Ghost Blade: New Shooting Game for Sega Dreamcast

[Jonst]

No. That does happen at points from stage 3 onwards...

[Enemy]

No. That does happen at points from stage 3 onwards...

I noticed it in stage 1!

[Jonst]

Oh!

[Enemy]

Terrible coding .... and a waste of money, as i said before makes the game unplayable to me. Dont get me wrong i dont mind slowdown in a shmup but the fact that whole parts of the levels drop to below 30fps its a joke. This should never had been released in this state!

[Jonst]

It does feel rushed...

[Enemy]

It does feel rushed...

Think you hit the nail on the head which is amazing really since it was announced in 2013, i know they had to switch programmers but why this one! They should have just cancelled it and given people their money back as this pile of trash will never be played again by me just down to the quality of the coding alone before you even get to graphics, playability etc. So disappointed and hate that feeling of for once i put money down without waiting for the opinions on here. Never again will i be such a fool!

[Immryr]

I'm surprised people got so hyped about this game after all the dux issues and revisions, but from the looks of this thread a lot of you got excited on the back of another companies games

[Enemy]

I'm surprised people got so hyped about this game after all the dux issues and revisions, but from the looks of this thread a lot of you got excited on the back of another companies games

well i wont be buying another hucast game, i will stick to ng:dev, think this is the nail in the coffin for them.

[ATTRACTS]

I'm surprised people got so hyped about this game after all the dux issues and revisions, but from the looks of this thread a lot of you got excited on the back of another companies games

You do realize both companies have the same people running them right?

[Immryr]

but one company has a strong track record and the other weak. this suggests to me that even if the same group of people are involved, one is creatively in charge of one and the other the other. personally, I'd treat them as separate entities.

[Sier]

(e)

Did not know caravan / some aesthetics were out. Would such a thing be due to time constraints, or would that be
folks leaving and joining the project with their works?

Probably overthinking that. Anyway, cheers for the YT link.
Those 3 ships, I've not seen any comparison of in play yet. Any ratio of difficulty between them?

If the superplay is outsourced, beyond Hucast's hands, they've never done one before - forgivable I guess.
I'll wrap up in some warm blankets and await November.

[emphatic]

(e)
Those 3 ships, I've not seen any comparison of in play yet. Any ratio of difficulty between them?

Yes, the Middle ship has clear advantages (IMHO), making the game easy. My two cents is that if you wanna put time into this game, trying to kill as much as possible without using bombs or dying should increase the difficulty a bit.

[Casey120]

I'm surprised people got so hyped about this game after all the dux issues and revisions, but from the looks of this thread a lot of you got excited on the back of another companies games

You do realize both companies have the same people running them right?

I believe Rene Hellwig is the boss of Hucast but just a graphics programmer in NG.DEV.TEAM lead by his brother Tim who is not involved in Hucast .

[Ghegs]

I'm surprised people got so hyped about this game after all the dux issues and revisions, but from the looks of this thread a lot of you got excited on the back of another companies games

You do realize both companies have the same people running them right?

Casey120 got it right. The same people are NOT running both companies. The two companies are separate with exactly one person working for both, and even that person does different things for each company.

[ATTRACTS]

I'm surprised people got so hyped about this game after all the dux issues and revisions, but from the looks of this thread a lot of you got excited on the back of another companies games

You do realize both companies have the same people running them right?

Casey120 got it right. The same people are NOT running both companies. The two companies are separate with exactly one person working for both, and even that person does different things for each company.

What I was getting at is that NDG and Hucast games are coming from the same small circle of people who I'm sure see each other's work and assist/make suggestions (they're brothers after all). The comment I replied to was saying that people were buying this purely on the hype of another recent release (Neo XYX or Razion I'm assuming) like it was out of the realm of reasoning. There's no fault in hoping for an upward climb in quality as the two companies learn with each release and as bosses communicate. Dux and reDux weren't terrible, they were just handled poorly. On the other site, Gunlord, Neo Xyx and Razion were decent games so you'd hope as they grow both individually and in the same circle that the quality would grow. There's no need to mock people who supported the game. It's always a crapshoot, sometimes we are pleasantly surprised, sometimes we aren't. Don't fault the handful in the community who chose to help fund development of games. Without them, the genre has no future.

[Enemy]

I agree, we need funding to save our fav choice of genre .... I know I am angry about this but funding is needed for these types of games, shame that this half ass attempt of a game has come out, ffs at least get a 2d game moving correctly on the DC. I enjoyed dux and you are right it no where near as bad as this, at least it moved smoothly! Ng:dev have turned out some nice games, i have neoxyx and gun lord and i enjoyed them. This game has problems before you get to playability and graphics and I cant believe no one else is angry about the screen update of this crap! Has anyone else played it?

