marcio_napoli

Hi, just sent you a PM!

Oh no, it can't be... Wow! Jag2000, this is beyond my comprehension, even if you don't need the money (this is easy 100 bucks on ebay), man don't trash precious games like these. I have a copy of Jag's Double Dragon V that I completely regret buying (it's sitting in a box probably never to be played again), and even so, it's living happily there in the box. It won't go to the trash, for the simple fact that... why trash it? It doesn't even take space...! Oh man... wow...

Hey, Jag2000, are you serious you're trading it away? I didn't volunteer because it can't be true someone is that disappointed with this game to trade it for anything else. If serious, let's arrange something (although I do have 2 copies already of AVP, wouldn't mind having a 3rd!). Regarding the game, I'll be 100% honest, I think the gameplay is absolutely boring in its intended original design. I'm with you on that one, I couldn't play it even if being paid. But video games are not my profession, so I don't care to cheat my way in how I play it. This game works wonders for me if I have saved at a point where I have plenty of weapons and ammo, and just play it as a first person shooter. I load it up and go out shooting things, navigating around, no pressure or anything. Just making it a mindless FPS. Definitely not how it was designed, but that's how I love this game and made it fun for myself. Now, please don't trash it, let me put it in my own trash bin here haha ;D

That's so true. There was a moment no one would defend the Jag in public, it would end your credibility. Now, You Tubers left and right are saying it isn't so bad, or it's just bad because it had terrible management and no decent support, but the console is awesome and powerful, has some amazing gems, etc. There you go, the Jag got popular! It's 100% more popular now than in the 90s, for sure. Sooooooooo there goes your wallet if you decided to have it from 2015 and onwards. I'd love to know the feeling of getting a Jag for 30 bucks, like some people here did. BTW, in 5 years price will be at least double or triple they're now.

Months ago when pandemic started, I was pi$$ed gaming prices were rising, and someone here asked me if there was any race whatsoever to buy games. This is why there is a race. I'm glad I already have plenty of stuff regarding retro gaming, because each month you let a game pass, chances are prices will surprise you when you're in the chase again in the future. It's so bad some console's library are simply rendered uncollectible, like the Saturn's.

Aren't we all in similar places in adult life? haha Besides being my favorite genre anyway, one more vote for beat em ups, there's no simpler genre for busy adult gamers. You just move right and beat people, and even more awesome, a bunch of them were designed to be beaten in 30 min. Wish Jag had any of those, but I got all the other 2d consoles for that anyway. As a kid, Ocarina of Time was one of my most beloved games, today I won't even buy a copy knowing there's zero chance I'll play it decently. Simply no spare time. So beat em ups here we go.

Polys per second is marketing number you can manipulate according to marketing needs. It depends on shading type, textures, if any sort of lighting is rendered, etc. The claimed number can be really high or really low depending on such factors. And if that wasn't enough, also depends a ton on the code's optimization. Take our friend, the N64. It has games that look worse than the 3DO, and has games ***almost*** Dreamcast like graphics. Variation so high depending on the team's abilities behind, of course.

This thread is getting a bit too "complex":D But hey, Agradeneu's point is exactly what I was hinting at. If you count this polygon-fest, over-enthusiastic explosion and redistribute this amount of polys into fixed level geometry, yup you'd have pretty complex 3d environments that would lead people to respect the Jag's 3d abilities. For whatever reason, this game devs thought it would look cooler to use this much rendering power on explosions than on fixed level geometry. Case is, no matter how you do the math, this is really respectable poly count for a 1993 console.

Leeroy, not sure if I agree because those criticisms are for IS 1. Most of IS 2 playing field is fully textured, it runs at least at 20 fps (I could confirm that I guess, but too lazy haha) and I'm not even saying IS2 is the Jag's full potential. My post meant that IS2 (both actually) wasted rendering power on ways that are sub optimal. Even the best the Jag did was sup optimized. For example: Those pine trees are cones made of polys. No one asked for trees to look like cones, no one. They should have instead used a sprite, a flat plane with a texture and alpha channel. Less polys to render, and better looking trees, rendering power used with more efficiency. The ground is completely flat, it's just an infinite plane. How about taking some of those polys from enemies explosions, and use those instead on level geometry, like more buildings and cars (just boxes, very easy to render), or low poly mountains that could almost look like pyramids (not a shame here, even Star Fox 64 has ultra low poly mountain terrain). Cover those mountains with a humble ammount of trees (again, flat planes with texture, don't consume too much rendering power). For the explosions, do not waste gigantic amount of on screen polys. Just use a small flat plane with explosion animated texture instead. It's all about directing rendering power on a more efficient way. I'm saying even IS2 didn't show us Jag's full potential, but it did show us small glimpses of it. BTW, I'm not making a console war. I had the 3DO in 1993 and absolutely LOVE it, it's for sure in my top 4 favorites of all time. Yeah, 3DO's graphics were from another world in 1993, it was trully mesmerizing. But the Jag had untapped power, it should have been much closer to the 3DO than it was. Also, we could argue that even when it comes to failed consoles, the 3DO was miles ahead in commercial success. It possibly had way better dev teams than the Jag (all consoles on Earth had better dev teams )

You're right, I may have been a bit too excited haha But one bit to add: The Jag, even if programmed to its fullest, is not going to compete with the very best the Saturn can do. But who knows, maybe Jag with the best optimization could compete with low end Saturn titles. Take 3DO as an example. If EA or Crystal Dynamics weren't programming for it and we had never seen Road Rash, Need for Speed or Fifa Soccer, would we know 3DO was that capable? Because excluding some A+ titles from these 2 companies, the 3DO looked about as lame as the Jag on 3d. Saying the Jag is the 3DO without EA and Crystal Dynamics, is not really far from the truth.

