NinjaFlicker

In my tiny corner of Pennsylvania, the 7800 suffered from the same fate as the Virtual Boy and the 32x. It was a next generation experience that just improved on the wrong things, in the eyes of the public. And if you were too poor to buy the system everyone wanted, and you waited until those they ignored were taking up too much space on store shelves, you could take that next generation leap before people with a lot more money than you. Of course, in those days before the too much information age, you'd have no idea what you were really leaping into. Sure, my brand new Super 2600 Advance could sometimes display so much detail that it felt like the still backgrounds of Pole Position II were alive...in the rare moments when I wasn't torturing it with Pac-Man, Defender, Rampage (2600), and Revenge of the Beefstake Tomatoes instead...but was it any better than Enduro? And then I bought Ball Blazer; which was my very first taste of smooth, high speed 3d gaming. And it was something the NES's tile based graphics simply couldn't compete with. Just like it couldn't compete with the sprite flicker free armies of Robotron 2084. Between these two games? It was like looking into the future of gaming. But I didn't know that. I instead dreamed of running into the darkness with Samus or seeking out mysteries and secrets alongside Mario. Or just getting Double Dragon on any platform I owned, because it would somehow legitimize my Atari collection. It's not like Atari fans were getting a lot of modern arcade ports. Just seeing the Atari 2600 version exist on store shelves and be priced out of my reach? It was proof that Atari's future was in good hands. Similar to seeing Commando on the Intellivision at Toys R' Us, because I loved that console too. Oh, and my Colecovision, even if there were no new games sold for it. And the TI 99/4A, which seemed even deader. Plus two LED games. And, of course, any educational software I could find for the the classroom Apple IIGS. Like 'The King of Chicago.' Unlike most kids, I had so many divided loyalties... I was always just a player. Eventually, I'd get my NES, when I was trying to buy a Master System instead. The temptations of Galaxy Force screenshots were no match for the vast library Nintendo's illegal monopoly had won them. And besides, have you heard what Sunsoft was doing with Fester's Quest? There was no way my elderly Sunday school teacher's heart could survive that much excitement. Unfortunately, my trusty 7800 could no longer compete with the vast worlds, charming characters, and contagious music expected of a modern day gaming platform...or even with Ultima: Exodus. But who cared about all that? Xevious on the 7800 shrunk the Solvalou's targeting reticle, so that every bombing run was a high stakes game of chicken. 7800 Joust's less demanding physics were more fun on Atari than it'd ever be in arcades, and there was nothing more fun than teasing the lava troll. There was plenty of room in my heart for two versions of Title Match Pro Wrestling to keep M.U.S.C.L.E. company - even after I discovered how much more fun a wrestling game could be when it wasn't one of the worst things ever made. (Mind blown.) Even now, I still play both 7800 and NES games. I couldn't possibly choose between them.

There's absolutely no reason to consider all the screen tearing bloom abuse and ridiculously boring color palettes retro, unless you have eyes and aren't a hypocrite. It's like claiming the Neo Geo wasn't considered retro in 2008. Just because something aged gracefully, doesn't mean it hasn't aged. Really, the only reason people refuse to consider it retro at this point is because they want brand new rules to prevent PC influenced console gaming from tainting their Nintendo/Sega/Atari influenced nostalgia. I wonder if UK gamers raised on C64/Spectrum/CPC/Amiga/ST gaming have the same ridiculous hang-ups? Because those games directly inspired the modern AAA sandbox.

If you say so. I prefer the precision and balance of a d-pad for games like Frogger and Pac-Man 8k.

