Games You Played Today The Nonbiri Express '09 (Galaxie ((500×2)−1)) 9小時9人9ゲーム LOOK I MADE IT LONGER: The Power of One

[smbhax]

Namco Museum Archives Volume 1 (PC/Steam)

I extracted the ROMs from the Steam version with MArchiveBatchTool GitHub - farmerbb/RED-Project: ROM Extraction Documentation Project and played them in Mesen.

The games:

Dig Dug (FC) (no NES)
Dragon Buster (FC) (no NES)
Dragon Spirit: The New Legend (NES)
Druaga to Nou (FC) (aka Tower of Druaga; no NES)
Galaxian (FC) (no NES)
Mappy (FC) (no NES)
Pac-Man (FC) (late NES Namco release after Tengen (Atari) unlicensed ver)
Pac-Man Championship Edition
Sky Kid (FC)
Splatterhouse: Wanpaku Graffiti (FC) (no NES)
Xevious (FC)

These look designed for square pixels; at NTSC screen ratio they are slightly too wide: oval Pac-Man, rectangular Dig Dug dirt, etc.

Dig Dug

Like this better than the arcade version: creepy black sky, weird soil colors, smoother pumping.

Dragon Buster

Remarkably terrible.

Dragon Spirit: The New Legend

Worse looking than the arcade version at 1st glance but the funky pixelization started to grow on me.

Tower of Druaga

Never grokked Druaga. Range-fried by a wizard, no desire to try again.

Galaxian

Slower, crustier Galaga.

Mappy

OH so when the big red cat hides behind something, they aren’t waiting to leap out at you–take the item they’re hiding behind, they hold up a “1000” bonus sign!

Hadn’t realized you can bounce up into the attic. = o Later stages put bells above the outer shafts: knock bells onto cats for big combos.

NES Mappy video gets riddled with music copyright claims. Doesn’t happen w/ PS4 Arcade Archives, which is harder, probably due to the narrower vert screen.

Pac-Man

Weird looking and sounding but plays surprisingly well.

Sky Kid

Always hated, still hate & now I find the chibi military theme super gross.

Splatterhouse: Wanpaku Graffiti

Slidey but fun; great ghoul designs; I’ll have to scum through some time.

Xevious

I think I liked Xevious for about 4 minutes as a kid.

Pac-Man Championship Edition

Faster & smoother than the non “demake” version.

Namco/M2 didn’t create NES CE; they polished an unacknowledged, unreleased 2008 homebrew port by Japanese 8-bit console port hobbyist coke774 ( https://www.youtube.com/@coke0774 ):

2007
CE releases on Xbox 360
2008
coke774 posts video of their “FC VER.”/“NES” CE to YouTube and Niconico, and screenshots to their personal website
2009
A presumed copy of coke774’s 2008 NES CE video appears on Vimeo

Pac Man CE For NES

2013
coke774 tweets (Google Translate) “It’s been a while since I received an email from a foreigner asking for a Pac-Man ROM”
2014
A Twitter user shares a photo of a Famicom cart w/ a sticker on it saying “PACMAM Championship Edition DX”

2015
According to Namco’s NES CE director in a 2020 interview, Namco “negotiates” & starts work on a never-released stand-alone 3DS port of NES CE
2018
coke774’s YouTube NES CE video nears 150K views
2019
coke774 sets their NES CE videos private & takes down their personal web site
2020

• Namco teases their “new,” NES version of CE
• Making no mention of coke774, Namco’s NES CE director says

“While there are some people who knew about this project beforehand, I bet even they will still be surprised at the finished game!”

• Official NES CE release as flagship game in the “Namco Museum Archives Volume 1” collection, credited entirely to M2
• Confronted by Ars Technica, Namco half-assedly admits

“In the case of Coke774, his work was highly appreciated by our team and we worked with him officially to implement his design into our game”

• TCRF/Shacknews analysis: M2 polished the FX, replaced the sound, added more fruit, and the menu stuff: Extra mode, in-game achievements, replays, sound test

Sources:

• We traced Namco’s “new” Pac-Man demake to its source: A 2008 fan ROMhack | Ars Technica
• So, About That Pac-Man Championship Edition Demake… | by Matt Hawkins | Attract Mode | Medium
• https://www.siliconera.com/pac-man-championship-edition-demake-started-out-as-a-3ds-game/
• Namco Museum Archives Vol. 1 credits (Windows, 2020) - MobyGames
• twitter tweet 412916369680629760 - Google Search
• Prerelease:Pac-Man Championship Edition (NES) - The Cutting Room Floor
• The best game released in 2020 was an NES demake from 2008 | Shacknews

[drastic_bb]

continuing my Photographs Of Monitors series …

osman / cannon dancer

love this game never went super hard on it but ive been routing the more challenging parts of the game today. it’s too bad it has gameboy advance music lol … i would love a version of this with the dulcet fm synth tones of strider, which it is kind of a sequel too. but i do think it has basically one of the most beautiful color palettes of nineties gameing it’s up there with like … waku waku 7, xexex, jj squawkers, etc. i guess i should take some pics of those games too.

love when a game has a convenient Skip This Section button much like batsugun and dodonpachi it loves to give you bombs

[extrabastardformula]

Played a lot of Empire City 1931 and feel like it wasn’t a good idea. Arcade version includes vertical scrolling, FC is pure horizontal. It’s all crosshairs shooting like in Golgo 13, probably a better game. Will get bqck to the Lynx soon instead.

