Retro Gaming Thread

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Szlia

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Well... since the NES was hot, I also played through Fester's Quest.

This top down exploration shooter game uses the Addams Family licence. I am not familiar with the Addams Family, but I don't think this story of alien invasion is exactly canon... anyway, you control the slow and 4 direction moving uncle Fester and shoot mutant frogs, slimes and other oddities through a town and its sewers. To spice things up you have some first person view mazes and some boss fights...

I would say the three most original things about this game are:

1) The whole town is one big map, the whole sewer system is one big map and the alien spaceship is one big map. I find that both odd and elegant.

2) The intro is simple but surprisingly well animated for a game of that era. There are also many big still images throughout the game (portraits of the family members when you check some houses - to save memory though they are in a limited sepia palette!).

3) It adds a number of rpg-lite elements: enemies drop money (needed to buy hot dogs at hot dog stands to heal), light bulbs (to see in the sewers), keys (to enter buildings), and power ups for your blunderbuss and whip as well as power down for those. In the buildings you meet family members who give you special items such as TNT, health potions, etc. The flip side of that "rpg-ness" is that at times you need to farm for gun upgrades (if you stupidly collected a power down), for keys or light bulbs (the later is theoretical as I had plenty).

Other than that... the game is pretty bland. Exploration is minimal (a couple of area in town are opened, but 90% of the game is spent walking down the one available path). Enemy design and variety is lame, you basically spend your time mashing things down no matter what shows up in front of your blunderbuss. Boss battles are lame (again: mash mash mash, chug health potion of invulnerability potion, mash mash mash) and challenge is limited. The European version of the game that I played is easier than the US version with all enemies and bosses having less hp, so I died only once. A good thing I did not die more, because when you do you restart all the way to the beginning (but bosses are dead and you keep your collectibles). That being said, I suspect having more hp on everything would not make the game that much harder, but just a lot more tedious!

So yeah... Fester's Quest. A lot less glitches than Metal Gear, but also a lot less entertainment!

Fun fact: the game has no ending credits. I guess the people at Sunsoft were not too proud of that one!
 
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Tanoomba

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Well... since the NES was hot, I also played through Fester's Quest.

This top down exploration shooter game uses the Addams Family licence. I am not familiar with the Addams Family, but I don't think this story of alien invasion is exactly canon... anyway, you control the slow and 4 direction moving uncle Fester and shoot mutant frogs, slimes and other oddities through a town and its sewers. To spice things up you have some first person view mazes and some boss fights...

I would say the three most original things about this game are:

1) The whole town is one big map, the whole sewer system is one big map and the alien spaceship is one big map. I find that both odd and elegant.

2) The intro is simple but surprisingly well animated for a game of that era. There are also many big still images throughout the game (portraits of the family members when you check some houses - to save memory though they are in a limited sepia palette!).

3) It adds a number of rpg-lite elements: enemies drop money (needed to buy hot dogs at hot dog stands to heal), light bulbs (to see in the sewers), keys (to enter buildings), and power ups for your blunderbuss and whip as well as power down for those. In the buildings you meet family members who give you special items such as TNT, health potions, etc. The flip side of that "rpg-ness" is that at times you need to farm for gun upgrades (if you stupidly collected a power down), for keys or light bulbs (the later is theoretical as I had plenty).

Other than that... the game is pretty bland. Exploration is minimal (a couple of area in town are opened, but 90% of the game is spent walking down the one available path). Enemy design and variety is lame, you basically spend your time mashing things down no matter what shows up in front of your blunderbuss. Boss battles are lame (again: mash mash mash, chug health potion of invulnerability potion, mash mash mash) and challenge is limited. The European version of the game that I played is easier than the US version with all enemies and bosses having less hp, so I died only once. A good thing I did not die more, because when you do you restart all the way to the beginning (but bosses are dead and you keep your collectibles). That being said, I suspect having more hp on everything would not make the game that much harder, but just a lot more tedious!

So yeah... Fester's Quest. A lot less glitches than Metal Gear, but also a lot less entertainment!

