I think Battle Garegga has some pretty glaring issues

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ScOULaris
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I think Battle Garegga has some pretty glaring issues

Post by ScOULaris »

Hey everyone. This is my first post on this forum, and it was the topic of this thread that pushed me to create an account in the first place.

I've sporadically lurked around here for a while now since getting into shmups a few years ago, and I've always noticed that Battle Garegga tends place near or at the top of the annual Top 25 Shmups of All Time threads. I'm someone who has been sampling pretty much every major arcade and console shmup released since the mid-to-late 90's since falling in love with the genre a few years ago, but I hadn't yet given Battle Garegga a fair shake until recently. Now that I have been playing it for a while, I'm struggling to understand its top placement on an otherwise really solid Top 25 list as voted on by some of the most devout fans of this genre.

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Don't get me wrong. I completely understand the appeal of Battle Garegga, especially from a shmup enthusiast perspective. It has unique and captivating aesthetics, great music, and some of the most free-form gameplay and depth you're likely to find from a scoring perspective. Out of Raizing's shmup offerings, I agree that Battle Garegga is probably their best and most complete package. Having said that, I think that certain design weaknesses are given maybe too much of a pass here.

The two that keep jumping out at me as I play are probably fairly obvious to anyone familiar with the game:
  • Bullet Visibility: This one probably goes without saying since it's easily the most readily noticeable and frequently mentioned issue with the original arcade game, but it's such an egregious design oversight that I feel it should almost single-handedly prevent the game from taking the top spot in the Top 25 rankings. Sure, the M2 ShotTriggers port rectifies this with its various bullet visibility options, but that doesn't seem to be the specific version called out in the ranked list. As the original stands, it's the only shmup that I've ever played where I can't see what killed me 80% of the time. It's an egregious problem that shouldn't ever be ignored when discussing the game, IMO.
  • Sluggish Movement: Battle Garegga is one of those games like Batsugun that sort of straddles the line between classic shmups and modern bullet hells. Similar to a Psikyo game, for example, the game combines fast-moving bullets with the occasional slower, denser patterns that don't quite add up to bullet hell numbers. That's all well and good, but I'd argue that the denser patterns that do occasionally confront the player call for Cave-esque levels of control precision to comfortably micro-dodge through. This game, however, does not come close to the responsiveness and precision of a Cave shmup in my opinion. In fact, it almost feels like there's some small degree of inertia on most of the ships in Battle Garegga, which I know is a big no-no in these kinds of arcade shmups. If there isn't actually inertia, then there must be some palpable input latency inherent to the game's engine itself. I'm playing it via an emulation setup with the lowest possible input lag (2 frames for most arcade shmups), and Battle Garegga's movement always feels just slightly delayed to me. Maybe it's the acceleration curve or something, I can't say for sure. I just know that it never feels quite right to me.

Now I realize that these criticisms are somewhat subjective, but I'm personally struggling a bit to understand how enough people on this forum feel differently enough about these perceived shortcomings to consistently vote it as the best shmup ever made over games like Mushi Futari, DDP DOJ, Ketsui, etc. I'm not here to say that anyone is wrong. I'm just wondering what I'm missing while evaluating the game through a critical lens.
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Shatterhand
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Re: I think Battle Garegga has some pretty glaring issues

Post by Shatterhand »

You are not wrong. I think it's well known that Battle Garegga has some input lag which is NOT on the Sega Saturn version.

Also I don't think anyone would dispute the fact that the game has some real issues with bullet visibility... which again was kinda sorted on the Saturn version with the "Red Ball" option (waaaay before the M2 port)

So... first, maybe people played the game more on the Sega Saturn than on arcades? I find unlikely but not impossible.

But... while I never voted for in on the top 25 lists I took part... and I think Batrider is actually a better game (or at least way more fun to play), I think the fact that Garegga is so deep, with so many different things you can try to do or just ignore and some real cool bosses and level design ending up making people ignore those shortcomings.

