The same development studio, Sega AM2, recently had a developer reveal that he had put an Easter egg into Fighters Megamix for Saturn. However, he mistakenly introduced a crash bug in it.
This set me off looking for the Easter egg. After a couple days of reverse engineering, I finally found it [0]! I love looking for this stuff.
Also playing through on Steam Deck. Steam QTE problems really haven't hindered my enjoyment at all. Kind of shocking how well it's aged overall and how different it is playing through as an adult.
I am waaay better at driving that forklift 20+ years later. The foreman loves me now.
I replayed Shenmue on my Deck about a year ago and I had the same QTE problems. The solution was to download a custom, community-made control scheme from the Steam workshop.
Athens being its own special hell, looking across the city from Lykovounia and seeing everything in the city at the same ~5 storey level of dark concrete.
> Is it typical for Japanese towns to have all the electricity wiring above ground?
Yes
> Is it on purpose
Yes? Electrical wiring is built deliberately, of course it's on purpose. Where else would you put it, and why? You're implying it's somehow normal to bury it? That sounds like it would be expensive, both to build and to maintain.
> You're implying it's somehow normal to bury it? That sounds like it would be expensive, both to build and to maintain.
It is in my neck of the woods (the Netherlands) too, the only places you see overground electricity is high tension lines outside of towns. Here's a random suburb I just picked randomly, looks like it was built in the 80's: https://maps.app.goo.gl/7DeZiTyKuB4DZKdG8. Or else Amsterdam, which is much older: https://maps.app.goo.gl/FWm6vYgbV5h2CkZu5.
I'd argue (based purely on gut feeling and handwaving) that having it out in the open is more expensive and dangerous; weathering, wind, trees, cars crashing into it, people climbing up into it, birds, etc.
Anyway, your comment sounds like US defaultism, be wary of that.
I'm not sure about your location, but around here (Austria) it is indeed much more common to have electrical wiring that runs through the ground than above air. The only place where you see wiring above ground is usually out in the rural areas.
Reminds me of a similar story about Blast Corps, specifically how they implemented logic to correctly display apparent retrograde motion vis-a-vis the orbit of Venus from the perspective of Earth...all just for what basically amounts to a background animation. [0]
This is one of those things where it's like if you have to program them to move, it's probably just easiest to program it to be somewhat faithful instead of making up some other values.
When I took the sophomore-level Computer Graphics class as an undergrad in 2001, the final project was to build a solar system simulator in OpenGL. It didn't have to be especially faithful (all orbits perfectly round, don't care about starting positions, etc). The most complicated part was implementing a view from a planet's surface which would rotate at the proper rate for the given planet. This was not a difficult assignment (for me, can't say anything about my classmates!).
Making it marginally more accurate for a real product would only have been a bit more effort.
Nintendo and Rare (as "Xbox Game Studios") figured out how to work together, and as of Feb 2024, you can play Blast Corps on the Nintendo Switch Online Expansion Pack (along with a bunch of other Rare games)
Shenmue I and II will stay with me forever. I waited and waited for Shenmue III, and swore that when it came out I would buy whatever it took to play it, but the reviews were so poor that I haven't even tried it. Is it worth it?
Haven't yet completed it. In my opinion, although the originals had a clunky control scheme, it still had charm. Really bugs me how they moved the camera to an "over one shoulder" view rather than directly behind like in the first games. (nitpick) They also changed the iconic font used in the for no good reason.
Shenmue is one of my favorite games. I did a bunch of Ghidra reversing on the Dreamcast version last year, since I wanted to add improvements to it. Like adding bilinear filtering on the sky background, making time run a bit (faster so you can see time specific events like Christmas/New Year more easily,) getting the game to run without disc swapping on an ODE, and adding antialiasing (which would require mipmaps to improve rendering performance, which would require higher texture compression levels to get them to fit, which would require a different texture format that supports that...) I never got around to actually implementing any of that, outside of doing some experiments, like forcing bilinear on all 2D elements.
I don't think I found the sun/moon code (or more likely I did, but didn't realize what exactly it was doing, Ghidra SH4 has serious problems with floating point instructions making following anything that uses them almost impossible) but I did find most of the other time related code for updating the clock/calendar.
One weird thing I found while doing that is about the in-game watch. You always have a watch in your inventory, so you'd think it would be hard coded in, but it's treated like any other item. The game also has code to check if the watch is missing and add it back in anyways. But the code that draws the on-screen clock also checks if you don't have the watch, and won't draw the clock if you don't have it (or at least part of the UI clock logic is disabled, I haven't actually tried seeing what happens if you don't have a watch to verify if my interpretation is correct).
