Ninja Gaiden [NES] + R2RKMF: Scrolling Action Monogatari

[copy-paster]

Now that SS being brought up again, I did all chevos run on the game since it was added weeks ago. I'm on the third place but that's because I heard the news 4 days after it's release and apparently there's other two who did it first in a relatively quick time (mastered in 3 hours after it's release? nothing sus here, right!?). All done on stream of course.

I don't care about cheevos and all that since for me 1CC/Nomiss is the real deal, but after hearing the news SS being added I couldn't help but do it anyway. Aside from usual "clear X with no deaths" and all that there are some nice ones like getting to Yokozuna Jr upon boarding the train in 30 seconds or kill the crawler bug with flamethrower only. At least you can use retry and the cheevo progress will be reset.

Also, least deranged Shin Contra achievements:

[BIL]

Arcade Archives Surprise Attack, appropriately named. Long-lost Konami straight outta nowhere, as is Ham-chan's wont! See also Mystic Warriors just a few months back. Delighted to see this one make it home in trusted hands, even if I'm putting my gaming time elsewhere atm.

Sumez, while I briefly surface out of my From Coma (you were so goddamn right re: putting DSIII and ER first, I'm fuckin bussin here ) - would you happen to know if there's any truth to the Famicom having specific difficulties with collision detection?

It's the kind of thing I've heard faint yet consistent bleatings of in various dumps like reddit and youtoob, over the years. Normally I'd glance at the 100+ carts on my shelf and remark with the utmost haughtiness "holy fuck lmao! these chumps need to play better games!" But I guess my Relatively Mainstream Gayming sojourn has made me morbidly curious, and so I can't help asking my learned Shumps Fren™, the man who cracked The Great Micronics Engima. (as you know, previously, we all just said "Yeah wow these guys couldn't code for shit" )

Have I stumbled upon the mythical Magic 100 Selection? The collision in a hearty chunk of these - all our usual favourites from Konami, Capcom, Tecmo, Natsume, IREM, Sunsoft etc - is, to use layman's terms, motherfucking airtight. Pixel-sharp, frame-precise, easily on par (or better) with the mightiest arcade boards of the time. Even so, I've never felt like tight collision was anything but fundamental on FC, as it is for any worthy platform.

I wonder if it's one of those things that crept forth from AVGN et al, slowly and insidiously becoming casual gospel. Like "THE TREASURE TEAM" inventing Contra and Castlevania and Skate Or Die in the mid-80s, their humble acolytes Tsujimoto and Nakazato and Akamatsu only hoping to meekly preserve their legend, as they left to create the H4RDEST GAME EVER ALIEN SOLDIER (ala STAGE 1 RAEPED MY BUMH0L3: THE GAME)

Got your ass reamed out by Jaquio? It's not your blundering hamhocks' fault, careering and skidding over the controller, sending your master ninja headfirst into flaming death! It's just that Bad NES Collision Detection™ lmao, now please, slam that like button like you slam into bullets and spikes in other games you suck at.

Every time I return to this core brace of games, I come away refreshed. I tend to underrate things in hindsight, not wishing to be disappointed on return. I do this with certain PS1 games' GRAFX too, like R-Type Delta, Omega Boost, and Silent Bummer. Hoooly fuck those games are still face-meltingly gorgeous. So too, shaving past bullets at pixel distance in Gimmick and Guevara and GUN-DEC, and too many others to name. If their creators really were struggling against some cruel innate handicap, I will have to personally donate to their grandkids' college funds.

Nope, you're right - Shin lets you restart a mission you'd otherwise miss the S-Rank on, but it counts as a credit used. So by default, you have like two restarts for the whole game.

And indeed, it doesn't acknowledge a SHIN NOMISSU, ie no restarts used.

Oh I wasn't aware that was possible. But I meant I can't remember if it's possible to get an overall S rank even if one stage was only A rank. I'm pretty sure I just S'ed all of them, but this is over 20 years ago no, sheesh I'm fucking old

You can't. Overall S Rank needs to be S on all stages, and if you wanna rack up credits count you need to play on a certain hours (just like how default player increase works) but needs to be done on 2 Player co-op mode.

