R-Type Dimensions III

[Steven]

These patch notes are especially saddening because these are things that should never have been broken and needed fixing at all.

I haven't heard anything but praise for the Rainbow Cotton port (the criticisms are usually aimed at the original game), and I read they also didn't have the original source code/assets, which, if its true, would make this even harder to port than R-Type 3.

Some of the bugs I've seen on R-Type Dimensions 3 are very typical of wonky hit detection on Unity, which would be pretty easy to miss if you didn't have the time/budget to test things properly.

It wouldn't surprise me if they had a super short deadline so they had to rush it and didn't have time to fix stuff. I think it's hard to explain some of these things any other way. I extremely highly doubt that they didn't know about the Force disappearing during level transitions or the stage 6 random deaths thing prior to shipping it.

It's funny (in a bad way) because they made a big deal about the Switch 2 release being a real physical copy but what's available on those physical copies is... this mess.

I hope that bad games are mostly bad because of problems like these and not developer incompetence.

Most of the time, it is. Back from Amiga days (even the Speccy days) you had very competent coders/artists delivering some bad stuff because they had no proper time/budget/resources to make things and they tried their best with what they had... you hear their stories nowadays and you understand why stuff from, say, US Gold, were so terrible back in the day. Programmers working like 16 hours per day to deliver a game on insane deadlines and that barely worked (and I am pretty sure working 16 hours a day for weeks on and getting your game crushed on reviews most be absolutely disheartening - and sometimes they didn't even get paid correctly). And 100% it still happens today.

Oh boy, US Gold, best known to me as the creators of the completely horrifying Amiga Out Run title screen. I have no idea what to even say about that thing. There are no words. Well, aside from

*terrifying voice* OUUUUT RUNNNNNNNNNN~~~

Nooooooooooo~ do not want~!

Also, it's like I said on the Cave topic... shmups make near to no money, I can only guess established companies work with low budgets to try to make some profit, unlike indie devs which most of the times see the extra money as a bonus, not a goal (Or does anyone believe the guys who worked on ZeroRanger for 12 years expected to make 144 months worth of wages with it?). I am not trying to make excuses for them, and we're just speculating here with absolutely NO IDEA of what really happened during development, but sometimes it makes me wonder why some of them invest on shmups if they need to be profitable.

I wonder about this too. There is no way in hell these games are turning massive profits, and I wonder if they generate much profit at all. Like how much cash does M2 get from ShotTriggers? I know they've said before that they do ShotTriggers because they want to, but I would not be surprised if M2 has lost money on every single ShotTriggers release with no exceptions. Well, maybe not Daioujou, but only because that whole project was CAVE's idea and I wonder if CAVE helped cover development costs for that or paid M2 a lot of money to do it or something (but I doubt it).

ACA is also weird like this. Hamster does good work, but sometimes they release games that I wonder how many people are going to buy. They did that Neo Geo shogi game recently, right? Shogi's an awesome fucking game, but I don't know how many people are like "hell yeah, let's play shogi but as an arcade game on a fairly basic Neo Geo emulator!" when there are certainly better alternatives somewhere. Oh well.

[Firehawke]

Haven't watched the video yet, but it seems https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rqXOb0XHU68 is saying that the patch is out and there's an implication more may be done. I'll get around to watching it when I'm not super-busy; figured I'd share it since it popped up on my YT feed.

[Sly Cherry Chunks]

Another patch dropped yesterday. The improvements slowly trickle out. Shadow Force's aimed shots have been upgraded from orange dots to actual bullet shapes - except the rotation hasn't been put in and you shoot the same sideways-facing sprites at every angle of attack.

Weapon damage still seems all over the place - Shadow Force blue (green?) laser is super overpowered. I beat the final boss' first form by standing still. Standard Force red laser is virtually useless on the final stage.

Last boss' final form takes much more damage before it opens up (except sometimes it doesnt??). The patch notes actually mention that the aimed shots can stay off screen for longer before they come back and chase you. The original game did not behave like this.

Music looping and boss stings have been fixed - I really dont like how the tunes fade in though. Stage transitions seem to go on for an unusual amount of time. 10+ seconds on a black screen, waiting for the next level to start.

The wall on stage 2 with the weak point on the other side (so you have to use a full beam) can be taken down with normal weapons.

[Jonpachi]

Meanwhile at ININ Games HQ: