[General Discussion] Shmups on the nextgen HDTV

Now here's an intresting question, what will come of the shmups on the nextgen consoles when played on HDTV's??
As you know the requisistes, at least for Xbox 360, for a game to be licenced is the support for 720p, full 5.1 surround sound and 16:9 widescreen.

While the 2 first requisistes pose no problem the last one does, at least for vertical shmups. Horizontal shmups will have no problem, the screen will just be wider and that's it, the first 2 Darius used a hyper widescreen (12:3, over 2 times wider than a 16:9 TV of the same size) and that was never a problem.

Now vertical shmups are another story, there are 2 ways to play a vertical shmup:
1. You play with the TV on horizontal orientation like Gigawing or Radiant Silvergun
2. You play with the TV on tate mode, that is you rotate the TV 90º and play with vertical orientation

Both these modes present a problem on 16:9 TVs, the first mode, the horizontal orientation won't be very playble since you'll have to much space horizontally but almost none vertically, it would take too much time to go from on side of the screen to another, the second mode is also problematic since you'll have to look higher than you would on a 4:3 TV to see the enemies coming.

While these problems are no show stoppers they defenitely don't help the shmup cause, also these HDTV are noramlly (always?) LCD displays that are quite thin and they aren't build with tate mode in mind so tating then and making sure they don't fall is an added challenge. Many include a 'feet' but it doesn't allow rotation (unlike LCD PC monitors many), others include a hang on the wall holes but these are meant for horizontal orientation. Tating an LCD display and making sure it stays tated (and not crashed on the floor) seem kind hard... lots of duck tape might be needed

So what do you shmuppers think about this? Will this be a problem or am I just posting nonsense?

Jam it back in, in the dark.

Originally Posted by Qwarky

You're a tad naive if you think old-school shmups will somehow live on in next-gen consoles (outside perhaps Live arcade in ugly filter mode).

True, games (and players?) are getting fagier (is this a word?) by the minute with countless FPS and action 'games' being tossed everyday but as you said there's Live Arcade and we might get lucky, also Radiant Silvergun 3 was half announced to be in development for X360. Lets have some hope and vote with our wallets, that's what I do.

Originally Posted by Qwarky

SNK has said they like to support the Wii as it's most welcoming for 2D from the three consoles.

Fail to see how is Wii more welcoming for 2D games, I would like to see some API docs backing that up please, also being Wii targeted at 'non-gamers' I fail to see how will it be welcoming to a very hardcore genre like shmups.

Originally Posted by Qwarky

As for TVs, you'd think flat screens would be ideal for turning for tate, but as far as I can tell, a good number of flats still shouldn't be turned, for whatever reasons.

The only reason I can think of is that the TV might fall since it would be very hard to keep it up, like I said lots of duct tape needed.

Originally Posted by Qwarky

Best bet is to get one of those large flat computer monitors that carry a 90 degree sticker on them, at least you know you won't break them.

Of course a monitor is always better and cheaper, but then there's that native resolution problem. Large 1280x720 monitors simply don't exist. Bleh.

There's nowhere I can't reach.

Originally Posted by Infernal Monkey

Why not? It's the weakest of the three with no real HDTV support, no standards. Anything can be passed off on the Wii, just look at Far Cry and GT Pro. It's already got Super Star Soldier on it via the VC. And SNK has released this little collection of totally unknown 2D games I think they were developed for the Sega Panasonic Lynx back in the 80's or something.

To be considered more welcoming to 2D in my book it needs true API/hardware support for 2D handling, the kind of thing Mega Drive and Saturn did. What new consoles do is the usual 2 poligon plane with the game screen mapped as a texture, it's a lame thing but way better than nothing I guess.

Originally Posted by Infernal Monkey

There's a nice looking shoot 'em up for the 360 in Japan, 'Senko No Ronde'..
.. Which will likely never see the light of day anywhere else!

Senko No Ronde isn't a true shmup, but rather a mix of shmup with fighting on a versus battle, still highly original and it comes from yours trully G.Rev that made 2 of the best shmups on DC.
Unfortunly as you said the game will prolly never leave the land of rising sun... Why do Japan hate us?

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.

Originally Posted by Qwarky

And I would like some evidence to back up your bullshit about Treasure ever even talking about developing for the 360.

http://www.racketboy.com/retro/2006/...ga-sequel.html

Racketboy is a relyable source in my book so it's not bullshit, plus I have Treasure's sayings in way higher account than SNK's.

