Dodonpachi Daioujou Black Label Extra [JP X360] - Patch is out!

[Geezer]

I've seen a couple of ebay listings for this mentioning a bonus booklet, I wonder what it contains. Maybe an artbook?

Example.

[KOMA]

According from a webshop where i bought my Jp game,is it an art book.

[Geezer]

According from a webshop where i bought my Jp game,is it an art book.

Where are you buying yours? I wonder if Play-Asia will include it, they are a bit hit and miss with preorder bonuses.

[EOJ]

New vid of X-mode up:

http://5pb.jp/games/div2/ddpdojblex/media_xmovie.html

Looks like a really poor man's Daifukkatsu. The stupid part is you cancel bullets with both your laser and shot. So basically when you get into hyper mode, you're invincible as long as you're holding down the fire button. Lame.

[Geezer]

Some of the new music seems good at least. X-mode seems pretty stupid, I'll give it a shot but I don't expect much.

[EOJ]

According from a webshop where i bought my Jp game,is it an art book.

It's a 24 page guidebook, showing tips on how to beat the first loop, along with maps:

http://5pb.jp/games/div2/ddpdojblex/media.html

Won't be of much use unless you can read Japanese.

[KOMA]

According from a webshop where i bought my Jp game,is it an art book.

Where are you buying yours? I wonder if Play-Asia will include it, they are a bit hit and miss with preorder bonuses.

I'm buying here http://www.nin-nin-game.fr/index.php
French dude based in Japan 

[adverse]

Friend managed to pick this up today at a shop that sells early.  Will go tomorrow and get a copy (as long as it has the bonus guide).

[Geezer]

Sweet, let us know how the game is if you get it!
I've just ordered from PA, they shifted the price up a bit to $72.90, had I been a day earlier it would have been $68.90

[adverse]

Picture of the package and the guidebook.  Guidebook btw doesn't have any crazy art or anything, just a stage by stage breakdown.  I'll post some impressions after playing a bit.

Edit: One thing really nice about the guide book though is it has full stage maps.  The beehive part will probably be pretty helpful.

[adverse]

Ok....people are going to hate a lot about this port.

First, the loading is BAD.  Just to get into the main menu it seems to take at least two minutes.  This is with the game installed. 

The menus are really poorly laid out.  To access tate mode, you're going to have to go into the Visual config, then switch it to either Tate A or B, and then that takes effect when you actually get into the game. 

There's loading on the goddamn art gallery.

Some of the achievements seem like they aren't popping for me for whatever reason.

X-mode is not available at the start, I assume it gets unlocked.  You also get no continues to start off with, which is fine but also really disconcerting when it says Continue? 9, 8, 7.. and you hit start and nothing happens.  Continues are added as you play FYI. 

Once you get past the awful menus and awful loading, the game itself is rather intact and still really fun.  You'll notice slight changes to certain patterns I think.  I'm gonna mess around with the aspect ratio a bit and see if I can make it any prettier.

[EOJ]

Sounds pretty bad. I went to cancel my play-asia preorder but they're already "preparing my order". Damn.
No scanline option I assume?

It seems like the guy who made it doesn't know how to program very well. Having 2 minute loading times on a 7 year old 2D game ported to the X360 is inexcusable.

[adverse]

2 minutes is an exaggeration, or at least the loading gets better after playing a little bit.  It's about 30 seconds to get into the main menu, and 20 to get into the mode you choose (black or white).

No scanline options.  You can change the overscan, the aspect ratio and the horizontal/vertical orientation.  That's it. 

Haven't unlocked the remixed music yet...will try to.

[EOJ]

Ok, thanks a lot for the info. Is there some smoothing filter on the graphics, or are they just something like "nearest neighbor"?

[Ast-Kot]

Play-asia sent my copy of the game today  I have supposed that the porting team used to view ather team produtcs as RF2 to make a good game..No scan-line and no filter on option as in RF2? one year to realese a port a like this?

