames, and background tiles, they're not even close to Sapphire (especially so for Nexzr).

[seieienbu]

I think Lords is the superior game but I definitely think that Sapphire is a technical marvel that's unmatched on the system.

[exodus]

Overrated is certainly not an objective term that could be applied to anything. And Sapphire is definitely an impressive game - it doesn't use absolutely every technique that the PCE can do, but no game does. I would say Sapphire is graphically impressive, and so are a bunch of other games

Legend of Xanadu 2 is a big one for me. Basically looks like an early PS1 game.

[LMS]

What Soop said.

As a platform the PC Engine felt as if it had such a long lifespan at the time, initially landing among other 8 bit systems and then due to its various hardware updates, keeping impressive pace with the generation of 16 bit systems that followed. The idea of the Arcade card was so exciting at the time but we never really got to see it played out to it's full potential in terms of software support. The opportunities were there but many of them (Strider I'm looking at you) really weren't executed as well as they could have been. I would have loved to see Konami develop a title for it, they were in their element during that era and considering the level of mastery they'd reached with Dracula X, it would have been epic to get something like an Arcade Card Contra or Axelay!

Creatively speaking, I feel like Gate Of Thunder stands above any other shooter on the system. Just my subjective opinion though, obviously.

[CrackTiger]

The PC Engine isn't an 8-bit system any more than Intellivision is 16-bit and Xbox is 32-bit. It also never received any hardware upgrades. The system cards were the cart that game segments were loaded into. The different CD formats are no different than larger cart sizes for 16-bit games.

The SNES is the 16-bit console which used hardware upgrades to keep pace. The PC Engine received a pixel for pixel port of R-Type 4 months after launching and it runs smooth. 3.5 years later the SNES received a compromised port of R-Type II, built around the SNES hardware's weaknesses. It still chugs as bad or worse as R-Type for SMS.

Even the SuperGrafx is just a regular PC Engine, saddled with additional tile and sprite layers to handle. Super Ghouls 'n Ghosts was built custom for the SNES hardware and also chugs super bad, while the CPS port Daimakaimura released a year earlier runs smooth on the only cpu PC Engine hardware ever used.

[PukeSter]

super GNG has a patch that fixes the slowdown. It works on real hardware

https://www.romhacking.net/hacks/3473/

Didn't R-type 3 perform way better than r-type 2?

[SignOfZeta]

You need to understand the difference between technical achievement and artistic acumen. Sapphire does things Gate of Thunder never could but Gate of Thunder is more cohesive. In GoT, all the graphics look like they were drawn in the same time period by the same people and it plays way better. Many PCE shooters are better than Sapphire overall, as a game, but Sapphire goes to extremes in more lavish ways, mainly in the number of animation frames it stores in the AC. The time traveling theme works as much for it as against it artistically. Gameplay wise is pretty B- in my humble opinion.

As a high water mark it can't be overrated, as a shooter I guess it is if you think it's the best ever. I'd consider it a top 10 shooter on PCE, probably not top 5, but still worth $700 because of multiple factors. It's been hard to find since the day it came out, for one thing, and now that Neo ports are everywhere Sapphire is clearly the game to demo the arcade card with...maybe the only one.

[seieienbu]

You need to understand the difference between technical achievement and artistic acumen. Sapphire does things Gate of Thunder never could but Gate of Thunder is more cohesive. In GoT, all the graphics look like they were drawn in the same time period by the same people and it plays way better. Many PCE shooters are better than Sapphire overall, as a game, but Sapphire goes to extremes in more lavish ways, mainly in the number of animation frames it stores in the AC. The time traveling theme works as much for it as against it artistically. Gameplay wise is pretty B- in my humble opinion.

As a high water mark it can't be overrated, as a shooter I guess it is if you think it's the best ever. I'd consider it a top 10 shooter on PCE, probably not top 5, but still worth $700 because of multiple factors. It's been hard to find since the day it came out, for one thing, and now that Neo ports are everywhere Sapphire is clearly the game to demo the arcade card with...maybe the only one.

