Ninja Gaiden [NES] + R2RKMF: Scrolling Action Monogatari

[BIL]

If anyone is interested in the long form, please raise your hands.
I feel that I can make your eyes roll in despair by the third line or so, or your money back.

The people demand more Randoposts! (｀w´メ)

And if they don't, I'll see to it they do! (■｀w´■)（＾w´ ）

[BrianC]

There's a thought, did Run'n'Gun and other such actiony genres ever get the Filthy Euro malignment as badly as shmups did?

Besides Turrican there's also Skeleton Krew and Alien Carnage, but most janky western run and guns are american stuff like Alien 3 or Jazz Jackrabbit. It probably helps that these games don't suck as bad as your average euroshmup, even shit like Bio Menace plays ok.

ETA: Pretty sure Dinosaurs For Hire was made by americans too.

Alien 3 for Genesis was designed by Probe Software in the UK.

[BIL]

I remember Dinos 4 Hire being kinda ok, in my little boy brain. Nothing I was compelled to seek out later, but I recall it doing well in rotation with Dynamite Headdy and Splatterhouse 3.

Normally I'd withhold comment, but I distinctly recall Alien 3 being tragic, and Robocop vs Terminator falling far short of its winning style. And revisiting as a grown-ass mayne I was quite correct on both counts.

(I later became the most degenerate man in all of history by picking up a pristine NTSCJ Robo, which I own to this day )

You know what's non-Nihongo and will rock ur fukken box? Sub-Terrania. God damn, that one sits alongside Toyota-sama's Ex-Ranza in my Inertia Done RITE file.

[it290]

There's a thought, did Run'n'Gun and other such actiony genres ever get the Filthy Euro malignment as badly as shmups did?

I don't remember it being so bad, but being weaned on Jean Claude Van Damme's Turrican probably skews the perspective a bit.
And, late realizations, they totally lifted the Contra logo for that backdrop

The Amiga was home to a million action platformers and run and guns. Some noteworthy ones:

• Lionheart: one of, if not possibly the best Amiga games, this is a highly methodical barbarian platform game with a somewhat unique control scheme (make sure to play in 2-button mode!). Stunning pixel work by Henk Nieborg that is only made better by some canny use of the Amiga's copper to change palette mid-refresh.
• Wolfchild: a cool horror platformer by Core Design. Stylish enemy and level designs, let down by the typical overly aggressive Euro difficulty. The game is fun when you are fully powered up, but taking damage will reduce you back to wimp mode where your attacks have a pitifully short range. Could have been saved with some light rebalancing.
• Ruff 'n' Tumble: another Amiga gem with stunning graphics, this one also suffers from a poor frame rate and overly tuned difficulty. Still a fun game to give a go at once in a while.

[it290]

Normally I'd withhold comment, but I distinctly recall Alien 3 being tragic, and Robocop vs Terminator falling far short of its winning style. And revisiting as a grown-ass mayne I was quite correct on both counts.

I had the Alien 3 Genesis cart as a kid and got good enough at the game that I could fairly easily beat it, which is incredible to me now given how memorization-heavy it is (there's no way you will clear most of the later levels without knowing where all the prisoners are ahead of time).

I can guarantee you most of the contemporary reviewers did not play through the entire game, because there exists a bug whereupon jumping on a particular elevator about 3/4 way through the game will trigger a hard lock about 50% of the time. Was always a delight hitting that section and rolling the dice as to whether your run could continue or not.

[BIL]

I can guarantee you most of the contemporary reviewers did not play through the entire game, because there exists a bug whereupon jumping on a particular elevator about 3/4 way through the game will trigger a hard lock about 50% of the time. Was always a delight hitting that section and rolling the dice as to whether your run could continue or not.

Ah man, I didn't even know about that! Another Bug Hunt indeed.

[Bassa-Bassa]

Wasn't MCD Terminator more or less decent, at least?

MAME, with some pretty horrible lag/emulation issues. I don't have any PCB set-up at the moment. I would say that part of the experience was just learning how to play some stages with random frame-skipping inconsistent frame rates (e.g. Second Key to Third Key's stages).

Did you find any glitches aside of that (which, I understand, it's due to performance)? I'm always tempted to try it but given Mame's usually poor attempt at emulating late 2D Konami games, I can never get motivated enough.

