This game was pretty late in the consoles life, so they were trying to keep up with the newer stuff coming up. Sort of like one last harah.

Such a shame they rammed up the difficulty so much. Lovely looking game and extremely memorable intro and stage 1 themes by Jesper Kyd all wrapped up in the fantastic Batman animated series looks.

@@LeeONardo it seems like a trend. the last few battletoads games on the NES were pure visual effects and the system being pushed as far it could go in 1991, and yet those games are also known to be infamously hard.

@@LeeONardo yeah, it's ridiculously hard after a couple of levels. Kinda like those shmups that have a lot of impressive looking effects going on but can't be appreciated while playing because they make a modern bullet hell feel reasonable

@@LeeONardo It's crazy to think there were games so difficult we were just happy to get to that 'next' stage. I recently spent some serious time learning this game, and I think I maxed out my capabilities at the flying level. I don't think I'll ever get any further. Not only is it difficult, it's relentless.

100% would be amazing

Stephen Thomson actually did comment on the previous video to state he and the team were honored that their work was featured, so he is aware of it.

@@sensifacient yes it’s mentioned in the video here so the about probably already know it. The topic was about having an interview with them.

Yes. These guys achieved some timeless stuff and get 0 coverage.

True...specially if he could talk about the unreleased X-Women game for the Genesis that was being developed by the same team if I remember correctly.

Yeah games weren't a nice guided stroll through the park like they are now!

Yeah but by 1994 when this game was released, the Sega MegaDrive had been available in Japan since 1988, in North America since 1989 and in U.K./Europe/Brazil PAL/SECAM regions since 1990. That means that Western game developers could have started studying Sega MegaDrive S.D.K. documentation for more than at least two to three years and as such have already programmer experience (depending on if the game programmers were hardcore devs because others made multiple games and didn't really push the hardware much even by 1995) What this means? that the Sega MegaDrive did not have some hardware Project being approved that derailed game programmers like the Sega of America created 32X did to the Sega Saturn which launched in Japan November 1994 and by May 1997 a certain big shot who was a new employee to the parent company decided to announce that Saturn was not Sega's future... Imagine if something like that happened in May 1991 just as Sonic Team was finishing up Sonic the Hedgehog, then this game would most likely NEVER have existed.

I would not be surprised if the Batman & Robin team programmed some Amiga games. The Amiga dev scene and Genesis crossed over because of the 68K processor.

@@apollosungod2819 It runs deeper than that. The Genesis CPU had been popularized by the Amiga and Atari ST around 1985, and its VDP was derived from the same TMS9918 derivatives used in MSX computers and Sega's own SG1000, Mark III, and Master System. By the time the Genesis came out, its hardware was somewhat of an industry standard in Japan and familiar to American and European programmers too.

I wonder if that's a bit beyond Jon's scope. Being a programmer, he probably wouldn't spend a lot of time figuring out musical hacks, especially demo scene stuff which typically goes above and beyond normal hardware limitations. You'd just expect the music guy to do his part, I suppose.

@@rars0n I would say the opposite. At this point in time many coders did the audio code as well and often has a connection to the demo scene

@Knobcore most EU/US composers used the stock GEMS program. GEMS itself is a tracker-like program and quite limited, so most companies (namely JP ones) like Sunsoft decided to implement their music in a MML format, in which combined with their own driver, usually let them have increased control over how they wanted the hardware to sound. Toy Story is almost entirely GEMS-based, by the way, with the only exception occurring with the MOD player for both the title screen and the ending. While I don't think GEMS itself is bad, the people using the program usually had no idea what they were doing half the time, so to see the team behind Toy Story actually utilize GEMS correctly is a refreshing thing to hear. I bet there are a lot of other super good GEMS soundtracks, but they're unfortunately drowned out with tons of really bad GEMS soundtracks, often being the result of an overworked programmer half-assing it and calling it a day. Going on a slight deviation here, and into Toy Story's sound, it seems Allister Brimble was credited for the soundtrack. Considering the MOD file in the game credits him, he likely was the one of the major people of the sound team, since he previously coded a tracker for his NES Codemasters games, and has lots of experience with MOD trackers in general, which means GEMS was likely second nature.

@Carlos Eduardo Espinosa Sánchez It can be concluded that the samples is what pushed Jackson to quit Sonic 3's music team. If we take the quote of Brad Buxer saying "he didn't like the sound of the Genesis" into account, we likely can infer he meant the terrible sample routine, since Jackson himself really enjoyed FM, and even was okay with a previous game with his works (Michael Jackson's Moonwalker)

To this day, I consider this to be the greatest video game score ever.

Now it's time for the 68000 heart on fire

Oh yeah! Light Crusader had a great isometric engine, I'd love to see a deep dive on that

A lot of the treasure game effects are stuff he's already explained, he'd just be repeating himself at a certain point

Including the 3D polygonal objects in Light Crusader?

