Here's the official press release, straight from the horse's dragon's mouth: http://www.forever-entertainment.co...make_i_panzer_dragoon_ii_zwei_remake_a01.html I beg of you, Sega... PLEASE don't screw these up, and maybe they'll sell enough to justify Panzer Dragoon Saga also getting the same treatment?
Seems kinda weird that the entire "announcement" is just a little bit of text. Not even a screenshot. What's the point of that? Are we supposed to be excited about something without having the slightest clue of what it's going to be like? If they're trying to hype up the game, 7 lines of text is a pretty weak attempt to do that.
Between that most basic of announcements and Forever Entertainment's track record, would YOU trust this company with remaking one of the Saturn's most beloved franchises? Earlier this year, Polygon managed to interview most of the key players from Team Andromeda for what might just be the definitive retrospective on Panzer Dragoon Saga, and while many are now scattered across various developers, I got the impression quite a few would love the chance to revisit the series or even supervise a remaster/remake done properly. Instead, as is so often the case with modern day Sega, it seems like they're going for more of a budget effort... just look at what could have been if the more ambitious Shenmue I & II HD treatment was allowed to continue rather than the patch-heavy alternative we ended up getting! P.S. M2 has strongly hinted that it's now perfected Saturn emulation, so there's a good chance the original Panzer Dragoon trilogy may yet surface on contemporary platforms.
It also doesn't help that the game is a prime example of the Saturn's lackluster library. Panzer Dragoon is like Starfox 64, but with the good gameplay sucked out.
I absolutely love M2! They are just about the only company who gets how a proper port/emulation i supposed to be made. Far too many companies just don’t get something as simple as integer scaling and scanlines without blur. What’s the point in playing something that looks like you smeared your ass all over the screen! I don’t get it All but Zero Gunner 2 of the Psikyo-stuff on the Switch looks like this, which really, really sucks as I would like to play them, especially now that they have been released physically Allowing d3t (who also did Shenmue HD) to do the recent Mega Drive Collection was also a big mistake. Sure the scanlines can look fine, but no integer scaling means pixel shimmering and the audio skips and cracks up every now and then. These games are litterally a billions years old by now. How hard is this to get right?! ...oh and let’s not forget about the input lag, making some of the games borderline unplayable. I have the Switch-version in the mail, but I don’t expect it to fare much better than the PS4-version I already own. (I’m a moron for buying it twice, I know. But I just want to play Phantasy Star IV on the go.) Speaking of Phantasy Star. Been playing the M2 port of PS1 on the Switch over the last few days, and I can’t get over how good it is! The map screen is a godsend and the more approachable Ages mode is a really great addition. M2 fucking rocks! Oh and one last thing. The rumors say that Sega have ditched Atgames for the Mega Drive Mini in favor of a Japanese company. What if that company turns out to be M2?! :O That would mean pretty much perfection! :O :O
I first read about the source code being missing for Panzer Dragoon Saga in the early 2000s, so it's likely this was lost during Sega of Japan's corporate restructuring (which is also how the raw data for several Model 2 games was misplaced, including The House Of The Dead, Daytona USA and Virtua Fighter 2 - the latter two of these could only be reissued on more recent hardware using partial emulation solutions). Was it ever confirmed that Panzer Dragoon Zwei also suffered some kind of data loss? This previously remaining a Saturn exclusive title for so long might be an indication of that being the case.
Just a quick correction to my earlier post - the Panzer Dragoon Saga code supposedly wasn't lost during the Dreamcast-era corporate restructuring I mentioned, but rather when an attempted hard drive backup didn't work properly. When you're dealing with such important data, it always makes sense to check your new copy ahead of destroying the original sources...
Shame they couldn't work on decent games.. saturn is my worst ever console, was good for old school 2d but pretty crap at 3d.. will say nights was sweet tho, probably best game on the system
They probably didn't consider it to be important data though. If you've never worked on software you would probably be surprised by just how little companies care about code they don't support anymore. There is lots of stuff that only exists now because the people that were working on it backed it up.
I forgot to mention this before, but an artist involved with the Saturn conversion of HOTD once mentioned that AM1 sent over a hard drive containing all the original arcade game's source code and assets, including quite a few textures that didn't make the final cut (plus a few that appear to have been from an earlier ill-fated project based around the Judge Dredd license, with some of these remaining in the final ROM). The fact this is one of many Sega titles now believed to be partially lost to time in its raw form points to bad HDD backups as the reason for so much of the company's data misplacement, and SOA's internal solution of burning everything to CDR archives in the early 2000s is hardly much of an improvement - especially as it's likely most of these discs can no longer be read due to the poor way they were stored.
