#Virtual Hydlide

[segadriven]

Virtual Hydlide is the first and only 3D entry in the Hydlide franchise. Created by T&E Soft, Virtual Hydlide is technically a remake of the first game in the series and is notorious for its poor framerate. This has earned it notoriety as one of the Saturn’s worst games, but it has received reappraisal in recent years and was even speedrun at 2 Games Done Quick events in 2019 and 2024

[mvfm-25]

" Race on the earth! Fly in the sky! "

Saturn Fan Magazine n05 - May, 1995.

[surpriserose]

Agdq this week im shifting into speedrunning mode...

[devileaterjaek]

Virtual Hydlide (Sega Saturn)

(Image source: myabandonware)

This is one of the ugliest fantasy games I've ever seen. And I fuck with it. I adore this specific style of cheesy western fantasy aesthetic. Joel Haver-lookin-ass...

//Discord// //Twitch// //Ko-Fi//

[prettycottonmouthlamia]

There's such a profound loss of whimsy among gamers now that it's kind of depressing. Back in the day I remember playing GTA Vice City, one of the classics of the genre, and getting stuck in geometry and having to reset the game. How could this have happened? Well it was pretty common for games, especially 3D games back then, to have those kind of bugs. It really wouldn't take a lot of stress to clip through a wall or fall through the floor or endlessly vibrate halfway through a door. But you know, we didn't freak out and get extremely angry at the developers. It used to just be a thing you laughed at or maybe showed off to a friend if you could get it to happen again.

The gaming culture was a lot more casual ten, fifteen, twenty years ago I'll admit. Nowadays there are lot more people, and a lot more skilled people, who are putting their time and effort into cracking, breaking, and utterly blowing a game apart. A glitch is no longer something that you might have experienced on time at 3 in the morning. It is now something reported on, posted on reddit, and made into tweets and tumblr posts about how the developers are lazy garbage, and what were the QA even doing.

Bugs...aren't just fun anymore. I clipped into a tunnel wall in Pokemon Scarlet and after a bit, I was taken out of the wall and I went "Huh. Neat." Back then, you were just fucked. Maybe they had some contingency in place if you were lucky and if you were luckier maybe it worked. But now its a strike, a blight, a sign of development gone wrong. Harmless glitches don't exist anymore, they're grave mistakes inflicted on poor consumers.

Like, listen, if you spend any amount of time in the retro gaming world you'll soon come quickly to learn maybe games have glitches and bugs and some of them are really bad. You have your bad games like Virtual Hydlide or Mort the Chicken and even well regarded games like FF6 have tons of bugs on their original release. There's plenty of clips, skips, crashes, softlocks, and unintended interactions. Some games got reputations like Superman 64, but for a lot of games, that was just...what being a video game was. It was an imperfect piece of coding that sometimes broke, sometimes in funny ways, sometimes not.

It's weird how that viewpoint has just...changed. And not for the better.

[regallibellbright]

Oh, I was wrong. One more Awful Block game: The Seconds-Per-Frame classic Virtual Hydlide. (Quoting the host.)

PROMISING!

[ska-suggestions]

I hope nobody in the Prevent Cancer Foundation saw the Awful Block of ADGQ featurng Virtual Hydlide, and Urban Yeti

[oldgamemags]

SEGA Megazone #52, June 1995 - Preview of ‘Virtual Hydlide’ on the Saturn.

[yninigreenhill]

[vgm-in-irregular-time-of-the-day]

DAY 1283) Virtual Hydlide - Volcanic Cave

Composer: Yumi Kinoshita

Starts in 4/4 but goes into 7/8 at :35. The 7/8 section ends with an extra 2 8th beats just before :56, then it goes back into 4/4.

[probablyinsan3]

i just realized. legend of zelda ocarina of time is literally exactly the same as virtual hydlide. no difference at all. literally, frame for frame identical. wow

[randomisedgaming]

Gaming Nightmares videos and channel update.

OK, so if you’re an eagle eyed Randomised Gaming YouTube Channel fan, you might have noticed some changes to the older thumbnails. That because we are phasing out the old logo, used on the videos and we hope to have it done by the end of September. Many thumbnails are also being updated to look  better and be more eye catching.

Today it was the turn of the Gaming Nightmares to be updated, while the series wasn’t that popular when Riven first did it. The videos have steadily being growing in views, so at some point later in the year we will do a few more installments and not just on Saturn games. Also if you’re a new follower to the blog you might not have seen them before, so please do have a watch and share the videos if you enjoy them.

Five Sega Saturn games you wouldn’t want in your Christmas stocking! At some point we would like to get a proper artist to do a design for the series logo and name. For now these new thumbnails are much easier to read than the older ones!

Also if you like the videos please give us a like, seem Virtual Hydlide does have it’s fans who don’t like to hear bad things about their favourite game.

[runningwithhelicopters]

Jim was on his way to rescue a princess, along the way he found time to be a dick to dead people.

[segalovers]

Okay...

