Myself and the rest of the old Clockwork Tortoise team are honoured you featured our game. I personally had so much fun working on the art. Huge thank you.
You made this? It's startlingly beautiful for a Genesis game. I'd even have considered it beautiful for the SNES. The tricks are interesting, but the quality of the spritework really shines as well.
Thank YOU Stephen; Clockwork and Jesper Kyd's work on this game were both a labor of love on a console that Japanese developers had already given up on for Saturn. Would love to hear any recollections of "X-Women" if you have any!
You did an awesome job. Me and my brother were HUGE Batman and Robin fans so we played this game a lot. Even as adults a couple of years ago we went on a kick where we would emulate it and message each other back and forth about who could get farther. I'm a game developer now, and there is this effect you did with the super bar UI where the bar almost looked like it was a glass being filled with liquid, and that inspired the look I want to achieve with the stamina bars in my game
Fun fact: The guy who did the music for this game is Jesper Kyd, who would go onto compose for the Assassin's Creed series. Recommend looking up a genuine hardware recording of the soundtrack. It goes in hard.
Had to rewind to pay attention because the 3D claw was so impressive and mesmerizing that it robbed my concentration. AMAZING work. Never played this one before and now I'm tempted to play it right now.
The pseudo-3D techniques that were used in the 16-bit era are more interesting and impressive to look at than actual 3D graphics. I love this era of gaming.
Yeah man, imposing constraints and then forcing developers to get creative often leads to amazing results. This was especially true for 16-bit console titles. I just wish more developers rose to the challenge in the modern console era. Just look at Quantic Dream's work versus, say, Epic Games or Ubisoft. The former really pushes the limits of modern hardware whereas the latter just says "looks good enough to make money" and moves on.
Yep. Even the 3D effects. I used to play Lucasfilms Battlehawks 1942 on the Amiga and it seemed like the graphics were ahead of its time. In 1988 looking like a game from 1993. Well.. they made full 3D models of the aircraft and then pre-rendered them at different angles. It make movement of the aircraft very choppy.. but we were used to that on the Amiga anyways and it was worlds better than the Commodore 64. Maelstrom.. a 1990s asteroid game on the Apple.. was done the same way but it was much more simple and pre-rendered to a much higher degree. Same with the FMV games on the Sega CD and others. I only ever saw the commercial clips but they looked like the most amazing games ever.. and to film all of that and have even a workable rail shooter game out of it like Sewer Shark was pretty amazing.
The brilliance of this game was the artistic style and the pacing in which these effects were used. Each level looks great and the next level always manages to surprise you with a new effect. It's a shame the game is so overtuned in terms of difficulty and that some of the levels seem to drag on forever. Great breakdown as always!
Balance is an issue with a ton of these games created by talented programmers and demoscene coders - they concentrate so much on creating cool graphical effects and pushing the sound hardware to the limit that they forget to actually create and balance the game, so you end up with a beautiful game full of bangers that's completely unfun to play. Both the Genesis and SNES had games that could have been instant classics if only the teams making them had spent a little more time on the game part of the game.
Yeah, at this time a lot of American and European developers were very deliberately making their games as hard as possible, to reduce how much money they were losing to rental stores. Basically - they hoped - if it was guaranteed no one could possibly finish the game in a weekend, it would inspire more people to actually buy copies. (No idea if that turned out to be true, tho.)
@@jasonblalock4429 This actually isn't true, nor is the idea of making games artificially harder for whatever reason. What tended to happen is that the developers and programmers would master playing the game as they made it, and would then make levels that were hard for themselves, assuming that end-users would be willing to learn how to beat it. Ecco the Dolphin is a frequently cited example of this phenomenon. It was (and still is) a design philosophy for small developers, no real malice intended. If they made a game they enjoy, then it was assumed that there will be other people that will too.
@@UA-cam.Commen-tater I've read multiple interviews with developers saying that, yes, they were told to make their games harder. Ecco The Dolphin and The Lion King are two of the better-known examples. It's not a myth. And yes, poor testing or testers getting too good can also cause poor difficulty balancing, that's true.
I remember renting this game from Blockbuster as a kid. This game was awesome! Gunstar Heroes has similar effects and that was a really really good game too. Miss those days when gaming was fun.
The Genesis game that blows my mind the most is Contra: Hard Corps. Still can’t believe that a Genesis is doing that. It’s just nonstop action spectacles.
@@drink15 Makes sense, Gunstar Heroes was created by former Contra devs. Forgot exactly why they left Konami but it was just a small group that wanted to do their own thing without Konami intervening. IIRC they had some troubles initially finding a publisher. I consider GH a real Contra successor, personally speaking anyway.
This game's BATshit insane difficulty is only rivaled by the absolute banger of a soundtrack Jesper Kyd made for it and the most advanced graphics for a Genesis game, you had to keep playing !
I played my friend's copy of the game last year, not knowing anything about who made it. I could tell right away the music was by Jesper Kyd! I have Subterrania for the Genesis which he also wrote music for. He's one of the best!
@@Mike-nf6nf haha damn right ! Funniest thing I've heard was on the Gameplay and Talk youtube channel, there's amazing longplay of old games while the host plays very well, on this game he had some cool memories, he had a friend of his who was DJ at the time, he himself was pretty much into house music and techno, he loved the game soundtrack so much he did make his friend listen to it not telling him it was from a game, his friend was mindblowned by the stuff, I think he did use it to play on some club at the time, amazing story!
And the soundtrack is written in stereo too which i think is a little rare. Apparently Konami soundtracks are in stereo too but i know that Adventures of Batman and Robin has a fully stereo soundtrack
Wanna hear another banger soundtrack that Jesper Kyd did? A few months ago, I got a copy of the Genesis game Sub-Terrania for 6 bucks. I had never heard of this game, and to my knowledge it's pretty obscure. It plays like Gravitar on the Atari 2600; just a hell of a lot cooler. It was actually really fun, a lot more than I expected it to be. But yeah, Jesper Kyd did the soundtrack for that game and it's really good. It uses some pretty cool instrumentation that you can listen to and immediately know that a YM2612 is churning out that sound.
Wouldn't that be Kkrieger? That one was made by an actual demogroup. But then again that was 2004, almost a decade after this one. But yeah, this and Red Zone are pretty much demos you can play as games. Not surprisingly a lot of Amiga developers later worked on Genesis titles back in the early-mid 90s.
@@DashsChannel Right, KKrieger is definitely the most incredible thing I've ever seen! I really had to disconnect the network cable to be sure nothing got loaded from the net. Just could not believe it. But this one is incredible, too. I didn't know it to be honest...
It doesn't hurt that the game is pretty fun. Too many times demoscene coders forget when making game, it should kinda be fun. I think that's where Treasure was great, they did these effects that are awesome looking, but never forgot to make the game fun.
Me and my cousin played this game everytime we were at my grandpa’s together (grandpa had the sega genesis at his house), I remember not being immensely good and he would carry, but the day we beat this game together was a day I’ll never forget
the background and the airship both followed the same rotational pattern as well. the game seems like someone said "let's throw together every visual trick we can think of into one game" and now we have batman and robin
This game always looked gorgeous, just from pictures even, and it really bummed me out as a child that none of our locals stores had it, for some reason. I only got to play it years later.
The first time I've seen this game I actually checked if you were somehow involved with it. It really does have some amazing effects, although the gameplay is fairly mediocre
I don't think this one I've played before and this footage honestly blew me away. It looks more like a modern homebrew made by someone with the benefit and hindsight of having full documentation of every trick possible on the hardware than it does something actually made during the console's lifespan in the 90s
I mean for the time the gameplay looks above average i would say. I mean Games that try many different gameplay styles like shoot em ups and jump and run are allway a bit wonky when it comes to the quality of each section. But you really have to admire the effort that went into this. This was clearly a flex first and a game second
Yeah, the gameplay was pretty meh. There's impact and weight, but it was also sluggish. Still pretty addicting though. I was not allowed to play it when I was younger because of the flashing lights.
