Before people get carried away, the X-Mode is optional and load times are fine once the game begins (including restarts), right? And no glaring errors as far as emulation is concerned?
Taylor wrote:Before people get carried away, the X-Mode is optional and load times are fine once the game begins (including restarts), right? And no glaring errors as far as emulation is concerned?
Edit: Now less loaded.
Yes, yes and yes.
One person on 2ch was remarking that it seems like Sakari Masaki, the game's lead programmer, probably just built an emu for the ROM of both games, and that's why it takes so long to load. Dunno about the accuracy of that statement, but the sheer length of loads makes me wonder wtf is even going on in my 360.
Still, I have to say, as a big Black Label fan, this game is still near the top of 360 shmups only because the competition is so awful in general.
It's really just the startup loading times that are annoying. Maybe it's loading the entire game into memory, I got no clue what it's doing there. Also those loading times are identical whether you run the game from disc or copy to HDD first.
What's also annoying are the shitty menu controls and either I'm totally dump or you can only play the game with one single credit. Anyone got some info on that? I noticed it shows "credit: 1" prior start, but no matter what button I hit, I am not able to increase those credits. Also didn't find anything in the options. Maybe you will be able to increase those only when you play for some time.
I don't surely don't regret getting this one, Do Don Pachi is still an excellent game after all and there are by far worse games on the market. However I don't have too high hopes those issues will be improved with Ketsui as the game will be ported by the same (adult adventure game) company as DDP.
But there's surely hope that Cave will take better care of Death Smiles.
adversity1 wrote:
One person on 2ch was remarking that it seems like Sakari Masaki, the game's lead programmer, probably just built an emu for the ROM of both games, and that's why it takes so long to load.
Might be possible yeah, the entire game gets probably loaded into the system memory during startup.
ex.machina wrote:
What's also annoying are the shitty menu controls and either I'm totally dump or you can only play the game with one single credit. Anyone got some info on that? I noticed it shows "credit: 1" prior start, but no matter what button I hit, I am not able to increase those credits. Also didn't find anything in the options. Maybe you will be able to increase those only when you play for some time.
Credits increase the more you play the game. Not sure what the max is...9?
Also ex.machina, add me on XBL so we can compare scores! adversity1
Play-Asia's also shipped my copy. I don't care about the loading times since, like some other 360 titles, they only occur a couple of times before becoming faster. Nothing can compare to Ninja Gaiden 2's loading times, so unless they're that bad, I don't really care all that much.
But yeah, the chances are Ketsui will end up like this too. It's sad that I'm more interested in chaos;head noah than the Ketsui port, and I can't even play it properly.
Udderdude wrote:Well, so much for that. I guess the Ketsui port is going to be half-assed as well. At least we can hope they'll patch it.
Well, Sakari did take the initial critism of DOJ BLEX to heart, hence why the game took an extra 2 months to arrive. Hopefully he'll make it a point to patch DOJ in the near future and spend more time on Ketsui (the game still has an indefinite release date and it should remain as such until he's taken it back to the drawing board).
Udderdude wrote:Well, so much for that. I guess the Ketsui port is going to be half-assed as well. At least we can hope they'll patch it.
Well, Sakari did take the initial critism of DOJ BLEX to heart, hence why the game took an extra 2 months to arrive. Hopefully he'll make it a point to patch DOJ in the near future and spend more time on Ketsui (the game still has an indefinite release date and it should remain as such until he's taken it back to the drawing board).
If they manage to fuck Ketsui up, shooter fans in Japan will be at the 5bp offices with pitckforks and hatchets.
Udderdude wrote:Well, so much for that. I guess the Ketsui port is going to be half-assed as well. At least we can hope they'll patch it.
Well, Sakari did take the initial critism of DOJ BLEX to heart, hence why the game took an extra 2 months to arrive. Hopefully he'll make it a point to patch DOJ in the near future and spend more time on Ketsui (the game still has an indefinite release date and it should remain as such until he's taken it back to the drawing board).
If they manage to fuck Ketsui up, shooter fans in Japan will be at the 5bp offices with pitckforks and hatchets.
I don't suppose GaijinPunch would also be in for this as well.
I second Zakk's comments. This doesn't sound remotely worse than Mushi port. That one had imperfect porting issues in addition to bad loading times and sucky menu.
Matskat wrote:This neighborhood USED to be nice...until that family of emulators moved in across the street....
If BLEX's biggest issues are unintuitive menus and loading times when you load things up, I'm still pretty excited about it. I'm really only worried about the reports of bugs, though I haven't heard exactly what the bug/s are.
