> > ShouTime dumped a prototype SSV hardware game from 1993 called Pastel Island > > Clip showing what gameplay looks like. > > - > [MAME] Pastel Island (prototype) (c)1993 Visco > > https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=meV9i1GI9Ug > - > > A mix of Atari Crystal Castles + gameplay tribute element of Stern's Berzerk. > > Some of the musical medley pieces are very good. On some of the instrument pieces, > the music audio seems to have had real musicians in a recording studio (doing drums > and xylophone or marimba) being sampled. The xylophone or marimba sounds (round 1 and > 2) seem to have a better quality compared to what would have been generated from a > keyboard synthesizer back in the 1990s.
Yeah, the whole thing is a visual + audio treat
It's pushing the SSV hardware in ways nothing else supported pushes it
It takes FULL advantage of all the work done over this cycle to get all those line effects working. The entire playfield here is a line-effect, scrolling the closer parts at a different rate to the more distant parts, then you've got all the intro / outro line-effects as the levels start.
On top of that it's also using a mid-screen raster interrupt to split the screen (change scroll values) and in addition to that polling hblank / vblank flags to count scanlines for the effect you see on the region disclaimer.
Basically it's a tech demo for the hardware, and a real shame it somehow ended up being cancelled. With a bit more love, and some optimizations in places, it could have been a really nice release; early in the SSV lifecycle too considering there were games put out 7 -8 years later than this so it's not like they ran out of time to develop it on a dying platform as sometimes happens.
If you try running this in 0.204 it's an unplayable mess due to unemulated features, so it was rather good timing that I did all the work to add the effects for Dynagear etc. earlier in the month.
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