Games You Played Today VIII: Journey of the Cursed Poster

[smbhax]

Tecmo Bowl (NES)

The original, PRG0 version of Tecmo Bowl for NES has the older, circular black Nintendo seal on cart label; it was replaced that same year by PRG1 aka “REV A” with the updated white oval Nintendo seal–Indianapolis star running back Eric Dickerson had himself replaced over a licensing dispute with the NFLPA.

So I’m trying to play as his Indy. : D Was getting crushed trying my silly run defense blitzing as outside lineman that worked well as LA in the SNES Super Tecmo Bowl (1993) PS3 remake “Tecmo Bowl Throwback.” Finally found lower LB 50 BICKETT (thought he was a CB since he’s placed on the lowest wing position!) with his “SACKS 12” stat (later Tecmo football games DON’T show the most important player stat–sacks for defenders, rush yards for running backs, receptions for receivers, etc–under the current player’s name; but it was quite handy here for IDing the top player!); Bickett can cover a large swath of the field, turned my defense around; at first I was blitzing with him, but at best that leaves at least one receiver wide open and at worse left us super-vulnerable to long runs, so I switched to dropping back in coverage where I could prevent huge yardage plays and and also get interceptions.

Couldn’t always break things open with Dickerson (maybe starting to mash A continually helped in not getting grabbed in the first place, though?) so resorted to passing now and then, threw a pick-6,

eventually got a bit better at it; one pass has Dickerson as an outlet option!

Sweet. In this game, passes seem to go either totally wild–especially if you’re moving while throwing?–or right to the receiver; in later games, they can just get dropped, or miss by a bit or something, which seems pretty frustrating : P–whereas here they’re almost always caught by SOMEONE on one of the teams. ; )

No 2-point conversion! This game came out in '89, and the NFL didn’t adopt the 2-point conversion–from college football–until '94; Tecmo Super Bowl II: Special Edition and Tecmo Super Bowl III: Final Edition (SNES, Gen) have 2-point conversions; I don’t like the increased complexity of the later games though, and maybe it’s nice to be less corporate here without the NFL team license, so you’ve just got 12 city-named teams

with weird logos (Cleveland snakes!

Pink Seattle!). ; D And the tiny little tunes in this game are pretty much all AMAZING. Anyway I nearly had a miracle comeback from horrible defensive play–thought I had it, in fact, but my math was off by one, that’s how smart I am. ^ _^

My eyeballs appreciate that this game doesn’t have (sub-screen) flashing FX on kicking extra points, etc–NES Tecmo Super Bowl has those. Also the players here are much bigger on-screen, and much less flickery–even if there are only 9 of them on field per team, vs 11 in the later games.

Playing on the arcade stick felt a little loose and eventually started irritating my right shoulder–maybe from all that A button mashing. ; D It’s definitely one of those games where it feels made for keeping the thumb ready over B while hitting A with mid-thumb. But I hadn’t been able to get my DS4 working wirelessly in Mesen; later I installed DS4Windows, that got it working! I’ll go pad next time; that has the nostalgia vibes for me anyway from probably largely imagined memories of trying to play back in the day ^_ ^; I mean, my family had the game–probably the Dickerson-free revision with the white Nintendo seal, since we got an NES relatively late–but I don’t think I actually spent a TON of time playing it back then. The music definitely stuck in my head though so maybe I watched/listened to my brother playing it a lot.

Might be too easy now that I’ve found Bickett? But if memory serves, the attraction was in just how lopsided a score you could run up. ; ) Seems to be the case in the later games as well.

[LaurelSoup]

Forcing you to get cozy with the autoexec.cfg unless you were using a fancy launcher was kind of a nice touch

[username]

My main/only memory of Stalker is dying on the first fight outside the camp (some people ask you to help them take on some people in a house or something nearby) repeatedly, never figuring out what exactly I was doing wrong despite trying several different things, then uninstalling. I assume that is realistic in the sense that is what almost certainly what would happen if i were to be dropped into such a situation, but it would have been nice to be able to see literally any of the game.

