Fascinating! It's a crying shame the publishers made you guys use tank controls, and it's an even bigger shame this is considered "one of the worst PS1 games." It controls poorly and the camera isn't very good, but there was so much potential here. I thought the level design was a lot of fun, and the production value was excellent. Very interesting hearing you explain why the camera gets weird when you turn near a wall, that makes a lot of sense.
"just because they are well known" It's not just because he's well known, but also because he did a review of this exact game in which he described how amazing the game was on so many levels (such as detail) except the controls. It's very reliant to his channel as a reviewer who almost exclusively does platform games. Also Nitro Rad only has like 100k subs, which is a lot, but it's not like a super massive popularity or anything. Edit: As a note Nitro Rad's video on this game is probably the whole reason GameHut even released this video, there seems to be a clear connection between points talked about and release dates of the videos.
@@psychonauts0 How else would people know of that review if he wasn't well known? How else would people know him? I've seen his channel, his review(s)". Rascal isn't solely relevant to him. Getting upvotes isn't solely relevant to him. It's usually relevant to popularity.
"use these controls like this popular game that is compete different in style!" it boggles the mind how much the suits don't understand their customers....
3rd person 3D games were a totally new thing back then and Tomb Raider obviously did something right. I totally understand their decision, even if it was the wrong one.
mario 64 came out in 96. the dual analog controller for ps1 came out in 97. rascal came out in 98. i think the publishers had enough time to figure out that tomb raider controls are not necessarily the best for a 3d action game.
"It's using all kinds of clever techniques to stop the textures from distorting, which was a big problem on the PlayStation 1." New GameHut video incoming?
From what I know the playstation didn't have any Z buffer, and relied heavily on sorting tris using the painter's algorithm. So I think that the game is using some object midpoint algorithm, and sorting on that. It'd be interesting to actually see what's going on.
IIRC the PS1, like a lot of 3D hardware of the era, lacked perspective-correct texturing and used much less computationally demanding affine texture mapping instead. The effect beingthat the textures appear to warp and wobble as your orientation towards the triangles they're mapped to changes. As I understand it, one common solution is to tessellate (break bigger triangles into smaller triangles) the geometry closest to the player, as smaller triangles meant less noticeable warping. I'd love to hear about what else clever developers came up with.
It's not just the z-buffer. The GPU fundamentally lacked perspective correction for textures on a hardware level. Obviously, there were ways around that (as ControlCardPin and Tanner Schultz pointed out), but it was easily visible in games that didn't take the time to fix it in software (the Twisted Metal series in a HUGE offender on that count... just try getting near any vertical surface in that game and watch the universe warp around you...). I'd say that it was the various ways developers came up with to combat the problem that game the PS1 much of it's very distinctive graphical look (such as shimmering walls, etc.). Although, it's worth pointing out that the competition at the time also had issues with textures (the 4kB limit in N64 giving it's blurriness, the quadrangles in Saturn leading to a similar problem as the PS1, for different reasons, and so on) with perhaps only the failed 3DO (ironically) being the only one without a major issue in that department. Those were some pioneering times. But, hey, they all beat flat-shading!
Psygnosis were full derp at this moment in time with suggestions. This is the company that changed Wipeout 2097's name to Wipeout XL in the US, as they thought Americans would wonder what happened to the 2095 other sequels! (not a joke)
As a PlayStation fan boy, please make a director's cut of Rascal, Jon! I know Sonic R DX would be amazing, but seeing this game the way it was meant to be would be incredible. The way the textures don't warp and other visual techniques are almost unheard of in 3d games on PS1
The comments ask him to do a director's cut for every single game that he makes a video on. If we really want another director's cut we should pick just one and stick with it. He can't make them all.
Yeah, after commenting, I realized that he probably doesn't even have all of the resources to completely rebuild the game from the ground up. Sonic 3D Blast involved some tweaks, but Rascal is pretty messed up haha. This prototype is just so much more impressive graphically and control-wise than the final product.
@@ReplayStation I'd love to see more of his prototypes released somehow. If we could get "DX" versions of games that'd be killer. I mean, he's got a Patreon, right?
I flew out to the UK 20 years ago to see a batch of Psygnosis games for the magazine I was writing for, and I remember seeing a demo of this at TT when it was a bit further along. We were stunned by the fact that it ran at 60fps on the Playstation. I think TT was working on Sonic R at the same time -- there was obviously a second project going on that they did a good job of covering up during the visit. Can't remember much about the office, but maybe it was in a converted farmhouse? Really high ceilings, I think? Anyway Jon was a fantastic host, thanks again and greetings from Japan!
When the prototype looks and feels better than the finished product, something is wrong. You gotta keep doing these, I love looking at the betas, prototypes, so. The early and unfinished products. They're many a time more interesting than the final game! Thanks for doing this for us!
The conviction you have shown during this video shows how genuine you are as a person. I greatly respect you Jon. Not only as a developer, but as a video publisher.
I never owned a PSone (well later I did get one for free with a dodgy laser I fixed) and still love those sounds. Although I loved Saturn, Dreamcast and Gamecube intros too. Its sad in some ways modern consoles are always-on so we never get this satisfaction any more. Well except the PS4 where I have the PSone theme. ;)
@@alexatkin Those nostalgia triggers still do exist, you just don't hold nostalgia for them because you're not young anymore. In 20 years you'll probably get the same sensations remembering stuff from now, that is if you allow yourself to form new memories and have new experiences.
The most common way to do it is geometry subdivision because smaller polygons are way less likely to warp. Some other devs like Naughty Dog sort of prerendered the perspective each camera frame (I don't know how that works). This game probably checks the camera and the surrounding geometry to do some corrections in software?
The PSX didn't have native support for floating point geometry so all polygon calculations were done as integers. Much of the distortion was due to rounding errors when converting floats to integers. My guess is they used a larger scale so these rounding errors were less noticable; The difference between 1.52 being rounded to 2 or 15.2 being rounded to 15.