Game is great actually, you just have to learn how to play it as the play design is extremely deliberate. One of those games where if you die, you know it's your own fault, but superficially it can seem like it's just cheap until you finally "get" it. Personally I like it more than Hard Corps, and I love Hard Corps- though both require a decent amount of trial & error to figure out the ideal strats.
4:05 I think there is no palette swap, it's just the way how spheres overlap each other. It seems drawn from bottom to top, so lighter part of the sphere is covered by the next sphere, so it looks darker.
Most of the effects in the game are just abusing the raster interrupts and scroll values, or rotate palettes (or combine all of these at once). But they managed to pull out all of those to make the levels look unique, which is what matters. Most Amiga/C64 demos fail at this, they just show off a lot of effects, very few of them actually make transitions from effect to effect or use effects with a purpose to enhance some graphic. There was one game that pushed raster effects even further, Vectorman. You boot the game and you immediately get fullscreen horizontal/vertical "wave", plus the main character is made mostly of orbs (and you can blow the screen up, halting the animation!), then you have the Blue Sky logo which also uses custom per-line scrolls. And then you have the title screen which uses like 6 different effects at the same time - stretching the screen, multiple palette cycling (I still don't know how they did the left-to-right tracing palette update), windowing to display circling graphics, LENS FLARE, shadows that move with the light source, then the background tiles fall off as sprites to "deconstruct" the scene... all in beautiful motion, synced to the music. All this crazy eye candy, and you haven't even gotten in-game yet!
Had a quick look at Vectorman. The title sequence uses all pretty basic effects that many games use, mainly horizontal scrolling. The "left-to-right tracing palette update" is just changing the palette each character block uses moving in columns from left to right. That's why it's on an 8 pixel boundary.
@@CodingSecrets on the title screen, there's a part where the entire screen shifts into an alternate palette, as if the alternate palette scrolled from left to right. It's a completely smooth, per-pixel palette change, not just every 8 pixel. I mean you could probably still do that with palette manipulation only, but that means they set up a shit load of different 8x8 graphics, all in a way so every pixel can be individually paletted (plus they are animated too)... Yeah, it uses "basic" effects, but it uses an overwhelming amount of them in just a 10 second sequence. I can't think of any other game right now that uses this many different effects for just a title screen. And that's just the title screen, in-game it gets crazier.
@@zyrobs I discovered that myself when I was a kid and though "huh, that's pretty neat." But I sorta hoped it would trigger a secret level or something, and it never did.
I think what worked so well for this game was that the design team nailed the color and artwork to really emphasize these effects. The lighting/color on the city really gives more of illusion of depth. The airship, ground, and background in the bossfight were all making eahother pop. Simple effects go a lot further if you actually DESIGN the assets to play into the effect. It looks great on the wooden floor, but the wooden floor doesn't present it in the dramatic fashion a city does. Also, with these being so simple, why did so few use it??? Vectorman was a game devoted to that sphere effect, and it looked wonderful.
Just saw this on my feed, read your channel description. Instant subscribe, there is no better content than hearing from the people that actually created such experiences.
An absolute masterpiece. I still keep the soundtrack on my iPhone to this day! The Harley “ tank”, The 3D claw, Joker's balloon, the falling Two-Face building and blimp, the entire Mad Hatter stage!If I ever had one complaint, it's that the final Mr. Freeze episode in general was somethig of a letdown after the graphical marvels that were the other 3.
I used to do no death playthroughs on this game. It's not hard once you find the right timings to do jump kicks and such. I only use the green batarang because its the strongest. But in the Two-Face flying level I get the fire batarang.
Green is bola Blue is shuriken But yeah that what i keep saying the game isnt too hard green way op Orange is manageable but green is overall better it doesn't have drawbacks of a single shot weapon
The game is a challenge enough the first few times and blue is a depower Do u get the depower item in other games is up to u And plus getting green helps get a full playthough in especially during the flight section otherwise game turns into test of patience dodge fest I could ramble on and on of this game
Yeah, this game came out in ~95, so the developers had 7 years of tricks up their sleeves. You see it a lot with games that come out late in a system's life. The early games don't push the hardware that much, but the games that come at the end of the system's life have a lot more tricks packed in.
Just look at Super Mario 1 vs Super Mario 3. Even the companies that develop the hardware don't realize the potential of it until a few years into the life cycle.
This channel is so cool, as someone making games and loves retro games to see what old games did to get their effects helps me get that authentic feel I hope to get, thank you!
There's something visually appealing about the sprite-based pseudo-3D that isn't present in actual 3D (at least not by default). It reminds me of how much I appreciate the visual style of 1980s film-composited stop-motion ghosts in horror films that is sorely missed in contemporary films.
@@JosephDavies Well, ghost effects were uniquely well-suited for bluescreen or optical compositing, since anything that made them look more unreal actually worked to their advantage. But it'd be fun to see modern movies try harder to replicate that effect.
Lots of tricks, creativity, effort. We don't get any of that nowadays. It's also a problem because most developers now probably code and build games on very powerful computers when in reality it would be better if they limited themselves because that's how you find innovation
@@JosephDavies I suppose we are just too used to polygon-based graphics now to the point that those are not as impressive anymore as they were back when they were still new. But we can't get enough of pseudo-3D since you just don't expect something like a 16-bit system to pull off something even close to those graphics, let alone as smooth as they look. It is, quite literally, too good to be true.
@@JosephDavies The pseudo 3d effects in this game are done really well. I love the snes too, but a lot of mode 7 effects on it cross the line for me into bad 3d. Well done 2d is really nice, you have to be careful not spoil it. But sensibilities were of course different back then. But I think that game developers have been toying with pseudo 3d for almost as long as games have had graphics.
One of the programmers who worked at Treasure once said that their approach was not to do really heavy programming to squeeze every ounce of power from the system, but rather to simply take what was readily available on the system and combine it with good design. It looks like the same thing is happening here.
@@myfirstname3913 The point made over and over again in this video is that none of these tricks are truly difficult to pull off in terms of programming. It's the combination of creativity with broad, flexible use of the hardware that gets the impressive result. That's what the Treasure programmer was talking about: they never squeezed blood from a stone, they simply came up with outside-the-box ideas for how to use various hardware features and executed them well. I even got the sense from that interview that the Treasure guys would rather be thought of as skillful designers than skillful programmers.
@@sirsinnes Nope. You got the right idea, but your concept of what is "designer" and what is a "programmer" is wrong. What was achieved here, if things were done exactly as the video THINKS they were, was, plain and simply, badass programming. Creative use of hardware to achieve things that it wasn't really supposed to do is what a good programmer can do. By the way, the reason I downvoted the video video was because there is a lot of "I think this is how it was done", and none of "here is the game code showing that what I think is right" nor "I talked one of the coders and he confirmed that was how it was done." I do believe the video is right, and since the dude was a Sega Genesis programmer, and did something similar, he is probably right. But I don't deal with "probably" :)
This is amazing that I've found this channel...There is one game I've always had in mind from when I was a kid playing my NES then I had a mega drive as I'm from Australia, I used to say to my mate that the mega drive is better than the Super Nintendo and we used to argue healthy all the time I knew deep down Super NES had better graphics but there was one game I always said to my mate that this game has really smooth mode 7 like graphics and it was Puggsy how the space ship at the start came in and out of the screen I was so impressed from that and my Super Nintendo mate was aswel, from that day I had in myself a little Sega Win...It has always racked my brain what game it was until a couple months ago Puggsy...I'm now 45 and still love my gaming especially the Nintendo switch... cheers 🤘🏾 thanks for the memories bro
He's not saying that it's not good work, it's that these effects aren't complicated or difficult for the hardware to achieve. Simple doesn't mean bad. The art is great, after all.
The fact that these effects were so simple makes me hate a good chunk of game developers from that era even more. They weren't even trying with the good ol' genny.
@@RockoEstalon What's worse for me is that SNES could also do all of these effects too, and in many cases it could do so with with additional background layers to spare, as well as the usual more colours and proper transparency, and yet very few SNES games at all went to town like this. Genesis developers at least did stuff like this far more than SNES developers, particularly line scrolling, and that is a real shame because the superior SNES visuals in terms of colours and transparency combined plus more background layers along with all of these tricks done more regularly on that system could have resulted in some truly stunning results. As it is, there are still some SNES games that look as technically impressive as this Batman game does on Genesis but they are rare.
