What [not shmup] game are you playing now?

Anything from run & guns to modern RPGs, what else do you play?
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WelshMegalodon
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Re: What [not shmup] game are you playing now?

Post by WelshMegalodon »

Don't forget the bosses in After Burner and the completely different version of Enduro Racer.
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Re: What [not shmup] game are you playing now?

Post by Marc »

I do get the point though. The NES feels like a home console, the Master System often feels like a horribly gimped arcade machine. I'm no expert on it by any means, but I had a lot more experience with the MS as a kid, and while a step up from my C64 visually (never heard the FM sound, but the original....), a lot of its games didn't really play any better.

Anyhow, Leynos! Damn, this is (mostly) some good shit. It's got the big stompy robot thing down to a tee, in both controls and feel it instantly calls Cybernator to mind. Only criticism so far, is that when are a lot of explosions on screen, (and this game loves you to blow shit up), they do tend to obscure bullets and you can quickly go from being at full energy to being right in the shit.

Started Iconocalsts, and in the same way I didn't like that Shantae game right off the bat, I really like this.

Picked OutRun back up... not sure what's going on here, but when I last cleared each route, I could usually afford one accident and still squeak over the line with a handful of seconds remaining. Played a few credits last night, and seemed to run out of steam on the between the split and goal on the 4th checkpoint every, single, time.

Looks like I'm sorted for the rest of this week.
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Re: What [not shmup] game are you playing now?

Post by Sumez »

Sengoku Strider wrote: I had heard about Alex Kidd games my entire life as a major franchise and figured they must be really solid. Until I finally played a bunch of them and...this might be stepping on a landmine...but discovered it was probably just Master System kid Stockholm syndrome. Shinobi World is the only one that isn't kinda bad.
The only people I commonly run into with a fondness for the series are the ones that grew up with Miracle World on Master System.
I played it a bit at my cousin as a kid, and occasionally at demo stands in stores, and I was a little fascinated by it, simply out of virtue of it being "the Mario" of that other console. But after eventually getting an SMS of my own with the game built in, I quickly discovered that the game is awful and always was.
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Re: What [not shmup] game are you playing now?

Post by Herr Schatten »

Sumez wrote:The only people I commonly run into with a fondness for the series are the ones that grew up with Miracle World on Master System.
That would include me then. Care to elaborate what you hate so much about it? I mean, it's far from ranking among the best platformers ever, but I think for a game released in 1986 it's more than decent. Granted, the janken matches are a terrible idea (even if somewhat mitigated by the fact that you can just memorize them), and the weird way the game handles jumps needs a lot of getting used to until you can perform them with the precision that's needed, but otherwise the game is mechanically solid and the level design is quite competent. Also, there's a somewhat surprising amount of variety on show.

The other games are a mixed bag, though. Lost Stars is boring and repetitive. High Tech World, while in its original incarnation an actually charming challenge-less game aimed at little girls, doesn't really work with its new scenario. Shinobi World is good, but short and very easy. Enchanted Castle is complete garbage.

So yeah, poor Alex' track record isn't great, but while I wouldn't exactly heap praise on Miracle World and Shinobi World, they are well above average and there's definitely fun to be had with them.
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Re: What [not shmup] game are you playing now?

Post by vol.2 »

Marc wrote:The NES feels like a home console, the Master System often feels like a horribly gimped arcade machine.
Well, yeah, Sega was always more "arcade" and they made no apologies for it. They were a successful arcade machine company (much more so than Nintendo), and it makes sense that they were trying to translate that experience to the home.

On the other hand, NES had it's fair share of arcade ports, and MS had it's share of home console games (the OG Phantasy Star being my favorite). MS just had a shorter time in the spotlight in general so has fewer games (both good and bad). Given the sheer number of NES carts, it wouldn't be hard for me to believe that the SNR of the MS might actually be better than the NES.
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Re: What [not shmup] game are you playing now?

