ah, erecting a quote pyramid and filling the thread with too much text. my favorite past-time. hope i'm not annoying ya'll.
Sumez wrote:Zelda 2 is amazing, better than the first, and almost completely bullshit-free (unlike the first which is crammed full of it). I will fight you till the end of time.
come, now, almost completely bullshit-free? what about the grind it takes to increase your health and magic to reasonable levels? the meaningless, time-wasting random battles? the vacant and dull-as-dirt overworld? the lifeless, repetitive towns? combat and exploration utility magic being tied to the same bar, and needing to constantly be recharged? that one is nearly as unforgivable as metafight's hover ability being tied to a bar, and thus needing to be mind-blowingly tediously farmed all the damn time if you do not know the exact pathing.
or perhaps the absolutely most damning thing about zelda 2: its tedious linearity! it set into stone a terrible tradition of pretty much one dungeon at a time, never letting its player truly free but still jerking them around with increasingly obtuse progress gates. these gates feel boring to solve and lose meaning when the world is so linear - i am not allowed the opportunity to approach them in my own order, thus making each new riddle a
demand, rather than a reminder. when madoola makes the decision to be almost entirely linear (you will sometimes want to retread an old stage or two), it has the respect for you to have breakneck pacing and relatively little obtuseness, which have little place in a linear game. i feel you could make a better game out of zelda 2's components than madoola's, for sure, and it definitely has better combat, but so much of the game is spent deducing the jarringly specific thing that it wants you to do next, grinding, or farming. it has much less than many modern games, of course, but i find even small amounts of those two activities a sleight. to understand my taste and dispassion for zelda 2, please let me stress how much i feel this has no place in a game of this genre and structure (i worry you will catalogue this information and bite my ass with it in a later post down the line when i mention being more tolerant of it in another game, so i'm pre-emptively covering my ass, hehe
).
whether you prefer zelda 2's combat to zelda is a subject of taste, and i am willing to admit there is some uniquely cool attraction to its signature sword-hopping, but it is absolutely, entirely, indisputably nowhere near levels of having cleansed itself of its bullshit. it is for similar reasons i hold disdain for the other listed games with similarities to it, honestly. i am of the likely horribly unpopular opinion that there is
no good zelda game between the first and a link between worlds, which is the first game i consider to actually learn from the first since the first (i have admittedly not played and been meaning to get around to majora's mask, which might change my mind on this). zelda 2 is nowhere near as hand-holding or dull in combat as many of its follow-ups, but i consider it merely decent-ish because of its above flaws and its general disrespect for your time.
i do consider the first game excellent, though perhaps slightly less innovative than most. i believe it is more of a refinement than an innovation, and takes a lot of inspiration from both the dragon slayer series and tower of druaga - combing through their interesting elements and putting them to much better use. aside from the obviousness of taking from druaga's combat, i also feel like it learned from the community formed around druaga. in japanese arcades, people would leave notebooks behind to solve the game's increasingly demanding and absurd levels of obtuseness (druaga is more interesting as a social experiment than game, imho), and it was through this dedicated group effort (and a million coins taken by old endou's cabinets) and co-operation that the game was ever considered beatable. LoZ had a similar idea, though i feel like the game never intended for you to collect everything (druaga nearly forces this), and for much of its secrets to be shared by word of mouth or found by the truly dedicated. it's hard to appreciate fully in today's environment, but brilliantly ahead of its time. i find it that there was perhaps not another game as creative about its adventure and potential for social interaction until demon's souls and its scrawled messages & world summoning goodness.
Sumez wrote:I never even heard of it! Thanks for the recommendation.
i pray you enjoy it! i have not gotten anyone else to beat this game, much less 1cc it or try its hard mode. it's damn good and i will stick to it forever no matter how alone i am, but i do so crave some company up on my hill.
(Sorry if it feels like I'm going at your throat, but I just like to discuss this stuff...)
Although way too slow for my tastes, I can understand Tail'Gator. But please don't tell me you would ever recommend Spanky's Quest over Taito's original "single screen platformers"?? There's an absolutely enormous gap in quality. I don't mind that Spanky doesn't have the incredible depth and abundance of little details that define the Taito benchmarks, but Spanky's Quest is such a god damn drab to play. I love the mechanic that it's based on, but clearing stages is so slow and feels like a chore, the direct opposite to the upbeat on-your-toes gameplay of the Bobble Bobble series.