We were poor, and just blown away to own any console at all. We couldn't even afford to play it at first, because the included joysticks didn't work with Demons to Diamonds. Fortunately, ET was only a few dollars, and a week or two later, it saved the day... When it's the only game you have, ET becomes Grand Theft Auto 5. My brother and I would create our own improv stories for the game. ET was suddenly a jaded 6-pack a day smoker who planned revenge on the Earth for every indignity. If the scientist's sprite disappeared while you were trying to break free of his grasp, it counted as a kill. The candy pixel was used as whatever gross joke two bored kids could come up with. It was fun. Like we were making our own television show. Anyways, it wasn't long before we got a decent collection together. If you were into retrogaming, things were dirt cheap. We couldn't afford new games like Double Dragon, but games like Defender, Space Invaders, and Pac-Man were practically given away. And there were so many obscure games to be found in yard sales - who bought Tax Avoiders, and why? We came so close to getting Communist Mutants from Space - but a lot of what you found, you'd never find again if you didn't pick it up immediately. Not because a lot of people were looking for the games, but because people would simply toss them or give them to charity if they couldn't quickly sell them. Still, as much as we loved the system, we were painfully aware of what we didn't have. And that's why we'd snatch up any newer game that went on sale. Ghostbusters and Kung Fu Master may not seem like much when you're comparing them to the better ports, but when you're comparing them to the 2600 library? Compare Flash Gordon to either of those games, and maybe you'll understand what we saw in them. Even a taste of the original material seemed like something of a miracle. And then, sometimes, you'd find a game that just held up on its own. I still played Frogger long after I owned a Sega Genesis and a Saturn. And I still play my 2600 library from time to time now, even if it's just on a cheap hacked AtGames handheld. It's still a better experience than using the original joysticks.

Slap a Union Jack on it, give it out for free to schools, and rebrand it as the Super Konix Multisystem.

The First Dragon Quest isn't exactly the most polished game around. And to Dragon Quest's credit, later games immediately improved on the formula. In terms of just saving the game, sequels included a place to save in every village, and a quick save at any time in case you needed to quit suddenly. It'd be overwritten the next time you started the game. I'd argue that your home should also offer a free health restore. And maybe a place to store extra items? Make it actually feel like a home, so you have a real reason to return to it.

Sorry for the necromancy, but this a harder port than it looks. It's not the number of sprites - Nintendo's hardware has an advantage over Sega's in that department. And it's not the cpu clockspeed - the 68000 isn't the most efficient chip around, and it'd be a mistake to compare them on that number alone. It's a lot of smaller things that add up to a death by a thousand paper cuts. One of the Super Famicom's less known weaknesses is that you're limited in the sprite sizes you can choose from, and, even worse, you can only choose two sprite sizes at a time. This means that duplicating the all out sprite insanity of a Treasure game on any random frame will require you to either waste a lot of smaller sprites, or waste a lot of cpu resources dealing with pixels the player won't ever see or interact with. Either one of which is a bad situation when you can only access the code controlling all of this between vblanks. And did I mention the sprite look-up tables are nowhere near as efficient as they are on Sega's hardware? And that's just the beginning of the brutal hazing that awaits you. I'm not saying it couldn't be done. After all, I flunked junior high math enough times to confirm every stereotype about the non-coders who post here. And I am just repeating what I was told by a few people familiar with both systems, in ways that most went completely over my tiny little art major head. Slow DRAM look-up? 8-bit multiplication? Inflexible limitations on RAM allocation? How much of that is even relevant? It all kind of blurs together, and my best efforts to remember their exact opinions on the matter probably sounds close to how a hack television writer would fake technical knowledge about hacking. But I do know that the sprites used in every SNES run and gun are a bit more carefully controlled compared to their Genesis counterparts. And it's probably not a coincidence that the games that best represent each system's personality are GunStar Heroes and Super Metroid. So, is it really as hopeless as it looks on the surface? Or are there workarounds to all of these problems, like when Burger Becky somehow managed to port Out of This World to the SNES, using the slowest available ROM cart?

Let's hear some actual grunts of pain when attacks connect in Double Dragon. Sure, it won't even come close to anything good. But everyone who's ever played that game for more than 15 seconds knows that the AI is set to Skynet, unless you spam the elbow attack. Fighting a bunch of slightly annoyed robots can only enhance the experience. I'd also like to see it used for a port of Space Channel 5, both because the small but fully voiced command set is perfectly suited to the hardware's limitations, and because it'd be such a terrifying misuse of the technology that any form of criticism ceases to be relevant.

