Games on £149 Megadrive that made 1991 PC look shit

[ImmortalA1000]

Thunder Force III, from 1990.

Castle of Illusion, from 1990.

It would be half a decade before the P[rick's]C[hoice] caught up as a games machine. At least if developers with talent were given a chance you could get close with a 32 colour version on Amiga but not that pathetic MS Dildostation before PC-I bus was inside the high street PC wank.

It was also cheaper than a 14" base spec of an SVGA monitor, you know those titchy specialist monitors DOSwankers HAD NO CHOICE but to use for playing games on even if they owned a £1000 top of the range Dolby compatible Sony Trinitron.

[Bruce Abbott]

Thanks for that. Yesterday I entertained the idea of buying an old Mega Drive and few games to compare it to the Amiga. Now I realize that I don't have to. One boring R-Type clone and one boring cutesy platformer. If those two games represent the best on the Mega Drive in 1990 then I won't waste my money - just watching them on YouTube was enough.

Now I remember why I never got a Mega Drive.

Oh and that reminds me, I need to get a mouse trap. A rodent playing platform games on your spare motherboards might sound cute, but when it pisses all over them...

[van_dammesque]

Seeing MD games nowadays makes me realise how much they relied on dithering!
I have an MD emulator, it never gets used, as I completed SOnic 1 and 2 back in the day, played eco to death too. What else is there?

[Predseda]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

One boring R-Type clone and one boring cutesy platformer. If those two games represent the best on the Mega Drive in 1990 then I won't waste my money - just watching them on YouTube was enough.

Strange approach, can be applied to any platform.

[gimbal]

Originally Posted by Predseda

Strange approach

That pretty much defines this thread and quite a few threads lately.

[stevelord]

Other Megadrive games that kicked the PC's arse:

• Golden Axe
• Super Hang-On
• Revenge of Shinobi
• Altered Beast
• Thunder Force II

Not a fan of Altered Beast myself, but the Megadrive version definitely kicks the abysmal PC version's (and crappy Amiga port's) bum.

It's unsurprising that the Megadrive's best early titles were arcade ports using similar hardware, and X68000 ports which also had some similar hardware.

[van_dammesque]

The MD was cheap but paying £40 in 1991 for games was too steep and considering Bruce's point is that it is not enough to ditch the Amiga and buy an MD IMO. All impressive in screenshots and adequate gameplay mind you.

[Megalomaniac]

Were the Megadrive and PC even competing for the same market? If you had a PC for serious use or the more serious game styles, it was worth paying an extra £150 for a Megadrive if you also wanted 2D action games. Action games in general pretty much, except Wing Commander maybe. Nobody bought a PC to play those. What really changed in the first half of the 90s was that tasted evolved from 2D games to 3D ones, where the PC did have an advantage. If you already had a PC, a Megadrive may have been a better option than an Amiga, as most great Amiga games eventually got Megadrive or PC versions, which were usually as good. If you only had the money and space for one system, like most people did, an Amiga was the thing to have though, even if it couldn't match PCs costing 3 times as much for colour level.

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by Megalomaniac

If you already had a PC, a Megadrive may have been a better option than an Amiga, as most great Amiga games eventually got Megadrive or PC versions, which were usually as good. If you only had the money and space for one system, like most people did, an Amiga was the thing to have though, even if it couldn't match PCs costing 3 times as much for colour level.

Yep, the Mega Drive would be used on your TV - different space if you had a PC, possibly not if you had an Amiga.

This is one reason the Amiga didn't do so well in the US. Everyone had a PC (for 'serious' use), but you didn't want the kids playing games on it so you got them a Mega Drive. Of course you would use the PC to play games, but not cutesy platformers.

Originally Posted by Predseda

Strange approach, can be applied to any platform.

Not strange at all. The question is should I 'invest' a few hundred $ in a gaming console that I will hardly use, when I already don't have room or time to use all the retro computers in my collection? A YouTube video obviously doesn't provide the same experience as playing the game on real hardware, but it might tell me whether it's worthwhile getting that hardware.

I think I will buy a Mega Drive controller though, because I can use that on my Amiga.

[Predseda]

Still strange. Why should you buy a console if you have not a room and time for it?

