TMNT: The Cowabunga Collection

NYN · Post by **NYN** » Thu Aug 18, 2022 12:00 pm

Dude, gnarly Konami collection is comming soon. Yeah, dude, it's 13 games in all done by Digital Eclipse. You gonna shell out, dude?

Shred, I never knew there was a NES Tournament Fighters in the day...

Mutant Power!

BIL · Post by **BIL** » Thu Aug 18, 2022 12:05 pm

NYN wrote:You gonna shell out, dude?

Digital Eclipse?

More like...

Spoiler

DICK
SUCKIN
LIPS

Air Master Burst · Post by **Air Master Burst** » Thu Aug 18, 2022 2:44 pm

That's a lot of bloat when all anyone really wants is TMNT arcade, Turtles in Time SNES, TMNT3 NES, and maybe whichever Tournament Fighters version you have nostalgia for.

Sima Tuna · Post by **Sima Tuna** » Thu Aug 18, 2022 5:35 pm

I was going to ask which team is doing the porting. Some of the Konami porting work in the past has been done by M2. But if it's digital eclipse, then fuuuuuuck. No thanks.

I'm still waiting for those hackfrauds at Konami to port Violent Storm and Metamorphic Force.

BurlyHeart · Post by **BurlyHeart** » Fri Aug 19, 2022 12:30 am

NYN wrote:You gonna shell out, dude?

I'm in the wait and see camp. I probably will eventually if it's a good port. I've never played the console versions, so that would be nice. If it's a good port.

BIL wrote: Digital Eclipse?

More like...

Spoiler
DICK
SUCKIN
LIPS

Air Master Burst wrote:That's a lot of bloat when all anyone really wants is TMNT arcade, Turtles in Time SNES, TMNT3 NES, and maybe whichever Tournament Fighters version you have nostalgia for.

Hyperstone Heist is supposed to be very good. Some even prefer it to Turtles in Time on the SNES.

Air Master Burst · Post by **Air Master Burst** » Fri Aug 19, 2022 9:09 am

BurlyHeart wrote: Hyperstone Heist is supposed to be very good. Some even prefer it to Turtles in Time on the SNES.

I always thought it was just a butchered version of Turtles in Time? I know the story is different, but aren't the stages and bosses all recycled? Somehow despite growing up in Sega country I never knew anyone who had this.

it290 · Post by **it290** » Sat Aug 20, 2022 4:21 am

There are several differences in the levels, bosses, controls, etc. More of a remix than anything. It's a worthy game on its own, probably inferior to TiT, but maybe a bit more sharply tuned if you're going for a 1cc.

I'll probably pick this up at some point when it gets a bit cheaper, if just for the netplay.

BrianC · Post by **BrianC** » Sat Aug 20, 2022 4:50 am

Air Master Burst wrote:
BurlyHeart wrote: Hyperstone Heist is supposed to be very good. Some even prefer it to Turtles in Time on the SNES.
I always thought it was just a butchered version of Turtles in Time? I know the story is different, but aren't the stages and bosses all recycled? Somehow despite growing up in Sega country I never knew anyone who had this.

It's an odd one. Stage design is recycled, but it also has a handful of things from TMNT1 arcade and the NES port of the arcade game (the Baxter boss from the original AC game, the ancient Japanese styled building with bamboo spikes from the NES version, and bits of the sewer stage from TMNT1. Car obstacles from TMNT1 in one stage). Gameplay wise it feels more arcade like with faster gameplay. Worst part is that it has a boss rush that should have just been left out (game still would be a decent length without it). The new boss, from the TMNT movie, is Tatsu, and he's awesome. His stage is awesome too.

it290 · Post by **it290** » Sat Aug 20, 2022 10:19 pm

I always liked the fact that HH gives you the option of setting 'Animation' or 'Comic' color mode. Pretty unique for a game of that time.

BrianC · Post by **BrianC** » Sun Aug 21, 2022 12:38 am

it290 wrote:I always liked the fact that HH gives you the option of setting 'Animation' or 'Comic' color mode. Pretty unique for a game of that time.

Turtles in Time SNES has that option too. "Comic" is based.on the Archie TMNT comics' palette. No b/w "Mirage" palette.

One thing I like better in Hyperstone Heist is that it has a dedicated run button that works correctly. I keep Turtles in Time SNES on auto, though there's a hack that fixes the issue with the unresponsive manual dash.

