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SEGA 3D Classics Lands on European Nintendo 3DSes

Europe gets the vintage SEGA treatment of 3D Space Harrier and 3D Super Hang-On.

Japan have been getting lots of titles under the SEGA 3D Classics banner, but it's about time other parts of the world can have some of the love. Europe's getting just that with the arrival of 3D Space Harrier and 3D Super Hang-On on the Nintendo eShop. Both titles are €4.99 / £4.49 each and brings a new sense of gameplay with the Nintendo 3DS' 3D capabilities.

Naoki Horii (left) and Yousuke Okunari (right)

Speaking of 3D Space Harrier, the SEGA Blog posted up an translated interview from Game Watch and Impress featuring Yosuke Okunari from Sega of Japan and Naoki Horii from developer M2. The interview shows the process of getting well known SEGA classics and making 3D versions out them on a new handheld gaming system. Here's snippets of the interview below.

"Yosuke Okunari: It was Space Harrier’s 20th anniversary at the time, and since it’s a game from 20 years ago, we figured that the PS2 would have no problem running a game like Space Harrier. I mean, it ran on the Dreamcast after all (it was in Shenmue), but that’s just not how it worked out. The ins and outs of emulating things were still being figured out back then. Being new to this, even I thought we could churn out ports pretty quickly, but it turns out that wasn’t really the case.

It turns out that since the hardware is different, it takes quite a lot of machine power to emulate these games. M2 is quite fussy about these kinds of things, and they wanted to really get the controls right from the get-go."

Game Watch & Impress: Interesting (laughs). So it sounds like in your experience, the game’s sound quality was limited by the power of the console, to the extent that you were performing calculations internally and then outputting the sound.

Naoki Horii: When using streaming output, you can’t reproduce the behavior where some sounds would disappear due to sound effects being played. It depends on the game, but a lot of people actually like that effect. We wanted to cater to that need. But if streaming is the best option for a particular game, we’ll go with that.

GW&I: OK Finally we are at the point where we can actually talk about 3D Space Harrier! (laughs)

YO: Three years since we released the Wii version and it’s finally here! (laughs) Sorry for the wait!

NH:  Geez, that was a super long leadup! (all laugh)

YO: When the Nintendo 3DS was released, it included Virtual Console on it, which led us to start working on Space Harrier. At the same time, Nintendo indicated to us that they were looking for games that also use 3D. I thought, “Man, I want to do that.” So I went to Horii-san and said “We’ve got to do this 3D thing....”

GW&I: Remaking a game originally built in 2D into 3D… tell us about that.

YO: If you want an idea of how hard it is, just consider how M2 has been building games. They’ve been using emulator techniques that replicate the hardware since the PS2 days. That’s one way of faithfully reproducing the originals, but the drawback is that it’s really hard to go back and add things to the code. For example, you wouldn’t be able to add in extra bosses, or build new stages.

NH:  That’s why you won’t see extra features that were added to console or PC ports of older SEGA arcade games in the SEGA AGES ports. They weren’t in the original game.

YO: Re-making games in 3D is almost impossible for similar reasons. When you take a character sprite that was originally in 2D and bring it into a 3D viewpoint, you have to build the graphic from scratch. So for example, back in the 8-bit era, very large enemies were often displayed as backgrounds. But if you did a simple 3D conversion of an enemy like that, it would end up being on a different plane from the player character and look like it’s out on the horizon. If you want real 3D, then it’s basically the same as rebuilding the game from scratch.

SOURCE: Nintendo Life

26th November, 2013 - 22:17 GMT Twinny Article viewed 1891 times 0 Comments

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