[adverse]

Yeah, it really shows that most of the work was done by one guy here.  5pb are really a pretty amateur company.  No wonder this isn't being advertised on Xbox live (despite the fact Chaos Head Noah is).

Ok, thanks a lot for the info. Is there some smoothing filter on the graphics, or are they just something like "nearest neighbor"?

Yes, there is smoothing/no smoothing. 

I beat the game with Exy with one continue and X-mode did not unlock.  Neither did the remixed music?  Wtf...? 

You know I have to stop and hold my head a little here.  The whole point of X-mode was to give beginners something to play around with, to learn the levels.  At all the DOJBLEX showings I went to, they had everyone playing X-mode.  And now you're asking random players to clear the game (yes, continues seem to be regularly increasing), possibly with all three characters (?) to unlock the stupid thing??  I mean I'm pretty speechless.  I can not think of a more ass backwards way to make a game.

More menu shit, going from black label mode to the main screen takes like 40 seconds, lol.  I'm also not sure how to save my score for the leaderboards, maybe you have to hit the record option to do it and then not continue.   Will test it out at some point. 

Oh another menu thing, for whatever reason there are sections of the menu where you highlight something then have to hit A twice to select it...like the first A is a verification "do you really want to choose this?"  Small but just an example of the non-functionality of the whole thing.

Lastly, slowdown is very well emulated in the game.  At least regarding that, I think they did the job right.  Game itself is mostly intact and I'm having a pretty good time unlocking achievements and trying to get my score higher.

[EOJ]

A guy on 2Ch just unlocked X-mode. It happened right as he passed the 6 hour mark of total play time, so it seems to be a time-release thing. Pretty dumb.

Everyone there is ripping this port apart, by the way. They all seem to think it's garbage. And there are some major bugs as well.

[adverse]

A guy on 2Ch just unlocked X-mode. It happened right as he passed the 6 hour mark of total play time, so it seems to be a time-release thing.

Everyone there is ripping this port apart, by the way. They all seem to think it's garbage. And there are some major bugs as well.

Shit, keep me updated please.  Definitely curious about bugs.  One thing I noticed is that you can no longer laser through the third boss' fourth attack (the quick swiping bullet whirls), that you will have to switch to shot.   But that's not a huge deal.

When my arm feels a little better (this plus SF4 for a week have not been good for it lol), I'll hop back on.

[EOJ]

From what I gather the bug is in White label. Not really sure what it is yet though.

The practice mode is another thing people are complaining about - you can only choose the stage, your ship, and your doll. No option to start at the boss, adjust rank settings, hyper amounts, or anything else. You always start each stage with zero hypers in practice mode. This really pales in comparison to the PS2 version's practice mode.

Another thing that has me worried is people saying the "timing" is slightly off, making some parts chain differently, or feel weird. That's the most disappointing thing I've read about this game to be honest.

If only Mihara would do a PS2 black label port...

[adverse]

If only Mihara would do a PS2 black label port...

Haha, seriously.  Man, he sure had a lot of venom for the programmer of this game too.  Fair talk now that we've seen the final product.

So, I just beat Hibachi.  All you need to do is select 1 loop and then use a bunch of continues to take him out.  Lame achievement.

Good news I'm steadily improving my score, just got up to 70 mil.  Hopefully I can beat what I did in the arcade.

[adverse]

So yeah, all achievements in this game are retarded.   

I did all of this in about 7 hours today:

http://live.xbox.com/en-US/profile/Achievements/ViewAchievementDetails.aspx?compareTo=adversity1&tid=%09]%3agj%2fl3

Blegh.

[Goongrave[KNS]]

Hey adverse some questions for you:

The 20-30 seconds loading time are experienced the first time you enter the game? I mean you load the game, 30 sec to get to credits than 30 seconds to choose white label/black label then end of loading time? I hope you don't have to wait so much every time you restart a game (cause you died/missed a chain).