Kind of irrelevant, but this is the making of crash bandicoot 1 from the co-founder of naughty dog, Andy Gavin. He explains all the tricks behind the fantastic graphics of the game, i think it says something about polygon distortion as well. Very interesting! all-things-andy-gavin.com/2011/02/02/making-crash-bandicoot-part-1/
That is one of the problems, but that normally resulted in vertex popping or shimmering. The real distortion came from a lack of perspective correction in the PS1 graphics hardware. For a short explanation; the PS1, like most 3D hardware, renders triangles rather than more complex primitives because they're fast and stable. On each vertex of a triangle is a texture coordinate, which tells the hardware how to map a 2D texture onto the triangle. However, since we only have three points on a triangle, we can only make the texture warp parallel to two of the sides of the triangle. So when you have a surface that gets smaller towards the top (Like a trapezoid), it will be made with 2 triangles, neither of which have enough information to take all four vertices into account, so the texture will warp. Perspective correction fixes this by using the depth of the vertices to sort-of reconstruct the missing information, but it requires a divide calculation for every single pixel (Or every few pixels) and back in those days, division was super expensive. If you're curious about learning more about it, look up Perspective Correction on Wikipedia, it has a more thorough explanation. :)
A fixed up version would be great, but unfortunately I think properly fixing the controls to directional input on the final game would be a lot harder than it initially seems, since the entire game/engine/levels were designed around it in the end. It'd be great, but it'd take more work than it's worth if he couldn't sell the updated version commercially (and he couldn't)
Couldn't they have compromised and had both control systems? But I thought Tomb Raider only used those controls because of the game was built on a set grid.
Larry Bundy Jr would have been a lot of work to “tune” everything to work with two very different systems. Plus, I just didn’t have the energy to argue... Sonic R was hard...
As explained in another comment, hot-patching a PSX game is an achievement of its own and the patch would probably not fit into memory anyway since camera system also needs to be redone.
+Jack White And, as explained in reply to that another comment, it's not too hard, and with a modchipped PS1 or emulator with NoCash BIOS(which is free and legal and works on real PS1 too), you can just push an edited disk image into it and done.
The decision they made to keep rotational controls for the game couldn't be any more wrong...What were they thinking? It really is a shame that a game this optimized and technical got the short end of the stick...
Because when 3d was in it's Early days the Devs weren't a 100% sure which would be better... Which is why a GAME PUBBLISHER has even LESS ideas on what to do!
Talk about taking the wrong lessons from the success of Tomb Raider. "Hey, let's make the game have tank controls, that's why Tomb Raider was successful right?" *Facepalm*
It was a success with Tomb Raider...but only because of the type of puzzle game that it was, each block on the ground was designed for that mechanic. Shame some publishers force their bad opinions. As a creative I have been faced with the clients asking for objectively bad decisions without any way of making them see the light, they are much too often the ones with absolutely zero knowlegde on the subjects to boot.
Its really funny because Nitrorad was saying if you could somehow fix the controls and some other minor issues with Rascal the game could be quite good, not a masterpiece but a simple and harmless experience indeed, and you came up with this lovely video XDD Its quite shocking to know that it was meant to be a more traditional platformer and quite possibly a more polished experience than what we got, and yes trying to appeal to the Tomb Raider crowd was the death kiss for this game indeed, if they wanted rotational or "tank controls" for Rascal they should had been tried to mimic Croc's controls instead of Tomb Raider, one its a wacky platformer and the other is a more action oriented exploration-puzzle solving *SLOW* platformer were there is little to none hazzards or even enemies and if they are they dont oppose an inmediate threat for the player like a platformer like Mario 64 or even Croc and Crash have, you dont have crazy stuff flying all over the place in Tomb Raider so this more sluggish and toned down tank controls fits more for the kind of game it is, but for something like Rascal? nope they just dont work at all, and here it shows that the game could had been a more tolerable experience just by the kind of controls it has, because this game has pretty damn cool graphics for an 1998 PSX game and Gran Turismo was the apex of graphical prowess in the PSX era and Rascal sure has pretty damn good graphics, its a shame that the controls are butt ugly untolerable.
The thought that they wanted it to have Tomb Raider styled tank controls is baffling. Tomb Raider worked with Tank controls because the entire game was designed around that control scheme. The engine for Rascal looks really nice though. Technically, all of TT's games are competent.
Dither-swapping the textures like in the Sonic 3D intro! I love seeing how you and other developers from the earlier days of games combatted problems, i find it a bit sad that we dont have the same sort of issues around anymore unless you're either writing super performant code or developing for some obscure low powered embedded hardware.
I hated this game as a kid, i couldn't even beat a single stage and i hated the controls, will it ever be possible to make a director's cut of Rascal and fixing the controls?
As someone who's hacked PSX games, yes. You do need special disc imaging tools though - PSX disc images use full 2352-byte sectors instead of the usual 2048-byte data sectors that you're limited to w/ .iso files. I've also done homebrew and successfully tested my stuff on a real modchipped PS1. Also, emulators help a lot here. Even Mednafen has its flaws (mostly pertaining to GPU timing being a bit too kind) but it does get things *mostly* right.
It is theoretically possible (and was done by PSX hackers) but is REALLY tricky and limited. Also prohibitively time consuming. Not even the original devs with full source code are expected to pull it off. In essence it requires one to burn a CD, somehow make the PlayStation execute code off that CD (either modchip or cheat device or exploit of yet another game). At this point you put target game disk in, loader code would then read target executable into memory and hot-patch it before executing. The loader would need to stay in RAM and hook itself to disk code reading subroutines to patch everything else on the fly since measly 2 (TWO) MB of RAM total meant code had to be dynamically loaded. This is not only arduously hard and time consuming, and obviously requires through knowledge of both game and console much beyond official specifications but also likely to require a major game code restructure which is not really an option even for commercial release most of the time. Furthermore, the amount of code that can be patched is very limited, otherwise it would be necessary to sacrifice some gameplay features or even game modes because of such tiny RAM - failing that, constant disk swapping would be necessary. Though it may be possible to store some code onto memory card, reading it back is really slow. Using an emulator that supports some kind of patching would lift a good amount of these problems, but PSX emulators need to use a (copyrighted) BIOS file downloaded from a real PSX (or its replacement) which makes officially endorsing emulation potentially questionable legally.
Serious question - was it proposed to the client to keep both control methods and have a toggle in the settings menu? Obviously, hindsight is 20/20 - just curious if that was discussed.
Assuming the controls where what killed it such a toggle could have been the difference between trash and a hidden gem. But as you say hindsight is 20/20
I know I'm two months out now, but...I'm pretty sure they didn't do that because everything would need to be reworked for both, which would eat up a lot of resources. Space and memory-wise. The game needs to be programmed for two different sets of controls and camera movements to make sure no clipping and such happened, like you saw in this video, because the clipping is what causes all the artifacts and weird stuff like items overlapping each other. Then the controls need to be programmed in, of course, and then you have the whole camera system... It'd take a lot of time, effort, energy, and resources. All four of which were probably in extremely limited supply when the decision was made to change it.
Yet another example of corporate meddling and bad design decisions being made to "do what the other guys are doing, see, it's all the rage!" That mentality of publishers back in the day seriously neutered some games that could've been shining gems. Very much a fan of you finally showing us how this game could've turned out! As for the future, SUPPORT INDIE DEVS. They are more likely to care about the vision and finesse than appealing to a mass market because it's the hot thing to do. Seriously.
