Sumez

On 12/7/2019 at 9:06 PM, Jono1874 said:

Say what you will about Mike Matei regarding his behavior, but that guy is the most passionate about gaming on the entire internet. He knows his stuff.

Even though shmups was a very major genre at least up until the mid 90s, most of the best shooters remained kinda overlooked. And today the genre falls pretty heavily into the niche pigeonhole of catering to some of the most devoted gamers out there, and the same people who care a lot about video game collecting. Add the fact that a lot of the most coveted shooters even to this day are still arcade-only.

On 11/21/2019 at 3:01 PM, MuNKeY said:

I love Cave shooters mostly for the eye candy and bullet patterns, but another plus is pretty much all of them you can play and even if you are really bad at them you can still complete them

wait what 

On 11/21/2019 at 2:36 PM, Philosoraptor said:

If you're still sort of getting your feet wet in bullet hells and want to try another Cave shooter, pick up Deathsmiles. That one is really accessible and you can select the difficulty of each stage before you play it. Just don't choose the easiest rank the whole time...

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...because it'll put you on the hardest rank if you select too many stages in a row on the easiest rank.

 

Not true, that's what happens if you pick the *highest* difficulty on every stage. Or I think even just 5 out of the first 6?
And yeah you definitely don't want that if you're still a beginner.

DeathSmiles is definitely an "easy" 1 credit clear for a Cave game. Even Espgaluda, which is often considered one of the easier Cave games is way harder. It's still a great game!

Ibara

Blazing Star

Mushihimesama Futari

Omega Fighter

Gokujou Parodius

I have all of these games as original arcade PCBs, and they are definitely among my most prized possessions!

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 

2 hours ago, treed said:

As far as I can tell, it's identical in cycles and bytes, so is it just a matter of taste or is there a drawback there? I guess the only benefit I see with using BIT over AND is that A is left alone, in case you wanted to use the same bitmask right away.

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.

6 hours ago, TylerBarnes said:

Ah, I see now. I was over thinking in that it was something more specific than that. I personally like the readability of declaring constants with labels. Seeing too many instances of MaskLUT+1, MaskLUT+3, etc in the code would throw me off in the context I am thinking of. Other contexts I'm sure would be great with the above. 

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?

1 hour ago, DefaultGen said:

It is the only Mega Man game Wikipedia considers best enough to be on their best list of the best. Not even Mega Man X makes it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_video_games_considered_the_best

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.

1 hour ago, Splain said:

What role does historical context play?

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?

1 hour ago, Splain said:

If Nintendo released SMB3 today, we'd all say "huh, neat game but I could just download these levels on Mario Maker??"

Sure, if Mario Maker had any levels anywhere near as good. Mario Maker is great though, it's definitely up there.

1 hour ago, Splain said:

So how much better does a modern game have to be, to be able to defeat the historical significance/context of older games?

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.

20 minutes ago, arch_8ngel said:

Do you really think that Super Mario World would not be a lesser game if it lacked save states?

Why should that same logic not hold for SMB 3 (which is a larger game) just because they give you the whistle for potentially skipping worlds?

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.

9 minutes ago, jonebone said:

it's hard to believe they are on the same hardware.

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.

9 minutes ago, arch_8ngel said:

I hope you appreciate the irony of you making this statement and then two posts later listing numerous 40+ hour RPGs on your list of prospects of the "greatest"

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.

1 hour ago, Sega Genesis Sage said:

Also, CRTs aren't magical, gaming on a CRT isn't going to immediately eliminate all the lag we see with flat panels. That's because much of the lag we see nowadays is because of digital processing of the picture. Later model CRTs that had HDMI inputs suffered from some lag as well.

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.

54 minutes ago, themisfit138 said:

Like, I tried to like, watch this like, video, or like whatever. But, I like, just, like, couldn’t, make it through, like, you know. 

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.

28 minutes ago, captmorgandrinker said:

People with no puzzle game interest aren't going to like Tetris.

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.

1 hour ago, jonebone said:

You'd need to define great (most sales?  highest ratings? most influential? etc.) first.

Imagine a world where the stuff that sold the best was also the best thing

1 hour ago, CasualCart said:

I always appreciate when games offer an 'easy' difficulty setting. I like to play retro games for fun, not to challenge or frustrate myself.

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.

8 hours ago, Rooster said:

Do any of you guys have experience using OSSC?  How does it compare to using a CRT?  I had a Sanyo flat screen CRT television when I lived in the US, but if I used it for more than a few hours it would get a green spot on the screen. 

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.