This is a comparison page for High Velocity and Ridge Racer 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

High Velocity/King the Spirits (1995) runs at 30fps, with occasional drops in framerate and virtually no visible pop-up. HV runs at an unknown resolution, probably 320x224, with no lighting or transparency, but has some kind of environmental/atmospheric effect that makes the texture maps lighter in color as they get further from the screen.

Ridge Racer 1 (1995) runs at a rock solid 30fps (60fps in the premium disc with RRIV, 1999) with occasional, but very far away, pop-up especially in the more dense building areas. RR1 runs at 320x240 resolution, with no lighting or transparency apart from the 2D menus overlaying the 3D graphics at the beginning of a race.

Going by the movie files, High Velocity weighs in the lowest at 1.08 MB per second, with Ridge Racer at an effectively identical 1.19 MB per second. The Turbo mode on the RRIV premium disc weighs in at 1.15 MB per second, which indicates that each of these games is displaying roughly as much color wise per frame as the other. With that said, the Turbo disc runs at 60 frames per second, which is a momentous achievement that took four years to achieve.

Sound

Both games use digital voice samples and CD Audio.

Gameplay

Each game controls very similarly, while both maintain their own unique flair in the power slides. High Velocity has 15 second load times, while Ridge Racer has approximately 20 second load times.

Conclusion

What this comparison does is compare two games in the same genre, released within a month of one another. In that comparison, there is no support for the portrayal game magazines gave the Saturn in 1995, as the Saturn game is doing all of what the PS1 was doing.

As early as 1995, there was already a huge disparity between what could be seen on either system in gameplay, and what magazines, and subsequently their subscribers, were touting about the comparison. Other 1995 comparisons on this site include the aforementioned Wing Arms and War Hawk comparison, Wing Arms and Air Combat and Wipeout and Cyber Speedway.