Yuzo Koshiro is making new MD shmup.

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Re: Yuzo Koshiro is making new MD shmup.

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Sumez means "what century?", I'm guessing.
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Re: Yuzo Koshiro is making new MD shmup.

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lol oh XD
Steven wrote: Mon Jul 21, 2025 9:13 am Sumez means "what century?", I'm guessing.
No, "10/30" did not register as a date to me. American date formats look really weird with certain numbers, especially out of context. I thought it was talking about price, but that sounded cheap.
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Re: Yuzo Koshiro is making new MD shmup.

Post by Faith »

PC Engine Fan X! wrote: Sat Jul 12, 2025 9:37 pmOur resident fellow shmupper, Faith, will finally be able to try out the much hyped Mega Drive based Earthion stg out on Steam this coming July 31st, 2025
o_O?!~ I was so confused... thought it was a sarcastic post at first... lol that is not me, but actually referring to someone else it seems @_@"...

I can only watch, but not play, horizontal STG. Always breaks brain!~
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Re: Yuzo Koshiro is making new MD shmup.

Post by jehu »

bobrocks95 wrote: Mon Jul 21, 2025 5:06 am Gotta say this Exa Arcadia announcement hurts more than others, the game isn't even finished yet... Is it delaying the other releases? Is it a mode that would have been in the main game if it wasn't siphoned off for an arcade release?

As someone else said I hope Yuzo's being paid well at least.
exA does their own work in-house; it’s not sapping development attention from the main Earthion project. The aim of the exA label series is basically to create the definitive edition of the game they’re working on, so they look for ways to add value to complement the game’s strengths without totally changing its identity.

The main strength of the game seems to be the aesthetic and the flavor of the Mega Drive OST by Koshiro, so they’ve added a bunch of different sound profiles for various Mega Drive hardware configurations. And, if I had to guess, I’d say the weakness they’re trying to hedge against is limitations to the intensity of the game caused by Mega Drive hardware limits. The exA arrange seems to be significantly more gratuitous with the bullet patterns than the base game would allow. All the exA stuff was developed by exA people in parallel with the main game, so nothing is being lost or taken away from the release.

However, this is the first time an exA label has dropped right at the same time as the base game. Their team, IMO anyway, has gotten very good at figuring out how to target development on content that genre fans are actually going to want. Here that’s 1f input, aesthetically pleasing gadgets, some new art, and the aforementioned OST enhancements and game arranges (aside from the main exA arrange, they also add ‘Extreme’ modes to the original game and their own arrange, neither of which will be on Steam). I guess I get why people don’t particularly like that it exists; they’re getting a brand new game and want the best realization of it possible. Even though nothing is being taken away and they’re going to be playing the same game they would have been if the exA title hadn’t existed, it still feels like the lack of that additional content is a conspicuous absence. Still, I tend to like their work (in theory and, from what I’ve played, in practice) and think they raise the industry standard in a way that’s good for genre fans.
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Re: Yuzo Koshiro is making new MD shmup.

Post by Sumez »

jehu wrote: Mon Jul 21, 2025 6:31 pm exA does their own work in-house; it’s not sapping development attention from the main Earthion project. The aim of the exA label series is basically to create the definitive edition of the game they’re working on, so they look for ways to add value to complement the game’s strengths without totally changing its identity.
Oh cool, so you're saying the definitive edition of the game is going to be completely unavailable to most people, and if you buy the one available to consumers you're left with a lesser version of it?
So great. Nothing wrong with that.
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Re: Yuzo Koshiro is making new MD shmup.

Post by bobrocks95 »

jehu wrote: Mon Jul 21, 2025 6:31 pm
bobrocks95 wrote: Mon Jul 21, 2025 5:06 am Gotta say this Exa Arcadia announcement hurts more than others, the game isn't even finished yet... Is it delaying the other releases? Is it a mode that would have been in the main game if it wasn't siphoned off for an arcade release?

As someone else said I hope Yuzo's being paid well at least.
exA does their own work in-house; it’s not sapping development attention from the main Earthion project. The aim of the exA label series is basically to create the definitive edition of the game they’re working on, so they look for ways to add value to complement the game’s strengths without totally changing its identity.

