This is a comparison page for Burning Rangers and Legacy
of Kain Soul Reaver for the Saturn and Playstation 1. All written comparisons,
movies, and JPGs were made while playing the games on the actual console and
taken from the actual console through an S-Video connection.
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Comparison Comments
Graphics
Both games employ dynamic lighting effects as well as transparent 2D and 3D
objects in the form of explosions (Burning Rangers), green orbs (Soul Reaver),
and translucent polygonal light rays. Burning Rangers can be assumed to run
at 320x2xx by eyeballing the aliasing in comparison to Soul Reaver's 512x240
display. However, Soul Reaver uses the PS1's common workaround of full screen
dithering, and it is as of yet not known how many pixels are effectively eliminated
in regard to bandwidth and Video RAM by using this option.
For example, if all 512x240 pixels were actually part of the image being displayed,
then there would be 122,880 pixels total of one color each being output to the
television set. Yet if half of these pixels are eliminated through the dithering
effect then there is only 61,440 pixels being displayed in comparison to Burning
Ranger's 76,800 at 320x240 (the most likely resolution). Soul Reaver's true
resolution was obtained by using the "PSX emulator" (v1.7), which
does not interpolate the image as ePSXe and Bleem! does and which outputs screenshots
at the original resolution, as seen in Soul Reaver's "Intro and 1st level"
link above.
The proof that this display method is affecting the color counts is in the .avi
file sizes. 3ivx Compression was used on all video files with the exact same
settings. Each Soul Reaver movie file is of smaller file size per second in
relation to the Burning Ranger movie files. Since both are captured using the
same hardware and with no audio compression was used, this can only mean that
Soul Reaver is displaying fewer colors on screen than Burning Rangers. This,
when combined with the fact that both games consistently run at a framerate
lower than 15FPS, with neither demonstrating a noticable advantage in framerate
or polygon count is what leads to the fact that neither demonstrates superiority
to the other in any absolute sense.
Sound
Both games use digital voice samples, while Soul Reaver uses MIDI for the musical
scores (identical in the Dreamcast version) and Burning Rangers uses only digital
environmental effects and has no in game music.
Gameplay
Both games control very similarly when moving the characters about in 3D. Soul
Reaver is emulating the Legend of Zelda 64 with its lock on function, and Burning
Rangers is a prototype of Sonic Adventure's gameplay of the following year's
Dreamcast launch title. There is nothing evident in the gameplay that demonstrates
that one game is doing more on the processing level than the other. Soul Reaver
has a single load time of less than 6 seconds from the start, and then employs
a unique streaming load technique, while Burning Rangers typically takes 10-12
seconds to load one level segment.
Conclusion
On a gameplay level, Burning Rangers and Soul Reaver become totally different
games. However, they both represent cutting edge software for their respective
systems and genre, with Burning Rangers being released over one year earlier
than Soul Reaver. The conclusion is inconclusive in regard to which game demonstrates
absolute superiority, either technically or in gameplay, over the other. It
is certain that a much more detailed analysis could be done of the video files
to determine which game system is technically doing more on average, but the
fact of the matter is that the no technical advantage is easily demonstrated.