Ninja Gaiden [NES] + R2RKMF: Scrolling Action Monogatari

[Sumez]

Kitten, I just ordered Nuts & Milk out of your recommendation - I've seen the name many times when going through the old-ass Famicom library, but never paid any attention to it. It doesn't look like a game I'd like, but I'm always curious about those really early arcade style games, and even tend to enjoy Ice Climber despite how annoying it is.

It's almost incredible to how many people the NES (and to an even bigger extend, the Famicom import side of things) is basically just everything that happened until Castlevania. Whenever I actually see people on local retro trading groups selling Japanese carts it's almost always mostly carts from the pulse series.
People will fondly remember NES Donkey Kong, Ice Climber, Balloon Fight, Duck Hunt or even Clu Clu Land, while most of the games we typically touch in this thread are all late era NES titles. It's almost like people being into two completely different systems.

Of course, all Famicom games are interesting for historical reasons (and many early ones are still pretty good) - some times it's almost unbelievable that the first few titles were running on the exact same hardware that we see later titles. Of course, stuff like animated backgrounds, extra RAM, scanline counting and largely variatied graphics were only made possible through extra hardware included on later cartridges, but the "vanilla" NES is honestly not as limited as those games made it look. The NES supports hardware scrolling out of the box, but no games made use of it until around Lode Runner and Devil World, which were still pretty damn subtle in how they use it.
You need to respect that Super Mario Bros. is an NROM game. That's the most basic NES/FC cartridge possible, the same that Donkey Kong, Tennis and Popeye use. That game was a ridiculous game changer for the Famicom and home video game consoles in general.

it handles sfc really damn well, too, imho.

To be fair, SFC has RGB out of the box. There's a huge world of difference

[Sumez]

i've still not played shovel knight more than once because of how exhaustingly long it is. there were a number of good things about it, but i really feel like yacht club could not help but to bloat the game in ways that really placed its design out of the generation it was intending to imitate. definitely a better imitation than most modern stuff, though! it's definitely not as utterly abysmal as something like oniken or odallus.

Shovel Knight is actually not particularly long. I think it's about the same length of an 8-bit Mega Man game, maybe just a little tad longer. It's a little more padded though, with more stuff to do like the map encounters or spending money on upgrades.

I really recommend playing through the first playthrough leisurely and causally, just treating it as a practice mode. The real game doesn't start until you've completed it and unlocked New Game+.
In this mode there are no health pickups, enemies do a lot more damage, and the stages only have one checkpoint. Of course, more importantly you'll be fully upgraded and don't have to bother with looking for secrets, finding the subweapons or spending money, so there is nothing to break up the pace, and you are free to play it as a classic action platformer. It's much closer to the generation it imitates, and in my opinion a completely valid member of the family!
I went from the opinion you have now to actually loving the game just from playing New Game+.

It's still not a super hard game though, but the beauty of the upgrade system is that it basically lets you choose your own difficulty. Get less hearts, play without subweapons. There's a billion possible categories for this game, and you can definitely find a valid way to enjoy it.

Ps. Glad you recognised Odallus as abysmal, btw. I don't understand the love that game gets, it does so many things wrong. I found Odallus to be a huge improvement though. Still very amateurish and by no means a great game, but it entertained me well enough.

[Vanguard]

I really recommend playing through the first playthrough leisurely and causally, just treating it as a practice mode. The real game doesn't start until you've completed it and unlocked New Game+.
In this mode there are no health pickups, enemies do a lot more damage, and the stages only have one checkpoint. Of course, more importantly you'll be fully upgraded and don't have to bother with looking for secrets, finding the subweapons or spending money, so there is nothing to break up the pace, and you are free to play it as a classic action platformer. It's much closer to the generation it imitates, and in my opinion a completely valid member of the family!
I went from the opinion you have now to actually loving the game just from playing New Game+.

Dang, that sounds pretty good. I'm gonna have to bump that one forward a few spaces on my to-do list.

