Saturn Virtua Cop: Alpha vs Retail

Yup got it confirmed by Madroms it says Work in progress. Thanks both.

 

no worries. :thumbsup:

Yakumo

 

The 30% complete version of HOTD pictured is the very same one that SSM featured in their first coverage of this disappointing Saturn conversion, which originates from a build sent to Sega Europe in late November '97 that led to the game's release date being brought forward a month. What nobody could have predicted at this early stage in its development was how Tantalus failed to live up to its promise of improving the game's visuals, and since then I've checked up my SSM back issues to find that the first stage was finished quite early on, though some placeholder information was still to be found in the screenshots printed from this earliest publically-seen build. Sadly, the final version still lacked a few polygons here and there, plus it seems from further analysis that the last two stages appear in the retail game without any of the (less than obvious) optimisations Tantalus (supposedly) gave the first two, bearing even scrappier background textures and the same occasional absent polygon certain enemies suffer throughout. Honestly, despite all this criticisms, I doubt even AM1 could have done much better considering the amount of time Sega ultimately gave Tantalus - not as if their past Saturn efforts were 100% either, of course!

According to descriptions from SSM's first preview of the 30% version, there isn't even a sprite of the actual houe in the background of stage 1 this early into the game's development. Also, there are a few placeholders to be found once you get upstairs as much of the debug information seen related to the location of power-ups. Can anybody confirm this, as it seems the version being shown now might actually be the same as the SOE build and perhaps even sourced from there somehow? If this is the case, it's known that a certain high-ranking member of Sega's European operations still carries around with him/her (let's keep this anonymous for now) a the finished, second revision of another Saturn collectors' holy grail... do you need any more hints? I sure would love to see that leak as well, especially if something as obscure as an early HOTD preview can so easily!