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thegoldenband

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Posts posted by thegoldenband

  1. Posted

    81. Double Dragon (PlayStation)

     

    Beat this Japanese-exclusive Neo Geo port on all four difficulties, as Jimmy Lee.

     

    Very Easy and Easy were pretty much a cakewalk, while Normal put up stiff resistance. But by the time I completed my playthrough on Difficult, I'd figured out a pattern that devastated most opponents: double-jump backwards and forwards, come in with a jump kick until you back them into a corner, then follow your jump kick with a couple of jabs and a low sweep to knock them down.

     

    For variety you can throw in a "set yourself on fire" charge move if you want, but otherwise special moves aren't necessary. With that in hand I beat the game's two boss characters on my first try. Does the same pattern work in the Neo Geo original? Maybe I'll try it.

     

    On Normal (didn't try it on Difficult) I was also able to eke out some wins on time by trapping opponents in a corner and spamming low kicks, causing them to hold a defensive crouch indefinitely, even if I had more health than them. Cheesy, but all's fair.

     

    Anyway, this port seems fine and plays well, but the loading times are annoying, especially the inability to retry a match immediately without waiting 30-45 seconds to change my character (don't want to) and reload the stage I was just in (why is that necessary?). And there's the perennial paradox of fighting games: the moment when it "clicks" and you find a pattern that works is also the moment when the game no longer has much to offer.

     

    C-, would be C+ without the loading times.

     

  3. Posted

    That reminds me -- a while back I saw a really nice CRT with component inputs by the side of the road, but (a) it was huge, (b) it might have been weather-ed upon, and (c) the power cord had been cut.

     

    Broke my heart, but I couldn't justify taking it, especially given the likelihood that it just didn't work (I hope that's why the cord was cut, and not just out of spite/lawsuit paranoia?). My Toshiba with composite inputs is enough for me, at least for now.

  4. Posted

    5 hours ago, carlsson said:

    This week is won by the Sniper (volume 56 in the Simple 1500 Series) ahead of Buttsushi Buttsubushi, both PlayStation.

    I always have to make an effort not to type "Buttsubishi", which makes it sound like a cross between a Mitsubishi and, well, a butt. (Settle down, Beavis.)

     

    Also, if anyone is curious, I posted some comments about the Sniper and the Shisenshou here. It really is bizarre that the Sniper's reward for beating the game is, essentially, a mass murder simulator, but at least those bonus stages have some actual level design on offer.

    • Like 1
    • Haha 3

  5. Posted

    Both Castle of Dragon and Sword Master have an odd gimmick: after you get a GAME OVER, you keep the health you earned in your previous attempt! Or something like that, anyway.

     

    I beat Castle of Dragon earlier this year and need to replay Sword Master, as it's one of a steadily-shrinking number of games that I've only beaten with the aid of savestates. I like both games, though the double-jump in Sword Master is unreasonably finicky -- it plays like a glitch, not a feature.

    • Like 1

  6. Posted

    My times for the week:

     

    Atari 2600:
    Lilly Adventure, aka Lili, Artkaris - 9 min.

     

    NES:
    Bases Loaded - 76 min.

     

    PlayStation:
    Buttsubushi - 157 min.
    Double Dragon - 65 min.
    One Two Smash: Tanoshii Tennis! - 23 min.
    Pop’n Tanks - 18 min.
    Simple 1500 Series Vol. 56: The Sniper - 250 min.
    Simple 1500 Series Vol. 79: The Shisenshou - 117 min. 

     

    Beat the two Simple 1500 games I played, including the extra/unlockable modes you get after completing each of those games.

     

    I also beat Double Dragon (a Neo Geo port) on the two lower difficulties, and cleared 27-28 puzzles in Buttsubushi, which I picked up for the first time in a while.

    • Like 3

  7. Posted

    80. Simple 1500 Series Vol. 79: The Shisenshou (PlayStation)

     

    Shisenshou is a mahjong tile-matching game, and I rather like it. Back in 2016 I played through a Game Boy implementation, Shisenshou: Match-Mania, with 60 carefully curated levels that make it into a kind of puzzle game (the last levels were quite tricky!).

     

    This PlayStation version, by contrast, has very little content: just time attack and score attack modes, plus an easy mode for learning the game. By way of bells and whistles there's a hint button, which you can use four times -- but otherwise you're just completing a randomly generated board, and that's that.

     

    However, if you complete the board 6 times in score attack mode, you unlock a version of the game where the tiles fall after each match, either downward or in different directions (I never nailed down what triggered gravity to change directlon).

     

    These modes are so rife with combos that it almost plays out like a parody of an action-puzzle game: at one point I made one move, and then got to wait over 60 seconds while a 30+ step combo played itself out automatically, complete with fireworks and lightning storms.

     

    Completing those two extra modes gives you nothing but a "you won" message -- you can't even save your scores in these modes -- so there's not much meat on the bone here. The basic gameplay is fine, but doesn't really go anywhere, and games like solitaire and Shanghai offer a deeper experience, as does the Game Boy title I mentioned above. D.

  8. Posted

    79. Simple 1500 Series Vol. 56: The Sniper (PlayStation)

     

    What an odd duck of a game. It's got tons of dialogue sequences (in Japanese), a jazzy soundtrack, unique voiceovers each time you save between levels, and opening and closing credits that play before and after every level. Especially for a Simple 1500 game, it's got buckets of style.

     

    All these lavish trappings, however, are only to obscure the fact that -- when you come down to it -- this game consists of eight QTEs and basically nothing else. Yes, you can customize your position and the time of day, but you're ultimately just lining up a target in your sights, shooting them, and that's the level. Only in the last two levels do things get trickier, with small additional twists required, but it's very basic stuff.

     

    However the game had one last surprise, as after the final credit roll, it revealed that the game's practice mode can, with the push of the SELECT button, be transformed into a totally psychopathic mass murder mode. Instead of the assassin's clean task of sniping one enemy target with a single bullet, you're expected to shoot as many as 12 mafiosi, or yakuza, or whatever they are, who are ambling about the streets minding their own business.

     

    Wearing a suit? It's bullets for you! Plus in every stage there are two men who, on hearing the gunshots, crouch and freeze in terror. Are you expected to shoot them too? You sure are, you heartless bastard! And in the last few of these stages, the game actually becomes a bit clever -- far more clever than the main story mode -- as you have to strategize carefully and move accurately to hit all your targets...or indeed, to find them at all.

     

    This sort of thing probably hasn't aged well, given the events of the last 25 years, but it elevates The Sniper from something too flimsy for words, to something with at least a bit of rewarding gameplay to offer. It's a bad game, or at least a bad value-for-dollar, but I kind of like it anyway.

     

    By the way, the game is largely in Japanese, but I used my phone to translate onscreen text and spoken dialogue. While I missed 25% of the text and 90% of the dialogue (no, phone, the female antagonist probably didn't shout "Chinese cabbage!"), I was able to get just enough to make it work. D+.

  10. Posted

     

    19 hours ago, Mr. Postman said:

    I’ll be honest, I haven’t played this game heavily in a long time. The manual states 256 levels. I dumped it as a 4K ROM, by any chance would I need to do it as a bankswitching one or something different?

     

    When I was younger I was positive that you had to not reach 100 lives or the game would end and I thought I’d seen videos of people reaching 256.

     

    Can you compare what happens after stage 99 in A difficulty mode in the standard PAL Homevision release?

    9A516F14-646C-4FDE-9575-9CC600403506.jpeg

    Hey, thanks a bunch for that manual scan! That's really interesting to see that they referenced 256 scenes specifically. I think your younger self was exactly right about 100 lives being the trigger for a GAME OVER. This line is funny: "When she is dead, she loses a life". Well, yes. :)

     

    18 hours ago, Mr. Postman said:

    edit: Ahhhh, maybe there is a grand total of 256 possible randomly seeded stage options available in total programmed into the game, regardless of how many stages there are per loop (99).