On the PAL version, the code that checks for a missing watch is at 0x0c180dc6 (that's where the code is loaded into memory, subtract 0xc010000 to get the address in 1ST_READ.BIN), and I think the code for drawing the clock (or at maybe it was just updating the hands of the clock?) is at 0x0c18290a.
Dreamcast Shenmue has code to support other video modes, like alternate resolutions (320x240p!), antialiasing, and 24/32 bit color. They're a bit bugged, like when using antialiasing, the 2D elements being squashed into the left half of the screen, and some strange issue with the screen position for the RAMDAC being setting incorrectly, causing the screen to vibrate left/right by a pixel or two, but the 3D models were drawn correctly.
24-bit color worked surprisingly well (even if the flag intended to enable it didn't seem to work, and I had to force it elsewhere.) I would have thought that having less video RAM free would have caused serious problems, but the game just loaded fewer NPCs. It was strange playing without dithering.
The moon in-game also has a complex implementation. I don't think anyone realized this until the team porting the games to modern consoles pointed it out in an interview
I was really hyped for Shenmue when it came out on the Dreamcast, but I wasn't crazy about it once I finally played it. It was a glorified point and click adventure game, and it ultimately had no ending or purpose. It was an interesting and ambitious idea for a game though, they threw the kitchen sink in there.
My favorite part of the game was playing space harrier in the arcade.
I read every piece of US magazine coverage during the development of this game until finally 3-4 years later I bought my Dreamcast on launch and eventually Shenmue followed by a boot disc and Shenmue 2 (UK). 6 years of waiting to spend countless hours playing Space Harrier and Pachinko not to mention find some sailors. Absolutely loved this game.
I’m not sure a single person in this thread actually read the article rather than just taking an opportunity to say how much they like the game.
I read it and I’m not sure I get the point—it seems in the end what they discovered is the simulated sun position in the first two games are based on each other's locations. Not familiar enough with the series to understand what implication that has, but in any case, is it an easter egg or an oversight? It can't be both.
The first game is set in Yokosuka, Japan, which has its latitude at 35deg north. The second game is set in Hong Kong, which has its latitude at 22deg north. It seems like whoever coded this data into the games may have swapped them.
Playing it on Steam Deck right now. Only issue is with QTEs but honestly hasn't bothered me at all. Thought that might ruin it. Overall it has been an excellent way to replay it so far.
It's a game, for Dreamcast. Certified classic. Amazing technical demo for the time. Redefined what games could be. The Yakuza games would not exist without it and are generally considered it's spiritual successors.
Shenmue was one of the first 3D games where realistic human characters had details like individually movable fingers. It was a very big deal for the year it came out.
Man I loved this game so much as a kid. I remember being enthralled by opening the drawers, lol. I basically played it once a year every year from ages 9 - 16. Some of the enchantment was lost when I played the remaster recently, but still such a great world they built.
An all-timer for me as well! So much strange magic in there. No game before or sense has quite that vibe. Maybe a product of it coming out at just the right time.
"Do you remember... that day?"
"The day it snowed?"
NO! The day I got it right as it came out. A Friday after school and I played for like 4 hours straight. Yes! I remember THAT day!
What didn't work about the remaster or was it just a matter of shattering the illusion of your memories?
I've been thinking about the game a lot since having my first child last year. She often lifts things and rotates them in her hand just to see and experience them. When I was a kid playing Shenmue I always found it funny that they added that mechanic because "who does that?" but now I feel a very deep appreciation for it.
> What didn't work about the remaster or was it just a matter of shattering the illusion of your memories?
At the time it was a unique, first of it's kind, game. Now there have been a lot of advancements since then so I didn't have the same "Wow" feelings of just being in the world. But the nostalgia still hit me hard and it still has a special place in my heart.
I had played Morrowind and gta3 at the time, but I missed the train on Shenmue. So ten years ago I bought a used Dreamcast and a copy of the game and... The game was sloooow. Granted, the system I bought was dying as well, but just going into drawers was slow. So no immersion to be had unlike many of the games at the time gave me.
I guess it depends on what you're trying to accomplish with playing Shenmue now. Is it the story or the immersion?
I don't think applies to you but I imagine people playing this series for the first time today probably think, _What's so special? This feels just like every other open world game_, even though it's really the other way around.
