The guy who programmed Toy Story, Mickey Mania and many others for the Genesis has a RUclips channel called Coding Secrets, where he explains how he did all that wizardy.
@@SegaLordX Joe Montana Sports talk 2 was best football games they served up in my view.where else can the Cincinnati Bengals actually win a superbowl..an against the 49ers!LMAO sad but true.
@@SegaLordX what is the best website to download roms for my raspberry pi. I really wanna look for some of these games you highlighted, including Lost World lol
@@SegaLordX , I think that Pier Solar and the Great Architects and Paprium need to be mentioned in this video, even IF they are not so-called "officially licensed" video games, and the reason for that is that they have done things that a Sega Genesis/Mega Drive should not be able to do AND that what they did, flawed games notwithstanding, was FAR more impressive than any of the games that are on this video.
@Ryu You should look up the channel Coding Secrets on RUclips. It's a channel by one the programmers of both games. He goes into depth how all the effects were done on the games.
@@SegaLordX The Coding Secrets RUclips channel has one of the Traveller's Tales devs talk about many aspecs of programming for games he was involved with back in the day and how some crazy effects were achieved.
The video on Gamehut where one of the devs goes into how they fit that video intro for Sonic 3d blast is amazing. Dude basically wrote his own video compression algorithm at a time when MPEG was brand new tech.
Triple Play GOLD was the pinnacle of baseball on the Genesis. I loved how you could hammer the A, B, and C buttons after somebody scores to spam crowd cheers, horns, and chants. That was the best rubbing it in your friend's face in 2-player!
Toy Story's sprite scaling is probably the best of its kind on the SEGA Genesis. Makes you wonder how well ports of super-scaler arcade games would've looked w/just double or triple the mega.
The lack of 1:1 Super Scaler ports on either the Genesis or its add-ons like the 32X and Sega CD is baffling. The CD alone feels like it would be perfect for that, but Sega never did it.
@@SonofSethoitae - SEGA was always great at innovating when it came to hardware, both in arcades & home. However, when it came to commitment to software, it was very hit or miss. They quickly gave up if a console or peripheral didn't immediate sell like gangbusters.
@@Guernicaman True, it's just weird that they wouldn't use that as the initial approach to sell the systems. Especially considering how they designed and marketed the Genesis to be the "arcade at home". "Hey kids, here are all those arcade games you love in perfect detail" would be a far better selling point for the Sega CD than "hey kids, here are some blurry videos with an awkward adventure game attached".
@@SonofSethoitae - Indeed. Especially when it comes to the SEFA / MEGA CD's redbook audio. SEGA could've produced exclusives, such as an OutRun CD, Space Harrier CD, After Burner CD, Power Drift CD, & then a Streets of Rage CD, Golden Axe CD, Shinobi CD & so many other titles that weren't just the same game I played on my base console, w/a few extras. Exclusives like Sonic CD & Final Fight CD were reasons to purchase a peripheral like the SEGA CD, but you needed MORE of that - not less.
Same. I love most of SLX videos, but this topic is right up there as an app time fav. If you read this, a series would be great. Biggest SMS, GG, 32X, even SNES and NeoGeo would be great. I know we can Google but it's fascinating seeing the games back to back.
It really makes me wonder what kinds of games we would have been playing on the Genesis if ROM chip prices weren't sky-high at the time. You can see what they were able to do when they had more than 4mbit available. Streets of Rage 2 is a good example of what happens when the gloves come off (pun intended). Absolute top notch graphics, music, and gameplay.
@@voodooturbo Paprium... I guess NEOGEO is what you would play. It was the same base for processor as the MD but more colours and "unlimited" cartridge size.
@@_TheElMan Yeah but the games weren't that great lol. They tended to go the opposite direction. Had massive carts with a lot of colorful sprites but the games and gameplay were kinda meh. Mainly because it was arcade oriented and not so much the chill at home kind of game. That said there were a few good NG titles.
So story time with Revolution X, during the winter my sister played softball at a indoor softball building in the late 90s. They had the dream scenario of a completely free arcade upstairs (machines modded with coin buttons) for the intention of hosting birthday parties, but was free to use the rest of the time. They had solid game selection in the most part including Ghouls and Ghosts, Smash TV, Afterburner (yes full moving cockpit), double dragon, Heavy Barrel along with a bunch of others, including Revolution X. One night my Brother and Myself decided to tackle Revolution X, holy cow even with unlimited continues was that trail, by end game you are literally hitting the quarter button every 10 seconds it felt and the last boss is literally a half hour of constant shooting. We were so exhausted at that point and hands cramping that we actually started taking shifts to keep going (one would continue shooting with both guns while the other got a break.) We beat it, but totally not worth it. lol
That's a great story! Revo X; cabinet looks like T2, plays like your mum.... Shoiting cd's....Somewhat similar, we had three cabinets, including, Police 911, at out frat house. Some of the tech savvy brothers got into the dip switches and set it to free play. Nearly got on academic probation one semester because we had Police 911 tourneys until 5am for weeks! We would rob the quarters from the other two cabinets and distribute them evenly between all three so the games wouldn't get taken away.
Yeah, I remember beating it when emulated and realized quickly why I had never done so in the arcade. Crazy ass game that's totally not worth the commitment or the money to beat it.
Not going to say that Revolution X isn't a shit game, but you at least have to give it credit for having a cool and original idea. It was just executed poorly.
i remember playing though it at an acquaintance's house on sega console in the 90's. i thought it was fun and cool and all, because i just had an NES at home at that point.
With how smooth the 3rd person racing and 1st person maze sections were in Toy Story, I'm surprised they didn't adopt the implementation for more games...
