Castlevania Bloodlines

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Originally Posted by Barone

@Kamahl
Thanks for the explanation. I had noticed the staircase weirdness but not the alignment issue in its own.

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Yeah, it's subtle, but it's also one of those "once you see it" type of things. Drives me crazy every time I play the game. The stairs are extremely poor however, I think everyone notices those.

SC IV at the very least was impressive when it came out. The multidirectional whip which flails around ""realistically"", the atmospheric music and dark dreary look of the game, the gorgeous special effects in some stages... It served as an excellent early title for the SNES, really distancing it from the NES, even if it didn't play all that great or age all that well.

Bloodlines, if anything, just helped propagate the stereotype that the MD was terrible at colour and had less polished games.

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Originally Posted by Kamahl

SC IV at the very least was impressive when it came out. The multidirectional whip which flails around ""realistically"", the atmospheric music and dark dreary look of the game, the gorgeous special effects in some stages... It served as an excellent early title for the SNES, really distancing it from the NES, even if it didn't play all that great or age all that well.

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To some extent (sample-based music put to good use, rotating background) I agree with you.
But I honestly believe this is one of the most glaring examples of how biased and ultimately corrupted the media was (is). In terms of animation, to name ONE aspect, the game is really weak compared to several other titles available at the time for other platforms.
I guess that most of SNES owners at the time of the game's release were really hardcore Nintendo fanboys with little to no knowledge of the world outside their Nintendo bubble. 'Cause if it was put to serious technical analysis and comparison, I think it would have been panned for the most part.

You won't get any disagreements from me on that, the animation in the game is quite poor. Revenge of Shinobi looks less clunky with half the cart space.

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Originally Posted by Barone

About 4th gen Castlevania games:

- Super Castlevania IV is by far the worst IMO. Controls like shit, gameplay is a sluggish mess, tile work is by far the worst, animation is horrid, music is hit and miss, sfx are shitty, etc.

- Rondo of Blood is the best, most fun and a gazillion times more polished than the others. All graphics are very well detailed, with great animation all around; soundtrack is fenomenal and the sfx are pretty good, with great use of PCM voice clips.
Last but not least, alongside with Streets of Rage 2 and a few others it's one of the console games which make really great use of color and art for proper CRT highlight and sparkling effect; none of the other Castlevania games are nowhere near as good in such aspect.

- Bloodlines has good tile work overall, but some parts are really, really poor; like not even alpha stage stuff. It's very unfortunate. The compositions are great even considering that they do not make extensive use of the hardware; the sfx are OK. The color use is terrible, to say the least.
The one thing Bloodlines excels at is in terms of the multi-jointed bosses. They move better and animated faster than the other ones. Other than that, the other technical measurements in terms of animation put it below Rondo of Blood.

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While I'm inclined to agree with your verdict on SCIV, I'd honestly still rank it higher than Dracula X SNES, and for the same reason you prefer Bloodlines - SCIV is its own thing, whereas Dracula X is just bad port, with absolutely nothing to justify playing it over Rondo. Also, I have to say, for me the worst part of SCIV was definitely the samples and sfx. The game just sounds... urgh. I don't know why some people are so infatuated with it.

About the sparkling effect in Rondo, I don't have any CRTs and I'm not sure what you mean. Any particular examples of this?

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Originally Posted by Kamahl

Bloodlines, if anything, just helped propagate the stereotype that the MD was terrible at colour and had less polished games.

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This.

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Originally Posted by Kamahl

You won't get any disagreements from me on that, the animation in the game is quite poor. Revenge of Shinobi looks less clunky with half the cart space.

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It's just mind boggling to me.
Put this into perspective:
- A lot of people try to trash PS2 for launch games such as Ridge Racer V due to its "jaggies" despite it using 24-bit coloring, having great lighting effects and polygon counts which were pretty much at the limit or beyond of what the competition (Dreamcast) could do when maxing out their hardware.
- Super Castlevania IV was released almost a full year after the Super Famicom launch and it runs like shit when compared to two-year older games (Revenge of Shinobi, Mystic Defender, etc.) running on two-year older hardware. It gets universal praise to this day.

