Late realizations

[Ruldra]

Are you saying Raiden is lively and cheerful? That's definitely how I'd NOT describe it.

[Obiwanshinobi]

Are you saying Raiden is lively and cheerful? That's definitely how I'd NOT describe it.

I would. Very "tea dance".

[Xyga]

Many shmups with a 'gay' ambience, because of visuals or sound or both (Toaplan, Parodius, PS/MM etc many) are quite brutal in fact...

[Mischief Maker]

Oh, I thought that was some kind of reference to 1980s David Lee Roth since the game over music is pretty much this.

[mamboFoxtrot]

Donkey Kong is literally a monkey's uncle

[copy-paster]

The Xbox port of Metal Slug 3 has cruel continue system, if you die at any spot and use continue it sent back at the beginning of the current stage. Not really bad actually, but imagine losing life in the final mission...

[BIL]

It was a really fucking stupid move, sadly. I get what they were trying for, but 1) it only triggered the other half of the classic too short/too hard mainstream whine, and 2) yes - it's a legitimate pain in the ass, given Final Mission is a good 50% of the game's runtime, and it consists of a ton of easy autoscrollers followed by a sustained battery of deadly setpieces. It totally fucks up the game's learning curve.

I applaud anyone who actually stuck with the port (must've been the mother of all catharsis clears), but I eventually bailed for MAME in frustration. Even having no-missed the game there and on MVS since, I'd hate to go back to that port.

The PS2 one is basically identical (no slowdown, stage practice, Fat Island) but thankfully lacks the restart, so I like having it around. (referring to the stand-alone 2003 release... the much later Anthology disc is apparently plagued by input lag. I've never tried that one, but the stand-alone's controls are tight. Angry gold needles, baby!)

[Stevens]

the much later Anthology disc is apparently plagued by input lag. I've never tried that one, but the stand-alone's controls are tight. Angry gold needles, baby!)

I have it, the lag is awful. I still enjoy fucking around with it from time to time, but trying for a legit clear? Not forth the frustration when there are better options available.

Many shmups with a 'gay' ambience, because of visuals or sound or both (Toaplan, Parodius, PS/MM etc many) are quite brutal in fact...

The giant blue laser in Dogyuun is as big a blue dick I've ever seen. Massive and veiny.

Dogyuun still rocks though.

[Sumez]

I believe we have a thread for that stuff

[copy-paster]

The PS2 one is basically identical (no slowdown, stage practice, Fat Island) but thankfully lacks the restart

I remember Uyama use this port for his speedrun (both practice and full run) so it must be a good addition. Perhaps the AES version is the best for practice purpose, just switch the debug on and voila! you can select every stage and every section too.

I have it, the lag is awful.

Been a looong time since play PS2 Anthology, but I did not notice any lag on all games.

[Stevens]

Been a looong time since play PS2 Anthology, but I did not notice any lag on all games.

It is well documented including a thread here:

https://www.google.com/search?q=metal+s ... +input+lag

[Mischief Maker]

I just learned that the 90s band Ace of Base were neo-nazis.

Fuck, dude, they're coming out of the goddamn walls!

[BIL]

Tetris for Famicom is not the Nintendo-developed version found on NES. It's some janky piece of shit from Bullet Proof Software, with utterly fucked controls (pad rotates, B drops... what in the sweet fuck). I found this out after I'd blithely pounced on a nice cheap copy. 3;

[emphatic]

I just learned that the 90s band Ace of Base were neo-nazis.

Fuck, dude, they're coming out of the goddamn walls!

Pretty sure just one of the members had been a neo-nazi, and had turned his life around before the Ace Of Base years.

[BIL]

I just learned that the 90s band Ace of Base were neo-nazis.

Fuck, dude, they're coming out of the goddamn walls!

OH NOES, NOT MY FAVOURITE NINETIES JAMS - wait

Pretty sure just one of the members had been a neo-nazi, and had turned his life around before the Ace Of Base years.

MM you are fake news. (・｀W´・) Wait a sec my phone is ringing. What's that?! Oh heck no! 70s band ABBA were the product of a NAZI EUGENICS PROGRAM TO DOMINATE EUROVISION*

*"Sweden took in several hundred Lebensborn children from Norway after the war. A famous survivor is Anni-Frid Lyngstad, a member of the music group ABBA. Her father was a sergeant in the Wehrmacht, and her mother was Norwegian; to escape persecution after the war, her mother took Anni-Frid to Sweden, where their personal history was not known."

