Vanguard wrote: ↑Tue Sep 10, 2024 3:12 am
Came across a Megaman X fangame that seems pretty solid and thought of this thread. It's called Mega Man X8 16-bit, and it is a remake of Megaman X8, a game I've never played, but with gameplay and visuals that imitate the original Megaman X. I am only halfway through the 8 mavericks, but it seems quite solid. The feel is just right, the look is pretty close, level design has been at least as good as Capcom's so far, difficulty feels half a notch above the original Rockman X, which is right about where I want it for something like this. They've still got time to drop the ball, but from what I have seen, I doubt that will happen.
I don't know if this was in the original X8, but I love that it let me smuggle a ride armor suit into Vile's midboss room. How do you like it, shithead? Not so funny now that the shoe's on the other foot!
I'm given to understand that there are like 6 playable characters in Megaman X8, here it's just X, but that's fine with me.
Playing some Mystic Warriors currently (JP ver), with Kojiro. I'm trying to do a No-Death run. It's much harder than I thought; max rank really makes a big difference IMO. I'm not sure I understand well the controls... Sometimes my character stops autofiring after a dash or a slash.
Kojiro and Keima have the trickier shots, imo, compared to those on the narrower side of the spectrum. Pointblanking's a lot more important, to avoid dangerously long waits between shots. Maybe you're attempting to fire while still in cooldown? I suspect the ACA release has its low-frequency autofire for just this purpose.
I find Mystic's attack inputs slightly restrictive, compared to freewheeling Sunset. The melee attack freezing you in place / disabling your air control takes some adjusting to. Works fine once you learn the zoning - EG, blasting hordes at a distance, rather than rushing in close like you might in a Metal Slug, which can leave you cutting down the pointman as his backups open fire.
BIL wrote: ↑Wed Sep 11, 2024 3:42 pm
Kojiro and Keima have the trickier shots, imo, compared to those on the narrower side of the spectrum. Pointblanking's a lot more important, to avoid dangerously long waits between shots. Maybe you're attempting to fire while still in cooldown? I suspect the ACA release has its low-frequency autofire for just this purpose.
I find Mystic's attack inputs slightly restrictive, compared to freewheeling Sunset. The melee attack freezing you in place / disabling your air control takes some adjusting to. Works fine once you learn the zoning - eg, blasting hordes at a distance, rather than rushing in close the way you might in a Metal Slug, which can leave you cutting down the pointman as his backups open fire.
The character won't fire unless I release the button and press it again. It happens when many enemies are on the screen. It might be a MAME-specific issue
I think it already happened to me in the past with Metal Slug X in MAME. Then I overclocked the CPU to the max and the problem was gone, along with the slowdown.
About Mystic Warriors, it might be wiser for me to stop trying to speedkill the bosses, because it gets me speedkilled. But the temptation is strong.
Is this external autofire you've setup, or what's in the game? Can't remember at the moment if it has it built in or not. If it's external autofire, the other possibility is it's set so high that the game is getting confused and seeing it as a held button input at times, something that can happen if you set it to 30 hz in some games.
Contra x Wild Guns gameplay in a cyberpunk dystopia? Sign me the fuck up.
You're sure to be in a fine haze about now, but don't think too hard about all of this. Just go out and kill a few beasts. It's for your own good. You know, it's just what hunters do! You'll get used to it.
Finished Megaman X8 16 bit. It's good. Better than any official Megaman X game after X2.
There are two different armor sets and you can mix and match. I'm a fan of the body armor upgrade that gives X Bloodborne rallying. The armor sets make you powerful enough that the later mavericks and maverick stages don't put up much of a fight, but the Sigma stages expect you to have them and are tough even with upgrades. The final boss rush is particularly brutal. I gave in and decided to use subtanks - and then won on the next try without needing them.
One interesting idea I liked was that in the usual endgame boss rush, you choose any two bosses and they fight you at the same time. I checked and that wasn't in the original Megaman X8.
Help me out here folks.
In the esteemed opinion of everyone here, we're in agreement that the SNES Star Wars games are mostly poorly-designed shite..... right?
Marc wrote: ↑Tue Sep 17, 2024 10:53 am
Help me out here folks.
In the esteemed opinion of everyone here, we're in agreement that the SNES Star Wars games are mostly poorly-designed shite..... right?
Absolutely.
There's a strange appeal to them which I think ties into a combination of nostalgia and the still-mythic air around the Star Wars saga at the time, before it became exploited to the grave and beyond.
But as far as actual game design goes? It's insane that no one dared to stop them.
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.
[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.)
Last edited by 1KMS on Tue Sep 17, 2024 8:47 pm, edited 2 times in total.