It's just ridiculous.

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Originally Posted by Lion

The game just sounds... urgh. I don't know why some people are so infatuated with it.

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I couldn't agree more.

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Originally Posted by Lion

About the sparkling effect in Rondo, I don't have any CRTs and I'm not sure what you mean. Any particular examples of this?

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It's difficult to find material to share here to demonstrate it, but this sort of old school capture can give you a vague idea:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3BHFOHKWls0

Look at it around 1:40 to 2:15, 3:22 to 3:34 and then 4:50 to 5:00.
It uses high contrast effects, tiles contours with proper tone and lighting variance, foreground/background with high contrast variance and color range, etc.

SOR2 goes in the same direction, with most of its scenes designed around those principles (these shots won't make justice to the actual image quality and its sharpness but, again, they'll give you a vague idea of what I'm talking about):

https://i.imgur.com/LSz3fwN.jpg

https://i.imgur.com/QlF5Top.jpg

https://i.imgur.com/PLu2i8G.jpg

Shaders such as CRT Royale try to simulate those aspects (especially scanline blooming) but they still suck IMO. And so do the Framemeister-esque solutions.

You need a powerful SD CRT TV (forget about stupid slim models) with features such as Scan Velocity Modulation disabled in order to get the most out of those games graphics.
In such setups, they really look wonderful. It's rather interesting to see that SOR2, for an example, looks rather shitty when played through emulation and hooked up to a standard LCD TV (yes, I looking at you, nasty Raspberry Pi-based "arcade" boxes).

Shaders like CRT-Royale will only really work with HDR screens. You really need that extra brightness popping out of the screen, otherwise it won't even be close.
You need 4k screens and HDR to barely mimic much older technology :p.

I still don't understand how people stand regular scanlines. Making the screen darker and uglier is the OPPOSITE of what made CRTs great...

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Originally Posted by Kamahl

The stairs, that is where this game really shines, how am I the only person who notices this shit? Seriously...

https://i.imgur.com/grjvZka.png

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The exclusive frames of animation of the player in the stairs are right, but the trasition frames are recicled from the walking animation
because that you noticed this insue ans occurs from the both characters.

https://i.imgur.com/SAr2oz3.png

I think if we have people with the beta version (if some love in the hearth) and some coders with maybe they do some day a direct's cut version of the games
with the missing levels, enemys and etc.. and total fix for artwark, anamition and bgs

As others have stated, technical issues not withstanding, Bloodlines is fun. Plus it didn't have to be imported on a media that may be full of rot by now.

I don't recall seeing scanlines half as visibly as emulators show them off. Hell, I don't recall seeing them at all, which I'm willing to bet is a side effect of not sitting too damn close to the screen. Most consoles gave you damn near 5 or 6 feet of gamepad cord. The 3DS has scanlines, but you're not going to notice unless you hold the thing 2 inches from your eyes. So in short, emulated scanlines definitely suck.

I did come to realize that emulators are often too bright though, thanks to a Raspberry Pi.

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Originally Posted by Barone

It's difficult to find material to share here to demonstrate it, but this sort of old school capture can give you a vague idea:

SOR2 goes in the same direction, with most of its scenes designed around those principles (these shots won't make justice to the actual image quality and its sharpness but, again, they'll give you a vague idea of what I'm talking about):

https://i.imgur.com/LSz3fwN.jpg

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Yeah, it's really hard to photograph CRTs, but the colors in those pictures do seem to pop in a way they just don't LCDs. The blue lighting on the ground in that first image is a great example, so I'm guessing this is what you're thinking of?

And man, Rondo really was gorgeous. Imo they managed to pull off more impressive parallax scrolling than we see in a lot of MD or even SNES games, especially in the prologue and with the wrecked ships at the docks. Guess actually having access to proper additional layers made it easier to just phone it in for devs, and that's exactly what many of them did.