I'm pretty sure KOF 2K3 was the largest Neo Geo game ever released (though not the last). Even had it's own standalone PCB released alongside the cartridge format.
I've always been a Nintendo man back to the NES days but when it came to the Megadrive I absolutely loved it and I stuck by its side throughout the 90,s and to date...one of the best machines ever 🙏🏽🤘🏾🤘🏾🤘🏾🤘🏾
Even as a snes fanboy it's hard to argue either way. It was nice when competing consoles were completely different and not just homogenous underpowered gaming PCs
@@alanlee67 Seriously. Once it all went to commodity pc hardware and the same titles with a few exclusives, I stopped caring about console gaming. Honestly I think it peaked with the 16-bit wars. Everything else after that was just fumbling in the dark with new tech until nVidia and AMD started making good chips cheap.
I just found out about your channel two days ago and I can’t get enough of this content. This channel is everything I wish I had as a kid, when all I played was Sonic, the Disney platformers , Streets of Rage and Ghostbusters. Replacing my Mega Drive with a Saturn in 1995 made me miss out on a ton of great games. Thank you for reminding us about these games. You’re really doing them justice by reviewing them in the context of the time they came out. Fantastic video.
It also helped that sculptured software developer mk3 and ultimate mk3 on Genesis. If sculptured software developed mk1 and mk2 for Genesis, they would have turned out better than they did.
There's one good thing UMK3 has on the Genesis. The ridiculous amount of glitches, and cashes you can discover just by screwing around with the character Rain. I mean you can spam his roundhouse kicks endlessly, he's untouchable in this version.
Why exactly? I've watched a few of his videos and he's beyond annoying. I simply stop watching every RUclipsr who randomly screams/shouts in his videos for no apparent reason. Also, it was boring to constantly listen to him complaining how bad he is in literally every game he comments on. Why even play video games if you find them too hard xD?
I remember my brother owning Pocahontas back then. It was hard for me to believe that it was playing on a sega genesis of all things. I guess because we also had shining in the darkness and I didn't understand the difference between the two games in terms of graphics and release at the time. Pocahontas still looks amazing till this day and I gotta go back to it someday.
Yes the Genesis is a powerhouse. The big issue was the cost of the extra storage on the carts. It was a lot cheaper to press a CD than make a cartage with equal storage.
Sad part majority of the cd games did not utilize the genesis vdp nor the sega cd scaler chip. Which caused a sega cd games to look like generic genesis ports.
25:10 You can also divide by 8 the amount of megabits to roughly obtain the amount of megabytes. Streets of Rage 2 would be 2 megabytes, the 32 megabit games would be 4 megabytes and Flicky and Columns would be 0.125 megabytes each or 125 kilobytes
It turns confusing. -byte was always used for capacity or size, and -bits, for data transfer. Which at last is another tricky deceiving bussines tactic.
When lightning force released i marveled at the incredible graphics, parallax scrolling, and that awsome music. At the time i didn't understand the concept of megabytes, just that the game was noticeably enhanced. I actually didn't know about several titles you mentioned here x, like frank thomas baseball. Going to have to check that one out, and i never liked revolution x either lol. I also think one of the most impressive titles for me was phantasy star 4
Phantasy Star IV was a hefty cartridge too, I think it was 24 mb and it also had a save battery. I remember seeing it at Media Play for $99.99 USD, twice the price of other new games. And since I was playing the demo setup of a PlayStation in there at the time, that seemed crazy for a last gen game.
Lightning Force is one of my all time favorite Genesis games. the sound effects are memorable, especially the crazy "1up" which sounds like "Wabba" I play it on my phone all the time, along with the PSX game Einhander.
A co-worker and myself talked about this topic last summer only we conversed about the rom size of n64 and SNES games. Great topic to cover. I've been on a Genesis kick for the past four months.
1:21 got to love that stolen artwork of a traditional space marine on the Strider boxart. Reminds me of the Dom taken from Gundam for the Space Harrior menu screen.
Excellent video SLX, it's a pity that storage was so damn expensive in both physical and dollar costs those days. Some of the newer Genesis games - particularly the 'Demons of Asteborg' game show what can be done when there are no real limitations to the cartridge size. At the same time, I did like your NBA Jam & College Slam comparison as it shows the developer using the added space just to add 'filler' content.
The crowd is animated rather than static in the college basketball. It really makes a difference to me as that always drove me nuts with NBA Jam. Just my 2c of course, might not bother anyone else.
The release of Strider put the megabit count in games to the forefront; the magazines were giving that aspect so much hype that it compelled me to put Strider on my must have list just to experience what all the build up would ultimately produce. Fortunately the game was good also so the purchase was not regrettable. Then the Neo-Geo came along and made the mega marketing a central focus of justification of why their games were priced so high and out of most consumers' reasonable price range. Some attention getting games but not worth between 150 and 250 dollars each. I wish that Sega would have been as generous with granting extra megabits to Phantasy Star 2; the developers requested 8 megabits but it was denied and one of the consequences is the lack of backgrounds during the battle scenes, as well as the idea of 3D dungeons from the first game being discarded.
The chips themselves holding the memory were the main reasons for decisions being made. The genesis could have always had 100 MEGA SHOCK, but you're paying for hardware in the carts, not necessarily the work to fill it utilize that memory. Computer tech manufacturing techniques are utlimately what decides a consumer product's limitations because you can do whatever you want with computer tech right now, but it'll cost you. From a business perspective, they're always trying to hit that sweet spot of 'cool but not so pricey they can't move units'.
@@heavysystemsinc. In PSII's case upon release it was already priced at $84.99 which was uncharted territory up to that point for a 16-bit console game and earlier; I just feel that with how common that larger cartridges for Genesis became over the following year or two that Sega could have authorized the extra meager 2 megabits so the developers could have their vision fully implemented. Of course none of that stopped me from rushing out and buying it on the day of release or a couple of days later, whatever the case was.
