Ninja Gaiden [NES] + R2RKMF: Scrolling Action Monogatari

[Sumez]

you said "2nd stage" at one point, does the ps4 version have linear stage progression? :O

No, I'm just basing "second stage" on the second one I play. First stage is easy enough, but after that I choose the one on the far lest (this one), and get wrecked.

The PS4 version is definitely harder than the original and I don't think the difficulty settings do anything but replace old stages with new ones.

I think they also make a difference in how much life you have.

[Squire Grooktook]

really nice quirky little game with a depressing premise.

Yeah the JP ending script is some Rayforce-tier melancholia.

RIP all fallen arcade game protags


-


Anyway, actually spent some time with both versions of the game.

My favorite gag so far is the difficult to find and posses Castlevania-shout-out looking vampire who opens his cape to shoot out a spread of three projectiles...revealing his boxers in the process. Likewise I also enjoy that the first thing you can choose to do after "choosing" your starting character is to murder the other 3.

As for the game itself, it's indeed a solid little platformer with some interesting concepts. Not tight or fast paced as many of the better titles discussed here, but fun enough to allow it's theme to shine.

I like how some of the stages are very "vertical", complete with multiple paths, which supplements the possession mechanic and the many hosts different (often downright wacky) jump physics and move speeds. Some freedom in routing things in there. Also interesting how the lethality of enemies is dependent on how many are on screen: dying in a crowded room is a minor blow to your ghost energy bar, but falling to a single far off opponent can be death as you float to the next host.

Balancing your true health vs host durability and utility, and occasionally suiciding to switch hosts, makes me recall when we earlier talked about the possibility of a "garegga-esque sidescoller" where a gameplan can be formed from manipulating every variable. I'd love to see a more "hardcore" take on this formula (suicide to lower the rank and take a better body!).

i've only played the gb version of this! brought it up a few pages back as semi-obscure game boy games that don't -too- often get recommended, i believe. it's pretty neat, but a little pricy for a gb game. i've never played the arcade version, but the gb version seemed to be better balanced and have some better design sensibilities from as far as i could tell, looking at versions of both. gb version also comes packed with an additional hard/expert mode, which is very notably tough.

Not quite decided yet on which one I prefer better, but you are right that despite the technical downsizing, the GB port feels like a refinement instead of a straight port. Little quirks of physics and controls (can't do the rapid attack crouch-cancelling trick from the arcade version on gb) are fixed, and there are some questionable "gotcha" elements in the arcade verison that seem absent so far. The cute compactness and innocent monochrome of the gb aesthetic also offsets the lack of detail and animation gags (some of which are still present and cute) from arcade version, and the more super-deformed character cutscene art fits a bit better imo.

I'll have to play more to decide which one is definitive. That extra difficulty on gb sounds nice though (though both games are already a bit more lethal than appearances would suggest, given the fragility of their mortal hosts), how do you unlock/activate it?

[Sumez]

Just picked Gimmick back up. Only spent a very short time on it last year (but enough to fall in love), and decided to go for the all treasures 1cc this time around. Looks like it should be easy enough, since the game shovers you in 1ups - so I might actually try going for a 1lc. At this point I just want something easy to warm my NES back up, though.

But damn, this game is so unique that getting back into it feels almost like learning it from the beginning again. So unique in the way everything is controlled by momentum, and the incredible AI in the bosses, I couldn't remember how to fight any of them at first. Especially the two guardians at the beginning of the castle had me stumped for a while until I somehow managed to remember how I beat them last time around. Everyone seems to have their own strategy for those guys, I really love that!

[BrianC]

I see Avenging Spirit mentioned here, really nice quirky little game with a depressing premise. Shame the only port was to Gameboy, but it's even good there, but boy oh boy it's price sure isn't nice.

There is that licensed retro-bit 10 in 1 Jaleco multicart coming out that includes Avenging Spirit. I wouldn't be surprised if they somehow messed it up, but the GB cart has a solid list of games (it also has Banishing Racer and both Fortified Zone games).

[BIL]

Sword Maniac (SFC): Oof, disaster. Marginally interesting sword mechanics let down by awkward, AI loop-dependent duels and outright torpedoed by a godawful case of camera malfunction. It's one of those that lurches ahead in the direction you're facing, leaving you blind to anything behind, with your exposed back against the screen edge. Level designs, despite their simplicity, are not calibrated to compensate. Have fun with the turbo-rolling baddies on st2's fire escape.

Shame, as when it's in firmly right-scrolling flatland mode ala Vigilante, it's not without satisfaction. Nailing enemies with efficient strikes and quick combos hints at a better game. Quickly trips over itself with the above issues of over-ambitious "duelling" and lurching FOV. Actraiser 2 is categorically superior SFC sword action.

[Sumez]

Sword Maniac is a game that feels like it should be fun, but then you meet the first boss.

For this one though, I got the US version, it has a vastly superior soundtrack. Who is Hitoshi Sakimoto anyway??

[Perikles]

Aaaah, good old X-Kaliber 2097/Sword Maniac! 'twas one of the games I grew up with, which makes nostalgia not an option but an exigency.

Its biggest detriment is the hilariously punishing knock back upon getting hit, especially against those toasters with laser beams. You can't even block these because the beam will pass through the sword and then cross up, leading into a combo of hits that smacks you around left and right, it's quite cathartic in its absurdity.

The contrivance in beating most bosses is thus (it served me well, at least): you want to push the boss into a corner first. If you just hit them there, they probably will block everything. However, if you alternate between the quick strike (whilst holding to the side in which the boss is positioned, i.e. forwards) and the wave slash, you'll have a good chance to get a hit in. I guess that is because the AI figures you're vulnerable after using the quick strike and then drops the guard, but since you recover almost immediately you can attack once more before the retaliation has a chance to come out.

The final boss is entirely dependent on luck, by the way. There's a pattern that has a fairly decent success rate, but you may die regardless.

Love the music of the Western release, though! Prime example for inverse BioMetalism.

Edit: it's the other way around regarding quick strike/wave slash. Fixed that. Too late, too tired.

[Squire Grooktook]

(it also has Banishing Racer)

Now that I'm on a slight GB kick, maybe I'll give that one a shot too along with gb bionic commando and the batman game that was mentioned awhile back.

[BIL]

Edit: it's the other way around regarding quick strike/wave slash. Fixed that. Too late, too tired.

