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Regular games: 1. Metroid Dread 2. Wizards and Warriors 3. Yakuza 5 4. Virtua Fighter 5 5. Yakuza 6: the Song of Life Quest to play all the NES games, year 3. numbering these separately: 1) The Legend of Zelda 2) The 3D Battles of Worldrunner 3) Deadly Towers 4) Lode Runner 5) Raid on Bungeling Bay 6) Ring King 7) Sky Kid 8) Spelunker 9) Spy Hunter 10) Sqoon 11) Star Voyager 12) Stinger 13) Tiger-Heli 14) Winter Games 15) Alpha Mission 16) Lunar Pool 17) Rad Racer 18) Zanac Bicyclops fucked around with this message at 02:24 on Mar 19, 2022 |
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Jan 1, 2022 18:46
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American McGay posted:
hell yeah.
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Jan 2, 2022 04:24
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i love stone tower but i get really sick of playing the Elegy of Emptiness over and over again.
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Jan 3, 2022 17:39
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Mamkute posted:1. The Ratchet and Clank Movie: The Game (Platinum Trophy) lmao
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Jan 4, 2022 17:28
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going to continue my quest to get through every NES game by release date, and finished game 57: The Legend of Zelda (Second Quest) ngl i got kinda burned out on this by the end. there are too many wizzrobes in the second quest. i got wasted a ton of times starting at dungeon 6 or so just by being impatient. i think next time, i'll take a break between the first and second quest. i had beaten this before, both as a child and as an adult. it's always good to come back to. i love the zelda series too much to be objective, but why do i need to be? it's an awesome, groundbreaking game, with open-ended exploration, great dungeons, a catchy and iconic soundtrack, cool bosses, a good bestiary of monsters, a ton of cool gear, + epic battleborn heroes. getting the sword upgrades feel so fuckin' powerful. unless i'm mistaken and missed one in one of the earlier games, i think this was the first north american NES game to use a battery save, setting the stage for all the RPGs to follow. reading about myco's randomizer runs, i think the biggest flaws in this one are how many screens involve using the candle or bombs on every square - if there had been some kind of a rule (always in the center or something), it would be a lot more managable. i also don't love all the doorways in the second quest that involve just walking into a wall until you push through. heading into september of 1987 next, which was a big month for the NES - 15 games! we have stuff by broderbund, bandai, acclaim, konami, sun soft, and, first up for me, the first NES game developed by Square: the 3D battles of worldrunner. my rough count says 86 games until castlevania 2.
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Jan 4, 2022 18:33
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mbt posted:castlevania 2 wasnt nearly as bad as people said it was (if you have the hot tips from nintendo power) i thought people wanted me to get to it because it was good, lol.
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Jan 4, 2022 19:57
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The 3D Battles of Worldrunner you gotta admire this for its ambition. square clearly wanted to do their own take on a home version of space harrier (all of the boss fights are basically slight variations on the first boss in space harrier, really). the best part about it at the time must have been the graphics. it has a stereoscopic 3D you can turn on, which is certainly a first for the NES, but i have to miss out on it - i'm stereoblind. i'd be interested to see what other people think of it, you just need the typical red/blue glasses to make it work, i think. even without the 3D it looks really cool for the hardware that it's on (it looks way better while moving, but still, cool backgrounds) :   other than that, it's not too impressive. besides the bosses, you don't fly like in spare harrier, you just run across the bottom of the screen and have a really long jump. there are enemies on the screen all over the place and they can kill you, but the real difficulty is in all of the bottomless pits and timing your jumps, especially when you have to bounce on springs or pillars within the pit itself. there's also a fairly quick timer that can kill you due to obstacles like gloved hands that block your way. at one point in the later stages i got stuck for a long time because the solution was to jump on top of a flaming pillar that kills you normally, which felt stupid. often the difficulty feels created by how little ahead you can see - sometimes you suddenly see the point you need to jump to and just don't have time to get there. nobuo himself does the music, although there isn't very much of it (there's just "stage," "boss," "tiny victory fanfare" and some music at the end). i don't think i'd have known it was the final fantasy composer. the pause sound is the same as the menu beep from final fantasy, which is sort of jarring if you've played that as much as i have. the bosses all felt kind of samey and what they do is just give them more HP (which makes you in danger of running out of time before killing them) and make you fight more and more of them in a row (you have to beat six on the last level). there are power-ups that you get by bumping into pillars, but i never really understood what most of them did (one, a mushroom, just kills you, lol). i started to ignore pillars unless i was low on time (one of the powerups gives you more time). at the end of the game all the bosses crawl in one at a time and tell you to press a bunch of buttons? i tried it and nothing happened. basically, this was cool, but i think square's reach exceeded its grasp.
