Ninja Gaiden [NES] + R2RKMF: Scrolling Action Monogatari

[Sumez]

I'm tentatively accepting this Mage No-Damage Clear is legit - ReplayBurners are good peeps in my experience

Correct me if I'm wrong on this, but I think ReplayBurners are just a semi-automated recording and upload of various mame input recordings by various players, right?
I believe I've heard of some of their videos being cheaters before, though probably not to the blame of the channel uploading them. I don't know how strict their verification process is.

[BIL]

I'm tentatively accepting this Mage No-Damage Clear is legit - ReplayBurners are good peeps in my experience

Correct me if I'm wrong on this, but I think ReplayBurners are just a semi-automated recording and upload of various mame input recordings by various players, right?
I believe I've heard of some of their videos being cheaters before, though probably not to the blame of the channel uploading them. I don't know how strict their verification process is.

I do recall hearing they'd (inadvertently?) hosted some cheated runs before, though it's been a while; can't recall the details. But yeah, on balance, I take their replays with a grain of salt, that one included. I know they tend to specify WolfMAME, which helps, but AFAIK isn't bulletproof.

From a quick glance over the video, I could see it being legit, or at least a good reference. Mage can do some ridiculously abusive shit to bosses, the penultimate and final being huge sources of undodgeable spam. Lategame use of Lightning looks deadly-precise, yet plausible. I'm sure it'd take daunting practice and discipline to pull off, if legit; Vanguard is our ranking Cadash authority, so I'll not speculate further. I picked up a bangin' st4 boss tech from a Dogosoken nomiss on their channel, so I've a soft spot for them.

[Sir Ilpalazzo]

Zelda II does something not many ARPGs of its time ever chanced to: it puts the martial - the art of killing without being killed - front and center, pride of place. If you're not good at handling Link's short yet deadly-accurate blade, and keeping his big fuckin head safely behind the shield, and watching your footing and general vicinity, you're gonna get ping-ponged from one big dogman dick to the next! Straight into the nearest burning lava pit, or pond! WAAAA! BIDEOGAME KILL MEH1!1

Zelda 2 kicks ass. I always liked it a lot but it wasn't until late last year that I came back to it and tried out the Japanese version, which really cemented it as a classic in my mind.

The JP balancing makes a lot more sense in some areas. The magic economy is tight enough that it's tough to justify spending it on the fire spell in the immediate post-raft portion of the game, but as a result you miss out on a fair bit of EXP due to several enemy types being only vulnerable to fire - so the Japanese version never requiring fire smooths things out and explains why that portion of the game always felt slightly messy to me (it does mean that the fire spell is useless in JP, but that's better than the US version's inelegant solution). The lowered EXP thresholds for the highest levels and ability to choose your upgrade path early on do a ton for the flow of the game, too, and that it's reasonable to get up to 8/8/8 makes the Death Valley / Great Palace stretch far less daunting than it is in the US version.

I'm curious about how it would feel to a first-time player honestly. Even as someone who had never 1CCed the US version, I had no trouble adapting to the Japanese version's deleveling penalty (and then to cleanly 1CCing the game as a whole), but I can see it being a steep and intimidating roadblock for someone who hadn't played before. I suppose it's much faster and easier to grind out levels to replace lost ones in JP given its lower thresholds, whereas grinding in the US version would be a huge pain in the ass. Outside of that, I'd say it's clear that the game (and particularly its endgame) are balanced around the Japanese experience distribution, and that most of the reason the endgame is (kind of deservedly tbh) considered such a surprising difficulty spike is actually just from US version difficulty changes which don't feel that well-considered. I'd still lean towards recommending the Japanese version to new players were it not for the lack of a good translation patch, at any rate.

My only real complaint about the JP version are the aesthetic upgrades the US version got - I really miss the US version's unique dungeon visuals and its far superior battle theme. (And - non-aesthetically - the new unique boss added to dungeon 5 in the US version, the mace guy, is a minor highlight of the game; he's sorely missed in the JP original.)

I ended up playing through both Faxanadu and Battle of Olympus as well afterwards (last year). I don't want to bloat up the post more but I thought they were both really interesting games, even if they're nowhere as superlative as Zelda 2 - Olympus was deeply flawed but was also really lovable.

Really looking forward to Shinobi non Grata as well; Tanuki Justice was definitely a classic and this seems in that ballpark. The lack of random enemy spawns does seem like a shame, honestly, but it looks otherwise strong, and to be fair Tanuki has the same weakness, so I'm sure it's not too bad.

[BIL]

My only real complaint about the JP version are the aesthetic upgrades the US version got - I really miss the US version's unique dungeon visuals and its far superior battle theme. (And - non-aesthetically - the new unique boss added to dungeon 5 in the US version, the mace guy, is a minor highlight of the game; he's sorely missed in the JP original.)

Definitely; I was kinda shocked when I realised how visually bereft the JP temples were, having grown up with the NES's distinctive hues. The loadtimes and disk-flipping are decided downgrades, too - although I dodged those, since the first version of the game I played seriously was the JP GBA version, which performs exactly like the NES cart (see also Metroid). The slightly distorted resolution it shares with all FC/NES Minis is a minor bummer, but it played absolutely fine via GB Player.

I think the most ideal way to play the JP ver these days might be Famicom via aftermarket SSD, outside of just emulating it ofc.

Really looking forward to Shinobi non Grata as well; Tanuki Justice was definitely a classic and this seems in that ballpark. The lack of random enemy spawns does seem like a shame, honestly, but it looks otherwise strong, and to be fair Tanuki has the same weakness, so I'm sure it's not too bad.

