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Looks like those trouple fishing spots keep sparkling if they don't give you anything. So I assume that you could use a potion on the spot and then fish again to get it filled right back up. Which is nice of the devs.
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Nov 14, 2015 10:54
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I have no idea what those flying fuzzyspherebatOHGODTEETHthings in Plague Knight's level are but they're amazingly cute.
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Nov 14, 2015 13:34
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 Part 4: MISTER NUTS?! Part 5: SHRINK ME BRUHH Part 6: SAVING IS FOR BABIES  Playlist Part 4: IN FACT, HLBLUAAGH Part 5: VERY...VERY. JUST VERY. Part 6: HE'S A GOD, MAYAN Playlist
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Nov 14, 2015 14:22
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anilEhilated posted:I have no idea what those flying fuzzyspherebatOHGODTEETHthings in Plague Knight's level are but they're amazingly cute. I think they are a Pachirisu or Emolga.
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Nov 14, 2015 15:27
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I've Covered Chinese Zombie Wars With Bruce Willis  Prologue 5
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Nov 15, 2015 00:02
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Hehe, this game is so ludicrous in its crossovers. The blue dressed zombies are from Ghosts N Goblins. Can't speak for the other ones (Resident Evil perhaps?). Heihachi's clearly Tekken 1 age from his hair alone. Which makes Jin even existing yet, let alone being from Tekken 5 or 6 ish strange.
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Nov 15, 2015 00:36
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Heihachi took a drug that restored his youth. I assume he was Old in namco vs. capcom with the way they talk to him. Once again, good job continuing a story line with direct references to a game never released in the US.
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Nov 15, 2015 00:45
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With that scanner thing at the end and talking about a sinking ship I think they might be from RE: Revelations 1.
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Nov 15, 2015 06:39
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 In this episode, Shovel Knight takes to the skies to bring down the pompous airhead, Propeller Knight, in one of the hardest stages of the whole game!
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Nov 16, 2015 13:34
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Major_JF posted:With that scanner thing at the end and talking about a sinking ship I think they might be from RE: Revelations 1.
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Nov 16, 2015 15:07
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Tame...? Chapter 1 Boy, this is like...not crazy. Weird.
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Nov 17, 2015 00:37
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Tae posted:Tame...? Y'know, this applies to the other updates as well, but those combat sequences are basically impossible to follow visually. Just a mess of sprites flying all over the place and numbers popping out. Is there anything in particular to do gameplay-wise, do you just button-mash or what?
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Nov 17, 2015 01:30
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:Y'know, this applies to the other updates as well, but those combat sequences are basically impossible to follow visually. Just a mess of sprites flying all over the place and numbers popping out. Is there anything in particular to do gameplay-wise, do you just button-mash or what? I mentioned it in an earlier update, but it's basically memorizing juggle points. The attacks are fancy, but they all end with a wall bounce to the left so it's less chaotic than you think. When it's a huge mess, it's actually when you just mash because the Cross keeps the enemy in place so your juggle points don't matter for that moment. That's the bad thing about the game. There's literally no depth after that beyond using skills to heal/increase damage for a 40-something chapter game. It's not like positioning matters. edit I should clarify that an attack is literally just A+direction (or neutral). You're not pressing anything beyond that. It's not like I'm inputting fighting game moves to make those animations happen. Tae fucked around with this message at 01:37 on Nov 17, 2015 |
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Nov 17, 2015 01:34