Fun fact: the game has no ending credits. I guess the people at Sunsoft were not too proud of that one!
I had Fester's Quest as a kid but never came close to beating it. I never liked 8-bit games that feature first-person dungeon-crawling as a mechanic, and I would regularly die at boss battles. I did find the overworld stuff reasonably fun and usually would spend the first part of the game just grinding for my best gun, but because it has a wide spray it's harder to use in the narrow sewer passages. If you don't align your character with the bottom of a corridor your bullets will hit the upper wall and disappear instantly, and god forbid you accidentally get a downgrade to the triangular bullets that fire outwards and are impossible to use in those spaces!

Music was good, though! It's weird that Sunsoft chose to make a game based on the Addams Family franchise. I recognized it from having seen reruns of the 60s TV show here and there, but why base a 1989 game on such an old and no longer relevant series? The Addams Family movie (which was awesome) wouldn't come out for another 2 years, so it doesn't seem like the game was meant to generate interest for that. Quite odd.
 

Tanoomba

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Next thing you're going to tell me the enemies don't take hundreds of shots to kill... That stone head that oozes flies or worms, that slime that just seems to reproduce indefinitely until it arbitrarily decides to let you kill it, these were bullet sponges. Even an oft-encountered patch of purple spiky things requires you to wail on the fire button again and again and again. I think if I played it with a guide I would probably enjoy it a lot more, but at the time it was a hard game to make progress in, due at least in part to how physically punishing it was to play for extended periods of time. If I were to play it now I would definitely exploit a rapid fire option. And maps of the 3D dungeons. Some of those include walls you have to walk into to get an extra hit point, but unless you know ahead of time which walls those are you're likely to miss them and then be at a disadvantage for the rest of the game. Nintendo Power helped a bit, I guess...

Addams Family Pinball, on the other hand, is pretty much my favorite pinball machine of all time.
 

Szlia

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You have been traumatized by the 3D mazes as a kid, but they are ridiculously tiny and only have one entrance and one exit. Other than that they are totally empty (with the exception of the hidden hp thing in the first maze that I found by accident the first time around). If it can make you feel better, the slow moving Fester is 17% slower on the EU version thanks to 50hrz PAL vs 60hrz NTSC!
 
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Szlia

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Ok... I have been playing Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles on the NES these last few days... it invariably ended with me being very pissed off, putting the cartridge back in the pile trying not to break it in half and invariably, the next day, I picked up the cartridge again thinking "That should be doable if I just (insert variable comment here)". At this point I am able to reach the last stage of the game but the current state of the variable comment is something like "farm that one uber weapon for a couple hours"... so... yeah. I am writing the comments on the game now in an attempt to not pick that garbage game again.

Conceptually, the game is pretty cool. You have your team of four ninja turtles, each one with his iconic weapon. The four turtles move identically, but the weapons have different reach, damage and speed. Each turtle has his own health bar and you can switch character at any time. If, say, Leonardo reach 0 hp, he is captured. You are sent back to the beginning of the level (or, in some case, to the beginning of the current sub-level) with your three remaining heroes, but somewhere in the level you can find Leonardo and free him to get him back. Lose all four and it's game over.

The levels are not exactly your typical "go right" fare. A typical level has a top view overworld from where you can enter different side view sub-levels that themselves can have a little dose of exploration in them (multiple floors, pits and ladders kind of stuff). Some of these sub-levels are needed to reach different area of the overworld and work toward your goal, but some are totally optional: just an opportunity to gather some stuff or to free a captured turtle.

This mix of team management and semi-exploration gameplay is pretty original and pretty sweet. You also get some neat cut scenes and in the pause menu, you have (on top of a rudimentary map of the overworld and your turtle selection menu) some advice given by April or your master. The problem is the execution of this concept that leads to crushing difficulty and maddening tedium and frustration.

The list of issues is pretty damn long, but let's start with the turtles... they all have the most gigantic of floaty jump, they get knocked back like there is no tomorrow and in many area, if you want to make a long jump without bonking your head and falling into a pit (luckily death pits are super rare, but pits that send you to a lower floor or in sewer water that carry you outside the sub-level are not a lot better), you need to be at the very edge of the pit and tap that button for the shortest time humanly possible. So movement is crap but the weapons are not much better: Leo's katana, Raph's sai and Mike's nun-chunks one shot only the most basic of enemies and have zero stoping power, so, pretty early in the game, trying to kill enemies with their weapon is an exercise in futility. Don's bo staff does basically twice the damage of the other weapons and has the longest reach, so, yeah... but it's slow!