SnG does keep a decent frisson of Saigo's intensity; several spots, like st2's zombie-infested forest, and st4's outer defenses, it's similarly easy to get blindsided and drop your combo (the scoreplay is likely busted, but nobody likes seeing a fat number zeroed ).

But yeah, it's a missed opportunity, not getting the heavies in on the RNG; they're perfectly-designed for it, and your moveset could easily deal with the added pressure. I've got my fingers crossed Pico might tune the game up a bit, on top of patching the PS4 rev's minor but irksome bugs. It's a killer game teetering right on the edge of excellence.

Tanuki is my favourite from the last few years' crop of new-face R2RKMFs (excepting GNGR - a transcendent work from a storied master, Fujiwara's renaissance). Super-tight handling and stage+enemy design, with a Shin Contra hit ratio system that seems exceptionally well-judged for longterm replay. My only qualm there is, I think it might've worked even better with inbuilt autofire. The manual fire is the good sort, more than maxed by leisurely tapping; I just prefer foot-to-the-floor feelgood with my latter-day Contraesques. ofc, that's easily sorted out nowadays. A full Insane no-miss with 100% shootdown sounds absolutely superplay DVD-worthy.

[Blinge]

https://youtu.be/ZJo0CZBjd9Q

Well got my Alteredu Beasto No miss

[BrianC]

Actually, it's called 獣王記 (Juuouki) in Japan. Beastmaster is somewhat closer to the original title (which means Chronicles of the Beast King, IIRC), but that was already taken.

Nice play. Funny how the game has a bear form that gets his enemies stoned years before Cocaine Bear.

[BryanM]

it does mean that the fire spell is useless in JP, but that's better than the US version's inelegant solution

That's often a sad thing that happens to killing techniques in all Zelda games. You get these neat gizmos to mix things up, but they have limited ammunition so it makes doing an all-wand or all-bomb run a lot less fun. I suppose it's a compromise that prevents any power escalation of the player's avatar, but it really kind of cleaves closer to Last Battle than it'd seem. Start the game with the sword, end the game with the sword.

Alteredu Beasto

You got me to boot up the arcade version and give it another go. I'm way out of practice.

The arcade version is harder; the snail boss uses a different pattern - you can't hurt it with the spin attack, you have to push it back against the wall with your bad bear breath. (BBB) (Still a trivial boss fight) The most important difference is you can't pass all the way through the final boss, so you can't just kick left and right like a jackass and win.

Ah... such complicated feelings about this game. The fact that you're mainly fighting zombies and demons along with the palette choices makes it metal as heck - "Altered Beast as an 80's dark fantasy film" is the same thing as saying "Altered Beast as a film", it has no other aesthetic. (Some metal band released a knockoff flash game or something that does better homage to this game than its own sequels did.)

As a whole Stage 4 is the only alright level in the game. The palace background, the boss, it's the game at its best.

The gd blue wolves are the most annoying thing about the game before you've memorized it though. They train us that it's good to walk up to something and kick it in the face as soon as possible, then bait us into a kaizo trap! Haha >_>

Give each party member a different paradigm - classic nested popups for one, ring menus for another, exotic Buriki One style inversion-of-control for a third, etc - and cram it full of tactile *ka-chik* input optimization opportunities that feel good on an arcade lever.

Heh, some truly wickedly evil ideas here.

For practicality, "push a button to use a skill, maybe specify a target with the joystick" is as fast as you can go. (Short of uh, automatic combat like Half Minute Hero and certain free to play RPGs... no time to push buttons/pushing buttons is extra~)

Sigh, if only throwing together a prototype was as easy as throwing together ideas

Ah, I think this is a helpful feature. If an idea can't keep your interest for longer than a couple weeks after letting it bake a while, it probably wasn't 100% good. That's been my experience in writing webnovels - if God doesn't even care, how could the readers possibly care either?

The true curse of us ADHD-ridden bastards is getting beyond the prototyping phase. Making a game? Fun as hell. Producing content for a game... slow boring nightmare. After the doing the fun part, why would you want to go on?

Like I was saying about the PICO-8 platform (which isn't a bad place to prototype things; Celeste being its biggest success story probably), making 16x16 sprites is fast easy fun and they're always super cute. 32x32 sprites though? An hour to three hours depending on how complicated it is. 4 times the pixels means 20 times the time.

(Here's an example of my work steps with bigger sprites, with a very simple battle sprite of a guy in a catsuit. I often begin the drawing process thinking it's dogshit and that I'm a fraud. Then after glaring at it and changing things until I can finally bare to look at it, I often end up horrified at what moving a couple pixels around can do. It really is like fiddling with clay. If I ever get around to finishing a Shm'up, it definitely will use ~20x20 sprites. Skykid looks great, 20x20 is more than you need.)

Oh, this PICO-8 little maze jumping game is relevant to current topics. You could spend $80 and hundreds of hours of your life to let those milk thieves at Blizzard kick you in the nuts, or click on this jumpy-stabby game and have a lovely time for a couple minutes. There are no other choices. Those are the only two you're allowed.

[Sumez]

making 16x16 sprites is fast easy fun and they're always super cute. 32x32 sprites though? An hour to three hours depending on how complicated it is. 4 times the pixels means 20 times the time.

This vastly depends on your skill and experience
I've made prototypes of more games than I can count over the past few decades, and the only ones I ever finished were ports with ready-made assets available to me.
Needing graphics for my projects is usually the primary showstopper, because creating effective sprites just isn't something I'm very effective at. And I pretty much always work in 16x16.

