Ketsui: Kizuna Jigoku Tachi Extra (XBox 360)

[Dragoforce]

foreigners can't post scores for Japanese shmups

What does this mean?!

I think he refers to a competetion that Arika held for Ketsui DS foreigners weren't allowed to submit scores. I think MrMonkeyMan had a great score that he couldn't submit because of that.

[hermosaguy]

Super quick install. I'm not noticing a difference in loading speed though.

[StarCreator]

Wow, I'm totally impressed... 5pb went from producing the port with the most load times, to the port with nearly nonexistent load times. Everything just oozes class and functionality, even more so than Cave's own efforts.

The smoothing mode selection is also pretty crazy... I've never heard of any game offering real-time Lanczos resizes. Definitely a throwback to when I set up filter chains for animation encoding... perhaps not the most user-friendly approach, but it's nice having more than the pedestrian bilinear and bicubic algorithms for a change. There aren't any particularly "villainous" options like 2xSaI either...

[Fudoh]

I've never heard of any game offering real-time Lanczos resizes

as far as I remember Raiden Fighters Aces offers this as well. Does Ketsui offer the possibility to disable any additional filtering ?

[adversity1]

Agreeing with StarCreator. I'm very happy with the port.

[alastair jack]

Is there much difference between bicubic and lanczos? I reckon they'd look pretty much the same.

[StarCreator]

Lanczos does a slightly better job of preserving sharp edges, at the cost of a little distortion - you can really tell if you pay attention to the scrolling backgrounds. From what I recall, Lanczos isn't nearly as good at enlarging images as it is reducing them.

Nearest Neighbor is the equivalent to a non-filtered resize, but you get pixels of crazy sizes and shapes if you're not dealing with a multiple of the original resolution. The one thing missing is an option for dot to dot display, like Mushihimesama Futari provided - the 1% at a time overscan size adjustment just isn't precise enough.

[moozooh]

Lanczos produces less smear on sharp edges, but really its main advantage is preserving fine details when scaling down, not up…

Edit: Gah, beat by StarCreator.

[dmauro]

My biggest problem with DOJBLEX is that when you get the image to the right size for a 4:3 CRT monitor and turn filtering off, it's still blurrier than the arcade modes of all the other CAVE ports. It sounds like nearest neighbor takes care of this then? Has anyone with the copy tried it on an arcade monitor yet? I can deal with no scanline options, but if it's blurry like DOJBLEX then I will be hating on 5pb.

[charlie chong]

glad that the port appears to be good quality!! can we finally stop bitching about the price of the game and just talk about it's excellent scoring system and style now please!

i was playing the pcb last night to get myself hype.. can't wait to play around with practise and replay mode

[Kiken]

My biggest problem with DOJBLEX is that when you get the image to the right size for a 4:3 CRT monitor and turn filtering off, it's still blurrier than the arcade modes of all the other CAVE ports. It sounds like nearest neighbor takes care of this then? Has anyone with the copy tried it on an arcade monitor yet? I can deal with no scanline options, but if it's blurry like DOJBLEX then I will be hating on 5pb.

I'm running the game using Nearest Neighbor on one of my old tate'd CRT TVs via S-Vid (I think I have the overscan at 94%) and everything looks very sharp, all pixel edges are really well defined. It does look like the image has been scaled up, but it doesn't look at all blurry. You still get minor scaling artifacting in the backgrounds (no doubt due to the percentage I've chosen for OS)... but unless you're actively looking for that, you won't notice it.

[JAPJAC]

JAPJAC's video here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VGCet30zSQM

[dmauro]

Thanks, Kiken! That's what I wanted to hear.

[ex.machina]

Has anyone installed the game yet? Would very much like to know the installed size.

846MB (DDP had 3.4GB)

[2dvertical]

As promised, I've put up some footage here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VGCet30zSQM

Cheers.

Nice trailer japjac

[Naiera]

Some sad news for us Europeans that I just thought about - we could be in for significant delays (regardless of shipping method used) due to the continued presence of the Icelandic volcanic ash clouds that continue to plague European airspace at the moment.

The first week or so it was just a Blu-ray movie and such things that the asscloud delayed, but now it's personal

I hope it's over before too long. Until now I thought Ketsui was a crappy port (being from 5pb and getting shit reviews), but now I'm really starting to get excited.

[StarCreator]

So I'm left wondering... What -does- the "Ketsui Bomb" EX option do?

