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[Lord Error]

There's a level of understated awesomeness to SotB attract screen and the initial game section that's unmatched to me. It's like perfect 2D artistry and tech mix. I'm so glad the SotB game on PS4 lets me run that attract sequence in perfect 60FPS. Every emulator I tried prior to this has failed to render it correctly one way or the other.

 

[BPoole]

Serious Sam Double D XXL

 

[Springfoot]

.

 

[Lord Error]

Most of you probably know there is a ps4 dynamic theme for the original 1989 shadow of the beast for anyone interested.

I got it from my ps4 - the extras tab - when I bought the heavy spectrum version and I was going to post the link to the store for you but for some reason the link is an error on the store, but on ps4 it worked last time I tried about an hour ago.

I tried searching for it on the web store and no luck. Could it be a EU store only item?

 

[dogen]

I can't believe I forgot Galactic Attack. I loved that game as a kid.
Definitely one of the best looking games of the era.

https://youtu.be/1_OcMm439tM?t=234

It had some killer line scrolling effects if you ran it in "arcade" mode(Yes I flipped my 80lb crt just to see this lol).

I made a gif of that video.

I edited out the mothership mini boss here. to give a better effect.

It's amazing how convincing it is.

 

[Cow Mengde]

It really does. What were they thinking?

The graphics are actually pretty good. It just feels like you're running around in a circle.

 

[VariantX]

I love this neat effect from ranger X. I didn't even notice it right away from playing it.

https://youtu.be/ZmkyHnh-lWM?t=10m53s

 

[MrCunningham]

I should've known Ulillillia would show up here. The man loves his parallax, to an extreme extent.

Nothing short of insane. I love how he even calculated the proper speeds for everything, Cars traveling at 25MPH, the elevator traveling at 500MPH and such.

 

[Zolbrod]

The classic Sonic games immediately jump out to me.

First post nails it.

Sonic 2 is still my favorite game in terms of parallax scrolling.

 

[dogen]

I love this neat effect from ranger X. I didn't even notice it right away from playing it.

[/QUOTE] Yeah, line scrolling effects are awesome.

 

[Hilbert]

I remember thinking sparkster 2 on the genesis had amazing skies. Can't find any good gifs of it though.

 

[nded]

... and yet Syder Arcade does it and very effective too. Breaking up your scene into layers with parallax scrolling gives way more depth impact than scrolling through normal 3D scene. It's also less expensive performance wise, than rendering full scenes with lots of depth.

Puppeteer on PS3 also sports parallax scrolling while having lots of 3D rendering.

I still don't think these are examples of parallax scrolling as defined by the article you linked. These just show an actual parallax effect as depicted in a 3D engine.

 

[AmyS]

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

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.

What about Galactic Attack / Layer Section on the Saturn? I seem to recall some really cool parallax effects.


Aptly named too, as you dig deeper into each layer of the world.

I can't believe I forgot Galactic Attack. I loved that game as a kid.
Definitely one of the best looking games of the era.


It had some killer line scrolling effects if you ran it in "arcade" mode(Yes I flipped my 80lb crt just to see this lol).

I made a gif of that video.

It's amazing how convincing the effect is.

So awesome!

Watch that effect at 60FPS (arcade version) https://youtu.be/IZx5e_XAzlM?t=4m41s

 

[dogen]

So awesome!

Watch that effect at 60FPS (arcade version) [/QUOTE] Yeah, I've seen that one. Good runs are so much fun to watch.

 

[RoryDropkick]

Talking about Rayforce, earlier in that level there's an equally impressive scrolling effect where you fly through part of a space station, I was very impressed when I first played the game, it really gave an impression of depth.

https://youtu.be/IZx5e_XAzlM?t=260


Just the movement and change in speed along with the way the sprites were shifted from right to left gave it a great 3d effect. You HAVE to play it in tate mode on the Saturn version, otherwise the effect does not look right whatsoever.

 

[dogen]

Talking about Rayforce, earlier in that level there's an equally impressive scrolling effect where you fly through part of a space station, I was very impressed when I first played the game, it really gave an impression of depth.




Just the movement and change in speed along with the way the sprites were shifted from right to left gave it a great 3d effect. You HAVE to play it in tate mode on the Saturn version, otherwise the effect does not look right whatsoever.

Oh nice, somehow I never noticed that, or forgot about it. Only tried tate mode once, my tv is massive.

 

[Soodanim]

actually...that's because those boss levels use the background layer as a foreground object. For example:

That platform is actually the background layer which allows for full scaling and mode 7 movement

That's pretty cool, thanks

 

[RyudBoy]

Some third party games like Earthworm Jim and Mortal Kombat II had more layers of parallax scrolling on SNES compared to Genesis. I always thought that was really weird. The missing layers were added in the 32X version of MKII.

 

[Gen X]

I wonder how many people came into this thread not knowing what Parallax Scrolling was.

But speaking of scrolling, I'm pretty sure Atari tried to patent that once. Lol.

 

[Rewrite]

I've always loved Stardust Speedway's bad future look and effect in Sonic CD. it's absolutely gorgeous to look at and it's epic racing against Metal Sonic there.

