My only concern is with the Xbox version’s more controversial effects (e.g. bloom; motion blur); does anyone know if these can be turned off or reduced?
Not yet, however the FAQ says these are new post-processing effects - which is reflected in the much subtler implementation of bloom we can see in the pre-order trailer. They've effectively been redone.

Anyway, changing the subject - save anywhere in Shenmue 1 is a big deal. This is the kind of improvement that justifies the HD port, besides porting Shenmue for its own sake, of course.

This will be a big help to new players who have never experienced Shenmue before. Although, I'm wondering if I will still continue to save only in the bedroom, just purely out of habit.

He did a nice job explaining that the assets just weren't there for the cutscene ratio. I don't think it'll be that jarring to be honest.

I had no idea the original game was so intensive and complicated in coding. It sounds like it was a miracle to port it at all...

It still astounds me that after years upon years of pleading, nearly $7 million invested in a sequel they have no involvement with that SEGA would be so afraid a re-release would not yield them a return from passionate fans.

I really, really hope this wakes them up and a proper in-house Shenmue IV comes alive for PS5(let's face it, that's where it'll end up if it comes). So, does anyone else play Xbox One backwards compatible games? With a couple exceptions, like Ninja Gaiden, there's no widescreen support. I've been playing Knights of the Old Republic, and honestly, I didn't even notice the aspect ratio after the first 10 minutes. And Shenmue will have widescreen gameplay. So, I really don't think it'll be a big deal.

I preordered the game and one of the major reasons why I wanted a version for PC was because of the aging Dreamcast system and the GDROMS are not going to last forever. The alternative of course was DEMUL and ROMS which of course fall into a gray area in terms of legality at least for the ROM portion.
If you have a working Dreamcast, consider looking into one of the optical drive replacements available. It's an alternative that uses the original hardware but you don't need to worry about moving parts wearing out. I bought a GDEmu board for mine several years ago and dumped every single disc I own so I have digital copies that will never degrade. Games load from flash storage and load times are amazing, much faster than from disc media. Installation is pretty easy, you unscrew and pull out the original drive and the devices slide right into the drive connector on the mainboard. In addition to GDEmu there's a USB based one that may be easier to obtain but GDEmu seems to be the more favorable option as it has 100% compatibility with all retail games. There are also 2 different vendors that make HDMI adapters for Dreamcast. There's a cheap one that Adam reviewed recently, the results are somewhat blurry but better than old composite cables, and there's the Akura HDMI box which is kind of expensive but the quality matches what you'd get from a VGA box.

There's never been a better time to upgrade your Dreamcast for the modern era.
You're right, they did use a better texture. It makes me wonder why they didn't use a high-quality texture for Roy's jacket?
Who's Roy?

The texture thing has a fairly simple explanation. The original textures were compressed in PowerVR format for the Dreamcast's graphics hardware. They can't be used as-is because the texture format is hardware specific, and none of Sega's previous Dreamcast ported titles (ex. Sonic Adventure, Phantasy Star Online, Jet Set Radio) used the original files either. In some cases like Sonic Adventure they took the original format (PVR) and made up their own GVR format for the Gamecube and later ports.

They basically had two options:
1. Unpack the already compressed textures and repack them in formats applicable to the platforms they're porting to now
or
2. If they have them, which apparently they do, take the uncompressed source textures that they compressed for PowerVR and package those up for other platforms instead.

Although the PVR texture compression format has been documented since DC homebrew started way back in 2000, they would actually have to write new code to be able to use those files as-is. Option 2 was probably the easiest option. This explains why we're getting better textures, but the same audio. The CRI middleware used for voice playback is not hardware specific and is available for other platforms already. For the music, AM2's DTPK music synthesis player had to be ported from AICA ARM to x86 for the Xbox port of Shenmue 2. (Shenmue 1 also used the same format, but I haven't checked to see if it's the same version. That driver was used by multiple AM2 games and some of the DSF ripping tools are aware of it.) Here's the interesting part though: The XBOX had 64-channel audio mixing in hardware just like the Dreamcast did. Essentially it gives them the ability to use separate channels for different instruments and not have to mix everything together manually in software which can be expensive. Modern gaming hardware isn't really optimized for synthesized music anymore though. If you look at the PS4 tech specs on Wikipedia, the only thing they list for audio processing is a variant of AMD TrueAudio, which is primarily for doing DSP effects and surround sound.

