Ninja Gaiden [NES] + R2RKMF: Scrolling Action Monogatari

[Sumez]

Which leads to the only complaint I've ever seen, namely that Tengo Project remakes do not take the place of the originals. Because of the 16:9 play field and some other gameplay changes, the original versions are still desirable to play for purists.

That's a complaint??

[Sima Tuna]

Which leads to the only complaint I've ever seen, namely that Tengo Project remakes do not take the place of the originals. Because of the 16:9 play field and some other gameplay changes, the original versions are still desirable to play for purists.

That's a complaint??

Not for me, no. But the only bitching I've ever heard about Tengo Project games is some people don't like them as much as the originals. Primarily because of either relative difficulty or aspect ratio. I have never heard any other complaints.

[Sumez]

I think I do ultimately prefer OG TNWA over the remake, and I'm undecided on Wild Guns since I still haven't learned to single player it in 16:9 (though it's a god damn riot in co-op).
But that doesn't translate to complaints. I think it's great that they offer something different. It doesn't have to be better.

Of course, TNWA having five viable characters that all feel unique, over the two(!) in the original, is an objective improvement. But I'm only playing as Ninja anyway, and I still god damn love the remake.

[BIL]

TNWA/OA in particular play very differently, despite sharing the same foundation. While both are great speed games, Once Again's huge crowds+combos+playfields give it an almost Block Sorter vibe; much more liberty to hackysack the horde into a nice neat pile, escaping to the freedom if things go south. Meanwhile, the SFC game puts all of four enemies onscreen, but they can surround you with shocking abruptness; gives it a grittier survivalist tenor, opposite OA's performance ceiling.

I actually prefer SFC Guns to Reloaded; the shorter, simpler stages are undeniably easier to dominate, but I like the foot-to-floorboards pace that brings. It's the sort of feelgood game I can 1ALL absolutely any night of the week. Reloaded is a more technical affair on sheer survival alone, never mind score.

Both sets are must-haves. The only thing more shocking than Natsume returning from exile without missing a step is their continuing onward for five games and counting. NGL, either Shatterhand or Dragon Fighter would've been my pick, but I like that they've gone for a different genre with each so far.

My dream of dreams remains The Ninja Warriors 2. Just 2. WILD THE FUCK OUT ALREADY

[Sumez]

I loudly wished for, yet didn't truly believe in, Shatterhand when they first started out. At this point I believe only those two games are actually left remaining - unless you want to count Pocky 2 (seems redundant since Reshrined is basically already a sequel), and that Power Rangers game (licensing issues, as well as seemingly a game they didn't care too hard about anyway)

Both Shatterhand and Dragon Fighter remakes would be amazing to see, and at this point I could wish for nothing more, outside of them simply just taking on another brand new IP.
But it'll probably be a couple years before we'll even see anything from Final Mission: More Finaler - Though, roughly one and a half year between Kiki Kaikai and Kage seems like a decent turnaround.

[Air Master Burst]

I guess what I'm saying is 4:3 would never work in their remakes, because they'd be chopping off part of the play field. The games are built for native 16:9.

Sonic Mania pulls this off pretty well, although admittedly it's a much simpler game than these.

There are few things more jarring to me than an old style CRT filter on a widescreen game, but it's the only way to make pixel art look right.

I guess the obvious solution would just be to get a 16:9 CRT at some point.

At this point I believe only those two games are actually left remaining - unless you want to count Pocky 2 (seems redundant since Reshrined is basically already a sequel), and that Power Rangers game (licensing issues, as well as seemingly a game they didn't care too hard about anyway)

Didn't they also do Power Blade?

I'd love to see them take another crack at Natsume Championship Wrestling. Or get real crazy and update Dungeon Magic.

[Sumez]

I wouldn't have considered Power Blade before, since none of the Tengo members were involved with that. But to my knowledge, they weren't involved in Final Mission either, so I guess anything goes.

