Bugs & Detrimental Changes (UPDATED w/ Mod Links)

[Saturn Memories]

Since it appears no one here has ever bothered to catalog all the major issues with this version of NiGHTS, I figured I'd do just that. I know it's been a decade since release, but my hope is that one day someone (hopefully Sega, but more likely a fan) will take it upon themselves to patch at least a few of these:

• Analog - When the remake was first ported from PlayStation 2, full analog control was lost somewhere along the way. Sega did eventually fix this in the Xbox 360 and PS3 versions, but the patch doesn't seem to have ever been applied to the PC port. The easiest way to observe this is by slowly rotating the analog stick in a circular motion after dualizing with NiGHTS.
  
  MOD AVAILABLE: https://gamebanana.com/mods/452520
  
  
• Air brake - Performing quick, tight paraloops using the air brake is impossible in the remake.
  
  
• Drill dash speed - The drill dash is considerably slower, which makes some of the more challenging links impossible under normal circumstances. I say "normal circumstances" because this issue can be mitigated somewhat by another bug that gives you a slight speed burst when dropping out of a drill dash. Between these two bugs, the optimal way to play the remake is to frequently tap the drill dash button instead of just holding it down like you would on Saturn.
  
  Mare 1 of Mystic Forest best illustrates this problem. In the original game, it's difficult, but very possible for a seasoned player to consistently pull off an infinite link. But in the remake, the ONLY way to do so is by intermittently tapping the drill dash button -- still, it's exceedingly difficult to keep the link going in this manner!
  
  
• Overhead speed - Maybe it's just the change in perspective playing tricks on my eyes, but it feels like NiGHTS becomes a bit slower in top-down sections like Mare 3 of Splash Garden and Mare 4 of Mystic Forest.
  
  
• Dash panels - Speed boosts obtained from dash panels don't seem to last quite as long. This is most apparent in Mare 2 of Spring Valley where it should be possible to pull off a unique paraloop as the player/camera circles around the giant tree. I'm sure the drill dash speed being too slow also ties into this.
  
  
• Paraloop depth - The paraloop's z-axis does not extend far enough into the background, which renders some background items on neighboring planes unobtainable. The easiest place to observe this is Mare 4 of Frozen Bell where, right before reaching the NiGHTS Palace, it should be possible to paraloop a cluster of stars and blue chips floating in the background. This may also have something to do with why the massive paraloop link amidst the floating snowballs in Mare 3 isn't possible either, but that's just a guess.
  
  
• Hitboxes - Link balls and the star bonus Nightopian (the little guy that spawns above the NiGHTS Palace on Mare 3 of every Dream) can be difficult to grab. Their hitboxes probably need adjusting.
  
  
• Wandering Nightmarens - Nightmarens tend to end up in some unexpected places over the course of multiple same-session replays.
  
  
• Water bubbles - The floating water bubbles in Splash Garden demand a much more precise entry angle to avoid being shot off in a random direction.
  
  
• Rail ride controls - The rail rides in Mares 2 and 4 of Stick Canyon are much more difficult to control. In the original game, the position of NiGHTS would correspond directly to the position of the analog stick. So if your thumb was pressing up toward twelve-o'clock, NiGHTS would also be positioned at twelve-o'clock on screen. And if, for instance, you switched to seven-o'clock, NiGHTS would too. It was simple and intuitive. The new control scheme is not.
  
  
• Stick Canyon lighting - At least I think this is a lighting issue. Basically, everything in this stage is way too dark. This doesn't appear to have been a problem in the PS2 version, so it's a bug that was introduced when Sega Europe ported it back in 2012.
  
  
• Boss shader - Texture shading for bosses is disabled for some reason. This is another issue that was introduced in the 2012 port.
  
  MOD AVAILABLE: https://gamebanana.com/mods/455706
  
  
• Jackle's cape - Jackle's normal cape texture is swapped for a corrupted prototype texture when separated from his body.
  
  MOD AVAILABLE: https://gamebanana.com/mods/452401
  
  
• Puffy's camera - When grabbing onto Puffy during her boss fight, the camera is supposed to position itself in such a way that the breakable wall will come into view. In the remake, this doesn't always happen, so the player needs to either memorize where the breakable portions of the wall are or be sure to look at it before latching onto Puffy.
  
  
• Clawz' AI - If you destroy mouse rockets too quickly (ie: drill dashing straight into them one after another), Clawz will stop igniting their fuses as he runs away, thereby prolonging the fight. It is possible to blow up an unlit mouse rocket by initiating a paraloop near it, but this takes longer and makes getting a x2.0 bonus pretty damn difficult. Reprogramming Clawz' AI would be too much trouble, but I imagine lowering the 2.0 requirement by five seconds probably wouldn't be that hard.

That's all I got. If you guys have anything to add, please feel free to do so. Anyway, here's hoping someone eventually tackles a few of these problems.

[Ignigknawt]

This is a good highlight of all the issues this port has. I really wish the game had a bigger modding community like SADX and SA2B, but Idk much about modding. This game could be hard to modify for all I know :(

[Ikagura]

Sega and shoddy ports of ports: a long love story.

