cj_iwakura
Member
It launched at $20. It was cult from the start.
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Polygon - Exclusive: 19 Minutes of PHANTOM DUST Remastered Gameplay
- Thread starter Cheddahz
- Start date
Awesome! I'm looking forward to it.
Edit: perfect timing for my reply, lol. I'll send a request when I'm home from work.
Edit2: Nvm, didn't know it was so easy to do from the phone lol. Request sent!
Got your request, sent the invite.
I'm not sure if there's something you have to accept on your end.
please watch the video
The original source assets, not the lower res assets used in the OG Xbox release.
I'm playing the original game right now. This is a game that has aged very well but the Xbox One release isn't a mere port.
FinaruDensetsu
Member
Ah ok, thanks. I stand corrected.
Did I miss the AA/AF that the original person I was responding to claimed as well?
Scorpio gives 16x AF for free.
I'm looking at the original game right now and it's not hard to spot the jaggies. The remaster obviously has AA, it's a lot cleaner.
Cool. Just got off work so I'm heading home to watch this video. Feel free to send me a friend request if you want. I don't think I'll have many friends getting this sadly. Tho I'm gonna be doing my best to make sure they all know about it. Lol
I mean... If they managed to get this far without any proper source code, some AF and a bit of FXAA isn't out of the question. Hopefully, the PC version will have proper AA, or even support downsampling.
Wolfgunblood Garopa
Member
This is one of the more interesting projects in some time, how it was reverse engineered and ported from DX8. This is one of those games that I would watch hours of tech talk and stories of all of the stuff they ran into and had to work around.
I could see PD getting another cult following, for sure.
I could see PD getting another cult following, for sure.
King Gilga
Member
What a weird looking game.
I thought people said it was supposed to be some kind of card game?
Well either way looks like the opposite of fun.
I thought people said it was supposed to be some kind of card game?
Well either way looks like the opposite of fun.
cj_iwakura
Member
It's very fun. Great story too.
sixteen-bit
Member
What are the chances we get the a PD character in Killer Instect as a guest character?
This was a $20 release when it came out on the Xbox, its was a budget cult niche of the niche kind of game and the fact we got anything is incredible. Maybe its just me putting things into proper perspective but I wasn't expecting much beyond the original game and being able to play it online again. This was never going to be a huge production and if you ask me what we got looks pretty good to me but I enjoyed the original game for what it was and this seems like more of what I loved. The fact they were able to do so much with so little is impressive to me.
I vote Freia
I don't think she would stand out at all considering the cast of KI, honestly.
Head.spawn
Junior Member
Watching this footage, man. Nostalgia feels all over the place <3.
Absolutely amazing that these textures simply existed in the standard OG Xbox game.
As long as they nail that run animation. But yeah, that'd be cool as hell.
Absolutely amazing that these textures simply existed in the standard OG Xbox game.
As long as they nail that run animation. But yeah, that'd be cool as hell.
Hatefilled Vengeance
Member
Looking forward to trying this game finally. Looks fun.
Head.spawn
Junior Member
My dude. Lets get a proper Panzer sequel (no kinect/vr focus) and get in someones ear about a "collection" -release. That'd be amazing.
almostjuliuscaesar
Member
I still don't understand the purpose of this or the voodoo vince remaster, considering the other XBOX classics people have actually asked for.
So you admit you're nitpicking someone misspeaking (a verbal typo)?
It's a card game behind the auspice of being an Akira-inspired arena fighter.
The abilities that you pick up are part of a huge roster. You gather them and arrange them into a "deck" of available abilities. Then, when you are playing the game you wait for one of your cards/abilities in your deck to be randomly "drawn" from the deck so you can use it.
It's a total trip a few games feel as good and support as many disparate playstyles. The multiplayer is awesome as well.
See Grabbed by the Ghoulies.
Also how if the source code missing for so many games?
GuitarAtomik
Member
Fucking sold. Looks so clean. Amazing that's the original texture assets.
