newtmonkey

I've been playing a lot of shmups lately. I never was much into this genre, but I decided to take a break from RPGs and play something more skill-based. The Switch (and PS4) has some AWESOME shmup releases from M2, and I ended up buying almost their entire lineup. I really cannot imagine better releases than what these guys put out. They usually contain multiple versions of each game, input lag is VERY low for emulation (3-4 frames by most accounts), and they have a very cool "gadget" system where you can selectively add individual gauges and meters to the side of the screen to give you useful information in real time, such as boss weak points, and even obscure scoring stuff. You can save your replays, and in some games can even save your game state to practice tough parts until you get them right. The goal, like most arcade games, is to eventually complete the game on a single credit. Many of the games even have "super easy" modes that reduce the number of bullets onscreen and enable auto bombing (if you get hit, you sacrifice a bomb instead of a life). There are a bunch of these releases, but I mostly played ESP RA.DE. Psi, Darius Cozmic Collection. These are both worth getting for any shmup fan, as the first game has never had a home port, and the latter is just packed full of Darius goodness (multiple version of the arcade versions of Darius and Darius II, and of course Darius Gaiden). --- I've been using the 8BitDo M30 (Bluetooth) gamepad to play these games, and it's awesome. It feels great to hold with solid construction and a matte finish, the buttons are all excellent (even the shoulders), but the best thing is the dpad; totally comfortable to press with no fatigue, and extremely accurate (even the diagonals, which are often a sore point for 8BitDo). From what I understand, the Switch has the same amount of input lag whether connected by USB or wireless, so it's a no-brainer to use this excellent pad for any 2D game that doesn't need analog sticks. Highly recommended!

It's annoying to see the SNES subforum become topic after topic by the same guy, but what can you do? The mods seem to be okay with his behavior, since he's not really breaking any rules. I don't think bombarding Kirk with confused emojis is a good idea. It seems malicious to me. Just ignore him if you don't want to read his posts. I appreciate that people want to correct his misunderstandings, but at some point you need to step back and consider whether correcting him is even worth it, since he apparently doesn't read anything posted by anyone else. A better plan imo would be to create topics that interest you, or post in existing topics. There's a topic in this forum about what games you've been playing recently, and not very many people post in it. Instead of dealing with all this drama, why not instead play some SNES games and talk about what you're playing?

@wongojack Congrats on finishing SOTN! My history with this game is quite different from yours. Castlevania was one of my favorite series of games growing up; I absolutely loved all the NES games, as well as Super Castlevania IV on the SNES. I remember getting Castlevania 64 on the N64 and being very disappointed indeed (I've come to really like that game, though). So I was very excited back in 1997 when SOTN was released to see another 2D game that seemed similar to the older games in the series. The fact that it was sort of similar to Super Metroid just made it better for me... it seemed like the natural progression of Castlevania II: Simon's Quest. Back then, I would have rated SOTN 5/5 for sure. Now, let me try to convince you why SOTN deserves no more than a 3/5 rating. I agree with your criticisms 100%, but I think these are actually bigger problems if you really think about them. The game is just way too easy, even if you try to challenge yourself... during my last time playing through the game, I just used what I could find, and restricted myself to using only dagger/knife weapons, and it was still a cakewalk. The game gives you so many ways to play it, but there is no depth imo. You basically master the game halfway through it (maybe even earlier). The inverted castle is even worse on a replay. The castle was clearly not designed with this twist in mind, and it's annoying how often you have to rely on the bat or mist just to navigate the inverted castle. It feels like filler, as though they finished the game, realized you could finish it in just a few hours, and then did the easiest thing they could think of to roughly double its length. The actual design of the castle, screen by screen, is really quite poor. You spend a good portion of the game mindlessly jumping up platforms in vertical sections, and there is hardly any platforming in the mostly flat horizontal sections. The enemy placement is generally uninteresting, and many of the bosses are just "spectacle" bosses that look cool but mostly just stand there as you wail on them. It's certainly not a bad game at all, and it feels great to play, but in hindsight I don't think it's anywhere close in quality to similar games like Super Metroid or Demon's Crest.