[Lander]

Blinge mate, your Nice Try Fighter sig has a certificate error. Longhena can no longer be trusted!

Nice clear btw. Appreciate the ticker text, since I've never seen far beyond Wise Fwom Youw Gwave.
Odd to see the Chicken Leg from Golden Axe make an appearance on Stage 3! Alongside a few baddies that La Mulana evidently nicked wholesale

For Fighter and Ninja, I would describe Cadash as 90% no-hittable, with the remainder a composite of "Nope" and "Extra Nope." (grindan would likely help; I deliberately avoided it where I could, besides ensuring I was at L10 before hitting Teh Dark Continent. the graveyard plays nicely then, but feels a bit Euroshumpy if weaker, so I whacked a few of the underforest rock dudes, after circumnavigating my way back down to blow my stack on Golden Bells)

And tbh, the tight FOV, big sprites, and unforgiving hitboxes make a lot of technically-avoidable stuff seem precog-mandatory. It's a decided rope-a-dope aspect, feeling like it was inherited from Dragon Buster and Genpei (though it's a more disciplined game than those trve & honest Real Pinball Simulators). I'm sure it's possible to machine together techs that avoid all but the most egregious spam (catacombs boss, final boss), but it's probably well beyond what's needed - or likely to be contemplated - for conventional, first-run play.

Mage and Priest might fare better, with their magic spells. I'm tentatively accepting this Mage No-Damage Clear is legit - ReplayBurners are good peeps in my experience - but regardless, might be a handy blueprint!

Ah, I probably should have known the game is crammed with secret tiles and hidden walls! Both your clear and Master o' Magic there are most instructive
The harpies shortly after the rockmen are my personal bane - multiple hits to kill, bastardly keepaway, and vertical shotgun projectiles. Ach!

The mage clear seems anecdotally legit, since you can see a few nervous errors toward the end. Though watching that genie boss gives me Krillin feels - blink and you'll miss it!

Indeed! I was dimly aware of Benkei (Berserk and Baki both making reference to his famous "bridge knight" and "standing death" exploits), but not his fellow midboss Yoshitsune; was very interesting, reading up on their often Robin Hood & Little John-esque portrayals in other Japanese media.

Benkei seems to get all the love - probably the first japanese epic hero I encountered by way of Mystical Ninja 64:



Honor lies in the middle distance.

Though played pretty fast and loose; more a fusion of Bridge Knight with greek mythos' Achilles, if Achilles' heel was secretly a weakness to being battered by hurled Donkey Kong barrels. Credit where it's due, he takes them on the chin!
I sometimes wonder how much of a corruptive influence that game's wacky oh-japan factor had on my young mind

Heh, some truly wickedly evil ideas here.

For practicality, "push a button to use a skill, maybe specify a target with the joystick" is as fast as you can go. (Short of uh, automatic combat like Half Minute Hero and certain free to play RPGs... no time to push buttons/pushing buttons is extra~)

That's where contrived menu layouts and such come in - secretly arrange it such that various fitegame motions correspond to Move to Magic -> Open Magic -> Wrap to bottom -> Megaflare etc, so early players flail, but experienced ones ride the gate and rattle off orders like a microswitched drill sergeant.
Maybe take the JRPG-specific stuff that traditionally lives in an options menu (hi, cursor memory!) and buttonify it to complexify the traversal graph too

Ah, I think this is a helpful feature. If an idea can't keep your interest for longer than a couple weeks after letting it bake a while, it probably wasn't 100% good. That's been my experience in writing webnovels - if God doesn't even care, how could the readers possibly care either?

The true curse of us ADHD-ridden bastards is getting beyond the prototyping phase. Making a game? Fun as hell. Producing content for a game... slow boring nightmare. After the doing the fun part, why would you want to go on?

True, true. I have a disgustingly large archive of projects that got to the "alright, it works!" stage, only to get walled on Actual Content and / or Fuck This Engine.

Like I was saying about the PICO-8 platform (which isn't a bad place to prototype things; Celeste being its biggest success story probably), making 16x16 sprites is fast easy fun and they're always super cute. 32x32 sprites though? An hour to three hours depending on how complicated it is. 4 times the pixels means 20 times the time.

In theory I quite like PICO-8 and its creativity-through-limitations setup, particularly the asset / content side. Though in practice, we don't get on - it almost always turns into a Zachtronics exercise of wringing out every last undocumented trick, foolishly trying to build abstractions over them, then running out of code memory before getting to the game part.

But hey, at least I have this neato demosceney palettescroll!

(Here's an example of my work steps with bigger sprites, with a very simple battle sprite of a guy in a catsuit. I often begin the drawing process thinking it's dogshit and that I'm a fraud. Then after glaring at it and changing things until I can finally bare to look at it, I often end up horrified at what moving a couple pixels around can do. It really is like fiddling with clay. If I ever get around to finishing a Shm'up, it definitely will use ~20x20 sprites. Skykid looks great, 20x20 is more than you need.)

I've made prototypes of more games than I can count over the past few decades, and the only ones I ever finished were ports with ready-made assets available to me.
Needing graphics for my projects is usually the primary showstopper, because creating effective sprites just isn't something I'm very effective at. And I pretty much always work in 16x16.

Ah, a familiar feeling

At this point I've concluded that I'm best at code, and thus the answer lies in building tooling that can turn terse code into decent art without needing to torture myself with asset-creation packages.
Though so far it's been a bit of an antipattern; last round was a Quake map processor intended to power my own FPSZ, but one way and other ended up with its claim to fame being Cruelty Squad. Edifying, but not what I was going for...

