What is the point of playing gimped arcade ports?

[pegboy]

Most of that stuff apears to be fixing bugs. Hardly the same as making a ships hitbox larger or changing enemy point values and indroducting mind numbing counterstops for no reason whatsoever.

[iconoclast]

Small changes like you list really are as simple as the particular coder/s being dissatisfied with some element or another. CAVE has done this quite a few times: the slowdown fixes applied to the US release of the 360 version of Deathsmiles (before it was patched), the removal of the infinite lives trick from the 360 version of PinkSweets, and the removal of the "supershot" from the Steam version of Mushihimesama (before it was patched). These were all intentional decisions by CAVE staff, and these are the exact same kinds of things developers used to do in the PlayStation/Saturn era. For all we know, the changed scoring in the 360 version of Guwange was intentional as well.

Probably the greatest example of all is the 360 and Steam versions of Ikaruga. We all know that story.

You're not coming at this like a developer who isn't necessarily familiar with every single aspect of the game's execution. You're coming at this as someone who's studied a specific game for years and doesn't understand why a port would want to change anything, positive or negative. You make a big assumption about the changes necessarily being worse. Likewise, I'm not saying this is a good or bad practice.

Personally, I don't think the Mushi supershot is inherently good, and I recognize that the only reason it was patched out was because players complained hard enough. The only reason people did want it in is so they could feign competition with scores that the vast majority of whiners will never even try to reach; I'm actually surprised it was even found and the campaign was even mounted. I don't think infinite lives in PinkSweets is good either, and in addition to the above, the only reason anyone thinks it's an okay mechanic just by itself is because of how insane PS is.

Cave removed slowdown from Deathsmiles because they thought westerners wouldn't understand that it's essential to the game.

Personally, I didn't recognize a single name in the credits of the PC port of Mushihimesama when I looked. Chances are, it's a new team that had nothing to do with the original arcade game or the console ports and they didn't understand what they were doing. They see the "supershot", think it's a bug, and remove it without realizing it's been a part of the game for the last 12 years.

Cave's console team wanted to accurately reproduce their arcade games. A lot of the bugs and inconsistencies most likely come from rushed development schedules and difficulty in reproducing accurate slowdown, especially in games like Deathsmiles MBL and Futari BL. They did "fix" stuff sometimes, like the sprite overload causing the ship to disappear in DFKBL and SDOJ's overflow bug, but the latter was one of their bad decisions.

Yamamoto: I think we reproduced the arcade version’s slowdown very well. The gameplay in Saidaioujou is simple, so compared with other titles it was easy to hone in on the sections with slowdown and fine-tune them.

http://shmuplations.com/sdoj-book/

[Despatche]

They were right. Westerners really don't understand what slowdown means to a game; it's "supposed" to be there, so they think it "needs" to be. Noone is willing to actually determine if this is true.

Yes, new blood. That's great! It's also so much more reason to want to actually fix things. The console team clearly cared way too much about making it 1:1 (and not actually doing so most of the time, which is an even worse problem) and too little about what any bit of Mushi's code means. The supershot is a bug, and I'm actually impressed they dared to remove it.

The overflow bug is a pretty clear example of how dumb "top players" really are. The entire arcade version of SDOJ was a giant bug that needed to be fixed, just like DFK and Futari before it, and it's a fucking crime we got a bunch of input lag as a consequence. If it weren't for the input lag, those PCBs would be absolutely worthless.

Most of that stuff apears to be fixing bugs. Hardly the same as making a ships hitbox larger or changing enemy point values and indroducting mind numbing counterstops for no reason whatsoever.

Aside from the counterstops thing, which is you pushing a single game so hard, you assume changes like this aren't meant as bugfixes. Changing hitboxes definitely sounds like "bugfix"/"balance change" (yes, they are the same thing) to me. Instead of freaking out that something's changed, you should actually study the differences.

Amazingly, fighting games actually used to take this into consideration; they don't anymore, sadly. People rejected Zero 2 Alpha because it made a bunch of bonehead changes that resulted in a lesser playing game. People rejected the 3rd Strike patch because all it did was ruin a character that wasn't even good; yes, they fixed a bug, but that bug legitimately made the game better! People were actually able to honestly research this and determine this for themselves.

You need to do the same.

[vvv_stg]

The overflow bug is a pretty clear example of how dumb "top players" really are. The entire arcade version of SDOJ was a giant bug that needed to be fixed, just like DFK and Futari before it, and it's a fucking crime we got a bunch of input lag as a consequence. If it weren't for the input lag, those PCBs would be absolutely worthless.