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Not one human in sight -- let's play Transformers: Fall of Cybertron Chapters 1 and 2: The Exodus and Defend the Ark Chapter 3: Metroplex Heeds the Call Chapter 4: Eye of the Storm Fall of Cybertron is everything a Transformers game should be. It's fun to play, it has all the giant robots you could ever want, the action is pretty much nonstop, the villains are megalomaniacal while the heroes are stalwart guardians of peace, the story doesn't try and pretend to be deep, there are no human characters anywhere, and Peter Cullen plays Optimus Prime. This game is the second in a trilogy of three, and is considered the best of the bunch. The first in the series, War for Cybertron, was a promising title that ultimately didn't deliver, while the third one is a garbage cash-in that we wont talk about. There was an LP of the first game done a number of years ago, and it's available to watch on the archive. It's pretty good, and I'd encourage you to check it out if you like what you see here. http://lparchive.org/Transformers-War-for-Cybertron/ As I mentioned in the video, my exposure to the entire Transformers series has been minimal. Apart from this I've only ever watch Transformers: The Movie and Transformers. I'm only vaguely aware of the series in general, and my knowledge doesn't extend past cultural osmosis. There are two different cartoons called Beast Wars and Beast Machines, and only one of them is good, but I don't know which. The whole original series was a 30 minute long toy commercial. Kiss Players exists. I'm pretty sure there's currently an ongoing show, and that new episodes air on nickelodeon. Because this puts me in a bad position to do an LP, I'll be watching through a few of the cartoons inbetween updates so I'll have stuff to talk about. I'll be doing this LP with live commentary, and because I want to keep things moving along, I'm playing with all the weapons and upgrades already unlocked. This means I wont have to waste time hunting around for money, and things will be easier from the get-go. The game also has a number of hidden easter eggs in it, but (save for one) I won't be showing those off. The videos are already going to be long enough as it is, and I don't want to spend the time finding a bunch of references that I wont get. If you want to see them, then that's all the more reason to play the game for yourself. Wanamingo fucked around with this message at 11:00 on Dec 13, 2015 |
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Nov 17, 2015 10:26
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 Today Shovel Knight deals with Tinker Knight and his old friend Polar Knight, the only two members of the Order of No Quarter left to stand in his way of the tower. Then, he begins his ascent.
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Nov 18, 2015 13:36
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Part 7: WELCOME TO HUMANFACTS Part 8: MAYBE YOU SHOULD SAVE Part 9: A CONSTANT WAVE OF FUCKS PlaylistPart 7: KILL EVERYTHING EVER Part 8: DEATH, KILL, DRACULA, SUCK BLOOD Part 9: YOU RUINED EVERYTHING Playlist
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Nov 19, 2015 08:19
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Wanamingo posted:Not one human in sight -- let's play Transformers: Fall of Cybertron As I recall, Fall and War for Cybertron are supposed to be a reboot which ties in somewhat with the Transformers Prime 3d cartoon, which is definitely something people should watch. There are human characters, and one of them is quite annoying in the first season, but even so, she doesn't appear all that much, and the Transformers are really given a time to shine. Best of all once that season's done, things get so, so much better. I really can't recommend the show enough.
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Nov 19, 2015 10:54
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CommissarMega posted:As I recall, Fall and War for Cybertron are supposed to be a reboot which ties in somewhat with the Transformers Prime 3d cartoon, which is definitely something people should watch. There are human characters, and one of them is quite annoying in the first season, but even so, she doesn't appear all that much, and the Transformers are really given a time to shine. Best of all once that season's done, things get so, so much better. I really can't recommend the show enough. Are there any arcs or individual episodes you could recommend? I'll have to sit down and watch some.  Chapter 3: Metroplex Heeds the Call In this episode we have to destroy some warp cannons, and I give you my thoughts on The Five Faces of Darkness, the five part opener to Transformers G1 season 3. Spoilers: I didn't like it. Sorry if my commentary seems a bit disjointed at points, I'm still getting the hang of talking and playing at the same time. As a bonus, here's the first page of notes I took while watching Five Faces.
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Nov 20, 2015 09:02
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Some years ago I marathoned through the Transformers G1 cartoon. I stopped when I reached the third season because it was really bad to me, and not just in a '80's cartoon' sense. Funnily enough, I found out that the last episode I saw of the cartoon as a kid was the final season 2 episode, so it seems like I dodged a bullet there. e: and boy that season 3 intro... Zanzibar Ham fucked around with this message at 09:09 on Nov 20, 2015 |
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Nov 20, 2015 09:07
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Wanamingo posted:Are there any arcs or individual episodes you could recommend? I'll have to sit down and watch some.] Thing is, Transformers Prime has long arcs and character development that last through the whole series; all I can do is recommend the usual first-3-episodes routine and see if you like that. That said, the first three episodes do a lot to establish the series' main elements, such as a surprisingly dangerous/competent Starscream.