I really like the finesse touch hinted at while dispatching st1's guards - leaping their gunfire, stunning them with an airborne slice, and deftly killing them upon landing, in one seamless attack. The turrets in the vertically-descending section immediately after, too - baiting their fire to the ground, leaping it and cleaving them down with a single heavy blow.

Even st2's ostensibly repetitive biker and roly-poly kills are kinda satisfying. I was digging the grim precision of getting juuust close enough to trigger the latters' door-shattering entrance, before insta-killing the shamelessly flexing creep with a heavy stab through the throat. Harsh! I don't even mind the prodigious repetition of this kill, it's got a nice groove. This could've definitely been a pretty decent Vigilante-esque, imo. That camera drives me nuts though.

Speaking of, kind of: Dengeki Big Bang (FC), aka Clash At Demonhead. Gave this one a very quick deco. Handling is decidedly a bit sludgy, and the character is biased slightly towards the scrolling edge. Not fatally so (fun or maybe horrifying fact: Ninja Gaiden III's guilty of about the same amount), but that's never encouraging. ಠ_ಠ It's late as fuuuck here so I didn't stick around, wasn't turned off but wasn't really moved either. Floaty anime man didn't grab my attention like contemporary nonlinear sidescroller Metafight's killer tank. Much like River City Ransom, can definitely see why it'd attract a cult following though. Love the whiny damage animation, haha - makes me wanna reach into the screen and slap the guy while yelling "GETTA HOLDA URSELF."

[kitten]

Relentlessness is a big draw for me, yep. In action/arcade-derived stuff, anyway! Nothing gets my goat like R-Type III's lazy first stage. (・｀ω´・)

OTOH, some of my favourite non-action games ever are the KCET-made Silent Hill quartet - I like to replay them in release order every couple winters, when the nights are nice and long and the holidays free up time. I like to really bask in the mood of those (their endgame ranking systems actually facilitate intensive "results-oriented" replays - I've never been interested tbh).

i feel like i enjoy a pretty wide variety of games, but pretty much all that i reliably replay more than once every few years is short, sweet, and typically action-oriented.

i usually get my fill of revisiting silent hill through listening to the soundtracks again, or just watching something like this. they're a bit too slow and dull, for me. there's some ps1 stuff i drift back to a little more often than more recent stuff that isn't quite entirely fast and snappy, though. for example, i adore the first (and third) ape escape, first armored core, and the first mega man legends (been thinking about making king's field (IIjp) more of a frequent thing, too). i feel like a decent chunk of stuff from that generation managed to open games up without completely unraveling them, and i really love the kind of truncated open-worlds they are. they're small when you think about it, but capture that sense of being in a larger world without making the world uninterestingly vast and vacuous. all those previous examples are 4-star games, to me, if you didn't check my backlog.

the ps1 felt like its hardware restricted 3d worlds enough to make them have to come up with creative solutions that ultimately ended up benefiting many of its greatest games. it felt like the same kind of wild west that the famicom had been for 2d stuff. a restrictive canvas and toolset breeds more creativity!

On the subject of Technos, have you played Double Dragon Advance? Love letter to Technos by ex-employees at Million. Possibly the definitive Technos brawler, almost certainly the best Double Dragon game. Besides the superb DDII FC, I have a soft spot for the slow-moving but elaborately choreograph-able Return Of (SFC), and outside the series, the primal car-crash violence of The Combatribes (SFC port - haven't played the AC one). DDA's my pick of the lot though. Adds exceptionally smooth handling and sensibly restrained combos, without sacrificing one iota of the trademark Technos brutality. Even does some lore housekeeping, too, gracefully resolving and incorporating the starkly divergent AC/FC Double Dragon II storylines.

i haven't played it, no. really that good, huh? i will have to consider it, but 30+ bucks for a gba game is whopping, imo. i usually have a strong disdain for the GBA and feel like handheld gaming died sometime around the end of 94 and never got back up to that speed it was at until just recently there's a few gems here and there, but i have an intense bitterness over how excellent the first half of the game boy's years were, only to be followed by a total death of handheld gaming being taken seriously as more than a novelty by devs for so, so fucking long.

the gba i tend to especially dislike more than other handhelds (though i guess the gbc is even worse and a total wasteland) because of how ugly it was and how hideous the music sounded. so many games using pre-rendered sprites, ugly-ass and extremely lazy parallax backgrounds, lumpy and over-animated characters with terrible hitbox readability, fuck-ugly digitized art (particularly for cutscenes), poor palette choices, 16:9 resolution messing with action games meant to be 4:3, etc. garbage mechanical design for most of the games, too. i can survive a terrible presentation, but it's usually an indicator of poor quality game in all aspects. i feel like it often gets painted as what was the last refuge of classic 2d gaming, but man, i'd rather walk out into the wasteland and die of exposure than sit around waiting to die, there.

even much of the "good" stuff is bad, my complaints don't just apply its intensely staggering droves of raw sewage. kirby became ugly and significantly more banal (fuck flagship), inti creates shit all over mega man by taking the x series template and making it even worse, metroid becomes uglier and lazier and gets stuck in poorly copying was super metroid did right, castlevania ingrains itself as repeating symphony but worse and significantly uglier for eternity, battle network turns mega man's popular face into a cynical grade-schooler serial with manipulative rpg elements and two versions of the same game each year, pokemon releases what is pretty widely regarded as fans as its worst generation, etc. there is total, unmitigated slaughter. much of the library is sfc ports and they usually fuck with the sound and controls, too.

DDA looks and sounds hideous and commits many of the aforementioned sins. if it's mechanically high quality i am definitely interested in it and god knows technos were never particularly great at visual craft (i do still feel they had some charm going), but that is a damningly bitter exterior.

I'll have to play more to decide which one is definitive. That extra difficulty on gb sounds nice though (though both games are already a bit more lethal than appearances would suggest, given the fragility of their mortal hosts), how do you unlock/activate it?

it's on gamefaqs! i believe it's up+a+b right at the start. it is significantly more difficult. i finished the main game on one life with some practice, but had absolutely no interest in doing that for the expert mode. was still a good bit of fun to beat, though. they change up the enemy placement so much that it's almost like a new game.

Just picked Gimmick back up. Only spent a very short time on it last year (but enough to fall in love), and decided to go for the all treasures 1cc this time around. Looks like it should be easy enough, since the game shovers you in 1ups - so I might actually try going for a 1lc. At this point I just want something easy to warm my NES back up, though.