[Sir Ilpalazzo]

Rastan II does stink. Having gotten a bumpy clear in it it at the end of last year, there is some fun to using some of the weapons - combining the rapid claws with the lightning powerup to turn their unsatisfying tiny hitbox into a huge wall, or slipping around enemies' guard with the broadsword's huge, meaty swings - but the action is very weak. It's slow, full of obnoxious forced waiting for random enemy cycles that doesn't pair well with the game's strict timers, and more often than not is a strict, unintuitive memorizer. I wouldn't call the game absolutely awful or joyless - it's certainly not good but its memorizer qualities make it a little interesting in a puzzle-like way, and its soundtrack is one of Ogura's best. But it's nowhere near the first game's classic status.

On Tengo Project's stuff, I'm definitely in the camp that prefers the SNES originals, though I haven't had the chance to play Reshrined yet. I still think Reloaded and Once Again are phenomenal games, but neither of them exactly match the games they're based on. Wild Guns loses a lot of its particular cadence and flow by stretching the playing field out, which makes its action feel less kinetic (on top of it just being easier) and as BIL said, Ninja Warriors turns into a little more of a speedrun / high-performance assault course game than a raw survival challenge due to its weaker enemies, which is still very appealing, but less so than what the original was going for. (I would disagree on the bosses being powered up though; I think most of them save stage 7's Zelos are actually effectively weaker - they don't even have wakeup iframes to save them from grabs anymore, despite crowd control being easier in the remake than the original.)

But those first two games still rule even if they don't replace the originals. It's just kind of a shame because their aesthetics are so masterfully done, and they are such miracle releases, that I kind of wish they had been good enough to outmode the SNES games. This is kind of why I'm particularly excited for Kage, since I think the original is decidedly one of Natsume's weaker NES games, and it's likely the new version will end up a lot more polished and palatable. (Unfortunately I like SCAT even less, and I would have been much more excited for Shatterhand or Dragon Fighter, but for the same reason I'm extremely interested to see what Tengo does with it.)

[BIL]

Rastan II does stink. Having gotten a bumpy clear in it it at the end of last year, there is some fun to using some of the weapons - combining the rapid claws with the lightning powerup to turn their unsatisfying tiny hitbox into a huge wall, or slipping around enemies' guard with the broadsword's huge, meaty swings - but the action is very weak. It's slow, full of obnoxious forced waiting for random enemy cycles that doesn't pair well with the game's strict timers, and more often than not is a strict, unintuitive memorizer. I wouldn't call the game absolutely awful or joyless - it's certainly not good but its memorizer qualities make it a little interesting in a puzzle-like way, and its soundtrack is one of Ogura's best. But it's nowhere near the first game's classic status.

Ha, I had no idea OGR did the music! That explains absolutely everything, down to the expertly oneiric vocal fx. It's so damn good, just about hauling the game back from the brink of instant dismissal. Cheers for the weapons info, I did suspect there was some quality hiding in there.

God damn, that's another Haunted Castle connection. Storming OSTs paired to middling-at-best melee sidescrollers from 1988. Well, HC falls off in the middle, but it explodes back up at the end, inspiring this utter beast from Shibata, Shimizu & co.

[Sima Tuna]

I'm excited for SCAT (heh) because I don't particularly like it. I want to see how Tengo Project update and improve the game into something that's not only beautiful (as always) but fun to play.

I don't really agree that Kage is one of their weaker games, but I haven't played it very much. I think a cleaned-up and dramatically improved Kage has the potential to be one of the best things Tengo Project has ever released, in an already stellar library of absolute bangers.

... Granted, I felt that way about Pocky and Rocky Reshrined, but then didn't gel with that game as much as some others... That was primarily down to the lack of lock-strafe on the majority of characters. I wanted a control setup a little closer to Shock Troopers than the pure kiki kaikai moveshoot we got. S'all good though. I still need to go back and give it more time.

[Air Master Burst]

I wouldn't have considered Power Blade before, since none of the Tengo members were involved with that. But to my knowledge, they weren't involved in Final Mission either, so I guess anything goes.

