Also, fuck reverse input by default.
The 3D helps with the enemies and bullets, but not so much with the stationary obstacles which have habit of popping up around a quarter of a second before you run into them.Eh, now imagine playing that without stereoscopy.
Not out yet in America/Europe. I have it on my Japanese 3DS... Not much to say about it other than "it's Sonic". The 3D effect isn't particularly impressive.Originally Posted by The Lamonster
Sonic 3D impressions?
http://blogs.sega.com/2013/11/25/seg...m2/#more-18849
Here's a bit:
Yousuke Okunari (Producer, SEGA CS3): When the Nintendo 3DS was released, it included Virtual Console on it, which led us to start working on Space Harrier. At the same time, Nintendo indicated to us that they were looking for games that also use 3D. I thought, “Man, I want to do that.” So I went to Horii-san and said “We’ve got to do this 3D thing,” and he burst my bubble saying, “Oh come on, that’s ridiculous! Do you have any idea how much trouble that’d be to do!?” I took a look at the sample 3D version of Xevious provided by Nintendo for reference, and I really wanted to do something similar, but I kept being told that re-making 2D games in 3D was a pretty big effort.
- Remaking a game originally built in 2D into 3D… tell us about that.
YO: If you want an idea of how hard it is, just consider how M2 has been building games. They’ve been using emulator techniques that replicate the hardware since the PS2 days. That’s one way of faithfully reproducing the originals, but the drawback is that it’s really hard to go back and add things to the code. For example, you wouldn’t be able to add in extra bosses, or build new stages.
Naoki Horii (President, M2): That’s why you won’t see extra features that were added to console or PC ports of older SEGA arcade games in the SEGA AGES ports. They weren’t in the original game.
YO: Re-making games in 3D is almost impossible for similar reasons. When you take a character sprite that was originally in 2D and bring it into a 3D viewpoint, you have to build the graphic from scratch. So for example, back in the 8-bit era, very large enemies were often displayed as backgrounds. But if you did a simple 3D conversion of an enemy like that, it would end up being on a different plane from the player character and look like it’s out on the horizon. If you want real 3D, then it’s basically the same as rebuilding the game from scratch.
NH: Some things you can change, and some things you can’t. At the time I thought we could probably build a visual copy of the game in 3D, and I wanted to. But cost-wise, there was no way it was going to happen, you know? This was back just before the 3DS release.
YO: But when I asked Horii-san if there wasn’t some way to rebuild the game in 3D, he said “Let’s do it” (both laugh)
I don't have nostalgia connections to the other games... well Street of Rage, but not much.
Mini Ride-On / Sit Down refers to the ROM that the game uses. They are slightly different versions of the game with different track layouts. Moving cabinet refers to the direction the screen moves when you turn, and how severe the effect is. For example, if you turn right, it determines whether the screen will turn right, or turn left.Ok I do have one gripe: the manual is useless. Seriously we have loads of options to customise our game yet none are explained. I can guess Difficulty or Time limit, but what's Mini Ride-On / Sit Down types? Moving cabinet does what exactly? Harrier's moving area means?
Also, fuck reverse input by default.
Harrier range is a super obscure fix to ensure an insane level of arcade accuracy. From Okunari's interview:
The Japanese site lists specifics of what all of the options do. Obviously it's of little use to non-Japanese speakers, but near the bottom, it shows visual comparisons of the three settings:Originally Posted by Yosuke Okunari
- So in other words, the PS2 and the Wii versions were both accurate ports?
YO: We puzzled over why the horizon line was higher on certain cabinets, and the dev team came to the conclusion that the sticks in the cabinets were probably loose. Our warehouse kit hadn’t really been used all that much, and it also gets maintenance from time to time, so it’s in pretty good condition. But the cabinets at arcades have been out there for over 20 years, and their sticks get worn out. When you fix an arcade stick that’s broken, its throw distance changes, and as a result the player’s movement also changes. When sticks loosen, you can move them further than you previously could, allowing you wider control of Harrier.
