Of course, before the announcement were made, many were expecting that the company would announce a Dreamcast Mini, or perhaps even a Saturn Mini, since a mini console version of the Genesis had already been released, and because there’s clear demand for similar treatment for Sega’s other platforms as well. So why is it that the company is sticking with the Genesis?

Well, according to Sega, mini versions of the Dreamcast or the Saturn would be too costly to make right now. Speaking recently with Famitsu, Yosuke Okunari – producer of Sega’s retro hardware re-releases – explained that due to the COVID pandemic and with the global semiconductor shortage, production of a Dreamcast Mini or a Saturn Mini would be too costly right now.

“I had experience with the Mega Drive Mini, so it was easy to make a plan if it was an extension of that,” Okunari said when asked why the Mega Drive Mini 2 was greenlit. “We also know the precedents for production and supply.

“In fact, some of you may say, ‘why isn’t this Sega Saturn Mini?’ or ‘I wanted a Dreamcast Mini.’ It’s not that we didn’t think about that direction.

“The development of new boards has been stagnant due to the coronavirus, and of course, it would be a fairly expensive product in terms of cost.”

Of course, there’s always the chance that Sega will eventually decide to get around to releasing a Dreamcast Mini or a Saturn Mini, but for now, it doesn’t look like that’ll happen anytime soon.

For now, the Genesis/Mega Drive Mini 2 is launching later this year.

Fifth to sixth gen: the first 3D transition

Till date, the single greatest generational leap in fidelity and capability was between the fifth generation consoles and the sixth generation. Barring the commercial failures that were the Atari Jaguar and 3DO, the Sega Saturn, PlayStation 1, and Nintendo 64 were the first consoles built around the idea of 3D graphics, barring earlier experiments like Nintendo’s Super FX add-on chip and the failed Atari Jaguar and 3DO consoles. The Saturn was the first of the three to market, back in 1994, the weakest in terms of capabilities, and the first to be discontinued. Sony’s PlayStation 1 arrived the year after, and the Nintendo 64 finally turned up in 1996. These were the first consoles to support fully 3D game environments with shaded and textured polygons. Earlier efforts compromised on the “3D” aspect somewhere or the other: Star Fox on the SNES, for instance, used flat shading: each polygon onscreen was shaded with just a single color. Doom and titles like Alien Versus Predator on the Atari Jaguar, on the other hand, featured textured environments and lit environments, but relied on 2D sprites for character models.

The PlayStation 1, Nintendo 64, and Sega Saturn delivered fully realized 3D worlds, with 3D environmental and character assets. They pioneered entirely new genres like the 3D platformer, Super Mario 64 and Crash Bandicoot being early examples. And yet, relative to modern hardware, these were still incredibly primitive consoles. The N64-the most powerful 5th generation console, could deliver just 100 MFLOPs of compute performance-Xbox Series X is, believe it or not, over 100,000 times faster. While 5th generation game worlds were full 3D, the consoles simply lacked the power to deliver animation, models, or environments that even remotely approximated real life. High quality 2D visuals in SNES games like Radical Dreamers were just truer to life, even if they were bound to a flat plane. The real leap in fidelity was only to come.

The Dreamcast, PlayStation 2, and Xbox: recognizably modern

While the sixth gen consoles are weak in comparison to modern hardware-the Xbox Series X can crunch numbers about 500 times faster than the original 20 GFLOP Xbox-sixth gen internals were fast enough to deliver the first, recognizably modern games. Most modern gameplay tropes and genres evolved during the sixth generation. Released at the end of 1999, Shenmue on the 1.4 GFLOP Dreamcast was the first recognizably modern 3D open world title. Everything from the Grand Theft Auto series to Ubisoft’s ubiquitous open worlds to No Man’s Sky owes a debt to Yu Suzuki’s masterpiece. Character models and animation were detailed enough that players could actually relate to the emotions showcased in real-time cutscenes. The world itself was unprecedentedly massive: an almost to-scale rendering of suburban Japan.

