MegaCD Spiele die die volle Hardware nutzen

Samurai Shodown was ported to various consoles following its success in the arcades. Most of the home ports were handled by Takara, who often worked with SNK on console conversions. The Genesis and SNES releases of Samurai Shodown both take many shortcuts and liberties with the source material to make the transition. Naturally,all of the scaling effects are gone. But otherwise, the most obvious alterations are with the graphics.

The Genesis version has smaller, less colorful sprites than the arcade version, though things move as quickly as they do in the arcade and the majority of move animations are intact. The Genesis has less on-screen colors overall, but uses a brighter selection that fits the style of the original game equally well. Many of the characters' animations have been changed drastically, resulting in different moves. For instance, Haohmaru's fierce slash has been changed into the same animation for his hurricane attack projectile. If you're using a three button control pad, you're stuck with an awkward control scheme where the three slashes are mapped to A, B, and C, while kicks are executed with a combination of any of these buttons. Earthquake is missing entirely here.

Despite the fact that the SNES usually had the superior versions of fighting games, its version of Samurai Shodown is pretty weak. It has absurdly small and bland sprites when compared to any other Samurai Shodown game and it's like the whole game is fought in zoomed out mode. The SNES' color palette is put to good use to mimic the Neo Geo's lush backgrounds. They hold up quite well, though any animated sprites (Kuroko, the audience in Senryo Kyoshiro's stage, etc.) in the backgrounds look just as terrible as the playable characters. In addition, many attack animations are removed completely, making for a very unbalanced game experience. While both games move at about the same speed, the Genesis version has noticeably tighter controls that feel more accurate to the Neo Geo original than the SNES version. This, combined with it retaining more moves from the original game (in hit detection if not necessarily in animation) makes for a more fluid experience than the choppy, brazenly stripped down SNES game. The SNES version has the advantage of featuring all characters including Earthquake, although his sprite is barely any larger than Nakoruru's.

Both versions have vastly inferior sound to the Neo Geo. The Genesis version comes out on top again, though both have to cut back significantly. The SNES version has every sound effect and voice over from the Neo Geo game, but the sound quality is terrible. The Genesis version has many sound effects and voices removed, but what's there sounds much crisper and clearer than it does on the SNES. The music in the Genesis version is a bit better since the SNES uses some really weird sound samples. It's a testament to Takara's skill that they were able to take such a graphically intense game and tone it down in different ways to take advantage of the different home systems of the time.

A final interesting note is that much of the dialogue is altered for both home versions. In the Genesis version, many quotes are clearly abbreviated to accomodate the Samurai Shodown font being displayed at a lower resolution in a much smaller text box (literally just two lines of text across the top of the screen). The SNES version however seems to have toned down the intensity of the dialogue rather than just the length. A good example is one of Senryo Kyoshiro's opening lines of dialogue: "Now in this scene, I rip out his heart." has become "Now in this scene, you cry like a baby."

The Sega CD version was ported by another company called Funcom, and it's the best of the 16-bit conversions. It looks a bit better than the Genesis version, and actually keeps all of the moves faithful to the arcade versions, even though there are still missing animation frames. It utilizes redbook audio to play music recorded straight from the Neo Geo version, and is the only 16-bit version to completely include the intro, with Haohmaru slicing a tree in half (including the narration omitted in the World version of the arcade game). However, there are a few trade-offs - the announcer only speaks in-between matches but never before them (i.e. the "SHOBU!" voice clip is gone entirely), Earthquake is still missing, and the judge is gone completely, as well as the running guy that tosses in bonus items. As can be expected, there's also a whole ton of loading, which is definitely the Sega CD version's worst issue. All three 16-bit versions lack zooming and suffer from pretty awful sound effects. The Genesis version is the only one with gore (despite being rated MA-13, the equivalent of a "T" rating in the ESRB system), although it's not nearly as bloody as the arcade version.