Aha, thanks for confirming. I could've sworn I remembered Shin requiring S-Ranks in each Mission, but it's been a while. I tend to mix up its requirements with Neo's more forgiving ones, too.

Typing this, I remember Shin and Neo are the Contras I've played the least over the last fifteen years. Not by choice, just had a bunch of other stuff on my plate. Will be nice revisiting at some point, after so long focused on arcade stuff.

The only feasible way to see whether a run is S-rank no restart is to see Battle Log and see it's scores, if the end score is over 100k or above it means the run is no restart.

That's an excellent point! I'll include the Battle Log when I record a new clear.

[Sumez]

Sumez, while I briefly surface out of my From Coma (you were so goddamn right re: putting DSIII and ER first, I'm fuckin bussin here ) - would you happen to know if there's any truth to the Famicom having specific difficulties with collision detection?

It's the kind of thing I've heard faint yet consistent bleatings of in various dumps like reddit and youtoob, over the years. Normally I'd glance at the 100+ carts on my shelf and remark with the utmost haughtiness "holy fuck lmao! these chumps need to play better games!" But I guess my Relatively Mainstream Gayming sojourn has made me morbidly curious, and so I can't help asking my learned Shumps Fren™, the man who cracked The Great Micronics Engima. (as you know, previously, we all just said "Yeah wow these guys couldn't code for shit" )

Definitely a "can't code for shit" issue. Or a "most professionals programming video games in the mid 80s came directly from working on embedded systems, and probably never saw a video game before" issue.
There's nothing hardware-related to collision detection on the Famicom, so it's all based entirely on game logic and fictive coordinates stored in ram. There is a hardware sprite collision, but it only works on a single sprite, and is completely impossible to use for actual game logic - devs use it to change the scroll value mid-screen, like the static score display at the top of SMB1.

Though I'd say one thing that surprised me when I started working with old game hardware is how well it lends itself to tile-based collision detection, which makes checking against the terrain (which is always in the same place) a lot easier and faster than checking against other objects (which could be anywhere depending on your game).
Since the hardware enforces terrain to be bound to very specific sets of 8x8 pixel tiles (and heavily encourages 16x16 pixel ones), it's extremely easy to look up exactly what tile your character is standing on just by "moving the decimal pointer" (like dividing by 10, except for binary/hexadecimal) without needing to do any searching or math at all, like you would with the vector based meshes of 3D games.

So that's a hardware advantage if anything, but it comes automatically with old-school computers, and isn't unique to the Famicom, it applies to any video game hardware with tile-based 2D graphics, at the arcade or at home.

[BIL]

Definitely a "can't code for shit" issue. Or a "most professionals programming video games in the mid 80s came directly from working on embedded systems, and probably never saw a video game before" issue.
There's nothing hardware-related to collision detection on the Famicom, so it's all based entirely on game logic and fictive coordinates stored in ram. There is a hardware sprite collision, but it only works on a single sprite, and is completely impossible to use for actual game logic - devs use it to change the scroll value mid-screen, like the static score display at the top of SMB1.

I knew it! They've been speaking shit to me! (｀w´メ) Invaluably clarifying as always, cheers bud.

[Steven]

Revenge of Death Adder spotted in the wild.

Spoiler

Unfortunately it was at Mikado, which of course means the colors on the monitor are completely messed up. It might not look that bad in the picture, but in person the entire screen was a sickly yellowish green.

[BIL]

Nice. Criminally unported, that.

[Lander]

Definitely a "can't code for shit" issue. Or a "most professionals programming video games in the mid 80s came directly from working on embedded systems, and probably never saw a video game before" issue.

I've heard some anecdotes to that effect about the Mega Man NES titles - the engineers were used to programming for industrial heavy machinery, so ended up building the gameplay code in a similar safety-critical fashion that ended up being relatively slow.

Kind of fun given the subject matter; Dr. Light is nothing if not meticulous

There's nothing hardware-related to collision detection on the Famicom, so it's all based entirely on game logic and fictive coordinates stored in ram.