Even if MS or the devs called it a Remaster, I would still think that's a fair label considering the results. It sounds like you and others are wanting a remake, which is different than a remaster. Models aren't typically redone in remasters.
I did >< though admittedly I was distracted with work, so I could have missed it if he said AA was applied.
Voodoo Vince was a pet project done by a single MS employee, not a huge project and this is what we're getting instead of the canceled reboot.
Edit:
I'm sure remasters and remakes weren't taken into consideration back then. We rarely saw such things during the PS2/Xbox/GC generation.
PuppetMaster
Member
This.
A lot of old games just look worse when you increase the res. These assest were never meant to seen at 1080 or 4k.
At lower resolutions the human brain fills in a lot of the details for us. A lot of interpolation magic goes inside our heads. And cranking up the res defeats that. Because now we realize the detail our brains thought was there is not there at all.
That's actually a bit funny considering "the other XBOX classics" would be a perfect way to describe a game like Phantom Dust.
Kent
Member
Well, for starters, Phantom Dust is pretty much the best game on the original Xbox, and I say that understanding exactly how amazing its exclusive library is.
The other part is that these are things that were personally championed within Microsoft to make them happen. Phil is very attached to Voodoo Vince, while Ken Lobb is very vocally a fan of Phantom Dust (and Killer Instinct, of course).
As much as I'd love to see all of those amazing Sega games come back, it's probably not going to happen unless you have someone on Sega's side of things that's just as passionate about making it happen (and likely going to need some first-party funding to make it happen, in all honesty). Probably a pretty similar situation with pretty much any third-party game.
Even as short of a distance in the past as 2004, we didn't have the standards and ease of accessibility for mass storage as we do today. A lot of companies just didn't keep a whole lot of the development assets for games, including the source code, and some of them may yet be buried somewhere in an old tape drum.
Guardian Heroes HD was a pretty great example of this happening - when Sega and Treasure were working to make the re-release, they actually found a magnetic tape cassette that contained the source code, and had to venture out to multiple studios and partners of Sega's in order to gather the parts necessary to build a machine just so they could retrieve the source code, which was then used to port the game cleanly to the Xbox 360.
In addition to simply misplacing, deleting or otherwise having some hazard befall source backups, it's also entirely possible that tape decay could have set in during the interim. Which sucks, because that stuff needs to be preserved if at all possible.
This leak get posted?
https://m.imgur.com/hlelOeS
https://m.imgur.com/hlelOeS
DriftingSpirit
Member
Ignoring Jade Empire, sure.
Jaguar Victory
Member
Or Halo..
Grumplestiltskin
Member
They added micro transactions to an og XBX remaster... really?!? Come on. Is there just never going to be an MS studios games without micro transactions anymore? This is ridiculous.
GuitarAtomik
Member
I've read the first few pages of this thread and it makes me sad. The game is awesome if you give it a chance. I know the video is long, but it's actually really damn informative about the process.
OttoSporteman
Member
Not really a leak when MS Creative Director posted it to Twitter
I think it looks amazing, but I've been looking at the original for 13 years. I originally thought we were getting a 4:3/480p uprezed backward compatible version of PD with modern Xbox Live. It is so much more than that. I can't imagine fans of the original will be disappointed. I hope new players give it a chance, the game is very deep and if you like anything about the strategy of card games but want an action game, this is it.
I originally thought we were getting a 4:3/480p uprezed backward compatible version of PD with modern Xbox Live. It is so much more than that. I can't imagine fans of the original will be disappointed. I hope new players give it a chance, the game is very deep and if you like anything about the strategy of card games but want an action game, this is it.
cj_iwakura
Member
lightskintwin
Banned
I'm definitely going to check it out.
As others have suggested I hope Xbox dedicates a small group going forward in doing more OG Xbox HD rereleases. The notable ones have already been mentioned but don't forget about Fusion Frenzy.
As others have suggested I hope Xbox dedicates a small group going forward in doing more OG Xbox HD rereleases. The notable ones have already been mentioned but don't forget about Fusion Frenzy.