Digital Devil Story: Megami Tensei I finished exploring the first five levels. So far, this game is pretty cool! I've played some of the more recent games in the series, so it's fun to see where it all started. I read the manual before playing, and also read some general advice on character building (but ended up ignoring it)... otherwise I am playing blind, and am just recruiting and combining demons as I'm able to do so. I feel like I've got over the initial difficulty hump, as I've got my two human characters decked out in decent gear and finally was able to fuse my first demon. There really isn't much story to this game, but that's fine because I was in the mood for a dungeon crawler. I'd forgotten how satisfying it is to map out mazes on graph paper.

Yeah, this part was awful. None of the combat was difficult by this point, but my companions just kept running back to fight the constantly respawning enemies. It was unbelievably frustrating to just get them to follow me.

Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic (PC) Finally completed! I think mostly everyone knows what this game is about, but it's an RPG with a three-person party, and real-time (with pause) combat. I've tried finishing this game many times over the years (starting with the XBOX version!) but never was able to make much progress. However, this time around I became quite addicted, and was finally make it to the end. All in all, the game took just under 30 hours from start to finish, and I did everything I could find other than the minigames (racing, cards). This game was obviously designed for XBOX first and foremost, with the interface and controls poorly ported to mouse and keyboard for the PC version (there is no controller support in the PC version by the way). It plays mostly fine during exploration, but during combat it is very awkward to control, with you having to press TAB to switch between characters and then target enemies from an uncomfortable behind-the-back perspective. What's worse is the interface, which was clearly designed to be operated with a controller and viewed from halfway across the room on your sofa. You have to navigate through multiple screens just to get basic information, and the item screen only shows a few items at once, requiring you to tediously scroll down to find stuff. Thankfully, combat is mostly mindless and, with just a few exceptions, extremely easy... so you don't have to wrestle with the interface too much. Overall, I liked it despite its many issues. I have next to no interest in Star Wars, but I found myself addicted once I got through the somewhat dull starting area. The game really opens up and allows you to explore several planets in any order. There's a good variety of environments, and plenty of interesting quests including both combat- and dialogue-focused content. You really do feel like you're exploring the Star Wars galaxy, even though you only have access to tiny portions of each planet.

(Quoting from the SNES forum). I was playing the SFC remake of DDS:MT but decided to follow up on this and give the original FC version a try. Digital Devil Story: Megami Tensei This could basically be described as Wizardry with monster summoning. You have two (fixed) human characters in your party: Nakajima the genius programmer who develops a program to summon demons, and his friend Yumiko who can cast spells. You fill out the rest of your party by negotiating with demons and convincing them to join your party, and can then combine two demons to create an even stronger one. Like Wizardry, it takes place in a first-person dungeon and you are quite weak to start out. Although the game has an auto-mapping spell, you can't rely on it 100% because it shows you the entire map (even unexplored areas), and it is crucial to fully explore the maps by stepping on each tile. The map also won't work during the new moon phase, which also turns demons crazy with bloodlust. I guess the biggest issue with this version in particular is the lack of battery backup. Instead, you have you work with passwords, though they really aren't bad... they aren't too long, and consist of only numbers and uppercase letters. Anyway, I played the FC version for an hour or so this morning, just to try it out. It's a pretty impressive FC game with large, colorful enemy sprites and some excellent music, and moves much snappier than the SFC version. The color palette used also gives the game a darker atmosphere than the SFC game, which mostly just reuses graphics from the Shin Megami Tensei games. When the game starts you get to allocate stat points to the two human characters, so I restarted a few times trying different strategies. I think I've settled on splitting the points between STR (HP) and ATK (physical damage) for Nakajima and STR and INT (MP + demon negotiation bonus) to start.