Other titles of this generation, from Metal Gear Solid 3 on PS2 to Halo on the Xbox are, again templates for generations of newer games. Visually, games of this era don’t always hold up that well. However, for better or for worse, the core gameplay loops we’re used to today-things like fetch quests in RPGs, turret missions in FPSes, and more all started right here. And thanks to the proliferation of mobile ports of a number of sixth-gen classics, many of these games remain visible to this day. The 6.2 GFLOP PS2, the weakest of the sixth-gen consoles (barring the Dreamcast), interestingly had the greatest staying power, with new units being sold into the 2010s. Studios like Kojima Products leveraged close ties with Sony to squeeze the most out of the console: Metal Gear Solid 3 delivered some of the most stunning dynamic lighting seen in a video game till date.

Rockstar, in particular, has diligently ported over nearly all their high-profile sixth-generation titles, barring the controversial Manhunt series. Max Payne, Grand Theft Auto, and Bully feel just as good to play on an iPhone 11 Pro Max as they did on the PlayStation 2 a decade or more earlier. At a technical level, we saw the first use here of ragdoll physics, as well as real time shadowing, dynamic lighting, normal mapping, and many other technical hallmarks of modern titles.

Nintendo’s 9.4 GFLOP GameCube was the console maker’s last attempt at class-leading performance. The GameCube’s Flipper GPU enabled developers to deliver classics like Resident Evil 4. That particular game’s sub-par PS2 port, with muddy textures, a low resolution, and missing effects shows just how much more was possible on Nintendo’s hardware.

The original Xbox delivered 20 GFLOPs of compute, making it over 3 times faster than the PS2, was the last entrant in the sixth-gen race. However, the high-performance, PC-derived CPU and GPU combo enabled Microsoft’s console to punch above its weight. Between 2004-2006, a number of transitional titles like Doom 3 and Half Life 2, that eventually made their way over to the seventh-gen consoles, debuted on the original Xbox, albeit at 480p resolution.

The PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360: Moore’s law begins to collapse 

There is a reason why the Xbox Series X delivers only a 10x performance uplift over the Xbox 360 and not the insane jumps seen in earlier generations: the exponential rate at which transistor density’s increased-termed Moore’s Law has slowed down and-at present-completely collapsed. While the leap to the seventh-gen consoles was still transformative, everything after has been an evolution, not revolution. Both the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 delivered a comparable level of performance—240 GFLOPs in the Xbox 360’s case and 230.4 GFLOPs for the PS3. However, they achieved this in different ways. The PlayStation 3’s RSX GPU was relatively weak. Instead, developers offloaded graphics work to the SPUs on its Cell processor. Making full use of Cell was critical to PS3 success-this is something that Naughty Dog managed with The Last of Us. The Xbox 360 had a more conventional setup with a triple core PowerPC CPU and a Xenos GPU based on an ATi design.

In terms of gameplay, there were a few things that the leap to the seventh-gen enabled that weren’t possible. The increased CPU power allowed for large scale NPC simulations, enabling games in the Assassin’s Creed and Dead Rising franchises to have hundreds of characters onscreen at one time. From a technical perspective, features like ragdoll physics and real-time lighting, which were “halo” features in a handful of sixth gen titles (including, well, the Halo franchise), became standard. Overall, the move to consoles with circa 200 GFLOPs of floating-point power resulted in a refinement of the gameplay approaches developers took in the previous gen. The increase to storage size also allowed developers to experiment with detailed, large-scale worlds. Just Cause 2, for instance, features a map that’s several hundred square kilometers in size. The advances to graphical tech also enabled developers to increase their focus on in-game narrative experiences: higher polygon models, high-res skin textures and enhanced animation allowed developers to push through the uncanny valley, at least part-way. As a matter of fact, some franchises like Telltale’s The Walking Dead and Naughty Dog’s The Last of Us relied on these advances to push story-centric experiences, spiritual successors of sorts to the FMV games of the early 90s. Overall, though, you do get the distinct feeling that progress is slowing down.

