CV1000 games make my eyes bleed

[uzernaem]

A bit of a rant post. Anyone else feels that CV1000 games are damn ugly and hard on eyes? Everything is washed out pre-rendered sprites with annoying neon colored special effects on top. Games like Donpachi, original Dodonpachi, Battle Garegga, Raiden DX, that are good old 16-bit pixel art, look miles better in my opinion. DOJ is something in between as it is mostly pre-rendered but doesn't have the overabundant special effects of later Cave games and it still looks nicer than DFK. As a big fan of Garegga I've tried to give a chance to Ibara several times but coming from Garegga's crisp visuals it is really hard to do.

[Xyga]

Not necessarily. I'd rather judge how 'readable' a bullet-heavy game is before even questioning the developper's taste.

Garegga and Ibara are notoriously hard-to-read shmups with lots of very small bullets and shrapnel that often get mixed-up in the graphics-heavy backgrounds.
(Ibara Kuro with a reworked color balance is kind of improved in that field)

MM Pork on the other side might be one of the messiest, with Manpuku and Arrange on top, but since they've picked the colors and effects right it's still easier to read than Garegga and Ibara.
For DFK they made some poor choices probably because they wanted absolutely OTT effects and clumsily went too far, but that could have been fixed without altering the constant-explosion-looking looks of the game.

Gaudy-looking is not really the issue, the choice and balance of colors is. IMHO.

[uzernaem]

Well you learn to read Garegga bullets well with enough practice. It just becomes as natural as any other shooter. I mean that looking at something like Ibara, DFK or MM Pork makes me want to mess with my monitor's sharpness/contrast settings and even then I can't get them look right.

[rancor]

Is this a rant about actual PCBs, or MAME emulation?

[KAI]

Ibara looks awesome and sharp on the emulation tho...

[IseeThings]

A bit of a rant post. Anyone else feels that CV1000 games are damn ugly and hard on eyes? Everything is washed out pre-rendered sprites with annoying neon colored special effects on top. Games like Donpachi, original Dodonpachi, Battle Garegga, Raiden DX, that are good old 16-bit pixel art, look miles better in my opinion. DOJ is something in between as it is mostly pre-rendered but doesn't have the overabundant special effects of later Cave games and it still looks nicer than DFK. As a big fan of Garegga I've tried to give a chance to Ibara several times but coming from Garegga's crisp visuals it is really hard to do.

nah, it's not just you, I've always felt this way about them.

the low resolution, limited colour bits per pen (it's 5-5-5, even earlier hardware like the psykosh stuff was 8-8-8) and overuse of the blending DOES just make everything look like some washed out garish 80s neon display.

maybe that's what they were going for.. but I definitely prefer the cleaner, sharper look of the older stuff.

[Xyga]

garish 80s neon display

I love it, though it's sometimes indeed a bit too much, the result is often quite unique.
The good old pixel art is a superior delicacy in practice of course, but I can appreciate some steroids-enhanced junk food too.
I'm okay with the prerendered stuff anyway as long as it's at the right resolution on a proper crt display (and if not, then it's go to be reasonably 'hdified' and/or scaled like some of the 360 ports).

[Hagane]

Yeah, pre-renders are ugly. Much better pallete control is one of the main reasons why pixel art looks vastly better than muddy 1000+ color pre-renders.

[Strikers1945guy]

Is this a rant about actual PCBs, or MAME emulation?

That was what I was thinking.

Ibara Kuro looks so damn sexy on my Astro City.

[TVG]

While hand drawn has it's own unique charm, I think pre rendered can look good.

I know some people hate it but for me blazing star looks the tits. DOJ looks fine also.

I am guessing CV1000 means death smiles and up ? I think it's just a matter of inspiration rather than platform, frankly, the last cave games took a strange, bland ish direction imo. Saidioujou seems to play well (besides being broken but judging from HD Youtube vids the color choices are bizzare. I haven't seen tje game running tho. I've seen death smiles pcb and I don't like the way it looks, but it's more aesthetic than technical.

Also, one thing that bothered me with cave, I know toe hoe is sucessful and I guess they kinda wanted to cash on that but they werent inspired by the right elements. Instead of taking the uniqueness of the intricate and pretty bullet patterns (which is an objective touhou quality I cannot deny], they took the lolis. There's so many directions they could have taken. Dont get me wrong I like scoring syspems (or do I ? I can't seem to be bothered learning mushi scoring, too much unintuitive stuff} but their only innovation seemed MORE BIG FLASHY NUMBERS ON SCREEN. Yes, the games were quality and I'm sure superplayers were satisfied but I can't shake the feeling that things could have gone in a different direction.

I am probably a little wrong tho, STGs are kinda dead because their main platform and source of revenue, japan arcades, are almost dead, not because of lack of inspiration.