It’s not that developers weren’t trying; being simple doesn’t mean that anyone can do it. You need to design your gameplay and artwork to take advantage of these effects, which are VERY particular. They may not be impossible to figure out, but you need to commit heavily to these effects to incorporate them.
The way I'm interpreting him, he's saying that any one of these tricks is not too hard and not unprecedented, but the developers used many of them in a single game, and sometimes several of them in a single scene. And that to do all this in a single Genesis/Mega Drive game is quite advanced.
@@Flameb0 Agreed, Alien Soldier kicks ass. Though sadly I had to settle for playing it on Emulator since I'm in 'Murica and it was only released in Japan and Europe.
@@Flameb0 Actually, most of the background stuff in Alien Soldier is extremely basic technically, just two normal scrolling layers and not much else, but the art is strong there. The bosses are often rather impressive though and the place where the game shines most.
First time coming to your channel, love the fact that you're an actual dev that can break all this down for us plebs but also I never knew about The Adventures of Batman & Robin before... it looks phenomenal! I had a SNES and Genesis growing up, and I'd be lying if I said the SNES didn't receive more playtime than my Genesis. Mostly because I was really getting into RPG's after I beat Dragon Warrior for NES and I had just gotten Final Fantasy II. Anyway, amazing content and new subscriber!
Thank you so much for making this! I was one of the many who wanted to see this game broken down (and was likely somewhat annoying about it) but I sincerely appreciate your breakdown of it all & can't wait for Part 2.
4:40 I am pretty sure the problem is not the DMA/Chip RAM bandwidth for Agnus (which contains the blitter) vs Megadrive sprites, which is why Turrican 3 looks pretty much identical on both. Lotus II on Amiga also has better frame rate than Megadrive.
@jabroni destroyer I consider myself quite a hardcore gamer but without save states... This game is just madness. But thanks to savestates / rewind technology in retroarch i enjoyed it deeply. Some stages are just the best gfx, bgm and sfx on the platform. Puts many snes games to shame.
This game has a seriously soecial place for me, the music/animations/ combat all memorable. The music mostly cuz now I realized how much it’s influenced my own. I gave my nephews my Genesis and cartridges. This is their favorite one. No matter the generation it’s a great game
Using words like "simple", "cheap" and "tricks" sounds a bit dismissive and minimizing, but I don't think Coding Secrets intended that. Rather that how to do the effects is obvious to him due to understanding the system architecture, that there isn't a lot of cpu overhead required to produce the effects, and that the approach used isn't as generic as it first looks, making unexpected use of hardware features. This absolutely doesn't take away from the end result - it doesn't matter if the code "fakes 3D" - in the end the only thing that matters is how it looks. If the approach of calculating the 3D position of each pixel has the same visual result as using line scrolling and line skipping on a pre-scaled texture, it's a perfectly valid way to display 3D, and very smart since the CPU doesn't have enough performance to use a more generic approach at high frame rates. Figuring out ways to combine the techniques available in the system to produce a game like this as well as executing on them is very creative and also technically impressive, and why this game stands out from the pack. It often requires hand-crafted assembler coding to control the graphics hardware with very specific timings in order to convince it to display the intended output. Awesome work by the Batman & Robin development team! 😎👏
Yeah I get what you mean...most even good developers were not able to get close to this. He's one of the absolute masters...it would be like listening to Bruce Lee narrate a master martial arts competition. To HIM it would look simple.
like magic tricks, once you know how it's done it appears "simple"... but knowing how something is done and actually executing it are two different things... anyway this is great channel, i'm subscribing! I remember those days, digging in the 68000, messing with hblanks and vblanks and DMAs... then the playstation came along with their libraries and changed the whole game up lol
Thank you for tackling this game. The graphics for this game were mind blowing and I don’t know how people just compare it to other ordinary games and not give it the recognition it deserves. It was polished to the extreme.
This is one of the best action games on the Mega Drive. It got mediocre reviews and most people passed. Still one of the ones to launch now and then, it has this arcade like replayability. Without the extra lengthy bat plane level this could be top 5.
I don't think it plays particularly well to be honest, as in I didn't find it that much fun trying it recently, but it does look extremely cool on a technical level for a Genesis game.
@@inceptional the controls are spot on and when you lose it is always your fault. It is challenging but fair. Back in 1995 it was criticized for small sprites and no password system by people that do not get it: this game is like arcades, you get good by replaying the levels.
@@miltiadiskoutsokeras9189 Technically, I have no doubt the controls are spot on--but I didn't find the just hold fire button down and shoot as enemy after enemy runs at me, using very little strategy or thought beyond simply keep shooting with no time to even do anything else of my choosing, fun. And, unlike say most shmups, even the enemy patterns just feel like it was one after the other just coming and that was it. Honestly I was just going through the motions. This game is graphically stunning, but I do not find it fun to actually play. It's more fun to watch imo.
@@inceptional actually the strategy comes once you realize the patterns. You have many ways to clear a screen of them, but the optimal one is always a very strategic plan. I find it simple too learn but difficult to master. Contra Hard Corps and Gunstar Heroes on the same machine may be better and based on new IP, but this game holds well. I tend to prefer it over Gunstar Heroes for quick sessions.
The running joke on "Mr. Wizard's World" was that so much of the scientific phenomena demonstrated on that show had something to do with air pressure. Coding Secrets has taught me that the go-to trick on so many seemingly complicated effects is just playing with horizontal interrupts. Keep up the awesome work!
Yeyeyeye, love this game, I still listen to the incredible soundtrack by Jesper Kyd every once in a while. Great job in breaking down those effects to the bare essentials on how they were done, very, very informative.
Great channel, great breakdown. So glad many of you veterans in the industry have made time to make channels and spread your wealth of knowledge rather than this information being lost to father time. Much Appreciated.
It's all bloody interesting, thank you! I remember this game well cause my best mate had it. I was always impressed. I'm not sure that skewing is the be-all-end-all for the building. The side edge of the ledge is visible in some positions and not others, giving a really great parallax effect. That said, it's only on a few horizontal lines, so I expect that there would be plenty of time each frame to tweak how the edge is drawn.
Would you care to explain how they did the scrolling layers of Sonic 3 and Knuckles? It is by far the best example of such layering in the classic era and makes the environments very dynamic.
The areas with 3 or more layers are done by updating tile data in VRAM. It's not fancy hardware exploitation other than DMAing new graphics data in on the fly.
Can't wait for Pt. 2! I discovered Game Hut a few months ago. I thought the channel was over with, and I wouldn't have any GH vids to look forward to. I'm so pleasantly surprised this channel exists instead!
5:09 Using an interrupt to actually be able to column scroll parts of the same background layer differently is a very cool cheat. I presume something very similar could be done on SNES using background Mode 2 then?
Yeah, Earthbound is a good example. I'm not totally sure what Mode(s) it's using, but the battles all have trippy backgrounds making extensive use of various horizontal interrupt tricks.
@@jasonblalock4429 What, Earthbound column scrolls different sections of the same background independently? I need to see that in action. Do you have a link?
From what I've seen, you are correct. Mode 2 looks to have a versatile column-scroll feature that operates on a per-pixel basis. I references this video from Retro Game Mechanics Explained: ua-cam.com/video/5SBEAZIfDAg/v-deo.html
@@ravagingwolverine The column scrolling is only every 8 pixels, but that's still twice as smooth as the Genesis. The row scrolling can be every single scanline though, which is the same as the Genesis.
@@inceptional Yes. That was an oversight on my part. The columns look to be eight pixels wide as you say, but can be shifted per pixel up and down. I misunderstood the explanation initially.