But damn, this game is so unique that getting back into it feels almost like learning it from the beginning again. So unique in the way everything is controlled by momentum, and the incredible AI in the bosses, I couldn't remember how to fight any of them at first. Especially the two guardians at the beginning of the castle had me stumped for a while until I somehow managed to remember how I beat them last time around. Everyone seems to have their own strategy for those guys, I really love that!

if you aren't satisfied after your one life clear, try that run i made up! it's in the pastebin at the bottom of the link in my signature. god, gimmick is seriously my all-time favorite game.

the two guardians are really, really easy when you get them down, but seem super frustratingly difficult, at first. trip world has a very similar fight at the end of it.

There is that licensed retro-bit 10 in 1 Jaleco multicart coming out that includes Avenging Spirit. I wouldn't be surprised if they somehow messed it up, but the GB cart has a solid list of games (it also has Banishing Racer and both Fortified Zone games).

oh, wow, those are official? that's pretty dang neat.

Sword Maniac (SFC): Oof, disaster. Marginally interesting sword mechanics let down by awkward, AI loop-dependent duels and outright torpedoed by a godawful case of camera malfunction. It's one of those that lurches ahead in the direction you're facing, leaving you blind to anything behind, with your exposed back against the screen edge. Level designs, despite their simplicity, are not calibrated to compensate. Have fun with the turbo-rolling baddies on st2's fire escape.

Shame, as when it's in firmly right-scrolling flatland mode ala Vigilante, it's not without satisfaction. Nailing enemies with efficient strikes and quick combos hints at a better game. Quickly trips over itself with the above issues of over-ambitious "duelling" and lurching FOV. Actraiser 2 is categorically superior SFC sword action.

i was up late playing some SFC stuff i owned but had neglected last night, myself. ended up playing:

uchuu no kishi: tekkaman blade - a combination horizontal shooter and fighting game. fly your gigantic robot through space and then end the level with a fighting game match. both elements are very poor, but feature strangely competent sprite art for a game of such low caliber. the shooting segments let you either slash with or chuck your spear, and it ends up playing very different from most horizontal shooters and slightly more like an auto-scrolling action game. i guess? i played it twice, and managed to 1cc on default settings with my 2nd run through. it's bad, but it's not entirely charmless. this almost feels like a watered down port of a pc engine game with its quirkiness, snippets of dialogue, and occasional (but very brief) character portraits between battles.

hyperzone - not really relevant to the thread, but a kind of inoffensive and lightly enjoyable space harrier clone released early on in the sfc's life by HAL. managed to 1cc it, but the game forces you to to complete it, anyway. i was originally prompted to play this by running into some doofus on youtube going by "SHMUP MASTER" who really likes to pat himself on the back. he wrote a really fucking hilariously self-aggrandizing article about his speedrun of this game (lmao @ speedrunning a very unpopular autoscroller and getting ego about it) over here: http://www.gamingrebellion.com/2017/02/ ... speed-run/ i suggest reading this, it is a good laugh. especially so when he shits on speedrun.com and says it's not as legitimate as speed demos archive. and of course someone on speedrun.com has a faster recorded time than him (whoa lol it updated again today with an even more commanding lead).

genocide 2 - this felt like total trash. some okay sprite animation, but otherwise pretty ugly and horribly loose control of your character. run up, smack shit with your ambiguously ranged little saber, repeat. the hitboxing and visual tells for attacks in this game are fucking garbage and i quit when i got to a boss that kept hitting me when i felt it shouldn't. i think i got 4 stages in? maybe 4 stage segments? it was a construction robot on top of a really tall building. there seem to be a lot of different versions for this game for various consoles, i wouldn't be surprised to hear this is one of the worst but the others don't look that great, either.

acrobat mission - again not thread relevant, but bringing it up for the sake of being relevant to the console i'm discussing and played amongst other action games on here. if i'm getting too off-topic, feel free to reign me in, but i don't know where else i would put a couple sentences blurb on this. really hated this and it felt totally amatuer, i only credit-fed my way through it (it's a vert shooter). really shocked that there is not an autofire button separate from the charge attack button. anyone played the arcade version of this? is it better? felt like someone's first shooter. i feel bad for the sprite artist, they put some occasional work into this heap.

xandra no daibouken: valkyrie to no deai - i think this might be the most frustrating action-platformer i have ever in my life played and i am begging anyone reading this to fire up an emulator and play up to the end of the 2nd stage (there are multiple portions to each stage, you'll know you've reached the end of the 2nd one when you're fighting the moon) and then report back on here. you can try the euro localization of the game (whirlo), i believe it is identical. its one-hit kills, bad hitboxing, and outlandishly unintuitive control scheme combine for a freakishly irritating experience. blind jumps and other common sfc platformer staples are abound, too. very nice production value and obvious love put into its visuals, but a trash fire to play. i want to explain the controls of this and how frustrating they are, but i'm going to wait to see if anyone else here plays it (or has played it) first.

(it also has Banishing Racer)

Now that I'm on a slight GB kick, maybe I'll give that one a shot too along with gb bionic commando and the batman game that was mentioned awhile back.

yes pls play batman tas

[WelshMegalodon]

I take it you didn't much enjoy Kagami no Daimeikyuu and Metroid Fusion?

[kitten]

very strongly disliked both, yes. the kirby game, especially, and i'm a very big fan of that series

[Squire Grooktook]

Mega Man Zero is godlike those are fighting words son.

Battle Network is also one of the best action-rpg battle systems I have ever played, period. I was actually just thinking about them and the overwhelming respect I have for the addictively tactical, combo driven chip/custom system. The rpg around that battle system is admittedly weak, but mechanically it's still a level of quality and creativity we rarely see in the mainstream industry today.