 

[Lemnisc8]

I tried searching for it on the web store and no luck. Could it be a EU store only item?

My guess as well as I am in uk. It was free but I don't know if that's because I bought the game. Come to think of it, I wonder if it's tied to the game in some way.

 

[KojiKnight]

That's bullshit, neither of those things have anything to do with CPU.
For the resolution the SNES simply doesn't support 320x240 (it does however kindof support 512x240)

For parallax the SNES is objectively superior, as it supports more real bg layers. Technically it supports up to 4 but in that mode you can only use 2 bit palettes so it's not that useful; but a very common mode uses 3 layers, (2 with 4-bit palettes and one 2-bit). While megadrive only has two (both 4-bit).

However the way a lot of games achieves more impressive parallax effects is by using raster based scrolling. But that's not a very CPU demanding task. Both consoles have a bit different approaches to set this up, but I think that with the way the SNES HDMA table works it can probably update the scrolling layers with less CPU overhead than Megadrive in most cases.

It's really more about clever image composition at that point than CPU power to acheive many layers. For example, plenty of games on both consoles do stuff like full screen wave effects; that's technically the same as 224 parallax layers



In mode 7 you only have one layer. So yes in Super Mario World some bosses like, Ludwig, Roy, and Bowser use the the BG while most of the background is actually sprites

I'm not sure about Sega, but the SNES also had priority bits on their layers, effectively doubling the amount in many situations.

 

[magnetic]

I made a gif of that video.

It's amazing how convincing the effect is.

I never played those games as a kid and yet I get a weird sense of nostalgia from effects like these. Maybe because this looks like what as a kid I always assumed the next version of the SNES would look like.

There's also this arcade fighting game with a TON of parallax, weird Outrun-style zooming and shifting, almost nauseating to look at - but I have no idea what that was called...

 

[Kjell]

In terms of parallax scrolling the VDP doesn't really have any features that the SNES doesn't match or surpass. How you set up things like line based scrolling is a bit different, but it should actually be more flexible on SNES with the HDMA system, and it can do more real layers.

The primary difference is that the MegaDrive has dedicated V(S)RAM for per-tile / per-scanline scrolling while the SNES doesn't ( it can only replicate those features using HDMA ). The downside of the HDMA approach is that it halts the CPU when it's accessing memory, which means fewer cycles to work on the next fame.

 

[Piston Hyundai]

Serious Sam Double D XXL

normally I'm against memes and shit as jokes in games, but this is clever as fuck

 

[hodgy100]

Even though the Genesis only has two layers, each of its background layers has a high and low layer which can scroll independently and even have different Z priority.

This is where most of the parallax magic happens in hardware.

I kind of abused this to have 3 layers to my background that move in opposite directions yet still appear in the correct depth order.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cnCNJxWQgzE

these are the source background files I use to create the background in that video

the background only uses the Plane A and Plane B Layers the sprite layer was used for the character sprite, columns hud etc.

 

[2+2=5]

Here's a whole article on it and some other parallaxing techniques. Really interesting stuff.

A couple images from the article:

That's not 2d at all, that's exactly like Don't starve, flat 2d textures in a 3d world, just made differently.
The guy says:

"It looks like in Don’t Starve, but remember: Diablo 2 is a 2D game! There’s no official information about this mode."

So he says that without any source... but he has a source, he linked it too... too bad it says the complete opposite:

http://paul.siramy.free.fr/_divers/dt1_doc/

"Ok, so what are the DT1 files ? They are all the Diablo 2 Tiles that are used for the floors and walls of the maps (a Tile beeing the gfx element of a map). Or maybe the T stand in fact for Textures ? Well, that's not important"

"Another usefull things to know : Diablo 2 is a 3D-isometric game"

 

[magicalsoundshower]

Is there a reason why Genesis had more games with parallax than Snes?

Personally, I don't really think that's true. It's more that both systems had different strenghts and weaknesses when it came to parallax.

Looking back, Genesis games tended to have more linescrolling effects (this is the 3D-ish perspective effect that you see in the Sonic games, for instance) because it was easier to do on the hardware than it was on the SNES. The downside to this: the different segments can't overlap as it's still a single background scrolling at different speeds per line. If you wanted overlap, you had to work in sprites or some other trickery.

The SNES, on the other hand, was able to pull off an extra layer of parallax with overlap and everything. Mode 1, which most games used, allowed for 3 background layers, one of which was usually used for the HUD and/or transparency effects. If you wanted, you could also use the third layer for extra parallx. I don't think a lot of games did this as there were limitations as to what you could do. Games that come to mind right now are Yoshi's Island or the cave level in Super Castlevania IV. Too bad I can't post any videos as I'm at work right now.