You guys realize this story was featured in the "just warm fuzzy slices of life" blog? It's only reporting on the guy's personal experience, and the warm memories his post brought back for some people. Then it has a cute kids moment, as they try to understand us older folk and completely fail. They've also reported on burning issues like a cop helping an old woman with her groceries. They do this, because some people enjoy learning about little bits of good news, instead of the usual 21st century clickbait desperately trying to make extinction level volcanic explosions out of molehills. (Or desperately trying to make molehills out of the things we should be worried about.)

Defender is an improvement over the arcade, because of it's flaws. 1. The terrible graphics mean I'm defending the last survivors of humanity in an actual city at night, not on the random vector mountains of a lifeless alien planet. 2. The terrible graphics also gave us the most awesome laser in any Atari game, bar none. It fills the sky with color. It's so awesome that the Atari 2600 has to erase your ship in order to actually draw it, which means that maybe you are the laser. For the brief moment when you're firing it, you can't actually die. This introduces a risk/reward dynamic that only encourages players to take more chances... 3. Because we're working with one button, you are now safe while you plan how to make the most effective use of your bombs and warps - but the entire time, humanoids continue to be abducted. How often do you see a shmup with this layer of strategy attached, even now? I wish someone would port this game, and not the real Defender, to a more powerful system. I would pay for just the rom.

Is it just me, or does this look less like Double Dragon, and more like Mat Murdoch in his original costume, Karen Page, and Wilson Fisk? I know hair wise, we're dealing with the graphical limitations of the Atari 2600, and a quick cash-in besides, but check out that lives icon - it's clearly meant to be something more ninja-like. Also, just like in the series, the hero often gets his ass handed to him, because the enemies don't stay stunned after a punch, and they never let up once they've got the upper hand. Seriously how hard it is to program an enemy sprite that doesn't fight back right away? Doing nothing is their default state. I could program an enemy sprite acting like they've just suffered serious head trauma, and I don't even know how to program a microwave. But my point is - actually, I don't really have one. I just thought it was a fun coincidence, because I'm about to watch the last episode of Daredevil, and this game got me hyped up for it.

What if you removed every unnecessary line, gameplay wise? For example, if the tanks were simply a wedge with a scary pyramid head up top? And bullets were an X or a cross? Granted, that's severe, but from a bare skeleton, you can see what absolutely needs to be on the model to sell the idea of a tank, and only add as few lines as needed. What if you also limited visibility, and you need to use sounds, a motion tracker, direction of shots fired, and something like "headlights"? Could it run at a good speed, then? It wouldn't be Battlezone anymore, but it would still be in the same genre.

Love the idea, but the execution...right now, it's Mario with a broken neck. On someone else's body. Maybe it would help to use one of the 3d Mario games as a guide for the sprite? Also, the bike really needs something more, to make it suitable for the Mushroom kingdom. Whether you go for cute, or subversive badass overkill, it needs to acknowledge that Mario's the one riding it.

The Atari 7800 wins for me, in a tight race. But that's mostly because I prefer the Nintendo/Square style of exploration based gameplay, and I'm horrible at simple Atari-era twitch games. Allow me to explain. I've played everything to death on the NES, and I've played that style again in every Japanese released console released since. And it's all evolved. How can anyone go back to Final Fantasy's slow squeaks, broken elemental damage/status attack systems, and endless grind, after playing any of the story based games in the series? What makes a Contra a classic, if you've already beat Gunstar Heroes and Metal Slug? Imagine playing Ys III or Symphony of the Night before Link's Adventure, and then coming back to the NES and trying to convince yourself that you're having fun as you wait for the s...l...o...w... text to fill the screen. Besides, each of these games has an actual win state to reach for. Either you reach it, or you don't. Once you have reached it, what happens next? By contrast, the 7800 keeps kicking my ass. And I can expect it to kick my ass in the time it takes for someone to reply to my answers on Skype on a slow day. But I'm only competing with my childhood. Can I beat my own high score? With that said, and with all due respect to Ballblazer and Super Mario 3, if I'm going to play through an 8-bit library, it's usually a portable one. Link's Awakening, Parodius, Fatal Fury Special, Streets of Rage 2, Metal Gear Solid, Mr. Do, Mario's Picross, and Final Fantasy Legend II, simply have more to offer than their NES and 7800 counterparts. And although not a substitute, Sonic Triple Trouble and the Warioland series help make up for losing Super Mario 3.

