Hey guys, can we have a thread dedicated to interesting arti

This page has tons of links about Lobotomy Software.

https://lobotomysoftware.wordpress.com/2012/12/10/update/

>>3649453
> Horii: so we can all agree Zelda 3 is going to be a masterpiece, but what gives it the retro feel?

>>3649482
I'm interested in how Miyamoto was saying it was going to have a party system.

http://shmuplations.com

This is a great website that archives translated Japanese interviews, I learned a great deal from it. If only more people were privy to stuff like this, the insight can be very enlightening.

>>3649473
>Eurogamer: Saturn versus PlayStation, let's put this to rest once and for all. You helped oversee two of the most technically accomplished games on those systems, so lay it out for us, which machine did you prefer from a technical perspective and why? What were the most rewarding and annoying aspects of both systems?

>Ezra Dreisbach: I didn't exactly oversee anything. Jeff Blazier programmed the entirety of Lobotomy's PlayStation output. But it's not hard to tell the PlayStation is better.

>The Saturn was really an insane abortion. The graphics hardware was made by guys that obviously wanted to just keep developing 2D hardware and tried to avoid learning anything about 3D. So they made this thing that was totally different from what everyone else in the 3D community was doing and missed some real key ideas, making some things (clipping) impossible.

>And then the rest of the system had a whole other batch of warts caused (according to the internet) by a hasty pre-launch upgrade to match the PlayStation. They threw a whole bunch more parts in the box, and none of them worked out that great. The second processor in particular made it both more difficult to program, and impossible to fully utilise.

>This probably ultimately doomed the Saturn. With so much different crap jammed in the box, it never got cheap for them to produce it.

This is from the man that programmed the excellent Exhumed, and also programmed the excellent Quake and Duke 3D ports.

>>3649523
Yeah, but you gotta put things back in perspective: he himself says that he didn't program the PS1 version of the game. So it didn't really know the console in depth at this point, not as much as he knew about the Saturn, so while he was able to said what sucked technically speaking about the Saturn, he may not have been able to say anything negative about the PS1 because he just didn't know it enough (notice how he did NOT say anything about the PS1 here).

Also, meanwhile, the Saturn version of the game is runs smoother than the PS1 version. I know it's not really fair to say this because the game was programmed with the Saturn in mind, and the PS1 version is a port; but still, he says the Saturn is worse but the PS1 version of his game runs worse on that console and is prone to lag.

>>3649501
Yeah Shmuplations is great. Lots of good material.

http://shmuplations.com/capcom1991/

>>3649558
Very few programmers in those days were truly multi-platform programmers because the systems were pretty radically different and it was all based around low-level optimization.

That being said, the PS1 wasn't an unusual design or anything, so his educated comparison to the Saturn, unusual hardware that he understood very well, is probably a fairly reasonable one.

>>3649523
Yeah well, Sony denied Treasure a Silvergun port because they told them the Playstation wouldn't be able to handle it. So fuck off with your shitty console war bait, cunt.

>>3649617
[citation needed]
Not the anon you're talking to but I love reading interviews. Please provide the interview you read where they say that.

http://retrogamingmagazine.com/2016/01/03/8258/

“Loser” Kashiwagi

>>
Anonymous 12/02/16(Fri)13:16:45 No.3652426▶

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AEGvc_6O1kU [Embed]

yuzo koshiro

This is a great interview. https://yomuka.wordpress.com/2013/03/29/itoi-miyamoto-interview-64dd/

By the way, thanks OP. I was looking for that one.

>>3649626
https://web.archive.org/web/20101209165843/http://www.ugo.com/games/radiant-silvergun-almost-shipped-for-ps1

The most likely reason for rejection, was because the PSX port was poor compared to the Saturn version, and would've given Sony a bad image. I mean, if they greenlit Silhouette Mirage, with its massive cuts and problems, imagine how bad RSG on PSX must have been..

>>3649453
>M: I was amazed by how much data you packed into Portopia.
>H: Yeah, we were cutting excess data right up until the final stages of development, but there was still quite a bit left. We were 2 kilobytes over, around 2000 characters. We had exactly 1000 messages, so we started by cutting out all the suffixes. "This sentence doesn’t need an object marker," we’d say. "This emphatic particle can go too!" [Laughs]

i love details like that

>>3652590
The reason he states, however is this:
>"Back then, SCEA was rejecting a lot of titles because there were a lot of games coming out. If you think about it, our title wouldn't be a massive seller, so I can understand why it didn't make the cut -- but it would have been nicer if SCEA could have considered it a bit more. Even if there are fewer people playing shooters, there is still a group of gamers that appreciates them, so I don't think they should have just eliminated the genre."