    I think that's exactly it -- that, or there are 256 possible stages that can be generated from the seed they're using. Maybe it might be a LFSR similar to the one Pitfall uses?

    8 hours ago, Mr. Postman said:

    Also yes, tapping reset does randomly create a predetermined set of stage progression based on which “Stage 0” you start with, which could very easily account for 256 unique stages within the game.
     

    I’d love if you yourself could compare  with the official PAL Homevision ROM if the stages reset to $00 after beating stage 99. 
     

    You seem to legitimately enjoy the game enough to have beat it on infinite lives mode, you should record yourself and go for an official high score on A difficulty.

    In the absence of reverse-engineering the game's stage generation algorithm (which I don't have the chops to do), it'd be great to document exactly how many combinations of playfield, enemies, alligators/turtles, and colors there are. It's possible, for example, that there are more than 256 possible combinations but that the differences are cosmetic, i.e. colors.

     

    I like the idea of attempting to loop the game on Difficulty A in principle, though right now I'm overcommitted and probably can't take it on (playing it yesterday was a temporary bout of escapism :D ). Still, having completed Difficulty A -- and knowing that the difficult Stage 91 I encountered isn't inevitable -- makes me curious. I might take a shot at checking out that Homevision ROM to see whether it has the same behavior and RAM locations, though!

     

  11. Posted

    My times for the week:

     

    Atari 2600:
    Lilly Adventure (NTSC) [aka Lili, Artkaris] - 91 min.

     

    NES:
    Bases Loaded - 221 min.

     

    Jaguar:
    Battlesphere Gold - 28 min.
    Full Circle: Rocketeer - 6 min.
    Mr. Heli - 3 min.

     

    PlayStation:
    Critical Depth - 37 min.
    Happy Salvage - 23 min.
    Rescue Copter - 199 min.
    Syphon Filter - 76 min.
     

    Played through the recently-dumped NTSC version of Lilly Adventure (thanks to AtariAge user Mr. Postman!), on B difficulty which gives you infinite lives. Since you start out with 5 lives, and gain one per completed level, the game has an automatic kill screen when you reach Level 95 and the counter rolls over to zero.

     

    It appears there are 99 levels (generated procedurally and pseudo-randomly), or really 100, whereupon the level counter rolls over. But I don't know if I have it in me to try A difficulty, with limited lives, just to say I reached 5-6 more "numbers". The game is just too janky and random for the time/effort investment that'd be required.

     

    I also got the final gold medal I needed in Level 3-2 of Rescue Copter, giving me gold across the board in Easy mode. However, I didn't quite get a perfect score in it... 😠 Meanwhile, Expert mode seems basically unplayable, and the one Expert mode playthrough on YouTube doesn't succeed in completing 3-2 at all. So there, too, I question the wisdom of investing any more time on the game -- which is annoying since I like to beat the highest difficulty level on the games I play.

    • Like 3

  12. Posted

    56 minutes ago, Mr. Postman said:

    The system needs to be played in “A/A” difficulty to play all 256 stages. Also if you earn above a certain amount of lives the game is over, so you must purposely die a few lives off periodically to not reach said limit if you want the best high score and all 256 levels. Since you have infinite lives in B difficulty & you earn 1 life after beating each stage you will reach the lives limit and the game ends.

    Interesting. If correct, that suggests $D3 isn't where the stage number is stored, since it uses binary-coded decimal and you can't represent 256 different numbers that way. Are you sure there are 256 levels as such?

     

    You can switch difficulties on the fly, so I'd assume that if you get to Level 99 legitimately, switch to A difflculty, and burn off a few lives, you can keep going normally. I just tried setting address $D3 to value $97, played through Levels 97-99, and it rolled over to Level 00 and value $00 after I cleared Level 99.

     

    I'm also realizing that I played through 94 stages, not 99, since the game froze when I hit 99 lives. (I was, incorrectly, looking at the life counter instead of the level counter.) I think that's the key limit -- set $D1 to 99 lives, and the game will automatically freeze on the next screen as it rolls you over to $00, i.e. zero lives.