[OneSecondBefore]

I’m away at an out of town conference, so it’s 3DS time. The 3DS is my conference machine, that’s the only time I play it. I started SMT IV for the first time ever and I’m hooked. There’s really nothing like escaping a boring conference session and awkward networking event to hunch over a good dungeon crawler in my hotel room.

[smbhax]

Duggy’s author was kind enough to get in touch with me even after I was a bit unsparing on their game; they’re https://youtube.com/@whorubeta , and amazingly enough they’ve worked on an emulator for The Matrix Online, the game on which I became the last designer. What are the odds?? Whoa. And apparently Duggy was ported to PS4 from Switch, so it probably has fewer problems there. ; )

Also, I have to say they have some chutzpah for getting Nintendo to put out a SMB parody/clone (Super Drunken Guy) on their own platform. ; D

[eska]

were you responsible for crumpling everybody up at the end there

[smbhax]

^ _^ No; once I found out they were shutting it down I’d initially intended to stick around to the bitter end, but I found I no longer had the inspiration to work on the game, and I didn’t want to see it end–so I’d quit a little before that. The remaining dev they had at the studio who had also worked on MXO was kind of into messing with players in fun ways–generous use of the admin “meatwad” command being one of them–so that may have been their doing–well, it MUST have been them who implemented it, since nobody else there could have; it was a copy of what was done at the end of beta years before, which was also not something I had a hand in.

[iguferon]

i always forget were you the designer who was kind of annoyed that they killed Morpheus with bugs? For anyone who didn’t play mxo I mean literally a swarm of bugs

[idiot]

played the first few hours of dragon quest x, which is largely tutorial and “go to the weapons shop” quests. the translation tools add a second or so hitch while it hits up deepl talking to most npcs but all the story dialogue and shops etc. are manually translated already. ran a dungeon which seemed to not be instanced… walked past some rando and their trusts hanging out in a corridor

this was a massive fuck about to setup, outside of jp/us you need a vpn and i don’t trust the skeezy commercial ones so i ran my own wireguard setup and wrote some python to update the linode cloud firewall gimmick with my home ip if it ever changes, so we’re very much in Full Linux Gaming territory here. the rest of the process involves getting a jp square-enix account, downloading the client at a glacial pace and hooking up a deepl/google translate api key to the translation tools. i looked up methods to buy the full game (the trial is the base game and the first expac) and suddenly felt very tired.

oh yeah and the client needs your password and 2fa every single time you log in

it is charming though and i can’t help but imagine it was really fuckin’ cozy on a wii in 2012. so far feels like a kind of missing link between the full wow/ff14 mmorpg experience and something like early destiny.

[bib]

thank you, i breathed a sigh of relief at how too-much-hassle that sounded

[idiot]

you can skip the vpn shit at least

[bib]

[alfred]

Wait what was the DQ game with deepL translation you’ve already been posting screenshots of for like a year? X offline?

[idiot]

x online, screenshots stolen from discord

[smbhax]

I think you might be hard pressed to find a designer from the game who would have taken the story that way, but it was what the Wachowskis’ chosen writer came up with so it was what happened.

[Rudie]

Much to my surprise I enjoyed some time with Quantum Theory this time courtesy of the Japanese Playstation Plus Service. It uh played pretty well. I remember briefly trying this back in the day because the aimming acceleration was off and it doubly is once you add that it is being streamed from a ps3 in Tokyo and I am using the dreaded DualSense. And there’s no auto-aim just to help you out.

QT isn’t a good game, but it’s close to one. I read four contempoary reviews and none of them would acknowledge it is Literally Gears Of War. “Heavily inspired” was the often turn of phrase. Not you know the same god damn engine certainly using the Gears source code like every dev was at the time. It’s not inspired It Is Gears.

I mean mostly. They made the awkward decision that any time an enemy gets hit it freaks out and does a “take damage” animation that frequently causes it to teleport away from your sights. Also it is impossible to use a shotgun because aimming down sights as a 2x Zoom and there is no cursor at all for hip firing.

This all adds up that if it was at all challenging it would be miserable. It’s not. I’m about to ride a brown fuzzy worm up to the Trachea of the tower. Meanwhile a girl I met at the mall has told me to pretend to be her boyfriend so we can meet her dad at the top of the tower. I can fastball special this girl at any time to take down the double large enemies.

