Tag: nicoleexpress

Nicole Express on The Legend of Makai

What a weird game Nicole Express has dug up, an excellent example of how interconnected video gaming can be, in unexpected ways.

The Legend of Makai is a 1988 arcade game from Jaleco, developed by NMK. NMK made a variety of games around that time, but one especially notable thing they did was publish a Famicom game in Japan called Densetsu no Kishi Elrond, which is a slightly modified version of Rare’s Wizards & Warriors. It’s no bootleg: it was licensed from them for release.

This is getting off the track a bit, but Elrond is one of those games where the changes are minimal, but what was changed is extremely interesting, since rarely will you have so a clear an example of what the publisher’s priorities are. In the Japanese version the level order has been rearranged, and your knight hero has only one life, but does have a numeric counter for their health, and by collecting health-granting meat you can increase your life total above its initial maximum.

Wizards & Warriors is one of those games that’s fallen into the classic gaming netherworld. Its publisher Acclaim no longer exists, and Rare has little connection with Nintendo these days, so while it’s possible to play it officially these days (as part of Rare Replay), it’s missing from most of the prominent avenues in which classic NES games have been kept playable, like the Wii and Wii-U Virtual Consoles, the NES Mini and Nintendo Switch Online. Back on the NES W&W was rather popular; its hero Kuros actually got a cartoon rendition as part of the cartoon segments of the game show Video Power (there he’s a generic barbarian who speaks in thees and thous forsooth, and has no armor). His second and third adventures were developed for Rare by the legendary Pickford Bros. But now, the series is gone, and probably will never be revived.

So why do I bring up Wizards & Warriors, a British game, in an article about The Legend of Makai? Because as Nicole points out, The Legend of Makai is a arcade game made by W&W’s Japanese publisher, and it has many things in common with Wizards & Warriors that can’t be coincidental.

  • Your character jumps in a similar way, that few other games replicate
  • Your character holds their sword out at all times, and if you jump into enemies you can stab them with it
  • You’re searching for colored keys
  • Levels have a verticality to them that’s reminiscent of W&W
  • You’re searching for permanent powerup items that increase your abilities, some similar to W&W.

Hardcore Gaming 101 also noticed the similarities. It’s unlikely we’ll ever know what went on there (maybe someone who can read Japanese can look through old magazines from the time?), but in one of those twists of fate, it’s easier to legally play The Legend of Makai now than Wizards & Warriors, for it’s been released through Arcade Archives (Switch, PS4), while W&W has to be sought out through Rare Replay, or else on the original cartridge.

Nicole Express on Twin Famicom Compatibility with Guardic Gaiden

Nicole Express is so knowledgable. How many blog posts have you seen about an obscure hardware issue, itself with obscure hardware, and the Japanese version of one specific cult game? Which the writer tested herself with her own unit and cartridge? Then went in to investigate herself with a freaking multimeter? Whaaa?

Nicole’s two Twin Famicoms

I won’t keep you waiting for the link: here it is. And here is my grossly simplified summary, intended to inspire you to go to the original article, if you have the time, and get all the deets.

Guardic Gaiden, known in the US as The Guardian Legend, uses a weird trick to put its status bar at the bottom of the screen, instead of, as usually seen in an UNROM game, at the top. To create a fixed status window requires stopping whatever the processor is doing at a very precise time while the display is being drawn to the TV, and then changing some PPU registers to display the status.

Guardic Gaiden’s title screen

More complex and versatile mappers, like the MMC family, have the ability to trigger interrupts at specific screen lines, but Guardic Gaiden/Guardian Legend doesn’t use an MMC. It doesn’t even have a raster line counter, so the game simply doesn’t know where on screen the raster beam is drawing.

There are still lots of games on the system that have status windows, even with MMC chips. The PPU has a built-in feature called Sprite 0 Hit, where the chip can signal when Sprite 0 (of the system’s 64 sprites) is being drawn on top of non-transparent background data. So what older games commonly do is put Sprite 0 in an unobtrusive place at the bottom of the status window at the top of the screen. When the Sprite 0 Hit register indicates a collision, the code knows it’s time to set up the PPU to display the main portion of the game screen.

There is a really big problem with this setup, though. Sprite 0 Hit doesn’t trigger an interrupt. It doesn’t stop the code to let it switch the graphics. It’s not even proper to say it “sends a signal.” It’s up to the code to check if Sprite 0 Hit has been triggered. If it has, then it’s time to set the scroll register to the right place, and maybe switch to the proper background tileset, and do whatever else needs to happen, and the code can then be off to run essential game logic, the actual game part of the game.

