You get that one off... what was it OC Remix? They had some atrociously bad stuff on there what with the industrial/techno/whatever, but with a few gems scattered about. Actually, looking at what I got, their Actraiser showing was... incredibly poor. Just googling about shows some pretty solid stuff. Square gets a lot of credit for their scores, but Enix were no slouches here. A shame a lot of Western carts were just.... bad.
Except Donkey Kong Country.
As for Actraiser 2, I remember just how damn good that game looked and how fluid it played. Then how disappointing it was as nothing but a side-scoller beat-em-up. I enjoyed the Hell out of it, but I felt like a large portion was missing. But Enix.... I don't really know how to put it. Sprite graphics are all about (duh) the sprite itself. With 3D shit, lighting, specular maps, animations, rigging, physics, etc can all add up to great models looking flat or hilariously bad in motion. But sprites, you have to bake all that shit in.
Actraiser 1 and 2 fucking did that in spades. Some of the background assets and bosses were just ridiculously good looking, even when up against 1st party titles. They could have benefitted from more sprite animation frames, but IIRC they were already pushing the limits of the SNES at the time. Donkey Kong OTOH, I don't know how they made that game, especially with as little slowdown as it ended up with at release. Graphics alone combined with all the anmation frames should have just blown the console up.
Whatever man, Rare was the bomb.
Eulogy wrote: ↑2018-03-08 02:20pmThe only good thing about this development is that more studios have seen the unmarked graves of those companions that EA murdered and are steering clear of them. Small comfort to those dead studios.
![Sad :(](./images/smilies/icon_sad.gif)
Yea, still sucks because some studios can still end up in the situation where they need the backing of a big hitter like EA or take a look at those profits and buy-in. Luckily, the emergence of easy to license engines and digital distribution gives them other options.
And it's sad because certain publishers don't treat their underlings like shit and we get magic. I already talked about Rare and Nintendo combining to make Donkey Kong Country. Then you look at Retro and what they did with Metroid Prime. Nintendo also had little faith Metroid could make the jump to 1st person and they still gave it the go ahead. I also might have hated Other M, but it's not like it was terrible due to Nintendo trying to gouge it's customers or due to Nintendo heaping dogshit on an otherwise good game (READ: Battlefront), they honestly thought they were working with Team Ninja to make a something great.