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Jan 4, 2022 22:06
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1. Metroid Dread Feels really good to hit those counters on the final boss, just a great end-cap to a great game. My percentage was only 54 and I'm not even going to say my time. back to Yakuza 5!
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Jan 5, 2022 03:41
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i know i'm wordy with some of these but it's not like anyone has to read them. Deadly Towers this game sucks. it's ugly-looking and the music sounds ugly (it's not the composition, it just doesn't know how to use the sound chip).  at the beginning of the game, basically every monster can kill you in 2-3 hits, but you've got to hit everything like 20 times before it dies. not that it's a HUGE problem, because if you get close enough, you stun-lock every monster in the game and just sit there, hitting them forever. any time there are a bunch of things on the screen, there's slowdown and some of the sprites become invisible. entering a room is always dangerous because you might just walk into something that will hit you, stunlock you, and kill you. rooms that contain valuable items have swarms of enemies so that you can't move - you just have to bash the attack button and won't survive if you don't have the right armor and enough hit points. you can also be knocked off a cliff or, quite easily, touch the edge of a hitbox for a cliff without realizing it and instantly die. walking into random walls takes you to secret areas and there aren't any zelda-y old men to advise you how to find them. there's no explanation as to what the mountain of equipment that's sold does, so there's no way of knowing what's good. this is about as much information as you ever get (not even the shopkeepers talk to you):  i almost immediately resorted to using a guide and i knew i was in trouble when the author noted that first we would be doing a few things to "mitigate the game's many flaws" (thanks TVotava0077). once you get almost literally all of the best equipment in the game, it gets less repetitive, partially because things actually die to 3-4 hits and partially because you can afford to just walk into things instead of carefully cornering every monster one at a time. at that point it's trivially easy until the end boss (the other bosses, you typically can hide in a corner and fire at them, they're all on a tiny screen, so it's not like there's a lot of room for dodging, it's always just "hide out of their hit zone").  anyway, you can move in eight directions, which is cool, you always have the sword-shooting power from zelda (but as mentioned, it's not terribly useful, because you have to get up close to stun-lock things). the game is pretty enormous for an NES game and it's basically one long dungeon crawl littered with shops. there are dungeons that are so big they feel randomized, and those have shops where you can spend money on all the items and armor and stuff. you can only carry 250 at a time and everything costs about 100, so there's kind of a lot of grind. there's a brief movie at the beginning that gives you your objective: to burn seven bells in the sacred flame. the flame serves as kind of the hub, and you explore towers around it to find the bells. burning a bell also recovers your HP (the only other way is to collect little heart drops or buy potions). the ending boss run (there are three bosses) is the only time that this felt like a good game, and even then, only by comparison. so what would have made this good? i think all it needed were three major changes. 1) the HP needs complete rebalancing. there's nothing between "you die almost instantly and you have to whale on things forever" and "everything is extremely easy." 2) if your guy could move a little faster and you couldn't stun-lock enemies, combat would be challenging instead of just a slog. bosses would need bigger areas. 3) LESS content. a game like this doesn't need 10 secret dungeons and like 30 things to buy. it doesn't have the gameplay to support that. they should have just put the shops in the towers and given you like one upgrade in each one. better sprite art and sound design also would have helped. next up is Double Dribble, the first NES basketball game.
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Jan 5, 2022 19:09
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Fungah! posted:deadly towers sucks but its at least interesting, theres like 80% of a good game in there and ll they needed to do was do some rebalancing and changes to fix it. i dont ever want to play it again but its got this rep for being a epically massive turd and there's way worse on the nes i think the player/regular monster HP imbalance and the fact that you'd take forever wandering very long, samey, hidden dungeons to correct that problem without a guide make it actually bad. someone could probably make a playable romhack by changing a handful of variables, though. overall, it's 80 percent of a good game that's dragged down to turd level by a few major flaws.
