Sumez

X/Y indexing is the bread and butter of the 6502 along with quick zeropage access It's not very C friendly, but it's very effective when your code and data structure is optimized towards it.

Played with the princess constantly as a kid. And yeah she's easy mode - way OP. Luigi is fun. But Toad is the true gamer master race

Though of course BIT has other usages, that's the primary reason to use BIT over AND when you are only interested in the Zero flag. Though in your example it would probably make more sense to load "buttons1" into A and then BIT with the bitmask, allowing you to use the button states again, immediately after your branch.

If you're working with constants there's no reason to use data space at all, and of course "MaskLUT+3" doesn't make any sense - that's not the purpose of a look-up table. My example was in the context of accessing a dynamic index into a byte with 8 flags in it, for example because you have 8 on-screen enemy slots with indexes from 0 to 7, and need to access one of them. LDY CurrentEnemy ; Let's say this is enemy index 3, so Y is now = #3 LDA EnemyFlags ; A byte with 8 flags, one for each enemy. We are looking for bit 3, but our code doesn't know that so we can't use a constant AND MaskLUT, Y ; This will AND the byte with %00001000 (8) to check for the flag state in index #3 BEQ WhateverBranch ; Branches based on enemy 3's flag

You beat Contra 3 on hard, but "Lost Levels" was too much for you? I'm surprised. I absolutely love the Japanese SMB2. I can see why its release might have turned people off from the franchise, but it's not like it's frustratingly or unfair hard. It's just a more challenging version of the original SMB with a bit less "conventional" level design (people who compare it to Kaizo hacks are out of their mind, though!) The game has an amazing sense of flow and original ideas same as the first game, and for someone who's played a LOT of Mario through their life, this approach to a Mario game is a rare shining gem among the attempts to keep the other titles in the series a little too child friendly.

I've seen games giving extra endings, either secret stuff or goofy/gimmicky endings for beating them on hard mode - and cutting the game short early on easy wasn't uncommon either. But actually holding on to the "real" ending on normal mode? I'm curious to know which games do that?

Anyone who thinks Mega Man 2 is the best of the series however, should really try out the rest of the NES series. You're in for a genuine treat.

For NES development I do this constantly. It's very simpe to check towards a single bit/flag, it's just a single AND. So I don't really see why you shouldn't. I store a lot of data in bitmasks also, and enemy/object spawning/destroying uses a bitmask too, just using an 8-byte LUT to get the correct mask value. For SNES development, I don't really bother. In fact, I frequently even reserve two bytes for tiny numbers, just so I don't have to worry about not having registers the correct size when I address it.. That system just has an infinite supply of RAM.

IMO none. If a game can't stand on its own outside of context, how "great" is it? Historically important, genre defining, influential, sure. But if you don't want to play it in favor of other current alternatives, what does that matter? Sure, if Mario Maker had any levels anywhere near as good. Mario Maker is great though, it's definitely up there. It just needs to be objectively better. The thing is, games can be really good at fooling us into thinking they are "better" by just shoving more shit in there. And if that works, then it obviously counts for something. But chances are you won't be returning to it later. If you find yourself saying 10 years later "oh that game didn't age well", maybe it wasn't super good at being young either. Don't get me wrong though, tons of great games are still coming out nowadays. I can think of (and already listed) at least two modern games that I think are serious contenders for the best game ever.

I find it weird that anyone would ever consider GTA3 or Uncharted 1 the greatest of anything. I mean, I liked Uncharted 1, but I don't think anyone ever claimed it was the best of anything. It had a ton of glaring issues right from the get-go (most obviously its tedious repetition), and Uncharted 2 magically fixed all of that. Though the base game behind all the polish is essentially the same, everything that makes Uncharted 2 as special and great as it is didn't exist in any form in the first game. As for the GTA games I never understood why people liked those in the first place, so it's hard for me to comment on. But these games are all based on the "more is better" formula, so obviously you can always "improve" them. But it won't fix the shallow core game design (which is fine, I love a lot of shallow games). It's a different type of game.

I'm sorry to disappoint you. Then again, if you think the NES BB2 is good, your threshold might be different than mine. Though to be honest, I would have been perfectly satisfied with a game on that level. The last great Bubble Bobble game was Bubble Memories, but I really hope we'll get another one some day.