I must admit I never noticed how many people actually put Battle Garegga at the top, but I guess if a lot of people put it on the top 10 without other games being mentioned with the same frequency, the game will be raised to the top places in the rank, even if its not *the* favourite game of anyone.
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To Far Away Times
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Re: I think Battle Garegga has some pretty glaring issues

Post by To Far Away Times »

I definitely don't think its up to the standards of the other games in the Top 5.

I agree that the visibility issues alone would probably seal that. We are talking the very best of the best. The best games don't have issues like that.

But primarily, the randomness, rank control, and just the general obtusiveness of the game rules are the opposite of the things I want in a shmup.
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Re: I think Battle Garegga has some pretty glaring issues

Post by Lander »

Yeah, the bullets visuals are more or less inarguable. I found they made base version quite hard to approach until setting it aside to put some hours into Battle Garegga Type 2 and get my bearings, and clearly that didn't stick long-term since my groggy test credit for writing this post lasted all of 60 seconds :P
But then, Type 2 cuts out some interesting secrets and fiddles with the option mechanics, so doesn't feel like the definitive version of the game despite the visual improvements. Nothing wrong with that, but you can definitely feel the training wheels.

There is no interia or acceleration on the movement - the heavy feeling is down to internal lag that can be cut out with 3 frames of runahead in libretro-based emulation, to the point where you can freeze-frame it and chart a linear motion that starts the frame after the joystick is moved, and stops the frame after it goes neutral.
Though the movement is a bit on the slow side by default - I always make a point of using the A+B+C variant of any given ship to take advantage of the shrunk hitbox and faster movement. Golden Bat baybee! 8)

In terms of its appeal, I think Garegga's esoteric nature is a big part of why it ranks consistently high. Being the poster boy Yagawa game, it's so dense with mechanics and secrets across both diagetic (in-level stuff like the flamingo castle) and non-diagetic (gameplay systems, secret codes etc) domains that players familiar with it hold it in high regard for its design despite the mentioned shortcomings. The Genius Of Garegga thesis does a good job of putting some of that into words, but you have to trawl around for old threads and various Web 1.0 fansites to grasp the full extent of the design iceberg.

So on some level, I think Garegga exists in its own lane and doesn't step to the same quality scale as its genre contemporaries. It's a bit roughshod and industrial compared to the polish and precision scope of a CAVE game, but is such a puzzle box of interesting components to pick apart that it can be considered 'as good' in totality, but by different means.
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ScOULaris
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Re: I think Battle Garegga has some pretty glaring issues

Post by ScOULaris »

Lander wrote:Yeah, the bullets visuals are more or less inarguable. I found they made base version quite hard to approach until setting it aside to put some hours into Battle Garegga Type 2 and get my bearings, and clearly that didn't stick long-term since my groggy test credit for writing this post lasted all of 60 seconds :P
But then, Type 2 cuts out some interesting secrets and fiddles with the option mechanics, so doesn't feel like the definitive version of the game despite the visual improvements. Nothing wrong with that, but you can definitely feel the training wheels.

There is no interia or acceleration on the movement - the heavy feeling is down to internal lag that can be cut out with 3 frames of runahead in libretro-based emulation, to the point where you can freeze-frame it and chart a linear motion that starts the frame after the joystick is moved, and stops the frame after it goes neutral.
Though the movement is a bit on the slow side by default - I always make a point of using the A+B+C variant of any given ship to take advantage of the shrunk hitbox and faster movement. Golden Bat baybee! 8)

In terms of its appeal, I think Garegga's esoteric nature is a big part of why it ranks consistently high. Being the poster boy Yagawa game, it's so dense with mechanics and secrets across both diagetic (in-level stuff like the flamingo castle) and non-diagetic (gameplay systems, secret codes etc) domains that players familiar with it hold it in high regard for its design despite the mentioned shortcomings. The Genius Of Garegga thesis does a good job of putting some of that into words, but you have to trawl around for old threads and various Web 1.0 fansites to grasp the full extent of the design iceberg.