The problems with the turtles are compounded by two others. The first is that as soon as the spawn point of an enemy leaves the screen, it is ready to spawn back again. So if you track back a little to have the time to land all the swings Leo needs to kill the dude, well, it was all for nothing because the dude is back when you move forward again... (I guess the flip side is that enemies despawn as soon as they leave the screen so if you can outrun them, it kills them). The other problem with relying on Donatello to progress just about anywhere and to kill bosses is that, well, there is just the one Don and... there is no such thing as a health drop in this game. And you don't get any health when beating a level. There are health items (pizza!), but they are in specific spots. The good thing is that they repop if you leave the sub level to go to the overworld and come back. The bad thing, is that working all your turtles to full health is pure tedium if the health item you are trying to farm is somewhat deep into the sub-level.

At this point, I am reaching the 6th and final level, but I get there with a bunch of injured turtles (as you get to fight a tricky boss at the end of a tricky sub-level). The thing though is that, in that 6th level, there is no overworld; just one side-view level packed with enemies that hit like truck, that you need to hit entirely too many times and with a grand total of 3 health pick-up (two full life, one half life). I am getting wrecked. Even if I use one of my two (!) continues to have all my squad at full health again, I get pretty much nowhere in that hellhole of a level.

Remember what I said in the first paragraph? "That should be doable if I just farm that one uber weapon for a couple hours." Yeah, there are no health drops, but there are sub-weapon drops (ninja stars, boomerangs) that are significant upgrades for the three weak turtles and there are also weapon pick-ups that repop just like health do. A rare pick-up is a sub weapon that fires a wave that does twice the damage of the Bo staff. So at this point, the one and only way I can fathom to beat this game is farm that pick-up in level 3 until I have 99 of it for all 4 turtles and use it to wreck everything on my path to Shredder. But that's putting tedium to a whole other level as you will lose health farming the weapon, so you will have to go farm health elsewhere, to go back farming the weapon... yeah... to hell with that garbage game! Maybe...



PS: There is a sequence in the 2nd level of the game made famous by the Angry Video Game Nerd where you have a limited time to defuse a number of bombs in an underwater level. This is known for being super hard and frustrating, but, really, once you know what route to use and realize you can switch turtle when one gets low on health, it is not hard at all (you will need to farm some health at the start of the next level though).
 
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Szlia

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I am an idiot and went and farmed the super weapon (99 for all non Don turtles so had to replay the same sub level 15 times... I guess it took 45ish minutes). I am now at the start of level 6 with all turtles almost at full hp and 226 kiai out of the 297 I had at first. In a dozen minutes I'll be very pissed off or very satisfied...

EDIT: Kowabunga! Shredder got schooled! But even with two full health in the level I reached him with 3 turtles about to die. The enemy spam is absurd in the last section. Luckily form me, my cartrdige, my controller and my sleeping neighbours, the fresh turtle just sub-weaponed the poor end boss to death. He did not stand a chance!
 
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Tanoomba

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Ok... I have been playing Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles on the NES these last few days... it invariably ended with me being very pissed off, putting the cartridge back in the pile trying not to break it in half and invariably, the next day, I picked up the cartridge again thinking "That should be doable if I just (insert variable comment here)". At this point I am able to reach the last stage of the game but the current state of the variable comment is something like "farm that one uber weapon for a couple hours"... so... yeah. I am writing the comments on the game now in an attempt to not pick that garbage game again.

Conceptually, the game is pretty cool. You have your team of four ninja turtles, each one with his iconic weapon. The four turtles move identically, but the weapons have different reach, damage and speed. Each turtle has his own health bar and you can switch character at any time. If, say, Leonardo reach 0 hp, he is captured. You are sent back to the beginning of the level (or, in some case, to the beginning of the current sub-level) with your three remaining heroes, but somewhere in the level you can find Leonardo and free him to get him back. Lose all four and it's game over.