[WelshMegalodon]

It's almost incredible to how many people the NES (and to an even bigger extend, the Famicom import side of things) is basically just everything that happened until Castlevania. Whenever I actually see people on local retro trading groups selling Japanese carts it's almost always mostly carts from the pulse series.
People will fondly remember NES Donkey Kong, Ice Climber, Balloon Fight, Duck Hunt or even Clu Clu Land, while most of the games we typically touch in this thread are all late era NES titles. It's almost like people being into two completely different systems.

You'll have to clarify what you mean by "until Castlevania", since I see NES and Famicom games released after 1990 brought up all the time.

[FinalBaton]

how would i tell if it's an FS120?

by looking at the back of it!

To be fair, SFC has RGB out of the box. There's a huge world of difference

I don't think he's talking about the SNES' RGB signal... probably it's composite signal, maybe S-Video

[Blinge]

I must say Sumez, it's nice to completely agree with you about something for once

It's still not a super hard game though, but the beauty of the upgrade system is that it basically lets you choose your own difficulty. Get less hearts, play without subweapons. There's a billion possible categories for this game, and you can definitely find a valid way to enjoy it.

And yeah even with its hardest modifiers, player made or otherwise, SK is easier than most of the games discussed in this thread.
Playing as Plague takes some getting used to though.

[Sumez]

I don't think he's talking about the SNES' RGB signal... probably it's composite signal, maybe S-Video

Why would anyone use SNES composite though? A RGB cable costs like $10 at most.

And yeah even with its hardest modifiers, player made or otherwise, SK is easier than most of the games discussed in this thread.
Playing as Plague takes some getting used to though.

Never got into the previous expansion due to how unintuitive it felt playing as Plague, but Specter looks a lot more fun, I'm really looking forward to the Wii U release.

You'll have to clarify what you mean by "until Castlevania", since I see NES and Famicom games released after 1990 brought up all the time.

Around 1986 the type of games you'd see on the Famicom would slowly start to change, being less arcadey short bursts of entertainment you'd seen up until then, but more along the lines of SMB - longer experinces designed more towards being played at home, less focus on score, and more on beating the final boss, etc. Even the graphics changed a lot, and of course this is where you'd see games starting to use various mapper chips to allow more memory and ROM data.
I think it's very obvious that there's a huge difference between the two ends of the system's lifespan. And yeah, I'm not saying that late era games are rarely brought up, I'm saying there's a suprisingly large amount of NES lovers for whom it's the early part of the machine's game library that defines it.

[Blinge]

Never got into the previous expansion due to how unintuitive it felt playing as Plague, but Specter looks a lot more fun, I'm really looking forward to the Wii U release.

How far into Plague's game did you get?
Spark powder destroys everything.
I think I was pretty good with Plague by the time I'd got all his achievements (nothing makes me git gud like unlockable achievements)
The speedrun cheev was a bitch though!

Specter of Torment comes as a free update if you already own the game btw guize

[FinalBaton]

Why would anyone use SNES composite though? A RGB cable costs like $10 at most.

he doesn't have a SCART/component converter just yet

[Sumez]

Component < RGB

[FinalBaton]

Component < RGB

everyone and their mom knows that, yes
why would you even state that, aside from the goal being stroking your euro peen?

[Sumez]

You were the one who avertised converting RGB to component. That seems like a very silly thing to do I think.

[FinalBaton]

You were the one who avertised converting RGB to component. That seems like a very silly thing to do I think.

consumer CRT's over here don't have SCART sockets on 'em. How the heck are we supposed to feed them RGB?

[WelshMegalodon]

Uh, kitten is a woman.

[FinalBaton]

Uh, kitten is a woman.

Oh, didn't know that

sorry x1000 miss kitten

[Squire Grooktook]

Shovel Knight feels roughly the same to me as classic Mega Man difficulty wise.

The length is a big problem for properly tight single sitting play sessions, as it is for me in all Mega Man influenced games, but one thing that vastly alleviates it (in Shovel Knight and the Zero/ZX games) is splitting up the level selection into increasingly more challenging groups of 2's and 3's. The 8 evenly paced and challenge balanced starting stages in most Mega Man games usually results in me getting bored halfway through and turning the power off, but the more organic difficulty ramp (while still retaining some measure of freedom in stage order) alleviates that massively and makes the whole thing feel tighter to me.