Yeah, I assume any original IP Natsume developed is fair game at this point. They also seem to have Taito's blessing at least; if they could convince Bandai to get on board I'd love a modern Endless Waltz update. Their SNES Power Rangers games were also solid, although I'm more excited to see what Digital Eclipse does with Rita Rewind (already mentally prepared for the disappointment of an i-frame dodge roll). I'm not familiar with any of their later licensed work apart from their decidedly unimpressive game boy wrestling games, but it mostly appears to be a steady churn of generic drek.

[Ghegs]

The next Tengo Project game, after Kage, seems to be a remake of Final Mission / SCAT. Like Shadow of the Ninja, this is definitely one I'd like to see them update and polish up, so I'm curious how this will turn out too.

That's great news. That type of multidirectional shmuppin' is a niche within a niche, and I like those a lot.

[Marc]

Why the fuck does jump on Arcade Kung-Fu Master not work properly?

[BrianC]

Why the fuck does jump on Arcade Kung-Fu Master not work properly?

Arcade as in actual PCB, or emulated like MAME? It works oddly because the game uses a 4-way stick and still uses up to jump. I like the game itself, but this design has me shaking my head.

Rastan Saga 2 is a guilty pleasure for me. Flawed game, but the oddness factor is high. Does that voice really say "Yes, we do!" when inserting a coin?

[cfx]

.

[Marc]

Why the fuck does jump on Arcade Kung-Fu Master not work properly?

Arcade as in actual PCB, or emulated like MAME? It works oddly because the game uses a 4-way stick and still uses up to jump. I like the game itself, but this design has me shaking my head.

Currently a few different versions of MAME and Antstream. Antstream even maps it to a button, and even then it simply jumps straight up half the time. It's a game I'd love to learn, but the first half of ST2 is torture because of this.

A 4-way stick, as in the same way I can set the Egret Mini's arcade stick to 4-way? How the FUCK is that supposed to work?

Anyone know if this 'feature' is still present in the PS1 / Saturn ports?

[Sumez]

I've only played Kung Fu Master on actual arcade cabs, and I can confirm, the jumping is weird as heck. It's pretty consistent, but it's not intuitive.

[Bassa-Bassa]

I'd love to see them take another crack at Natsume Championship Wrestling. Or get real crazy and update Dungeon Magic.

Light Bringer? I don't think there was any involvement of Natsume there. Maybe you're confusing it with Riding Fight?


RE: Tengo Project remakes.

Biggest complaint from me is that they are forcing modern phylosophy nonsense into games which responded to arcade ethos like no other. The idea of making you finish (therefore, spoil) easy mode Kiki Kaikai to unlock its natural mode, or of forcing you to play 4P mode Wild Guns to get the hard course in multiplayer... that stuff. It's like they're too afraid of journalists and Steam policies to really make what they want.

That's why I'm afraid of they redesigning Final Mission for analog twin sticks. The only complaint I recall reading about Kiki Kaikai was that one, I think even on this forum. And they already tried it with Omega 5, after all.

A real shame besides is that these games are basically getting the best pixel art made in recent times yet you can't display them 1:1 on any ordinary CRT at full width due to the odd resolution mode their assets use or other problems. And the CRT filters they feature for flat screens are suboptimal, as usual. They could have kept the original 224/240 vertical resolution and just enlarge the horizontal resolution if a wide format was ever-so-important. There's always a way too big viewport as they are now, indeed.

[Air Master Burst]

Light Bringer? I don't think there was any involvement of Natsume there. Maybe you're confusing it with Riding Fight?

No, the Wizardry-style rpg they did on NES in 1989. I would never confuse Riding Fight with anything else because Riding Fight is one of my favorite arcade games! Also I don't recall Natsume having any involvement in Riding Fight.

A real shame besides is that these games are basically getting the best pixel art made in recent times yet you can't display them 1:1 on any ordinary CRT at full width due to the odd resolution mode their assets use or other problems.

They are not alone, lots of my pretty modern pixel art games have native widescreen resolutions and it's a total bummer. I'm actually picking up a G1-modded Trinitron later today so I was just looking over my PC collection to see what would work best, and the results were depressing.

At this point I think it mostly depends on what they use to make them.