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Nov 20, 2015 14:46
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 At the top of the tower, Shovel Knight confronts the Enchantress and saves the world. For shovel and shield!
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Nov 20, 2015 16:55
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CJacobs posted:
A very  ending
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Nov 20, 2015 19:12
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CommissarMega posted:As I recall, Fall and War for Cybertron are supposed to be a reboot which ties in somewhat with the Transformers Prime 3d cartoon, which is definitely something people should watch. There are human characters, and one of them is quite annoying in the first season, but even so, she doesn't appear all that much, and the Transformers are really given a time to shine. Best of all once that season's done, things get so, so much better. I really can't recommend the show enough. It's more like they work off the same notes Like if it was The Lord of The Rings, one would be the Balski Cartoon and one would be the Peter Jackson Film But the Prime cartoon barely references this backstory anyway and is its own thing. It's worth watching just if you think Blum has limited range as a voice actor to hear him camp it up as Starscream. IT. IS. LORRRRRRRD
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Nov 20, 2015 20:19
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You know, for how obvious the whole Enchantress "twist" was, it still felt touching. This game does a lot with a little bit of writing. Also that boss rush looked straight-up brutal and I'm saying that as someone who never got past Propeller Knight's level. Anyway, are you going to do the DLC? Acne Rain posted:It's worth watching just if you think Blum has limited range as a voice actor to hear him camp it up as Starscream. IT. IS. LORRRRRRRD anilEhilated fucked around with this message at 23:38 on Nov 20, 2015 |
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Nov 20, 2015 23:34
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N'aww that ending. That was awesome, thanks for showing it all off. I am horrible at 2d platformers so that's why I never got to experience it but it was amazing.
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Nov 21, 2015 01:52
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In Episode 6 you mentioned that you weren't sure if the devs of shovel knight were actually using the real NES palette when making the game, and I seem to remember there was some previous details in one of the unfinished LPs that went into details about the technical stuff they had done. I'm old and smoke crack for a living but I believe that it was mostly true, but the big dodge was that all of these colours were possible on the NES, but it was impossible to have all of them on the screen at once, and the same was true for how they used the sprites. E.g. 1 sprite might be that motive/detailed but not all of them. Of course watch this be addressed in ep 7 and I'll look dumb for jumping the gun posting 
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Nov 21, 2015 11:44
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  time! Yes, it's an effort post in a no-effort thread!I've worked with the NES quite a bit and am familiar with the restrictions. First thing to note: Shovel Knight does not look remotely like an NES game. Yes, some of the colors are from the same palette, but it breaks far too many restrictions to even come close to looking like an NES game. It's a personal pet peeve of mine so I get unreasonably annoyed when people try to claim games have a certain look when they don't, so bear in mind. The NES look is more than just color palette, and it has to do with the hardware restrictions. The NES graphics system is basically divided into two components: tiles and sprites. Tiles are 8x8 four-color paletted images, where one color is always the same between all palettes (usually black, but you can change it and some games did). You can have up to four background palettes at the same time. The NES graphics unit has space for two 32x30 tiled background screens (two 256x240 screens), and you can smoothly scroll either horizontally or vertically between the two. They also wrap. This is what makes smooth scrolling possible on the NES: you set up the first bit on one screen, then continue building onto the right until you hit the rightmost edge of that one, then you start over on the left of the first screen and the PPU will scroll and wrap appropriately. Tiles are specified as indexes into the pattern table. There's not a lot of space in the pattern table, so the number of different tiles you can have on screen is limited. But there is an additional complication: although there are 32x30 pattern references on each screen, there are only 16x15 attributes. Think of it as grid of 16x16 pixel, or 2x2 tile, squares across the screen. Attributes are what controls what palette that particular square uses. This means that each 16x16 square on the screen has to share the same palette, so you will never see more than 4 background colors in one 16x16 space. Now, pixel artists back then were very creative and did all sorts of trickery to hide this fact from players, and came up with some amazing looking scenes despite these restrictions. You can see it if you know what you're looking for, though. There is no such thing as layers in an NES game. Parallax scrolling (as done in Shovel Knight) is not possible without clever trickery, and even then it's very limited.  