Even back then, publishers were the people with all the clout and none of the understanding. Morons in high places who probably never played a video game before and only knew "what sold before". Trying to make lightning strike the same place. *P:* "If it worked for Tomb Raider, it should work here." *D:* "I'm telling you, with our hands inside this game, up to our elbows in this game's innards, it will be a disaster and nobody will like it. The way _we_ have is better because it is designed for this game." *P:* "Well, do it *_our_* way or we won't fund your project. Also, if it fails, we and everyone else will blame you for your incompetence." It's small wonder so many game devs are going indie, or at least write out in their contracts that they get managerial control of their project, free of executive meddling. Sorry, Jon, but saying "It's my fault too because I was busy elsewhere" isn't going to cut it. I'm not a fly on TT's walls, but it sounds like everyone fought against the publishers as hard as they could, but the ivory towers have the final say.
Noxedwin Tepes Some publishers are still like that. They can get away with poorly designed engines and bad optimization because of more expensive and powerful tech
Paul Westfall Really when you got guys in boardrooms discussing "market metrics" and "whats hot right now", you get no innovation, or bad innovation trying to copy a sucessful formula. It seems like many AAA pubs keep putting out the same game, same engine, just a reskin for your latest IP that your "focus study" told you people wanted. I think that if indie deving hadn't taken off the way it did, I wouldnt play games anymore.
It's because the industry is mostly market-driven instead of design-driven, which is why you get higher ups in these companies more concerned with selling shit than making shit.
Yeah it probably would've been the console's Mario if it actually managed to pull this stuff off... the shooting controls were pretty unique for a platformer of its time, and when you look at the PS1's other platform game offerings like 40 Winks I still think this game was leagues ahead of it, even with all of its flaws.
1:06 wait, Jim Henson's Creature Shop created the main character design? The same team behind the Muppets and Sesame Street? Sounds like there's more to the story there..
Oh hell yeah, I've been eager to see you talk about this game once I found out you were a part of it. You have such awesome knowledge on everything you work on or have a part in. The technical aspects of everything are always so impressive to.
Me and my brother wanted this game so bad when we were kids. His birthday was first, so he got the game, but I was the one who was determined to complete it. And I did. A couple of times. He never did. In fact, he quit after a few attempts. Probably got frustrated because of the tank controls... The music was so catchy that it haunted me many nights in bed.
Oh wow, those directional controls really do make all the difference in the world. Also? This PSX game prototype, thanks to the smooth motion and not-so-wobbly polygons, looks like it could easily be an early gen PS2 game.
2:28 I'm always amazed when business people key off of the most superficial of reasons for a product's success (or failure) in a market, while managing to completely miss the fact it's the effect of the whole which really matters. "Pickles are selling great at the concession stand, let's change out the vanilla for pickle flavored ice cream."
Cheers Jon, that was very insightful and interesting. Amazing to see the game running @ 60fps . The texture trick giving it that nice polished look is phenomenal.
oof... if only you guys had playtesters who could compare and contrast the control schemes of both the original intended controls with the dreaded "tank" controls that only worked in few games like Resident Evil
game is designed around how a character can move. If character is made to move like a tank then the rooms are designed with that in mind. If you gave them directional controls as an option the game may of been infinitely easier to beat as it wouldnt be designed for that type of movement.
It sounds like in this case the ability to have the more fluid control scheme would be so widely appreciated due to the fact that those challenges implemented into the game certainly weren't made in mind with a more restrictive movement. So maybe the ability to switch would have been a good idea.
Shortest answer: Adding a "simple" toggle option means they have to do twice as much testing and debugging to ensure that both of them technically work. That's not even counting the ripple effect it has on level design and difficulty...
@@IdealIdeas100 Basically what he said in the video was that the camera loaded things based on what was visible (Probably because of the RAM) so if they fixed the camera for both modes they would have to do twice the work (Plus it could be impossible because of disk space/working memory, not really sure)
It would be fucking amazing to see this game remastered like Spyro and Crash were. It deserves a real chance to be played how it was originally intended to be.
I've always wondered, whats that tune that plays in most of your intros to your videos, its really cool! is it from a game or something or did you compose it yourself?
Bubsy 3d is an alright game, and the only reason it has tank controls is because the guys who made Bubsy 3d havent noticed that SM64 came out at the time. And when they did, it was too late for them to fix.
As a big fan of video games and someone who cares about the programming/technology side i really appreciate your channel Really cool to have someone that was on the inside of the industry
I played this a few months ago, and all I kept repeating was, "This game would be great if not for these controls" Turns out you can't trust the bean counters to make gameplay decisions.
Can't believe you developed Rascal too. As an impressionable young kid I loved this game. It didn't matter that the controls were awful, all that mattered was that he was rad and had sunglasses, a backwards hat and a ray gun.
Environment mapping, and no UV texture folding?? I didn't know that was possible on the PS1. There's even some smooth plending in those running animations. And that camera moves so fluid. So many greatest games from my childhood could not compare to this technological marvel. _Truly incredible_ I absolutely love seeing how you and your team wrung out every possible drop of technological capacity out of every game, and then just invented new things when that failed.
A friend and I had been trying to beat this game since we were kids! Every couple of years we'd catch up, boot up the game, get stuck on a level and either not know how to get through Atlantis or would experience the save bug. This September we finally finished the game... and oh boy what a ~memorable~ experience. #istandwithdeputywarrennash
After Nitro Rad's review, I become alot more interested in the game for alot of its design choices, rather than actually playing the game. Hope to see more on this (if there is anything more)!
I thought rascal was really cool. But I was a kid at the time, so maybe now it wouldn't fly so much. Just the ideas and stages were so cool for a kid. The flooded buildings really had my mine running wild.
It‘s nice to see how you can „redeem“ yourself with those videos, 20 years after releasing the game and having to endure countless of bad reviews and youtube videos. The prototype looks really good and if it wouldn‘t have been for the change forced on you by the publisher, this game would have been actually quite great.
Man, I've played the game on a demo disc as a toddler... and some of the images have been ingrained into my mind since. But for the life of me, I couldn't remember the name of the game. Was talking to my father about it today , as I was watching the video, he didn't remember the game either, but then decided to google it and found out it's the same game! Awesome channel!
Jon: This is one game that I would like to see a "DX" version for. Rascal is not really a bad game. The gameplay is quite good aside from a couple tiny things and there are a lot of other good qualities about it. The engine is really impressive, I can't believe that it is running at almost 60FPS for the majority of the time. The textures look clean and have little warping. Nice use of light maps and environmental maps too. But the tank controls killed this game. Would it ever be possible to patch some of the camera and control behavior code from the beta to a ROM of the final release? I know you are not the coder of this game.
