shmups.system11.org

Yeah, I bought Undeadline, Twinkle Tale and Devil's Crash for a very low price back in 2009 iirc.

Enviado de meu moto g(6) usando o Tapatalk

I've been getting back into playing around with my Genesis, and I decided to dip my toes into using RGB; I got myself a branded SCART genesis cable and a generic cheapo $30 SCART to HD box off of Amazon (I know, I know, but I don't feel like spending $200 without really knowing what I'm getting into), and I hooked em up yesterday (fun fact, since the Genesis model 1 outputs AV mono, the SCART cable gets stereo audio using a plug that goes into the front headphone jack!).

Some impressions and complaints about the SCART to HD box I bought: (https://www.amazon.com/CiBest-Converter ... cart+to+hd)


Speaking of Mega Turrican, the soundtrack for it is a thing of beauty! I'm more taken aback though by the fact this came from a western dev team given how much non japanese devs struggle with programming the Genesis FM synth chip.

Anyone know of other non-japanese games that make good use of Genesis audio?

I'm thinking of going at Shining Force again. It's been a while. Playing Fire Emblem Conquest makes me feel that returning to a strategy game that doesn't take an hour per map (plus retries). It might be a good palette cleanser!

Anyone have thoughts on the first-person Shining games, Darkness and Holy Ark? I picked up the Shining in the Darkness cart for pennies a year ago but didn't put much time into it.

I've tried a few times to make progress in Holy Ark, which is a game I like quite a bit (at least as far as I get), but the difficulty ramps up to such insane levels that it's hard to know how to make progress. It easily becomes Wizardry hard imo - well, minus the decapitating ninja squads!



Electronic Arts games, no lie. Of course JOHN MADDEN is the theme of legend, but despite the sparse audio, games like Desert Strike and The Immortal also stand out.

And of course, Ecco the Dolphin. Sometimes you gotta use ugly sounds to be beautiful.

Darkness is far more accessible than a first-person dungeon crawler has any right to be. I recommended it once to a friend that wouldn't even touch the likes of Final Fantasy, and she actually got to the last floor before real life took over. She even did all the mapping herself...

I really can't wait to get into Shining in the Darkness myself. Just bought it some time during last year, and I feel like I've already held out too long.

Much like saying "Ghostbusters", this is a trigger assured to make me appear. Guess that makes me a Betelgeuse-esque ghoul.

As I'm contractually obligated to mention I made a basic data editor for SH2, much like how Mark Rosewater has to mention he wrote for Rosanne... I have to mention the rom hack scene for it. Mostly a lot of rough stuff that's not really that great, but a few that might look alright if you squint a bit.

Not really a big fan of Shining in the Darkness. It fell short of its contemporaries even at the time - my biggest complaint would be the tiny character roster. It's not really different from Dragon Warrior 2 in that regard. In comparison, Dungeon Master has a big roster of characters, and that came out years before SitD.

It does feel like it's only half way to being a full game to me. If it only had a full cast of ~8 characters like Dragon Warrior 4 had, if only it had more and better bosses so I could remember more of them than just the crab and Dark Sol, if only it had a few more story segments after the early game, if only the labyrinth scenery were more memorable.. it'd be one of my favorites. It's just too rudimentary all around in my opinion. Phantasy Star 1 feels like it has more to it. Shining Force was so much better.

Can only recommend it to those looking to try something extremely simple where you grind a bunch to kill a crab, then walk from the beginning to the end without having to think or make any decisions.

See, tiny character rosters is usually a huge plus for me when it comes to turn based RPGs. I never saw the purpose of having more characters than you can fit in your party anyway. And Dragon Warrior 2 is excellent.

Good point. As much as I love Fire Emblem, the maps are often too time-consuming, especially if you meet with bad luck and need to retry.

I was recently wondering whether Shining Force is more casual in this regard. Is it? My memories of Shining Force are pretty hazy. I just got the latest Sega compilation for the Switch, so I'm tempted to return to Shining Force.

It's extremely gentle, Dragon Quest on a grid. You have infinite access to EXP and infinite lives.

Shining Force I & II are tremendous fun. And are up there for me in my personal pantheon of retro gaming goodness. I've been wanting to try Darkness for a while, I should really give it a go now. it intrigues me...


Don't know how other people play it, but I always give myself the self-imposed challenge of no-grinding in Shining Force.

