Addendum: M Kai, Judgement Silversword, And The Wonderswan (At 75Hz)

10 July 2024

Note: I originally posted this on the now-defunct Cohost, as a follow up to the previous post

Quick little addendum to this post, but lets get this out first:

If you enjoyed Pleasure Hearts or my ramblings, please support the developer by buying their other games on steam, they're on sale right now! Sale's almost over, I meant to post this way sooner 😭 Here's their developer page, you can grab this and this pack to get all 4.

Anyway, as I was saying, I just wanted to add a couple of things based on the two very nice comments I got.

@nichronomicon brought up this forum playthrough which eventually turned into the OP translating the game! Great piece of Pleasure Hearts history, and it really shows off all the weird and surprising details in this game.

@dog brought into my attention that M-Kai, of course, has developed a lot of shmups in the years since! Which is what I want to talk about. I haven't gotten to playing their 2.5D shmups, but the moment I heard they moved on from the MSX to develop homebrew games on the Wonderswan??? I HAD TO check that out, and fall down a rabbit hole.

Judgement Silversword is sick as hell and- you get the deal, but also the Wonderswan is SO COOL

Judgement Silversword Title Screen
In game screenshot, reading WARNING, HERE COMES THE JUDGE, MITSURUGI

I'll try to keep it short but if you haven't heard of it before, the Wonderswan (and the subsequent Wonderswan Color) was Bandai's Japan only Gameboy competitor which did nowhere near as well, but has a cult following owing to how COOL of a little handheld it is. You can find plenty of overviews and trivia about it online, all very informative. I love, love how the WSC ends up in this weird in between the Gameboy Color and and Gameboy Advance, but most of all its really intuitive rotating setup. As you might be able to tell from pictures, it includes two sets of stacked cardinal buttons on the left side when held horizontally, which allows for you to hold it vertically and without compromising on control schemes. Its such a genius setup, and opens up a lot of games that wouldn't have worked on the system.

However, the other COOL thing about the Wonderswan is the Wonderwitch, a home development platformed released by Bandai themselves that let people develop games for the WS, as well as load them into the Wonderwitch flashcart! This meant they could distribute games and even hold contests.
Well, M-Kai's next game after Pleasure Hearts, Judgement Silversword, started life as one such contest entry. It won that year, and eventually was polished up into a full, official cart release which costs a fortune now. (Dicing Knight, cult classic rouguelite from the developer of Bunny Must Die, had the same trajectory, try that one out too!) If you're curious I recommend trying out both versions to see what the differences are! Most of the game is all there in the original release, but the retail one adds more bullet types, graphics, and mixes up some of the waves/attack patterns. I've put more time and energy into the full release now though, and it has those incredibly stylish warning messages. (This retail release has also been excellently ported to modern platforms)

Its an M-Kai game! They really push the console to its limits, the shooting is super slick, the expression and presentation is high class, and the game is tons of fun. The setup is all about speed, with short "areas" coming in one after another you're encouraged to master and clear as fast as possible. I recommend reading this guide to get a good sense for the game. Really do try this game out! It has a similar progression system to Pleasure Hearts, this time exposed in the options as the "Option Level", which even shows you the score threshold for each level, and over time unlocks credits, easier difficulties, and various cheaty options. I've been grinding away at this one, and on normal with default options its really hard! If you wanna get through this one on credits alone it might be worth doing easy mode. Its super satisfying though, and I'm committed to seeing it through.

The 75hz Rabbit Hole

So, follow me with these dominos: I started playing this on my RGB30 handheld, but at some point while messing with emulation settings saw a "60hz mode" toggle. As it turns out, the Wonderswan screen refreshes at 75hz??? That's nuts!! So in the interest of framerate matching and some level of "accuracy" I moved on to my PC and CRT monitor with a custom 75hz resolution. Sure, its not an LCD, but the framerate matches, and I'd already set myself up with a shader setup which color corrected to match a real WSC screen as well as add an LCD grid.
Well, as I was playing I suddenly remembered: I had an old monitor laying around that apparently does 75hz, but it was my wife's and she never took advantage of it. Around the same time @kayin was going on about reaction times because of some twitter nonsense and I realized, my regular LCD monitors are pretty laggy! SO, I dug out that old monitor and it turns out its pretty sick?? Well, as far as basic, slightly old gamery monitors go, its better than what I had. 75hz, low latency, and Variable Refresh Rate! This in turn prompted me to entirely reconfigure my already ungodly multimonitor setup just to accommodate this monitor (along with a long overdue full office clean) BUT I can now play wonderswan on an LCD at an accurate 75hz, and also have a really nice monitor to game on now, VRR is really cool tech btw!

Thank you uh... La Mulana?? was that how this started?

(I would add pictures of all of this chaos but I need to sleep, maybe I'll edit them in tomorrow, lol)

Cohost Comments!

I felt like archiving these too! I doubt anyone minds, but if you'd like to hide your username (or exclude your comment) just let me know.