Shenmue (1999) Reverse Engineering Reveals Possible Sun Position Oversight
23 comments
·March 12, 2025chiffre01
Playing through Shenmue 1, they did a really good job capturing the vibe of the area. Looking at random points in Yokosuka just feel like Shenmue.
https://www.google.com/maps/@35.2781594,139.677597,3a,75y,27...
AdmiralAsshat
Reminds me of a similar story about Blast Corps, specifically how they implemented logic to correctly display apparent retrograde motion vis-a-vis the orbit of Venus from the perspective of Earth...all just for what basically amounts to a background animation. [0]
rawling
Isn't this just... they made the planets have the correct orbit times, and retrograde motion just drops out from that?
gs17
Yeah, it's impressive that they bothered to animate them with the correct ratio of periods, but it's not like they had to add epicycles.
klysm
This is one of those things where it's like if you have to program them to move, it's probably just easiest to program it to be somewhat faithful instead of making up some other values.
soupfordummies
Well that's ANOTHER oddball, semi-forgotten, great game!
toast0
Nintendo and Rare (as "Xbox Game Studios") figured out how to work together, and as of Feb 2024, you can play Blast Corps on the Nintendo Switch Online Expansion Pack (along with a bunch of other Rare games)
kowlo
What a game. Lost hours to QTE Title (one of the games within the game) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=drdFhBKDvIQ
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wk_end
The tl;dr (though you should read!) of the "oversight" is that there's a constant used to adjust the sun's position that's seemingly based on latitude; in the first Shenmue, it's set to 22, and in Shenmue II - which uses much of the same code - it's set to 35. This is odd, because Shenmue I takes place at latitude 35°, and Shenmue II at 22° - precisely the other way around.
If that's what's going on, it's sort of hard for me to wrap my brain around how that might've happened. I could see them "fixing" the Shenmue I code base and then forgetting to "unfix" it for Shenmue II, but I can't - even knowing that there were already plans for where the sequel would be set - come up with a story for how they would've accidentally used Shenmue II's latitude for the original game.
mook
Maybe they realized the bug early in Shenmue II's planning and decided to just move the game to where the bugged value was correct, not knowing that it was fixed in code in the mean time.
(This has an approximately zero chance of being correct.)
chickenzzzzu
Maybe the code was written at the early onset of the game, and originally the locations were flip flopped in super early development. Then later they decided on the locations that became permanent, and nobody bothered to fix that part of the code?
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yoyohello13
Man I loved this game so much as a kid. I remember being enthralled by opening the drawers, lol. I basically played it once a year every year from ages 9 - 16. Some of the enchantment was lost when I played the remaster recently, but still such a great world they built.
AlecSchueler
What didn't work about the remaster or was it just a matter of shattering the illusion of your memories?
I've been thinking about the game a lot since having my first child last year. She often lifts things and rotates them in her hand just to see and experience them. When I was a kid playing Shenmue I always found it funny that they added that mechanic because "who does that?" but now I feel a very deep appreciation for it.
yoyohello13
> What didn't work about the remaster or was it just a matter of shattering the illusion of your memories?
At the time it was a unique, first of it's kind, game. Now there have been a lot of advancements since then so I didn't have the same "Wow" feelings of just being in the world. But the nostalgia still hit me hard and it still has a special place in my heart.
ethagnawl
I don't think applies to you but I imagine people playing this series for the first time today probably think, _What's so special? This feels just like every other open world game_, even though it's really the other way around.
It's similar phenomenon to people hearing the Beatles or the Rolling Stones (or any of the artists they ripped off ...) with modern ears.
There's hope, though. I do think in both cases, it's possible to develop an appreciation once you learn about the lineage of a particular work.
byproxy
Same! So satisfying to just explore the world they built, to the point of me neglecting the actual story a lot of the time. Hell, I think the only reason I advanced the story was to unlock new dialog from the NPCs. I loved the whackiness of 'em.
Unfortunately, I think the lost enchantment is just a product of aging. Things I were so enthusiastic about as a child (videogames, particularly) no longer have the same appeal, despite my best efforts to reignite some passion. That said, I did put in a good chunk of playtime with the remaster and I was still having fun with it. Though, not to completion as my attention span for videogames has dwindled.
soupfordummies
An all-timer for me as well! So much strange magic in there. No game before or sense has quite that vibe. Maybe a product of it coming out at just the right time.
"Do you remember... that day?"
"The day it snowed?"
NO! The day I got it right as it came out. A Friday after school and I played for like 4 hours straight. Yes! I remember THAT day!
WXLCKNO
There was something very special about it, I agree that no game has made me feel that way since.
Half Life 2 did but in a different way.
Maybe when a game just leapfrogs what's been thought of as cutting edge and you're so amazed that you forget that you're playing a game.
I'm not sure if my fascination for Japan started with Shenmue but it certainly grew from there. I was so happy to visit for the first time last year.
VBprogrammer
I remember driving a forklift for hours!
null
Fantastic game!
The same development studio, Sega AM2, recently had a developer reveal that he had put an Easter egg into Fighters Megamix for Saturn. However, he mistakenly introduced a crash bug in it.
This set me off looking for the Easter egg. After a couple days of reverse engineering, I finally found it [0]! I love looking for this stuff.
[0] https://32bits.substack.com/p/bonus-fighters-megamix