Fun fact: Japan didn't produce 32 megabit cartridges, So Mortal Kombat 3 wasn't released there. Only Sega of America was producing 32 megabit cartridges and only about 20 games in all are that big. This is a big reason why Sonic 3 had to be split into 2 games. They attempted a 24 meg single cart but it still ended up 32 so technically its the only 32 megabit game in Japan
I remember when either Mortal Kombat 3 or Ultimate was on the Sega Channel. If I recall correctly, not only did you have to pay an additional fee to "rent" the game, only half the roster could be downloaded to your Genesis in a single session due to the game size.
I will say one nice thing about Revolution X. The full size arcade machine had a big bulky and pretty awesome plastic gun attached to it. It at least felt good to play in a physical sense, it rumbled and I think it had a speaker in it, if memory serves.
I'm surprised by the number of 32 meg Genesis games in 1994. I was under the impression Donkey Kong Country was one of first games to be 32 MEG when it launched.
I was blown away by Toy Story. That game got me through a lot of weekends as a kid. Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 was my shit, too. I wasn't very good at it, though. But I was impressed by what Williams and Midway did considering the technical limitations of the Genesis hardware.
I'm Brazilian and a friend had a Duke Nukem cartridge for Mega Drive, in the early 2000s. Since the first time I played, I don't know how Tec Toy managed to design that game.
Have you watched the GameHut channel here? The guy behind it worked on both Sonic 3D and Toy Story, and he has some interesting stories to tell about the programming techniques he used, particularly the crazy compression done to fit everything in.
Another great video, it really shows how critical storage on those carts that was made clear in your Mortal Kombat Arcade Edition video and honestly some of those were seriously impressive for the hardware. looking forward to the next one! Keep up the great work!
What i like about virtuafighter2, is the main character has the ability to open up the opponents defense..and strike it immediately..i wonder why todays fighting games didnt include that..
Thank you for acknowledging the horrendous music in SF The New Challengers. I was devastated back in the 90s when I first played it and forever hated it and could never play it as a result lol.
That Tower Scene should not have been possible! They gameplay and childhood itself had me pinned to it, despite not being a big Mickey fan. So well worth it. One of my favorites of all time for platforming hop& bop!
5:05 My jaw dropped at that intro to Frank Thomas. I had no idea this existed. It only lasts a few seconds, but that looks like 60fps full motion video, even better than full motion video on Sega CD games! Also, those sprites are humongous! Truly impressive!
My mom hated Super Street Fighter II, she managed an arcade back in '93 and the coin-op for that title was right next to her office... music from the intro drove her nuts.
Feels good seeing someone appreciates that SoR music too. That's my favorite for the Genesis. Besides SoR, loves the Batman soundtrack and the heavily underrated Decapattack.
Would love to see the same for Game Gear. Been playing some of these games after getting my older brother a GG for Christmas, and I am thoroughly impressed with what that thing could do!
Looking back now it seems amazing on the systems of the time that they were able to fit certain kinds of games on cartridges especially and kind of adventure or RPG that took hours to play through and explore. Yes things took up less space then and there were countless reused graphical tiles and assets but they really did use the space so much more efficiently then. Although it did seem like 32 megs was the maximum most publishers were willing to go for the most part with a few exceptions and I think it was around 1993 when that was first hit for both the Mega Drive/Genesis and the SNES it's surprising just how expensive rom chips were at those sizes even after years of being in mass production.
I remember when Star Control came out it was 12 MEG and 4MEGs were dedicated to sound alone, and those 4 MEGs were used well, the voices and sound effects were fantastic
5:06 - I only ever played the Game Gear version of Frank Thomas Big Hurt Baseball, and I have to say, I legitimately thought the intro to the Genesis version shown here was footage of Frank Thomas composited in front of a background image of the game's logo for use in a commercial or something from a distance.
There was only a handful of games that blew me away in the graphics department back then. The one game that floored me as a kid with its color pallet, great animation, sound and everything else was Yoshis Island. Hell it looked better than most 32 bit 2d offerings at the time.
i am sure that being a nintendo kid, i never payed much attention to this, i don't think many nes or snes boasted this, or i was just oblivious to them, and end of the day, it is not the size that matters, but this was a nice video and an eye opener.
1. Demons of Asterborg's size is 117 MB?! Will the original console be able to handle such a large game? OO 2. Flicky is only 1MB? How did they fit so many stages in only 1MB? 3. I think Vectorman 1 and 2 could also be interesting here because they also had a 3D like platform and some other cool stuffs.
The Demons of Asteborg cart size is 15,335,424 bytes. This makes it a 122 megabit cartridge (megaBIT was the unit that was being used back in the day).
Games like Demons Of Asteborg have additional FPGA chips / logic on the cartridge to shuffle the memory around. Image it like multiple cartridges in one exchanging at the right time.
@@Zahir658 haha yeah true, but the processing power and memory requirements of this additional logic surpasses the power of the mega drive. Imagine modules like this costing more than the console :) But it's a nice way of breathing new life into classic consoles. I really like the approach.
Getting crazy flashbacks of gaming magazines in the early to mid 90s. Still recall the playground arguments about how important game size was to overall quality.
When I started emulating back in the '90s I was completely floored by how small those games were. I could have an entire library of every console on my tiny 8 gig hard drive.
Hey, a channel called GameHut was a worker at traveller's tales, he actually goes into how he managed to squeeze the Sonic 3d Blast intro into a genesis cart without taking up a massive amount of the cartridge space!