[kitten]

Mega Man Zero is godlike those are fighting words son.

i very strongly dislike it and just about every single other thing that inti creates has done. i played through the entire series (including hard mode on zx, etc.) and i just can't stand them. nonsense ranking system, big sprites making screen space poorly used, terrible stage design, tedious and unnecessarily open environments to explore, unforgivable amounts of grinding required to use cyber elves (which the game can't decide are a part of the game or a handicap for new players), weapons that you have to upgrade to get proper functionality, moves that you can't even use without playing the aforementioned shitty ranking system, awful story (lol @ significant plot events between 3 and 4 being wrapped in a radio drama and then expecting the player to know this shit at the start of 4) and lots of talking with frequent interruptions (sometimes even during missions), mother fucking backtracking, etc.

there are significant expanses in some of the games (especially the first) where you will dash straight into an enemy that started an attack offscreen, and you're often severely punished by the ranking system for taking that damage, which heavily enforces memorization (which, in a health bar action game with random enemy drops and expositional dialogue as well as backtracking, secrets, grinding, and farming, feels much worse than usual). boss fights are by far the big draw of the game, but incredible amounts of them have ridiculously large health bars and spend annoyingly significant portions of the fight unable to even be attacked. you have to become uncomfortably familiar with their repetitive patterns to beat them without damage/quickly. the amount of rpg elements, dialogue, and very specifically non-action oriented elements of the game collide horribly with the sometimes memorization intensive stages and bosses that rank you for your performance and in some games gate you from abilities that make the game more interesting. the games are very easy if you abuse all the dumb rpg nonsense, but very tedious and joyless to memorize if you play by the ranking rules. it has no idea how to reconcile its mixture of genres and it shows - balance is all over the place and pacing was not even briefly considered by the designers as something to ever prioritize.

this mission in the first game takes at least six fucking minutes (the player is definitely competent and given the channel, probably savestating frequently) and is victim to many of the above complaints. it happens near the beginning of the game, too. even includes a verrrrry bad escort mission, for fuck's sake! the series gets a little better about this stuff as it goes on but mostly just a little better. i feel like the series probably peaked with the first zx, as it had the most interesting play variety with the numerous forms and some of the best boss fights, as well as a pretty brutal hard mode. also, to my recollection, no horrid ranking system. its map was 100% unforgivably horrible and it would have been better as a straight action game, but this was as close as inti creates ever got having a genuine moment of lucidity and making a good game. of course, after this, they go straight to lock-and-key bullshit with the forms and make what is maybe the worst game in the entire series (perhaps after zero 2) to follow it up.

oh, and then azure striker gunvolt, which is so abysmal i'd really rather not even touch how awful it is. at this point i was so fed up with their bullshit i finally didn't even bother finishing it. ranking system, random drops, crafting... *visible shudder* i once considered the zero games the pinnacle of mega man action design and was a huge fan, for the record. i adored this series when i was younger. today, i only consider the classic series to be genuinely worth a toss, though some of the x games do have very nice presentation, at least.

and the first legends. <3 the first legends. 2nd one i will pretend didn't happen.

Battle Network is also one of the best action-rpg battle systems I have ever played, period. I was actually just thinking about them and the overwhelming respect I have for the addictively tactical, combo driven chip/custom system. The rpg around that battle system is admittedly weak, but mechanically it's still a level of quality we rarely see in the mainstream industry today.

it has a pretty decent battle system, yes. i played through the first five games. however, it rarely ever presses you to use it particularly interestingly and gearing up for versus (where many serious enthusiasts swear is where the real meat is) not only requires local friends who have the game but for them to have been as deranged as you in the yearly chip collection across two versions of the game to participate in the meta. hours of time sunk in just to get to the real meat of the game, and fighting with lots of manipulative systems to do so. the presentation is really poor and feels very cynically marketed to younger people. the cartoon, the school setting, the repetitive conflicts, etc. inafune is a pretty cunning business man and i really fully believe that this series was much less passion and much more profit.

[Squire Grooktook]

Re: the system in battle network not being pressed to use interestingly:

I think BN3 has a perfect difficulty balance on its bosses. That aside though, just getting good set ups and speed killing bosses is fun and rewarding in itself. Very little feels more satisfying then terminating a boss from one counter hit with an improvisational custom combo sequence.

It is a shame that a lot of things around it are a slog though. It's kind of amazing to think that they came up with such a creative, ingenious little system out of nowhere that really feels like nothing else, and then had no idea how manage the basics of an rpg to build around it. I can't stay mad at it though.

Re: Zero

Honestly the only problem I have is the small screen size. Though it's not bad enough generally to hinder my enjoyment of the games. The rest of the stuff mentioned in the first paragraph I can't really remember despite playing the games several times (backtracking? all the missions are linear...maybe in the first game)

The only game in the series I really dislike is the first, due to its repetitive and flat level designs. But the rest (particularly 2 and 4, 4 is often overlooked even by fans but I personally think it has some of the best level design in the franchise) are the highlights of the entire franchise imo. Only titles I consider on par in the series canon would be X2 (a masterpiece of dashing, wall jumping, speed-run friendly action).

I also like the ZX games quite a bit once you get past their irritating overworld. Something that seems awful on the first playthrough but quickly fades away into static on future reruns, allowing the excellent boss fights and action to take center stage.

Azure Striker Gunvolt is indeed shit though. Fuck that game.The Zero and ZX games may not have been perfect, but they had tight boss fights and level design that ranged from good to great. Something modern Inti sadly seems to have lost (Blaster Master Zero is still cool though).

[BIL]

i haven't played it, no. really that good, huh?

Absolutely. Not quite on my ultimate tier of stuff like Alien Soldier and TNWA, but definitely the next one down. I got a GBA Player pretty much exclusively for it (at the time I'd not found my other killer GBA app, Ninja Cop). Plays seamlessly and ultra-violently, upgrading the original arcade game to a more technical aesthetic without ever losing its essential crudeness. No 100,000hit Guardian Heroes combos, every blow is calculated to destroy the enemy's face and/or body. Forget those wimpy Final Fight lifebars too. Wanna know if the enemy's dying? Don't worry, you can tell when they're no longer able to defend themselves.



If this had been on JAMMA circa 1995, it would be fapped over today. Even in its latter-day micro-format context, though, it's a must-play.

I just wish, while Million was expertly cherry-picking Technos mechanics for its moveset, they'd included The Combatribes' singularly vicious "enemy prone" grapple. You know, the one where you grab a fistfull of hair and smash the fucker's face into the floor until they're dead. Inescapable and iconic of merciless brawler carnage.

Spoiler

OTOH, driving both boots into the hapless target's spine from a couple metres up is a pretty close second.

DDA looks and sounds hideous and commits many of the aforementioned sins. if it's mechanically high quality i am definitely interested in it and god knows technos were never particularly great at visual craft (i do still feel they had some charm going), but that is a damningly bitter exterior.

How much of the first two AC Double Dragons have you played/seen? Aesthetically it's pretty much them with marginally more headswaps. Now, that won't mean much if you think they're ugly as sin too, but it's not the GBA or even Million's fault. The grungy, cauliflower-eared arcade games were a far cry from the Famicom DDs' colourful chibi-brutal look. I'm a fan of the latter too.

