Ninja Gaiden [NES] + R2RKMF: Scrolling Action Monogatari

[Air Master Burst]

Personally I prefer the original Dark Forces the best, but that's mostly because Jedi were always kinda boring to me.

[BIL]

Neon Inferno's announcement trailer has dropped:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-tXBjDu ... nkanahalli

Contra x Wild Guns gameplay in a cyberpunk dystopia? Sign me the fuck up.

Gonna be rad.

The quality of the SNES Star Wars games are inverted from the movies (ROTJ > SW > ESB).

Stage designs are decent for the most part. The main problem is that the games were fundamentally designed around HP attrition, which was implemented as a cop-out for careless enemy layouts and built-in movement latency.

This is much less of a factor in SROTJ, because you're given more tools (like Chewbacca's elegant i-frame Haggar spin), so that one might actually be possible to beat without taking damage.

Haha, I thought I remembered someone describing a similar, marginal progression in the trilogy. Was gonna go looking for the post.

Never played any of them myself, beyond a ~15min tryout of the first, ages back. I did get the impression it was archetypally EuroShumpy. Charismatic, but decidedly janky on fundamentals.

[EDIT] Here's a good run of SSW's Jedi difficulty by bubufubu, played about as cleanly as the game allows.

Also, I just did a comparison of the jumps in SSW and Contra Spirits. In Spirits, the jump is active on the third frame after the button press. In SSW, it's the sixteenth frame.
(The jumping sprite appears on the fifteenth frame, but it isn't higher than the standing sprite yet.)

God damn. Good posting, marked for index.

The natively-laggiest game I've personally encountered is the Jaleco Mega System version of Aicom's The Lord Of King / The Astyanax. MAME has it at like... I wanna say 9f before animation starts, for walking, attacking, jumping, and bombing alike. Even the Coin-In and Start buttons have quite a bit of lag. (number might be lower, or even higher... definitely up there though)

This was the game that taught me 1) I notice stuff around 5f, and 2) it's not always a gamekiller, depending on genre. STGs are always hardest-hit, with their reliance on pinpoint-precise 8way movement, typically paired to 1HKOs. Lordy's less comfy that it should be, but being an archetypally heavy-handling Rastanesque, it's still quite playable. I'd almost wonder if at least some of the lag was deliberate, but then there's that [start] and [coin] situation, dohoho.

[Sumez]

Personally I prefer the original Dark Forces the best, but that's mostly because Jedi were always kinda boring to me.

The best parts of Jedi Knight all happen before you get your lightsaber. The jedi stuff really only comes at the end (and in multiplayer), but I do think the finale is really cool. Has a bit of an indiana jones kinda vibe to it

[Ex_Mosquito]

Here is run I made recently of the MD Shadow Dancer on hardest with no dog/shuriken/magic. It was a lot harder than I thought it would be! The routing for melee no magic/dog is super precise, more than I thought it would be when I started learning it. Most of my runs ended from the slowdown and dropped inputs, it gets pretty bad at times when you CLEARLY pressed the button but the slowdown eats the input and you die, it’s pretty frustrating. I had to employ a double-tapping SF2 style input to make sure my attack/jump came out on the heavier sections. Apart from that, what a game. One of my fav MD games for sure.




https://youtu.be/CPWTeHMhp8A?si=XS8gPhxixpOGq3o2

[BIL]

God damn, now there is a masterclass in ninja sidescrolling form. Superlatively done, Mosquito-sama! I always knew that cart harboured some fathomless depths, befitting the credits' nod to AC Shinobi & Shadow Dancer's teams! Marked for index.

Love the picture quality btw... I'm forever partial to that auld magazine scan look, it's like a Mean Machines page in motion.

[Ex_Mosquito]

Heya, cheers Bil Yeah I thought it was neat that they thanked the AC developers of the other Shinobi games. I also like that they included an easy cheat for level select for practice purposes, a must for effective routing efficiency.

Hah yeah that’s why I like filming the screen for that exact reason, to get the effect of the old C&VG and Mean Machines screenshots.I get weird compression artefacts in the background using an old IPhone unfortunately. I used to drool over those screenshots as a kid. I still have a complete collection of Mean Machines for that reason

[BloodHawk]

Came across this game "Iron Meat" on xitter, looks pretty cool. Very Contra-like. Might be worth checking out. https://store.steampowered.com/app/1157740/Iron_Meat/

I think someone else mentioned it on here in another thread!

I just picked up Iron Meat on GOG and I have to admit it's pretty damn fun so far. I have only played enough to clear normal difficulty though, which with the number of lives they give you wasn't too hard. I don't consider myself that great at these games and I only had to retry a few stages twice. If you are a seasoned vet of run and guns I would start on hard difficulty.

I love the graphics and the soundtrack (I actually ended up buying the OST separately on Steam). The pacing is well done too. Looking forward to knocking it out on hard.

As for gripes, a couple minor nitpicks then one other thing of note. Occasionally the explosions masked enemy shots/projectiles, and on one of the stages towards the end it was a little difficult at first to determine foreground/background and what platforms you could walk on. Obviously though once you played through it once you figure out which is which.

The one big thing though that I didn't see in the game was an outright "Arcade Mode", which I think would benefit this game greatly. Currently, your number of lives resets on every level (the number is based on the difficulty selected I believe), so there really is no option to go through all the stages with one stock of lives. That's unfortunate, as if you were to clear all of the stages efficiently in order I think it wouldn't be more than an hour.

As it's set up now, the main draw is to clear stages to earn XP and unlock skins. Once hard difficulty is cleared I don't know if there is going to be a lot of incentive to keep playing unless you are an achievement hunter or want to unlock everything. We will see...

