Aleste is coming back?!

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Rastan78
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Re: Aleste is coming back?!

Post by Rastan78 »

It's about time for M2 to get hip to interpolation. Take a look at a game like Shovel Knight. It uses a non integer scale to get up to full screen, and some type of interpolation has been used so there are no major scrolling artifacts. Yet the image is not extremely blurred over with the aggressive smoothing filter you see on M2/Hamster games.

Pixel perfect scaling is the next best thing, but so often a game doesn't have the correct aspect ratio and/or doesn't fill the screen well in this mode.
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trap15
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Re: Aleste is coming back?!

Post by trap15 »

pablumatic wrote:I'm guessing M2 wanted to make the game look 3:4 vertical aspect ratio and to keep pixels sharp shoved it into a smaller window. That happens on lots of modern ports of vertical shooters. That doesn't excuse it in this new game though.
All these Japanese port/emulation houses really really need to learn about the idea of nearest neighbor scaling to the nearest integer multiple, then bilinear to the final target. Keeps clean sharp pixels, without borders. I don't understand how they're still so far in the dark ages with this stuff, it's a pretty obvious solution even IMO.

Even aside from that, if the game is internally 240x320, I don't know how they managed to make it so small on the screen even with just integer scaling, since that'd still be almost 90% instead of 80%. That's what is so baffling to me.
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Ms. Tea
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Re: Aleste is coming back?!

Post by Ms. Tea »

trap15 wrote:
pablumatic wrote:I'm guessing M2 wanted to make the game look 3:4 vertical aspect ratio and to keep pixels sharp shoved it into a smaller window. That happens on lots of modern ports of vertical shooters. That doesn't excuse it in this new game though.
All these Japanese port/emulation houses really really need to learn about the idea of nearest neighbor scaling to the nearest integer multiple, then bilinear to the final target. Keeps clean sharp pixels, without borders. I don't understand how they're still so far in the dark ages with this stuff, it's a pretty obvious solution even IMO.
Is that what you did with SDOJ Exa Label in yoko 1080/4K? It looks great.
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Rastan78
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Re: Aleste is coming back?!

Post by Rastan78 »

trap15 wrote:All these Japanese port/emulation houses really really need to learn about the idea of nearest neighbor scaling to the nearest integer multiple, then bilinear to the final target. Keeps clean sharp pixels, without borders. I don't understand how they're still so far in the dark ages with this stuff, it's a pretty obvious solution even IMO.
Gotch seem to be the only ones that have figured out a good solution for this. It really is baffling at this point.
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trap15
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Re: Aleste is coming back?!

Post by trap15 »

Ms. Tea wrote:Is that what you did with SDOJ Exa Label in yoko 1080/4K? It looks great.
It does it for all resolutions, yes.
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Sengoku Strider
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Re: Aleste is coming back?!

Post by Sengoku Strider »

I've gotten sucked back into the Aleste Collection the past week. I got Deathtiny a couple of weeks back, and the necessity of practice in that game got me diving hard into the challenge mode. After a while of which I realized it was by far the best way to play these games, with arcade mode there largely as a way to put an official stamp on things.

I had pretty much ignored the challenges with Aleste Colletion, as my time had largely been spent with the GG games, none of which are overly difficult. Sadly, the mode is just not as good here. For some reason, they only divided each stage into field and boss runs. This is bizarre because the stages in some of these games are pretty long, while ESP Ra.De & Ketsui with fairly short levels got split up into field/midboss/field 2/boss, which is way more useful. Ketsui's Kizuna mode breaks things down even further, giving you 5-10 second scenarios based around your arcade mode deaths, which is amazing.

Still, just the framework of forcing you to no-miss a stage and the ease with which it's implemented is quite helpful.
Herr Schatten wrote:I used to think similarly. After I had breezed through the game on my first try, it left little to no impression on me. Upon revisiting it I paid more attention, though, and now I appreciate the apparent work that went into stage design and enemy patterns.
I went back to do the GG 1 challenges, which I hadn't touched because I 1CCed it the first time I played it. Going through it on Special is definitely a better time. I remembered this discussion a couple of pages back on GG 1 vs. 2, and I can see the case for the first game more strongly now. The first stage alone has a series of set pieces which are more impressive than just about anything in GG 2. Still, only having one attack button & no bombs or other mechanics does hold it back a little.
xxx1993

Re: Aleste is coming back?!

Post by xxx1993 »

Ellinor Waizen's birthday is on the 20th of this month. Not only that, but this is also the year she's born. I wonder if M2 has anything to say about that?
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Re: Aleste is coming back?!