Love that we get to hear from somebody within the industry, for so long! Speaking of Toy Story on genesis, I played through that along with on SNES and wow those games were challenging! But they’re beautiful too, so great job on all that 3D imagery :)
I think, even though you have shown that the tricks used to achieve the effects here, are fairly simple and had been used in previous games, is the scale of what was accomplished. Games may have used some of these tricks in one way or another but, the genius of compiling all these different effects into this single game, was above and beyond most of what had been seen at the time. Each moment was something new, something different that at the time, seemed so mind blowing. Instead of using a great effect for boss levels, or one insane level, they were used consistently and flawlessly throughout. There wasn't just a single, or a few amazing moments, the creators made a game full of these moments. This really was amazing. Also, thank you so very much for taking the time to explain all these our for us. Much appreciated.
Very emotional video for me to watch. My big brother and I used to play this for hours and hours and hours. He has since passed away. This is my favorite memory of him.
I played this when it came out in Germany. It had an awesome soundtrack and graphics. It was a great game towards the end lifecycle of the Genesis system.
This was fascinating. I don't know how "easy" any of these would be, but you certainly explain it in a way that makes it (relatively) easy to understand.
I remember Diehard Gamefan magazine hyping this game like crazy in its previews. A pity that its insane difficulty kept me from fully enjoying this game.
It was probably assumed by the general gamer journalists press that because Nintendo was heavily touting the "Mode 7" scaling and rotation hardware features that somehow the Sega MegaDrive (released in 1988 Japan) and maybe the NEC PC-Engine (released in 1987 Japan) that such features were impossible to replicate outside of the Super FamiCom SNES released in 1990 Japan. A key point is that some game programmers were racking up experience and knowledge of each hardware that they were working on and that since the SNES was newer, it required a similar experience timeframe before seeing 2d Sprite graphics effects that were not in hardware and that were fast processed at 60fps... A bigger key point is that since large ROM Cartridge sizes were becoming feasible, this allowed the potential for more powerful capabilities by the game programmers to engineer. However the 3DO and Atari Jaguar raised the stakes in competition so decisions had to be made to keep up
At this rate, you might as well be talking Vectorman in general, which shouldn't be too hard. Mostly characters with multiple sprites, and the math associated with them. However, Vectorman (or its prototype builds, anyway) does have one interesting demoscene hidden away in the level select, and I'm pretty sure it's been posted on UA-cam. Mostly, it involves a guy made up of green circles moving, then the camera rotating, then jumping in front of the camera. That's all sprites. Can't wait to see you talk about the Cheshire cat boss and the Mad Hatter. For all I know, the slinky/wheel tumblers may be all sprites with frames of rotation rather than doing actual in-engine rotation, since they only have two frames of animation.
One of most visually impressive games on the system is Gunstar Heroes. A great deal of love and care went into that game. Would love to see it featured on this channel.
Such simple tricks to make something look this amazing for the hardware. It still takes a lot of talent to keep things simple, yet effective. Especially that fire animation. Only 6 frames and it still looks so dynamic and "alive." Props to the artist who did those frames.
I never thought we'd see the day when Coding Secrets did a collab with himself, but here it is - best collab I've ever seen on a (what would I consider to be) tech channel. 👍🏻
To have a guy who worked in my favourite games from my childhood teaching me tricks to use in my recreational game developing is a dream I never imagined to seeing it coming true. Thank you!
This is....everything you make is pure gold my friend. I could watch your channel nonstop all day long and it would never get old. What's amazing about all of this is the Sega Genesis was doing this stuff without any specialized hardware. The Snes might have had those extra modes but without helper chips it was dead in the water half-way through its lifespan. You guys made Sega's 16-bit console sing with sheer brute force and technical knowhow.
You're saying these effects are simple, and thy may be. But it took real creative minds to figure out they could do that when almost no one else was doing the same stuff.
This was one of the games that impressed me the most on the Genesis. My friend and I would play through it all the time. The flying level took forever.
"as you can see, using nothing more than horizontal interrupts on the sega genesis, we can actually synthesize the cure for alzheimer's disease fairly easily"
Eh, what. Where is there a single instance of visuals anywhere near technically impressive as this in Crash Dummies on SNES? All I can see via a quick UA-cam search is use of two standard flat background layers and nothing else.
Check out this group of videos from Retro Game Mechanics Explained, where he breaks down specific effects in specific games for the NES and SNES ua-cam.com/play/PLHQ0utQyFw5KT8_MDSi0DHlVG_cGaY-Cu.html
Myself and the rest of the old Clockwork Tortoise team are honoured you featured our game. I personally had so much fun working on the art. Huge thank you.
You made this? It's startlingly beautiful for a Genesis game. I'd even have considered it beautiful for the SNES. The tricks are interesting, but the quality of the spritework really shines as well.
Thank YOU Stephen; Clockwork and Jesper Kyd's work on this game were both a labor of love on a console that Japanese developers had already given up on for Saturn. Would love to hear any recollections of "X-Women" if you have any!
You did an awesome job.
Me and my brother were HUGE Batman and Robin fans so we played this game a lot. Even as adults a couple of years ago we went on a kick where we would emulate it and message each other back and forth about who could get farther.
I'm a game developer now, and there is this effect you did with the super bar UI where the bar almost looked like it was a glass being filled with liquid, and that inspired the look I want to achieve with the stamina bars in my game
@@sensifacient You're under the impression that snes is somehow vastly superior to the genesis, that's humorous
Thank you for so many fond child hood memories of playing this game.
This and toy story were my top five
Fun fact: The guy who did the music for this game is Jesper Kyd, who would go onto compose for the Assassin's Creed series. Recommend looking up a genuine hardware recording of the soundtrack. It goes in hard.
He also did State of Decay 2
He did MANY music for games. So much that even hard to list.
Played the heck out of this game as a kid in the 90s. Had no idea what a gem this was until now.
Had to rewind to pay attention because the 3D claw was so impressive and mesmerizing that it robbed my concentration. AMAZING work. Never played this one before and now I'm tempted to play it right now.
The pseudo-3D techniques that were used in the 16-bit era are more interesting and impressive to look at than actual 3D graphics. I love this era of gaming.
Yeah man, imposing constraints and then forcing developers to get creative often leads to amazing results. This was especially true for 16-bit console titles. I just wish more developers rose to the challenge in the modern console era. Just look at Quantic Dream's work versus, say, Epic Games or Ubisoft. The former really pushes the limits of modern hardware whereas the latter just says "looks good enough to make money" and moves on.
Yep.
Even the 3D effects.
I used to play Lucasfilms Battlehawks 1942 on the Amiga and it seemed like the graphics were ahead of its time. In 1988 looking like a game from 1993.
Well.. they made full 3D models of the aircraft and then pre-rendered them at different angles. It make movement of the aircraft very choppy.. but we were used to that on the Amiga anyways and it was worlds better than the Commodore 64.
Maelstrom.. a 1990s asteroid game on the Apple.. was done the same way but it was much more simple and pre-rendered to a much higher degree.
Same with the FMV games on the Sega CD and others. I only ever saw the commercial clips but they looked like the most amazing games ever.. and to film all of that and have even a workable rail shooter game out of it like Sewer Shark was pretty amazing.
What utter rubbish. You're just blinded by nostalgia.
This game has been getting a lot of love lately. The creators are finally getting the recognition they've always deserved for this masterpiece
Batman the animated series was a huge factor in my younger teenage years. I remember coming home from school and watching it everyday. Cheers.
The brilliance of this game was the artistic style and the pacing in which these effects were used. Each level looks great and the next level always manages to surprise you with a new effect. It's a shame the game is so overtuned in terms of difficulty and that some of the levels seem to drag on forever. Great breakdown as always!
Balance is an issue with a ton of these games created by talented programmers and demoscene coders - they concentrate so much on creating cool graphical effects and pushing the sound hardware to the limit that they forget to actually create and balance the game, so you end up with a beautiful game full of bangers that's completely unfun to play. Both the Genesis and SNES had games that could have been instant classics if only the teams making them had spent a little more time on the game part of the game.
@@Damaniel3 In fairness to them, there was sometimes pressure from management to make the games "too hard". :(
Yeah, at this time a lot of American and European developers were very deliberately making their games as hard as possible, to reduce how much money they were losing to rental stores. Basically - they hoped - if it was guaranteed no one could possibly finish the game in a weekend, it would inspire more people to actually buy copies. (No idea if that turned out to be true, tho.)
