Dreamcast-Talk.com

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Going to have to pick this up. I don't know if I want the LE or not.

I sat on the fence about the LE, but I'm a sucker for guidebooks. They just said that you can find a Mega Drive cart in game and unlock the 16 bit version. That's kind of cool. I wanted to check out the original sprite artwork.

Well the sprites (characters, enemies,...) remain the same. The only thing to be redrawn will be the backgrounds and the cutscenes.

Omnibot2000 wrote:Well the sprites (characters, enemies,...) remain the same. The only thing to be redrawn will be the backgrounds and the cutscenes.

Ahh, ok.
So I guess you get to unlock 16 bit cutscene goodness then.

Probably not. Those bonuses seem to be designed for the HD versions. What we get is more than likely going to be a direct port of the Genesis version but, as mentioned before, a couple of things will be redrawn. I think there's a lot of confusion regarding this and showing the SD/HD comparison on the front page of DCTalk isn't going to help diminish that.

This is from the update, so I guess they have the unlock on all versions.


Wow, 57,000 in 2 days...we are really humbled by everyone's support. We can't express how excited we are and how much we are looking forward to bringing you guys Pier Solar HD!

We've got a surprise for everyone to celebrate!

We wanted to keep this easter egg a secret till a little later... but since there have been so many questions about it, we decided to announce this for everyone right now!

The original SEGA Mega Drive/Genesis graphics of Pier Solar HD will be playable on every single platform, XBOX360, PC, Mac, Linux, and Sega Dreamcast.

It will be unlock-able by finding a special in game item, a "Pier Solar Mega Drive Cartridge" that is hidden somewhere in the very beginning of the game...

Once you fin d this, it will unlock the entire version of Pier Solar for the SEGA Mega Drive & SEGA Genesis!

BrianC wrote:Probably not. Those bonuses seem to be designed for the HD versions. What we get is more than likely going to be a direct port of the Genesis version but, as mentioned before, a couple of things will be redrawn. I think there's a lot of confusion regarding this and showing the SD/HD comparison on the front page of DCTalk isn't going to help diminish that.

Pier Solar on Dreamcast won't be a direct port of the Genesis/MD version. They'll take the backgrounds and cutscenes of the HD version and scale them down to 480p (which is still twice the resolution of the Genesis/MD version). The backgrounds and cutscenes will still contain all the (hundreds or thousands of) colors of the HD version. The Genesis/MD version managed to display more than 64 colors at once (which is the official limit of the system's capability) using tricks like shadow- & highlight-mode, but the DC version will of course look significally better because of its (PC/Mac/XBox) origin.

Even the HD versions will contain SD-sprites though. I'm still not sure if I like that. I hope WaterMelon will spice things up with some nice transparency- and lighting effects for the spells or at least more colors and/or more frames of animation for the (SD-)characters and enemies.

Ahhh thank you for clearing that up! That makes all the difference in the world; I just had no interest in buying a relatively direct port that would probably run worse than it would on the MD for such a high price. Now that I know that to not be the case then this project sounds very exciting. Had anyone played Piers Solar on the MD because I'd love to hear some thoughts.

Impulse wrote:Topics merged so it might look a little messy.

http://dreamcast-talk.com/forum/viewtop ... f=2&t=5127