Recca/Raizing connection?

[AWJ]

Was the 1992 Famicom shmup "Recca" programmed by someone who later ended up designing shmups at Raizing? The similarity between Recca and Raizing shmups like Mahou Daisakusen and Battle Garegga is downright eerie. The high-speed scrolling backgrounds (and overall very fast pace of the games compared to other verts), the types of enemy formations used, the way your dying ship's explosion lasts a long time and destroys enemies that fly into it... The selectable option formations in Garegga are also almost identical to the ones in Recca.

[Cthulhu]

IIRC there's no way to know for sure, as the credits in Recca are all pseudonyums, as is the standard for 8-bit. I've never seen it mentioned in any bios or interviews either.

[Icarus]

If you search for Battle Garegga in it's katakana form on Yahoo Auctions, you'll come across a Recca replay VHS.

I'd like to know the connection between them as well.

[SFKhoa]

Since I've cleared the game, here's what I know:

The Designer and the Programmer of Recca was S. Yagawa
EDIT: Never mind, it's already been mentioned in another thread.

[Cthulhu]

If you search for Battle Garegga in it's katakana form on Yahoo Auctions, you'll come across a Recca replay VHS.

I'd like to know the connection between them as well.

I looked up that video... I want the 100 page booklet that comes with it more than the video itself. One of the things that's supposed to be in it is "the connection between Recca and Battle Garegga." Grr, damn them for not giving more information.

[AWJ]

The Designer and the Programmer of Recca was S. Yagawa ;)

Ah, I guess that explains the similarities then.

[AWJ]

Wait, did Yagawa program Mahou Daisakusen? MAWS doesn't have a credits listing for it.

[TGK]

I noticed these similarity recently when replaying Garrega, what bugs me is that many of the elements in Raizing games are already invented way back then.

The mechanical arm laser (that shoots extremely fast in Recca, not moderately fast like in Garrega)

One of the bosses in Recca is very similar to the head of Glow Squid and another boss is similar to the body of Glow Squid

One of the bosses in Recca uses a similar pattern as Sobut in Batrider

The option

The formation

The lingering explosion

The tickle attack in Batrider (that at max level can be released for increased normal shot firepower) is almost the same in mechanic as the bomb in Recca.

[Randorama]

Wait, did Yagawa program Mahou Daisakusen? MAWS doesn't have a credits listing for it.

No, a few Compile guys did, the credits are in the booklet of Shippu Mahou Daisakusen, Saturn version. I think the mame history file also has them, or you can check arcade-history.com (please check the Sokyugurentai entry, too).

[Dylan1CC]

I dunno what to say but that Yagawa is the man and now I really need to track down Recca someday.

Oh yeah, and the pseudonym thing in 8-bit credit lists is odd. I may never know who that "bun bun" guy really was in the Megaman credits.

[shiftace]

I suppose this is as good a place as any to mention that Shinobu appears to be a woman's name.

One more thing in Recca that recurs all over: score medals with accumulating value. They go from 100 to 2,000 in 16 steps, with a fairly strange progression.

And having looked over the Ibara thread... "Wakabayashi" is in the Recca credits in I think debug team. Akira Wakabayashi?

Edit, months later: No, having looked for another 5 minutes, the name Shinobu looks gender neutral. Anyway...

[Randorama]

I suppose this is as good a place as any to mention that Shinobu appears to be a woman's name.

One more thing in Recca that recurs all over: score medals with accumulating value. They go from 100 to 2,000 in 16 steps, with a fairly strange progression.

And having looked over the Ibara thread... "Wakabayashi" is in the Recca credits in I think debug team. Akira Wakabayashi?

Why not? Both were Toaplan guys, probably went away after the boat was sinking (Toaplan bankrupted in 1994). I wouldn't be surprised if Yagawa or Takano are after the early Toaplan titles...

[AWJ]

Wait, did Yagawa program Mahou Daisakusen? MAWS doesn't have a credits listing for it.

No, a few Compile guys did, the credits are in the booklet of Shippu Mahou Daisakusen, Saturn version. I think the mame history file also has them, or you can check arcade-history.com (please check the Sokyugurentai entry, too).

Mahou Daisakusen and Shippuu Mahou Daisakusen are two different games. arcade-history.com has the credits for Shippuu, but not for the original.

[TGK]

I dunno what to say but that Yagawa is the man and now I really need to track down Recca someday.

Oh yeah, and the pseudonym thing in 8-bit credit lists is odd. I may never know who that "bun bun" guy really was in the Megaman credits.

you do need to track it down. I just replayed it in an emulator (Nestopia) yesterday for old time's sake, and wow, it IS awesome. I realized that my constant praise for it around here is not rose tinted talk after all. The game is incredibly long, fast, and creative. By creative here I mean you will die by many many ways, not just bullets. The game is as fast as Feveron most of the time, but does not feel like either a Cave or Raizing game. It feels like a Compile game (think Guardian Legend) after 6 expresso.