Originally Posted by Qwarky

Since it's so difficult to comprehend, consider it this way. The Wii is not pushed as a powerhouse of a console for the next age of game graphics, therefore it doesn't have specific technical requirements (720p minimum, full 3D graphics naturally, overuse of bloom, every single surface must be shiny) that need to be met before you're allowed to make games for it, unlike PS3. It's also cheaper to develop for, which is pretty ideal for a relatively small company lacking in huge megasellers.

MS never said polygonal graphics are a requirement for game licences, nor they will since there's already a bunch of sprite based games on Live including new exclusive games (Castle Crashers).

Also if the console is weaker so will the games be no? I for one would like to see a 720p (or even a 1080p) version of Guilty Gear instead of yet another 480p release, and before you say it, no creating higher resolution sprites isn't more expensive, infact all sprites have always been way over 1080p during conception, they are then redrawn, scaled and optimized for lower resolutions, color gamuts and other hardware limitations.

As for the Wii being cheaper to develop... you get what you pay for

I am a dolphin, do you want me on your body?

Originally Posted by Qwarky

And just how many 2D games have you seen on the 360 outside Live arcade minigames?

Infernal Monkey just said one, and I said another that hopefully wont take forever to be released. By 2D games I don't mean only based sprite games, I also mean polygon based games as long as they're played like 2D games (aka 2,5D).

Originally Posted by Qwarky

If you think SNK or any of the bigger 2D arthouses are going to develop games for Live Arcade, you might as well ask them to start making them for PC as java games.

I dunno about that Java thing but their sure should start releasing their games on PC since I'm not to fond of paying 70€ per game when the same game but PC version costs something as low as 35€. Also having to buy a whole set of consoles just to ensure you get all these rare oldskool games isn't funny nor cheap.
Recently (sorta) the PC saw ports of Guilty Gear and 2 Taito X games (Raiden 3 and Shikigami no Shiro 3, unfortunly they're only released on Japan too! What da f*ck is wrong with these guys anyway??), let's indeed hope more retro goodness hits this shores.

EDIT: You know what? It might as well be that! If you notice both new Sega and Taito arcade board are just locked PC hardware... hummm..... kinda suspicius

Originally Posted by Qwarky

Sigh.

wut?

I was speaking idiomatically.

Originally Posted by Elixir

Second of all, Treasure make games few and far between. In an interview they said they deliberately make them challenging so you'll have something to work on which will tone your reflexes as well as feeling like you've achieved something by passing a hard level/area. So they aren't stupid. Now, with saying that, why would they be making it for the 360, when the 360 has next to no interest with the japanese?

I never tought Ikaruga was hard, there are far harder games (not just shmups) than it, and Treasure only does WTF comes to their minds so they might as well go 360 whatever game it is.

Originally Posted by Elixir

Senko no Ronde looks great, but G.rev aren't too bright. Releasing Under Defeat on the Dreamcast in 2006, instead of the PS2, was a fucking dumb move. Yeah I bought the limited edition, but they would have made many more sales had they of chosen the PS2. Milestone are in the same boat with Radilgy.

That may have something to do with all these games being arcade games running on the NAOMI board that is essencially a Dreamcast in a big wooden box, it's far simpler and cheap to just add a few menus to the game and recompile the code to run on DC than recode the whole game to run on PS2. Being a recently formed company G.Rev simply couldn't afford to do a full port of the games, so they went and got their quick buck, plus the big money comes from the arcade licences. Next time talk about what you know.

Originally Posted by Elixir

How I see it is that you have an obsession with the Dreamcast and you're worried that a (practically japan-exclusive already) genre will die with the next generation consoles being out. Well guess what? Technology moves on. Shmups are going to be few and far between and they've been getting more and more obscure since the 90's. It's just how it is.

Shame on me for being worried about one of the nicest genres of video gaming and liking of one the consoles with the best games ever instead of drolling over the next awsome action/adventure game about a women who has ghost visions (bet 5$ that 'till the mid of 2007 two games like this will be released).

Originally Posted by Elixir

You seem to have something against the Wii, but face it, it isn't supporting HD and there's already 2 2D games available (Trauma Center, MSA) for it. If anything you'll be seeing 2D games on the Wii over the other 2. If the Wii isn't aimed at "hardcore gamers" but more a direct public, who cares. So long as the games get released it doesn't matter.

My grip against Wii may have something to do with it being overpriced, being played with a Powerpoint mouse and not supporting HD... or maybe I just don't like the name.


Anyway, you guys really hate me, I just asked how do you think vertical shmups will be played on HDTVs and you almost eat me alive...... is it because I don't post enough in the sewers subforum?

What kind of toxic man-thing is happening now?