The levels are not exactly your typical "go right" fare. A typical level has a top view overworld from where you can enter different side view sub-levels that themselves can have a little dose of exploration in them (multiple floors, pits and ladders kind of stuff). Some of these sub-levels are needed to reach different area of the overworld and work toward your goal, but some are totally optional: just an opportunity to gather some stuff or to free a captured turtle.

This mix of team management and semi-exploration gameplay is pretty original and pretty sweet. You also get some neat cut scenes and in the pause menu, you have (on top of a rudimentary map of the overworld and your turtle selection menu) some advice given by April or your master. The problem is the execution of this concept that leads to crushing difficulty and maddening tedium and frustration.

The list of issues is pretty damn long, but let's start with the turtles... they all have the most gigantic of floaty jump, they get knocked back like there is no tomorrow and in many area, if you want to make a long jump without bonking your head and falling into a pit (luckily death pits are super rare, but pits that send you to a lower floor or in sewer water that carry you outside the sub-level are not a lot better), you need to be at the very edge of the pit and tap that button for the shortest time humanly possible. So movement is crap but the weapons are not much better: Leo's katana, Raph's sai and Mike's nun-chunks one shot only the most basic of enemies and have zero stoping power, so, pretty early in the game, trying to kill enemies with their weapon is an exercise in futility. Don's bo staff does basically twice the damage of the other weapons and has the longest reach, so, yeah... but it's slow!

The problems with the turtles are compounded by two others. The first is that as soon as the spawn point of an enemy leaves the screen, it is ready to spawn back again. So if you track back a little to have the time to land all the swings Leo needs to kill the dude, well, it was all for nothing because the dude is back when you move forward again... (I guess the flip side is that enemies despawn as soon as they leave the screen so if you can outrun them, it kills them). The other problem with relying on Donatello to progress just about anywhere and to kill bosses is that, well, there is just the one Don and... there is no such thing as a health drop in this game. And you don't get any health when beating a level. There are health items (pizza!), but they are in specific spots. The good thing is that they repop if you leave the sub level to go to the overworld and come back. The bad thing, is that working all your turtles to full health is pure tedium if the health item you are trying to farm is somewhat deep into the sub-level.

At this point, I am reaching the 6th and final level, but I get there with a bunch of injured turtles (as you get to fight a tricky boss at the end of a tricky sub-level). The thing though is that, in that 6th level, there is no overworld; just one side-view level packed with enemies that hit like truck, that you need to hit entirely too many times and with a grand total of 3 health pick-up (two full life, one half life). I am getting wrecked. Even if I use one of my two (!) continues to have all my squad at full health again, I get pretty much nowhere in that hellhole of a level.

Remember what I said in the first paragraph? "That should be doable if I just farm that one uber weapon for a couple hours." Yeah, there are no health drops, but there are sub-weapon drops (ninja stars, boomerangs) that are significant upgrades for the three weak turtles and there are also weapon pick-ups that repop just like health do. A rare pick-up is a sub weapon that fires a wave that does twice the damage of the Bo staff. So at this point, the one and only way I can fathom to beat this game is farm that pick-up in level 3 until I have 99 of it for all 4 turtles and use it to wreck everything on my path to Shredder. But that's putting tedium to a whole other level as you will lose health farming the weapon, so you will have to go farm health elsewhere, to go back farming the weapon... yeah... to hell with that garbage game! Maybe...



PS: There is a sequence in the 2nd level of the game made famous by the Angry Video Game Nerd where you have a limited time to defuse a number of bombs in an underwater level. This is known for being super hard and frustrating, but, really, once you know what route to use and realize you can switch turtle when one gets low on health, it is not hard at all (you will need to farm some health at the start of the next level though).
I'm guessing it's just a coincidence, but TMNT and Fester's Quest have something in common that annoyed the crap out of me: Overworlds filled with several buildings you can enter that serve little to no purpose!