My god. You guys found a way to mitigate the affine texture mapping, polygon warping, and still keep a 60 FPS framerate. I too would love to know how this was done as the PSX is my favorite console.
I would love to see more of this prototype. Rascal is such a criminally underrated game. The controls weren't good but everything else was pretty awesome.
This is kind of sad... I remember still to this day how hyped I was for Rascal back then after seeing pictures of it in a swedish gaming magazine. But afterwards I heard nothing about the game... But the PSX needed another, more open platformer than crash bandicot was. I wasn't a fan of the nintendo 64 graphics. I preferred the sharper textures than the all smoothed look of the n64, but the PSX never got anything that could competed with mario 64. Rascal could have had been the answer though...
It's weird seeing a PS1 game with such smooth textures and almost none of the typical artifacts and polygon glitching PS1 has. Very impresssive indeed.
Man, you guys were doing incredible things on the PS1. I remember wanting Rascal as a kid but never got a chance to play it. If you ever happen to stumble upon an IPS patch that corrects the controls and camera behavior by all means share it! You guys made some great stuff on the PS1, just wish your original game was as great as the Disney ones.
I'd love to see a more in depth video about the tech here...there seems to be a lot going on that the hardware can't normally do. I'm particularly interested in how you seem to have almost completely removed the "jiggling" (floating point inaccuracy) most 3D PS1 games suffer from.
Even with the clunky rotational controls, worst PS1 game? REALLY?! Whoever thinks this game is the worst clearly hasn’t heard of Bubsy 3D. And besides, TT’s games were almost always technically impressive even when they weren’t the best to play (which they usually were I might add).
I'm not going to ask for a full Director's Cut of the game like you did with Sonic, but I don't suppose that there's any way for you to re-implement the controls from the prototype into the final version of the game, and upload it as a patch? I used to collect a bunch of different magazines as a kid, and Rascal was one of those games that I was always really curious about, but since I never had a PlayStation, I never played it for myself. I'd never notice the changes in a full DX version since I've never played the original, but I'm still curious about it. I once played Castlevania: Legacy of Darkness for the N64 on emulator, another game that was criticized heavily on the controls, and since I could remap everything comfortably on a 360 controller, I found it a very fun and enjoyable game. I'm very curious how well Rascal would play with the proper controls as well, and it would be fun to discover just how much of a difference it would make on a blind side-by-side comparison.
That actually looks amazing. Could you please make a video in which you explain how you got around the limitations of affine texture mapping? I'm guessing it has a lot to do with the POV of the camera, in the room, but I'm still mesmerised by the results.
If that same publisher would sell cars, they would probably insists on their engineers that steering wheel should be on the right side of the car even in the countries that have right hand traffic (while pedals stay on the left side) because Intial D is such a cool movie.
Now that has to be one of the most interesting stories behind the development of the game that, while it may be considered as one of the worst games of all time, I did have a very strong bond with especially since it was one of the first games that I got with the PS1 way back in May of 1998, and the fact that due to my very strong bond that I have with the game for more than 20 years now, I even had done a playthrough of the game way back in 2013, which while heavily outdated due to poor recording quality, I'm still amazed that unlike many other people who instantly hated it when they first played it (Yes, I'm even looking at you AaronFolkwes), I got used to the flawed yet still somehow manageable rotational controls that Psygnosis decided to have in your game, and surprisingly I got through the game pretty well and even completed it, especially since I also discovered many strange exploits that your team had left over, which still helped me get through it.
Damn, the same people who made the game that introduced me to video games (LEGO Star Wars) were the same people that made the infamous Sonic R and Rascal. Huh
That's right Mr. Publisher, Tomb Raider was a great success because of it's amazing controls. What planet were these people on? I used to play the demo of this all the time.
This is the first game I purchased for my PS1 (because it was in the bargain bin). It was a regretful purchase. I appreciate the background info on the game.
Fascinating! It's a crying shame the publishers made you guys use tank controls, and it's an even bigger shame this is considered "one of the worst PS1 games." It controls poorly and the camera isn't very good, but there was so much potential here. I thought the level design was a lot of fun, and the production value was excellent.
Very interesting hearing you explain why the camera gets weird when you turn near a wall, that makes a lot of sense.
Somehow I knew you'd be in the comments on this one.
Was curious if you saw this video, such a sad fate for this game.
I hate when people get mass upvotes just because they are well known.
Plenty of people surely say the same things and go ignored.
"just because they are well known" It's not just because he's well known, but also because he did a review of this exact game in which he described how amazing the game was on so many levels (such as detail) except the controls. It's very reliant to his channel as a reviewer who almost exclusively does platform games. Also Nitro Rad only has like 100k subs, which is a lot, but it's not like a super massive popularity or anything.
Edit: As a note Nitro Rad's video on this game is probably the whole reason GameHut even released this video, there seems to be a clear connection between points talked about and release dates of the videos.
@@psychonauts0 How else would people know of that review if he wasn't well known? How else would people know him? I've seen his channel, his review(s)". Rascal isn't solely relevant to him. Getting upvotes isn't solely relevant to him. It's usually relevant to popularity.
"use these controls like this popular game that is compete different in style!" it boggles the mind how much the suits don't understand their customers....
The game's industry is just *full* of stupid shit like this where clueless execs ruin otherwise great games.
It's not even about understanding customers. It's about understanding function.
@@Aaron-sl9ov I wonder how functions would work like Dead or Alive...!
3rd person 3D games were a totally new thing back then and Tomb Raider obviously did something right. I totally understand their decision, even if it was the wrong one.
mario 64 came out in 96. the dual analog controller for ps1 came out in 97. rascal came out in 98. i think the publishers had enough time to figure out that tomb raider controls are not necessarily the best for a 3d action game.
"It's using all kinds of clever techniques to stop the textures from distorting, which was a big problem on the PlayStation 1."
New GameHut video incoming?
Yes please!
Heck yes that would be great!
From what I know the playstation didn't have any Z buffer, and relied heavily on sorting tris using the painter's algorithm.
So I think that the game is using some object midpoint algorithm, and sorting on that.
It'd be interesting to actually see what's going on.
IIRC the PS1, like a lot of 3D hardware of the era, lacked perspective-correct texturing and used much less computationally demanding affine texture mapping instead. The effect beingthat the textures appear to warp and wobble as your orientation towards the triangles they're mapped to changes. As I understand it, one common solution is to tessellate (break bigger triangles into smaller triangles) the geometry closest to the player, as smaller triangles meant less noticeable warping. I'd love to hear about what else clever developers came up with.