Here's a screenshot from TMNT! There are four palettes: one greenish with white highlights for ceilings and floors, an orange-and-red one for the wall, a blue one for the water, and a white/red/blue one for the HUD below there. Note how each 16x16 square only uses a single palette. Leonardo there is something else. He's a sprite - several sprites, actually. Sprites are 8x8 images (usually - you can do 8x16 sprites as well), just like tiles, but they are not constrained to a grid and can be independently positioned anywhere on the screen (almost). 8x8 is quite small, so you'd pretty much always put several together to form a larger character. You have four additional palettes for sprites which are independent of the background palettes. Additionally, index 0 of a sprite palette is always the transparent color, so in practice what you have is three colors + transparency. Note how Leonardo uses exactly that: A light green, a darker green for contours, and blue for his bandanas. You can have up to 64 sprites on screen at once, which sounds like a lot until you realize you may need 4-16 sprites for a moderately sized character. Additionally, you can only have up to 8 sprites on a single horizontal line at a time! The PPU will simply not render any more than that on a single horizontal line. This is why NES games flicker when there's a lot going on - too many 8x8 sprites horizontally level with each other, and some of them are going to not render for one frame or another. There are more quirky details to talk about, but this is getting long and you probably don't care (but I'll elaborate if you want). The upshot of it all is that what I, at least, think of as the "NES look" is a direct result of these restrictions and all the clever things artist and programmers did within those restrictions. They really did some amazing things and made things that are beautiful precisely because they couldn't just do whatever. Relaxing the restrictions too much - as was done in Shovel Knight - robs the product of that special look and makes it look... well, I'm not saying it's bad, but it's also not like an NES game. It really makes you appreciate the lengths they went to in order to make gorgeous games like Vice Project Doom or Batman. 
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Nov 21, 2015 12:45
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I always felt the biggest difference between "retro" games and old games was in size. Shovel Knight is about 200 megs which is tiny by today's standard, but weren't NES cartridges something like 1024 kb?
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Nov 21, 2015 12:50
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anilEhilated posted:I always felt the biggest difference between "retro" games and old games was in size. Shovel Knight is about 200 megs which is tiny by today's standard, but weren't NES cartridges something like 1024 kb? Most NES games were much smaller. Dragon Quest IV is 1024 kb (a.k.a. 1 mb), and there are a few bigger ones (like Kirby's Adventure), but most were in the range of 128-256 kb. Anyway, that was more by necessity than anything else, and it doesn't even have the grace of being a necessity that has interesting implications (like the graphics stuff). Unless you're the kind who's really awed by the marvels of compression, bank switching and other engineering tricks, which don't get me wrong, you might be, but I bet most people aren't.
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Nov 21, 2015 12:56
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Yeah, I thought it looked like it had way too many colours for a NES game, but I had nothing to back that up. Thanks for confirming.
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Nov 21, 2015 14:37
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Well alright, maybe they didn't conform to it all that well, but they mimic-ed it well enough which I think is cool in its own way. Good effort post Hyper Crab Tank! And, I dunno if I'm doing the DLC. I might, because it's fun! But I also might not because it could lead to frustration because it's pretty hard. I am definitely thinking about it though.
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Nov 21, 2015 15:16
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I think Shovel Knight looked just fine. It's obviously not as constrained as an actual NES, but the point I believe was to invoke NES nostalgia while maintaining a smoothness and variety of play that would be vastly more difficult to achieve on actual hardware. The important thing is the play experience, not holding yourself to some ancient conduct as you develop your game. One neat thing about Shovel Knight though is that the music actually would be playable on an NES -- that is, it uses the same sound channels that the NES had available to it. Another interesting retro-style game is Axiom Verge, which uses NES-style palettes (with a bit less rules-breaking than Shovel Knight) but SNES-level or better resolution. It also makes use of graphical "glitching" that frequently shows you the 8x8 chunking that makes up all of the sprites and tiles.
