[Dynamo of Eternia]

It may not technically be a "lazy port" since it is meant to be the arcade version, but it is disappointing that we aren't seeing some kind of version with the features added for some of the home console ports back in the day.

While the Saturn was sadly short-lived due to Sega's botched handling of it in almost every regard, it was still a great system in many respects, and not just for what it potentially could have done, but for things that it actually did.... unfortunately a lot of those things required buying imported games due to the system's death in the US market.

The biggest thing was the RAM expansion cart that, when combined with the system's internal RAM, tripled the overall RAM capacity of the system on it's own.

To date the only decent official home console releases of X-Men vs. Street Fighter and Marvel Super Heroes vs. Street Fighter were the imports for the Saturn. They were very close to being arcade perfect ports. The RAM cart allowed it to have the full tag-team feature and pretty much all frames of animation, with very, very short load times.

The PS1 versions in the US, by contrast, were very stripped down by comparison, being 1 vs. 1 with an assist character, and with many frames of animation missing from the characters that were present.


But back on the topic at hand, many consider the Saturn import of Street Fighter Zero 3 (the Japanese name of Street Fighter Alpha 3) to be the definitive version of the game. It also utilized the RAM cart. While the differences are not nearly as drastic as the aforementioned X-Men/SF & Marvel/SF games, the Saturn version of SF Zero/Alpha 3 is still overall considered to be better and more arcade accurate (in terms of graphics, animation, etc.) than the PS1 and even Dreamcast versions of the game, while also featuring the extra characters and features added for the home versions.

SFZ3 for Saturn goes for INSANE prices on the secondary market because of this.




I still plan to get this collection and it looks great overall. But I still shake my head a bit at the catch-22 old arcade games being ported to modern consoles.

Back in the day of the 16 and 32 bit eras, when it came to many games including the Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat titles, many people, myself included, were interested in getting the ones that were closest to the arcade version as possible, especially in terms of graphics. There was always some degree of trade-off, and few ever came close to being "perfect" back then. However what I, and I assume many others DID like were some of the extra features added to some of these games for the home ports, including cheat codes, extra features, extra modes, sometimes additional characters, etc.

Today's systems are more than capable of providing the desired accuracy to the arcade versions, but since more often than not these are now released as straight-up arcade ports, they usually lack the extra features, options, characters, etc.

On the MK side of things, as great as it has been having more arcade accurate versions of the original games, it kind of stinks that they've only released the arcade games and haven't re-released Mortal Kombat Trilogy... which in most regards is superior or Ultimate MK 3, as it is basically just another upgrade to MK3 that added in many more features from the previous games. At minimum I would love to see it re-released for current consoles accurate to the PS1 version in all respects except that loading times will no longer be an issue. So there would be no more having to compromise in terms of Shang Tsung's morphs, for example.

If they could go a couple of steps further, I wouldn't mind seeing a few aspects of the N64 version added in. While the N64 version was inferior in most respects by comparison to the PS1 version, it did have a small handful of things going for it. Scorpion has an addition Fatality that he does not have in the PS1 version. The PS1 version had a male character called Chameleon, a ninja who randomly turned into the different males ninjas based on his color, N64 had the female character Khameleon, which was the same concept, but with the female ninjas. It would be cool to have both of them in an updated release of MK Trilogy. Due to the lack of loading times, the N64 version also features a 3 vs 3 mode, and also had a code that could be entered on the 2-player vs. screen that would allow both players to randomly change into different characters during the match. Mortaro and Shao Kahn had fatalities in the N64 version of the game that they didn't have on PS1. Due to memory limitations of the cart format, some characters were removed from the N64 version... in particular, the unmasked Sub-Zero was removed entirely, and some of his moves added to the masked version. It would be cool if the masked version could retain those moves, but without the removal of the unmasked Sub-Zero. There's probably a few other oddities that I'm not thinking of off-hand.

It would just be nice to see a little attention to detail in this regard with this current re-releases. I can't imagine that it would take extensive work to make these things possible on current systems.