I also like that you can somewhat use gold as a pseudo-score counter in Shovel Knight, attempting to go for all the difficult jumps for gold and make it to the end with minimal losses from death. Of course with some spots for infinite farming, it's a self imposed challenge, but it does add some much appreciated sense of tension and pressure (even in non-single-sitting runs).

Also Specter Knight is the X to Shovel Knight's Mega Man. Rad and addictive as fuck movement.

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Sign me up for the "fuck Odallus/Oniken" club as well. I don't think they're "bad" games per se, they check enough boxes to avoid the kuso-pile and fall into "technically solid" territory, but they're so fucking uninspired. There's no unique playstyle or mechanics, there's no particularly strong design fundamentals (see the boring and basic boss patterns, a far cry from the wicked balance of rng and tactic we usually laud here), no abilities feel particularly cool or visceral, there's no real depth or skill ceiling. It's all just really one dimensional design and it honestly blows my mind that a small team would summon the passion necessary to go through the hell of game development and then craft something so utterly soulless. It honestly puts me off more than any design flaw, at least flawed games sometimes have seeds of good ideas or moments of coolness.

Like, for comparison, Odallus feels closest to Demon's Crest with its disconnected levels which are at first played through as an action experience, and later returned to with new powers to explore and open up new paths. Demon's Crest isn't a very tight game either, but it at least gives you the feeling your playing as a unique entity, a demon who can fly and cling to walls, ascending and descending impossible convoluted halls of spikes in a hellish other-world to reach his target. Odallus doesn't have comparable creativity with its generic sword-swinging, and the last few bosses aren't the massive leap in entertainment that the final encounters in Demon's Crest are.

Also worth noting that Odallus controlled a lot worse at launch, with several major control issues patched out later. The sword for instance, had a massive amount of lag at the end of its swing (after the attack hitbox become active)...but was jump cancellable for some reason. So you basically bunny hop cancelled every single sword slash because there was no reason not to, which felt like shit even though there was zero disadvantage to it. To this day I have no idea why they made that initial design decision, and I suspect my complaints on the steam forum and their youtube account might have influenced the change lol. I believe there were a few other tweaks and conveniences added later as well.

[__SKYe]

I finished Shovel Knight quite a while ago, but only in the regular playthough. I really should play NG+, and the other characters (which I didn't even know were playable).
But I agree it is a pretty nice game, and, like it has been said, if you disregard the level select map, and the trinket hunting (which can actually be kinda fun, as you get to go to different parts of the levels, which are not required, if you just make a beeline for the exit), it pretty much plays like a straightforward, old-school action game.

Also worth noting that Odallus controlled a lot worse at launch, with several major control issues patched out later. The sword for instance, had a massive amount of lag at the end of its swing (after the attack hitbox become active)...but was jump cancellable for some reason. So you basically bunny hop cancelled every single sword slash because there was no reason not to, which felt like shit even though there was zero disadvantage to it. To this day I have no idea why they made that initial design decision, and I suspect my complaints on the steam forum and their youtube account might have influenced the change lol. I believe there were a few other tweaks and conveniences added later as well.

I also agree that Jump Cancelling attacks is a no-no.
If you're going to make a cancellable attack, make it cancellable on landing. Then you'll end up with a Ninja Gaiden or Castlevania: AOS slash type, where you can chain two quick slashes (if you have the proper timing, or you risk not landing the first slash at all), but no more, as you have to wait for the slash after landing to fully end, before continuing.
I believe this leads to a satisfying mechanic, as a more skilled player can use it to deal damage more quickly, but it still doesn't allow abuse.

I think it's very obvious that there's a huge difference between the two ends of the system's lifespan. And yeah, I'm not saying that late era games are rarely brought up, I'm saying there's a suprisingly large amount of NES lovers for whom it's the early part of the machine's game library that defines it.

