Slowdown, The Very Best Of

Anything from run & guns to modern RPGs, what else do you play?
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BIL
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Slowdown, The Very Best Of

Post by BIL »

Here is mine. Castlevania IV, loop 2, stage 2 (or rather Akumajou Dracula as this is occurring on a Super Famicom). Unexpectedly the game spawns two invisible men / Evil Dead Tree Rapists instead of the usual one, right as a pigeon dives in from 3'oclock, an armadillo rolls in from the right and a zombie erupts from the ground to Simon's left. Simon is in the first startup frame of his whipping animation, and I have what seems like all week to watch him strike the first EDTR, to my chagrin as this lets the zombie hit it from the back. A few frames of sheer ineptitude excruciatingly prolonged into seconds. Then the EDTR explodes and gradually spacetime unfucks itself up to a decent 59.9fps, incrementally as the remaining EDTR, the zombie, the pigeon and the armadillo depart the scene. It was like that climactic horror in Dulce et Decorum Est only in 2D and colour. I've never had it so slow or so good.

So, what are the occasions where slowdown really moved you? Perhaps made you lose all faith in the hardware? I've still not bought R-Type Final owing to a suspicion it'll make my trusty fatty PS2's GPU overheat and explode.
Last edited by BIL on Sat Aug 17, 2019 10:38 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Hagane
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Re: Slowdown's Greatest Hits

Post by Hagane »

Metal Slug 2. I cleared it easily long ago thanks to the absurd levels of slowdown it has. Then I moved to X and proceeded to get demolished. I wonder how in the hell did SNK decide to release the game like that.
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Re: Slowdown's Greatest Hits

Post by trap15 »

Hishouzame has very little slowdown, but when it does... Oh man. You'll never forget it 8)
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Re: Slowdown's Greatest Hits

Post by KAI »

Arcana Heart 2 is soooooooo slooooooooooooowwwwww, I remember doing a 70hits combo at 2fps, pure awesomeness.
Last edited by KAI on Sat Oct 26, 2013 9:23 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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Re: Slowdown's Greatest Hits

Post by BareKnuckleRoo »

Sand Scorpion. Get to the Stage 3 or 4 boss with maxed out spread weapon, watch the game grind to nearly a halt. There's so much slowdown (or maybe just bullets shot by the bosses) that it actually has trouble firing off your own bullets, which is a pain since there's a lot of shootable enemy bullets that you really want to destroy to make life easier. It's the most amusing part about this Raiden-like.
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Re: Slowdown's Greatest Hits

Post by Battletoad »

Giga Wing 2 often has slowdown while you're reflecting bullets which is good. If you try stage 4 with the Reflect Laser though, beware... Not too far into the stage you get to two enemies that cause a giant explosion and cancel all onscreen bullets when destroyed (they come again later in the stage, but I mean especially this first appearance). Don't destroy them with shot, but rather hover over them to suck up their bullets with the reflect laser. When your lasers are finally unleashed, you're gonna be able to count every single frame.
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Re: Slowdown's Greatest Hits

Post by Pretas »

Hagane wrote:Metal Slug 2. I cleared it easily long ago thanks to the absurd levels of slowdown it has. Then I moved to X and proceeded to get demolished. I wonder how in the hell did SNK decide to release the game like that.
The PS3 Neo-Geo Station port of MS2 has an option to remove the slowdown by simulating an overclocked CPU.
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Re: Slowdown's Greatest Hits

Post by Ed Oscuro »

Half-Life on a 200MHz Pentium MMX with 16MB of RAM (and a 1MB S3 video card). 15 minute load time between level segments, seriously. My memory was that it was surprisingly fluid in gameplay but it probably wasn't - didn't have any benchmark to compare to at the time really.
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Re: Slowdown's Greatest Hits

Post by Ruldra »

When I was younger and inexperienced with arcade games, I used to think Shock Troopers 2nd Squad was awesome. Nowadays I find it unplayable due to the insane amounts of slowdown.
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Re: Slowdown's Greatest Hits

Post by Koa Zo »

Radirgy Precious

slowdown abounds.
the slowest I've ever seen a game, ever, would be when using the bubble weapon and fighting the stage 4 boss.
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Re: Slowdown's Greatest Hits

Post by null1024 »

Running Sonic Generations on my netbook at one frame every 1 to 2 seconds was probably the slowest thing I've ever encountered in my life. I almost beat the game like that too, haha. And I played through the entirety of the Unleashed mod like that [one stage, the one that is supposed to give good machines framerate issues due to the way the level geometry is set up or something ran at one frame every 2-4 seconds, which was hilarious, my friends just stared at my machine and shook their heads].

Everyone should enjoy the magical experience this was - still felt kind of fast despite running at less than single digit framerates.
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Re: Slowdown's Greatest Hits

Post by BulletMagnet »

Odin Sphere slowed down quite a bit during certain boss fights, if memory serves.
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Re: Slowdown's Greatest Hits

Post by Pretas »

BulletMagnet wrote:Odin Sphere slowed down quite a bit during certain boss fights, if memory serves.
Yes, a couple of them were nearly unplayable due to slowdown. It was all fixed in the PAL version, at least.
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Re: Slowdown's Greatest Hits

Post by Ed Oscuro »

null1024 wrote:Running Sonic Generations on my netbook
I've got to chime in here, in favor of a voluntary ban on anything related to emulation. If you're going to talk about emulation then anything is fair game. Heck, I could talk about the slowdown I encountered just trying to play the OGG music from Uru: Ages Beyond Myst on the same 200MHz computer mentioned above (and this after I'd upgraded the RAM to 64MB!)