Its kinda true!

[Sumez]

I'm glad this thread is here to help me sort out the political standings of defunct Swedish pop bands. Could someone help me clear out the ideologies behind One More Time and Army of Lovers?

[emphatic]

[BIL]

Whoa, what the heck?! WHAT IN THE SWEET FUCK

After many, many years living abroad in BRITLANDSHIRE with an eye firmly homeward... ;w;

Only LITERALLY NOW do I realise the BBC's cute little Welsh MILF Alex Jones shares a name with infamous fat internet heiffer / peddler of spermicidal toxins Alex Jones!





I know which one imma fap to! Probably help the ol' meat & two veg if anything! ;3 I wonder if thar be some highfalootin doctor word for this sort of mental blind spot / homonym sorting mechanism.

[WelshMegalodon]

Has there really never been an OST release for The King of Dragons?

[Specineff]

When you don't let a woman (or anyone else for that matter) try to guilt-trip you or otherwise emotionally-manipulate you, you're not being an ass. You're standing up for yourself and drawing a line in the sand.

Suddenly, "Does a ni**a have to slap a bitch?" has a new meaning.

[BIL]

Has there really never been an OST release for The King of Dragons?

Not sure if it ever got a stand-alone release, but in case it's of any help, the game does have a spot on Captain Commando: Capcom G.S.M. 5 (disc 1 has an arranged track, disc 2 has the OST).

[WelshMegalodon]

Ah, so it did. I noticed the arranged track on Disc 1 when I was looking around, but not the rest. Many thanks.

[BrianC]

Cary Grant never said "Judy Judy Judy" and James Cagney never said "mmmmm you dirty rat".

[soprano1]

http://nintendo.wikia.com/wiki/Cranky_K ... es#Ranting
Rare themselves confirming their game was all graphics and crap gameplay by hiding it under an old man (well, ape) yelling at clouds.

[Sumez]

The original game might be flawed, but the sequel had seriously great gameplay.

[WelshMegalodon]

I knew from __SKYe's post that Bishoujo Senshi Sailor Moon MD was more than a port of the Super Famicom game, but... it's really, really different. Different levels, different bosses, different movesets.

[kitten]

It was a really fucking stupid move, sadly. I get what they were trying for, but 1) it only triggered the other half of the classic too short/too hard mainstream whine, and 2) yes - it's a legitimate pain in the ass, given Final Mission is a good 50% of the game's runtime, and it consists of a ton of easy autoscrollers followed by a sustained battery of deadly setpieces. It totally fucks up the game's learning curve.

I applaud anyone who actually stuck with the port (must've been the mother of all catharsis clears), but I eventually bailed for MAME in frustration. Even having no-missed the game there and on MVS since, I'd hate to go back to that port.

The PS2 one is basically identical (no slowdown, stage practice, Fat Island) but thankfully lacks the restart, so I like having it around. (referring to the stand-alone 2003 release... the much later Anthology disc is apparently plagued by input lag. I've never tried that one, but the stand-alone's controls are tight. Angry gold needles, baby!)

metal slug 3 on xbox was my very first nomiss and the brutal continue system was very instrumental in me finally starting to get into classic gaming in earnest. it was a hugely important game in my trajectory of taste & general development and led me to communities that would ultimately end up informing much of my early feelings on these games. while i don't think i'll justify it as a smart decision, that continue system was essentially the thing to stoke my flames. i often wonder if i'd have pursued another hobby had it not been for my intense desire to see metal slug 3 through to the end and hone my play. i still remember the sheer stress and sweaty palms it gave me, and how much things like rpgs slowly ceased to be my big fascination going forward.

here's personal backstory, if ya wanna read -

Spoiler

metal slug had been something i'd always gawk at whenever visiting the mall arcade (my mom worked there, and they got a cab toward the end of her years-long position), and even once put a credit into. for me to put a credit into something that wouldn't win me a thing was highly unusual - i'd usually burn out my small reserve of coins on ski-ball for tickets and then gawk at demo footage or older players daring enough to actually attempt these games. when it was time to go, i'd cash my tickets in for like, rings or toy jewelry or candy or w/e.

the sprite art for it had me totally mesmerized, as did the in the hunt cabinet at the local public pool. i could watch their demo reels forever. i still remember the time i was at a celebration station and someone left a credit inside the in the hunt cabinet they had there, and i felt like i was the luckiest person alive. a slave to earning tickets for material things, i'd never actually risk a coin in a real arcade game for fear of getting decimated in seconds, even though i knew well of the concentrated joy those seconds were.