At the risk of sounding like a broken record, I firmly believe we've never seen Jag's true potential. Simple reason: very small teams, underpaid, deadline pressures, possibly not very good programmers (it hurts to say, but that's true, no offense meant). In my opinion, Rebellion games (AVP and Skyhammer) are the best to look at because of amazing art direction and texture work, not because they're pushing Jag's limits (these are mostly 3d boxes and nothing more). IMO, the closest we've got to seeing Jag's full potential was Iron Soldier 2, with rock solid framerate, very high polygon count on screen and even higher each time an object exploded, most objects are fully textured, etc. But IS 2 should impress even more, because most of that poly count is not dedicated to fixed level geometry, in other words, the ground is completely flat. IF level geometry was a bit more complex regarding design (and the engine clearly supports that), it would easily be some 3d comparable to Saturn games. I know that sounds insane, but when 2 enemies explode at the same time, so many polys fly on screen and the Jag never misses a beat, proving yes, it can handle high poly count indeed. We've only never seen Jag's potential because it never had a Rare, Ubisoft, Capcom, Konami, Sega, Nintendo programming for it. With the companies it had, be 200% sure the Jag never reached its full potential. It's all about optimization. Most Jag devs were probably "how do I get out of this $hit" mode on every commercial game we've seen.

Not everyone will agree, but I absolutely love that the Jag is cart based, in fact same applies to all cart based consoles. No CD means no expiration date of the laser cannon, no loading times (huuuuuuge advantage), devs focus on more arcade-ish games, no rubbish FMV (these were AWESOME in the 90s when we haven't seen anything like it. In 2020, these are just annoyances slowing down the game's pace). Did I mention no loading times???? You can throw in even minor things, like carts have actual personality (not just a boring plastic disc), carts need less care (I'm 100% sure if I could find my 90s CDs, they must be covered in scratches), etc. Jag being a cart console is amazing. Same applies to N64, which a lot of people claim it would be better being CD. Not to me.

Austin, there're many types of players out there, some (I'd say a lot) are not concerned in the slightest about minor issues with framerate. Don't take this the wrong way, but I know your style from your YT channel and I guess you're putting more emphasis on this than most casual players will ever care. If not being 60 fps, or even the matter of inconsistency, is all that important, than 3DO's Gex, Metal Slug, Jag's Raiden are not deserving at all the praise they've got from reviewers, are these reviewers irresponsible? BTW, I just focused on 30 fps 2d games that everyone praises, there must be others out there. Hey, Double Dragon 1 and 2 should have been trashed and never become milestones at the arcades by that criteria. (even though those are the only ones I agree inconsistency almost kills them - but that's because it's ABYSMAL inconsistency we're talking here) If Jag's Pitfal ran at 10 fps and had identical graphics to the Genesis version, then yeah I'd not praise it, but it's a little better than that...

Hi Austin, you're THE Austin from Gameplay and Talk right? Man I love your channel, it's always one of my go tos channels on YT! May I make a request? Please do more Jag stuff, your Raiden videos (for example) are awesome, but since they're fairly old they have a kinda soft capture. If you could revisit Jag titles, it would be awesome! Also it's awesome that your videos are always from actual hardware. Sometimes I don't wanna play on my Jag, but I wanna enjoy some high quality, actual hardware footage. Now, regarding the topic above, on that one my friend, I'll disagree. Because you see, the way you approach games is from the hardcore player angle. You're a fine player, you care for high scores and skillful gameplay. I believe not all of us care for high precision gameplay, we just wanna have a bit of lazy fun here and there. Even if 30 fps may hurt some jumps, I don't think that's a big deal to many people that just wanna play carelessly for an hour or so. I mean, it's just fun, not a job haha Hope you don't mind this comment, but the day I think inconsistent framerate is killing a fine game for me, then it's time to sit back and chill. The only time this comment was ever true to me is arcade versions of Double Dragon 1 and 2, which slow down is really, really hurting gameplay. (two of my all time favorites made a ton less fun because of that, sign...) But yeah, that my entire rant knowing that I am not a hardcore player, I just wanna have simple, careless fun.

I think I've heard the reason for the 32x on You Tube. The Genesis architecture itself is so optimized to work the way it does with sprites and background layers, that is has no problem running 2d tasks at 60 fps. But the 32x has none hardware optimization on that regard, everything it does is written on software (therefore it relies exclusively on its 32 bit muscle power to render any tasks throw at it). It's something like SNES's mode 7, which has that dedicated chip to scale and rotate backgrounds, but the 32x is handling super scalers like Space Harrier and After Burner without any hardware aid, it's all written in software and rendered by the fast 32 bit chip. So, having no dedicated hardware to move backgrounds, Pitfall on 32x is a very curious case. Genesis, with its dedicated architecture for backgrounds, is handling backgrounds (you can see those have no more than 61 colors and run at 60 fps), and foreground elements and character sprites are rendered by the 32x (at 30 fps due to lack of dedicated hardware), but those have much larger color palette and better artwork. In a nutshell, we don't realize how much of a difference dedicated, optimized architecture does it can beat 32 bit CPUs at 2d games. And the Jag... I suppose it may be something similar, lack of hardware optimization for such tasks, or simply a rough, non-optimized code (yeah, that's more likely, because Rayman runs at 60 fps). If this is all BS, maybe a dev can chime in