Kyuuyaku Megami Tensei This is a remake of the first two games in the legendary Megami Tensei series, which were originally released on the Famicom. I am of course starting with the first game, Megami Tensei. It's basically the Famicom game running in the Shin Megami Tensei engine. It's definitely more of a straight dungeon crawler than SMT (there doesn't seem to be much story or even a world map), but all the SMT stuff is here: first-person view, talking to demons to convince them to join, assigning bonus points to stats when you level up, and even the same spells. It's alright so far, but it pales in comparison to one of the Wizardry or Might & Magic titles. The dungeon is just a big maze with really nothing to find in it other than random and fixed encounters, and system used to get demons to join you is just frustrating trial and error at best, total randomness at worse. You can try to calm a demon, lecture it, give it something, or threaten it. The first two options seem to do absolutely nothing, while the last option is basically how you exit the conversation and start the fight. So, it all comes down to just giving the demon whatever it wants. The other annoyance is how annoying it is to combine demons. Each time you get a new one, it's back to town and then trying to combine the new demon with every other one you've got, just to see if you get anything good. Early on, you cannot even combine demons because the resulting demon is always of a much higher level, so it's all just a giant waste of time. That means you mostly rely on your two human characters, so most battles are just you selecting Fight over and over, and maybe healing now and then, as it takes quite a while for the second character to even get her first attack spell! It does have a nice automap built in, so it's pretty painless to play. Although I complained a lot in this post, it's somewhat addictive, and I'm guessing that things will become more interesting once I've made some more progress.

Akumajo Dracula (aka Super Castlevania IV) Just like with Final Fantasy USA, this is game I've played and completed many times, but was in the mood for a replay and decided to play the Japanese version to compare. Outside of minor stuff (blood and crosses that were censored in the US release), there isn't much. This is a pretty easy game even for a first-time player, so I decided to start in the Hard mode you access by clearing the game once... I didn't feel like playing through on Normal, so I just found a code online. So far it is, indeed, quite a bit harder. On Normal mode, I can usually get to Block 7 before losing my first life. On Hard, I saw the game over screen before even reaching the boss of Block 3! Part of the reason why is unfamiliarly, as it adds more enemies especially around pits. Another change is that enemies that take only a single shot to kill in Normal takes two hits in Hard... not a huge difference, but just enough to throw your timing off a bit.

Maybe Square was right in assuming that Americans are too fucking dumb to play RPGs, so I'd like to take back my negative comments about Final Fantasy Mystic Quest.

Congratulations! I definitely recommend giving Soul Blazer a shot. The combat is actually not that impressive (it's very simple), but it's fine... and restoring the settlements is a cool mechanic and becomes very addictive. It's also weirdly touching just like Illusion of Gaia.

Final Fantasy USA Mystic Quest This is the Japanese version of Final Fantasy Mystic Quest, which I played and completed back when it was first released. I was in the mood to replay it, so I decided to play the Japanese version and see if there were any differences (besides the language, no). Everything about the game has been simplified to the point where the game is just boring. They removed random encounters, probably because some test group told them they were "totally bogus," and replaced them with visible enemies on the maps. However, the enemies stand still in fixed locations and, due to corridors all being a single tile wide, cannot be avoided. In effect, the game becomes a worse slog than even the grindiest "real" RPG with random encounters. There is no utility magic, just healing and damage spells, so combat completely lacks any strategy or tactics. Damage spells really aren't very effective unless the monster is weak to them, so you can't even blast through battles quicker by casting spells instead of fighting. So, the game is just fight and heal. Making this even worse is that you have just two characters in your party. There's simply not much you can do with such a limited battle system. The game is linear and lacks any sense of exploration. There is no world to explore, just a map that basically serves as a menu to choose which dungeon or town to enter. The story and characters are just lame. The game is not completely horrible, though. The monster graphics are colorful and fun, and actually show damage as the fight goes on. The game has also got an excellent soundtrack, though there aren't very many songs and things get repetitive very quickly... even for a game that lasts only 10 hours or so.

