smoreon

Most localization prototypes aren't especially interesting, since they were made after the final Japanese build, but JSR is an unusual case: it has two new levels that were added for the North American version, which is why they can be seen in an incomplete form here.

"Non-textured 3D"... so it would have looked like Viewpoint or Silpheed, then?

I understand that full English translations would be costly, but it's a shame that they're not at least doing multi-platform releases. Not all of their potential audience is on Switch!

@845H The main draw so far is that this appears to properly support 60fps and widescreen. Both of those were possible on emulators, but 60fps had certain objects (like the penguins) moving too quickly, and the widescreen mode stretched the HUD instead of repositioning everything properly.

Why do I suspect that this show is mainly going to give the middle finger to Duke Nukem fans?

@marciolsf Oh, I'm aware that enterprise-grade stuff is expensive- and potentially a headache (having had some rather nightmarish experiences in the past, involving an aging server with a RAID 10 array).

In cases like this, though, anything is better than nothing. If someone had just gone around and stashed a bunch of stuff on consumer-grade media, companies like Square might have had an easier time now. (Obviously, that carries its own reliability risks, but we're talking about data that otherwise had a 0% chance of surviving.)

I know it does no good to go, "they should have done this and that" now, with the benefit of hindsight. But it's still a shame.

@Blofse I get that things were expensive back then, but I'm talking specifically about a major company (with a budget) developing a game in 1997 (1990 tech would be a whole other beast!), and about the possibility of using cheap storage.

SCSI drives have always been very expensive per GB, and the cost of that 500 MB drive could have bought a stack of consumer HDDs, which could affordably offer a couple of gigabytes each in 1997.
Of course, the reliability isn't on the same level, but I'd personally take the redundancy any day. Plenty of consumer HDDs from over 20 years ago still work, too, so chances are good that the data would survive.

And then there are tapes. I never personally dealt with those, but I understand that they offered multiple GB each, even back then, and at a relatively cheap price for the time.

Or even burned CDs! They're not known for their longevity, but I still have burned CDs which are almost that old, and they still work flawlessly. I didn't even keep them stored in a cool environment or anything.

TL;DR: My point is that there were plenty of ways to store a couple gigabytes' worth of data in 1997 (besides high-end servers and SCSI disks), and not all of them were expensive, especially for a major company. Other companies pulled it off, but Square apparently didn't consider it important.

@Tasuki Makes sense- the best time to buy is when the games are "old" and "outdated", but not yet "vintage". For NES, that was around 2000, when games were going for $2-3 CAD. For PS2, it started around 2010 and continued for quite a while.

But I'm still a little surprised that NES (etc.) games have come down at all. Your reasoning is solid, but I had always just assumed that prices would only ever go in one direction, once a game/console passed into that "vintage" status and was in demand again. Oh, well, I'm not complaining!

@Tasuki I recently noticed a bit of that stabilization as well. All those $3 games on systems like the PS2 and Xbox 360 have had a bit of a price hike, but a lot of older games, which had been getting pricey, seem to have come down a bit.

Not sure the top-end ones like Chrono Trigger and Earthbound have come down, though, as I'm not looking at those!

@MARl0 Neo Turf Masters has been on modern platforms for years now, under its Japanese name: Big Tournament Golf.

@marciolsf A server would be expensive, sure, but what was stopping them from just buying a few 2 GB hard drives, stashing everything on there, and sticking them in a vault? Not sure that'd be enough to hold all of the raw asset files*, but it'd at least keep the source code safe.

*Obviously, the team's project files would be much, much bigger in total than the final game's 500 MB or so, but I don't have much of a reference point to go on. I seem to recall Factor 5 saying a Rogue Squadron game (2 or 3) on GameCube produced almost 1 TB of files, but that game was a massive leap in fidelity over FFT. Taking a wild guess, maybe FFT could have used 10-20 GB, depending on how things were managed?

EDIT: Also, fairly high-capacity tapes were an option, and may have made things more feasible.

Not personally interested in picking up another copy, but I'm glad more people can play this!

Though I should probably mention that the PC version has been available on GOG for quite some time, often goes on sale for about $2, and should run perfectly on even very old laptops.

Nice! I still prefer this one over the N64, DS, and Wii versions. (Haven't played New Leaf or New Horizons.)

I wonder what kinds of enhancements people will cook up for this, whether for GameCube or any hypothetical ports.

Ouch, the irony of deciding to bring Duke Nukem Forever to the PS2, after a different Duke project ran into development troubles.

Anyway, the time-travelling premise sounds like it could have been fun (and probably just a tiny bit stupid!), assuming the story and game design really leaned into the absurdity of it all.

