Having kind of forgotten how this game went I fired it up tonight and was immediately fucking flabbergasted by the slowdown. I did NOT remember it being this bad. Contrasting heavily with Gradius III's actually pretty helpful slowdown, the JP and NA releases for Thunder Force IV are borderline unplayable. It also still crashes on PicoDrive on all versions, including the slightly better EU and Sega Ages ROMs.
Thunder Force IV (aka Lightening Force: Quest for the Darkstar) isn't actually developed by the same team as its predecessors. Some time after completing Thunder Force III, the staff who worked on it (bar the sound team) would leave Technosoft to work under Red Entertainment instead. While there, they would produce Gates of Thunder and Lords of Thunder for the TurboGrafx-CD, and Technosoft would have to hire a new set of people for the next Thunder Force game.
This group didn't have prior experience programming shmups, and their previous endeavor on the Genesis was some pinball port. Supposedly, due to this Thunder Force IV is not slowing down so hard from pushing the console's limits a la Kirby's Adventure, but rather shoddier programming in strange places. Using Blade for example will always slow the game to a crawl, whereas weapons like Hunter seem to do fine despite creating a similar amount if not more sprites. I don't really get how that works as I have no programming knowledge, but it can't go without being mentioned. It comes awfully close to eclipsing the actual quality of the underlying game.
But ultimately, it doesn't. In the scenario where you claw your way past that initial shock, you'll find a damn solid shmup packed with some insane music. It's just more interesting to talk about its major flaw. Grab the Sega Ages version if you're going to play this, it seems to have the slowdown toned down to the best of their abilities save for some moments where it's hard-coded in. Don't use PicoDrive for it either. That shit cannot run Vectorman 2, I don't know why I expected it to magically work this time after failing a year ago.
Thunder Force IV (aka Lightening Force: Quest for the Darkstar) isn't actually developed by the same team as its predecessors. Some time after completing Thunder Force III, the staff who worked on it (bar the sound team) would leave Technosoft to work under Red Entertainment instead. While there, they would produce Gates of Thunder and Lords of Thunder for the TurboGrafx-CD, and Technosoft would have to hire a new set of people for the next Thunder Force game.
This group didn't have prior experience programming shmups, and their previous endeavor on the Genesis was some pinball port. Supposedly, due to this Thunder Force IV is not slowing down so hard from pushing the console's limits a la Kirby's Adventure, but rather shoddier programming in strange places. Using Blade for example will always slow the game to a crawl, whereas weapons like Hunter seem to do fine despite creating a similar amount if not more sprites. I don't really get how that works as I have no programming knowledge, but it can't go without being mentioned. It comes awfully close to eclipsing the actual quality of the underlying game.
But ultimately, it doesn't. In the scenario where you claw your way past that initial shock, you'll find a damn solid shmup packed with some insane music. It's just more interesting to talk about its major flaw. Grab the Sega Ages version if you're going to play this, it seems to have the slowdown toned down to the best of their abilities save for some moments where it's hard-coded in. Don't use PicoDrive for it either. That shit cannot run Vectorman 2, I don't know why I expected it to magically work this time after failing a year ago.
3 Comments
@HylianBran the picodrive thing is more of a side note i’d say. i dont really dock it against the game itself esp compared to the slowdown but i felt it was worth mentioning
Kinda surprised it didn't crash on me as I played on an older everdrive. Boy did the game TANK on the second to last boss however.
HylianBran
10 months ago
Also this is a personal thing but I feel like it isn't the best to criticize a game for technical things like this if you're emulating it since it is possible that it is contributing to the problem. Like I understand your frustration but unless you know for certain that it's the game and not the emulator than I don't think the game should be at fault for it, like it isn't like the developers could've accounted for the game being played on an emulator many years later.
Maybe I'm way off base though, I don't know how accurate the emulation really is since I don't use emulators all that much.