Damn, this is all awesome news, always wanted to try Saint Dragon.
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While we’re talking about DLC would you mind helping me - I definitely want to pick up the Black Label DLC on my PAL 360 but I’m not sure where to start.
I presume 1.01 was also listed on the marketplace as DLC because of the 4MB patch limit?
I would. I’m considering it so I can play some more titles like Otomedius Gorgeous, Mamorukun Curse and Tetris Grandmaster Ace. Leaderboards are also preserved (and should continue to be since MS is committed to BC and XBL on 360 needs to be up for that to work)
I don’t have my hopes up because everything they’ve worked on so far in the modern age has been on Unity engine with input lag.
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I have zero expectations that anyone but M2 can get the slowdown right or provide a response anywhere near real hardware but there is no harm in waiting a little while if those games are your focus.
Apart from Futari all the 360 ports have at least two frames more lag than the PCB’s so nothing is as responsive as the real thing, but yeah there is no doubt that City Connection and Zero Div (who were bought by CC so could work on this stuff) have poor form in this regard so far, especially when it comes to the Switch.
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ElectricUnderground really needs to be capturing at something higher than 60fps for his lag tests. To be more accurate he needs to be capturing at something more like 960fps.
This is totally tangential but I also wish people would stop using lag for processing time. No the PCB on a CRT doesn’t have 4 frames of lag, its 4 frames of processing time.
Yeah, I skipped the PC ports as well for that reason. That and they weren’t feature complete anyway.
I also forgot about the ZeroDiv acquisition, even though their Switch ports were on their own engine I definitely noticed the input lag that you described on their Switch releases.
Thanks so much for the link, wasn’t aware of this! I’m really not a big fan of the proliferation of Unity engine in genres where response or bespoke systems matter. Input lag along with bloated filesizes (Pac-Man on PS4 is close to 1GB!) due to all the included libraries just feel blasphemous. And then there’s the loss of craft - the menus in Super Monkey Ball BB HD were butchered presumably because they couldn’t be easily recreated in Unity.
btw - do you know how accurate Cave’s in-house iPhone and iPad ports from 2010-2012 were? I remember being really impressed by what they achieved at the time (I wouldn’t have dreamed the iPhone 3GS capable of that sort of 2D performance) and I remember the later games had toggles for slowdown, were the games offering arcade accurate on-screen playback?
@ShinJohnpv His results are a good enough rough estimate, all this stuff should be taken with a grain of salt. But you don’t need a 960fps capture to know that the Switch is far from responsive in a lot of these titles which was the only reason I posted the link. At the end of the day you either consider something responsive enough to have fun with or not.
We are talking about how long it takes a game to respond to a players action, whatever the source or processes behind that are the end result to the player is input lag.
@harborline_765 The mobile stuff was all built around touch screen controls, the player craft can zip around the screen at a silly rate, they really aren’t trying to give an arcade experience but are still pretty fun.
I don’t think I actually own anything that uses Unity so have zero first hand experience but I do wonder if the weak CPUs on the current gen machines contributes to the problem, reducing latency takes a lot of additional overhead that these consoles just don’t have.
This is why I don’t get into these conversations because people would rather grossly generalize and miss use terms than be accurate. Using input lag and just losey gosey defining it as how long the player waits for an input to show up muddies the conversation. Processing time and input lag are two very different things, while the end experience may be similar, one is usually taken into account for when developing a game, and one isn’t. One is also consistent across everything, and one can vary based on tv/monitor used, and some other factors.
I just hate this catch all use of Input lag.
Yeah I get that, that’s why I had to specify “on-screen playback”. Sure, your character can move faster than at the arcade, but for ports (rather than entirely new games like DoDonPachi Maximum or Aka to Blue which are made for fast character movement) it’s still important that everything which happens on-screen matches the arcade.
I think you’re right about Unity. I would be interested in seeing what the latency is like on Tekken 7 on PC. That was Unreal 4 and the console versions had four extra frames of lag.
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It’s years since I ditched my old phone with all that stuff on it so I really can’t remember how they performed against the home ports. I’m sure the shmups forum will have discussions on them that would be more helpful than my poor recollection.