The folks at Tec-Toy really were something else with their SEGA stuff. They did us Brazilians proud. I remember looking for a Nintendo Wii back when it was released and seeing a Mega Drive 3 available on shelves. I can't imagine you could've found a brand new Mega Drive/Genesis of any kind in other countries in 2006 lol
I remember picking up Star Control back in the day, and seeing the box touting it as the first 12Mbit game. I also remember some articles about it in the various magazines at the time, showing off just how close it was to the Amiga original graphically (which it was... very close actually). Hearing the digitized sound effects that matched the Amiga stuff was pretty wild, too. Sadly, the music took a nosedive, though. Guess the 12Mbit wasn't quite enough to get them to match the Amiga tunes.
I came to this channel after knowing Jon Burton's GameHut channel. In there, you get some explanation about how things were achieved in games like Sonic 3D and Toy Story (and others). My favourite one is his "Impossible Fading on the Sega Saturn" video.
It's so interesting to think that modern Sega Genesis releases Come with 80-megabit cartridges and above. If only we had cart sizes like this back in the day :P
Makes me wish that the sega cd didn’t have the extra hardware driving up the cost of the extra unit to attach. Maybe just get as much ram in there as possible or something without driving the price too high. Seemed to do wonders for the PC Engine.
@Benjamin Owuye Jagun I'm talking about sega cd games of Malibu. I agree with the gem sound engines on Malibu genesis port sounding terrible especially batman returns.
Anytime Toughman Contest comes up, I always have to mention that the Genesis version has more ring girls in it, compared to the 32x version! Which is strange
I wasn't expecting to see Pocahontas on this list. Not because it's not an excellent-looking and enjoyable game, but because it's so incredibly short. Just 4 levels, and not particularly long ones considering that's all there is. Still, what's there is solid.
It should be ray casting in the Duke 3D segment. Modern gaming has burned ray tracing into my brain so much I said that by mistake. Damn you Nvidia!
Nice! I look at the file size and multiply it by 8.
@@joaoclodoaudo5385 You mean the conversion from Megabit to Megabyte; raycasting and raytracing are rendering methods for 3D engines
Great topic sir, thank you! Never heard of comic slam before!
Can you please make the gameplay parts where there is no commentary last less? They are almost 20 seconds long! Like come on...
@@porkyminch5131 You know that you can skip ahead, right?
The guy who programmed Toy Story, Mickey Mania and many others for the Genesis has a RUclips channel called Coding Secrets, where he explains how he did all that wizardy.
Yeah, he's one of the greats.
And he made Sonic 3D!
@@Alkvaarder 3D Sonic games, like the Adventure series, or Sonic 3D blast??
@@have_a_good_day420 3D Blast
Thanks for that info I subscribed to the Channel
That Lost World part where you are on the secondary part of bike being chased is seriously mindblowing for a Genesis game.
I'd take a whole game of just that!
That game really doesn't seem like a Mega Drive game, really impressive.
We knew this in 1997 and 1998, get your head out of Nintendo ass, boy
@@rustymixer2886 😅 so true
"MILFORD AMUSEMENT CENTER... WE'VE GOT THE FUN!" 🎶🎵
Discovered recently that GameSack is actually a big fan of SegaLordX. So, allow me to say.... MEGA-POWER!
I don't know Joe personally, but I was a fan of his channel from way back. Good stuff.
@@SegaLordX he mentioned your channel in hist last (or the one before) video. Definitely one of the coolest guys in the retro scene.
At one point Game Sack switched to a lower cart size. That's why its down to one host and lost the intro fart sound.
@@SomeOrangeCat same sack, smaller package.
@@SegaLordX Joe Montana Sports talk 2 was best football games they served up in my view.where else can the Cincinnati Bengals actually win a superbowl..an against the 49ers!LMAO sad but true.
I can never get over how amazing the lost world looks.
Yup. That river rafting scene beats just about anything on the Sega CD outside of Batman Returns.
@@SegaLordX thunderhawk?
@@SegaLordX what is the best website to download roms for my raspberry pi. I really wanna look for some of these games you highlighted, including Lost World lol
@@SegaLordX , I think that Pier Solar and the Great Architects and Paprium need to be mentioned in this video, even IF they are not so-called "officially licensed" video games, and the reason for that is that they have done things that a Sega Genesis/Mega Drive should not be able to do AND that what they did, flawed games notwithstanding, was FAR more impressive than any of the games that are on this video.
I remember playing Toy Story for Genesis during Christmas '95, and was blown away by the graphics.
I thought I was special for having a PlayStation and Battle Arena Toshinden. Looking back, I would have much rather been playing Toy Story, lol.
@Ryu You should look up the channel Coding Secrets on RUclips. It's a channel by one the programmers of both games. He goes into depth how all the effects were done on the games.
@@mcameron1981 he even released a new directors cut 3d sonic that fixed 33 bugs and issues
I was too until I realized the gameplay was stiff,difficult and not as smooth as dat booger man .
@Ryu the sodium was 🤤 on toy story too, like comix zone
That Toy Story footage is amazing. Reminds me a bit of Clockwork Knight on the Saturn. That's super impressive visuals for a Megadrive game.
First time I played it I thought it had a special chip in it. But no, that's all software rendering.
@@SegaLordX The Coding Secrets RUclips channel has one of the Traveller's Tales devs talk about many aspecs of programming for games he was involved with back in the day and how some crazy effects were achieved.
The video on Gamehut where one of the devs goes into how they fit that video intro for Sonic 3d blast is amazing. Dude basically wrote his own video compression algorithm at a time when MPEG was brand new tech.
Triple Play GOLD was the pinnacle of baseball on the Genesis. I loved how you could hammer the A, B, and C buttons after somebody scores to spam crowd cheers, horns, and chants. That was the best rubbing it in your friend's face in 2-player!
