BrianC wrote:Hi kitten. Welcome to the shmups forum!
thanks! :p hey, are you the same brian i used to chat with on AIM a few years back?
BIL wrote:I just got both, they cheap.
Then sprang for the SuperGrafx one a bit later, but I'm a bit nuts.
wahhhh, i want a supergrafx. maybe some day, when i'm rich. at least lie to me and tell me it's not the coolest thing
In all seriousness, if it's a great port of a great game, for a system I'm already heavily into, I'll happily double/triple up. Heroic ports are just as integral to a console's library as its original games, imo.
sometimes i care about ports a lot, sometimes i don't. generally, if there's an arcade accurate way to play it otherwise, i discount them (r-types makes pce r-type obsolete, imo), but sometimes the port is quirky enough for me to still like it. megadrive and arcade daimakaimura probably both use fm synth, so i'm expecting a good soundtrack.
nothing will ever beat out the famicom and its huge amount of "ports" that are basically totally goddamn awesome, redesigned games. gradius 2, contra, super c, nes jackal, nes legendary wings, etc.
on a slightly different note, i just learned today that capcom did an arcade game for the little nemo property - anyone here play that? it looks okay.
RKA is signature Nobuya Nakazato - blitzkrieg sidescrolling action, and another game no MD library should be without! Out of curiosity, have you seen Shin Contra's secret ending?
of course
i almost linked it here for fun. it's pretty tough to earn that thing, in-game, but i loved doing it. shin contra is damned good, but i feel it wears its incredibly-long-sitting to get it down both as a plus and minus. i never go back to it casually because of ift, like i do a few of the other games (particularly the fc ones), but it left an arguably bigger impact in quite a few ways.
you ever bother with this one-hit kill mode, BIL? i played a bit before i went to bed last night and it seems kind of on par bucky o hare's in terms of what it does to the design: a few parts are a bit more interesting but most of the game was
very clearly not designed with it as the intent and it trods over some of the game's finer points. really makes you scared to bleeding death to do boss speed kills, too, which are such a critical part of the game. the big difference between those two modes is that it doesn't have the generosity to give you infinite continues that bucky o hare does
i feel like just one step down on the difficulty ladder (jp/eu "very hard," us "normal") is about perfect, for this game. most non-negligible stuff kills you in 4 hits, lots of stuff will kill you in just 3 hits, a few things in just 2 - enough wiggle room for a couple of mistakes. given that on the original cartridge you had to unlock 2nd hardest before you could unlock hardest, i'm willing to
mostly dismiss this like bucky o' hare's "HARD!" too. it just seems like something the programmers put in when they'd gotten bored with their high level of competency in playtesting. bucky's i'll still recommend over this due to the infinite continues, though - just pretend it's some modern platformer like super meat boy, where the levels are all short and self-contained super challenges.
still going to try to beat it like i did bucky's hard
i managed to get through a sizeable chunk without dying last night, until i hit that stupid fucking fish & spikes tunnel and proceeded to lose every life that i had. this game is just too danged long for a mode like this. i feel pretty satisfied with my very hard/normal no miss, though. i don't think i'm going to get much better at performing this game, just memorizing it.
BIL wrote:Makaimura Gaiden: Red Arremer II - The Demon Darkness (Capcom, GB 1993)
I was gonna give this miniaturisation of the second Arremer game (from FC) a shot! :O I already got the rovely FC game but I do love me GB softs, and the boxart is sha-weeet! Then I start the first stage, change direction sharply, and 'arry carries on in the same direction. ಠ_ಠ Yes, it's a small but distinct control glitch right out of the gate, and with a GB port of an established FC favourite already on thin ice, I'm not encouraged to continue.
Verdict:
GET THIS CRAP OUTTA MY FACE CAPCOM I ain't got time for damage cases nowadays.
Well no it's not crap, I'm sure it might be ok if you can't play the FC version for some reason. I demand my ports control at least as tightly as the source material though!
i could just never enjoy arremer 2. i felt like it was just redoing the formula from the first game, but worse. i think the biggest thing that screws the design in that game is the little whirlwind platform step - because it's so easy to abuse, it feels like the level design of the entire game bends over completely backwards in really bad ways to accommodate how freely you can move. feel pretty much the same about demon's crest - absolutely gorgeous game (maybe the literal strongest aesthetic on the entire sfc), really startlingly weak platformer and action design. i honestly think that mechanically, demon's blazon is the worst of the three, it does some
really dire balancing around your constantly increasing attributes. if only the series had gone
less rpg and upgrade oriented and
more toward just refining its action, i feel like it could have been legendary. it broke my heart that this series never had the game to match its art. i'd love to know the staff behind demon's blazon, so i could see what else they did, but it seems like it's still, to this day, a mystery.
if you're unaware, gb arremer 2 does have some exclusive content in the form of - i believe - 2 additional stages. no unique bosses, but i do think they use some unique tiles. i think one of them (maybe both?) add some unique upgrade, too, but i can't remember what it does and it's probably just some negligible late-game bonus. i played through this a few months ago, praying that it somehow fixed what i disliked about the original, but it didn't, really.