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Jan 5, 2022 19:43
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was going to hold off on posting in case i finished another one today, but that seems unlikely.  Double Dribble my only experience in the real world playing basketball was in gym class. usually the teacher would just leave us on our own and this one kid, who was actually on the basketball team, would periodically throw basketballs at the back of my head while i tried to play with my similarly sports-inept friends. i don't know why, i pretty much never spoke to him. then during COVID he got really into trying to organize high school reunions and contacted me on facebook apologizing for it. like this long, moving heartfelt thing about how he had to be a better person now so he could be a good example for his kids and how toxic masculinity had tainted his teen years or whatever. it was one of the most genuine apologies i've ever gotten in my life, completely out of nowhere. i'm probably always going to think of that dude when i see a basketball now, lol. so obviously the sports video games are mostly not for me. but as far as NES sports goes, even i can tell this is well-made. konami knew what they were doing. i have the same complaint i have with a lot of these, which is that it's hard to tell which player you're controlling at times (when you're on defense, here, you switch with B, but it takes awhile to understand how it chooses which player you're switching to). i was really frustrated with it at first until i read a FAQ with the controls (i couldn't tell why it kept saying "travelling," because in this game, that just means holding the B button too long when you take a shot). i felt way better playing it once i had all the information that would have presumably come with the instruction booklet in the cartridge. i should have just read the controls instead of trying to figure them out and getting creamed badly. like most early sports games, it has difficulty settings (three, i chose the middle one), an option for 2 player, and you can pick what team you play as from a pool of 3 (no licenses, so no real teams). you can set the timer for anywhere from 5 to 30 minutes per period (and it counts in ticks rather than seconds, so you can beat it in about 15 minutes once you know how to play). it has cool cut scenes that are kind of impressive for the NES at the beginning, end, at halftime (cheerleaders dance) and, most awesomely, whenever you dunk.   it even has some voices (mostly just saying "Double dribble" but still cool for the time). i think this holds up pretty well even when you compare it to a lot of SNES basketball.
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Jan 5, 2022 21:19
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b_d posted:I hope you tortured him psychologically by engineering a situation in which he was about to have sex with a bunch of hot women before suddenly remembering he's married. lol
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Jan 6, 2022 00:25
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is shadowman the game that opens with narration from jack the ripper? i think i vaguely recall playing that at a friend's house.
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Jan 7, 2022 15:12
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Lode Runner this was a pretty cool puzzle game in the vein of Wrecking Crew. gold is scattered throughout the level, as are enemy guards. you can move, climb ladders, climb horizontally along ropes, and eliminate a brick block that is immediately underneath you; they reappear after a few seconds. you can fall as far as you want. you lose if the guards get you, if your brick reappears in a space that you're inside, or if you get stuck in an area that you can't escape from (this is easy to do, on purpose). sometimes there are invisible holes that both you and guards will fall through if you try to walk on them (this is surprisingly not as annoying as it sounds most of the time). if the guards end up in a brick as its reappearing, they respawn, but they can also easily get stuck. there's a lot to do with those basic concepts! personally, i don't think there is 150 levels of it, though, so i'm glad i played the NES port, which only has 50 levels. that felt just about right. when you beat the game, it just loops back to the beginning - no ending. i was curious if there was supposed to be a story, so i read the instruction booklet - apparently you are supposed to be a galactic rebel stealing unfair food taxes back from the vaults of an evil empire, lol. interestingly, there's a level editor, which i think would have been pretty revolutionary at the time. it feels pretty clunky now, and the main game feels like it explored most of the interesting things that you can do with the mechanics, with more screen room than the level editor has. still, it's a very early example of letting players make their own content, and probably the most impressive thing about the game. some complaints: often the puzzle aspect is figuring out how to dig into a set of bricks to get some gold without locking yourself in, which is fine, but on a few levels, the solution for getting out is falling through an invisible hole. that sucks. the difficulty curve on this is also weird. there are levels in the teens and 20s that are middle-of-wrecking-crew hard, but most of the levels after 40 just involve moving quickly to capture the guards, and the puzzles sort of start to fizzle out. also, in wrecking crew, you could pause and pan over the screen to plan. while it's not as necessary in lode runner, there are levels where it would have helped (i believe this is unique to the NES port, as you can see the full screen on the apple 2 version). next up: Raid on Bungeling Bay, which sounds like it was designed purely to give imps an opportunity to make fun of its name.
