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Arcade/MAME HSC 2018 Round 11: X-Men / Captain Commando


Leto27

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Arcade/MAME HSC 2018

Round 1: Time Pilot '84

Round 2: Toki / Moon Patrol

Round 3: Sunset Riders ( 2 player version)

Round 4: Golden Axe/Hippodrome

Round 5: Gravitar/Xybots

Round 6: Time Tunnel / Super Pac- Man

Round 7: Ghould’n Ghosts / Mystic Riders

Round 8: Into the sea

Round 9: Prehistoric Isle in 1930 / Cadillacs and Dinosaurs

Round 10 Tetris Plus / Puyo Puyo

Round 11: X-Men / Captain Commando

Round 12: SHMUPS

Round 13: Request round

Round 14:

Round 15: Moderator favorite

Round 16: Taito Arcade Round

Round 17: SHMUPS 2

Round 18: Polish your armor 2

 

Standings after: tetris plus / Puyo Puyo

 

  1. Youxia 142
  2. Ramses 136
  3. Cynicaster 136
  4. SBAZ 128
  5. Leto 119
  6. Atari Warlord 84
  7. Hero2billions 63
  8. jblenkle 41
  9. asponge 21
  10. Zoyous 19
  11. NIKON 19
  12. roadrunner 10

Round 11

Captain commando (World 911202)

post-62867-0-31069000-1546183977.png

captcomm.zip

Captain commando by Capcom, 1991

MAME ROMset: captcomm
Dip Switches: Default: (2 lives / Difficulty: 4 Normal )

Number of credits: 2 credits

Remember to play with the recommended settings, and do not use cheats or any kind of enhancements to take advantage

Round January 13th @ midnight MDT

 

Captain Commando

Ramses 29091 (+10)

leto27 28832 (+9)

yuoxia 26741 (+8)

atari warlord 21131 (+7)

S.Baz 16380 (+6)

hero2billions 15940 (+5)

jblenkle 15630 (+4)

roadrunner 14330 (+3)

cynicaster 12240 (+2)

 

Scoring will be as follows:

10 Points for 1st

9 for 2nd

8 for 3rd and so forth

Bonus points: If you defeat the first three enemies harmless (perfect round) you will get double points

 

Round 11

X-Men

post-62867-0-44566000-1546183960.png

xmen.zip


 

X-Men by Konami, 1992

MAME ROMset: xmen
Dip Switches: Default: ( Difficulty: Medium / 2 lives / Maximum mutant power 9 )

Number of credits: 2 credits

Remember to play with the recommended settings, and do not use cheats or any kind of enhancements to take advantage

Round January 13th @ midnight MDT

X-Men

Leto27 185 ( +10)

Ramses 113 (+9)

cynicaster 109 (+ 8)

atari warlord 91 (+7)

yuoxia 90 (+6)

hero2billions 56 (+5)

jblenkle 47 (+4)

roadrunner 36 (+3)

S.Baz 35 (+2)

 

Scoring will be as follows:

10 Points for 1st

9 for 2nd

8 for 3rd and so forth

Edited by Leto27
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X-Men and its Konami cousins TMNT and Simpsons have to be the most raved-about arcade games from their time, and I just don't get it. Despite their very nice looking graphics, these games are very mindless, IMO. You don't even get to choose how you attack the enemy; you simply mash a generic "attack" button and your character chooses how he wants to hit the enemies. Heck, at least Double Dragon let you execute different moves at will. The scoring systems are practically non-existent... how fun is it to chase a high score when you simply get 1 point per enemy, regardless of how you do it and how difficult/easy the enemy is? It makes the inclusion of a scoring system feel like an afterthought. I say all this as somebody who is just the right age to have played and loved these games when they were current. Back then they were great because they had cutting edge graphics and sounds and you could only afford to drop so many quarters into the machines... in 2019, they're just games where you pump in however many virtual credits you need and you just sort of zone out while you play because the game is so simplistic and you don't need to worry about surviving because you can just continue all you like. Anyway, sorry for the rant...

