Amiga Mag HDD Backup/Amiga Mag HDD Backup.zip/Amiga Mag HDD Backup/Alexander.img.bin/Alexander.img/***3⁄number 3/3 CES/Final WCES Report (w⁄ Pictures)

Text File | 1995-01-17 | 25KB | 399 lines

Subject: Final WCES Report (w/ Pictures)
From: [e-mail] (Jeremy B Horwitz)
Date: Tue, 17 Jan 1995 02:41:36 GMT
Message-ID: <[e-mail]>

CES Report Wrap-Up (with Photographs)
by Jer Horwitz

Photographs mentioned herein can be found at the BUSOP.CIT.WAYNE.EDU FTP
site, in (sys/) pub/pselect/WCES95. Please forgive the occasional yellow
blotches in a few pictures (Virtua Fighter, Rayman) -- they're artifacts of
my quickie screendumping procedure.

Nintendo

    What should have been Nintendo's mission at this Consumer Electronics
Show? Essentially, to continue interest in their current platforms and
inspire interest in their upcoming platforms. Part one of this mission:
have enough great SNES games on display that the average player wouldn't
dump their 16-bitter and purchase another company's 32- or 64-bit game
system in the next few months. Part two: impress people with next-
generation hardware and win their confidence. Nintendo succeeded in part
one. They drew mixed reactions on part two.

SNES
    There's little doubt in my mind at this point that the SNES is
entering the NES phase of 1989-1990 -- plenty of games, but a decreasing
number of developers interested in devoting the time to refine an older
system's aesthetics. The big surprise of Nintendo's booth was the utter
lack of Nintendo in-house Advanced Computer Modeling (ACM) titles -- games
which certainly would have drawn crowds like those from Summer CES's debut
of Donkey Kong Country. ACM was not in plentiful use, though Squaresoft
announced the Secret of Evermore, a Mana-esque game using ACM and hand-
drawn artwork in tandem, and a handful of other games were using the
technology in small ways.
    ...but ACM wasn't necessary. Nintendo's improved (CPU-quadrupling) FX
chip, "FX2," was the star of their booth. Making a somewhat surprising
appearence was StarFox 2, packed with just about every feature people have
been asking for since StarFox was released. Not on rails, StarFox 2 allows
great freedom of movement within an innovative map screen, then allows full
navigation through 3-D flight and mech-walking scenes. Confusing? Here's
the lowdown:

    * The game begins with a full-screen polygon-generated cinema
intermission completely eclipsing the intro from StarFox. As a flying
robotic dragon starship wipes out an entire fleet of spacecrafts, you'll be
gawking and cheering on the graphics... until you realize that those blue
and gray exploding ships are what remained of your fleet. Andross is back.
He's not very happy about his previous defeat at your hands. The camera
movement makes the epic introduction even better.
    * Choose from six characters, including the four pilots from StarFox,
a female fox, and a female puppy poodle. In one player mode, the game on
demo gave you 10 hit points and two pilots with which/whom you complete the
game. In two player mode, you have a split screen. Ships can morph into
several forms depending on the outer space or planetary environment they're
in. Pilots have different flight dynamics and ships.
    * When in outer space, you have a flat map of several planets and
your mother-world Corneria. Andross launches missile and fighter attacks
against Corneria from other planets; you control either StarFox or a
comrade and respond in real-time to each attack, heading towards planets to
scour them of villains.
    * When attacking an enemy or chasing a missile, your craft
looks much the same as StarFox until you hit the select button -- then you
morph into a battle cruiser with more powerful guns and less
maneuverability.
    * When attacking a planet, you either stay in your ship and fly above
the surface, or transform into a walking mech robot to conduct a walking
Space Harrier-like attack. Maze scenes inside buildings, weapon power-ups
and boss encounters are plentiful and well done.
    * Still early in development, some people (myself included) were able
to get to the demo's "ending," reaching a huge Andross battle and the words
"To Be Continued..." It wasn't all that difficult, but it was damn fun
getting there.
    * The music was brand new and great, using the same John Williams-
derived style from StarFox. Somehow, the musician manages to evoke feelings
from the player of heroism and dismay through simple manipulation of
orchestra instruments; quite a technique Nintendo has down, eh?

