[Shapermc]

If you haven’t been following the (attempt at a humorous) front page post about Castlevania Dracula X Chronicles, you can find it here. If you have, I added a new bit of information which I will post here in correspondence with FKW and at least EGM appreciating it (even if ever so mildly):

So, it seems like even with the story breaking early from 1up not EGM, there is a little bit left to be found in the Magazine Edition of the Rondo of Blood (Dracula X Chronicles) release for the PSP. All info stolen from EGM issue 213.

First, let’s get some quotes from Iga: “We were inspired by all the fans that have been asking for a title with 3D graphics and 2D gameplay for so long. Since Rondo of Blood never received a proper release outside of Japan, we decided it would be a perfect candidate for a remake.”

At this point I question why Iga didn’t point out that he said he wanted to bring this game out since the original Chronicles release 6 years ago in an interview on the PS1 disc. It seems more likely that if he was playing to the fans, as he claims, that he would have said something more akin to “See guys! I live up to my promises.” Though, I’m sure he probably didn’t want to remind us Americans (and Brits!) about our failure to purchase that game. But, back to Iga:

“Even though we are remaking Rondo in 3D, our goal is to retain the look and feel of the original 2D game. The first stage is especially faithful so gamers can easily transition to our new look if they were familiar with our original game.”

Is this some kind of backhanded statement about how “we know it doesn’t look as awesome, but hopefully we lower your expectations enough that you’ll find things looking good later in the game to be good enough”? The world can only wait in patient antici

Pation. But that’s not all! Igarashi can’t leave the original game alone: “We’ve changed some of the original stages so that more experienced players could still enjoy the exploration and surprise of playing it for the first time. Plus, we’re making drastic changes to one level [ed: Oh noes!] and adding some light collection elements to the overall game [ed: gouging eyes out with spoons here], but the basic gameplay will still be pretty faithful.”

Pretty faithful? Hmm. Anyways, reading down a bit I noticed that Shane Bettenhausen slipped a mickey into my drink. “[H]e does know that the original TurboDuo version of Rondo will be unlockable on the disc.” Crap. Well, there goes any chance of ignoring the remake.

Though, honestly, I guess I didn’t expect anything else. I even joked around with a friend about the addition of collectable elements to the game. Oh that Igarashi! As we have come to know this is a release called “Dracula X Chronicles” as in, both games in the DracX series, so Symphony of the Night will also be included on the disc (UMD). With the release of SotN right around the corner (and outside the timeframe of FKW) it seems a bit odd to port the game twice in one year… but wait!

EGM claims that the game is getting reprogrammed so that it is going to fit the widescreen format of the PSP. I don’t know if this is actually amazing or horrible. On one hand, this is the first time that I can recall a game that’s getting converted to widescreen and not just involving a stretched format, or a cropped format (or even the in-a-box format), but actually reprogrammed so that you can see additional items which were originally outside the viewing area. On the other hand, this is a travesty for the XBLA release which is going to be in the original 4:3 aspect ratio. It’s a bit unfair that a system which is going to be widely ignored by fans of this type of genre (if past sales of both Chronicles and PSP fixed plane platformers are any indication), and yet a console that is on my damn TV which is connected to a system who’s prime feature is widescreen High Definition isn’t getting this kind of attention. As I swallow my tears I shall digress.

Aside from that there will be some minor background tweak, and audio tweaks for SotN, but they’ll “only be making changes to the parts I’m not satisfied with,” states Iga. Bettenhausen claims that this is going to be for the voice acting, but I have a feeling it will be more than just that.

As any “would-be Belmont” knows, the PS1 version of SotN wasn’t the only one released. Recently the Saturn version of the game was lambasted on the 1up Retro Show by Jeremy Parish and crew. But we all know that you’ve been dieing to see these things added to an official version of SotN without the drawbacks of the Saturn hardware. Two new areas, selectable playable characters from the start, and a whole new character, Maria (who I’m told plays a bit like Mega Man, and is possibly the only reason to try the Saturn version). But what does Igarashi have to say when asked about these things getting put on the Chronicles collection?

“Good question, but I’m afraid that’s a secret for now. All I can say is that we’re planning to incorporate new content that is going to be really enjoyable for anyone who is a fan of the game.”

For as negative as this may sound, I’m actually pretty happy about most of this news. Let’s hope that Iga has the sense not to completely deface the games that got him where he is today.
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The bad sleep well at The Gamer's Quarter

[JamesE]

How long until the next Castlevania thread is posted? Who can say?

[Shapermc]

'sup James.
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The bad sleep well at The Gamer's Quarter

[dessgeega]

[Predator Goose]

[kiken]

[Ashura]

[kiken]

[Shapermc]

N?

Anyways, I still haven't played the Saturn version... only seen videos. But that makes sense.
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The bad sleep well at The Gamer's Quarter

[kiken]

[showka]

[Ashura]

[kiken]

[showka]

[Lestrade]

[showka]

Yes. In fact I wrote a 2D game engine that uses OpenGL, and if you want your game to take advantage of the 3D hardware there no other way to do it.

I was thinking about this last night, one draw back to doing 2D with 3D hardware is how texture memory is used. For example, most textures should not be larger than 256x256 pixels, even on newer cards. In the past, cards had lower limits, like 64x64. Strange things also happen if your textures aren't a power of two, strange things that can totally fuck up your alogirthms for showing 2D graphics without stretching them.

I created code that, from the outside, just lets you take any old bitmap and then create a sprite that has a position on screen and then cordinates for that bitmap. But within that code, things are more complicated. The bitmaps are sliced into as many textures as they need to have, those textures are expanded to be powers of 2, and then the sprite routines might have to draw multiple textured quads for what appears to be one sprite if the source image is more than 256 pixels in either direction.

I'd be willing to say that a PSX game from 1997 didn't take the time to create an abstract layer like this, because 1) having game code call a sort of library created just for handling the 2D geometery would slow things down a little bit compared to working with the graphics hardware, or structures that were used by the graphics hardware, directly and 2) the fact Nintendo had to flip the entire damn world in Twilight Princess to make Link right handed makes me think Japanese game coders prefer to make the game work rather than ensure they're code is set up to handle the possibility it might need to work differently one day. What I'm trying to say is that Symphony of the Night is most likely filled with code that is made for the 3D. Almost all the code for doing anything graphical, from how Richter's whip moved to Alucards after-images, was hard coded to work with flat polygons and small pools of texture memory.

One solution would have been to have created a system that acted like a facade of the PSX's 3D hardware, so it took data structures or interfaces that looked the same as what was used for the PSX's graphics and then passed them through some code that used the Saturn's 2D hardware. But this might have been prohibitively expensive in terms of time, there may have been so much PSX specific code in the game to make this impossible, or maybe how the Saturn dealt with 2D (especially with how the graphics were stored in memory) was so different that it would've slowed the game down.

So the only solution was to try and use the Saturn's 3D methods, or reprogram vast portions of the game, and while they were doing that they might as well have redrawn everything since even if they'd added the transparencies or gotten rid of the slow down the graphics would still look blocky. Since I've always heard the Saturn dev team was strapped for time, this probably was not an option.

Really, its kind of annoying to hear people chalk up the flaws in ports to developer laziness. There are severe differences between the archeticture of the PSX that would make porting the games difficult unless the original game was programmed from the start under the assumption that it might be ported. Given that no Castlevania title aside from SOTN ever had a direct port before, I can't see how it would have been.

[Felix]