Bit late of a reply, but Raiden Fighters Aces was supposed to be released in Europe too. I had it preordered on Amazon Germany in 2012, but it was delayed and then cancelled due to reasons unknown to me.
Actually, I did a search through my mail and the page is still up at Amazon, including the unreleased German cover of the game. https://www.amazon.de/gp/product/B006M8HGME
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I wish that happened. Picked up a NA copy after misreading a region free chart and then felt very silly when it arrived…
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No problem! I’ve been thinking about Mushihimesama Futari a lot when I’m away from my 360 this week so I ended up digging out my last device from almost seven years ago which had the iPhone port on it. Good way to familiarise myself with the levels when I’m out and about haha.
It does indeed have arcade-accurate slowdown, at least from my very recent recollection of M2’s 360 port. There’s an option in the settings to turn it off too.
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Rolling Gunner on Switch is now on sale for $15.99 (normally $19.99). Been thinking about getting it for awhile, I know ex-Cave talent worked on it plus it looks colorful and fun and I haven’t played a manic horizontal shmup since Progear.
Picked it up last summer on Switch myself, you should go for it. The audiovisual design is really impressive - particularly the little skits between stages. They are just delightful to watch.
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I’m waiting on the physical Switch release, because I already bought the doujin DVD PC release. I’ll double dip on Switch, though.
Is that an iPhone 5S? Looks like my old phone. Cave recently updated the games to be compatible with iOS 13, so if you decide to update, it should work, from what I understand.
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This weekend I was in the mood for playing some PS2, and decided to fire up some Raiden III and Ibara. I bought both of these new back in the day, and played the hell out of them back then. While I have the discs I played both off a hard drive, specially for Ibara so I could run the 240p hacked version.
I was doing pretty good in Raiden III with consistently making it to Level 4, and making it to the boss most times. Then everything fell apart and I was struggling to get past Level 2. Hate how that happens sometimes. I think its a solid entry in the series, and I’m all about the Vulcan shot. I don’t know if its just me but I feel like the lasers are less useful here than in other entries. Could just be me though. I also kind of wish they had used more 2D visuals in this one. It’s not bad for the era for things do get somewhat muddy at times. Though I am just looking now and see that Raiden III can be patched as well and I haven’t done that yet, I need to get on that. I don’t know how I missed that when doing all the other games I have.
Then I fired up Ibara. I felt like Gandalf when he’s sitting in the mines of Moria. I used to play the hell out of it back when I first got it. I fired it up this weekend and sat there thinking “I have no memory of this place…” I swear I played the hell out of this but I do not remember anything about it at all. Playing it this weekend it kind of felt like Cave’s take on Battle Garegga. Which looking up some details it seems this is exactly what it was. With the main programmer of BG, Shinobu Yagawa joining Cave and being asked to make BG at Cave. I can really see now why people want a modern port of this. The blurry filter, and lack of slow down, almost make this not worth playing. There is no doubt that M2 could do a much better modern port of this. Where as I am ready to jump back into more Raiden III soon, I think with Ibara I might wait for a different way to play it.
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Curious about how the patched games look. I’ve read conflicting reports, some saying it looks great, others saying it can’t accurately downsample the 480i stuff to 240p, and that you don’t get a good 1:1 pixel conversion, so images look “wrong” when playing the patched games. It would be interesting to take a game like Raiden III and run the 240p image through an OSSC, and then 5x line double it to 1080p, and see how that compares to the PC/Steam version. I have the PS2 version, so it might be kinda fun to try this out.
I’ve been playing the M2 ShotTriggers games: Esp Ra.De, Battle Garegga and Dangun Feveron. Still waiting for Ketsui to arrive in the mail (and get the other JP only game they only released digitally). They’re all great games and also great ports.
I’m not super skilled with these games, so I’m really happy M2 added all these additional (easier) arrangements, super easy mode, tons of options and challenges. Since I missed all of these games when they were released originally (no arcades where I grew up) it’s all pretty much new for me.
These are also great games to play with my son (5). (He really likes the hidden rubber duck (is it a duck?) character in Dangun Feveron.)
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