There most definitely is a difference.
Early Famicom/NES games were very much as arcade style as it got, whereas later games, veered more to the "reach the ending" style, just like you said.
Perhaps the people who prefer those early games, were people who grew up with games like Donkey Kong, Pacman, etc, and never got much into the later FC library. Much like the people who still feel like 'arcade games' are pretty much only the games from the Pacman, Donkey Kong and Burger Time era.

[Squire Grooktook]

I am completely okay with attacks being jump cancellable, there's lots of games I like where you can jump cancel everything all the time. Daimakaimura has near instantaneous attacks that are also jump cancellable, and that works as a wonderful way to let you improvisationally dodge while attacking, without actually letting you fire on the move.

It's just the way it was implement in Odallus that made no sense:

If, for example, the attack had a noticeable amount of lag before the attack hitbox became active, but was jump cancellable the whole way through, that would make sense. It would essentially mean "you have to find a window to deal damage, but you have an emergency escape route if something goes wrong".

If the attack had that massive lag at the end that it does, but was not cancellable, that would make sense. It would essentially be like Castlevania, where offense/defense is very commitment based.

But as is, where you can cancel at anytime, the attack comes out almost instantly, and there's this weird bit of lag at the end to always be cancelled, makes no sense. You never have a valid reason not to jump cancel, because otherwise you're just sitting there.

This might seem like a neurotic little nitpick, but when your most basic and fundamental ability that you use ten bajillion times over the course of the game has a weird obnoxious little quirk to it, it is a big deal.

They did patch it and tightened up the timing on the attack, which feels massively nicer now, but still. I will never understand how something so obvious and fundamental made it out of development.

[__SKYe]

I am completely okay with attacks being jump cancellable, there's lots of games I like where you can jump cancel everything all the time. Daimakaimura has near instantaneous attacks that are also jump cancellable, and that works as a wonderful way to let you improvisationally dodge while attacking, without actually letting you fire on the move.

Ah, I was thinking more in a short range attack, where you could cancel anytime, making you able to repeatedly perform faster attacks, by just doing small jumps after every attack, and cutting their animation short.
Makaimura does indeed to this, but (most of) its attacks are long range, and they are almost instantaneous, so even if you can jump (which, like you say, is a good thing), you cannot abuse it in order to do massive damage, that otherwise wouldn't be possible.

Something like, if in the classic Castlevania(s), you could cancel your whipping motion motion, by jumping. Of course, in the original (arcade style) games, you'd still have to deal with the fact that the jump isn't variable (you couldn't do small jumps just to cancel attacks), so perhaps, this wasn't the best example, but I hope you can understand what I had in mind.

It's just the way it was implement in Odallus that made no sense:

If, for example, the attack had a noticeable amount of lag before the attack hitbox became active, but was jump cancellable the whole way through, that would make sense. It would essentially mean "you have to find a window to deal damage, but you have an emergency escape route if something goes wrong".

If the attack had that massive lag at the end that it does, but was not cancellable, that would make sense. It would essentially be like Castlevania, where offense/defense is very commitment based.

But as is, where you can cancel at anytime, the attack comes out almost instantly, and there's this weird bit of lag at the end to always be cancelled, makes no sense. You never have a valid reason not to jump cancel, because otherwise you're just sitting there.

This might seem like a neurotic little nitpick, but when your most basic and fundamental ability that you use ten bajillion times over the course of the game has a weird obnoxious little quirk to it, it is a big deal.

They did patch it and tightened up the timing on the attack, which feels massively nicer now, but still. I will never understand how something so obvious and fundamental made it out of development.

You'll have to forgive me, but I haven't played Odallus in a long time, and don't really remember how the attack worked, but if it is as you say, then it's definitely bad design.

I mean, if your going to allow jump cancelling like that, ou might as well remove the end delay altogether, and allow normal fast attacking (or smaller/no end of attack delay), and just compensate by having enemies having more HP, or something along those lines.

