White Screen Bug in Crisis Zone (PAL ps2), any help?

[Alf-Life]

Hey all,

Just got this game... am loving it - love the way it doesn't make Time Crisis 3 'obselete'...

But... encountered a nasty bug/glitch... the first day I played it was fine, but today about 99% of the time, whenever I fire my machine gun in the Crisis Missions the screen is overlayed by a white layer which makes it very difficult to see.
I fumbled through a few challenges on Hard, but some are impossible - the survival-with-no-shield one is impossible because I just can't see the grenades thrown at me, and it's torture when two are thrown simulateanously early on.

At first I thought it was a smokescreen the badguys threw on hard, because it does look like a layer in Photoshop where they've just done Filters>Render>Clouds ... but it only flashes on when I hold down fire. If I release, the screen is clear again.
And while this never happened during yesterday's play, it's happening all the time now, except for once when it suddenly cleared, but then came back later.

Anyone know what causes this, or how to fix it? Anyone else even had this?

[yashiro]

Did you resolve this?

[MD]

In a lot of shooting games, if the screen can't be read (or just in general) it will display a white screen so the gun can pick up where the on the screen you have shot.

If your using an manual autofire gun (i.e not one in the game) then every other frame is likely to be the white screen you are talking about, switch off autofire and play the game properly, else try darkening the room and turning brightness up.

[Alf-Life]

Yash: Nope, never resolved this... although next time I plug in me dual GunCons I'll try loading the game without a memory card plugged in and see if it's anything to do with my save? (I remember the F-Zero X ROM used to feck right up if you completed the first three cups on Hard or something).

MD: Autofire? I've just got the normal Guncon2, no idea what all that's about, I'm new to this Namco lightgun malarkey.

[Alf-Life]

Can a mod perhaps move this to a more relevant forum, or is it fine here?

Anyway, apparently Gaming-Age and IGN have had things to say:

If you have a light gun please use it, as Namco has managed to lessen the horrible white flashing effect that's plagued the genre for so long.

Since Crisis Zone relies solely on a machine gun, the fire spray is always constant. Each shot requires a flash of white on the screen, so to remedy this and not cause epileptic seizures nationwide, Namco has players set up a brightness test on the screen before play. The result is a transparent overlay of white mist when you fire at everything. It takes away from seeing everything get blown to bits clearly, but it doesn't detract too much from the game.

Thing is, if I'd read this, I'd have been quite happy but I just know that I've played the game when it was more "normal", and Time Crisis 3 didn't have this... so what I'm thinking is that maybe what I'm experiencing is the transparency effect of the 'smoke-screen' going tits up and not working, since it's like 99% opaque.

[beccedee1]

Mine does this too but I considered it to be normal.