Fictive is a nice way to put it - the profusion of old games that ended up a bit janky by way of a young industry could easily have an onlooker assume that the hardware itself prevents them from running a nontrivial gameplay sim. Surely, a pixel must be the smallest atom such a machine can think in? Not so!

Naturally there's a grain of truth to it, since you only have so many bytes and cycles to throw around, but it's all down to algorithmic smarts in the end. To this day, original Super Mario Bros is a brilliant showpiece for taking limited hardware primitives and stacking them up to make something butter-smooth and precise.

[BrianC]

I played a little bit of Hammerin' Harry on MiSTer and it reminded me a bit of Metal Slug with its hard hitting action and cartoony charm. Sure enough, some Metal Slug staff is in the credits. Only two names are linked, though. Too many credits on the site with unlinked names. There's even one name here that's in the credits as a pseudonym right on the page and still listed as "uncredited".

Edit: The staff list is from a high score table and not all of them are credits. The first name is the name of the main character in Daiku no Gen-san.

[Kino]

I played a little bit of Hammerin' Harry on MiSTer and it reminded me a bit of Metal Slug with its hard hitting action and cartoony charm. Sure enough, some Metal Slug staff is in the credits. Only two names are linked, though. Too many credits on the site with unlinked names. There's even one name here that's in the credits as a pseudonym right on the page and still listed as "uncredited".

Edit: The staff list is from a high score table and not all of them are credits. The first name is the name of the main character in Daiku no Gen-san.

From what I dug up, only 2 members of the Metal Slug crew at best worked on it. Most of the planning/design staff of Hammerin' Harry was from the all-female team responsible for Mystic Riders (to a lesser extent, there was some overlap with Legend of Hero Tonma and the unreleased Dice Game, as well.)

The creator of Hammerin' Harry later worked as a planner on a bunch of 90's-era Square RPGs, ironically enough.

[BryanM]

Tried out The Curse of Issyos today. From the guy who made Maldita Castilla.

It was pleasant enough at first, but I grew to kind of hate it.

[Sumez]

I've heard some anecdotes to that effect about the Mega Man NES titles - the engineers were used to programming for industrial heavy machinery, so ended up building the gameplay code in a similar safety-critical fashion that ended up being relatively slow.

Most NES games are in fact really poorly coded, even the ones that are really well designed. It's surprising how well some of them work, because when you look under the hood they really are held together with duct tape.
When I was looking into sprite cycling routines (the logic that causes sprites to flicker as a tradeoff to avoid them disappearing entirely), I looked into two examples to learn good and bad practices, namely Mega Man 3 and Dynamite Batman - the latter IMO having some of the cleanest sprite cycling with larger sprites appearing nearly solid if played on a CRT. What they did to achieve this is actually extremely clever (some interviews say they use unique cartridge hardware to achieve it - that's not true, it's just smart math). Meanwhile Mega Man 3 has pretty extreme flickering even with few enemies on-screen.

That game only cycles between two possible states which is excusable for someone's first go at overcoming this challenge. What's really stupid however, is that it only cycles every few frames, instead of every frame, which makes the flickering waaay more noticeable, even on a CRT screen. I can't think of any reason they'd do this. Saving CPU? Well, you're still gonna spend that on the frames you do cycle either way, and the game is hardly optimized either way. And the sprite memory needs to be rewritten on every frame, even when nothing changes.

Fictive is a nice way to put it - the profusion of old games that ended up a bit janky by way of a young industry could easily have an onlooker assume that the hardware itself prevents them from running a nontrivial gameplay sim. Surely, a pixel must be the smallest atom such a machine can think in? Not so!

Naturally there's a grain of truth to it, since you only have so many bytes and cycles to throw around, but it's all down to algorithmic smarts in the end. To this day, original Super Mario Bros is a brilliant showpiece for taking limited hardware primitives and stacking them up to make something butter-smooth and precise.

