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[imastalker co.]

before this became an xbox game, and was still in development for Dreamcast, the game was going to be a Co-Op online game.

here's a little thing i found on an old preview...

The game will have single, multiplayer, and co-operative online play modes. Additionally, Smilebit has implemented a unique control system where players will use the controller and the gun peripheral simultaneously. Not much is known about how that will work, but Sega feels that it will "allow the player a unique in-game feeling of unrestricted aiming via the Gun whilst maintaining the freedom of movement you get with a controller."

i remember looking forward to this a lot.
anyways, my GameFans are in the basement, so i don't feel like going through them, but i do remember them having some better info on the game.
i eventually ended up liking the game (xbox), but it seemed like the game could've been a lot better if it had become what it was originally intended to be.

anyways, info on the game when it was still in development for Dreamcast would be appreciated.

oh, and one last thing, anyone have songs from the soundtrack on mp3? i'd like to get some tracks from the first few levels.

 

[RiZ III]

Sure did turn out purty on Xbox.

It wouldve been really interesting to see how the Gun+Controller thing worked.

 

[Docpan]

The game could've been good if it didn't suck.

 

[RiZ III]

Enter the haterz.

 

[Docpan]

I speak the truth.

There's nothing wrong with calling a truly crappy game a piece of crap.

No offense to you fans. I just don't get how you can enjoy crap. I would've liked it if it played like Burning Rangers.

 

[TheGreenGiant]

no wonder the game controls so bad. They just had to salvage and make it work.

 

[nitewulf]

the worst sega game i ever played in my life. lets stop talking about it.

 

[Uncle Dukey]

I didn't like it, but a friend of mine really did...

 

[RiZ III]

Was a good game. The music sucked tho. The first trailer they released had music from Panzer Dragoon Saga so I was expecting that style of music for the game. Turned out it had cheezy synth music.

 

[Dead]

it was ok

 

[imastalker co.]

i was hoping that this thread would be more focused on the Dreamcast version.

so once again yeah, any info on it would be appreciated.

 

[Fifty]

Your threads are getting locked...

 

[imastalker co.]

what for? not really spamming. just trying to get some game discussion going on.

 

[nitewulf]

no one outside of sega would know anymore about it. we saw the same screens as you, and read that same snippet...i'm talking arund the end of 2000 here, before the "announcement" (cries).
personally i thought the game looked tremendous and that the controls sounded retarded. i love sega and all, but sometimes too much innovation is just, well...too much.
some other games were announced and lost forever as well, type x spiral nightmare and this other survival horror in the mountains, cant recall the name anymore.

 

[Lazy8s]

Possible GUNVALKYRIE for Dreamcast shots (note: screens incorrectly labeled in Properties):

Concept Artwork:

Notice that there is a light touch of cartoon shading given to the characters, resulting in a unique contrast.

 

[akascream]

Yeah.. it looks really good.

It wouldve been really interesting to see how the Gun+Controller thing worked.

That actually sounds like lots of fun.

 

[Buggy Loop]

Notice that there is a light touch of cartoon shading given to the characters, resulting in a unique contrast.

Uh no, just the artists' work on the textures.

 

[Nerevar]

Metroid Prime killer.

 

[dark10x]

I remember those DC shots...

It really does look a lot better on XBOX and isn't even near high end for the system whereas this bests a lot of DC games easily.

 

[imastalker co.]

whoa, nice pics. that sure looks interesting. seems like it would have PSO style co-op door opening.

really gotta wonder what that would've turned out like if development stayed on Dreamcast.

 

[Defensor]

Metroid Prime killer.

 

[BuddyC]

 

[Ninja Scooter]

**goes back in time 3 years**

Screw Retro/Nintendo! THIS IS METROID IN 3D DONE RIGHT!

 

[Lazy8s]

Buggy Loop:

Uh no, just the artists' work on the textures.

