TL;DR: Has the change from 4:3 to widescreen displays killed or at least damaged the vertical scroller genre?
So I’m taking a short break from my big project to create a simple vertical scroller in the style of the old arcade / NES games 1942 and 1943 but with 3D models.
1943 for reference:
So I’ve been working on the prototype and I ran into an issue. I just can’t see the enemies far enough away. If I zoom the camera out I fix the distance issue, but then the planes are just way too small. No matter how I fiddle with the knobs I can’t get it to look and work right.
But then it occurs to me that I can’t make it look right because the physical shape of monitors has significantly changed since these games were popular. I know vertical scroller games still exist, but the genre is a shadow of its earlier popularity. Previously, of course, there was so much more vertical space to play with back in the tube TV days.
Am I correct that the change from more squared 4:3 displays to 16:9 and wider screens has killed the vertical scroller, or at least been a significant set back?
I’m considering redesigning the game to be a side scroller, similar to the old UN Squadron, primarily because of this issue.
I wouldn’t say it’s the change in aspect ratio — it’s that the arcade machines you’re thinking of had the screen mounted in portrait mode. If you could convince your users to do that, modern wide-screen monitors would work great for a vertical scroller!
[quote=“Martin_H, post:3, topic: 801288, username:Martin_H”]
If that was the case, they should be thriving on tablet devices.
[/quote]Not necessarily, because screen orientation isn’t the only factor. The controllers are a major one, and the difference between an arcade audience and a phone audience is also huge.
They still seem to be around. Check out how Velocity Ultra handles the changed screen shape. The gameplay is still vertical but the active part of the screen essentually “pans” from side to side as different parts of the screen become obstructed. In other words, they turned it into a mechanic.
You could potentially also do something with perspective, so that movement isn’t completely vertical.
Another option is to just… not use the whole monitor. I know there’ll be a psychological challenge there, but even if I treat my monitor right now as a square based on its height it’s still bigger than what I used to play games on back when these games were more common. So I’d think about other things you can do with that screen real estate.
I used to play on 15", 17" and 19" CRTs before I switched to the 16:10 ratio 22" flatscreen monitors that I still use. I think just not using the full screen space is totally valid. It doesn’t have to be black bars though, you could use that space to fill it with fancy UI stuff or even use it to expand on gamemechanics like adding a mouse cursor and putting interactable GUI elements there to micromanage shields, weapons, specials etc… Maybe a minimap that shows you how far a long in the level your are etc… If there’s some resistance in the target audience to “not using the full screen”, maybe things like that could be used to mitigate somewhat.
Often when I play old 2D games I wish there was an easier way to just tell the game “Just don’t interpolate the resolution and make the screen as big as you can without cropping off something”. Is there a way to do that?
Quite possibly, it depends on your gear. Check out the scaling options on your monitor, and if not there then check out the scaling options in your video drivers.
My screen doesn’t have any options for that. Last I checked the video drivers only offered 1 to 1 resolution display with black bordes, but that doesn’t make sense for low resolutions like e.g. 320 x 240 because it gets so tiny on screen. Scaling at even 2x or 3x factors is possible for some dosbox versions of retro games from GOG, but I had to run them in windowed mode.
Thanks, that sounds more like it. Though if I understand it correctly the nvidia GPU that I have doesn’t support the integer upscaling, and I’ll need to wait till I have one of those Turing cards. But that’s ok, what’s another couple of years to wait for playing 20 year old games like they looked 20 years ago :). Not playing many retro games at the moment anyway and I just finished another JA2 playthrough, so maybe for the next one I’ll have a 4k screen and a GPU that supports this feature.
Thanks for the help guys, back to shmups!
I talked to a friend once who said he loves shmups and I recommended a sidescrolling shooter to him (probably Hydora, but I’m not sure), thinking it’s basically the same, but he said he only plays vertically scrolling shmups, doesn’t consider sidescrolling ones as part of the genre, and said he won’t touch any of those. I don’t know if he’s an outlier with an unusual but strong opinion, or whether it’s more common among shmup fans. Might be worth looking into before you commit to switching the orientation.
Edit: pressing win key and “+” on windows 7 does a crisp 2x, 3x, 4x scaling. So if a game can be played in windowed mode and doesn’t need you to move the mouse to places where it would start scrolling the desktop, that seems like a decent enough workaround for the resolution scaling problem.