Toy Story's sprite scaling is probably the best of its kind on the SEGA Genesis. Makes you wonder how well ports of super-scaler arcade games would've looked w/just double or triple the mega.
The lack of 1:1 Super Scaler ports on either the Genesis or its add-ons like the 32X and Sega CD is baffling. The CD alone feels like it would be perfect for that, but Sega never did it.
@@SonofSethoitae - SEGA was always great at innovating when it came to hardware, both in arcades & home. However, when it came to commitment to software, it was very hit or miss. They quickly gave up if a console or peripheral didn't immediate sell like gangbusters.
@@Guernicaman True, it's just weird that they wouldn't use that as the initial approach to sell the systems. Especially considering how they designed and marketed the Genesis to be the "arcade at home".
"Hey kids, here are all those arcade games you love in perfect detail" would be a far better selling point for the Sega CD than "hey kids, here are some blurry videos with an awkward adventure game attached".
@@SonofSethoitae - Indeed. Especially when it comes to the SEFA / MEGA CD's redbook audio. SEGA could've produced exclusives, such as an OutRun CD, Space Harrier CD, After Burner CD, Power Drift CD, & then a Streets of Rage CD, Golden Axe CD, Shinobi CD & so many other titles that weren't just the same game I played on my base console, w/a few extras. Exclusives like Sonic CD & Final Fight CD were reasons to purchase a peripheral like the SEGA CD, but you needed MORE of that - not less.
This has to be one of my favorite topics when it comes to how gaming hardware had progress
Same. I love most of SLX videos, but this topic is right up there as an app time fav. If you read this, a series would be great. Biggest SMS, GG, 32X, even SNES and NeoGeo would be great. I know we can Google but it's fascinating seeing the games back to back.
It really makes me wonder what kinds of games we would have been playing on the Genesis if ROM chip prices weren't sky-high at the time. You can see what they were able to do when they had more than 4mbit available. Streets of Rage 2 is a good example of what happens when the gloves come off (pun intended). Absolute top notch graphics, music, and gameplay.
@@voodooturbo Paprium... I guess NEOGEO is what you would play. It was the same base for processor as the MD but more colours and "unlimited" cartridge size.
@@_TheElMan Yeah but the games weren't that great lol. They tended to go the opposite direction. Had massive carts with a lot of colorful sprites but the games and gameplay were kinda meh. Mainly because it was arcade oriented and not so much the chill at home kind of game. That said there were a few good NG titles.
So story time with Revolution X, during the winter my sister played softball at a indoor softball building in the late 90s. They had the dream scenario of a completely free arcade upstairs (machines modded with coin buttons) for the intention of hosting birthday parties, but was free to use the rest of the time. They had solid game selection in the most part including Ghouls and Ghosts, Smash TV, Afterburner (yes full moving cockpit), double dragon, Heavy Barrel along with a bunch of others, including Revolution X. One night my Brother and Myself decided to tackle Revolution X, holy cow even with unlimited continues was that trail, by end game you are literally hitting the quarter button every 10 seconds it felt and the last boss is literally a half hour of constant shooting. We were so exhausted at that point and hands cramping that we actually started taking shifts to keep going (one would continue shooting with both guns while the other got a break.) We beat it, but totally not worth it. lol
👍👍
That's a great story! Revo X; cabinet looks like T2, plays like your mum.... Shoiting cd's....Somewhat similar, we had three cabinets, including, Police 911, at out frat house. Some of the tech savvy brothers got into the dip switches and set it to free play. Nearly got on academic probation one semester because we had Police 911 tourneys until 5am for weeks! We would rob the quarters from the other two cabinets and distribute them evenly between all three so the games wouldn't get taken away.
Yeah, I remember beating it when emulated and realized quickly why I had never done so in the arcade. Crazy ass game that's totally not worth the commitment or the money to beat it.
Not going to say that Revolution X isn't a shit game, but you at least have to give it credit for having a cool and original idea. It was just executed poorly.
i remember playing though it at an acquaintance's house on sega console in the 90's. i thought it was fun and cool and all, because i just had an NES at home at that point.
With how smooth the 3rd person racing and 1st person maze sections were in Toy Story, I'm surprised they didn't adopt the implementation for more games...
Had it not been so late in the life of the Genesis, I could see the developer using them many more times.
A Neo Geo version of this video would be interesting. I was always curious to see the new, high-meg, Neo Geo arcade games.
Late generation Neo-Geo games are astonishingly good looking, KoF 2003, Garou Mark of the Wolves, Sengoku 3...
The later Neo Geo titles get absolutely crazy with megabit size. The biggest one (one of the later KoF games iirc) is over 700 megs!
I'm pretty sure KOF 2K3 was the largest Neo Geo game ever released (though not the last). Even had it's own standalone PCB released alongside the cartridge format.
I love tracking down the biggest carts for systems and seeing how the space has been used. Thanks for producing this.
I've always been a Nintendo man back to the NES days but when it came to the Megadrive I absolutely loved it and I stuck by its side throughout the 90,s and to date...one of the best machines ever 🙏🏽🤘🏾🤘🏾🤘🏾🤘🏾
Even as a snes fanboy it's hard to argue either way. It was nice when competing consoles were completely different and not just homogenous underpowered gaming PCs
@@alanlee67 Seriously. Once it all went to commodity pc hardware and the same titles with a few exclusives, I stopped caring about console gaming. Honestly I think it peaked with the 16-bit wars. Everything else after that was just fumbling in the dark with new tech until nVidia and AMD started making good chips cheap.
Dat FM synth!