This time I've stepped beyond engine specifity and into building a higher order shape language that can transpile field functions (the Media Molecule Dreams tech) into shader(/toy), image, mesh, ASCII art, etc - a bit like Haskell diagrams, but more general.
Will probably post up a thread in the dev forum once it's able to compose a decent-looking palettized starfighter, see if anyone else can get some use out of it.

[Udderdude]

Genesis/MD version of Xiaomei and the Flame Dragon's Fist. https://twitter.com/ColumbusCircleC/sta ... 3547988037
This was originally on Switch and is basically an updated version of Kung-Fu Master aka Spartan X.

The Scramble Vice, big stompy mech action game with nice pixel art. https://twitter.com/FlyhighWorks/status ... 7255941624
The main character is naked in the teaser trailer, so I have high hopes for this one.

[BIL]

An old ignominy avenged, as KONAMI's MANHATTAN 24 BUNSHO: NEW YORK CITY 151 ~ NISHI DAI 100 STREET aka JAILBREAK gets ACA release. A couple years back, Datsugoku/Prisoners Of War was announced, and some peeps were disappointed it wasn't this - understandable!



Are the hordes besieging FEAR CITY an army of NeoNazi skinheads? Or merely tragically English-impaired Hare Krishnas?! Either way, DONUT-FUELLED CORRECTIVE VIOLENCE HAS COMMENCED

I actually can't recommend Bunsho without stern caveats. It's comprehensively encrusted in Konami's trademark 80s aim lag, an ill it took their AC division an astonishing length of time to grow out of (1991's Sunset Riders would seem to be the first escapee). Effective twitch movement is virtually impossible, and with the leaden movement speed and ruthless stage design, even relatively considered reflexive play can doom you. The game is clearly designed around this - anyone who's put time on AC Super Contra will know the arduous process of outmaneuvering and returning fire - but it's an abrasively hard sell for any but the most willfully tuned-in to its very specific tactical strictures.

In aesthetic terms, it's an instant classic, bursting with cheerfully absurd hardboiled character; the construction worker hostage's running animation alone might brighten up your day. And as a history lesson, it'll certainly teach an appreciation for subsequent run/gun efforts. But it's really not to be approached by anyone demanding 1/nth of the refinement seen in later genre highlights; if you think Ikari handles heavy, this'll make that one seem light as a feather. Fire up Shock Troopers after a credit of Bunsho, you'll feel cybernetic. Both of those are on ACA in similarly superb form, incidentally! Approach with care.

Ah, I probably should have known the game is crammed with secret tiles and hidden walls! Both your clear and Master o' Magic there are most instructive
The harpies shortly after the rockmen are my personal bane - multiple hits to kill, bastardly keepaway, and vertical shotgun projectiles. Ach!

Indeed, there's at least one item I'm buggered if I know where it is - and while idly watching a Ninja 1CC, I learned I'd been walking right past another! Seems there's a fair bit to go back to, once survival is secured.

Those Harpies are the goddamn worst for visibility >w< Especially as the camera won't pan upwards until you're past that first puking plant. Green Beret/Rygar sprite-to-screen ratio (with the loss of punter-pulling oomph offset by BADASS BACKGROUND GFX) is the way to go. Big sprites need hard playfield borders ala Alien Soldier.

The mage clear seems anecdotally legit, since you can see a few nervous errors toward the end. Though watching that genie boss gives me Krillin feels - blink and you'll miss it!

I'd seen Vanguard say he could oneshot bosses, and done it myself via KNIFESTORM on Black Pudding, but that made me laugh. Was all "Hmm, I wonder how he'll deal with the fireball RNG, I bet some crafty leveraging of-" *NUCLEAR BLAST* "Oh"

I'm a chronic one-character/ship/car sort (had a hell of a time putting down the Saw Cleaver in BB, that was an ~emotional connection~ ), but Mage looks like the character I'd switch to; the way LIGHTNIN' handles otherwise fiendishly-placed snipers and projectiles gives me "default character" armchair designer feels. Priest and her Barrier to a slightly lesser extent.

Benkei seems to get all the love - probably the first japanese epic hero I encountered by way of Mystical Ninja 64

Oh man, I totally forgot he was in that game! I wonder how many other things I blanked on, back in the late 90s, that would leap out at me now. I bet there's a ton. I'm actually more recently-acquainted with the SFC games, particularly the excellent second, whose title (and villain) directly reference Matthew Perry of Black Ships infamy. Whimsical historical revisionist fiction, wheee~ ^w^ (speaking of Baki!)

The main character is naked in the teaser trailer, so I have high hopes for this one.

Same same I wonder if that's a Black Magic M-66 reference? Pico have astute taste in spirit animoos, judging by SnG's Ninja Scroll riffs. Ah, who am I kidding, there's probably a million toyboy-fronted mecha-cheesecakorizers out there

What I really wonder is whether they'll go for Valken's one-and-done arcade cinema, or its directorial followup Gun Hazard's revisitable map model. Either would be fine by me tbh, given the quality demonstrated by SnG. What I really hope, though, is that they invest in higher difficulty modes, or at a stretch, better-articulated scoring. The former would be simpler, but either would give SnG the staying power it currently lacks in comparison to Tanuki Justice and Huntdown.

[Lander]

I'm a chronic one-character/ship/car sort (had a hell of a time putting down the Saw Cleaver in BB, that was an ~emotional connection~ ), but Mage looks like the character I'd switch to; the way LIGHTNIN' handles otherwise fiendishly-placed snipers and projectiles gives me "default character" armchair designer feels. Priest and her Barrier to a slightly lesser extent.