The main strength of the game seems to be the aesthetic and the flavor of the Mega Drive OST by Koshiro, so they’ve added a bunch of different sound profiles for various Mega Drive hardware configurations. And, if I had to guess, I’d say the weakness they’re trying to hedge against is limitations to the intensity of the game caused by Mega Drive hardware limits. The exA arrange seems to be significantly more gratuitous with the bullet patterns than the base game would allow. All the exA stuff was developed by exA people in parallel with the main game, so nothing is being lost or taken away from the release.

However, this is the first time an exA label has dropped right at the same time as the base game. Their team, IMO anyway, has gotten very good at figuring out how to target development on content that genre fans are actually going to want. Here that’s 1f input, aesthetically pleasing gadgets, some new art, and the aforementioned OST enhancements and game arranges (aside from the main exA arrange, they also add ‘Extreme’ modes to the original game and their own arrange, neither of which will be on Steam). I guess I get why people don’t particularly like that it exists; they’re getting a brand new game and want the best realization of it possible. Even though nothing is being taken away and they’re going to be playing the same game they would have been if the exA title hadn’t existed, it still feels like the lack of that additional content is a conspicuous absence. Still, I tend to like their work (in theory and, from what I’ve played, in practice) and think they raise the industry standard in a way that’s good for genre fans.
I'm generally not too salty overall with ExA- game centers are dying as it is, and if they're injecting fresh content and doing their own dev work then not a huge deal.

But you do have an aspect of marketing towards genre fans, especially with this one dropping around the same time- do you want the wimpy ~$30 Mega Drive version or the definitive $900 ExA release? It's maybe at least a decent deal if you are actually an arcade operator I'd imagine, but with the number of niche Cave releases and such they have and the availability for anyone to purchase games from several retailers, I wonder what their sales percentages actually look like for arcade operators vs. super fans.

I dunno, not too upset like I said- I've long given up hope on playing anything ExA so I just pretend they don't exist. I'm glad they do for those in areas where some arcade operator was crazy enough to buy danmaku shmups and put them out.
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Re: Yuzo Koshiro is making new MD shmup.

Post by Bassa-Bassa »

How come a version of an unreleased game made entirely by an external developer is the definitive edition?
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Re: Yuzo Koshiro is making new MD shmup.

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Bassa-Bassa wrote: Mon Jul 21, 2025 7:22 pm How come a version of an unreleased game made entirely by an external developer is the definitive edition?
Not sure if this is rhetorical or just an incredulous lament; explained it all above. Again, it’s that the exA version has everything the standard version has, and then more.

Even if you roundly prefer the original mode over the exA label arrange, you still get all the other exA-developed enhancements in that mode: faster response time, gadgets, more sound options, enhanced voices, and the option for kiwami (extreme difficulty).

When the initial release of the game is so close to the exA label version, the exA’s ‘extra content’ has a way of just feeling more like ‘missing content’ in the Steam release. Nothing is really lost, but the ambiguity has a way of doing some psychic damage. As Bob said, probably best to ignore it if it isn’t accessible to you in the near future.
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Re: Yuzo Koshiro is making new MD shmup.

Post by Bassa-Bassa »

jehu wrote:Not sure if this is rhetorical or just an incredulous lament; explained it all above. Again, it’s that the exA version has everything the standard version has, and then more.
Rhetorical, I guess. The standard version is a cartridge for the MD crafted by no other than Ancient themselves. Sorry for the pedantic approach, but you just can't beat that because no other version can be used on the original hardware and on a CRT. Any extra mode is not the author's own vision as they're not taking part in its design.

The version for Steam and current consoles is not being made by Ancient either as far as I know, so I was leaving it apart as well despite coming first.
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Re: Yuzo Koshiro is making new MD shmup.

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Bassa-Bassa wrote: Mon Jul 21, 2025 10:31 pm Rhetorical, I guess. The standard version is a cartridge for the MD crafted by no other than Ancient themselves. Sorry for the pedantic approach, but you just can't beat that because no other version can be used on the original hardware and on a CRT. Any extra mode is not the author's own vision as they're not taking part in its design.
Side-note: Exa does in fact run quite well on a CRT with a simple DVI to VGA adapter, and since it supports real 480p it will look completely perfect. A low res game with its scanline option enabled (eg. Gimmick Exact Mix) is functionally identical to any traditional 240p game.