Post by MrJBRPG »

trap15 wrote:Not impressed.
  • bio bosses look super out of place and terrible
  • bosses in general have almost zero animation
  • half of the music ranges from bad to just ok (other half ranges from good to bangers)
  • game start flow is excessively complicated (4 menus, then a tutorial, then 2 more menus before you start the game???)
  • gameplay systems seem messy and unnecessarily complicated
  • half of the ship types are absolutely terrible to play as (type B's aiming system makes it a huge PITA, and type D does such low damage that you'll timeout bosses and midbosses even with 100% hit rate)
  • completely baffling game screen size inside of the display (only 80% of the screen height is used???)
  • no shadows on air units at all
  • uninspired ending sequence that is just 3 nearly static shots and a book's worth of text
  • a lot of derivative ideas and designs that don't feel like they're building on their origins, but instead aping them
  • 2 difficulty modes that are so easy that even low-tier players are clearing on their first time (pretty sure everybody getting to play 35 minute credits is not a good revenue flow for an arcade game)
I also read on Arcade Otaku that the game is rejected from Exa Arcadia as confirmed by the Exa Arcadia CEO due to poor optimization and high input lag.

With its planned release on PS4, this game will not be missed from arcades, especially from an aging Sega All Net Multi-Pras.
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Re: Aleste is coming back?!

Post by Astro City II »

You'd think M2 would know how to make a shmup with low input lag by now. How weird.
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heli
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Re: Aleste is coming back?!

Post by heli »

Yes i am suprised by the black beams, would expect 9:16 full screen aspect ratio these days.
When will it be on PS4 ?, this aleste branch is the same as the M2 self made game before ?
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Re: Aleste is coming back?!

Post by Sengoku Strider »

heli wrote:Yes i am suprised by the black beams, would expect 9:16 full screen aspect ratio these days.
When will it be on PS4 ?, this aleste branch is the same as the M2 self made game before ?
This game started development as Senjn, then was retitled to Senjin Aleste. There is no home version announced.

The previous game M2 made was GG Aleste 3: https://youtu.be/RL2U8KE7V5s

Aleste Branch is yet another game they're making, which doesn't have a release date yet: https://youtu.be/Hl1eeFmWZMg
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fakeXsound
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Re: Aleste is coming back?!

Post by fakeXsound »

Yeesh. Why slap the Aleste name on it when you're not going to do anything remotely Aleste with it? The least they could have done was design some mid-bosses or bosses with that pseudo-bio-engineering look. I'd be kinda fine with it if they took the Aleste aesthetic and applied it to Cave-type stage / formation design.
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Re: Aleste is coming back?!

Post by kid aphex »

MrJBRPG wrote: I also read on Arcade Otaku that the game is rejected from Exa Arcadia as confirmed by the Exa Arcadia CEO due to poor optimization and high input lag.

With its planned release on PS4, this game will not be missed from arcades, especially from an aging Sega All Net Multi-Pras.

Yeah, not sure why they pursued an arcade release, other than to appeal to purists?

Just feed it to me digitally. I’m not one of the 20 people who have access to the EXA platform, so I could give a fuck about it not being good enough for it.

Game looks fun to me, and I can perceive the Aleste influence.
Seems like they just grafted some Aleste aesthetics onto a Bullethell.
Since STG are already a niche genre, I guess you have to hedge your bets.
I’d say it’s a safe guess that there are more “bullethell fans” than there are “aleste fans” in the STG community.
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Re: Aleste is coming back?!

Post by Samildanach »

kid aphex wrote:
MrJBRPG wrote: I also read on Arcade Otaku that the game is rejected from Exa Arcadia as confirmed by the Exa Arcadia CEO due to poor optimization and high input lag.

With its planned release on PS4, this game will not be missed from arcades, especially from an aging Sega All Net Multi-Pras.

Yeah, not sure why they pursued an arcade release, other than to appeal to purists?

Just feed it to me digitally. I’m not one of the 20 people who have access to the EXA platform, so I could give a fuck about it not being good enough for it.

Game looks fun to me, and I can perceive the Aleste influence.
Seems like they just grafted some Aleste aesthetics onto a Bullethell.
Since STG are already a niche genre, I guess you have to hedge your bets.
I’d say it’s a safe guess that there are more “bullethell fans” than there are “aleste fans” in the STG community.
With a bit of luck, we'll get a console/steam release a year or two down the line with added modes/bosses/levels a la Darius Burst Chronicle Saviours?

