This is a comparison page for Wing Arms and Air Combat 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

Wing Arms and Air Combat for the Saturn and PS1 both run at 320x240 and the same sub 30 frames per second. The PS1 game features full screen dithering as well as transparent smoke effects over the Saturn game. Both games feature gouraud shading on enemy craft and the player's plane in "chase" mode, but the Saturn game uses dithered transparency for clouds and missile trails. By comparison, while Air Combat is using true transparency, the 2D effects being displayed transparent are also dithered, and so create a similar effect to the Saturn's approach. The light shading in Wing Arms is yet another example of a special effect the Saturn wasn't supposed to be capable of, according to game magazines of the day.

Air Combat uses a flat color for the ground, a color gradient for the sky, and places flat polygons texture mapped to look like foliage from a distance. Wing Arms uses a 2D scaling background for the water effect, dithered transparency for splashing effects, and texture mapped 3D polygonal islands for additional detail. The ground textures in the foliage spots on Air Combat appear to be of similar color count and resolution with the texture maps on the islands in Wing Arms. However, with the addition of the 2D scaling background for the water, Wing Arms presents a much more detailed picture overall. Furthermore, the foliage texture maps in Air Combat actually pop in just below the horizon, whereas the 2D background in Wing Arms scales all the way into the horizon.

Accordingly, the Wing Arms gameplay movies weigh in at .63 MB per second, nearly double that of the .32MB per second Air Combat movie files. Since both movie files are taken using the same hardware and software, and the audio is captured at 1411 kbps, this seems to demonstrate a significant increase in color for the Saturn game. 3ivx Compression was used on all video files with the exact same settings.

Sound

Both games use digital voice samples and CD Audio.

Gameplay

Both games control very similarly. Wing Arms in default controls is more arcade style, and does a barel roll when the left and right triggers are tapped, while its advanced controls allow for full control of the craft. Air Combat's default controls are similar to Wing Arm's advanced controls, and the lock on missiles make destroying enemy crafts much easier than Wing Arm's line of rockets. However, the Saturn game has only 8 second load times in comparison to the PS1 game's 14 second load times.

Conclusion

In the first level alone, Wing Arms displays absolute superiority over what Air Combat is doing. This is not to be touted as any sort of absolute example of the Saturn hardware's superiority, as Air Combat is not considered one of the PS1's finer titles. That is why a comparison between Wing Arms and War Hawk, one of the PS1's finest titles, has also been done. 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 most of what the PS1 was doing, minus transparency and full screen dithering, with the addition of the 2D backgrounds providing for a no pop-up environment.

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, Wipeout and Cyber Speedway, and High Velocity and Ridge Racer 1.