TMNT will always have a soft spot in my heart for its commendable ambition and sweet soundtrack, but I doubt I ever made it even halfway though. I played enough as a kid for the underwater bomb-disarming level to not be very difficult, but the lack of guidance combined with the many gameplay flaws you listed made it difficult for me to make real progress.
 

a c i d.f l y

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Ok... I have been playing Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles on the NES these last few days... it invariably ended with me being very pissed off, putting the cartridge back in the pile trying not to break it in half and invariably, the next day, I picked up the cartridge again thinking "That should be doable if I just (insert variable comment here)". At this point I am able to reach the last stage of the game but the current state of the variable comment is something like "farm that one uber weapon for a couple hours"... so... yeah. I am writing the comments on the game now in an attempt to not pick that garbage game again.

Conceptually, the game is pretty cool. You have your team of four ninja turtles, each one with his iconic weapon. The four turtles move identically, but the weapons have different reach, damage and speed. Each turtle has his own health bar and you can switch character at any time. If, say, Leonardo reach 0 hp, he is captured. You are sent back to the beginning of the level (or, in some case, to the beginning of the current sub-level) with your three remaining heroes, but somewhere in the level you can find Leonardo and free him to get him back. Lose all four and it's game over.

The levels are not exactly your typical "go right" fare. A typical level has a top view overworld from where you can enter different side view sub-levels that themselves can have a little dose of exploration in them (multiple floors, pits and ladders kind of stuff). Some of these sub-levels are needed to reach different area of the overworld and work toward your goal, but some are totally optional: just an opportunity to gather some stuff or to free a captured turtle.

This mix of team management and semi-exploration gameplay is pretty original and pretty sweet. You also get some neat cut scenes and in the pause menu, you have (on top of a rudimentary map of the overworld and your turtle selection menu) some advice given by April or your master. The problem is the execution of this concept that leads to crushing difficulty and maddening tedium and frustration.

The list of issues is pretty damn long, but let's start with the turtles... they all have the most gigantic of floaty jump, they get knocked back like there is no tomorrow and in many area, if you want to make a long jump without bonking your head and falling into a pit (luckily death pits are super rare, but pits that send you to a lower floor or in sewer water that carry you outside the sub-level are not a lot better), you need to be at the very edge of the pit and tap that button for the shortest time humanly possible. So movement is crap but the weapons are not much better: Leo's katana, Raph's sai and Mike's nun-chunks one shot only the most basic of enemies and have zero stoping power, so, pretty early in the game, trying to kill enemies with their weapon is an exercise in futility. Don's bo staff does basically twice the damage of the other weapons and has the longest reach, so, yeah... but it's slow!

The problems with the turtles are compounded by two others. The first is that as soon as the spawn point of an enemy leaves the screen, it is ready to spawn back again. So if you track back a little to have the time to land all the swings Leo needs to kill the dude, well, it was all for nothing because the dude is back when you move forward again... (I guess the flip side is that enemies despawn as soon as they leave the screen so if you can outrun them, it kills them). The other problem with relying on Donatello to progress just about anywhere and to kill bosses is that, well, there is just the one Don and... there is no such thing as a health drop in this game. And you don't get any health when beating a level. There are health items (pizza!), but they are in specific spots. The good thing is that they repop if you leave the sub level to go to the overworld and come back. The bad thing, is that working all your turtles to full health is pure tedium if the health item you are trying to farm is somewhat deep into the sub-level.

At this point, I am reaching the 6th and final level, but I get there with a bunch of injured turtles (as you get to fight a tricky boss at the end of a tricky sub-level). The thing though is that, in that 6th level, there is no overworld; just one side-view level packed with enemies that hit like truck, that you need to hit entirely too many times and with a grand total of 3 health pick-up (two full life, one half life). I am getting wrecked. Even if I use one of my two (!) continues to have all my squad at full health again, I get pretty much nowhere in that hellhole of a level.

Remember what I said in the first paragraph? "That should be doable if I just farm that one uber weapon for a couple hours." Yeah, there are no health drops, but there are sub-weapon drops (ninja stars, boomerangs) that are significant upgrades for the three weak turtles and there are also weapon pick-ups that repop just like health do. A rare pick-up is a sub weapon that fires a wave that does twice the damage of the Bo staff. So at this point, the one and only way I can fathom to beat this game is farm that pick-up in level 3 until I have 99 of it for all 4 turtles and use it to wreck everything on my path to Shredder. But that's putting tedium to a whole other level as you will lose health farming the weapon, so you will have to go farm health elsewhere, to go back farming the weapon... yeah... to hell with that garbage game! Maybe...