The Nintendo Wii and Wii U were Nintendo’s two entrants in this timeframe. The Wii is chronologically an eighth-gen console and the Wii U is technically the first eighth-gen console. However, in terms of capabilities, they were both an entire generation behind the competition. The Nintendo Wii’s Hollywood GPU is essentially the Gamecube’s Flipper, but clocked higher. The Wii’s “Broadway” CPU, likewise is an upclocked variant of the one utilised by the GameCube. Consequently, the Wii offers 12 GFLOPs of compute, around 5 percent of what the “real” seventh gen consoles deliver. Nevertheless, this meant that the Wii had more resources on offer than the GameCube. Certain titles like The Conduit and Red Steel pushed the Wii hardware to the limits and delivered visuals which weren’t too far off from early seventh-gen titles, albeit running at 480p.

The Wii U arrived at the very end of the seventh-gen, in 2012, exactly a year before the PS4. At this point, the Xbox 360 was seven years old. The Wii U delivered 352 GFLOPs of compute, which makes it nominally faster than both the PS3 and Xbox 360. It also features 2 GB of RAM, with 1 GB allocated to games, 4 times as much as the PS3 as twice as much as the Xbox 360’s unified memory pool. While its GPU capabilities were notably better, the Wii U’s CPU was actually substantially slower than the seventh gen consoles. This meant that, in many cases, Wii U multiplat games ran at a higher resolution (as high as 720p), while often performing worse than the PS3 and Xbox 360 due to CPU bottlenecking.

The eighth and ninth generations: progress, finally?

The early eighth generation was when video game innovation hit its nadir. Both Sony and Microsoft cheaped out on their eighth-gen hardware, delivering consoles that made the smallest leaps so far in terms of technical capabilities. It’s telling that a number of early eighth-gen classics, like Alien Isolation and Grand Theft Auto 5 for instance, ran fine on seventh-gen consoles, albeit with compromised visuals.

From a technical perspective, the issue was twofold: on the one hand, the increase in base resolution to 1080p meant that the 5x increase in GPU capabilities didn’t count for as much. On the other hand, CPU capabilities were incredibly limited on the eighth-gen consoles. The PS3’s Cell CPU was actually faster in certain workloads than the PS4’s Jaguar-based CPU setup. These issues were exacerbated on the original Xbox One. That console’s 1.310 TFLOP GPU just wasn’t power enough to consistently output 1080p visuals at a playable frame rate. “Resolutiongate” raged between 2013 and 2014, as a number of AAA developers opted for a 900p framebuffer on the Xbox One, while PS4 owners got a crisp, native 1080p. The PS4’s faster 1.843 TFLOP GPU simply had more headroom. The newer Xbox One S features a slightly enhanced GPU delivering 1.4 TFLOPs of compute. The extra 100 GFLOPs does make a difference: in games with a dynamic frame buffer, the Xbox One S often runs closer to a native 1080p than the original Xbox One.

The poor CPU performance on both consoles, though, meant that attempts at next-gen gameplay often failed miserably: Assassin’s Creed Unity is a case in point here. This resulted in year after year of stagnation: eighth gen titles looked better than seventh gen titles and ran at higher resolutions and enhanced frame rates. However, far too many franchises reheated the exact same gameplay tropes and approaches we’ve been seeing now for years.

At this low point for console innovation, Nintendo switched things up (pardon the pun) with the Switch. By 2017, mobile hardware had gotten to the point that the fastest mobile chips like Nvidia’s Tegra X1 and Apple’s A11 delivered CPU and GPU performance exceeding the seventh gen consoles, at sub 5W consumption. Nintendo leveraged a semi-custom version of the Tegra X1 in the Switch, delivering 1 TFLOP of compute when docked, which isn’t too far behind the Xbox One. However, the Switch’s relatively week A57 CPU votes hold it back somewhat. Overall, though, the Switch manages to deliver passable version of AAA eighth-gen titles and enhanced ports of 7th gens, all available on the go.