Cartoon shading is a general description for the artistic direction of the work and can be achieved in a lot of different ways. It doesn't imply specific cel-shading algorithms, which SEGA Smilebit referred to as "manga dimension" incidentally.

dark10x:

It really does look a lot better on XBOX and isn't even near high end for the system whereas this bests a lot of DC games easily.

These are shots of distinctly unfinished work of course, as is obvious from the barren layout. The video footage of the development version looked really smooth, with the character acrobatically dancing around indoor-type (unlike the Xbox version) environments during their assault.

 

[MightyHedgehog]

**goes back in time 3 years**

Screw Retro/Nintendo! THIS IS METROID IN 3D DONE RIGHT!

Well, I, for one, would have preferred MP as a 3rd person game.

 

[mjq jazz bar]

I remember when Virtua Cop 2 was new, and I thought it'd be brilliant to come out with a lightgun with a digital pad attached to it.

 

[dark10x]

These are shots of distinctly unfinished work of course, as is obvious from the barren layout. The video footage of the development version looked really smooth, with the character acrobatically dancing around indoor-type (unlike the Xbox version) environments during their assault.

...and? I'm saying that, even in its unfinished state, it looks much better than the vast majority of games released on Dreamcast. At the very least, it still looks like a game that could be released today and look acceptable. Most Dreamcast games DO NOT hold up at all when compared to current consoles. They are absolutely poly starved and have all kinds other issues...

 

[Bog]

Acceptable today? Maybe if every other game looked like Disaster Report.

 

[StoOgE]

There was some poster up there that said that the Dreamcast game had indoor type environments while the Xbox one didnt, which isnt true, about half the Xbox levels wound up being indoors.

My biggest disapointment is that it was obvious that the game was rushed on the Xbox.. I loved every minute of the game when I was playing it, one of my favorites this generation.. but it just seemed like the level design was meant to be Metroid esque, with all of them connecting together.

Still a good game.

 

[The Promised One]

not a bad game, but I honestly wasn't in the mood to take the several hours it would take to master the controls, for a game that is little more than a bug hunt.

 

[Bog]

I must be a genius, because I picked up the controls while playing on a kiosk in EB.

 

[mjq jazz bar]

I must be a genius, because I picked up the controls while playing on a kiosk in EB.

Same here.

 

[Lazy8s]

dark10x:

...and?

Trying to gauge the Dreamcast from an unfinished game and where development as a whole for the system never even reached the halfway point in a console cycle is tenuous.

StoOgE:

There was some poster up there that said that the Dreamcast game had indoor type environments while the Xbox one didnt, which isnt true, about half the Xbox levels wound up being indoors.

I meant that the environments shown in the development version were generally more enclosed than the final game.

 

[fausty]

Gillian Seed! Badass avatar you got there...

 

[dark10x]

Trying to gauge the Dreamcast from an unfinished game and where development as a whole for the system never even reached the halfway point in a console cycle is tenuous.

...but taking games from similar time periods on other machines demonstrates FAR more impressive visuals.

With less time under its belt, PS2 saw MGS2, ICO, Silent Hill 2, Jak and Daxter, ZOE, and Gran Turismo 3...all of which visually crush anything on the Dreamcast. GC and XBOX saw even more impressive (technically) titles within their first 6 months!

I don't believe for a second that Dreamcast would have suddenly turned around and started to push high poly counts, far more advanced effects, and higher framerates had it remained alive. It certainly could have improved, but it would never have matched the other three systems.

Are you suggesting that later generation Dreamcast games would be able to hang with mid-generation PS2, XBOX, and GC titles (high quality titles)?

 

[ATJaguarX]

Online CO-OP would have been awesome.

 

[Die Squirrel Die]

no one outside of sega would know anymore about it. we saw the same screens as you, and read that same snippet...i'm talking arund the end of 2000 here, before the "announcement" (cries).
personally i thought the game looked tremendous and that the controls sounded retarded. i love sega and all, but sometimes too much innovation is just, well...too much.
some other games were announced and lost forever as well, type x spiral nightmare and this other survival horror in the mountains, cant recall the name anymore.