When you say that the tate option takes effect only when you enter the game, does it mean you have to browse through the menus in YOKO? O_O

I hope they are gonna release some patches to fix these design flaws, i mean c'mon we are in 2009 you can't make this n00bish mistakes anymore T_T

[Lunchbox]

It seems that, at the end, Famitsu wasn?t so wrong (according with that ppl of 2ch and somo of u). That scares me. ^_^U

[adverse]

Hey adverse some questions for you:

The 20-30 seconds loading time are experienced the first time you enter the game? I mean you load the game, 30 sec to get to credits than 30 seconds to choose white label/black label then end of loading time? I hope you don't have to wait so much every time you restart a game (cause you died/missed a chain).

When you say that the tate option takes effect only when you enter the game, does it mean you have to browse through the menus in YOKO? O_O

I hope they are gonna release some patches to fix these design flaws, i mean c'mon we are in 2009 you can't make this n00bish mistakes anymore T_T

Ok one thing they got right is that there is a 'restart' option which is pretty much instant.  That's really nice. 

The worst load times are when loading the main menu and going in and out of the modes.  Just tedious.  You will come to hate the poor resolution 'Now Loading' message...

Yeah, you have to browse the menus in YOKO.  It's fucking ridiculous. 

Don't count on a patch.  These people couldn't program their way out of a box.  Honestly I'm no longer blaming this on Sakarai Masaki, I'm blaming this on 5pb as a whole.  Games this fucked up just shouldn't be released.  Playing X-mode is like a kick in the dick to all DOJ players, an insult. 

If these people have the temerity to put out a console version of Ketsui, they better be prepared to be despised by fans if it's anything like this half-assed effort.  I'm sure Mihara is going to have some hilarious shit to say oh about the 20th or so.  Looking forward to reading him!   

All hate spewed, I'm still happy to have Black Label on a home system, and I think I'll continue working towards besting my high scores and hopefully chaining parts of stage 5.  I would say I got the value of what I payed for, but just barely.  If you're on the fence about it, save your money.  Or actually, buy Street Fighter IV.  Much better value for the cash. 

[drboom]

Being a stcikler for port perfection, I have to ask - is it a perfect port of the game itself. I think I could excuse a lot in terms of menus and loading times if the port was perfect. Especially if I don't need to drop ~700 on a BL pcb.

[zakk]

So what I'm reading through all the complaining about menus(?), achievements (whatever) and perplexing hate for a mode you don't even have to play, is this is probably no worse than the Ibara and Mushi ports.

[Udderdude]

A guy on 2Ch just unlocked X-mode. It happened right as he passed the 6 hour mark of total play time, so it seems to be a time-release thing. Pretty dumb.

Everyone there is ripping this port apart, by the way. They all seem to think it's garbage. And there are some major bugs as well.

Any info on those bugs?  That has me really worried ..

[trev1976]

oh well mines on its way  f**k it i think ill just keep hold of it either way , cheaper than buying a BL PCB and i own the original DOJ PCB so can always go back to that , is a shame tho when the DOJ PS2 port was pretty much perfect  

[EOJ]

Being a stcikler for port perfection, I have to ask - is it a perfect port of the game itself. I think I could excuse a lot in terms of menus and loading times if the port was perfect.

Far from perfect. As I mentioned earlier in this thread:

Another thing that has me worried is people saying the "timing" is slightly off, making some parts chain differently, or feel weird. That's the most disappointing thing I've read about this game to be honest.

From what I've read, there are differences in nearly every stage (stage 1 seems pretty accurate though). It's not as close to the PCB as the PS2 Daioujou was to its PCB. It's probably more on par with the Ibara port in terms of accuracy.

[GaijinPunch]

Don't the RF games have scanlines filter added (as a patch). Anyways, glad I got my PCB.  Doesn't sound like I'm missing much. Those load times seem quite unforgiveable.