Sumez

10 minutes ago, MeganJoanne said:

And depending on your knowledge of japanese, is only necessary for the cut scenes otherwise not needed during the gameplay.

That's good to hear. I've had Grand Master lying around for the better part of a decade, and I haven't even pulled myself together to pop in the cartridge yet.

What's the point here?

Whether anything is "legit" depends entirely on what your goal is.

If you don't want to play every stage in SMB1, and skip a majority of the game using warp zones, that's what they are there for. But the result is that, well, you won't be playing every stage. You could also just not play the game at all, and thus skip every stage if that's what you want. It's all valid.

I'm the guy who'll tell you that if you truly want to "beat" a game, you need to do it without using continues. But in reality you're the only person who gets to decide what you want to do or not.

Doesn't sound like a good strategy to me? If you die mid-fight, you can lock yourself out of being able to beat it, because you don't get your ammo back. You'll be stuck farming weapon refills for ages, which is the worst thing that can possibly happen in a Mega Man 2 run.

The only way to beat it is to go in with full ammunition on the crash bomb, and don't destroy any walls that you don't need to. There are few ways to optimize it

IIRC you can beat the boss with like one shot left on the crash bomb, but it's better to assume you don't have any in case of screw-ups. The wall right in from of you when you enter the room can and should be skipped using items 1, 2, or 3. The one in front of the upper right trap can be skipped too in a similar manner, but it can also be destroyed along with either the wall below it, or the trap above it. The leftmost wall can also be destroyed along with the trap above it.

Honestly, this boss (and the majority of the stage) is the primary reason that I don't understand why anyone could claim MM2 is the best of the series. The game is great, but it would be better without it.

6 minutes ago, fcgamer said:

What about the "pause" technique in Rad Racer?

The answer will be the same as everything else, it's subjective. But I'd file this as cheating. Obviously the game isn't designed with this approach in mind.

6 minutes ago, fcgamer said:

Also, I'm curious on others' take on playing games on easy mode

"Cheating" would be a heavy misnomer here, but it's kind of in the same category as stuff like credit feeding/using continues, P-wings, or save scumming.

It's a feature of the game, no one's saying you can't play on easy, and it's up to you whether you want to do it. It's a great way to make a game more beginner-friendly, it can help any players starting out, and it's a good way to practice if you want to move up to "the full experience". There are probably examples of games that are better on easy, but it's also likely those aren't very good games in the first place.

Ok, I'm curious. Since this is one of the rare scenarios where a busted up cartridge is still with what I'm assuming is the original owner..... What the hell happened to that game?

Of course it's not "cheating". That said, if you're using E-tanks in Mega Man, you should feel bad.

Kidding aside, of course E-tanks are there for a reason, and you're free to use them. But there's clearly a design philosophy around them that goes deeper than that. They are there to help out beginners, but anyone who feels like spending more time with the game and digging into them should aim to try for a completion without using them or continues.

It creates a nice natural dynamic difficulty to the games that is more inclusive without shunning people who like a challenge. Of course, the "E-tank" here is really a symbol of any similar mechanic in any action games. But the Mega Man titles especially are really great in this aspect. Obviously they are also designed with a "buster only" challenge in mind - but moreso than E-tanks that should never be the goal for any player starting out. The games are designed around the help you get from weapons that can be acquired, and it's a central mechanic you'd be robbing yourself of if you just ignored them from the get go.

1 hour ago, fcgamer said:

Yes, they sometimes can allow you to cheese it, but at what point would it slide into the cheating category? Exploiting glitches?

When doing it makes the game "less fun", and/or simply cuts out content or central gameplay elements (like level skips, items that can trivialize a boss fight, removing the consequences of failing, etc.)
It's really subjective, but I'd say that's the gist.

Stunlocking bosses with the holy water in Castlevania isn't a glitch, but you could argue you're robbing yourself of the experience of fighting them and achieving a satisfying victory. Whether you want to do it or not is up to you - personally I cheese the Death boss every time.

2 hours ago, austin532 said:

Not sure. They are most likely different. Doesn't mean it can't be enjoyed with friends though.

Yeah man, I won't go as far as to say it's not fun to play the game. Hell, I'd play it just to see how amazing stuff can look on the SNES.
It's just that there's a very good reason it gets "overlooked", and its name is Street Fighter Alpha 3. It's not unusual to find people who prefer 2, but those people don't prefer the SNES version.

A more sorry state is how the early marvel/capcom crossovers tend to get overlooked due to the pure splendor of MvC2, but the original X-Men vs. Street Fighter is a super fun game, and I actually prefer it.

Deadly Premonition is a gentleman's Twin Peaks

That's not something the next generation can do anything about.

6 hours ago, Tanooki said:

Gekisha Boy is a CD game?  I can't seem to find it in my package I have of card based games.