PS: There is a sequence in the 2nd level of the game made famous by the Angry Video Game Nerd where you have a limited time to defuse a number of bombs in an underwater level. This is known for being super hard and frustrating, but, really, once you know what route to use and realize you can switch turtle when one gets low on health, it is not hard at all (you will need to farm some health at the start of the next level though).


As a kid I had Infinite time, so I never spent time farming health or secondaries (I was also like six years old, so shit like farming or backtracking was counterintuitive to my developing mind). Just brute force one run after another, trying to get through as quickly as possible with as minimal damage as possible. So many times I'd make it past the underwater levels with minimal damage, and then get run over by the next boss, start all over again, die at the same place, eventually lucking out to get to the next area. Once I accidentally figured out I could just skip enemies since they rewarded nothing, I was playing the avoidance game, skipping as much as possible. Rinse repeat until I got all the way through. In a way, this game is the reason I refuse to beat my head against a wall playing the Souls games. Every now and then I'll watch a speed run on youtube as a refresher of why I love/hated the game. Playing on an emulator with save states is infinitely easier.

Next to the brutal timing requirements of Battletoads and pure memorization of Afterburner, the original Turtles game ranks as one of the hardest games I've ever played. Folks talk about the monkey level in Lion King for the SNES and I beat the shit out of that game with little effort comparatively.
 
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a c i d.f l y

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Well... since the NES was hot, I also played through Fester's Quest.

This top down exploration shooter game uses the Addams Family licence. I am not familiar with the Addams Family, but I don't think this story of alien invasion is exactly canon... anyway, you control the slow and 4 direction moving uncle Fester and shoot mutant frogs, slimes and other oddities through a town and its sewers. To spice things up you have some first person view mazes and some boss fights...

I would say the three most original things about this game are:

1) The whole town is one big map, the whole sewer system is one big map and the alien spaceship is one big map. I find that both odd and elegant.

2) The intro is simple but surprisingly well animated for a game of that era. There are also many big still images throughout the game (portraits of the family members when you check some houses - to save memory though they are in a limited sepia palette!).

3) It adds a number of rpg-lite elements: enemies drop money (needed to buy hot dogs at hot dog stands to heal), light bulbs (to see in the sewers), keys (to enter buildings), and power ups for your blunderbuss and whip as well as power down for those. In the buildings you meet family members who give you special items such as TNT, health potions, etc. The flip side of that "rpg-ness" is that at times you need to farm for gun upgrades (if you stupidly collected a power down), for keys or light bulbs (the later is theoretical as I had plenty).

Other than that... the game is pretty bland. Exploration is minimal (a couple of area in town are opened, but 90% of the game is spent walking down the one available path). Enemy design and variety is lame, you basically spend your time mashing things down no matter what shows up in front of your blunderbuss. Boss battles are lame (again: mash mash mash, chug health potion of invulnerability potion, mash mash mash) and challenge is limited. The European version of the game that I played is easier than the US version with all enemies and bosses having less hp, so I died only once. A good thing I did not die more, because when you do you restart all the way to the beginning (but bosses are dead and you keep your collectibles). That being said, I suspect having more hp on everything would not make the game that much harder, but just a lot more tedious!

So yeah... Fester's Quest. A lot less glitches than Metal Gear, but also a lot less entertainment!

Fun fact: the game has no ending credits. I guess the people at Sunsoft were not too proud of that one!

The only top down shooter game I ever enjoyed was fucking Jackal. That game was amazing. Especially two player. Only Halo has managed to capture that coop feeling, minus the severity of dying. "This place is too hard? Hang back as a respawn node." Which didn't work on the last level, but hey, at least I know the name of Master Chief.
 
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Siliconemelons

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if we had tuco bucks I would bet them as a reward... but we dont ;-) so ill give a solidarity or a like if anyone can guess the "whats that retro game" akin to our whos that girl thread lol

Back in the NES days - Home Shopping Network was advertising a top down (thats what got me thinking) airplane shooter, it was so funny watching it as a gamer kid because it was selling to the parents... it was an entire segment, like 1+hour on a single game for the NES... just the game, not system+game combo or anything.