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Jan 7, 2022 17:21
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Raid on Bungeling Bay, Game Bmysterious loyall X posted:raid on bungling bay was the first famicom game to do hoizontal and vertical scrolling at the same time in 1984 or w/e. for some reason they hadn't thot of it yet. also will wright designed it and him dicking around with the map editor toolset maxis made was what inspired simcity. farewell it turns out that this is the coolest thing about this game (it's 1987 for the record), which sucks, very badly. i'm guessing it's the port, because i can see how a lot of things would be better on a computer. it's clear that a lot of effort was put into it and it's unique and a lot of the ideas are sound, but the execution is just terrible. if you're a programmer, i think reading about how it works might be interesting - it was too big for memory so they recycle a lot of the screens. so apparently the bungelings were the same bad guys as from lode runner - this is technically a sequel. this time instead of taxing food, they're building some kind of AI war machine at six factories, and you have to destroy them or they're going to blow up earth. you control a helicopter can that shoot bullets at the various hostiles or drop bombs on a factory. there's a carrier ship you have to get to in order to refuel (and it can be destroyed by the bad guys). the map is 100 screens big, in a 10 by 10 grid, and you have to find the six factories and bomb them all. the factories create more hostiles (planes, battleships, helicopters, etc) so it's important to get them fast. once you do, you beat the level. i'm letting myself cheat here - the game technically has 9 levels, but they are all identical in Game B (in Game A, the game apparently starts you off with an easier level 3 times and then is identical to Game A  ). and there's no ending (it just loops), so i'm calling it after beating one level, and no one is going to talk me into playing more. i acknowledge that games like Athena are worse than this because at least this is innovative and gave birth to sim city, but this was the most excruciating one for me to play so far except maybe for the wrestling games. i'd probably be putting this whole project in a sock drawer if Bungeling Bay were longer. one level takes about 15 minutes, but it took me like three hours to even figure out what i was doing. there are tons of units and a lot of rules and math involving damage to the carrier, the units, the factories, etc that i didn't get super into, learning the basics were enough. i wish it had been a turn based strategy game.why is it so bad? the controls. your helicopter goes faster when you tap up and slower when you tap down, and you use left and right to steer. A shoots the gun, B drops bombs. it is slow to turn. it is slow to speed up. it is slow to slow down. your bullets have very little range and they're also slow. the bombs are so slow and finicky, i had difficulty telling when i had run out of them. in general, your inputs feel like they are being relayed by a game of telephone in a fast-moving combat that requires a lot of strategy to defend your own base while attacking the enemy. i thought the instruction manual was wrong about how to refuel because of how difficult it is to land on your carrier. the factories themselves do not particularly stand out compared to the design for the rest of the buildings and they don't respond differently when you bomb them (until they finally explode, and some of them have more hits than you have bombs), so for a long time i thought they were not factories and kept searching. the factories also regenerate while you're not actively attacking them, which can really gently caress you over. eventually i memorized where all the factories were and drew myself a rudimentary map, and was able to eke out a win, although i still ended up speeding past my objective often and wanting to throw my hat on the floor and stomp on it like diddy kong. the map:  i think all this needed to be a good game was intuitive, responsive controls, but as it is, it feels like playing a real time strategy game with a broken keyboard. there's a reason will wright preferred loving around with the level editor to playing the game, and it's because the level editor was the basic starting point for sim city. e: next up is ring king, which i expect probably got eclipsed by punch out, since that came out the following month. Bicyclops fucked around with this message at 22:58 on Jan 7, 2022 |
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Jan 7, 2022 22:24
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Pablo Nergigante posted:Also Chuck if you’ve never played Chrono Trigger please play it immediately. extremely this, but congrats on ff7, it's so iconic and now at some point you can enjoy the remake. looking forward to your takes on 8 or the PRs.
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Jan 10, 2022 02:49
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That Little Demon posted:you should play CT, and you should emulate the snes version this. the steam/iOS port is probably bad. the DS one is probably fine if you ignore the bonus dungeon but just go with the original. under no circumstances play the playstation version.
