983 karma · joined March 18, 2019
So many people these days mistake the blurring from composite signals as being due to the CRT. A CRT doesn't magically blend pixels together. And there are certainly many tradeoffs to using composite so that many people prefer the sharper pixels of RGB.
I doubt anyone in 1993 thought the OPL2 version of the music sounded better. General MIDI was mind-blowing in comparison.
See Table 1 here and its sources:
https://circulareconomy.earth/publications/how-japan-is-usin...
Japan recycles about 24% of its used consumer plastics into new products, while the US recycles about 8%. That's NOT factoring in thermal recycling, which Japan is far better at than the US.
The key point is that Japan recycles 85% of its plastic waste, which is excellent compared with a country like the US that recycles about 10%. And, the per capita plastic use in the US is far more than in Japan.
This whole point pops up on the internet so frequently because tourists go to Japan and see lots of individually packaged items in supermarkets and convenience stores. Yes, there is room for improvement there, but overall the situation is not as bad as many countries and probably doesn't deserve the attention it gets.
Rely more on statistics and less on personal observation.
Seriously, this game is a miracle, and the amount of love Ancient put into it is unlike anything we've ever seen for a modern commercial release on hardware that came out in 1988!
It certainly beats out a good portion of the games originally released on the Mega Drive.
There are plenty of gorgeous games on the Mega Drive in terms of color. 61 colors on screen at once is more than enough.
What are "CRT bloom and blending"? Are you referring to artifacts caused by composite video output? That is not due to the CRT but rather the signal distortion. RGB output on a CRT will look pixel perfect and colors will not merge. I'd say most gamers using original hardware on CRTs these days are using RGB, so if anything, it reflects the current user trends if the Earthion designer did not use dithering (which he did, making this comment irrelevant).
Pixel bleeding? Are you referring to color distortion caused by the use of composite video? Why would you expect to see that in a screenshot viewed on your LCD screen? You'd have to actually see the game output via composite from a Mega Drive to a CRT to see it (which you would, since the art uses dithering well).
This is one of the best-looking Mega Drive games released in a very long time, developed by the company responsible for games like Streets of Rage and Beyond Oasis.
The Saturn hardware, for example, was designed by Kazuhiko Hamada and a team of about a dozen engineers who had previously made the System 32 arcade hardware.
In addition to his work leading Sega's R&D efforts, Sato should also be remembered as one of the primary reasons why Sega began investing more into arcade video game development in the 1970s.
After Console Wars, he apparently stopped giving interviews because he didn't like that game historians were constantly getting the Sega story wrong.
>So I tried slowing down even more, and discovered something. I slowed to a pace that felt almost absurd, treating each sentence as though it might be a particularly important one. I gave each one maybe triple the usual time and attention, ignoring the fact that there are hundreds of pages to go.
I've been on the fence about getting a ZuluIDE for a while because of the price and because I don't exactly need one... I'll wait and see how the PicoIDE is priced.
SCE in Japan fought back and eventually positioned themselves within the company to be able to fire nearly all of the upper management in the US in order to promote their vision of the console.
It turned out no consumer in the US cared enough about the name, the size of the controller, or the color and look of the console to not buy it.
Dragon Quest, a video game series that was very popular in Japan in the 1980s, featured character art by Toriyama. I wouldn't exactly call Dragon Quest "Toriyama's work". And while Dragon Quest is very popular among a certain audience, it doesn't have nearly the reach and broad appeal of Dragon Ball.
https://www.hitachi.co.jp/New/cnews/9512/1201.html
It was intended as an in-car game console / GPS navigation combo unit.
One of the unique selling points was that it could use the Saturn hardware to create a 3D map simulation of a planned route that you could view in advance of going on a trip. So, you could take it in the house, watch the simulation, then put it in the car for the actual trip and use the GPS navigation.
These are smaller, private onsen designed for families or couples (or, I suppose, the shy foreigner). They're fairly common.
The Mega Drive's VDP is capable of both line scrolling and column scrolling, and the effect (commonly called "tilting") is a combination of line and column scrolling.
Tilting can be done via hardware on the VDP quite easily. Both line and column scrolling are easy to set up. One disadvantage is that a background can only be tilted to a certain degree before the illusion is broken (which makes it different from true Mode-7 rotation). Another disadvantage is that there's a bug in the VDP such that when both forms of scrolling are used concurrently, the leftmost column has garbage data. Most developers would hide this column with a black bar (as seen in Batman and Robin).
Some more examples can be seen towards the bottom here:
https://rasterscroll.com/mdgraphics/graphical-effects/tiltin...