Same here. Terrible case of Ryu syndrome in most games, though the gentlemanly cane was too good to pass up in BB's case. Damn and blast the meta, wot!

Oh man, I totally forgot he was in that game! I wonder how many other things I blanked on, back in the late 90s, that would leap out at me now. I bet there's a ton. I'm actually more recently-acquainted with the SFC games, particularly the excellent second, whose title (and villain) directly reference Matthew Perry of Black Ships infamy. Whimsical historical revisionist fiction, wheee~ ^w^ (speaking of Baki!)

The first SNES game made many a round of after-the-fact emulated couch multiplayer BITD, though I'd not seen 2 - looks to be where all the stuff I know and love started out. Delighted to see the prelude to my inaugural what the fuck am i seeing moment, complete with mechaparody-staple reckless disregard for innocent buildings!

(Apropos of a small-scale rabbithole, it looks like Konami's descent into pachislot may have spawned the apex Impact fanservice at the opposite end of the series a flawlessly executed A-to-Z of Hissatsu Genkai Powah, tragically lost to offscreen cam footage!)

Still thoroughly gripped by Baki, on the topic - Yujiro might be the new top contender for charismatic villain. On to the Most Evil Death Row Convicts saga with gusto!

Shotgun Jimmy regards his NSFW Doom.

Holy subtext, batman! Wonder if the editor at Shonen Champion did a spit take when this monster landed on his desk

[Steven]

Leynos 2 Shit Tribute is coming: https://www.gematsu.com/2023/09/assault ... tch-and-pc

Why do they sometimes call these Saturn Tribute and sometimes S-Tribute? I don't get it.

New Snow Bros, too, and this time it's a completely different type of game than the previous ones. Their eyes look like they will suck your soul out...

https://www.gematsu.com/2023/09/snow-br ... and-switch

[XoPachi]

That new Contra they announced is so ungodly hideous. Can they please stop making Contra shit in the spirit and visage of the knockoff Tencent trash.
To think it was by WayForward who made one of the best playing and looking games in the series.

[BIL]

https://twitter.com/famitsu/status/1702596941144846359



Again, Legendary Men Return

Delighted to see the prelude to my inaugural what the fuck am i seeing moment, complete with mechaparody-staple reckless disregard for innocent buildings!

Unforgettable. IKUZO! ~MACHINE COMES ALIVE~ Rest well Mizuki-san. That was one hell of an introduction to the storied arts of HENSHIN NEKKETSU BGM

In hindsight, there was a distinct serendipity in GG64 reaching international shores near-unheralded. As a polygonal love letter to the SFC Impact trilogy, it's unmistakable; but as an amiably rambling exercise in cheerfully unelaborated-on madhattery, it's inimitable.

(Apropos of a small-scale rabbithole, it looks like Konami's descent into pachislot may have spawned the apex Impact fanservice at the opposite end of the series a flawlessly executed A-to-Z of Hissatsu Genkai Powah, tragically lost to offscreen cam footage!)

In my ideal future where Konami stop being shitbirds after going on two decades, there'll be an anthology box with all those pachi CGs we can enjoy without complicated feelings ;-;7 Some real vintage fire in that forlorn canon, despite the small matter of no fuckin games!

Still thoroughly gripped by Baki, on the topic - Yujiro might be the new top contender for charismatic villain. On to the Most Evil Death Row Convicts saga with gusto!

Shotgun Jimmy regards his NSFW Doom.

Holy subtext, batman! Wonder if the editor at Shonen Champion did a spit take when this monster landed on his desk

"Itagaki-san, what this in draft about Hard Black Dikku?"
"He's a tough Cuban detective! ;3 "
"Ah, s-soka."

[BryanM]

I plan to play this new and exciting Konami game sometime this month, so I might actually get a post in here that's 100% on topic.

As for Cadash, my soul screams Ninja. But my stupid brain knows that Cleric is broken as all hell. Which is just wrong.

Everyone knows that Ninjas are the best.

In theory I quite like PICO-8 and its creativity-through-limitations setup, particularly the asset / content side. Though in practice, we don't get on - it almost always turns into a Zachtronics exercise of wringing out every last undocumented trick, foolishly trying to build abstractions over them, then running out of code memory before getting to the game part.

I definitely have a wanting-just-a-bit-more syndrome with it as well.

My own toy project with it was hoping to make something bigger than Dragon Quest 1, in about a month or two. Spent about a week filing out the tilemap and planning out how data would be handled. Here's an example of the battle screen.

For the dungeon layouts, I wanted to do something like how Super Mario 1 encodes its levels: mainly just a sequence of floor rectangles. The walls would be drawn around the floors once the level loaded. And I'd have length+height be one byte: see, since there's really no difference between a hallway 11 tiles long than there is 10, I'd get more out of the data by having 11 represent ~15 tiles, 12 20, etc. So an entire dungeon floor could cover 256x256 tiles, four times the size of Dragon Warrior 1's overworld. With just ~200 bytes.

I love shit like that sometimes, it feels like cheating the universe. I imagine it's the same feeling some people have when they understand how busted and just wrong levers are.

Anyway, various things made me decide to discontinue it of course. Mainly when I thought about how there's no way everything would fit into ~32k. (Nine characters with 6 skills each! They'd all have to be damage/heal basic shite to save space!) And there's always a couple things I would have liked to change: a couple more pixels length+height on the sprites would do them a world of good, as would a more robust palette like the Atari 2600's. The idea of spending so much time on something then being unable to expand it is also anathema to me.

Also it's my crude understanding is the basic palette swap functionality is only frame-wide, and can't just be flipped before drawing one sprite. If DQ1 has palette swaps, I'll roll over in my grave while still alive if *I*'m not gonna get palette swaps.

