The Panzer Dragoon remake publisher is at it again. Sega has put a lot of faith in the these devs. I wonder why. Still, I hope it's good. Likely VR, considering the current trends in tech.
Exciting news! I do hope it isn't exclusive to consoles with VR though. Are there any good Lightguns for the Switch?
"I'VE BEEN WAITING FOR THIS TIME TO COME." Cannot wait to see more of this, hopefully on every consoles of this gen.
Looks like as with Panzer Dragoon remake, this is a Switch timed exclusive. The gameplay is stiff enough to tell it's using joystick control. They'll likely include gyro, considering it's on the Panzer remake they also did. A light gun game without a proper gun option feels... Wrong.
I guess the problem with the Switch being effectively two console generations behind now.... ...is that this remake looks like it needs remaking.
This looks really promising honestly! Here's hoping that maybe we'll get a Typing of the Dead of it if it ends up on PC.
Took long enough but very excited nonetheless. I can only hope the game will look even better on superior consoles, should they release it on those.
The House Of The Dead 2: Remake - ESRB I was not impressed with the first one, so I can't say remaking one of SEGA's most memed games is a good idea. I'm surprised Forever Entertainment has staff to do this between this, supposedly Panzer Dragoon Zwei Remake, and that recently-announced Donkey Kong Country Returns remaster.
I hated their Panzer Dragoon remake too. I wish Sega would use someone else for remaking these games, as these are among the best titles from that era of sega and they deserve better care.
Panzer Dragoon remake was utter crap and HOTD not much better. I am not looking forward to what these clowns do with HOTD 2 or Panzer Zwei
Panzer's art direction was utter crap the aiming system was all messed up. HOTD was better but didn't look or sound like House of the Dead
Panzer Dragoon looked completely different, with a 100% different art style, and played drastically differently and worse. Basically the only thing that wasn't altered was the level design. The art design of the original PD games was one of their biggest strengths, so changing the art style is a huge blow that really changes the mood and atmosphere. For example, here's the same level from both: The story in Panzer Dragoon is about how ancient civilizations completely ruined the planet, making it uninhabitable and barren. This is supposed to be a vast, endless ocean with no land for miles and miles around, with only the very tips of civilization poking up from the water deep below. The entire mood was about not seeing land for so far around. In the remake... Land abound. It's no longer a vast ocean, it's now more like a flooded city. There's so much land and small mountains everywhere, its very different. Later levels in the game featured impressive special effects in the Saturn version that are just missing and replaced by bog standard level art in later levels. The whole visual identity of the games were ruined. This keeps up every level. The level right after this ocean level is a vast, scarred desert. It's like a contrast to the ocean, just as vast and empty but full of dry sand instead of water. You're supposed to be able to see far, far off in the distance as a huge thunder storm approaches. In the remake, it takes place during a sand storm, so the entire stage has a thick tan hue over everything and you can't see very far in the distance. It no longer looks vast and endless, and they completely removed the storm at the end. Compare: The controls were somehow much worse. They got rid of the dual analog stick mode that they had added in Zwei, and the reticle worked differently. Instead of the larger rings being the part that locks on -- so you can sweep the screen and lock onto lots of enemies at once -- instead only the tiny dot in the middle where your pistol shoots locks on. That makes your lock-on target go from something that covers about 1/8 of the screen at any one time, to it becoming a single dot cross hair. The enemies are arranged to let you quickly sweep across the screen with the old reticle, so this new tiny crosshair makes the game play worse. Enemy patterns just don't work well without proper lock-on, they are a lot more tedious and unfun. Pretty much everything I really liked from PD1 got all fouled up in the remake. Just a very poor remake that doesn't respect the original very much. I'm very worried about how they'll handle PD Zwei because, even more so than PD1, Zwei loves to play with the camera and backgrounds. There are many moments when you are supposed to be able to see far off, purely for effect. For example, one of the early levels is on foot before your dragon can fly, and the camera is pulled down low and close, so 90% of the screen is tall night sky. This ends with you coming to a cliff and jumping off as bad guys chase you, and your dragon's wings slowly emerge as you fall and you glide to safety down to the huge, vast ground below. Judging from how they handled the atmosphere and art and camera in PD1 and HotD, those kinds of moments are going to be ruined in the remake. This company just doesn't have an eye or appreciation for those parts of the games they are remaking.
When I wrote this in 2021, I was optimistic, hopeful, having not played their Panzer Dragoon Remake. I think I'm actively against what this company is doing in their remakes now, at least if things don't change. Hope HoTD2 is better but I really have no hope in it, or PD Zwei. I also think their Front Mission remake looked equally rough, but I haven't played enough of the original (or the remake) to really have a stance there other than that it looks incredibly soulless and cheap. Just wanted to say thank you. This is a really well written post which breaks down why PD Remake entirely misses the mark on things. I was shocked playing it on PC a few years back at how rough it was, and how it just entirely felt like it missed the point behind every decision made in the original game.
I don't have much experience with the arcade original, but the PC version of the HOTD remake seems fine from what I played? Plus you can replicate the original controls with some tweaks and a PC lightgun, a Wiimote or a VR controller (though the default mouse controls are fine). The console versions look ugly as sin though, and I heard they suffer from control issues. I agree on the criticisms about the Panzer Dragoon remake, btw.
On the Saturn, VDP2 draws an infinite plane, which is how you get those "open" areas. Nobody really followed the Saturn's lead on that - there might be some weird drawbacks (particularly on Switch) that make it unfeasible. ..I can't for the life of me think why it would be an issue, but how many modern games render nothing but a horizon (and one that you constantly travel towards)? Do the implementations hold up to scrutiny if you spend 384902384 hours looking at them? No this isn't a good excuse but hey, you read my post. Hope it was nice for you.
With todays tech it is trivial to make vdp2 style endless planes. You can do them entirely in shaders, the most basic programmable shader pipeline can accomplish this. There are multiple ways tk do this: you could have a geometry shader that actually spits out endless geometry, or you could have a "background" polygon that stretches over the segment of the screen that is supposed to be the plane and do an affine transformation in the fragment shader.
Yeah, sorry. I might have been a bit too harsh in my post. I was just kinda shocked by my positive statements prior to playing panzer dragoon remake, which felt like it entirely missed the point.