[Bassa-Bassa]

No, the Wizardry-style rpg they did on NES in 1989. I would never confuse Riding Fight with anything else because Riding Fight is one of my favorite arcade games! Also I don't recall Natsume having any involvement in Riding Fight.

Dungeon & Magic originally, it seems. Not sure I even was aware of that. A shame if some of the best developers of action games still active get their time dedicated to turn-based RPGs, if you ask me.

And yeah, Natsume was involved at least in Riding Fight's graphics:

https://g16.hatenablog.com/entry/2023/01/17/181219

A real shame besides is that these games are basically getting the best pixel art made in recent times yet you can't display them 1:1 on any ordinary CRT at full width due to the odd resolution mode their assets use or other problems.

They are not alone, lots of my pretty modern pixel art games have native widescreen resolutions and it's a total bummer. I'm actually picking up a G1-modded Trinitron later today so I was just looking over my PC collection to see what would work best, and the results were depressing.

At this point I think it mostly depends on what they use to make them.

I hate it, but I can perfectly understand that wide screen formats are being used even for this kind of games. My lament was that they could be wide format and still be suitable for ordinary CRTs - many modern games use 427x240 or even less which you can display at 240p with the proper hardware, you just don't fill the screen vertically. Many others use 640x360, which you can display like a 640x480 game with black horizontal borders as well on a VGA monitor. But the 480x270 or whatever these Tengo games are using are only good, if anything, for upscaling to flat panels resolutions, which nobody gives a shit to do properly anyway.

[BrianC]

Why the fuck does jump on Arcade Kung-Fu Master not work properly?

Arcade as in actual PCB, or emulated like MAME? It works oddly because the game uses a 4-way stick and still uses up to jump. I like the game itself, but this design has me shaking my head.

Currently a few different versions of MAME and Antstream. Antstream even maps it to a button, and even then it simply jumps straight up half the time. It's a game I'd love to learn, but the first half of ST2 is torture because of this.

A 4-way stick, as in the same way I can set the Egret Mini's arcade stick to 4-way? How the FUCK is that supposed to work?

Anyone know if this 'feature' is still present in the PS1 / Saturn ports?

You have to press up while moving to do a moving jump. It's super weird because the game doesn't let you press left or right and jump at the same time.

[Air Master Burst]

Dungeon & Magic originally, it seems. Not sure I even was aware of that. A shame if some of the best developers of action games still active get their time dedicated to turn-based RPGs, if you ask me.

And yeah, Natsume was involved at least in Riding Fight's graphics:

https://g16.hatenablog.com/entry/2023/01/17/181219

They don't seem to be credited anywhere (at least in the US version), and I can't translate that page at the moment, but if that's true it's HUGE and gives me BIG HOPE!

Dungeon Magic is actually real-time like Eye of the Beholder; it wouldn't be my preference either, but it's another option if their mandate is strictly updating old Natsume games and not making new ones.

[Bassa-Bassa]

It's not a widely known thing, it seems, but it's true, I heard about that too long ago to remember. That linked page just lists the names from the credits. Though don't get it wrong - unlike with Ninja Warriors Again, Natsume seems to just be a co-developer here, the game's core seems to be Taito's.

[Sumez]

[The only complaint I recall reading about Kiki Kaikai was that one, I think even on this forum.

By people who hadn't even played the game no less. It's such a dumb non-issue.
I also don't really see how that connects to "modern philosophy". Locking hard mode behind a clear of normal mode was extremely common in the 8- and 16-bit eras. Hell nearly every classic Castlevania game does it, either by looping or an unlock as on Bloodlines.

[BIL]

Man, I just got disabused hard of my distant fondness for AC Jackal, out today on ACA. It's got the worst camera tracking and FOV issues I've seen in any topdown run/gun, bar none. Middle third debuts a policy of total blindfold straitjacket memorisation that only worsens further in.

Guevara has bouts of this, but once you adjust, it merely opens up the game beneath the scuff. Jackal is pretty much all scuff. There's perishingly little besides "know where thing is and shoot it the instant you scroll it onscreen an inch from your jeep." No sense of tactical or technical prowess, just "remember where the instakill turret is and press button." No catharsis either; forget cracking a wicked chokepoint and demolishing all beneath your treads; the stage design in the back half is so claustrophobic you can hardly wedge your pong paddle hitbox through.