Originally Posted by Cetra

A vertical shooter will probably not be scaled to fit a 16:9 space, rather it is going to extend the boarders further to fill out the screen and/or move most of the on-screen information to the sides of the screen. And for tate mode, there are quite a lot of HDTV mounts out there that allow for 90+ degree rotation of the screen.

Like having the extra space filled with the game background but unable to reach it with your ship? Like having a preview of the enemies that will come? Not a bad idea, placing the score, power-up info, chain status and or other onscreen info on a top bar is also a good idea leaving the play field for shooting only.
As for HDTV vertical mounts I haven't seen any yet, but that would partially solve the thing, there would still be the problem of chaning between yoko and tate on the fly but it's better than duct tape

Originally Posted by Cetra

Also you are completely correct about development costs of sprite based games for the PS3 and XBox 360. The cost difference of developing a HD sprite vs a SD sprite is marginal and with the processing capabilities of the two machines compared to the Wii, developers of such games can afford say a particle system overlay and not have to spend tons of money on optimizations for the XBox 360 and PS3 because they are more than capable of dealing with the extra overhead. Sprite based games are potentially cheaper to develop on the Xbox 360 and PS3 because of the massive overhead the two machines can deal with when compared to the Wii.

Yeah, you don't even have to think about it that much, if you scan one drawing on your home scanner you'll easly get resolution way over the 1080p, so all these sprite we see need extra work to display correctly on low resolutions without, the higher resolution the less optimization needs to be done, and even 720p isn't enough but it's better than nothing for now that 1080p TV are simply unaffordable. Also more processing power not only means particle effects overlays but smooter scalling, rotation, tinting, live distortions, etc on these large images because processing a 1280x720 image is 3 times more CPU intensive than processing a 640x480 one.

Originally Posted by Cetra

Plus the move to 720p resolutions offers the best possible increase in sprite quality in the past 10 years. These developers are going to absolutely love that home users finally have the ability to display sprite detail only previously offered at the development level.

Hell yeah, if you see the Omake/galleries of many games, not only 2D, you'll see beatifully crafted drawings, illustration and conceptual art for these games during the development stages but to fully appreciate them you need wacko zooming schemes. Now imagine a game using such awsome 2D illustrations but with HD resolution so no scaling down/zooming is needed... whenever I think of this Comix Zone comes to my mind, how awsome would this game be if the STInstitute had the chance of using 720p res with the color gamut that the HDTVs allow? That would be sweet I tell you!

FELIPE NO

Originally Posted by Elixir

You avoided the fact that just because they mentioned "shooter" doesn't necessarily indicate that it's going to be a sequel to Ikaruga.

First you'll notice that I said according to the article Treasure would be releasing Radiant Silvergun 3, even if this game is released it won't be called Ikaurga 2, Treasure never does that.
Also I don't really care if it's a new Ikaruga simply because I don't think the game is that good as many belive, it's simply the most well known recent shmup, it's good but hardly the best even on DC.

Originally Posted by Elixir

G.rev is hardly what I'd consider newly formed either. What, they didn't turn enough profit from Border Down to release Under Defeat on the PS2? I dunno. Making games for the Dreamcast in 2006 almost feels like beta testing.

6 years ain't a hell lot of time when you compare with other heavy weights, plus they are a 8 man company (lol), you bet they don't wanna take more risks than what they need to.

But don't take my word, take their word; check this EDGE interview to G.Rev president. There's also an interview to Milestone of Radirgy fame that you also criticized, they are few too (only 9) and formed from an old company, Compile, from the Aleste and MUSHA fame (SNES, MD, MCD). Triangle Service makers Trizeal, a very lame DC shmup is also interviewed... a 1 man company at the time of interview O_o
They all state their very tight budgets and profits, the dificult that is a small company like that to survive, the shrinking arcade market in Japan and why do they choose NAOMI/Dreamcast instead of PS2/other boards (basicly because NAOMI boards have a large installed base among arcade operators on Japan).

Now that you made a complete jackass, idiot and moron figure of yourself could you please take your ignorant trolling somewhere else? Thanks in advance. BTW you are in my black list now. Have fun.

What, you don't want my bikini-clad body?

1. People do what they want, if Treasure want to release their new game on the 360/PS3/DC/Wii they will, it doesn't have to make sense to you or be smart.

2. Treasure is a 30 employee company, well established and almost 15 years old. Check wikipedia or their homepage.

3. I'm only hostile to persons who barge into topic about how a vertical shmup will be developed considering the wide screen TV ratio with stuff like: shmups will DIE and the last of them will be on the Wii because you want to or how companies you know nothing about should do stuff the way you think it's smarter or even how I'm obcessed with the Dreamcast.