1. Karate! 2. Sssnake. 3. Video Life. A desert island is a boring, lonely place. These games will help me develop a sense of imagination and wonder as I struggle to mine any fun at all out of them. Other people may enjoy their Atari more, but I'll enjoy my life more.

Double Dragon has a great visual hack on Atari Age, but it needs to have an enemy stun when you start hitting them, and an enemy AI that doesn't immediately drop kick you to death. Elbows should be as simple as turning away from the enemy, and hitting the attack button. Your own drop kicks could be holding the attack button down, and hitting up. It's frustrating to know that the 2600 could pull a decent version of the game off, but we'll never see it. Especially when that's used as the go-to example for arcade conversions too ambitious for the system.

Kung Fu as one of the worst? No way in Hell. The Atari 2600jr was my first game console, and I couldn't believe there were that many enemies, that many stages, and a deadly boss waiting at the end of each one. It was my addiction - my first exposure to post-crash gameplay. High scores were forgotten. I needed to explore... But Space Invaders has to win best - we wouldn't even be having this conversation without it. It was the console market's first killer app. Worst: Double Dragon. The very first fight is roughly equal to the last fight in the NES port. Your only hope to survive is to exploit the Ai over and over again, rather than try to actually fight it.

Well, I watched. This won't be a good review. Apologies, but my roommate, who is also a retro-gaming show enthusiast and transgender, and who applauds your work for Sisters... Well, her first reaction wasn't kind. Before I give her review, I'd like to say what we liked about the show - your enthusiasm, how easily you invoked heavy nostalgia of sneaking up past midnight to catch things like Tales from the Darkside and other horror anthologies, your taste in games. I wanted to be a fan. What was missing was any kind of hook, or polish. The webcam fixed on a television doesn't live up to your opening, but more importantly, as our hostess, you leave dead spaces in your words, you repeat yourself. You have a lot of basic declarative sentences like "It's fun" and "You put out fires." that could easily come from watching my mom playing the game. After reminding me that I could simply change the channel, she said "If she's on radio, I want to know where, and if I go there, I'm buying a television." Please, if you wish to gain a larger audience, don't take any of this personally. Worse things have been said of millions of successful people. I really do believe you can improve dramatically, and I look forward to the day when we're eating our words, and you don't need to give us the time of day. But you deserved an honest review. After finding out you help out women who are just revealing to the world that they're women... I respected you too much to do anything else. You're like a Fairy God Sister. I wish there were a thousand of you.

Hmm. Good point. But at the same time, look at Sega's Master System library - Double Dragon 1&2 on the NES pays tribute to clean lines and suggested texture. Double Dragon on the SMS is a riot of bizarre color choices and absurdly detailed backgrounds that remind you they can't actually handle perspective yet. Altered Beast on the SMS throws grape jelly on everything, because purple rocks. But even in 16 bit games that were known for their great graphics, Sega finds a way to hint that art is difficult for them. Look at the trees in Ghouls N' Ghosts, compared to the original. Yes, I know they needed to redraw a few things to fit in limited cart space, but they do so in a way that's usually left to the cheapest European Amiga conversions. This is coming from Japan, a country where kids are taught art as if it were a science, beginning in elementary school. It's rare to see that kind of mistake... The Sonic team guys made the Genesis look like an entirely different system. Then there's the super scalers. Yes, Cotton had far more space to play with, but Road Rash actually wrote sprite scaling in software, in order to pull it off. (I think Cotton did too, but it's impossible for an amateur like me to tell.) And sure, Sega can't be faulted for not thinking of it first, but there are smoother super scaling style games on the competition. Square and Hudson would have done far more with the 4meg Sega gave themselves for SMS Afterburner.