[Strikers1945guy]

Also, one thing that bothered me with cave, I know toe hoe is sucessful and I guess they kinda wanted to cash on that but they werent inspired by the right elements. Instead of taking the uniqueness of the intricate and pretty bullet patterns (which is an objective touhou quality I cannot deny], they took the lolis.

Yeah, not a loli fan either, but if the game is good enough it really doesn't bother me. I'm fond of the ships / steam punk look myself, or the regular flying a plane / ship in real world or space.

I will admit I felt a bit strange in espgaluda flying around my Transgender fairy but hey the games good so eh.

[StarCreator]

I am guessing CV1000 means death smiles and up ?

Mushihimesama was the first CV1000 game. Every arcade STG Cave has released since then except Deathsmiles II has run on the hardware.

[Muchi Muchi Spork]

The Akai Katana Shin port was on Nesica.

[Udderdude]

Pixel art purists, assemble! Oh, wait .. they all left the site a decade ago.

CRTs can do a lot to smooth out the uglyness of pre-rendered graphics. Just look at Mars Matrix on an arcade CRT, then look at it on an LCD. It's like night and day ..

[BrianC]

When I saw the CV in the topic, I was thinking of Colecovision (though CV1000 has nothing to do with Colecovision). I could imagine the single colored sprites being a pain on the eyes, though I didn't mind it too much.

[BIL]

Pixel art purists, assemble! Oh, wait .. they all left the site a decade ago.

THATS WHAT YOU THINK

RECAPRECAPRECAP

:3

[Despatche]

can we please stop using the term "washed out", because it means absolutely nothing

pre-renders are not ugly unless someone makes ugly pre-renders

"garish 80s neon displays" are a good thing and we need more of them

note that this is coming from someone who prefers the pixel art of gunbird and dodonpachi etc over later games

[pixelcorps]

You have as much control over prerendered sprites as you have over pixel art. If a graphic is washed out, you can either fix the material, or post process. iff you want to palletize, you can index the pallette and remap/retouch as much as you like.

Here's a 4 step pass that I do on my renders, take at look at the slightly washed out and indistinct look on step 1 in comparison to step 4, it's subtle but you can see what can be done.



Pixel art is nice, but we are talking about 200x320 displays that was used in mobile phones 10 years ago, maybe it's time to forge forward? It's not like the indie fraternity have given up on pixel art...

the CV1000 PCB does not have a requirement for prerenders, it's a company decision because they have to create, prototype and iterate rapidly, which pixel art does not allow you to do.

Another thing to consider is that the games you like all come form an era where STG's where WAY more popular than they are now, they made more money so companies would allow more time for development.. Pixel art takes a long time in comparison to photoshop and modelling work, and finding a team of staff that can create a cohesive style that doesn't look like a hodgepodge of styles is VERY hard.

One final thing to consider is career relevance. Any game graphics designer in a professional corporate field that is still producing pixel art has basically committed career suicide, no one wants to see a portfolio of 90's style dot graphics.. It happened to me. I did GBA work to bring in income while the rest of the company made 3D console games, after 4-5 years my portfolio was utterly irrelevant to the current development landscape.

What you should be saying is "I don't like the art direction on Cave's games anymore."

[Hagane]

You have as much control over prerendered sprites as you have over pixel art.

No, you really don't. Pixel art allows for, well, pixel level manipulation of sprites. That's the medium's strongest suit and why good pixel art looks so sharp and detailed compared to contemporary pre-rendered sprites.

The main problem with prerenders is their poor color management, not enough contrast, indexed palletes that are never as good as handpicked ones, etc. Just look at this thing



a tiny sprite with 179 colours. Way too many. Poor contrast, lack of detail, hard to tell things apart. I still have to see a pre-render that doesn't look like it's made or plastic/clay or doesn't look messy and poorly defined.

[AxelMill]

Also, one thing that bothered me with cave, I know toe hoe is sucessful and I guess they kinda wanted to cash on that but they werent inspired by the right elements. Instead of taking the uniqueness of the intricate and pretty bullet patterns (which is an objective touhou quality I cannot deny], they took the lolis.

It's weird how the (Do)DonPachi saga went from "kill your own comrades" to "destroy teen Transformers" to "BARRIER! HEIKI DA MON~" or whatever that loli bee says, in the span of a few years.

[monouchi]

For me its a choice of monitor (Scanlines).
DDP looks amazing on my Nanao MS9 while cv1000 looks messy.
Then on my Tosh PF (heavier scanlines) cv1000 looks amazing while DDP looks very chopped up.

[system11]

I agree with you, not only is the pre-rendered look clearly not as good as traditional sprite work, but the actual output quality of the PCBs is rubbish too. It's shameful if you compare them to something like a Namco System 1 game which have absolutely beautiful video output despite being 15 years older.