[Steam] Out Zone - Normal 3-ALL Clear - 4,282,400
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New Toaplan Steam ports came out courtesy of Bitwave.
Based on the arcade versions, this first batch includes Out Zone, Tatsujin/Truxton, Zero Wing and Kyuukyoku Tiger/Twin Cobra.
Having Toaplan games be on Steam is pretty wild.
Didn't expect that in a million years.
They got some things really good in this.
The slowdown is correct and the input lag is -really- low.
It also has good practice options, savestates, replays, gadgets and leaderboards.
Some very neat things too like a hitbox viewer and ability to reduce the hitbox.
Kyuukyoku Tiger and Tatsujin even have widescreen arrange modes added to them.
Some bizarre stuff too like a 'Dodge' option that quote, "automatically dodges enemies and bullets".
Base input lag is 2 frames, which is already really good, but what's really interesting about these ports is that they also have uncapped framerate, which is something I've rarely seen with ports of old games.
Meaning that if you have say a 240 hertz monitor, you can play these games at 240 FPS and the input lag would be insanely low, beating even runahead on regular emulators.
So pretty incredible out of the gate.
What's wrong with the ports is uh... everything else.
- Out Zone is based on the wrong romset.
It's based on the 'outzonec' romset in Mame, which is the oldest version available and is based on an old unfinished prototype. It's very buggy, has a lot of missing content and wrong music plays in the wrong stages. Important secrets that you use to score the game with are simply not there and tons of regular enemies are used as placeholders for enemy sprites they didn't finish yet. The final boss is also unfinished, it's missing graphics and patterns.
There is Hard mode, which is based on *another* wrong romset (outzoneh), but it's closer to the actual game since it has all the missing content Normal mode is missing.
It's a weird version where enemies start with 2nd loop behavior but bosses are still the same.
- All of the dipswitches are wrong by default.
Besides difficulty being too high, they also start you with less lives and you only get two extends, even though you should be getting an extend every 300k points.
The option to select 300k every isn't even there. Or maybe they're mislabeled???
- The games are running too fast.
Like Out Zone is supposed to run at 55.161545 Hz, but they made the base speed for all games 60 Hz. This makes the game run almost 10% too fast.
I tested how long it takes for energy to run out and you die in the Steam port over 4 seconds faster: https://tinyurl.com/mr34ppzw
- Audio is just *atrocious* all across the board.
Sound effects are wrong and they sound awful, and music is playing in the wrong stages at the wrong tempo with missing undertones.
It's also completely missing 4 out of 7 stage themes. (!!!)
- The good things about the port are half-baked too.
Like the gadgets are useless, even though you could have useful things in there.
Like I keep losing track of how many C items I've collected for the Zero Wing secrets and having a gadget there that just tells me would have been extremely nice.
Practice mode is missing a lot of options too, like being able to select speed up or not.
The hitbox viewer is pretty broken, and the widescreen modes look very janky too. Like nothing got updated to actually accommodate these. Animations didn't get adjusted and enemies just spawn out of existence now.
All the other ports seem to suffer from these same problems too.
Audio in Tatsujin is especially awful, and stage 1 seems to have a wrong background.
Zero Wing has a layer problem at the top that shows things you're not supposed to see.
Kyuukyoku Tiger probably got the worst treatment.
The base game is already really hard, but now besides the game also running too fast, the difficulty is also off. Enemies shoot far more than they're supposed to and their shooting timings and angles also seem wrong.
Which is most evident in that safespots simply don't work -at all- anymore. (!!!)
This is a huge problem with the stage 10 boss in particular.
Enemies can fire at you in spots that they shouldn't be able to, which implies that something is fundamentally wrong with how enemies aim and shoot.
Hopefully most of the egregious problems get patched out.
This has the potential to be definitive ports, even beating out traditional emulation (but probably not M2), but it's really not there yet by a long shot.
This is like a rare case of a port getting all the advanced features right but then just falling flat on their face on the fundamentals, and forgets about actually porting the game well in the first place.
Buy the game here:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2022920/Out_Zone/
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