Well.. Basically because they give you the whistle for potentially skipping worlds. If SMB3 had the "completion" aspect that SMW has, a save battery would be an interesting addition, but it's just not designed that way. I have played SMB3 countless, countless times. And probably half of them have been on the All-Stars version, which does have battery save, and I've never had the memory of starting from the beginning and working my way to the end outside of the surprisingly few times I've actually played from stage 1 to the final boss in one long sitting. Conversely, if SMW didn't have all of its secrets that you'd typically go back and revisit older stages to find, and didn't have the ability to backtrack across the entire game world, but instead allowed you to immediately go to any other world less than 5 minutes into the game, what purpose would the savegames serve outside of letting you imprint the fact that you've beaten some or all of the stages, only so that it can inform you of that later on? Instead, to me, SMB3 is just a bunch of individual stages in individual worlds, all of which stand out to me in their own ways. It's never been my goal to beat every stage, it's my goal to play every stage. I don't care about having a badge of honor in storage on the cartridge, telling me that I've done it. Kind of unimportant detail here and now, but in a lot of ways, they really aren't. SMB3 wouldn't have been remotely possible with the limited amount of RAM and storage space SMB1 had access to.

Lol, I get your point. It's obviously very different types of games, and I think a lot of people complaining about "lives", "game over" and "a lack of saves" try to employ the logic of those types of games to older games that just aren't designed that way. I also made a whole post talking about Tetris. Imagine making a savepoint halfway through a Tetris run XD That said, the reason I picked those two RPGs specifically is that even to this day, I still feel like just popping them in and playing them from the beginning, and have done so multiple times. Really, no other RPGs ever had that effect on me. Probably because a majority of them would become a lot more bloated and slow paced going forward.

By this logic (which is correct), playing on a CRT would eliminate lag. At least the manner of lag you're talking about here. EDIT: Unless of course you meant a CRT rendering a digital video output via HDMI etc.? Yes, that would still lag just as bad. I think it's implied here that one of the primary ideas behind using a CRT, is to display analog video. I guess a better point here is that nowadays lag also comes from a lot of other sources. Game engine bloat and managed code, controller drivers and wireless protocols, operating systems, etc. etc. Hell, even game logic. There are so many factors outside of just the video output. But the video output is definitely still a big one in today's world.

prolly

Anyway here's my list of other potential games I'd all argue for a position as "greatest game ever created" outside of what I already mentioned. I really can't pick one, it totally depends on my mood. These are mostly all related to some kind of personal taste, so I don't see any issue with people telling me either of those games isn't worthy of it. (that said, you can't deny that they are all great! ;P) Super Mario Galaxy Symphony of the Night Dark Souls 1 Final Fantasy VI Chrono Trigger Rainbow Islands

I agree that it would make sense for SMB3 to have a battery save, but the way it's designed perfectly gets around that. Consider me a "naysayer" in that context, the game doesn't suffer from not having it. If a game isn't worth playing from the beginning every time you pop it in, then it definitely isn't worthy as a contender of the title "the greatest game ever created". SMB3 isn't a bad contender though.

I have a lot of different suggestions based on how personal/subjective I'm going to get. But a lot of people have already said Tetris, so I think that's a game worth addressing. Of course you can't just say "Tetris" and stop there, as there are literally hundreds of different versions of that game, and a surprising high amount of them have a bunch of individual issues. In terms of the most perfectly balanced and exceptionally enjoyable, challenging single player version, with an absolutely incredible skill ceiling, Tetris: The Grand Master 2 is to me the absolute, perfect iteration of Tetris. I don't know if I would say it's THE greatest game in the world, but I'd definitely be satisfied with it getting that trophy if there ever was one. I think the reason why a lot of people always bring up Tetris in this context is that Tetris is the closest you can probably get to a "perfect" video game. The concept is so simple that there is barely anything you can do to change it without making it a different game. A lot of people have tried, and some of those are very good. But they have never been able to reach the same amount depth and infinite replayability that the core Tetris concept has. That said, you can still fine-tune stuff in terms of how the game relays feedback to the player, how inputs work in terms of making the controls more intuitive, precise, and satisfying, etc. and this is the reason I'd submit TGM2. Not because it's a famously "super fast and hard" arcade game. But because just playing it on any skill level is simply incredibly satisfying, like few other games. On one hand that argument could be pushed on any potential "correct" answer (of which there is none). Any game of any genre would potentially not apply to a person who dislikes that genre. On the other hand, I'm also not sure you are correct, though it depends on how specific you are about "puzzle games". Like if you dislike the fact that they are mostly abstract, then yeah, Tetris won't appeal to you of course. But even in the world of puzzle games, Tetris stands out. No other game is as immediately intuitive and satisfying. And very few puzzle games are as "immediate" as Tetris. One of my favourite aspects of it is that it never involves planning very hard ahead, despite the fact that any single mistake could cause problems many, many steps going forward. It's really a game like nothing else. Imagine a world where the stuff that sold the best was also the best thing