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Jan 10, 2022 17:04
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Ring King despite all the early censorship in NES games, this data east gem is a cozy slice of life story with lots of LBGTQA representation. you play as the secret, gay, jacked, red-headed mario brother. all of the characters are men and they all want to suck and gently caress each other. sometimes in the middle of a match, the opponents stop just give each other a life-recovering hug. in between rounds, you can mash the buttons to get a blowjob from some kind of Mini-Me clone of yourself and recover your health:   my principal complaint about this game is the pacing. the players have three stats and when you create your character (and give him a name, which is cool), you start with nine points, which is fewer points than even the rookies have in the game's career mode. you can choose from a 2 player match, a practice, a tournament, the ranking career mode (which has 3 different levels and 5 matches in each level). the game's movement isn't 1 for 1 - your player moves vaguely in the direction you press on on the D pad. missing enough times can eat as much health as getting hit, so it's important to be precise with your strikes instead of mashing buttons, which took me an embarrassingly long time to learn. you can either KO the opponent just by hitting them hard, reduce their health to zero and get an auto KO, or get the most hits in six rounds to win. that's all fine and it plays well once you get used to it. it's also a cool idea that you gain points to put into your 3 stats as you win matches (which you can "save" by using a password), but this is where the game falls apart for me. it takes 3 matches before you get any points, and you only get ONE. and even the weakest boxer in a non-practice match starts with more points than you. i tried to grit my teeth and start on ranked, but after winning two matches, i realized it was going to take forever, so i grabbed the password and went to the practice mode. practically speaking, that's unfortunately the best strategy - to grind. i felt like i had experienced all the game had to offer after one match with a guy who was stronger than me (going up against guys with your stats or less is kind of a joke), so the rest of this felt like a slog. plus, the best strategy once you get a little ahead on points is to put all of them into speed, get a few good hits on your opponent early, and then just avoid them for six rounds. also, i wanted to give my guy other funny meme names, so for awhile i thought the password system was busted, because it actually uses the name you enter as part of the password. lots of cool ideas dragged down by one aspect of the execution again. i think if they'd given you points every match, made it more like 3 per win, and started you a little higher, it would have been way cooler.
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Jan 11, 2022 20:32
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Sky Kid pretty simple horizontal shmup. no powerups, you just fly a biplane that can shoot bullets or do a flip. the sprites are very small, so you can see a lot of the screen, but not enough that you aren't likely to accidentally fly into a cliff when one suddenly shows up. i would say that's maybe the worst thing about the game: having more space on the screen should make it so that you can see what's in front of you, which you can't always do in shmups where your ship is bigger, but you really can't. it's a waste of the minimalist art.  anyway, despite how simple the art is, they put a lot of effort into it. you go past things like the pyramids, the sphinx, cities, bridges, angry suns, sleepy moons. there are evil thunder cloud enemies, volcanoes. something new to discover in every level (there are only 21 and they're all pretty short). you can even interact with most of them. when i did a flip near the statue of liberty it lifted up her skirt, lol:  there's a mechanic where every level makes a beep sound to let you know the bomb is coming, at which point you have to fly to the bottom of the screen to collect it. while you're holding the bomb, you can't do flips, and you have to carry it to the enemy base (the enemies appear to be nazis) and drop it on them. i say have to, but you don't lose if you miss, just miss out on a ton of bonus points and a big medal.  you appear to be some kind of bird person, but you are also definitely in world war 2, fighting nazis, and definitely fly by the statue of liberty, whose skirt you can pull up. there are some ladies that you can do flips for and they throw hearts at you, and i figured they were bird people too, but i guess they are human. real max ernst thing going on here. in what was definitely missed by the people who put the nintendo seal of approval on this, when you beat the game it says "happy ending" and bounces the girls on a mattress, and one of them is nude. it is best not to ask questions about the story. i had nightmares about it last night from thinking about it.   overall, it was okay. it helps that it was short, so it couldn't wear out his welcome. i'm used to gradius-type shmups with power ups and i think i prefer those. next up: spelunker.
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Jan 12, 2022 16:33
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cool find, i'm https://ggapp.io/Bicyclops and i followed all the imps.
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Jan 12, 2022 18:20
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i like making lists and i like video games so i'll probably spend some time on it.
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Jan 12, 2022 18:21
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symbolic posted:Bicyclops entering hour five of adding every NES game to "Want to Play": lol. i went to put in last year's and it already can't find most of the final fantasy PRs. by tomorrow i'll be sending frantic emails to the devs asking when they're going to make sure that Sky Kid is listed.
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Jan 12, 2022 18:30
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so far i've entered all the games i beat this year and last year, my gaming backlog, and what i'm playing now. i'll probably go back and try to put every game i've beaten in at some point.
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Jan 12, 2022 19:13
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Daikatana Ritsu posted:yeah I'm not adding every game I've ever played because that's impossible to remember i've been going through wikipedia lists of games starting with intellivision to remind myself and only putting them in if i beat them. it's been fun. i've beat at least 224 games (i can't find dragon quest 2 or tmnt2: the arcade game), and i haven't gone through gamecube, playstation, playstation 2, wii or wii U yet.
