Riptide Stage (Eternal Champions: Challenge from the Dark Side [1995])

[Will insert description here later; my apologies for not being able to finish this list in time without cutting corners a little]

(Length: 1.5+ minutes)

I was thinking about Eternal Champions: Challenge from the Dark Side on SEGA CD today, as one does from time to time.

One of the things that sticks out to me when the game is looked at as a product is its thick, thick instruction book. This ranks in at 70 pages, and we're talking 70 pages of a longbox instruction book.

This book barely fits under the plastic tabs on the case to hold it in place. It features the commonplace items of explaining how to play the game and describing the characters, but it goes into levels of having multiple pages of lore and how to most effectively arrange your audio equipment to get the best sound from the game (?).

This is a game that is too good to be stuck on the SEGA CD format. If the series is touched on in any way by SEGA, it's always the Genesis/Mega Drive version. This is a game that screams "1990s," for better and for worse, but it has such a rich feature set that it impresses me to this date. I definitely still enjoy playing it every now and again.

It's a shame that SEGA allegedly saw the franchise as a threat to its Virtua Fighter sales and popularity. A variation of the console box for the SEGA Saturn featured a mock screen of Eternal Champions: The Final Chapter, which never came to light. If the series was going to go away, it would have been nice if it had the chance to do so on its own terms instead of fading away with a whimper.

over the last year developer Mike Simone (MikeS) has been working hard implementing high-quality composite¹ and s-video output capability in the MiSTer FPGA project.

he's finally done cooking. result? largely fantastic. look at that shot of NES Gun.Smoke in composite. it's exquisitely analog, perfectly imperfect (the display is my PVM-2950Q). i love it and am excited about likely adopting composite video, and sometimes s-video, as my daily driver for various consoles.

but, getting ahead of myself. let's talk about how this is working, why i like it, and that time two of Sonic's creators went on record shit-talking Sega's penny-pinching on the Mega Drive.

as interpreted by MiSTer's Y/C MD core, that is.

Eternal Champions uses a ton of dithering to create transparencies and smooth gradients. this stage's fog looks much nicer in composite because the transparency effect actually comes through. you can see a lot of smoothed color blending on the wooden buildings and other areas too.

meanwhile s-video is just too good at resolving fine detail for these effects to still function; instead you see every pixel rendered discretely. this really hurts the look of this game, in my opinion.