I definitely think that Gates of Thunder is a better game than Sapphire.  Also Lords, and the lowly not-even-super-cd title Spriggan, and a few others.  With that said, Sapphire has more impressive visuals than all of them imo.

Aside from Sapphire, I would argue that the best example of what the Arcade Card can do is likely 3X3 Eyes.  A comparison to the Super CD versus the Arcade Card versions really show me what could have been. 

[SignOfZeta]

Yeah, we "could have been" waiting absolutely forever for our digital comics to load. Upset that you paid $50 for Yuna 2 and it only took 45 minutes to beat? No problem. Hire some animators and add 3 hours of load screen watching!

Btw, there is no "s" in Gate of Thunder. I don't want to sound like one of those Ys/Y's dicks but for some reason this one drives me nuts.

[LMS]

It also never received any hardware upgrades. The system cards were the cart that game segments were loaded into.

I think you may have somewhat misinterpreted my post. I never referred specifically to the PC Engines CPU which of course remained the same throughout it's lifespan. The addition of a CD-Rom unit was a hardware update and as far as I understand it, the system cards provide the system with additional (hardware) memory. I kind of see your logic comparing system cards to larger cart sizes but it's not the capacity of the media that is increasing, it's the systems ability to run it.

Didn't R-type 3 perform way better than r-type 2?

It did and I think you have to be careful judging a systems capabilities by any third party developers ability to write software for it at a given time. With practice and subsequent releases, a developer is likely to get more familiar with the platform and create additional tools to work with it... learning new tricks and allowing them to better optimise their code. Both Super R-Type and Super Ghouls and Ghosts are examples of relatively early attempts on the system by Irem and Capcom respectively. There's no escaping the fact that they're both pretty weak though.

My initial point was more about how the PC Engine arrived among a generation of 8 bit systems (NES, SMS) and held it's ground more or less throughout the entirety of their successors (SFC, MD). It was by far the most interesting system of the time when it came to unexpected hardware announcements in the import mags of the day.

But regardless of technical specs, a quality title endures the test of time because of it's overall design and gameplay and while Sapphire does some interesting things graphically, it's far less entertaining overall than a lot of other shooters on the system. Maybe people put it on a pedestal because it's arguably the most 'interesting' Arcade Card title in terms of showing that final system card's potential? But perhaps it's technical achievements get a little over emphasised by some to compensate for it actually being pretty boring.

[CrackTiger]

super GNG has a patch that fixes the slowdown. It works on real hardware

https://www.romhacking.net/hacks/3473/

Didn’t R-type 3 perform way better than r-type 2?

I was pointing out that the only hardware upgrade that the PC Engine used to keep pace with the SNES was a time machine, to go back in time almost a console generation and run the same type of game faster, with twice as much sprites, larger sprites, with more animation, no constant slowdown, all at a higher resolution.

The dev team said that the PC Engine's outdated cpu made the game harder, because it removed a bunch of slowdown that the arcade version has. What the average "retro" commenter doesn't realize is that the PC Engine version came out only 9 months after the arcade was released. It ran faster than current arcade hardware. The SMS/Mark III version, which people like to say was the best version until the PCE port finally came out, wasn't actually released until 6 months after the PCE version and the same month that the Mega Drive launched.

R-Type III was released 5.5 years after R-Type for PC Engine. Mode 7 is a neat gimmick that other consoles couldn't match, but the game tosses around maybe half as many sprites/action as Super R-Type. Literally around half the time there aren't any enemies onscreen. They usually get killed while entering the screen, keeping their numbers low. But when a string of them sneak by you get hefty slowdown. The better NES/SMS/Game Gear shooters have much more action. R-Type III also abuses tile flipping and is light on artwork. Gradius II for Famicom tosses around 3 or 4 times as much and has several times as much artwork. That's not really keeping pace with real 16-bit consoles.