So it looks like brown sludge, it controls awkwardly, the enemies are glitch and stupid. It’s basically a famicom kusoge. I want to play more of it? I can’t say that about most of the dreck I’ve been indulging in lately.

[Father.Torque]

This is pretty much Anodyne 2, kinda sorta…

[Drem]

I love this game so much. I stumbled on a cabinet running it at Magfest one year in the middle of the night, long past midnight, and decided to sit down and try it. I had never heard of it at the time and it’s personality was so fascinating. An older guy eventually sat beside me, and when I got a game over I offered to hand the cabinet over to him. But he declined, saying he enjoyed watching people play this game. I ended up playing through the entire game over the course of that next 40 minutes, with him watching me the entire way with little to no commentary.

I understood so little of what was going on in that game’s story, but it’s so evocative of that experience you have reading about some Japan-exclusive game in a magazine or website as a kid, that’s showing you screenshots that look amazing and you’re imagining it being a lot cooler than it actually is. Osman is indecipherable and all the better for it. It has an incredible visual direction and the writing that’s there has a fairy-tale style quality to it. I’ve never forgot the phrase “Come here, Osman. My beautiful killing machine.”

[Drem]

This made me finally open the Strictly Limited collectors edition of that I got last year. Dang, there’s a lot of cool stuff in here! A big cloth picture. A few different acrylic stands and diorama, some postcards, coin, an iPad, three condiment bottles. A big ol double sided poster that shows they clearly could not find original art assets and had to blow up the art from the original poster.

[smbhax]

Fighting Vipers 2 (DC, in Flycast)

I checked & the low-res background textures ARE the same resolution as the ones in the emulated Sega Model 3 version in “Like a Dragon Gaiden: The Man Who Erased His Name”–but that slight extra Model 3 highlight and shading on the character models has been lost, leaving the action looking a little flat and taking away from the overall look more than I would have thought.

On the plus side, in Flycast it runs @ full screen height–not vertically bordered like in Gaiden–& in epic 16:9 widescreen. & doesn’t have a dumb fake scanline overlay. & as w/ everything in Flycast the controls are super-low-latency, whereas they felt a tag laggy in Gaiden; it runs at the same speed but FEELS way faster in Flycast. It DOES drop a frame now & then in Flycast; not a problem Flycast has typically, so seems likely to be a problem with DC FV2 rather than an emulation issue.

I was feeling a bit flat about the game after this session, & really missing that Model 3 specular highlight…but I should probably play through it with a regular character rather than the slightly overpowered, surprisingly move-limited boss character w/ whom I was terrible at comboing (downloaded a save file from GameFAQs to unlock the locked characters : P).

Got punched through a T. Rex skeleton!

No move lists (not even in the physical manual!). : P

Training has weird settings language where it starts at “CPU RANK G”; from there you can lower it to say “CPU RANK F” where the CPU starts fighting you. : P There’s a “DEAD” toggle (you can KO CPU–no player health bar though so they can’t hurt you). You have to press A on the green “SET UP” text in the lower middle of the training menu to confirm changes. : PPP

“Random” mode is just Arcade mode w/ random opponents rather than I guess the fixed gauntlet you’d face w/ each character. Survival is a fairly typical Survival mode although you don’t regain ANY health OR armor between 1-round matches.

If you use the “f,b,f,b plus PKG” armor blow-off move you’re said to get a bit faster (the FAQ says this too) but it DOESN’T seem to let you then do the “f plus PKG” Super K.O. instant win move–which is only, it says, available when you’ve lost your armor–so I guess that’s when the opponent knocks your armor off for you.

VS mode has vs CPU–& even TEAM vs w/ up to 8 characters per team in 1-on-1 matches; I ran a 8-CPU-vs-8-CPU session which was kind of fun if fairly predictable, although Jane got 2 KOs & the boss DID tilt the outcome in his team’s favor, but not by as much as I would have thought. You have to re-pick characters after each VS so you can’t do uninterrupted endless random VS CPU which is all I really need a fighting game to do–alas.

Internet mode is a web browser thing & the built-in start page w/ thumbnail links to dead sites www.sega-rd2.com/fv2 and www.dricas.ne.jp momentarily had my addled brain thinking I was actually browsing the web & these old sites were gonna still be online. ; D

Tried raising the difficulty–which you can’t do in Gaiden–but it was weird: mashing as Bahn I got right through the first 3 opponents fast–although I suppose w/ a dropped round or 2, but still didn’t see MUCH harder than NORMAL–then hit a brick wall in Picky. But I always have at least some trouble with Picky even on NORMAL.

It’s all just simple mashing fun I shouldn’t over-analyze, I suppose; if I want complicated I should be playing VF. (Although oddly each FV2 character–I think–can do crouch throws & a “b plus PKG” counter-block that then lets you follow w/ P or K OR sidestep–which you can’t do normally (u or d plus PKG).)