This does differ a bit from most other Exa releases of new games for sure.
Donut Dodo Do for example fixes most of the issues with the original game, making it much more challenging and arcade-like, *and* it adds a brand new level which honestly is one of the game's best.
But this was all made by the original developer, and while you could reason that they might not have done that had Exa not pushed them, you could also reason that had Exa not bought this update to the game, you and I and everyone else could have actually have had the option to own and play it ourselves. Rather than it being hogged by a super exclusive arcade system that only a small handful of people could ever confirm the mere existence of.

The nature of Exa Earthion is hard to say though, and its influence on the consumer release is impossible to discern. Exa has that stupid consumer-hostile rule that their version of the game needs to be exclusive to their system - so if they wanted to make a more challenging and arcade-tuned version of the game for their system, it could have kept Ancient from including something similar in their version, in order to avoid unwanted similarities. It depends on not just the nature of their individual contract, but also Yuzo Koshiro's own thoughts on his game.
Ultimately what happens is that two official versions of the game are launching at roughly the same time, and one has the full base game, while another one has the full base game AND a completely new mode which might or might not be super good. But you'll never know because you'll never have the opportunity to play it.

Fuck Exa.
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Re: Yuzo Koshiro is making new MD shmup.

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bobrocks95 wrote: Mon Jul 21, 2025 7:04 pm But you do have an aspect of marketing towards genre fans, especially with this one dropping around the same time- do you want the wimpy ~$30 Mega Drive version or the definitive $900 ExA release? It's maybe at least a decent deal if you are actually an arcade operator I'd imagine, but with the number of niche Cave releases and such they have and the availability for anyone to purchase games from several retailers, I wonder what their sales percentages actually look like for arcade operators vs. super fans.
Not sure where you're getting your prices, but 30 bucks seems too cheap for the megadrive cart version, i expect it to be more in the 60usd range?
Also the exa version is not 900, the preorder is now up for a little over 1300. Assuming you actually have the PC motherboard to play it on you'd be done, else add another 2700 to be able to play it.
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Re: Yuzo Koshiro is making new MD shmup.

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Bassa-Bassa wrote: Mon Jul 21, 2025 10:31 pm The version for Steam and current consoles is not being made by Ancient either as far as I know, so I was leaving it apart as well despite coming first.
There's a possibility that the PC version won't actually be a separate version but just be a Mega Drive ROM in an emulator of some sort. Some PC releases of modern MD games do that. I think Xeno Crisis might be an actual PC version judging by the differences from when you play it on the actual MD, but I haven't checked. You should still be able to play the modern console versions on a CRT with a downscaler/DAC/whatever. You should absolutely be able to do it with a PC because PC is awesome.

In any case, what really matters is this:
Sumez wrote: Tue Jul 22, 2025 6:25 am Fuck Exa.
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Re: Yuzo Koshiro is making new MD shmup.

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You can't deny they've managed to achieve something with sounds impossible on paper. I still wonder to this day how their model can be even slightly profitable. It must be the world is big enough for almost anything, these days.

Steven wrote:There's a possibility that the PC version won't actually be a separate version but just be a Mega Drive ROM in an emulator of some sort. Some PC releases of modern MD games do that.
200% possibilities it's a MD ROM in an emulator. The version for current home systems is a LRG project, they've hired the usual Western dev doing emulation for them, if I recall. That at least means you're not getting the latency optimizations good emulators have. It's even possible they don't give you the option to display the game in 4:3, Windows and all.

Sumez wrote:Side-note: Exa does in fact run quite well on a CRT with a simple DVI to VGA adapter, and since it supports real 480p it will look completely perfect. A low res game with its scanline option enabled (eg. Gimmick Exact Mix) is functionally identical to any traditional 240p game.
Good point as it at least confirms a 4:3 mode, but big nah. For some people it may do the job, but you can't really mimic the display qualities of a 15khz CRT (with moderate TVL count, at least) on a 31khz CRT plus filters, even if we're talking about RGB. There's the possibility of using a downscaler as Steven mentions, though. It still has the hassles of being a Windows-based system with a digital-to-analog conversion involved in the end against the simplicity of a 16bit cartridge-based console but admittedly, when talking the MD, you might get way better PQ in RGB with the former - with a suited Windows PC at least you do.
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Re: Yuzo Koshiro is making new MD shmup.