If it hasn’t… then, the code has to check again, and immediately. And if it hasn’t triggered then, to do it again. It has to literally check as quickly as it can, because if it delays in its check, the game screen might not get set up at the right moment, which will be perceptible as the bar straying down one extra line that one frame. Not the end of the world, but it looks glitchy. And this code will be running every frame, so if it strays down once, it might do it again, which is a more perceptible glitchiness.

Sprite 0 is set to trigger its hit at the top of the screen, because the code won’t have to spin its wheels checking the hit over and over. It wastes time, but not that much. This is why UNROM games put their status lines, with the score, timer, health bar and life counters, at the top of the screen.

Well, The Guardian Legend is an UNROM game, and maybe because creators Compile wanted to show off, they decided they’d put the bar at the bottom of the screen. And yet, their game doesn’t waste most of each frame just in maintaining the status bar.

How? And what does that have to do with the Twin Famicom? For that I’m going to direct you to Nicole Express’ blog post. May you find it as fascinating as I did!

Nicole Express: Is the Twin Famicom Flawed? The Case of Guardic Gaiden

Nicole Express: Nintendo’s First Consoles

Long long before the Switch, Wii-U, Wii, 2DS, 3DS, Gameboy Advance, Gamecube, SNES, Super Famicom, Gameboy, NES or Famicom, there were Nintendo’s Color TV Game 6 and 15.

Nintendo’s second console – the Color TV Game 6, released a week earlier, was the first
(Image from Nicole Express)

These were what are now called dedicated game consoles, that can only play games that are built into it. It used to be that these were the only kinds of consoles there were. They’ve made something of a comeback recently, for this is essentially what units like the NES Mini and Atari Flashback are.

Nicole Express has the details. Some interesting facts from her post:

  • The Color TV Game 6 and Color TV Game 15 use the same system-on-a-chip design. As sometimes happened back then, the 6 is electrically capable of playing all the games the 15 can, but doesn’t make the 15’s extra game’s selectable.
  • The paddles don’t use potentiometers, like nearly every other paddle controller does. They’re switches, meaning no analog control. When your paddle moves up or down, it’s always at a constant speed, making the included Pong-style games play much than on practically every other system.
  • All of Nintendo’s game consoles have used a three letter designation. The Switch’s is HAC. The Wii was RVL (Revolution), the DS was NTR (Nitro), the Gamecube was DOL (Dolphin) and the Famicom was HVC. This system may have originated way back here with the Color TV Game: it’s code was CTG.

First is the Worst: Nintendo’s Color TV Game 6 & 15 (Nicole Express)

Nicole Express: Vintage Pachinko

The always excellent Nicole Express has a great post on the Japanese gambling game Pachinko, especially the imported machines that made it to the U.S. when for a brief time we liked it too. It contains the fact that we probably got video pachinko before Japan did, through the Odyssey2 game Pachinko! (The exclamation point there is part of the game’s title, as it is with all Magnavox-produced Odyssey2 games. While I enjoy that bit of trivia, I am not actually hugely excited about it.)

“Thunderbird,” one of several machines in Nicole’s post, and in her collection!

Physical slot machines were, and maybe still are, illegal in Japan, so all the ridiculous graphic and sound flourishes those demonic entities bear in North America are instead put in the service of the Tiny Silver Balls. I’ve always shied away from these forms of gaming for the same reason I never got into Magic: The Gathering: by tying profitability to gameplay, they feel to me like they’re more business model than game, really. I might not be able to earn my quarter back at Pac-Man, but at least there isn’t someone figuring out how to work those odds against me.

Nicole Express: Vintage Pachinko: Going Back And Forth Across The Pacific

Nicole Express: The Many Ways the PC Engine Saved Games

We love Nicole Express! She regularly covers the most interesting, and often obscure to U.S. audiences, gaming topics. This time out, she relates the many ways that the PC Engine saved game data. Just about every possible way the system could do saving, it did, from simple passwords to on-cart battery-backed RAM to expansion port peripherals with batteries or capacitors, even to a device that plugged into the controller port. Great information as always from Nicole Branagan!

Image from Nicole Express

Nicole Express: Tennokoe, or, How I learned to Stop Worrying and Save the Game

Nicole Express Presents: The World’s Most Popular Arcade Board?

Awesome retro gaming blog Nicole Express wonders, what is the best-selling arcade board of all time? It’s gotta be Pac-Man, right? It sold over 100,000 units back in the day, and every Ms. Pac-Man machine contains it inside it. But Nicole offers that it may actually be a bootleg board called the 60-in-1.

Image from Nicole Express

The 60-in-1 is often recognizable by its distinctive menu system, but it can actually be set to play one of its games in a stand-alone mode, in which case its menu never appears. It’s actually an ARM board running MAME, which means its games have distinctive quirks. All the information is there, so go acquaint yourself with ubiquitous gray-market arcade hardware!

Link: The World’s Most Popular Arcade Board?