[Sima Tuna]

I just picked up Iron Meat on GOG and I have to admit it's pretty damn fun so far. I have only played enough to clear normal difficulty though, which with the number of lives they give you wasn't too hard. I don't consider myself that great at these games and I only had to retry a few stages twice. If you are a seasoned vet of run and guns I would start on hard difficulty.

I love the graphics and the soundtrack (I actually ended up buying the OST separately on Steam). The pacing is well done too. Looking forward to knocking it out on hard.

As for gripes, a couple minor nitpicks then one other thing of note. Occasionally the explosions masked enemy shots/projectiles, and on one of the stages towards the end it was a little difficult at first to determine foreground/background and what platforms you could walk on. Obviously though once you played through it once you figure out which is which.

The one big thing though that I didn't see in the game was an outright "Arcade Mode", which I think would benefit this game greatly. Currently, your number of lives resets on every level (the number is based on the difficulty selected I believe), so there really is no option to go through all the stages with one stock of lives. That's unfortunate, as if you were to clear all of the stages efficiently in order I think it wouldn't be more than an hour.

All of the highlighted sound like pretty big problems to me. I often encounter this kind of design from these nu-arcade "retro" games. Not that old games didn't have issues with visual clutter at times, but the lives resetting seems like a case of a dev not understanding arcade play. Sometimes I think there should be a requirement for an action game dev, that if you want to make an action game you need to first 1cc an action game. Any action game. But it needs to be a 1cc. Because the process of getting a 1cc teaches the player a lot about why arcade/retro games do specific things. Foreground/background visual noise is extremely common with modern nu-retro titles. Color blending is another issue I encounter all the time. Projectile colors that are too similar to background/foreground colors cause bullets to blend and become invisible. Sometimes background and foreground elements are too busy and cause visual overload, which is often combined with small projectiles for an eyestrain nightmare. Foreground objects covering projectiles-again, extremely common.

Needing to memo eyestrain out of the equation isn't good game design imo.

I don't know what the thought process is behind the regenerating lives system.

[Sumez]

the lives resetting seems like a case of a dev not understanding arcade play.

*OR* it's an attempt at making arcade play more palatable to a wider audience.
Huntdown does the same thing for its arcade mode. I didn't like that game much, but I appreciate its approach. It's a good way to both avoid the mainstream impression of your game being "too short", while also making arcade-style single-segment challenges viable.
Though I don't know how long the stages are in Iron Meat. If it's just 2-3 minute affairs it's of course too small to really segment.

Needing to memo eyestrain out of the equation isn't good game design imo.

Someone tell Shinobu Yagawa this

[Steven]

Foreground/background visual noise is extremely common with modern nu-retro titles. Color blending is another issue I encounter all the time. Projectile colors that are too similar to background/foreground colors cause bullets to blend and become invisible. Sometimes background and foreground elements are too busy and cause visual overload, which is often combined with small projectiles for an eyestrain nightmare. Foreground objects covering projectiles-again, extremely common.

Needing to memo eyestrain out of the equation isn't good game design imo.

You should tell all of this to the guys that made Cygni lol. Not that they listened when I told them.

[it290]

*OR* it's an attempt at making arcade play more palatable to a wider audience.
Huntdown does the same thing for its arcade mode. I didn't like that game much, but I appreciate its approach. It's a good way to both avoid the mainstream impression of your game being "too short", while also making arcade-style single-segment challenges viable.
Though I don't know how long the stages are in Iron Meat. If it's just 2-3 minute affairs it's of course too small to really segment.

Huntdown does do this for its arcade mode, but any lives lost will dock your score, meaning that if you are playing for score, you need to 1lc all stages within each gang, plus rack up significant combo bonuses, melee bonuses, dual-weapon bonuses etc in order to score well—the skill ceiling is really quite high. Each gang takes about 15-20min to play through, which is the length of a shortish arcade game and I feel like represents a decent challenge. I think the game would be kind of frustrating to play for score if you were expected to play the whole arcade mode in one sitting, since you'd be looking at over an hour to do so and a single mistake can tank your run and force you to reset. That may not be too different length-wise from doing a 2-ALL on a lot of shmups, but Huntdown is a lot more rigid in its scoring and I think having a score attack mode that lengthy would hurt the game.

[Sumez]

I think the game would be kind of frustrating to play for score if you were expected to play the whole arcade mode in one sitting, since you'd be looking at over an hour to do so and a single mistake can tank your run and force you to reset.

This is exactly why I'm advocating for this approach in modern arcade style games. I don't think it's bad to segment your game into multiple smaller arcade challenges.

[Air Master Burst]

I think the game would be kind of frustrating to play for score if you were expected to play the whole arcade mode in one sitting, since you'd be looking at over an hour to do so and a single mistake can tank your run and force you to reset.

This is exactly why I'm advocating for this approach in modern arcade style games. I don't think it's bad to segment your game into multiple smaller arcade challenges.

I love Huntdown, but even I can admit there's some serious padding going on there. It would be a better game at half the length. It's also too easy, although I haven't tried playing it for score.

"Arcade style" means a proper 1CC that doesn't take all fucking day. Preferably only using 2 buttons. Huntdown is dope as hell, but I'd never call it "arcade style." Huntdown plays like the watered-down but more user-friendly home port of an even better arcade game that I wish existed.

ETA: if Huntdown had enough ideas or variety to sustain so many large stages it would be different, but the enemy patterns and stage design are both pretty basic compared to something like a Contra or Metal Slug. I don't think there are even any random enemy spawns to keep players sharp. Perhaps most damning of all, there's only a single boss every few levels and no real sub-bosses to speak of. I enjoyed the shit out of my time with Huntdown but it's a bloated home console style release down to its very bones.