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Bassa-Bassa wrote: Tue Jul 22, 2025 11:48 am
Steven wrote:There's a possibility that the PC version won't actually be a separate version but just be a Mega Drive ROM in an emulator of some sort. Some PC releases of modern MD games do that.
200% possibilities it's a MD ROM in an emulator. The version for current home systems is a LRG project, they've hired the usual Western dev doing emulation for them, if I recall. That at least means you're not getting the latency optimizations good emulators have. It's even possible they don't give you the option to display the game in 4:3, Windows and all.
It certainly has a chance of being a ROM in an emulator. There are some game collections where you can't just go in there and extract the ROM from the directory, like the M2 Castlevania collections, but we'll see what happens here.

I checked Xeno Crisis just now and there are a bunch of Unity files, which I did not expect, but I did not see a ROM. I suppose it's possible that they rebuilt the game in Unity for the PC version instead of using an emulator. That was definitely the hard way of doing it instead of making a custom emulator or licensing a good one, assuming that that is indeed what they did, but it does allow the PC version to exceed what was possible on the MD. They definitely are not the same game. PC version is way harder and the grenade goes over enemies when thrown at close range, which definitely doesn't happen on MD. It might not even happen on Dreamcast, but I have to check that because it's been a while.

I also checked Astebros, another modern MD game (one that I don't really care for that much, unfortunately) and the ROM is just sitting there in the installation directory for whatever emulator it is to use... or for players to do with as they want. Don't see any reason why this ROM wouldn't work on a real MD, but I'm too lazy to do this test for a game that I don't really like lol
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Re: Yuzo Koshiro is making new MD shmup.

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Bassa-Bassa wrote: Tue Jul 22, 2025 11:48 am Good point as it at least confirms a 4:3 mode, but big nah. For some people it may do the job, but you can't really mimic the display qualities of a 15khz CRT (with moderate TVL count, at least) on a 31khz CRT plus filters, even if we're talking about RGB.
Why not?
I'm not talking "fake scanline filters" like you'd see in most modern PC games or shitty emulators. I'm talking the mode that most (all?) Exa games seem to have which just blacks out every second line, meaning you just get one visible line for each vertical pixel in a 240p game.

A 15khz signal is drawing 480 lines on the screen over two fields, just shifting the field by half the distance between two lines for every other frame. You know this of course! 240p is functionally identical to 480i, except it doesn't shift the field, so it's drawing over the same 240 lines every field, leaving every second line blank all the time.

A 31khz signal can draw 480 lines every field. But if every second line is left blank, what it draws is completely identical to a 240p 15khz signal, right? Because it's still drawing over the same 240 lines every field, and only those lines!

Maybe I'm missing something here that I didn't account for, and I would be open to be corrected. But to me it looks completely perfect! Gimmick Exact mix looks like it was designed for this setup.
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Re: Yuzo Koshiro is making new MD shmup.

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Bitwave is doing the PC version. I say this without any knowledge or any sort of basis, but my expecation would be that it would function the same as Bitwave's previous work with the Toaplan games. Those didn't use a rom file either but were somewhere halfway between port and emulation (or so they claimed)
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Re: Yuzo Koshiro is making new MD shmup.

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Halfway between port and emulation sounds like PR talk, but I think I know what they mean. It's still emulation though. Xeno Crisis on modern platforms is actually a different build, and they are able to do it because they wrote the game in C. I don't think they emulated anything. Instead they used that source to build various other ports on systems that couldn't reasonably emulate a MegaDrive. There are some really notable differences between them though, so it's not a very straight port.

It's very possible Earthion is also made in C, which *would* make it possible to port to other platforms with a bunch of groundwork. But I don't think they have any reason to do it, when it's so easy to just package it with an emulator. That doesn't necessarily mean having the ROM plainly accessible in the game data though. :) That's not an essential aspect to emulation.
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Re: Yuzo Koshiro is making new MD shmup.

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People went to the arcades to play games that were vastly superior to what they could play at home. EXA adds some extra content and tweak the games a bit just to prove their version is better than the one you are playing at home and justify their high cost. It's just a marketing gimmick, they don't have the money to make a completely new arcade quality game like the ones made in the 80s/90s, because there are no arcades anymore, no market. Arcades died long time ago and the ones opening these days as barcades, etc don't want EXA games, they want JAMMA and older games, not even NAOMI and newer crap. Don't get fooled by the idea that EXA is "making arcades great again", they are not. Earthion for EXA is just more of the same...
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Re: Yuzo Koshiro is making new MD shmup.