The hosts were like "And unlike OTHER games, when you die - you restart right where you were! not back at the beginning of the level!" it was funny hearing them talk about the hours of gameplay for your kids, the layers and levels of the clouds etc. visuals etc.
 

Yaamean

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Fuck TMNT on NES......pretty sure I gamesharked it to beat it, and never played it again.
 
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Szlia

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The NES backlog massacre continues with Contra! Well... all my NES games are PAL so for some reason the game was rebranded and reskined with robots as Probotector. The game is, to my knowledge, functionally identical. You just happen to control a little robot and all the enemies are robots too (well... except the aliens at the end). As a side note, I thought for the longest time this was related to the TV show Robotech, but absolutely not.

Contra is a pretty damn sweet run & gun with 8 direction shooting. As far as movement option go, you can also duck (well... lie on your belly) and jump down through platforms. It should be noted that that when lying you cannot move nor change direction without going through the standing position and that jump down through platforms also include a couple frames of standing. Expect to die because of that. Not a lot, but this is a game in which you don't get to die a lot, so every death hurts (more on that later). Also, the NES controller being what it is, you cannot shoot diagonally without moving and cannot shoot below you without jumping. Note that all those issues have been fixed in Contra 3 on SNES. Something that is in all version though is a pretty hard to control jump. You go high and trying to control the left and right positioning you go full speed to the left or full speed to the right during the fall. Pretty tough to dodge stuff with that and pretty easy to not land where you want to (luckily there is almost no platforming challenge in the game, though the levels can have the occasional tricky or misleading gap). For flavor, there are also three sections consisting in a serie of rooms where the point of view is in the back of the character.

The 6 side scrolling levels all have a different flavor to them. The first one is like the basic template, the second one is set vertically, the third one has multiple mini bosses and grenades raining from the background, the fourth has a number of fire bars (not the Super Mario Bros rotating ones, more like bars of fire that stretch in and out of flame throwers), the fifth has a multitude of moving traps and the final level has alien thingies embedded in the wall that shoot destructible projectiles at the player. In all but the last stage, you have set enemies and hazards, but things are spiced up by an almost constant flow of basic enemies that spawn and act randomly (run back and forth, jump from platform to platform, shoot, shoot while ducked...). This mix of set theme, set enemies and random enemy patterns keep things very fresh and entertaining. It can also be a bit irritating when you are near the edge of the screen and guy just happened to show up or when jumping forward and a guy shoots just as the scrolling made him enter the scene... so, yeah, I guess this is NES hard.

One of the problem of hard games where you have limited lives and credits, is that the player will need to play the game again and again to get a little further every time and discover a bit more. So basically, to get 1 shot at stage 5, you will have played 5 times stage 4, 25 times stage 3, 125 times stage 2 and 625 times stage 1... usually things are less dramatic than this, but you get the idea. With its three lives per credit, your 3 (4?) credits bringing you back at the start of the current stages and a pretty high level of difficulty, Contra is a game that is a prime candidate for this type of soul crushing grind needed to progress. BUT, there is the Konami code. With the code done at the starting screen, you get 30 lives per credit! With that it is pretty difficult not to beat the game. But, more importantly, everytime you play you will go through the whole thing, so you can learn the game and get better and better while having fun! On top of that, the game loops (and at some point gets more difficult), so you can just enter the Konami code and have fun for a couple hours before you run out of credits.

End result: It took me a couple 30 lives credits to beat the game at first. The next day, I could go through the game with a single set of 30 lives. Playing some more I used less and less lives, so today I attempted a code-less play-through and though I almost choked on the last sage, I managed to beat the game using 4 credits! I guess the next step is to 1 cc it :)

Really fun game. I am pretty sure I would not have enjoyed it as much without the 30 lives trick though.


Note: this game has a 2 players mode that I have not tried, so I am not sure if you scroll kill each other or if the action becomes too confusing to be managed, etc.


