Tag: nes

Chrontendo 63!

Dr. Sparkle has come through once again with the 63rd edition of Chrontendo! It’s the third we’ve linked to from Set Side B (even if, for a while, we incorrectly labeled the previous one as #68, oops).

The games covered by this one are:

Knight Move (Japan only): A puzzle game involving landing a chess knight trying to land on a target square. Apparently this got a later release on PC by Spectrum Holobyte. Wikipedia tells us that the “A. Pazhitonov” listed as the creator on the Famicom version’s title screen is Alexey Pajitnov, the creator of Tetris. I cannot speak to that fact’s veracity, but it seems plausible enough. Pajitnov later would be hired by Microsoft to make puzzle games for them around the Windows XP era.

Lamentable US cover art of The Mafat Conspiracy (image from MobyGames)

The Mafat Conspiracy: the sequel to Golgo 13! The US release does its Japanese manga source material a great disservice by not having the grim face of protagonist Duke Togo visible anywhere on the front of the box, instead using extremely generic cover art. In play, it’s very similar to a slightly more competent version of the original, just with a different scenario.

Disney Adventures in the Magic Kingdom: Another of those Capcom Disney games, a glorified minigame collection, and probably the worst of the bunch! We’re a mile away from Ducktales here. As if to confirm the player’s low expectations, trivia questions are part of the game.

Solstice: Isometric platformer of the style well-known around that time in the UK, a very difficult yet respectable exploration game, and probably the best game in this episode. I prefer its SNES sequel Equinox, programmed by the Pickford Brothers, which has a highly distinctive look.

The vibe of Solstice’s print ad is like “we’re gonna make a porno”

The Last Starfighter: This is secretly a renamed port of the Commodore 64 classic Uridium! A little of the bloom is off the rose here, if only because high speed scrolling of the kind you see here is so common on the NES, yet so difficult to accomplish on the Commie. The C64’s distinctive look was heavily influenced by that system’s limitations: it takes some serious programming effort to get the C64 to be able to scroll significant screen data in a frame, enough so that, to do it, you basically have to leave color memory unchanged, since it can’t be relocated like tile definitions can. The NES can do scrolling much more easily than the Commodore 64, and had been doing very colorful fast-scrolling games like the Super Mario series for years, yet the game kept the same nearly-monochrome look as the C64 game. That’s why Uridium got such acclaim in the UK, because scrolling games like it were unknown on the system at the time, while the NES had support for it in the hardware, so it didn’t have nearly the same impact.

Captain Skyhawk: The main things I remember about this, a game which I’ve played and beaten, is it was made by Rare, and that Dave Barry once wrote a column about how much his kid dearly wanted a copy of this game. Dr. Sparkle is pretty hard on this one too, and I think for good reason. This is clearly a game intended to be in the River Raid style, but with elevation. It could have been done as a quasi-flight sim, with targets you have to duck beneath or fly over, but in its design the elevation barely matters, and instead it’s a lot more like a standard vertical shooter. The enemies don’t even cast shadows! Helicopters or ground vehicles alike can be shot if if they were on the same plane. It would have done better if it had either gone all-in on the elevation, maybe tying it to the player’s speed, and having fewer yet smarter enemies that also had elevation; either that, or taking out the elevation completely and making it into a 2D shooter more like Zanac or Raiden. Rare at that time understood the NES hardware better than most developers, and was more than capable technically of going with either approach. But they didn’t.

Then after you have Afterburner-style dogfighting levels, then the point where most players threw down the controller in disgust, when they’re asked to align and dock with a rotating space station. It all resembles a tech demo at Rare that Milton Bradley decided to try to make a few bucks off of selling as a game.

This even made it into the US release

Mechanized Attack: It’s another military-themed SNK action game, like Ikari Warriors, Guerilla War, Iron Tank or P.O.W. This one’s a light gun shooter. The game is most notable for having a debug mode, accessible by a code, with pixelated female nudity. This connects with reports of sexism in the Japanese game industry at the time (link found on Kid Fenris’ blog). The full salacious details of the cheat are up at The Cutting Room Floor.

Horrifying Palamedes box art (image from Wikipedia)

Hatris: Another game designed by Tetris creator Alexey Pajitnov, it’s also nowhere near as iconic as Tetris was, but as time has shown us, very little else is. I get the play mixed up with that of Nintendo’s Yoshi puzzle game, perhaps for good reason. Turns out there was an arcade version of this!

Palamedes: Another Tetris-ish generative piece-laying puzzle game, this one with a dice theme. And there was an arcade version of this too!