I just found out about your channel two days ago and I can’t get enough of this content. This channel is everything I wish I had as a kid, when all I played was Sonic, the Disney platformers , Streets of Rage and Ghostbusters. Replacing my Mega Drive with a Saturn in 1995 made me miss out on a ton of great games. Thank you for reminding us about these games. You’re really doing them justice by reviewing them in the context of the time they came out. Fantastic video.
It also helped that sculptured software developer mk3 and ultimate mk3 on Genesis. If sculptured software developed mk1 and mk2 for Genesis, they would have turned out better than they did.
There's one good thing UMK3 has on the Genesis. The ridiculous amount of glitches, and cashes you can discover just by screwing around with the character Rain. I mean you can spam his roundhouse kicks endlessly, he's untouchable in this version.
All we needed is Joe from Game Sack to scream “Mega Power!”
A nice spot for that woulda been during the Duke Nukem part , after the developers are complimented on their giant sacks! 😹
Why exactly? I've watched a few of his videos and he's beyond annoying. I simply stop watching every RUclipsr who randomly screams/shouts in his videos for no apparent reason.
Also, it was boring to constantly listen to him complaining how bad he is in literally every game he comments on. Why even play video games if you find them too hard xD?
"MEGAAAAA POWERRRRR" popped into my head multiple times through the video
@@budyll1 He rarely yells. He's not the angry videogame nerd. Game Sack is mostly quiet.
I remember my brother owning Pocahontas back then. It was hard for me to believe that it was playing on a sega genesis of all things. I guess because we also had shining in the darkness and I didn't understand the difference between the two games in terms of graphics and release at the time.
Pocahontas still looks amazing till this day and I gotta go back to it someday.
Any video that starts off with a Street of Rage song is bound to be awesome - great vid!
That soundtrack is damn near perfect.
@@SegaLordX Strafefox did a good video on SoR and it's music. Worth checking
Yes the Genesis is a powerhouse. The big issue was the cost of the extra storage on the carts. It was a lot cheaper to press a CD than make a cartage with equal storage.
Sad part majority of the cd games did not utilize the genesis vdp nor the sega cd scaler chip. Which caused a sega cd games to look like generic genesis ports.
Plus there was a cartridge shortage in the 80s and 90s
It fills my heart with joy to see SLX mention Demons of Asteborg, that game is awesome. I backed it on Kickstarter!
Now you're playing with Power, Mega Power!
Phantasy Star II only being 6 Megabits and IV only being 24 surprises me.
25:10 You can also divide by 8 the amount of megabits to roughly obtain the amount of megabytes. Streets of Rage 2 would be 2 megabytes, the 32 megabit games would be 4 megabytes and Flicky and Columns would be 0.125 megabytes each or 125 kilobytes
It turns confusing. -byte was always used for capacity or size, and -bits, for data transfer. Which at last is another tricky deceiving bussines tactic.
Fun video, as always! By the way, it's worth pointing out that 1 Megabyte is 8 Megabits.
That is a great point and I think SLX should have made that clear. So 32 megabits is what 4 megabytes?
@@marccaselle8108 Yep. That's right. Thanks for the reply!
When lightning force released i marveled at the incredible graphics, parallax scrolling, and that awsome music. At the time i didn't understand the concept of megabytes, just that the game was noticeably enhanced. I actually didn't know about several titles you mentioned here x, like frank thomas baseball. Going to have to check that one out, and i never liked revolution x either lol. I also think one of the most impressive titles for me was phantasy star 4
Phantasy Star IV was a hefty cartridge too, I think it was 24 mb and it also had a save battery. I remember seeing it at Media Play for $99.99 USD, twice the price of other new games. And since I was playing the demo setup of a PlayStation in there at the time, that seemed crazy for a last gen game.
Lightning Force is one of my all time favorite Genesis games. the sound effects are memorable, especially the crazy "1up" which sounds like "Wabba" I play it on my phone all the time, along with the PSX game Einhander.
Every day I learn more and more about Sega!
Thanks for these Awesome Videos!!
Glad you like them!
A co-worker and myself talked about this topic last summer only we conversed about the rom size of n64 and SNES games. Great topic to cover. I've been on a Genesis kick for the past four months.
What a delightful way to spend my insomnia time. Thank you, SLX. :)
Any time!
Yeah, 2am. I needed something to watch.
1:21 got to love that stolen artwork of a traditional space marine on the Strider boxart. Reminds me of the Dom taken from Gundam for the Space Harrior menu screen.
Wow The Lost World looks incredible!
Now an unofficial larger Sega Genesis games would be nice to see. There are some pretty interesting stuff.
Your channel is relaxing for me
Excellent video SLX, it's a pity that storage was so damn expensive in both physical and dollar costs those days. Some of the newer Genesis games - particularly the 'Demons of Asteborg' game show what can be done when there are no real limitations to the cartridge size.
At the same time, I did like your NBA Jam & College Slam comparison as it shows the developer using the added space just to add 'filler' content.
The crowd is animated rather than static in the college basketball. It really makes a difference to me as that always drove me nuts with NBA Jam. Just my 2c of course, might not bother anyone else.
NBA Jam Tournament Edition on Genesis has animated crowds and improved announcer like College Slam compared to Vanilla NBA Jam.
The release of Strider put the megabit count in games to the forefront; the magazines were giving that aspect so much hype that it compelled me to put Strider on my must have list just to experience what all the build up would ultimately produce. Fortunately the game was good also so the purchase was not regrettable. Then the Neo-Geo came along and made the mega marketing a central focus of justification of why their games were priced so high and out of most consumers' reasonable price range. Some attention getting games but not worth between 150 and 250 dollars each.
I wish that Sega would have been as generous with granting extra megabits to Phantasy Star 2; the developers requested 8 megabits but it was denied and one of the consequences is the lack of backgrounds during the battle scenes, as well as the idea of 3D dungeons from the first game being discarded.