Nope, HuCard. It's also some times known as "Photograph Boy", maybe that's why?

3 hours ago, austin532 said:

I'm sure it's missing lots of frames so fighting enthusiasts will poo poo on it

And the hitboxes are completely broken?

Considering Alpha 3 is one of the best Street Fighter titles ever made, and already perfectly ported to the Saturn (but even the DC and PS1 versions are super good IMO, though people will shoot me for claiming that ), it's hard to get invested at all in Alpha 2.

It does have its own qualities though. Not sure I'd play the SNES version though, as it's a pretty terrible port objectively speaking. The other ports are superior in every way, but at least the SNES one is notable for being one of the most impressive cartridges on the platform!

Oh you can get better prices "locally". But that's a "smart approach" thing, not a patience thing.
When you need to rely on eBay, patience very very very very very rarely pays off.

10 minutes ago, drxandy said:

What if you walk into a store and find them for half the price you expected?
What if someone finds a shipping crate loaded with sealed cases?

I'm reserving my patience for stuff that actually realistically happens.

I've said $20 is too much for games that now sell for $200. I've said $150 is too much for games that now sell for $1000. I've been wrong about way too many predictions, to make any assumption like your examples. Sure, if you want to save a few bucks on a boxed Zelda you might be lucky. But you're not gonna go into a store and find someone selling a Guwange PCB that they don't realize what is worth. It just doesn't happen.

The only time I've been wrong about the opposite (expecting a game to stay expensive, but it ended up cheaper), it's only been in relation to other games taking a larger hike. Like Radiant Silvergun used to be the most expensive Saturn shooter, and now it's among the cheapest ones. But it's still no cheaper than it used to be - it just didn't go up.

21 hours ago, Bearcat-Doug said:

I played through Ducktales this week for the first time since I was a kid and it didn't seem to hold up all that well. It took me three tries to get the "best" ending. Even though I got both hidden treasures on the first two tries, I kept finishing with around 9.5 million. IGN had it ranked #10 of their top 100 NES games which seems a bit high. I'm guessing it didn't make the 30 game cut for the NES classic edition because of Disney licensing, but I'm not sure if I would put it in my personal top 50.

For what it's worth, I just double-checked my own top 100 NES games list, and I seem to have ranked it #29 - and that's on a list where I've generously collapsed every NES Mega Man game into a single entry.

Ducktales is a very typical game for Capcom's line of licensed platformers. It's extremely competently made, but also quite short, a little too much on the easy side, and generally lacks that final touch that makes the best Capcom platformers really stand out.
I've ranked both NES Ducktales games the same, but IMO the sequel is a tiny bit better, fixing a couple of the issues I had with the first.

12 hours ago, DefaultGen said:

Demon’s Souls. I haven’t played any Souls games (or many modern action games at all). Really enjoying it so far about 8hr in. There is no BS in this game. The death system has made me be cheesy to not lose souls so far. I rush at a boss and get one-shot, then my second time at him I use 100 arrows and hit and run because I don’t want to lose my souls. That’s worked for like 4 bosses in a row.

The trick to all of the Souls games is that you don't really need to care too hard about your lost souls. You can always quite easily farm a bunch if you feel like you need them - and you never really do need them to make progress in the first place.

So if you stop getting desperate about the potential of losing a bunch of them, it really eases the pressure of these games. On the other hand, that pressure is also an amazing part of the game's world building, so there's that.
If you really do want to care about a pile of souls dropped in a boss fight, one approach could be to equip the item that lets you return to a checkpoint, rush into the boss arena and find a quiet spot to use that item.
In general, just don't go into anything you know is a boss fight with a huge pile of unbanked souls. Just return to the fight later, rushing your way there without fighting anything on the way.

On 12/13/2019 at 5:28 PM, WhyNotZoidberg said:

Hell I recently discovered a SNES game I'd never heard of and goes rarely mentionned, but has all the markings of a above-average action platformer. Pretty costly tho so _some_ people know about it heh.

Come one, you can share the title.
There's a good chance most people here already know about it, and in case anyone don't wouldn't it be nice to share the knowledge? One forum post isn't gonna hurt your chances of being able to pick up a copy.

Alternatively, someone might be able to advise on whether the game is truly worth the price of admission.  I think there are a lot of platform games on SNES that look much better than they are. On the other hand, there are also a bunch out there that I could easily recommend, including a bunch that can still be picked up for cheap.

On 12/15/2019 at 2:14 AM, drxandy said:

You know what they say, patience is a virtue.

Patience has helped me miss out on a lot of great prices for a lot of games I'll now never own.

Wow, I always thought 64 was probably the worst game in the series. Did you ever play Mario Kart 8? It's a very different experience of course, but it's massively entertaining.