[Korban]

Originally Posted by ImmortalA1000

the P[rick's]C[hoice] ....................................................not that pathetic MS Dildostation before PC-I bus was inside the high street PC wank.

........................................................ you know those titchy specialist monitors DOSwankers HAD NO CHOICE but to use for playing games on ..............................................................

Seriously?
How old are you?
Have you reached double figures yet? In either age or IQ ?

Not only is this pathetically immature, but also wrong. TV out existed on pc video cards in 1990, and before.
Also, games on PC in 1990 like Red Baron, Thunderstrike, Ultima VI, Knights Of The Sky, Secret Of Monkey Island, Wing Commander, Kings Quest V, Railroad Tycoon and a plethora of other titles were easily on par with Megadrive titles, many going well beyond what the Megadrive ever offered.
Yes, the Megadrive was better for 2d, but the PC was infinitely better for anything 3d. Neither was incomprehensibly better, they were just different in what they offered.

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by Korban

Not only is this pathetically immature, but also wrong. TV out existed on pc video cards in 1990, and before.

CGA in NTSC only? Very few PCs had PAL video out (the Amstrad PC-20 - which I had - was one) and even fewer did it in VGA resolutions. The vast majority of PCs needed a dedicated monitor.

Also, games on PC in 1990 like Red Baron, Thunderstrike, Ultima VI, Knights Of The Sky, Secret Of Monkey Island, Wing Commander, Kings Quest V, Railroad Tycoon and a plethora of other titles were easily on par with Megadrive titles, many going well beyond what the Megadrive ever offered.

All those games were produced for the Amiga too. So you could play them without being a DOSwanker.

Yes, the Megadrive was better for 2d, but the PC was infinitely better for anything 3d. Neither was incomprehensibly better, they were just different in what they offered.

Better for sure, but not infinitely better. The Mega Drive did surprisingly well considering its low spec.

[ Show youtube player ]

In comparison to the the Mega Drive, your typical PC was a behemoth that wasn't very game friendly and cost a bomb. You couldn't throw it in your backpack and take it around to a friend's place to run on their TV. Games generally had to be installed on the hard drive, with no guarantee that they would work even after fiddling with the configuration files trying to get enough conventional memory to run them.

In 1988 - when the Mega Drive was released in Japan - your average PC didn't even have VGA, so games had either horrible CGA or slightly less horrible EGA graphics. The Adlib (first popular PC sound card) had only just been released in 1987, so few PCs had one. Most just had disgusting 'PC speaker' sound. A reasonable sound card and speakers cost the same as an entire Mega Drive!

ImmortalA1000 was right about it being half a decade before the PC caught up as a games machine, and even then it was still overpriced and less convenient. P[rick's]C[hoice] indeed!

[Megalomaniac]

In general, those games were best on a £3000 PC, if you could put up with the config.sys and boot disk hassles, but (once Amiga versions came out at least 6 months later) were better on a £400 Amiga than on a £1000 PC (or a PC you'd spent £3000 on 2-3 years earlier) - most offered 256 colour graphics if your PC had the grunt, and PC speaker was rarely the only option by 1990, but was it worth spending that kind of money just to play (some types of) games slightly better than on an Amiga? Even turning a business PC into a games-ready machine would cost more than an Amiga, or a Megadrive and several games. Once Megadrive programmers started using the additional Z80 processor for extra calculations (beyond just sound, as intended by Sega) it gave the Megadrive a roughly 50% processing power boost, which helped. What few action games the PC had at that time compared poorly to even early Megadrive games. Those of us with Amigas were lucky to have the most cost-effective allrounder, even if it wasn't the very best for everything.

[Korban]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

CGA in NTSC only? Very few PCs had PAL video out (the Amstrad PC-20 - which I had - was one) and even fewer did it in VGA resolutions. The vast majority of PCs needed a dedicated monitor.

All those games were produced for the Amiga too. So you could play them without being a DOSwanker.

Better for sure, but not infinitely better. The Mega Drive did surprisingly well considering its low spec.