It's actually nearly impossible to make a smooth feeling scrolling platformer (or even a very rough one tbh) without going into units smaller than a pixel. A shoot'em up with aimed shots not just going in cardinal directions? Completely impossible.
You can probably think of them in different manners. To me they are just decimals (or hexa-decimals I guess) - speedrunners call them "subpixels"
For collision detection I usually find it advantageous to convert those coordinates into pixel coordinates, since you don't need any more precision than that, and you need them converted to display your sprite anyway - this prevents off-screen object collisions but that is rarely necessary anyway. For 16-bit math, this isn't really relevant anymore. So yeah, maybe off-screen collisions are a bit more rare on 8-bit systems?

[Steven]

Nice. Criminally unported, that.

Sega being Sega again.

[Sima Tuna]

Nice. Criminally unported, that.

Sega being Sega again.

Speaking of Sega, I was in the mood to play some Shinobi, so I booted up the eshop to find Sega Ages Shinobi... Guess it's been delisted for a while.

Unrelated, but I've noticed that Shinobi Non Grata doesn't seem to get many mentions. I know I asked a while ago about it and people said it was solid enough. I'm assuming it's just not up to par with the Saigo of Nindo Legend? Any other Ninja Spirit-likes the thread can recommend?

[BIL]

Nice. Criminally unported, that.

Sega being Sega again.

Speaking of Sega, I was in the mood to play some Shinobi, so I booted up the eshop to find Sega Ages Shinobi... Guess it's been delisted for a while.

Goddamn, that was one of the three M2 ports (the others being Gain Ground and Virtua Racing) which stayed my hand from bashing sega over RODA. :[

It's still up in the Euro store - might not be of any help, but maybe it's not been flat-out removed in the US, just yet?

Unrelated, but I've noticed that Shinobi Non Grata doesn't seem to get many mentions. I know I asked a while ago about it and people said it was solid enough. I'm assuming it's just not up to par with the Saigo of Nindo Legend?

SnG is a very good first attempt at combining two legendary titles in Saigo and Alien Soldier, one that ends up teetering right on the edge of genuine excellence. What holds it back somewhat is the lack of Saigo's immortalising global RNG. Large enemies are strictly set spawns, so while the zako rain is invigorating, it can never summon that simmering danger, where something you can't take down in one shot might appear exactly where you don't want.

(also, the PS4 version has some mild but nagging frameskip bugs, at certain spots, which they really need to fix)

Its Alien Soldier side is stronger; of the huge boss roster, there's only maybe two I'm lukewarm on. Tweak in some proper heavy enemy RNG, and I'd call it a rare return for both styles of game. I got a quick and dirty survivalist 1LC a while back, no regrets at all. It's an excellent pickup for any fan of late 80s scrolling ninja action and the games that followed in their wake. Special mention to the PCE-esque soundtrack, sounding absolutely like something you'd hear in the FC's Natsume Power Trio. Lots of references to official anime of the thread Ninja Scroll, too!

Any other Ninja Spirit-likes the thread can recommend?

Other than SnG, there really aren't any that I can think of; nearest that comes to mind is Saigo's clear inspiration, Legend of Kage. Which has taken on a charming immediacy, simplicity, and pace, post-Saigo, but doesn't really scratch the same balletically destructive itch.

I hear Kage itself got a... DS, I think, sequel, which a few trusted peeps here thought was good. Always meant to look into it. Maybe that one's worth a try?

[Marc]

Tried out The Curse of Issyos today. From the guy who made Maldita Castilla.

It was pleasant enough at first, but I grew to kind of hate it.

Can I ask why? I enjoyed his previous stuff.

[BryanM]

Most NES games are in fact really poorly coded, even the ones that are really well designed. It's surprising how well some of them work, because when you look under the hood they really are held together with duct tape.

Completely forgivable at the time. Industry experience hadn't really been built up much, and the time pressure was crazy. Nobody won any extra points for having the most elegant source architecture.

When you compare the budgets of then, which were like five guys for eight months, to the several tens of millions poured into a modern pokemon game... Is there any greater technical ineptitude in the world of games than them, when the magnitude of the importance of the work we as a society have put upon it is taken into account?

