Saturn Tribute: Cotton 2 + Boomerang, Guardian Force, 9/21

[BrianC]

I just bought Guardian Force for a small fortune on Saturn because the Switch version didn't feel right. Guess I'll be buying the Cotton games as well. Time to sell off my final Dreamcast shooters

A lot of people must have had the same sentiment, because both Cottons shot up after this collection was released. I held off on getting Boomerang before that because it was $300+ and this collection was coming. Now I'm sitting here realizing that was somehow a bargain.

I have been seeing Cotton Boomerang at 500-600 before this collection was released. It didn't shoot up.

[EmperorIng]

And now my steam ver. of Cotton 2 won't launch. The weird, jank-ass Ranking.exe that tries to run simply crashes the game, and the update gets stalled with a "disk write error." They better fuckin' fix that, I tend to like my games playable.

Update: it was my anti-virus, that shitty fucking Avast, that had quarantined the Ranking.exe without my knowing it. I had to make an exception for the game to load and run properly.

[banjoted]

And now my steam ver. of Cotton 2 won't launch. The weird, jank-ass Ranking.exe that tries to run simply crashes the game, and the update gets stalled with a "disk write error." They better fuckin' fix that, I tend to like my games playable.

Update: it was my anti-virus, that shitty fucking Avast, that had quarantined the Ranking.exe without my knowing it. I had to make an exception for the game to load and run properly.

Annoying. Glad it's sorted tho, mate.

[FunktionJCB]

I played Guardian Force today on Steam, and I'm getting disastrous performance.

I'm not one to call a game unplayable because there's an extra frame of slowdown or whatever, but for me the game is currently unplayable.
The sound keeps skipping, and it takes ages to move my tank on the screen.

I tried disabling v-sync, and I believe it improves things, but it's such a minimal benefit it makes no difference.

It almost seems like I'm getting the effects described for the fast loading option (sound de-synch, animation slowdown), but I have that option disabled.
In fact, I tried enabling it, and it gets even worse.

For those playing the PC version, if you are getting fluid gameplay, did you have to make any changes?

My PC meets the requirements, and the only change I made when launching was to make the game fullscreen, I didn't mess with any other setting.

For me, previous CITY CONNECTION ports were perfectly playable, but this one sadly isn't.

[Bassa-Bassa]

It's the first under their Zebra engine. Unfortunately, seems it won't be the last one.

[Steven]

I couldn't sleep last night, so I decided to find my Switch cart and try it with the patch. Cotton 2 and Boomerang are... surprisingly, perfectly lagless as far as I can tell, but again, I am extremely insensitive to input lag. Is it there? Yeah, probably, but if I don't notice it and have no way to scientifically test for it, it might as well not be there. I'm also too lazy to set up my CRT and test Cotton 2 on my Saturn there to see how it compares. Maybe I'll do it later today if I get bored or maybe tomorrow or next year.

Now Guardian Force, unfortunately, is still pretty laggy. Do not want. Time to go find either a MODE or a real copy of Guardian Force.

[scrilla4rella]

To all you fellers eyeing that expensive Saturn copy of Guardian Force: You might want to try it out on a burned disk or ODE first.

The game is super laggy as is. Feels like you're driving that tank on ice. It's a shame because all the other ingredients of the game are pretty awesome.

[Sengoku Strider]

I have been seeing Cotton Boomerang at 500-600 before this collection was released. It didn't shoot up.

You may have seen it listed at that. These are the completed transactions PriceCharting has tracked over the past couple of years. They only have it topping $400 once, until the Tribute Collection hit:

Spoiler

My observations were based on that, and Japanese online retailers like Suruga-ya (though I see they have a ~$300 copy available now, too bad I just blew my import gaming budget for the season on PC Engine & Dreamcast stuff).

[Carmen]

So after trying the Layer section demo and being surprised at it... not sucking, I decided to boot up Cotton Saturn Tribute (which was promptly shelved after the initial play right after launch) and, hmm, this seems a lot better. Enough so that I'd like to play it more (give me ok performance and even the crappiest of scanline filters and I'll bite, I guess my standards are pretty low...) However, I do have one question...

Is there a way to turn off or hide the Options indicator in the bottom left corner? I was playing Guardian force and couldn't figure out how to get rid of it.