RETURN OF THE LAG! BATSUGUN Saturn Tribute Review

RETURN OF THE LAG! BATSUGUN Saturn Tribute Boosted Review. The Saga of City Connection Sega Saturn Ports of shmups (shoot em' ups) continues. When it comes to shmup ports, City Connection are absolutely hit and miss. Sometimes they can put together a fairly solid port, like the Deathsmiles 1 and 2 package, but then other times they can release absolute abominations like the Cotton 2 Saturn Tribute (with 11 frames of input lag). Since my initial review of that release, there has been a lot of talk of City Connection patching the lag (down to 9 frames, which is still absurd) and today we get to see how far they have come along when it comes to the input lag on their "Zebra Engine." As I point out in today's review though, porting an already slightly laggy port from a console with notoriously laggy emulation (especially on low end hardware) seems like the worst way to go about releasing a new version of Batsugun, especially since emulation for the arcade version is so solid to begin with. But they have spent all this time working on this Zebra engine, so of course they need to continue to use it, even if it sucks. The tale of the Saturn Tribue releases is a classic example of sunk cost fallacy because doing a port of the Saturn version of Batsugun makes no sense to begin with. Compare this to livewire, who did a port of the Sega Saturn game, Radiant Silvergun. However, rather than basing their port on the Saturn Original, they used the xbox 360 version which is a frame laggier, but certainly better than 3 frames laggier.
If it feels like I am beating a dead horse with these Saturn Tribute ports reviews, that's because I am. At this point I think this will be my last review of these City Connection Saturn ports and in the future I'd just approach them with heavy skepticism.
As of right now this game is on PC (steam), Nintendo Switch, and PS4/PS5.

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