     

    When I set $D3 to various values it definitely teleports me ahead in the game -- though strangely it takes two screens to do so. However it's not matching what I saw in my playthrough, e.g. the very memorable Level 91 which had an unusually tricky placement of a floating enemy such that I had to freefall onto an alligator and time it perfectly to get through. (Also the floating enemy would shift left/right based on proximity, so jumping over him wasn't an option.)

     

    I guess the length of time you hold down RESET generates a seed that procedurally generates all the subsequent levels, modulating their difficulty based on some unknown factor (maybe the high byte of $D3, i.e. the group of 10 that the level is in?). $DC, $E8, and $E9 get incremented by one for every frame RESET is held, so maybe that's the seed.

     

    So the levels are pseudo-random in some aspects; these playthroughs frequently match each other, but some screens diverge:

     

     

     

    I wish I had a savestate from my playthrough so I could see what seed generated the Level 91 I had to play, as it was infuriating but clever!

    • Like 1

  13. Posted

    Played through all 99 levels of this today! Kind of a trip that it has an actual end, albeit a totally perfunctory one (you just stop moving at Level "100").

     

    Some levels are almost unplayably finicky, so it was wise to include an unlimited-lives mode (right difficulty to B). A pity that they didn't make that the only mode, as trying to play it with limited lifestock (right difficulty to A) would be an exercise in frustration.

     

    Speaking of lives, the address with your lives is at $D1 in RAM, and when you set it to $FF you get "hoho" instead of your life count. I thought it might be a sly Easter egg, but no, it's just the "ho" in "Home Vision". :D

     

    The stage number is at $D3, and gets incremented midscreen when your character hits the righthand edge. I tried changing the stored value to $FD (or something like that) a couple scanlines afterward, and still got a playable level, so I guess it's procedurally-generated using the level number as a seed?

     

    What does the left difficulty switch do -- anything?

    • Like 1

  14. Posted

    6 minutes ago, zetastrike said:

    I have to post this here because it's a big deal for me.  After about 6 years of owning the game, I finally cleared level 10 of Monster Manor on the 3DO.  It's a notoriously frustrating map with a ton of enemies and hardly any ammo to deal with them.  Worse still, there are many dead ends that will unleash hordes of spiders and grim reapers that you won't be able to defend yourself against due to the sparse ammo dumps.  This took me roughly an hour to complete.  Here's the map in case anyone else out there is struggling with this level.  Even the game's developer couldn't finish it during his playthrough on youtube.

    @thegoldenband you might appreciate this one!

     

    The yellow dot is the location of the talisman piece you need to exit the level and the exit is marked by the white X in the bottom left corner, just above the red + sign which is me.

    Awesome, zetastrike! I think I still have a hand-drawn map of that level in my files from when I beat EFMM back in 2013. That huge ring around it looks very familiar.

     

    I definitely appreciated the survival horror/ammo conservation aspect of EFMM; pretty good game, I thought, though my taste in FPS games leans strongly toward the slow and methodical so I may not be the best judge.

    • Like 3

  15. Posted

    My times for the week:

     

    Atari 2600:
    Checkers (Activision) - 9 min.
    Glacier Patrol - 8 min.

     

    Atari Jaguar:
    Action Fighter - 7 min.
    Aircars - 15 min.
    Beebris - 17 min.
    Cybernoid 2 - 1 min.
    HMS Raptor - 4 min.
    Protector SE - 16 min.
    Rick Dangerous - 10 min.
    Skyhammer - 8 min.
    Soccer Kid - 3 min.
    Super Burnout - 6 min.
    Supercross 3D - 5 min.
    Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles - 4 min.
    Tiny Toon Adventures - 2 min.
    Zero 5 - 5 min.

     

    PlayStation:
    Evil Zone - 221 min.
    Resident Evil - 37 min.
    Rescue Copter - 80 min.
     

    Beat Evil Zone.