Personally I am not bothered at the wait as there are SO many shmups I haven't played and so many are damn good quality. We probably now have more 'good' shmups than we could properly play in a lifetime. It is both a blessing for us and a bit of a curse for new devs to try to gain enough attention in the genre. Releasing a new Aleste game (that doesn't look like an Aleste game)...I can wait. Release a compilation of old Aleste games...I WANT THEM NOW!!!
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Re: Aleste is coming back?!

Post by Ms. Tea »

trap15 wrote:Even aside from that, if the game is internally 240x320, I don't know how they managed to make it so small on the screen even with just integer scaling, since that'd still be almost 90% instead of 80%. That's what is so baffling to me.
Looks like the official site has native res screens; seems to be natively 224x288. Explains the discrepency - it's smaller than x320, but not by enough that you can fit a 4x integer scale in there.

Image

Fits with the 1080p native res screenshots on the APM3 site, which show how they're windowing it:
Spoiler
Image
I wonder why they went for that resolution over x320. Is there a particular machine they're trying to bring to mind?
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Re: Aleste is coming back?!

Post by trap15 »

Seems like some late-80s konami and early 80s namco games use that resolution. But that doesn't explain why they would choose such a strange resolution here, especially when it impacts the final result so badly. The game doesn't really resemble either of those in any remote way, and they ignore that it would've been non-square pixels on those too, so I completely don't see the purpose.

EDIT: was around so I stopped by a sega game center to give it a round for shits and do some testing. Did some input lag testing, averaged around 4.5 to 5 frames, tested on the extremely long tutorial play screen. Pretty dire.
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Re: Aleste is coming back?!

Post by ADM »

Is this a new video? I need a translator in here...
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ANUY2Pnp5V8

Aleste gameplay starts around the half hour mark.

And there's a ShotTriggers announcement for what appears to be a Tiger Heli/Twin Cobra collection at 1:13:30 (this may be old news, I'm not very up-to-date).
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Re: Aleste is coming back?!

Post by kid aphex »

Not sure if that’s a different mode?
But switching characters on the fly seems cool.
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Re: Aleste is coming back?!

Post by Rastan78 »

The main designer for Senjin Aleste is Daisuke Koizumi. Former Cave staff who worked on games like Akai Katana and SDOJ. Not to mention Rolling Gunner. Guess that explains why it's basically a Cave style game.

Believe it or not Jemini Hirono is credited on this game as advisor.
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Re: Aleste is coming back?!

Post by DMC »

Do you also know who's involved in Aleste Branch? I think that one seems more interesting to me.
xxx1993

Re: Aleste is coming back?!

Post by xxx1993 »

I just found out that Honoka Inoue (Ally from Puyo Puyo, also the daughter of Kikuko Inoue), Shiori Izawa (Ginko Kuroi from Planet With, Tini Memoril from Ginga Force, Mizarisa from Full Dive), and Noriko Hidaka (Erica Fontaine from Sakura Wars, Osanai Syouko from Aoi Shiro, Stephanie from Salamander, Josette from Wonder Project J2, Shiny Chariot from Little Witch Academia, Chairwoman Minami from Love Live) are voicing some of the characters in this game. Interesting...
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Re: Aleste is coming back?!

Post by trap15 »

DMC wrote:Do you also know who's involved in Aleste Branch? I think that one seems more interesting to me.
Garegga WR holder Yamanaka is the head of it. Like you, I also think it's much more interesting.
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Re: Aleste is coming back?!

Post by Rastan78 »

DMC wrote:Do you also know who's involved in Aleste Branch? I think that one seems more interesting to me.

Naoki Horii - Planning
Highma Fuyuno - Planning, graphical design
Masato Yamanaka - Programming, game design
Keiji Takeuchi - Music and sound design
Komatsu Eiji - Character design

Takeuchi was at Compile and did music on some of their classics in the day.
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Re: Aleste is coming back?!

Post by Sengoku Strider »

Rastan78 wrote:
DMC wrote:Do you also know who's involved in Aleste Branch? I think that one seems more interesting to me.

Naoki Horii - Planning
Highma Fuyuno - Planning, graphical design
Masato Yamanaka - Programming, game design
Keiji Takeuchi - Music and sound design
Komatsu Eiji - Character design

Takeuchi was at Compile and did music on some of their classics in the day.
He did Super Aleste. Legend.

I looked up Komatsu Eiji's artwork...I feel like I'm gonna vomit. Hyper-loli hentai involving octopi & scalpels in underwear places scalpels shouldn't go. I need to find a way to unsee that. WTF kind of person wants that on a body pillow???
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Re: Aleste is coming back?!

Post by DMC »

Promising mix of veteran developers and a novel, elite player's perspective then--sounds good on paper. :D
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Re: Aleste is coming back?!