This definitely would have been cool to see, though I'm not sure that a Tenacious D soundtrack would have fit. Seems like it would have been too much of a departure from the game's tone.

@Goj Not really- the Switch 1 is an absolute potato. Nintendo got Super Mario Sunshine running pretty well, but my understanding there is that the code was recompiled (effectively translated) in advance, making it a hybrid of native and emulation.

If you try running even an older, faster version of Dolphin on an old PC, you'll see that just emulating 6th gen consoles on an Xbox One or PS4 is already a huge undertaking, and those are well ahead of the Switch.

@ArcadeRacingCENTRAL Great to finally have some confirmation as to where that stutter came from, so thanks!

The GameCube and especially PS2 (probably Xbox as well) slowed down considerably whenever there was a lot of dust/smoke being kicked up, like when starting a race. I had always assumed that the jittery appearance while turning was caused by the smaller amount of smoke coming from the tires at those times (i.e., just enough to slow the game down to around 55-58fps, causing little stutters).

But then I ran it in Dolphin with overclocking, and the juddery turning was still there. I don't recall looking into it further, but I was a bit confused after seeing that.

Looks great on PC, but the lack of the Dreamcast (+GCN/PS2/Xbox) features makes this arcade-based port of 2049 somewhat less appealing by comparison.

Should be easily the best way to play SF Rush 1/The Rock, though!

I like the ridiculous Arabian Fight (I think that's the one) scaling they've got here, where it's a little exaggerated, but still looks really cool in a '90s way.

If the Dragon Ball IP is eventually being removed, then does that mean a commercial release is being considered?

Where do they get "over 40 years of experience in the videogame industry"? I assume they're counting their mechanical games without video displays, but that's a stretch! They could just call it "the games industry" and technically be telling the truth.

Looks pretty impressive, based on those screenshots. That beach one literally looks like a scene from a 3DS game! And assuming the overlay at the top is accurate, then their claim of "high framerates of at least 30+ FPS" is understating it a fair bit.

@PrivateCat Better get on that, then!
Ape Escape 1 and 2 are about $10 each on modern PlayStation consoles, if you have one.

@gingerbeardman Looks like the author(s) scrubbed the whole thing instead of correcting the errors: no tweet, no article on their site. Seems really fishy.

I don't even know what they got wrong. There is indeed a Mario Kart 64 decompilation on GitHub, and it just reached 100.0% in the last couple of days, apparently.

I would have assumed that Nintendo put a gun to the writer's head, but that same X account still mentions the Mario Party 4 decomp, so I really don't get it.

Quite the milestone, even if Mario Party 4 wouldn't have been my first choice!
This game already runs beautifully on original hardware and emulators, but one enhancement that it could benefit from is added geometry outside the camera bounds, allowing for wide/ultra-wide display modes.
Most of the environments were built with a fixed camera in mind, and only the bare minimum was modelled. (Actually, I think there's at least one place where you can see just past the edges of the map, even without hacks.)

Great stuff! PC port or not, it'll be great if someone cleans up the timings: there is already a 60fps code for emulators, but certain elements are too fast. (This game's whole way of handling speed/timings is really janky.)

And HD texture packs also already exist, but maybe we'll be able to get 3D models for the characters now?

This could be my excuse to finally get around to playing Driver 2, if all goes well!

@MegaManFan What would the correct order be, then?

A full decompilation would make it way easier to actually fix the bugs, add new content (if necessary), and finish the game. A recompilation like this also helps a lot (even if it isn't quite as thorough or as easy to work with), and to my understanding, the recomp can act as a sort of reference point that makes a proper decomp easier to do.

Once the game has been improved/completed, compiling it again into a PC executable or N64 ROM is relatively simple, as opposed to trying to poke at addresses by hand and cram new data into a tightly-packed 64MB ROM.

"I'm interested in this."

-Alucard

@MysticWangForce Arcade (from GT3 onward?) is just a quick race mode, with the same sort-of-realistic handling as the sim mode.

Simulation mode is named for the aspects of saving up money, making purchases, and tweaking your cars between races, but the core gameplay during races is exactly the same, as far as I could tell during my time playing GT3.

The visual spectacle there is something else- not even F-Zero GX's track designs were quite that wild!

I wonder if this actually plays well, though. That footage looks a little chaotic and hard to parse at times, even in 1080p60. So much stuff flying around, and at a low framerate to boot.

@BulkSlash I had no idea that this worked on real hardware now! It seems that modders found ways to optimize the game considerably. It's far from a true 60fps, from what I'm seeing, but it stays above 30 most/all of the time, which is an accomplishment in itself.

Note that this optimization most likely took a lot of work. Removing a 30fps cap is simple, but making the game engine fast enough to actually run at 60 on real hardware is not!

