Psikyo games coming to Steam

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TransatlanticFoe
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Re: Psikyo games coming to Steam

Post by TransatlanticFoe »

Ice Beam wrote:EDIT: Changed subject title

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1261 ... KERS_1945/

It's being published by City Connection, who published the PC port of Psyvariar Delta.

They also have plans to bring other Psikyo shmups to Steam:

https://www.gematsu.com/2020/04/striker ... -to-follow
Pricing seems to be in line with the Switch releases - possibly a bit steep to gain traction on PC. It's a tough sell when the emulation has been there for years, the odd enthusiast might pop a purchase to support the current rights holders but I'm not sure more casual PC gamers will until a price drop/collection discount.

After it was clear on Switch that these were being drip-fed out and physical editions started to appear in Japan, I waited and bought the EU compilations. Not vastly pricer than the individual releases and some nice bonuses thrown in (even if OST for some Psikyo games aren't exactly selling points).

Slightly surprised we aren't seeing these on PS4 too really, unless they did that badly on Switch. Still not noticed any input lag, just missed diagonals on the joycon pad and/or analogue stick - bit of a bummer to be relegated to docked play because of that.
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banjoted
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Re: Psikyo games coming to Steam

Post by banjoted »

FWIW, I wrote about games professionally for over a decade, and DRM critics are right up there with Star Citizen apologists on the single-minded mentalist scale.
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blossom
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Re: Psikyo games coming to Steam

Post by blossom »

While MathU is obnoxiously fixated on the subject, you have to admit he has a point. I'm going to ignore the fact MathU awkwardly views Steam itself as DRM - which, okay, it is, but who gives a shit - and instead talk about DRM on a more general level.

As much as I'd like to buy Dragon Quest XI on Steam, I'm afraid because of Denuvo. How do I know if I'll be able to play the game in three, five, ten years from now, if Denuvo goes out of business? There's also the issue of limited machine activations, however either that has been changed or clarified recently, in that I've seen a couple store pages on Steam say "five machine activations per day", so it's not as restrictive as change parts in your rig more than five times and then you'll never be able to play it again. Still, the idea of Denuvo etc going out of business and then losing access to my games terrifies me. And the argument I've heard from some people is if that scares me so much, why not pirate them in the future? To which I'd offer the reply, why not pirate them now? I'd prefer not to, but if that's really the best option, DRM is a failure.
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To Far Away Times
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Re: Psikyo games coming to Steam

Post by To Far Away Times »

There is a world of difference between Steam DRM and bullshit like Denuvo.

I've used Steam since Half Life 2 came out. Steam's DRM has never once prevented me from playing a game or inconvenienced me.

Denuvo is shit. It has blocked me from playing games before and it is well documented that it decreases performance in games. There's also a strong likelyhood that the games on it will be lost forever when Denuvo shuts down.
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Elixir
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Re: Psikyo games coming to Steam

Post by Elixir »

Domino wrote:
MathU wrote:I wish that were a complete solution, but paying money for anti-consumer practices simply encourages more of them. The consequences for this behavior must be monetary or developers and publishers will never get the message.
I hope you understand that the Japanese normally do not like DRM-Free at all. They are very conservative with regards to digital rights. I also believe they have strict Anti-Piracy laws in Japan. End of their day their culture viewpoint on things like this plus their laws will provide direction with regards to their digital games. They will not care what a gaijin thinks about DRM. I accepted this fact ten plus years ago, and per the market gamers overwhelming prefer Steam over something like GOG. The market has spoken a long time ago on this matter, and in the end of the day gamers prefer convenience. You lose, admit it.

And yes, I prefer DRM-Free stuff in the end of the day. However, people made their decision a long time ago. Stop spamming the forum.
Where are you getting any of this from? 10+ year old preconceived notions about the Japanese doujin scene? There was no Japanese documentation 10 years ago for releasing your games on Steam (eventually they started putting games on Greenlight's process), all doujin games went through western publishers (ie. UFO with MOSS, Rockin Android with PlatineDispositif, Nyu Media with Siterskain), doujin games without any anti-piracy measures are released bi-yearly at Comiket (how do you think westerners are playing the latest Touhou mainline games day 1? they're not buying them), and commercially mainstream retail releases are usually geoblocked from Japan (there's a whole Japanese wiki on this issue) in order to prevent consumers from undercutting domestic sales for consoles/physical releases.