Magnitude of crapitude * the Importance of not fuckin' it up?

Can I ask why? I enjoyed his previous stuff.

I enjoyed Castille too, which is why I gave it a shot.

The art and music are lovely, but they're also the things I value the least in action games. It can be a bit difficult to articulate why I feel down on it without using a lot of words. (Which makes me feel like a jerk - this is something someone made as a hobby and gave away for free. It isn't a trillion dollar pokemon game where the player's avatar glitches out into a pretzel and starts phasing through mountains... it doesn't deserve to be bullied like that.)

That Simpsons episode where they focus test an episode of Itchy and Scratchy, and the kids have these dials to turn to say how they feel at any given moment: neutral, bad, and good. So they're able to break down moment by moment how people feel about every bit of the work. (Milhouse really likes the muscle guy.)

Really good games are of two camps, imo: they're either constantly stimulating like a Mario or Metal Slug game, or they're non-demanding chill games like a jRPG or Animal Crossing. Or as I put it, a game that demands either all of your attention, or none of it.

Issyos is a game that hasn't made up its mind which of those two it wants to be. Much of it is mindless and trivial, punctuated by brief moments where you have to pay some attention. I hate being poked like that, but it could be perfectly fine for someone that's at a low skill level when it comes to video games.

I personally didn't feel any reason to ever play the game again, which feels like the worst thing I could say. While I was playing it, it reminded me a lot of Mush's version of Castlevania. So I gave that one a play just now.... and I think Demon Castle is more fun.

[Steven]

Nice. Criminally unported, that.

Sega being Sega again.

Speaking of Sega, I was in the mood to play some Shinobi, so I booted up the eshop to find Sega Ages Shinobi... Guess it's been delisted for a while.

It's still up in Japan, but yeah, it looks like it is indeed delisted in the US eshop. They already removed Marilyn and replaced her with Altered Beast, so I am not sure what other issues there might have been other than that digital games suck and/or Sega being Sega yet again.

[ryu]

What the hell? Now I'm extra glad I got those games on 3DS carts back in the day. Sucks they stopped releasing them as Fukkoku Archives and that we never got Thunder Force IV on such a collection.

[Steven]

Those 3DS carts are very expensive now! Hold on to them!

[ryu]

Holy shit, I'm rich.

[Steven]

Yeah, the Japanese set is like 50,000 yen now. I wish I'd bought them before they started approaching the cost of a month of my rent, but too late now. At the same time the down button on my 3DS d-pad is fucked anyway despite the d-pad and membrane being immaculate and cleaned multiple times in an attempt to repair it, so some stuff is basically unplayable now. Still can't believe how fragile the entire 3DS hardware family is.

[Sima Tuna]

I have a bunch of physical 3ds carts, but I'll probably just sell them all. As you say, Steven, my 3ds is partially fucked up too. Mine is the analog stick. So I can play games that don't use it, but it does tend to drift frequently. Whenever the ghosts in the stick decide to start a-rumbling, I'll typically take a dive straight into damage/death. 3ds are fragile as shit compared to GBA and GB.

At least I have the Sega Ages 3ds Streets of Rage 2. To date, it's the only port of SoR2 for modern hardware that I can tolerate. The Sega Classics Collection version is garbage! There are no controller remapping options aside from what the original hardware had (so you can only remap buttons inside the original game, and the game won't save them unless you save state after changing them.) That version also has 10 frames of fucking lag, which is shameful. But the 3ds Sega Ages port is great. I think it's the same version you can buy on xbox 360. Don't know if it's on PSN or not, because I think you'd have to go through the PS3 shop (assuming that is still up.) The PS3 storefront hasn't been accessible via computers for years now...

That reminds me, I do have an xbox 360 and Sega Ages Shinobi is probably still listed on the xbox 360 storefront.

The locomalito discussion brings back to my memory that I've still not explored Cursed Castilla beyond the first couple levels. Super cool game inspired by GnG, but I got distracted by other games. My favorite Locomalito game is this Rodan game he made. It's called Gaurodan.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WmO48T0gXAQ

Not enough big stompy monster games exist in the market and this is a fun/funny one.