[ATTRACTS]

I agree, we need funding to save our fav choice of genre .... I know I am angry about this but funding is needed for these types of games, shame that this half ass attempt of a game has come out, ffs at least get a 2d game moving correctly on the DC. I enjoyed dux and you are right it no where near as bad as this, at least it moved smoothly! Ng:dev have turned out some nice games, i have neoxyx and gun lord and i enjoyed them. This game has problems before you get to playability and graphics and I cant believe no one else is angry about the screen update of this crap! Has anyone else played it?

I won't have mine for a few more days living in NYC. I'll post an honest review/opinion.

[Horsey]

Yeah I have played it. I have even done a review on it on my YouTube channel
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gmMo9qrEF8I

I don't mention the frame rate as much as would of liked as it can get pretty shocking on level 4. But overall I am very disappointed with it.

Unless they hand out version 1.1 for fre like redux then I won't be buying another version.

[Enemy]

sod it ive emailed them ... bet i dont get bugger all back and if i do it will be the standard crap!

[Enemy]

I agree, we need funding to save our fav choice of genre .... I know I am angry about this but funding is needed for these types of games, shame that this half ass attempt of a game has come out, ffs at least get a 2d game moving correctly on the DC. I enjoyed dux and you are right it no where near as bad as this, at least it moved smoothly! Ng:dev have turned out some nice games, i have neoxyx and gun lord and i enjoyed them. This game has problems before you get to playability and graphics and I cant believe no one else is angry about the screen update of this crap! Has anyone else played it?

I won't have mine for a few more days living in NYC. I'll post an honest review/opinion.

look forward to it ...

[Enemy]

I agree, we need funding to save our fav choice of genre .... I know I am angry about this but funding is needed for these types of games, shame that this half ass attempt of a game has come out, ffs at least get a 2d game moving correctly on the DC. I enjoyed dux and you are right it no where near as bad as this, at least it moved smoothly! Ng:dev have turned out some nice games, i have neoxyx and gun lord and i enjoyed them. This game has problems before you get to playability and graphics and I cant believe no one else is angry about the screen update of this crap! Has anyone else played it?

I won't have mine for a few more days living in NYC. I'll post an honest review/opinion.

look forward to it ...

hows your eye for framerates, to be honest you would have to be blind not to pick up the looooooooong framerate drops

[ATTRACTS]

Got my LE in the mail this afternoon and played with the game for about 4 hours now. Here's my initial feelings right off the bat (I'd like to write a formal detailed review in the coming days).

1. My first playthrough I was immediately hit with some big framerate drops. I was using the middle character. After shutting it off to eat and returning to the game, I selected the smaller green ship and noticed a big improvememt in the framerate. Same for the ship on the right. But upon playing again with the middle ship, it was fine again up until level 4 where the screen gets crazy buzy. I don't know what can explain the inconsistencies (sometimes fine, sometimes not) but when it's steady, the playability is fine. For a machine that only has 8mbs of RAM, I think with the amount of art, color and detail they have crammed into the game, it doesn't do too badly. Could it be MUCH better? Absolutely so the negatives in that regard are fair.

That said, here are some positives that immediately struck me:

1. The visuals are gorgeous. Touches of Toaplan and DoDonpachi are evident but the ship designs and the backgrounds are really nice. Stage 4 especially with the pink cherry blossom vibes is one of the nicer levels I've seen in recent memory. It's what SDOJ could have been if they broke away from the all blue pallette.

2. The scoring mechanic is actually really nice if you enjoy fast tallied, combo based, canceling for points kind of structures. Combo counter climbs with each kill, bombs cancel bullets which turn into points so timing a bomb in crowded bullet storms will net you a higher score. Watching the numbers climb quickly gave me the same vibe I get when I play Espgaluda/Mars Matrix etc. I think there's good potential here for some interesting scoring challenges/leaderboards.

3. The music is great. Upbeat/techno with catchy melodies. Varied enough to give each level it's own hummable tune. Obviously if you don't like electro you will be annoyed but I think it fits the vibe of the visuals nicely.

Overall, I think this game doesn't suffer from a rushed schedule or bad coding, I think it suffers from the fact that they really crammed a ton of visual performance into a 16 year old system. I think it's a good game, marred by a lack of challenge for more seasoned players and obviously these strange framerate anomalies. When it runs correctly (and isn't dipping) as some of my runs showed it can do, I think it's a good Toaplan/DDP style shmup with the potential for some good scoring runs.

People will automatically kneejerk react to a three year wait and lack of perfect performance (and that's a fair complaint) but I feel like if this was moved to PC/PS4 with some more processing/RAM wiggle room, the reactions would be better. Good potential but maybe it's time to move on from the DC.