So anyone who plays the cabinet nowadays may be using a joystick that’s in poor shape, and they might find that the horizon line is higher than what they remember as the real Space Harrier, and we can’t deny that. Generally speaking, we were left with the conclusion that the Wii version is in line with what the developers imagined at the original release. As a side note, the 32X and Sega Saturn version differ in the same way, with the Saturn version’s horizon line staying low like the Wii version.
- Sounds like this one wasn’t all that straightforward.
YO: That’s why for the 3DS version, we believe we’ve addressed player concerns by putting in 3 levels of movement ranges.
http://archives.sega.jp/3d/harrier/
I love this stuff. It's crazy how granular the details in 'simple' arcade games can get.Originally Posted by discoalucard
Harrier range is a super obscure fix to ensure an insane level of arcade accuracy.
can't wait to buy Super Hang-On!
Particularly looking forward to seeing the Chaos Emerald bonus stage in Sonic in 3D. And I don't care what anyone says, Altered Beast is one of my favorite SEGA classics. That intro music gets me every time!
I mean, you wouldnt see me complaining if the 3d classics were even cheaper, but put side by side with the vc games, they offer much more for a cheaper price
Ffffuuuck! I remember my eyes constantly watering from the intense colors (and that bright white flash at the end) from playing it for the first time on the Mega Drive. It was my first experience with 16-bit graphics, and my visual cortex couldn't handle it at that time, lol
Particularly looking forward to seeing the Chaos Emerald bonus stage in Sonic in 3D. And
it's great having them on 3ds. not only is the 3d a perfect fit for space harrier but both games are brilliant palette cleansers, the perfect things to jump into before and after a session with a slower paced rpg or adventure game which there are plenty of on the system.
i like them being coupled together too. i think you can really see an arcade racing sensibility with the relentless forward pace of space harrier. even though it actually preceded suzuki's racing classics, it betrays a similar interest in the thrill of speed and its ability to make your games relentlessly exciting. space harrier is probably the true masterpiece, super-hang on is great for how it boils down motorbiking to three core fun hooks - going really fast (the feel of the boost is just superb), slipping past opponents at high speed and turning by leaning sideways - that makes it constantly engaging, but space harrier has more longevity, losing lives seems more fair than the slightly finicky hang-on, there's a better curve of challenges with the harder enemies and bosses, and the abstract and beguiling stage designs seem way ahead of it's time - how good is stage four in 3d goddam.
They did a really good job of this port.
Yes. Actually, I think that feature was turned off by default. It turns itself on if you turn on gyro controls, but there is a separate option to have gyro controls on without the screen tilt.3D Super Hang-On question: Can you turn off that effect that makes the screen move as if you were playing it on arcades?
Holy shit I didn't even realize Ecco was on the list! I'm going to go broke :(Originally Posted by Secret Fawful
Ecco in 3D!? I can't imagine how that will look. It will probably make me shit my pants, especially at the beginning.
I never played Space Harrier or Super Hang-On, I'm tempted to buy one of them because they're classics and I love 3D remakes, and old school 2D sprite graphics gives me the best nostalgia boners, but:
1. I'm unemployed and really shouldn't be spending much money on non essentials
2. The games I really want on the list are: Sonic, Shinobi, and Ecco (because I played them back then and I'm a sucker for nostalgia), so I should be saving my money for them instead of Space Harrier and Hang On.
3. But then again, maybe it's wiser to buy games that I haven't played before?
And if I decide jump on either of the first games I wouldn't know which one to pick, both look fun. I wish the videos on the e-shop were in 3D, I wanted to see how the 3D looks in both of them.
...I think I'll be buying all of these. This dedication deserves to be rewarded.
Quick question for the Space harrier fans:
When I use the analog stick, when I let go of the stick, Harrier immediately returns to the center of the screen. I have to constantly apply pressure to keep him in place. Yet, when I use the dpad, the character maneuvers just fine.
Is there an option that fixes this? Thanks
Also, almost definitely, my GOTY choice.
Edit: Actually, is there any word on co-op for that one? It's not a deal-breaker, but link play would make me even more excited than I already am!