So on some level, I think Garegga exists in its own lane and doesn't step to the same quality scale as its genre contemporaries. It's a bit roughshod and industrial compared to the polish and precision scope of a CAVE game, but is such a puzzle box of interesting components to pick apart that it can be considered 'as good' in totality, but by different means.
I pretty much agree with everything you've said in your post. As for the input lag... you need three damn frames of runahead?! That means that Battle Garegga's original arcade release has roughly 3-4 frames of inherent latency even when playing on an original cabinet + CRT? What even happened there? No wonder it feels so sluggish to me, even with the A+B+C ship selection. I don't recall Raizing's other games feeling like they suffered from that amount of in-engine input delay.

I have yet to play the M2 ShotTriggers version of the game (I will soon-ish), but I'm wondering if M2 did anything to mitigate that latency in their updated release. I'm assuming that they did, but I haven't heard much on the subject elsewhere.
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Re: I think Battle Garegga has some pretty glaring issues

Post by heli »

It is about my favourite game also, not liking cave so much to much bullets.

I had the saturn version, playing for hours,
if i beat the game with 9 credits i got the special ships that made it easy.
No battery in my saturn so once i have that i left it on for a while and keep playing.
I dont know about the items, sometimes the game is very easy to play, and sometimes the game is mad at me ?
I was questioned about why the game got so mad at me until i got the M2 version with colorfull bullets.
Now i keep flying strategys and the fun is gone, M2 version keeps saving or asking for things, bad flow.
Maybe it is easy to ROM-hack those grey colors ?
Last edited by heli on Mon Nov 28, 2022 2:00 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: I think Battle Garegga has some pretty glaring issues

Post by DMC »

ScOULaris wrote:Bullet Visibility: This one probably goes without saying since it's easily the most readily noticeable and frequently mentioned issue with the original arcade game, but it's such an egregious design oversight that I feel it should almost single-handedly prevent the game from taking the top spot in the Top 25 rankings. Sure, the M2 ShotTriggers port rectifies this with its various bullet visibility options, but that doesn't seem to be the specific version called out in the ranked list. As the original stands, it's the only shmup that I've ever played where I can't see what killed me 80% of the time. It's an egregious problem that shouldn't ever be ignored when discussing the game, IMO.
I would not call it an oversight, it's clearly an intended feature that runs across every stage. It makes the game a little less accessible, but not every game needs to be accessible.

It takes a bit of time getting used to discriminate between bullets, background, splitter, and smoke in this game. This discrimination is part of the challenge, and I do not see why the ability to quickly discriminate between these objects should not be part of an STG challenge.
For example, let's say you're chasing a juicy 10,000 medal, and just when you're about to grab it, you realize there's a camouflage bullet in front of it--are you quick enough to respond?
You might need a few hours to tune your vision to the bullets but you will. After that, it comes down to paying attention, discriminating the objects on the screen, having quick reflexes, and improvising.

My experience was that you got used to it pretty quickly. From there on bullet visibility was never 0%. It might not be 100%, but I thought it was enough to give you a fair chance.

The realistic bullets, splitter, and smoke add to Battle Garegga's gritty, industrialistic aesthetic. Just look at the beautiful second stage boss with the grey steel bullets, and how the whole look changes with the purple ones. https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x54ilkq

Just like some of the greatest movies and books are not the most accessible, not every top STG should be. Radiant Silvergun is another example, which you could critizise for having too many weapons, but it makes it unique, and in the end, I think it works.

Edit: Forgot to say welcome to the forum! :)
Last edited by DMC on Mon Nov 28, 2022 2:51 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Lethe
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Re: I think Battle Garegga has some pretty glaring issues

Post by Lethe »

Testing a theory: What's your current progress in Garegga after playing for "a while", and how long is "a while"?

