Ninja Gaiden Sigma demo up on PSN

[betan]

I think the demo is great. Fairly long, proper difficulty, decent replay value (especially on hard), doesn't bug you with "This is a demo go order the real thing" screens.

I am new to Ninja Gaiden as well but I will probably end up buying the game. Mostly good graphics especially if it is really 1080 native. Ryu's model is amazing with self-shadows and absence of visible polygon edges. I notice some low resolution shadows during the opening scene but that was it. Neither hard to miss jaggies, nor the rare screen tearing really bugged me. I found indoor textures boring though.

Combat mechanics is indeed awesome.

Still, the game screams "I am a port" as opposed to a proper remake: repetitive, disconnected, static camera cut-scenes (opening a chest, entering a room), total lack of animation on object interactivity, disappearing leaves, pieces, bodies.

And what's up with latex ninja costume?

 

[Titanio]

I think the difficulty is kind of interesting. I'd never played NG before, but on normal I was able to pretty easily get to the boss my first time (where I was killed), and beat him on the second attempt. After hearing so much about the difficult of NG, that was a little surprising. But I guess I'll try hard mode next..

(Not that I'm complaining, mind you. I think it's just right. It feels very rewarding.)

 

[homy]

Man, this game opened up my eyes.

 

[Neb]

Man, this game opened up my eyes.

Mine to, wished I hadn't done that, made the lack of AA more obvious. Neverthless the cinematics in this game are great (nunchuck man showing off). The art in the valley is great, but wish they would have put some more work in the indoor scenes (lightning, surrounding detail). :smile:

 

[Bad_Boy]

Haven't seen any of you play this game on 1080p.
Here is the low-down from Jim at neogaf.

I can agree word for word with what he said. Well, minus the SXRD part. I'm using a sammy.

 

[Rolf N]

I didn't notice it myself but my brother was watching when I beat the boss the first time, and he reads all these muppet-infested forums without wearing proper troll-bullshit goggles, so he is very skeptical of the PS3 anyway. He constantly tries to find flaws to tell me how sucky the PS3 is and all that.
(his own gaming hardware peaks out at a Wii and Geforce FX5700 btw)

He pointed out to me that in the cutscene where you talk with the guy, and the camera moves forward very slowly, there's terrible aliasing in the edges of the window frames and around there. You're not supposed to look there, and it's out of focus (DOF), but that was kinda interesting because the jaggies seem much larger than they have any right to be in 1080i (which was the resolution I was just trying to see if the texture aliasing on that outdoor "forest floor" texture gets better).
It might be the case that Sigma implements the DOF as a forward process where the out-of-focus parts of the scene are rendered in lower res to begin with, as opposed to being rendered just the same and blurred purely as a post-process.

I found that thought interesting for five minutes.
They sure are working hard to achieve that framerate, at that resolution.

 

[kyleb]

I can agree word for word with what he said. Well, minus the SXRD part. I'm using a sammy.

Try playing a game that is actually rendered at 1080p, with anti-aliasing and decent texture filtering, then you'll agree that what he said is nonsense.

 

[Rolf N]

Try playing a game that is actually rendered at 1080p, with anti-aliasing and decent texture filtering, then you'll agree that what he said is nonsense.

It isn't nonsense, the jaggies are definitely there for anyone to see. It is perhaps nitpicking, and as the game actually directs your attention elsewhere while it's going on, you have to want to find flaws to notice them, but nevertheless they exist.

The thing with the floor texutre outdoors is strange, because there's a rock texture directly adjacent to it (a rock section left of the starting point, where the first chest is) that is filtered just fine. it might as well be that thing with Japanese developers just not seeing the benefit in proper mipmap filtering and actually prefering the "sharper" (noisy, actually) look of unfiltered textures (look at that Pangya Golf game, or Paper Mario: TYD for examples even on systems where mipmapping is trivial to implement).
I really hope they get that in order. They sure will see feedback about it after the demo. It's the sore thumb that stands out, and it's immediately at the beginning of the game.

 

[kyleb]

Sorry for the confusion, I was replying to Bad_Boy's comment.

 

[Bad_Boy]

kyleb did you play at 720p or 1080p? From what I hear the jaggies are worse at 720p. I havent tried 720p yet. But at 1080p there IS aliasing (I'm not saying there is none), but not as big as people make it out to be.

 

[kyleb]

It can't get much bigger without lowering the rendering resolution as they aren't using any AA at all on the environment, which makes the jaggies about as obvious as they can get at any given resolution. And of course the jaggies are worse at 720 lines than at 1080, as rendering at a lower resolution makes jaggies worse. The difference is pretty small in Sigma though as they aren't using but about 12% more pixels for 1080 line outputs as they are for 720p.