It's not just the z-buffer. The GPU fundamentally lacked perspective correction for textures on a hardware level. Obviously, there were ways around that (as ControlCardPin and Tanner Schultz pointed out), but it was easily visible in games that didn't take the time to fix it in software (the Twisted Metal series in a HUGE offender on that count... just try getting near any vertical surface in that game and watch the universe warp around you...). I'd say that it was the various ways developers came up with to combat the problem that game the PS1 much of it's very distinctive graphical look (such as shimmering walls, etc.). Although, it's worth pointing out that the competition at the time also had issues with textures (the 4kB limit in N64 giving it's blurriness, the quadrangles in Saturn leading to a similar problem as the PS1, for different reasons, and so on) with perhaps only the failed 3DO (ironically) being the only one without a major issue in that department. Those were some pioneering times. But, hey, they all beat flat-shading!
Psygnosis were full derp at this moment in time with suggestions. This is the company that changed Wipeout 2097's name to Wipeout XL in the US, as they thought Americans would wonder what happened to the 2095 other sequels! (not a joke)
I think they did that as Wipeout XL seemed more like an expansion pack than a sequel.
Good thing they didn't publish the Anno series.
@@EdHarrisonMusic Lol didn't even think of that and a 40th game in a series is far more plausible than a 2097th.
Hello you ! Good to see you here .
Nice plug there mate
As a PlayStation fan boy, please make a director's cut of Rascal, Jon! I know Sonic R DX would be amazing, but seeing this game the way it was meant to be would be incredible. The way the textures don't warp and other visual techniques are almost unheard of in 3d games on PS1
The comments ask him to do a director's cut for every single game that he makes a video on. If we really want another director's cut we should pick just one and stick with it. He can't make them all.
Yeah, after commenting, I realized that he probably doesn't even have all of the resources to completely rebuild the game from the ground up. Sonic 3D Blast involved some tweaks, but Rascal is pretty messed up haha. This prototype is just so much more impressive graphically and control-wise than the final product.
@@ReplayStation I'd love to see more of his prototypes released somehow. If we could get "DX" versions of games that'd be killer.
I mean, he's got a Patreon, right?
I assure you, Jon Burton does not need a Patreon.
I wonder if even just a quick hack to use directional controls in the final game would make it decent.
I flew out to the UK 20 years ago to see a batch of Psygnosis games for the magazine I was writing for, and I remember seeing a demo of this at TT when it was a bit further along. We were stunned by the fact that it ran at 60fps on the Playstation. I think TT was working on Sonic R at the same time -- there was obviously a second project going on that they did a good job of covering up during the visit. Can't remember much about the office, but maybe it was in a converted farmhouse? Really high ceilings, I think? Anyway Jon was a fantastic host, thanks again and greetings from Japan!
Sweet.
When the prototype looks and feels better than the finished product, something is wrong.
You gotta keep doing these, I love looking at the betas, prototypes, so. The early and unfinished products. They're many a time more interesting than the final game! Thanks for doing this for us!
The conviction you have shown during this video shows how genuine you are as a person. I greatly respect you Jon. Not only as a developer, but as a video publisher.
Yeah I think it's cool of him to own up to his share of the blame
Liam He is a venerable guy. I really respect him.
Ps1 bios sound.....ears pleased!
I never owned a PSone (well later I did get one for free with a dodgy laser I fixed) and still love those sounds. Although I loved Saturn, Dreamcast and Gamecube intros too.
Its sad in some ways modern consoles are always-on so we never get this satisfaction any more. Well except the PS4 where I have the PSone theme. ;)
@@alexatkin Those nostalgia triggers still do exist, you just don't hold nostalgia for them because you're not young anymore. In 20 years you'll probably get the same sensations remembering stuff from now, that is if you allow yourself to form new memories and have new experiences.
Would love to hear about how you solved the texture/polygon distortion on the PSX.
Me too, I have seen a few games solve it but an explanation would be interesting.
The most common way to do it is geometry subdivision because smaller polygons are way less likely to warp. Some other devs like Naughty Dog sort of prerendered the perspective each camera frame (I don't know how that works). This game probably checks the camera and the surrounding geometry to do some corrections in software?
The PSX didn't have native support for floating point geometry so all polygon calculations were done as integers. Much of the distortion was due to rounding errors when converting floats to integers. My guess is they used a larger scale so these rounding errors were less noticable; The difference between 1.52 being rounded to 2 or 15.2 being rounded to 15.
Kind of irrelevant, but this is the making of crash bandicoot 1 from the co-founder of naughty dog, Andy Gavin. He explains all the tricks behind the fantastic graphics of the game, i think it says something about polygon distortion as well. Very interesting! all-things-andy-gavin.com/2011/02/02/making-crash-bandicoot-part-1/
That is one of the problems, but that normally resulted in vertex popping or shimmering. The real distortion came from a lack of perspective correction in the PS1 graphics hardware. For a short explanation; the PS1, like most 3D hardware, renders triangles rather than more complex primitives because they're fast and stable. On each vertex of a triangle is a texture coordinate, which tells the hardware how to map a 2D texture onto the triangle. However, since we only have three points on a triangle, we can only make the texture warp parallel to two of the sides of the triangle. So when you have a surface that gets smaller towards the top (Like a trapezoid), it will be made with 2 triangles, neither of which have enough information to take all four vertices into account, so the texture will warp. Perspective correction fixes this by using the depth of the vertices to sort-of reconstruct the missing information, but it requires a divide calculation for every single pixel (Or every few pixels) and back in those days, division was super expensive.
If you're curious about learning more about it, look up Perspective Correction on Wikipedia, it has a more thorough explanation. :)
Omg this actually looked like good?? A DX version of this would be so rad!!
Nitro Rad? ;)
A fixed up version would be great, but unfortunately I think properly fixing the controls to directional input on the final game would be a lot harder than it initially seems, since the entire game/engine/levels were designed around it in the end.
It'd be great, but it'd take more work than it's worth if he couldn't sell the updated version commercially (and he couldn't)
@@theSato very true. Just thought it would be neat if it happened :)
This breaks my heart, so much potential
So disheartening that the publishers couldn’t comprehend feedback from the team.
Couldn't they have compromised and had both control systems? But I thought Tomb Raider only used those controls because of the game was built on a set grid.
Larry Bundy Jr would have been a lot of work to “tune” everything to work with two very different systems. Plus, I just didn’t have the energy to argue... Sonic R was hard...
@@GameHut you developers don’t get the love you deserve
Someone should make a hack that re-implements directional controls.
As explained in another comment, hot-patching a PSX game is an achievement of its own and the patch would probably not fit into memory anyway since camera system also needs to be redone.
+Jack White
And, as explained in reply to that another comment, it's not too hard, and with a modchipped PS1 or emulator with NoCash BIOS(which is free and legal and works on real PS1 too), you can just push an edited disk image into it and done.
The decision they made to keep rotational controls for the game couldn't be any more wrong...What were they thinking?
It really is a shame that a game this optimized and technical got the short end of the stick...