I totally agree with DMC. Comparing Garegga unfavorably with the highly accessible Caveshit at the top of the popularity poll is missing the point of what it's doing.
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Re: I think Battle Garegga has some pretty glaring issues

Post by jehu »

Interesting topic - think it will continue to spark good conversation, but:

I'd just take issue with the central premise that because Garegga has flaws - or even these particular flaws - means it should not be in the running to be 'the best.' This seems rather naive to me, even from a generalist perspective.

A piece of media's quality is measured across many parameters. It can be judged not only for what it is trying to do, but for what it fails to even attempt. A game with discernible imperfections may very easily rise above a game with none - if only because the former is more ambitious, or just formally different in some way.

If the issue at play here is "Garegga has flaws" - yes, that's rather uncontroversial, and people are pretty sober-eyed about them. Moreover, people who like the game have found it quite manageable adjust to each of your complaints. If the argument is rather: "Garegga has flaws, and no game with 'flaws' should be the best" - then I think the discussion is just flawed in premise.

(Though, in truth, I don't love Garegga myself. The Raizing formula has yet to really click with me - the chasing/dodging 'fragments' thing isn't particularly compelling gameplay, if you ask me. A flaw to my mind; a draw to someone else's. You have to respect the staying power - the people aren't pretending to like something for almost 20 years.)
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Re: I think Battle Garegga has some pretty glaring issues

Post by DMC »

jehu wrote: A game with discernible imperfections may very easily rise above a game with none - if only because the former is more ambitious, or just formally different in some way.
That's an excellent point.

A few games like Gun Frontier and Raiden 2 were using a variety of realistic looking bullets, splitter, and explosions to challenge the player, but Battle Garegga pushed it further.

To me, the realistic bullets and challenging visibility is an integral part of the game. Playing Battle Garegga with any of the bullet color options activated is the video game equivalent of listening to some low-budget Norweigan black metal record remastered by Rick Rubin. (although it is nice the option is available).
Last edited by DMC on Tue Nov 29, 2022 6:42 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: I think Battle Garegga has some pretty glaring issues

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DMC wrote:I would not call it an oversight, it's clearly an intended feature that runs across every stage. It makes the game a little less accessible, but not every game needs to be accessible.
This is where I lean too. I do feel for people with vision issues that really impact the game for them, but it's clear they were going for a "chaos of war" vibe. Smoke and shrapnel everywhere, and difficulty for the pilot to see what's what. I feel the same way when people complain about Gley Lancer's opening asteroid field stage.

Garegga's a game I quite like, got the platinum on the M2 port, but the whole 'holy grail' aspect of it has never quite clicked for me. Some of it is down to subjective elements - many love its style, but I find it kinda basic & drab (seriously, they couldn't manage a single line scroll/parallax layer on stage 4? It looks like wallpaper. I get annoyed when PC Engine games do that, never mind something with the resources of mid-90s arcade hardware at hand). Others are things like some of the more esoteric elements which thrill people, but I don't really get how things like its infamous rank management are so different from similar elements in all sorts of other games. But I chalk that up to me not being an upper tier player; I still revisit the game with the door open to getting it.

I think its Soukyuu hands down for my Raizing fave. In no small part due to it feeling the most Compile-like of the games in their catalogue.
Edit: Forgot to say welcome to the forum! :)
Yep, more thought-out discussion threads are always welcome.
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Re: I think Battle Garegga has some pretty glaring issues

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Sengoku Strider wrote:I do feel for people with vision issues that really impact the game for them, but it's clear they were going for a "chaos of war" vibe.
I'd honestly be more inclined to suspect that it was another way to shorten time at the cabinet and demand additional coins from players; Yagawa has openly stated that the game's rank system was specifically created to make it more difficult and thus more profitable without the player being aware of it, and I wouldn't put it past him (and other arcade-era developers whose games have similar "issues") to have also figured that the occasional "wait, what just killed me?" death would also contribute to the cause.
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Re: I think Battle Garegga has some pretty glaring issues

Post by ScOULaris »

Some really great responses in here so far that have given me extra insight into why so many people find this game to be uniquely enjoyable. While the issues I outlined at the start of the thread are problematic enough to keep Battle Garegga firmly out of my personal Top 10, I can more easily see now why others might be able to hold the game in such high esteem despite them. The posts mentioning the game's visually chaotic and hard to parse style as being in keeping with the intended tone of the game's steampunk WW2 aesthetic stood out to me in particular, as did those that suggested that the unforgiving nature of the poor bullet visibility being potentially a design choice rather than an oversight.

