There was a good thread about SNK ports on the MD/SNES/PCE and the discussion about the 32X being capable or not as well. Very interesting read....
http://www.sega-16.com/forum/showthread.php?28804-SNK-32x-Ports
Here is what I thought was a good post on the ports.
@Da_Shocker : While very good in some areas all PC Engine ports of SNK games have a lot of flaws / problems :
- World Heroes 2 : lacks all the parallax & as a result not only looks bland overall but even dumb in some instances like here : http://youtu.be/C_wGoDkmnUc?t=16m55s compared to the original : http://youtu.be/dNsesiWsCNk?t=18m39s. Also the lower-res + added black bar for the HUD don't help.
- Fatal Fury 2 & Special : both very good but same as with World Heroes 2 they lack the parallax & run in lower-res with an added black bar for the HUD. & what about those 8 bit music between each rounds? :s
- Art Of Fighting on PC Engine may looks good on pix but in action it's another story mainly due to the horrendous way to fake what was initially real zoom. Also & here too the game runs in lower-res + with an added black bar for the HUD. & though the sprites look good the backgrounds are rather poor overall. The Genesis port may not have the zoom but on other hand it adds parallax + line-scrolling for the floor (Both effects exclusive to this port) & runs in high-res + without an added black bar = same as the Neo Geo original.
Yeah even running with the PC Engine + its CD add-on + the Arcade Card some PCE games aren't as good or just not better overall as their Mega Drive / Genesis counterparts (i.e. without Mega-CD or whatever else) like Fatal Fury 2 which is a better deal overall on Mega Drive since it has the parallax + homogeneous quality music rather than swapping from great to awful renditions + the 4 bosses playable (& also some new combo possibilities) & also Strider which is overall a great port on Mega Drive & a weak one on PC Engine Arcade Card CD.
As for the topic, one thing comes to mind is that most if not all Neo Geo Vs. Fighting with zoom don't have parallax but Cyber Brawl (Cosmic Carnage) on 32X has both huge zoom & parallax so i wonder if, for example, a 32X port of Samurai Shodown could have kept the zoom while adding some parallax... ?
But indeed some 32X ports of SNK games would have turned out great & they could have also use, like graffias79 started to talk about, the Mega-CD for improving even more in some respects.
Dumbest shit I have ever seen regurgitated from Sega 16. Outside of that, basically its like this concerning the 16-bit Neo ports (including games not ported over to PCE-Arcade Card CD).
NeoGeo>PCE Arcade Card CD>Snes>Genesis/Sega CD.I could go into all sorts of reasons as to why, but basically it amounts to how faithful the ports try to be, how true to the original source, and Takara and JVC took a bit too many liberties with the Genesis & Sega CD ports concerning game play (and Sega themselves totally f*cked the World Heroes 1 and AOF Genesis ports), and too much content was edited out of things like the background stages, character selection, story scenes, or animation.
You couple in that with the lower sound quality, and those Sega ports tend to hurt more. Doesn't mean they are all terrible, because they are good games in their own right (outside of World Heroes and AOF), but like I said, the key thing here is which were the more faithful, and the Sega ports come dead last in that department.
Some key issues worth mentioning:
Genesis port of Fatal Fury 1 is missing Billy Kane and Hwa Jai, and some animation frames were cut which makes the characters seem more stiff.
Genesis port of Fatal Fury 2 is missing a decent amount of background details, music is meh, sound samples again are meh (the music issue really hurts on Kim Kaphwan and Rugal's stage
).
Genesis port of World Heroes is missing animation, has bad controls and timing issues, and if I remember right cant even be bothered to announce the start of the match outside of making a ding sound or something.
Genesis port of Samurai Shodown is missing the intro scene, and artwork from other story scenes. Actual attacks are also missing from the gameplay, which screws with things. Music is not bad, but not as good as Snes, and sound fx and voices are ok. Earthquake is also a no show.
Also, and this is a issue that is only present it seems when you run the port on legit hardware. There are some stray stuck pixels on screen, kinda like when a Nes game had glitchy graphics from a bad connection. This is a issue with all the carts. I have tried over 20 of them and they all had the same issue, no matter the cart or Genesis model.
Genesis port of Art of Fighting is missing attacks, the story intro scene is trashed, zoom mode gone, has sub par voice samples and sound fx, and music is.....meh, etc. Also, there is a discrepancy between the difficulty between the Mega Drive and Genesis releases. Google is your friend if you want to know more concerning this.
Sega Cd port of Fatal Fury Special has a ton of missing animation and missing background details in stages. Also, the game is plagued with slowdown at times. Music tracks sound at times like they were pulled from a AES with RCA cables and not cleaned up.
Sega Cd port of Samurai Shodown is missing Earthquake, and the ref is also edited out. Also, final stage battle with Amakusa has a issue with the pressed disc that will cause the system to not loop the music track during the first round. This will cause the cd drive to shut down and music to stop. This will also cause an issue with you being able to fight Amakusa when the background graphics need to change.
The fix is to open the lid door and shut it again. That will reactivate the drive. A better fix is to install a door switch, but most wont bother with that. Also note this bug affects Fatal Fury Special on the character select screen. Let the music keep playing till the end and it wont loop, and after that the first fight cant load unless you trigger the door switch again.
Again, not saying PCE and Snes ports are perfect, because they are not. But they do stay as true as possible to the original content at least, and when it concerns ports, that is usually the most important aspect of it all.
