Displaced Gamers’ series on investigating design and programming problems with NES games continues with a game that I’m surprised isn’t more notorious, Ikari Warriors. (21 minutes)
The biggest problem with Ikari Warriors is probably that it was ported by infamous anonymous NES developer Micronics, who even in their best efforts tended to produce buggy, janky messes. Some other games they made: Ghosts & Goblins, 1942, Tiger-Heli, Elevator Action, Super Pitfall and Athena. All the other problems have their root in that.
Ikari Warriors runs at 15 fps. One game frame for every four screen frames! It uses expensive multiply routines instead of look-up tables for movement! Everything is slow even accounting for that! And it tries to adapt the arcade game’s character rotation system, which supports 16 directions (even though there are only character graphics for 8 of them), and forces the player characters to rotate through them to move.
All of this overhead makes Ikari Warriors really slow and frustrating to play. Displaced Gamers not only diagnoses the problem, but even makes a game attempt to fix them. And they come to the conclusion that it has additional problems, beyond even these, and really needs a bit of a redesign to really make it playable. Ah well, it was a good attempt.
Displaced Gamers’ Behind the Code series is one of the best explainers of the quirks of NES games on Youtube. It’s not afraid to dive into the assembly code itself if need be, but its videos can often be understood by people without deep technical backgrounds.
Watch the video for the full spiel, but here’s a summary.
Once upon a time, in the waning days of the Famicom, Konami planned to release a game called Arc Hound in Japan. It was going to be another of their trademark run-and-gun shooters, along the lines of Contra. It even received coverage in enthusiast magazines in Japan, and it probably would have used one of Konami’s bespoke mapper chips like the VRC6 that the Japanese version of Castlevania III used.
Arc Hound was likely far into development when the decision was made to not release it in the Japanese market. Producing a game cartridge requires a substantial investment in parts and marketing, of course, and they must have judged that they couldn’t make enough of a profit off of it in their home territory: the Super Famicom was already out, as well as Contra III on that platform. But the NES still had a little bit of life left in it in the US, so they decided to give the game a shot over here, as a title in the Contra series
A big problem there was Nintendo’s policies towards manufacturing NES games. Nintendo demanded the right to build all the licensed software for the NES, and further restricted most (although not all) publishers to using Nintendo’s own family of mappers. Konami had been forced to revise their games to use Nintendo’s mappers in other games: Castlevania III famously used a different mapper in Japan, one that offered greatly expanded sound capabilities that worked through the Famicom’s sound channel pass-through, but was incompatible with the NES.
Extra sound channels are nice, but the primary use for most mapper chips is bank switching, swapping different sections of a cartridge’s data into the Famicom/NES’s 6502-workalike’s 64K address space, and also potentially making different sections of the game’s graphics data visible to the PPU graphics chip.
Behind the Code’s examination of the game program reveals that a large portion of the time of each frame is spent in setting up bank switches. Whether it was coded poorly, or just that Konami didn’t want to pay to include a mapper with more a more efficient bank switching mechanism, the game wastes a lot of time just pulling in different banks of data to be visible to the NES’s hardware. So it is that Contra Force could have run a lot better, but Konami either didn’t want to expend the coding effort, or pay for the the mapping hardware, to allow it to do so.
Presumably, somewhere in Konami’s archives, there is a version of Arc Hound that uses a VRC chip to handle mapping, and that runs much more smoothly. Maybe someday it’ll come to light, although I wouldn’t lay any bets on it. More likely perhaps is that someone will hack up the code and make such a version themselves. Who knows?
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
If you haven’t seen it before (it made a trip around the blogs and such back in 2001), you really aren’t prepared for Duelin’ Firemen. The version that people saw then was really low quality though; a few years back, as part of a documentary about its making that seems like it never really got off the ground, a somewhat better quality version appeared on Youtube. It is, um, really something.
Duelin’ Firemen was a cancelled FMV game, probably a music game, for the 3DO console. Right off the bat it shows you it means business: not one but two planes, one of them in fact the space shuttle Columbia, the other Air Force One, collide with the top of the Sears Tower. The trailer was made in 1996 so you can’t blame it for being inappropriate due to either of those things. You might still consider it inappropriate due to other things, but it’s not too much offensive, unless you consider its childish innuendo or gleeful appraisal of a city in flames offensive. It might just be waiting for a massive citywide conflagration to hit the media for people to tsk at it for that. Which, well, would probably be fair.
Let me not keep you waiting any longer! Here is Duelin’ Firemen, the video game intro trailer that got submitted to freaking Sundance in 1996. You won’t be the same person afterward that you were before. Because we’re all changed by our experiences, be they great or small. But it really is an experience. 7 1/2 minutes’ worth of one:
Recognizable people in it, behind all the poorly composited flames, include blacksploitation star Rudy Ray “Dolemite” Moore, DEVO’s Mark Mothersbaugh, Dr. Timothy Leary, Rev. Ivan Stang of the Church of the Subgenius, Steve Albini, David Yow, and no doubt others I’m leaving out or don’t myself recognize. I’ve never been great with pop culture figures, or music figures either. But you don’t have to know who any of them are to enjoy it, probably with the aid of the mind-altering substance of your choice.
I don’t see as many fan shrine sites as I used to. Old ones have died out or, in the best case, gone into archive mode, and new ones aren’t replacing them as quickly, or at least don’t seem to be. It could be I don’t search for them as often, or Google not surfacing them as much-not only has the quality of its search degraded markedly over the past decade, but for whatever reason its results seems much more focused on answering questions and selling things. Google also seems a lot more like to give you links from big sites, instead of small web sites made by individuals.
That’s why I was please to find 6th Division Den, a site focused on Metal Slug that the Wayback Machine suggests was founded as recently as 2018. I didn’t find it through Google, but as the host of the official site of the game from yesterday’s post, Aqua Ippan.
Much of the site’s content is devoted to creating pixel art and on getting the images out of the games, but it has a lot of examples to go by. And the site itself looks great! I don’t see many sites like this anymore, but I’m glad they can still be found from time to time.
Indie Retro News reported recently on this cool run-and-gun game made by Division 六 the style of Metal Slug. Here’s a promotional video. Note that some of the sound effects are taken directly from Metal Slug, but are intended as placeholders. The final version should have no outside assets.
\An awesome fansite about this history of classic hardcore NeoGeo run-n-gun series Metal Slug, there’s lots of information and screenshots scavenged from Japanese gaming magazines about its development!
Early screenshot of a development version of Metal Slug, scavenged from Gamest. All images in this post from Metal Slug M.I.A., which has many more of them!
Early in development, you spent the entire game in the Metal Slug tank. You could rescue soldiers who would then help you in battle, such as the one in the white uniform in this image riding on the Slug.
Beta screenshot of the final boss fight with General Morden.
