DaMadFiddler wrote:I have spent some time with the game now, and here are my impressions:
First off: for the record, I have been playing Neverball since its early incarnations (read: before they added the shiny shader effects, and extra variations like Neverputt). So I have at least some familiarity with the source material. That said....
First thing, i can't get it to work decently at my PC, so i have no familiarity with the source material (the framerate is terrible)... well, that's why i have a Dreamcast!
- as noted, there is a horrible memory leak. If you turn on backgrounds and high-quality visuals, the game will hang after four or five tables. With these options turned off, the game will play for considerably longer.
Depends on what levels you're playing, there are some levels that are very memory-intensive, playing these repeatedly crashes the game no matter what are the visuals' quality. And the game just crashes after some levels anyway. No big deal, really.
- there are significant transparency issues. In Neverball, the ball itself is transparent, to aid visibility. However, this does not work right...the ball is crosshatched, and usually starts off invisible. Once you start moving, it layers in. Also, levels that use transparency effects will suffer some odd video glitches, depending on the particular situation.
The transparency issues (starting off invisible, and later layering in) are a result of playing with enhanced graphics, or playing the memory-intensive levels (Try Hard-17 for the most extreme example of this). The different ball style (instead of the black-and-white used in the usual binaries) is no glitch, try downloading the PC binaries and replacing the folders with the ones from the Dreamcast CD. It'll change the ball and the coins. And i got no odd video glitches, the transparency effects on levels were just removed and the blocks turned into solid blocks, not depending on any particular situation. BTW, this makes Mehdi-5 completely unplayable, and Mehdi-13 gets even more harder (as if Mehdi levels weren't hard enough).
- there are some audio buffering issues. The music sometimes cuts out, and reappears almost randomly (if you trigger an event, call up the menu, etc.). Also, the ball rebound sample seems to echo and "repeat" sometimes for no reason during play.
Never had any problems with the sound effects so far, but that music thing does happen. If the music cuts out, pause and unpause the game. It should come back.
- physics don't seem to be quite right with vertically moving platforms. The ball either moves through them, or is "pushed" out of them...and then continues to drift in that direction infinitely until you do something, regardless of other objects or boundaries.
I couldn't understand this part. The "moves through them" i understand, apparently the ball can pass through a lot of supposedly solid objects, a glitch i have no idea if it is in the original game or not, but i couldn't understand anything from "'pushed' out of them" to the end.
- the analog stick could use more range. Maybe I'm just used to "real" Monkey Ball, but it doesn't feel like I can tilt the stage quite as much as I should be able to. Moving the stick to an extreme feels like it should tilt the stage a bit more, especially given how light and floaty the ball is in Neverball. This makes control rather imprecise, and makes heavily slanted stages rather difficult.
I feel the analog range is quite right, even if i never played the original, or Monkey Ball. And the game seems to agree with me; there's a Mehdi level (M-18) where the pre-game text states that achieving maximum speed is recommended to cross the first slope, and tilting the analog stick all the way forward put me precisely at the higher end of the slope (too bad the following superfast horizontally moving platforms proved to be much of a challenge to my puny skillz).
On the other hand, this statement "Moving the stick to an extreme feels like it should tilt the stage a bit more" is correct, as you can see for yourself. Tilt the stick all the way to a direction, then, while paying attention to the stage, sightly move the stick in the opposite direction (for example, move the stick all the way up, then go back down just a little). The stage will first tilt along with the stick, but it won't "untilt". I guess this is a kind of "safety" range, because some sticks get loose (see n64 analogs), and if the game was programmed to use all of the stick's range, then many used or third-party analog sticks would be at a serious disadvantage (as they don't have all of the original detection range available to them).
It's good work, and I hope Chui continues to refine this.
Totally agree with you, man, this game rules, and i can honestly say this is one of those moments were you're just glad you own a Dreamcast.
Oh, and one thing, i didn't know you could change the settings, i thought the game was locked on the lowest possible options since i couldn't get lower than the fullscreen/640x480 line, the cursor simply didn't get there, but after i saw this post, i tried again and it worked. So thanks for being the first person to actually post decent opinions on this port AND for giving me a clue on the settings.
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