Platinum Games announces Sol Cresta, Sequel to Terra Cresta

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BIL
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Re: Platinum Games announces Sol Cresta, Sequel to Terra Cre

Post by BIL »

Despatche wrote:Cresta is barely a coherent series. Also some games in the series are not called "Cresta", e.g. Dangar, which is very obviously a followup to Terra Cresta in a way that Terra Force really is not.

This game looks good though. They probably specifically tried to model it after Terra Cresta, because that's the right thing to do.
"Ongoing series" meaning Platinum's Neo-Classic Arcade Image :wink: (sounds like a given, but "Toaplan Shooting Battle Vol.1" and whatever Saturn Batsugun was subtitled haunt me from their graves!)
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Re: Platinum Games announces Sol Cresta, Sequel to Terra Cre

Post by Despatche »

I swear I wasn't referring to that specific line, just to the topic. Games like Sol Cresta are often dismissed as cheap cashgrabs. Some people were already taking aim at those new Aleste games because they aren't 1:1 Compile clones (which is terrible and you don't want that).

I also hope this continues to be a thing, yes. Shmups renaissance please.
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Re: Platinum Games announces Sol Cresta, Sequel to Terra Cre

Post by Astro City II »

BIL wrote:
Despatche wrote: "Ongoing series" meaning Platinum's Neo-Classic Arcade Image :wink:
I think the 'Neo-Classic Arcade' series is a Hamster Corp project. Platinum are just the first announced developer to make a game for it.
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Re: Platinum Games announces Sol Cresta, Sequel to Terra Cre

Post by BIL »

Platinum's English blog seems to call it their own:
This game will also be the first title in PlatinumGames’ new brand, the Neo-Classic Arcade series. Stay tuned for more games in the series, in which the essential fun and spirit of classic games will be polished with modern technology and skill.
I'm happy either way, though. Hamster have really stepped it up this gen. AFAIK, besides Nichibutsu, they own NMK's catalogue as well (going by ACA Thunder Dragon's title screen). Whoever's ultimately in charge, a dev of Platinum's stature being first up is a promising start.
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Re: Platinum Games announces Sol Cresta, Sequel to Terra Cre

Post by Bear78 »

New trailer out today. Coming out this year.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L5BsIw9fV3E
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Re: Platinum Games announces Sol Cresta, Sequel to Terra Cre

Post by Darkseed_5150 »

Bear78 wrote:New trailer out today. Coming out this year.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L5BsIw9fV3E
Wow. Cant Wait!
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Re: Platinum Games announces Sol Cresta, Sequel to Terra Cre

Post by Rastan78 »

Yuzo Koshiro on music duties!? Oh damn.

I wonder if Hideki Kamiya Creative Director / Story means he's not actually doing much but they wanted to make sure to name drop him right off the bat anyway lol. I do know he's a real arcade head with a big collection of classic PCBs and some solid high scores under his belt. Even had a jerry rigged 3 monitor setup so he could play his Ninja Warriors PCB. So either way his involvement on some level ought to be a good thing.

Very interested to see how this goes and if it leads to other retro sequels. The name recognition and credibility of Platinum could bring a lot of attention that this kind of project might not normally get.
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Re: Platinum Games announces Sol Cresta, Sequel to Terra Cre

Post by xxx1993 »

So 2021 or 2022? When is it coming out?
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Re: Platinum Games announces Sol Cresta, Sequel to Terra Cre

Post by CRP »

xxx1993 wrote:So 2021 or 2022? When is it coming out?
see the trailer dont want to spoil it for you ;)
xxx1993

Re: Platinum Games announces Sol Cresta, Sequel to Terra Cre

Post by xxx1993 »

Also, is this really going to be the final chapter of Cresta as a whole?
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Re: Platinum Games announces Sol Cresta, Sequel to Terra Cre

Post by Creamy Goodness »

The Yuzo Koshiro soundtrack alone will likely make it worth the price of admission. I think I will pick this up.
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Re: Platinum Games announces Sol Cresta, Sequel to Terra Cre

Post by Marc »

That actually looks really, really good. Looking forward to this one immensely.
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Re: Platinum Games announces Sol Cresta, Sequel to Terra Cre

Post by FRO »

Looking forward to seeing more footage, but the initial concept and trailer is looking mighty good!
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Re: Platinum Games announces Sol Cresta, Sequel to Terra Cre

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Re: Platinum Games announces Sol Cresta, Sequel to Terra Cre

Post by Rastan78 »

So nice to see a modern vert shmup release that has a certain degree of visual polish, actually isn't a bullet hell or heavily Cave inspired game, and on top of that no inappropriate 12 year old lolis with massive boobs.