    FX Fighters, GTE Interactive's personal computer and FX2 polygon
game, was also looking pretty sharp for the SNES. Motion capture technology
and proper pacing made the overall mood much better than Atari's 64-bit
Fight for Life, though the polygon count, resolution, color palette and
texture-mapping were all much lower on the SNES. Some of the game's cool
features include short ACM-style computer rendered character images (akin
to watching the pre-game animation in the character select screen of Art of
Fighting 2 or Killer Instinct), player-controlled left and right camera
movement, and moves that look more like Street Fighter 2 than Virtua
Fighting. Imagine a move with the coolness of Guile's backhand or Ryu's
crouching sweep kick -- this time, moving even more fluidly and rendered
entirely in polygons. FX Fighter convinced those of us who saw all of the
polygon fighters that *moves* were more important than graphics.
    While we're on the subject of polygon fighters, let's do one of those
infamous cross-platform comparisons everyone seems to get so rabid over.
This is bound to be a subject of much disagreement between Jaguar lovers
and SNES devotees, but here's my take on it: while at WCES, I saw Virtua
Fighter 2 (arcade), I saw Tohshinden for the Playstation, Tekken (arcade),
Virtua Fighter on the Saturn, FX Fighter on the SNES and Fight for Life on
the Jaguar. In the order listed above, that's where the games ranked (from
best to worst) on an overall appeal scale for me.

* VF2: fast, has a great number of moves and characters, terrific music and
the best graphics overall. Texture mapped backgrounds and characters were
absolutely mind-blowing, from the subtle (catch Shun hopping so slightly
over a sweep kick, then landing with a hard counter attack) to the blatant
(oh, we're floating down a river under 3-D bridges and everything is moving
at 60 frames per second?). VF2's play engine is of a stronger design than
VF1, also. Down side: Only available as an arcade machine for now, VF2 will
-- at best -- be 75% of the arcade game visually when it's released for the
Saturn.
* Tohshinden was close, and definitely a must-see. Gouraud-shaded complex
polygonal characters with weapons and incredibly fast motion were only part
of the experience -- some of those 3-D moves were similar to the awesome
SNK animations Takara has been translating for the last few years. (World
Heroes' Hanzo and Fuuma should be thanked for their Dragon Punch
animation...) The best part? Forget about the arcades, Tohshinden is
already out for the PlayStation in Japan and it's cooler than any other
home system fighting game.
* Tekken and Virtua Fighter 1 had their own advantages and disadvantages.
Tekken is arcade hardware based on the PlayStation, but it wasn't as cool
as VF2 or Tohshinden because of the overall graphic style and some weird
character poses. Virtua Fighter 1 for the Saturn was nice and fast, fluid
and reasonably high resolution, but wasn't quite a perfect translation of
the arcade game. Fewer polygons per character and a smaller selection of
moves made VF1 pale in comparison to VF2 and Tohshinden, but people will
love seeing the cool animation and poses of VF1 on their home Saturns.
* FX Fighter had really smooth animation but fewer polygons than any of the
aforementioned games. Even with only two of the characters on display in
the SNES version, FX Fighter showed a lot more potential than Fight For
Life for the Jaguar (which was nearly complete at the show). The wicked
body slams, throws and attacks -- all extremely fluid -- made FX Fighter
better than I had expected to see on the aging SNES.
* Fight For Life: See the Jaguar section of this report.