 

Captain - 12, 240

 

post-27528-0-00439000-1546670149_thumb.jpg

 

X-Men - 109

 

post-27528-0-17122800-1546671249_thumb.jpg

 

 

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X-Men and its Konami cousins TMNT and Simpsons have to be the most raved-about arcade games from their time, and I just don't get it. Despite their very nice looking graphics, these games are very mindless, IMO. You don't even get to choose how you attack the enemy; you simply mash a generic "attack" button and your character chooses how he wants to hit the enemies. Heck, at least Double Dragon let you execute different moves at will. The scoring systems are practically non-existent... how fun is it to chase a high score when you simply get 1 point per enemy, regardless of how you do it and how difficult/easy the enemy is? It makes the inclusion of a scoring system feel like an afterthought. I say all this as somebody who is just the right age to have played and loved these games when they were current. Back then they were great because they had cutting edge graphics and sounds and you could only afford to drop so many quarters into the machines... in 2019, they're just games where you pump in however many virtual credits you need and you just sort of zone out while you play because the game is so simplistic and you don't need to worry about surviving because you can just continue all you like. Anyway, sorry for the rant...

Totally hear what you're saying. Never been a fan of bashers -- they're either overly simplistic or there are a million moves you could never hope to remember. In my experience, it only wound up in so much button mashing. I've enjoyed a few of the bashers we've played in the HRC (especially Cadillacs and Dinosaurs) but that's because there are limitations on credits. The whole "pay-to-win" thing started in the mid-'80s and never really went away, and in the process I lost interest in arcade games completely. Plus games like X-Men and Simpsons cost a whole dollar per play which was pretty steep in 1992; no wonder I either stuck with pinball or the old Time Pilot machine in the corner whenever I went to the arcade back then.

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Totally hear what you're saying. Never been a fan of bashers -- they're either overly simplistic or there are a million moves you could never hope to remember. In my experience, it only wound up in so much button mashing. I've enjoyed a few of the bashers we've played in the HRC (especially Cadillacs and Dinosaurs) but that's because there are limitations on credits. The whole "pay-to-win" thing started in the mid-'80s and never really went away, and in the process I lost interest in arcade games completely. Plus games like X-Men and Simpsons cost a whole dollar per play which was pretty steep in 1992; no wonder I either stuck with pinball or the old Time Pilot machine in the corner whenever I went to the arcade back then.

 

I loved them back in the day when they came out just because of the graphics and presentation, however these days I find most of them boring and mindless. I still get a lot of nostalgia from TMNT, but I usually don't feel like finishing it whenever I play it. I just do a credit or two. I was too young to properly enjoy the early 80s arcade games when they were originally released, though these days I play them more than anything else.

Edited by Ramses
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I don't agree at all. Brawlers are no less or more mindless/pay-2-win than other arcade games, or games in general. I could say the same about eg platformers: you only go right, press A to jump, how tedious. Shoot'em ups? Endlessly fly up, bash the fire button, shoot zillion things, so boring.

Of course it's not true but it also isn't for brawlers. The fact that now you can spam unlimited credits applies to all games, and something I never actually do - hence being bit put off when I saw we are supposed to use 2 in this round.

 

Xmen and its ilk are not my favourites but are not so bad gameplay wise either. Yeah, so you press Hit button and the character exectues some moves but this happens in lots of brawlers. You can still do other stuff though plus obvioulsy need to apply some skill to survive anyway.

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The fact that now you can spam unlimited credits applies to all games,

 

Strictly speaking, it's not the ability to spam unlimited virtual credits into a home MAME machine that is my complaint; it's the ability to continue a game indefinitely by doing so. I realize you can artificially limit yourself to strictly 1-credit plays, and that helps my enjoyment factor of a lot of such games, but it doesn't completely fix the problem for me. Reason being, single credit or not, the fact remains that at some point the paradigm shifted and game designers started to take it for granted that players would gladly pay more money to continue a game, so the design of the games started to reflect that assumption by ensuring your death at regular intervals with ridiculously cheap hits, hopelessly unfair boss fights, etc.

 

Besides that, the ability to "continue" was not a thing, at least not a common thing, until the mid-late 80s. That means there are tons of games to play from before that time where you couldn't activate a continue function even if you wanted to; and, perhaps more importantly, the gameplay is designed with that in mind. DK, Robotron, and Pac-Man are some high profile examples that come to mind immediately and there are lots of obscure, lesser-known titles as well that are great. Even though I was too young to appreciate those games as a kid, being too busy with the likes of TMNT and Simpsons, those older ones are the games I gravitate toward now because, despite their primitive graphics, I just find them so much more rich and nuanced than the multi-player, post-Final-Fight button-mashers that took over in the 90s.

 

But there's no accounting for taste... people like what they like, and that's cool.