[CStarFlare]

The scoring system sounds decent tbh. If it shows up on steam like Dux did I'll probably pick it up as long as it's reasonably priced.

Lack of a caravan mode still bothers me though.

[Enemy]

Ill boot it up and try the other ships as only tried the middle one so far

[Enemy]

Got this back from them, seems they are unaware that it drops the framerate on stage 1 using the middle ship as only mentioned stage 3. I have replied to point this bug out

Hello Alex,

Ghost Blade was not poorly programmed. The slowdowns in Stage 3 happen because the vram of the DC gets flood a bit and we had to compensate this by using compression on the fly to fit all gfx in the vram, and the compression method is consuming power of the CPU which leads to the slowdown.
 
I can only apologize that the games framerate is slowing down sometimes.

HUCAST

[Shadolf]

Hey Guys, I´ve played mine since yesterday evening.
About the framerate drop, at first I thought that this is intentional, cause some cave games also have drops at some points.
But after playing the first runs in NOVICE mode with all the different ships, I also got the problem is mainly with the middle ship and it´s not only occational.
I´m very sad about this, because it takes the flow out off the game.

Another "problem" for me is the very strong contrast/saturation off the background.
I like well colored/colorfull games, but this makes it difficult to distinguish bullets from the background.
For example in the stage with pinkish backgrounds, some the pink bullets can be easily overseen.

When playing some rounds in NORMAL mode today I´ve noticed the mixed Highscore table for NOVICE and NORMAL.
I think this is a bad desicion, cause I had the impression it´s way easier to get way higher scores in NOVICE than NORMAL.
So if you played some more runs in NOVICE you never will get some highscore entry in NORMAL, or am I wrong?

The graphics and scoringsystem are nice and although there are some problems it makes some fun to play.
I wish for an free updated V1.1 for Dreamcast (could be disc only with an ARAMRAY holder to put in the original case) and some HD Versions for PS4 and PC.

[ATTRACTS]

Got this back from them, seems they are unaware that it drops the framerate on stage 1 using the middle ship as only mentioned stage 3. I have replied to point this bug out

Hello Alex,

Ghost Blade was not poorly programmed. The slowdowns in Stage 3 happen because the vram of the DC gets flood a bit and we had to compensate this by using compression on the fly to fit all gfx in the vram, and the compression method is consuming power of the CPU which leads to the slowdown.
 
I can only apologize that the games framerate is slowing down sometimes.

HUCAST

I think you got the explanation of why, regardless of what stage it is. Not sure about your system but after my first play, most of my other plays have been fairly steady up until stage 3 and 4. He's probably focusing on 3 because that's when it seems to be the worst. I spoke with him briefly last night and he said that there are more plans for the game that will hopefully make the players happy. There is this illusion/assumption out there that he and the creators don't care about what they do, I can tell you first hand that he does. Can't be easy working on something for a long time and reading people cutting it down and making some pretty harsh assumptions about coding when the reality lies more in limitations of hardware. There's a fun game in there and I think the move to better systems is going to show it. Does that erase the fact that we paid good money for a game with a lot of slowdown? Not at all but I think we should ease off the accusations and non informed insults.

[Enemy]

To be fair he did say in another email he would speak to someone to look into the problem with the framerate of the middle ship so hopefully it gets fixed. Still not played with the other ships as yet but will fire it up this afternoon.

[Shadolf]

I played some more, mainly with the green ship and some with the third one and I think its a very nice game.
The difficulty is good for newbees and average players. Would be nice to see some other difficulty modes.
I´m happy about this game, although its not perfect yet, it can become.

@ATTRACTS: Nice to hear that there are plans for the future of this game .
I hope this also involves a Dreamcast V1.1, but I´m happy about everything concerning shmups.
I think they are doing a really good job for such a small company and a system like the Dreamcast.
Would also like to see a Xbox360 release, cause it´s one of my main Shmup plattforms beside the DC and PC.
EDIT: Maybe (if it will) I would be best to release a Dreamcast V1.1 some time after a PC/other console release.
As there will come some patches and so on for sure.

@EMPATIC: You were a beta tester and advisor right? What do you say about the difference between the beta version and the final version.
Regarding slowdowns, difficulty and so on.

[Horsey]

For myself the main issue is difficulty.
I can expect frame rate issues (christ,even the 360 has it) but there really needs to be a harder difficulty in future releases. I really enjoy playing it and it does play well. I was pretty disappointed with stage 5 boss design. Very flat.
I have just uploaded a video of me going thru all bosses on YouTube. This isn't my intention of bad mouthing the game but to show Rene where it needs improving. We all would like to see more shooters being made.

I felt neo xyx had many problems too but sadly no revise for that game.