[AortaPlatinum]

Originally posted by Ignigknawt:

This is a good highlight of all the issues this port has. I really wish the game had a bigger modding community like SADX and SA2B, but Idk much about modding. This game could be hard to modify for all I know :(

I always thought it didn't get any mods because it's a port of a Saturn game so it would be a nightmare to try to reverse engineer... but it's a port of the PS2 version, which was built from the ground up because, well, the original was a Saturn game. Now that we've got datamining going on in our small community, I wouldn't be surprised if a ton of features were able to be restored. Really I just want the physics and controls fixed, it would totally be possible to hack Sonic into Dreams back in using the Classic Sonic model from Generations, and once it's been fully decompiled, I'm sure it would be incredibly simple to replace the opening and ending Christmas NiGHTS narration with the original English version instead of the English re-record they did with a different actor for this version. Though why someone would want to play with that old narration is beyond me, poor girl sounds like she's being held at gunpoint lol

[Saturn Memories]

Originally posted by AortaPlatinum:

Originally posted by Ignigknawt:

This is a good highlight of all the issues this port has. I really wish the game had a bigger modding community like SADX and SA2B, but Idk much about modding. This game could be hard to modify for all I know :(

I always thought it didn't get any mods because it's a port of a Saturn game so it would be a nightmare to try to reverse engineer... but it's a port of the PS2 version, which was built from the ground up because, well, the original was a Saturn game. Now that we've got datamining going on in our small community, I wouldn't be surprised if a ton of features were able to be restored. Really I just want the physics and controls fixed, it would totally be possible to hack Sonic into Dreams back in using the Classic Sonic model from Generations, and once it's been fully decompiled, I'm sure it would be incredibly simple to replace the opening and ending Christmas NiGHTS narration with the original English version instead of the English re-record they did with a different actor for this version. Though why someone would want to play with that old narration is beyond me, poor girl sounds like she's being held at gunpoint lol

The PS2 version was not built from scratch. It is very much derived from the original SH2 assembly language. I'm actually in the process of summarizing a blog post by the game's producer that details just how difficult the whole project was.

[AortaPlatinum]

♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ what
That's so cool, I thought I remember DiGiValentine saying they rebuilt it and that's why the controls and physics are funky. If this is true, then it means the datamining going on right now isn't just uncovering lost PS2/HD version stuff, but potentially lost stuff from the original that we've never been able to decompile.

[Saturn Memories]

Originally posted by AortaPlatinum:

♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ what
That's so cool, I thought I remember DiGiValentine saying they rebuilt it and that's why the controls and physics are funky. If this is true, then it means the datamining going on right now isn't just uncovering lost PS2/HD version stuff, but potentially lost stuff from the original that we've never been able to decompile.

Here a few select bits from what I've done so far:

A month into the job, NiGHTS co-creator and original lead programmer Yuji Naka approaches Uchida. He asks, "Are you sure the Shanghai team can handle this? It's all in assembler language and pushes the Saturn's twin CPUs to their fullest." Uchida replies, "Just wait and see."

Although SSC has access to the game's source code, they're still missing some important materials: the original picture data, uncompressed versions of the FMV, the source code for Christmas NiGHTS, etc. They'll have to recreate much of this.

...

Four months have passed since the start of the project. Analyzing the original source code is proving very difficult, and there hasn't been much progress. To make matters worse, a rival company poaches three of the team's four main programmers. Their work has to be discarded.

[Ikagura]

But at the end the game still plays nice

[Saturn Memories]

Originally posted by Ikagura:

But at the end the game still plays nice

Kind of. The remake is decent, but there are enough issues with it that I can't say it renders the original obsolete like some other Saturn remakes manage to do. For instance, if you own Dynamite Deka on PS2/PS3 or Guardian Heroes on XBLA, there's no reason to play either one on Saturn again. Can't say the same about NiGHTS though...

[AortaPlatinum]

Man I never realized the work that went into this. If Megapixel Games ever gets the balls to remake Panzer Dragoon Saga after they do Zwei, SEGA Shanghai would make for an excellent collaborator

[Saturn Memories]

Originally posted by AortaPlatinum:

Man I never realized the work that went into this. If Megapixel Games ever gets the balls to remake Panzer Dragoon Saga after they do Zwei, SEGA Shanghai would make for an excellent collaborator

The company that owns Megapixel recently signed a deal for the rights to remake some yet-to-be-announced Square Enix titles, so they may end up working on those after HotD 1/2 and PD Zwei are done.

[AortaPlatinum]

Oh that's right, I forgot. Well better Forever Entertainment than squeenix's historically ♥♥♥♥♥♥ in-house "remasters"

[Ikagura]

Originally posted by Saturn Memories:

Originally posted by Ikagura:

But at the end the game still plays nice

Kind of. The remake is decent, but there are enough issues with it that I can't say it renders the original obsolete like some other Saturn remakes manage to do. For instance, if you own Dynamite Deka on PS2/PS3 or Guardian Heroes on XBLA, there's no reason to play either one on Saturn again. Can't say the same about NiGHTS though...

To be honest Guardian Heroes and Dynamite Deka (isn't it Die Hard the videogame?) are a bit more simple than Nights was.

Still a shame they couldn't do a 1:1 remake but I've seen worse (like SADX compared to the DC release visually).

[sauceboss]

also the game lags a lot during when you go into a trick ring

[AortaPlatinum]

I think it was determined that ^that only happens if you're using certain brands of GPUs or integrated graphics

[also just to avoid confusion and I don't want to sound like an ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥, "lag" usually means delayed inputs- what happens with the trick rings is dropped frames]

[Saturn Memories]

The original post has been updated to reflect new mods that fix some of the issues in the above list. I'll continue to make changes as more fixes become available.

Please note, these mods aren't by me. All credit so far goes to Jordan/Colon D.