The chips themselves holding the memory were the main reasons for decisions being made. The genesis could have always had 100 MEGA SHOCK, but you're paying for hardware in the carts, not necessarily the work to fill it utilize that memory. Computer tech manufacturing techniques are utlimately what decides a consumer product's limitations because you can do whatever you want with computer tech right now, but it'll cost you. From a business perspective, they're always trying to hit that sweet spot of 'cool but not so pricey they can't move units'.
@@heavysystemsinc. In PSII's case upon release it was already priced at $84.99 which was uncharted territory up to that point for a 16-bit console game and earlier; I just feel that with how common that larger cartridges for Genesis became over the following year or two that Sega could have authorized the extra meager 2 megabits so the developers could have their vision fully implemented. Of course none of that stopped me from rushing out and buying it on the day of release or a couple of days later, whatever the case was.
Fun fact: Japan didn't produce 32 megabit cartridges, So Mortal Kombat 3 wasn't released there. Only Sega of America was producing 32 megabit cartridges and only about 20 games in all are that big. This is a big reason why Sonic 3 had to be split into 2 games. They attempted a 24 meg single cart but it still ended up 32 so technically its the only 32 megabit game in Japan
I remember when either Mortal Kombat 3 or Ultimate was on the Sega Channel. If I recall correctly, not only did you have to pay an additional fee to "rent" the game, only half the roster could be downloaded to your Genesis in a single session due to the game size.
Super Street Fighter II has two wonderful hacks available. Pyron's color hack, and a sound driver fix.
I will say one nice thing about Revolution X. The full size arcade machine had a big bulky and pretty awesome plastic gun attached to it. It at least felt good to play in a physical sense, it rumbled and I think it had a speaker in it, if memory serves.
The biggest game I remember buying was Phantasy Star IV. it was 24 megabits and cost $100. I wasn't disappointed
Love your channel man. We were a snes household so im seeing lots of these for the first time.
Same. And now im playing Snes game hacks and randomisera wich make the roms 60 Megabyte large.
I'm surprised by the number of 32 meg Genesis games in 1994. I was under the impression Donkey Kong Country was one of first games to be 32 MEG when it launched.
As soon as I saw the title I immediately thought of ssf2. This wasn't just a trip down memory lane, but a real eye opener. Thanks a ton.
Good wholesome SEGA content 😌 I never paid attention to the sizes until this video 😲 this is really good to take note of
Terrific video. Since I got my wireless genesis controller ive been obsessed with genesis and watching heaps of your videos. This one was terrific.
I had the regular MK3.. loved it on Genesis.. also had the street fighter super 2.. also loved it so many classics what a great time.
I was blown away by Toy Story. That game got me through a lot of weekends as a kid.
Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 was my shit, too. I wasn't very good at it, though. But I was impressed by what Williams and Midway did considering the technical limitations of the Genesis hardware.
There is also Gunstar Heroes, only 8 Megs for one of the best and spectacular games of the 16 bit era.
Ah yes, an episode for Joe from GameSack!
I love the topic of Mega Power, this video is awesome.
I'm Brazilian and a friend had a Duke Nukem cartridge for Mega Drive, in the early 2000s. Since the first time I played, I don't know how Tec Toy managed to design that game.
Have you watched the GameHut channel here? The guy behind it worked on both Sonic 3D and Toy Story, and he has some interesting stories to tell about the programming techniques he used, particularly the crazy compression done to fit everything in.
Another great video, it really shows how critical storage on those carts that was made clear in your Mortal Kombat Arcade Edition video and honestly some of those were seriously impressive for the hardware. looking forward to the next one! Keep up the great work!
Haha, I was gonna say, where's Revolution X?? I love that game!!
My friend in the video is on the other side of the fence on this one. To each's own.
aah the good old days when the leap in technology and graphics between the old and new generation of consoles was massive
What i like about virtuafighter2, is the main character has the ability to open up the opponents defense..and strike it immediately..i wonder why todays fighting games didnt include that..
This touches all my hardware nerd buttons.
Thank you for acknowledging the horrendous music in SF The New Challengers. I was devastated back in the 90s when I first played it and forever hated it and could never play it as a result lol.
I've been enjoying your videos. Thank you for all the great work you are doing to document game history.
That Tower Scene should not have been possible! They gameplay and childhood itself had me pinned to it, despite not being a big Mickey fan. So well worth it. One of my favorites of all time for platforming hop& bop!
This episode is brilliant. I wish I would have came up with the idea. Great video.
5:05 My jaw dropped at that intro to Frank Thomas. I had no idea this existed. It only lasts a few seconds, but that looks like 60fps full motion video, even better than full motion video on Sega CD games! Also, those sprites are humongous! Truly impressive!
My mom hated Super Street Fighter II, she managed an arcade back in '93 and the coin-op for that title was right next to her office... music from the intro drove her nuts.
Such an interesting cool video!! enjoyed that a lot as I grew up with some of these classics and like you say at the time I’d be blown away
Really good video. There's some of my favorite Genesis games in this list.
One of your best videos yet!
What a good video, as always. Appreciate your passion and dedication to everything Sega
Glad you enjoy it!
Feels good seeing someone appreciates that SoR music too. That's my favorite for the Genesis. Besides SoR, loves the Batman soundtrack and the heavily underrated Decapattack.
Would love to see the same for Game Gear. Been playing some of these games after getting my older brother a GG for Christmas, and I am thoroughly impressed with what that thing could do!