Arguing over DRM is pointless though so I'm not really sure what to say. I'm not going to bother defending Steam, I barely even use it (hell, in NZ you can't even sell digital games on consoles on the basis that you don't own them). People don't take MathU seriously because he's monotonous but maybe you could articulate yourself differently than just going "lmao ur autistic XD".

On-topic, City Connection bought Zerodiv which was operated by an ex-Psikyo employee, so I'm curious to see how their Switch backports will work without having to cope with Switch's native input lag.
I haven't actively browsed/used this forum in many years and it's no longer an accurate representation of me.

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FunktionJCB
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Re: Psikyo games coming to Steam

Post by FunktionJCB »

It seems the ports will be coming fast and furious. :mrgreen:

Like I previously mentioned, GUNBIRD is out on May 11th:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1261970/GUNBIRD/


A page was just added for Samurai Aces, which is out on May 20th:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1261 ... urai_Aces/


And by the way, STRIKERS 1945 is out now:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1261 ... KERS_1945/
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Arthandas
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Re: Psikyo games coming to Steam

Post by Arthandas »

FunktionJCB wrote: And by the way, STRIKERS 1945 is out now:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1261 ... KERS_1945/
Did you try it? I'm curious how it performs, or in other words, what did they manage to mess up.
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banjoted
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Re: Psikyo games coming to Steam

Post by banjoted »

Am keen to hear how 1945 is.
FunktionJCB
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Re: Psikyo games coming to Steam

Post by FunktionJCB »

Arthandas wrote:
FunktionJCB wrote: And by the way, STRIKERS 1945 is out now:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1261 ... KERS_1945/
Did you try it? I'm curious how it performs, or in other words, what did they manage to mess up.
Sorry, while I did purchase it already, I'm yet to try it, since I'm swamped with work. :)

The only thing I can tell you at the moment is that I noticed it doesn't have cloud saving.
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Arthandas
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Re: Psikyo games coming to Steam

Post by Arthandas »

FunktionJCB wrote: The only thing I can tell you at the moment is that I noticed it doesn't have cloud saving.
That's a non-issue for me. I'm mostly curious about pixel perfect scaling, tate mode and general lag.
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SAM
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Re: Psikyo games coming to Steam

Post by SAM »

I have bought Strikers 1945 at Steam. And it does have some basic features missing:
-No Practice/Training Mode, and no save State either.
-Could not save Replay, and thus could not download and view other players' games at the online Ranking board.
-Online ranking board do not have sub-boards which separate the type planes being used.

Others than these the game is perfectly okay.
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Arthandas
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Re: Psikyo games coming to Steam

Post by Arthandas »

SAM wrote:I have bought Strikers 1945 at Steam. And it does have some basic features missing:
-No Practice/Training Mode, and no save State either.
-Could not save Replay, and thus could not download and view other players' games at the online Ranking board.
-Online ranking board do not have sub-boards which separate the type planes being used.

Others than these the game is perfectly okay.
But did the other ports had those features?
What about pixel scaling and tate?
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Klatrymadon
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Re: Psikyo games coming to Steam

Post by Klatrymadon »

FWIW input lag in the Steam version of Strikers 1945 seems as low as was claimed (I'm testing it using the Brook UFB, which should be a decent yardstick).
FunktionJCB
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Re: Psikyo games coming to Steam

Post by FunktionJCB »

Klatrymadon wrote:FWIW input lag in the Steam version of Strikers 1945 seems as low as was claimed (I'm testing it using the Brook UFB, which should be a decent yardstick).
Glad to hear it!

With at least two more Psikyo games coming next month, it will be great to revisit these titles, with worthwhile ports.
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SAM
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Re: Psikyo games coming to Steam

Post by SAM »

Arthandas wrote:What about pixel scaling and tate?
This version of the game has Tate mode and the pixel scaling seems okay for me.
Arthandas wrote:
SAM wrote:I have bought Strikers 1945 at Steam. And it does have some basic features missing:
-No Practice/Training Mode, and no save State either.
-Could not save Replay, and thus could not download and view other players' games at the online Ranking board.
-Online ranking board do not have sub-boards which separate the type planes being used.