@@cordellcox6126 I was thinking of those. They seem like particles, and how in Gunstar Heroes is Seven Force morphing done. It would explain how VectorMan morphing was done too.

@JM Coulon It's almost too bad monitors couldn't just have CRT filters built into their settings honestly. Could probably help even modern games as far as anti-aliasing (at least it could be an alternative solution for someone if the in-game temporal AA is too blurry)

I asked the same question earlier, cos I thought it was shadow/highlight too. Jon says its just part of the road.

Jon appears, batman 1997 horns play

Oof

Back then, transparency was achieved by flickering a sprite on an off really fast, giving it the illusion of transparency. I'm not sure if that's what was done here but that's my guess

@@aurathedraak7909 ???

They really worked hard to make the ol' genesis keep up with the SNES. Very impressive game graphically. And its gameplay is alright as well.

Lion king is another one

There are plenty Genesis games like that. As long as the devs didn't try to make everything look "realistic", developed the game with the Genesis color palette in mind and didn't overuse the dithering effects, the games could look extremely colorful. Some of the most colorful ones I can think off: Magical Taruruto, Super Fantasy Zone, Sonic 2, Rocket Knight Adventures, Streets or Rage 2, Treasure games, Monster World series, Ristar, Panorama Cotton, Shockman, Aladdin, Earthworm Jim, Ranger X and this guy's own Sonic 3D Blast. Edit: For some reason when I first posted this, stupid KZfaq, reduces my long list of colorful Genesis games to 4. I'm re-adding some... LOL.

This Batman game looks pretty trippy too. Honestly looks more bizarre than Earthworm Jim honestly.

And... Flink, arguably the best use of the palette!

Yes, the music on this retro game is no doubt phenomenal with a capital P. I was impressed how a game like this from the mid-90s has such an impressive score composition for what it is. But the entire game is all around impressive.

So much great engineering. The hardware and drivers provide a specific set of capabilities, and these true gaming engineers took the tools they had and built things that nobody knew were even possible. I'm sure their ingenuity surprised even themselves at times. Amazing what could be produced with these "simple" (ha) tricks.

Or focus of pushing the current or future hardware ;)

@@litjellyfish Well Stefan there has already been so advancement hardware & software in 3D CGI etc to where games look like a cinematic movie than the games of yesterday to where it's so common to see. But when you see this older games doing all these visuals on a less powerful system to where you see the effort that was put in it. The only thing I can think of that would be future hardware is VR gaming

Just in case you didn't know, there's *still* a demo scene for old M68000 machines like the Mega Drive and Amiga. Some of the recent MD demos out there are really impressive, including things like genuine FMV and full-screen polygonal graphics. I'd love to see Jon talk about them someday, especially considering his early roots in the Amiga demo scene.

How do we convince the people that made sonic mania to do something similar of an upgrade for Vectorman?

Do you know what music that is? I have herd it before but dont know where its from.

@@BiancaRoughFin The song is: 'Is That You or Are You You' - Chris Zabriskie

And the scaling stuff for Batman Returns and Cliffhanger CDs! Nobody could rock the Sega CD's special features like him and also the guys at Core.

@@GameSack Batman returns on the mega cd with the 3d road effect and all those scaling sprites just looks absolutely stunning!

@@willyarma_uk It really does. I've also noticed that all of his games are EXTREMELY difficult. Batman Returns' driving scenes are super tough and it's probably his easiest game.

@@willyarma_uk Sega CD has hardware sprite scaling though. And a second, faster CPU.

@@noop9k Thanks, I knew that

@JM Coulon For me, the whole package: gameplay, visuals, music is an absolutely perfect symbiosis. I've never played a game that make me feel so high on adrenalin from start to finish. I am a huge fan of run and gun games, I have played countless of them, some amazing ones. Trust me, to this day, nothing tops this game!

As mentioned many effects are variations of 3 core ones. Most likely at this point in time they already had a good starting point for the code of this so why not use it together

@@litjellyfish yes

yes please

@@NoahNCopeland OMG you're the guy behind the Sonic Triple Trouble remake.

I'm guessing it was cancelled because cats would literally be the worst animal to anthropomorphize and take care of hostage situations? 🤣

@@plasmaoctopus1728 You haven't seen the show it's based on have you?

@@Nathan-rb3qp Hehe just making a bad joke

From a couple of interviews online it sounds like one of the co-founders left, X-Women was cancelled, and the company just kind of fell apart after that.

Believe me modern 3D pipes has a lot more of tricks and optimizations setup than this. It’s just in such a bigger scale that it looks brute force. Of course now and then there is a difference of good coded games and not