The input lag in the original version, however, is not something that I can personally accept or forgive when discussing the game critically. It's just an outright failing of the game's engine.
BulletMagnet wrote:
Sengoku Strider wrote:I do feel for people with vision issues that really impact the game for them, but it's clear they were going for a "chaos of war" vibe.
I'd honestly be more inclined to suspect that it was another way to shorten time at the cabinet and demand additional coins from players; Yagawa has openly stated that the game's rank system was specifically created to make it more difficult and thus more profitable without the player being aware of it, and I wouldn't put it past him (and other arcade-era developers whose games have similar "issues") to have also figured that the occasional "wait, what just killed me?" death would also contribute to the cause.
Given that particular era of arcade shmup design, I think that this is highly plausible as well. Either way, it's clear that the bullet visibility issue affects everyone unequally. I'm slightly colorblind, so it very well might be more problematic for me than others. I genuinely cannot see what the hell killed me the majority of the time.
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Re: I think Battle Garegga has some pretty glaring issues

Post by dark »

I can understand why people would have issues with bullet visibility as other genre defining titles for the genre have bright bullets whereas they tend to be grey in this game... that being said, I never have that much of a problem seeing the bullets, having them be grey does not ruin the game for me, and while I die a bunch in this game, primarily at the bosses, its rare that I get a surprise death because I didn't see bullets coming at me.

Without getting into the technicalities of the scoring and various secrets, the game reminds me a bunch of the Raiden series. It's a little slower, a little more serious and conventional. Heck, the lightning clouds stage seems an awful lot like the lightning cloud stage in Raiden Fighters... but that must just be coincidence since they were released in the same year...
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Re: I think Battle Garegga has some pretty glaring issues

Post by To Far Away Times »

BulletMagnet wrote:
Sengoku Strider wrote:I do feel for people with vision issues that really impact the game for them, but it's clear they were going for a "chaos of war" vibe.
I'd honestly be more inclined to suspect that it was another way to shorten time at the cabinet and demand additional coins from players; Yagawa has openly stated that the game's rank system was specifically created to make it more difficult and thus more profitable without the player being aware of it, and I wouldn't put it past him (and other arcade-era developers whose games have similar "issues") to have also figured that the occasional "wait, what just killed me?" death would also contribute to the cause.
I line up with BulletMagnet's thoughts on it. Garegga's follow up, Armed Police Batrider, would take the rank system a step further, into what I think is fair to consider true quarter muncher territory. The way it works in APB is that rank carries on after a game over and will slowly cycle down each time the attract screen runs. So the game is harder after a fresh game over, and easier if the cab has not been played in a long time. If you run into an APB cab in the wild, you'll never really know what the starting rank will be. So to get a neutral start in the game, you'd either have to play a credit immediately upon starting the cabinet up at the "default" start up rank, or you have to start after exiting the test menu, and the starting rank will be zero.

I can't imagine someone would intentionally craft a really thoughtful rank system in Garegga, and then do something like APB's carry over rank in their next game. IMO, that's just designing a game to eat quarters. And once you're shown you're willing to go with that route, Yagawa's other game design decisions start to get a bit sus.