[Sumez]

Since this behavior has been patched out of the game, I don't think it's really fair to judge it by this anyway.
I do enjoy Odallus more than Squire seems to consider it worth. On the other hand, I wouldn't consider Oniken "technically solid". I consider it a horribly meager and unenjoyable game, despite the developers obviously having put a ton of effort into it. One of my biggest fears in regards to my game programming hobby is that if I ever finish an action game that it will have all of the flaws that Oniken has.
Making a game like this is a lot harder than it looks, and I feel like it's far too easy to end up with a game like Oniken.

[__SKYe]

One of my biggest fears in regards to my game programming hobby is that if I ever finish an action game that it will have all of the flaws that Oniken has.
Making a game like this is a lot harder than it looks, and I feel like it's far too easy to end up with a game like Oniken.

That is true, but that's why I believe that, when making a game (especially as a hobby, where I would assume people don't have such urgency in getting it done), gameplay mechanics (player control, how player interacts with enemies, etc), should come before everything else. I wouldn't even try to do anything else (like graphics/sound/level design) until I got this part pat down.
The only level design I would make, would be for testing the character(s) controls/capabilities, in order to make them as flawlessly as possible.

Note that when I say 'flawlessly', I don't mean that there's only one true way of making an action platformer character's behave, but rather, having your character behave exactly how you want it too.

After all, regardless of how good the game will look/sound, or how well the levels are designed, if it is flawed at such a critical point, then it will drag the entire game down.

[Sumez]

Oniken honestly controls pretty nicely. It just has some dumb design choices and completely stupid level design. It's already been too long since I played it for me to say exactly why it sucked, but I definitely won't hold it against the developers. I feel that they definitely tried.

[Ghegs]

I like Oniken. My biggest issue with it was the randomized item drops, and that was fixed in the Unstoppable Edition.

In other news, I've been playing the first NES G.I. Joe game, developed by the venerable KID. It's kind of a mix between action-platformer and run 'n gun, pretty fun, even if it doesn't do either one as good as an entry that focuses on being just one of them. Lots of bosses, which I like. The maze stages take some getting used to and figuring out the best path, but I haven't found them annoying, at least not yet.

[Squire Grooktook]

Since this behavior has been patched out of the game, I don't think it's really fair to judge it by this anyway.

It's true. Keep in mind I played it through in one sitting on launch day, so I got smacked in the face with a lot of irritating and odd little things (including an infuriating softlock glitch that caused a boss to fly offscreen and iirc forced me to replay one of the most ponderously slow segments in the game) that were patched out later. I honestly feel like I should replay it sometime to see the full extent of the changes.

Like I said, I do consider it a "solid" game, it just fails to reach for anything that could be its own (as another user here eloquently put it).

Give me a flawed, unbalanced, mess of a game with a soul over something that checks the basic boxes but doesn't do anything particularly well or uniquely.

I consider it a horribly meager and unenjoyable game, despite the developers obviously having put a ton of effort into it. One of my biggest fears in regards to my game programming hobby is that if I ever finish an action game that it will have all of the flaws that Oniken has.
Making a game like this is a lot harder than it looks, and I feel like it's far too easy to end up with a game like Oniken.

Open betas and feedback, especially aimed at the hardcore like the people of this forum, can go along way to straightening out those technical issues. There are lots of amateur developers who simply "get it right" on the first attempt too. I could name a few.

I personally just believe that JoyMasher is one those developers that just doesn't "get" the nuance of these games, and thinks that slapping on really basic level/boss pattern design onto a cool aesthetic is enough to make a game fun. I would be willing to bet that the very basic/straightforward conversations we've had about design here are vastly more complex than any thought process that went into the design of their games.

That is at least the impression that their non-descript boss patterns and stage layouts give me, and the fact that neither changed from Oniken to Odallus. I'll be genuinely surprised and impressed if their new game (Blazing Chrome) offers more thoughtful design or more characterful mechanics (not betting on it).