[Randorama]

Birru-dono:

Thanks for the pollice recto (i.e. "thumbs up, lad"). To celebrate the seal of approval, I'd post an old Berkeley Breathed's Opus Sunday strip that ended with Opus being dragged away by Milo Bloom and screaming "Stupid Incompetent Masses!!!" after a tense discussion on Opus' absolutely questionable taste, but I am too lazy to find it

I am going to spend some time putting all the pieces together, before posting the final version. The reference to The Gamer's Quarter is not casual, because playing this title for the clear really became a mildly surreal journey towards a goal every bit as pointless as mid-life goals are ("zomg the 1-CC's! I paid my mortgages and my retirement plan looks solid, but I must lose sleep over something because I am 40-something and I must feel in control over each single facet of my life!!1!").

I believe that writing an overly verbose and self-indulgent article of moderate length on this game could provide me a sense of catharsis that would be equal or even higher to that of seeing some old foe's corpse floating on the proverbial nearby river. If it makes a few people on the int3rwebs smile/frown/etc., I consider myself having been brought back to the realm of normal human beings, too - hermit life due to work/training/videogame zealotry tends to have preoccupying effects on the psyche (...short version: if someone likes the piece, I am happy - I spent a few crazy months and my brain produces Academia jargon even as a reply to someone just saying "hello, s'up matey").

Bassa-Bassa:

I am relatively sure that in some cases emulation assigns hits in an incorrect manner.

The crimson warriors with the dual swords and the blue and orange warriors with the shields can, in certain situations, increase their hitting range and/or become able to hit when knocked down. In the first case, you can expect the enemies to hit from roughly twice their standard range. If you are keeping your shield up (hold A/attack button), you will parry without problem, but the animation will look awkward - as if the character parried from an invisible projectile. For the knock-down bug...under certain situations, if you knock down one of those two enemy types and you are too close to them, they will somehow hit you and cause un-parried damage.

I would also say that the third key bosses (ST 14) seem to have some extra bugs that were not present in the arcade version. Some attacks from "Maxima", the second Mecha-like boss on ST 14, seem to also have abnormal range and deal exaggerated damage levels (four-five bars of energy, which is half of your life, when no attack should deal more than three bars).

The first bug seems to occur more often when the enemies attack from vertical lines: the game has TATE/vertical orientation, and vertical attacks seem somehow to involve some dubious hit assignments anyway. I have no idea on when the second bug (i.e. the knock-down bug) becomes active, but there are two stages in which it can become an issue: "Dark Corridor" (ST 8 ) and "Los" (ST 12).

I played the game in the arcade in 1994, which is why this was a 30- or 31-years old grudge (it was released in 1993), so my memories of the game cannot be perfect. However, I am quite sure that these bugs are indigenous to MAME: the third one, in particular, is something I never, ever experienced in the arcade, but that occurs one play out of 10 or so in MAME.

I believe that it is actually possible to tweak settings in MAME to get a proper framerate most of the time, even though stages 10-13 simply make the game stutter (I played them at a fixed frame-skipping rate to avoid sudden stuttering, at some point). This is actually quite perplexing because other Konami from the same year and hardware (e.g. Violent Storm) run fine without much tweaking.

I actually love the game, and I understand that it can run relatively well on a decent computer (mine is from 2015, so...). However, I'd suggest to steer clear from it if you cannot find a way to run it at full speed and you are not able to endure frame-skipping at all. You'd be driven to seething rage sooner or later - I definitely had tons of moments in which I rage-quit and had to chew the table or something, to calm down.

...Anyway, I will expand more in the full post on the toopic.

[Bassa-Bassa]

Are you using a Mame version previous to v0.239? There was a tweak just before which "fixed Gaiapolis ranges", though I don't really know if it has to do with what you mention. It's a game with not few revisions originally, on the other hand, so who knows. As for graphic glitches (priority errors, blending issues, etc.), was it OK to your eyes?