[Steven]

The rubber part of my New 3DS XL's analog thingy disintegrated a few years ago, too. There is a reason that they put that rubber on there, as the underlying plastic part is rather slippery. It's usable, but far from optimal. I may get a new analog assembly, but the d-pad is probably dead. I wish I had another New XL, even if only to sacrifice for parts.

3DS is definitely a system that needs a good emulator. I hate emulation in most cases and will go out of my way to buy real hardware no matter the cost, but in this case the real hardware is already starting to fall apart. My 37~38 year old arcade PCBs and 40+ year old Intellivision still work perfectly, but the New 3DS XL that I've had for less than 10 years is dying! That's not even counting the others that I have had, like my Fire Emblem Awakening LE version that I put in the back my desk with nothing on top of it only to dig it out a year later to find the hinge completely cracked in half for some unknown reason. How does that even happen with nothing sitting on top of it?

[Lander]

Most NES games are in fact really poorly coded, even the ones that are really well designed. It's surprising how well some of them work, because when you look under the hood they really are held together with duct tape.

I heard the term fooling the eye once from a pro 3D animator - doesn't matter if it's technically wrong, just needs to be not-wrong enough to trick the viewer into assuming it's right

It's actually nearly impossible to make a smooth feeling scrolling platformer (or even a very rough one tbh) without going into units smaller than a pixel. A shoot'em up with aimed shots not just going in cardinal directions? Completely impossible.
You can probably think of them in different manners. To me they are just decimals (or hexa-decimals I guess) - speedrunners call them "subpixels"
For collision detection I usually find it advantageous to convert those coordinates into pixel coordinates, since you don't need any more precision than that, and you need them converted to display your sprite anyway - this prevents off-screen object collisions but that is rarely necessary anyway. For 16-bit math, this isn't really relevant anymore. So yeah, maybe off-screen collisions are a bit more rare on 8-bit systems?

In a sense that depends on how big an umbrella the idea of 'subpixel' is - if positions are machine integers, and the software reasons about them in a higher-precision way without explicitly implementing a higher-precision number type (i.e. by using accumulators to track the up-up-right-up-up-right motion of bullet aimed at 22.5 degrees), does it still count?

I guess so, since integer parts and fractional parts are all the same to the machine whether they're handled explicitly inline, or hidden away behind a friendly fixed-point number datatype with associated subroutines to handle algebraic ops.

Which I suppose is why I find fictive pleasant in this context, since it creates a distinction between semantic numbers - i.e. the ones a mathematician or designer would prefer to think in - and the machine numbers that ultimately need to be munged in ASM to make the math workable in practice.

Completely forgivable at the time. Industry experience hadn't really been built up much, and the time pressure was crazy. Nobody won any extra points for having the most elegant source architecture.

Eh, good architecture pays for itself in saved time... With the caveat that you have to design it right on the first go else fall into the Infinite Refactor Vortex, which is really bloody difficult unless you have total knowledge of the problem space.

So yeah, forgivable.

[BryanM]

My favorite Locomalito game is this Rodan game he made. It's called Gaurodan.

Peak gaming. Everything comes together perfectly. The constant forward momentum encourages head-on collisions when trying to shoot something on the same plane. The predictable nature of enemies that are easily managed when there are a few, but can become quite dicey and more complex as more of them pile onto the screen. The island setting allowing him to alternate between land and sea stages. The buildings provide shielding to ground units, so you have a tactical reason for wanting to destroy the imprudent human's buildings. Super thematically resonant.

My only complaint is how much rocking the d-pad back and forth constantly to shoot mostly downish is incentivized. There's only one thing I would change (besides add moar) and that's being able to press down to rock instead. The skin on my thumb is barely hanging on here.


I found this post by a reddit anon just now. I get a warm fuzzy feeling knowing there's a more than 1% chance one of ya'all made it...

Foolish child, thie shall not conqueur thie genre of shmup simply overnight.

Thie finer things in life take progress young newb, increments of mastered skill thie must earn.

