Ok so yeah you know how I praised the batsugun port even if some people poopoo on Saturn Tribute due to the nature of the earlier games in that series (and some consoles like Switch not helping things)? Nah, this line should be the big red mark for any input lag ridden reissues.
So yeah uh, this was the set that literally made me go "fuck this" and halt reviewing Qubyte Classics. Until now, I covered every one, and they were all in the same damn wrapper. No improvements despite many releases and some like Zero Tolerance getting stupid expensive physical versions. Why? Well, these are both SNES games... That have ludicrous input lag. Not just on XSX, but on every platform. The menus are clunky. The save state feature in particular is slow and not practical to use how you'd expect it to be. Hell, in the Tinhead set, it even crashes the application.
These emulations are BAAAAAAAD. Absolutely inexcusable. Don't even get me fucking started on the GB emulator which has excessive screen tearing that'll make you vomit. Going from Evercade versions of a lot of these games with rock solid emulation to these just really show the opposite end of a retro reissue: the lazy, cheap, poorly done kind where developers just seemingly do not listen to feedback whatsoever. I've given feedback and ideas for every single port up to now, and was blown away and really enjoyed Breakers Collection, a set which did have feedback and community input in mind. Since there was a big gap from the last game (Water Margin) and this one, I hoped maybe they'd do a 2.0 of the wrapper and make all of these games emulate way better.
Nope. Six months later and still the same shitty unity garbage wrapper and UI. So with this review of bad input lag brawlers, I gave up and wouldn't review the next few games (my reviewer friend told me they both have the same emulator and input lag problems).
I wouldn't be surprised if they end up throwing Legend of Wukong with it's super bad anti piracy protection that broke the Evercade version on this service at some point, without testing to see if it's beatable, since these guys are really pushing the "absolutely no effort in emulation quality" boundary, which in a post Digital Eclipse/M2 age, is pretty shameful. Considering how fun Legend was and how rare the other title is, it was hugely depressing to see them treated like this.
I also feel that @gosokkyu in particular would benefit from knowing just how bad these reissues are: like, holy shit they are “who tested these” bad
I certainly don't buy or play every one of these but I do make a point of grabbing one every so often and they're all terrible. I know I have a history of griping about the likes of ININ, Ratalaika etc, particularly in terms of positioning their output as premium product, but for whatever grievances I might have, they do at least show some affection for the games they're curating, whereas the QUByte Classics releases often suggest that they haven't even played the games they're ROM-dropping.
(Their most recent reissue came out just the other day: Gourmet Warriors, a contemporary Pxko-produced localisation of the late Tomoharu Saito's very silly SFC-exclusive brawler Gourmet Sentai Barayarou—QUByte Classics are released globally, so I grabbed the JP version just to confirm that this version doesn't include the authentic SFC version at all, and that even JP buyers are stuck playing the "SNES" version.)
People are rightly buzzing about Digital Eclipse's interactive Karateka retrospective and the broader potential for independently-funded and produced museum pieces, and there's a particular QUByte Classics releases that I tend to bring up as the antithesis to The Making of Karateka, and an ultimate example of squandered potential:
Thunderbolt Collection, a two-pack containing a pair of unlicensed shooting games produced by Taiwanese studio Gamtec for the FC/NES and MD, respectively: both of these games are awful, and a more judicious publisher wouldn't dare commercialise them (the NES game is a blatant "demake" of Hudson's Super Star Soldier, and the MD game looks to be heavily derived from Namco's MD port of Dangerous Seed), but buried deep beneath the obvious awfulness of these games is the kernel of a neat idea: that is, taking these "bootleg" games—and not specifically these ones, there are countless dozes of others to choose from—and using them as the scaffolding for an examination of the cottage markets for unlicensed games in specific territories, the history and genealogy of the games released under particular brand names, etc. The Video Game History Foundation's Frank Cifaldi has often spoken of the ideal game reissue as being one where the user could be entirely satisfied without ever actually touching the game, and has also lamented the notion that vintage game reissues are still primarily evaluated through the lens of the significance or "quality" of the original game vs. the thoughtfulness and craft of the curated package, and I think that a release like Thunderbolt Collection could, ideally, serve as the ultimate catalyst for getting people to decouple their expectations for a vintage game reissue from a strict appreciation for the subject matter...
...but no, Thunderbolt Collection makes no attempt to provide any context whatsoever for either of these games, their developer or anything else: in fact, the only real descriptor they provide for either of the games is the big FOR THE FIRST TIME IN THE EASTERN text in the trailer, which is just... whatever that is, I don't even know. The one content change Pxko made to these ROMs was to replace the kanji title graphics with English title graphics, and I'm betting the only reason they even did that was because the kanji titles are identical to Raiden Densetsu and they didn't think they could get away with leaving them as-is.
Put simply, they took a pair of shoddy games that virtually nobody has ever heard of and few would ever enjoy outside of the context of their initial release, altered the titles so that anyone who did have some nostalgic attachment to them probably wouldn't find or recognise them, unceremoniously served them up on modern storefronts as if they were something one might plausibly buy on a whim, and emulated them badly, just to ensure that anyone who did accidentally buy them would hate themselves for doing so.
Everything about Thunderbolt Collection baffles me, but the reason it really sticks with me is because there was a point where I believed the audience for vintage game reissues had naturally evolved to the point where they expected and demanded more thoughtful propositions from commercial curators, but this release—and the whole QUByte Classics line, and most everything Pxko is attached to, really—shows that simply putting things on a storefront will evidently create enough of an audience to let you shovel out crap for as long as there's more crap to shovel.