Post by WelshMegalodon »

Even for people that like the Master System's first-party arcade ports (like me), the Famicom's SNR is still better just by virtue of having so many more signals.
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Re: What [not shmup] game are you playing now?

Post by vol.2 »

WelshMegalodon wrote:Even for people that like the Master System's first-party arcade ports (like me), the Famicom's SNR is still better just by virtue of having so many more signals.
That's not how SNR works. lol.
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Re: What [not shmup] game are you playing now?

Post by WelshMegalodon »

Lol. You got me there.
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Re: What [not shmup] game are you playing now?

Post by Sengoku Strider »

BrianC wrote: Alex Kidd and the Lost Stars SMS is actually a bit different from the arcade. AC version is more challenging and has lives instead of that odd time system of the SMS version. Space Harrier NES is actually inferior to the SMS version and IS a direct port (and I would argue that it's more of a slideshow than the SMS version). It tries too hard to replicate the music instead of making use of the NES sound chip, has a terrible fire rate, bad slowdown, and odd shooting angles. Oddly enough, it has the stuff added to the SMS version like the jet and new final boss. I disagree that Sega didn't redesign their games for the hardware. Shinobi adds a life bar and has subtle differences in level design, Double Target/Quartet is very different from its arcade counterpart, and even Space Harrier has some stuff exclusive to the SMS version. SMS also got its own sequel to Zaxxon.
Sega sorta got the memo later on. Shinobi hit the SMS a couple of years after Space Harrier did. The Shinobi & Wonder Boy series are good examples of a change in direction. On the other hand, they would continue releasing bare-bones arcade ports throughout their entire time as a 1st party. This really hurt them in the 32-bit era when Namco started running circles around their home ports.

By 1:1, I meant FC Space Harrier wasn't 1:1 with the SMS version.
Sumez wrote: The only people I commonly run into with a fondness for the series are the ones that grew up with Miracle World on Master System.
Those would be the 'Stockholm syndrome kids' I was alluding to. It was built into Master Systems later on, so it became the default game a lot of kids across Europe all had. Which is fine, there's plenty of things like the Amiga stuff that I thought was mind-blowing as a kid that looks really jank to me now.
Herr Schatten wrote: the weird way the game handles jumps needs a lot of getting used to until you can perform them with the precision that's needed
That's exactly it. That, and the hit detection on his punches is awful; I died so many times with enemies just passing through my fist. It's an action platformer, and the two main actions you perform are not well implemented. That was what really hit me about it when I finally played it.

There are things to like about it. It's cute, colourful, weird, and the vehicle sections can be fun. But I just can't see it as something rising above its era.
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Re: What [not shmup] game are you playing now?

Post by Rastan78 »

Oh man, trying to knock the little sections off that red octopus tentacle one by one in the underwater stage. You inch forward pixel by pixel then get hit out of the blue. It feels like your hurtbox and the hitbox of your fist are basically the same thing.

Trying to punch anything in that game is like trying to fuck if you had a micropenis.
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Re: What [not shmup] game are you playing now?

Post by BrianC »

Sengoku Strider wrote: By 1:1, I meant FC Space Harrier wasn't 1:1 with the SMS version.
I know what you meant and that's only partially correct. It's a poor example because it IS a direct port of the SMS version and the inaccuracies are because it's a terrible port, not because it actually tried to be different from the SMS version. It even has the cheat codes from the SMS version. Not to mention that the SMS version includes a boss not in the AC version (though it's also in the FC version and some other ports).

By "direct port", I don't mean 1:1, but directly based off another version. The FC Space Harrier is based off the SMS version, not the arcade version.

I like Miracle World despite its flaws, but there is no denying that the hit detection sucks.
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Re: What [not shmup] game are you playing now?

Post by Rastan78 »

Yeah somehow Miracle World does manage to be a pretty cool game. There's something really charming about it in spite of the jank. Has anyone been following the remake coming out? Looks like it might be pretty well done. Sorry if it's been mentioned elsewhere already.
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Re: What [not shmup] game are you playing now?