NGL the first stage was looking a little bland gameplay wise right now, but no doubt things will pick up and become more challenging later. Can't really judge a game by its first stage, especially with a super choppy stream frame rate and no sound/music.

Funny to see Kamiya was mashing shot on the cab yet when he held down on the button autofire was present anyway. Guess he just has those decades of arcade mashing muscle memory going on.
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Re: Platinum Games announces Sol Cresta, Sequel to Terra Cre

Post by Ghegs »

That looked pretty nice. The length of the stage was on the long side at ~8 minutes and there were some barren sections here and there, but at least the latter could easily be remedied while they're still tweaking the game, and/or by difficulty settings. I think there were some environmental hazards too which I appreciate, though I also thought the background was a bit too busy at times.

The formation shots look really cool, those should give tons of tactical options. And changing the order in which the ships dock together and having that change your shot types reminded me of Super Robot-shenanigans, that was neat as well.
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Re: Platinum Games announces Sol Cresta, Sequel to Terra Cre

Post by DietSoap »

I have to say this looks a lot better than I was expecting, honestly.
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Re: Platinum Games announces Sol Cresta, Sequel to Terra Cre

Post by Sengoku Strider »

Ghegs wrote:That looked pretty nice. The length of the stage was on the long side at ~8 minutes
I'm not sure where I stand on this right now. On the one hand, shorter levels do tend to make for a better mastery experience. On the other, I'm looking at all the stuff going down with Summer of '58, and how the dev just announced they're basically pulling back from gaming because mountains of people complained and refunded it for being a 2 hour game.

So I can't blame anyone for putting something out there which tries to push past Steam's 3 hour refund window.
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Re: Platinum Games announces Sol Cresta, Sequel to Terra Cre

Post by DietSoap »

Sengoku Strider wrote:
Ghegs wrote:That looked pretty nice. The length of the stage was on the long side at ~8 minutes
I'm not sure where I stand on this right now. On the one hand, shorter levels do tend to make for a better mastery experience. On the other, I'm looking at all the stuff going down with Summer of '58, and how the dev just announced they're basically pulling back from gaming because mountains of people complained and refunded it for being a 2 hour game.

So I can't blame anyone for putting something out there which tries to push past Steam's 3 hour refund window.
The refund window is 2 hours just FYI. And with all due respect to that developer, I can't imagine refunding a game I "beat" in under 2 hours if I liked it. I understand there are some obscenely poor and impulsive people out there that might, but by and large I think the vast majority of people won't refund a product they liked as long as it's not broken in some way.
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Re: Platinum Games announces Sol Cresta, Sequel to Terra Cre

Post by Ghegs »

Sengoku Strider wrote:
Ghegs wrote:That looked pretty nice. The length of the stage was on the long side at ~8 minutes
I'm not sure where I stand on this right now. On the one hand, shorter levels do tend to make for a better mastery experience. On the other, I'm looking at all the stuff going down with Summer of '58, and how the dev just announced they're basically pulling back from gaming because mountains of people complained and refunded it for being a 2 hour game.

So I can't blame anyone for putting something out there which tries to push past Steam's 3 hour refund window.
I really doubt that, in this specific instance, they're making the stages longer just to to push the overall length past Steam's refund window. 99.9% of shmups are short if simply looking at the playtime of a single run, and at least I haven't heard of similar cases about the many shmups available on Steam. The game will also be available on consoles where similar refund possibilities either do not exist or the conditions for eligibility are different.

Going a bit off-topic, but refunding a game you played through and liked just because you can is indeed horrible behavior. But developers trying to combat it by making their games artificially longer (and quite possibly making the game worse as a result) is not a good solution.
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Re: Platinum Games announces Sol Cresta, Sequel to Terra Cre

Post by MrJBRPG »

From what I've seen, the gameplay for the Cresta series wiht SOL seems more refined and complexity is added on top.

You collect formation tokens that change from being shot.
  • * Green is down triangle with super spread (3 x 3 way forward)
    * Blue is vertical with side wave beams, called moon beams
    * Yellow (forward L) and Purple (horizontal flipped L) shoot diagonal laser beams
    * Orange is horizontal with 3 way backward lasers
    * Red is up triangle with invincible Phoenix, and is only activated once all other formation tokens are collected

The wing represents the first two ships being picked up, blue and yellow since your starting ship is red. After all ships collected, then wing glows rainbow to pick up command formation represented as S, called special command formation.

There is a button to trigger formation change, whether it be docking or special command, which definitely costs an S token.

With three ships docked from front to back, the first two on front and middle fire, while the bottom most ship could act as a special dock firing mechanism.

Energy can be earned by downing opponents and collecting medals, which is used up by special formation attacks.
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Re: Platinum Games announces Sol Cresta, Sequel to Terra Cre

Post by bcass »

I wish they'd gone with pixel art.
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Re: Platinum Games announces Sol Cresta, Sequel to Terra Cre

Post by Jeneki »

Melee drill attack gets my attention. Formation handling looks interesting.