That would Agartha. That game look kicky. You were going to be able to choose whether you were good or evil as well. But No Cliche (the developer) was taken down with the sinking shop that was Sega Europe.

 

[Lazy8s]

dark10x:

With less time under its belt, PS2 saw MGS2, ICO, Silent Hill 2, Jak and Daxter, ZOE, and Gran Turismo 3...all of which visually crush anything on the Dreamcast.

Both the PS2 and the DC have respective advantages, the largest being the PS2 lion’s share of developer focus and its continued evolution compared to the DC for which support never made it passed 2001.

The PS2 draws things faster than the DC: polygons, pixels, particles, and such. Most significant among those are the PS2's advantages for particles and fillrate-intensive effects, and these strengths have given the hardware its character. They can be useful for conveying certain realistic behaviors of materials and for cinematic effects. Cinematic effects like motion trails (blur), depth of field, and post-processing filters are very usage sensitive and not of global benefit like, for example, increased resolution detail would be. They’re analogous to lens flare last generation or shiny bump mapping this generation: they can add a tasteful touch to the right specific situations under limited use, but designers more interested in pushing some feature than in artistic application often lead to abuse of the effects.

The PS2 can sustain several times more polygons than the DC. However, the two console’s characteristic ranges for geometry overlap one another, so the significance of the advantage isn’t so great. The quality of the object modeling is actually what makes the biggest difference at this level as, for example, a car made up of 30,000 triangles doesn’t show much visible improvement over a well-modeled one of 3,000.

The DC, on the other hand, has its own appreciable advantages. Being more efficient, it’s better with image properties: these are the elements that distinguish a generation from the previous one in the quality of effects as opposed to the quantity. It excels at this in classic SEGA hardware design, like earlier systems such as Models 2 and 3 which clearly demonstrated a higher class of 3D than other machines of their eras even though isolated spec comparisons could misleadingly show close numbers. The more plentiful display memory of the DC results in less compromise between textures and image qualities. This, coupled with its simultaneous output of interlaced and non-interlaced signals from the same buffer, enables support for full resolution screen refreshes (progressive scan/proscan) and the more solid resultant image to be standard. The integrity of the visuals also don’t break down in motion as badly from alaising because the console provides a more sophisticated selection for mip levels per texel during mip-mapping. To complement this, it’s shown more advanced usage of texture filtering - with in-game anisotropic - to keep the texture transition smooth.

Some of the payoff from the DC’s advanced design comes in smaller details, though. Unlike any of the other consoles, its precision for z-buffering is independent of the same resource drain and thus maintains 32-bit all of the time. Also, all blending is resolved internally before writing out to the framebuffer, so multiple alpha blends don’t suffer extra dithering to color on DC. The larger set of hardware-accelerated blends and mathematical operations that the system has over the PS2 even saw to the use of more advanced pixel shading in the form of dot product calculation for bump mapping in-game.

 

[Sysgen]

If you leave Gunvalkyrie at the title screen you see a demo of how to play. I can see how people would hate the game if they couldn't approach the gameplay in the demo, but for those of us that were able to grasp the controls the game was very very good.

 

[Lazy8s]

I'm not familiar with FTP, but this site lists having video footage for the GUNVALKYRIE movie when it was for DC (CG stuff only, maybe?), as well as videos of various other Dreamcast rarities like the Tower of Babel demo, Project Berkley and Shenmue Beta, Propeller Arena, and Geist Force:
http://www.segagagadomain.com/welcome-news.htm (go to Movies)

Also, I've spotted a few videos of early Shenmue promo footage of a build dating back to 1998 and some Japanese commercial spots, too, over at goodcow's site:
http://www.goodcowfilms.com/farm/games/shenmue/index.htm

 

[Phoenix]

not a bad game, but I honestly wasn't in the mood to take the several hours it would take to master the controls, for a game that is little more than a bug hunt.

Ding - we have a winner. Its one thing to need soem time to get into a game, but I tried to give this game days and it was still kludgy to play.