Monster World IV (Sega Genesis) — Full Playthrough
0Hands down one of my favorite games for the Genesis/Mega Drive.
Responsive controls — check.
Adorable pixel art — check.
Beautifully orchestrated soundtrack that carries a central theme — check.
This was released in Japan in 1994, but didn't officially make its way to the US until 2020. Apparently it's playable on the Sega Genesis Mini, and a remake was released in 2021 for PS4, Switch, and Steam. What I'm playing is the original Megadrive version, with a fan translation patch by Michele Di Somma. (If you ever see this, Michele, thank you. I owe you a beer. Or something.)
It's a good thing I really like this game, because SO many things went wrong during the recording process. A veritable comedy of errors.
Playthrough #1: O.G. Sega Genesis Mk II, modded for improved video and audio quality. Got all the way through to Ice Pyramid I. Didn't like the way the dithered fog was being picked up by the capture card. Tried OSSC. Tried RetroTINK 5X Pro. Messed with settings ad nauseum. It all boiled down to "choose between sampling phase artifiacts, or occasional single-frame vertical sync losses". I went for the nuclear option, and switched from original hardware to the Analogue Mega SG. Time to restart from the beginning.
Playthrough #2: Analogue Mega SG. Complete playthrough. Start editing the video in kdenlive (to join segments together, let's not pretend that what I'm doing has any production value), and discover that the editing software recognizes my videos as 60fps, imports them as 60fps, but treats every second frame as a duplicate of the one before it. As in, stepping through the footage, you see frame 1, frame 1, frame 3, frame 3, and so on. I'm a Linux user, and I'm using open-source utilities for all of this, so it's a learning process. If kdenlive doesn't work, I'll switch software. Gave Flowblade a try — same thing. Openshot? Ditto. Pitivi — you get the picture. Come to find out, most video editing software is just not happy if you feed it source video that has a variable frame rate. 60fps video is important when recording retro video games, so I've got a major issue on my hands. I attempt to convert the video to constant frame rate, and the audio desynchronizes. Badly. I slowly come to the unpleasant realization that all of the video I've recorded up to this point is unable to be edited. Time to restart from the beginning; again.
Playthrough #3: Analogue Mega SG. First session — play from the beginning of the game to halfway through Handera volcano. Second session — pick up where I left off, get up to Ice Pyramid III, and X11 crashes on my capture workstation. FFMpeg doesn't exit cleanly, so it doesn't finalize the video... and I am made aware of the extremely unpleasant fact that the video container format I was using for recording — MP4 if you're curious — is one of formats that saves extremely important metadata at the very end of the recording. (I did mention that I'm new to this, right?) In other words, all of session #2 is gone. By this point, I've long since overwritten the save file from the end of the first session, so I can't pick back up from there. Yes, I know I could probably synthesize the metadata, since I know what the recording parameters are... but it'll most likely take less time to recreate the footage. It will definitely involve 100% more "playing video games" and 100% less "slogging through white papers". Time to restart from the beginning; yet again.
Playthrough #4: We've learned valuable life lessons. We're recording entirely digitally. We using CFR and a container format (Matroska) that's recoverable if something crashes. We've set ourselves up for success, and we're going the distance. And I discovered an easter egg I'd somehow never encountered before! If your money quantity ever hits exactly 777 gold, the game will give you another 7,000. Watch for it at around the 53 minute mark!
Video notes:
Original video format was 1080p@60fps, cropped to 1284x1080 to remove dead space. The Mega SG was configured to use the "zero delay" video mode, meaning its clock speed was adjusted to run 0.13% faster, outputting 60.0 frames per second rather than the NTSC Genesis' original 59.92275. The result of this is smoother video, but it does mean that this playthrough is 22.818 seconds faster than if it had been played on original hardware. I'm not a speed runner, so I'm perfectly fine with this.
Video recording path:
Analogue Mega SG → Magewell USB Capture HDMI+
Audio recording path:
Analogue Mega SG → Magewell USB Capture HDMI+
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