It also doesn't help that in the Star Wars universe, lightsabers are supposed to be these cool, elite weapons used deftly by melee combat experts to deflect lasers, and in the SNES games the lightsabers are wimpy as hell compared to an upgraded projectile weapon and cause you to be pushed backwards if you block with them. SRotJ is the most interesting of the three by far because of the wider variety of playable characters spicing things up, but if you want a cool lightsaber oriented action game for the SNES you'd do far better with Run Saber.
One of the better, more competent Star Wars games remains Shadows of the Empire, the one with Han Solo expy Dash Rendar. It's quite decent and is fun to explore, even if the N64's control scheme is a bit clunky to work with. I remember 100% ing that as a kid. There's a certain degree of secret hunting necessary as the later levels on Hard and Jedi kind of demand you burn lives a bit at some points.
BareKnuckleRoo wrote: ↑Tue Sep 17, 2024 4:36 pm
One of the better, more competent Star Wars games remains Shadows of the Empire, the one with Han Solo expy Dash Rendar. It's quite decent and is fun to explore, even if the N64's control scheme is a bit clunky to work with. I remember 100% ing that as a kid. There's a certain degree of secret hunting necessary as the later levels on Hard and Jedi kind of demand you burn lives a bit at some points.
We spent a month and a half on this jankfest one summer when it was the only N64 game my friends had for a while, and I strongly disagree. Terrible camera, terrible platforming, terrible everything. Especially egregious after spending the previous summer playing X-Wing. That fucking Sam and Max token in the swoop level still occasionally haunts my nightmares.
Rogue Squadron and Episode 1 Racer were legit as hell though.
BareKnuckleRoo wrote: ↑Tue Sep 17, 2024 4:36 pm
One of the better, more competent Star Wars games remains Shadows of the Empire, the one with Han Solo expy Dash Rendar. It's quite decent and is fun to explore, even if the N64's control scheme is a bit clunky to work with. I remember 100% ing that as a kid. There's a certain degree of secret hunting necessary as the later levels on Hard and Jedi kind of demand you burn lives a bit at some points.
We spent a month and a half on this jankfest one summer when it was the only N64 game my friends had for a while, and I strongly disagree. Terrible camera, terrible platforming, terrible everything. Especially egregious after spending the previous summer playing X-Wing. That fucking Sam and Max token in the swoop level still occasionally haunts my nightmares.
Rogue Squadron and Episode 1 Racer were legit as hell though.
Max is the only redeeming quality of the entire N64 Star Wars catalog.
Of course, it can get so much worse. I bet Billy Dee Williams could have done it, though.
BareKnuckleRoo wrote: ↑Tue Sep 17, 2024 4:36 pm
One of the better, more competent Star Wars games remains Shadows of the Empire, the one with Han Solo expy Dash Rendar. It's quite decent and is fun to explore, even if the N64's control scheme is a bit clunky to work with. I remember 100% ing that as a kid. There's a certain degree of secret hunting necessary as the later levels on Hard and Jedi kind of demand you burn lives a bit at some points.
We spent a month and a half on this jankfest one summer when it was the only N64 game my friends had for a while, and I strongly disagree. Terrible camera, terrible platforming, terrible everything. Especially egregious after spending the previous summer playing X-Wing. That fucking Sam and Max token in the swoop level still occasionally haunts my nightmares.
Rogue Squadron and Episode 1 Racer were legit as hell though.
Yeah, agreed. I played through Shadows of the Empire on a rental, and couldn't really stomach the jank. Not really a hot take either, even at the time it had a repetition for being "potentially a good game, but the on-foot sections are really bad"
The only part of the game I really liked was the final part (final stage even, I think??) where you're flying around in a space battle and have to complete objectives which culminate in navigating tunnels through a space station to take pot shots at a core, akin to the Death Star battle from ROTJ. I thought that was really well pulled off, and I wanted more of that.
Then Rogue Squadron came out, and it was an entire game of more of that!
We spent a month and a half on this jankfest one summer when it was the only N64 game my friends had for a while, and I strongly disagree. Terrible camera, terrible platforming, terrible everything.
The presentation and music do a lot of the heavy lifting, especially when you're a kid with a shiny new N64 and a limited selection of games to play. It's not too bad when you get a feel for how the auto aim works, and I think you have to adjust the controls so it stops autorecentering for it to feel best (being able to shift your view and then move around with it shifted helps). I still remember thinking it was the first genuinely decent Star Wars game, having been exposed to the NES, SNES, and GB ones which I remember were very jank, but I also never played any of the PC releases like Dark Forces (?) so I'm sure I've missed out on stuff.
