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Posted on March 24th, 2008 by JMT.
Categories: Articles.
It seems that all post-generation expansion of the Sonic the Hedgehog enterprise only focus on his speed. But the original sonic wasn’t all about speed. For every part where you’d whip around loops at top speed, there were other areas where you could take time and find some secret areas. The video looks to me like it’s entirely a fast paced on-rails 2.5D platformer. It might still be hella-fun, but I just can’t tell if it has other elements to balance it out yet.
I think it’s important for a platformer to have a good balance between the two. Sonic Adventure kind of accomplished it by splitting the two into different gameplay areas.
Even Mario had the balance. There was good old jumping and fireballing action, plus there were little secrets, like the hidden blocks, subterranean bonus levels, and warp zones.
And even Doom, with it’s good balance of chainsaw massacre and finding secret areas.
Posted on March 16th, 2008 by JMT.
Categories: Articles.
I just picked up Gradius III and IV for the PS2.
At first I thought something was wrong with the system. There was audio playing during the opening CG cinema, but it all went silent when it launched into the games.
Eventually I figured out that when the game is in the arcade emulation mode, audio is only output via the analog audio. There is no audio coming out of the digital optical output.
How is this even possible? I thought that that was a system feature, I didn’t think that a game itself could enable or disable the analog/digital audio output independently.
Also, the games seem to have some control flaw. Once you gain a couple of points of speed, the motion feels just too quantizes. When you tap UP, even lightly, the ship jumps up too far (jump distance is of course proportional to speed). Also, the diagonal motion feels awkward, like it’s jumping into a diagonal position instead of smoothly flying.
Scrolling shooters, even when you’re at faster speeds, should have solid ship motion. Holding down a direction may go faster, but you should be able to tap lightly to get a shorter motion. And the diagonal motion should be more proportional, and not feel like such a jump.
In comparison, the SNES version of Gradius III doesn’t have these control problems. but the SNES version is a modified game, and not the original.
Does anyone know if the original arcade had these control flaws too? (In which case, the PS2 is just correctly emulating the original arcade flaws).
Posted on March 15th, 2008 by JMT.
Categories: Articles.
I was trying to consolidated my saved files from my VMUs so I could sell some of them. But now I’m stuck, because my Chu Chu Rocket and Sonic Adventure save files won’t allow me to copy them. The copy choice is disabled in the pop-up menu. What’s up with that? Both are Sonic Team games, so I assume it’s some kind of security they’ve decided to put into their save files. Probably so you can’t give someone else your save game. But why should they care if someone else gets to have all the stages unlocked for free? At least they still have to own the game first. And when I want to use a different VMU, now I’m prevented from moving the files.
Posted on March 13th, 2008 by JMT.
Categories: Articles.
I picked up Tekken 2 and 3 at half price cheap, after continually hearing/reading that they’re the greatest 3D fighting game ever made.
And then we were playing through them (and dozens other games) in preparation to pull out lots of titles to sell at the game convention.
I just have to say I was totally unimpressed with the two games. The characters/graphics weren’t all that great. The virtua fighter characters are kinda plain too, but at least they all have noticably unique fighting styles.
But who cares about graphics, I like polygons you know. But gameplay… the special moves were incredibly hard to pull off. And it wasn’t just the PoS controller. I have one of those capcom controllers, and an arcade stick too. It didn’t matter. You have to hit those buttons at lightning speed. At least twice as fast as the combos on MK3. You have to go Yngwie on those buttons.
And what’s worse is the charge-back/chargeforward parts of special moves. In most fighting games, you just have to hold for 1 or 2 seconds, and if you hold it for more than that, no problem. But for the charge holds in Tekken, you have to hold it or like exactly 800ms to 1200ms. If you hold it for 1.5 seconds, it considers it too long of a hold and cancels the move. I could try a special move 10 times and be lucky to get it to work once.
And then they list all these special moves to do while you’re running, but they don’t actually exist. You perform the exact same special move just by running into someone, without having to press any of the buttons.
And the moves and special moves are all rather boring.
The only cool think about the games is the throws. Each character has a really cool hold/throw/backbreak type move, one from the front and one from behind. They sometimes last 10 seconds. Those are very cool. But they don’t make up for the rest of the game in my mind.
In comparision to other 3D fighters I’ve played, like Soul Blade/Calibre, and Dead or Alive 2, and even the original Virtua Fighter, it just didn’t stack up.
Posted on February 27th, 2008 by JMT.
Categories: News.
http://www.midwestgamingclassic.com/
March 29th and 30th in Oconomowoc, WI.
W E L C O
M E T O T
H E N E X
T C O N !
Posted on February 24th, 2008 by JMT.
Categories: Articles.
This is one of my favorite games for my favorite system. First, take it from the point of view of an arcade-style helicopter shooter, and NOT from the point of view of a 3D desert strike or a “simulation” of any kind. These may predisposition your experience.