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Strictly speaking, it's not the ability to spam unlimited virtual credits into a home MAME machine that is my complaint; it's the ability to continue a game indefinitely by doing so. I realize you can artificially limit yourself to strictly 1-credit plays, and that helps my enjoyment factor of a lot of such games, but it doesn't completely fix the problem for me. Reason being, single credit or not, the fact remains that at some point the paradigm shifted and game designers started to take it for granted that players would gladly pay more money to continue a game, so the design of the games started to reflect that assumption by ensuring your death at regular intervals with ridiculously cheap hits, hopelessly unfair boss fights, etc.

 

Besides that, the ability to "continue" was not a thing, at least not a common thing, until the mid-late 80s. That means there are tons of games to play from before that time where you couldn't activate a continue function even if you wanted to; and, perhaps more importantly, the gameplay is designed with that in mind. DK, Robotron, and Pac-Man are some high profile examples that come to mind immediately and there are lots of obscure, lesser-known titles as well that are great. Even though I was too young to appreciate those games as a kid, being too busy with the likes of TMNT and Simpsons, those older ones are the games I gravitate toward now because, despite their primitive graphics, I just find them so much more rich and nuanced than the multi-player, post-Final-Fight button-mashers that took over in the 90s.

 

But there's no accounting for taste... people like what they like, and that's cool.

As a Kid I was limited to play just two credits at the arcades per day, because my parents says that I already have an Atari 2600 and a Colecovision, so I have to maximixed every credit, thats what helps me to vastly improve in various arcades games and what put me away of games like gauntlet where your energy is depleted as the time pass

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Strictly speaking, it's not the ability to spam unlimited virtual credits into a home MAME machine that is my complaint; it's the ability to continue a game indefinitely by doing so. I realize you can artificially limit yourself to strictly 1-credit plays, and that helps my enjoyment factor of a lot of such games, but it doesn't completely fix the problem for me. Reason being, single credit or not, the fact remains that at some point the paradigm shifted and game designers started to take it for granted that players would gladly pay more money to continue a game, so the design of the games started to reflect that assumption by ensuring your death at regular intervals with ridiculously cheap hits, hopelessly unfair boss fights, etc.

 

Sorry, but this "paradigm shift" theory just doesn't ring true for me. I can assure you that for every seemingly unfair/cheap death there's a bunch of players who learned how to deal with them and don't perceive them as such and also vice versa - some people might say that early no-continue classics are "unfair" because of their steep difficulty (Defender or Gravitar, anyone?). It's not like early arcade games were designed for charity after all. And obviously there are heaps and heaps of classics from post-continue era which are to this day revered for their pure gameplay qualities.

 

I totally get that not everybody has to like brawlers but I don't see the reason to attach some artificial theory to support this dislike, plus dismissing an entire genre as "mindless button mashers" sounds a bit elitist and condescending. Some wag could just reply to this with a shrug and "git gud" trope :)

 

Personally I love both the early, "pure" games and the later, post-continue ones equally. Brawlers are just a different genre not an inferior one.

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Sorry, but this "paradigm shift" theory just doesn't ring true for me. I can assure you that for every seemingly unfair/cheap death there's a bunch of players who learned how to deal with them and don't perceive them as such and also vice versa - some people might say that early no-continue classics are "unfair" because of their steep difficulty (Defender or Gravitar, anyone?). It's not like early arcade games were designed for charity after all. And obviously there are heaps and heaps of classics from post-continue era which are to this day revered for their pure gameplay qualities.

 

I totally get that not everybody has to like brawlers but I don't see the reason to attach some artificial theory to support this dislike, plus dismissing an entire genre as "mindless button mashers" sounds a bit elitist and condescending. Some wag could just reply to this with a shrug and "git gud" trope :)

 

Personally I love both the early, "pure" games and the later, post-continue ones equally. Brawlers are just a different genre not an inferior one.

 

 

 

I never called brawlers objectively inferior to early 80s games, I just gave my opinion on it. I should point out that I realize exceptions abound. You mention Gravitar and Defender; I agree completely that those games are brutal, which is why I have no use for them. But even those games have been conquered by many skilled gamers though, and not just through memorizing exactly where enemies are going to pop up, as is often the only recourse for avoiding cheap deaths in later games like TMNT and X-Men. On the other side, I don't dislike all brawlers either. I dig Sengoku 3 for example, which has really nice looking graphics and actually has some technique to it by allowing you to execute different moves at will.

 

Pointing out that games like X-Men are less nuanced than earlier classics is not elitist or condescending; it's simply an observation. It's no different than somebody who explains why they prefer "typical" 60's and 70's rock with its stronger emphasis on musicianship and virtuosity over "typical" 90's and 2000's rock with its stronger emphasis on accessibility and pop immediacy. Personally, I have rock music that I love from all of those decades, but I can certainly acknowledge the point that, at least in the mainstream, there are some aspects of the art form that kind of mutated, faded to the background, or died completely, leaving something else in their place. Whether those aspects are needed or not to make a good song is entirely up for the individual listener to decide, and there are no right or wrong answers. I'm just saying that for me, the things that faded out of arcade games in the post-continues era are indeed important, so I mostly play the games that pre-date that shift.