Spoiler

SHMUP MASTER

He's a good dude, honestly - posts in the main shmups chat forum sometimes.

acrobat mission - again not thread relevant, but bringing it up for the sake of being relevant to the console i'm discussing and played amongst other action games on here. if i'm getting too off-topic, feel free to reign me in, but i don't know where else i would put a couple sentences blurb on this. really hated this and it felt totally amatuer

That's MICRONICS QUALITY. (don't you feel dirty when you realise you've been playing one of their games without knowing it? I sure do. D: )

OT posts are okay in the context of yours (majority sidescrolling), but yeah, let's keep things mostly on-topic. Don't want the thread sprawling out of control, 25 pages a year average is how I like it. ;3

EDIT: I'll officially decree (lmao ) that beltscrollers are welcome here too. Every attempt at a "beltscroller thread" over the years has quickly fizzled out, it's something of an orphaned game type with interesting links to sidescrolling (see TNWA), and Skye & co are writing some excellent posts I'm grateful to have in this thread.

[Sumez]

if you aren't satisfied after your one life clear, try that run i made up! it's in the pastebin at the bottom of the link in my signature. god, gimmick is seriously my all-time favorite game

I doubt I am ever going to 1LC Gimmick. Way too much random shit that just kills me. Biggest offender so far is when your momentum is so high that you lose footing on slopes and miss an important jump, spiraling into your death like a noob. Not a fan of that. I absolutely love the game though.

xandra no daibouken: valkyrie to no deai - i think this might be the most frustrating action-platformer i have ever in my life played and i am begging anyone reading this to fire up an emulator and play up to the end of the 2nd stage (there are multiple portions to each stage, you'll know you've reached the end of the 2nd one when you're fighting the moon) and then report back on here. you can try the euro localization of the game (whirlo), i believe it is identical. its one-hit kills, bad hitboxing, and outlandishly unintuitive control scheme combine for a freakishly irritating experience. blind jumps and other common sfc platformer staples are abound, too. very nice production value and obvious love put into its visuals, but a trash fire to play. i want to explain the controls of this and how frustrating they are, but i'm going to wait to see if anyone else here plays it (or has played it) first.

I don't think I ever played past the first stage, but my experiences echo yours. It's so disappointing, because the game looks great, and it seems like it should control and play like the standard SFC platformer at worst, but no, it's almost unplayable garbage. Big disappointment. Reminds me of the similarly awkward Famicom game "Wagan Land", also released by Namco.
I have the boxed Jap version just because it was so cheap it was basically for free.

[Sir Ilpalazzo]

To poke at your post, kitten - what do you think dragged Zero Mission down, relative to Super Metroid? I've always considered it one of my favorite Metroid games, but after replaying it a few weeks ago I came away with a higher opinion of it than before - really appreciate the hard mode, as well as the various shortcuts that allow you to skip certain items (as well as the unlockable art gallery that actually incentivizes low-item challenge runs). It definitely feels a bit iterative and I don't feel it compares favorably to Super Metroid, but I do like that it is the only 2D Metroid that caters to advanced players. So I'm interested in hearing what you'd have to say about it. (Also, thanks for linking your backloggery - insightful stuff there, and it's cool to see where you're coming from. It got me interested in Chikyuu Kaiho Gun ZAS too.)

I can't really disagree that Mega Man Zero is a bit flawed (the ranking system / implementation of cyberelves is schizophrenic and the GBA's resolution really harms the games) but I still consider them among the best games in the Mega Man franchise - the player character's toolset and bosses are too fun for me to put anything but the ultra-polished Mega Man 9 over them. I think I have to agree on the Battle Network series though - the battle system is absolutely fantastic but everything surrounding it is kind of miserable. I can overlook glaring flaws if a game has certain elements that draw me in strongly enough (just see my opinion on the Zero series) but yeah, I have no desire to ever revisit some of the BN series' inane fetch quests.

[Sumez]

GBA is a fine platform though! My only regret is that it never became what it should have been - a revival of the true 2D video game machine. It simply didn't live long enough, and didn't get to see a lot of major releases that weren't supbar SNES ports of shitty "handheld versions" of console games. It does have a bunch of high quality poster boys that makes the system worth spending time with. However, it seems to almost completely lack the "hidden gem" segment. That's where the Nintendo DS platform got you, it ended up becoming everything GBA should have been, but on a less awesome machine, with more crappy 3D.

Here are some great GBA games:

Metroid Zero Mission (yes, Fusion sucks, this one doesn't)
Ninja Cop
Castlevania: Circle of the Moon
Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow
Astro Boy (flawed, but I liked it)
Minish Cap
Advance Wars 1 & 2
Mario & Luigi
Golden Sun 1&2
Fire Emblems

I'm not a big fan of the Mega Man Zero games either, but I had fun playing them, they aren't terrible, and definitely had some high points. I prefered ZX on the DS though.

what do you think dragged Zero Mission down, relative to Super Metroid?

Zero Mission is great, but it has nothing of what made Super Metroid a complete masterpiece. I've gone into details on this on other forum posts, and can drag them out if needed.

[Squire Grooktook]

Yeah I agree about Zero Mission too. Second best game in the franchise by far to me. Much tighter action, bosses, controls, etc. than fusion / metroid 1 / metroid 2

Might not be the best "exploration" game in metroidvania terms, but not too bad and it actually makes up for it by being stronger in other areas (unlike Fusion).

[Sir Ilpalazzo]

Yeah, I think the GBA is my favorite handheld system, honestly. There are absolutely standouts on other handheld systems (someday I will get around to trying GB Bionic Commando and Mega Man V), but I don't think I've found any handheld library that interests me quite as much, between games like the Mega Man Zero, Metroid, and Fire Emblem series, plus Ninja Five-O and Mother 3.

[Squire Grooktook]

OT but on that note Fire Emblem 7 aka Blazing Sword aka just "Fire Emblem" in the west is also the best game in the franchise and one the best strategy-rpg's out there too. They picked a helluva place to start localizing em'. The turn based equivalent of stuff like Ninja Spirit / TNWA, a masterwork of fast paced improvisational tactics.

[Sir Ilpalazzo]

I actually just played through it and Binding Blade for the first time over the last few months. I kind of liked Binding Blade more though, honestly - Blazing Sword has way better character balance but it's just too easy, it locks its hardest mode behind two playthroughs of its normal mode and the four-hour forced tutorial is.... kind of unthinkable given that it's in the seventh game of the franchise. (I understand that it was the first game to come out in the west, but having played through all six prior games, I don't feel like any of them would benefit from such a laborious tutorial.) I still agree that it's a great game though, and maybe my third favorite in the series (after Thracia 776 and Binding Blade). Really looking forward to playing Fates: Conquest sometime though, I've heard great things.