[ Show youtube player ]

No.
There's been dedicated tv hardware out for pcs since the 80's. Pretty much any and every pc can be used on a tv.
As for the Amiga versions of the games I listed that existed on pc, they were heavily compromised, both in terms of visuals, and speed/fluidity, if they existed in 1990 (the year the games that are the point to the thread are in comparison to) at all. Not all had Amiga versions until a few years later and even then they werent nearly as good.
And the youtube video you showed of megadrive 3d just goes to reinforce my suggestion that pcs were much, much, much better than anything the megadrive could do for 3d.
Price and portability wasnt part of the equation either. There was a blanket statement made. A stupid one written in a moronic way.

[ImmortalA1000]

Originally Posted by van_dammesque

Seeing MD games nowadays makes me realise how much they relied on dithering!
I have an MD emulator, it never gets used, as I completed SOnic 1 and 2 back in the day, played eco to death too. What else is there?

Sonic is such a shit game, why did you bother?

lol I had an Amiga 1000, a Sony Trinitron and a SCART RGB cable. Dithering on the Amiga games, especially all those crappy 16 colour ST port jobs, was much much worse and yes I hate it too EGA is even worse for dithering, you got jarring colours for free too when I had a PC on loan for 1986 side by side with my Amiga 1000.

As for 1990 SVGA cards with composite video TV output in 1990, methinks not, especially as not one single make/model of card is mentioned in that casual wikipedia style uncorroborated comment implies. Perhaps these are not actually ISA SVGA off the shelf cards but some weird $500 top end card which perhaps comes with a free tattoo kit included in the box so you can tattoo "I am a loser" on your forehead too?

If 1990 286/386 PCs could even handle Amiga 1000 compatible games like Shadow of the Beast or Lotus II (you need a 486DX250 from 1993 for that one) or Turrican III (Pentium!) let alone top end quad parallax 60fps bullet hell Megadrive shoot 'em ups like Thunder Force III then maybe somebody should have told Amstrad so they didn't waste their time putting a Mega Drive inside a PC desktop case so you wouldn't have to play DOSwank I always knew PC fanboys have wank taste in games, my test thread is working well.

Perhaps we can look at PC OutRun vs Megadrive or even the 1987 PC Engine hardware running the same game next? Gauntlet II for DOS is as shit as said game for the ST graphically never mind the almost arcade quality port on Megadrive.

Yeah, who needs a Megadrive eh, let me go and play Leisure Suit Larry or Commander Kean perhaps instead yeah let's do exactly that [whilst getting "I am a loser" tattooed on my forehead].

Methinks not. It's not really my fault if the childish clueless rival thread trying to show me little moving plops on static screen with bleeptastic sound 'karate games' are better than IK+ on a 1982 Commodore 64 let alone Elfmania/Shadow Fighter PC arsefucking game engines on Amiga...oh dear how childish that would be on an Amiga forum lol.

I also noticed there isn't a thread about "How Super Mario Bros NES saved video games industry" bollox thread too....I will wait right here for somebody to start that up too.

[str0m]

Surprised you rememebr all these old games as you sound about 8 or have you found them recently after browsing youtube and are now looking back at them?

Why does it even matter now which was best in the 90s? Everything had it's good and bad points/games, just play and enjoy which ever takes your fancy.

Now to go fire up my GX4000, that was a real MD/PC/Amiga killer :P

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by Korban

Price and portability wasnt part of the equation either. There was a blanket statement made. A stupid one written in a moronic way.

Where you see 'stupid and moronic' I see a successful troll.

And a good one too, as it got us started on examining what the Mega Drive could do. I was surprised to find that some reasonably competent 3D games were made for it, since I had assumed the hardware wasn't suitable.

the youtube video you showed of megadrive 3d just goes to reinforce my suggestion that pcs were much, much, much better than anything the megadrive could do for 3d.

This morning I tested the parts I have collected to build my 'typical' PC of the day, a 386SX-16 with 2MB RAM and Trident VGA card. Then we shall see if your blanket statement is true.

[dlfrsilver]

Thunderforce III was developped by Tecnosoft on the Sharp X68000 for the megadrive

[pandy71]

PC was not designed with multimedia on mind, this is visible even today...
There is nice comparison PC vs Sega implementation of one, particular game:

https://fabiensanglard.net/another_w...DOS/index.html
https://fabiensanglard.net/another_w...sis/index.html

Both systems pros and cons are exposed.

[Karlos]

Does this game work like conkers? If title X on platform Y makes platform Z look shit, then anything making Y look shit automatically wins over Z, or is it that you have to play all combinations?