That being said Garegga has never really stood out to me with the visuals and music (some of it is pretty good but there is a lot of gray) like it does to so many other people, so that hook isn't there for me. I do really love the way APB looks and sounds, so I'll put up with some of it's bullshit. I put APB as an honorable mention in last year's Top 25 vote, but I did knock it down a few pegs because of the aforementioned rank issues.
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Re: I think Battle Garegga has some pretty glaring issues

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To Far Away Times wrote:The way it works in APB is that rank carries on after a game over and will slowly cycle down each time the attract screen runs. So the game is harder after a fresh game over, and easier if the cab has not been played in a long time.
According to Icarus' ST, Garegga actually does something quite similar:
An especially odd feature of Battle Garegga’s rank system is that it adjusts itself slightly even when the game is not actually being played: while the very first game played on either the arcade machine or the Saturn port will begin with the rank counter at the default starting value listed above, with each successive game played, the rank counter will begin at a slightly lower number, and thus a slightly higher difficulty. The exact amount of the change in the rank counter, to all appearances, seems to vary depending on region, difficulty setting, and perhaps other factors. In any event, the more successive games played, the (slightly) more difficult each successive game gets.

To counterbalance this, the game has an equally unusual mechanic in place which will actually raise the rank counter when the game is not being played, thus causing it to start out slightly easier (though the counter cannot ever go above the default starting value of 15,728,640). While the game is switched on but not being played, like most arcade games it will cycle through an “attract mode” which shows the title screen, gameplay demonstrations, and the high score list: every time it does this, the rank counter will rise slightly (around 65,000 points) and thus the next game played will start out at a slightly lower difficulty level. The more times the attract mode sequence is allowed to run, the higher the rank counter goes and the easier the game gets (though, again, it never gets easier than the default starting amount).

Another (and possibly quicker) way to get the rank counter back to its highest default setting is to simply reset it. On arcade machines, the rank counter is completely reset to its highest value by resetting the arcade board, while on the Saturn port the counter is reset by simply entering the “Options” menu (you don’t need to adjust any particular setting, just enter the menu).
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Re: I think Battle Garegga has some pretty glaring issues

Post by To Far Away Times »

That is good to know, I had no idea.
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Re: I think Battle Garegga has some pretty glaring issues

Post by Kiken »

ScOULaris wrote:I pretty much agree with everything you've said in your post. As for the input lag... you need three damn frames of runahead?! That means that Battle Garegga's original arcade release has roughly 3-4 frames of inherent latency even when playing on an original cabinet + CRT? What even happened there? No wonder it feels so sluggish to me, even with the A+B+C ship selection. I don't recall Raizing's other games feeling like they suffered from that amount of in-engine input delay.

I have yet to play the M2 ShotTriggers version of the game (I will soon-ish), but I'm wondering if M2 did anything to mitigate that latency in their updated release. I'm assuming that they did, but I haven't heard much on the subject elsewhere.
IIRC, this has to do with the original Garegga's PCB hardware having an odd quirk with the frame buffer: the foreground sprite layers are updated 1 frame behind the background tile sets. This doesn't happen on the Saturn port since all of the sprite and background layers are updated simultaneously despite the Saturn having one of the most convoluted frame buffer systems ever conceived (the back and forth frame layer assembly between VDP1 and VDP2 is utterly bonkers).
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Re: I think Battle Garegga has some pretty glaring issues

Post by Rastan78 »

ScOULaris wrote:The input lag in the original version, however, is not something that I can personally accept or forgive
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Re: I think Battle Garegga has some pretty glaring issues

Post by ScOULaris »

Rastan78 wrote:
ScOULaris wrote:The input lag in the original version, however, is not something that I can personally accept or forgive
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I'll never forgive him 'til the day I die. Three frames of input lag on original arcade hardware is beyond the pale.
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Re: I think Battle Garegga has some pretty glaring issues

Post by Lethe »

I don't buy the "bad bullet visibility on purpose" theory. Garegga's visibility isn't much worse than contemporary or earlier games, and depending on the ship I'm using, the bright yellow bullets can be much less visible than the gray ones. More likely it just wasn't considered a problem during development and they only realized it put people off after release. Could say similar for the input lag.
To Far Away Times wrote:The way it works in APB is that rank carries on after a game over
It always goes back to the starting minimum value on a new credit. The minimum rank is what decays over idle time or with the service mode trick, AFAIK that's all that changes. Batrider's ultimate approach to rank is very different to Garegga's anyway and is much more intuitive: anything that potentially gives you score will increase rank. You can't neuter it with efficient play, only limit your greed before the game gets too hard.