[kitten]

The rest of the stuff mentioned in the first paragraph I can't really remember despite playing the games several times

...when is the last time you played these games? they are absolutely lousy with those things i listed and there are secrets in each which can require backtracking, farming, or significant detours during a stage that ranks and rewards you based on a time limit (zero 2 does all of these!).

Only titles I consider on par in the series canon would be X2 (a masterpiece of dashing, wall jumping, speed-run friendly action).

a masterpiece of *climb up the opposite wall, wait for the enemy to come and attack that direction, drop down and punish, repeat*

x2 has absolutely abysmal boss design. in addition to the above series staple that forms the basic routine for a staggeringly large number of its fights, many of them spend INSANE amounts of time offscreen or invincible on top of their obscene health bars. overdrive ostrich runs off into the background any time he goes offscreen and wheel gator not only spends more than half of his fight underwater, but has invincibility that lasts past his i-frames and allows him to resubmerge. other bosses can be hilariously trivialized by getting them stuck in loops, as they will always perform the same attack after being pelted by their weakness. morph moth hardly gets a chance to do anything and crystal snail spends large portions of time invincible, slows the game down to unbearable speeds, AND has a repetitive loop when nailed by his weakness.

like the zero games, but to a lesser degree, x2 also horribly suffers from horribly spotty balancing issues that barely account for the idea you've been collecting power-ups until the last boss (who is the easiest, but slowest and most repetitive, of all 3 snes final bosses). the number of variables that can be applied to your character are incredibly numerous and the game is generally balanced around you having the base minimum with some minor suggestion that you should probably get a thing or two before fighting certain bosses. i have done runs of x1-4 without enhancements, sub-tanks, or heart tanks (as well as with them but without dying once or using sub-tanks), and let me tell you, they are all jarringly goddamn tedious and unforgivably dull at multiple points.

the x series has bad pacing because of all of its collectible power-up nonsense and frequently tedious-as-hell bosses, but the zero series is MUCH worse about having more collectibles, collectibles as random drops, dialogue, dialogue, more dialogue, unskippable cutscenes, backtracking, grinding and farming, min/maxing cyber elves (4 has a bunch of convoluted rpg shit that you sometimes even want to adjust in-mission), etc. in a vacuum, there are portions of the zero games that are okay (SOME boss fights and minor portions of particular stages), but as a whole they're a freakishly discordant and sloppy messes that have gone forgotten in the scope of mega man history for damn good reason.

I doubt I am ever going to 1LC Gimmick. Way too much random shit that just kills me. Biggest offender so far is when your momentum is so high that you lose footing on slopes and miss an important jump, spiraling into your death like a noob. Not a fan of that. I absolutely love the game though.

i don't feel like there's anything random - all that stuff is quite learnable, it just has a very (very) high skill ceiling. you get a serious intuition for how these things work with repeated plays, though. watch a speedrun and observe how the player will get the treasure in the first few seconds of the game, and then practice doing that yourself. intensely difficult, but can be reliably done and is revealing of how non-random the movement is. most runners have specific spots and timing with which they will do star rides, all of which are reliably imitable with practice. i still don't have that beginning superplay jump down for the first treasure, but i practice it until i get it with every time i boot up the game. sometimes, it's the first try. sometimes, it's the tenth. i consider it a very good warm-up for when i've not played for a couple of months to practice in a safe environments some of the finer nuances of the game's movement.

I don't think I ever played past the first stage, but my experiences echo yours. It's so disappointing, because the game looks great, and it seems like it should control and play like the standard SFC platformer at worst, but no, it's almost unplayable garbage. Big disappointment. Reminds me of the similarly awkward Famicom game "Wagan Land", also released by Namco.
I have the boxed Jap version just because it was so cheap it was basically for free.

ah, yes, sweet validation. my favorite button in the game is the A button, because it is a piece of shit, godforsaken bastard of a button. tap it and you do a rapid, forward jump. hold it down, and you begin charging a jump. charge the jump too long, and you become stunned for a period of time that will absolutely result in death if you did it near a hazard or enemy. but wait, there's more! the charging does nothing at all. the height of the jump is purely affected by your run speed before you started charging. certain hazards in the game will have you run a distance, and then charge the jump for the minimum amount of time to make a high jump. charge it TOO briefly and the game registers it as a tap, sending you flying forward (to death). charge it TOO long and the hazard will kill you. and, of course, you have to choose to charge it at just the right time, because the horizontal distance it covers is nil. there are also certain platforms in the game that are super small, but you must do the full jump height to get off of, safely. that means running in place to build up speed (which does not decrease on turn-around, as you would think from playing any other momentum-based platformer). also, if you jump real high and land far down, you get stunned for a huge period of time! yay! this stun has variable lengths from how far you fell, and even the shortest one can get you killed and activates all the fucking time.

and my ABSOLUTE favorite thing about the A button? it's only one of three jump buttons!

Absolutely. Not quite on my ultimate tier of stuff like Alien Soldier and TNWA, but definitely the next one down. I got a GBA Player pretty much exclusively for it (at the time I'd not found my other killer GBA app, Ninja Cop). Plays seamlessly and ultra-violently, upgrading the original arcade game to a more technical aesthetic without ever losing its essential crudeness. No 100,000hit Guardian Heroes combos, every blow is calculated to destroy the enemy's face and/or body. Forget those wimpy Final Fight lifebars too. Wanna know if the enemy's dying? Don't worry, you can tell when they're no longer able to defend themselves.

given your appreciation for DDII and high rating of TNWA, i'm very much assured you're not pulling my leg, here, but it might still be a while before i get around to it. the recommendation and details are still appreciated, however.

How much of the first two AC Double Dragons have you played/seen? Aesthetically it's pretty much them with marginally more headswaps. Now, that won't mean much if you think they're ugly as sin too, but it's not the GBA or even Million's fault. The grungy, cauliflower-eared arcade games were a far cry from the Famicom DDs' colourful chibi-brutal look. I'm a fan of the latter too.

enough to know they don't have horribly ugly, digitized anime art of the two main characters in the opening or as character portraits i do agree with you that the original DD games weren't that pretty and conceded that technos weren't exactly masters of visual work, but the sound is also really getting to me.