Final Fantasy USA: Mystic Quest I was only an hour or so away from finishing the game. I completed skipped the battle arenas, but ended up at level 34 anyway, which seems to be around the level most people finish the game... proving that those arenas are just a big waste of time. The final dungeon was alright, but not anything I hadn't experienced over the previous 10 hours of this game. At least it wasn't an annoying slog like the previous dungeon, Pazusu's Tower. By far the most difficult boss in the game is Zu, which you fight before the final boss. Whether you win or lose against Zu depends completely on luck, since he seems to always go first each round, and has an attack that automatically kills a character. If he kills one of your guys, and then decides to do the same to the other the next round, there is literally nothing you can do but just retry the battle from the beginning. In comparison, the last boss was laughably easy. --- It's not a good game, but I had bits of fun here and there. The monsters are all cool looking and colorful, and it's got a great soundtrack. That's about it lol.

When you step on the first save point in FF3 (SNES), a dialog box pops up telling you exactly what it does.

Final Fantasy USA: Mystic Quest I decided to resume my replay of this, and I'm nearing the end. This time around I'm playing the Japanese version (no differences other than text of course), and decided to ignore the battle arenas as they are the very definition of "grinding." Anyway, this game kind of sucks, and not (only) because it's overly simplified compared even to console RPGs. I understand it was meant as a "beginner" RPG, but I'd argue that it's a very poor introduction to RPGs. It probably did more bad than good in getting people into the genre. I suppose the developers thought that random battles were what was stopping USA KIDS from enjoying RPGs, so all enemies are visible on the screen. However, they just stand there in fixed locations, usually in one-tile wide corridors, so you absolutely have to kill most if not all of them just to fully explore the dungeons. In their attempt at removing the "grind" of random encounters, they made the entire game a massive grind. There's no worse feeling than tediously clearing a winding corridor full of enemies, only to enter a door taking you to yet another corridor full of enemies. Worst of all is that nearly every single enemy from the very start of the game to the end, takes two hits to kill. It makes it feel like you're making no progress at all, like you're doing the same exact thing 10 hours in that you were doing during the first 15 minutes. You almost always have two characters on your team, which means you can kill a single enemy per round. During the last 25% of the game, seemingly every single encounter is against three enemies, each of which has status effect attacks/magic and/or healing. You can't really do anything to prevent enemies from casting spells, so you just hope that both of your attacks hit before the enemy can stone/paralyze/sleep one of your characters or heal itself, making the battle even more tedious. That's not to say that the game is difficult, though, as you are never in any danger of losing, thanks to generous healing spells and items. Even if you do somehow manage to lose a fight, the game gives you the option to start the fight over from the first round. So in other words, battle is just a complete waste of time with no tactics or strategy whatsoever, and you cannot even avoid it by running from annoying enemies like you can in basically any other "real" RPG.

Lunar: The Silver Star (Mega-CD) I went into this one not knowing much about it, though I had heard of it (and its remakes). I got mostly what I expected, which is a very linear 16-bit RPG where you go from town to town killing boss characters in nearby caves over and over until the end. It does have one innovation. The battle system takes positioning and range into account, though you cannot directly control the movement of your characters; you simply command them to either run toward to away from an enemy, and the game automatically moves them for you. Sadly, combat is so simple and easy that the interesting combat system is basically wasted. It's very beginner-friendly, though perhaps to a fault. Several characters in the endgame party (which is established quite early into the game) have cheap but powerful healing spells, and the game also loads you up with items to restore HPs and MPs inside and outside combat. Monster AI almost always targets the nearest character, which will almost always be your frontline fighters, so you are almost never in any danger whatsoever. The boss monsters are basically no stronger than regular enemies (they just have a lot more HPs). There are a ton of dungeons you have to explore, and they are thankfully somewhat mazelike with plenty of cool stuff to find. However, because the game is so easy, dungeon exploration becomes dull. You're never in danger of running out of resources (never mind dying), so all that's left is basically solving mazes and making sure you don't miss any important treasure chests. Finally, although it has an excellent CD audio soundtrack, many of the songs are way too short and of course cannot be seamlessly looped. I would have preferred a chiptune soundtrack during gameplay. Having said all that, not every RPG needs to be a struggle to complete, and the likeable characters and fun quest make Lunar worth playing. Thanks to its linear structure, easy combat, and quick pace, you could probably blast through it over a long weekend.

