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Games that have really nice parallax scrolling

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Phediuk

Member
The Genesis has numerous games with outstanding use of parallax. A few examples:

Greendog has quite a nice-looking underwater level: https://youtu.be/VL7jR1NN4p0?t=837

Thunder Force 4 has a pretty mind-blowing first level over a lake. I think there's something like 16 layers here?: https://youtu.be/EmO8WGx1hcE?t=80

Toejam & Earl 2 has the flower meadow level: https://youtu.be/CbwSmKex_qY?t=2781

Adventures of Batman & Robin has this cool 3D effect in some of its levels: https://youtu.be/CR0MWpOK1RU?t=2637
 
Green Hill Zone in Sonic 1 is still the most impressive with the depth and quantity of layers on the water, still amazes me today.
 
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I adore parallax scrolling. If I had the time I would go off and make a bunch of gifs of my faves as from my image searches there needs to be more of them existing.

For now here's Shinobi III:
tumblr_o0v3qpL8NC1u6jjy9o1_400.gif
 
Thunder Force IV is just very smart about how it vertically splits up the level. There's a gap just large enough between the upper clouds and lower mountain foreground so that they will never be displayed at the same time, giving the impression of twice as many layers.

Phediuk said:
Ranger X is another Genesis example.

Check out this forest level. There's even dynamic lighting! https://youtu.be/ZmkyHnh-lWM?t=847
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Yep, the Ranger X forest is the absolute king of parallax use.
 
There was a Spectrum game, way back in the 80's, that had amazing (for the time) paralax scrolling.

I can't remember the name of it, but it was a side scrolling beat'em up, I thought it was "Way of the tiger", but after watching youtube vids I don't think that was it.

edit : actually maybe it was it, but it doesn't look anywhere near as impressive as I remember it!
 
Phediuk said:
Better CPU. Same reason most games were higher res on the Genesis than the SNES.
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Actually, the SNES simply doesn't support 320x224, unlike the Genesis. There was a high res 512x448 mode, but it was only used for title screens and such.

When it comes to parallax the SNES actually has a slight advantage. It supports an additional background layer, but I don't know if any games make use of that. Typically the "many layers of parallax" is faked using raster effects. This means those layers can't overlap, but it still look good so I doubt it's worth bothering with an extra background (which naturally eats video ram).
 
notBald said:
Actually, the SNES simply doesn't support 320x224, unlike the Genesis. There was a high res 512x448 mode, but it was only used for title screens and such.

When it comes to parallax the SNES actually has a slight advantage. It supports an additional background layer, but I don't know if any games make use of that. Typically the "many layers of parallax" is faked using raster effects. This means those layers can't overlap, but it still look good so I doubt it's worth bothering with an extra background (which naturally eats video ram).
Click to expand...

A lot of games probably reserve one layer for scaling/rotation effects as well, since it technically only works on backgrounds and not actual sprites.

Probably why Super Mario World boss scenes just have an empty black background, because all the layers were used for the bosses and platform setpieces.
 
lazygecko said:
Probably why Super Mario World boss scenes just have an empty black background, because all the layers were used for the bosses and platform setpieces.
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actually...that's because those boss levels use the background layer as a foreground object. For example:

smw_post3.jpg


That platform is actually the background layer which allows for full scaling and mode 7 movement
 
SatansReverence said:
No idea, but it is.
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I'm going to assume that this is exclusive to the 3D accelerated Glide version of the game. My wild guess would be that it makes the game use an actual camera on a 3D plane in order to get rid of that perfectly symmetrical orthographic view you otherwise have in 2D isometric graphics.
 
epmode said:
Unless I'm crazy, that's not a 2D game so it's not parallax scrolling.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallax_scrolling said:
Parallax scrolling is a technique in computer graphics and web design, where background images move by the camera slower than foreground images, creating an illusion of depth in a 2D scene and adding to the immersion.
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Syder Arcade got different layers of scrolling fore and background elements. Some of these are just happen to be 3D objects with lighting and some are 2D bitmaps like the background.
 
ChryZ said:
Syder Arcade got different layers of scrolling fore and background elements. Some of these are just happen to be 3D objects with lighting and some are 2D bitmaps like the background.
Click to expand...

I just watched a gameplay video of Syder Arcade and it's clearly a 3D game with a handful of 2D bits (because actually rendering them in 3D would needlessly tax the hardware, and it's hard to tell the difference with a camera that's locked into a set path). Like Gradius 5, it's 2.5D.
 
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