A shame, as it's lovely to look at.

This is why I blind buy stuff, even very cheap stuff, so rarely. I'll only jump in if I know that, in the event I get PWNed, I'll at least be edified. So yeah, sorry for regarding you as lesser in recent years, old faithful NES Jackal! A legit rehabilitation of a promising but busted-to-fuck arcade title.

Happily, I feel refreshed about nailing down that Guevara 1LC.

The 1950s - Somewhere in A Country Ruled By A Dictator (tm/c SNK):

DOWN ON THE CORNUH ♫
OUT IN THE STREET ♫
WILLEH AND THE FASFGASGASDFDFHDSAFH BAND ♫
W/THE NEW OL' HANDEH BEAT ♫

Mama mia! This newfangeld wireless from Another Country sure is fun! What do you think, Tied Up Dissident Dude? Wait, what's that sou - OH HELL NO

AIEEEE

Spoiler

Behold, even more Power Of Leaving Furniture Intact. Turn that alleyway firefight meatgrinder into a Mechanised Metal Massacre! I shoulda linked that with Metal Slug X and The Super Shinobi, in my post up there re: Ninja Ryukenden!

[cfx]

.

[Bassa-Bassa]

As pointed, it's not just a matter of considering the existence of CRT users (which I wouldn't ever expect if only because the systems these games run on just aren't suitable for CRTs as such), I strongly believe that all these remakes would benefit from a smaller viewport. Kiki Kaikai feels a bit too slow, Wild Guns is a bit too overwhelming, and while Ninja Warriors is fine, loses a bit of the visual impact from the original game despite the sprites being technically even bigger.

I also don't really see how that connects to "modern philosophy". Locking hard mode behind a clear of normal mode was extremely common in the 8- and 16-bit eras. Hell nearly every classic Castlevania game does it, either by looping or an unlock as on Bloodlines.

They locked arcade mode behind story mode, though. Not the same thing and there's the extra characters thing. This unlock stuff mentality sounds particularly modern to me, but likely I consider modern anything post year 2000, so bear with me. I wouldn't ever say that locking hard modes was "extremely common" in earlier eras anyway, but indeed it's not modern philosophy per se.

[Sir Ilpalazzo]

Speaking of the first few Tengo games, I don't think anything about them would be compromised if they had been 4:3 instead of 16:9. Wild Guns just feels like a game where the basic essentials of play control - the speed of the cursor, the amount of time it takes to go from one end of the screen to the other and back again, from enemy to enemy to bullet to enemy - were very tightly wound in order to create a particular feeling, and the remake stretching the playing field out makes the game feel looser and a bit more sedate. It isn't bad in any way, of course, but it doesn't have the exact flow of the original and does feel weaker in direct comparison.

Ninja Warriors is the more obviously-indirect conversion since that game is very much balanced around the player and enemies having specific attack ranges and timings that are tuned for that particular playfield; widening the game space without giving most enemies much to compensate makes it feel immediately milder than the original. (Again though, the remake obviously leans into this different mode of design by also buffing the player characters dramatically and incentivizing efficient play even harder through the game-long timer and speedrun trophies.)

Echoing Bassa here but this is pretty clearly not an issue of aesthetics or wanting the games to display on CRTs; the remakes are just slightly compromised mechanically as a direct result of reworking tightly-designed 4:3 games into 16:9 play spaces. They are still fantastic games by any measure, but in a direct comparison I'd still take the SNES originals in the case of these first two.

[cfx]

.

[Air Master Burst]

Updating them while changing effectively nothing is a waste of their talents in my opinion.

And not offering a way to display them in the proper fashion is a waste of the artists' talents in my opinion.

These games are inherently compromised on HD screens. Filters can only do so much. And it's not even like most of these modern games have sprites that are any bigger than old-school sprites. Shovel Knight is still only 24 pixels tall.

if they're going to stick to original resolutions and aspect ratio, why bother to remake the games at all?

To change the gameplay? Sonic Mania did it.