EDIT: Wuwu! Beat the game in one credit! Almost choked it like an idiot on the trivial last boss! I somehow got deep into level 4 with my first life, died once in snow, died once or twice in the energy station, but clutched the hangar like a mofo so I entered the alien lair with like 4 lives and the spread gun... and still managed to almost lose it all!
 
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Szlia

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Played and beat Mega Man for basically the first time. Back in the days I did not get why people liked this game. Today, I still don't. I guess you can say it's a solid game, as in not janky (well... except the magnet beam I guess). Nice music, nice visuals with a distinctive aesthetic. But, oh boy, do I hate that character that can't do shit. Run left, run right, Shoot in front of him, jump, climb ladders... and that's it. No ducking, no shooting up, no nothing. Oh wait. What he can also do is get knocked back for days and land on spikes that kill in one hit! That game... it's really un-fun crap game design 101. Slippery character, edge jumps required without grace period, bonking, hits that make the character let go of ladders, iciest of ice level, random moving platforms over death pits... I guess speedruners like this game because the skill ceiling is very very high as the controls are very responsive. For casual play though, the only thing I enjoyed is cheesing just about every boss fight (when you hit a boss, he becomes invulnerable for a little while, but that timer still runs when the game is paused.... also, when you unpause the game, there is a little window during which the game logic is active but time is still frozen, so basically, if you hit the pause button while a projectile is over the boss, that boss is dead after some pause-unpause cycles)...

To the game's credit though (pun not intended!), it has unlimited continues and a good number of check points (a death brings you to the last check point, a continue to the start of the level). So, with the boss cheese, the difficulty is manageable.
 

Tanoomba

ジョーディーすれいやー
<Banned>
10,170
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Played and beat Mega Man for basically the first time. Back in the days I did not get why people liked this game. Today, I still don't. I guess you can say it's a solid game, as in not janky (well... except the magnet beam I guess). Nice music, nice visuals with a distinctive aesthetic. But, oh boy, do I hate that character that can't do shit. Run left, run right, Shoot in front of him, jump, climb ladders... and that's it. No ducking, no shooting up, no nothing. Oh wait. What he can also do is get knocked back for days and land on spikes that kill in one hit! That game... it's really un-fun crap game design 101. Slippery character, edge jumps required without grace period, bonking, hits that make the character let go of ladders, iciest of ice level, random moving platforms over death pits... I guess speedruners like this game because the skill ceiling is very very high as the controls are very responsive. For casual play though, the only thing I enjoyed is cheesing just about every boss fight (when you hit a boss, he becomes invulnerable for a little while, but that timer still runs when the game is paused.... also, when you unpause the game, there is a little window during which the game logic is active but time is still frozen, so basically, if you hit the pause button while a projectile is over the boss, that boss is dead after some pause-unpause cycles)...

To the game's credit though (pun not intended!), it has unlimited continues and a good number of check points (a death brings you to the last check point, a continue to the start of the level). So, with the boss cheese, the difficulty is manageable.
Mega Man introduced a great concept (fight bosses to earn their special attacks, use them to find the weak points of other bosses), but it was really Mega Man 2 that polished the formula and got WAY more recognition and fame. Probably didn't hurt that MM2 got a Nintendo Power cover story when the magazine was just starting to take off.
 

McCheese

SW: Sean, CW: Crone, GW: Wizardhawk
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Mega Man is just not fun. I understand it was impressive for it's time, and the controls are awesomely tight, but it is really not a good game overall.
 

Siliconemelons

Avatar of War Slayer
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3 is when MegaMan really started to shine with the power up shot, sliding and the dog mechanic.

1 and 2 where rough
 

Tanoomba

ジョーディーすれいやー
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3 is when MegaMan really started to shine with the power up shot, sliding and the dog mechanic.

1 and 2 where rough
The slide was great because it added to your maneuverability and allowed for some new level design elements and Rush was cool because he added more personality to what were previously the fairly generic Items 1, 2 and 3. I hated the introduction of the charge shot, though. Most Mega Man games from 3 on were plagued with the problem of cramping your hand by holding down fire so you've got a charged attack ready at all times. To make it worse, the otherwise stellar audio of the games is compromised since you're always hearing your buster charging. I was glad when Mega Man 9 chose to exclude the charge mechanic, personally.