[Randorama]

Bassa-Bassa:

v0.184, as I haven't bothered with updates in years, by now. ST 11 ("Aleista") has/had a a priority problem, in that the mist floating over the stage is supposed to create a translucency effect ("let's add a mist effect over the sprites"), but often the impression is that it appears on the action plane ("I cannot fully see my sprite due to the mist"). There are other similar problems here and there. As for blending issues, I am not really sure because I am not sure what blending exactly is (combining sprites and backgrounds together?), but I'd say that there are some spots with massive slowdown due to background effects such as waterfalls (ST 2, "NeoMosc") or rotating objects (ST 15, "Gaiapolis"). I would venture and say that "Gaiapolis ranges" is about attack ranges and damage levels in the game, which again are buggy in the version I played: I had a quick run before, and I had a situation in which a crimson warrior apparently hit my parrying character at the bottom of the screen, from the top of the screen (i.e. at four, five time the expected range). It's rare but infuriating, honestly.

To cut a long story short, I had to learn the game and its numerous bugs in v.0184, to get a 1-CC. If new MAME versions solve all the various emulation problems it would be good, even the game is quirky in its mechanics (I will write more on this topic, in the write-up), and remarkably long (a 1-CC will be a 1+ hour ordeal, even if you speed-kill just about everyone). It was really a matter of being stubborn on some old and pointless grudge...though I admit that the OST might my most beloved soundtrack from a Videogame, ever.

[Sumez]

I've been meaning to get back to a Gaiapolis 1CC some time, my PCB has been sitting almost entirely unused since I got it.
The thing is, whenever I'm in the mood for these types of games, my cab monitor is rarely in vertical orientation.

Also, there's no lack of euro run'n'guns. It's probably even more prevalent than euro shmups tbh.
Comparably, there's actually not even that many Japanese run'n'guns. Outside of the big names, it was never a terribly prevalent genre, surprisingly.

[Randorama]

Sumez:

it's a beautiful but somewhat outdated game already for its time, and especially if you consider what Capcom was doing with their brawlers/action games (1993, and Konami also released more sophisticated brawlers on that year alone). I don't think that you should find it difficult with your skills (I do remember that you are quite good?), at least until the second key boss. From ST 10 ("Aleista") onwards, it is mostly about learning bottleneck sections and exploits (e.g. how to kill ST 15's bosses without falling asleep, since they have a ton of hit points...).

Again, though, a 1-CC is a time-consuming endeavour. You probably know that you can write down codes to access different levels in the game before you start, so the PCB also allows you to practice single stages. I did use those or save states, for practice: full runs, I left them for the week-ends.

[Bassa-Bassa]

When Gaiapolis was released, nor Metamorphic Force nor Violent Storm nor Dadandarn! were there yet, Astérix had been the latest from Konami. It also came earlier than the D&D's from Capcom or Light Bringer. I haven't played Gaiapolis so I don't know how advanced it was against stuff already there (I'd say Warriors of Fate was the most complex one, as even Cadillacs hadn't been released yet), but just to give some context here. The game really appears to have something else, and not just because of the tate thing.

Bassa-Bassa:

v0.184, as I haven't bothered with updates in years, by now. ST 11 ("Aleista") has/had a a priority problem, in that the mist floating over the stage is supposed to create a translucency effect ("let's add a mist effect over the sprites"), but often the impression is that it appears on the action plane ("I cannot fully see my sprite due to the mist"). There are other similar problems here and there. As for blending issues, I am not really sure because I am not sure what blending exactly is (combining sprites and backgrounds together?),

I meant alpha blending, which means translucency effects. The mist issue you describe is indeed an alpha blending issue.

Thanks for the report, but indeed the driver including Gaiapolis and other pre-GX Konami games was improved post v0.184 and that stuff was supposedly fixed, along with the range issues, whatever that is. It's quite rare for Konami games to get their drivers updated despite the poor state of their emulation, generally speaking, so that was a bit of an event. Though, as the game was rare in Western arcades, I don't think a good report of how's the emulation compared to the real thing currently has ever been made.

You're using a very outdated Mame version, I wouldn't let your hardware's age refraining yourself from trying a recent version, even of Groovymame instead. Your 1-CC sounds more like work.


Ed.- Just grammar bits.