In Pearl's Batrider 1CC guide he posits the starting rank behavior was to discourage players from resetting constantly as is the case with Garegga, which would eventually damage the PCBs. Both games remain very restart-prone regardless of rank.
ScOULaris wrote:Three frames of input lag on original arcade hardware is beyond the pale.
Go Play Mars Matrix!
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Re: I think Battle Garegga has some pretty glaring issues

Post by Shatterhand »

In APB when you turn on the board the rank is at maximum but lowers a little bit after each attract mode demo, which makes MAME players full throttle the emulator after booting the game for a while so rank is at minimum. (Or, as I used to do, have a save state at the title screen after leaving the game running for a while). It's the opposite of Battle Garegga.

And I read somewhere they did it like this because people in Japanese arcades found out about Garegga rank resetting to minimum when the board is reset, so there were people kicking the cabinets trying to make it reset, which made arcade operators furious.
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Re: I think Battle Garegga has some pretty glaring issues

Post by Lander »

Rad to see this thread take off into a full fledged discussion!
ScOULaris wrote:As for the input lag... you need three damn frames of runahead?! That means that Battle Garegga's original arcade release has roughly 3-4 frames of inherent latency even when playing on an original cabinet + CRT? What even happened there?
I wouldn't consider 3 frames particularly crazy, since 2 is the average I've observed on my emulation setup. It takes 4-5 to make me balk and wonder what the devs were smoking, and that's happened once or twice :)

That said, it did surprise me given the game's legendary status and already-high baseline difficulty - I suppose it's a case of player adaptation winning out.
heli wrote:sometimes the game is very easy to play, and sometimes the game is mad at me ?
There's something special about feeling like you did something to make a game angry :lol:

Though I find Garegga's implementation quite subtle compared to something like Zanac, where the system will pop a blood vessel and immediately fill the screen with enemies if you dare grab a shield powerup.
Kiken wrote:IIRC, this has to do with the original Garegga's PCB hardware having an odd quirk with the frame buffer: the foreground sprite layers are updated 1 frame behind the background tile sets.
Well shucks, now I'll never be able to unsee the floaty bomb chips :?

I wonder what kind of exotic hardware engineering situation caused them to configure it like that.
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ScOULaris
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Re: I think Battle Garegga has some pretty glaring issues

Post by ScOULaris »

Lander wrote: I wouldn't consider 3 frames particularly crazy, since 2 is the average I've observed on my emulation setup. It takes 4-5 to make me balk and wonder what the devs were smoking, and that's happened once or twice :)

That said, it did surprise me given the game's legendary status and already-high baseline difficulty - I suppose it's a case of player adaptation winning out.
Well, I'd wager that we're actually looking at around 5 frames of input latency on original arcade hardware here. Since most arcade games have about two frames of inherent latency, and then someone said that you'd need to use three frames of runahead to make it properly responsive. So that sounds to me more like five full frames of inherent delay. And that's what it feels like to me. It's really sluggish compared to most of the other shmups helps in similarly high regard.
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Rastan78
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Re: I think Battle Garegga has some pretty glaring issues

Post by Rastan78 »

@scoularis, have you ever played the actual PCB running on a cab or CRT? Having owned it myself I'd say you're blowing the issue out of proportion. It feels very playable.