What surprises me the most though is that you claim that you don't like the Taito games, but enjoy both Tail'Gator and Spanky's Quest? As far as I can tell, they should have the exact same target audience. Or are you just being harsher on Taito because their games are more popular, while the others could be considered "hidden gems"?
spanky's quest and amazing penguin were both asides i felt like mentioning. the commentary before them is not applicable, i simply wanted to bring up that they're also interesting natsume games. neither of them are really games that belong to that same kind of genre, especially amazing penguin. spanky's quest i've never beaten, as i feel it's never "clicked" with me. a friend of mine swears by it, though! which i felt let it deserve half of a sentence of recommendation as a sorta-kinda obscure gb game.
tail'gator would require more explanation for my love for it, but oh, do i love it. incredibly smart usage of space for the game boy, a snappy attack, delightful music and visuals, and enemies that all feel very learnable. perhaps my greatest point of contention with most taito single-screen games (such as don doko don) is that the attack is often deeply awkward and unsatisfying, at least for me personally to use. bubble bobble is somewhat of an exception, but a lot of their other games just get to me. i also feel as if the enemy design is a bit too focused on you, which can engineer situations where you're screwed and sometimes makes levels feel all too samey. tail'gator's enemy patterns are a bit more deliberate and pathed out, thus crafting what i would personally consider a more refined and thoughtful game with greater level variety.
i'm suddenly reminded that i didn't bring up avenging spirit! that one has become somewhat commonly recommended, however. anyone here not familiar with it? need a pitch?
Didn't even know Yousai had a sequel, and the first is still on my to-get list.
i feel like they are both a bit of good fun, but the second is notably better and actually pretty good. i feel like they're a good take on what metal gear would have been like without stealth.
copy-paster wrote:IIRC one of the AC Gradius II composer (Shinji Tasaka) credited as "thanks" under the name 'Tasaka'.
thank you for the information. this potentially helps explain how it's music retains that just so distinctly gradius-sounding feel to it.
Shoryukev wrote:I'm just going to throw this out there. I've never really had much interest in Bubble Bobble either (Puzzle Bobble yes, but not BB), but something about Parasol Stars has really got its hooks in me. The sprites are decently sized and interesting to look at, the music (while repetitive) is catchy....I find myself humming it after I turn it off. The controls are really what draws me in though. You can guard yourself with the umbrella horizontally or vertically, and use water drops in a lot of interesting ways. You can use them to grab items by throwing them, collect them in a group to unleash a devastating attack, or even use them as a platform to bounce off of like a trampoline. Little things like that make it a really charming, fun to play game. I picked it up about 3 weeks ago and I can honestly say I've played it at least one round a day since then, it is highly addicting.
i'll consider it a higher priority in my pc engine quest, thank you for this.
Air Zonk, Blazing Lazers, R-Type - I won't go into these, we all know these are great shmups!
actually... i'll disagree on all three fronts!
time to take a thread subject detour, uh-oh.
i haven't played air zonk, but i
very much did not enjoy super air zonk. i bumbled my dumb, falling-asleep ass through a 1cc on my first attempt with it, and consider it to be extremely banal and an even worse take on shooters than bonk is on platformers (something i figured impossible). horrible sound effects and shot feedback, awful power-ups, enemies with too much health, the obsession with its presentation over all else... man, i didn't care for it. not one bit. i've near-unanimously heard its predecessor is better, but i can't imagine THAT MUCH better that i'd consider it anything more than semi-decent at the very best. i tried playing it on hard, but it didn't make it more interesting, just more irritating. lots of clutter, that game.