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Originally Posted by Pyron

The exclusive frames of animation of the player in the stairs are right, but the trasition frames are recicled from the walking animation
because that you noticed this insue ans occurs from the both characters.

https://i.imgur.com/SAr2oz3.png

I think if we have people with the beta version (if some love in the hearth) and some coders with maybe they do some day a direct's cut version of the games
with the missing levels, enemys and etc.. and total fix for artwark, anamition and bgs

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Even the custom frames have the same alignment issue as the flat ground frames though, and using the flat ground walking frame for transitions completely ruins the animation. Very, very, sloppy, Konami!

And yeah, it'd be really cool if there was a restored DC some day.

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Originally Posted by Kamahl

Shaders like CRT-Royale will only really work with HDR screens. You really need that extra brightness popping out of the screen, otherwise it won't even be close.
You need 4k screens and HDR to barely mimic much older technology :p.

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It's insane the drop we had in terms of exposure capacity when industry switched from CRT to LCD.
LCD fixed the geometry and definition issues, as well as the weight and space requirements; but, good Lord, did it downgraded all the rest. The built-in speakers are also as shitty as they can be for the most part.

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Originally Posted by Kamahl

I still don't understand how people stand regular scanlines. Making the screen darker and uglier is the OPPOSITE of what made CRTs great...

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Stupid youtubers + people willing to drink the kool-aid to be elite (to be honest, there's also the other side of the coin with BVM and PVM worshiping which many times go well beyond any good sense).

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Originally Posted by Lion

Yeah, it's really hard to photograph CRTs, but the colors in those pictures do seem to pop in a way they just don't LCDs. The blue lighting on the ground in that first image is a great example, so I'm guessing this is what you're thinking of?

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That is one of the things, yes.
But also notice how the garbage can shines there and so does the leather jacket of the enemie; if you try it in raw emulation none of that will be there.

In the case of Rondo vs Bloodlines; compare how the curtains and pillars are colored in both games.

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Originally Posted by Lion

And man, Rondo really was gorgeous. Imo they managed to pull off more impressive parallax scrolling than we see in a lot of MD or even SNES games, especially in the prologue and with the wrecked ships at the docks. Guess actually having access to proper additional layers made it easier to just phone it in for devs, and that's exactly what many of them did.

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The opening scene has the wheels been animated at 60 fps; something really rare the time. Some of the fireball animations in the game are also at 60 fps.
Then you have lots of stuff at 30 fps and 20 fps; when the standard for well-animated games at the time was floating around 12-15 fps.
Several enemies are also using a high amount of animation frames.

The HUD looks great, the font looks great; all the presentation elements are richly detailed.

I've never been into this series, that comes with not being Nintendo centric, but that said I've never been interested in the MD's outing even though it looks good. What is the standout reason that I should reconsider my view and buy this game?

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Originally Posted by Barone

The opening scene has the wheels been animated at 60 fps; something really rare the time. Some of the fireball animations in the game are also at 60 fps.
Then you have lots of stuff at 30 fps and 20 fps; when the standard for well-animated games at the time was floating around 12-15 fps.
Several enemies are also using a high amount of animation frames.

The HUD looks great, the font looks great; all the presentation elements are richly detailed.

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Indeed, they did an amazing job. One wonders what Bloodlines might've looked like, had they put in the same effort there. Granted, it could never have reached Rondo's level because of the palette limit, but still.

World War I was a good setting IMO. The lack of proper content and references hurt Bloodlines to no end though.
Stuff like the Zeppelin and the melting platforms of the foundry stage which were cut give us a hint that a lot more could have been done. NOT with a friggin' 8 Mbit cartridge though!

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Originally Posted by Barone

World War I was a good setting IMO. The lack of proper content and references hurt Bloodlines to no end though.
Stuff like the Zeppelin and the melting platforms of the foundry stage which were cut give us a hint that a lot more could have been done. NOT with a friggin' 8 Mbit cartridge though!

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I'm not sure if WWI is ideal for vampire scenarios, but yeah, I love that whole early 1900s time period, and there's certainly a lot of interesting things that could be done with it. Also, I'm absolutely convinced the game was originally supposed to be 16Mbit, but they slashed the ROM at some point.

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Originally Posted by Lion

I'm not sure if WWI is ideal for vampire scenarios

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Maybe not, but WW2 is!

https://i.imgur.com/ssdlnmZ.jpg

:p