And it does seem that achievements continue to track even with EX options set, so this is conceivably another "easy" 1000 points like DOJBLEX was, with very little skill... just takes lots and lots of grinding.

[Elixir]

Ketsuibomb. New term. Activates the Ketsui bomb glitch from the PCB version and just endlessly bounces around the screen.

[ex.machina]

So I'm left wondering... What -does- the "Ketsui Bomb" EX option do?

And it does seem that achievements continue to track even with EX options set, so this is conceivably another "easy" 1000 points like DOJBLEX was, with very little skill... just takes lots and lots of grinding.

I got over 400 points in the first day of playing. But lots of secret achievements that are still locked. Is there a list of all achievements with English translation available yet?

[Ghegs]

I got over 400 points in the first day of playing. But lots of secret achievements that are still locked. Is there a list of all achievements with English translation available yet?

Most of them are here. Kiken's post has some of the secret ones.

[InsaneNutter]

I got over 400 points in the first day of playing. But lots of secret achievements that are still locked. Is there a list of all achievements with English translation available yet?

Most of them are here. Kiken's post has some of the secret ones.

Cheers for that, time to start working on some achievements.

[evil_ash_xero]

It seems that most people here who have the game have already played in on PCB. Well I hadn't.

So, my initial impressions are Famitsu's score is crap. The Famitsu Xbox 360 review is more accurate(well, in terms of what they give good shmups).
The bullet patterns are wonky, and can really throw you off. I don't know how I feel about this yet. They seem to try to trick you a bit. I'll have to get used to it.
I like the look of the game. I'm playing this on a LCD, and it looks basically like the port for DOJ or Raiden Fighters Aces. But it has "nearest neighbor" on it, so if you have a CRT, i'm guessing that would clear up the "blur" look.
Good soundtrack.

I'm thinking this will be a little higher than DOJ quality.

Of course, it takes a while for these games to sink in.

Oh, someone said on this forum that this was easier than Galuda II. I guess they play Galuda II with a blindfold. This game is hard as hell. Galuda II is definitely easier.

[lmagus]

That statement scares me, as I'm very uncapable of playing Galuda2 well =(

I was hoping it would be DOJ-like difficulty.

I guess I have a very long way to go

[adversity1]

Oh, someone said on this forum that this was easier than Galuda II. I guess they play Galuda II with a blindfold. This game is hard as hell. Galuda II is definitely easier.

Uh, no.

Is anyone having lag issues with the game? Not massively off, but noticeable. Probably just my LCD I guess.

[brentsg]

Ketsui is not an easy game by any means, but it's much more approachable than Galuda II.

[Jockel]

Oh, someone said on this forum that this was easier than Galuda II. I guess they play Galuda II with a blindfold. This game is hard as hell. Galuda II is definitely easier.

Well... if you play for survival only that might be true, but trying to get a decent score in Galuda II is WAY harder than playing Ketsui for score.

[Kiken]

Is anyone having lag issues with the game? Not massively off, but noticeable. Probably just my LCD I guess.

You mean input lag? That's certainly something that I haven't run into playing on my CRT. The game reacts perfectly to what I do on my joystick. The one thing that does irk me a little though, is the frame dropping that occurs on certain patters; namely Sphinx's final red/blue interlaced spiral pattern and BlackDraft's blue razor rain pattern. Maybe it's just my eyes, but both of these patterns in particular appear to be skipping every other frame, which causes a strobe effect (granted, both of them are really obxious patterns, visually, to begin with). Strangely, I haven't noticed any frame drops during the tate ana (the part where the PCB really starts to chug). They should have ditched the Wait On/Off option and instead, included a Frame Skip On/Off.

[InsaneNutter]

I have never played this game before either, initially the game horrified me! I got game over on the second stage.
After playing it for a bit i got to grips and finished the game with 8 continues on normal, i have since played though it twice more and got that down to around 4-5 continues.
I honestly have no idea if thats good or not, ive not played a lot of shumps... i am really loving this though.

To me anyway this is a million times easier than Galuda II, and a lot more fun

Has anyone looked at the images in the extras?

Image 126 appears to have some website on, evacindustrial.co.hk? i cant really make it out. Just thought it might be some easter egg or something.



Large Image: http://upload.digiex.net/files/0mg1y9qs8vtsio4vk10e.jpg

[Elixir]

EVAC Industry.co.ltd

[CRI]

now read evac backwards.
i never knew it until adversity1 mentioned it at cave-stg.