[Randorama]

No worries Bassa-Bassa, even if we might just stare at Sumez very intently so that he compares PCB and latest emulated version

i don't remember the exact dates of release so certainly I could be more precise on matters of innovation in game design, but I am leaving this topic for the long ass-winded post. By the end of 1993, though, I had access to this title and the other 1993 brawlers, so I had this lingering impression that the game chose a "design path" that was certainly original, but could have been developed better. Just to be sure:

The game resembles Knights of the Round or [King of Dragons[/i} because the players have to learn when and how to parry, and when and how to use various combinations of sword swings/hits. There are some macros that can deal more damage, and a nuanced game of gambit based on parrying: if a character parries with the shield (clubs for the fairy) but the enemies are very close, the character will receive tick/minimal damage but obtain a generous 1-1.5 seconds worth of i-frames, which can be exploited for landing combos (well, multiple hits) on enemies.

So, the fighting system is more refined than I make it to be. Still, it tends to be on the slow, vaguely clunky side ("parry, hit back, parry again, use the dash attack if you feel unsafe, repeat"), unless players really take their risks. It is a Konami game, so "taking their risks" means that some enemies can land 3-4 hits in quick succession and kill the characters in seconds, in the opportune sections (e.g. the blue and orange warriors when they appear on ST 6 and ST 7; the crimson warriors on ST 10, at their first appearance; etc.). A less frustrating way to approach the game is to play it safe but boring, especially when it comes to handling the absolutely stereotypical, overbearing Konami bosses. Any one of them, really: boss fights are all too long and drawn out, in this game, and most errors will come from players just trying to speed up fights and getting owned quickly.

Nevertheless, the Science Fantasy setting is *fantastic*, though not very original: it strongly reminds me of Michael Moorcock's Hawkmoon's books and similar sagas, or perhaps of Miyazaki's Nausicaa (OK, the sources of inspiration were the Science Fantasy books of the 60's). If anything, I like its derivative nature: as a teen, I adapted the whole game plot's as a campaign for the dice-and-pencil RPG Elric!, i.e. using the world setting from the Hawkmoon RPG (all Chaosium, Inc. titles). The The OST is, at least for me, one of the best ever to grace a coin-op game as far as I am concerned, but I am very partial to "epic orchestral fantasy" fanfares and the other quirky pieces playing during the game.

In terms of Zeitgeist, it was a phenomenal game for my teen self ("Arcade RPG with a Science Fantasy setting and glorious OST? I will never forget you!"). I am actually delighted that I solved this grudge, but my laziness in experimenting with emulators' set-ups made this experience less pleasant than it should have been. I play little, and most games run very smoothly, but on this one I didn't bother to fix solvable problems because I trusted my skills a bit too much. Oh well, that's life in the video-gaming world, and I guess that some people would even say that I went the falsificare way by not playing it via proper emulation.

[samspot]

I just learned of https://www.bitmapbooks.com/collections ... t-shooters

I really want a book like this, but written by BIL.

[BIL]

Aww, thanks. Maybe a decade or so down the road, when I can set up a vanity label. We'll market it as the FLAMIN HOT CHEETOS of coffee table retrospectives.

[Sumez]

Reportedly there's a demo of the new Shadow of the Ninja out in Asian territories. Unfortunately it's not here yet, but I'd keep my eyes out

[Bassa-Bassa]

as a teen, I adapted the whole game plot's as a campaign for the dice-and-pencil RPG Elric!

That's quite something, I'd say.

[Lander]

This thread had better end up preserved for the ages, be it on paper, or meticulously carved into a series of rock cairns by some mountain madman like in Death Frost Doom

[Randorama]

as a teen, I adapted the whole game plot's as a campaign for the dice-and-pencil RPG Elric!

That's quite something, I'd say.

I actually adapted the world setting from Hawkmoon! to the Elric! rules. I then wrote the whole campaign so that it would fit within this setting’s canon/continuity. The campaign ended up being 50+ sessions or so, or roughly 7 months of gaming (September 1994 - March 1995). Let’s just say that as teen I was over-active and I preferred playing with rules and with world building, in the guise of the GameMaster.

[Randorama]

Double post, sorry.

Do we have an inclusive list of A(rcade)RPGs? By "inclusive", I mean that personally I would include Magic Sword and Black Tiger, since they have some small RPG elements (levelling up, companions for the first game; levelling up, tools shop for the second game). I don't remember seeing a full list on the forum, and the search engine is not giving me particularly specific results.

[BIL]

Not that I recall; sounds like a good idea for a thread! Or a thread within a megathread.