Hiryu No Ken III: 5 Nin No Ryuu Senshi: Only released in Japan. Dr. Sparkle is quick to let us know right off this isn’t the “Fist of the North Star” Ken, but the Flying Dragon: The Secret Scroll Ken. These games are a bit more simulationist (in a sense) in their depiction of martial arts than most beat ’em ups.

SD Hero Soukessen: Taose! Aku No Gundan: Also Japan-only, second in a long series of “super deformed” (basically meaning big headed, small bodied humanoid figures depicted in a cutesy kind of way) robot fighting games. The robots (and tokusatsu characters) are licensed from a variety of media, making this a massive crossover media series that could be seen as an inspiration for the hulking monstrosity that Super Smash Bros. has become. Properties that I recognized from the video are Kamen Raider, Gundam and Ultraman. This one has a fan translation patch.

Chrontendo 63 (Youtube, 1 hour 18 minutes)

Jeremy Parish Covers NES Friday the 13th

Few games for the NES have been better treated by hindsight than Friday the 13th. At the time it was regarded as a terrible game with difficult play and nearly impossible to win.

But even then there were things about it that indicated that there might be a little more going on then than was first apparent. Publisher LJN was known for making terrible games, but they outsourced their work to different companies that often weren’t actually that bad, just given weird properties for video games (The Karate Kid? Jaws? T&C Surf Designs??) and approaching them with experimental gameplay. And for their part, all of LJN’s games are technically sound, and manage to hit their 60fps frame rate targets, which is much more than you can say for many other NES games, including some from big manufacturers like Capcom, like Ghosts & Goblins and 1942, both implemented by Micronics, or Strider, which as we’ve noted before is a mess.

The critical reappraisal for Friday the 13th began with TripleZeroFilms made a well-produced 76-page PDF strategy guide for it, that exalted its good qualities. There is a Metafilter thread, from user Pope Guilty, on it that may also be of interest.

It has come time, as we all knew it must, for Jeremy Parish to collide with Jason’s axe, and as befits the game’s redemption, his video is divided in half, first about its reception at the time, then later now that it’s appreciated a little better. Just don’t turn it off after the 8 minute mark, there’s still more than half of it to go!

The masked axe-slinger: Friday the 13th, NES Works 113 (Youtube, 18 minutes)

More on the Terribleness of NES Strider’s Programming

A while ago Displaced Gamers, as part of their great Behind The Code series, did a video about how awful NES Strider’s sprite updating was. Arcade Strider was huge hit and outright masterpiece, a great arcade platformer released right before fighting games took over game rooms around the world, but NES Strider was a wretched thing, full of big ideas but with code woefully unable to live up to them. Imagine a puppy trying to do your taxes. It might put up an adorable effort, but it’s just not going to get the job done.

We linked to their last video examining its malformed construction. Well, Strider is the well of crap that keeps on gushing, and so Displaced Gamers has another video on the subject of the flaws in its programming, this time about its player physics. Walking into walls causes Strider Hiryu to shudder in place; jumping beneath a low ceiling causes him to bump his head repeatedly as his jump continues even though there’s no room to ascent; and his infamous “triangle” wall jump is so wonky that it literally requires a frame-perfect input to pull off, and not even the right frame. You have to jump the frame before you contact the wall!

Here is the new video, which explicates the entire cruddy system. It goes into exquisite/excruciating detail, including tracing the code and examining Hiryu’s X and Y coordinates on a frame-by-frame basis. It’s the kind of deep geekery that I just know you love/hate! Enjoy/despair!

The Physics Nightmare and Bizarre Jumping of Strider (NES) – Behind The Code (19 minutes)

The Copetti Site: Architectures of Recent Game Consoles

From the site, a diagram of the architecture of the Wii U’s Game Pad

A good old-fashioned website! It’s hope to information on the construction of a wide variety of console platforms! Docs on the NES, the Sega Master System, the PC Engine (a.k.a. Turbografx 16), the Mega Drive (a.k.a. Genesis), Gameboy, SNES, Saturn, Playstation, Virtual Boy (yes), Nintendo 64, Dreamcast, Playstation 2, GBA, Gamecube, Xbox, DS, PSP, Xbox 360, Playstation 3, Wii and Wii U.