I think it's more to the point to talk about something awful when you can say "look, this is how they expected the game would be played."
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Re: Slowdown's Greatest Hits

Post by null1024 »

Ed Oscuro wrote:
null1024 wrote:Running Sonic Generations on my netbook
I've got to chime in here, in favor of a voluntary ban on anything related to emulation. If you're going to talk about emulation then anything is fair game. Heck, I could talk about the slowdown I encountered just trying to play the OGG music from Uru: Ages Beyond Myst on the same 200MHz computer mentioned above (and this after I'd upgraded the RAM to 64MB!)

I think it's more to the point to talk about something awful when you can say "look, this is how they expected the game would be played."
Emulation? That's the native PC version. :P
No idea how one would even attempt to try to emulate Generations.

But yeah, slowdown on the intended level of hardware is probably a better fit for the thread.
The fact that the netbook actually supported all of the graphics features to even run the game was magical in and of itself. My much faster main laptop won't even attempt to start the game because it doesn't.

On a more related note, Pokemon X/Y's slowdown with 3D on is a bit embarrassing. It's the only 3DS game that I've seen frameskip more because 3D was on. It's also the first one that I've seen not even enable 3D in a non-menu/FMV area.
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Re: Slowdown's Greatest Hits

Post by Ed Oscuro »

Well, there was this time period where we said "yay shaders and support for everything" without actually addressing the problem of "is the hardware powerful enough?" Obviously not...I doubt that system really was within the recommended requirements, or at least what was envisioned for playing it. PC support is always touch-and-go anyway; nobody really envisions their game being played on the worst stuff out there. Of course, that more than disqualifies my Half-Life mention, which is still by far the worst thing mentioned in this thread, at least in terms of the level transitions.
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Re: Slowdown's Greatest Hits

Post by Despatche »

ikaruga slowdown on explosions (gamecube only? not sure how the port differences work) are p.cool

double dragon (ac) slowdown is not cool and fuck that game

anything by micronics may as well be perpetual slowdown haeuhauHAUEHeuahehae
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Re: Slowdown's Greatest Hits

Post by null1024 »

Despatche wrote:ikaruga slowdown on explosions (gamecube only? not sure how the port differences work) are p.cool

double dragon (ac) slowdown is not cool and fuck that game
Slows down on DC, and IIRC in the arcade. I'm pretty sure that was coded in to make explosions look cooler [or maybe they just made something that was too taxing and the slowdown looked cool and left it there 8) ].

DD in the arcade bothers me. That game is perpetually running under slowdown.
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Re: Slowdown's Greatest Hits

Post by iconoclast »

Ninja Gaiden II's staircase battle on Path of the Master Ninja is awesome (especially without the patch). Ninjas, explosions, blood and severed limbs everywhere while the game runs in slow motion from start to finish.
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Re: Slowdown's Greatest Hits

Post by NTSC-J »

The last few stages of Earth Defense Force 3 are pretty awe-inspiring. Ants, explosions, lasers, alien mother-ships crashing to the ground, and your character somersaulting through all of it.
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Re: Slowdown's Greatest Hits

Post by mrsmiley381 »

So, I was playing good ol' Rogue Squadron II a few years back. In one of the missions you're given a Y-Wing and have some typical bombing targets. You know, Star Wars shit. Pretty normal.

So I decide at some point to get as close to the ground as possible and start dropping bombs on targets. Except, since this was a replay of the mission and I had access to the upgraded cluster bombs which naturally cause more mayhem and destruction as they explode multiple times.

Well, as I start dropping bombs like diarrhea after Mexican night with spoiled milk on the side by jamming the bomb button as much as possible for no reason, I start hearing the sound skip and the frame rate drops to be about one frame ever two seconds or so. I'm thinking that the Gamecube has just shat its final shit, but I instinctively pull back on the control stick and after a few seconds I finally manage to pull the camera away from my cluster bomb cluster fuck to keep it from rendering and the game returns to normal.

I'd love to see if someone can replicate this. I really can't figure out why it was slowing down so bad.
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Re: Slowdown's Greatest Hits

Post by moh »

the muchi muchi pork pcb practically plays in a constant state of slowdown.
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Re: Slowdown's Greatest Hits

Post by SuperDeadite »

The Dreamcast port of Baldr Force EXE during the later Hell Mode stages. The stage where you fight 2 Leviathans at once is so bad the game will fully stop (0 FPS) for a few seconds as the CPU catches up, then unfreezes and keeps going. The PC and PS2 versions don't have the crazy slowdown, the DC port just sucks, still though the slowdown is awesome in it's own way.

And as a teenager with no money I used to play Descent ][ online via Kahn on my 486DX2 with a 2400 baud modem....
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Re: Slowdown's Greatest Hits

Post by idchappy »

I love a bit of slowdown, Double Dragon had some good bits :D
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Re: Slowdown's Greatest Hits

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Re: Slowdown's Greatest Hits

Post by Koa Zo »

I keep seeing the thread title as "Snowdens Greatest Hits" ....thinking it's going to be a compendium of the greatest leaks!
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Re: Slowdown's Greatest Hits

Post by Skykid »

idchappy wrote:I love a bit of slowdown, Double Dragon had some good bits :D
Love DD's slowdown, fits like a glove. :D
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Re: Slowdown's Greatest Hits

Post by SuperGrafx »

Gradius III on SNES
Basically the game ran in a constant state of slowdown -- unless you stopped firing your weapon.
Still though, I loved that game. SO many great memories and that magical soundtrack
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Re: Slowdown's Greatest Hits

Post by Pretas »

Depending on your point of view, Gradius III SNES is either a heavily gimped, inferior port; or a rare example of a game improved by slowdown.

At least it ditched the lousy 3D speed stage. I was actually surprised they didn't attempt to recreate it with Mode 7.
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Re: Slowdown's Greatest Hits

Post by Jonst »

Double dragon and radirgy precious.
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