@@jasonblalock4429 This actually isn't true, nor is the idea of making games artificially harder for whatever reason. What tended to happen is that the developers and programmers would master playing the game as they made it, and would then make levels that were hard for themselves, assuming that end-users would be willing to learn how to beat it. Ecco the Dolphin is a frequently cited example of this phenomenon.
It was (and still is) a design philosophy for small developers, no real malice intended. If they made a game they enjoy, then it was assumed that there will be other people that will too.
@@UA-cam.Commen-tater I've read multiple interviews with developers saying that, yes, they were told to make their games harder. Ecco The Dolphin and The Lion King are two of the better-known examples. It's not a myth.
And yes, poor testing or testers getting too good can also cause poor difficulty balancing, that's true.
I remember renting this game from Blockbuster as a kid. This game was awesome! Gunstar Heroes has similar effects and that was a really really good game too. Miss those days when gaming was fun.
I like how they're using the horizontal interrupts in the top down flying sequence to move the traffic on the streets below.
Sometimes car line goes backwards on bottom but still look great overall
oh wow, they are aren't they? good eye.
@@ninjacat230 indeed...
The Genesis game that blows my mind the most is Contra: Hard Corps. Still can’t believe that a Genesis is doing that. It’s just nonstop action spectacles.
@JM Coulon Agreed. Hard to believe but Konami used to make digital magic.
Reminds me of Gunstar Heros. One of my top games on Genesis.
@@drink15 Makes sense, Gunstar Heroes was created by former Contra devs. Forgot exactly why they left Konami but it was just a small group that wanted to do their own thing without Konami intervening. IIRC they had some troubles initially finding a publisher. I consider GH a real Contra successor, personally speaking anyway.
Alien Soldier is also good, and Castlevania bloodlines
@@KryptKicker5 One of my favorite Konami games is Sunset Riders. Used to have a blast playing this with my cousins back in the day.
This game's BATshit insane difficulty is only rivaled by the absolute banger of a soundtrack Jesper Kyd made for it and the most advanced graphics for a Genesis game, you had to keep playing !
Oh the memories....
I played my friend's copy of the game last year, not knowing anything about who made it. I could tell right away the music was by Jesper Kyd! I have Subterrania for the Genesis which he also wrote music for. He's one of the best!
@@Mike-nf6nf haha damn right ! Funniest thing I've heard was on the Gameplay and Talk youtube channel, there's amazing longplay of old games while the host plays very well, on this game he had some cool memories, he had a friend of his who was DJ at the time, he himself was pretty much into house music and techno, he loved the game soundtrack so much he did make his friend listen to it not telling him it was from a game, his friend was mindblowned by the stuff, I think he did use it to play on some club at the time, amazing story!
And the soundtrack is written in stereo too which i think is a little rare.
Apparently Konami soundtracks are in stereo too but i know that Adventures of Batman and Robin has a fully stereo soundtrack
Wanna hear another banger soundtrack that Jesper Kyd did? A few months ago, I got a copy of the Genesis game Sub-Terrania for 6 bucks. I had never heard of this game, and to my knowledge it's pretty obscure. It plays like Gravitar on the Atari 2600; just a hell of a lot cooler. It was actually really fun, a lot more than I expected it to be. But yeah, Jesper Kyd did the soundtrack for that game and it's really good. It uses some pretty cool instrumentation that you can listen to and immediately know that a YM2612 is churning out that sound.
It's like "Demoscene: The Game." It looks absolutely amazing even today.
Exactly :D
Wouldn't that be Kkrieger? That one was made by an actual demogroup. But then again that was 2004, almost a decade after this one.
But yeah, this and Red Zone are pretty much demos you can play as games. Not surprisingly a lot of Amiga developers later worked on Genesis titles back in the early-mid 90s.
@@DashsChannel Right, KKrieger is definitely the most incredible thing I've ever seen! I really had to disconnect the network cable to be sure nothing got loaded from the net. Just could not believe it.
But this one is incredible, too. I didn't know it to be honest...
@@DashsChannel Me myself was blown away that Kkrieger only is 96K....
It doesn't hurt that the game is pretty fun. Too many times demoscene coders forget when making game, it should kinda be fun. I think that's where Treasure was great, they did these effects that are awesome looking, but never forgot to make the game fun.
YES! Been touting this game for years as a technical marvel. I was stunned back in the 90s when I rented it from video palace.
I think dc will have a problem with you calling it a technical MARVEL lol
@@EDifyer881 lmao
Such a surprise to rent after many terrible licensed games and get something so mesmerizing.
@@EDifyer881 buhuhuh
WTF is video palace??
Me and my cousin played this game everytime we were at my grandpa’s together (grandpa had the sega genesis at his house), I remember not being immensely good and he would carry, but the day we beat this game together was a day I’ll never forget
😂😂man I've never beaten it and I plan on doing that asap
This is all very very cool my man :) tnx for being here explaining your and other s art skills and tricks ✨
It’s magical how many tricks the genesis can handle
the background and the airship both followed the same rotational pattern as well. the game seems like someone said "let's throw together every visual trick we can think of into one game" and now we have batman and robin
This game always looked gorgeous, just from pictures even, and it really bummed me out as a child that none of our locals stores had it, for some reason. I only got to play it years later.
3:11 Wow! If I'd seen that arm swinging back in the day my mind would have been blown. That looks remarkable and out of this world!
The first time I've seen this game I actually checked if you were somehow involved with it. It really does have some amazing effects, although the gameplay is fairly mediocre
I don't think this one I've played before and this footage honestly blew me away.
It looks more like a modern homebrew made by someone with the benefit and hindsight of having full documentation of every trick possible on the hardware than it does something actually made during the console's lifespan in the 90s
Man findet dich auch echt überall haha
I mean for the time the gameplay looks above average i would say. I mean Games that try many different gameplay styles like shoot em ups and jump and run are allway a bit wonky when it comes to the quality of each section. But you really have to admire the effort that went into this. This was clearly a flex first and a game second
Yeah, the gameplay was pretty meh. There's impact and weight, but it was also sluggish. Still pretty addicting though. I was not allowed to play it when I was younger because of the flashing lights.
Game is great actually, you just have to learn how to play it as the play design is extremely deliberate. One of those games where if you die, you know it's your own fault, but superficially it can seem like it's just cheap until you finally "get" it. Personally I like it more than Hard Corps, and I love Hard Corps- though both require a decent amount of trial & error to figure out the ideal strats.
4:05 I think there is no palette swap, it's just the way how spheres overlap each other. It seems drawn from bottom to top, so lighter part of the sphere is covered by the next sphere, so it looks darker.
Most of the effects in the game are just abusing the raster interrupts and scroll values, or rotate palettes (or combine all of these at once). But they managed to pull out all of those to make the levels look unique, which is what matters. Most Amiga/C64 demos fail at this, they just show off a lot of effects, very few of them actually make transitions from effect to effect or use effects with a purpose to enhance some graphic.
There was one game that pushed raster effects even further, Vectorman. You boot the game and you immediately get fullscreen horizontal/vertical "wave", plus the main character is made mostly of orbs (and you can blow the screen up, halting the animation!), then you have the Blue Sky logo which also uses custom per-line scrolls. And then you have the title screen which uses like 6 different effects at the same time - stretching the screen, multiple palette cycling (I still don't know how they did the left-to-right tracing palette update), windowing to display circling graphics, LENS FLARE, shadows that move with the light source, then the background tiles fall off as sprites to "deconstruct" the scene... all in beautiful motion, synced to the music. All this crazy eye candy, and you haven't even gotten in-game yet!
Had a quick look at Vectorman. The title sequence uses all pretty basic effects that many games use, mainly horizontal scrolling. The "left-to-right tracing palette update" is just changing the palette each character block uses moving in columns from left to right. That's why it's on an 8 pixel boundary.
@@CodingSecrets So simple yet so amazing in motion!