And you're smart because of... what exactly? Inability to realize about why a game with a well-established scoring history is better than a slight variation of that game that nobody ever plays?

[Shepardus]

All CAVE had to do to make everyone happy was to manufacture a single PCB without the overflow glitch and present it at a CAVE Matsuri as "Dodonpachi Saidaioujou Even Bluer Label," then their port would have the arcade-accurate scoring everyone wants and the port would be including a super-rare version of the game released for the public to enjoy.

[Bananamatic]

All CAVE had to do to make everyone happy was to manufacture a single PCB without the overflow glitch and present it at a CAVE Matsuri as "Dodonpachi Saidaioujou Even Bluer Label," then their port would have the arcade-accurate scoring everyone wants and the port would be including a super-rare version of the game released for the public to enjoy.

overflow isn't the only issue with sdoj

1) stage four is ENTIRELY missing the key scoring mechanic aside from the midboss - cancels
2) it takes serious effort to break the chain, might as well remove the chaining entirely
3) on expert, the overflow arguably makes the game better than without it as it makes stage 3 relevant, without the stage 3 overflow stage 5 would dominate even more over other stages
4) stage one is total filler that might as well not exist anymore
5) increasing the rank in 1.0 makes you score less, which makes dealing with rank always disadvantageous even if you can handle it

1.5 is barely a fix as it just makes everything recharge you to 10 way too easily and ripping through everything with a massive laser with 3x power is something I'd expect in a console arrange, not an arcade release

it's a game that pretends to be dodonpachi on the surface, meanwhile it plays like a fucked up futari ultra with the cancels that exist in only 2 stages to be worth considering in the first place

I'd like to see a 2.0 or 3.0 that:

1) doesn't fuck up your scoring as rank goes up, as faster bullets = smaller cancels (fixed in 1.5 somewhat by making higher rank recharge you faster)
2) actually has chaining relevant again or scraps it entirely and reworks the entire game according to it
3) actually has all stages relevant again
4) doesn't have the anus destroyer level 6+ hyper and keeps it reasonable with 5 or so hyper levels like in DOJ and doesn't have the big stars only at level 6+ mechanic

No idea how it ended up like this as they were aiming for a more simple experience instead of this clusterfuck of a scoring system with an identity crisis

It's still a fun game though, especially for survival and even for score

The only reason people did want it in is so they could feign competition with scores that the vast majority of whiners will never even try to reach

supershot affects survival, not scoring, especially for anyone playing ultra which people here do

People were actually able to honestly research this and determine this for themselves.

You need to do the same.

you'd know the above thing if you honestly researched things yourself instead of sourcing things from your ass

honestly, if you base your scoring around a mechanic and then have it entirely absent from a lategame stage then the competency of the developer is questionable at best (and that was back in the arcade days when cave was still supposed to be "good")

at this point they probably understand their own games even less than despatche does

[iconoclast]

All CAVE had to do to make everyone happy was to manufacture a single PCB without the overflow glitch and present it at a CAVE Matsuri as "Dodonpachi Saidaioujou Even Bluer Label," then their port would have the arcade-accurate scoring everyone wants and the port would be including a super-rare version of the game released for the public to enjoy.

overflow isn't the only issue with sdoj

1) stage four is ENTIRELY missing the key scoring mechanic aside from the midboss - cancels
2) it takes serious effort to break the chain, might as well remove the chaining entirely
3) on expert, the overflow arguably makes the game better than without it as it makes stage 3 relevant, without the stage 3 overflow stage 5 would dominate even more over other stages
4) stage one is total filler that might as well not exist anymore
5) increasing the rank in 1.0 makes you score less, which makes dealing with rank always disadvantageous even if you can handle it

1. Not really a problem. Just look at DOJ, SPS is practically the only person who uses hypers in stage 3, almost everyone else holds on to them for stage 4. Nobody complains about that. If the overflow didn't exist, you could probably hyper during the first half of the stage, recharge on the midboss, and either hyper once more before the end, or stock hypers for stage 5. I don't know what would maximize score but either is fine, design wise.
2. Cave tried to address Dodonpachi's all-or-nothing scoring system in DFK and SDOJ. Chaining itself isn't supposed to be the primary challenge, maximizing your chain is. I'm sure they received plenty of complaints about how the older games were too punishing, so that was their solution to balancing it. I don't see how it's a bad one.
4. It's a Dodonpachi game
5. If we're pretending the overflow doesn't exist, the score you can get from stages 1 through 4 probably more than makes up for the points you'd lose from doing stage 5 at high rank. I don't know for sure though. Arcadia's Shot/Laser scores were in the mid/high 30 billions before people figured out how to trigger the overflow IIRC. I'm sure they were still optimizing the first 4 stages at that point.

