StarBlade/Development

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Development

The Sega Mega-CD port of StarBlade is most notable in its presentation: while the arcade original featured extensive 3D levels, the Mega-CD has nowhere near as much processing power as the original arcade boards, and instead utilizes what at first appears to be full-motion video backgrounds. However, upon closer examination, and with insight from both the community and the game's developers, it was realized that the Mega-CD's backgrounds are actually rendered polygons; due to the game's nature of being "on rails", all the polygons appear in the same spot in every playthrough. By precalculating where these polygons are in advance (on Tecnosoft's computers), and then giving the Mega-CD a list of locations to drawn those polygons, the system can reasonably display an accurate rendering of the arcade version's backgrounds (a technique also used in other games with linear cameras, such as Crash Bandicoot.)