Post by bobrocks95 »

spmbx wrote: Tue Jul 22, 2025 6:36 am
bobrocks95 wrote: Mon Jul 21, 2025 7:04 pm But you do have an aspect of marketing towards genre fans, especially with this one dropping around the same time- do you want the wimpy ~$30 Mega Drive version or the definitive $900 ExA release? It's maybe at least a decent deal if you are actually an arcade operator I'd imagine, but with the number of niche Cave releases and such they have and the availability for anyone to purchase games from several retailers, I wonder what their sales percentages actually look like for arcade operators vs. super fans.
Not sure where you're getting your prices, but 30 bucks seems too cheap for the megadrive cart version, i expect it to be more in the 60usd range?
Also the exa version is not 900, the preorder is now up for a little over 1300. Assuming you actually have the PC motherboard to play it on you'd be done, else add another 2700 to be able to play it.
I was ballparking the digital pricing, $30 would definitely be too cheap for a full cart + box + manual release, probably going to be $60 or $70.

ExA price was converted from yen since I saw it on Beep. Pretty funny that you can save $400 by importing it (sorry to our Japanese members and their very weak yen).
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Re: Yuzo Koshiro is making new MD shmup.

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kebrank wrote:People went to the arcades to play games that were vastly superior to what they could play at home. EXA adds some extra content and tweak the games a bit just to prove their version is better than the one you are playing at home and justify their high cost. It's just a marketing gimmick, they don't have the money to make a completely new arcade quality game like the ones made in the 80s/90s, because there are no arcades anymore, no market.
Not like I'm one to defend Exarcadia, but that's a pretty narrow approach to the company's labor. In addition to re-releasing classic games or low-grade Steam games (improved or not so much) they're also getting exclusive releases which are even more interesting than similar modern AAA titles, just check Axel City 2 or Dynamite Bomb! (making the authors cancel the previously announced Windows versions, btw.) Some times existing titles do really get what you'd call a remake - Gimmick!, Battle Princess Madelyn, Shinorubi...

So yes and nope.




Sumez wrote:Why not?
I'm not talking "fake scanline filters" like you'd see in most modern PC games or shitty emulators. I'm talking the mode that most (all?) Exa games seem to have which just blacks out every second line, meaning you just get one visible line for each vertical pixel in a 240p game.

A 15khz signal is drawing 480 lines on the screen over two fields, just shifting the field by half the distance between two lines for every other frame. You know this of course! 240p is functionally identical to 480i, except it doesn't shift the field, so it's drawing over the same 240 lines every field, leaving every second line blank all the time.

A 31khz signal can draw 480 lines every field. But if every second line is left blank, what it draws is completely identical to a 240p 15khz signal, right? Because it's still drawing over the same 240 lines every field, and only those lines!

Maybe I'm missing something here that I didn't account for, and I would be open to be corrected. But to me it looks completely perfect! Gimmick Exact mix looks like it was designed for this setup.
Yeah, by "filters" I also meant a basic even/odd scanlines-like overlay for 480p. You described pretty well how a CRT essentially draws an interlaced and a progressive picture, but I'm afraid the technology involves many other factors to infer that just by leaving blank every second line in a line-doubled picture you get functionally the same result as with a progressive 15khz display. For instance, I mentioned the "moderate" TVL count. 240p graphics such as those of the MD were not intended for displays with a small dot pitch, like 31khz monitors usually have. The higher the TVL count, the thicker the space between the scanlines is, and the less natural the picture gets as blending should be happening at some level. Check this example courtesy of forum member aaronmjr, both from Trinitron displays:
Spoiler
aaronmjr wrote:PVM-2530 (560 lines)
Image

PVM-20M4U (800 lines)
Image
Photographs as usual make the latter look better than it really is and not so much the former, but for some, even 560TVL might be overkill already for your ordinary 240p game. 800TVL just make it way too sharp for their own good especially on large formats, but even if you're fine with ultra thick gaps and argue that 800TVL displays do exist for 15khz content after all (different strokes for different folks, they say, but it's sure those monitors were never ever made for low resolution video games), you also face the problem of losing brightness when using an overlay on a 31khz display. Not every 31khz display is the same, on the other hand. Maybe you're using one for arcade cabs with a bigger dot pitch than a PC VGA monitor.