4. there is no point 4

5. You do like to sit on topics don't you?

Jam it back in, in the dark.

Originally Posted by Elixir

I don't see why people can't rotate their HDTVs sideways and play their vertical shooters like so, but I highly, highly doubt they're going to do that, as they're of a high size usually, unless you have a 20-30" one. Besides, vertical shooters are supposed to be an arcade experience, not a high def in-with-the-rest genre that's keeping up with the other games available.

Fail to see what keeps an arcade game from using HD graphics, infact Taito Type X2 board uses an Intel Core 2 Duo CPU and a GeForce 7900, that enough to provide resolutions above 1080p let alone puny 720p.

Originally Posted by Elixir

Shooters are almost dead anyway. I'm probably the biggest shooting fan on gff second to MrMonkeyMan who posts once every 5 years. I'd love to see more games for the next generation consoles, but there isn't going to be very many in this catagory. Seriously.

Well if you really wanna see more shooters and general 2D goodness vote with your wallet. That's what I do, I have an Xbox and I only own 5 games, if they don't release what I want they'll see no money from me as I'm not going to buy games just to pile up, produce what I want or you'll die of starvation, no more no less.

Originally Posted by Elixir

I'd much rather prefer the genre to stick to Dreamcast, Gamecube, and PS2. Most of the CAVE titles I own, along with a bunch of other shooters. The problem is, 2D doesn't look good on HDTV's. Even with 480p, 16:9 isn't bound to happen. How many 2D games support 16:9 aspect ratio, let alone the 480p?

16:9? Asides Guilty Gear Judgement for PSP, none. But I bet that's because almost no new 2D sprite games are released nowdays rather from any techincal problem. Developer lazyness doesn't help either

Originally Posted by Elixir

I can think of Sega Ages 25: Treasure Box, which does both. But I've compared a 29" HDTV 480p/16:9 Gunstar Heroes to a standard 29" SDTV with component, and the component looked better. Seriously, you would be surprised at how poor some of the games on HDTVs look if they're 2D. Take Disgaea for a example. Jagged and pixellation everywhere.

That because they are displaying 320x240 games on 640x480 resolutions with using any filters, they are just doing simple 2x scaling. If you do the same on you PC using an emulator you'll get the same results, that why image scaling filters like hq2x or 2xSaI were created, the thing is these filter are all GPLed so these companies can't use them without releasing their games source code and that's defenitely not going to happen.
Also CRT SDTV have a natural bluring that LCD screens don't have, that help reducing pixelation.

As a proof of concept, incase you don't belive me here's a screenshot of an upcoming 2D PC shmup, using 480p resolution:



.... it sure looks pixeled. (I love this smiley)

There's nowhere I can't reach.

Originally Posted by Elixir

What I was trying to point out mostly was Treasure's released a 3-in-1 title which supports these modes, but it doesn't look better than the original. That's how I see the future of shooters on HDTVs.

..... what part of 320x240 resolutions scaled all the way to 480p without filtering is that you didn't understand? And if you are talking about 720p, not only it's rescaled to 480p, but then that image is rescaled again to 720p.

Originally Posted by Elixir

On a PC is a little different to on a HDTV like the topic says. Unfortunately there isn't going to be a large amount of 2D games seen on HDTVs because they simply don't mix. One japanese doujin-esque game doesn't justify this.

WTF? A PC monitor is exactly the same as an HDTV but with smaller color gamut and bigger dot pitch. I just said HDTV for the sake of simplicity but if PC games don't count then one can play Xbox 360/PS3 on a PC monitor without any hacking, god you can play Dreamcast and it's bunch of 2D fighters and shmups on a PC monitor.

Originally Posted by Elixir

This is why I said the Wii is more likely to have them. Just look at Metal Slug Anthology which is already out (in america). Component cables are out too, and there's third party ones which are cheap as hell. I'm sure I'd much rather prefer to play it on a SDTV over a HDTV. It's just too much hassle.

3x WTF? HDTV also use the very same component cables!!! Infact component cables are the only HD cables available to Xbox 360 asides the VGA cable!!!!
Do you think before posting? Do you even think at all?

Originally Posted by Cetra

This won't be the case if the 2D game was developed natively for 720p with 1280x720 backgrounds and proper sprite resolutions.

Don't try to reason with this guy, he wants all games to be released on Wii no matter what, regardless of all logic, even if the game quality will suffer. I just hope he is alone in his insanity.

Most amazing jew boots

When you talk to walls, rocks and fanboys about real world game development instead of how Wii/360/PS3 is so cool that what you get.

I am a dolphin, do you want me on your body?