Thie indulge upon such quests for thie sense of achievement having mastered thie seemingly impossible.

ONE DOES NOT just simply mount thie skateboard and instantaneously execute thie every flip trick known to man.

ONE DOES NOT just simply stroll into thie Shaolin temple and master thie shaolin arts over night (unless thie is Chuck Norris ofcourse).

ONE DOES NOT just simply perform 10 reps of thie mothers 0.5kg pink aerobics dumbbell "weights" and immediately on thie spot metamorphosize into thie Mr Universe.

AND ONE DOES NOT just simply 1cc thie Black Label Cave shmup having not thie invested thousands of thie hours of thie gruelling arduous E training that would shun even Rocky Balboa to thie eternity of shame.

BEGONE! BLASPHEMOUS! IMPRUDENT! CASUAL GAMER!

BEGONE! I SAY!

PROCRASTINATING! NER'ER-DO-WELL! INDOLENT! SLOTH FOLK!

At the very least, it's like some kind of instrumental convergence.

[velo]

Speaking of Sega, I was in the mood to play some Shinobi, so I booted up the eshop to find Sega Ages Shinobi... Guess it's been delisted for a while.

I guess the Shinobi Non Grata guys must have sent them a cease & desist? Dekudeals shows that certain stores like Best Buy are still selling digital copies, maaaybe that might work? Otherwise, you might try Shadow Gangs.

[BrianC]

Sega Ages Shinobi is still available at nintendo.com, though I had to type "sega ages" before it for it to come up.

[BIL]

Aha, there it is.

[Sima Tuna]

Aha, there it is.

Says unavailable for me. Maybe I could region-swap, but I dunno. I could also just go buy it on my xbox 360.

I decided to fire up some Ninja Warriors Once Again, after not having played for a while. I'm trying to learn any other character than Ninja. Been working on Yaksa and figured I'd pick Kunoichi this time. She's supposed to be easy to use, right? Big mistake. Got absolutely clobbered on Stage 1 Noob Breaker boss. I regularly get beat there with Yaksa too. Figured, "maybe I'm just shit and rusty at the game. Let me quickly swap over to Ninja." Beat him no problem, then no-effort cleared until the Stage 5 wall stopped me. So I can practice Kunoichi and Yaksa and still play like shit, but I pick up Ninja and immediately am steamrolling.

So does anybody know how to level up my Kunoichi game? I already know the theory of Yaksa. She's just slow and high execution compared to what my scrub ass is used to. Ninja was a perfect fit for my play style, with how I could zip around the screen and spam invul states using throws and nunchucks. The level of disrespect you can show the Stage 1 Boss as Ninja is hilarious. Just go nunchuck apeshit whenever he tries to do anything. That doesn't work with kunoichi though, and yaksa seems to get most of her boss damage off juggle combos using zako.

I've seen footage of the SNES version's stage 1 boss and they really upgraded that motherfucker for the Once Again version. Stage 5 boss looks easier on SNES too.

Edit: I bought Assault Suits Valken because it was on sale. First impressions: music is sick. Extra materials include a full game guide with artwork.

[BryanM]

Ninja Turtles' turn in the cycle. A very avant-garde game.

For some reason, it was very RPG-like. The hub world was a more action-y take on Zelda 2's. Multiple characters you can control. Some weapons do extra damage against certain enemies. Randomized enemy spawns, for some reason.

It really had the foundation for a really good game. Just choose to not have the four characters be the Ninja Turtles (palette swap = boring!), don't put a water maze at the very front of the game, and have a freakin' password or save system for crying out loud.

Are there any games that are like that, where you hit start and can swap to another character right there? Doki Doki Panic/Friday the 13th kind of have a swap system, but not one that generous. And of course Megaman is almost the same thing... Castlevania 3 or Wai Wai World of course...

I always thought it was a potentially cool work around to the two button limitation. A great way to swap weapons in top-down games like Zelda, Alien Syndrome, New Ghostbusters II... Also a neat way of implementing multiple lives. An actual sense of loss when you're no longer able to use your favorite character, at least for a while..