it was years later, as a young teen, that i realized that metal slug 3 was being released on xbox (the original cab for the first game hit in 96, and the xbox release of the 3rd game was 2004) after looking it up online. for you europeans out there, please be reminded that because of sony america's ludicrous policies on 2d games at the time, they couldn't be released as stand-alone titles and were forced to be released in compilations. thus, we never got the ps2 version of metal slug 3 and only got 4 and 5 as a bundle. nazca's dedicated team had set some kind of fire in my heart and i had to have it, but i was totally destitute and had no real options for earning any money.

i also had my first rectal exam coming up and was totally, incomprehensibly mortified about it. to ease my fear, i was offered the choice of being bought something i wanted for going through with it by my parents. and thus, after one traumatizing doctor's visit (my doctor was rude to me and brown-skinned and spoke with an arabic accent, and i was at the height of irrational teenage xenophobia and racism in a post-9/11 world - just a peachy time), i finally obtained the game. i dug into it being someone chronically terrible at classic games and unable to clear even the first stage of nes life force, and i came out weeks later someone taking the xbox to the comic shop just to show it off, even belting a 1cc out on demand. i was, of course, still a few years off from even knowing what "1cc" was.

i still have the snoopy band-aid i was given for having my blood drawn, as unusual a keepsake as that might be, stored within the case of the game. it was a big deal to me. lol

the game and its xbox-specific restrictions were seriously the reason i went from someone godforsakenly bad at games to someone with the drive to become a competent player at something. it was the moment i started to cease being the person who (literally) had a chibi-sephiroth printed out on the front of their trapper-keeper and started being the person doodling marco and co. on notebook paper and thinking about what exciting game to play next. it took me from passive, superficial appreciation of the hobby into a deeper, more meaningful investment. that investment was sincere and earnest both before and after, but no personally meaningful rpg from that time period satisfied the most important thing a game is arguably meant to do - a sheer sense of quality play.

did it have this effect for anyone else because of its one credit restriction? probably not. was it a good decision to add it in, considering that? almost definitely not. i don't even want to contradict your indictment of what they did, bil, but... gosh dang golly geez. for me, personally, very personally, it was absolutely the right thing to have been done. i cannot imagine how differently i would have considered the game and even the hobby itself had it not been there to be the sole influence i had for learning to tackle a game with the proper mindset and drive with lack of a friend or community to really encourage that. feel like i'd be another credit-feeding tourist at best and lost interest in classically-styled games at worst if it weren't there to break me in. i specifically think the cruelty in forcing you to play the entire final stage from scratch was what ultimately changed my perspective and proclivities.

mind you, i don't go back to the port now for a reason

in fact, i've not been back to the game in quite a while because of how seriously i started to take the game and how panicky i'd get during some of those final stretches. but i still just can't find myself entirely discrediting the decision to have done what they did given the surprisingly profound effect it had on me. without that absurd restriction, i might have never stopped being just another jrpg fangirl that only went to classic forms of gaming when i fancied the occasional e-tank-fueled, nostalgic romp through a rockman or two. that kind of restriction is definitely cruel for an enthusiast trying to practice, but for a true novice to have the carrot of beautifully animated sprites & incredible fulfillment dangled in front of my face, it was just right.

yet again, i must apologize for an unnecessarily lengthy post! i am cursed to be wordy. hopefully, the story was interesting.

[Sumez]

Hopefully you don't left the RPGs completely behind I always found there's room for many different approaches to game design, and in recent years I've probably been appreciating more wildly different games than ever before.

A Metal Slug 3 nomiss is something I feel I could never hope for. It's absurd for me to imagine that it's even possible... That final stage is beyond brutal. I could see someone starting out their path towards hardcore arcade games with the first Metal Slug... but 3? Damn.

[kitten]

Hopefully you don't left the RPGs completely behind I always found there's room for many different approaches to game design, and in recent years I've probably been appreciating more wildly different games than ever before.

not entirely, but i found myself disdainful of most for blatant time-wasting and manipulative design with vapid mechanics. unless they have a really superbly strong presentation (e.g. chrono trigger) or highly addicting and cleverly thoughtful mechanics (e.g. smt3), i'm often hard-pressed to really enjoy them and insulted by the amount of time and busywork they demand. i do quite adore some offbeat titles with RPG inspiration like mega man legends (the first, specifically) and king's field 2 (1US), though!

most of my favorite modern games are often really narrative-focused, because i feel like capacity for those types of games to grow has been tremendous with lifted technical restrictions, accessible game design tools, and more open minds approaching games. classic genres, however, feel terribly misunderstood, for the most part. everything's a metroidvania with 'rpg elements,' now. the same is true for some modern genres, even - design feels bloated with traces of so many things and no actual direction to provide meaning to it.