Others than these the game is perfectly okay.
But did the other ports had those features?
The point is these have become basic features for Shmups games nowadays. Not how the pervious port of this game had done.
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Arthandas
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Re: Psikyo games coming to Steam

Post by Arthandas »

SAM wrote: The point is these have become basic features for Shmups games nowadays. Not how the pervious port of this game had done.
I disagree, this is a port, not some major re-release or remaster. If previous versions of 1945 didn't have those features, you shouldn't expect them here.
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Re: Psikyo games coming to Steam

Post by el_rika »

Arthandas wrote:
SAM wrote: The point is these have become basic features for Shmups games nowadays. Not how the pervious port of this game had done.
I disagree, this is a port, not some major re-release or remaster. If previous versions of 1945 didn't have those features, you shouldn't expect them here.
PC aside, why would anyone buy this then, when you can play it in mame, possibly even better? Some extra features would be a good incentive, but it's just a rom in an emulator, no effort for anything extra.
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Re: Psikyo games coming to Steam

Post by Square_Air »

Arthandas wrote:
SAM wrote: The point is these have become basic features for Shmups games nowadays. Not how the pervious port of this game had done.
I disagree, this is a port, not some major re-release or remaster. If previous versions of 1945 didn't have those features, you shouldn't expect them here.
This is 2020 and any shmup being released without these features is incomplete IMO. No replay saving and not separating ships in the leader boards is amateur. No practice mode/training mode/save states also means that MAME will be the superior option most of the time since Psikyo games are memorization heavy. Tate is probably included, pretty sure the previous ports had it.
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Re: Psikyo games coming to Steam

Post by MathU »

It's becoming so difficult to compete with emulators that have years of dedication and countless contributors behind them that I really do wish rights squatters would just give it up already and release full-blown ROM licenses. I would jump all over that. Not even the most impressive and dedicated commercial port developers like M2 are able to compete with the feature sets of emulator communities that have myriad man-hours of work baked into them through the sheer virtue of being open source. If they were super interested in enhancing the experience they could submit their own improvements or features to existing emulators.

So what's the verdict: are these City Connection releases crippled with Steam DRM or not?
Of course, that's just an opinion.
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Bassa-Bassa
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Re: Psikyo games coming to Steam

Post by Bassa-Bassa »

MathU wrote:Not even the most impressive and dedicated commercial port developers like M2 are able to compete with the feature sets of emulator communities that have myriad man-hours of work baked into them through the sheer virtue of being open source. If they were super interested in enhancing the experience they could submit their own improvements or features to existing emulators.
It depends on what "enhancing the experience" means for everyone. M2 concerns about accuracy much more than any of those contributors to free emulators (except for Byuu, maybe?), likely because they were also gamers and have the means to know well how the games play, unlike say Mame devs (who were always more interested in quantity and testing themselves out).
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Arthandas
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Re: Psikyo games coming to Steam

Post by Arthandas »

Some impressions from TEU:
https://youtu.be/Doz0byGQcuA

Also, they posted this:
"We'll keep checking the forums and continue to update.
And we have some updates in mind.
Thank you for your continued support."

So maybe it'll get some additional features.
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Re: Psikyo games coming to Steam

Post by Jeneki »

The Hamster releases might be a better comparison point, as they are recent and in the same price range.

Those have a rudimentary save state, screen rotation in either direction, full button config with autofire options, multiple zoom and filter options (including none at all), and multiple online leaderboads (one with defaults enforced).
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BIL
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Re: Psikyo games coming to Steam

Post by BIL »

Yeah and no fuckin lag :cool: (on PS4 anyway!) Not meant as a comment on the Steam Psikyo stuff, I ain't played it.
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Arthandas
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Re: Psikyo games coming to Steam

Post by Arthandas »

I got my hands on it and the port is crap: 4 frames of input lag, no pixel perfect scaling and you can't extract the rom because it's not using one (the files are loose).
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Re: Psikyo games coming to Steam

Post by Bassa-Bassa »

Not what I'd call unexpected.
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Re: Psikyo games coming to Steam

Post by mainpatr5 »

I will be laughing so hard if the eventual Sengoku Cannon PC port is worse than the original.
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Re: Psikyo games coming to Steam

Post by BrianC »

The 4 frames of lag sounds even worse since I heard that was on Windows 7 without V-Sync.
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Re: Psikyo games coming to Steam

Post by Klatrymadon »

It's 4 frames? Christ, I need to spend more time with it - it felt responsive during my quick test, but then my only points of comparison are various older console ports. Apologies for any false reassurance!
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clippa
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Re: Psikyo games coming to Steam

Post by clippa »

Well, I've no way of measuring it but it feels nice and nippy to me playing with vsync off at 144hz. Feels a lot faster than the various ways I've emulated it in the past so I'm more than happy. This is the way I'm gonna play this game from now on.
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banjoted
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Re: Psikyo games coming to Steam

Post by banjoted »

Agreed, feels good to me on my Gsync monitor too.
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