I wonder sometimes how many cool smaller threads are buried in OT... I went looking for all the goodies I could recall, a few years ago when we had the Other Gaming/Off Topic split. Methinks I should have another crack, I'm haunted by memories of a "chronology of Gun Shooting" one.

In addition to Black Tiger and Magic Sword, I suppose other charter members would be Wonder Boy 2: Wonder Boy In Monster Land, Legend of Valkyrie, Cadash, and Makai Densetsu. The latter feels slightly bastardised - NMK's port of Rare's NES Wizards & Warriors, or I suppose its Famicom localisation, Densetsu no Kishi Elrond. But it certainly ticks all the right boxes, IIRC. (shop system, upgradeable gear, persistent stat growth, non/semi-linear progression)

Would stuff like Dragon Buster and Genpei Toumaden count, in your opinion? No shopping, but seeking out legendary gear in nonlinear worlds is a big part of both. Well, "nonlinear" and "world," in DB's case; each round is a map with a couple branching paths containing a few dungeons. But you're still ferreting out better weapons, armour, and spells, once you're in your multi-scrolling dungeon/cave of choice.

[Sima Tuna]

I think I was talking with somebody about Cadash and arcade action-rpgs in another thread. Sounds like it's time for arcade rpgs to have their own thread. Arpigs? The "A" can also stand for action.

[Randorama]

Birru-sensei, I'd say that you cite all titles that qualify as ARPGs. Dragon Buster plays a lot like a D&D early '80s adventures for basic levels (i.e. explore dungeons and level up before you see the world). Makai Densetsu might be a title that I do not recognise, though - any links to it? The interwebs are not giving me relevant pointers, somehow.

Personally I would include Taito's Lighbringer, which is a mix of belt-scroller and tabletop RPG (dungeons are huge and you choose one of many paths) and of course Gaiapolis. Some might resist my inclusion ("they're belt-scrollers!"), but my retort is that fantasy dice-and-pencil RPGs involve a lot of belt-scrolling-like hack'n'slash action, when fights are involved. I am fairly sure that quite a few companies designed RPGs with "bare knuckles fighter" classes to recreate the videogame feeling of punching several goons with your mighty fists, provided that you roll a critical. I remember that AD&D's Dark Sun and Forgotten Realms expansions had them, and EarthDawn had spells to land one punch onto multiple enemies (N.B. I just revealed that I am a dinosaur: these RPGs and world settings are ancient).

Well, I remember that a friend of mine designed a Guts-like character who could be devastating with his bare hands exactly for this purpose, when we were playing the aforementioned Elric! RPG (ah, good times). Crushing demon skulls with magic-imbued artificial hands and brass knuckles is every white male teen's secret fantasy (while the DM, yours truly, plays Doom/Black/Death Metal music in the background), I assure you The surprising part is that we *actually* had girlfriends, who were of course goth/fantasy-style weirdos and who even played RPGs with us, often (so, birds of a feather...and we were all teens, hey).

On the topic of scavenging this thread to find the various sub-threads:

Frankly, at some point I'd be tempted to hire a research assistant to do this kind of complex archaeological/historical work. My current experience with data extraction is...meh, but I usually have a different team person to handle these parts of the job. So, I guess that a properly trained human might do a better job than not so well-programmed bots. Alternatively and in a more distant future, instead of turning into umarells spending our retirement days on the streets, we could sit down and put everything into good order and eke some coffee table books out of this submerged information. That should trump anything released by hardcoregaming101 quality-wise, I believe

Sima Tuna: I vote for "yes", though the sports thread I started a year ago or so died an ugly death (sigh!). We could turn it into a thread in which we praise Cadash to absolutely irrational and repetitive levels, and I would nevertheless be happy about it (...the ending theme should offer a simple reason on why I'd be happy about repeating my praises over and over again).

EDIT: Warrior Blade, the third and final chapter in Rastan's saga, is an ARPG/beltscroller hybrid. No levelling up, but the structure is non-linear and the game offers tons of secret items, also via a complex system of extra stages. I played it lots but by activating the "automatic extra stages" dispswitch.