Sima Tuna · Post by **Sima Tuna** » Tue Aug 30, 2022 4:46 pm

Today is the release day for the cowabunga collection. I look forward to hearing what people think.

Rastan78 · Post by **Rastan78** » Tue Aug 30, 2022 8:07 pm

Looks like 40 bucks will only get you one save slot per game.

Gamer707b · Post by **Gamer707b** » Wed Aug 31, 2022 4:10 am

Just got this today and I'll say that a lot of love went into this. I'm sure many, myself included didn't expect it to be this level of good. Haven't played the games too through yet, but others that have, haven't complained of glitches, crashes or anything else weird. And how about the extras? Heck, they even got a video of a no hit clear of the various games. They also put in these cool strategy guides and tips to all the games and more. I got my physical for 40 bucks. If this isn't worth 40, then I don't know what is. I'll even go out on a limb and say, this might be M2 level of quality. Digital Eclipse upped their game here.

Bloodreign · Post by **Bloodreign** » Wed Aug 31, 2022 9:50 am

Saw the expected cuts, like the Pizza Hut ads in TMNT Arcade NES, and the coupon for the restaurant removed from the digital manual of the NES game, but what got me scratching my head was, Pizza Power was left unaltered for Turtles in Time arcade, yet the first arcade game had to be altered to have different people sing it.

As for the games quality, I have seen review videos for it, no one has complained about the games at all, so Digital Eclipse did quite well on this one, had they not, folks would've had torches and pitchforks ready.

Sima Tuna · Post by **Sima Tuna** » Wed Aug 31, 2022 5:19 pm

I'm still waiting for hard data on the input delay. General consensus on the overall quality means nothing to me, since the masses have been wrong in the past on porting jobs. I still remember the SNK 40th collection which, indeed, did have a lot of nice extras. And the input delay situation wasn't too bad either. But it had its own set of problems which only a dedicated player would uncover.

By browsing various forums, I've found one person who claims the games are laggy and another person who says they're completely the same as PCB. Neither source seems entirely credible, since neither have posted any kind of documentation or measurement process.

Rastan78 · Post by **Rastan78** » Wed Aug 31, 2022 10:36 pm

Saw some tests of the PS4 version played on PS5 and the lag is atrocious. Don't know if that's the same for all versions, but it doesn't sound good. One game showed input lag of over 225 ms which is over 13 frames. Digital Eclipse aka Dick Suckinlips is going for a new record.

Of course the press will applaud everything they do even if their releases are laggy, have glitchy emulation, and lack of extra save states etc. As long as there are tons of art and design document scans they're doing God's work supposedly.

Mortificator · Post by **Mortificator** » Thu Sep 01, 2022 10:49 pm

Rastan78 wrote:One game showed input lag of over 225 ms which is over 13 frames.

BrianC · Post by **BrianC** » Fri Sep 02, 2022 8:30 pm

Mortificator wrote:
Rastan78 wrote:One game showed input lag of over 225 ms which is over 13 frames.

Spoiler

Nice pic! Hopefully, Digital Eclipse will try to address the issues instead of throwing a thermal grenade, only to have it lobbed back at them by the turtles

Lag didn't seem that bad on PC, but I use G-Sync with a low lag Freesync monitor.

Rastan78 · Post by **Rastan78** » Fri Sep 02, 2022 11:11 pm

IGN wrote some stuff about the lag. I'd take this as super informal testing, but probably no too far off the mark. I dont think the idea was to try and get some kind of definitive results but just to give a heads up that there are some issues. They got results between 83 to 157 on different systems, but don't get too specific about the games tested. For reference that's between 5 frames to 9.5 frames. And they're wrong about DE doing the Megaman X Legacy Collection. DE handled the original NES games. Interesting though to see info like that hitting a mainstream review.