The mid-cycle refresh consoles—the Xbox One X and PS4 Pro-did little to change this: they simply enabled existing titles to look acceptable on 4K displays. The 6 TFLOP Xbox One X did a better job—many multiplat titles run at either a native 4K, a dynamic resolution that’s in the neighbourhood, or 1800p, which delivers almost all the sharpness. The PS4 Pro, though, made do with a 4.2 TFLOP GPU: graphics capabilities were doubled relative to the PS4. However, the target resolution-4K-was four times as great. In practice, this meant that the majority of PS4 Pro titles either delivered a 1440p framebuffer or used frame reconstruction techniques to deliver an approximation of “4K.”

The ninth-gen consoles deliver roughly twice the GPU power and over 4 times the processing power of the refresh consoles, thanks to Moore’s law. However, progress does add up, even if its gradual. The Xbox Series X, with its 12.15 TFLOP GPU delivers fifty times the raw performance of the Xbox 360, 32 times the memory, and storage that’s two orders of magnitude faster. The 10.28 TFLOP PS5 isn’t that far behind. This is at least as big a leap as the one the 360 and PS3 delivered over the sixth-gen consoles. We’ve seen almost exactly the same gameplay paradigms for over 15 years. The enhanced technical capabilities of the ninth-gen consoles might finally enable something that approaches a true generational leap. We look forward to seeing what that entails.

Outer Wilds

The set-up of Outer Wilds, Mobius Digital’s stellar open world adventure game, is that you’re an intrepid explorer in a solar system that’s going to end. You have 20 minutes to explore nearby planets, solve mysteries and determine why the sun is going supernova and destroying everything. Spectacles like planets that are only explorable during certain time periods, shifting gravity and much more make the exploration a treat (and discoveries are tracked throughout all playthroughs).

ALTERNATE ENDINGS

Resident Evil has never been a stranger to multiple possible endings, especially in its earlier days, and Resident Evil 3 had them as well. The remake, however, is dropping that, with Capcom have confirmed that the game will tell a single, cohesive story. While the larger story beats – such as the destruction of Raccoon City, or Jill and Carlos’ escape from the city – will, of course, remain the same, the finer details – such as how the escape the city, or whether or not Nikolai lives – will now only play out one single way.

But with 2 fantastic classics under its belt, the Resident Evil series would need to do what those other games also had to do with its third game and think well outside the box to deliver something that would deserve to stand with the others. While Capcom certainly didn’t reinvent the wheel with RE3, they certainly were able to churn out yet another classic horror game under the Resident Evil name by continuing the story of the first game and not side-stepping it like the second game did. With the help of Resident Evil veteran Shinji Mikami, as well as the other wizards over at Capcom who had survival horror down to a science by this time, the team pulled out yet another classic with the game launching it to similar heights as RE 1 and 2, and RE 3 would even see ports to future hardware like the Dreamcast and GameCube, which was rare for games that were originally developed for the PlayStation. In turn, Despite being somewhat overshadowed by the original and its excellent sequel, Resident Evil 3 would go down in history as one of the better games of the series.

Resident Evil 3 was particularly noteworthy to fans of the series for a multitude of reasons, but one of the most prominent is its story. Unlike Resident Evil 2, which at the time didn’t feel very tightly attached to the original, Resident Evil 3 continued the story of Jill Valentine as she continued her escape from the horrors that befell her and her comrades in the Mansion of the first game. While the setting and gameplay feels more like the second game in most ways, Resident Evil 3’s story structure and character happenings more closely resemble the style of the original with Jill coming across several STARS members, uncovering more of Umbrella’s secrets, and having a dramatic showdown with a Tyrant at the end. For this smart combination of the strengths of both previous games, one could argue that Resident Evil 3 is the superior entry of the original trilogy at least on paper.