The only thing I can infer from this is it was cut because it's a shooter and therefore not a guaranteed high seller. But since shooters did eventually see a presence (although relatively small) on the playstation it could be related to the whole exclusivity thing that Sony was strong at, given the time of denial.

This would explain why a game like G-Darius and R-Type Delta was given the go ahead but Radiant Silvergun was not given the go ahead.

Any any rate, the reason given as by his own mouth was due to volume of games coming out. So With G-darius, Delta, and Einhander something had to give.

>>3652623
Well, but there were plenty of cross-platform shmups for both PSX and Saturn, so I don't really think that would be the issue. It had to have been because it didn't pass Sony's quality control, but we'll never know unless Maegawa comes out with some footage of the PSX prototype port that he's sitting on apparently.

>>3652645
Sure but the release history for these games, and many ports were stagnated, there are ports that were up to 4 years from their original. Possibly due to the same thing as mentioned by his own mouth.

>>3652647
Sony could have taken the game and sold it in markets where RSG wasn't seen, like what happened with Thunder Force V. "Oversaturation" seems like a poor reason, RSG was groundbreaking at the time and would have blown other shmups away had it been more than just a niche release only in Japan for an almost dead system. I just don't get why Sony would prefer ports of Soukyugurentai, Shienryu, and TFV over the stellar Radiant Silvergun. Maybe they were just retarded, or maybe the version sucked. Who knows.

Just watch these two channels.

https://www.youtube.com/user/XboxAhoy

https://www.youtube.com/user/phreakindee

>>3652590
>The most likely reason for rejection, was because the PSX port was poor compared to the Saturn version

I wonder if this may have something to do with the fact that the arcade Radiant Silvergun was based on Sega Saturn hardware (ST-V).

Oh wait...that would make too much sense...

>>3653193
There were other ST-V ports to PSX, so why not RSG?

>>3652680
>"Oversaturation" seems like a poor reason
It's the reason he gave. So unless you're taking him as a liar on his word involving his own game..

>>3649482
>Miyamoto: What did he mean by this?

>>3653384
Maegawa had nothing to do with Silvergun, the last game he had any involvement with was Mischief Makers. I wouldn't rule anything out until we either A) saw the game for ourselves or B) gotten several input from PSX Silvergun developers or C) received an official statement from Sony as to why the game was rejected.

>>3653197
The other ST-V ports that got ported to PS1 had very little 3D or used very little of shit like VDP2 rotation. So porting those games to PS1 would have been easy as piss.

pixelatedaudio.com/
Podcast about retro soundtracks and they actually got the composers on the show, which naturally leads to an interview. They had Chris Hülsbeck, Barry Leitch (twice!), Matt Furniss and even some Japanese, like Takushi Hiyamuta, Masahiro Kahijara, Seung-Hwan Ro and Toshiaki Sakoda.

http://www.c64.com/interviews/leitch.html
This site got a lot of SID composer interviews.
>We were working on Prophecy the Viking Child, and I'd given Sean the job of recording the sound effects for the game. Somehow we'd blagged a sampler to use at work and we needed a sound for the player falling off-screen. I told Sean just to record himself going "Aaaaaaahhhh" and fade it out like he was falling off into the distance. Sean crossed his arms and shook his head: "No way! Ahm no recording maself. Ah sound stupid." — "Sean, just do it!" — "Nope!" — "You have to, it's part of yer job, just record yerself, it'll take two seconds." — "No way, I don't like how ma voice sounds." and so it went on for about an hour. In the end I threatened to throw him out the window and record him as he fell. And I'll always remember his reply. He just crossed his arms again and said: "But I'll just not make any sound", all smug. I snapped at this point and told him to fuck off. He quit a few weeks later after one of the infamous Imagitec parties because "Everyone is trying to change ma personality". He wasn't happy when we pointed out that you had to have a personality to change to start with. A few years later his career in the industry ended abruptly when he accused his employer of internationally kidnapping him

Barry got the best stories.
It's kinda easy to find stuff on Euro composers, because they are really chatty, which is fantastic.

