gosokkyu

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gosokkyu
@gosokkyu

City Connection's latest emulated Saturn reissue has been announced: Assault Suits Leynos 2, Masaya's Japan-only sequel to their influential side-scrolling mecha action games Assault Suits Leynos (Target Earth) and Assault Suits Valken (Cybernator) One of the comments I saw in reaction to this announcement is that "it's the best hardcore 2D mecha action game ever made, right until the fighting starts" and while I think that's overstating just how unfun it actually is, it definitely tries to split the difference between the previous two games and instead embodies the worst elements of both, and it strikes me as practically unfinished.

(It was also a product of a completely different team than the prior games; the people behind those games split to form their own studio, and their first game was Front Mission: Gun Hazard aka Valken-but-Square-owns-it.)

It'll be out on PC/PS/XB/Switch next year, and aside from the basic emulator functionality—save states, rewind, etc—it'll include some simple tweaks like an extra durability toggle and hint displays for the missions, but they're not going all-out like they did with Batsugun.

That said, they are going to the effort of translating it for the first time, which they decided not to mention in their announce but instead left to a random dev to tease on twxtter; City Connection has a very flaky history with teasing but not delivering localisations of their vintage reissues, so it's nice to have this hard-confirmed right away:


gosokkyu
@gosokkyu

City Connection's locked down a release date for Assault Suit Leynos 2 Saturn Tribute: it'll be out on April 25 in Japan, and it's getting a couple of different physical packages for PS5 and Switch—a standard physical version that comes with a sticker (¥3850), and a special-edition box that comes with an official fan book, an OST with the music from both Leynos games and another reversible jacket with illustrations from 4 as-yet-unidentified guest designers (¥7150). There's also a bunch of retailer tchotchkes that I don't care to list, including the customary Famitsu DX mega-set with a big tacky crystal whatever. (The standard digital release is priced at ¥2980.)

Leynos 2's a very sloppy game and I don't know that it's going to be able to withstand the added performance hit inherent to City Connection's emulator, but I'm still glad the series has some sort of momentum... the Leynos remake's nearly a decade old, after all.


gosokkyu
@gosokkyu

(clockwise from top left)

Watari U (Hades Project Zeorymer Ω, Final Exerion, etc; prolific fan artist)

Koh Inaba (Gundam: Witch from Mercury, Xenoblade X & 2, lotsa late-'00s From games including Armoured Core 4/Answer, etc)

Naohiro Washio (loads of Gundam including Iron-Blooded Orphans, Infinite Space, etc)

Hiroyuki Kani (former From designer with long ties to Armoured Core, from Project Phantasma to 4 Answer)


gosokkyu
@gosokkyu

heads up: City Connection's announced that the Japanese PS/Switch versions of Leynos 2 Saturn Tribute will not support English—as with other recent releases, it seems that the EN versions are being held hostage by whichever boutique publisher they're currently working with, and will be available globally on those platforms whenever those publishers feel they ought to come out. (The Xbox/PC versions will launch with English support.)


gosokkyu
@gosokkyu

the Japanese store listings are all up (Switch + PS + XB + PC) and with them, they've finally revealed the specific enhancements they've made for this reissue:

  • the ability to continue unlocking mechs/weapons during the second loop
  • an in-game recreation of the weapon/equipment data card includes with first-print copies of the Saturn version
  • optional support functions to halve booster energy consumption, increase shield durability and/or increase mech HP, plus simple in-game strategy/tips for each mission
  • button config includes rapid-fire options for single-shot weapons

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in reply to @gosokkyu's post:

I just don't trust City Connection. They've already embarrassed the legacy of the great shmups from Psikyo. Those collections are awful and unbelievably lazy.
Their Saturn emulator is made in-house, a supposedly pretty good, but some of their "Saturn Tribute" releases--the Cotton games for example--have been pretty bad too. I haven't played it yet, but the Batsugun Saturn Tribute I've heard is a laggy mess. Elevator Action Returns plays well, but I've never played the original arcade, just their port, which was already a great port from everything I've seen and definitely not an intensive game for their emulator.
Hopefully Assault Suit Leynos 2 is one of their "good" ports. I haven't played the original though so I'm not sure how it played on original hardware? If that was a subpar port, you can bet the City Connection port will be basically the same.
Akai Katana (not a Saturn port though) works well enough. It's the last game I've purchased from City Connection.
Similar to what Live Wire has been doing, they just have the rights to port specific console ports (Saturn in this case).
If I'm not mistaken, City Connection only have the rights to those Saturn versions. Similarly, Live Wire only seems to have the rights to the Cave 360 ports, while M2 has some of the arcade rights. I'm sure there's a bunch of goofy stuff involved with contracts and specific titles though, lol.
Live Wire, for example, has only been porting the Xbox 360 ports (ports of ports=usually not good) of Cave shmups, and they've only ported the really good ones (Mushihimesama, Espgaluda 2, and Dodonpachi Daifukkatsu). They didn't touch Dodonpachi Daioujou (thank the GODS for M2 ShotTriggers!) because it was an awful 360 port.
Anyway, I will never buy a City Connection port until I've seen and read enough to feel comfortable giving them any money. They've burnt too may bridges with me and especially the shmup community. I'll never get over how awful those Psikyo collections are. They deserve soooooo much better!