I played Shining in the Darkness recently but gave up on the 3rd floor of the tower, I was probably doing something wrong but the enemies were getting pretty tough and only the MC outputted good damage, at that point I'd had enough, I didn't feel like grinding levels to survive.

Also played through Shining Force and got through it easily enough though I'm sure I probably missed tons of stuff.

Cool, I look forward to revisiting Shining Force in the coming month or so.

Yeah that's the real beauty of decent JRPGs, you can play using any strategy and ruleset you want to. You don't need to select an option on a screen in order to do so. Gives them actual replay value.

Watching those "Fire Emblem Pitfalls" videos on youtube, which often brings up efficiency versus waifus, was always humorous to me. And always reminds me of those hours spent into my waifu Adam, a character you can only use for about 90 minutes until the game ends.

For the longest time I thought Adam as implemented was a bad design decision and a waste of art assets by the developers. But I can't deny how memorable he was, and how much leveling him prolonged the game.

Did Trap ever actually release a download? I've been busy gathering translations and rom hack improvements to stick on my Everdrive, and I suddenly remembered this 6 button hack being mentioned early on in the thread.

Stuff I've gathered so far if anybody cares or wants to start a discussion on one of these games:

Not even in Suikoden or Shining Force? I feel that games doing it the wrong way (Chrono Cross) merely attemt & fail to emulate those two properly. Well, arguably both emulate Fire Emblem, but since I'm not even done playing my first FE to completion, Shining Force serves as the benchmark of sorts in my book.

The point, at least in games with freely customizable parties (and not ones where a slot is locked permanently by a "main" or where the party is always determined by the plot) is that you can freely experiment and play with whoever you enjoy and their abilities. It's especially fun in RPGs with meaningful variety in abilities with characters where you can experiment with unorthodox setups (Labyrinth of Touhou series is the best example I can think of, 40 characters, 12 in battle, 4 in frontline with a heavy emphasis on the switch in and out system).

Yeah see that's exactly the stuff I'm not a fan of.
I'd rather have a game optimized for tactical freedom within a set party, with characters than can effectively play on eachother's skills and obvious weaknesses, than a game that tries to balance out a billion different options. The latter will often end up with either some configurations being clearly inferior, or a lack of variety between options that are supposed to give you variety due to how sanitized they need to be - going back to the DQ2 example - 2/3 of your party is clearly inferior, but you are stuck with them, and that is part of the appeal. I'm sure the games you mentioned all have at least a few characters that no one ever uses.
Also I don't see the appeal of a lot of elements being in a game if I'm not seeing them anyway in the approach I choose to play the game with (like why should I care if there's a bard character, when I never use it?).

More members works fine if they can (and should) actually be used as a tactical choice during combat within reason, such as in DQXI where constantly switching out active members is an important feature of your utility belt.

The point is in having the freedom to choose to use or not to use a character.

Freedom and meaningful player choices makes RPGs more replayable when you have multiple characters or classes to choose from and can't use them all at once, so you can try out different class combinations on a subsequent playthrough. One of the earliest popular console RPGs, Final Fantasy, had significant replayability because of the sheer freedom in character selection (6 classes, 4 slots, choice of whether or not to change to advanced classes later).

Another example is something like the "Tales of" series which has combat that is a mix of RPG and fighting game mechanics - characters play quite differently from one another. The most extreme case is the air combat/juggling oriented Tales of Destiny:R for PS2 - huge character roster, and eventually you can even double up on characters (or triple, or make all four characters identical which is very silly). They play differently, but are all very usable and effective and it is fun trying out each across multiple playthroughs.

Remember when we were mocking Phantasy Star Idola's bad, overwrought, melodramatic writing for its character's backstories? Backstories are one of the things I love most about Shining Force. Let us contemplate Arthur's story:

The hero approaches a knight, to ask if he wishes to fight against the forces of evil together. Before he can open his mouth, the knight says "Don't bother me kid - can't you see I'm doing laundry?"

Later, the hero decides to try asking him one last time. Before the hero can speak a single word: "Alright, laundry's done. Now it's time to take out the trash!"

* Arthur the Knight has joined the force *

That's all you need man.



I know the princess is OP, but the dumb blue ox gets infinite Healmore once he has a Shield of Strength.

Some players might not realize this though, since games back then liked hiding equipment use-effect information.



All characters get used by somebody.