Lunar: The Silver Star Well, that was quick. The game ended up being very linear and easy, and surprisingly short. It's got a cool battle system where positioning it taken into account, but the game is just too easy and simple to really do anything with it. It really only came into play during the final battle, because the boss can teleport around the screen, so you have to constantly tell your squishy mages to run away. It's got a great CD audio soundtrack, many of the songs suffer from being too short, and because it's redbook audio they of course cannot loop seamlessly. I honestly would have preferred a chiptune soundtrack during gameplay, with CD audio used only during the cinema scenes. Although as an RPG it's not very exciting, it does have some great characters and a fun quest... and since it's so easy (absolutely no need to grind levels at all), you could probably blast through it over a long weekend.

Computer Gaming World (1986) I finished reading through the '86 issues. This magazine got both better and worse this year, though honestly I don't think the better parts have anything to do with the actual mag itself. 1986 saw computer gaming beginning to move away from primarily text adventures and wargames, so the greater variety alone makes the magazine more interesting to read today. This year also saw the release of the Atari ST and Amiga, so it's a lot of fun to read about the early history of these computers. There's a distressing focus on praising computer games for being controlled with a joystick instead of a keyboard. This makes absolutely no sense to me, because I know what this really entails: instead of being able to enter any command instantaneously just by pressing the corresponding key, now you're slowly moving through menus item by item and hitting the one button to select it. There were several interviews with and even articles written by early game design luminaries Chris Crawford, Dan Bunten, and Jon Freeman. All come off as completely arrogant and unlikeable; Crawford is especially insufferable. He claims that he is one of only three developers in the entire world in all of history who has made more than one good game. He's also living in some fantasy land, in 1986, where the only system worth developing on is the 8-bit Atari line, even going so far as to say that developing a good game on the Commodore 64 is impossible. Total nonsense.

The "catch" is this one game console plays your TG16 AND PCE games and the game industry hates it -- and that's a good thing! Click for more information! Remember to smash that like button, subscribe, and comment below!

GamePro (1991) I blasted through all the '91 issues over the last week or so. Not much has changed from 1990 to be honest. It's basically GamePro as most people remember it now, with reviewers writing as characters, obvious/useless PROTIPS all over the page, and tons of reviews and previews. These are very quick magazines to read through, because so much of the text is worthless today and therefore skimmable or skippable. Your typical review will have two paragraphs of story (usually skippable... I mean, who cares about the "story" of Midnight Resistance or whatever?), one paragraph giving a brief overview of the game (start reading here), a couple paragraphs simply listing powerups and monsters (what is the point of this?), several paragraphs describing basically the background graphics of each stage (worthless), and then finally a paragraph actually offering some criticism. In most cases, you can just read the third and final paragraphs, and it actually ends up being a decent review. A LOT of the magazine is devoted to hints and tips. This was certainly useful back in the day, but now is a waste of time to read. Having said all that, it's not a bad magazine. You get tons of content, and since they review so many games each issue you get to read somewhat in-depth summaries of games that just got a screenshot or two in other mags. One thing that changed in '91 is that the editor stopped bringing up topics in his editorial for discussion in the letter pages. That's unfortunate, because it gave the mag a real sense of community that other mags didn't have. Instead, he now just summarizes the games covered in the current issue, which is what Nintendo Power was also doing around this time. Pretty dull.

As annoying as the spamming can be, I guess it's not technically against the rules? I mean, it's not much different from the posters who create a new thread each time they upload a video to their YouTube channel.