Their Saturn emulator is made in-house, a supposedly pretty good, but some of their "Saturn Tribute" releases--the Cotton games for example--have been pretty bad too. I haven't played it yet, but the Batsugun Saturn Tribute I've heard is a laggy mess. Elevator Action Returns plays well, but I've never played the original arcade, just their port, which was already a great port from everything I've seen and definitely not an intensive game for their emulator.

CC's Saturn emulator is largely built off a freeware emulator they acquired and it is reasonably accurate, with the trade-off that it adds an unavoidable 3+ frames of lag to every game it runs; this lag was present well before CC got their hands on it, and when they say they can't get it any lower, I believe them.

Because there's a certain amount of baked-in emulator lag, the responsiveness of their Saturn reissues is especially affected by the amount of input lag present in the original games, and they made the unwise decision of launching the Saturn Tribute line with a trio of games (Cotton 2 + Boomerang + Guardian Force) that were notoriously laggy to begin with, tainting the whole brand going forward. People often categorise certain Saturn Tribute releases as "good" or "bad" and it's certainly true that some are less burdened by input lag than others, but the "good" ones are better for the simple reason that they were extremely responsive to begin with, not because they've had any more effort put into them. CC doesn't get some right and some wrong; they're simply putting the ISOs into their emulator and they come out how they come out, so if you know how much delay any game originally had on Saturn, you'll know exactly how much the Saturn Tribute version will have.

(Again, I haven't played Leynos 2 in forever so I don't know how much lag it has, and it's a hard game to guesstimate on feel because it's an inherently un-smooth game to begin with; extra lag's never good, but some games accommodate it more than others, and Leynos 2 is certainly not a game that ought to feel any more burdensome.)

I wish they'd use this emulator for RPGs or other games that weren't so reliant on quick input response, and there are certain games that I'm dreading them getting their hands on before M2 or some other studio can do them justice (Soukyugurentai...)

Akai Katana (not a Saturn port though) works well enough. It's the last game I've purchased from City Connection.

Akai Katana, Deathsmiles I+II and Psyvariar Delta were ported by a several team, now known as TAKExOFF; they're not based on existing ports, and yeah, they're a much safer bet than Saturn Tribute, at least so far. I did find it funny that they made a big fuss about all the work they were doing to get Deathsmiles to run at a more arcade-accurate speed (which they did!) but their Deathsmiles II port is all over the place and yet nobody cares because it's Deathsmiles II.

Similarly, Live Wire only seems to have the rights to the Cave 360 ports, while M2 has some of the arcade rights. I'm sure there's a bunch of goofy stuff involved with contracts and specific titles though, lol.
Live Wire, for example, has only been porting the Xbox 360 ports (ports of ports=usually not good) of Cave shmups, and they've only ported the really good ones (Mushihimesama, Espgaluda 2, and Dodonpachi Daifukkatsu). They didn't touch Dodonpachi Daioujou (thank the GODS for M2 ShotTriggers!) because it was an awful 360 port.

Yeah, Live Wire's licensing existing X360 ports, and they're specifically limited to the games Caves themselves ported—DOJ was off the table from the jump because Cave didn't port it themselves (and the code itself was based on stolen source code from Arika, so it may not be legal for anyone to touch anymore).

For reference, the other X360 ports they won't be able to get from Cave are Mushihimesame Futari (ported by M2, as it happens) and Ketsui (by 5pb and a company called Tachyon, who later made Bullet Soul)—Muchi Muchi Pork, Pink Sweets, Guwange and SDOJ are all on the table, and they have put a little extra work into their other ports to add little tweaks or useful options, so one would hope that they could fix the more obvious issues with some of those ports, if and when they get to 'em.

in reply to @gosokkyu's post:

Yeah i heard rumblings clear river is planning to put this one out. Still no word on the batsugun physicals though, which aren’t announced yet for the west even though they delayed the xbox DL ver of that with the other console versions… which led to it quietly dropping on the stores in july.