I haven't played Galaxy Force in any form before, can't wait for it!Wait til you play Galaxy Force II!
There's no option as it's by design, they mention the thinking behind it in the making-of interview..... but I don't remember the reason!Originally Posted by MaverickHunterX
Quick question for the Space harrier fans:
When I use the analog stick, when I let go of the stick, Harrier immediately returns to the center of the screen. I have to constantly apply pressure to keep him in place. Yet, when I use the dpad, the character maneuvers just fine.
Is there an option that fixes this? Thanks
http://www.nintendolife.com/reviews/..._space_harrier
http://www.nintendolife.com/games/3d..._super_hang_on
I'm sold. I think I'll start with Super Hang-On, very excited. This will be the first game I buy in many months. Thank you Based SEGA.
need that super hang on in my life
If they can somehow get Outrun on the 3ds i would be a happy man. But i guess that won't work due to the Ferrari license :(
This is intentional. The original arcade game had one of those jet fighter joysticks with analog controls. However, all of the home ports used digital controls instead, so they altered the control scheme. The 3DS version offers both you can switch between just by using the other pad.Originally Posted by MaverickHunterX
When I use the analog stick, when I let go of the stick, Harrier immediately returns to the center of the screen. I have to constantly apply pressure to keep him in place. Yet, when I use the dpad, the character maneuvers just fine.
Is there an option that fixes this? Thanks
SEGA 3D Classics – 3D Sonic the Hedgehog Interview with Developer M2
The never-ending battle with slowdown.
YO: That said, after starting development, we immediately ran into problems. Unlike games like Space Harrier which were built in 3D from the very beginning, the difficulty of converting a 2D game into 3D was on a different level.
In order to give this an easy explanation, I’ve brought along the first version of the game we got working on the 3DS. Take a look. This is the prototype for 3D Sonic The Hedgehog. With this version, you can play from start to finish like you normally would.
Since the MegaDrive has two backgrounds layers and some sprites, the initial idea was to add depth information to the background portions, and then place sprites with depth info right in front of you. We thought that by doing so, the game image would come out in stereoscopic 3D. However, when you put the game in 3D like this, the screen looks empty. Compare it to the final version and you can see that the rasterized portions of the backgrounds look quite different. I wonder if the people reading this will get the picture. (laughs)
The rasterized portions of the background in this first version don’t have depth information yet, right?
YO: That’s right. When we played the initial version, we found that playing it in 3D didn’t really add much impact or appeal. Even though we’d got it running, we even started to think to ourselves, “maybe this isn’t going to work. Maybe we should just give up on Sonic.” Since Sonic was the flagship game for the MegaDrive, it would need to have a new aspect of fun to it in 3D… but the initial version was just a simple implementation of the 3D. We DID get it working, but the fun wasn’t there yet. Especially the first stage, Green Hill Zone, didn’t feel 3D and thus wasn’t very exciting.
However for the loop-de-loops in the stage, there were places that would have broken the 3D effect when you look at it which M2 told me they had fixed by patching the original code. In other words, M2 had gone in and applied 3D processing to those parts of the level by hand.
As we discussed that approach, M2 mentioned that while they were researching stereoscopic 3D, they found that if they applied 3D processing to areas of the stage that use parallax scrolling backgrounds[2], it looked amazing. So I said, if that’s the case, maybe we should add depth to the clouds, the ocean and all that. M2 told me that doing so was certainly possible technically, but it was going to generate processing overhead, and require a fair bit of work. Still, I felt like we definitely had to do it, so I kept bringing it up.
What’s more, to keep the game speed up, they hadn’t yet implemented the FM Synth emulation. Every time the FM Synth made a sound, the program would generate slowdown, so it was as if I was asking them to make it lag even more.
A 3D-compatible Virtual MegaDrive: the Gigadrive Plan
- Something I was curious about when you mentioned how hard it was to get MegaDrive games to run on the 3DS was that, compared to the PS2 port,, it sounds like you have to squeeze out twice the framerate (60fps to 120 fps, 60fps x 2 eyes (left and right) = 120fps), all while not having any input lag. That sounds like a really tough goal, right? It’s pretty an amazing feat.