And all those little gray coins! Is this an XOP game? :lol:
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Re: Platinum Games announces Sol Cresta, Sequel to Terra Cre

Post by m.sniffles.esq »

Going a bit off-topic, but refunding a game you played through and liked just because you can is indeed horrible behavior. But developers trying to combat it by making their games artificially longer (and quite possibly making the game worse as a result) is not a good solution.

Even though some people hate it... I always thought the gRev (and others) solution was best. When you first start the game -- zero continues. Then eventually time unlocking continues, until you hit infinite after spending five-six hours with the game.
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Re: Platinum Games announces Sol Cresta, Sequel to Terra Cre

Post by BIL »

m.sniffles.esq wrote:Even though some people hate it... I always thought the gRev (and others) solution was best. When you first start the game -- zero continues. Then eventually time unlocking continues, until you hit infinite after spending five-six hours with the game.
^ yeah, same. I wonder, with G-Rev having contributed to Ikaruga and Gradius V, if this was something they came up with, or if they simply liked the effect, and kept it for their own STGs.

There's no ideal solution - noobs will either complain it's SUPEREASY (free play), or SUPERHARD (limited/no credits). But at least the latter might spark some sense of achievement, however adversarially.

On that note: I like Gradius V's approach of trash-talking the player at each Game Over. :cool: That kind of blunt feedback can be more compelling to novices than relatively esoteric rankings/stats. Crucially, the MC gets subtly less derisive as you approach the finish line, giving a surprised/exasperated "WHAT THE HELL?" if you eat it at the 11th hour. Legitimately convinced me to 1CC the first loop BITD, when I'd have happily left it at a ~5CC, given GV's herculean runtime and not-inconsiderable difficulty from newbie standpoint.

Ideally, I'd combine the time-unlocked credits with the unfolding Practice Mode seen in Gradius V... and quite possibly Ikaruga and others, it's been a while. Reach a stage = unlock it for practicing. The PS2 ports of Metal Slugs 3, 4 and 5 do this, too. Even as a more advanced player than I was back then, this is an incredibly valuable feature I'm always happy to see. It's a lot easier to impart the iterative nature of arcade gaming, where you're expected to gradually refine a ~30minute run over many hours, when the player's given tools for just this objective.
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Re: Platinum Games announces Sol Cresta, Sequel to Terra Cre

Post by m.sniffles.esq »

On that note: I like Gradius V's approach of trash-talking the player at each Game Over.

Oh, I really liked that too. They did something similar with Border Down, with your superiors screaming at you if you game over in the first stage.

But regarding the time-unlocked continues: I think that fell by the wayside due to a lot of the hardcore bellyaching "I like to credit-feed and see the entire game on the onset! If you take away my ability to do so, it seems like you're hiding something"
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Re: Platinum Games announces Sol Cresta, Sequel to Terra Cre

Post by heli »

9 credits is more fun then free play.
I remember playing for the 9CC garegga on saturn, very much fun.
For PS4 it is no fun, ok you can choose not to free play, well you know, sometimes you do and ruin the game for the rest of your life.
*also the shitty press X to save your replay prompt takes away the fun.

I did not notice the screaming in border-down since i dont read any text and press fire.
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Re: Platinum Games announces Sol Cresta, Sequel to Terra Cre

Post by Licorice »

In terms of player education I really like what they did in Batrider. You have a boss rush so you can practice bosses, you have a short and long course, you have stage select or randomization, and finally you also have a wealth of characters and combinations of them.

It feels content rich, and it allows new players to experience a large part of the game, practice it, and have a sense of achievement.

This approach has never been tried for a home release, AFAICT, but IMO has advantages over proven casual friendly approaches (e.g. Winds of Thunder, where 90% of game is stage select and you can rely on resource management skills, or RSG's grind your weapon levels and earn continues), or simpler, more lukewarm approaches like G.Rev's.
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Re: Platinum Games announces Sol Cresta, Sequel to Terra Cre

Post by OmegaFlareX »

Licorice wrote:In terms of player education I really like what they did in Batrider. You have a boss rush so you can practice bosses, you have a short and long course, you have stage select or randomization, and finally you also have a wealth of characters and combinations of them.
Is there an option for random characters? Between that and random stage order, that'd be pretty valuable for casual replayability.
xxx1993

Re: Platinum Games announces Sol Cresta, Sequel to Terra Cre

Post by xxx1993 »

https://www.gematsu.com/2021/09/sol-cre ... december-9

Release date is December 9th. There will also be a DLC story mode similar to Blaster Master Zero Trilogy and Raiden V.
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