Post by null1024 »

WelshMegalodon wrote:Even for people that like the Master System's first-party arcade ports (like me), the Famicom's SNR is still better just by virtue of having so many more signals.
Honestly, I feel like looking at consoles by SNR is a bit of a bad metric. :P
Machines with a small library tend towards having high SNR, but when it comes to machines that are absolute gold for getting a lot of good games on, you end up with a list like the Wii, PS2, PS1, DS, etc. Machines with tons of games, to the point where even if less than one in ten games was good, you'd still have dozens of good games to play.

Like, if we look at something like the 32X... Space Harrier, After Burner, Virtua Fighter, and Virtua Racing are amazing on it, most of the other random Genesis ports like MK2 are fairly decent, Chaotix kinda really sucks as a game but it's gorgeous, has amazing music, and has fun enough mechanics to want to play despite the barren levels and the general unfinished feeling the game has, the sports games aren't that bad, Shadow Squadron is pretty decent, never was big on Star Wars Arcade but it's okay, Kolibri never quite clicked with me but it's gorgeous, and I just named nearly the machine's library as being decent or better. There are extremely few other machines I could do that with.

That being said, I feel like the SMS has a low SNR in general and like 90% of my time with the SMS library in terms of what I actually feel like playing is basically R-Type [was the first version I played, so I still pop it in], the Sonic games apart from S2, Hang-On, and Space Harrier [which, despite being a visual mess, plays well enough].
I would play After Burner SMS more if I didn't know the absurdly cheap trick that absolutely ruins the game forever [well, it works for the first dozen levels or so].
seriously don't click this spoiler :lol:
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you can just hold left, and until level 12, NOTHING WHATSOEVER will hit you, completely kills any tension in dodging because if something is going wrong until then, I can just start holding left and absolutely know that I'm safe
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Re: What [not shmup] game are you playing now?

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Sengoku Strider wrote:It's an action platformer, and the two main actions you perform are not well implemented. That was what really hit me about it when I finally played it.
Fair enough. I guess I never really saw it as an action platformer, though. (For me, that would describe games like Wonderboy or SMB.) I rather perceived Miracle World as some kind of adventure game. It was definitely the joy of discovering what's next that kept me playing, not the game's mechanics as such. (Not that it wouldn't have helped if these worked better.)

I think that Son Son II on the PCE is basically Miracle World done right. Aren't both supposed to have been based on Dragonball during early development?


Re: Western box designs. The laughable clip arts were a terrible idea, but apart from that I can see what they were trying to achieve. It seems like they wanted to push the brand rather than the individual game, and they actually kind of succeeded with that, as I remember the Sega boxes really standing out on store shelves. I think Nintendo originally tried a similar thing with their early NES boxes (the ones with the big pixelated sprites), but they abandoned the idea much quicker than Sega.

Oh, and grid patterns were all the rage in the 1980s, design-wise. They were everywhere. In fact, I own a Commodore Amiga from 1989 that looks like this.
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Re: What [not shmup] game are you playing now?

Post by Marc »

Rastan78 wrote:Yeah somehow Miracle World does manage to be a pretty cool game. There's something really charming about it in spite of the jank. Has anyone been following the remake coming out? Looks like it might be pretty well done. Sorry if it's been mentioned elsewhere already.
Looks nice. I've got it ordered, because.... actually I'm not sure why.

Oh, and Iconoclasts is really good. It's the movement, it feels pin-sharp and responsive, and the momentum and pace are just right. Impressed with this so far.
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Re: What [not shmup] game are you playing now?

Post by BIL »

Herr Schatten wrote:I think that Son Son II on the PCE is basically Miracle World done right. Aren't both supposed to have been based on Dragonball during early development?
Interesting, it seems so (re: Miracle World). I had always assumed the stuff it shares with Dragon Ball was simply due to DB itself being a takeoff of the classical Chinese novel "Journey To The West," referenced by like a million other games/anime.

Now I wonder if SonSon 2 was the same deal. The original (and Taito's Chuuka Taisen) seem to be based on the novel rather than DB.