This gave me another interesting thought. Were they actually able to port the AM2 music driver to modern hardware? I don't know enough about the capabilities of modern console audio hardware to speculate on that. Back in 2012 I played with DSF support in one of the open source audio players on iOS to try and come up with speed increases so devices in the iPhone 4 era could play back DSF's at full speed which is when I learned just how heavy on CPU the mixing and DSP effects were. Disabling channels and mixing at lower quality had significant impacts on performance, enough to go from stuttering to full speed. (Modern phones now can handle the same AICA emulation code as PC full speed.) Unless they have a direct route to take on music with modern hardware I honestly can't see them implementing their own replacements. IF they can't do it in hardware anymore, the easiest route for them would be to just replace all of the music tracks with streamed (recorded) versions. Based on the other choices they've made, I could see this happening and it would go part of the way to explain the 30GB space requirement that Sega lists on the Steam page. Especially since the XBOX port retained separate folders for each disc with a bunch of duplicate files and it's easier for them to retain that structure than re-working things into shared locations. But it would also make some people wonder why they didn't do the same thing they did with the textures and just use the high quality versions like Shenmue Online had. I guess the only counter-argument I can come up with that those tracks weren't always identical to the 1&2 game versions, they could have been the "demo" tracks that were presented to Suzuki-san before being converted down to AM2's sound format and it wouldn't be good to change them.

I'll be interested in seeing whether there's any correlation between this proposal and how they actually handled the music. If it ends up being all streamed, then we've already got a good explanation as to why.

I really hope the vile Xbox motion blur effect from the Shenmue 2 fights can be turned off. That would be awesome.

I'm pretty happy with the HD versions. The mere fact they exist finally is a miracle.

Shenmue and Shenmue 2 are two of the most innovative games ever made, and they still have extra special place in the hearts of almost everyone who played them. That alone makes them eligible to way better treatment than the one they recently have had so far.

I am aware of the low-price tag, the limited development budget, and the joy and excitement of walking into a game store to buy a brand-new Shenmue game off the display shelf. But allow me to ask you this simple question: what are you going out of that game store with? It isn’t a remake, not a remaster and not even a direct port. It indeed has, first and foremost, an identity crisis. so I’d simply call it: a lazy port.

When I take a look at recent (and even last-gen) HD remasters, I feel how lazy and probably rushed this port really is. I can understand and forgive the 30fps, but everything else is totally unforgiven: compressed audio, a mix of 4:3 and 16:9, no reworked models, poor looking textures, missing Passport/VMU content, saves not compatible with Shenmue 3, Denuvo etc …


When I started to read your post I fully expected to disagree with you, but I don't think you're being irrational. I just don't believe that it was realistic to expect Sega to fund a top-down remaster to make all of those extra things possible. I don't think anyone (including the people that frequent this site) would've anticipated the re-release completely taking off the way that it has. I don't think Sega was being lazy per se, I just think they simply dedicated the amount of resources that they believed were warranted for the project.

It's hard for us to be objective about something that we're all so passionate about, but based strictly off past sales figures, Shenmue probably didn't warrant the kind of remaster you were looking for (even with the success of the KS for Shenmue III). If Sega had known how crazy the hype would actually end up being, perhaps they would've devoted more resources to it, but for me, I'm just happy that it exists! I think that the re-release will definitely captivate a new audience of gamers despite the issues that it may have. There's a much more diverse and patient audience of gamers than there was back in '99, and Shenmue's pace isn't as radical in the year 2018 as it might have seemed back then.

Esppiral wrote: I will mod the hell out of it.

when it comes out, i want to see someone mod/downgrade shenmue 3 and make it playable on the dreamcast.

I appreciated how he tried to bring rationality and balance to certain threads. Spaghetti will be missed and I hope he comes back one day.

It's getting to the point now where people are actually making up problems about these remasters to be worried about. Give it a rest.

There is no emulation. It's a source code port, being created by a company who literally exist to convert this kind code as faithfully as possible. That's why SEGA aren't doing it themselves. You can throw as many nonsense technological sounding things about SH-4 processors and audio codecs as you like but that doesn't make your baseless accusations any more solid.

Literally was just thinking about something similar, but hardware assisted modding. Been a pipe dream for years (although, after DreamPi and GDemu, what isn't possible anymore from the homebrew community?) for the modem port to be utilized as RAM expansion ala Saturn carts.

San Andreas style Shenmue with your modding ideas and expertise would be so cool. Although, realistically, the solid state benefits of GDemu essentially do this without sacrificing the load screen entirely or any code modding.

EDIT, this idea is very much in layperson terms. I'm no programmer. For all I know somehow could be possible without extra RAM. PS2 had DVD and double the RAM for a much bigger map of GTASA compared to Shenmue I (or even Shenmue 2?), although much less detailed or interactive. Perhaps 16MB isn't actually enough to stream load either Shenmue. Anyway, I digress...

I actually attempted to do this once:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nR9GcbIONIg

Sadly the game engine doesn't like it too much.

I don't think anybody is trying to suggest that these are the perfect dream ports of Shenmue.