Because when 3d was in it's Early days the Devs weren't a 100% sure which would be better...
Which is why a GAME PUBBLISHER has even LESS ideas on what to do!
Human idiocy making something good bad in matter of seconds yet again.
I agree that the publisher messed up with that descision
Talk about taking the wrong lessons from the success of Tomb Raider. "Hey, let's make the game have tank controls, that's why Tomb Raider was successful right?" *Facepalm*
It was a success with Tomb Raider...but only because of the type of puzzle game that it was, each block on the ground was designed for that mechanic. Shame some publishers force their bad opinions. As a creative I have been faced with the clients asking for objectively bad decisions without any way of making them see the light, they are much too often the ones with absolutely zero knowlegde on the subjects to boot.
Its really funny because Nitrorad was saying if you could somehow fix the controls and some other minor issues with Rascal the game could be quite good, not a masterpiece but a simple and harmless experience indeed, and you came up with this lovely video XDD
Its quite shocking to know that it was meant to be a more traditional platformer and quite possibly a more polished experience than what we got, and yes trying to appeal to the Tomb Raider crowd was the death kiss for this game indeed, if they wanted rotational or "tank controls" for Rascal they should had been tried to mimic Croc's controls instead of Tomb Raider, one its a wacky platformer and the other is a more action oriented exploration-puzzle solving *SLOW* platformer were there is little to none hazzards or even enemies and if they are they dont oppose an inmediate threat for the player like a platformer like Mario 64 or even Croc and Crash have, you dont have crazy stuff flying all over the place in Tomb Raider so this more sluggish and toned down tank controls fits more for the kind of game it is, but for something like Rascal? nope they just dont work at all, and here it shows that the game could had been a more tolerable experience just by the kind of controls it has, because this game has pretty damn cool graphics for an 1998 PSX game and Gran Turismo was the apex of graphical prowess in the PSX era and Rascal sure has pretty damn good graphics, its a shame that the controls are butt ugly untolerable.
The thought that they wanted it to have Tomb Raider styled tank controls is baffling. Tomb Raider worked with Tank controls because the entire game was designed around that control scheme.
The engine for Rascal looks really nice though. Technically, all of TT's games are competent.
Dither-swapping the textures like in the Sonic 3D intro!
I love seeing how you and other developers from the earlier days of games combatted problems, i find it a bit sad that we dont have the same sort of issues around anymore unless you're either writing super performant code or developing for some obscure low powered embedded hardware.
Shows dithering at low framerate, cool effect... Can't unsee it now, though.
I hated this game as a kid, i couldn't even beat a single stage and i hated the controls, will it ever be possible to make a director's cut of Rascal and fixing the controls?
Hear, hear! Director's cut!
I'd imagine its tricky with there being no legal way to download it that can be patched. We got lucky with Sonic due to Steams mod system.
Plus, is it even possible to hack a PSX game? I know you can use stuff like gameshark to mess around woth the game, but to actually hack it?
As someone who's hacked PSX games, yes. You do need special disc imaging tools though - PSX disc images use full 2352-byte sectors instead of the usual 2048-byte data sectors that you're limited to w/ .iso files. I've also done homebrew and successfully tested my stuff on a real modchipped PS1.
Also, emulators help a lot here. Even Mednafen has its flaws (mostly pertaining to GPU timing being a bit too kind) but it does get things *mostly* right.
It is theoretically possible (and was done by PSX hackers) but is REALLY tricky and limited. Also prohibitively time consuming. Not even the original devs with full source code are expected to pull it off.
In essence it requires one to burn a CD, somehow make the PlayStation execute code off that CD (either modchip or cheat device or exploit of yet another game). At this point you put target game disk in, loader code would then read target executable into memory and hot-patch it before executing. The loader would need to stay in RAM and hook itself to disk code reading subroutines to patch everything else on the fly since measly 2 (TWO) MB of RAM total meant code had to be dynamically loaded.
This is not only arduously hard and time consuming, and obviously requires through knowledge of both game and console much beyond official specifications but also likely to require a major game code restructure which is not really an option even for commercial release most of the time.
Furthermore, the amount of code that can be patched is very limited, otherwise it would be necessary to sacrifice some gameplay features or even game modes because of such tiny RAM - failing that, constant disk swapping would be necessary. Though it may be possible to store some code onto memory card, reading it back is really slow.
Using an emulator that supports some kind of patching would lift a good amount of these problems, but PSX emulators need to use a (copyrighted) BIOS file downloaded from a real PSX (or its replacement) which makes officially endorsing emulation potentially questionable legally.
Serious question - was it proposed to the client to keep both control methods and have a toggle in the settings menu? Obviously, hindsight is 20/20 - just curious if that was discussed.
Assuming the controls where what killed it such a toggle could have been the difference between trash and a hidden gem. But as you say hindsight is 20/20
I know I'm two months out now, but...I'm pretty sure they didn't do that because everything would need to be reworked for both, which would eat up a lot of resources. Space and memory-wise. The game needs to be programmed for two different sets of controls and camera movements to make sure no clipping and such happened, like you saw in this video, because the clipping is what causes all the artifacts and weird stuff like items overlapping each other. Then the controls need to be programmed in, of course, and then you have the whole camera system...
It'd take a lot of time, effort, energy, and resources. All four of which were probably in extremely limited supply when the decision was made to change it.
Yet another example of corporate meddling and bad design decisions being made to "do what the other guys are doing, see, it's all the rage!" That mentality of publishers back in the day seriously neutered some games that could've been shining gems. Very much a fan of you finally showing us how this game could've turned out! As for the future, SUPPORT INDIE DEVS. They are more likely to care about the vision and finesse than appealing to a mass market because it's the hot thing to do. Seriously.
I'll support indie devs when they actually make a game worth giving a damn about.
@@LOOMING_WRAITH_OF_BAD_OMENSupport good developers that make good games and gatekeep THE MESSAGE out*
Nice textures,love that it runs with 60 frames,lets make a racing game with this engine :)
The title screen is so cool. The way it is a freeze frame, and then you press start....boom straight away!
Even back then, publishers were the people with all the clout and none of the understanding. Morons in high places who probably never played a video game before and only knew "what sold before". Trying to make lightning strike the same place.
*P:* "If it worked for Tomb Raider, it should work here."
*D:* "I'm telling you, with our hands inside this game, up to our elbows in this game's innards, it will be a disaster and nobody will like it. The way _we_ have is better because it is designed for this game."
*P:* "Well, do it *_our_* way or we won't fund your project. Also, if it fails, we and everyone else will blame you for your incompetence."
It's small wonder so many game devs are going indie, or at least write out in their contracts that they get managerial control of their project, free of executive meddling.