Out of all of these games, Zelda 2 is probably the only one I do recall getting a lot of backlash. People disliked it for both being different and hard, and I think it actually has gotten a bit of a renaissance in more recent years. That said, I think this backlash is mostly based on a general expected level of quality for the Zelda series (nevermind the fact that Zelda 2 absolutely is quality! ), where no one really had anything to compare Fester's Quest against.

I'll even shamefully admit that for years, in fact until Link's Awakening first came out, I had the dumb idea that I didn't like Zelda games at all, because I felt so burned by Z2 having rented it as a kid. Much later in my life I'd return to that game and find out I was just a dumb kid - the game is great.

On 12/14/2019 at 3:08 AM, Tanooki said:

and strangely another that has been flat and also is a konami game is Gradius II

In general, for a genre that typically tends to attract the worst price inflations, Konami shooters have been pretty good at dodging that bullet, the same goes on Saturn.

Salamander, Detana Twinbee and Gradius are all very affordable, and the PC Engine version of each of them are some of the best conversions of each game - if not better than the arcade.

On 12/14/2019 at 3:08 AM, Tanooki said:

A weird one would be the Gate of THunder/Bonk(Genjin) multi-game disc that used to be anything from $5-20 depending how nice, now it's like a $100 game.

Whoa, that really caught me off guard! Yeah, I think I paid like $5 for that one. Definitely weird!

I'm not saying there haven't been a few awful price hikes - there are plenty. But like I said this goes for most popular retro platforms over the past 5+ years, with Nintendo platforms, Saturn and arcade probably having taken the worst hit.

But still, if I were to pick my top 30 or so games for the PC Engine, at least half of them should still be at least as affordable as most major SNES or NES titles. Meanwhile I wouldn't recommend anyone get into Saturn at this point.

Good thing you have the warp whistles.
I feel like we're going in circles

Definitely. And the further we move into these areas, the less it actually has to do with video games anymore.

The more you fine tune these details, the less noticeable each incremental step will be, and the amount of impact it'll have on the whole video game experience (with presentation and immersion being the main attributes we're looking at here I guess) will be nearly negligible.

Like I started out saying. The "traditional" impression of video game hardware segregated into "generations", which I'd say didn't really become a major thing until the fourth generation, is again becoming less and less of a thing the further ahead we move. It's a pretty typical evolution for any kind of technology really, and it's completely ok.

42 minutes ago, arch_8ngel said:

I would be willing to bet that people that don't think graphics have improved much, or are tapering off, aren't fully considering things like longer draw distances and larger object counts, combined with the other things like shadows/lighting, water/reflection, etc.

I maybe people who say this think that things like longer draw distances and larger object counts, combined with the other things like shadows/lighting, water/reflection, etc. doesn't really make a hugely noticeable difference on video games at this point, to the extend of considering it a "new generation".

When you have a way more limited basis (such as PS1 3D opposed to what would come after), these improvements make a much more noticeable difference which affects not only how games look, but also how you actually perceive them as a player, greatly impacting the experience.

At this point, it's mostly superficial polish. The current generation has some amazing looking AAA games, and even if the next generation may have slightly more amazing looking AAA games, I'm not seeing this causing any difference in how you'll remember them.

5 minutes ago, TDIRunner said:

Because it doesn't put you back in the same spot. 

Why do you need to be put back in the same spot though? What's the advantage? We're talking about the quality of the game here, not the quality of being able to skip parts of the game you've already played - which IMO sounds like the description of a less great game.

IMO it doesn't really make sense to talk about console "generations" following the X360/PS3 generation. New console hardware at this point is just a tradition used for marketing purposes as well as an attempt to keep up with the constant upgrade of gaming PCs.

Would have to be something pretty groundbreaking to qualify a "new generation", and squeezing out a few more megaflops or whatever, to display what's essentially the exact same thing, isn't it.
I can see an argument for VR, but that's too gimmicky to feel like a generation shift. It's more like a cousin.

On 11/27/2019 at 9:50 PM, AstralSoul13 said:

Graphics have reached a kind of plateau ever since Gen 7 IMO. The jump from Gen 3 to 4 to 5 to 6 were all big jumps, but as time goes on the jump becomes less and less. At what point will graphics become impossible to improve on? When they look exactly like real life? Gen 9 consoles will look better than Gen 8 sure but it will be marginally incremental.

Pretty much this! The biggest difference in how much "better" (in terms of technical fidelity, not just art design) any single game looks comes down to budget moreso than hardware already at this point.
This isn't the 90s anymore, it's just a different world - and IMO the most "defining" factor of the "current" generation is how heavily the focus has changed towards lower budget titles and generally an overall smaller reliance on flexing tech/3d muscles. We've finally arrived at a place where big expensive AAA titles are expected to occupy the same territory as edgy minimalist indie games.