If the Garegga PCB running on CRT feels like shit then so would most modern console ports from M2 on Switch or PS4. There could also be something about your setup causing additional lag. Like maybe the games you think are 2 frames are really 4 frames for example on your monitor and controller of choice. So the extra lag in Garegga pushes over the threshold of good playability. Feels like 5 frames on your undisclosed setup does not equal 5 frames on real hardware.
velo
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Re: I think Battle Garegga has some pretty glaring issues

Post by velo »

To Far Away Times wrote: I can't imagine someone would intentionally craft a really thoughtful rank system in Garegga, and then do something like APB's carry over rank in their next game. IMO, that's just designing a game to eat quarters. And once you're shown you're willing to go with that route, Yagawa's other game design decisions start to get a bit sus.
I confess I don't get why rank seems to be such a popular feature in shmups (for developers and maybe for players as well). It usually doesn't even seem to work the way the developers wanted it to.
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Rastan78
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Re: I think Battle Garegga has some pretty glaring issues

Post by Rastan78 »

velo wrote:I confess I don't get why rank seems to be such a popular feature in shmups (for developers and maybe for players as well). It usually doesn't even seem to work the way the developers wanted it to.
One cool thing about a good rank system is that is makes gameplay more dynamic and adds to the risk reward going on. Like if you start playing really aggressively for score on an earlier stage you might go whoa. To grab those points I also have to refine my routes and rank control through the entire rest of the game. Maybe you have to reconsider what is worth it to do and develop your own playstyle that can adapt and change over time. Likewise maybe a late game section is really only lucrative to score on if you rank boosted leading up to that point.

So rank can mean you're thinking not just about how to handle individual sections of a run, but how they relate to other parts of the run. There's a dynamic complexity more than just, ok once I memorize a route for this boss I can check off that boss and never have to reanalyze it. A great game offers a lot of room for player growth over time and doesn't become static over a short period.
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Shatterhand
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Re: I think Battle Garegga has some pretty glaring issues

Post by Shatterhand »

velo wrote:
To Far Away Times wrote: I can't imagine someone would intentionally craft a really thoughtful rank system in Garegga, and then do something like APB's carry over rank in their next game. IMO, that's just designing a game to eat quarters. And once you're shown you're willing to go with that route, Yagawa's other game design decisions start to get a bit sus.
I confess I don't get why rank seems to be such a popular feature in shmups (for developers and maybe for players as well). It usually doesn't even seem to work the way the developers wanted it to.
I dislike it too. I'm ok with the game throwing more stuff when my ship is more powered up, though I really think the "ditch power ups completely" approach is way better nowadays (the only thing I appreciate on Ikaruga).

I'd rather have something like Psikyo games with first levels in random order, forcing you to learn the levels in different ways. But the "difficulty raises because you do some cryptic shit" is really not a good design choice IMO.
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Re: I think Battle Garegga has some pretty glaring issues

Post by gray117 »

It's not a nice game, it is a good game.

There's some great purposeful work in it, but it is dark and kind of punishing. It is not accessible, but it can be rewarding if your inclined to stick with it.

For newcomers perhaps we could jump on the meme bandwagon and call it the demon souls of shmups: It' s not attempting to be your friend, it couldn't give a shit if you understand it or not (though m2 will help you), you better get gud (OK not unique for shmups/arcade games), you should play the same content again and again, it's probably not for everyone, but it should probably be played by more people than the creator's might have anticipated because there's some rather excellent parts to it.... It might have taken it longer to 'break' into Western markets with the m2 ports (OK 20ish years is aaaages).
bulletsnotfast
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Re: I think Battle Garegga has some pretty glaring issues

Post by bulletsnotfast »

gray117 wrote:It's not a nice game, it is a good game.

There's some great purposeful work in it, but it is dark and kind of punishing. It is not accessible, but it can be rewarding if your inclined to stick with it.

For newcomers perhaps we could jump on the meme bandwagon and call it the demon souls of shmups: It' s not attempting to be your friend, it couldn't give a shit if you understand it or not (though m2 will help you), you better get gud (OK not unique for shmups/arcade games), you should play the same content again and again, it's probably not for everyone, but it should probably be played by more people than the creator's might have anticipated because there's some rather excellent parts to it.... It might have taken it longer to 'break' into Western markets with the m2 ports (OK 20ish years is aaaages).
what a strange analogy.
shmups are a very hard genre on their own so there is no need to compare them to fromsoftware games
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