Resident Evil 3’s gameplay also consisted of some revolutionary decisions for the series. While Resident Evil 2 took some baby steps towards more action-oriented gameplay, the third game of the series took more of a leap in that direction with way more zombies in most areas as well as explosive objects in the environment that could be shot to damage several enemies at once. To accommodate the influx of enemies, the player also had access to more ammo, but the proportions of enemies to available firepower was still balanced in a way that made every shot continue to count, so the management of resources was still a key element of the gameplay while giving the player access to more action. Cleverly drawing from some of Resident Evil 2’s best elements, the constant threat of a Tyrant encounter would also be an always-present danger in RE 3.

On top of that, Resident Evil 3’s control was a little tighter and faster than the previous two games and even included a dodge manoeuvre that could get you through some sticky situations if you had the skills to master it’s short window of effectiveness. This calculated additional emphasis on action would plant the seeds for future games like RE 4 to use well and RE 6 to arguably use not so well. While some of the additional speed and the increase of large combat sequences did clash somewhat with the tank controls and fixed camera angles of the time, those seeds would eventually blossom for the series and the genre as a whole in ways that can still be seen today with The Evil Within games and others like them. So while having these ideas contained in the limited capsule of the PS1 sort of felt like playing Mozart with a kazoo, there’s no doubt that RE 3’s revolutionary mix of combat and horror elements would be infinitely important and influential for the future of the genre.

One thing that matters to the Resident Evil series almost as much as the story and gameplay is the overall atmosphere, and Resident Evil 3 nails its atmosphere and presentation just as well if not better than its predecessors. The pre-rendered backgrounds would have more detail than ever, with many of them featuring animations like realistic fire and some real-time shading for the character models to walk through. Also, speaking of the character models, the sheer amount of enemies on screen all running well most of the time was an impressive feat for the time, as most action games on the PS1 would only put you in situations with no more than 3 or 4 enemies at a time for fear of massive frame-rate dips, Resident Evil 3 was able to cram 7 or 8 zombies on screen at any given time, sometimes more. This brought a different sort of urgency to the player than the original game did, but it was a convincing tension nonetheless and furthered RE 3’s unique atmosphere that much more effectively. As you might expect, this was made all the more effective on the later Dreamcast, PC, and GameCube versions.

Resident Evil certainly has its classics, and if you were to ask a Resident Evil fan to choose a favorite, odds are, they would either choose the first or the second due to one of those likely being their first experience with the series and nostalgia being one hell of a drug. With those love goggles removed however, it’s clear to see that Resident Evil 3 is unfairly overshadowed and left out of conversations about Resident Evil’s most important entries. RE 3 took the superior characters and story of the first game, the superior gameplay elements of the second game, tweaked them both, and added in a few ideas of its own to form arguably the best iteration in the series up to that point. It’s not only a third game that stands alongside its predecessors, but it exceeds them on multiple fronts while also performing some necessary experiments that would ultimately provide priceless guidance for future games like Code Veronica and Resident Evil 4 to benefit from several more years down the road. It is unquestionably one of the best games in the series, an extremely important entry for the survival horror genre, and without a doubt, one hell of a game.

Shadow Hearts: From the New World

Imagine an alternate reality Prohibition era America with ninjas, talking cats, vampires and of course, demons. That’s Shadow Hearts: From the New World in a nutshell as players assume the role of teenage PI Johnny Garland. The game starts in a fixed path but quickly expands after a job that Johnny takes quickly goes off the rails. With a combat system dependent on timed button presses and combos, strange plot twists and an endearing cast of oddities, From the New World is perhaps the strangest and yet most endearing PS2 RPG of its time.

But really, can anyone really blame us? So far, Capcom has put out two ground up remakes for Resident Evil titles, and both of them have been unbelievable good. It’s no surprise, then, that we all want to see other classic RE games receive that same treatment as well. 

In this feature, we’ll be working on the assumption that Resident Evil Veronica will get remade (one can always hope, right?) and talk about fifteen things we want said remake to do. 

Without further ado then, let’s get started.