...R2RKMF ultimately includes tons of sub-threads, if only because the "macro-genre" has clear contours (kill mother-fuckers to the right), but there are tons of micro-genres showing how such a simple formula can be implemented. Well, no chance that we get bored and end up watching construction sites, once retired

[BIL]

Makai Densetsu might be a title that I do not recognise, though - any links to it? The interwebs are not giving me relevant pointers, somehow.

Feels like one of those few games by a cult fave that remains genuinely little-known. Well... remakes by a cult fave; Wizards & Warriors was popular on NES back in the day, had a couple sequels, too. Fabio famously got some work modeling for the second game's NES boxart, lmao. Must've been a great incentive for well-read suburban moms, they know the man is a seal of quality!

I remember a thread here asking for Makai Densetsu / Legend of Makai's name, a good ~15yrs back, with people wondering if the OP had hallucinated it after a rousing W&W session.

I went looking for more substantive info, but could only find my paltry three-stage test drive of its Arcade Archives release. Which was three years back, now... I see I was going hard at Guevara around then, and was promptly distracted by Sengoku 2.

Few more pics via Hamster

Forgot how much I dug its 80s fantasy manga look; reminds me of Black Heart The ARPG. Or, to get the timeline right, Black Heart would be Makai Densetsu The Shooting.

[Bassa-Bassa]

The problem with how you're defining this is that you'll have to include there from stuff like Breywood to Willow to Sol Divide to Battle Circuit, isn't it?

[Randorama]

Bassa-Bassa:

I think that it is easier to include too much stuff and then discard titles via well-thought reasons, rather than getting exactly the right list at first try (and getting pages and pages about people bitching about "oh but you can't exclude this/include that, my butt would hurt so much if the list does not perfectly match my opinions!"). As a man of science, I am not worried about some trial and error, and the bitching and moaning from the "perfection, now!" crowds could be entertaining

I also wouldn't worry too much about hybrid titles or lowly prototypical stuff. For instance, Willow is for me a platform title with a few RPG-ish mechanics...like Black Tiger, so I'd add it in a discussion on ARPGs with the disclaimer "this platform has something relevant for the topic at hand". Same reasoning for Sol Divide and Battle Circuit, I guess. Breywood, I need to play it again because I do not remember anything about it.

If we want to be strict, I believe that we could get at most half a dozen ARPG titles out of 40+ years of arcade gaming - Wonder Boy in Monster Land, Cadash,...what else? Even with these two games, we have a case for treating them as platform games with "strong RPG elements". My conjecture right now is that "ARPG" counts a radial category, but with possibly no central/prototypical game at the centre and a lot of titles that are really peripheral.

...Or maybe we can just list which games have RPG elements/mechanics, to have all those narcolepsy-inducing threads about definitions and ontologies and such to die at birth (painfully, I hope). I admit that I was presupposing that ARPGs are all fantasy-themed (and I have played many other genres, go figure), so I may be overlooking some obvious examples.

[BareKnuckleRoo]

Even with these two games, we have a case for treating them as platforms with "strong RPG elements".

This is how I'd do it, honestly. Action platformer / top-down action / beat 'em up with RPG elements.

[Air Master Burst]

No shopping, but seeking out legendary gear in nonlinear worlds is a big part of both. Well, "nonlinear" and "world," in DB's case; each round is a map with a couple branching paths containing a few dungeons. But you're still ferreting out better weapons, armour, and spells, once you're in your multi-scrolling dungeon/cave of choice.

This describes Capcom's arcade D&D titles pretty accurately. They're also the games that do the best job of capturing the feel of actual tabletop D&D combat (at least the way I run it).

On the topic of scavenging this thread to find the various sub-threads:

I figured out which pages have the belt-scroller discussion a while back, it actually didn't take too long once I got into it. The hardest part will probably be separating out bigger posts that are part of multiple different discussions.

[Sima Tuna]

Even with these two games, we have a case for treating them as platforms with "strong RPG elements".

This is how I'd do it, honestly. Action platformer / top-down action / beat 'em up with RPG elements.

Action Arcade RPG. AArpig. King of Dragons counts, Knights of the Round Counts, Dark Seal counts and so do Cadash and Monster Boy.

Furthermore, I'd allow console aarpigs under the stipulation they follow some kind of arcade legacy in design. AKA that they aren't purely just a console game like Secret of Mana or Illusion of Gaia. The Wonder Boy games on console descend from the arcade wonder boy, for example.