[kitten]

tv stuff

i'll check what tv i have sometime, it's really inconvenient for me to get behind it with how i have it set up. i am indeed using composite, i don't have the option to do otherwise with my current stuff.

tv is capable of s-video and i use it with snes because i have a proper cable.

Kitten, I just ordered Nuts & Milk out of your recommendation - I've seen the name many times when going through the old-ass Famicom library, but never paid any attention to it. It doesn't look like a game I'd like, but I'm always curious about those really early arcade style games, and even tend to enjoy Ice Climber despite how annoying it is.

i actually like ice climber a bit, in complete, sincere honesty. the jump is obnoxious, but mechanically speaking, they knew what they were doing with it.

nuts & milk is not what i would consider a great game by any measure, but it is extremely noteworthy for its time and i think a valuable game to anyone invested in the famicom's history. i've never gotten very far in it, but i enjoyed my brief time with it. one of few fc games i own the box for, even if it is beat up to shit. real cute.

it's weird to me that lode runner was the bigger early hudson runaway hit, because it is way less competent than nuts & milk and not really even one of their own games. nuts & milk, imho, deserves to be put up there with stuff like ice climber and above junk like mach rider. if only it had been released over here at the nes launch, maybe it would have caught on better as a classic. it's very known among old famicom enthusiasts but not really outside of that sphere - the kind of people you mention fondly remembering old launch titles and with little regard for anything in the middle and later years of the fc's lifespan.

the original SMB is indeed a technical marvel. they did some real clever, economic spritework in that game to make it so visually varied with such minimal space.

I went from the opinion you have now to actually loving the game just from playing New Game+.

i will keep this in mind, but the base game's draining length will probably forever be a detriment to my opinion of the game. i've been hoping they put out some kind of definitive edition physical version with all the dlc they've been doing on it for me to buy - it's what i've been saving a replay for. maybe i should just already buy that physical edition that's out? maybe?

looking at completion times, it still seems like shovel knight is a fair bit above any of the fc rockman games when it comes to speedruns, and given how fat trimming those tends to be, i'd wager it's fair to say it's still a reasonably longer game. i have been long interested in giving it another shot, though - it's not like i disliked it.

they check enough boxes to avoid the kuso-pile and fall into "technically solid" territory

imho they are absolutely in the kuso-pile. i found both games extremely repugnant and awful to play. oniken is flagrant amateur hour, so i'm going to mostly criticize odallus, since they tried a little harder. lots of super lazy parallax, humongous sprites, ugly but more fluid/frame heavy animations - i don't even understand why they go for the famicom palette restrictions when they don't give a damn for any of the rest of the technical restrictions (what the hell is up with the game's obsession with blue, teal, and bluish-green?). the mechanics they copy are way more sfc generation (and more recent), too. this seems to be a common thing among modern imitations of retro generations - aiming to imitate one gen and then adding in so much modern detritus that the game doesn't even resemble that generation, anymore. even popular stuff like axiom verge did this shit (btw, many laughs at upcoming battle princess madelyn, which looks like hot trash from a developer of known hot trash). shovel knight is one of few examples where they exceed certain boundaries but do it with some manner of thought and taste, honestly - that game has a pretty good aesthetic.

the lazy parallax backgrounds scroll over the goddamn place as the camera tracks you moving over its way-too-open environments, making the game a nausea-inducing, visual mess - a very common problem on bad snes games (and bad gba games, and especially bad, modern indie stuff). there is vertical scrolling on NEARLY EVERY JUMP, which is just egregiously shitty camera work for a game with this kind of level design. odallus has non-linear levels with backtracking, too, so it's not like there's a way to mostly just move forward and only deal with the camera, occasionally. enemies with too much health (their upcoming run 'n gun is definitely going to be shit, its popcorn enemies have tons of hp and this is 99% a show of damnation in that genre. nothing says fast paced run 'n gun action like having to stop to take care of every bullet sponge enemy) and patterns that are too repetitive, levels that don't know if they want to be horizontal or vertical and do both at the same time, significant upgrades, backtracking, fucking crate puzzles, etc. just. eugh. extremely "modern indie" with no real technical competency, imho. superficial, vague imitations of ye good olde days.