The emulation doesn't do the game justice since there is a lot of slowdown making the game much easier, but it's still a good teaser to playing the real thing. Nestopia is already the best emulator around for Recca. (Tip: adjust the aspect ratio a little bit in this emulator seems to take away the interpolation filter on the graphics, making it a little better)

[gunbird18]

I dunno what to say but that Yagawa is the man and now I really need to track down Recca someday.

Oh yeah, and the pseudonym thing in 8-bit credit lists is odd. I may never know who that "bun bun" guy really was in the Megaman credits.

you do need to track it down. I just replayed it in an emulator (Nestopia) yesterday for old time's sake, and wow, it IS awesome. I realized that my constant praise for it around here is not rose tinted talk after all. The game is incredibly long, fast, and creative. By creative here I mean you will die by many many ways, not just bullets. The game is as fast as Feveron most of the time, but does not feel like either a Cave or Raizing game. It feels like a Compile game (think Guardian Legend) after 6 expresso.

The emulation doesn't do the game justice since there is a lot of slowdown making the game much easier, but it's still a good teaser to playing the real thing. Nestopia is already the best emulator around for Recca. (Tip: adjust the aspect ratio a little bit in this emulator seems to take away the interpolation filter on the graphics, making it a little better)

Played it last night as well!!!

Wow that is fast for a Famicon game. Can you believe it people? TGK is correct, as fast as FEVERON! And yes the enemy patterns reminded me a lot of Compile patterns.

[shiftace]

The emulation doesn't do the game justice since there is a lot of slowdown making the game much easier, but it's still a good teaser to playing the real thing.

Oh good god. That's the only thing I found remotely lacking in the game, and I've played it maybe 50 hours in various emulators. Maybe I'll get off my ass and go patronize NES Reproductions now.

[SFKhoa]

The emulation doesn't do the game justice since there is a lot of slowdown making the game much easier, but it's still a good teaser to playing the real thing.

Oh good god. That's the only thing I found remotely lacking in the game, and I've played it maybe 50 hours in various emulators. Maybe I'll get off my ass and go patronize NES Reproductions now.

Actually, I think playing it on the original NES would be even worse, since much more flickering with the sprites and stuff. After all, almost ALL emulators have the ability to "extend" sprite counts, right?

[zaphod]

Yeah, "remove sprite limit" is a very nice feature. However, the trippy raster effects will work much bettter on the real thing.

[TGK]

the "trippy raster effect", that's exactly what I mean

I think the speed of this game is possible only because of clever usage of flickering.

But if memory serves me right, the flickering on a real TV hooked on a real NES is smoother, so the speed of the game is more or less constant, with the occasional slowdown (which is good, or else 1CCing it is really hard)

Well, I can easily get to stage 4 on 1 credit now after 12 years not playing it, and I've quit video games as a whole for 3 years. It must definitely got easier on an emulator.

[Cthulhu]

The NES is capable of doing some pretty impressive stuff (well, for what it is ) in the right hands... Compile's NES games are well known for their large amount of objects onscreen and high speed, and Super Spy Hunter (I forget the Japanese name ... it's not actually related to Spy Hunter at all) has some amazing visual effects too. I've never seen Recca non-emulated, but yeah, it's up there with the most impressive NES games without a doubt.

[TGK]

hehe, I just replayed it again on Nestopia, got to the third last boss this time.

Recca's ship is truly the most overpowered shmup ship I've ever played! I feel safer in this thing than in the type 1 Batsugun ship at full power.

[shiftace]

Yeah, one of the cooler things I found in Recca is that it's posssible to not fire the main gun for about half of the game and just kill everything with S pods and the occasional bomb. 10 minutes of not firing is worth up to 150,000 points.

TGK -- since you've actually played this "for real" -- I've been wondering, how does the game clock behave in Recca on a Famicom? The clock appears to run at 50 FPS, but it's an NTSC game, so the hardware's supposed to go at 60 FPS, right? But that makes the clock run 20% fast. Now, one emulator I played on once (RockNES) set the game at 50 FPS by default, and it didn't slow down with lots of sprites (it was just slow all the time). Everything else ran it at 60 FPS; the game would slow down, but the clock would stay steady. Any thoughts?

As for flicker and sprite limits -- I turned off the sprite limit in I think it was FCE Ultra, but the game still observed the same limit as before. There are places in Area 7 that might want over 200 sprites for bullet spirals, although the game only allows about 40 at a time. Lots of games use flickering to get around the NES/FC's 64 sprite limit occasionally. I think Recca's over 64 sprites most of the time though.

[TGK]

I had Recca (and a Famicom) when I was a kid, so I didn't know much about clock speed or frame rates back then, but there's a few place that I think behave strangely in emulation

I have the best emulation result for Recca on Nestopia with sprite limit turned off and frame rate synched to the monitor refresh rate (so 60 fps). It all seems very close to what I remember except.

The "Wall with laser arms" boss is a lot slower, I beat it on the first try without even remembering the pattern, just dodging everything.

The wiggling effect before the snake bosses comes out is extremely pixelly

Sometimes when there is a lot of bullets, some bullets go through you without killing you.

