Played every game for a while. Yep, it's a great package. While the CRT filter is better for the 8-bit stuff, it's a bit too blurry, decimating some non-dithered detail, and the extreme curvature, simulating the distortion on a classic tube television, is kind of annoying. Still, it's better than raw and super-sharp pixels. Give us a few options in the filters, at least, where I can choose to preserve perfect geometry and still get some kind of help on the overall image quality that was best-remembered and experienced on CRT, Rare.
The N64 emulation desperately needs a scanline/bilinear filter at the minimum when those low resolution UIs and really stretched textures in JFG and Blast Corps. really pop out at you sometimes. It's shockingly jarring without some kind of effect in place to mitigate the stark contrast between relatively decently detailed and formed characters and structures against rather plain and low poly backdrops. KI Gold looks fucking terrible compared to the simple arcade emulations of KI and KI2 that released in conjunction with KI reboot and a lack of a decent screen filter has a lot to do with that.
Grabbed by the Ghoulies disappointed me back on the OG Xbox for its auto-fighting stick control, like the PS2 game, Rise to Honor, but the doubling of framerate and a severe lack of 3D brawlers this gen has kinda-sorta led me to reevaluate the game much more positively. Always liked its presentation and look, but that gameplay really was limp-feeling to me back then. Now, I'm feeling it and having a lot more fun than I recall ever having in its original release even if it never will match up to a button-to-action-driven BEU. Great fun.
Wish the instructions made available for each game didn't resort to using the outside Help app for what amounts to just a small amount of text as that thing takes entirely too long to initiate. The snapshot instructions and rules could do with simply explaining the controls in parentheses rather than forcing someone to bother with a slow-loading, glorified rich text viewer.
Hope they improve the speed of emulation with the N64 games, but they seem on par with the original system in general. The X360 emulation needs more perfomance tweaking as Nuts and Bolts feels a bit lower in framerate than on the real hardware.