Banjo-Kazooie
Member
I don't think you get this at all lol
^^ Thank you. ^^
cj_iwakura
Member
It's a toss up between this and JSRF for me... but since JSR1 is better, PD narrowly wins.
Has anyone Followed him and then tried to find the game?
Banjo-Kazooie
Member
Some of the posts in here are downright embarrassing. Its a freaking achievement that this even exists on a modern platform
FlutterPuffs
Member
Oh no, I'm not saying I want a remake, but it seems like even Polygon is changing the title of the video from Remastered to an HD-Rerelease.
As long as there's remastered in the thread title, you can be sure people will still call it out for looking crap.
Also models are redone in a lot of remasters. Like some said, we expect better things when a game is titled as remastered versions now. If it's an HD-Rerelease, sure. That's more like a port and a different thing entirely.
BONKERS
Member
3rd party users have been able to modify games to greater lengths without any access to any kind of source. And this has happened a lot recently with many PC ports.
So, they definitely could've done better. (30FPS stable as an accomplishment? I don't think so. There was at least one frame drop/stutter in that video. Porting a 30FPS game and getting rock solid 30 on platforms orders of magnitude more powerful is hardly impressive. Yes, it had tons of drops originally. But that's still not impressive. The fact there are any drops at all still is not impressive at all. There's not even Anti-aliasing in that video.)
Also: I'm sure if the budget was there, the game could've been redone for 60FPS. That would just require a lot more work depending on various circumstances.
Plenty of other games have had to rebuild without the source code and they've hacked their way through it without excuses. (MGS2,3,Kingdom Hearts, FFX/X-2, the upcoming Starcraft Remaster, i'm sure there are other examples where code had to be salvaged from retail copies.)
Ultimately this is on Microsoft however. Since it's their game, they are the ones making the decisions and paying the bills.
At the very least upgrade the UI assets FFS.
I'll still buy it. But as far as a "Remaster" goes. This is pretty barebones and disappointing. That term has become a giant misnomer.
Upgrading the visuals would NOT make it a remake. A remake would be rebuilding the game from the ground up. Like the original PD Remake that was supposed to be happening. A remaster builds on top of an existing product. And honestly they wouldn't have to do much here. Simply redraw new UI and 2D assets. Upgrade the textures, smooth out some geometry maybe.
The upcoming Crash Bandicoot games, I would call remakes. Rebuilt from scratch.
So, they definitely could've done better. (30FPS stable as an accomplishment? I don't think so. There was at least one frame drop/stutter in that video. Porting a 30FPS game and getting rock solid 30 on platforms orders of magnitude more powerful is hardly impressive. Yes, it had tons of drops originally. But that's still not impressive. The fact there are any drops at all still is not impressive at all. There's not even Anti-aliasing in that video.)
Also: I'm sure if the budget was there, the game could've been redone for 60FPS. That would just require a lot more work depending on various circumstances.
Plenty of other games have had to rebuild without the source code and they've hacked their way through it without excuses. (MGS2,3,Kingdom Hearts, FFX/X-2, the upcoming Starcraft Remaster, i'm sure there are other examples where code had to be salvaged from retail copies.)
Ultimately this is on Microsoft however. Since it's their game, they are the ones making the decisions and paying the bills.
At the very least upgrade the UI assets FFS.
I'll still buy it. But as far as a "Remaster" goes. This is pretty barebones and disappointing. That term has become a giant misnomer.
Upgrading the visuals would NOT make it a remake. A remake would be rebuilding the game from the ground up. Like the original PD Remake that was supposed to be happening. A remaster builds on top of an existing product. And honestly they wouldn't have to do much here. Simply redraw new UI and 2D assets. Upgrade the textures, smooth out some geometry maybe.
The upcoming Crash Bandicoot games, I would call remakes. Rebuilt from scratch.
RedAssedApe
Banned
GuitarAtomik
Member
Well it's a good thing Microsoft isn't calling it a remaster.