Even I'll admit that there's stuff I wish they could have implemented. It'd be great to see 16:9 cutscenes. 4k? I'd love to play it on my 4k monitor. Obviously these things would make it a definitively better port; you'd be hard-pressed to find somebody who doesn't think this.

But are these problems enough to write off the entire port? I wouldn't say so. In the grand scheme of things some of these criticisms are fairly small. It's not like d3t and SEGA aren't putting effort into these ports. We could have had a lazily done emulated port with zero enhancements, but that's not the case. Things I rarely see the people who are overly saddened by these ports mention is features such as saving anywhere, both dubs, short loading times, modern controls etc. I'm not saying that people should ignore the shortcomings because there's good things too. But when you feign ignorance to these things and focus exclusively on the negatives then obviously you're going to be disappointed.

Do we deserve better? It's a tough one to answer. Technically we don't really deserve anything. Only a couple of months back getting any sort of remaster seemed like an impossibility with SEGA barely uttering a single word about Shenmue. Some are so quick to forget about this. I know that there are posters here who have never uttered a single positive thing about Shenmue, but even still, apply some context and realise that we're actually getting something pretty decent (albeit with a couple of shortcomings) instead of acting so ungrateful and demanding we have it better.

To summarise, I just don't get how people can get this upset over these ports and make SEGA and d3t out to be lazy and awful when what we're actually getting is going to be a well crafted, decent port (after many years of asking for it) with a few drawbacks.

I wouldn't say that the graphics are cartoony, the graphics were always a bit cartoonish, it is just bad for the current year.

One of the reasons I got into Shenmue was because I was always a computer nerd and I liked how much the game pushed hardware to its limits. Shenmue III has the graphics of your typical korean MMO or phone game. It isn't impressive, and sure as shit isn't hardware pushing. A good example of a modern stylized (actually more of an idealized reality) asian game would be FFXV. I was actually genuinely amazed when I realized that his opening cutsence was being rendered in real time:

https://youtu.be/Cwc6TyCTjEM?t=1m43s

That is what I am expecting of Shenmue III. The current graphics that they shown to the public is very disappointing, to say the least.

But if it can be done by us at home, why wouldn't a professional developer be able to do it?

Just because people have made it work in specific places doesn't mean those changes just 'work' across every other possible moment and eventuality in the game. Its entirely possible they have tried all the same tweaks we have as a community and found it was too hit and miss and time consuming in reality. For example, just saying it's easy to just move the camera back to get a 16:9 ratio is daft.. Sure.. and that might work most of the time, but there could be a future cutscene where doing that even slightly pushes the camera inside another object... Can't move forwards, can't move backwards... What about the many characters that freeze when they leave the confines of the 4:3 border, add new animations too??

We are all talking like we are professional devs with full access to the code and shitting all over thier efforts as if they were lazy or incompetent. Don't be so arrogant and so sure of yourselves.. have some humility.. (people in general, not specifically you mrandyk)

D3T is a capable outfit filled with professionals.
The problems/ shortcomings that are mentioned in various threads have nothing to do with them as a team, or their work ethic.

Let’s face it: everything comes down to the budget.
Sega most likely did not “break the bank” for these HD ports/remasters. Had they added another zero on their check, then we could have gotten 16:9 cutscenes/ 4K gameplay/ online forklift racing/ What’s Shenmue/ Passport features/ updated textures/ etc.

So, let’s not be too harsh. It’s a discounted collection that you can get in the US for about $25. Besides, they could always make further improvements to the collection via future patches.

The good news: the game is selling well beyond expectations, which will undoubtedly have a positive effect on the franchise in the future.

But if it can be done by us at home, why wouldn't a professional developer be able to do it?

In a related question, if it's so easy to be done at home, why haven't any of these hobbyists turned pro and pitched the project to Sega? And yet it's the professional dev teams getting called "lazy" by the semi-anonymous people watching from the sidelines.
In a related question, if it's so easy to be done at home, why haven't any of these hobbyists turned pro and pitched the project to Sega?
They have. Blit pitched it to them over 5 years ago, and Sega turned it down. This is a situation of easier said than done. Many developers have pitched games to Sega before and gotten turned down. Other examples would be the Sonic skateboarding game pitch that Borman over at AssemblerGames found a prototype of and released, as well as more recently the Jet Set Radio Evolution pitch that Sega also rejected. Sonic Mania is the result of an existing relationship that Christian Whitehead formed with Sega after having handled the 3 mobile ports prior to that, and significant fan support over his initial YouTube video proposing the first one. The same situation is not appropriate for a professional company to get themselves into, it's more likely they'd get legal on their ass instead if they're trying to get a pitch to go viral by posting it publicly.

I should also mention that some of us making these comments do have a background in software development. I'd love the opportunity to fix this myself, but that's just not a realistic situation.
D3T is a capable outfit filled with professionals.
The problems/ shortcomings that are mentioned in various threads have nothing to do with them as a team, or their work ethic.