@@CodingSecrets on the title screen, there's a part where the entire screen shifts into an alternate palette, as if the alternate palette scrolled from left to right. It's a completely smooth, per-pixel palette change, not just every 8 pixel. I mean you could probably still do that with palette manipulation only, but that means they set up a shit load of different 8x8 graphics, all in a way so every pixel can be individually paletted (plus they are animated too)... Yeah, it uses "basic" effects, but it uses an overwhelming amount of them in just a 10 second sequence. I can't think of any other game right now that uses this many different effects for just a title screen.
And that's just the title screen, in-game it gets crazier.
@@CodingSecrets On the SEGA screen of Vectorman, try getting the powerup on the top right monitor, you can blow up the SEGA logo with it.
@@zyrobs I discovered that myself when I was a kid and though "huh, that's pretty neat." But I sorta hoped it would trigger a secret level or something, and it never did.
I think what worked so well for this game was that the design team nailed the color and artwork to really emphasize these effects. The lighting/color on the city really gives more of illusion of depth. The airship, ground, and background in the bossfight were all making eahother pop. Simple effects go a lot further if you actually DESIGN the assets to play into the effect. It looks great on the wooden floor, but the wooden floor doesn't present it in the dramatic fashion a city does. Also, with these being so simple, why did so few use it??? Vectorman was a game devoted to that sphere effect, and it looked wonderful.
It's very nice to see these relatively easy tricks used in such a versatile way. Also very well explained, thanks.
Just saw this on my feed, read your channel description. Instant subscribe, there is no better content than hearing from the people that actually created such experiences.
An absolute masterpiece. I still keep the soundtrack on my iPhone to this day! The Harley “ tank”, The 3D claw, Joker's balloon, the falling Two-Face building and blimp, the entire Mad Hatter stage!If I ever had one complaint, it's that the final Mr. Freeze episode in general was somethig of a letdown after the graphical marvels that were the other 3.
I used to do no death playthroughs on this game. It's not hard once you find the right timings to do jump kicks and such. I only use the green batarang because its the strongest. But in the Two-Face flying level I get the fire batarang.
I tried to complete the game with the blue batarang (the "ice" as kid me called it) and the Mad Hatter stage is impossible for me
Green is bola
Blue is shuriken
But yeah that what i keep saying the game isnt too hard green way op
Orange is manageable but green is overall better it doesn't have drawbacks of a single shot weapon
@@Spawn3X5 green = I really can’t handle a challenge so I’ll just use the most OP weapon there is. Blue = IM HERE FOR A CHALLENGE.
The game is a challenge enough the first few times and blue is a depower
Do u get the depower item in other games is up to u
And plus getting green helps get a full playthough in especially during the flight section otherwise game turns into test of patience dodge fest
I could ramble on and on of this game
Considering how impressive yet 'easy' these effects were, I wonder why they where so uncommon in other Genesis games?
Easy once you know the method - hard to invent the method in the first place
Yeah, this game came out in ~95, so the developers had 7 years of tricks up their sleeves. You see it a lot with games that come out late in a system's life. The early games don't push the hardware that much, but the games that come at the end of the system's life have a lot more tricks packed in.
A lot of devs may not have known the hardware as intimately, or put their limited resources elsewhere.
Just look at Super Mario 1 vs Super Mario 3. Even the companies that develop the hardware don't realize the potential of it until a few years into the life cycle.
@@PigeonHoledByYT Mario 3 uses an enhancement chip, though, so it's technically on more powerful hardware than the first game.
This channel is so cool, as someone making games and loves retro games to see what old games did to get their effects helps me get that authentic feel I hope to get, thank you!
It’s amazing all the ways people found to simulate a pseudo 3D feel back in the day. I miss that more games don’t do this now.
There's something visually appealing about the sprite-based pseudo-3D that isn't present in actual 3D (at least not by default). It reminds me of how much I appreciate the visual style of 1980s film-composited stop-motion ghosts in horror films that is sorely missed in contemporary films.
@@JosephDavies Well, ghost effects were uniquely well-suited for bluescreen or optical compositing, since anything that made them look more unreal actually worked to their advantage. But it'd be fun to see modern movies try harder to replicate that effect.
Lots of tricks, creativity, effort. We don't get any of that nowadays.
It's also a problem because most developers now probably code and build games on very powerful computers when in reality it would be better if they limited themselves because that's how you find innovation
@@JosephDavies I suppose we are just too used to polygon-based graphics now to the point that those are not as impressive anymore as they were back when they were still new.
But we can't get enough of pseudo-3D since you just don't expect something like a 16-bit system to pull off something even close to those graphics, let alone as smooth as they look. It is, quite literally, too good to be true.
@@JosephDavies The pseudo 3d effects in this game are done really well. I love the snes too, but a lot of mode 7 effects on it cross the line for me into bad 3d. Well done 2d is really nice, you have to be careful not spoil it. But sensibilities were of course different back then.
But I think that game developers have been toying with pseudo 3d for almost as long as games have had graphics.
This is like the 12th time i rewatch the whole video. I never get tired of this
It makes me happy to see this game appear on UA-cam every once in a while. Looking forward to part 2.
One of the programmers who worked at Treasure once said that their approach was not to do really heavy programming to squeeze every ounce of power from the system, but rather to simply take what was readily available on the system and combine it with good design. It looks like the same thing is happening here.
It looks like the exact opposite is happening here.
@@myfirstname3913 The point made over and over again in this video is that none of these tricks are truly difficult to pull off in terms of programming. It's the combination of creativity with broad, flexible use of the hardware that gets the impressive result. That's what the Treasure programmer was talking about: they never squeezed blood from a stone, they simply came up with outside-the-box ideas for how to use various hardware features and executed them well. I even got the sense from that interview that the Treasure guys would rather be thought of as skillful designers than skillful programmers.
@@sirsinnes Nope. You got the right idea, but your concept of what is "designer" and what is a "programmer" is wrong. What was achieved here, if things were done exactly as the video THINKS they were, was, plain and simply, badass programming.
Creative use of hardware to achieve things that it wasn't really supposed to do is what a good programmer can do.
By the way, the reason I downvoted the video video was because there is a lot of "I think this is how it was done", and none of "here is the game code showing that what I think is right" nor "I talked one of the coders and he confirmed that was how it was done." I do believe the video is right, and since the dude was a Sega Genesis programmer, and did something similar, he is probably right. But I don't deal with "probably" :)
This is amazing that I've found this channel...There is one game I've always had in mind from when I was a kid playing my NES then I had a mega drive as I'm from Australia, I used to say to my mate that the mega drive is better than the Super Nintendo and we used to argue healthy all the time I knew deep down Super NES had better graphics but there was one game I always said to my mate that this game has really smooth mode 7 like graphics and it was Puggsy how the space ship at the start came in and out of the screen I was so impressed from that and my Super Nintendo mate was aswel, from that day I had in myself a little Sega Win...It has always racked my brain what game it was until a couple months ago Puggsy...I'm now 45 and still love my gaming especially the Nintendo switch... cheers 🤘🏾 thanks for the memories bro
i don't think "being simple" detracts from the effects. the final result is what matters.
in fact being simple makes it even more impressive.
He's not saying that it's not good work, it's that these effects aren't complicated or difficult for the hardware to achieve. Simple doesn't mean bad. The art is great, after all.
The fact that these effects were so simple makes me hate a good chunk of game developers from that era even more. They weren't even trying with the good ol' genny.
@@RockoEstalon What's worse for me is that SNES could also do all of these effects too, and in many cases it could do so with with additional background layers to spare, as well as the usual more colours and proper transparency, and yet very few SNES games at all went to town like this. Genesis developers at least did stuff like this far more than SNES developers, particularly line scrolling, and that is a real shame because the superior SNES visuals in terms of colours and transparency combined plus more background layers along with all of these tricks done more regularly on that system could have resulted in some truly stunning results. As it is, there are still some SNES games that look as technically impressive as this Batman game does on Genesis but they are rare.
It’s not that developers weren’t trying; being simple doesn’t mean that anyone can do it. You need to design your gameplay and artwork to take advantage of these effects, which are VERY particular. They may not be impossible to figure out, but you need to commit heavily to these effects to incorporate them.