A Metal Slug 3 nomiss is something I feel I could never hope for. It's absurd for me to imagine that it's even possible... That final stage is beyond brutal. I could see someone starting out their path towards hardcore arcade games with the first Metal Slug... but 3? Damn.

it really, really stole my heart. without a strong childhood admiration for the designers and a perfect storm of conditions, it would have otherwise been insurmountable, but i stuck to it with considerable dedication that i've perhaps never really hit again. i genuinely got excruciatingly nervous when playing and eventually found it too much to continue with. it's not the most impressive nomiss in the world, but i think that it was my first is pretty baffling. it's a game that allowed me to go back to something like contra with gusto, even! the original nes contra is probably my favorite in the entire series and in my top 10 games of all time, but i didn't even beat it without code until after this despite its difficulty being totally juvenile by comparison. i absolutely had to have metal slug 3's piss mean restriction to tunnel me into no other way to the top.

[BIL]

metal slug 3 on xbox was my very first nomiss and the brutal continue system was very instrumental in me finally starting to get into classic gaming in earnest. it was a hugely important game in my trajectory of taste & general development and led me to communities that would ultimately end up informing much of my early feelings on these games. while i don't think i'll justify it as a smart decision, that continue system was essentially the thing to stoke my flames. i often wonder if i'd have pursued another hobby had it not been for my intense desire to see metal slug 3 through to the end and hone my play.

I can relate to the epiphanic experience. Gradius V was that game for me, specifically for its announcer. Withholding approval "in-universe" until the player survived the loop was a minor bit of genius, I believe... it certainly provoked a response in me. And I very nearly passed up on GV entirely, after EGM's well-meaning but over-egged "good luck finishing without free play" review comments.

Though as skillful as GV was at provoking this reaction, I think it requires the player to have a latent love of classical "hard gaming." I'm sure many more players just skulked away at Announcer-sama's booming putdowns, and/or beat a hasty retreat after unlocking free play. Nature of the beast, I fear. We will always be an endangered species.

To young noobs of today: Bite the bullet, you motherfuckers.

I'd like to think MS1-3's endgame tallies, which pointedly list the number of continues used, might've had a similar effect on me had I encountered them first. It was right around the same time, incidentally. I was definitely already smarting at the difference between a fat end-stage rescue roster and the pitiful "moth flutters from wallet" alternative of dying beforehand.

A Metal Slug 3 nomiss is something I feel I could never hope for. It's absurd for me to imagine that it's even possible... That final stage is beyond brutal. I could see someone starting out their path towards hardcore arcade games with the first Metal Slug... but 3? Damn.

It was the hori and vertical STG segments that take up seemingly half the stage which really started to grate on me after a while - little skill required, but you can't doze, and as someone who's done it with and without autofire, fuck the vert ship's default shot.

On the upside, I remember I was reaching the cocoon battle with an obscene amount of grenades (saved from the autoscrollers) after a while, which was cool! Cruelly easy to die there if a flamethrower zombie gets close. Among my top three fears, towards the conclusion of my nomiss endeavours - the others were the barricade closing out the eyebug tunnel (grenades a huge help there too), and the final zombie escape (infernally tempting to push my luck there... trick is knowing when you need to rush down a shambler, and when you're just inviting a body-obliterating bloodlazor). The rest is very controllable with nerve and practice, though holy fuck, good luck with the last boss's bullet updrafts if you don't know about the vehicle eject exploit.

I think it was the conceptual ludicrousness of the stage itself that attracted me in the first place. That (welcome!) midpoint cutscene with the rockets launching, wow. Feels grand. Those overlong autoscrollers belabour, but even they aid the sense of apocalyptic climax, not just of the series but sidescrolling action as a whole. The lead actor can't shit himself halfway through the show! This is the same cinematic thinking that makes me want to 1LC even easier console stuff. How lame does it feel if Simon Belmont drowns en route to slaying Dracula? Applying this standard often brings out the best in those games, imo. (sometimes it reveals appalling new dimensions of pain, ala Holy Diver!)

It's the big overblown concept album of its kind. Much more likely to put on MS1 or X nowadays, but I always respect its audacity.