Gimmick! EXA's graphics are originally 256x144, it seems. I've never played it, but they likely have compensated the brightness loss with higher gamma or something when you pick the mode with the line overlay. Or by using black lines at 50%. Likely if you could display them on a 15khz monitor (again, with moderate TVL count, but always well-enough tweaked) at native rez, you'd like it even more.
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Re: Yuzo Koshiro is making new MD shmup.

Post by Stevens »

One more week! Excited about this one.

Anyone else picking it up day 1?
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Re: Yuzo Koshiro is making new MD shmup.

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Stevens wrote: Thu Jul 24, 2025 2:07 pm One more week! Excited about this one.

Anyone else picking it up day 1?
I did originally intend to. On Playstation. Now that its just on PC/Steam until later in the year I'll be waiting.

I've got a PC, but I'm not willing to invest into games on it at the moment.
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Re: Yuzo Koshiro is making new MD shmup.

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Looks like I picked the right week to buy a Steam deck, with the news of the console delay. I'm getting "hype", as the young shmuppers say. From the trailers, it really looks like the full package (Exa aside, but indeed, fuck 'em) - audio and visuals on point, all that remains to be seen is performance and level of challenge
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Re: Yuzo Koshiro is making new MD shmup.

Post by PC Engine Fan X! »

BEAMLORD wrote: Thu Jul 24, 2025 4:21 pm Looks like I picked the right week to buy a Steam deck, with the news of the console delay. I'm getting "hype", as the young shmuppers say. From the trailers, it really looks like the full package (Exa aside, but indeed, fuck 'em) - audio and visuals on point, all that remains to be seen is performance and level of challenge

Playing stgs on the Steam Deck is ace, especially Devil Blade Reboot with scanlinres implemented -- is your SD the LCD or OLED variant version?

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Re: Yuzo Koshiro is making new MD shmup.

Post by Steven »

BEAMLORD wrote: Thu Jul 24, 2025 4:21 pm Looks like I picked the right week to buy a Steam deck, with the news of the console delay. I'm getting "hype", as the young shmuppers say. From the trailers, it really looks like the full package (Exa aside, but indeed, fuck 'em) - audio and visuals on point, all that remains to be seen is performance and level of challenge
Alright, looks like it's Steam Deck beginner advice time. It's a great computer as long as you know its many limitations, but it's got a lot of oddities and problems that you should definitely be aware of, even though this is super off-topic.

Steam Deck is basically a slightly weaker PS4, although it's theoretically capable of higher framerates than PS4 because it's a PC and therefore not limited to 60FPS. It won't have any problems with a Mega Drive game like this. Probably.

Important: for every single game, open the game, press the ・・・ button to open the settings menu, enable the per-game settings profile thingy, and ENABLE UNLIMITED FRAMERATE! If you don't enable that, you'll induce massive input lag no matter what settings the game and Steam Deck are set to. Unfortunately, if you do this on the OLED you'd better hope that whatever game has flawless frame pacing if the game doesn't allow 90FPS because if it doesn't you're going to have occasional really really REALLY bad stuttering, but it's really only noticeable on side-scrolling 2D games. How nice of Valve to give the player a choice between occasional crippling stuttering or really bad input lag. I prefer the stuttering. I think it's safe to disable vsync on everything. The Steam Deck has its own vsync setting, which is called Allow Tearing in the ・・・ button menu, which will disable vsync if you turn it on. Well, it's supposed to do that, but it's broken right now and doesn't do anything even if you enable it, so yeah, no need to use in-game vsync when it's forced on anyway due to a bug with SteamOS.

This is a Mega Drive game, so normally there's no way it would support 90FPS, but if Bitwave is indeed doing the emulation or whatever, they made the Toaplan games' emulator somehow support infinite refresh rates, so theoretically it could be done here too. We'll find out in six days, of course. Hopefully they didn't wreck the audio on this and then never fully fix it like they did for the Toaplan games.

