Road Rash - Sega Saturn and Playstation 1 Comparison

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Observations:

Road Rash was originally released for the 3DO, Electronic Arts' first and only attempt to dominate the game console market. A port of the original Genesis game's graphics engine was made for the Sega CD in 1994. The Sega CD game contained the 3DO version's menus, grunge music and cutscene movies but none of the level designs. The 3DO game was then re-released without significant modification on the PS1 in January of 1996 and then again on the Saturn in June of 1996. The Saturn and PS1 games are effectively the same, with the only differences being typical to games on both platforms. The original 3DO game would have been limited to roughly 20,000 polygons per second, well below one quarter of the polygon counts of first gen Saturn and PS1 games. Accordingly, the port to the Saturn and PS1 uses sprites for the bikers, pedestrians, obsticals, vehicles and track side details. In addition, the tracks and "3D" scenary seems to be running not on polygons but on distorted sprites (i.e. Doom). Just like the original Genesis games, the camera is always locked behind the bike and never shows different angles in order to demonstrate that the buildings or cliffsides are actually "3D". Without camera controls, even if only in replays, this assertion cannot be proven either way.

Comparison between these two versions of the game is interesting on many levels. Electronic Arts was one of the first developers to begin publicly denouncing the Saturn's 3D capabilities while bloating the PS1's capabilities. According to EA representatives, the PS1 could actually display 360,000 polygons per second, while the Saturn was supposed to be limited to the 60,000 that Daytona USA ran with. In reality the PS1 and Saturn were both floating around 80,000 polygons per second in games released between 1995 and 1996. Were Electronic Arts' words based in reality their own software should have shown some kind of gap in performance.

Graphics:

The Saturn game appears to be running at 320x224 and the PS1 at 320x240, which is more of an aspect ratio change than it is a resolution difference. The PS1 has a slightly longer view vertically, which results in being able to see underneath the car in chase view. The PS1 version adds building shadows in the City level to the side of the building sprites that are facing the screen. In addition, the PS1 game has a translucent shadow under the bike, but the dithered far background shows that this change was not free of charge. The Saturn game has a dithered black shadow under the bike and no dithering in any other part of the scene. Both games run at the same framerate, which is typically close to 30 frames per second.

As has been noted in other comparisons on this page, full screen dithering significantly lowers the color counts on screen in PS1 games. The use of gouraud shading for the building shadows has the potential, however, to shoot the color counts up again. This is indicative in the respective file sizes of the movie files for the Saturn and PS1. The de-interlaced movie files for the PS1 and Saturn versions ran at roughly 2.2 MB per. This seems consistent with the other movie files on this site that use gouraud shading and full screen dithering.

Gameplay:
Both games play with the same apparent controls and arcade style physics. AI for the other bikers seems a bit tougher in the PS1 version when playing "Thrash mode," which is the arcade mode apart from the main game that features incremental difficulty.

Audio:
The 1994 Sega CD and 1996 PS1 games use the exact same CD Audio for music, but the PS1 has unique digital sound efffects. The Saturn game really appears to be unfinished as a result of the CD Audio being replaced during gameplay with excessively muffled midi "music" that sounds more like a bad joke than any kind of BGM. Also, if one attempts to just turn off the engine sound in the options menu, all sound begins to crack up during gameplay, even basic sound effects, and this also causes no music to play. Audio glitches like these in the menu and in the game makes it more than apparent that Electronic Arts did not finish the Saturn game before releasing it.

Conclusion:

Had EA focused its assertions more on the ease of programming effects onto a PS1 game, rather than blowing the system's 3D capabilities up to unreasonable heights, this comparison would not be nearly as conclusive. Because EA and the media claimed a performance increase of over 600% for the PS1 in 1995-96, the absolute lack of any evidence in software demonstrates their assertions were merely part of some flawed marketing scheme. The Saturn and PS1 games are practically identical in sprite counts and framerate, therefore neither game demonstrates the absolute superiority of one system over the other. The preference of one game over the other would more likely be based on system preference rather than any subjective impression of the games' respective graphics. Using AV cables would also eliminate the PS1 version's dithering, rendering the games almost identical.