3rd June 2012, 5:29 PM
So I had to double check my Xbox version to compare it to the HD remakes, and I noticed a number of flubs here and there. I checked online and I'm not the only one to notice. There's some serious Cain being raised about this port. This is mainly for SH2. Apparently SH3's port was a lot better done.
First thing I noticed was a much more subdued grain filter, the fog not being quite as intense, and the movies being poorly upscaled and stretched so they end up looking rather distorted and grainy. I also noticed that sometimes dialog doesn't match up and there's some framerate skipping issues. It doesn't help that I had to take up 4 gigs to install ports of PS2 games.
So here's the other thing, there's stuff I didn't notice that plenty of others caught. There are missing details all over the place. There's far less debris in the streets, and some background textures such as the island across the water at the beginning of the game that are missing or different.
Hijinks, the people responsible for this port, state that Konami actually gave them source code from a beta version of the game instead of the released code. Hell, even the GBA port of Mother 1+2 used the most up to date source code from the unreleased English translation of 1. Didn't Konami keep that code around? (Capcom screwed up once with keeping old resources too. They somehow lost a lot of assets for Okami requiring lots of them to be remade for the Wii port.)
So the world looks higher res, which is nice until you start noticing that the lesser fog and grain filter actually exposes the low quality of the textures, which were never updated for this version. They didn't even turn on antialiasing. Further, the streets feel a bit emptier and some of those headlines and little background details that peeps like Weltall love to speculate on are just gone.
That makes the original XBox and PS2 versions of Restless Dreams the definitive version of the game. That sucks...
Compare this to Konami's other big HD release, the Metal Gear Solid HD collection. That game looks and plays absolutely amazingly with things like antialiasing and so on added. Aside from the removed extras, the games are all around better now. (Though I still wish they'd kept those extras.)
Add in the simple fact that they didn't even bother making it a complete collection and skipped 4 and I get the impression that Hijinks just isn't a very talented company. Konami screwed up by giving them beta code for one of the games, but that's only a partial excuse. Other companies have been able to convert the games by reverse engineering the disks and didn't even need the source code.
First thing I noticed was a much more subdued grain filter, the fog not being quite as intense, and the movies being poorly upscaled and stretched so they end up looking rather distorted and grainy. I also noticed that sometimes dialog doesn't match up and there's some framerate skipping issues. It doesn't help that I had to take up 4 gigs to install ports of PS2 games.
So here's the other thing, there's stuff I didn't notice that plenty of others caught. There are missing details all over the place. There's far less debris in the streets, and some background textures such as the island across the water at the beginning of the game that are missing or different.
Hijinks, the people responsible for this port, state that Konami actually gave them source code from a beta version of the game instead of the released code. Hell, even the GBA port of Mother 1+2 used the most up to date source code from the unreleased English translation of 1. Didn't Konami keep that code around? (Capcom screwed up once with keeping old resources too. They somehow lost a lot of assets for Okami requiring lots of them to be remade for the Wii port.)
So the world looks higher res, which is nice until you start noticing that the lesser fog and grain filter actually exposes the low quality of the textures, which were never updated for this version. They didn't even turn on antialiasing. Further, the streets feel a bit emptier and some of those headlines and little background details that peeps like Weltall love to speculate on are just gone.
That makes the original XBox and PS2 versions of Restless Dreams the definitive version of the game. That sucks...
Compare this to Konami's other big HD release, the Metal Gear Solid HD collection. That game looks and plays absolutely amazingly with things like antialiasing and so on added. Aside from the removed extras, the games are all around better now. (Though I still wish they'd kept those extras.)
Add in the simple fact that they didn't even bother making it a complete collection and skipped 4 and I get the impression that Hijinks just isn't a very talented company. Konami screwed up by giving them beta code for one of the games, but that's only a partial excuse. Other companies have been able to convert the games by reverse engineering the disks and didn't even need the source code.