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Jan 12, 2022 21:03
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i wish i had played this version. even the normal song is catchy though, lol. Spelunker while this metroidvania was designed for the previous generation of consoles, it was at the tail end during the crash, so the NES version is perhaps the most well-known. apparently this is infamous for its poor controls, and don't get me wrong, they're bad, but i think it's just the game's complicated development cycle make it a second generation game on a third generation console. more than anything else, this feels like playing Pitfall, and it controls about how Pitfall did. that just feels terrible because it's on a console with games that control more like Super Mario Bros. you can only fall a couple of pixels, and the slightest tap when you're climbing a rope makes your guy climb off of it into thin air. areas like this make you break out into a cold sweat:  that's basically the major problem: the jumping requires very precise inputs. it's intentional that it's hard, but it's naturally pretty frustrating. but it's cool! you have a limited power supply that ticks down as you explore, and there are batteries that recover it at set points in the cave. other things you can collect are treasures, keys, bombs and flares. treasures give you points. keys (there are blue and red) unlock doors of their color, and bombs can blow up boulders that block your path. there are only two enemies in the game: a bat and a ghost. you can temporarily scare the bat away with a flare, and you can bust the ghost at the cost of some of your power supply. they're not nearly as much of a threat as falling off a ladder or missing your jump by a pixel. the game has checkpoints where you recover your power. it's a pretty good game if you think of it as an atari game with upscaled graphics rather than a nintendo game. full disclosure, the game puts you back in the same cave but ups the difficulty something like six times, but i only played through the first cycle. that felt like enough, i got a victory screen: 
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Jan 13, 2022 15:41
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Spy Hunter not much to say about this one. it's a top down vertical driving game. the road is endless and there is no ending, so i played until i felt like i'd seen everything. you have infinite bullets and you're trying to shoot enemy cars while avoiding civilians. you can also get some special weapons. it's supposed to feel kind of like you're in a james bond car chase scene, and it sort of does, for awhile. there are cars trying to shoot you, some trying to blow out your tires or run you off the road, and helicopters dropping bombs. there are even boats later. it was probably a great arcade game to sit in back in like 1983 but the NES port doesn't feel fleshed out. Sqoon middling horizontal shmup in which you play a submarine. the idea is that invaders from neptune have melted the polar ice caps and you are rescuing people they've kidnapped. each "phase" (there are 8) has a little cityscape at the beginning that's supposed to be a different earth city that's now underwater. it's got the basics - you have missiles that fire below and a basic attack that fires forward and you can upgrade each once. no shield and no choices of powerup. the "bosses" are all just little neptunian bases that have three parts to hit. sometimes there are little neptune bases you can shoot that release people you can rescue. the quirky thing is that you have a certain amount of fuel that gradually runs out, and the only way to refill it is to either A) rescue 9 people or B) have rescued at least one person and shoot a crab at the bottom of the screen and grab the dot he leaves behind quickly. this was an interesting mechanic and creates all of the challenge in the game, but it gets really repetitive. game loops at the end without a cut scene. someone at quality control was sleeping on the job again because there is a topless mermaid in the game.  next up is a power pad game called Stadium Events. e: or........ not. next up is Star Voyager. i'll talk more about Stadium Events if and when i get World Class Track Meet later, but the short version is that they're the same game and i will play it under World Class Track Meet. Bicyclops fucked around with this message at 22:23 on Jan 13, 2022 |
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Jan 13, 2022 22:11
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Nutmeg posted:2) Arkham knight. definitely worth the 3 bucks since i loved the past arkham games but i think this one is the weakest of the three. i really liked flying around gotham and didnt care for the batmobile that much. the combat in the car was fine but driving around was more annoying than fun. I liked the story for the most part. I appreciated that they didn't take away the moves you learned from the previous game metroid style, but then it adds more on top of it and coming into the game fresh i did feel overwhelmed with all the options available along with having to do certain things to hurt curtain goons in fights. i still have to beat this one of these days. i think arkham city was just about the right amount for me, knight overdid it enough that i bounced off it.
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Jan 15, 2022 06:42
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Nutmeg posted:i remember feeling that way when the game was being advertised, open world and having the car and all. I honesty enjoyed flying around looking for things to clear with my eyes as the game won't always give you waypoints. You can easily fly from one end of the map to the other in a short period of time so I was happy with how little down time there is going from spot to spot. this is going to seem like a nitpicky complaint, but I hated the UI for the map, which was always intuitive in the previous 2 games
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Jan 15, 2022 18:19
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my favorite thing about skylanders is that every time someone mentions it exists, i remember that fred ford and paul reich are working on ur-quan masters 2 and i check their website to see how it is going.