The 60fps code itself is, as with many games, just changing a single number. Some games immediately work flawlessly with this (at least on emulation), whereas others need a ton of manual work to fix everything. DKR was in-between: its 60fps hack needed a few tweaks, but it's possible that the people behind the N64 optimization have fixed that, or are going to.

It's rare that a game is capable of considerably better performance, but simply doesn't enable it- that'd be a huge oversight! There's almost always a reason for the limitations. Though I will say that some games, such as Tomb Raider Legend on GameCube, or the Sonic Storybook games on Wii, run quite well at 60fps. It would seem that the devs couldn't get it stable enough for their liking, and made a judgement call to cap it at 30 for a more consistent experience.

@MG4M3R It looks like he's saying that Linda's design was approved immediately, but Amiga had to go through 30-40 different designs before the orthodox one was accepted.

Naka: "Do you think people will assume I'm interested in genderless characters like this, given the fact that I'm not married?"

I don't think this would have occurred to anyone, had he simply not brought it up!

@Aiden_Warren I think we all know about emulation here!

Decompilations, and especially native PC ports, allow for all kinds of enhancements that aren't possible through emulation. For example, there's a hack that makes the N64 version Diddy Kong Racing run at 60fps, but it has a few bugs, as all it does is change a single number. A decomp would make it easier for someone to go through the code and tweak any of the timings that aren't working properly.

And imagine all of the new content that modders could add to a PC release: new characters, new tracks, etc.!

@slider1983 I thought it seemed like that, too. It might be because old games could only move things (objects as well as the screen itself) around by whole pixels, with no in-between.
So if the screen is scrolling very slowly, like 30 pixels per second, it can only shift over by one pixel on every second frame: effectively resulting in 30fps scrolling, even while the characters are moving smoothly!
That might be what's giving the impression of choppier motion in the original (which scrolls very slowly at times) compared to the faster scrolling seen in this remake.

@slider1983 This is 60fps, the same as the arcade and Genesis/Mega Drive versions.

@Andee I'm just imagining the clickbait that could come from this:
"You won't believe what Skeleton #1 from King's Field looks like now!"
"Skeleton #2 is all grown up now, and he's mind-bogglingly gorgeous!"

Wait a minute- does this mean they already got the original PS2 textures working on Dreamcast, and are now trying to go beyond even that?
Last I saw, the textures were all scaled down by half, due to the Dreamcast's RAM limitations.

Nice! This is still available on PS3, but it's great that it's available for a wider audience now, and with higher resolutions!

I've never played Breath of Fire, but I've heard it's quite good... and quite weird.

Kudos to them for releasing all of these materials of their own volition!

@Andee And the Omega Collection, while they're at it!

It's strange and unfortunate how limited/quiet the Wipeout series has been lately. Is there a tangled legal situation, or something? I'd love to see Wipeout come to more platforms. Not sure if Sony would have to give permission for the Omega Collection specifically, but some previous games have been on competing consoles like the Saturn and N64, so it's not like it's exclusively their series.

@Quick_Man I didn't say anything about this agenda or that.
Is it not objectively true that:
1. Many Japanese/anime-ish games have been blocked or censored* in the past decade or so.
2. Other games have gotten away with the same stuff on a T or M rating.

*Using "censored" in this context to mean something was provably toned down or removed, regardless of whether it was caused by governments, ratings boards, company standards, etc.

@Zedecks Video games themselves probably wouldn't be able to exist if companies had to fully appease both Californians and Texans!

@MSaturn It's a Japanese/anime game thing. Significantly stricter standards when games have "anime" looking characters, regardless of the characters' ages.

I thought Sony was the most zealous about anime character censorship, followed by Nintendo.
But now there's stuff that even they are okay with, that Xbox won't allow?

@SpaceChurro Thanks for this! It's what I had suspected, but it's good to finally have confirmation of the translation's status.

Wonder how long it'll take for modders to put the original script back in, so we can have our Tootsie Pop references and whatnot.

@slider1983 They go for deep discounts fairly often, at least!

@Daniel36 I assume "wizard" refers to those step-by-step setup/installation programs?
It sounds like there's a modern- and somewhat sketchy- Unity engine app which launches first, allowing you to change some settings or something, before it launches the actual game.

@KingMike All true! I noticed a mention of "puzzle shooter" on the box.
I have played it, and the connection to Tetris is pretty flimsy. (I was only being half-serious about counting it.)
Though it technically is a puzzle, and it involves falling blocks, so...

@-wc- Columns is older than Dr. Mario, at least. That's the only one I can think of, but there must be others. (Does Quarth count?)