From a design standpoint, I think the slow hyper generation is SDOJ's biggest flaw. They increased how many hypers you could hold on to, but they didn't balance that with how quickly you could generate them. That's something they fixed in 1.5, but nobody cared since it's not an arcade game.

[Bananamatic]

1. Not really a problem. Just look at DOJ, SPS is practically the only person who uses hypers in stage 3, almost everyone else holds on to them for stage 4. Nobody complains about that. If the overflow didn't exist, you could probably hyper during the first half of the stage, recharge on the midboss, and either hyper once more before the end, or stock hypers for stage 5. I don't know what would maximize score but either is fine, design wise.
2. Cave tried to address Dodonpachi's all-or-nothing scoring system in DFK and SDOJ. Chaining itself isn't supposed to be the primary challenge, maximizing your chain is. I'm sure they received plenty of complaints about how the older games were too punishing, so that was their solution to balancing it. I don't see how it's a bad one.
4. It's a Dodonpachi game
5. If we're pretending the overflow doesn't exist, the score you can get from stages 1 through 4 probably more than makes up for the points you'd lose from doing stage 5 at high rank. I don't know for sure though. Arcadia's Shot/Laser scores were in the mid/high 30 billions before people figured out how to trigger the overflow IIRC. I'm sure they were still optimizing the first 4 stages at that point.

From a design standpoint, I think the slow hyper generation is SDOJ's biggest flaw. They increased how many hypers you could hold on to, but they didn't balance that with how quickly you could generate them. That's something they fixed in 1.5, but nobody cared since it's not an arcade game.

1. That still makes stage 4 uneventful as hell, right now it's basically survival ghost town with nothing to do except "don't get hit", possibly "get hit on the midboss anyways because I'm ZAP and don't need the extra life". Stage 4 should have a lot more to do than that in my opinion.
There's a possibility that some people did complain as there were complaints about "unbalanced scoring", not sure though if it refers to the whole game or just the overflow bug. Stage 4 is still well made for survival, it could just be way better if it had more than only survival.

2. They haven't really addressed anything in DFK with any real score being locked behind the same old chain break gameplay with the exception of the low max bonus and no super hard chains like DOJ st3, could've easily done a "regular" chaining game except with no breaks or huge multipliers like in DFK and just chain reductions for mistakes, possibly with a gauge that drops at second loop speed to make it more casual friendly?
At this point if anyone tells me they want a good "casual" score in SDOJ I'd just tell them to use a level 10 on the stage 3 midboss and just no miss the game with a survival route considering how huge the survival bonus is at a casual level.

4. DFK and DOJ still have lots of interesting tech and people play these stages for score, SDOJ has "generate less hypers on purpose" and "break your chain on the midboss on purpose to generate less hypers". The difference between 21m and 22m in 1-1 Ketsui is also worth almost nothing in the long run but it's still fun and in some way rewarding to optimize. SDOJ just actively punishes you later on with how the rank/hyper system works if you try to do anything else than pure low rank survival. I don't think I've ever actually routed the stage with how the game discourages you to do anything but get through it with minimal effort.

5. Unless it costs you a level 6+ at some point in stage 5 I assume? I probably see the game differently as I've only played Expert and the extra rank can really screw you up at some points with no slowdown as some things get considerably harder at 10+ rank already.

Not really a fan of the "skip hibachi for score" nonsense I've seen a lot either

[iconoclast]

Honestly, if you want SDOJ's earlier stages to mean something, you should just play the bug fixed version in Score Attack. You'll (probably) have to maximize your score in every stage if you want to put together the best run possible, and Hibachi is actually worth a significant amount of points. The overflow makes arcade SDOJ purely about survival until stage 5 (unless you've maxed out stage 5 in Expert, then you can go for the stage 3 overflow too).

[Bananamatic]

How many hypers can you afford to use in stage 2 anyways and how much would it affect your stage 3/5 score/rank? Would it be worth it in stage 4 with stage 5 being worth around 400-500bil?

20+ rank into the stage 4 boss on the shitty port while not being allowed to hyper the second phase to keep the hypers sounds like fun time
20 rank is also where the first part of stage 5 starts dropping slowdown
plus I already have the "world record" for bugfixed sdoj for a year