    Nintendo's other major games were an odd bunch to say the least.
NovaLogic's Comanche also used the FX2 chip, was a great conceptual idea
but was about as poor graphically as any SNES game to date. Based on the PC
game with 3-D terrain, Comanche is a helicopter title which actually will
allow two SNES units to be hooked up (via a joystick port cable) for head-
to-head competitive anti-air attacks. It's a fun game which unfortunately
is blockier on screen -- though this may change by July ...? -- than
anything I can recall for game systems in the past couple of years.
Earthbound is Nintendo's unexpected USA release of the Japanese RPG Mother
2, which has been under development for literally years at Nintendo Japan.
Graphics are, again, exceptionally bad for the SNES, but the quest is long,
Japanese players swore by Mother 1, and Nintendo employees really like the
Mother series. It's a 24-meg cart with probably 2-3 megs of graphics data
(slight sarcasm intended; only photographs will do my statement justice).
    Kirby's Avalanche is Nintendo's release of the awesome Japanese
puzzle title Super Puyo Puyo (by Compile), which was formerly unveiled for
the Genesis as Doctor Robotnik's Mean Bean Machine. It's one of the best
Tetris-like puzzle games to date, with richly-colored liquid blobs as
pieces. Kirby's Dream Course is a terrific miniature golf/croquet title,
featuring the Kirby character as a powerful ball. It's one of the most
challenging golf titles in game history, with 70-some holes and Kirby
literally taking on the abilities of the obstacles he bumps against. Both
of these were already released in Japan, and are solid titles for certain.
    Third-party highlights included Konami's release of the third game in
the NCS Assault Suits series, now titled Metal Machines. Remember the SNES
game Cybernator, which was the sequel to Target: Earth for the Genesis?
This is the latest installment, with zero title continuity in the USA.
Metal Machines looked completely great, with even better side-scrolling
mech action and a very long introduction sequence. Tecmo's big
announcements were three new sports games for the SNES -- Super Baseball,
Super Hockey, and Super Bowl II: Special Edition. Super Bowl II is a
limited release Tecmo Super Bowl with a 3-D scaling field and generally the
same perspective as the last Tecmo Super Bowl -- it looks cool and it's
limited to a tiny run of cartridges, so today is the day a fan should get a
reserve order in for TSB2.
    Capcom's Mega Man X2 was a cool follow-up to Mega Man X -- fans of
MMX will definitely want to see it -- and Mega Man 7 shockingly enough was
a Super NES continuation of the NES Mega Man series. Want another surprise?
The Mega Man character in MM7 is actually larger than MMX2's, and the
overall screen layout is more on the bulky, cartoony side for MM7.
Acclaim's NBA Jam Tournament Edition was looking good for the SNES, though
the enhancements weren't glaring (still no scaling characters, etcetera).
Electro Brain's Dirt Trax FX was, believe it or not, much cooler than the
32X Super Motocross title, with a nice polygon environment and real 3-D
movement. Hudson Soft's The Sporting News Baseball was their USA release
(finally) of the awesome Super Power League game for the Japanese Super
Famicom, Playmates had a funky afro-edition Earthworm Jim on display (plus the
great Fatal Fury Special translation they snatched from Takara),
Sunsoft had the decidedly great Justice League Task Force fighting game,
and Namco had their own cool new fighting game Weapon Lord on display (with
some character designs from ex-Capcom Dee Jay creator James Goddard). Those
were the best games on display.
    Some other interesting announcements were made... Secret of Mana II
confirmed, MK3 confirmed, Primal Rage confirmed, Prince of Persia 2
confirmed, Revolution X confirmed, and 12 or more new ACM games in
development for debut at the E3 show in Los Angeles (May). Nintendo has
enough quality software in development to keep the SNES going for another
year at least.

NES

    For the first time in Nintendo home history, the classic Nintendo
Entertainment System had zero mention in the Nintendo first half '95 source
book. It's official: eight bit is dead.

Game Boy

    I didn't do too much looking around at Game Boy software, but
Nintendo sheepishly announced at an early morning press conference that
they were finally releasing a color GameBoy... but it's not quite what
people wanted. To spur more GB sales, they're releasing five "Play It Loud"
casings for the GameBoy, in Clear, Red, Yellow, Green or Black. (The Black
and Clear ones are the best.) Too bad they didn't fix the screens, because
that's what people have really wanted now for several years.
    The GB is getting a ton of great software this year, though. Kirby's
Dream Land 2 -- a title that should have had SNES written all over it, will
be out in May for the GameBoy, as will Donkey Kong Land, Primal Rage,
Earthworm Jims 1 and 2, NBA Jam TE and Batman Forever. Sales of the GB were
reportedly down markedly this season -- 25% or thereabouts. Will new
casings bring it back? Ummmmm....

Virtual Boy

    This was my first stop at eight in the morning on the first day of
CES --even before the floor officially opened. Virtual Boy is the $200
self-contained "virtual reality device" you've been hearing about. Basic
answers will suffice here, so let's get to them:

    * Is Virtual Boy really virtual reality? Well... no. Don't get me
wrong; this is a cool device with neat hardware features and great
potential, but you can't change your visual perspective by moving your head
around. That's an intregal part of VR.
    * ...but... the 3-D effects are great. There is most certainly an
illusion of depth with any filled objects that move in 3-D, which is a
major plus for the system -- this is both a product of the display
technology (stereoscopic lenses, etcetera) and the system's built-in
graphics hardware for object scaling and polygon manipulation. The best 3-D
effects were in a deep well of Space Pinball's brick-enclosed machine, the
parallax of Hudson Soft's newest Star Soldier game, and in a demo of water
and dolphin effects Nintendo was showing off. Unfilled polygons (used in a
T&E Soft game demo) weren't overly convincing as 3-D effects and looked
like nothing more than something you might see on a low-resolution, red-
palette SNES.
    * Only two games were playable. Nintendo's exhibit was a two-part
walk through an enclosed area -- part one had people holding up cardboard-
and-plastic stereoscopic glasses (in Virtual Boy/binocular-shaped holders)
through a room with six video screens. Standing directly in front of a
given screen with the glasses on, you could see the visual stereo
separation and get the same 3-D effect found in the Virtual Boy game units.
    * Screen one was a T&E Soft pterodactyl flying game which used
unfilled polygons to attempt the simulation of a 3-D mountainous world.
This was the least impressive title on display, as everything just seemed
like a bunch of lines moving around.
    * Screen two had Space Pinball, a five-machine-in-one pinball title
with some really neat 3-D depth, though the machines themselves were
certainly pretty simplistic (no scrolling; just fixed on screen like Super
Pinball for the SNES). Spinning 3-D stars were among the most memorable
parts of this game.
    * Three was Telero Boxer, a pretty lame robot boxing game I couldn't
really enjoy, even though it had a three-dimensional perspective a la Super
Punch Out. There wasn't anything overly alluring about it -- some standard
scaling boxing gloves and goofy robot opponents. Virtual Punch Out would
have been cooler.
    * Four was the aforementioned Dolphins and Water demo, which was
extremely cool -- a few dolphins were just swimming on their sides, and
water was being shown as if you were looking at a side view of rippling
water within a transparent bathtub. This demo alternated with an early
Super Monaco GP-like driving game, which wasn't anything special. The
contrast in the two demos seemed to be "shading," whereas the dolphins were
nicely shaded and looked more 3-D, and the driving game was cartoony and
looked like nothing special.
    * Five was simply titled "Shoot 'Em Up!" but was clearly a Virtual
Boy incarnation of Hudson Soft's Star Soldier; Hudson's name did appear on
the game. An overhead perspective was enhanced by 3-D parallax scrolling.
    * Six was the most intriguing, featuring a StarFox filled polygon
spacecraft (looking much better than the unfilled T&E Soft game) and
alternating with a short demo of Mario VB. The spacecraft did a lot of
zooming in 3-D -- really cool -- and Mario VB was a return to the classic
SMB 1 with a new twist: imagine SMB 1 is its own game going on in the
foreground, and there's a completely separate game of SMB1 going on in the
distant background. As you walk on bridges between the foreground and
background, you move in 3-D between two separate (but connected) worlds.
Other "drop into the pipe" scenes were exactly like Zelda scenes, with cool
overhead dungeon rooms and the constant danger of falling through floors to
a scaling and zooming demise.

    Virtual Boy units themselves waited in the second room of the VB
area, and two games were playable: Telero Boxing and Space Pinball. VB
units included a single controller incorporating two separate 4-directional
joypads, start and select buttons, A and B buttons, and buttons on the
bottom of the controller, directly under the joypads. The images were in
multiple shades of red. When you first use the VB, you need to adjust it
for the width of your eyes, and four VB logos appear (one in each of four
corners) for purposes of lens movement and focusing. When all four logos
appear on screen, relatively clear, you're set to play. Stereo headphones
are right at the correct level for hearing while you're watching, and the
device -- while not attached to your head (it sits on a table, propped up
by a bi-pod) -- is certainly immersive even with so-so games.
    Virtual Boy is a better technology than Nintendo has been given
credit for, as the overall experience is pretty cool even when you're
playing the so-so boxing and pinball titles they were showing. With better
titles and dedicated hardware than Sega had for their Genesis VR headset,
plus the disadvantage of more color limitations,  Virtual Boy is the
classic mixed bag. Even though it has a lot of potential, it's bound to be
raked over the coals by competitors and the media alike despite the fact
that neither could offer people a better dedicated "virtual" system for
$200. VB is a relatively inexpensive, totally portable 3-D game system --
remember that fact when you see people knocking it for what it is *not*.

Ultra-64

    Very little was said about Nintendo's new system, save the following:

 * Set for a worldwide debut -- on time -- in May, at the E3 in Los
Angeles.
 * Chipset completed and will be in silicon production as of this month
(January).
 * Developers are being licensed for the system. Current teams include
Williams (Doom, Cruis'n USA), Paradigm Simulation (Pilotwings 2?), Acclaim
(Turok the Dinosaur Hunter), Spectrum Holobyte (Top Gun) and Rare (Killer
Instinct ... and KI2(?)).