 

I guess it's an "agree to disagree" situation then, as is usually the case in these types of discussions. It doesn't ring true to you, but by the same token I don't know how anybody can deny that arcade game design philosophy markedly shifted some time in the late 80s when the rising prevalence of the "insert coin to continue" feature ushered in the era of the multi-player "quarter muncher" arcade game, rendering the single-player-at-a-time, fixed-screen, single-credit, score-attack type game pretty much extinct.

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I think it often comes down to the video games you experience as a kid. Video games themselves don't have a single set of "rules" that need to be followed -- just the parameters the designers and the company put on them in order to make money. I will always prefer the "three lives for a credit -- no continues" games from the early '80s because that's when I first played video games (actually, I only have a problem with continue games when "buying" more credits maintains your score. That's why the continued features in Super Cobra or Vanguard don't bother me). I also realize that the design of video games had become -- by the late '80s -- more about completing the game than getting a high score. The fact that game companies just happened to make tons of profit off of that fact is a case of the tail wagging the dog.

 

Just for the record, I didn't mean to single brawlers out, although I can understand how it may have come across that way because it was worded sloppily. My complaints about the "pay to win" games of the '80s onwards was based on a variety of games from that era. I like many games from that era btw -- Prehistoric Isle is fantastic, ditto R-Type and Cadillacs and Dinosaurs as well as old favourites like Rampage, but the early '80s model is still my ideal.

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I guess it's an "agree to disagree" situation then, as is usually the case in these types of discussions. It doesn't ring true to you, but by the same token I don't know how anybody can deny that arcade game design philosophy markedly shifted some time in the late 80s when the rising prevalence of the "insert coin to continue" feature ushered in the era of the multi-player "quarter muncher" arcade game, rendering the single-player-at-a-time, fixed-screen, single-credit, score-attack type game pretty much extinct.

 

Oh, definitely a "agree to disagree situation" :) which I however do not mind at all, it's fun discussing those things as long as the parties involved manage to keep a reasonable and non-emotional tone - a rare thing, which I do believe we managed so far though.

 

The fact that many people fall for this narrative does not make it any more true, and your opinions/observations are a part of this, hence my disagreement. The picture it paints is that of the post-early eighties arcade world completely dominated by multi-player, non-score based, unfairly designed games. This is simply factually incorrect. Yes, these elements were of course present, to some extent, and on case-by-case basis, but in no way they are connected into one overarching motif as it is presented in your post. The multi player feature has nowt to do with continues, same for fixed-screen which was logically replaced by better tech and obviously score-attack continues to be a modus operandi in huge amount of arcade games to this very day. And as I mentioned earlier, arcade games were munching quarters before the introduction of continue feature because it was always a business operation.

 

The aforementioned tech advances opened up gaming and introduced many new gameplay styles, such as 2.5 freedom of movement in brawlers or "vs" fighting games. Playing these games require heaps of skill too. Anybody can of course say that these skills were less "nuanced" than the ones needed for playing fixed-screen classics, but to me it's frankly entering a very murky, extremely subjective waters. Just ask any Street Fighter, Daytona USA or Batsugun player, see what they say about the non-continue days and gameplay being superior, since that is after all the underlying implication.

 

Your rock music parallel is quite a good one, but in the sense that it similarly creates a false narrative which seems quite fitting and yet falls apart under closer, unbiased examination. And it's one I also thought about many times and am quite fascinated by - thankfully we are in arcade forum and so there is no space for a protracted argument about that :)

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I did say that exceptions abound, don't forget.

 

Actually, I think shooters are the only types of games that did a great job of merging the best of the early 80s score attack spirit with the "play it till the end" multi-player spirit of the 90s. I know some people find them tedious, but they require great skill and fast reactions, and, crucially, they are often characterized by interesting scoring systems that give them their personalities. In other words, score still matters as more than an afterthought. I'm a big fan of lots of shooters from Cave, Psyikio, and others in the mid-late 90s and I play them all the time.

 

As for 1-on-1 fighters, I don't deny for one second the skill required for those but they never piqued my interest much. Besides, the fact that those games allow gamers to focus on human vs. human competition removes the ability of the game to unfairly take your money.

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