[Rudie]

[Mr_Mechanical]

I played through GTA IV on Series X. I said it was running in 4K in another thread but it’s actually still at 720p like the original 360 version. So it was a bit rough looking on a 4K display but the Series X is able to brute force its unlocked frame rate up to a stable 60 fps so that was nice. I don’t think I was able to get it to 60 when I played it on PC over a decade ago.

I like GTA IV so much I started up The Lost and Damned to keep the good times rolling. That game uses the same graphical filter as IV which makes the game blurrier than it would look without, because Rockstar really loved their visual filters back then, but thankfully The Ballad of Gay Tony ditched it which made that game look a lot sharper despite being the same resolution as the base game. Looking forward to playing that again too. It’s been a long time since I went back to these.

[scratchmonkey]

@username

My main/only memory of Stalker is dying on the first fight outside the camp (some people ask you to help them take on some people in a house or something nearby) repeatedly, never figuring out what exactly I was doing wrong despite trying several different things, then uninstalling. I assume that is realistic in the sense that is what almost certainly what would happen if i were to be dropped into such a situation, but it would have been nice to be able to see literally any of the game.

This is the hardest bit of the entire game, because all of your weapons are shit. You’ve got to play it incredibly conservatively, and let your friends do as much of the work as possible, and even then, abusing quicksave is probably going to be necessary (at least when playing it for the first time).

[iguferon]

The whole game is abusing quicksave it’s not illegal to do it!!! Also if you play on the easiest difficulty you can take shotgun blasts and instantly stop bleeding lol, there’s a lot of ways to ease into the game as you can change the difficulty at any time and contrary to popular belief playing on lower difficulties does not make your guns less accurate, unfortunately you’re always a possibly brainwashed amnesiac who is recovering from being half dead and got those shaky hands. Treat it like elder scrolls, be a little patient with the games more slavic design tendencies and you’ll enjoy it a lot more.

[iguferon]

Daphny also didn’t ragequit at the electra tunnel which is a sign of a true stalker already, it makes me proud, can’t wait for their trip to the agroprom >:)

[hellojed]

favorite part of stalker is how god damned hard it is to get ammo and keep ammo. i hung onto old guns longer than i should because i had bullets for them. this game makes every shot count, which creates an incredible amount of tension

[iguferon]

I like showing people the hidden cache in bes’ scrapyard that has like literally 800 9x19 rounds and then watching them completely go through that within the next half hour of gameplay

[tacotaskforce]

There was an infuriating window in the early 90s when “KBorM” was just how games were made. Might & Magic 3 for some reason thought that players would want to use the mouse to click on on-screen buttons, but would not want to combine that with using keyboard shortcuts.

[hellojed]

Tetris DX (GBC)

Finally learned how to T-spin. the game sands a few of the rough edges off GB tetris and adds a nice bit of color and variety. This era of GB games have a vibe that’s hard to pin down, but it has vibrant colors and slightly more varied music.

[Rudie]

I really gave myself a surprise when I put my ps2 in storage 9 years ago:

MX4SIO and McFreeBoot work fantastic. Excellent use of 20 bucks on amazon (as a christmas gift). Just plug and play. According to the spreadsheet FFX shouldn’t work but it was on this SDCard and I tried it. It is some kind of hacked version because it had a splash screen before it started. Turns out FFX is way better with Japanese voices. It’s wild playing games off my memory card slot. There is mild stuttering from cutscenes and maybe the loading is slightly longer but who cares? I am playing on composite cables on an HDTV if I wanted to watch cutscenes I’d open youtube.

I feel like Blockbuster is open and every mediocre PS2 game is at my fingertips. Not sure how mich to trust the mcfreeboot with save data but who knows how long I’d play any of this. Anyways gonna go make a thread because I Am A Thread Maker. Remember your promise if you took a patch from Needmore.

[Tuxedo]

Fire Emblem Engage

I’m a RETVRN to Simple Fire Emblem person, I’ve always seen the purity of the NES + GBA games as the best thing about them: no skills, just positioning and attacking that’s it. But the series has crossed the rubicon and cannot go back, so you have to manage incomprehensible battalions and pair all your characters and have to deal with skills with a low chance of ignoring magic defense.

FE Engage sort of tries to have it both ways by keeping things very simple at first, but then adding rings, each containing an earlier FE protagonist that can be temporarily fused into, with access to a whole bunch of skills and weapons.