CAMERA

When Resident Evil 2 was revealed as a game that would be adopting an over the shoulder third person camera instead of the fixed cameras of the original, there was some level of skepticism among fans, but as it turned out, it was a decision that paid off in spades for Capcom. There’s a huge section of the Resident Evil fanbase that would love to see Capcom going back to fixed cameras once again, if only temporarily, but as the most recent release in the series has shown us, third person can work with classic RE titles perfectly- a third person camera, then, is what we would love to see in a potential Code Veronica remake.

]]> https://gamingbolt.com/15-things-we-want-in-a-potential-remake-of-resident-evil-code-veronica/feed 0 389052 https://gamingbolt.com/sega-looking-at-bringing-dreamcast-games-to-switch-they-confirm https://gamingbolt.com/sega-looking-at-bringing-dreamcast-games-to-switch-they-confirm#respond Tue, 23 Oct 2018 19:08:23 +0000 https://gamingbolt.com/?p=369042

SEGA Ages is bringing the company’s classic catalog to Nintendo’s Switch, but the catalog of those games may soon extend into their beloved Dreamcast games. Speaking in an interview with Japanese gaming outlet Famitsu, M2 president Naoki Horii and Sega AGES supervisor Yosuke Okunari revealed that Dreamcast games may end up coming to Nintendo’s hybrid console, too.

Apparently, if it does happen, Sega will be emulating the games, instead of porting them straight over, since it looks like they prefer the options to enhance and tweak the games that emulation provides over the relative faithfulness to the source code that simply porting it over would entail.

“At the time, it seemed likely that we’d be able to emulate Dreamcast software on the Nintendo Switch,” said Horii (translated by Nintendo Everything). “Depending on whether you’re emulating software or remaking the source code entirely, porting something is completely different. I think SEGA chose some of the titles based on that – no doubt emulation increased the number of titles they were able to choose from.”

Were it to happen, Sega still hasn’t decided on how it would want to distribute the Dreamcast games on Switch—it’s considering the Virtual Console approach and the 3D Classics approach (which it embraced fully on the 3DS) both, it seems.

“I think that this time the results of the survey influenced that as well. I haven’t really come to a conclusion yet, but I wonder if it’d be better to release more titles from the list in a manner similar to the Virtual Console (in their original state) or to hand-pick a select few with added features (like the Grantnoff boss in the 3DS version of Thunder Blade),” said Okunari.

No matter what it ends up being, I am sure may will be overjoyed simply at being able to play Dreamcast games on a modern system, and on the go. While Sega has ported the catalog on Genesis multiple times to newer systems, Dreamcast games have been relatively less widely disseminated. Hopefully this marks a move to change that.

Shenmue II was a game that was ahead of its times in many ways, featuring an open world, a day-and-night system, a dynamic weather system, and other such features that made its world believable. In this game, many of the features from the first game makes a return while also bringing new features such as being able to ask for directions from random NPCs, and the ability to speed up the game’s clock when needed.

The game’s story sees Ryo continuing on his journey to avenge the death of his father and his journey takes him to new locations such as Kowloon. Combat in the game involves brawling against multiple enemies and also some quick-time events. The remastered version of the game brings some decent visual improvements to the game and it’s definitely worth picking up just so you can play it on modern systems. If you have any difficulty with any particular part of the game, then the following video walkthrough  will help you  out.

Shenmue was initially released back in 1999, and whether you played it back then or not, it’s definitely worth picking up the game now in its remastered form. The most important part about this remastered edition is that you will be able to experience the game on your modern gaming systems including as it will be available for the PC, PS4, and Xbox One. Apart from greatly improved visual quality, you will now also be able to enjoy other benefits such as much faster loading times.

The game’s story follows Ryo Hazuki as he sets out to avenge the death of his father. The game features quite a detailed open world in which there’s a lot to do, including managing your day on an allowance, playing the various minigames that are available, and more. If you’re planning to pick up Shenmue 3 when it finally releases in 2019, it’ll help you to know the events that transpire in this game. If you’re having any difficulty in the game, the following video walkthrough should be of use to you.