Sorry, Jon, but saying "It's my fault too because I was busy elsewhere" isn't going to cut it. I'm not a fly on TT's walls, but it sounds like everyone fought against the publishers as hard as they could, but the ivory towers have the final say.
Noxedwin Tepes Some publishers are still like that. They can get away with poorly designed engines and bad optimization because of more expensive and powerful tech
Paul Westfall
Really when you got guys in boardrooms discussing "market metrics" and "whats hot right now", you get no innovation, or bad innovation trying to copy a sucessful formula.
It seems like many AAA pubs keep putting out the same game, same engine, just a reskin for your latest IP that your "focus study" told you people wanted.
I think that if indie deving hadn't taken off the way it did, I wouldnt play games anymore.
I agreee its extremely sad to see how many projects, regardless of the medium, get ruined by someone who has literally no concept of the medium.
It's because the industry is mostly market-driven instead of design-driven, which is why you get higher ups in these companies more concerned with selling shit than making shit.
Yeah it probably would've been the console's Mario if it actually managed to pull this stuff off... the shooting controls were pretty unique for a platformer of its time, and when you look at the PS1's other platform game offerings like 40 Winks I still think this game was leagues ahead of it, even with all of its flaws.
1:06 wait, Jim Henson's Creature Shop created the main character design? The same team behind the Muppets and Sesame Street? Sounds like there's more to the story there..
and yet it looks like something out of the NES era, like Treasure Master.
@@moosemaimer Hah, I think TT would have been better off designing their own character.
The character comes off as a severe case of "Greetings, fellow kids" from 1994 maybe?
I was really impressed by the reflections
Oh hell yeah, I've been eager to see you talk about this game once I found out you were a part of it. You have such awesome knowledge on everything you work on or have a part in. The technical aspects of everything are always so impressive to.
Rascal Remastered with proper controls: Make it happen!
I always get a laugh at your thumbnails, they always get me
Me and my brother wanted this game so bad when we were kids. His birthday was first, so he got the game, but I was the one who was determined to complete it. And I did. A couple of times. He never did. In fact, he quit after a few attempts. Probably got frustrated because of the tank controls...
The music was so catchy that it haunted me many nights in bed.
This looks like an early PS2 demo. Very impressive.
Uh.... No...
Having never played the released version I would have appreciated even a 30 sec comparison.
You can buy a copy for $3 and emulate it on your PC if that's your cup of tea.
Oh wow, those directional controls really do make all the difference in the world. Also? This PSX game prototype, thanks to the smooth motion and not-so-wobbly polygons, looks like it could easily be an early gen PS2 game.
2:28 I'm always amazed when business people key off of the most superficial of reasons for a product's success (or failure) in a market, while managing to completely miss the fact it's the effect of the whole which really matters. "Pickles are selling great at the concession stand, let's change out the vanilla for pickle flavored ice cream."
That golden shield is so gorgeous!
That shiny armor is something else.
Cheers Jon, that was very insightful and interesting. Amazing to see the game running @ 60fps . The texture trick giving it that nice polished look is phenomenal.
oof... if only you guys had playtesters who could compare and contrast the control schemes of both the original intended controls with the dreaded "tank" controls that only worked in few games like Resident Evil
Why did you not have the option to just switch between the two control modes?
game is designed around how a character can move. If character is made to move like a tank then the rooms are designed with that in mind. If you gave them directional controls as an option the game may of been infinitely easier to beat as it wouldnt be designed for that type of movement.
It sounds like in this case the ability to have the more fluid control scheme would be so widely appreciated due to the fact that those challenges implemented into the game certainly weren't made in mind with a more restrictive movement.
So maybe the ability to switch would have been a good idea.
Shortest answer: Adding a "simple" toggle option means they have to do twice as much testing and debugging to ensure that both of them technically work.
That's not even counting the ripple effect it has on level design and difficulty...
@@IdealIdeas100 Basically what he said in the video was that the camera loaded things based on what was visible (Probably because of the RAM) so if they fixed the camera for both modes they would have to do twice the work (Plus it could be impossible because of disk space/working memory, not really sure)
It would be fucking amazing to see this game remastered like Spyro and Crash were. It deserves a real chance to be played how it was originally intended to be.
I've always wondered, whats that tune that plays in most of your intros to your videos, its really cool! is it from a game or something or did you compose it yourself?
I believe I came across it from the royalty free audio section that youtube offers when editing videos on this site.
The sad thing is this could have been considered a classic if the Publisher didn't steer the project to their vision
Hey, I know you
How could one consider this the worst PSX game ever Bubsy 3D takes me he cake for this
Why do I feel like you haven't played neither of the games?
Bubsy 3D is bad but far from the worst PS1 game. Psybadek is contender for THE worst game on it.
Bubsy 3d is an alright game, and the only reason it has tank controls is because the guys who made Bubsy 3d havent noticed that SM64 came out at the time. And when they did, it was too late for them to fix.
Welfz Twingo Furs because I haven’t
+Nerd_in_a_Nutshell There. Not playing a game makes it kind of bullshit to say it's worst than something else that you haven't played either.
This is actually my favorite childhood game
As a big fan of video games and someone who cares about the programming/technology side i really appreciate your channel
Really cool to have someone that was on the inside of the industry
I played this a few months ago, and all I kept repeating was, "This game would be great if not for these controls" Turns out you can't trust the bean counters to make gameplay decisions.
Can't believe you developed Rascal too. As an impressionable young kid I loved this game. It didn't matter that the controls were awful, all that mattered was that he was rad and had sunglasses, a backwards hat and a ray gun.
Great video! It's great to hear the story from the developers perspective. I love these kinds of videos you do!
I call rotational controls “tank controls,” since they usually allow you to turn in place.
Looks amazing for a PS1 game! This engine would have been great for a Zelda type PS1 adventure game
Environment mapping, and no UV texture folding?? I didn't know that was possible on the PS1.
There's even some smooth plending in those running animations. And that camera moves so fluid.
So many greatest games from my childhood could not compare to this technological marvel.
_Truly incredible_
I absolutely love seeing how you and your team wrung out every possible drop of technological capacity out of every game, and then just invented new things when that failed.
They even fixed the texture warp! That's insane!
A friend and I had been trying to beat this game since we were kids! Every couple of years we'd catch up, boot up the game, get stuck on a level and either not know how to get through Atlantis or would experience the save bug. This September we finally finished the game... and oh boy what a ~memorable~ experience.
#istandwithdeputywarrennash
I can't imagine how difficult writing an engine must have been back then. I'm super impressed by this demo!
"I'll just go through this wall" *continues*
After Nitro Rad's review, I become alot more interested in the game for alot of its design choices, rather than actually playing the game. Hope to see more on this (if there is anything more)!