Let’s face it: everything comes down to the budget.
Sega most likely did not “break the bank” for these HD ports/remasters. Had they added another zero on their check, then we could have gotten 16:9 cutscenes/ 4K gameplay/ online forklift racing/ What’s Shenmue/ Passport features/ updated textures/ etc.
This 100x over. It is entirely down to the price point of the games and budget. Despite being upset about the lack of investment in the ports, I actually think they made a sound decision targeting the budget price point from a business standpoint. It will maximize the number of people who can afford the game, and potentially help in the future. (As long as it doesn't end up being shitty and the reviews tank as a result hurting sales after release)

None of this B.S. about "well, maybe it's hard for them to only affect a specific scene" is valid - No, it's not. Easiest way to describe this so it can be well understood is just look at the debug build of Shenmue that's floating around. Every scene has a unique ID that you can select & play back with that build. The full game, despite not having a scene select, works the same way. If they don't want to try and modify the game data it's very simple for them to throw in an kludge on top of existing logic that checks the current Scene ID and applies a camera modification specific to one scene as Esppirial suggested. We can even do this already just using cheat device codes, as they support conditional logic.

The games have already been finished because they need at least 6 weeks for manufacturing and distribution. What they've shown lately is exactly what we're getting and it's unlikely they'll want to change much in a later patch. For the price they're targeting, I'm satisfied with what they've done. Would I like better, yes, but I don't think the game would sell as well if they were targeting say $10 more for example and then it might not be worth it.

Best case scenario is they do well and go back and remaster the first two when the series is done. I know some people are hoping the success of 3 results in Sega picking up 4 themselves instead of an external company like Deep Silver, and I think this will go a long way towards making that happen.

Just can't help but feel what a missed oppertunity this was. I mean how much would it have taken to actually spend some time on the game and update the graphics? It looks old, probably will play old too and because of that, there is probably a bunch of potential fans that won't bother with the game.

You are entitled to your opinion but consider this..

Many cases rereleasing games as HD reboots have failed.

The first special edition monkey island had a lot of criticism for voice acting and graphical decisions that took away from the original monkey island feel.

Silent Hill rereleases were also controversial to the originals.

Gabriel Knight rerelease, many fans including new players prefer the originals

I can go on, realize the situation here..

1) Shenmue 1 was exclusive to Dreamcast and out of print for some time now, the GDroms will eventually fail. for new players, at some point Dreamcast hardware will dry up.

2) Shenmue II was never released in the US for Dreamcast outside of PAL versions imported, Shenmue IIx was released for xbox but also out of print now, the xbox 360 emulator doesnt load everything properly which also hinders and makes it difficult to obtain the game.

3) Realize that we had literally no news about Shenmue continuing let alone a re release spanning from 2002 to 2015 for shenmue III and a remastered rerelease in 2018. If you date back shenmue 1s release date in 99 thats almost 20 years that have lapsed from the first game. Understand that fans had been pushing for continuations and releases for roughly over a decade.

4)We are getting both games at a cheap price with both Japanese and English dubs and 1080p support. As much as I would love a remaster, I highly doubt SEGA would take the risk on a full retextured game. If sales are good for the game, then perhaps that will send a message that there is demand for a remake of the games similar to what occurred with Yakuza.

Honestly I wish Shenmue 2 never had time skip, theres so much more to do and see than the first game.

I agree. But I disagree with it being needed in the first game too.
Personally I could never understand someone wanting to willingly progress things forward. A lot of the charm was in moving at the pace of the world around you. Shenmue rewards with patience. It's almost like the game is teaching the player the same thing that Ryo is having to learn.

I'm back only for this post.

... Or a QTE prompt.

Could be a counter indicator, à la the Arkham series.
It's neither.

https://abload.de/img/fightingthugsindicato9jf1p.jpg

Looks like a lock-on indicator. There's also a forklift in the background, and what look like newspapers on the floor.

The move Ryo is doing looks really similar to Akira's Houken at 1 minute 54 in this video: https://youtu.be/B9jm6lbJj54?t=113

High res:

https://abload.de/img/fight_with_thugsqrev6.jpg

Weirdest thing here: I tried the demo for Kiwami 2, and was thinking I was going to be ridiculously overcome with nostalgia and ear-to-ear grins... but it just didn't really happen. Seeing everything in the newest engine just doesn't really do it for me like I thought it would. Turns out the original PS2 character models are a big part of the charm for me, I guess.

Which got me to thinking how awesome it would be if they included the original models as alternate costumes (sort of like how the PS1 model of Snake was available in MGSV: Ground Zeroes), even if only as DLC or something.
Won't happen, but that still would have been amazing to see.