Were you a fan of Zone of the Enders back in the day ? Were you planning on buying the HD Collection ? Were you, by any chance, wondering if Konami had dropped the ball on giving the two cult games the proper treatment they deserve ? Wonder no more. Behold

Do note: the original PS2 incarnations ran at a near-constant 60fps. Not only do these two HD collections run way below that (the PS3 version especially), but according to this NeoGAF thread, the games are missing some special effects as well. So not only do these run worse than the originals, but they look worse as well. You would be better off taking your PS2 discs, putting them into your PC and playing on an emulator. Sigh.

The PS2 discs don't come with a demo of Revengeance! This sucks, I've always wanted to play the second game and this is the most convenient way to do so.

The PS2 version did have huge framerate drops but yeah, this sucks.

Konami sucks with HD collections. That is all.

I dont think its quite true that they would look better on the ps2 or an emulator, the new game still has higher res art, higher poly counts on the models and better particle effects. it may not run at a constant 60 but it does have 0 screen tearing and at no point did it look at all like it was becoming unplayable, which cant be said for all games.

It doesn't give me much hope for the Vita version :(

@AuthenticM said:

You would be better off taking your PS2 discs, putting them into your PC and playing on an emulator. Sigh.

That is the case with almost all HD collections. PC emulators can do some really awesome graphical enhancements.

Although the loading times being non-existent are the best thing.

Motherfucking shit....

that looks perfectly playable. And yes i still own the originals. Will most likely still buy this.

Scumbag Konami strikes again!

Didn't Konami state depending on how well this sells they might give Kojima a shot at a third game. Come on guys give Kojima a chance at doing something else besides Metal Gear again!

This just solidified my choice for the 360 version.

I am someone that usaly says "30fps is fine" however that video showed me that a 60fps of ZOE would be awsome as 45 to 40 shits int he face of PS3s 35 to 30. Wow....I wish it was 60fps.

@DelroyLindo: It does, but that does not excuse the developpers or Konami from sloppy work. HD collections are all about taking old games and giving them a new coat of paint. Plenty of developpers have shown that it can be done right (God of War collection, Metal Gear, and more). There is nothing excusing High Voltage from not making these two classics run at a constant 60fps without any concession.

It's hard to do things right.

First off while the PS2 versions did try to run at 60 they failed miserably, the slowdown in the original ZOE2  was horrid  (1 wasn't that bad, but it was more sparse), go replay it, it's really not that hot.
Second, the difference here is while these do drop frames they don't appear to actually slow down, that's a huge improvement no matter how you look at it. 
Third, they certainly don't look worse, textures are identical if not better, factor in you're not running interlaced on a sub-HD screen and you don't have the same ugly PS2 jaggies, I don't see how you could possibly think it looks worse.
  
If you want to blame them for anything then they could have done better with the PS3 version and the missing effects seems kinda dumb, but   I'd say this is a much better version all around.  

Already got it preordered for PS3. 30fps is fine.

Wow. Was bluepoint busy? I wish I had some kind of veto power to make them start over.

What effects exactly are missing?

JEHUTY, IN 1080

Well hopefully those problems can be remedied by a later patch cause I really want to play them and have never done so before.

@probablytuna said:

Well hopefully those problems can be remedied by a later patch cause I really want to play them and have never done so before.

Doubtful but still it's ZOE2 which is such an unbelievably underrated game. Even though I know Konami fucks people with these ports I am really tempted to get this for the 360 because I absolutely loved the original. It was the first PS2 game I bought as I had a late start on that generation and the action, graphics and music all blew me away. The story wasn't half bad either and at the time I used to like anime so it was a perfect package for me.

Also the signature Kojima touches - when you have to carry Ken in her suit in the room with the rising "lava" you can dip her in the lava and keep her close to it for the duration of that section and then in the next area she will only be wearing her underwear in her little portrait. Ahh Kojima..

Shame about the frame rate but I'll probably still get it because ZOE is an amazing gem that deserves purchasing. If supporting this HD version might in some small way improve the chance of ZOE3 happening then I'm buying it.

Good thing you're using a ~30 fps video to show it.

Konami don't care. :(

and suddenly, framerate matters

GIVE ME BACK JEHUTY!!  

@GunstarRed said:

The PS2 discs don't come with a demo of Revengeance! This sucks, I've always wanted to play the second game and this is the most convenient way to do so.

But the first did come with a demo for MGS2.

Didn't know ZoE HD came with a Revengeance demo, weird full circle man.

The MGS Collection was excellent, so I kind of wonder if this won't be that bad in the actual product. I'll end up getting it regardless. Also, after watching the video, it looks fine. Not like it's constantly dropping to 20 or anything.

Damn, I thought they were going to get Bluepoint Games to do the HD version of ZoE too. They're one of the few developers that put out quality HD collections.

I dunno, it looks good enough to play.

My problem isn't that it looks unplayable, because it doesn't. I just find it baffling that so many of these collections can't manage constant 60 fps for games that ran on a 300 Mhz machine with 32MB of memory.