Looking back now it seems amazing on the systems of the time that they were able to fit certain kinds of games on cartridges especially and kind of adventure or RPG that took hours to play through and explore. Yes things took up less space then and there were countless reused graphical tiles and assets but they really did use the space so much more efficiently then. Although it did seem like 32 megs was the maximum most publishers were willing to go for the most part with a few exceptions and I think it was around 1993 when that was first hit for both the Mega Drive/Genesis and the SNES it's surprising just how expensive rom chips were at those sizes even after years of being in mass production.
I remember when Star Control came out it was 12 MEG and 4MEGs were dedicated to sound alone, and those 4 MEGs were used well, the voices and sound effects were fantastic
Pocahontas is one of the most beautiful / visually impressive Genesis games ever.
Looking at pocahontas, kolibri could've bee easily done on the genesis and maybe the sega cd as a exclusive port with the right developers.
Thanx very much lord x!
Happy New year!
5:06 - I only ever played the Game Gear version of Frank Thomas Big Hurt Baseball, and I have to say, I legitimately thought the intro to the Genesis version shown here was footage of Frank Thomas composited in front of a background image of the game's logo for use in a commercial or something from a distance.
It always impressed me as well.
There was only a handful of games that blew me away in the graphics department back then. The one game that floored me as a kid with its color pallet, great animation, sound and everything else was Yoshis Island. Hell it looked better than most 32 bit 2d offerings at the time.
i am sure that being a nintendo kid, i never payed much attention to this, i don't think many nes or snes boasted this, or i was just oblivious to them, and end of the day, it is not the size that matters, but this was a nice video and an eye opener.
1. Demons of Asterborg's size is 117 MB?! Will the original console be able to handle such a large game? OO
2. Flicky is only 1MB? How did they fit so many stages in only 1MB?
3. I think Vectorman 1 and 2 could also be interesting here because they also had a 3D like platform and some other cool stuffs.
The Demons of Asteborg cart size is 15,335,424 bytes. This makes it a 122 megabit cartridge (megaBIT was the unit that was being used back in the day).
@@glenndoiron9317 That is huge! Can it be played on the original console?
Games like Demons Of Asteborg have additional FPGA chips / logic on the cartridge to shuffle the memory around. Image it like multiple cartridges in one exchanging at the right time.
@@stefanheiler2329 Dang. If only they had known how to do that in its console time
@@Zahir658 haha yeah true, but the processing power and memory requirements of this additional logic surpasses the power of the mega drive. Imagine modules like this costing more than the console :) But it's a nice way of breathing new life into classic consoles. I really like the approach.
Getting crazy flashbacks of gaming magazines in the early to mid 90s. Still recall the playground arguments about how important game size was to overall quality.
great video. i feel like travelling to the past. greetings from Brazil !
When I started emulating back in the '90s I was completely floored by how small those games were. I could have an entire library of every console on my tiny 8 gig hard drive.
Hey, a channel called GameHut was a worker at traveller's tales, he actually goes into how he managed to squeeze the Sonic 3d Blast intro into a genesis cart without taking up a massive amount of the cartridge space!
The folks at Tec-Toy really were something else with their SEGA stuff. They did us Brazilians proud. I remember looking for a Nintendo Wii back when it was released and seeing a Mega Drive 3 available on shelves. I can't imagine you could've found a brand new Mega Drive/Genesis of any kind in other countries in 2006 lol
The best retro content. Keep it up Sega Lord X!!!
Best video of 2022
Starting the year off right
CONGRATULATIONS ON YOUR 100K AWARD. BEST CHANNEL ON RUclips 👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏
I remember picking up Star Control back in the day, and seeing the box touting it as the first 12Mbit game. I also remember some articles about it in the various magazines at the time, showing off just how close it was to the Amiga original graphically (which it was... very close actually). Hearing the digitized sound effects that matched the Amiga stuff was pretty wild, too. Sadly, the music took a nosedive, though. Guess the 12Mbit wasn't quite enough to get them to match the Amiga tunes.
I came to this channel after knowing Jon Burton's GameHut channel. In there, you get some explanation about how things were achieved in games like Sonic 3D and Toy Story (and others). My favourite one is his "Impossible Fading on the Sega Saturn" video.
Thank you, great content as always.
I had no idea Duke Nukem was even on the Genesis...
It's so interesting to think that modern Sega Genesis releases Come with 80-megabit cartridges and above. If only we had cart sizes like this back in the day :P
Makes me wish that the sega cd didn’t have the extra hardware driving up the cost of the extra unit to attach. Maybe just get as much ram in there as possible or something without driving the price too high. Seemed to do wonders for the PC Engine.
@@IllegalPriest To be fair, when the developers built a game from the ground up for the Sega CD, you could definitely feel that power boost ^^
@Orzuum Sad but true. It seems FM audio wasn't the main line of expertise for a lot of western composers sadly.
@@st1ka sad only a few can utilize before sega ever did which is malibu, core and game arts.
@Benjamin Owuye Jagun I'm talking about sega cd games of Malibu. I agree with the gem sound engines on Malibu genesis port sounding terrible especially batman returns.
Anytime Toughman Contest comes up, I always have to mention that the Genesis version has more ring girls in it, compared to the 32x version! Which is strange
Wow a 26 MEGA POWER video. Nice on SLX.
Happy New Year Sega Lord X! Great content as usual! :-D
Same to you!
Dam another great video
Here right at the best moment in time
Thanks again for your video
Having UMK3 on the Saturn was a huge flex for me at that time 💪
Saying that I only had a Genesis at that time, my young self definitely would have been impressed with the saturn version.
Not surprised to see stuff Game Hut worked on here. He's a cool dude on RUclips.
Great video, dude. Keep up the great work.
I wasn't expecting to see Pocahontas on this list. Not because it's not an excellent-looking and enjoyable game, but because it's so incredibly short. Just 4 levels, and not particularly long ones considering that's all there is. Still, what's there is solid.