It's similar phenomenon to people hearing the Beatles or the Rolling Stones (or any of the artists they ripped off ...) with modern ears.
There's hope, though. I do think in both cases, it's possible to develop an appreciation once you learn about the lineage of a particular work.
Same! So satisfying to just explore the world they built, to the point of me neglecting the actual story a lot of the time. Hell, I think the only reason I advanced the story was to unlock new dialog from the NPCs. I loved the whackiness of 'em.
Unfortunately, I think the lost enchantment is just a product of aging. Things I were so enthusiastic about as a child (videogames, particularly) no longer have the same appeal, despite my best efforts to reignite some passion. That said, I did put in a good chunk of playtime with the remaster and I was still having fun with it. Though, not to completion as my attention span for videogames has dwindled.
A seemingly unlimited amount of content, nearly everything could be interacted with, and the graphics were very good compared to other games in 1999. Heck, the y had teeth meshes.
The background music for nearly every environment lives rent free in my head some 20-odd years later.
Me and my friend completed the game together as kids, and I vividly remember us being stuck at this stage looking for sailors (IIRC).
It accidentally imbued a lot class awareness into us; all we wanted was to revenge our father but here we were, driving boxes around hours and hours being paid pennies.
The tl;dr (though you should read!) of the "oversight" is that there's a constant used to adjust the sun's position that's seemingly based on latitude; in the first Shenmue, it's set to 22, and in Shenmue II - which uses much of the same code - it's set to 35. This is odd, because Shenmue I takes place at latitude 35°, and Shenmue II at 22° - precisely the other way around.
If that's what's going on, it's sort of hard for me to wrap my brain around how that might've happened. I could see them "fixing" the Shenmue I code base and then forgetting to "unfix" it for Shenmue II, but I can't - even knowing that there were already plans for where the sequel would be set - come up with a story for how they would've accidentally used Shenmue II's latitude for the original game.
Maybe the code was written at the early onset of the game, and originally the locations were flip flopped in super early development. Then later they decided on the locations that became permanent, and nobody bothered to fix that part of the code?
Wild guess: they set it wrong on the first game (possibly by looking up the wrong parameter). On the next game, when they went to fix the sun position for the new location they realized the mistake and changed it to the original location as an easter egg.
The coincidence of the wrong position matching the location of the next game is strange though.
I wonder if it has anything to do with the default cutscene that plays on the start screen if you don’t progress. That cutscene would have been set in China as its Shenhua reciting the games central prophecy
I wonder if it could be linked to the original development on the Sega Saturn, if I remember well the video of the prototype, Shenmue on Saturn was spanning across both Shenmue 1 and 2
Maybe they realized the bug early in Shenmue II's planning and decided to just move the game to where the bugged value was correct, not knowing that it was fixed in code in the mean time.
(This has an approximately zero chance of being correct.)
The same development studio, Sega AM2, recently had a developer reveal that he had put an Easter egg into Fighters Megamix for Saturn. However, he mistakenly introduced a crash bug in it.
This set me off looking for the Easter egg. After a couple days of reverse engineering, I finally found it [0]! I love looking for this stuff.
[0] https://32bits.substack.com/p/bonus-fighters-megamix
https://www.google.com/maps/@35.2781594,139.677597,3a,75y,27...
I am waaay better at driving that forklift 20+ years later. The foreman loves me now.
If you google "Shenmue locations in real life" there's a lot of cool stuff. They really did do a great job on that and the ERA as well.
Most Japanese towns are not even functional, they are just a chaotic maze of tiny streets and ugly buildings. I know because I live in one.
Yes
> Is it on purpose
Yes? Electrical wiring is built deliberately, of course it's on purpose. Where else would you put it, and why? You're implying it's somehow normal to bury it? That sounds like it would be expensive, both to build and to maintain.
It is in my neck of the woods (the Netherlands) too, the only places you see overground electricity is high tension lines outside of towns. Here's a random suburb I just picked randomly, looks like it was built in the 80's: https://maps.app.goo.gl/7DeZiTyKuB4DZKdG8. Or else Amsterdam, which is much older: https://maps.app.goo.gl/FWm6vYgbV5h2CkZu5.
I'd argue (based purely on gut feeling and handwaving) that having it out in the open is more expensive and dangerous; weathering, wind, trees, cars crashing into it, people climbing up into it, birds, etc.
Anyway, your comment sounds like US defaultism, be wary of that.
Yes, it's normal. It's called undergrounding.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FZ6eNJi02Qk
Making it marginally more accurate for a real product would only have been a bit more effort.