     

    On the Jaguar list, note that Action Fighter, Cybernoid 2, Rick Dangerous, and TMHT are all Atari ST games ported to Jaguar. But they should have enough differences (especially sound) to count on their own, and in any event it's a bit like Atari 8-bit vs. 5200 anyway (in that we count 5200 games as their own thing even if they're essentially identical to the 8-bit computer copies).

    • Like 4

  16. Posted

    1 hour ago, nosweargamer said:

    INTV Month concludes with a trip to a monster filled tower.
    Ep 663: Tower of Doom (Intellivision)

    Great review, and thanks for the shout-out and link to the Strategywiki page I put together! I put a lot of work into that, and I'm pleased to see it appreciated and used. :)

     

    As you might expect, I totally agree -- I think it's the best game I've played on the Intellivision (excluding homebrews), and certainly the deepest and most rich with replay value. It's pretty much the main reason I got an Intellivision about 10-11 years ago, as I'd played it at a friend's house around 1989 or 1990 and been totally mesmerized, and the memory stuck with me 20 years later.

    • Like 1

  17. Posted

    Got mine today! Had fun firing it up and trying out various Jag originals, demos, homebrews, and ST ports.

     

    Setup was easy and everything I tried worked right away, save one or two files I think only work on a Skunkboard and haven't yet been updated for JagGD compatibility. I'm using a little no-name 2GB MicroSD card I had lying around, which works perfectly (and will do fine unless and until CD support comes along).

    • Like 1

  18. Posted

    9 hours ago, DragonGrafx-16 said:

    The PS-LX2 has servo lock but the PS-LX4 has quartz lock... so it's different.

    Yeah, I noticed that. Here's an interesting discussion of the differences (between quartz/servo, not Sony-specific):

     

    https://www.vinylengine.com/turntable_forum/viewtopic.php?t=27762

     

    The LX-4 will probably have more stable speed, with the only downside being the difficulty in repairing it if something goes wrong (allegedly, anyway). That said the speed issues in my turntable were a result of the 33/45 RPM switch getting dirty; I'm not sure if that mechanic differs much between the turntables.

     

    What kind of cartridge do you have on it?

     

    BTW I bought a vintage 1980s turntable a while back that sounded interesting but turned out to be a total piece of trash, so they're not all good. :) But you got a nice one with the Sony; that series is well-known for offering a good-sounding, workhorse model of turntable.

  19. Posted

    4 hours ago, DragonGrafx-16 said:

    1418404305_sonytt.thumb.jpg.d0f0eb2dd7990e559059e72d6eb957d2.jpg

     

    I found this Sony turntable on the side of the road today... how's that for thrifting? Can't beat free!

     

    It has the lid and the hinges but I removed them as I couldn't open it that close to the wall.

    Nice! I have a PS-LX2, which I think is similar, and I'm really quite happy with it. I also got mine for free.

     

    The biggest factor to getting a good sound is making sure you have a quality cartridge and a fresh stylus (needle). If you've got those things, the Sony will probably perform quite respectably: not super-audiophile, but plenty good.

     

    I've got a Grado cartridge and am very satisfied with the sound I get -- nice, warm, and full -- which was much better than the cartridge that came with my Sony (an Ortofon, I think?). It improved a great deal more once I replaced the stylus; doing that reduces the surface noise and distortion so much, and improves the tracking too.

     

    Oh, and if you ever have issues with the turntable going in and out of the correct speed, try toggling back and forth between 33 and 45 really rapidly, about 30-40 times. When mine developed speed problems (intermittently running a bit slow), that worked like a charm for me, and kept me from having to take it apart or anything like that.

  20. Posted

    78. Evil Zone (PlayStation)

     

    Story Mode beaten on all three difficulties, with Kakurine.

     

    This is another game likely to appeal far more to Japanophiles and anime fans, but at least Evil Zone is trying to do something different. It's literally a two-button fighting game -- with one of those buttons only used to block! -- and all its special moves involve simple directional presses, timed with a bit of care, rather than complex inputs involving quarter-circles and whatnot.