I understand porting a game from one console to another is not as simple as just turning a few knobs, but still.

Shame about the frame rate but I'll probably still get it because ZOE is an amazing gem that deserves purchasing. If supporting this HD version might in some small way improve the chance of ZOE3 happening then I'm buying it.

The 360 version looks okay to me but anything less than perfection was always going to be slammed after the Silent Hill debacle. It's a shame they didn't get it right.

@lightsoda said:

Good thing you're using a ~30 fps video to show it.

Pretty much this. No screen tearing, and it seems to stay over 30 fps, which is totally serviceable. It's still going to look better in HD, and if the framerate is really bugging you get the 360 version. Also as others have mentioned the framerate dips on the PS2 were pretty awful in the more chaotic sections. Don't worry though, if this ZOE 3/ Enders Project thing ends up getting made it'll have to be coming out for the next gen consoles, so that's going to be damn gorgeous.

Y'know what- thinking about it- it's insane that Kojima Prod and Platinum Games are teaming up on Metal Gear Rising and not Zone of the Enders 3.
 
I mean Vanquish was basically halfway there, in some ways. I'm sure Platinum would ace the fast robot action, and Kojima Prod would bring the amazing characters and art direction and that sick ZoE music.

@nintendoeats said:

I dunno, it looks good enough to play.

I'm sure it's playable, I just expect better of a "remaster." And not even getting console parity of an almost 10 year old game seems unacceptable to me.

@I_smell: Oh my! How did I miss this? Well thanks for telling me that! Now I can put that game higher up on this little list I have that consists of "Half-Life 3, Persona 5, Bungie's Project Destiny and ZOE3".

So is there not gonna be a quick look of this?

@I_smell: I doubt they sent out review copies. That coupled with the holiday release season, and no, probably not.

I notice that in that video, during the cutscenes (which are in game I know) the PS3 version looks way more defined than 360. However when gameplay starts, it is quite the opposite, there is blur everywhere on PS3 (and not the good kind). It's kind of like a TV with really bad refresh rate, in addition to the 30FPS. The gameplay on 360 looks great though.

While I don't think that not being 60FPs is a deal breaker, the 360 version was running between 40-50 FPS and that is still above what 90% of console games these days push out. The PS3 version though... really surprised. 360 is running at a constant 11 FPS higher. That's quite a gap.

@Turambar said:

@I_smell: I doubt they sent out review copies. That coupled with the holiday release season, and no, probably not.

But then todays ILM came out and they're totally planning on doing a quick look.

I think these guys' thoughts on Zone of Enders is that it came with a Metal Gear Solid 2 demo.
 
So I'm secretly hoping they'll play the Quick Look and say "OH MAN, HOW COULD WE EVER NOT NOTICE HOW COOL THESE ROBOTS ARE!! LOOK AT ALL THESE SMOKE CLOUDS!"

It takes a certain type of skill to get a PS2 game that ran at 60 to run lower than that on the current gen systems. Great job, Konami...unless Jehuty really is too much to behold in 1080p.

A damn shame, was looking forward to replaying these and ZoE2 just murders my PC. The smoke effects are just that good.

I can't imagine the controls translating well to the Vita but I really want to see how that version runs.

Can someone explain to me how PS2 disc emulated on PC could run better than that?

Since my PS2 died and not being able to afford even a cheap one. I decided to do disc emulation. Results were poor.

I have Ring of Red, nope even in a small graphics area its below 20 fps.

Godzilla: Save the earth (Game I bought on the my ps2 died last year.) it runs between 1 to 20 fps.

I tried ZOE 2 as that was the game I wanted to play except my controller ports were broken and then PS2 died due to me taking it apart. Zoe 2 is 1 to 12 when stuff happens.

I even played RAD : Robot Alechemic Drive and it was 1 to 10. God hand 1 to 20.

Games that are large open environment lots going on kill the emulation. I know its not an exact science however I try everything and got setting to somtimes hit 30 to 60 fps....espeacly if I look to the sky with RAD.

It simply look like a port of ZOE 1 and 2 on the xbox 360 would be my consideration....that or buy a ps2...is about the same price.....hm....thats....thats...actually an idea!

Being as nice as possible, I just wanna point out that re-building a game for a HD collection can actually be really fucking hard. You do not port the files over, it actually does take a team of people over a year to do.
 
Here's a designer and coder of Ratchet and Clank 3 playing the HD Collection version of their game and talking about it.  If you've watched the rest of the series then you'll know that games don't come out WANTING to be ported, they come out as a humongous jittery ball of wet fish, and difficulties can range from the game using hardware that doesn't exist any more, to code that relies on where the data's physically lasered onto the spinning disc.
 
Going from 60fps to 40fps in HD really isn't the most diabolical rape scene in history. Buying this brand new is probably still cheaper than buying actual ZoE 2 on ebay, and it IS a game that practically nobody's ever fucking heard of.

I've never played the originals, but what am I supposed to be looking at? Things look fine to me.

If it didn't have a frame counter you people wouldn't even notice.