Author Topic: [Release] TailTale REsurrected - Definitive Edition of a game by fumi2kick  (Read 7909 times)

Offline dots_tb

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Video from @Yoyogames28


A Compiled History and Improvements (Skip to the end for a download and screenshots):
TailTale, or Shippo no Puzzle – Tail Tale, is a fast paced Tetris Attack-like puzzle game created by notable Japanese developer rerofumi and artist pyonkey-matsuo of the doujin circle FumiFumikick (formed 1997). The game, made in 2002, is a “doujin fan application” using characters from the relatively obscure anime Angel Tales/Angel’s Tail. Maybe too obscure as seen with its inaugural release, which was burned onto CD-R’s and had 10 copies sold. Rerofumi decided to distribute online along with its source code. Thus started TailTale’s Tale in open source software, however there was a hurdle.

It was programmed originally in the not so popular FreePascal utilizing SDL4FreePascal. But in Oct 2005, with interest in PSP homebrew growing, rerofumi was compelled to convert his work to C utilizing the portability of the SDL library. Because of the combination of C and SDL, this version served as the basis for every port to come.

And they came. (Full list and Links at the end. If there are anymore or you can recover some of the files, let me know.)

You may notice Rikku2000 popping up a lot, rerofumi actually has a pretty funny statement regarding the developer. Maybe something was lost in Google Translation:

Quote
Martin Dieter [Rikku2000], who lives in Germany, is one of those who likes "tailing" strangely, and who emails me every time he's ported something hard.

Many of his ports were through the seemingly defunct BigVioSoft, based in Germany. I really hope it was not a result of rerofumi’s post.

However, Rikku2000 is not too crazy with his love for TailTale. With every port it has gained new fans who praise it for its fun, addictive nature and cute graphics. This so much that the GP2x version had to be accommodated with new controls, due to the dead zones of the joystick hindering its gameplay. Some even listed it as one, if not their, favorite homebrew for their respective system. Even the devs of these ports take a liking to it.

I personally have gained a probably unhealthy (and autistic) obsession with this game (as you can tell with this article) and it is probably the longest I’ve played on my PS Vita gaming wise. I like pretty much everything about it, not only gameplay wise, but also its overall aesthetics. The music and graphics are just wonderfully a product of its time. SonicMastr, who tested my port, liked it so much he experienced hand cramps from playing the game (I also did, even with my baby hands, I can’t understand how people play on the Vita now).

So, with this new found love for a randomly selected game I found on wiibrew, I have decided to try to restore its full resolution.

Because the original was written in FreePascal, every port (that I know of) is based off the PSP port. This meant that with the resolution limitations of the screen, changes were made. The resolution of the assets were cropped, and in the version I used the quality was reduced also. Along with this, the overall difficulty changed with amount of rows being reduced from 13 to 11/10.
 
Rerofumi has made the changes to scale the game down easily reversible and if they were not, the Pascal code was used. But in hindsight a lot of this work was due to using gameblabla’s port as a base (such as the issues with PNG alpha), his base may have also helped, who knows. However, I did learn some SDL stuff at least.

So this vita port is seemingly the first port to restore its full resolution, utilizing the original PC assets, all while maintaining the new features such as difficulty settings.

With more rows, I have moved the difficulty over 1 (example hard is now very hard, easy is now normal).
So thus the resolution went from 480x360 -> 480x272 -> 320x240 -> 480x360.

Vita running the gameblabla's 320x240: (note the PSP version runs at 480x272 I believe, which had larger vertical resolution)


Vita running the restored 480x360:


Anyways, I hope you enjoy the game as much as I, the first 10 people who bought the CD, and the many other scenes did!

Download:
https://github.com/dots-tb/tailtale-vita/releases

Port History:
Aug 10, 2002 – Initial Version for Comiket 62
Oct 02, 2005 – Ported to PSP using SDL and C
Jan 8, 2006 - rerofumi ported it to the GNU/Linux handheld GP2x (with his own SDL wrapper to pair).
Nov 22, 2006 AmigaOS 4.0 port by Spot / Up Rough 2006 (http://aminet.net/package/game/think/TailTale)
Oct 30, 2009 – Dingoo (that one console ashens reviewed) by yoannd26 (https://gueux-forum.net/index.php?/topic/224896-tailtale-v01-pour-dingux/)
Sep 8, 2012 – Wii port by Rikku2000 (https://wiibrew.org/wiki/TailTale) (Lost to history?)
2012 (?) – Android port by Katsune Akizuki (http://sdrv.ms/MlCmFF) (Lost to history?)
Oct 10, 2012 – Pandora port by Rikku2000(https://dl.openhandhelds.org/cgi-bin/pandora.cgi?0,0,0,0,25,475)
2013 (?) – Another Android version with NetPlay by BigVioSoft (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=jp.katane.bigviosoft.tailtale&hl=ja )(Assets lost to history?)
2013 (?) – Nintendo DS by (?)(Not sure if this one actually exists?)
Jan 24, 2014 – GCW Zero port by Shin-NiL (https://bitbucket.org/shin_nil/tale-tail-gcw-zero/src/master/)
Mar 27, 2014 – WP8 port by Rikku2000 (https://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=2696984)(Lost to history?)
Aug 09, 2015 – Dreamcast port by gameblabla (https://dcemulation.org/phpBB/viewtopic.php?t=103678)
Jul 15, 2015 - TI Nspire port by gameblabla (https://www.omnimaga.org/ti-nspire-projects/sdl-ports-for-nspire/msg401798/#msg401798)
Sep 5, 2015 –Syllable OS by gameblabla (https://github.com/gameblabla/tailtale)

Further References:
http://www.limo.fumi2kick.com/works/tailtale/tt_index.html
http://www.fumi2kick.com/rrtalk/archives/1700
http://www.fumi2kick.com/rrtalk/archives/1602
http://www.fumi2kick.com/psp/
http://www.fumi2kick.com/pspapp/
https://pyra-handheld.com/boards/threads/tail-teiru-another-puzzle-game-by-rerofumi.23185/?amp=1137103675
http://forums.qj.net/psp-homebrew-hacks-discussion/38637-what-your-opinion.html

« Last Edit: January 20, 2020, 09:28:58 AM by dots_tb »