Spoiler

Now, let’s talk about input latency a little bit, since it is a criticism that’s been rightfully leveled at past retro collections at launch, like the Disney Afternoon Collection and the Mega Man X Legacy Collection. To test The Cowabunga Collection (which I did in solo mode) I set the Xbox Series X to 1080p 120 frames per second with auto low latency turned on. The camera filmed off-screen and button presses at 1080p 120fps. This was done on my Samsung 8K Q900 Series TV (Model: QN55Q900RBFXZA) with Input Signal Plus, and Game Mode turned on. My calculations put Xbox Series X closest to the actual SNES version captured with the same method on my older Sharp LCD (Model LC-62C42U) via a coax input. The math breaks down as follows: one frame captured at 120fps is about 8.3ms of latency, so by counting the frames from button press until there’s an action on the screen you can get a rough idea of how good/bad the total latency is. It’s not a perfect methodology, but it gives you an idea of where this collection lands. After measuring the time from button press to action on my SNES, I calculated the input latency to be consistently around 58ms. On Xbox Series X I was getting 83ms-91ms of total input latency. The Switch OLED in handheld mode had around 99.6ms of delay, and while using a wired Pro controller with a docked Switch (Pro wired communication on) had 141.1ms of delay consistently (107.9ms - 124.5ms with wired communication off), and the PS5 had around 157.7ms of delay consistently with ALMM (auto low latency mode) and 120Hz output set to automatic.

So I found I was getting around 83 to 157.7 milliseconds of total input delay – it was toward the low end of that range on the Xbox Series X, middle of the road on the Switch OLED, and a little bit on the higher side on the PS5. All of these are notable increases over the 58ms of the SNES over COAX on my older display. If you’ve recently played these games on their original platforms you will most likely notice it’s a lot slower. I did as soon as I started playing, so I was sure to turn on every option I could to eliminate that delay as much as possible – I imagine a CRT would further reduce that gap. For comparison, we also did tests with the modern TMNT: Shredders Revenge on Xbox Series X and it consistently returned a 49.8ms input delay. So it would seem 83 to 157 is not a great result.

Props to the reviewer for also reaching out to DE for their perspective who of course do not give 2 fucks or even notice any discrepancy across systems. They prove time and again their priority is being historical archivists and can't or won't develop ports that actually perform well across all systems and games in a collection.

Spoiler

I asked Digital Eclipse about the input delay issues. “While playing locally, we did not notice any significant input latency difference between consoles,” a representative said in a statement. “For online play, online speeds can affect game performance, especially when played with four online players. Modern displays can have latency compared to old CRT TVs, but many have settings for gaming.” That of course is all true, and based on my tests on the Xbox Series X, OLED Switch, and PS5, I think Digital Eclipse still has some work to do here. Especially when compared to the recent Shredders Revenge.

Sturmvogel Prime · Post by **Sturmvogel Prime** » Fri Sep 02, 2022 11:17 pm

BrianC wrote:
Mortificator wrote:
Rastan78 wrote:One game showed input lag of over 225 ms which is over 13 frames.

Spoiler
Nice pic! Hopefully, Digital Eclipse will try to address the issues instead of throwing a thermal grenade, only to have it lobbed back at them by the turtles

In other words, "Expensive and Broken". Thanks for the info.

Sima Tuna · Post by **Sima Tuna** » Sat Sep 03, 2022 1:07 am

Wait, that 9 frames thing is legit? Holy fucking hell. I'm glad I didn't buy the collection on launch. Just more proof you can't believe ANY reviews of retro game compilation releases until the hard numbers come in. Shamefur dispray indeed.

I'm so sick of game journo soy-factories giving rave reviews to retro collections just because they included some "extra features" aka jpegs of random shit like boxart.

Konsolkongen · Post by **Konsolkongen** » Sat Sep 03, 2022 10:03 am

I just received the PS5 version in the mail yesterday. Wish I had known about this thread before I bought it

The games all feel very heavy to play, but I wouldn't call them unplayable. It's still bad enough that I probably won't return to this collection again though. It should be noted that I had VRR enabled, so it's possible that the lag is even worse without that. I didn't bother testing.

The worst thing for me is the awful scaling. Every game except the Game Boy games are scaled poorly on the horisontal axis. I had to turn off Turtles In Time as the diagonal lines in the very first stage shimmered horribly. That for me is what makes this collection unplayable. I hate pixel shimmering, it makes my eyes tired and it just looks plain ugly.

I hadn't played any Digital Eclipse releases since Street Fighter 30th and Samurai Shodown collections. The SF one was especially great as it used very subtle bilinear filtering to produce a pretty sharp non-shimmering image from the awkward CPS resolution. This is the best these games have ever looked in a home console version.

