News from the Cave ustream broadcast

[EOJ]

I think the main reason they're considering the bluray route is they wouldn't have to keep making 2-3 DVD sets. You could put all the runs on one disc. Plus, bluray is pretty widespread nowadays and there is less piracy than DVDs.

[Strider77]

It's cool, I think they got it out of their system with DFK 1.5.

Nah, I'm mostly just kidding.

I was thinking more along the lines of Futari's arranged mode on the 360.

[brentsg]

I think the main reason they're considering the bluray route is they wouldn't have to keep making 2-3 DVD sets. You could put all the runs on one disc. Plus, bluray is pretty widespread nowadays and there is less piracy than DVDs.

If we're playing console shmups with HD assets then Blu-ray would be awesome.

[Kewing]

I think the main reason they're considering the bluray route is they wouldn't have to keep making 2-3 DVD sets. You could put all the runs on one disc. Plus, bluray is pretty widespread nowadays and there is less piracy than DVDs.

I'm not saying getting more money is the main reason, you actually have good points there. But I mean I wouldn't be surprised, considering the overall pricing of their merchandise, that they decided to jack up the price a little because of the implied improvement of the Bluray as an excuse. But anyway, that may be a rather minor grip compared to the core news here, no?

[EOJ]

I don't think there's a need to worry about the arcade stuff yet. Asada just said they're going to discuss things, nothing is set in stone yet. We should see that vertical shooter they're developing, at least.

[moozooh]

Seriously, Cave should just do a 720p DeathSmiles vert on the PGM.

Superplays on BD sounds like a swell idea with lots of potential that will most definitely never be realized. Raw RGB 240x320 capture point-resized to 480x640, then letterboxed to 720 lines and encoded in H.264 at 60 progressive fps could look pretty close to, say, a Futari X360 replay played back on a CRT display running 640x480 if done right, but who would bother?

I think the biggest issue Cave is really facing these days is that much of the core staff directly responsible for the games' mechanics (at least Yagawa and Asada who have both admitted it at some point) don't play — or maybe even love — what they're making. They don't take pleasure in creating the ultimate playing experience unlike, say, M2 and Mihara, who refine small details and make much effort putting in little bits that nobody even cares about (sepia color filter! These games are old, mirite?). It's not at all surprising that popularity and sales aren't particularly blooming even though the steps being made are economically sound (milking popular series in various ways, releasing mass-accessible horis with potential 16:9 support, porting the catalogue to a reasonably popular home platform at high resolution, making region-free releases and oversea localizations, etc.), and there's a lot of criticism in regards to porting quality and interface even though the experience should be accumulated constantly and the amount of time required to do the same kind of task should at the very least be the same. It appears that the interface-related blunders of varying severity plaguing nearly every port since Futari is a direct result of Asada not understanding the significance or the purpose of certain options. If you don't play this game like I do, how would you know my needs, right? People are telling you to include this and that, so you try doing so in your free time, but you still don't understand why exactly are those particular things desired, right? Yeah, seems so.

I have a strong suspicion this kind of attitude has prevailed since about the mid-2000s, as Espgaluda 2 AC was probably the last "quality" release before a cavalcade of mishaps started taking place. Ibara and Mushi PS2 ports sucked horribly. Pink Sweets had four or so revisions made, complete with controversial features being taken out and reinstated repeatedly. Futari 1.0 had to be completely rebalanced with nobody ever being able to clear Ultra on defaults (not sure what Ichimura et al. were thinking coming up with those attacks). DFK 1.0 had a ridiculously early counterstop that could have been caught with roughly 30 minutes of savestate-enabled playtesting, a GPS formula reference, and a calculator. DeathSmiles 2 had four revisions as well. Akai Katana was nearly maxed-out in about two months with a "proper" revision being overpriced and severely limited. The most accurate ports released since DeathSmiles have all been developed by other companies: Arika, M2, and 5pb.. Every single internal port after DeathSmiles had needed at least one patch to fix glaring bugs or gameplay-affecting inaccuracies, yet not even all of them eventually got any. I can't believe they've saved anything by not catching most of these blunders beforehand. And considering how obvious most of them were, it wasn't that hard to do so.

You see the trend. It's pretty alarming that Cave do so as well, but don't seem to find the culprit behind it, which is negligence and overall decrease in affection towards the end product over the past few years. Although maybe that is the exact reason they're thinking of leaving the arcade scene: if they don't feel it in themselves to be able to churn out at least one quality product like, say, the PGM era games (or DeathSmiles, which seems to have enjoyed the best treatment of all Cave games released in the last few years from both players and developers), per year in reasonable development time, without making a ton of revisions and hearing a choir of complaints from players and arcade operators alike, it would probably make sense to retire and focus on more casual genres that don't put as much strain on the developers (and probably turn better profit as well). Or hell, just take a break from shmups for a year or two.

I would hope that things aren't as depressing as they might appear from my post, but some unpleasant facts just can't be denied. Oh well, I hope they get better.

I agree - Nobody buy those 2 games!

Now that's a sound advice! If one direction is deemed unprofitable, let's make other directions unprofitable too, that will help the company to get back on track. /sarcasm

[skykid]

Espgaluda 2 AC was probably the last "quality" release before a cavalcade of mishaps started taking place.

Agreed, it was the last AC release finished to Cave's high standard before something started to go awry in the dev department.

[StarCreator]

At this point, the difference in cost between printing a DVD and printing a BD should be negligible - BD isn't exactly a cutting edge format anymore and a lot of factories should be well equipped to print them en masse now.

Honestly, I wish they had considered doing this sooner - the DVD format simply isn't good enough to contain a tate game rotated to yoko without loss.  On BD, we can actually get runs at 60fps progressive at full resolution.  It's also a plus for those of us in the US, as Japan and the US share a BD region.

[GaijinPunch]

Agreed, it was the last AC release finished to Cave's high standard before something started to go awry in the dev department.

Fuck pillows.  That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

[SuperPang]

Fuck pillows...I'm sticking to it.