gunhed/blazing lazers is honestly compile's most overrated game, to me. i'd much rather play gun nac or zanac, both similar games i'm not terribly fond of (but at least respect) to begin with. there are huge stretches of sedate nothing in the game, and they're followed by abruptly punishing enemies. either my concentration lapses or i'm taken off guard by not having memorized how something works, and my shot power is down and i'm caught in a spiral. i've beaten it, but didn't even find it worthy of my time to 1cc. imho, spriggan (i bring up for also being compile) completely blows it out of the water and is nearly up there with musha aleste's excellent shooter quality - if only its power-up system weren't standard compile nonsense
r-type - okay, i feel bad for leaving you hanging and thinking i thought r-type wasn't great - r-type is one of my favorite shooters of all time. i adore it. never bothered with its 2nd loop, but i can no miss the arcade version on its first loop fairly reliably. i consider the force pod a truly brilliant marriage of elegant exchanges between offense and defense as you manipulate it, and i strongly feel like it is one of few irem games to earn its forcing you to memorize it because of offering equal opportunity for you to increase your skill along with your rote memorization and muscle memory. also, goddamn, wonderful soundtrack, wonderful aesthetic. a true hallmark and deeply influential title. but. but! i do not give much of a toss for the pc engine version. i feel like it translates ever-so-slightly poorly despite a mostly faithful conversion, and there are a few moments like the stage 5 boss or last level that do not co-operate with the screen space being just a bit horizontally shortened (those goddamn babies in the final stage can come from way off the left side of the screen, which makes that fight (which i already strongly dislike) much worse. i feel like neither the hucard nor cd version has any space between the excellent port of the game on r-types, the interesting 2.5d take of r-type dimensions, or the quirkier home port on the sega master system with an absolutely delightful fm synth soundtrack (should you fm synth mod).
Vigilante - Interesting take on the "Kung Fu Master" formula. Larger sprites, you get to use nunchaku occasionally, and feels a little more like a quarter muncher than Kung Fu.
it has been nearly ten years since i played this, but i beat it and distinctly remember not liking it. i did find novelty in you looking like jackie chan and having the objective to rescue madonna, of course!
BIL wrote:Aha, one of my favourite game design theses: The Genealogy of Holy Diving. In truth, Holy Diver plays a lot more like Metroid with a hint of Zelda II than Castlevania.
this is... a bizarrely astute observation and take on the game i'd never seen before. bravo, this is quite well thought out. i never thought of it this way, but yes, the similarities to both games are now quite apparent and genuinely seem like verifiable influence.
Regarding Metal Storm, a 2-ALL is definitely a serious undertaking. What separates it from Holy Diver (actually, what separates most quality hardcore from HD) is its polish. MS handles beautifully and is balls-hard regardless. HD handles like a dog, plus it flickers brutally, and ends up balls-harder as a result. For the 1LC anyway... a 1CC is probably easier than the Metal Storm 2-ALL, given how generous the former is with resources (especially 1UPs). MS is relatively stingy, can't make many mistakes before your credit's over.
i have beaten metal storm's first loop on a single life and finished up its second loop. took me all day when i got it. i feel with another not-even-full-day, i could have reduced its 2nd loop to a 1cc quickly, or even a no miss clear (i'm too stuck in using this term rather than 1lc, sorryyy). it was miserably hard, but feels like once you've got it down, there's not much further to go to nearly master it. i
kind of like the first loop of the game, but don't enjoy the second nearly at all - hence why i never went back to do a challenge run on it. it feels
too strict, so much so that the game loses almost all sense of player quirk and becomes some kind of ingrained routine. my lack of admiration for metal storm is largely in that i feel it poorly marries its skill-increasing with its memorization-increasing, ala irem's better games like the first r-type. there is a best power-up and approach to almost every situation and it feels like it steams out player identity in its design - like the programmers kind of lost sense of balancing as they were making it and became too tunnel-visioned.
my favorite stage is stage 6, i believe (i think it's 6, maybe it's 5, god i don't remember), particularly on the famicom version where there are the electric gates at the top and bottom of the screen. this creates some brilliantly dynamic puzzle-solving action and highlights the game's strengths quite well, but is in my view the only stage in the game to really do that. also has a kind of fun and tricky boss with obvious r-type homage in the background. loop 2 of stage 6 is probably the absolute best the game gets, but i really strongly feel that the rest of the game does not capture that kind of dynamic joy.
Beware the temptations of a Holy Diver 1LC, however...
MOSH/METAL BLADES' bouncing, relentlessly firing behaviour has a decided resemblance to that of Zelda II's dreaded Fokker bird knights, too.