     

    It also uses an interesting mechanic, somewhat akin to the "desperation moves" in Art of Fighting: you can unleash a particularly deadly attack if you've charged up enough energy, and the lower your health gets, the faster you can charge up. It's a very "German board game" thing to do, in that it keeps matches competitive until the end.

     

    Still, the fighting is OK enough, but the simplicity has its downsides -- I didn't feel the level of control that I do with Street Fighter II, Mortal Kombat II, Virtua Fighter, et al. I'm also not the biggest fan of fighting games where you can block special moves without taking damage, since that tends to favor the CPU and lead to endless projectile spamming. And I got tired of the 5- to 10-second animations for my opponent's special attacks: if my character is already near-zero on health and their fate is a foregone conclusion, I don't want to waste my time watching the details.

     

    Finally, the terrible, overmodulated audio on the dubbing, the lousy manual, and the bizarre, cheesy-looking story segments take their toll: I'm guessing Evil Zone was a labor of love, but those shortcomings give it a "rushed, Japanese-exclusive 3DO game" quality, if you know what I mean. Sometimes you really need to hire a good graphic designer and audio engineer. C-.

  21. Posted

    77. Space Griffon VF-9 (PlayStation)

     

    Giant mech games are a good fit for me, and for early 3D: their slow-moving nature means frame rate issues and motion sickness aren't usually a factor. And as someone who struggles with fast-paced first-person shooters with large multi-level maps, I don't mind -- in fact, I actively enjoy -- a game that enforces the kind of measured, methodical style of play that would certainly bore a FPS veteran.

     

    But after a reasonable start, Space Griffon VF-9 flushes any goodwill I might have down the toilet. The combat is dull and one-dimensional, and its few attempts at strategy or depth only serve to annoy the player. The design seems to present you with huge, sprawling levels but keeps you completely on rails 95% of the time, with unskippable animated cutscenes and multiple forced sequences in which you lose control of your character but still take damage (!).

     

    And worst of all, what gameplay is present is interrupted constantly -- and I do mean constantly -- by some of the most asinine, haltingly-delivered, poorly-localized, poorly-edited dialogue I've ever heard. In the first half of the game it's tolerable, but by the second half, you're literally getting interrupted every five steps by incessant, juvenile whining from one of several characters, including your own.

     

    Every line is cringeworthy, and every one is followed by a lengthy silence. And no, you can't skip any of it, save for the occasional cutscene that consists of "five minutes of still images with non-synchronized mouth movements", but one of those drops a mission-critical passcode so you really can't skip any of it. By the end of the game I was literally saving after every bit of dialogue, just to ensure I wouldn't have to hear it again in case I had to reload for some reason (like the game's charming weapon-breaking mechanic).

     

    So, congrats, Space Griffon VF-9: you've combined the worst aspects of an early FPS, a cookie-cutter RPG, and a bad visual novel, and you've managed to rip off Alien and Star Wars in so doing.

     

    It appalls me that this game gets better reviews than something like Kileak: The DNA Imperative, which may not be terribly inspired but at least doesn't go out of its way to waste the player's time. But I guess anything with young Japanese girls will always get a massive bonus from a certain kind of reviewer (one whose browser history I'm better off not knowing). F.

    • Like 1

  23. Posted

    5 hours ago, bizarrostormy said:

     

    Sorry for the necrobump, but I would like to register my disagreement. In song form!

    Pretty cool, and very nice work! You're quite right, the VCS does surprisingly well here. Only in the closing measures do the intonation difficulties become a problem, particularly around the second and fourth scale degrees (G and Bb), which seems to match up with G4 and Bb4 being marked as well out-of-tune on your spreadsheet.

     

    Bach's idiom makes it easy to ignore the changing timbres. Applying a harpsichord-like envelope to each note -- so that it has a strong attack and quick decay -- would make that even less noticeable, and would be stylistically appropriate too. Not sure if Slocum's drivers allow for that.

     

    For some reason I'm getting a bunch of divide by zero errors on the F Major tab of your spreadsheet when I view it in-browser, but when I download it, those go away. Probably an issue on my end?

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