I still think the Pico-8 deserves it's own serious RPG, but I think something more stupid that'd be more suited to an Atari 2600 than an NES would be better for it. Maybe some dumb Gachamon game with ~30 minute long runs and a ton of little 8x8 characters/enemies. It'd look pretty bad, but could be a lot of fun to play again and again.

It's aesthetics might be just passable with lots of 1x2 and 2x1 dudes.... ah, they are cute too, but the same foundational problems remain..

At this point I've concluded that I'm best at code, and thus the answer lies in building tooling that can turn terse code into decent art without needing to torture myself with asset-creation packages.

We had a thread about pixel ship generators a while back.

There's definitely a feel that if you want to generate ~90 thingys that feel different, you have to write like 30 different algorithms. The latent space within the algorithms of these 9-billion dimensional AI models can start to get a bit samey, what hope do mortal algorithms made by the hands of meat have....

This vastly depends on your skill and experience
I've made prototypes of more games than I can count over the past few decades, and the only ones I ever finished were ports with ready-made assets available to me.
Needing graphics for my projects is usually the primary showstopper, because creating effective sprites just isn't something I'm very effective at. And I pretty much always work in 16x16.

My achille's heel is definitely music. Just no real means to learn as a kid - society has collectively decided the only thing worth teaching (as an elective) is how to play an instrument and do it while reading sheet music. (Shit, cooking is kind of the same thing. "Follow the instructions. Don't bother to try to think about what you're actually doing." (Which is usually heating food until the water inside of it starts to almost, but not quite, boil off.))

You can read a book and learn programming, how to juggle, almost anything else. But not really here. You're left to bumble fuck around and teach yourself absolutely everything from scratch.

I still think all musicians are probably sex perverts who don't want to share their secrets with other people. Why else do they start the alphabet with "c" or use made-up words like "arpeggio"....

[Sumez]

My achille's heel is definitely music. Just no real means to learn as a kid - society has collectively decided the only thing worth teaching (as an elective) is how to play an instrument and do it while reading sheet music. (Shit, cooking is kind of the same thing. "Follow the instructions. Don't bother to try to think about what you're actually doing." (Which is usually heating food until the water inside of it starts to almost, but not quite, boil off.))

Oh, I can't do music for the hell of it. But unlike artwork, music is a lot easier to postpone, and some times might even be an advantage to not start working on until you've already go the feel of the game down, so a composer will know exactly what to aim for.

Maybe if I had absolutely no skill at art whatsoever, "programmer art" might be better for me to accept in the early stages of development, but I think even if you're expecting to replace every asset down the road, a big part of how a game feels to play, and in many cases also specific mechanics, do rely a lot on how objects look.
This might be less true for a shooter, but think about a beat'em up where the timing and movement of animations 100% informs both player feedback, hitboxes, i-frames and other subtle mechanics. That kind of stuff is really hard to mock up without something that at the very least appears somewhat final, and understands basic composition. I feel like most sprites in a video game exist somewhere on that spectrum.

But there is no way I'd partner up with a pixel artist for a project that might probably never take off - it's a lot "easier" to get to the point where you can actually showcase something promising or almost finished and then hire a composer to fill in the blanks.

[Lander]

Unforgettable. IKUZO! ~MACHINE COMES ALIVE~ Rest well Mizuki-san. That was one hell of an introduction to the storied arts of HENSHIN NEKKETSU BGM

It still tickles me that soulful supra-karaeoke (Hey!) was the hot blood of choice for japan's golden age works.
Not so dissimilar from its cheerful western equivalent, but with a marked lead in subject matter. BIFF! you say? I raise Mazinger cleaving a bitch as happy children sing his praises

In hindsight, there was a distinct serendipity in GG64 reaching international shores near-unheralded. As a polygonal love letter to the SFC Impact trilogy, it's unmistakable; but as an amiably rambling exercise in cheerfully unelaborated-on madhattery, it's inimitable.

And mercifully unspoiled, to boot! Fie to the man who tries to localize Japan itself; the blurry line between gen-u-wine ancient folklore and clown-geta silliness was always in the series' favour on foreign shores.

For the dungeon layouts, I wanted to do something like how Super Mario 1 encodes its levels: mainly just a sequence of floor rectangles. The walls would be drawn around the floors once the level loaded. And I'd have length+height be one byte: see, since there's really no difference between a hallway 11 tiles long than there is 10, I'd get more out of the data by having 11 represent ~15 tiles, 12 20, etc. So an entire dungeon floor could cover 256x256 tiles, four times the size of Dragon Warrior 1's overworld. With just ~200 bytes.

I love shit like that sometimes, it feels like cheating the universe. I imagine it's the same feeling some people have when they understand how busted and just wrong levers are.

That lightbulb moment of realizing some new abuse of numerical properties is so sweet. Tetris encoding its mino configurations and playfield matrix via arcane bit shifts was always a favourite - utterly impenetrable the first time you see source, and still wholly optimal on today's machines.

Also it's my crude understanding is the basic palette swap functionality is only frame-wide, and can't just be flipped before drawing one sprite. If DQ1 has palette swaps, I'll roll over in my grave while still alive if *I*'m not gonna get palette swaps.

That rings a bell; I recreated the Mickey Mania moose chase effect at one point, but ended up too constrained by color count to make it particularly impressive; a few low-detail repeating tiles at best.

TIC-80 has a more traditional scanline-based drawing function, but jumping to the wider universe of fantasy computer window shopping seemed like crossing a rubicon from which focused productivity may never recover...

