Ken Griffey Jr. Presents Major League Baseball always held my interest because of its big beautiful sprites. Now In 2024 I have to ask, is this representation of KGJ racist? Have the makers of this game ever seen a human man at bat? The sprite work is hideous. Just some nightmare stuff.
Ken Griffey Jr’s Winning Run is by Rare?? And has their good good CG all over it. Has a wild I assume David Wise DnB title screen track. KGJ looks normal. It plays a bit better than expected from the British. It does not have the Player’s License so you get names like Manny Baez, T Bone Malone, and Raccoon Davis. It’s all you expect from a new baseball game from 1996. Better than the other one certainly.
i played this a few weeks ago! make a line of ice blocks to make all the blocks melt. if six or more unfrozen penguins are touching, they’ll disappear. flame thingies are junk blocks that disappear when they’re next to disappearing penguins.
it’s not only so boring that i couldn’t get a review out of it, it’s so boring that i didn’t even bother to include it in the monthly patreon-only “other games i playedthis month” post
Metal Warriors: Do I get this game confused with Cybernator, Assault Suits Valken, Front Mission Gun Hazard? YES. I think I mention this every time. Either way this one is by LUCASARTS and you can sometimes be a little guy trying desperately to find an empty mech to pilot. Game owns. Love seeing Lucasarts style lip flaps. Love seeing all the destruction the environment and mechs take. Game seems extremely hard and if I tried to beat it on “real” hardware I’d fail. Fantastic time though.
Minakuchi Engineering did pretty good work with the later Gameboy Megamans, but yeah that just makes X3 more disappointing in context. Rockman Worlds 4 and 5 are excellently crafted, series-reshaping works, whereas almost none of X3’s ideas feel like they made it past the second draft. The opening boss is a grossly inferior take on X2’s giant robot spectacle. The wireframe miniboss is just a test object instead of a cool sword. There’s a bunch of ride armors that don’t do anything. Zero is playable and yet a complete non-entity. etc. etc.
i don’t know how much actual overlap there was in staff between Rockman World 5 and X3 (minakuchi made over 40 games on contract!?), but just the thought of being given an assembly codebase somebody else wrote for a platform i have no working familiarity with and being expected to crank out a mainline sequel in a year as a reward for good job performance sounds like a nightmare scenario to me
(really, it’s kinda amazing at how much less they dropped the ball compared to most of its sequels)
on the other hand, X3 gave us GODKARMACHINE O INARY, so it’s impossible to say if it’s good or bad
I should get to Rockman 5 soonish. I am clearly absolutely trying to put distance between playing multiple games in the same series so the memories stay clean and it isn’t like the 4 times in my life I’ve played all the Valis games in a row and I couldn’t seperate out which game has which without severe effort and 50 American Dollars.
I keep wanting to shout “someone go play Nosferatu” as I am curious if anyone can get anything out of it, but I don’t know that I want to inflict that fate on anyone.
Today was the day. I took my junk SNES Mouse out of its package. I tried to clean it but the ball was locked in with two opposing plastic tabs that you had to push down and then with a mysterious third hand twist to unlock the mechanism. It seemed to work alright.
I think a lot about @VastleCania trying to use the mouse in emulation and snes emulators having no setting to lower sensitivity so they’d just swing the mouse wildly even at the lowest OS sensitivity settings. That’s what inspired Real Mouse Usage.
I skipped on the obvious of Mario Paint, which I will turn around and buy the next time I see it just to use it in real circumstances. I imagine there is nothing for a 40 year old trying Mario Paint in 2024.
So here’s the three Real Games I tried on the Super Famicom
Mario no Super Picross
Unplayable sadly. The mouse support is fine. But there is no way to mark clear tiles, an important part of picross. I actually got out paper to manually map out the 10x10 but realized I was boring myself and I was in a phone call with friends pointing my laptop at a monitor stretching a SVideo signal through a cheap Chinese upscaler (Retroscaler 2X if you can control aspect ratios on your output device works great (I can’t!)) anyways you can’t play Picross with no way to mark clear tiles.
Shanghai 3
I love Shanghai. It was fun. I ran out of time. I actually own two Shanghai carts for SFC. The other is Hello Kitty Shanghai which I probably talk about upthread. It is baby’s first Shanghai. It is very very easy. Shanghai 3 for SFC pretty great. First time playing with a mouse.
Mario and Wario
The centerpiece for the night. I’d be informed this is by Game Freak and has the same composer as Pokemon and he did not do good work. The music is horrible. You choose Mario, Peach, or Yoshi. Wario drops a bucket on their head and just cannot get it off. So they walk forward. You’re a fairy and guide them past traps and enemies and turn blocks on and off. I’ll say again the music was horrible and this particular setup meant my friends couldn’t hear it. I could! It sucked. The game is basic. At this point my arms started to hurt from using a ball mouse for the first time in 15 years as I kept having to pick it up so it didn’t fall off the table. I think this is the first game to have Wario make little Wario sounds and that was nice.