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Nov 21, 2015 17:24
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Well, just to be super clear, I'm not saying Shovel Knight looks bad. I'm just saying it looks nothing like an NES game, and that disappoints me a little because I so love (can you tell?) the actual NES look.TooMuchAbstraction posted:One neat thing about Shovel Knight though is that the music actually would be playable on an NES -- that is, it uses the same sound channels that the NES had available to it. Oh yes, the NES sound chip, despite its simplicity (2x square wave channel, 1x triangle wave channel, 1x noise channel, 1x DPCM channel) was capable of producing a surprising amount of really great-sounding music. Some cartridges (tragically only released in Japan) even extended the sound capabilities, such as Castlevania 3/Akumajou Densetsu. The music in the Japanese version has twice the number of sound channels available to it, and the music sounds really fantastic. Shame the one we got wasn't quite as full featured... sadly the VRC6 chip was not compatible with the western NES, so we got a trimmed-down version without those features.
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Nov 21, 2015 17:38
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But it doesn't look "nothing" like an NES game. You're implying here they didn't do the research and didn't make any attempt to stay close to the original limitations, which is really not the thing you want to imply with the way Shovel Knight development went. The NES aesthetic is certainly there, just not completely so.
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Nov 21, 2015 18:53
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Can we just agree to disagree on that? I don't want this to turn into a weird thing. Shovel Knight is a good game, aight?
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Nov 21, 2015 19:13
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Shovel Knight's visual style is probably best described as, "NES aesthetic without the physical limitations". edit: Also, I decided I'm not going to do the plague knight expansion. I really don't like the gameplay so I don't think it'd make for very good videos even though the writing is still top notch. CJacobs fucked around with this message at 20:08 on Nov 21, 2015 |
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Nov 21, 2015 19:25
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I'm going to agree that there's a lot of indie games out there that go for "retro" graphics, while not even attempting to look like what the graphics actually did, except for maybe sprite art. And it does bug me when people generalize that as all being "NES style" too. I'm not the expert Crab is, but the topic is fascinating to me. Question--You say that the backgrounds in that TMNT spot are all their own tiles arranged to look like one cohesive world while still following the 4-color rule, but what about the drain waterfall on the wall? Am I just vastly overestimating the size of a tile, or was some trickery used there?
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Nov 21, 2015 22:54
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Choco1980 posted:Question--You say that the backgrounds in that TMNT spot are all their own tiles arranged to look like one cohesive world while still following the 4-color rule, but what about the drain waterfall on the wall? Am I just vastly overestimating the size of a tile, or was some trickery used there? Betting it's a sprite. I remember weird artifacts popping up on those when I played the game an age ago. The falling water at least, it's about the same height as the turtles.
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Nov 21, 2015 22:57
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Choco1980 posted:Question--You say that the backgrounds in that TMNT spot are all their own tiles arranged to look like one cohesive world while still following the 4-color rule, but what about the drain waterfall on the wall? Am I just vastly overestimating the size of a tile, or was some trickery used there? You mean this? I've highlighted the central 16x16 pixels with green there. As you can see, that whole spot uses the blue palette.  This is a good example of simpler kinds of trickery. They got up to some really sophisticated stuff later on in the console's lifecycle, such as by cutting it real close to the edges of things and duplicating colors across palettes, all the way to fake parallax backgrounds. EponymousMrYar posted:Betting it's a sprite. I remember weird artifacts popping up on those when I played the game an age ago. The falling water at least, it's about the same height as the turtles. It was indeed also common to use sprites for background elements. It's not the case here, though.
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Nov 21, 2015 23:05
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Did any other games feature multiple direction scrolling like SMB3 did with its extra processor chip? I want to say it popped up in one of the later Mega Man games...
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Nov 21, 2015 23:13
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