As for your question, I played it first at 720p and then switched to 1080i to check the difference.

 

[Bad_Boy]

I'm not sure about you, but I just switched between 720p and 1080p and there is very noticeable difference in aliasing. Lots more jaggies in 720p. I'm not sure what to tell you.

I still agree with that quote of Jim's.

 

["Nerve-Damage"]

NGS At 720p aliasing is somewhat along the lines of Gears Of War (not PGR:3 aliasing). At 1080p it’s more along the lines of RFOM, not all the recognizable or distracting until you really look for it. This is off the master’s bedroom Toshiba HDTV (62HM195). I haven’t tried it off the 2nd PS3 in the family room, which houses my custom system. Anyhow, the graphics are very gorgeous and could have easily been done on the Xbox 360 (IMO).

 

[kyleb]

I'm not sure about you, but I just switched between 720p and 1080p and there is very noticeable difference in aliasing. Lots more jaggies in 720p. I'm not sure what to tell you.

I didn't say the difference wasn't noticable, I said it wasn't much, by which I mean it is only only the difference of ~12% higher resolution compared to the over 100% higher resolution which comes from actually rendering at 1920x1080 compared to 1280x720.

NGS At 720p aliasing is somewhat along the lines of Gears Of War (not PGR:3 aliasing). At 1080p it’s more along the lines of RFOM, not all the recognizable or distracting until you really look for it.

Uh, Resistance has nice multisampling on everything and Gears at least has some edge selective blurring to hide the alaising a bit, while Sigma has lots of untouched jaggies all over the environments at any resolution.

I switched to component to check 1080p and it is clearly using the same spatial resolution as 1080i, which again simply isn't much more than 720p. Also, so that we have something objective to discuss here I took a couple of pictures to illustrate the completely untouched aliasing along with the difference between rendering resolutions:

http://www.sunflower.com/~kyleb/1080p.jpg
http://www.sunflower.com/~kyleb/720p.jpg

 

[NovemberMike]

The biggest difference I can see between sigma and black is that Sigma has more vibrant colors and more decorators. The decorators might be a memory thing, but the color tones seem to be an artistic difference between Hayashi and Itagaki.

 

["Nerve-Damage"]

Uh, Resistance has nice multisampling on everything and Gears at least has some edge selective blurring to hide the alaising a bit, while Sigma has lots of untouched jaggies all over the environments at any resolution.

My point wasn’t it didn’t have any jaggies…my point was it seems less present in 1080p (well on my set anyway). My TV just shines better whenever 1080p material is present (could be the TV circuitry more so than PS3). Anyhow, the game as it stands could easily be done on the Xbox 360 without any sacrifices.

And I truly agree with you on RFOM multisampling …actually I can’t wait to see an Xbox 360 game match that level someday.

 

[Bohdy]

I switched to component to check 1080p and it is clearly using the same spatial resolution as 1080i, which again simply isn't much more than 720p. Also, so that we have something objective to discuss here I took a couple of pictures to illustrate the completely untouched aliasing along with the difference between rendering resolutions:

http://www.sunflower.com/~kyleb/1080p.jpg
http://www.sunflower.com/~kyleb/720p.jpg

Are you sure that it is running in 1080p mode in the first picture? If so, the only difference I see is that the 1080p picture seems "softer" rather than higher resolution. That would be consistent with the supposition of scaling.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Are you sure that it is running in 1080p mode in the first picture? If so, the only difference I see is that the 1080p picture seems "softer" rather than higher resolution. That would be consistent with the supposition of scaling.

Yeah, those pics aren't looking like 720p vs. 1080p. More like a 720p signal upscaled to a 1080p display. Can anyone else (Bad_Boy, Nerve_Damage) provide a comparison for how their TV's differe between the two?

 

[xatnys]

... so yesterday I beat hard mode. Definitely pretty damn challenging. The reward? "You've unlocked very hard mode." Gah!

Very nice looking, and yes the controls are great.

 

[kyleb]

Are you sure that it is running in 1080p mode in the first picture? If so, the only difference I see is that the 1080p picture seems "softer" rather than higher resolution. That would be consistent with the supposition of scaling.

Yes, I am certian, the PS3 was set to 1080p for the first shots I took, and then I moved the game cases away from under the display when switching to 720p to make it easy to differentate between the two shoots. The jaggies on the 1080p shot looks softer becuase they smaller thanks to the slightly higher rendering resolution at 1080p.