i've not played locomalito's stuff, but they seem to much better grasp aesthetic and mechanical design from that era. maybe their games suck nearly as badly (genuinely no idea, they look okay?), but they at least look like games that suck appropriately from the era. bless them for not abusing parallax constantly. nothing pisses me off more than lazy parallax from generations that either couldn't do it or had trouble doing it. mind you, i don't dislike parallax. i just think it needs to be done thoughtfully. ain't nobody on the goddamn planet gonna say that thunderforce iv didn't use it right, for example. it has become a really obvious tell, for me, that someone's modern-indie-retro-imitation game is going to be trash whenever i see it liberally applied in a trailer. there is hardly a term for an action game i can think of that is more insulting than "sub-gba-level design."

it is completely indefensible to me to make games as bad as joymashers do when they have such an incredible library of wonderful action games to pull lessons from. instead, they just really poorly copy superficial elements. i don't really take much joy in picking on indies, but it's not like these guys are just humbly making stuff out of their garages for their pals, they promote and get promoted, and i pay in time (and often money) to play their stuff as a result. these people brag about their experience levels and how much they've learned from and want to imitate their old favorites, too - and then they go and perform all the worst mistakes of the generation with many more popularized years after it. they're open game for shit-talking, imo. they want their games played without kid gloves so i'm going to criticize them without them, too. these kinds of mistakes being repeated as early as mid-life sfc are already bordering indefensible, but decades later? it's outright offensive. so many of these games claim to imitate old action games and then go semi-open-world """metroidvania,""" like that's somehow the essence of late 80's/early 90's design and not shitty, 2000's era homogenization and anti-design. barf. gag. retching noises.

i miss good 2d action games. i miss them, badly. there was already no more room in this world for more dreadful igavania, there is significantly much less for games that cannot even come close to reaching that. Death to Extraneous Bullshit in Action Games 2017

In other news, I've been playing the first NES G.I. Joe game, developed by the venerable KID. It's kind of a mix between action-platformer and run 'n gun, pretty fun, even if it doesn't do either one as good as an entry that focuses on being just one of them. Lots of bosses, which I like. The maze stages take some getting used to and figuring out the best path, but I haven't found them annoying, at least not yet.

KID is venerable O_o? are they well-liked on here? i'm pretty familiar with their library and wouldn't consider them anywhere near good enough to be venerable - most of their games are way too deeply flawed. mind you, i do like them, i just think that their stuff tends to cap out at "quirky and janky, but neat" at best, with only a couple of exceptions. i will go to bat for kickmaster, for example.

gi joe i REALLY wanted to call a good game, but ultimately just couldn't. i think the maze stages are the real deal-breaker, as they are abysmally paced and just get worse and worse on later loops. i've no-missed loop 3 of gi joe, where the difficulty caps (absolutely not an easy task, largely due to 4-2 and its boss and the lack of recovery going into 4-3), and it gets so damn close to being a good action title but always falls short.

[Squire Grooktook]

nothing says fast paced run 'n gun action like having to stop to take care of every bullet sponge enemy)

Thanks 'cause this clip expresses pretty much everything I've been saying about the lack of nuance in the level/boss design.

This is how all their games really are. An enemy just walks up and does a straight forward thing, and that's it.

Putting aside the pacing issues of the amount of hp on everything, I'd at least give the enemies some attacks that require some measure of reaction and sight reading. Like if it was me, maybe instead of firing straight foward on a static predictable timing like chumps, I'd give those grunts and mecha-snakes some difficult to read, unpredictable lobbing projectiles like castlevania skeletons. Or some sort of bullet spray. You know, something that might force you to read their trajectories or make a reaction of some sort.

But nah everything in Joymashers games follows the most simplistic and boring patterns imaginable. There's just not a lot of nuance here. Make enemies do basic stuff, slap some pixels on it, and call it a day. Who needs creativity or intensity?

