Battle Traverse

[Blackbird]

This game needs a proper thread. Tried out the demo version last night. Initial impression: This game ROCKS!







Someone mentioned in another thread that it's like a hybrid between Progear and Ketsui, which seems very apt.

Demo is here: http://naut-mark.com/download.html

[Pretas]

Tried the demo, not feeling it. They nailed the surface look and feel of an Ikeda STG, but without any of the heart and soul. Some of the enemies and patterns on display are direct swipes of those found in CAVE games, like the long-barreled tanks from Progear that shoot huge rings of bullets. Scoring is too straightforward for an Ikeda-style game (basically Ketsui For Dummies) and the survival difficulty is barely there.

It's just another mediocre student game, though an unusually polished one.

[RHE]

I like this demo. But why so easy?

[Despatche]

um... this game isn't remotely ikeda. neither is progear or ketsui! ikeda makes like, donpachi. that's mostly it. he's the figurehead of cave, really.

demo's easy because there are only two stages and the full version has two additional difficulties, and hard difficulty loops into an alternate version of very hard for some reason. it's weird.

[pokemon123]

okay i'm dumb and if ikeda didn't make ketsui who did?

[Shepardus]

Ikeda both directed and programmed Ketsui. Junya Inoue directed Progear but Ikeda still programmed it.

[CStarFlare]

um... this game isn't remotely ikeda. neither is progear or ketsui! ikeda makes like, donpachi. that's mostly it. he's the figurehead of cave, really.

demo's easy because there are only two stages and the full version has two additional difficulties, and hard difficulty loops into an alternate version of very hard for some reason. it's weird.

Is hard the only difficulty that loops? Seems odd with two above it, but every who mentions the loop specifcally says that hard loops.

[copy-paster]

Considering that this is a fangame, the game demo wasn't too bad for me.

[KAI]

Meh music, meh scoring mechanics, meh danmakus. Love the intro and the airship designs tho (3rd boss rules).

[Blackbird]

Yeah, the music could be a little better. There's a lot of good stuff so far, would love to see the dev keep refining it.

[Squire Grooktook]

Ikeda STG

heart and soul

That's a good one.

[BPzeBanshee]

I get a crash on exit and the config application complains about missing a mfc71.dll. Neat cutesy doujin otherwise.

[Zaarock]

Hard difficulty is the default / arcade difficulty. I can see why people here would find it a bit boring, it's easier than any cave STG I can think of until Stage 5 which is a big difficulty spike. For a survival challenge Very Hard or Hard 2-ALL seems good. Extreme mode is hilarious, it's like an Ultra mode from the mushi series but with suicide walls.

Stage 5 has a very cool design I think. Reminds me of daifukkatsu stage 5, big difficulty spike but lots of neat ideas. Clearly based on the finales to cave games but pulls it off very well (and dat boss intro)

Scoring is too straightforward for an Ikeda-style game (basically Ketsui For Dummies)

What are you talking about? It's pretty much Ketsui's system with bullet cancelling mechanics added on top and there is even an equivalent for empty locking. You get higher value items from point blanking and bullet cancels consume item value. High scoring routes are definitely not straightforward.

[Zaarock]

A digital release of this went on sale on DLsite a couple days ago: http://www.dlsite.com/eng/work/=/produc ... 57191.html

[Kaede]

Thanks very much for the download link, though this looked great in the other thread and will be buying this for sure.

[BulletMagnet]

One bug that doesn't seem to have been fixed is the game's incredibly annoying tendency to unwaveringly interpret the controller I plug in as "player 2"'s input device, so that pretty much no matter what I do the game summons a second player into the game the first time I press the shot/confirm button, and even re-summons it even if I let him/her die and press it again afterwards. Anyone else having this issue?

[BPzeBanshee]

One bug that doesn't seem to have been fixed is the game's incredibly annoying tendency to unwaveringly interpret the controller I plug in as "player 2"'s input device, so that pretty much no matter what I do the game summons a second player into the game the first time I press the shot/confirm button, and even re-summons it even if I let him/her die and press it again afterwards. Anyone else having this issue?

Not an expert on this game at all but in my GM experience I've found Windows has a strange tendency to assign different IDs to a controller from time to time and it's possible Battle Traverse may be using this ID as a reference to player side (it's either ID:0 or ID:1 usually) if it's using DirectInput for things. Worth having a look in the Control Panel's Game Controllers section when this happens to see what Windows is seeing it as.

[Jaimers]

You can turn off Player 2 in the config file.

[BulletMagnet]

You can turn off Player 2 in the config file.

This sounds like the easiest workaround, but now I get a "TODO [Japanese text] has stopped working" message whenever I try to open Config, and I could have sworn I was able to get into it just the other day (the game itself still works, though it's always given me a "program has stopped working" message after I close it - seems kinda obvious ). Wonder what the Dickens is going on with this thing...

[CStarFlare]

I could never get the config menu to open, I just had to mess with the file directly to turn on full screen (which involved a bit of guesswork). Maybe someone who isn't having issues with the config function could share a properly set up config file?

[autoNamed]

Does anyone know how to get this game to display full screen 4:3? Mine is full screen but stretched to 16:9

[bcass]

Does anyone know how to get this working correctly on Windows 10? I've tried with and without high DPI settings but the screen is still too stretched on a widescreen monitor.

[BareKnuckleRoo]

This is generally a problem with your graphics card and/or monitor not being configured to scale full screen at low resolutions correctly. For older games that run at lower, 4:3 aspect ratio resolutions (Battle Traverse runs at a native 640 x 480 if I remember correctly), either your monitor or your graphics card has to be setup to scale the aspect ratio correctly. It's easiest to do under the settings for your GPU/graphics card.

For instance, in Nvidia's control panel, this is the setting you're after:



Make sure it's set to Aspect Ratio mode (which adds bars to the left and right to keep it from getting stretched out of aspect) and make sure it's set to Perform Scaling On GPU, because most newer monitors suck at handling low resolution modes gracefully and don't seem to be built with maintaining aspect ratio for such modes as a default.

[bcass]

Thanks for the info. My card was already set to "Aspect ratio", but changing scaling to GPU, as you suggested, fixed the issue.

[BareKnuckleRoo]

I'm glad to hear it. I had a bit of a headache the last time I got a new monitor that was supposed to be able to handle this under the monitor settings; it ended up being far less trouble to have the GPU handle all the aspect ratio scaling, and it doesn't seem to add any real overhead or delay to the system (no surprise since such games are generally older, and running at a fairly low, undemanding resolution for modern systems).

[Klatrymadon]

Thanks for that, BKR - I was wondering why Battle Traverse looked oddly soft and fuzzy since I got my new PC. Turns out I was just playing it in widescreen without realising! Here are the same aspect ratio and scaling options in AMD's manager, for anyone who needs 'em: https://i.imgur.com/NwmtTFf.png (Integer scaling tidies up the remaining blurriness, but it 'centers' the game pretty weirdly.)

[BareKnuckleRoo]

Hooray! I seem to recall answering this question for other games a few times before.... probably on another forum? But at any rate it really begs the question as to why aspect ratio scaling isn't gracefully handled by default on monitors or GPU settings. Why the heck would anyone want the graphics stretched to all hell? Why would this be a default? It's just awful.

Disney+ apparently has published all the episodes of M.A.S.H. but they're using a DVD release that zoomed in all the original 4:3 aspect releases into widescreen and it's just awful. WHO WOULD WANT THIS? NOBODY ASKED FOR THE ORIGINAL CAMERA WORK TO BE RUINED. WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU?!