I was being facetious. Because.. Nomads... Battery life.... Never bloody mind. Also, the fact that you assume that I have a MD2 power and AV cable lying around, and wouldn't just use an MD2... I mean, I clearly have a 32X, so of course I have the right cabling, and I'm pretty sure there's a PAL MD2 around here somewhere quite rightly rotting away at the bottom of a pile of old junk. (also, a composite cable? Oh man, you weird, weird people from across the Atlantic. You slay me.) Fact is I sourced a VA1 to replace the VA5, no fuss, no muss, I'd been wanting an earlier revision of the console anyway as I have a fetish for ® symbols, it even had the brightest, bluest, non yellowed reset button I've seen for many, many years. Clearly somebody in Japan had this one stored away from sunlight since about 1989. Any excuse to not have a Nomad unceremoniously hooked up to the 32X connections uglying up the place just to play one mediocre game ...and mediocre is what it is. I mean Fonzie clearly had high aspirations, and on a technical standpoint, yeah, lovely (although if the custom chips are doing all the heavy lifting instead of the console, can you call it much of an achievement? The Everdrive Pro can run a better version of Doom than the 32X and Jaguar combined via it's FPGA, for example. When is a game a Mega Drive game and when is it an FPGA game running through a Mega Drive? We're getting to that point now, although I guess you could technically state we've been at that point ever since the Mega CD, 32X, and SVP). The problem is, the gameplay is not good. You can finish the hardest difficulty by doing nothing but jump kicking. There's nothing to it. No amount of explorable unlockable levels are going to make up for the fact for a game where combat is the "meat and potatoes", the AI combined with the moves that you are given are just junk. Also for a game that apparently (if you check out St1ka's videos) had to go through a lot of trouble getting animation frames redrawn during development because he got in a bunch of cheap subcontractors who traced sprites from other games, there's a LOT of traced sprites from other games still there... and a lot of them... don't fit together. When it first came out, there was a bit of complaint about how the keyframing was just so off that animations just didn't look smooth, but as we're beginning to find where they've been tracing from. It's obvious different frames have been sourced from different games, and it's a big old discordant mess. Bottom line: Fonzie talks a good game, and it's clear he's got technical talent, but his game design talent is lacking, and it's increasingly clear he cut corners making this. Also: His ego has, and for that matter, still IS getting in the way of EVERYTHING.
Since this thread got bumped... So nobody knows or cares about this anymore? I'd think there would be more interest in such a subject here of all places.
Pretty sure there isn't any transparency trickery in the game that isn't using a 30fps flickering image (using an alternating chequerboard pattern) or some use of highlight/shadow
Watermelon Games is dead or alive https://www.paprium.com/press/data/PAPRIUM_Communique_de_presse_EN_02_2021.pdf
Drama -> Noise -> Awareness -> Better Chance of Sales I vehemently disagree with every aspect of how this game was developed and promoted, it's obnoxious. But at the end of the day, this is a business. Moreso - it's a business with access to a captive audience who is willing to give them an enormous amount of leeway. If you're able to kick and scream and fuss your mistakes away, then that's what's going to happen.
But.... I'm not sure he's doing that. I own several of the 21st century-released Mega Drive games, including a Watermelon game (Pier Solar, which I think is the longest time between purchase and product I've ever had for anything) and after seeing the shitshow that's been caused since then, I wouldn't touch anything else the company puts out with a 20m barge pole.
I was in complete agreement when they were just harassing people on Twitter, but after running into the LOCUSTERY viral campaign and people taking it... seriously? I give up.
Non-Sega version Kickstarter: https://www.kickstarter.com/project...-16-bit-beat-them-all-coming-to-the-next-gen/ So much for all that "you can't get it anywhere else" talk.
Jesus, how on earth are people falling for this again? If they're just doing some kind of straight port, you can't polish a turd.
Well, most people interested in backing this probably haven't played the version that's already out, so they can't exactly make a call on the game's quality. If a digital version does materialize, I'll probably check it out, but I'm staying the heck away from backing the Kickstarter.
Yeah, that's pretty much where I am. I'm interested enough in the game, but the goings-on around it want me to steer clear of anything more involved than a digital copy.
Well it garnered enough money anyway so we'll see how long this will take and how it'll shape. I'll still stay the hell away from that kickstarter.
I'm a sucker for good color palettes. Considering the Mega Drive's reputation for a somewhat-limited color range, there's something about that Eternal Champions-esque color palette that really gets at my nostalgia. The color here is perfect for the mood and vibe, its a great fit. How can something be neon and pastel at the same time, I love it. It's very well-integrated into the spritework too, and gives the entire game this kind of uncanny, muted fever dream vibe that does so much for making PAPRIUM both visually-distinct and memorable. And its all the sadder that well-considered color work like this is mostly buried under unnecessary drama. Whenever I look at screenshots of the game, my internal camera zooms back to a saddened development team who's passion and hard work is being drowned in all this. This didn't need to happen. This team and this game deserved better.