 

[=GabrielKnight=]

Aladdin for the Sega Master System had and incredible parallax scrolling for the machine, just look at the sides of the buildings:

https://youtu.be/XWwgY2CVKTE?t=1m27s

And Atari 2600 parallax scrolling: Road Runner

https://youtu.be/YoampY4lzmE?t=3s

 

[VariantX]

here's another one from sonic 3 & knuckles, check out the cross beams between the pillars during the mushroom hill zone boss battle.

https://youtu.be/xSXIhPPT9fo?t=1h33m26s

helps really sell the idea that sonic is jumping through a 3d object

 

[MrCunningham]

Aladdin for the Sega Master System had and incredible parallax scrolling for the machine, just look at the sides of the buildings:

https://youtu.be/XWwgY2CVKTE?t=1m27s

And Atari 2600 parallax scrolling: Road Runner

https://youtu.be/YoampY4lzmE?t=3s

Empire Strikes Back on the 2600 has some pretty decent parallax for the hardware it is on.


Also Aladdin really does have some impressive looking graphics for a Master System/ Game Gear game.

 

[Omnipunctual Godot]

Well, there's the criminally overlooked Skyblazer on SNES:

And, my personal favorite, Super Castlevania IV:

 

[AmyS]

Well, there's the criminally overlooked Skyblazer on SNES:

Wow, that's beautiful.

 

[Dragon1893]

The Japanese version of the original Sonic had extra parallax layers that were not present in US or PAL versions:

https://youtu.be/17P0RkXHKoM?t=98

Looked pretty good in Marble Zone for example, where the trees are separated from the mountains in the background.



Could you name Nos. 1, 3 and 4 please? They look fantastic. I know No. 2 is Gynoug on Mega Drive.

How did I not know this? Why was this changed?

I didn't think anyone else played the game Greendog. First time I've seen someone mention it. The game was impressive, with a totally 90s protagonist.

I'll never forget Greendog lol, was so frustrated with it because on the first time I came close to beating it I got a game over in the last level and ended up yelling at a friend I had a crush on at the time.
I swore I'd never touch it again.
10 minutes later I started again and beat it lol.

Paralax scrolling used to be one of the first things I looked for in a game back in the 16 bit era.
Muramasa is a great example of a recent game doing it well, yeah.

 

[lazygecko]

How did I not know this? Why was this changed?

The game had a delayed release in Japan, giving them time to polish up the presentation more.

There's also a wave distortion effect added to the water in Labyrinth Zone.

 

[Poohblaster]

This video shows both the greatness of parallax scrolling and even greater greatness of Ulillillia.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yaNuuxglGdE

 

[Dragon1893]

The game had a delayed release in Japan, giving them time to polish up the presentation more.

There's also a wave distortion effect added to the water in Labyrinth Zone.

I see, thanks.

 

[Timu]

I love when games have this, like Ninja Gaiden 3 and such, makes them look like they have more depth in the backgrounds!

 

[Prat]

No one has mentioned Rayman Legends?? D:

https://youtu.be/thQijhlRHQU?t=1h24m1s

 

[Krammy]

The Dragon Ball Z RPG series for the Famicom had some great parallax scrolling for the time, especially Dragon Ball Z III: Killer Androids. This is mostly thanks to blending in sprite objects with the usual background tiles though.

 

[John Rabbit]

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

I used to spend a LONG time in this area as a kid because I was so blown away by the scene.

 

[sixteen-bit]

Ori and the Blind Forest

I played through this the other day and it is a great looking game.

 

[EVO]

I really wish somebody would make a movie like this. Straight side-scroling action and story for 90min.

I've always wanted a linear side scrolling game that goes on for hours, that's not broken up into levels or anything.

Out of This World is probably the closest I've played, but it's not completely seamless.

 

[jett]

I'm most impressed by parallax scrolling in NES games. Really has a unique look.

This is Super EDF, showing some parallax action on the SNES.

 

[Iztok Mravlja]

I really enjoyed the scrolling on the floor of Street Fighter II, I thought that looked amazing on my SNES. It's subtle, but I liked it.

I believe this is the "line scrolling" variant on this effect (Wikipedia).

 

[Peltz]

This thread is so damn cool.

I have nothing to contribute on mobile but Sonic 2 and 3 on Genesis had some really insane parallax scrolling. I wish I could post a few gifs right now.

 

[Morrigan Stark]

Aladdin for the Sega Master System had and incredible parallax scrolling for the machine, just look at the sides of the buildings:

https://youtu.be/XWwgY2CVKTE?t=1m27s

Whaaaat. I had no idea there was an Aladdin for the SMS. And wow those graphics are insanely good for an 8-bit game! Could easily pass as an early Genesis or SNES game.

 

[Parallax Scroll]

The ones I play

 

[Hilbert]

I really enjoyed the scrolling on the floor of Street Fighter II, I thought that looked amazing on my SNES. It's subtle, but I liked it.

I believe this is the "line scrolling" variant on this effect (Wikipedia).

I was just watching a video of Virtua Fighter 2 on the genesis and was wondering how they did the floor. It also scrolls like that, but when they jump it shifts vertically as well.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oulNdGCcYE8

 

[Herne]

The C64 was capable of some great parallax scrolling.

Flimbo's Quest

Shadow of the Beast

Wrath of the Demon

Menace

Star Paws