Acclaim's 32X love

[redsox2013]

Acclaim was the only manufacturer to produce plastic clamshell cases for 32X games, and the only one (as far as I know) to print color instruction manuals. Meanwhile, everyone else (including Sega) used cardboard cases and black & white manuals (although Acclaim's Mortal Kombat II port was released in a cardboard case with a color manual).

Acclaim was a major third party player in the mid 90's; maybe they really felt that their 32X products needed to be higher quality than the competition.

[xelement5x]

It's possible they wanted to make their games stand out on the shelves more. In a store with rows of cardboard boxes, the clamshell will catch you eye and maybe convince you it's a higher quality product.

[Da_Shocker]

Uhm what color manuals are you talking about? All of my Acclaim games have b&w manuals. Now if you're talking about using glossy covers on the 32X and not those xerox manuals I will give you that one.

[asmikace]

Acclaim wanted to make the packaging look good to hide the fact it the games were meh upgrades of existing Genesis ports. But hey, having a better version NBA Jam TE is a reason to keep my 32x hooked up.

[redsox2013]

Yeah, that's what I meant. Acclaim's 32X manuals are the same quality as most manuals for the Genesis.

[SEGACOOL]

Looking through my collection. Front cover in color really stands out. Noticed EA Toughman Contest had used a front cover in color. Brutal also. Appreciate Acclaim using plastic vs cardboard.

Little differences like that sometime get overlooked. Good observation.

[cowboyscowboys]

They did the same for their late Genesis release games as well. Sticking with clamshells and glossy covers for their manuals. So it wasn't like they were showing the 32x any special attention.

[Tor Landeel]

I would say anything about Acclaim expect there was love to the 32X, considering the lazy ports.
Mortal Kombat irritates me everytime I play it.

[Zebbe]

Maybe they just had leftover stock of Genesis boxes they wanted to get rid of...

[madhatter]

Maybe they just had leftover stock of Genesis boxes they wanted to get rid of...

They are not the same, they were specifically made for the 32X.

[Tower of Power]

Well, Akklaim manufactured their own games, unlike most third parties, no? They probably just didn't get the memo that Sega was going with cardboard and stuck with what they knew. Probably not any benevolence on their part.

[Barone]

I have my own take on this subject.

If the 32X had succeeded, it would have been good for Acclaim.

They had invested heavily on 2D games with digitized/pre-rendered sprites instead of 3D like other companies were doing around 94/95.
Pretty much all their money was on 2D games with huge digitized sprites and pre-rendered backgrounds.
On top of that, those games also relied on extensive use of voice samples for aural wow factor.


None of that was well-suited for either the Genesis or the SNES; due to several reasons.

On the Genesis the graphical issue was both the 9-bit master palette (making original art look awful after automatic conversion or requiring a laborious conversion process to look "OK") and the reduced number of the sub-palettes (digitized backgrounds with only 16 colors tend to look like vomit with poor shading). Voice samples tended to sound scratchy and distorted, with the system having no hardware support for audio compression on top of that.

On the SNES the visual issue was that pre-rendered-based animation tends to consume a lot more VRAM and the system had a hard limit to the amount of RAM it could use for sprites.
Voice samples would usually sound better than on the Genesis, but they had a hard limit in terms of audio RAM (being shared with music data as well) and to reload them quickly (for narration purposes) wasn't an easy task.

By 1994/1995 both systems had tiny VRAM and very limited number of on screen sprites compared to what Acclaim was pushing with their arcade games.
Acclaim games would look pale and undersized on the Genesis. Undersized and sluggish on the SNES.
They would sound noisy and garbled on the Genesis, muffled and quieter on the SNES.


Such games also weren't well-suited for CD-based systems due to the huge amount of graphical and audio data they required for each stage or round.


All Acclaim could wish for was a cartridge-based 32-bit home system with good sound and graphical capabilities.
The 32X was far from being state-of-art in any of that but, at least on paper, it could perform much better than both SNES and Genesis. And it wouldn't have the loading times of the CD-based systems.

[Peeteris]

Thanks for the info Barone, didn't know that.
Would rep if forum allowed me to do that again.

Eh, if only Sega would have made better decisions back then

[Zebbe]

That's a very interesting perspective and well thought out analysis, Barone! A lot of companies had a hard time adjusting to the staff-heavy 3D games of the era (Technosoft for example), and looking at it this may be how Acclaim tried to tackle it.

[Barone]

Big US publishers such as EA and Acclaim probably didn't want to lose the kind of control the cartridge market provided to them.
Only a handful of companies could manufacture the cartridges and they would toy with the hard limits of the production runs according to their best interests. They had a lot more control of what was on the shelves that way. Most developers were just little puppets in the hands of publishers such as Acclaim.

With CDs things changed quite a bit for companies like that. They couldn't run the market anymore just by creating batches of playable photocopies of blockbuster licenses.