The way I'm interpreting him, he's saying that any one of these tricks is not too hard and not unprecedented, but the developers used many of them in a single game, and sometimes several of them in a single scene. And that to do all this in a single Genesis/Mega Drive game is quite advanced.
A game that I always thought that had a lot of clever graphics techniques was dynamite heady. I thought it was one of the best looking 16bit games
And you were right. All the Treasure games were basically the system at its best.
check out alien soldier if you like dynamite heady. probably treasures best graphical work on the genesis
@@Flameb0 Agreed, Alien Soldier kicks ass. Though sadly I had to settle for playing it on Emulator since I'm in 'Murica and it was only released in Japan and Europe.
@@Flameb0 Actually, most of the background stuff in Alien Soldier is extremely basic technically, just two normal scrolling layers and not much else, but the art is strong there. The bosses are often rather impressive though and the place where the game shines most.
Just in case no one else has pointed it out, The Lost World on Genesis is also incredibly impressive.
I'd really like to see you analyze some more Sega Saturn coding secrets!
Me too !
*Sega Genesis
Did the Saturn actually play games? Thought it just had loading screens
@@andrewmoluf4299 nope that's the ps1
@@andrewmoluf4299 huh!
First time coming to your channel, love the fact that you're an actual dev that can break all this down for us plebs but also I never knew about The Adventures of Batman & Robin before... it looks phenomenal! I had a SNES and Genesis growing up, and I'd be lying if I said the SNES didn't receive more playtime than my Genesis. Mostly because I was really getting into RPG's after I beat Dragon Warrior for NES and I had just gotten Final Fantasy II. Anyway, amazing content and new subscriber!
Thank you so much for making this! I was one of the many who wanted to see this game broken down (and was likely somewhat annoying about it) but I sincerely appreciate your breakdown of it all & can't wait for Part 2.
I seriously appreciate this channel and look forward to every upload. You answer so many questions I have had for years.
HUGE shout out to this games OST because my god it bangs as hard today as when I was a kid.
It was composed by Jesper Kyd as far as I know - the composer of the early Hitman and Assasins Creed games
If it doesnt have a 16 bit version of kissed by a rose by Seal, then sir it does not bang nearly hard enough.
@@RalphNader2020 I don't know how that song fits with Batman and Robin, but I'm not complaining.
@@rushnerd Every batman should have an iteration of Kiss from a rose.
@@rushnerd jespers dark eletronic style music
I'm so happy you're covering this game! There's so many neat effects in this one and I value your perspective on them.
Do Ranger-X and The Lost World: Jurassic Park next!
💥
4:40 I am pretty sure the problem is not the DMA/Chip RAM bandwidth for Agnus (which contains the blitter) vs Megadrive sprites, which is why Turrican 3 looks pretty much identical on both. Lotus II on Amiga also has better frame rate than Megadrive.
Brutally amazing game. The audio section is simply a massive, absolute banger. If only it had been a little easier...
@jabroni destroyer
I consider myself quite a hardcore gamer but without save states...
This game is just madness.
But thanks to savestates / rewind technology in retroarch i enjoyed it deeply. Some stages are just the best gfx, bgm and sfx on the platform.
Puts many snes games to shame.
This game has a seriously soecial place for me, the music/animations/ combat all memorable. The music mostly cuz now I realized how much it’s influenced my own. I gave my nephews my Genesis and cartridges. This is their favorite one. No matter the generation it’s a great game
Using words like "simple", "cheap" and "tricks" sounds a bit dismissive and minimizing, but I don't think Coding Secrets intended that. Rather that how to do the effects is obvious to him due to understanding the system architecture, that there isn't a lot of cpu overhead required to produce the effects, and that the approach used isn't as generic as it first looks, making unexpected use of hardware features.
This absolutely doesn't take away from the end result - it doesn't matter if the code "fakes 3D" - in the end the only thing that matters is how it looks. If the approach of calculating the 3D position of each pixel has the same visual result as using line scrolling and line skipping on a pre-scaled texture, it's a perfectly valid way to display 3D, and very smart since the CPU doesn't have enough performance to use a more generic approach at high frame rates.
Figuring out ways to combine the techniques available in the system to produce a game like this as well as executing on them is very creative and also technically impressive, and why this game stands out from the pack. It often requires hand-crafted assembler coding to control the graphics hardware with very specific timings in order to convince it to display the intended output. Awesome work by the Batman & Robin development team! 😎👏
Yeah I get what you mean...most even good developers were not able to get close to this. He's one of the absolute masters...it would be like listening to Bruce Lee narrate a master martial arts competition. To HIM it would look simple.
Cheap as in CPU/memory budget.
like magic tricks, once you know how it's done it appears "simple"... but knowing how something is done and actually executing it are two different things... anyway this is great channel, i'm subscribing! I remember those days, digging in the 68000, messing with hblanks and vblanks and DMAs... then the playstation came along with their libraries and changed the whole game up lol
Thank you for tackling this game. The graphics for this game were mind blowing and I don’t know how people just compare it to other ordinary games and not give it the recognition it deserves. It was polished to the extreme.
This is one of the best action games on the Mega Drive. It got mediocre reviews and most people passed. Still one of the ones to launch now and then, it has this arcade like replayability. Without the extra lengthy bat plane level this could be top 5.
I don't think it plays particularly well to be honest, as in I didn't find it that much fun trying it recently, but it does look extremely cool on a technical level for a Genesis game.
@@inceptional the controls are spot on and when you lose it is always your fault. It is challenging but fair. Back in 1995 it was criticized for small sprites and no password system by people that do not get it: this game is like arcades, you get good by replaying the levels.
@@miltiadiskoutsokeras9189 Technically, I have no doubt the controls are spot on--but I didn't find the just hold fire button down and shoot as enemy after enemy runs at me, using very little strategy or thought beyond simply keep shooting with no time to even do anything else of my choosing, fun. And, unlike say most shmups, even the enemy patterns just feel like it was one after the other just coming and that was it. Honestly I was just going through the motions. This game is graphically stunning, but I do not find it fun to actually play. It's more fun to watch imo.
@@inceptional actually the strategy comes once you realize the patterns. You have many ways to clear a screen of them, but the optimal one is always a very strategic plan. I find it simple too learn but difficult to master. Contra Hard Corps and Gunstar Heroes on the same machine may be better and based on new IP, but this game holds well. I tend to prefer it over Gunstar Heroes for quick sessions.
Basically this game is dark souls difficulty
The running joke on "Mr. Wizard's World" was that so much of the scientific phenomena demonstrated on that show had something to do with air pressure. Coding Secrets has taught me that the go-to trick on so many seemingly complicated effects is just playing with horizontal interrupts. Keep up the awesome work!
Yeyeyeye, love this game, I still listen to the incredible soundtrack by Jesper Kyd every once in a while.
Great job in breaking down those effects to the bare essentials on how they were done, very, very informative.
Great channel, great breakdown. So glad many of you veterans in the industry have made time to make channels and spread your wealth of knowledge rather than this information being lost to father time.
Much Appreciated.
So you're telling me the game didn't actually need Blast Processing after all?
can't wait to see part 2! it is brilliant to hear those explanations
It's all bloody interesting, thank you! I remember this game well cause my best mate had it. I was always impressed.
I'm not sure that skewing is the be-all-end-all for the building. The side edge of the ledge is visible in some positions and not others, giving a really great parallax effect.
That said, it's only on a few horizontal lines, so I expect that there would be plenty of time each frame to tweak how the edge is drawn.
It’s kinda cool how you’re clearly figuring out some of this stuff on the fly. I enjoy seeing a glimpse into your thought-process.
Would you care to explain how they did the scrolling layers of Sonic 3 and Knuckles? It is by far the best example of such layering in the classic era and makes the environments very dynamic.
The areas with 3 or more layers are done by updating tile data in VRAM. It's not fancy hardware exploitation other than DMAing new graphics data in on the fly.
Can't wait for Pt. 2! I discovered Game Hut a few months ago. I thought the channel was over with, and I wouldn't have any GH vids to look forward to. I'm so pleasantly surprised this channel exists instead!