I wouldn't try to guess why these things happen though, since it probably has something to do deep inside the Famicom architecture.

How do you find out that the game clock is actually 50 hz? I think it was actually 60 hz. Since if it was 50 hz, then running the game with 50 or 60 hz monitor refresh rate won't make any difference. I just tested this, running it on Nestopia with 240 fps gives you the exact same game, so the display must constantly redraw the same game frame, which actually update at 60 hz. Although the music will be sped up 4 times, which I think is because sound is just played on the side separately from the game logic and don't follow the game clock.

However running the game at 50 hz (system clock) gives you a slower game.

[Randorama]

Mahou Daisakusen and Shippuu Mahou Daisakusen are two different games. arcade-history.com has the credits for Shippuu, but not for the original.

Obviously, but the programming team is more or less the same (Sakimoto and Iwata did the OST instead of Iwata alone). Yagawa joined for Garegga, so to speak, but didn't working with this group, since they were working on SokyuGurentai (with the help of other Compile newcomers).

[captain ahar]

i just played this the other day, and i must say it is thoroughly insane.

[AWJ]

Now, one emulator I played on once (RockNES) set the game at 50 FPS by default, and it didn't slow down with lots of sprites (it was just slow all the time). Everything else ran it at 60 FPS; the game would slow down, but the clock would stay steady. Any thoughts?

Wasn't the game originally produced for a promotional event (the "Summer Carnival 92" on the title screen) rather than for retail sale? Perhaps it really was designed for hardware with PAL timing. The speed of the ingame timer certainly suggests so.

Unfortunately, NES ROMs don't contain any internal information to identify what timing they were designed for (whereas SNES games have an internal "header" block identifying their region along with title, publisher, etc.). Most NES emulators assume NTSC timing unless specifically told to use PAL timing since there are far more NTSC games than PAL games out there. RockNES might try to determine the timing heuristically (though I can't imagine how) or far more likely it has an internal database that identifies Recca as a PAL game (rightly or wrongly)

As for flicker and sprite limits -- I turned off the sprite limit in I think it was FCE Ultra, but the game still observed the same limit as before.

There are two different sprite limits on the FC/NES.

One is the limit of 64 sprites onscreen, which is a memory limitation. There's no useful way for an emulator to remove or work around this limitation, since no game designed to run on the real hardware (i.e. any commercial NES game) will attempt to draw more sprites than will fit in memory.

The other sprite limit is a limit of 8 sprites per scanline. If more than 8 sprites occupy any pixels in a single scanline, only the first 8 such sprites will be drawn. This is more or less a speed limitation: the hardware is only fast enough to calculate the positions and priorities of 8 sprites in the time between the end of one raster scan and the beginning of the next. Commercial games work around this limitation by drawing the sprites in a different order each frame, causing the sprites to flicker when there are too many on one line, which is much better than some sprites disappearing altogether. It's easy to program an emulator to ignore this limit and always draw every sprite. However, a few games actually rely on this limit (e.g. using it to hide parts of a sprite) and will produce incorrect graphics on an emulator that doesn't enforce the limit.

If a game deliberately draws sprites on alternating frames (either to work around the 64-sprite limit, to speed up processing and avoid slowdowns, or deliberately to make objects look "transparent") then emulator settings won't make any difference. Many Konami games such as Contra, Life Force and Gradius II draw the player's bullets on alternating frames for one of the first two reasons.

[shiftace]

Ok, so, I noticed this 50 FPS issue when I was taking screenshots to figure out how the score bonus for not firing works. It's 1 point/frame while the bomb charges and 5 points/frame at full charge. It takes 128 frames to charge the bomb, but that takes 2.56 seconds to occur, according to the on-screen clock. Having noticed that, I started comparing the timer to a wristwatch and confirmed that it really* does run fast if the game is in NTSC mode. Now, Japan being an NTSC country, and Caravan/Summer Carnival games being a Japanese-only phenomenon, this 50 FPS real-time clock doesn't make any sense whatsoever.

(For more information about Caravan/Carnival games, there's a Caravan Games high score thread.)

Is it the 8/scanline limit that all those emulators are talking about with "Remove Sprite Limit?" Doh. I guess I should have realized, if they were actually trying to work around the 64 sprite limit, pretty much nothing ought to work.

* "really" might not be the right word, in the context of emulation...

[matt]

I looked up that video... I want the 100 page booklet that comes with it more than the video itself. One of the things that's supposed to be in it is "the connection between Recca and Battle Garegga." Grr, damn them for not giving more information.

I have the video & booklet. . . But they're somewhere in storage at my dad's house (which is in another country). It's been a few years since I last looked at it.

There's 2 or 3 pages near the beginning that discuss Yagawa's involvement in Battle Garegga, and how the style has evolved since Recca. I've tried to read it, but my Japanese was never good enough to understand much beyond the basics. Perhaps, if Gaijinpunch is still living here when I visit my family next, I'll dig it out and see if its greater meaning can be discovered.