We had a thread about pixel ship generators a while back.

There's definitely a feel that if you want to generate ~90 thingys that feel different, you have to write like 30 different algorithms. The latent space within the algorithms of these 9-billion dimensional AI models can start to get a bit samey, what hope do mortal algorithms made by the hands of meat have....

I'd be interested in the mentioned wall of text about your method, if you still have it to hand if I had to guess, it partitions space into contiguous regions for the broad strokes, then maps a spline or wave function through them to get the zigzag outline? Or perhaps some Mandelbrot-adjacent fractal magic; so many ways to do things.

My salve for algorithm overload has been functional programming. After the Monad fear check, there turn out to be ~16 algebras that subsume (and soundly thrash) the pesky My Patterns by John D. Programmer of imperative fame for gluing more interesting stuff together. Enough combinatorial space to give human intentionality a leg up, at any rate!

Anecdotally, I wasn't expecting AI art to appear in actual games so soon, but STATIS: Bone Totem (an otherwise well-executed horrifying pointy-click) has it all over the place for incidental stuff, complete with coincidentally-blurred hands! Unfortunate, since it has more than enough heeb jeebs without making you think about LLM singularities.

My achille's heel is definitely music.

Oh, for infinite time. My meager musical chops fell off after teenage, but there's part of me that feels like the just write a compiler lol approach could totally be applied to music as well.

There's a DJ live-coding thing called Sonic Pi that plus a scripting language into a synth, with all sorts of tantalizing note scales and arpeggiation functions to stick together. I dicked around making it play Amiga samples for a while, but it's too embedded to do much more than generate MP3s from samples or built-in synths.

[Sumez]

I missed this one

If DQ1 has palette swaps, I'll roll over in my grave while still alive if *I*'m not gonna get palette swaps.

There is no way DQ1 has mid-frame palette swaps. It's possible to do on NES, but it's complex and there's really no way to do it without screwing with sprite memory.
I mocked up a really nice prototype of an action RPG style game with a nice looking status bar up top using lots of different colors, while still freeing every palette needed for the backgrounds below. It was a hassle, but I eventually made it work in emulators with every hardware oddity emulation turned on, yet when trying it on actual hardware it still messed up things.

Startropics does the mid-frame palette swap and gets away with it because it has the status bar in the bottom and doesn't need to draw any more sprites at this point. It's the only game on the system I'm familiar with that does it, but there's bound to be a few more.

[XoPachi]

There was some game I remember seeing a few STG people playing like Jaimers. It was a doujin platformer RPG hybrid...thing. I think it was like 100 hours long and most of the assets were sprite edits with Mega Man Zero/ZX being a major influence both on look and combat. I cannot remember the name to save my life. What was that?

[BryanM]

I pasted your question to Bard and it's pretty convinced it's Valdis Story: Abyssal City. It'd be pretty funny if it was right; the death of google and forums all in one slice.

Other suggestions it gave when I pressed it for more output:

Cave Story (lololol)
Freedom Planet
Mighty No. 9
Azure Striker Gunvolt
Luminous Avenger IX

if I had to guess, it partitions space into contiguous regions for the broad strokes, then maps a spline or wave function through them to get the zigzag outline?

Nothing so exciting, just simple dumb brute force.

The red pixels show the outline of the scaffolding where the outer line cannot pass. It starts drawing a line from the top picking a random path until it reaches the center again on the bottom. "L" shaped paths aren't allowed. If a line doesn't meet the basic criteria, try it again.

As you can imagine, computation time scales exponentially with size. Fortunately, the biggest ships I show are about where it breaks down anyway. It looks way better with the smaller ships, more like Galaga than a Rorschach blob. Which was my hope and intention to get from it. One funny thing is when I was trying it out with Super Duper Duper big ships, is there would be times when the entirety of a RNG seed didn't generate a single viable line.

--

Anyway, I've been a little surprised at how little practical use messing with art has. Constantly mixing up swapping heads/clothes/weapons of the same kind of enemies just causes a confused jumble and makes it harder for a brain to learn silhouettes and response patterns. The best examples of it are things like the summoned skeletons in Diablo 2. Where it breaks up the sameyness of the blob, but you don't have to look at them or react to them so its ok.

Random terrain is indeed its crown jewel..... I do wish everyone on the planet would stop doing the Hack thing of nine boring rooms connected by corridors thing though. Monster Hunter has rooms connected by corridors, but it's so so much better.

Anecdotally, I wasn't expecting AI art to appear in actual games so soon

I was gathering Waifu Labs portraits for use in an "AI Waifu Dungeon" kind of game years ago (another thing doomed to never be finished). All of which look like dogshit by what's possible with LORA's+inpainting and all that. I think a lot of people have the feeling of "if I just wait another year or three, the tools available then will just blow what's possible now out of the water." Not sure if that's completely true unless they invent AGI within that time.

Things have finally gotten to a point where they feel pretty stable, relatively. If something looks good today it'll still look good decades from now. Real games are totally gonna start being packed with the stuff, which is why so many people were freaking out over it. They know it doesn't look like shit. They know humanity is screwed.

Ah, for some reason this reminded me of video game superstar Limbo of the Lost (LOL).

I missed this one

There is no way DQ1 has mid-frame palette swaps. It's possible to do on NES, but it's complex and there's really no way to do it without screwing with sprite memory.

Oh, no no no. It's a Pico-8 thing.