Find a game that doesn't work on Steam Deck or doesn't work 100% properly for any reason at all? Use this: https://github.com/GloriousEggroll/proton-ge-custom
Still doesn't work properly even with that? Give up and hope it gets fixed, or since it's open source you could theoretically program the fixes yourself if you know how. Yep. That's all you can do.

I have a handful of games that don't work on Steam Deck, but the only STG that I have that doesn't work is unfortunately Triggerheart Exelica. It runs at about half speed, so while you could play it if you REALLY wanted to, it's a miserable experience. Too bad it had to be Exelica because that game's too cool to deserve to be broken. Tatsujin Extreme demo has a very similar problem, but you can't download that anymore anyway.

Ignore Valve's official Verified/Playable/Not Supported thing. There are a bunch of unsupported games that run flawlessly (like Raiden III Mikado) and a bunch of games that are supposedly Verified that run like complete shit (like Death Stranding). ProtonDB is better than Valve's thing. Not perfect and maybe has outdated info, but better.
Firehawke
Posts: 173
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Location: Western USA

Re: Yuzo Koshiro is making new MD shmup.

Post by Firehawke »

I have the original model Deck and I'm going to say that this bit about "unlimited framerate turned on or you get massive input lag" isn't true at least on the original model; it's limited to 60 FPS, but leaving it at the default 60 feels just fine.

I will point out EmuDeck as the fastest way to get that sort of thing set up (sure you can do it by hand, I did originally, but it's significantly faster when it's all installed at once from one tool) assuming that's something you're going to want.

I'll briefly go off-topic to add that I'm still hoping there won't be any major issues with Gradius Origins when that hits, but the last handful of M2 releases have been fine on the Deck so I'm not feeling particularly worried. Of course there's Glorious Eggroll if all else fails, too, and in some specific kinds of cases there's ProtonTricks.
Steven
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Joined: Tue May 11, 2021 5:24 am
Location: Tokyo

Re: Yuzo Koshiro is making new MD shmup.

Post by Steven »

Here's something you can do to check input lag: go play Sonic Mania or Sonic 3 & Knuckles, be Sonic, have the insta-shield unlocked and selected if you play Mania, stand on a perfectly flat surface, jump, and attempt to use the insta-shield 1~3 pixels or so before you land. I think you will find it impossible to do unless you turn off the FPS limiter and you'll end up hitting the ground and jumping again instead. It definitely makes a noticeable difference, but yes, the LCD Steam Deck shouldn't have the stuttering at 60FPS that the OLED has with the FPS limiter disabled. It really is annoying.

There are also some news articles about it, as well, like this one which predates the OLED's release and actually has lag numbers: https://www.tomshardware.com/news/steam ... ut-latency

Anyway, the only M2 thing that doesn't work properly on the OLED that I have tried so far (don't have the Contra collection somehow, but I have everything else) is SFC Dracula, which has audio popping that I have tried and failed to fix, so Gradius should be fine.
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BEAMLORD
Posts: 231
Joined: Thu Jan 16, 2020 5:51 pm
Location: South Wales

Re: Yuzo Koshiro is making new MD shmup.

Post by BEAMLORD »

PCFX - yeah, it's the OLED. I'm sure Earthion is going to look absolutely dynamite on that screen!

Steven - thanks for the primer. I knew going in that it was not going to be as simple as plug and play, and it's my first foray into anything outside of a traditional console setup. I've arguably spent as much time tinkering as playing games in the last week :mrgreen:

Firehawke - Yeah, as a total emulation noob, I have found Emudeck very useful in getting things up and running.


To get back a little more on-topic, any word on pricing/editions for Earthion's Steam version? Can't see anything related to that on the Steam page. Might be nice to see some reviews trickling through in the next couple of days, too.
Steven
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Joined: Tue May 11, 2021 5:24 am
Location: Tokyo

Re: Yuzo Koshiro is making new MD shmup.

Post by Steven »

I have seen nothing about the price at all, which is really weird for a game that releases in less than one week. I have absolutely no basis for this, but I'm expecting 3000~4000 yen for some reason.
mojilove
Posts: 122
Joined: Tue Jun 18, 2019 3:34 am

Re: Yuzo Koshiro is making new MD shmup.

Post by mojilove »

this article from about a month ago says the dl version for all platforms will be 2980 yen: https://news.denfaminicogamer.jp/news/250613i
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