Reviews

• gamedeal user

  Jul 8, 2022

  The input lag is barely noticeable, but it is there. It's not the fastest latency but it's serviceable for casual play. The game itself is great of course. For me I have issues with sound popping painfully all the time and that never happens with any of my other games except Cotton Boomerang (got this in the bundle).
• gamedeal user

  Apr 10, 2022

  Note, that my issues with this rerelease isn't with the games themselves, but rather how the rereleases were handled. Imagine releasing a glorified emulator with encrypted ini files and bin/cue files (So good luck getting a fan translation of the game working with the official release, so you can actually read dialogue), not offering any sort of official English translation, and hardcoding resolution options that only go up to 1080p (Which don't really integer scale properly with 240p/480i outputs, unlike something like 1440p). For all the flack people give Nintendo for their lackluster rereleases, at least they give you the option of reduced flickering/strobing effects, which absolutely is a massive quality of life improvement for many retro games. The most that I can really say about this compilation in particular, over just buying a Saturn copy, making a dump of it, and using an English patch, is that it has achievement support, and they fixed the lag issues that were on the Switch release. There really needs to be more effort towards finding original source code for properly enhanced ports, rather than emulation, where outside of community efforts, they end up coming off as massive cashgrabs with less effort put in than even compilations from 20 years ago like Sonic Mega Collection. Literally, that compilation is almost old enough to drink alcohol, and we still see emulated rereleases of old games lacking incredibly basic improvements.
• gamedeal user

  Mar 10, 2022

  Note: Most of my playtime is on Switch, although that might change with this now that I prefer playing this version. A fantastic shmup, and personally my favorite game of the Cotton series, finally now with an affordable and fine way to play it! I won't go into the game itself since others have said what I've said about this game already, but here's a few pointers about this version: - Yes, the input lag has been fixed. Can't comment for others, but with vsync off and on my FreeSync monitor, I've noticed no issues so far. Even the emulation issues I noticed from the unpatched Switch version of the physical Saturn Tribute compilation seem to be fixed here, which is also really nice. - The language warning on the store page is half-false. The emulation shell's menus and the game's menus are fully in English. The story text in the game, however, is not in English. While the story is funny (and is worth playing with the English fanpatch for that), no Japanese knowledge is really needed to play the game. And really, everyone who's interested in this should have expected this anyways, considering this is a pretty basic re-release of a Japan-exclusive game. Not a huge issue for me since I know what everyone is saying, too. And if this bothers you that much, there's a full playthrough in English on YT, and the fanpatch is down that way. - I haven't been able to inject said English fanpatch into the game, although I wouldn't be surprised if someone will find a way considering the ROM is in the game's folder, but encrypted. That's probably what the game is looking for, if it's encrypted. - No online multiplayer, but again this is something that should have been expected from this. It has leaderboards, though, which is nice. - Only real complaint so far is that it doesn't seem to save my resolution settings, so I have to Alt+Enter every time I play this to fullscreen it. Overall a pretty good, legal, no-fuss way of playing Cotton 2 that doesn't involve shelling out millions of dollars for an arcade/Saturn copy of the game, or busting your balls over Saturn/ST-V emulation. Pretty content with this.
• Paisese

  Aug 26, 2023

  This is a terrible PC release. Basically this is just the Japanese Sega Saturn rom built in with a proprietary emulator. I mean this is not bad per se, I would rather have more old game legally accessible this way than not having them. The problem is when you encrypt the rom itself, preventing the pc gamers to mod it in any way (in this case I wanted to apply the fan’s English patch, since the company behind this game didn’t even bothered to translate the game dialogues to English). And not only that, encrypting the rom also prevents me to play it legally on my own Sega Saturn, not sure what is the problem of the company with that. Maybe they want to limit their own proprietary emulator to play this rom? Anyway there are much better ways to handle that (like checking what rom is actually being loaded) and even this is stupid because there are much better performing Sega Saturn emulators freely available on the pc if anyone would have the idea of playing other roms on it. Sega themselves release the roms not encrypted in the mega drive collection. Since my machine is a bit old the game struggles with it, though I will not bash the game for that, since it doesn’t match the minimum system requirements (i7-3610QM). The performance gets a bit better if I disable the antialias and all the enhancements, though the music seems to not be perfect... Anyway people with way more powerful machines than mine are mentioning lag and sound issues as well so I leave it to your own criteria. With a release like this I can’t recommend this game anyone, unless you really want to play this game legally and cheap (and have a good recent pc). Otherwise just buy an used Sega Saturn copy you will be much better served and you will have much less headaches.