GameFan (1992) This mag was first published in late '92, so there are only two official issues this year, though I think there was an "issue 0" before the first issue? Anyway, it's a nice mag to flip through and even early on the layouts were quite nice... though sometimes so busy that the text is difficult to read! The structure of the mag is not so dissimilar from that of 90's EGM, in that they have a review section containing paragraph-long reviews of each game (at this point, just two reviewers), and then have another section where they give each of the games a page or two of extended coverage. The big difference is that EGM would spend much of this extended coverage stuff on telling you the story of the game or whatever (basically just filler), while GameFan uses this to expand on their reviews a bit. The quality of the writing is quite poor, but oddly likeable. It's like reading someone's personal blog or forum post or something. I could criticize their out-of-control reviews, where nearly every game is awesome and seems to get a minimum 85% score, but it's hard to be annoyed at that because they seem so passionate about video games. One thing that I find hilarious about these early issues is that they keep talking about "scrolls." At first I though they were referring to finding mystical scrolls in games, and I was totally confused. They would mention in a review that some 99% awesome game has "tons of scrolls" or ask "where's the scrolls" for some game that merely gets an 85%. Why is it so important for a game to have scrolls in it??? Then I realized, they were talking about parallax scrolling. Anyway, I think is definitely worth flipping through even today. I never really read this magazine back in the day, but the writing, screenshots, and layout are all oddly nostalgic.

Lunar: The Silver Star So far this is pretty good. It's much easier and has a much quicker pace than PSII so far, but I'm also only a couple of hours in so far. I'm guessing this is gonna be pretty easy and linear, but we'll see. The combat is pretty fun, and I like how you have to have your characters near enemies to attack with melee weapons, without going full SRPG and making you position characters all over the place.

Phantasy Star II I finally completed this monster of an RPG! I've attempted to complete this game many times over the years, but always got turned off by the massive and very difficult to map dungeons. I did actually map all the dungeons in the first one-third of the game, but once you reach the dams mapping becomes way too difficult (for me anyway). From that point on, I downloaded some unlabeled maps and marked them up as I explored, making sure to try every teleporter/chute. I used Rudger (Hunter) and Anne (Medic) for the first part of the game, and then once I lost Nei I replaced her with Amia (Huntress). This party worked out quite nicely, and I had no trouble completing the game. It's cool that you can choose which characters to travel with, but sadly the other characters are mostly useless (Shilka [Thief]) or way too situational to be very useful (Huey and Kinds). The game has a reputation as a difficult and brutal grindfest, but I found the encounter rate to be just about right. I was also surprised to find that I didn't need to do any artificial leveling at all; just through normal exploration, I ended up reaching level 31 or 32 for all four characters by the final battle, and this was more than enough to defeat both bosses with little trouble (in fact, I defeated both on my first attempt). --- Although I ended up really enjoying this game, it has some major problems. It has some great songs, but a lot of them tend to sound very similar... and this is not helped at all by the horrible snare drum instrument in every single song (which was wisely replaced with something less annoying in the US version). The dungeons are pleasantly mazelike with lots of cool stuff to find, but some of them are just unbelievably difficult to navigate or map. The absolute worst dungeon has you blindly falling down pits down seven tedious levels, with each pit often dropping you in a section with two or three MORE pits to choose from. This one dungeon took me around three hours to fully explore, and not one second of it was fun! The biggest issue is that combat is mostly mindless. Very few enemies have special attacks, and your own characters never have enough TP to really make use of their techniques, so in 99% of the battles you are just trading blows back and forth until you win. Once you start finding the equipment that can be used to heal for free in battle, the game completely drops any semblance of difficulty... though I suppose you could refrain from using that stuff if you want a real challenge. --- Still, it's a great RPG and well worth playing today. I plan on playing Phantasy Star III, but probably not until next year.

Phantasy Star II Finished! The four dungeons on Dezoris were all somewhat annoying, but not so bad... though Ikuto was indeed very tedious. Just through normal exploration I ended up reaching level 31 or 32 for all characters by the end, and this was more than enough to win the final battles. Between the three Star Atomizers I picked up along the way, Anne's healing techniques, the equipment that cast healing techs in battle, and an inventory full of Trimates, even Dark Falz went down surprisingly easily. I ended up really enjoying this game, though I'd still rank it below Phantasy Star. The biggest fault of the game is that combat is far too simple. Very few enemies have special attacks, and techniques cost way too many TPs to really rely upon... so 99% of battles have you mostly just trading blows back and forth until you win. I plan on playing Phantasy Star III, but probably not until 2024.