-

Anyway, I will still maintain that they're not straight kusoge (just very boring and bland), by virtue of nailing most of the core fundamentals of a game that's playable: no input eating/dropping on the controls, no screen edge riding from the camera, can't get mulched by a lack of hit invuln, etc. They're playable, they just lack heart.

[Blinge]

I went from the opinion you have now to actually loving the game just from playing New Game+.

i will keep this in mind, but the base game's draining length will probably forever be a detriment to my opinion of the game.

looking at completion times, it still seems like shovel knight is a fair bit above any of the fc rockman games when it comes to speedruns, and given how fat trimming those tends to be, i'd wager it's fair to say it's still a reasonably longer game.

Uh, a quick search says the world record for SK is shorter than MM3
.. Then I realise the SK player is a filthy cheater

so the actual record is 10 minutes longer than MM3's record, make of that what you will.
Although on a first couple of playthroughs I personally wouldn't avoid the extra stuff like mini stages, dialogue.

[FinalBaton]

i'll check what tv i have sometime, it's really inconvenient for me to get behind it with how i have it set up. i am indeed using composite, i don't have the option to do otherwise with my current stuff.

tv is capable of s-video and i use it with snes because i have a proper cable.

yeah I get what you're saying. It can be hard to access the back of a CRT in certain cases. Like when it's set against the wall, or inside a TV stand/media console of some sort

I'm surprised yours doesn't have a component input though! I thought all Wegas had one.

Oh well, S-video is still pretty good

[Immryr]

There is a code you can input in shovel knight to play in NG+ mode right off the bat.

[Sumez]

(btw, many laughs at upcoming battle princess madelyn, which looks like hot trash from a developer of known hot trash)

I don't mind Madelyn's look. I do think they went overboard with their gradients and pixel shaders, but honestly, I can appreciate mixing old school lo-fi restrictions with modern effects - it's a unique aesthetic that has its merits. I don't think that there's anything wrong with using the Famicom palette restrictions while still applying parallax and SNES size sprites everywhere. I've seen way, way worse sins in "old school" aesthetics, where developers have simply applied low-res 2D graphics on top of a Unity game or some other home made engine where everything is moving on floating point vectors, and in worst case scenarios you will even see "pixels" partially overlap other pixels. Games that intentionally go for that aesthetic (like Hotline Miami) can get away with it, but otherwise it's just a misunderstanding of why you'd even go for the "lo-fi" feel to begin with. The keyword here is awareness of what you're even trying to achieve.
Joymasher even wrote a piece on that, which I respect, even if I'm still not a big fan of the game. His ideas of where he should draw the line between the Famicom's restrictions and his own liberties may not mesh with yours or even mine, but at least he did put some thought into what effect the restrictions actually had on the experience of the game, rather than just doing it for the hell of it. I do think Odallus looks good, too.

the lazy parallax backgrounds scroll over the goddamn place as the camera tracks you moving over its way-too-open environments, making the game a nausea-inducing, visual mess - a very common problem on bad snes games (and bad gba games, and especially bad, modern indie stuff). there is vertical scrolling on NEARLY EVERY JUMP, which is just egregiously shitty camera work for a game with this kind of level design.

It's funny that people still do that, just tieing the camera scroll 1:1 to the player character. Good scrolling algorithms isn't rocket science (in fact, some of the more advanced ones tend to just backfire) - I like to look at Kirby's Adventure as a good reference for how to do decent bidirectional scrolling in an old school 2D game. I'm not sure -exactly- what that game does, but what I did for my own NES game, which seems to have the same result, is simply having a hardcoded treshold for when you activate scrolling in each direction. That allows just a little big of wiggle room back and forth on each axis before the camera starts following you, which avoids the nausea. The downside to this is that for at least one direction you'll have less visibility ahead of your character, but with small sprites like in Kirby, that's not really noticeable.
If you want to make it a little more avanced than that, you can have a camera that auto-pans the moment you hit the treshold for the opposite direction, which is useful if you have a free scrolling game with a lot of backtracking. Super Mario World does this.
Here's a nice in-depth article on the subject - one of the surprising few.