5:09 Using an interrupt to actually be able to column scroll parts of the same background layer differently is a very cool cheat. I presume something very similar could be done on SNES using background Mode 2 then?
Yeah, Earthbound is a good example. I'm not totally sure what Mode(s) it's using, but the battles all have trippy backgrounds making extensive use of various horizontal interrupt tricks.
@@jasonblalock4429 What, Earthbound column scrolls different sections of the same background independently? I need to see that in action. Do you have a link?
From what I've seen, you are correct. Mode 2 looks to have a versatile column-scroll feature that operates on a per-pixel basis. I references this video from Retro Game Mechanics Explained: ua-cam.com/video/5SBEAZIfDAg/v-deo.html
@@ravagingwolverine The column scrolling is only every 8 pixels, but that's still twice as smooth as the Genesis. The row scrolling can be every single scanline though, which is the same as the Genesis.
@@inceptional Yes. That was an oversight on my part. The columns look to be eight pixels wide as you say, but can be shifted per pixel up and down. I misunderstood the explanation initially.
Love that we get to hear from somebody within the industry, for so long! Speaking of Toy Story on genesis, I played through that along with on SNES and wow those games were challenging! But they’re beautiful too, so great job on all that 3D imagery :)
Oooh I waited so long for this one!
não esperava você por aqui
Didn't think Jon would get to this one
i didn't, since i had no actual idea this game existed
Legal, você também acompanha esse canal. Vejo que também é um homem de cultura xd
The great MR. WILSON!
I think, even though you have shown that the tricks used to achieve the effects here, are fairly simple and had been used in previous games, is the scale of what was accomplished. Games may have used some of these tricks in one way or another but, the genius of compiling all these different effects into this single game, was above and beyond most of what had been seen at the time. Each moment was something new, something different that at the time, seemed so mind blowing. Instead of using a great effect for boss levels, or one insane level, they were used consistently and flawlessly throughout. There wasn't just a single, or a few amazing moments, the creators made a game full of these moments. This really was amazing. Also, thank you so very much for taking the time to explain all these our for us. Much appreciated.
Very emotional video for me to watch. My big brother and I used to play this for hours and hours and hours. He has since passed away. This is my favorite memory of him.
Narrator: "this is very easy, very cheap"
Me: "that can only be MAGIC"
I have never seen more than a short clip of that game before this video. That game looks awesome! Thank you for the video.
Raise your hand if you owned it! ✋
✋️
Great effects. Mind blowing for the system.
(tune starts)
ahh yes, coding secrets
I played this when it came out in Germany. It had an awesome soundtrack and graphics. It was a great game towards the end lifecycle of the Genesis system.
So, this batman game is basically that one bossfight that uses all your knowledge from other levels all at once? Very nice job!
This was fascinating. I don't know how "easy" any of these would be, but you certainly explain it in a way that makes it (relatively) easy to understand.
Im so glad you're covering this game, I've always been mesmerized by the wild things they did with the visuals in it
You made toy story??? I loved that game growing up!
I remember Diehard Gamefan magazine hyping this game like crazy in its previews.
A pity that its insane difficulty kept me from fully enjoying this game.
Gamefan magazine was the best gaming mag of the 90s, no question. I still talk to Typefiend to this day, I've heard some crazy stories haha
It was probably assumed by the general gamer journalists press that because Nintendo was heavily touting the "Mode 7" scaling and rotation hardware features that somehow the Sega MegaDrive (released in 1988 Japan) and maybe the NEC PC-Engine (released in 1987 Japan) that such features were impossible to replicate outside of the Super FamiCom SNES released in 1990 Japan.
A key point is that some game programmers were racking up experience and knowledge of each hardware that they were working on and that since the SNES was newer, it required a similar experience timeframe before seeing 2d Sprite graphics effects that were not in hardware and that were fast processed at 60fps...
A bigger key point is that since large ROM Cartridge sizes were becoming feasible, this allowed the potential for more powerful capabilities by the game programmers to engineer.
However the 3DO and Atari Jaguar raised the stakes in competition so decisions had to be made to keep up
At this rate, you might as well be talking Vectorman in general, which shouldn't be too hard. Mostly characters with multiple sprites, and the math associated with them. However, Vectorman (or its prototype builds, anyway) does have one interesting demoscene hidden away in the level select, and I'm pretty sure it's been posted on UA-cam. Mostly, it involves a guy made up of green circles moving, then the camera rotating, then jumping in front of the camera. That's all sprites.
Can't wait to see you talk about the Cheshire cat boss and the Mad Hatter. For all I know, the slinky/wheel tumblers may be all sprites with frames of rotation rather than doing actual in-engine rotation, since they only have two frames of animation.
One of most visually impressive games on the system is Gunstar Heroes. A great deal of love and care went into that game. Would love to see it featured on this channel.
Maybe you want to take a look at the demo "Overdrive II" from TItan Demo Group :)
Such simple tricks to make something look this amazing for the hardware. It still takes a lot of talent to keep things simple, yet effective. Especially that fire animation. Only 6 frames and it still looks so dynamic and "alive." Props to the artist who did those frames.
This is what separates the wheat from the chaff. Craftsmanship.
I never thought we'd see the day when Coding Secrets did a collab with himself, but here it is - best collab I've ever seen on a (what would I consider to be) tech channel. 👍🏻
I loved this game as a kid, so pretty
The presentation of this was outstanding and easy to follow along. I enjoyed this so much.
Can't wait for Part II: I want to know how those SNES-style windowing effects were done.
Genesis was incapable of doing true transparency.
Not entirely true, the Overdrive II demo shows transparency effects that were apparently from undocumented and incomplete circuitry in the VDP.
To have a guy who worked in my favourite games from my childhood teaching me tricks to use in my recreational game developing is a dream I never imagined to seeing it coming true. Thank you!
Even when seeing this game first time in my life I can say this graphic look great, lot of details and craft put into it.
This is....everything you make is pure gold my friend. I could watch your channel nonstop all day long and it would never get old.
What's amazing about all of this is the Sega Genesis was doing this stuff without any specialized hardware. The Snes might have had those extra modes but without helper chips it was dead in the water half-way through its lifespan. You guys made Sega's 16-bit console sing with sheer brute force and technical knowhow.
Which helper chip did Donkey Kong Country use?
@@rsmith02
You mean the game with flat 2d pictures of SGI workstation 3d models? Yeah, it used the same helper chip Vectorman did.
Lost World Jurassic Park on the Mega Drive had some impressive 3D segments no one ever talks about.
That's because no one ever played it.
Hello you
You're saying these effects are simple, and thy may be. But it took real creative minds to figure out they could do that when almost no one else was doing the same stuff.
This was one of the games that impressed me the most on the Genesis. My friend and I would play through it all the time. The flying level took forever.
The music of this game is burned into my brain. So is the fact that I couldn't even beat the levels after the Mad Hatter boss fight.
"as you can see, using nothing more than horizontal interrupts on the sega genesis, we can actually synthesize the cure for alzheimer's disease fairly easily"
Some of the effects remind me of Crash Dummies on the SNES, which is a very underrated game imo.
Eh, what. Where is there a single instance of visuals anywhere near technically impressive as this in Crash Dummies on SNES? All I can see via a quick UA-cam search is use of two standard flat background layers and nothing else.
Just about nodding off to sleep and this pops up! XD excellent
Keep us informed when you poop
@@nneeerrrd see you in about 7 hours my friend
@@nneeerrrd bit late but feel a bit lighter now haha
I always thought the Earthworm Jim games looked amazing for the time.
Man I wish there was a coding secrets for SNES games
Check out this group of videos from Retro Game Mechanics Explained, where he breaks down specific effects in specific games for the NES and SNES ua-cam.com/play/PLHQ0utQyFw5KT8_MDSi0DHlVG_cGaY-Cu.html
Oh, the elevator fight! Love its soundtrack the most. Jesper Kyd is a genius. Still have full OST in my playlist.
They did amazing work on this game, both in programming and music… Just made it too hard to enjoy!