i’m halfway through wizardry 1 right now myself and if that happened to me it miiiight be trivial to flee from battles all the way to where i was… but maybe there’s some reason that gets worse
i save whenever i’m in town though and i think i’d just reload there if something too bad happened
f-zero 99 does seem potentially kinda neat, i’d 100% be playing it if i had the ability to do so, but like
is there any single-player? time trials with the new mechanics/60FPS/widescreen? i’m guessing “hell no”
what happens to these “99” games? mario 35 is gone forever now, eh? looks like pac-man 99 is getting permanently retired in 3 weeks. like… what the fuck
fuck nintendo
Nintendo will cancel it and use it internally as evidence that no one wants any more F-Zero games
i guess in a way the 99 battle royale stuff is like a modern go-again on Satellaview time-limited content
notably, and for obvious reasons, the Satellaview library is far and away the least-comprehensively preserved set of media for the Super Famicom. there’s still a swath of original BS F-Zero Grand Prix tracks that are known to have existed but are lost media now
i kept a savestate in town and reloaded whenever my party wiped or got into an inescapable death spiral. did not use any inter-dungeon saves and tried to make an honest effort to drag dead party members back to town for revival (this still meant a couple of reloads when i got put into a financial hole by the temple of cant). My rationale was that the only real difference between characters besides class is my emotional investment, and going by the permadeath rules would just mean i’d make 6 more faceless character sheets with different names and have them spend a half hour fighting Murphy’s ghost anytime i got unlucky
Fwiw i still found it plenty tense and challenging with my more lenient experience, especially on long expeditions where my party got teleported or walked through the wrong one-way door and suddenly i was hopelessly lost. Youre also right that youre not missing anything amazing if you dont complete the game, i only beat Werdna because i was this close. The mapmaking is the keystone of OG Wizardry, you might as well treat it as a game that you can put down once you’ve satisfied the cartographer’s itch
edit: oh hey, made this post and then immediately got a google-recommended article for a fancy-ass digital eclipse remaster of wizardry 1 lol
well, actually, yes! there is a practice mode where you can practice on tracks you’ve race on, against a ghost of your fastest time.
but yeah, sadly it’s hard to invest too much in these games because they vanish and never get spoken of again.
They’ve got your number and your shoe size.
whoa, nice. huge revelation for me.
this is super important! it means the game will be able to be played and enjoyed long after the servers are shut down (via piracy, obviously)
fuck nintendo, tho
another question for ya isfet - what’s the speed curve like on these things? in the SNES game it takes an incredibly long time to accelerate to max speed. does this game work the same way? you said the turning is different - does blast turning still work (tapping throttle rather than holding allows much tighter turns without slippage in the SNES version)? is it the rate of the turning that’s different from SNES?
i wonder if this thing runs on yuzu…
I watched my younger sister play it some last night.
Onboarding is done with 4 short races full of CPU oppenents (each literally named “CPU xx”), gradually increasing from 25 to 99 racers while introducing the mechanics, so the game should in theory be playable without Online functionality (who knows if that’s how they’ll sunset it though).
The main mode, “F-Zero 99,” is what you’d expect — race 4 laps and try to make it to the end. Your rank is determined by your overall placement and your placement relative to 4 automatically selected rivals. Track selection in this mode is done by being given an A/B vote with the choice being given to the majority — no group ever selected Death Wind.
There’s also a team battle mode where your placement is determined by your team’s overall placement and some other score things (strong incentive to actually kill other racers in this mode).
“Grand Prix” events also happen every so often (like on am hourly basis I think?). Currently it’s only Knight Cup, but the idea is that in order to qualify for the next race you need to place above the bottom 20. Seems neat, though she only got as far Death Wind (which still has the wind).
There is a practice/time trial mode, but we didn’t try it so I can’t tell you the options.
Currently only 7 tracks are in the game — the 5 in Knight League, White Land I, and Port Town II (I think this is the same as the time trial selections in the OG), with the rest labelled as “Coming Soon.”
The skyways are implemented as catch-up mechanic — it’s generally easier to collect orbs when your placement is lower, and the duration of your stay also appears to be determined by your place. They’re layouts are simpler than the actual tracks, and have more boost pads in general.
I think blast turning is still in the game. No idea what (if any) other advanced tech is in the game until I try it myself.
They rearranged the menu music and a couple other bits — it’s still SNES sound, but it’s weird to hear.
The parallax scrolling on the skyboxes is gone. 0/10
Give me some content from MV and I’ll upgrade my score to 10/10
yeah so RT answered a lot, but i would say the turning radius feels tighter - but after playing for so long last night, it began to feel natural. i think, actually, that it might be that the controls are analog now? i’d have to test this more, but the game feels easier to control with the stick than the d-pad.
blast turning still works, yes. basically, all tricks from SNES F-Zero will help you out here. i’m currently rank B or B+ and aside from pushing to the limit too much and blowing up a few times, i am generally placing in the top 25 or top 10 on the majority of races.
yeah this part i like - the game gives you some remixes, but also does the thing from Super Mario 2 (USA) where going into certain menus will mute only parts of a song
if blast turning is in, the other one (which y’all probably already know) is that pressing down on the d-pad before hitting the ground will give a soft landing from a jump. pressing it during the entire jump gives you more air, which i think is pretty common knowledge, but i didn’t know about the soft landing until a few years ago
yes, the game gives hints during loading screens (as is the style at the time) and it mentions holding up or down during jumps (but neglects to mention the soft landing bit)
you hit a nerve, reminded me of how much i hate the fact that not every track is available solo in the first game.
this is 100% the worst decision the designers of the 1991 F-Zero could have made. they had the generosity to provide 10 ranks for 5-lap and a fast lap saved to the cartridge (luxurious!) and then force you to play more than half the game’s tracks within championship modes, with incredibly obnoxious CPU and infinite drone machines littering the track, including bomb drones. infuriating!!!!!!!!!!!!
just boneheaded oversight. yes, i’m still angry about this 30+ years later. fucking “practice” mode. incredible.
OH it’s also really important to mention here (maybe it’s obvious from the trailer) but a MAJOR change is that your boost comes from your life, now, like in the later F-Zero games, which fundamentally changes a lot. it’s also hard to tell in some instances how much the mechanics have changed because you’re surrounded by so many people and there’s a real element of chaos - oftentimes it’s about how well you recover from crashes in an F-Zero game.
as you get towards the front of the pack, things are less chaotic, but in the last lap the game tries to fuck you over by dropping in a bunch of AI-controlled cars that will blow up and take a chunk of your life off if you hit them
so the game has a bit of that Mario Kart “everyone can be a winner!” mentality with it
makes sense, the original system always felt kind of awkward because unless you are gunning for a fast lap rather than like, winning the race? the one-per-lap frequency means you effectively always use one in the same place every lap after the first. there’s nothing particularly interesting or dynamic about it, especially once you’ve figured out just where that optimal boost point is
i dig going to 4 laps as well, the original’s 5 felt a bit overlong at times
It’s in there actually, but it takes a while to show up, I only know cuz I noticed you can browse all the loading tips from the “Options” menu
i have to go back to this for a second
there is actually an ancient romhack which professes to correct this! and it seemingly works - but it’s actually fucking broken in a few ways! no one has made a newer, fixed version!
played the first hour of the new Armored Core
this is extremely my shit.
Im 100% in
Won a two player game of Caverna. All problems are solved through weapons in that game.