omfg, WHOAMG, cor burimey
I didn't know Haggar had a punch infinite in Final Fight. Dunno whether to post
slowpoke.jpg or that trendy surprised pikachu.
Timing's trickier than Guy/Cody's
[pp] [pivot p] [return] etc. Less mechanical,
more of a dosie-do RIDDIM. At least without autofire, as shown. With AF it's a lot easier, but that's life innit. My dpad sucks balls, having returned from the dead twice. Looking forward to trying this with a nice arcade stick. And not on grandma's Maury tv!
What a fuckin aesthetic this game wields. The huge sprites, the bone-crushing SFX, the pitch-perfect animation... I'm gonna finally get my hands dirty and L2P the evil fucker (always crapped out at Abigail), but I'm happy as a clam just replaying stage 1.
^
Satisfactions. BapBapBap! *KERASHH* That refreshing feeling of annihilating an enemy, and a phone booth, and a garbage can, utterly.
The game design can be a real surly bitch, but the mechanics and presentation are pure entertainment.
^
"RAHH RAHR RAHHGH" "Oh HELL no, this one a them bath salts muhfuckas"
I really have to wonder about claims (or rather claim, singular, Noodalls' to be precise) of this having eight frames of input lag on PS4. I'm not getting any appreciable difference going between it and ShmupMAME (1f). I know what 5f feels like (Sunset Riders' inbuilt crouch lag -
just about possible to ignore) and this ain't that. Hm. Oh well. Might be adaptation on my part. Gonna get stuck in and verify later on.
Update: For whatever it's worth (I lack the expertise to say), the PS4 keeps up just fine with ShmupMAME 4.2.
Here's Guy's 100% on Damnd - SM on top, PS4 on bottom, played side-by-side via Dual Shock 4, on USB cable and Bluetooth respectively. There's a tiny degree of variance, spottable when frame-by-framed, but it's nowhere near enough to affect the combo (this was the last of five attempts, and many other near-completions dropped by human error
ie, my fuckin lousy dpad
).
So, I'm gonna get stuck in and verify later. Taking Noodalls' findings with a grain of salt, going forward.
---
Picked up
Arcade Archives: Frogger on a whim. I've always been unclear on this game's provenance... like Burgertime, I used to assume it was Western-made, despite its Japanese manufacturer. Hm. According to
GDRI's twitter its precise creator is unknown - a Robert Pappas was instrumental in its reaching consumers, but he doesn't seem to have been its originator.
Anyway, further to the buffet of urban carnage above... I was impressed by the story of Elizabeth Falconer, another key figure in this now-iconic game's narrow survival.
Wikipedia wrote:Elizabeth Falconer, a market researcher at Sega/Gremlin, was tasked with checking their library of video presentations for potential licenses. It was here that she stumbled across Frogger.
Falconer asked if the game had been reviewed, learning that Gremlin was unwilling because they felt its basic gameplay and "cute" presentation would not sell. Despite this, Falconer thought the game deserved a chance, and requested a licensing window of 90 days so that some prototypes could be location tested. She was told her request would be granted if she could convince Gremlin's management.
Presenting her pitch for Frogger, she was met with executives from Paramount. Falconer opened by passing out booklets she made highlighting Frogger's gameplay and sales potential. One of the executives, Jack Cameron Gordon, immediately tossed the booklet at her and stated that Frogger had already been rejected, because it was a "women and kids game." Falconer replied that the executives were among those who also turned down Pac-Man, a comment that made the room go quiet. Seeing the deflation in resistance, Falconer went on to explain Frogger's appeal - the gameplay's easily memorisable patterns, its aesthetic attractiveness, and its catchy soundtrack were some of the reasons she used. The room was quiet until one of the executives relented, and told the group to "Let her have her goddamn kids game."
Sega/Gremlin agreed to pay Konami $3,500 a day for a 60-day licensing window. Once it was completed, the prototype was taken to a bar in San Diego called "Spanky's Saloon," where it was playtested by a mostly male audience. Gremlin's sales team was impressed at the amount of attention the game was getting, and it was all Sega/Gremlin needed to convince buyers at the AMOA show in October 1981. Distributors had been sold on Frogger based on its test run at Spanky's alone.
Great story! Brings to mind Decca and The Beatles, only someone with business sense was in the room to avert the historic blunder. But aside from Falconer's canny performance, I was mostly struck by the game being considered "too cute" or juvenile/feminine. Its customarily relentless do/die action aside, even on strict aesthetic terms, I always thought of Frogger as an archetypal early 80s video nightmare. Crushed under wheels, eaten alive, swept away by current, hurriedly securing food and mates in search of shelter, it's total Darwin. I once shadowed a gruff old solicitor, a hard-drinking Scot who after our lunchtime scramble across a busy, icy street muttered "fookin'
Frogger out there."
I'm guessing the pink frogs are females. Maybe they're just bros, or gay. Even then, I'm reminded of
Guerilla War's arcade flyer.
Anyway, I'm surprised I'd not heard of Falconer alongside Roberta Williams and first lady of STGs Carol Shaw. She may not have been an author like them, but she made a similarly lasting mark on the industry.
Noticed a small graphical glitch on PS4 - if the screen is scaled down with the border switched off, you'll get a bit of glitchy framing at the upper-left. It's only on certain scalings though, easily avoided.