I always play games on "normal" because I hate having fun.

Sounds like a HDTV issue. For those TVs OSSC is absolutely the best possible solution. I was trying to compare the experience to a pure CRT setup.

An OSSC does a lot of good things, but it's a very different experience. It eliminates upscaling lag almost entirely (though your TV might still add a bunch by itself), and gives you a better picture than any HDTV with RGB support would on their own. But I think there's a very obvious effect from trying to understand an analog signal and convert it into a digital HDMI image, pixel-by-pixel. Every single source needs its own individual configuration, which takes a lot of crazy analog magic into account (like phase, offset, target horizontal resolution, and a trillion other little things), and there are some consoles that I never got to look really nice, such as the SNES. Compare a CRT - you just plug it in, and you get a completely crisp near pixel perfect image.

As a kid I'd always play on easy because I had the presumption that I just sucked at video games. Or rather, back then a video game was considered a challenge that you have to beat - very different from nowadays where a developer is typically afraid that any player might not see the ending. And as a kid, how could I be up to that challenge? The problem with playing on easy of course, is that you're never gonna get any better that way. When I play "retro games" nowadays I always leave it at the default, including dipswitches on arcade games (though some times the jury is out on what "default" is there). If I can't beat it, I'm just not good enough, and there's nothing wrong with that. But I think any really good game deserves to be played on hard. If the game is super well designed, then the gameplay should be more pronounced when the stakes are higher. IIRC the "hard" setting in Shinobi 3 does nothing outside of making your life bar smaller. But it's a game a good player might be able to beat without getting hit, so it's a perfect solution. Contra III feels like it's designed around the arcade-like Hard mode, with Normal added in as a way to better appeal to the players, rather than immediately scaring them away. Ghouls n Ghosts on MegaDrive defaults to the easier of the two difficulties, but slams a huge "PRACTICE MODE" label over the bottom of your screen. On the other hand, if the game has issues, that might also be more obvious when the stakes are higher. IMO the Super Star Wars games are terribly designed. I loved them as a kid, and I still have a soft spot for them due to the cool graphical style and all the crazy setpieces they managed to cram into the game. But they are also just absurdly unfair and punishing. Most segments of the game will reward rushing through them an tanking damage rather than trying to stop up and fight anything. Enemies will come at you straight from outside the screen giving you no time to react, and shooter sections has your hitbox take up like 25% of the screen. I have no idea what they were thinking. (that Indiana Jones game with a similar graphical style, but made by Factor 5, however. That's a real gem IMO)

I'd take all of those PCE games if I didn't already have most of them. Suggested price for the whole lot?

I'd like to go on record and say that I have absolutely zero against AVGN. I loved the show when it first started, and I still have a fondness for James' character. I'm glad he's starting to make more videos against after the big break around the making of his movie. When I do have issues, it's when it's being put on a pedestal as something it's not, and when people get their "opinions" on video games from watching internet shows like this. Mike of course, is a different matter. Cinemassacre would be better off if he wasn't involved.

Even as a kid I never had any problems with the water level, why wouldn't you be able to beat it? Sure it's not a particularly well designed stage, but even if you screw up you can just switch out turtles and tank the damage with someone else. It's also so early in the on that if you don't get through it you've barely seen the game. As a kid me and my friends would usually get stuck hiking around the city trying to look for Splinter. I have never once heard anyone complain about that stage until AVGN made that video, and suddenly everyone was talking about the same thing The Technodrome, that's where the game completely falls apart.