Slam Dragon (1996) Sony PlayStation Gameplay in HD (Beetle PSX HW)

Game name - Slam Dragon
Original Title - スラムドラゴン
Console - Sony PlayStation
Game Release - 1996-04-12
Publisher - Jaleco
Genre - Fighting

Slam Dragon is akin to Virtua Fighter with 2D sprites. With one punch, one kick, and a guard button, you have various short attack strings and "special moves" that are flashier single attacks or longer attack chains. There are no projectiles or burning/electric attacks, even supers are nothing more than a long series of attacks or throws. Knockdowns are often excruciatingly long in order to allow pursuit attacks and the juggle system seems to be open for anything once someone is airborne. Some fake 3D elements are present, such as characters getting knocked into and out of the polygonal backgrounds, and a sort of sidestep ability.

As for the quality of the game, well, I'll say I've played worse. The controls are ponderous and unresponsive, making calculated performance inordinately difficult while mashing becomes the more effective tactic. The characters are all fairly well differentiated, if not original in the slightest. Terry Bogard, a black dancer, the cleavagey grappling cop, Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan, and a wrestler, with the Japanese lady luchadore and big monk being "standouts." You also get a weird kind of cyborg/mutant boss guy.

Graphically Slam Dragon is quite poor. Both the FMVs and more importantly the sprites seem to suffer from massive compression issues. Many non-key frames of character animation are blurry, artifacted messes. This on top of the graphics being pre-rendered CG to begin with, an artistic technique that has not aged well at all. Given that, it's hard to find fault with the 3D backgrounds.

RetroArch Settings
Core - Beetle PSX HW
Renderer - Hardware
Software Framebuffer - On
Adaptive Smoothing - On
Super Sampling - On
MSAA - 16x
Internal GPU Resolution - 8x
Internal Color Depth - 32bpp
Texture Filtering - Nearest
PGXP Operation Mode - Memory
PGXP Vertex Cache - On
PGXP Perspective Correct Texturing - On
Line-to-quad hack - Default
Widescreen Mode Hack - On
Frame Duping - On
CPU Frequency Scaling - 100% (Native)
GTE Overclock - On
GPU Rasterizer Overclock - 32x
Dithering Pattern - Off

My PC Specs
OS - Windows 10 Home
CPU - Intel Core i7-7700K @ 4.20GHz 4.20 GHz
GPU - NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX 1070
RAM - 16.0 GB

#game
#ps1
#Fighting