The Copetti site: Architecture of Consoles

Kid Fenris on Wurm

Wurm: Journey to the Center of the Earth is a Famicom/NES title with a lot of ambition, perhaps too much. Over on his self-named blog Kid Fenris posted a long article on it back in March. It makes it seem a lot more interesting than it otherwise would! We at Set Side B love experiments, successful or failed, and Wurm certainly was one, with shooter, side-scrolling platformer, first-person boss fights and even some visual novel elements. And protagonist lady named “Moby” is searching for her boyfriend named “Ziggy.”

Green-haired Moby wears the kind of outfit you could only find in something inspired by 80s anime.

The post mentions that designer Shouichi Yoshikawa, a.k.a. “Angela,” has an interview up at GDRI. It also mentions that Angela used to have a site devoted to their game, which while gone now has a backup on the Wayback Machine! Sadly the promised English version of the site never materialized.

Also–Kid Fenris mentions he once wrote about Wurm on GameSetWatch. My old stomping grounds!

Kid Fenris: Journey to the Center of Wurm

Why Is NES Strider So Janky?

There are a number of NES games that feel like they’re held together with paperclips and chewing gum. Some of them are almost endearing for their glitchiness. When it comes to janky NES games, a few that I tend to think of are those made by Micronics (who implemented Ghosts N’ Goblins, which has an awful frame rate) and Athena (where one boss has a death animation that causes it to flip through many of the sprites in the game).

A company that usually did a lot better with their internally-developed games was Capcom, makers of Mega Man, 1943, Bionic Commando, and all the Disney Afternoon games from the time, all of which have slick 60 fps update rates and smooth animation. One game they made of which that is definitely not true, however, is NES Strider.

If you’re only familiar with Strider from the beautiful arcade version, you might wonder what even NES Strider has to do with it. It’s not proper to say Famicom Strider, because Capcom never released it in their home territory, perhaps because they were too embarrassed to.

Other than the first stage being set in generally the same fictional location in Russia (even if it doesn’t look at all the same), its story has absolutely nothing to do with it. Jeremy Parish looked at it (and remarked on its glitchiness) in an episode of Metroidvania Works from a couple of weeks ago. Some people, like Kid Fenris of the self-titled blog, actually likes it, although acknowledges its many issues.

Behind the Code, one of the best game internals series on Youtube, had a look at the implementation of NES Strider. It’s an interesting 15 minutes to my taste, but if you want a tl;dr, NES Strider often doesn’t make its framerate target, and instead of slowing the game down as most games do, it plows ahead forward into the next frame, leaving the incomplete data in its update buffer to be copied into the PPU. This causes the individual hardware sprites that compose enemy characters to sometimes have only one of their coordinates updated, or even causing data remaining from previous frames to be copied over.

Why does it does this instead of just slowing the game down? Possibly the coding was so crappy that it would have caused excessive slowdown; the scene chosen as an example in the video has the problem occur when there’s only two basic enemies on the screen in the game’s first area! Not the best engine on the system there Capcom.

The Garbage Sprites in Strider (NES) (Behind the Code on Youtube, 15 minutes)

Quick Browser-Based Multiplayer Emulation

NES Party and SNES Party are sites that do a think that would have seemed like magic 10 years ago: they make it easy to pick out NES and SNES games, load them into the browser from the Internet Archive, and not only let you play them yourself but share a room link with another person and enable internet-based multiplayer. It’s all as simple as that.

Well, mostly. When I tried using it, emulation was much faster than normal. The game load screen suggests, if this happen, that you reduce the refresh rate of your display, which seems like kind of a kludgy solution. But on the plus side, snes.party has Rampart!

NES Party and SNES Party

Behind the Code: About the NES’ Sprite Capabilities

Displaced Gamers‘ Behind the Code series doesn’t get new videos often, but they’re always great. This one is more technical than usual, but I don’t think it’s really all that technical. It’s about how the NES processes and renders its sprites, particularly explains why there’s a eight sprite per scanline limit, and even reveals a couple of games that use that limit to produce special effects!

The gist: while each scanline is being prepared for display, the NES’ PPU looks through the entries for the machine’s 64 hardware sprites in order, finds the first eight that will display on the current line, and copies their attribute data to a small area of internal RAM. There is only space there for eight sprites, so, the NES cannot display more than eight sprites in a single scan line. Any later sprites in the primary attribute data won’t have room to be copied, and so the PPU won’t be able to display them.

One thing it notably doesn’t cover, however, is how games implement priority shuffling to cause sprites to flicker instead of not display at all. The video suggests that that might be coming in a future video….

NES Sprites, OAM, and the Battle for Priority – Behind the Code (Youtube, 19 minutes)

The Guardian Legend Shrine

The World Wide Web is now over thirty years old. In that time, more content has vanished from it than remains now, but some of it can still be dredged up from the shadowy archives of the Wayback Machine. This is the latest chapter in our never-ending search to find the cool gaming stuff that time forgot….

Part of the network of the similarly venerable shmups.com, The Guardian Legend Shrine is nearly the ideal game shrine, a static site crammed full of screenshots, strategy tips, fan art and fiction, and generally just everything of interest to a fan of the NES game.

“BOO!” Who is this supposed to be though? A villain? There’s no one looking anything like this in the game.

The Guardian Legend, recently covered by Jeremy Parish within Metroidvania Works as part of his penance for coining the term in the Before Times, is a cult classic in the genre. Design by “Moo” Niitani at Compile, it combines their deadly-sharp shooters with the exploratory gameplay of The Legend of Zelda. It even has its own form of the confusion as to who the main character is supposed to be. In this case, it’s pretty obvious in play that she’s a cyborg bikini girl out to blast aliens, but you wouldn’t know it at all from the manual or US box art. She’s just “The Guardian,” because otherwise it’d be more evident that you play as a girl.

Naria’s fanart. I like this one, it’s fairly tasteful.

Last updated in 2002, the heyday of the age of the internet fan shrine, its art section is full of crudely-drawn sent-in art of its main character Miya, or Alyssa, or whatever she’s called. Most of it is chaste, thankfully-this isn’t DeviantArt we’re talking sbout here. I wonder about the people who sent those drawings now, and how they feel about work they made probably as a kid still floating around the internet. The game was already nine years old at that time, so they really couldn’t have been that young?

Okay. We’ve found the perfect fan art. The rest of you can wrap it up, you can’t defeat this.

It seems likely that no one’s worked on the site for a long long while. The hit counter and guestbook don’t work, and the link to an archive of NES manuals is broken. The newest entry on the News page says they had lost their FTP password, but then found it again, and a new update should be coming soon. That was in 2002, so you know, any day now.

That Blue Randar is, as they say, totes adorbs.

The Downloads page has links to the game’s roms, shamelessly promulgated to all passers-by, as well as a lot of other media taken-from and inspired-by the game. As just one more example of just how old this is, the suggested emulator for playing the roms is Nesticle.

The original game is 34 years old now, and not getting younger. The age of the web fan shrine is long past, and its parent site Shmups hasn’t itself been updated since 2010. Who knows how much longer it’ll be with it. SO please, take a few moments to explore this relic of a past age. Do it for me. Do it for “Moo” Niitani. Do it for Miya/Alyssa/The Guardian/whatever. And especially, do it for Blue Rendar. Look into those googly eyes, how could you say no to them?

Christopher Emirzian’s Guardian Legend Shrine

Chrontendo 62!

Dr. Sparkle’s epic, Sisyphean journey through the entire library of the Nintendo Famicom/NES, Chrontendo is back! This episode has the subtitle, “The games will get worse until morale improves,” and is it ever fitting. Here it is, more about it beneath:

This episode presents ten games from June of 1990, well into the glut of NES games when many companies with no business being in the games business dipped in their toes, much as they did at the end of the Atari 2600’s reign. Even though Nintendo was supposedly guiding the library with their benevolent white-gloved hand, those of us who were alive then and lived through it know better.

The games:

  • Bandit Kings of Ancient China (a.k.a.. Suikoden): Dr. S has some fun with the opening of this one, where he confuses it with a different, much later, much prettier game called Suikoden. This one is another of Koei’s many historical sim strategy games, ports of computer games. These games aren’t actually bad, but they are definitely an acquired taste, and they’ll destroy you if you aren’t prepared. I wonder how these games look internally? There doesn’t exactly seem to be a huge Koei historical strategy sim romhacking scene. Internally I imagine them being a giant maze of 8-bit math routines and text tables. If NES-era JRPGs are anything to go by, lots of menu-based games like this are riddled with subtle bugs. Someone should look into that. Someone other than me.
  • Kickle Cubicle: Also not that bad a game, a fairly charming port of an arcade puzzle game. Someone should have told Irem that no one was making good NES games around this time, because this is a highlight of the episode. Sadly it’s not to Dr. Sparkle’s tastes, but he admits it’s not really that bad. (Apparently he got beat up by Koke the Eyepatch-Wearing Chicken.)
  • Moero!! Judo Warriors: A judo sim from Jaleco’s “Moero” series (which doesn’t contain Moero Twinbee as one might think or hope). Many of the Moero sports games got localized to the US under different names (the baseball one became Bases Loaded). It’s largely a redo of an earlier Jaleco judo simulation.
  • Jeopardy! 25th Anniversary Edition: Agh, another of the avalanche of Rare-developed game show adaptions from the NES era. At least Jeopardy still exists today so you roughly know what’s going on, as opposed to the hates of Double Dare or Remote Control. No great shakes, no, but at least look at the spinning words “Anniversary Edition” on the title screen. Rare would often put that bit of unnecessary polish into their work. Despite their efforts though, this is not a game that plays well with a gamepad.
  • Heavy Shreddin’: A snowboarding game from Imagineering, it’s pretty basic.
  • Cabal: an adaption of an arcade game, programmed by Rare. (But remember, there is no cabal!) You might call it an Operation Wolf-like, but with destructible terrain. On the NES it’s not a lightgun game, even though it looks like it wishes it were one.
  • Silk Worm: Another arcade port, on the NES is lacklustre side-scrolling shooter where you can play as a helicopter or a jeep. Keep in mind, as you watch the footage of this, that Super Mario Bros. 3 came out the year before in Japan.
  • Arkista’s Ring: the cover seems to promise at last the Zelda where you play as Zelda, but no, it’s not an exploration game at all. Not really bad, but not a system highlight. As Dr. Sparkle says, the game pulls a Ghosts ‘n Goblins on you, making you compete all the levels four times at higher difficulties. Hm.
  • Rad Racer II: Pretty much a track update of the original Nasir-developed Rad Racer, and Square’s last non-RPG game for a long time, as well as their last Famicom game. Rad Racer was a modest hit when Nintendo published it for the NES, so Square probably sought to capitalize on that with this US-only release.
  • Rocket Ranger: A port of the Cinemaware computer game. Cinemaware’s gimmick was making games that mimicked the experience of movies, and this one’s no different. In actual play it’s just a minigame collection within a simple strategy framework.

And as an extra, Dr. Sparkle presents his 1990 arcade round-up. Games covered are Sega’s Alien Storm, Moonwalker, GP Rider and Columns, Atari’s Batman, Race Drivin’ and Pit Fighter, Capcom’s Mercs, 1941 Counter Attack and Super Buster Bros., Konami’s Aliens and Parodius Da!, Namco’s Final Lap 2, Irem’s Air Duel, Williams’ Smash T.V., SNK’s Beast Busters, and-oh wow!-Seibu Kaihatsu’s Raiden!

Chrontendo 68 (Youtube, one hour 28 minutes)

|tsr’s NES Archive

It’s been a long time… before Hardcore Gaming 101, before Kotaku or the Angry Video Game Nerd, before 1UP, Joystiq and a bunch of other sites still living and defunct, there was |tsr’s NES Archive. While it only lived for four years, hasn’t updated in 23 years, and all of the images are broken now (a huge shame for some of the features), it’s still online, still ready to give you their humorous take on old video games. Long may it continue beaming out its snarky message. Consider that the time between when the NES was released, 1985, and |tsr’s archive shut down, 2000, was only 15 years. And that time isn’t getting any longer, while the time since it shutdown is. I’ve said it a lot here lately, but: time is cruel.

A few notable features there:

The images, I note, are not broken so much as forbidden access. It’s possible that tsr’s web host, Atari HQ, still has them but has misconfigured the site. Atari HQ is still up, but now seems to only be an aggregator for other sites’ content. I wonder if an email to the right person might restore access to that entire swath of early web and videogaming history, or if they’re completely asleep at the switch?

More Game Map Sites

We’re still searching for old game info sites that are still up in 2023. Another couple of use are Video Game Maps, last updated in 2007 but still available, and Revned’s Video Game Maps, which saw its last edit in 2016, but is mirrored on Github.

It feels, to me, like this is what the World Wide Web should look like, flat, static HTML pages with sidebars and hyperlinks. A thing of beauty.

For the past 20 years it’s felt like any game information you could ever hope to find is out there on the World Wide Web, somewhere, but as both the people who grew up playing these games grow old, and the drive and motivation to start and maintain websites has diminished with the popularity of social media, this is increasingly no longer the case. Sometimes you can find vanished websites on the Wayback Machine, but it’s a lot harder to find things there, Wayback often misses images, their web archives are often incomplete, and server-side scripts are broken by archiving so dynamic content is usually dead, the page contents locked in the state it was at when the time of archival.

VGM: Maps and Strategies! and Revned’s Video Game Maps