Would love to hear some more about the techniques you used for some of these effects and reducing the texture warping on the PS1
"What did it cost?"
"Everything. "
As someone who wants to get into game development, I find these prototype build videos very interesting, seeing how these older games were developed
I too love the original PS1 boot sound. It really made you think "Wow, *this* is something new" and I was a Sega fan at the time too. O_O
Thank you so much for saying "rotational controls" and not "tank controls". Everyone calls them that when it's a totally different thing!
I thought rascal was really cool. But I was a kid at the time, so maybe now it wouldn't fly so much. Just the ideas and stages were so cool for a kid.
The flooded buildings really had my mine running wild.
It‘s nice to see how you can „redeem“ yourself with those videos, 20 years after releasing the game and having to endure countless of bad reviews and youtube videos. The prototype looks really good and if it wouldn‘t have been for the change forced on you by the publisher, this game would have been actually quite great.
Man, I've played the game on a demo disc as a toddler... and some of the images have been ingrained into my mind since. But for the life of me, I couldn't remember the name of the game. Was talking to my father about it today , as I was watching the video, he didn't remember the game either, but then decided to google it and found out it's the same game! Awesome channel!
Jon: This is one game that I would like to see a "DX" version for.
Rascal is not really a bad game. The gameplay is quite good aside from a couple tiny things and there are a lot of other good qualities about it. The engine is really impressive, I can't believe that it is running at almost 60FPS for the majority of the time. The textures look clean and have little warping. Nice use of light maps and environmental maps too.
But the tank controls killed this game. Would it ever be possible to patch some of the camera and control behavior code from the beta to a ROM of the final release? I know you are not the coder of this game.
My god. You guys found a way to mitigate the affine texture mapping, polygon warping, and still keep a 60 FPS framerate.
I too would love to know how this was done as the PSX is my favorite console.
I would love to see more of this prototype. Rascal is such a criminally underrated game. The controls weren't good but everything else was pretty awesome.
Yeah, the PSX boot-up sound is so good!
I still get chills hearing the original boot sound.
You guys were magicians with any hardware be it Mega-Drive, PS1, Saturn, PS2... Travellers Tales you're bloody geniuses!
This is kind of sad... I remember still to this day how hyped I was for Rascal back then after seeing pictures of it in a swedish gaming magazine. But afterwards I heard nothing about the game... But the PSX needed another, more open platformer than crash bandicot was. I wasn't a fan of the nintendo 64 graphics. I preferred the sharper textures than the all smoothed look of the n64, but the PSX never got anything that could competed with mario 64. Rascal could have had been the answer though...
It's weird seeing a PS1 game with such smooth textures and almost none of the typical artifacts and polygon glitching PS1 has. Very impresssive indeed.
Rascal was one of my love hate games growing up. I hold it in fond memory and still play it sometimes.
Man, you guys were doing incredible things on the PS1. I remember wanting Rascal as a kid but never got a chance to play it. If you ever happen to stumble upon an IPS patch that corrects the controls and camera behavior by all means share it! You guys made some great stuff on the PS1, just wish your original game was as great as the Disney ones.
I was blown away by Portal when I saw the reflective surfaces, and yet here they were in 1998.
I'd love to see a more in depth video about the tech here...there seems to be a lot going on that the hardware can't normally do. I'm particularly interested in how you seem to have almost completely removed the "jiggling" (floating point inaccuracy) most 3D PS1 games suffer from.
If you ask me, Sonic R wasn't worth ruining this game.
Even with the clunky rotational controls, worst PS1 game? REALLY?! Whoever thinks this game is the worst clearly hasn’t heard of Bubsy 3D. And besides, TT’s games were almost always technically impressive even when they weren’t the best to play (which they usually were I might add).
I'm not going to ask for a full Director's Cut of the game like you did with Sonic, but I don't suppose that there's any way for you to re-implement the controls from the prototype into the final version of the game, and upload it as a patch? I used to collect a bunch of different magazines as a kid, and Rascal was one of those games that I was always really curious about, but since I never had a PlayStation, I never played it for myself.
I'd never notice the changes in a full DX version since I've never played the original, but I'm still curious about it. I once played Castlevania: Legacy of Darkness for the N64 on emulator, another game that was criticized heavily on the controls, and since I could remap everything comfortably on a 360 controller, I found it a very fun and enjoyable game. I'm very curious how well Rascal would play with the proper controls as well, and it would be fun to discover just how much of a difference it would make on a blind side-by-side comparison.
The graphics in that looked amazing for the PS1. I've never seen such smooth textures done before on that machine!
Cheap Hardware is the most impressive at times
so smooth and minimal texture warping! Marvellous!!
That actually looks amazing. Could you please make a video in which you explain how you got around the limitations of affine texture mapping? I'm guessing it has a lot to do with the POV of the camera, in the room, but I'm still mesmerised by the results.
dANG IT this actually looks amazing! Like, seriously!
So, can we expect Rascal Director's Cut with fixed controls?
wow. impressive. For the system it was on, this looks great. Sorry to hear about the issues you ran into with the publisher.
Great video! It kinda proves that gameplay is above technology in gaming industry
If that same publisher would sell cars, they would probably insists on their engineers that steering wheel should be on the right side of the car even in the countries that have right hand traffic (while pedals stay on the left side) because Intial D is such a cool movie.
So I'm 26 now I remember tt you guy are my heros I'm subscribe to you because inspiration
My new favorite channel.
Now that has to be one of the most interesting stories behind the development of the game that, while it may be considered as one of the worst games of all time, I did have a very strong bond with especially since it was one of the first games that I got with the PS1 way back in May of 1998, and the fact that due to my very strong bond that I have with the game for more than 20 years now, I even had done a playthrough of the game way back in 2013, which while heavily outdated due to poor recording quality, I'm still amazed that unlike many other people who instantly hated it when they first played it (Yes, I'm even looking at you AaronFolkwes), I got used to the flawed yet still somehow manageable rotational controls that Psygnosis decided to have in your game, and surprisingly I got through the game pretty well and even completed it, especially since I also discovered many strange exploits that your team had left over, which still helped me get through it.
I’d like to know how the texture warping was fixed
I wasn't aware that the PSX could do reflections like that. It was something I only remember seeing on the N64.
Damn, the same people who made the game that introduced me to video games (LEGO Star Wars) were the same people that made the infamous Sonic R and Rascal.
Huh
That's right Mr. Publisher, Tomb Raider was a great success because of it's amazing controls. What planet were these people on?
I used to play the demo of this all the time.
I would love to see a mod for _Rascal_ that switches the controls back.
This is the first game I purchased for my PS1 (because it was in the bargain bin). It was a regretful purchase. I appreciate the background info on the game.
Was waiting for you to talk about this game tbh!