NH: Around the time we were building Super Hang-on for SEGA AGES ONLINE[3], Okunari-san told us to “make everything 3D,” so we put a bunch of different games into 3D and showed them to him. At the time, we’d actually built a development environment that allowed us to make and show off quick implementations of stereoscopic 3D at a pretty low cost. We figured we’d just run the same program on the 3DS and that’d be good enough. However on the 3Ds, a lot of things weren’t working (depth adjustments we’d made to the background and sprites were broken), so at that point, we knew going in and fixing each issue one by one would be no small task.
Let me give you an example. When you add binocular depth to the game (by creating two separate screens, one for the left eye, and one for the right), you tend to lose the right and left edge of the screen, since you can’t add art that never existed in the first place. Fixing little issues like this one by one gets pretty overwhelming.
Once we had decided to include depth in rasterized areas, we figured we might as well build a MegaDrive architecture that supports stereoscopic 3D, a new SEGA console we dreamed up, which we decided to call the “GigaDrive.” We figured that if we can build this new platform on the 3DS using emulation techniques, and then create a version of Sonic The Hedgehog that runs on it, all our problems would be solved! This would give us smarter and more flexible 3D compared to patching the MegaDrive game program. In that sense, you could say we’re just “patching” a patch for a GigaDrive game, which gave us a lot more latitude to work with.
So that changed your approach to the port.
NH: That’s right. But at that point we still had no idea if the thing was going to work. (both laugh)
Inside this “GigaDrive”, we increased the number of background layers to four, gave each layer a Z-value (depth info), and gave each raster line a Z-value which allowed us to for instance, knock the lake into the background. Funny because I was just mentioning how hard it would be to port the game since the Megadrive has two background layers. (both laugh)
The rest of the interview hereNH: I thought it would be pretty awesome to reproduce the ultimate MegaDrive on the 3DS. To keep the MegaDrive atmosphere intact, we made no changes to the art palettes. There are still four.
We did expand the background layer count by four… two each for the left and right eye. And these can hold Z-values for each render line. Sprites have Z-values as well. And, since there wasn’t enough VRAM for 3D Sonic The Hedgehog, we expanded the VRAM by another 64Kbytes, to twice the size of the original MegaDrive. With just a little more pushing, maybe we could actually build some hardware with it. Not that SEGA would sell it for us though. (both laugh)
YO: Well, there wouldn’t be any software for it, right? (laughs)
NH: Yeah, there wouldn’t be. We’d of course be happy to make some ourselves though. Incidentally, when I told people at the office that Project GigaDrive was our next project, they all started using “GigaDrive” in their weekly and daily reports, and getting really involved in the whole idea. So internally at M2, I think it’s been a really good thing. Maybe in a couple of years, we can get Power Drift running on it and put that out. (grins) That’d be cool.
- With regards to the GigaDrive’s architecture, what level of hardware are we talking about?
NH: We’ve expanded the flexibility of the MegaDrive, to a larger extent than for instance how the PC Engine Super Grafx multiplied the number of sprites and backgrounds that the PC Engine had, and added memory to it. With the GigaDrive, Video Display Processor functions were added for the expanded game functionality, there are more sprite tables, you can use six background layers, the backgrounds have depth, all objects have depth, etc. Once you’ve got all this working, you can build Sonic The Hedgehog in 3D.
YO: Honestly, since we were really maxing out the specs, there are a few things that we cut compared to 3DS Space Harrier and 3D Super Hang-on. One is widescreen support. We haven’t done anything to show what would be outside the normal screen, partly to maintain the game balance of the original. We also wound up not adding a frame around the game screen.
NH: We really wanted to put in a TV frame. But if we did, there wouldn’t have been enough processing power to handle the stereoscopic 3D. Since that’s another thing we’d have to draw, we gave up on it. Instead we added “Classic Mode” as an additional 3D mode, where we were able to replicate a CRT TV in 3D. This mode is pretty nice. Hopefully you’ll agree that it looks like an old TV. The graphics blur too.
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