    The industry's rumor-mill continued to fly on Ultra-64 despite those
announcements. Developers -- some of them PlayStation backers and long-time
Sega allies -- were claiming that they were hearing about one of three
Ultra design problems: [a] a snag in U64 hardware development, of some
unspecified nature, causing Nintendo to completely re-design the U64
hardware specifications; [b] a final chipset with a price over $400; or [c]
that the entire Ultra-64 project was vapor -- a hoax -- from the beginning.
Nintendo -- at every official level -- denied these rumors completely. They
claim that everything is precisely on track for a pre-Christmas 1995
release.

Photographs:

Ethbound.gif: Just shown for illustrative purposes, this is a 24-meg RPG. Not supposed to be impressive visually..

fxftr/2.gif: FX Fighter's title screen and a fighting scene -- this game
has SGI Killer Instinct-like animations for character selection, too. The
polygon movement (with motion capture) was great.

mtlmchin.gif: Konami's sequel to Cybernator, Metal Machines. (aka Assault Suits 3, by NCS.)

paradgm1/2.gif: Why does this SGI demonstration from MultiGen's booth
matter? Well, these are graphics on the SGI Onyx RealityEngine2 system
(~$100,000), which will supposedly be possible on Nintendo's new U-64. This
flight simulator by Paradigm Simulations may be a starting point for that
company's new development with Shigeru Miyamoto (Mario/DK's creator, etc.)
-- they're rumored to be doing Pilotwings 2. That plane moves totally in
real-time with full texture mapping at a resolution you wouldn't believe --
completely fluid and awesome. The battleship? You can fly over this tiny
speck in the ocean until it gets as detailed as what you're seeing on the
screen. The possibilities are incredible. This was NOT a Jurassic Park-like
movie you watched - you control everything totally in real time.

sgicar/2.gif: Another incredible MultiGen booth demo, this was coded in 6-8 days by a MultiGen employee using some SGI and MultiGen development
software. In under eight days, this guy had a car with more realism than
Namco's Ace Driver and a course modeled on a real racetrack -- the fluidity
was unreal and the camera could be moved absolutely anywhere. Anti-aliasing
made this completely seamless visually. I kept these two pictures because
they were the best closeups of the car, but you could take any arcade-style
view (including "in the car") and this was just an eight-or-less day
project.

starfox2/2/3.gif: The great StarFox 2; title screens shown (the dragon
spacecraft attacking and eating part of your fleet, and the 6 characters
you can choose from) and one free-roaming in-game shot with your craft
seeking out three targets.

Sega

    Sega needed to fulfill the same objectives as Nintendo: continue
interest in their 16-bit hardware while getting people interested in their
upcoming Saturn platform. Sega's 16-bit library had some solid new software
coming, but Sega wasn't taking the Nintendo route -- their most
aesthetically innovative titles were, by and large, either 32X games that
were on the floor or Saturn titles on video tape only. Batman and Robin for
the Genesis was amazing, but everything else 16-bit was a lot like last
year's Genesis software. Sega's good stuff is intentionally all rolling out
at E3.

Genesis

    Hands down, the best Genesis title was Batman and Robin. With Gunstar
Heroes-style play mechanics, unfathomable 3-D graphics for a Genesis game
(all sorts of effects, from full-screen line scaling to warping), and a
soundtrack with a good beat, this is one of the best Genesis games to come
along in a while... except for a slight repetitivity factor early on... but
them's the brakes. Comix Zone is an interactive comic game where artists
are continually drawing new adversaries for you to fight within the
confines of a comic book's pages. You'll actually control the movement of
your fighting character as he crawls from panel to panel -- this had some
great spot effects and characters, plus the idea was really neat. Ristar
("the Shooting Star") is a Sonic-type platformer, cuter than Sonic and now
officially slated for U.S. release. X-Men 2: Clone Wars featured character
animation extremely similar to the Capcom SNES title X-Men, with less
colorful backgrounds but more interesting map design.
    Sports fans will probably love the updated and even cooler
(aesthetically) World Series Baseball '95 and Sega's NHL All-Star Hockey
(which is now an unabashed clone of EA's style), but will probably frown
upon the suddenly non-3-D Sega basketball title (it's overhead, 3/4
perspective). Deion Sanders was at Sega's party on the Thursday night
before WCES, announcing a new multi-year deal with Sega for football games
(and likely baseball, as well). He'll replace the aging Joe Montana license
next year, adding some of his trademark spunk to the last ten yards of any
touchdown drive or punt return. RPGs incl