In theory the very slow trickling of new rings (about 1 every 2 battles) would mean having enough time to digest how each new one works slowly and organically. In practice I saved them for difficult fights and didn’t need them then (On hard/classic difficulty) and didn’t really want to bother anyway.

Until Chapter 17 which had a bunch of difficult enemies + 5 whole bosses at once on one map. I got overwhelmed, wound time back and had to look at each of these damn rings and learn about all these damn skills. Turns out they’re great + fun, you can create near impenetrable defensive areas, freeze bosses in place, bait bosses from afar, have all your adjacent allies get an extra turn, shoot a water cannon, create 4 1HP clones around you , etc etc. The learning process wasn’t even that big of a deal since each ring usually only has One Big Skill I had to learn, the rest being little bonuses I didn’t need to worry about. It was the most memorable part of the game despite me almost dropping it entirely there.

The game opened quite nicely then, plus all the cool people joined around that point too. When I did finish the game in Chapter 26, I didn’t want it to end, which doesn’t happen often with long AAA games anymore.

After finishing the game I loved to go watch tier lists that all said « your favorite characters are all garbage » fuck you

The most baffling thing about this game is the excess :

• After battle you can explore each map as a 3D space that’s 1000000x more beautiful than the new dragon quest monsters, you can talk to your people and recruit dogs and camels, this has barely any use
• Each character has 3 short conversations with each emblem (36 total per character not including DLC, x 36 characters) Only people from your active team are going to see them, so I assume you’re going to see around 40 conversations in one 50 hour playthrough out of 36x36 = 1296 total not including DLC
• After every battle you can sleep in your bed and an ally will wake you up for a short conversation… There are 6 different events for each ally depending on whether you skip through the convo to wake up early or not, x35 non-main characters (not including DLC) there’s a youtube video with all the events and it’s 2 hours long, and all these events are voiced, and all the dialogue is filler
• There’s a Panzer Dragoon minigame

[smbhax]

Savage Warriors (PC/Steam)

A 1995 MS-DOS fighting game by French developer Atreid Concept–later Kalisto Entertainment–running through DOSBox with no controller support and misconfigured–at least for my system–DOSBox sound and video settings. Fortunately there are ways to fix those problems.

Not sure the developers understood some basic elements of Street Fighter-style 2D fighting, like that a stand block shouldn’t also block low, or that you shouldn’t be able to block a throw.

Special moves use meter, which regenerates on its own. No time limit. Everyone has the same amount of health. One punch button, one kick button–actually they do a decent job of getting a lot out of those. Most damaging attack is the jump kick. I don’t think there are any anti-air moves, particularly. Each character has a single, fixed jump arc; some characters have larger arcs, which can make landing their jump kicks really tough if the AI opponent takes a step or two forward, since the jump covers most of the screen–so you’re constantly overshooting, and they can turn around faster than you and hit you in the back after you land.

If the AI is going ham on you it’s kinda bad with the delay and I just had to block or get annihilated. Eventually they stop and sometimes just sit there until you hit them. After being unable to land much on the boss with the long-jumping character, after many frustrating losses where at best they chipped away at me with tick damage, I was finally able to beat them when they went into a state where they just looped a jump in attack at me as I turtled in the corner; I could get a sweep kick in after they jumped.

On the other hand, with the street tough boxer/brawler MeatBall, I obliterated the boss in seconds by looping his wide sweep kick, which seemed both to knock down and hit OTG, or maybe just as they tried to stand, repeatedly. This was all on Easy difficulty. = P

The 2D art and animation is really good, 3D not so good.

3D fighter animations are mostly pretty bad, and they feel all kinds of slow and janky, with moves hard to input and very delayed; potentially at least partially a DOSBox thing, dunno. The sound is bad, even after correcting the bad DOSBox settings.

You can toggle between regular low-res 16:10 resolution and “SVGA” (that’s what the FAQ called it) 16:10 resolution.

And they drew the 2D backgrounds–which have animated 2D elements in them, like squirrels running along tree branches, rippling leaves and water, etc–TWICE because you can also toggle between side view and an isometric view!