Not that they were particularly bad, they just were everywhere. Try navigating some menus for example. Basically, the main problem is that the game has no "restart from the beginning" option, so every time you die you need to wait about 7-8 seconds for the game over music to finish, then there's a loading screen, then the hiscore table, then the loading screen, then the menu, then the loading screen… That's half a minute to restart the damn game! And if I'm playing on Ultra, restarting takes up to 1/4 of my playing time.
(For comparison: to restart a Touhou game, you press escape — up — z. Takes roughly one second. Now that is ergonomics. No wonder I don't like playing Mushi for score.)
Last edited by moozooh on Tue Feb 17, 2009 6:40 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Matskat wrote:This neighborhood USED to be nice...until that family of emulators moved in across the street....
Sorry for folks that were really looking forward to this (myself included).
Hmm, too bad to hear about the sloppy design, but I can live with all that if the game is intact. They didn't do any bullshit filters did they? That's the only thing that could keep me from buying it.
Not that they were particularly bad, they just were everywhere. Try navigating some menus for example. Basically, the main problem is that the game has no "restart from the beginning" option, so every time you die you need to wait about 7-8 seconds for the game over music to finish, then there's a loading screen, then the hiscore table, then the loading screen, then the menu, then the loading screen… That's half a minute to restart the damn game! And if I'm playing on Ultra, restarting takes up to 1/4 of my playing time.
(For comparison: to restart a Touhou game, you press escape — up — z. Takes roughly one second. Now that is ergonomics. No wonder I don't like playing Mushi for score.)
You can practically eliminate all the loading if you install it to a HDD.
Goongrave wrote:Well the main problems are:
-No scanlines
-The Menu is always YOKO oriented also when you set the game to play in TATE mode
-Practice mode sux
We still don't know how faithful slowdown and patterns are. I hope in a patch to fix the major problems.
So long as there's no crappy image filtering, then no-scanlines won't be a problem for people playing on CRTs (such as myself).
Now, are there any legitimate complaints about the game itself, or is all this noise just over-reacting PCB owners?
bcass wrote:You can practically eliminate all the loading if you install it to a HDD.
I have a slim PS2, so I'm not going to go through all the hassle to get an HDD for it, and this is really beside the point. The game's menu is just not made in a way that makes it convenient to restart from the beginning. That's one problem. Loading times are another problem. One problem exaggerates the other here.
Matskat wrote:This neighborhood USED to be nice...until that family of emulators moved in across the street....
ex.machina wrote:It's really just the startup loading times that are annoying. Maybe it's loading the entire game into memory, I got no clue what it's doing there. Also those loading times are identical whether you run the game from disc or copy to HDD first.
What's also annoying are the shitty menu controls and either I'm totally dump or you can only play the game with one single credit. Anyone got some info on that? I noticed it shows "credit: 1" prior start, but no matter what button I hit, I am not able to increase those credits. Also didn't find anything in the options. Maybe you will be able to increase those only when you play for some time.
its a hardcore shmup why do you want more than one credit ? also if its so far only the loading times at the beginning that suck whats the problem? wack the disc in go graba coffee itl be loaded when you come back and away ya go !
Since I can't post on cave-stg I'll say it here. I think the ability to quick reset is great and this would eliminate most of the issues with navigating through the different menus. It sucks that practice mode isn't as comprehensive as what the PS2 one, but even the PS2 one was flawed in the sense that you never know what level to set your rank when going into a later stage, since every run is different. Unlocking X Mode after 6 hours sounds strange, but I don't mind too much.
I guess I can't really comment until the game arrives at my door and I've played around with it for a bit. So long as the core game itself is there and doesn't have any score breaking, game breaking glitches, I'll be happy with it.
Aru-san wrote:
I don't suppose GaijinPunch would also be in for this as well.
I have no time to care...much less act on thoughts about shitty ports.
My 2 yen worth: This patching bullshit is going to hurt sales. For a micro release, you need those "on the fence" guys... the ones (like me) who are not going to bother w/ shitty load times, menus, and no scanline option.
RegalSin wrote:New PowerPuff Girls. They all have evil pornstart eyelashes.
That initial loading time was horrible, but I can tolerate the rest. The interface looks good as well. I didn't quite understand how the control settings were.. gauge based.. well, I'll figure it out. Also surprisingly, no Japanese subtitles for the menu options (like the PS2 edition had).
I don't think I need to comment on the guy playing but that isn't what the video is for. Your choices are basically, put up with it or scout out the PCB at 70~90k yen.