The Atari arcade game was the first genuinely decent Star Wars game.
We here shall not rest until we have made a drawing-room of your shaft, and if you do not all finally go down to your doom in patent-leather shoes, then you shall not go at all.
BareKnuckleRoo wrote: ↑Wed Sep 18, 2024 3:01 pm
I still remember thinking it was the first genuinely decent Star Wars game, having been exposed to the NES, SNES, and GB ones which I remember were very jank, but I also never played any of the PC releases like Dark Forces (?) so I'm sure I've missed out on stuff.
The X-Wing and Jedi Knight series are both amazing and put Shadows of the Empire to shame. Jedi Knight still has the best lightsaber controls, and the force powers were easily the best until Force Unleashed. Don't sleep on the OG Dark Forces either, even tho you don't get the lightsaber until the sequel.
Randorama wrote: ↑Wed Aug 28, 2024 5:04 amQuestion: Has Taito's Crime City been ported to anything, so far? Are Hamster planning to port it, but I am blind and I don't see it in their upcoming titles?
Not mentioned by them, afaik - but I wouldn't be surprised to see it in the next six months. They've been in a tight Namco/Taito/Konami/Other [Tecmo/Nichibutsu/VideoSystem/Athena] groove, the last year or so. Some say it's a harbinger of great change, the fabled leap to current-gen hardware... others, a sign of the end. Mostly, they bitch about too much Namco, while I tell them to play their games for a change.
At any rate, the ninja ambush release is a fond ACA tradition.
Air Master Burst wrote: ↑Wed Sep 18, 2024 6:41 pm
The X-Wing and Jedi Knight series are both amazing and put Shadows of the Empire to shame. Jedi Knight still has the best lightsaber controls, and the force powers were easily the best until Force Unleashed. Don't sleep on the OG Dark Forces either, even tho you don't get the lightsaber until the sequel.
Good call on the Jedi Knight games. I ignored the story and bad main character (Kyle?) entirely. I'll never forget stormtroopers dashing to the door of the control room when I started to open the hanger doors. They almost made it to the control room, before they all got sucked out into space--no doubt instantly frozen solid as they were flushed to oblivion. Good times.
Gonna watch this tangent, because it really belongs in the FPS thread - but man, Jedi Knight! When that game came out it blew my mind. The Star Wars license helped for sure. Once again, since it preceded the prequels, the setting still had a unique mythical air to it, though I don't think it's as strong in that game, more like "hey it's a cool sci-fi setting I'm familiar with".
But what really did it for me, was the level design. Massive sprawling levels like I'd never seen before. Instead of moving around abstract arenas, it really felt like infiltrating real complexes, where you constantly need to discover unique alternative paths to force your way through, and they'd often wrap around on themselves often enough to give you a great sense of space and architecture. My favourite was probably the part where you need to make it through this massive defensive structure, and you have to slip into one of the "teeth" of a huge steel gate as it closes.
In retrospect I really like Doom, Quake and Duke3D a lot. Moreso than I thought to myself at the time, too. But when Jedi Knight came out I really felt like it was the first FPS game that I could truly vibe with, and I still think it's incredibly underrated.
I actually still haven't played the original Dark Forces yet, but I played the sequels to Jedi Knight, and I don't think they stand out at all, not in the way the "first one" did. Well, outside of Mysteries of the Sith, which I guess is technically a sequel even though it was marketed as an expansion. That one was great as well.
Marc wrote: ↑Thu Sep 19, 2024 7:28 am
Jedi Knight as in Dark Forces 2?
I wanted to try these games, but deleted Outcast within an hour of starting it.
Jedi Outcast is one of the absolute best Star Wars games along with X-Wing, TIE Fighter, Rogue Squadron II, Galactic Battlegrounds, and possibly X-Wing Alliance.
Unfortunately the first few parts of the game are not that great. When all else fails and you don't like the beginning of the game, hold shift and press ~ and enter the following:
devmapall
give all
g_saberrealisticcombat 3
setforceall 3
That will make the first few levels more interesting, or at least faster. You can also use higher numbers with setforceall to give yourself full control of NPCs when using mind trick if you want.
Marked for index. 
Your character and system guides were invaluable!
It's not too bad when you get a feel for how the auto aim works, and I think you have to adjust the controls so it stops autorecentering for it to feel best (being able to shift your view and then move around with it shifted helps). I still remember thinking it was the first genuinely decent Star Wars game, having been exposed to the NES, SNES, and GB ones which I remember were very jank, but I also never played any of the PC releases like Dark Forces (?) so I'm sure I've missed out on stuff.
