Widescreen vertical scrolling seems like a weird way to go.
Does anybody still remember Jamestown?
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I don’t hate widescreen/vertical scroll but I don’t have a terribly refined shmup palate
Yeah, my screen is only so big, and my eyes are only so good, so please fill my standard horizontal display thanks.
Yeah, it was…OK.
Rotating displays is super OK with flat panels, for one, but for two, this means that dodging shots is going to be…strange. like I’m trying to think of how to explain it, but basically you are going to be moving up all the time, but shots are either going to come from really close in front of you, or are going to come from the side a lot. Really, hori shooters are cool and I don’t get why they wouldn’t do that if filling the screen was the priority.
There’s still a level of effort to rotating a flat screen that I’m not going expend, but I understand that’d be a no-brainer for someone more committed to playing these games. I’m definitely a dilettante here, but I’ve played a lot of Skyforce Reloaded which is a widescreen, vertical scroller (except maybe on mobile). The dodging never feels awkward.
(Although that game does a soft narrowing of the aspect ratio in some situations by obscuring the sides of the screen with cloud cover. You lose track of your plane if you move too far to the right or left. I think the effect is more pronounced at higher difficulty levels, but I’m not sure it’s always present in every level.)
So I wonder whether widescreen, vertical scrolling is problematic because it is a failure of game design or a failure to meet expectations?
It’s basically making Tetris, but the field fills a widescreen. You could do it, but like, why?
it would be good
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Well I assume Tetris was designed to play in a fixed grid regardless of the display shape, whereas shooters were traditionally designed to fit their contemporary displays? I don’t really know. I imagine a game of Tetris on a wide board would just be tedious Tetris, unless the tetrominoes were adjusted to suit it. But widening the playing field of a shooter feels like simply altering it’s level design–which may or may not work depending on the strength of that design. I don’t think that decision should be written off just because it doesn’t stick with the way things are usually done.
Possibly, but then I wouldn’t exactly refer to my game “brining back the old school authentic shoot em up experience” because… obvious reasons.
gigawing is like that and gigawing is great
Gigawing is 4:3, not 16:9.
i thought cps2 games were slightly wider than 4:3
This is not an owning you link. I saw this a month back and have been thinking about it ever since.
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I’ve always wanted to know how to make CPS2 games appear in 4:3 resolution but also be pixel perfect, but there’s just enough math for me unable to do this in my head. So let’s do a post.
CPS2 has a resolution of 384x224 pixels or 12:7 pixel ratio. Assuming modern displays have square pixels, We’ll be multiplying both the 384 by x and 224 by y to achieve a pixel ratio of 4:3.
384x/4 = 224y/3
96x=74.666y
Both x and y have to be integers. If we try y=3, then x= 2.333, so it looks like y=9 and x=7. I genuinely don’t know how I’d have figured this out, but I’m assuming it has something to do with finding all the divisors.
Anyways, it looks like a 1080p screen can’t properly handle doing pixel perfect + proper ratio CPS2 games, but bump the resolution to 4k, and you can do it right! You’d end up with a final image size of 2688x2016 losing 1152 pixels on the horizontal and 144 pixels on the vertical.
If we settled for partial scaling (like like Shovel Knight or Sonic Mania), we’d end up with a 1344x1008 image. You’d have margins of 576 on the horizontal and 72 on the vertical. I’m guessing this is how something like Street Fighter 3 looks on the PS3? I’m not positive. Anyways, here’s a picture of SF2 scaled up 3.5 on the x and 4.5 on the y.
Please let me know if my maths are wrong. Whoops
Thanks for being here with me through this all this math!
Edit:
I did the same thing for NES/SNES resolution of 256x224 and it looks like you need to scale those images up to 1792x1344 (or 896x672 for “half perfect”) which leaves fairly large margins on either HD or 4k displays. I think at 6 or 7 pixels width it’s hard to perceive a single pixel of derpiness, but it is surprising how NES/SNES would scale poorly to modern displays. I wonder if there are ways to fudge the scale…
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Granzella posted this art for their R-Type Final 2 devblog thing and I love how happy the monsters are to give/receive death:
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Why does this remind me of A Shark’s Tale
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I’m old this is too much. Just gonna settle myself with ESP Ra De coming to PS4 and Switch??? On December 19th.
Should have this in the arcade box instead of Ketsui. I really like ESPRaDe.
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