He's a good dude, honestly - posts in the main shmups chat forum sometimes.

i will take your word for it, but i stand by that article being some seriously goofball egotism

That's MICRONICS QUALITY. (don't you feel dirty when you realise you've been playing one of their games without knowing it? I sure do. D: )

son of a bitch! how many times is this going to happen to me???? i lost track of how often i'd played one of the fc games i bought off my friend in that giant bundle and then after 15 minutes went "holy shit wait a second this is goddamn micronics, isn't it?" my sfc radar for this hasn't been tuned, obviously. blech. eugh.

btw, BIL, do you have any idea of ASO Armored Scrum Object for fc was micronics? i couldn't find any information it was but it just feels like one so much

OT posts are okay in the context of yours (majority sidescrolling), but yeah, let's keep things mostly on-topic. Don't want the thread sprawling out of control, 25 pages a year average is how I like it. ;3

with my arrival, i think we're working toward 25 pages in a month i am mostly on topic, though! just very talkative

To poke at your post, kitten - what do you think dragged Zero Mission down, relative to Super Metroid? I've always considered it one of my favorite Metroid games, but after replaying it a few weeks ago I came away with a higher opinion of it than before - really appreciate the hard mode, as well as the various shortcuts that allow you to skip certain items (as well as the unlockable art gallery that actually incentivizes low-item challenge runs). It definitely feels a bit iterative and I don't feel it compares favorably to Super Metroid, but I do like that it is the only 2D Metroid that caters to advanced players. So I'm interested in hearing what you'd have to say about it. (Also, thanks for linking your backloggery - insightful stuff there, and it's cool to see where you're coming from. It got me interested in Chikyuu Kaiho Gun ZAS too.)

zas is a pure delight. did you happen to catch my review linked earlier in the thread? i usually forget to attach those to my backloggery posts and have been trying to remember to do that more often.

zero mission feels like super metroid lite. each of the original trilogy of metroid games added tons of new things and ideas and took the series in new directions, zero mission's mechanics and progression are borrowed almost entirely from super metroid, wholesale, even many of its bosses. aside from the useless, stupid ledge grab, of course (thanks for your big innovation, fusion!).

imo the metroid games are honestly kind of poor when taken as action games and are meant to be more contemplative, intimate games not played to death (i find the time limit reward a misleading, ancillary attachment there to extend play life or help the playtesters not go insane). zero mission adds absolutely nothing, whatsoever, to the series, unless you consider extremely poor stealth to be a series addition. there's also a veritable ton of really stupid shinespark puzzles.

part of what makes super metroid so great is how much of an amazing awakening it is the first time you learn the off-the-wall jump and how much that can open the game up both on your current play and on replays. it is rich with environmental storytelling and unique situations, too. super metroid is a big GOAT for me, but it has been poorly or rotely imitated so many times that i would consider it one of the most toxic influences to ever happen to gaming. its worst elements are superficially copied almost endlessly.

super metroid stood for incredible attention to detail, refinement, and innovation. its imitators (like the dreadful axiom verge, which i also wrote a review on) and sequels stand for using its same old base formula until the world ends and completely forsake the finer things. can we please finally agree that lock-and-key design was the worst and easiest part of super metroid and get rid of it in future games "inspired" by it, please? a "successor" to super metroid would follow the original trilogy's tradition and not play all that much like it.

Mega Man 9

also a decent game, at best. kind of bad. i was no. 1 on the global speedrun leaderboard on 360 when it came out, too, and had the wii and ps3 times beat for a while. then i quit and someone else took over (when things like that concrete man exploit were discovered) and many people who took up the mantle slowly surpassed my time due to a meta and discovered exploits.

inti creates fuckin suuuuucks

[Squire Grooktook]

The bosses in X2 are noting special bar a few (I enjoy magna centipede's nervy spiral attack and shurikens, ostrichs uber fast falling sonic booms, stag dudes vicious wall jumping, violens horrific rng wrecking ball, etc. but admittedly there are a few clunkers in there like gator and bubble crab)

The main attraction is the level design. It's the only game in the series I regularly return to just to blaze through as fast as I can. I really give no fucks about all the explorable items. I just buster run through them without using boss weapons (on which account their fine) or armor unless the particular game has a few that I consider particularly fun. X2 in particular has marvelous stage pacing and enemy placements where dashing and bashing through feels sublime, with none of the down-time provided by x1's tankier roadblock enemies or x3's "here's a square room filled with some baddies" approach.

I guess we're really at opposite ends of the spectrum for this franchise. I honestly can't stand the classic series anymore and find them mostly really boring, and while nothing in the series is arcade-paced from the start (very much of the "consolized" style of gameplay), the graceful movement mechanics of the X onward series are genuinely compelling to me.

...when is the last time you played these games?

A year or two ago.

they are absolutely lousy with those things i listed and there are secrets in each which can require...

There we go. I give no fucks about the secrets and don't bother with them. Never used a cyber-elf in ever. All dashing, all slashing, all the time.

I literally never even stopped to figure out how the rpg elements in 4 worked. Skipped the tutorial and never crafted a thing. Game was fine that way.

[BIL]

I'd enjoy Fusion's more linear Metroid if only it'd included a fucking dialogue skip. God damn, those briefing rooms are relentless. >_< There's quite a bit I like - the smooth handling, the punchy weapon impacts, several of the bosses, and the 100% run - but I don't revisit nearly as willingly as a result.

One of those unfortunate instances where I own a game but would be happier playing a hack (see also Holy Diver and Dracula Densetsu II).

enough to know they don't have horribly ugly, digitized anime art of the two main characters in the opening or as character portraits i do agree with you that the original DD games weren't that pretty and conceded that technos weren't exactly masters of visual work, but the sound is also really getting to me.

Oh, those! Yeah there's a bit of unfortunate HUD/cutscene debris, but the really important thing - those doubled-over-in-agony pain expressions when someone takes a beating - are bang on. The enemy sprites are generally less fugly than DDII arcade's, as well. ;3 You also get one of the all-time greatest bits of VG ending prose, "Willy lay still from exhaustion."

btw, BIL, do you have any idea of ASO Armored Scrum Object for fc was micronics? i couldn't find any information it was but it just feels like one so much

GDRI is the best resource I know of for confirming their vile presence - of course, they weren't the only shoddy coders of the time. I've not played ASO's FC port, but try out Famicom Image Fight (by the guys who did Bird Week, AFAIK) sometime, if you want to feel your gamer soul die a little. D: It's technically playable yet somehow insidiously anemic. I had to play FC Salamander for like two hours afterward to restore my faith!

