These days, if you’re playing a game with multiple versions, there’s usually one specific version you want. For pre-Crash games, if there’s an arcade version, most of the time, it’s the one you want. After the Crash it becomes less definite. Super Mario Bros. at home is a much more playable game that the arcade version. Vs. Super Mario Bros., which is hungry for those quarters. For games like Smash T.V. though you still usually want to play the arcade version.
The arcade and PC Engine CD version of Gradius II though are a much closer call. In a couple of places this home version is actually slightly better, or slightly harder, than the arcade original. It also contains an extra level that’s missing from the arcade.
Inglebard Gaming on Youtube has played through both games entirely and shows them to you side by side, so you can decide for yourself!
This editorial doesn’t necessarily reflect the views of this blog. However, blogs don’t have views anyway, so what would that even mean?
I was sitting and watching some Zelda: Breath of the Wild videos in a Metafilter post by Fizz, from streamer PointCrow. I was going through the usual generation shock–I the hyper-frenetic editing, zooming visuals with added sound effects, slow zooms, constant cues telling me how they want me to feel, combined with his constant state of hype and excitement, they were wearing on me. But that’s probably just my age? As much as it pains me to admit it I’m not young anymore, having just turned fifty last month. Maybe it’s just the style of popular youth media now Somehow I don’t think it is, I don’t see everyone doing that. I suspect it’s really Youtube’s algorithm that prioritizes engagement really really hard, that pushes some people to those lengths. Anyway, I don’t intend to make this into a screed against PointCrow, who obviously works very hard to succeed, and does have some interesting videos. By all means watch a few if you want. That’s not the point of this post anyway.
Movie notwithstanding, does anyone care about Super Mario Bros. anymore, for its own sake?
It was while watching it that I started to realize how insular these kinds of video can be? If you don’t know anything about Breath of the Wild, a lot of it will be impenetrable to you. That may be why there’s so many videos about this game in particular. There’s like a while little genre of BotW videos that show off tricks, odd corners of the game, and amazing feats in it. I post about them here sometimes even.
My worry has to do with the phenomenon of retro (from our perspective) gaming in general. We often hear people talk about games like Super Mario Bros. and the original Legend of Zelda as if there were some kind of timeless classics, which is a bold statement to make even approaching 40 years out from the Famicom’s launch. Timeless is timeless, and in centuries will anyone know or even care about it? The jury is still out of course on whether humans will still be around in that time, but let’s presume they will be.
It’s a tricky and devious game for people not prepare for it, but the original Legend of Zelda is surprisingly playable now.
In fact, let’s restrict out scope to the relatively near future, maybe 20 years from now. Will people still care about the 8-bit era of games around that time?
We have some reason to believe that they aren’t played as much now as they used to be. NES-era games, on the Switch, are no longer sold individually, like they were on the Wii and Wii-U, but in bulk, as part of a subscription. That seems to indicate, I think, that they haven’t turned out to be as much of a selling point individually as before.
My hope is that they will, and I think games like Super Mario Bros. do have some qualities that don’t just expire like the milk left in the fridge for a month. But they don’t exist in a vacuum, and what gives me cause for concern is the ways in which these games are experienced now.
I think that retro games still fill a useful niche, in that they’re solidly-made and challenging games, with a distinctive look and sound, that don’t have gigantic playtimes. Super Mario Bros. will not claim weeks of your life. Even the longer ones don’t demand as much of your attention and times as a AAA-title Square Bethesda WA Microsoft Co Inc. And indie games, while often worthy, are often a risk to spend money on. Many NES-era games are well known to be playable and interesting, which is how they got to be popular in the first place.
My concern, though, is that as the people who grew up with these games age, their original context is being increasingly lost. Less and less often, the people who play and think about these games didn’t come to them from mostly personal, pre-internet perspectives, but as something brought to them by other people, meaning, not just hearing about them, but being pre-spoiled regarding their gameplay, and especially from watching streamers and speedrunners.