Rob Hubbard's series about the golden years of computer game music:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DiPdjbsiQqM

>>3649617

Yeah, cause it had tons of VDP2 effects. Doesn't make the system intuitive or powerful really. I mean, what's more useful for 5th gen games? Being able to scroll 2d backgrounds really well or a gpu 3x as fast?

>>3652680
>radiant silvergun better than sokyugurentai

Can't believe I have to bump this.

>>3649558
>>3649617
Saturnfags btfo.

>>3653707
VDP2 was fine, consider that Sega had shitload of classic arcade titles that relied on tilemappers.

The problem was that the VDP1 was slow as hell. Saying that it's 3x slower would be praising it. It was slower than that. It was more like 4-8x slower than the PSX GPU depending on what you are drawing.

>>3652590
Silhouette Mirage had 2d backgrounds and that was all, you could easily remove details from that without many people noticing.

RSG used complex 3d effects on the backgrounds and seamlessly loaded a ton of level data while the game was going. Remember that the Saturn not only had more VRAM, it also had extra 384k CD buffer that was really auxillary ram.

Since the playstation does both sprites and backgrounds the same way (textured polygons), they'd have to make the texture quality worse for the backgrounds to fit in there. And now you have the game looking like a NES to C64 port by comparison, while the Saturn version is universally hailed as one of the best looking games in the system.

I can fully understand why they canned it. They didn't even want people comparing the two.

>>3649523
>>3649558
The guy who coded Exhumed and coded the Saturn version of Duke3d and Quake, made a crack at porting their version of Quake to PSX.

He got it running at 60fps with no dips; he said that the video hardware was so much faster that it's not funny, and the game was held back by the T&L math (on the Saturn the bottleneck was the VDP1).

Sony didn't want to release Quake 1 either way... they did Quake 2 a few years later.

>>3656047
Yeah it's interesting how each console of that generation was "bottlenecked" by something different.

Saturn would be bottlenecked by graphics fill rate (VDP1). PS1 would be bottlenecked by CPU and/or GTE. N64 would be bottlenecked by RAM access.

>RPG games, action games, simulations… I feel that RPGs might be split into two types, for example. In one type, the story will take precedence, and people will take it very seriously. In another, only the world will be established, and you’ll get to eke out your own existence. Wouldn’t that be interesting? To have a fun RPG that allowed you live your own life?

Funny that Hori never created an Open World game, however some installments actually leaves some room for free wandering, but not too much.

>>3656067
>PS1 would be bottlenecked by CPU and/or GTE.

Do note that this was with the game running 3x faster on average, compared to the Saturn. So it's more like you simply exceeded the ability of the console (it's not like the Saturn could keep up with the T&L at 60fps either).

>>3656206
Saturn would get bottlenecked by VDP1 well before PS1 would get bottlenecked by CPU and/or GTE.

The CPU and GTE aren't exactly underpowered on PS1 but they probably are the console's weak link.

>>3653714
The zooming was really gay in Souky, especially against that red dragon tank boss.

>>3653578

This interview of Dennis Caswell (Impossible Mission) is a good read.

http://www.mayhem64.co.uk/interview/caswell.htm

>distinctly remember my elation at trading in my 2600 for a Commodore 64. When I was given permission to start a C64 project, I unplugged my 2600 and threw it out of my office and into the hall.

>>3653578

Also interview with Bob Yannes (the designer of SID itself!) has some interesting remarks....

http://sid.kubarth.com/articles/interview_bob_yannes.html

>ANDREAS : Have you heard the tunes by Rob Hubbard, Martin Galway, Tim Follin, Jeroen Tel, and all the other composers?

>BOB YANNES : I'm afraid not, are recordings available in the US?

Seems that the guy just forgot about it and moved on.

Making of Solstice
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HKpYoxVaWnY

>>3649501
My only gripe with that site is that a lot of interviews are sourced secondhand from a website that had them transcribed from the actual interviews, but never bothered to actually mention the magazine or issue date.

Otherwise it's an excellent website and I'm mad that I had a similar idea and never did anything about it.

>>3649492
Zelda briefly follows you in the finished game; perhaps that's a remnant of it? Or she was going to follow you longer through the game?