Thread of HD Remakes/Remasters, official emulation & BC.

Yes I think that’s exactly what’s up. They will be individual releases at $30 or $40 each.

Koei Tecmo are said to be cooking up a Ninja Gaiden Trilogy remaster package, and according to leaked details…they are only working with the Sigma versions of 1 and 2…

Sigh.

No More Heroes 1 and 2 are out on Switch, and to my surprise it appears to be the rare modern port handled with care and attention.

No More Heroes 1 plays at an unwavering (so far) 60fps, with the motion controls handled via the Joy-Con. This is a huge improvement from the PS3/360 ports from AQ Interactive, which often felt choppier than the original Wii’s uneven framerate.

Engine Software appear to have handled the ports, they did Killer7 on PC. Either way, great work - good to see they didn’t port the games to Unity engine as we’re seeing more regularly these days.

How are the controls? Should I opt for the Wii version or are the ones on Switch just as good?

Games that were made around the Wii remote always feel “off” when on other platforms. Is that what we are looking at here too?

Also is it a direct port of the Wii version or does it have the “updated” visuals of the ps3/360 version? Guess I can find that out pretty easily by just looking at some screenshots…

Surprisingly good, but dodge-rollingoff on the right-stick isn’t as good as using Wii remote’s D-Pad. But the actual motion controls feel the same as they did on Wii to me, despite the difference in controller size.

It looks like the Wii game to me, but it’s been a decade since I touched the PS3 release. I only had the first PS3 port of it, too, not sure what changed for the version Konami published outside of Japan

Soul Hackers Saturn compared with 3DS:

What is cool about this port is Atlus didn’t just take the assets from the Saturn game and zoom them in to fill the wider display of the 3DS, you actually see more to the sides that wasn’t there before. This extends to the world map where you’ll see more to the left even though you can’t physically move beyond the same point that was the edge of the screen on Saturn.

I wonder if the assets were always generated like this and were cropped for the Saturn game, or whether someone at Atlus went back and regenerated them?

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The Switch conversion of Baroque is a delight.

It’s the Saturn version running emulated, and Sting hasn’t employed a Unity engine wrapper, instead going for a home-built solution for the visual options or front-end, which is fast, snappy, and visually attractive.

Saturn frontend

Widescreen:

There’s even an option to enable/disable mesh alpha transparencies, it’s set to on by default for that authentic appearance. And because the Saturn version supports anamorphic widescreen, you can combine that with the full screen visual setting to create a 16:9 image. There’s also scanline options in addition to mimicking the curvature of a TV.

Visual settings:

Mesh transparencies left on

Mesh transparencies set to off

All this, including the emulation, appears to be the work of a single programmer at Sting according to the credits: https://www.mobygames.com/developer/sheet/view/developerId,327013/

From what I’ve played it certainly feels like an authentic recreation of the original Saturn game, right down to the lighting of the polygons and the rendering of quads. Only niggle is there’s no analogue controller support, the left stick seems to be substituting for the D-Pad.

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It’s a port of the Saturn version, not emulation.

It’s emulation - the credits page credits the programmer for the emulator too.

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Doesn’t mean emulation is used for everything, could be partial with ported elements like M2 do for a lot of titles.

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This is true, I would love to hear more from the programmer involved on the project.

Me too, that’s a lot of work for one person!

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Picked up Daimakaimura on PC Engine game archives on PSP.

I’m surprised this one got approved for release in the end, it seems like the PSP isn’t capable enough for SuperGrafx emulation. There is a lot of frame skipping going on when things get hectic, making the game unplayable during these moments as you can’t make out what’s happening.

The artwork also doesn’t scale well to super sharp video output. While Dungeon Explorer II’s backgrounds and sprites looked fine on the PSP’s display this one is overly sharp. And the colours are wrong, as if the PC Engine was outputting RGB instead of composite.

Just thought I’d mention this since the HUCARD is pretty expensive now.

Always thought it was strange how the courtroom in Ace Attorney was yellow, despite the official art of the game showing it as brown. Then I remembered the series originated on the GBA, and as we know the artwork in many a GBA game appears incorrectly on newer devices with a higher colour gamut.

Ace Attorney is no exception, as you can see from the comparison shots between the game running on DSi XL and Game Boy Micro below:

So how did Capcom’s HD remaster fare in this respect? Well, not great. For many art assets the team has redrawn them from scratch rather than lazily upscale and sharpen, and that’s great, but colour saturation is inaccurate.

The artists must have used the GBA assets as the base, but displayed them on their monitors without colour correction.

The frustrating thing is the core artwork for the game reveals how it’s meant to look, a stark contrast to the game itself…

image


As @poptart pointed out in the other thread, an even better look at the original art assets would be to photograph the game running on an original GBA or AGS-001, unfortunately I didn’t have one to hand, but the remaster already being a stark difference to how the game displays on a GB Micro is already not great news.

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For me the most effective remakes were Shadow of the Colossus / Ico. I love the originals and prefer them for nostalgia but from a visual standpoint both look amazing remade

There’s a remaster of Shin Megami Tensei III coming out soon, thought I’d take some comparison shots between the game running at 480i via S-Video on a JVC-TM-H140PN, with the HD remaster running ‘raw’ at 1080p on PS4.



image





Everything certainly looks a lot more angular now the geometry is output at 1080p, from Chiaki’s face, to the left side of that tree above, to the lady’s shoulders.

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I think I’m okay with this. Would prefer it just literal upscaling over redone poorly. Hope it looks good in motion.

This is true. I’m more worried about the input latency and long load times (compared to PS2) reported by reviewers in Japan, probably a symptom of it being ported to the Unity engine.

Eggsackly what I am hoping to see gets ironed out in patches. I’m already mads about the dlc but it will be a full nope if it has performance issues.