SNES vs. Genesis: A Battle for the Ages! [Part 1 is over, platformers coming up next]

[A Black Falcon]

Hmm...R2: Rendering Ranger, after ten minutes of play I feel a bit cold towards it. The gameplay in the first level is very similar to Contra III, only the level feels much more barren. It looks really good and there's a lot of stuff going on in the background, but nothing about it beyond that really blows me away. The first level is also extremely long and has a number of parts to it that a very unforgiving.

There's apparently some space shooting segments, but I haven't made it to one yet.

The second level is a shmup level I believe, so all you have to do is beat level on in order to see it...

Originally the game was going to have sprite graphics, but late in development Trenz was convinced to replace those with CG stuff because at the time that was what was supposedly popular (in the post-DKC days). Unfortunately it didn't help the game get picked up anywhere other than Japan, obviously. Other than the CG work though, Trenz did almost everything else in the game himself, programming it alone. It runs fast and without slowdown, with a bunch of stuff on screen too.

I agree it's not perfect gameplay-wise, but for the SNES it's a pretty big accomplishment visually for sure. And it is a fun game, I think. Not the best game ever (I do think I like Factor 5's Turrican games (that is, the Super and Mega Turricans) a bit more), but good.

And remember, the game doesn't use any addon chips or anything.

Mario could run just as fast as Sonic had they programmed that in.

The issue is that the faster the game runs, the more likely it is to slow down on the SNES thanks to the slow CPU... that's the truth behind "blast processing" and such. The slow SNES CPU made it much harder for games to run fast without slowdown, you had to really optimize the game, minimize use of the CPU, and put everything you could on the other chips, addons on the cart, etc. in order to avoid slowdown. Most programmers weren't that good at doing that, and hence many SNES games have lots of slowdown where Genesis games do not.

I mean, CPU-wise even the Turbografx has a faster clock speed than the SNES, and that system is three years older...