Plus a mostly hand-drawn low-res 2D intro, and brief generic hand-drawn ending in which a close-up hand-recolor and then your character drawn doing the same dramatic post are pasted in. No story, aside from the scenes in those animations, where people from various real/fantasy cross-time Earth civilizations are teleported to a beach by a Skeletor rip with a magical chest gem. There are little bios on the characters’ backgrounds.

Typing “cheat” on the main menu permanently activates a cheats menu;

typing more codes in there populates it with codes, like a tiny fighters mode,

being able to set fights to one round (thank goodness!), disabling weapon disarming, enabling endless power meter, etc.

Here’s the guide I submitted to Steam on fixing the controller, sound, and video issues:

fixing controller, sound, video

Controllers

The game does not have controller support, and it can be tricky to get controllers working in DOSBox. However, if you click the “View controller settings” link in the “Controllers not supported” box of the game’s Steam Library page, you can enable Steam Input, and use the Steam Input setup to map the game’s keyboard keys (arrow keys, Enter, Right Shift, Esc, F10) to your controller.

Sound and Video

You can set some sound and video settings for DOSBox using a utility that installs along with the game: click the green PLAY button on the game’s Steam Library page, then pick the “Launch Controller Layout Tool” option.

However, I found that with the included configuration files, on my system the game ran at a too-narrow aspect ratio, and had jarring-sounding sounds, coming mostly from the left speaker.

The too-narrow aspect ratio of the menus and gameplay screens–they are actually 16:10 widescreen, but are being forced to non-widescreen 4:3–can be fixed by unchecking the “Keep aspect ratio” box under the “Advanced Settings” tab in the Controller Layout Tool, or by replacing the default DOSBox settings the game installs with the settings listed below, which also correct the sound.

On my system at least, I corrected the sound and video issues by replacing the contents of the three .conf files installed with the game, by default in

C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Savage Warriors

with the following:

[sdl]
fullscreen=true
fulldouble=false
fullresolution=desktop
windowresolution=original
output=overlay
autolock=true
sensitivity=100
waitonerror=true
priority=higher,normal
mapperfile=mapper-0.74-3.map
usescancodes=true

[dosbox]
language=
machine=svga_s3
captures=capture
memsize=16

[render]
frameskip=0
aspect=false
scaler=normal2x forced

[cpu]
core=auto
cputype=auto
cycles=max
cycleup=10
cycledown=20

[mixer]
nosound=false
rate=44100
blocksize=1024
prebuffer=25

[midi]
mpu401=intelligent
mididevice=default
midiconfig=

[sblaster]
sbtype=sb16
sbbase=220
irq=7
dma=1
hdma=5
sbmixer=true
oplmode=auto
oplemu=default
oplrate=44100

[gus]
gus=false
gusrate=44100
gusbase=240
gusirq=5
gusdma=3
ultradir=C:\ULTRASND

[speaker]
pcspeaker=true
pcrate=44100
tandy=auto
tandyrate=44100
disney=true

[joystick]
joysticktype=auto
timed=true
autofire=false
swap34=false
buttonwrap=false

[serial]
serial1=dummy
serial2=dummy
serial3=disabled
serial4=disabled

[dos]
xms=true
ems=true
umb=true
keyboardlayout=auto

[ipx]
ipx=false

[autoexec]
@echo off
mount c .\GAME
imgmount d SAVAGE.CUE -t iso
config -securemode
C:
CLS
cd WAR
WAR
exit

[lonelyfrontier]

it’s christmas in phantasy star online!!! double experience for the holidays, but i still need to get that sweet rare loot.

[extrabastardformula]

Curse of Monkey Island

It’s not logical but I hate the whippy whippy spiral shaped clouds. They made me hate a lot of the graphics on the remaster of Monkey 1 and they make me hate this one.

The voice work is great though and the music is too. The jokes land pretty well, even when they are very adventure game type jokes.

[iguferon]

I’ve spent a not insignificant portion of my life thinking about sidor talking about lovers of the wonderful.

[iguferon]

My bethesda destabilization field is attacking Cyberpunk 2077 very severely

[iguferon]

@daphaknee

i love all the AI in this game

I have immense respect for the fella most responsible for the A-Life system that makes STALKER so special because he’s busy doing this right now in addition to being really talented