What, I wonder, is the ratio between people playing games as intended, and those purposely trying to break them in a variety of ways, and do superplays? Are new game players inundated by streaming culture? Do they get the sense that 8-bit games are only interesting if one tries to blow them up? And in the future, will people continue to find their way to games like Super Mario Bros. and The Legend of Zelda, and appreciate them for what they are?
Is there perhaps space out there for people just doing normal runs of retro games? I wonder if I should give it a shot.
This is a double review of Lunistice and A Space for the Unbound. Lunistice was played with a retail key, and Space was played with a press key provided by the developer.
Owner of Game Wisdom with more than a decade of experience writing and talking about game design and the industry. I’m also the author of the “Game Design Deep Dive” series and “20 Essential Games to Study”
Broken Connections is a little game by prolific roguelike creator Slashie, Santaigo Zapata (Facebook), that puts you in the shoes of Rogue co-creator Glenn Wichman (also on Facebook) in 1980. His then-roommate Michael Toy (yep, also on Facebook) worked on Rogue over a dialup connection to the mainframe at the University of California at Santa Cruz. The game poses a (probably fictional) situation that the connection is lost, and you are tasked with traveling to campus and finding out what is wrong with the connection and reestablishing it before the system reboots and a weekend’s work is lost.
There’s no enemies or anything like that. It’s a turn-limited quest that only requires that you find your way to the machine in time and plug in a cable, but along the way you encounter a number of people who have minor problems, or recognize you and want to tell you about something, or are just about on their day. Glenn is a very nice person, but it’s up to you if you want to engage with them or continue along on the task you’re there to do. If you feel up to it, you can go back after plugging the cable in, when there isn’t a pressing time limit.
The stakes are pretty minor. If you don’t make it, a weekend’s work is lost. I’m sure Michael Toy can recreate his work, but it’d still be very nice to be able to save it. There is no big win condition, or reward for being nice to people, other the just being a good person. In that way it’s like real life.
It’s a silly NetHack-themed game about exploring a dungeon, presented through a bunch of characters sitting around passing a blunt between them. It’s not really that hard, but there is a bit of strategy to it.
You and your pet sit around a campfire with other characters from that dungeon level and talk about things. Your character and your pet can say things like, they want to be less or more aggressive on the next level, or they want to invoke Elbereth, or they want to use an item; other characters may say things like telling you where fewer or more fights will be, or where treasure is. Or they may have nothing of importance to say.
Every time a character says something, they must pass the blunt, which when it’s depleted signals it’s time to go to the next level. (C’mon, you know all the characters in this dungeon have to be potheads.) All of the fighting and stuff happens in simulation between conversations. Your character or their pet may be wounded (observe their hit points when their conversation turn comes up), or even die at this phase. It’s possible for your pet to die but your character go on to win. It’s also possible for your character die and your pet go on to win the game, which is not something that can occur in NetHack.
It’s a very simple game, and as stated, not really that difficult. But it’s fun, and might give a chuckle to NetHack fanatics. It’s free and completely playable in browser!
This one’s actually playable! Josh Millard, cortex on Metafilter, some time back made a cute little Pico-8 game in which Luigi wanders a decaying Mushroom Kingdom having depressive thoughts.
Romhack Thursdays still on break. In the meantime this video from People Make Games tells us about Excel ESports, a thing that is real enough that it was on ESPN last year.
This is another huge topic that I should come back to later, but in the meantime here’s an article, mostly about the British type-in scene, from Wireframe Magazinne last year. It mentions the longest type-in game ever, Axys: The Last Battle (Youtube), an Amstrad program that had to be printed in five successive issues, and what it calls the best type-in game of all, Crossroads from COMPUTE!, although I’m dubious about that claim, there were lots of type-ins. It’s definitely great, though. It’s worth a read if you have the time, although who has enough of that these days?
This is Crossroads, yet another thing to add to the stack of future topics. If you like this, you might be interested in Forget-Me-Not, for iOS and Google Play and Windows (on itch.io)
Owner of Game Wisdom with more than a decade of experience writing and talking about game design and the industry. I’m also the author of the “Game Design Deep Dive” series and “20 Essential Games to Study”
On Romhack Thursdays, we bring you interesting finds from the world of game modifications.