I don't think I found the sun/moon code (or more likely I did, but didn't realize what exactly it was doing, Ghidra SH4 has serious problems with floating point instructions making following anything that uses them almost impossible) but I did find most of the other time related code for updating the clock/calendar.
One weird thing I found while doing that is about the in-game watch. You always have a watch in your inventory, so you'd think it would be hard coded in, but it's treated like any other item. The game also has code to check if the watch is missing and add it back in anyways. But the code that draws the on-screen clock also checks if you don't have the watch, and won't draw the clock if you don't have it (or at least part of the UI clock logic is disabled, I haven't actually tried seeing what happens if you don't have a watch to verify if my interpretation is correct).
On the PAL version, the code that checks for a missing watch is at 0x0c180dc6 (that's where the code is loaded into memory, subtract 0xc010000 to get the address in 1ST_READ.BIN), and I think the code for drawing the clock (or at maybe it was just updating the hands of the clock?) is at 0x0c18290a.
Dreamcast Shenmue has code to support other video modes, like alternate resolutions (320x240p!), antialiasing, and 24/32 bit color. They're a bit bugged, like when using antialiasing, the 2D elements being squashed into the left half of the screen, and some strange issue with the screen position for the RAMDAC being setting incorrectly, causing the screen to vibrate left/right by a pixel or two, but the 3D models were drawn correctly.
24-bit color worked surprisingly well (even if the flag intended to enable it didn't seem to work, and I had to force it elsewhere.) I would have thought that having less video RAM free would have caused serious problems, but the game just loaded fewer NPCs. It was strange playing without dithering.
https://www.phantomriverstone.com/2020/09/ryo-goes-to-moon-s...
My favorite part of the game was playing space harrier in the arcade.
I read it and I’m not sure I get the point—it seems in the end what they discovered is the simulated sun position in the first two games are based on each other's locations. Not familiar enough with the series to understand what implication that has, but in any case, is it an easter egg or an oversight? It can't be both.
Also excellent write up and discovery, truly inspiring *clap_emoji *bow_emoji
Shenmue was one of the first 3D games where realistic human characters had details like individually movable fingers. It was a very big deal for the year it came out.
"Do you remember... that day?"
"The day it snowed?"
NO! The day I got it right as it came out. A Friday after school and I played for like 4 hours straight. Yes! I remember THAT day!
Half Life 2 did but in a different way.
Maybe when a game just leapfrogs what's been thought of as cutting edge and you're so amazed that you forget that you're playing a game.
I'm not sure if my fascination for Japan started with Shenmue but it certainly grew from there. I was so happy to visit for the first time last year.
I've been thinking about the game a lot since having my first child last year. She often lifts things and rotates them in her hand just to see and experience them. When I was a kid playing Shenmue I always found it funny that they added that mechanic because "who does that?" but now I feel a very deep appreciation for it.
At the time it was a unique, first of it's kind, game. Now there have been a lot of advancements since then so I didn't have the same "Wow" feelings of just being in the world. But the nostalgia still hit me hard and it still has a special place in my heart.
I guess it depends on what you're trying to accomplish with playing Shenmue now. Is it the story or the immersion?
It's similar phenomenon to people hearing the Beatles or the Rolling Stones (or any of the artists they ripped off ...) with modern ears.
There's hope, though. I do think in both cases, it's possible to develop an appreciation once you learn about the lineage of a particular work.
Unfortunately, I think the lost enchantment is just a product of aging. Things I were so enthusiastic about as a child (videogames, particularly) no longer have the same appeal, despite my best efforts to reignite some passion. That said, I did put in a good chunk of playtime with the remaster and I was still having fun with it. Though, not to completion as my attention span for videogames has dwindled.
A seemingly unlimited amount of content, nearly everything could be interacted with, and the graphics were very good compared to other games in 1999. Heck, the y had teeth meshes.
The background music for nearly every environment lives rent free in my head some 20-odd years later.
It accidentally imbued a lot class awareness into us; all we wanted was to revenge our father but here we were, driving boxes around hours and hours being paid pennies.
If that's what's going on, it's sort of hard for me to wrap my brain around how that might've happened. I could see them "fixing" the Shenmue I code base and then forgetting to "unfix" it for Shenmue II, but I can't - even knowing that there were already plans for where the sequel would be set - come up with a story for how they would've accidentally used Shenmue II's latitude for the original game.
The coincidence of the wrong position matching the location of the next game is strange though.
(This has an approximately zero chance of being correct.)