Epilepsy warning - Flashing / strobing lights


no unspoilered visual examples in this thread, please


in accordance with the noble aims of anti-epilepsy hacks such as these: Translations and ROMhacks II - #512 by meauxdal

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

iā€™m 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 thereā€™s 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

Mickeyā€™s 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

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I donā€™t know why Iā€™ve become immensely sensitive to this considering I donā€™t have epilepsy myself but I have been avoiding these kinds of games recently

  • Zelda 2
  • Cyberpunk 2077
  • Sayonara Wild Hearts (I donā€™t think itā€™s ever full screen but it crossed my threshold)
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(i expect there may be extant lists of this type, but I havenā€™t 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 itā€™s definitely worth a warning

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videogames seem to be uniquely likely to cause these effects

Epilepsy and Videogames (Michelle Bureau, Edouard Hirsch, Federico Vigevano, 2004)

Thereā€™s also a pretty good video that is ostensibly part of a series about the history of the PokĆ©mon TCG that goes into how the Porygon Panic changed broadcasting regulations in Japan about halfway in

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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 Iā€™ve had a seizure once in my life (ask to see my tongue sometime; itā€™s permanenty scarred), it wasnā€™t related to epilepsy, so I donā€™t have any specific reactions to these things.

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Paladinā€™s Quest flashes the entire screen whenever basically anything of any kind happens in a battle. Itā€™s 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

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I just DLā€™d a puzzle game named Theorem off of itch earlier and someone in the comments said that ā€œOne 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 didnā€™t strike me as that much but Iā€™m 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.

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you probably already found this or would find it quickly, but thereā€™s 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 ā€˜fixedā€™ already, but obviously the original versions still exist. There may be quite a few more VC patches that do this, but I donā€™t think these changes are ever officially documented (or even acknowledged).

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Chrono Trigger isnā€™t 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.

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the new genesis game Paprium seems really aggressive with the strobing and flashing. it honestly feels malicious

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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

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Looking into KOF games and a lot of them have win screens that flash between red and white backgrounds which is somewhat upsetting

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Final Fantasy III (FC)ā€™s ending cutscene has a flashing white screen section to simulate the flare off a crystal I think

Iā€™ve been complaining that I canā€™t 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 Sakurinaā€™s post yeah a lot of KoFs are unplayable in this context.

Which oh yeah I canā€™t touch that SamSho Collection.

Teardown has

  • warning lights that flash when you trip an alarm

  • 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

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Casting magic in Dragon Quest II (NES/FC) causes full screen white flashes for about half a second with each spell

Played some of the original beatmania on PS1 tonight and thereā€™s 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

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