Edit the Frog is back, with a new romhack! And this one’s really amazing.
We’ve mentioned before Vitor Vilela’s hacks that retro a SA-1 (“Super Accelerator”) into SNES games that suffered from slowdown. So far he’s done it with five games: Super Mario World, Gradius III (which really needed it), Contra III: The Alien Wars and Super R-Type. The fifth is the most amazing so far: Race Drivin’.
When the original Hard Drivin’ came to arcades it was pretty incredible, the first 3D racing game that didn’t use scanline tricks to display its track, that rendered it using an actual polygonal 3D engine. It used special custom hardware to make its track and physics possible. Race Drivin’ was less revolutionary, but only because the ground had been broken for it.
It was exactly the worst kind of game to be ported to the Super Nintendo’s infamously underpowered hardware, a 16-bit variant of the venerable 6502 running at about 3.5 mHz, just a bit over twice the speed of the NES. Even from the start, the SNES used in-card accelerators and co-processors to help complex games run: even though launch title Pilotwings made heavy use of the SNES’s “mode 7” graphics to display the game world, it still needed a DSP chip to help it with calculation.
https://github.com/VitorVilela7/SA1-Root/tree/master/Race-DrivinRace Drivin’ doesn’t use any accelerator, despite being one of the games most sorely in need of one. Asking a SNES to perform up to the custom mathbox chips in the arcade game was ludicrous, and so SNES Race Drivin’ is looked down upon by many, and probably unjustly: the coding is perfectly all right, it was just asking too much of the system.
Even with a SA-1 you’d think that Race Drivin’ on SNES couldn’t measure up, but Vitor’s hack does quite a respectable job! The SA-1 is essentially a second of the same kind of chip that runs the SNES, with a number of extra features bundled in. It also has some faster memory included on-die, and runs at triple the frame rate. Imagine if this had come out at the time: the SNES game is less than two years older than the arcade version! An SA-1-powered version that matched the arcade so closely back then would have astounded. I see that in a few places on the Super Stunt Track, it drops to 12 FPS instead of the 30 it holds at elsewhere, but it’s still damn slick.
Here is one of Vitor’s side-by-side comparison videos, demonstrating the old version (on the left) and the upgraded hack (on the right):
The SuperGrafx is a failed system that had only five games, only three of which seem to be worth playing. The Sharp X68000 series of high-end personal computers, which were only released in Japan, on the other hand, is probably the popular gaming system Westerners have heard the least about.
As I said yesterday, the X68000 cost three grand, and that was just for the base system. If you thought the NeoGeo was expensive, hah. It’s price was justified in that it was a computer, indeed a workstation, and had a variety of software other than games. But it did still have a lot of games, including some of the best arcade conversions, including excellent ports of Rygar, After Burner, Strider, Final Fight, Street Fighter II and Detana! Twinbee, and a well-remembered recreation of the original Castlevania up to then-current aural and visual ideals. The X68000 even got conversions of Atari arcade games like Marble Madness, and even KLAX, that would I would have loved to have played back then.
The X68000 also worked a lot like a MS-DOS machine from the time. It ran mostly HUMAN68K as its OS, a DOS clone made by HudsonSoft, although it also had windowing OSes. Despite how it seemed in use though, it used Motorola 680X0-family processors, like original iteration of the Macintosh. But while it has a DOS-style OS, it’s a home computer with a dedicated sprite chip!
At times it feels like this blog is a recap of my gaming-related Youtube explorations, but I have no qualms about it when they’re as excellent as the two I have this time. One is a review of the “pro” version system from four years ago, from someone who went and obtained one:
Three years later, RMC returned with a more thorough exploration of a different machine of the line:
And this one is about emulating it, which is probably the closest most of us will ever come to trying out any of its software:
Owner of Game Wisdom with more than a decade of experience writing and talking about game design and the industry. I’m also the author of the “Game Design Deep Dive” series and “20 Essential Games to Study”
