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Gex is one of the best platformers I have ever played. It's up there with "Sonic 3 & Knuckles", or "Super Mario Bros. 3"-- it's in that absolute top-drawer of all-time classics thanks to its beautiful artwork, amazing soundtrack, cool core mechanics, and phenomenal level design.
My "Limited Run" physical edition of the new "Gex Trilogy" collection came in yesterday, for Switch. I was hoping it would become the definitive way to play Gex, similar to what the "Sonic Origins" collection is to those original Genesis games. But unfortunately the experience is a bit of a Gexdown.
There are two primary issues: first, their re-implementation in their "Carbon Engine" uses the assets, and emulates the lousy special effects, from the inferior PlayStation port of the game, not the 3DO original! Second, there is no way to remap the buttons, and they swapped "jump" and "tail whip" from how the 3DO controls were laid out, causing me to fight against thirty years of muscle memory.
Regarding the first problem: both the 3DO and PSX had one meg of VRAM. The 3DO could do arbitrary color-depth assets-- so developers could squeeze every last bit of that VRAM by using, let's say, 7-bit assets, or 6-bit, or so forth. But the PSX could only do powers of two! So basically every single 3DO-to-PSX port looks super dithered and color-bandey on Sony's platform, because they had to drop all the way down to 4-bit color depth assets: "BattleSport", "Road Rash", "PO'ed", and "Star Fighter" are just a few examples.
Gex is another. These aren't the best screenshots, but look at the super obvious color banding in the PSX version-- pay attention to the sky aligned with the moon-- then take a peek at the 3DO original. I wish these were "apples to apples"-- the PSX one is all blurry for some reason-- but you get the idea.
As well, the 3DO version had fancier special effects which were not as easily possible on the PSX and had to be dumbed down-- for example, the 3DO version scales the whole screen when going through doorways, which is pretty neat. Not to mention, the 3DO original also has that amazing 480i output, which always makes 3DO titles look super glossy and high quality-- something the collection can't capture.
All-in-all, I enjoy playing the original game on the 3DO much, much more than the remade one in this collection, despite the collection's rendition running at 60 fps. At least the collection has a decent CRT filter. I was never a fan of the 3D ones back in the day, but I'll give those a go in this collection too.
Bible Book Summaries
Similar to what I published via this post, I made another set of "cheat sheets" for myself, but this time to summarize all of the Bible books in a quick glance:
New Job Soon
I start my new job on Monday, really looking forward to it-- getting a little stir-crazy sitting around home for the past few months. I hope a new routine fixes my sleep-- I haven't had a good night's sleep in almost three weeks now, cumulative fatigue setting in. Kids and I are doing the "Pizza Ranch" buffet today-- should be delicious!
My "Limited Run" physical edition of the new "Gex Trilogy" collection came in yesterday, for Switch. I was hoping it would become the definitive way to play Gex, similar to what the "Sonic Origins" collection is to those original Genesis games. But unfortunately the experience is a bit of a Gexdown.
There are two primary issues: first, their re-implementation in their "Carbon Engine" uses the assets, and emulates the lousy special effects, from the inferior PlayStation port of the game, not the 3DO original! Second, there is no way to remap the buttons, and they swapped "jump" and "tail whip" from how the 3DO controls were laid out, causing me to fight against thirty years of muscle memory.
Regarding the first problem: both the 3DO and PSX had one meg of VRAM. The 3DO could do arbitrary color-depth assets-- so developers could squeeze every last bit of that VRAM by using, let's say, 7-bit assets, or 6-bit, or so forth. But the PSX could only do powers of two! So basically every single 3DO-to-PSX port looks super dithered and color-bandey on Sony's platform, because they had to drop all the way down to 4-bit color depth assets: "BattleSport", "Road Rash", "PO'ed", and "Star Fighter" are just a few examples.
Gex is another. These aren't the best screenshots, but look at the super obvious color banding in the PSX version-- pay attention to the sky aligned with the moon-- then take a peek at the 3DO original. I wish these were "apples to apples"-- the PSX one is all blurry for some reason-- but you get the idea.
As well, the 3DO version had fancier special effects which were not as easily possible on the PSX and had to be dumbed down-- for example, the 3DO version scales the whole screen when going through doorways, which is pretty neat. Not to mention, the 3DO original also has that amazing 480i output, which always makes 3DO titles look super glossy and high quality-- something the collection can't capture.
All-in-all, I enjoy playing the original game on the 3DO much, much more than the remade one in this collection, despite the collection's rendition running at 60 fps. At least the collection has a decent CRT filter. I was never a fan of the 3D ones back in the day, but I'll give those a go in this collection too.
Bible Book Summaries
Similar to what I published via this post, I made another set of "cheat sheets" for myself, but this time to summarize all of the Bible books in a quick glance:
New Job Soon
I start my new job on Monday, really looking forward to it-- getting a little stir-crazy sitting around home for the past few months. I hope a new routine fixes my sleep-- I haven't had a good night's sleep in almost three weeks now, cumulative fatigue setting in. Kids and I are doing the "Pizza Ranch" buffet today-- should be delicious!