Sega's hardware was a victim of Sega's software teams. Check out Golden Axe, for the system. The sky is neon turquoise. It's perfect for a laser death holocaust, but since everything else is using muted shading, the overall aesthetic looks like someone accidentally ruined a gif. Throwing 6 inches of texture over a mile of dirt isn't helping matters any. It's like they thought they were programming a Dreamcast game, and were shocked when they suddenly ran out of cart space. Contrast it to something like Alien Soldier or Pulseman, both of which were designed with the system's limitations in mind, and could easily pass for NEO-GEO titles. Then there's Sega's own conversions of their super scaler games. There's no excuse for Thunderblade to play with a frame rate similar to Myst, in a world where Cotton and Road Rash also exist.

Thanks for the honest answer. My own bias is towards Double Dragon, actually. I enjoyed the zoomed-in cinematic view - it made me feel like I was in a survival horror, almost. Focusing on my space, rather than how far I was away from the goal forced me to think like a survivor, anyways. I can only say that it's closer to my experience in real inner city fights, even if that takes away from some of the videogame escapism. But I know there's no way I'm going to see anything like that again, especially since this is your port, for you. If you're not having fun with it, what's the point? So back to the issues you raised, about just the basic concept of offering the player more than one perspective.... I know that it's not as simple as just drawing a new graphics set, but couldn't the patterns/movement simply be adjusted through basic size/pixel reduction equations? Or would it be possible to use the same code entirely for every view (minus things like adding arrows to show the locations of offscreen barrels), and just use the Lynx's zoom and rotate features to allow people to find the view that works the best for them?

I'd prefer the option between better graphics or full playfield, personally. Namco did it for all their gameboy ports of Pac-Man, and it was like getting two games in 1, due to the extra challenge of the graphically enhanced version. But why not create new Donkey Kong graphics? There's a lot of great artists to be found around here, and this is one of the great iconic games.

Will this have better AI than the other ports? Hype aside, the original game is kind of horrible as a one player experience.

If you're going to do this, take your cues from Ninja Gaiden, Scooby Doo, Dragon Ball Z, and minimalist art. Because you have limited space to work with, play with camera movement (a basic scrolling sprite can be a slow pan), high contrast lighting that obscures memory eating details, and use things like eye movements /faces - they're easy to animate, and it's easy to invoke emotion with them. You can repeat basic animations like running, lightning, etc. Also, remember that the first Dragon's Lair was more than just Simon says. The level design was tightly controlled, turning the art into a visual puzzle...

This thread makes my head hurt. First, can we define "Pre-crash" system? Because if it doesn't mean "released before the brief crash of the American videogame market", then we can throw away the label and save ourselves a lot of trouble. It clearly doesn't mean "less powerful than a Famicom", or else someone needs to explain how Tiger's R-Zone isn't a pre-crash system too. We aren't even arguing about the types of games made, because half of the downloadable shovelware taking up space on my 3DS really wants to bring those years back to life. It seems to be more about "can the 7800 actually bring the gameplay from the NES era to life without serious compromises? Does it need a handicap to compete?" I'd like to present the following hypothetical test, and I hope some of you with more technical minds can educate me on the matter... 1. With nearly unlimited multicolored sprites, is there any reason that the 7800 couldn't improve on The Legend of Zelda or Dragon Quest, in every way except audio and screen resolution? 2. We've focused on the strengths of tile based systems. What about their weaknesses? What could the 7800 do with Sega's super scaler games such as Space Harrier and Afterburner?