As soon as the mission loads, just lay down on the machine guns and head north, straffing left and right as you go to “mow down a path of trees”. This is hella-fun. Just the fact that you can lay down the gunfire and everything you see blows up under your fire is amusing and stress relieving beyond belief.
Then once some big targets show up, use those rockets, and watch as they alternate left-right-left-right from your sides as you pummel the tanks and towers with rockets.
When one of those pesky helicopters or airplanes shows up, raise your altitude, target, and fire off a missle to get rid of them.
As an arcade shooter, this game is utterly amazing. Even if the flat-ground and scaling sprites are antiquated by 3D graphics standards, the smooth flying motion animation and smooth scaling prevent the graphics from being a hindrance.
True, sometimes when you’re trying to pinpoint that last target, backing up into trees can get annoying. But that’s why I strafe a swath through the trees with gunfire. It’s both extremely fun, and serves a purpose!
This is one of the only games ever made where you can just jump into a 1st person view and fly around blowing up everything in sight and just have fun for a few minutes, 15 minutes, or an hour if you want. And the mission progress is saved to RAM, so you can load where you left off to finish the whole game over a longer timeframe.
There’s also a lot of variety to the stages. Some are in thick forests, while others are over rivers or islands in oceans, and desert canyons.
Lastly, this game has some depth to it. On many of the missions, there are special tasks you can perform that earn you extra medals. Like when you rescue the guy from the downed stealth bomber, or save a convoy.
The Sega CD is my favorite system of all time, because my three favorite games are on it:
1.) The best arcade driving combat game ever: Batman Returns CD
2.) The best arcade flying combat game ever: AH-3 Thunderstrike
3.) The best 2D fighting game ever: Eternal Champions CD
Posted on January 31st, 2008 by JMT.
Categories: Articles.
3DO is off-world intercepter, while Saturn is off-world interceptor “extreme”.
Graphically, 3DO seems to win. The textures and polygons have higher resolution, and are brighter. Sprites are brighter too. The texturemapping seems to have smoothing to it, while the Saturn is blocky. But the Saturn has some transparancy the 3DO doesn’t have, be it somewhat blocky transparency.
Animation wise, Saturn wins. At least twice the frame-rate of 3DO during regular play, though it slows down during intense battles. The increased frame-rate creates a smoother game experience. It could be the reduced graphics crunch that enables this. The 3DO doesn’t have slowdown.
Load-times are about the same. Saturn has some load screens the 3DO doesn’t have, but the 3DO might be a bit longer on the load screens it does have.
Backgrounds- Saturn wins, as the sky is a 3D plane that moves past you at high speed, creating a sense of stormy weather and motion. The 3DO is a static sky background.
Gameplay- Saturn wins. The car seems to drive 50% faster, making more intense battles. And with better animation, it’s easier to drive and aim to shoot the obsticles.
Levels- the levels are all basically the same in look/style/design, but the layout, actual terrain, and enemy/power-up locations are completely different between the two.
Controls- 3DO has a brake button that the saturn lacks. But who brakes anyway? 3DO has a special weapon select button. Saturn Maps the 3 special weapons to 3 buttons, so there’s no select. There’s also a cockpit/chase view toggle button in the Saturn. 3DO is fixed to chase-mode. However, the camera always points down the Z-axis, even in cockpit mode, which makes cockpit mode mostly useless, since the camera doesn’t actually point where you’re driving when you turn.
Which leads to the realization that Off-world intercepter is using the Solar/Total Eclipse engine with little modification.
Posted on January 14th, 2008 by JMT.
Categories: Articles.
Having recently reviewed Raiden III, and thinking of other games such as R-Type Final (which I tried out, and didn’t like, so I haven’t played much) and Castle Shikagami and Gunbird, and others I don’t have yet…
These are all classic 2D shooter games, but they have 3D rendered backgrounds.
In some aspects, this is cool. It provides a nice link between the 2D gameplay we like, and the modern 3D graphics the ignorant massess require (pardon the sarcasm ). Instead of just 2, 3, or 4 layers of parallax scrolling, you get true perspective scrolling. You can get better interaction with the scenery, such as damage and collisions.
But there’s a couple of aspects I don’t like. The first is that the gameplay usually is disconnected from the background. The ships you fly in shooters don’t fly with physics. They move up, down, left, and right in arcade-style direct correspondence with button presses. But now that the backgrounds are 3D rendered, the backgrounds tend to follow regular physics engines. Sometimes during the game, the ships course alters, and it veers left, or right, takes off at high speed. The ship physics of course remain the same, left, right, up, down, but the backgrounds start rotating and whizzing by underneath you, and it suddenly becomes obvious that there’s a complete disconnect between the ship/enemies and the background.
With fully 2D games, the backgrounds are kept connected with the ships better. Not because they tried harder, but just because they kept things simpler. The graphics just scroll with the ship, and parallax to show speed and distance. Simpler, in this case, ends up looking better.