Post by BIL »

Senjin becoming an Aleste seemed like a rebadge to me from the outset. I'll always take an interest in M2's work, but as a Zanac/Aleste fan I wasn't compelled. Yamanaka heading up Branch, now that's intriguing.

What I really want is Guardic Fukkatsu Image Single-credit labyrinth-diving gear-building topdown run/gun with STG courses ranging from LOL NOOB to JFC I'M DYIN HEAH, the baddest battlegrounds reserved for the maddest killers Image You can't do it all in one go! BLAST DOORS slam down to contain the raging scourge! EVE OF DESTRUCTION MODE puts a timer on the fucker, gets chopped hard with each credit used! Nubcaeks will not "BEAT TEH GAME" riding that continue button, they will only hasten the most upsetting GAME OVER sequence known to man! Get to the self destruct mechanism before MONSTER BABYLON crashes into FUTURE PLANET, for fuck sake :shock:

Hmm. Maybe allowing a ruined world of extraterrestrial horrors to commence might count as a bonus campaign. Deep down everybody wants to see what happens if The Thing escapes Antarctica.

I think it'd be rad. Then again I could just replay Gaiden for the Nth time, it's rad too. Image
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Re: Aleste is coming back?!

Post by Shatterhand »

BIL wrote:
What I really want is Guardic Fukkatsu Image Labyrinth-running gear-building topdown run/gun with STG courses ranging from LOL NOOB to JFC I'M DYIN HEAH, the baddest battlegrounds reserved for the maddest killers Image EVE OF DESTRUCTION MODE puts a timer on the fucker, gets chopped hard with each credit used! Nubcaeks will not "BEAT TEH GAME" riding that continue button, they will only hasten the most upsetting GAME OVER sequence known to man! Get to the self destruct mechanism before MONSTER BABYLON crashes into FUTURE PLANET, for fuck sake :shock:

Hmm. Maybe allowing a ruined world of extraterrestrial horrors to commence might count as a bonus campaign. Deep down everybody wants to see what happens if The Thing escapes Antarctica.

I think it'd be rad. Then again I could just replay Gaiden for the Nth time, it's rad too. Image
I'll only consider this serious if you've beaten the original Guardic, so you can grab your "Rootz oldschool hardcore" badge. :D :D :D
Image
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BIL
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Re: Aleste is coming back?!

Post by BIL »

Never touched it :sad: Or Final Justice! :shock: But I figure there's always time, either I sort out an MSX setup, or M2 does a proper Compile anthology somewhere down the line. :mrgreen:
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Re: Aleste is coming back?!

Post by Shatterhand »

Final Justice is under Pony Canyon trademark I guess.

Final Justice is very basic... it's fun but it's more basic than something like Star Force. Also it's hilarious that the game *does* have an ending after you beat level 99.

The game says "GIVE UP!!!!" and then shows you some end of story text and a staff credits roll. It takes about 2 and a half hours to beat it, heh.*

Guardic is a whole another beast. It's a very unique game (even more than Guardic Gaiden I'd say), and the "shooting & dodging" is completely different from Gaiden... and to be quite honest, different from most any game.

Probably because Guardic was a project solo handled by Pac Fujishima (Who also made Golvellius) while Guardic Gaiden was, IIRC, directed by Jemini Hirono (So the shooting levels there feel a lot like Zanac et all)


*This really makes me wonder if Crusader, another game from Compile but which is not a shoot'em up, does have some kind of ending. The game has 7 levels and then it loops. There's a counter showing the "Scene" where you are, so a Round 2-6 would be scene 13 for example. At the same time, the game also shows loop+level you are , by showing exactly like this.. "Round 4-3" (Loop 4 Level 3), between levels.

And there's a cheat mode where you can choose what scene you want to start, and it goes up to scene 98 (Round 14-7). I could never beat the boss on that level because that fucker seems to have infinity health and I always ended up dying. I always wondered if it's actually *possible* to beat that boss and if it would get me an ending screen or something.

I should try it now that I am older, wiser.... and have access to another cheat by using save states on an emulator.
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Re: Aleste is coming back?!

Post by Bassa-Bassa »

BIL wrote:Senjin becoming an Aleste seemed like a rebadge to me from the outset.
That's exactly what it is.

It gets even more lame - back when they announced Branch and were inquired about why it was not getting 2d visuals Horii answered it was hard or expensive to get the right people for that art style these days, blah, blah. The year after they present Senjin, made in-house as well, and it gets released sooner than Branch.


As with any revival, can Aleste really be coming back without Compile (or Eighting, for that matter)?
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