So Konami released Super Bomberman Collection today, and it's a pretty interesting retro compilation, for both good and disappointing reasons.
Based on the game credits, programming was done by Red Art Games with Konami providing assistance to the team (a technical advisor, sound engineers, an artist).
First: the good. The team clearly has the right ambition – there are fresh translations of the Japan-only games (4 and 5) and the front-end is quite attractive. A lot of care and attention to detail has gone into providing gorgeous-yet-snappy menus where you can unbox each game, look at the cartridges, look at the manuals, all that good stuff that is tied to the releases of the games themselves.
Plus there's GameShare support for online play with one copy of the game.
And the addition of a gallery is great, there is concept art and plenty of scanned artwork and posters etc. as well.
The core issue I have with this collection are related to the emulation of the games themselves:
- …noticeable input lag. I have the originals on Super Famicom and they are immediately responsive – so it's not the source content. Moving Bomberman around corners quickly and making micro movements doesn't feel as responsive as it should. You can see what I mean here – the cursor moves after my finger has already left the button: https://streamable.com/ejvnvg (recorded at 240fps)
- The CRT filter is terrible. There is no attempt to emulate the unique properties of a CRT (like the phosphors), you get basic scanlines and they don't even line up with the sprites! This is not how the games were originally designed to be viewed.
- The graphics aren't correctly scaled if you choose aspect ratios other than 8:7 (the default is 4:3), so you get shimmering on moving objects, this was immediately noticeable on the introduction scene to Super Bomberman 2.
Based on the IP notices attached to the game it seems it uses:
- SNESticle for SNES emulation
- cddNES for NES/Famicom games
- URP_RetroCRTShader for the CRT Shader
If the developers can fix the issues it'll be a great collection. It just needs more work. If you're not sensitive to lag and don't mind raw pixels you'll have a good time.
Posted by LightPad
5 Comments
Input lag has been a real theme with a lot of these emulation-based games. Same issue exists with games like the Capcom Arcade Collections which have atrocious lag too.
In the shmup world the Switch is known to be at best 1f laggier than a good PS4 port, and at worst unplayable (essentially, if you care about performance; 6f+ at 60 FPS).
Yeah I haven’t been able to play much yet, but the two big (non game) things i’ve noticed is that the ui presentation is really good, I like that you can “open” the games and then look at the cartridge or read the manual. and the CRT filter is *terrible* compared to high quality ones like the ones NSO uses it feels like a mismatched overlay more than anything, and I really love crt filters so it’s a bit of a bummer.
I have the original super bomberman 3~5 and have played the emulated versions. I never knew there was such lag? I even played the emulated versions online…so am I just not sensitive to this latency/lag?
SNESticle, wow that’s an emulator I haven’t heard for a while. I didn’t know it was still around. Others emulators have come out with more functions and bet accuracy. Or am I mistaken, and development has continued, and make it decent?
Soooooo, it’s shit then?