[doshmanziari]

Most English-speaking people today who are aware of videogame developer T&E Soft only know of them through two titles: the first Hydlide (specifically the, by 1987, dated/inferior NES re-release) and Virtual Hydlide. Both of these have acquired a pretty undue notoriety, mostly encouraged by the exaggerations of e-personalities intent on making everything out to be either AWESOME or LMAO TERRIBLE, since that’s what gets the most attention. It’s better to see Hydlide in its PC-6001/PC-88 context as an innovator of the action-adventure-RPG genre, and the influence for the first two Ys games’ format (also little-known:��Ys III: Wanderers from Ys was modeled on the design of Tritorn 2, a game by developer Sein/Xain/Zain Soft; it even copied some of the settings!). Understood as such -- compare the PC releases of Hydlide to, e.g., the original Dragon Slayer, also released for the PC-88 in 1984 --, we can also begin to understand its popularity as a consequence of something more than millions of Japanese citizens being deprived and deluded. Virtual Hydlide is noteworthy too as a strange and perhaps unique attempt at crafting a lightly randomized, score- and time-based 3D arcade game for a home console using the overworld + dungeon crawler format. Its most significant downside is a miserable framerate. I get why this would put people off from playing it, especially since it’s always conflicted with the design’s speedrun-like emphases. But if this were the worst thing you could knock a game for, the medium would be specially positioned among all others for a minimum of faults (hint: it isn’t).

With that preamble out of the way, I’d like to bring to unaware readers’ attention Rune Worth 2 and 3, released for the PC-98 in 1991. As usual, if your only resources on the English-speaking Internet for videogames are Wikipedia and MobyGames, you would probably never know about either of these (Wikipedia cites the first Rune Worth (1989) for the MSX, but says nothing of the sequels; MobyGames does not even cite the former). The Rune Worth series was, by all appearances, T&E Soft’s successor to Hydlide, and while it is formally organized as a trilogy, the three-months-gap between the second and third installment’s release, their discounted price, and the way in which 3 picks up right where 2 leaves off (to the extent of being able to transfer your character data from one to the other), means that, really, there are two full entries. Much of this information was laid out on a dedicated stream for both these games by Macaw45, who has dedicated years to researching, cataloguing, and exposing people to lesser-known videogames. If you can’t read Japanese, or just don’t want to play the games yourself, the embedded video would be your best bet for seeing them in action.

There are many things to say about Rune Worth 2/3 -- the dramatic introductory sequence preceding the main menu, the luxuriant sprawl of its public spaces (one can, for example, go out to the first castle’s rooftop, partitioned into a little pseudo maze, despite no requirement for doing so), its equal emphasis on setting, story, and action -- but since I’ve elected to make this into an image-based post, I want to illustrate how amazing these games look. Even from a distance, many PC-98 games have a distinct and highly abstract composure; and, looking at them up close, where the unlikeliness of certain chromatic and textural decisions make themselves known, it’s a wonder over and over again how representation emerges from what I described in a post about Super Hydlide as “an ornate and time-worn carpet.” The resemblance to a tapestry is especially obvious with Rune Worth 3 and its faded floral border depicting a grape vine. The overall visual splendor of these mosaics on a PC-98 monitor would, of course, be all the subtler and greater.

Over time, a handful of early- to mid-90s Japanese PC videogames have gotten more exposure in the West as the consumption of anime and nostalgic sentiment have grown hand-in-hand (not infrequently to pathologically anti-social effect). The bulk of these have tended to be of the visual novel/eroge type. YU-NO: A Girl Who Chants Love at the Bound of this World, released in 1996 for the PC-98, is a particularly popular example, in part because of its soundtrack by Ryu Umemoto. For me, the in-game artwork for these titles can be technically commendable, but is otherwise not very exciting. When I look at Rune Worth 2 or 3, it sometimes reminds me of looking at artist Kathleen Ryan’s beady sculptures of rotting fruit and marveling at the surprising vibrancy and coloristic range within putrefaction: the intersection of the beautiful and ugly, and its fructifying of the grotesque. This extends to a number of PC-88 titles too, like Sorcerian (Falcom, 1987) and DIOS (Zain Soft, 1989). In some cases, there is a remarkable convergence of visual grit/granularity and fidelity, maybe exemplified best of all by the PC-98 release of Xak III: The Eternal Recurrence (MicroCabin, 1993). But even there I find myself missing the marvelous polychromaticism of these two Rune Worth games. The intention for, say, Super Nintendo games to be played and seen on CRT TVs has never been an impediment to contemporary indie developers mimicking their look for modern LCD monitors. Even if it feels unlikely, then, I wonder if we will one day see a small revival of that fibrous, loom-woven PC-88/PC-98 look.

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[regallibellbright]

NPC: So you bought Hydlide twice?

Mechalink: Yes.

NPC: ... Why?

Mechalink: I bought this game (the Saturn version) twice, too!

Time starts when you take control of the player character. Twenty seconds after starting a new game.

Mechalink: "Yeah this is three or four frames per second, and you can count them, there's a timer right here."

Yeah, that's about accurate.

Mechalink: I scoured through four billion seeds and this was the best one I saw. *The PC runs through a featureless forest*... Yep.

NPC: With this game, how can you miss a turn?

Mechalink: Because it's going at four frames per second, and if you miss your input that's it for a quarter of a second.

Mechalink: The framerate is what it is, I'm not a Virtual Hydlide defender but I'm not like, lying.

Mechalink: There are a number of things in this game that are frame-perfect. But we have very large frames. A lot of the movement in this game is frame-perfect we just have a lot of frames.

Oh yeah this is seconds-per-frame.

The game runs so poorly you can heal in the seconds between dying and the game registering you have died.

Apparently this fantasy hack and slash game's engine was previously used for a golf game.

More than fifteen minutes under estimate and a new world record. By over three minutes after two months of seed-hunting. Nice.

Mechalink: Yeah see this is where all the money went toward, was that dress and the mo-cap.

Mechalink: If it weren't for the frame rate, this game would be playable.

NPC: This is the most playable of the Hydlides.

Mechalink: Yeah that is defensible. Game development tip: Don't develop an action game in a golf engine. They're optimized for entirely different things with action games requiring you to render a lot of things at once.