Prayer is never to be discounted. However, that man, if he truly does play TNWA like Spartan, needs something more immediate.Turrican wrote:This is the sad story of a man who still could tell wether he's playing Space Harrier rather than Burning Force. A prayer for him.
Spoiler
TBH you mentioned Green Beret and Vigilante - that's when my Nerdbunker Alert went off, and I raced home to commence battle >_> I didn't take any of it as a slur (HOW DARE YOU/I DEMAND SATISFACTION ), not even the nakedly console-warring "evolutionary dead end" stuff. I know how it be when you're in them console trenches.Perhaps what had enraged everyone so much was that to explain what a difference in feeling is to have one dimension, he had gone a bit too far back in time, mentioning games of an much older period. And that had sounded insulting to TNWA that was obviously pushing things forward in its own way. (But it can also be said that mentioning Spartan and Vigilante wasn't slur on his part. At least he ranked them quite a bit higher than the following examples of Juooki, Splatterhouse or even Crude Busters, but that's a digression).
I too regard TNWA and Crude Buster as their own thing. Where I disagree with you, is on TNWA being "Spartan with throws." To make TNWA out of Spartan is to obliterate the latter's combat, leaving only the bare chassis of a 2D plane, the player, and the enemy. You could say "Enemies run at you from both sides and you hit them, but now, you can also grab and throw them" - but this would be a gross oversimplification. Usefully describing even competent TNWA play would entail a vertitable glossary of terms and concepts taken directly from Renegade in general, Final Fight in specific.In a nutshell: by going to the extremes of removing depth and adding a lot of its own on the table, TNWA still doesn't play much like Final Fight or the subsequent games in the "main branch" of the genre (the one originated in Renegade/Double Dragon).
Adding to that, as Vludi said: This isn't even a setup alien to beltscrollers. After the arcade games' hinting at the concept, with rare platforms too narrow to sidestep enemies safely on, the FC Double Dragons employ vast swathes of straight 2D action. Sometimes entire stages. Do these segments "not play much like Double Dragon?" I assure you, if you play the toughest of them like Spartan - defending only your immediate space with strikes as enemies close in - you'll get beaten into the floor.
WRT hardcore, I am about accuracy, not feels. If you think that corridor feels like Splatterhouse, with its smoosher traps and pits, you must realise the enemies will nevertheless pound you into dogfood if you let them pincer you. Because these stages don't suddenly revert to 1985. They remain designed around canonical Kunio mechanics. Combos, grapples, crowd control. Not only do you not need to use these in Spartanesques - you overwhelmingly can't. They come from an entirely different subset of 2D action colloquially termed "brawling," where enemies can't be merely smacked away but must be strategically manhandled.
Actually, forget Spartan - we have a much more useful antecedent: The Ninja Warriors. The player has guarding, super-jumps, and projectiles, all of which made the leap to TNWA (the last heavily modified). All are big additions to Spartan mechanics! Enemies, meanwhile, behave more like Spartan's bosses - lots of footsies, special attacks and novel movement options. None of these things even begin to budge the needle from Spartan to Renegade. Had TNWA continued along these lines, increasing player and enemy repertoires, without introducing the tactile intersection of brawling, the result would be something like Capcom's Mutant Apocalypse.
WTF, how'd we end up back here? A recap: nobody was doing anything new with brawlers or sidescrollers, circa TNWA. In arcades, most of those genre's big names were either receding or dead, IREM and Technos included. A few genre classics aside, a desert ensued. Rinse/repeat for consoles.could really have used -like a carefully placed Zangief piledriver- a great and definitive closure like:
Yeah. That would have rocked. A lot more than bringing early 1990's Crude Busters on the spotlight, for sure. But ah well. Can't have everything. Instead, he had to settle for Sumez's (rather underwhelming) "strangely unexplored approach to the genre" comment. He was ready for the firing squad to put and end to his misery, but had hoped in a little more grandeur.in classic console war style, overstepped by implying TNWA is a novelty one-off anyway - a statement so retarded, that all forums members were eager to reply him with a list of a dozen post-1994 great brawlers that had been directly modelled after TWNA, primarily by reverting to a 2D space.
This tale of historical woe entertaining the notion that, because others didn't follow up on TNWA - released in 2D action's twilight, running on weaker hardware, balanced for tamer audiences - it's an evolutionary dead end. Again, I get the point-scoring. It doesn't make the points any less rickety, no matter how many times you intend to repackage them for us. If a game designer (as opposed to a console warrior) made this argument to me, I'd genuinely wonder if he was, in the most literal sense, retarded. If his appreciation of 2D action had been arrested at some point circa 1988, never to move ahead.
I've never heard anyone make this argument, and I spend way too much time nerdfighting over this shit with other nerds just as remorselessly obsessive as me. It's a garbage argument fit only for console war threads.
If you'd compared a simple example of [Genre A chassis] + [Genre B mechanics] like TNWA to Alien Soldier, the product of a decade-long evolution stretching back to Green Beret, I would've advised you to put down the pipe and pick up the controller.As he watched the sunset, he wondered if only he had shown more respect for Natsume's stroke of genius, comparing it to other games like Alien Soldier or Ikaruga, which had took an abused template and subverted it from the inside to offer a freshly new experience. But then again, it wouldn't have worked, because those games after all hadn't gone as far as removing one dimension in movement; and besides it was a moot point anyway, since most members here (with the notable exception of BIL) didn't feel it made any difference at all, and considered Final Fight and TNWA perfectly swappable. There was a bittersweet aftertaste in all this, but the sun had set, the guillotine rolled, and Turrican was beheaded.
Likewise Ikaruga. Why not mention Shikigami no Shiro, or Psyvariar? Both are designed around doing things with bullets other than merely dodging them. None of the three tore their genre down to its foundations, then imported another genre's entire ethos. They just messed with the collision parameters a little.
This oilslick-shallow cross-genre name-dropping is spiralling out of control, Turrican! I approve, but as I said, I am mercenary to the bone and only here to talk games, and it is GRADE A CANNON FODDER.