I guess I took it for granted that Digital Eclipse had nailed this aspect for good and that they would continue to do so

Austin · Post by **Austin** » Sat Sep 03, 2022 12:58 pm

Rastan78 wrote:Saw some tests of the PS4 version played on PS5 and the lag is atrocious. Don't know if that's the same for all versions, but it doesn't sound good. One game showed input lag of over 225 ms which is over 13 frames. Digital Eclipse aka Dick Suckinlips is going for a new record.

Wow, that sounds like Mega Man Legacy Collection (the first one) levels of bad. That one soured me on modern Digital Eclipse emu packages. They have even said in interviews, "You can never get rid of input lag," and I feel like they use that as an excuse to do a lazy job on that front. Yet, here we have companies like M2 doing emulation jobs where the input lag is nearly imperceivable.

Sima Tuna · Post by **Sima Tuna** » Sat Sep 03, 2022 3:36 pm

"You can never get rid of input lag, so let's do all we can to increase it as much as possible."

Yes, that seems reasonable.

DenimDemon · Post by **DenimDemon** » Sat Sep 03, 2022 4:59 pm

Their Samurai Shodown collection was pretty good tough.

BrianC · Post by **BrianC** » Sat Sep 03, 2022 5:13 pm

I find it surprising that the PS4 version has the worst lag. That was not the case with the Mega Man Legacy (not to be confused with Mega Man X Legacy that actually had some M2 involvement and still has horrible lag on all platforms) and SF Anniversary collections.

Sima Tuna · Post by **Sima Tuna** » Sat Sep 03, 2022 5:48 pm

It sounds like the switch version is still around 8 frames of input delay, which would place it firmly in Shitty Connection territory.

The Mega Man X collection is ridiculous. Some of the worst lag I've ever seen in any porting job. I don't know what the actual numbers are, but Mega Man X is unplayable. You can't even do dash jumps the way the game demands. But that one is on Capcom. The first Legacy Collection didn't feel great either though.

Rastan78 · Post by **Rastan78** » Sat Sep 03, 2022 6:12 pm

At least Capcom listened to the complaints about X Legacy bc Zero/ZX Collection feels great to play.

DE's SF 30th wasn't too bad if you just look at it as offline straight arcade ports. I think there are some minor emulation and sound issues. Input lag wasn't M2 levels though wasn't too bad. Like it was said earlier they did a nice job with scaling which is unusual for CPS system stuff.

It's just as an overall online package (matchmaking, lobbies, leaderboards, replays etc) they dropped the ball. Iron Galaxy was doing some really good work in that area with 3S online edition and others. Too bad Capcom didn't keep them around. It seems they long since moved onto more high profile stuff.

BIL · Post by **BIL** » Sun Sep 04, 2022 2:41 am

Gaming is a tactile process above all else. This goes without saying, amongst enthusiasts, but then we have always been a niche within a niche. In the mainstream, as long as this basic principle needs restating, shithouse nostalgia merchants like Digital Eclipse will continue to receive work.

There's a crude analogy to be made here, about making love to the woman (or man ;3) of one's dreams whilst encased in a HAZMAT suit. However, I think an automotive analogy is yet more apropos. A car's most decisive feature is not the engine, or the steering, or even the brakes. It's the tyres - the point of contact with the road. Skimp on those, and everything else goes to waste. The finest and the shoddiest machines alike blur into middling grey slop, the pleasure of driving vanishes; all that remains is a miserable, leaden, wearying clinch.

What we have here is an emulation industry where skimping on fundamentals is the norm - and where developers who consistently produce quality work, like M2, Hamster, and Gotch, are outliers. Specialists. Boutique. I take a glass half full view - between ShotTriggers and ACA, we've seen a healthier stock of home releases over the last gen than I'd ever have expected to.

Still, it's an ugly situation, to be sure. It wouldn't surprise me, at all, to see input lag apologists become a thing, at the rate things are going. But that gets into games journalism, which is an entire sewage system unto itself.

DenimDemon · Post by **DenimDemon** » Sun Sep 04, 2022 9:12 am

Would be a pass to me anyway, i find these games a bore to play... I haven’t booted up my carts in a while…just so many other belt scrollers that I love to re play.
Even the new TMNT, not sure why I bought it. Find it extremely boring as well. Competent combat sure.

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