Re: Thoughts on remakes/compilations

barrywaterberg@xxxxxxxxx wrote:
Scott H wrote: 
     It should be pointed out that both VF3tb and Soul Calibur were
ports from notably less capable hardware than the Dreamcast.  They



Ditto for TTT. Like Soul Calibur, TTT originally ran on Namco System 12
in the arcades, and was later ported to significantly more powerful
hardware, that being the PS2. As for VF3, that was just a rushed,
sloppy port. Its main graphic flaws were its crappy vertex animation on
the joints and lack of cloth movement. The DC could have done it
perfect, but Sega rushed it for the Japanese launch.

TTT had all new polygonal models created for the characters and the levels, it was basically completely redone. Soul Calibur had a resolution boost and nicer textures placed on basically the models and backgrounds (from what I've seen). They certainly didn't redesign the characters for SC like they did for TTT.



didn't rewrite the code from the ground up, nor was there any effort to
"max out" the Dreamcast's polygonal capabilities.  Yet the games had



It didn't max it out, but Soul Calibur was still no slouch in the
polygon department.

It is for a Dreamcast game. Virtually only Soul Calibur and PS1/N64/PC ports that ran at less than the 1 million mark for the DC.


Calling the flat looking sheen that the PS2 places on textures "pretty"
is questionable.  I've always found it, well, flat looking.  It doesn't
look like leather or silk to me, it looks like a texture wrapped on
plastic with a bright white light shining on it to me.  With that said,



To me, it looks more like silk than without it since silk has a natural
sheen to it. I wouldn't call Forest Law's silk shirt plastic looking,
though some of the other non-silk cloths do have a slight plastic look
to them. Still think it's pretty.

Not arguing that you can't think that, and it is technically doing more than the engines in the DC games we're discussing.


Soul Calibur was an atrocity, Namco couldn't have been lazier. Not only 


I really disagree. To really appreciate the effort that Namco put into
Soul Calibur DC, you have to do a direct comparison with the arcade.
I've done that, and it's like night and day. The arcade version is
plagued with seaming polygons, flickering, very low res textures, heavy
pixelization and a low polygon count. The DC version corrected all
that.

I spent a lot of time looking at the arcade version after the DC version was released, and the polygon models look identical. The tearing polygons is a PS1 hardware glitch, so that was fixed. But if you stood about five feet away from the arcade version's screen it basically looked like the same game, the DC just handled it better, and made it higher res and texture filtered.


Character textures became very high resolution, color depth
became 16-Bit or greater, the overall image became super stable, and as
you point out later, Soul Calibur moved 750,000 pps. That has to be at
least three times greater than the arcade considering that System 12
could only manage 360,000 *raw*.

Hmm, I thought the System 12 board was basically two PS1s and more RAM, I guess I was mistaken. That would be an improvement then,


If you want to see truly lazy DC ports 
from System 12, then check out the Capcom/Tecmo ports of Plasma Sword
and Tech Romancer. The only improvements that Plasma Sword saw was the
addition of gouraud shading, filtering and high-screen resolution. The
polygon count and texture detail remained the same as the arcade which
were pathetic even by System 12 standards. Capcom didn't even bother to
*polygonize* the static low color, 2D backdrops. Now Tech Romancer
could have really benefitted graphically from an increased polygon
count because the Mechs were EXTREMELY blocky in the arcade, but no
such luck. The only facelift it got was filtering and high-screen res.
Give Namco credit.


True, but nobody's tauting them as the best looking game on the DC. My point was to point out that Soul Calibur was using very little of the DC's capabilities, and was basically not optimized to the system's specs.



did they fail to implement smooth gradients in the bilinear filtering on
the floor textures (if it wasn't an even lower form of texture
filtering), but they ran the Dreamcast at 640x480 and increased the
texture map resolution of a game that ran at less than 20% of the
Dreamcasts actual polygonal limits (750,000 pps out 5 million pps).  Yet
people still insist that it's the DC's best looking 3D fighting game,
pointing to the colors on screen and animation mostly.  Go figure.




I'd say it's second best, second only to DOA2. It's still a very
beautiful and technically impressive game to me. I don't really
remember there being any other DC fighting games beside DOA2 that could
match or surpass Soul Calibur graphically. The other System 12 ports?
Read above. The Power Stones? They had nicely detailed backgrounds, but
the character models were low poly and lacking in texture detail.
Mortal Kombat Gold? Better than the arcade version thanks to the higher
resolution, but like the Power Stones, it lacked high texture detail
and polygon count. Project Justice? That's one game I never got to
play, but it didn't look too good judging by the screenshots. Fighting
Vipers 2? Never got to play that either, but it did look good in
screenshots despite the bad reviews.

VF3tb is technically doing more geometry, but overall I'd say DOA2 is the only one that clearly beats it.



--
Scott

http://www.gamepilgrimage.com 




--
Scott

http://www.gamepilgrimage.com
.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Thoughts on remakes/compilations
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