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Jan 18, 2022 16:09
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Bicyclops posted:
okay, who knew about this game and didn't tell me. it took me hours to understand the controls enough to even land on a planet and trying to type up how the game works is like 
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Jan 18, 2022 20:42
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Star Voyager this game is basically entirely about figuring out what all the different things in the HUD and menu mean. there are kind of three different parts to gameplay, and i am only going to describe one of them, because look at how many words it takes! you start off with a random map - you are in one corner, near your home base, and there are enemy ships in the other corner. there are also a handful of space stations (you can use these to refuel) and 9 planets. 2 of those planets have powerups on them (as far as i can tell, one increases your speed and one makes your attack better). your goal is to kill every enemy ship before any reach your base.   the top screenshot is normal gameplay and the bottom one is the map. the right side is your current fuel reservoir. when it runs out, one of the dots on the top right will delete (in the screenshot, i'm running low on fuel). if you run out of fuel, you lose. you can refuel at home base or another space station. in order to move to a new location on the map, you have to: 1) go into the map screen and move your cursor. your cursor is the tiny orange dot. you are the square. 2) out of the map, hold the B button until the meter on the left fills almost all the way up, then let go. 3) the top left meter will start to fill with dots. this is a timed mini-game: once it starts, you have to hold B until there are exactly as many dots as the number in the middle bottom of the screen, then let go. there's a bit of a delay so getting the timing down takes a little practice. 4) you will go into hyperspace! while in hyperspace, the little map in the lower left part of the screen will jostle around and you have to keep your destination centered using the D-pad or you will end up in the wrong location. all of this is just to move from one place on the map to another. once you reach your location, there are entirely different sets of rules for finding whatever is in that part of the map (planet, space station, enemy ships) and then entirely different rules for combat. if you can destroy all the enemy ships, all you have to do is go back to home base, at which point the game congratulates you on a job well done and runs the credits. it's ambitious and weird, but at the end of the day, it isn't very good. once i figured out what i was doing, i was mostly okay with it, but those kinds of controls continue into combat, making it, ultimately, pretty unplayable. it feels sort of like the kind of board game where you spend a half an hour reading the instructions, a half an hour arguing about the rules, and ultimately discover that what you played was mediocre anyway. next up: konami's Stinger.
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Jan 18, 2022 22:51
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lots of quick games in the NES run today. Stinger shmup where some of the levels are horizontal and some are vertical. pretty short - 7 stages. aesthetic like fantasy land but plays more like a very easy gradius. the power-up system is robust and managed interestingly - if you shoot a cloud, it drops a bell, which you have to juggle with your fire until it turns the color you want. catchy music, thin story about rescuing a scientist. nothing to write home about. i guess there were a lot of these in japan and this was the only one that came to the US. two player co-op option, which i would have loved as a kid.   Tiger-Heli i guess this was really popular in the arcades, but it seems like a mediocre vertical shmup to me. it's wicked short (4 stages which are a little long, but not that much) and loops without even telling you. i was playing for awhile before i realized it, lol. it plays very similar to 1942 (you can get two side ships as powerups). the new thing is they give you two bombs that sort of clear the screen if you use them (they refill every stage or via powerups), but the enemies can shoot them off, which kept happening to me, so i never made much use of it. i'd rather play 1942 on any given day. it's a micronics port, but people say it's pretty faithful. the coding experience for the now defunct company led to Twin Cobra, which i understand is also popular. Winter Games like athletic world and track and field, this is a series of mini-games with different controls for each. i don't love these because i spend most of my time looking up the controls on gameaqs or finding the instruction book rather than playing. this one is mostly based on tony-hawk like combos that you enter in time to not fall down. there's a high jump skiing (called "hot dog aerials" for some reason, lol - enter trick combos over a single jump), a skating race (this one is just pressing left and right repeatedly), figure skating (enter trick combos repeatedly while a timer ticks down) and bobsledding (even the gamefaqs guy doesn't super understand this and says it's mostly luck). i didn't go for the world records, just for finishing with any kind of time (the game does not differentiate except to store your record if you get the world record). next up: Alpha Run (yet another shmup)
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Jan 19, 2022 19:22
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absolutely anything posted:get his rear end whoops. you'd think all those hours i spent in club sega would have made me remember.