I know that well enough, but I don't see the appeal to it. I'd rather play a game developed with 100% focus on the characters I use, than a bunch of stuff I will never see.


I'd argue replayability is more about making the game fun enough that I want to play the same thing again. Not spreading out content in a way that you are essentially forced to play them mulitple times to see it all.


The princess is anything but OP. If all three characters were as strong as your main, you wouldn't need any healing outside of what you get from items.

Shields of Strength, not items. Medical herbs do not scale and are worth less than erasing one enemy's turn later on.

Without the shield of strength's Healmore, swordguy is easily the weakest character of the three. Value your facilitators more!

A shield isn't an item now?

Do you feel similarly about Shining the Holy Ark, BryanM? It has a larger party (8), though I guess it depends on how you feel about non-pc dungeon crawlers and the grind. The maps are good in any event.

Getting rev'd up to pop in that cart now.

Unfortunately I never got to own a Sega Saturn : (

Still kicking myself for missing out on one of the greatest potential deals of my lifetime - the local (30 miles away. I lived in an Olive Garden... I mean, olive ranch) used game shop (this was before Gamestop took over everything and made it horrible. BRE Software used to offer a "Buy two, get one free. Buy three, get two free." deal on games. Completely unthinkable in our current dark apocalyptic future, huh?) had listed the Saturn for 30 buckeroos, and any game they had for it for 10 bux. This narrow liquidation window only lasted a month or two, and I was still too young to drive when it happened. Should have shamefully asked my parents to drive me there. A cruel life lesson that opportunity doesn't linger long, I guess.

I know Saturn emulation has finally improved to being almost close to passable, but now there's the problem of having a million labyrinth exploration games instead of the pitiful thimbleful we used to have. So I might never get around to giving StHA a go. But it looks substantially better on the surface.

This is definitely one those moments to lament how game media isn't available forever on everything like music and movies are.

I really like the roster size of Shining Force! It's not too overwhelming(you get a couple more characters than you can carry : we're not talking Suikoden levels here), yet you got some room for party customization.

Don't like the weak attacks of the birdmen and think you can get better scouts in your party? reduce their number to just 1! Or 0! Like their movement? Get 3! (phoenix in SF2 is way better than birdos in almost every way though. so that's one less birdo you need to carry around...)

Heh, while on the topic of scaling, the birdmen are a good example of its victims.

Much like Prince Cannock, in SF1 they eventually scale into being very decent warriors by the endgame. And only deal maybe 15 fewer points of damage than your better fighters.

In SF2, however, they just kept the same stats per level from SF1 for all the classes. But they doubled the number of levels. With the linear damage algorithm, higher monster defense, and the larger percentage of total attack that base attack power makes up, they're substantially weaker than they were in SF1. And then they gave them -1 move range. And then they created Peter to rub salt in the wound.

(Also isn't it freaky how they were never able to settle on a consistent art style for the games?)

Well I caved and bought an OSSC primarily for my Genesis

Meanwhile I've been watching a lot of game sack and I noticed them offhandedly mention a game called Alisia Dragoon that looked really neat, so I decided to give that a try.

Still getting to grips with the gameplay (having lots of trouble dodging attacks), but right off the bat it seems like a real action gem, I'm surprised it isn't brought up more often when most people talk about genesis.

Searching the farms a little for it, seems like the controls aren't fluid enough for some people's liking? Haven't noticed that personally, but then again maybe that's why I keep soaking up hits like the putz I am

Any tips for a fledging Dragoon?

It has to be said, most of the variety brought by large character rosters to the cRPG genre doesn't make for much depth in terms of gameplay, but I like it when my choice of playable characters at least seems to affect the story told in game, or just the way it unfolds. Particularly, no Suikoden franchise without it for me.


To be fair, many first- and second-gen movies appear to be lost forever, from the days before Hollywood's global dominance, when movie-making was not considered such a big deal as it had come to be. The latest (?) major case being that of BBC "taping over" classic Doctor Who episodes.
With music, it had started long before the era of recordings (like seven out of ten Claudio Monteverdi-scored operas are no more, or not preserved enough to stage them anymore).

I remember BIL having a number of good things to say about Alisia Dragoon while pointing out its annoying control issues. He's made quite a few posts about it in the Sidescrolling Action thread.

Alisia Dragoon is my jam. Definitely a fun game, even if it's hard to consider it really great.
Accidentally bought two carts of it, because I thought I had lost the one.