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Re: What [not shmup] game are you playing now?

Post by Sumez »

Regarding signal to noise, the NES/Famicom just outshines the Master System no matter how you look at it.
The smaller library definitely work against the SMS, but ultimately it's the lack of real killer titles that does it in.

Looking at all-time classics or borderline masterpieces? Even if you're being super critical, the NES got at least a small handful, while the Master System has none.
Or just those really good and solid, timeless games? The Master System has Dragon's Trap or maybe Phantasy Star. The NES has it beaten via its lineup of Mega Man games alone, while its "B-listers" like Hebereke or Dragon Quest 3 IMO outclass aforementioned top titles in their respective genres.
Hidden gems or other obscure things that are worth at least trying? This is where the Master System finally gets some cards up its sleeve, with stuff like Master of Darkness, Kenseiden, Kung Fu Kid and so on. Quite a few things to dig into here, but I'm not sure it's a higher fraction of its complete library compared to the NES, which had absolutely spades of this stuff.

Of course this is all subjective really, but I try to look at both consoles with the same set of glasses, and whenever I play video games today, I'm more interested in the games I haven't already played to death, than buying into my nostalgia.
One aspect that might play in, is the Master System relying on arcade ports. Even if it had some really good ports at the time, those are pretty much all irrelevant today. And that said... the NES honestly has plenty of really good ports as well, it just has so much other great stuff that it's not really famous for them.

I absolutely love this whole era of video games, and I love the NES especially for how well represented it is on that platform. I would love the Master System equally if they had managed to get a similar strong footing with third party releases, but it just never happened.
Being as much into this stuff as I am, I have no trouble finding probably 300 NES/FC games that I'm at the very least interested in playing, but even given a bit more critical constraint, I could (and have) easily compile them into a solid top 100 of games worth checking out.
And honestly, even given Herr Schatten's reasonable appeal of not judging Miracle World by its wonky mechanics, but rather the qualities that it does have, it would probably still have a real hard time making it into that list had it been on the NES.
vol.2 wrote: Well, yeah, Sega was always more "arcade" and they made no apologies for it. They were a successful arcade machine company (much more so than Nintendo), and it makes sense that they were trying to translate that experience to the home.
It's funny how they kind of have that image, because I find it hard to believe it was ever a conscious decision by either company.
When the Famicom released in 1983, the gold standard for video games was simply arcade games. Even on home consoles before that, what you played at home would typically be arcade style score attack games. For the first few years, that's also pretty much everything that released on the platform, and it's hard to imagine they had anticipated anything else.
The evolution towards more "home oriented" games with a lazier pace, and focus on exploration or even narrative, is really a completely natural result of video games becoming more commonplace in people's homes, and happened completely independent from what Sega or Nintendo wanted, and both of them played into it as well, with games like Zelda or Phantasy Star.
Sega may have continued to produce arcade titles long after Nintendo stopped, but I really don't see that working its way into their home consoles at all. At least not until the Saturn, maybe?
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Re: What [not shmup] game are you playing now?

Post by vol.2 »

Sumez wrote: It's funny how they kind of have that image, because I find it hard to believe it was ever a conscious decision by either company.
Whether or not it was conscious, both companies played to their strengths. Before the NES/MS, SEGA was primarily a public amusements company, and Nintendo was primarily a private amusement company. Nintendo was a game and toy company who made (and still make) things like playing cards and dice. They only had a handful of arcade machines that were "bespoke" machines. SEGA on the other hand was making pachinko machines and pinball before they moved into arcade machines.

By the late 80's, the market had shaped what people wanted and that had become diluted, but I felt then, and certainly into the 90's, that Sega held strong to their arcade roots. For me, Nintendo's arcade machines post-1985 always felt like a bit of a joke; like a home game stuck incongruously inside a cab. They look cool, sure (especially the double-sided ones), but it would never be my choice of machine. I don't think Nintendo was ever comfortable competing in the arcade space, and they got right out of it the second they felt they had carved out a place for the company in the home console arena. Anything that happened after that were licensed cabs and vanity/promotional projects.