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Jan 19, 2022 19:36
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mysterious loyall X posted:Winter games is an epyx joint before they released everyines favorites summer games and california games. I never like kinamis track and field game but at least those games you can intuitively slap your famicom or arcade buttons and get somewhere. The eppx games all have like 20 page manuals that are more dense than computer flightsims from the same time yeah, i'd say winter games is worse than track and field. summer games came before, apparently, it just never made it to the NES. it's interesting that they did california games, though. winter games was ported by acclaim but california games looks like it was ported by Rare.
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Jan 19, 2022 19:49
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little munchkin posted:i played a shitload of winter games in school computer labs, it's a decent multiplayer game as long as you skip the figure skating modes it's also probably better with keyboard controls. the combos using the nes Dpad are a little awkward.
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Jan 20, 2022 06:38
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Alpha Mission vertical shmup. slightly different thing than most: some enemies are "ground" and some are "air" and your A and B shots hit different zones (so some bosses can only be hit by your B attack). there are a ton of powerups, both the traditional "get this to make your weapons stronger" and some that go on a screen you can access with select. the screen ones range from "shield" to "nuclear missiles that will devastate even bosses." those powerups use "energy" which can collect and hold up to 24 of, so you can only make use of them once in awhile, and only if you're playing well. i didn't use them much, because they're best against bosses, but for some reason the select screen makes a boss start over. 12 stages and then it loops. there are sort of 6 bosses - when you hit stage 7, the boss from stage 1 comes back with a very slight variation, and so on.  the good: it's got hard bosses, long levels, and good challenge. i liked this much better than stinger and tiger heli. you can see plenty of the screen, it gets crowded often, and there's only a little bit of slowdown when things fill up. the game also gives you little breathers after particularly tough parts. the bosses are telegraphed and you always have a couple seconds to collect yourself before they show up. the bad stuff, in order of how annoying it is: there's nothing to indicate that you're hitting the boss and they have a lot of invulnerable parts. they do turn red just before they're about to die, but that takes awhile. the bosses have too much health. in particular, the boss in level 6 and 12 involves flying in a loop over and over and over again while you wait for each of its six parts to explode. the powerups are too much too keep track of and there are three or four that are negative. BAD powerups are becoming a pet peeve of mine in these early NES games, particularly when there's an ocean of them and they're all represented by letters. while the visual design looks cool, it's very samey. this looks cool for the NES until you get to like level 4:   next up... Lunar Pool?! 
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Jan 20, 2022 15:49
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Joan posted:I wouldn't recommend it unless you really need to play every NES game or something haha. what an insane idea.
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Jan 22, 2022 20:18
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2. Wizards and Warriors putting this outside of the NES playthrough since it was out of order and i didn't use any emulator tools besides screenshots, even for pausing and stepping away for awhile. thanks for starting up the game club.
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Jan 24, 2022 19:09
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mysterious loyall X posted:lunar pool is pretty chill to play for 20 minutes or w/e it turns out that this is true but that the game goes on for a lot longer than 20 minutes. there are 60 stages and i'm still in the 20s.
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Jan 25, 2022 15:41
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| # ¿ May 10, 2024 11:50 |
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Lunar Pool this is basically puzzle pool from the yakuza games. the first table is a normal billiards table, and then for the following levels, they change the shape of the table, add bumpers, put the balls in different places, etc. the controls are very simple: the D pad aims the stick (L-R to turn, U-D to move the pointer closer or further away). a meter goes up and down to determine how hard you hit, and you hit A or B when it's in the right place. the movement takes a sec to get used to, but really only a sec. you get three shots. if you get any ball in, you get your three shots back. if you use three shots and don't hit any of the balls in, you lose a life. the game is generous about handing you extra lives, and the title screen lets you select whatever course you want anyway. also an option to play 2 player competitive or play against the computer. pros: chill, controls are mostly intuitive (it's surprising how similar it feels to yakuza, albeit way easier). a cool relaxing tune. being able to start from whatever course you want is essentially infinite continues. cons: the game has 60 courses but it feels like they ran out of ideas about halfway through and stretched the middle of the game out with a bunch of courses that feel kind of the same. the game only has 3 songs: the menu/"you won the whole game" song, "the level is starting jingle" and "the only other song." i think this one would be fun to do like one course a day or something, so that it doesn't start to grate on you. next up is square's second entry for the NES: rad racer.
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Jan 25, 2022 20:50
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