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Originally Posted by Galahad/FLT
I've only just got around to visiting the other versions of this landmark title.
Were the graphics and sound for this game really a boundary pushing exercise for the Amiga (lets overlook the obvious playability flaws), was and is it still really the tour de force it once was?
The answer..... is yes!
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Not really
It didn't push many boundaries, it's just that Reflections made use of the Amiga hardware. They looked at the custom chips and thought what kind of game it could be used for. (That's why the gameplay sucks, as opposed to thinking about which elements make a game great.) Hence the parallaxes, halfbrite, copper shades etc. A few weeks after, a bunch of 16-year old demo coders had duplicated the effort, usually with a scroll instead of the main sprite.
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Originally Posted by Galahad/FLT
Sonically however, I really can't believe that Psygnosis thought that they had even remotely captured the mood of the Amiga original. Granted, Psygnosis were not about to spend a load of money have a 32Megabit cart to store all the music, but the soundchip in the SNES is a very capable one, shame they couldn't be bothered. The music is dire!
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It's a bit tough to ask SNES developer to duplicate the music with f.ex. 100kb sample voice etc with the semi-crappy SPC700 chip in the SNES. The only ones who could do it would be the Follin brothers imo.
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Originally Posted by Galahad/FLT
How odd it is then that Psygnosis were seemingly incapable of replicating the Amiga original, it only went to show just how technically profficient Reflections were, and this in 1989, the SNES and Megadrive versions were 3 years later.
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It's not so odd if you consider that the whole game was based on what the Amiga could do, and the Amiga, with its blitter and copper was unique in those days. To do what it did put a heavier strain on the CPU than most systems could cope with, while the blitter and copper relieved the CPU of working too hard on the Amiga.
Reflections then went on to do other great things, like Driver, where the gameplay is truly great. It's always nice to see small teams pull off a big project like a game! But S.O.T.B. really didn't impress us demo coders in those days, we could instantly see how every graphics "trick" was made and knew how to do the same thing.
But it sure beats Bitmap Brothers' way of making 16-color ST games and do an Amiga port to make more money. (Take Gods, for example.)