[kitten]

The main attraction is the level design. It's the only game I regularly return to just to blaze through as fast as I can. I really give no fucks about all the explorable items. I just buster run through them without using boss weapons (on which account their fine) or armor unless the particular game has a few that I consider particularly fun.

the speedrun you linked mostly skips the level design it is very easy to go super quickly through each x game because little stands in your way and you're a hyper-mobile speed demon. this also ruins most of the boss fights and makes them far too easy! those movement mechanics are what brings most people in, but the game capitalizes on them worth jack squat.

There we go. I give no fucks about the secrets and don't bother with them. Never used a cyber-elf in ever. All dashing, all slashing, all the time.

i thought you might take this approach. you know, all slashing, all dashing, except for the terminally egregious amount of time spent skipping cutscenes, dialogue, and remembering exactly where to go next in the base to proceed the story so that you can actually play it. also the amount of time spent memorizing all the tedious ins-and-outs which will require manual reloading of a save to redo the stage with high rank... which will often require more dialogue skipping, etc.

even if you do not agree that the bosses have too much health, take too long to kill, and have deeply repetitive/boring patterns or even more ridiculously argue that the games have some kind of masterful design if you ignore huge portions of the content and suss out what matters most and go straight for its throat, you cannot ignore how much time it wastes with the above. surely that is some manner of very, very serious indication that maybe these are not the action games you're making them out to be and what you like is accidental and/or extremely selective. inti creates had extremely little idea what on earth they were doing at any point in that series' life.

GDRI is the best resource I know of for confirming their vile presence - of course, they weren't the only shoddy coders of the time. I've not played ASO's FC port, but try out Famicom Image Fight (by the guys who did Bird Week, AFAIK) sometime, if you want to feel your gamer soul die a little. D: It's technically playable yet somehow insidiously anemic. I had to play FC Salamander for like two hours afterward to restore my faith!

BIL, i strongly regret to inform you of this, but the fc/nes version of image fight is the only one i've really played. i'm very sorry.

[Squire Grooktook]

the speedrun you linked mostly skips the level design it is very easy to go super quickly through each x game because little stands in your way.

Doesn't skip the levels at all: Just moves through them very quickly.

And x2 is indeed very different from the rest of the X series: X1, for example, you cannot move through the game in the same way, because it's filled with a number of tanky, road block enemies that do nothing but to waste time. The pacing is simlarly off in x3 and x4 IMO. X2's jumps and enemy placements are layed out in such a way that leaping over (or blasting them along the way) feels tight and rewarding.

I'd also argue the game is not easier then the classic series, which is perhaps even easier. Like I said, none of these are arcade style games when you get down to it. They're all very much consolized games that are barely designed with single sitting playthroughs in mind. X onward is at leasting interesting mechanically to my mind. Classic kinda has nothing tbh. A poor man's Daimakaimura with none of the intensity.

i thought you might take this approach. you know, all slashing, all dashing, except for the terminally egregious amount of time spent skipping cutscenes, dialogue, and remembering exactly where to go next in the base to proceed the story so that you can actually play it

Select button completely skips cutscenes, and talking to Ciel is pretty much a universal start to the next mission.

even if you do not agree that the bosses have too much health, take too long to kill, and have deeply repetitive/boring patterns

No idea what you're talking about. The bosses go by pretty quick (for all its flaws, z1 is actually the quickest in terms of speedkill potential with a base z saber due to its combo system), usually about a minute at most (so...identical to the rest of the franchise and most action platformers). The patterns are pretty aggressive too, nothing boring about them.

*edit*

Like seriously, I'm looking at the times for my own boss run videos of Zero 3, and most of them are between 50 seconds and 1:30. Completely respectable time. AND that's on hard mode where you get less damage AND I don't skip their opening animations or death explosion. *shrugs*

I'm not sure how I feel about the legitimacy of "skipping content" as a criticism in terms of optional power up crutches that exist off the beaten path. An I "skipping content" in an rpg because I go straight to the final boss rather than grinding to maz level and finding every single weapon and item in the game world? Optional stuff is optional. If the game doesn't feel worse for skipping them, then it's fine in my book.

[BIL]

BIL, i strongly regret to inform you of this, but the fc/nes version of image fight is the only one i've really played. i'm very sorry.

I'm going to kill myself

[Perikles]

I really like the finesse touch hinted at while dispatching st1's guards - leaping their gunfire, stunning them with an airborne slice, and deftly killing them upon landing, in one seamless attack. The turrets in the vertically-descending section immediately after, too - baiting their fire to the ground, leaping it and cleaving them down with a single heavy blow.

Even st2's ostensibly repetitive biker and roly-poly kills are kinda satisfying. I was digging the grim precision of getting juuust close enough to trigger the latters' door-shattering entrance, before insta-killing the shamelessly flexing creep with a heavy stab through the throat. Harsh! I don't even mind the prodigious repetition of this kill, it's got a nice groove. This could've definitely been a pretty decent Vigilante-esque, imo. That camera drives me nuts though.

Indeed, the almost gratuitous brutal elegance that comes with thrusting a sword to cut a gunner in a half is one of the redeeming qualities of this game. I also love the languid - if clichéd - entrance of some of the mini-bosses, I'm particularly fond of the first mini-boss in stage 3 (the one with the blueish pallor that has blades for hands). Nonchalantly tossing its cape away despite the trickling rain, whirling around with effervescent valour, poising for some additional style points, it has a lot of character. They even thought about gravitas and impact, the mini-boss thereafter violently shakes the elevator every time it lands.

With a few tweaks, it could've been similar to Sword Master on the Famicom/NES at the very least. Comparatively insubstantial stages with memorable boss fights that reward proper spacing. Really unfortunate that the floaty controls, horrendous knock backs and hebetudinous AI foiled that with bravado.

That's MICRONICS QUALITY. (don't you feel dirty when you realise you've been playing one of their games without knowing it? I sure do. D: )

son of a bitch! how many times is this going to happen to me???? i lost track of how often i'd played one of the fc games i bought off my friend in that giant bundle and then after 15 minutes went "holy shit wait a second this is goddamn micronics, isn't it?" my sfc radar for this hasn't been tuned, obviously. blech. eugh.

Not to awaken the bridling anger of our saviour BIL in light of the persisting off-off-topic: the arcade Acrobat Mission is a goofy game to begin with. While the SFC port is admittedly shockingly sloppy (one of the two weapons is fatally bugged!), it does still retain the core of the source fairly well. I actually think it's one of their best efforts, compare this to their laughably bad Raiden port for some contrast.