Gradius III for SNES doesn't get enough credit for actually doing a lot. Sure it has a lot of slowdown as well and was reworked for the hardware, but it still has an impressive amount of action.

I think you may have somewhat misinterpreted my post. I never referred specifically to the PC Engines CPU which of course remained the same throughout it's lifespan. The addition of a CD-Rom unit was a hardware update and as far as I understand it, the system cards provide the system with additional (hardware) memory. I kind of see your logic comparing system cards to larger cart sizes but it's not the capacity of the media that is increasing, it's the systems ability to run it.

The PC Engine doesn't render graphics the same way as SNES and Genesis and doesn't need much ram. That's why it's so good at running animation. The IFU/system card memory doesn't upgrade the PC Engine, it's only the space that segments run out of, same as the FDS or Sega Saturn and its "ram" carts. It's not like the N64's ram expansion.

The PC Engine is actually severely bottlenecked by the CD formats and can do much more on HuCard. Which is why SFII' couldn't be done on Super CD and the Fatal Fury ports are still missing so many background details.

[seieienbu]

Btw, there is no "s" in Gate of Thunder. I don't want to sound like one of those Ys/Y's dicks but for some reason this one drives me nuts.

  I'll try to keep that in mind.  I think I wouldn't have made that mistake had "Lords" not been pluralized.  That's no excuse though (unlike Ys where I'd give a pass because the disk on Dawn of Ys includes a damn apostrophe for whatever reason). 

[Mathius]

It's kinda like the difference between Super Mario World 2 and Donkey Kong Country; both are a product of their cart sizes/artistic flair. Some might say the bright, clean graphics aged better than DKC's pre-rendered visuals, but I can't say that DKC is an ugly game. I personally think that pre-rendered look is pretty cool and I still marvel at what Rare did but, like Gate of Thunder, SMW 2 carries the  visual culmination of efforts by Nintendo and produced a truly beautiful game that is timeless.

I think Sapphire's a really cool shewtie with a neat bag of tricks. Definitely the game I pull out to show off my Arcade Card.

[Bardoly]

I pretty much agree with Mat here.  It's a really neat shoot-'em-up that I like to pull out and play 2-player and let my Playstation friends see what this system was capable of.  They really say, "Wow!  That's impressive!"  Is it the best PC Engine shoot-'em-up?  That's hard to say, but it is one of my favorites for sure.

[esteban]

Great thread.



I love discussions like this.

[SamIAm]

You need to understand the difference between technical achievement and artistic acumen. Sapphire does things Gate of Thunder never could but Gate of Thunder is more cohesive. In GoT, all the graphics look like they were drawn in the same time period by the same people and it plays way better. Many PCE shooters are better than Sapphire overall, as a game, but Sapphire goes to extremes in more lavish ways, mainly in the number of animation frames it stores in the AC. The time traveling theme works as much for it as against it artistically. Gameplay wise is pretty B- in my humble opinion.

Well said. I agree completely.

[spenoza]

Sapphire is clearly a technical marvel that highlights just how much graphical splendor the PCE is capable of when probably fed with data. I think of the PC Engine with Arcade card similarly to how I feel about the Neo Geo: throw enough RAM/ROM at the problem and it can handle almost anything. That said, I think Sapphire really doesn't have as impressive an artistic style as many other PCE shooters, and despite being fantastically animated, many of the enemies and bosses are actually rather ugly. The game is also mechanically rather bland. It's competently designed and programmed, but the only reason it stands out is the animation. Without those crazy amounts of animation the game would simply be pretty good and then promptly get forgotten in the sheer mass of great shooters on the platform.

[geise]

For it's time the graphics are quite good considering a lot were pre-rendered. Modeling was still in it's early forms then. Add to the fact it was for sprites on a 16-bit system with a limited but decent color palette, I felt they were pretty good.