some games with potentially dangerous flashing, particularly of the full-screen variety, have received patches to address this issue and make them more accessible to players with sensitivity to these effects
Mega Man 2
Kyouryuu Sentai Zyuranger NES (Super Sentai/ Mighty Morphin Power Rangers series)
Cocoron
Willow NES
Zelda 2
Earthbound
iām looking for as many games as we can collate regarding this issue. what are games that have moments of fullscreen or otherwise intense flashing or strobing?
i was just playing Whip Rush for genesis and noticed thereās a moment of letterboxed border flashing in the attract mode which made me a little uncomfortable.
some of the magic spell effects in Shining in the Darkness do a little border strobe, thankfully brief
Mickeyās Racing Adventure has a transition screen which makes me feel queasy, with a rainbow swirl rapidly rotating. tolerable on a tiny GBC screen, but when blown up to a bigger screen, it feels icky
I donāt know why Iāve become immensely sensitive to this considering I donāt have epilepsy myself but I have been avoiding these kinds of games recently
Zelda 2
Cyberpunk 2077
Sayonara Wild Hearts (I donāt think itās ever full screen but it crossed my threshold)
(i expect there may be extant lists of this type, but I havenāt gotten around to doing research on this. older games like arcade games and NES stuff are usually worse offenders with stuff like this. will run some googles and add any existing research on this topic to this thread, including the romhacking thread indirectly linked in the OP)
Early-80s arcade games use this as one of their primary special effects; Williams and Midway have some crazy stuff. I love it but itās definitely worth a warning
Would NES light gun games cause this? From reading up on it, the screen would flash black for a second to confirm target hitting and such, so i wonder if this triggered the effect for anyone. While Iāve had a seizure once in my life (ask to see my tongue sometime; itās permanenty scarred), it wasnāt related to epilepsy, so I donāt have any specific reactions to these things.
Paladinās Quest flashes the entire screen whenever basically anything of any kind happens in a battle. Itās so reliant on this effect that it would probably be a big project to ROM-hack it for safety. Even without epilepsy, I remember feeling disoriented after playing it too long in a dark room when I was a kid
I just DLād a puzzle game named Theorem off of itch earlier and someone in the comments said that āOne major caveat, however - when you land on the forbidden face after the previous block has disappeared, it triggers bright flashing lights for a few moments.ā It didnāt strike me as that much but Iām also not sensitive to it.
I assume the spaceship exploding in Gorf would be problematic, at least in the home Coleco version I am familiar with.
you probably already found this or would find it quickly, but thereās a few dozen examples listed over on TVTropes
(twin wiki All The Tropes lists a couple additional examples: Child of Eden and the F.E.A.R. franchise)
Less obvious, and perhaps less useful, is to look for mentions of epilepsy on The Cutting Room Floor. A number of games were modified when localized, reissued or rereleased via Virtual Console in such a way as to suggest an intent to reduce these issues. Those games are in a sense āfixedā already, but obviously the original versions still exist. There may be quite a few more VC patches that do this, but I donāt think these changes are ever officially documented (or even acknowledged).
Chrono Trigger isnāt TOO bad about it, but there are some spells that use a lot of flashing effects. The stronger spells you get late in the game tend to be worse about it.
Sega Master System game Ghost House has terrible strobing in the background for a few seconds when you hit a light fixture, and it comes out of nowhere too
Iāve been complaining that I canāt play any game with flashing white screens because I play in the dark in the same room as a baby. So that had eliminated
Panzer Paladin
Cyber Ninja
Mortal Kombat XI
Wish my tv had a setting to darken white.
Since learning about the Cyberpunk thing and reading Sakurinaās post yeah a lot of KoFs are unplayable in this context.
Which oh yeah I canāt touch that SamSho Collection.
no setting to turn them off the last time i looked
completely destructible environments, except for those lights
which led to a streamer i was watching painstakingly blast those lights off of walls with a shotgun, grab them off the ground and hurl them into the sea
Played some of the original beatmania on PS1 tonight and thereās definitely some intense flashing in there. The lanes are very narrow in 5-key bm so the middle two thirds of the screen is used to display background animations, and a lot of them have repeated flashing patterns that get really distracting