I would say House of The Dead is a good example of how SEGA kept it alive.
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Re: What [not shmup] game are you playing now?

Post by Sengoku Strider »

Herr Schatten wrote: Re: Western box designs. The laughable clip arts were a terrible idea, but apart from that I can see what they were trying to achieve. It seems like they wanted to push the brand rather than the individual game, and they actually kind of succeeded with that, as I remember the Sega boxes really standing out on store shelves.
Sure, later on when they stopped sourcing their box art from the local primary school, it worked:

Image

The way the early Mega Drive games iterated on it was fantastic:

Image

I really wish they'd stuck with that instead of moving to the red danger lines, but some marketing guy wanted their boxes to stand out more on shelves.
I think Nintendo originally tried a similar thing with their early NES boxes (the ones with the big pixelated sprites), but they abandoned the idea much quicker than Sega.
Yes, the famous black box games. That was the initial run of first party games during the first year on the market. Once 3rd party games started arriving they moved on.

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Re: What [not shmup] game are you playing now?

Post by BrianC »

I find it funny how the Mario Bros. just reuses and recolors (incorrectly!) the SMB Mario instead of using actual art from the game.
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Re: What [not shmup] game are you playing now?

Post by Sengoku Strider »

BrianC wrote:I find it funny how the Mario Bros. just reuses and recolors (incorrectly!) the SMB Mario instead of using actual art from the game.
They all do. The black box images all have extra details and shading which the actual sprites in the game don't have.

On the other hand nobody's head actually comes off in Master System Pro Wrestling, so truth in advertising is all relative.

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Re: What [not shmup] game are you playing now?

Post by BareKnuckleRoo »

And then there's Rad Racer for the NES which has actual ingame pictures on the back, but the front uses even lower-res, fake sprites than what's ingame.

Compare that to the JP version boxart, Highway Star, which oddly doesn't have ingame screenshots but goes for more slick-looking box design.
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Re: What [not shmup] game are you playing now?

Post by TransatlanticFoe »

That wrestling cover confused the hell out of me when I saw it in a shop, the screenshots on the back are about as enticing though! Some of those early clip-art SMS games are pretty basic and unimpressive. Even when there's a good game behind it like Zillion, who's going to buy a game with a shit cartoon microwave on the front?

The Master System is a strange one. It lacks the exclusive classics of the NES, thanks to a smaller library of non-ports and the US/JP focus that modern gaming culture has on retro gaming. But in terms of ports (both arcade and console titles) it's an absolute beast, and there are a good number of hidden gems. There's plenty of ports that are mighty impressive given the hardware (Operation Wolf, Sagaia, Gain Ground, Scramble Spirits, Desert Strike, Outrun, Streets of Rage, Robocop vs. The Terminator) and even when it's not ideal such as Space Harrier, it's still playable.

Sega usually focused on its consoles being an arcade at home experience, and that definitely wore thin later on when the home market increasingly expected longer and deeper games rather than short, challenging and replayable arcade games. In the early days, it fit the bill rather well and, aside from a barely playable Thunder Blade, got solid ports of the big Sega games (and not so big ones) - but along with Nintendo's practices, there are a couple of obvious own goals that hampered its progress in the market. The short dev timescale early on was clearly limiting, as were the cheaparse ROM sizes that left a lot of early titles with only a couple of levels. There are also some really bizarre decisions when it came to home versions:

Line of Fire - sure the SMS couldn't do the scaling in a light gun game, but it would have worked swapping between static screens and scrolling Operation Wolf-style sections. Instead it was turned into a top-down sort of shooter

Enduro Racer - home computer ports were reasonably faithful, so it's strange that the more powerful SMS got an isometric racer instead

Shadow Dancer - it's actually a solid conversion, but half the game is cut. This was the perfect candidate to give the SMS a tangentially related game. Instead, the hardware that could replicate the arcade game (the Mega Drive) got an exclusive side game and they tried to port the arcade game to the SMS