The other aspect I don’t like is the color schemes. I don’t know how much of this is to blame on modern 24-bit color systems (versus 256-color systems), and how much is to blame on 3D graphics and it’s use of unrealistic shading techniques and more realistic textures. But on the 3D games, the backgrounds have more normal colors. Grays and browns and washed out shades. And all the shading means things are always fading into shadows (or fog, kami forbid). And the ships have more realistic colors and textures, which are more earthy and industrial tones. And everything is smoothed together, so there’s no edges, and no contrast.
Now with 2D games on low-color systems, the ships were bright colors and had high contrast in both color and shape to the background, and enemy ships had bright, contrasting colors. And it was easy to see what on the screen was a ship and a bright, blocky bullet, versus the background.
Besides the bright colors and contrasting textures being more visually appealing, the game was also easier to “understand what’s going on” (I won’t say actually easier to play. In fact, the older games tend to be harder to play, but you didn’t lose because you couldn’t tell the difference between the bullet and the background, or you lost visual on your ship, but because the game just kicked your @$$).
Interestingly enough, the first gen of transition games from 2D to 3D I actually liked, since they used plain polygons, rather than textures. And the low-color palete polygons on lower-resolution systems still had the bright colors and edge contrast needed to see everything right. Games like Silpheed and Starblade. Surprisingly, the texture-mapped version of Starblade is actually not as fun as the polygon version.
Posted on January 12th, 2008 by JMT.
Categories: Articles.
I just picked up Raiden III for PS2 used.
It’s pretty much what you expect. Game hasn’t really changed since Raiden Trad on my Genesis. Except of course that all the backgrounds a 3D rendered now.
Game’s pretty good. The only issue I have is that it kinda feels like you’re flying through molasses. They shouldn’t have upped the movement speed just a notch. But surprisingly, I still don’t have too much trouble evading the bullets, mostly because the collision detection is extremely forgiving. You pretty much have to get nailed dead-on by a bullet to get destroyed. Normally you might complain, but because of the somewhat slow ship speed, the forgiving collision detection balances it out perfectly so the game remains playable and fun.
The game includes TATE mode. It actually includes 4 modes. Regular and TATE, and then a “wider” version of both.
Since I can’t rotate the projector screen, what I did was put it in Wide-TATE mode, and then set the projector to 16:9 mode, so it made the playfield super-long, and then just lay down sideways on the couch and play.
One other interesting tidbit I forgot to mention.
On all other games I’ve played, the “X” button is the OK/enter button.
So when I first load it, and it says “no save file found, do you want to create a new save file?” and I select “Yes” and click “X”.
Then it says “No save data loaded, do you want to play anyway?” and I select “Yes” and click “X”.
Then it says “no save file found, do you want to create a new save file?”, and once again I select “Yes” and click “X”.
And then it says “No save data loaded, do you want to play nayway?”….
And after going round and round half a dozen times, I finally figured out that the “X” button was mapped directly to the “No” choice. So even though I selected “Yes”, the “X” button chose “No”. And if you answer no to both questions, it keeps repeating the questions over and over.
In Raiden III, the “[]” and “O” buttons are accept, and the “X” is cancel.
Posted on January 4th, 2008 by JMT.
Categories: Articles.
Marvel Vs. Capcom 2 is hailed as one of the best fighting games of the era, according to reviews. I picked it up at the 20% off Discland sale.
I can say that the actual 1 on 1 fighting gameplay is superb. It’s really fun to play.
However, I find the team attacks to be completely flawed. Basically, in order for a fighting game to be good, button-mashing should not be able to win over skill. For the regular gameplay, this is true. But for the team attacks, you can basically button mash the trigger buttons to win any battle.
For those who don’t know, for every fight, you pick 3 characters. You fight one at a time, and after one dies, the next one comes in. The default controller setup has the trigger buttons mapped to team commands. You can swap players (which is a useful tactic, because health will slowly regenerate for the players not in use). But you can also call out attacks from your team members.
The problem is that all the offensive and defensive attacks you call out from your team members are invincible and devastating, and the damage zone takes up 3/4ths of the screen. And all you have to do is keep mashing the trigger buttons (along with +F, +B, etc) and your backup players will just keep coming out, unleash a gigantic special move that drains your opponents life, and you can repeat until whoever mashes fastest wins.
It was cool at first, when you figure out how to unleash this cool special move from your back-up player on your friend. But once it becomes clear that the only way to win a game is by button mashing the triggers, since attempting normal or skill moves is suicide, it looses it’s appeal.
The solution was to go back to the controller menu and disable the team commands on the trigger buttons. So you can’t button-mash devastating attacks over and over again anymore. After we did that, then the game became fun again.
But I’m just curiuos why nobody else seems to have reviewed this game (on any system) and complained about the poorly designed team attacks. It seems to be a big flaw to me. But at least it’s a flaw that’s easily corrected.
From a game mechanics point of view, they should have either made the team attack much harder to pull off, or made it less invincible and less devastating, or made some kind of power meter you have to fill from skill before you can use a team attack.