The Pico-8 has a global palette of 16 colors which... is way better than what the NES has, just by not having Black take up 33% of all colors. It's closer to a Master System. I'd say worse, but, sometimes I wonder who decided on the final system palettes of these old systems. I know there's hardware constraints, but golly. The old 3-bit color on PC's really takes the cake - 100% cyan and magenta are the kinds of colors basically only perverts ever want to use.

Anyway, swapping colors on the Pico-8 is a global thing, and not something that's an option if something else on screen uses the same color. There's almost certainly a way to change the colors of a sprite by rewriting them during runtime, which could have met most of my needs (simply recolor monsters while the battle loads; no palette swaps of the same monster on screen at the same time..... wait actually that would have screwed me over bigtime, since I wanted to use character sprites as enemies as well!); while the Pico-8 simulates old systems with most of its limitations, one thing it has is an unrealistically high amount of horsepower. (It really is great for making Shm'ups, making something like Recca but better is trivial in the thing.)

But like with everything else, that will eat up a game's limited space. Cart swapping is a thing some people do, but I feel like it's cheating and feel like it defeats the point. By that point, just don't make it a Pico-8 game!

I am always interested about midframe color swapping on old systems though. The Atari 2600 is a particularly insidious beast; the guy who made that Homestar Runner RPG mockup prototype is pretty memorable.



(As an aside, does anyone know of a good-looking NES game that doesn't use dark matte outlining on sprites?)

[XoPachi]

It's not Valdis Story. I have that.
I know it's none of those others as well. It almost looked like a ROM hack. I could have *sworn* Jaimers played it, but I don't see it on his channel.

EDIT: Distorted Travesty!

[Volteccer_Jack]

The Distorted Travesty games are very good, in a romhack-y sort of way. Well worth enduring the rough edges. Same goes for Valdis Story honestly.

And yeah, DT3 is like 70 hours for a first playthrough.

[BryanM]

The GameHut guy being mentioned made me check out what he was up to these days. I have some complicated feelings about it. The worst part is the pandering works so well.

For effort/reward, there was an artist who mentioned how much work similar palette cycling effects took to do on the 256 color adventure games he worked on. For a water effect, a couple of days. For snow, a week. For a screen a player would walk past in a couple seconds.

From my recent playthrough of Dragon Quest Monsters Joker 4 and its sparse world with a lot of handcrafted 3d geometry.... I think tiles are super incredibly amazing now...

[mycophobia]

The GameHut guy being mentioned made me check out what he was up to these days.

good lord

[Sumez]

This guy based his entire career around making licensed games (disney, sonic, crash bandicoot, etc) until his company eventually found a permanent niche with the branded Lego games (Star Wars, Batman, Harry Potter, etc.) which is like two IP licenses at once.
This game should come as no surprise.

[Sumez]

Allow me to shill a game that to my knowledge has never been mentioned on this forum during the ~20 years it has existed:

Baluba-Louk No Densetsu



It's an old-school arcade platformer probably more akin to the Heiankyo Alien / Pac-Man / Donkey Kong / Flicky / Mappy school of arcade games rather than pure R2R, given you have no direct way of attacking enemies, but I think its frantic sense of action would be right up the alley of most people who appreciate laser-focused arcade-style action games.

I'm drunk-commentating a live 1-ALL run by a friend in this Twitch video, which I think showcases the qualities of the game super well, full of thrilling clutch moments: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1927035922?t=04h56m10s


It's not just an incredibly obscure game, that even hardcore gaming 101 hasn't discovered, but also a really expensive PCB. I think a part of that obscurity is owed to the ambiguity of who made it. As in, it's credited to "Able Corp", but I would be incredibly surprised if it wasn't made by Tecmo! It was released pretty much immediately before Tehkan turned into Tecmo, so there's no doubt some corporate legal shenanigans going on. The code holds music and artist credits shared across earlier Tehkan games, and definitely shares more than a few similarities to Bomb Jack. It's also the only "non-Tehkan" game on the hardware it was designed for.

At a glance it looks like just a variation on Bomb Jack - pick up every chest without getting eaten by enemies and move on to the next stage.
But there's a twist to it, before picking up chests you can jump into them from below to open them up, revealing either a weapon or more points that you will acquire when picking it up. Activate a weapon chest twice, and it'll leave a trap which is one of only two ways to outright destroy enemies. Destroy an enemy with a trap and it will leave a powerup which will either increase your score multiplier or help with survival via effects like warp points or a rare cloud you can fly around on. There are a bunch of things you can get, which all work together in a nice synergy.

It's really a shame this game is confined to such obscurity. I'd hope that one day it gets an Arcade Archives port, but I wonder if anyone even owns the right to it, given its confusing copyright statement.

[BIL]

Baluba-Louk No Densetsu

Ah, man - it's bugging the hell out of me trying to remember where I've heard that name, and Able Corp's, before. I seem to recall going balls-out on early third-party obscurities for the FC, a few years back, and may've tangentially run across it then (along with stuff like Challenger and Raid on Bungeling Bay).

Superb and much-needed writeup, marked for index! Indeed, I'd love to see Hamster cover that one, especially as - sadly unlike erstwhile stalwarts IREM, Technos, and SNK - they've continued to release Tecmo/Tehkan stuff.

[Bassa-Bassa]

It's really a cool one, albeit a bit oldish for 1986. Authorship is attributed to Vic Tokai with help indeed from Tecmo, as Able was a publisher/distributor with no actual development resources. Makes sense if only because Vic Tokai themselves would make of it a series a bit later with Aegina no Yogen for the FC.

[BIL]

Vic Tokai themselves would make of it a series a bit later with Aegina no Yogen for the FC.

Aha! That's where I heard of the earlier game. Thanks, that really was gonna drive me up a wall until lunchtime.