Alex Kidd in Miracle World manages to rise into the wider retro gaming consciousness largely because most people who had an SMS (i.e. the SMS II) had this game built in - it's an exclusive that enough people played and have memories of to make some noise about it. The scope is a lot more impressive than the game itself - death by paper/scissors/stone is cheap (or trivial if you know a certain sequence remains fixed for the entire game) and the collision detection is DIRE. I only got as far as the underwater spikes near the end and just thought "well fuck this" - of course there's another cheap trick to get through that but I didn't know at the time and only had a couple of lives left. But what else lets you have a motorbike, helicopter and speedboat in 1986? That such an amibitious yet flawed game gets held up as the pinnacle of the console arguably holds it back from further recognition.

Later on it was an excellent balance between quality and cost. The old games were sold cheap, newer ones were still much cheaper than Mega Drive ones. It got solid conversions of 16-bit titles and enough exclusives to keep it running as a console on its own merit. If anything, I think it had another year in it and a lot of later Game Gear titles were in development for the SMS - but it essentially got retired between Sega juggling Mega Drive add-ons and specifically shifting its SMS strategy to younger gamers. Anecdotally, the latter turned off a lot of kids who'd spent the past couple of years with it - the Mega Drive and SNES were being aimed at us, the Saturn was too expensive and the PSX targeted at a slightly older audience. It was definitely a nice little earner in Europe for a while and Tec Toy kept it alive for longer in Brazil (albeit with its exclusives being of more questionable quality). Massively underrated console with tonnes of great games.... it's just that yeah, a lot of them are on more powerful consoles and people are less likely to go back to them on the SMS.
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Re: What [not shmup] game are you playing now?

Post by Stevens »

In Alex Kidd there is a trick to the under water spikes - if you allow Alex to float up into them naturally he will come to rest on them.
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Re: What [not shmup] game are you playing now?

Post by Mischief Maker »

I finally beat Ghostrunner.

I've been playing it in small chunks.

This game is one half Hotline Miami, one half platformer.

I love the Hotline Miami parts, but holy shit do the platformer parts get insane toward the end, especially the ones where you have to throw shuriken at targets to open a timed door lock.

Having now tried Hades, I would bump this down to my #2 game of 2020.
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Re: What [not shmup] game are you playing now?

Post by Sumez »

Got a copy of Ghostrunner from PA recently, blind purchase "because it was cheap". Good to hear it's not a bad game :D
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Re: What [not shmup] game are you playing now?

Post by Mischief Maker »

Protip: the bullet-time mid-air strafe is available once every jump and it's a life-saver for some of the trickier wall-running puzzles. It also encourages mid-air leaping kills like a proper (cyber)ninja.
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An oligarch walks in and grabs nine cookies for himself.

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Re: What [not shmup] game are you playing now?

Post by TheLimeyLemmon »

I jumped back in to Smash Ultimate to finish off World of Light.

I forgot just how much I love the function of Spirits and Spirit Battles in general.

Might just be one of my favourite ever inclusions across the whole series just from how much love and fan service went in to the scenarios.
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Re: What [not shmup] game are you playing now?

Post by BrianC »

Sengoku Strider wrote:
BrianC wrote:I find it funny how the Mario Bros. just reuses and recolors (incorrectly!) the SMB Mario instead of using actual art from the game.
They all do. The black box images all have extra details and shading which the actual sprites in the game don't have.
You misunderstood. None of the other boxes reuse art from another box like Mario Bros does (exact same Mario pose from SMB box). Also, Mario is wearing two shades of blue instead of red and blue like the actual game. Most of the other boxes at least make an attempt to look like the in game art, even though they aren't exact.

The Japanese counterpart for Pro Wrestling SMS is much more interesting, both in visuals and in box art. JP version is a female wrestling game!
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vol.2
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Re: What [not shmup] game are you playing now?

Post by vol.2 »

Image

whole 'nother enchilada
Last edited by vol.2 on Tue Apr 27, 2021 1:44 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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