I’ve also been playing through Final Fantasy IV on the real hardware and that deserves its own post but: playing on real hardware in winter sucks because that room is cold. I have to turn the laptop to power the scaler, the monitor, the power strip, and the SFC on to get it to work. Every day I think “this would be easier on the Mister or the ambernic.” This is my burden because I bought this stupid Super Famicom and I am gonna play at least one RPG through on it (and one more next year.)
First off this room is too cold, and being a little goblin in the office chair is no good for my back. Just want to play on the mister…but I gotta punish myself.
Sad most of the forum won’t read this post where I respond to all the comments about Final Fantasy IV as I play the original release In Japanese, on original hardware. For one it is so fast to get into the game, thank you for that. The game itself is so fast. Most dungeons have maybe 10 fights. There’s a plot twist and an event every 20 minutes in this game. It just buzzes through.
I thought Cecil and Rosa have sex in the opener!! They don’t. Cecil is too sad for having done a war crime.
Y’all were right the characters-mechanically never get to shine. You see the blue-prints of later SFC Squaresoft and how successful they’ll be. This is rougher, more imbalanced and half-finished. I like that though. You and the game are just skirting by. Tonight I got stuck at the return of Rydia when Golbeeza instantly killed her 3 times in a row. The 4th time he actually decided to focus on Cecil and I’d checked a guide to focus on hitting him and not reviving my party.
Modern and later games would have A Right Answer instead of A Question and An Answer. Final Fantasy is usually very good about “yeah whatever.”
Oh boy the writing in this game. It is not for Japanese beginners strangely. I wonder how many kids understood what the hell is going on. I’m not sure if it is a dialect I’m unfamilar with or like Ye Ole Timey (more likely), my level is just barely catching everything. It is interesting where-ever possible they are using Japanese names for stuff. He isn’t a Dark Knight he is an Ankokusenshi. Summoner is an S word I haven’t really paid attention too. It is Kuro and Shiro Mahou. Some word for Airship I can’t remember. Kind of neat to be presented with a dangerous hiragana word and have to backparse it to Red Wings.
Luckily I’ve played quite a few old RPGs in Japanese this year and this is absolutely the most baffling to read moment to moment! I actually played a few hours of FF1 and that was easier. I could understand everyone in SaGa. It’s like the game is in heavily slanged Singlish. I’m getting 40% and have played the game twice before so I kind of get it.
There’s quite a few parts where the sprites expressive-ness has impressed me. Especially compared to trash like To The Moon. They’ll have one character move a single tile and it’ll mean something!
Had to look up an english longplay to understand why exactly Cid suicide-bombed right after Yang locked-himself in to do uh…something to the canon control room; kaboom.
The Woodsley translation didn’t help because I think it doesn’t make any sense. They just decided needed more characters to die so invented an excuse. You remember Palom and Parom and Tera and Rydia getting lost. I do not remember these two deaths. I also don’t remember Edge At All.
Feel like they went “What if 4 more crystals but actually not um…”
I didn’t even put together the Tower of Babel I went into twice. Had to stare at the gamefaqs maps for about 10 minutes to realize “Oh same place I guess? Wait why am I here?”
And mad scientist character with Frankenstein, sure okay. Weren’t doing Sailor Moon/saint Seiya style-monster-of-the-week with brooding villian for the first half of this game? Who are all these characters now? What?
That the game is very fast and whatever was going to catch up to itself eventually.
While FF2US is commonly attributed to Woolsey, it was actually translated by Kaoru Moriyama and two other Japanese people. Ted’s Wikipedia article makes it sound like Square just picked whoever in their offices knew English well enough to handle the translation.
Ted’s earliest credited role is for the translation of FF Mystic Quest, which actually has a pretty decent script all things considered.
I did it folks I beat Final Fantasy IV. I had to cheat because my party was vastly underleveled and got one shotted by the Final Boss. But this is a Real Cartridge with two other end of game saves. So I used one of those and got one shotted by the Final Boss. Load up run from every battle up to the Boss, yell because for some reason run is not working ever. I watch the prefight sequence for a third time while listening to Michael Jackson’s “Starting Something.” Song ends, sequence is still going on.
This time the Boss does not instantly murder me so I could play the game. By which I mean I threw 10 Excaliburs at the fucker.
I also bought a Super Game Boy and Mario Paint today at a very lovely last game store that did not have any Game Gear games in box, dang it! I mean they did, but I want one as an aesthetic object and I’m not paying 4000 yen for that (yet.) So I guess I’ll play some Mario Paint tomorrow to close out The Year Of The Super Famicom.
Cone back next year when I playthrough: Dragon Quest II, Estopolis 2, Mother 2??, Final Fantasy V, and Romancing SaGa. Yeah on real hardware!! (No I should go back to playing games on my sofa where it is much more comfortable.)
it’s interesting because it’s very garish and in-your-face, moreso than most SNES tracks which tend to have a bit of “muffle” to them (this is usually due to low sample bitrate). as a set of videogame background music i don’t think these are going to hit right for nearly anyone. they are too honkin’ and blarin’, the melodies too disjointed, the rhythms bizarre.
so, in the context we are discussing, the intended thing; literal background music to this pretty simple game, i can agree it doesn’t work
but i also think it is one of the more fascinating and intriguing soundtracks i’ve heard on the platform in awhile. unpredictable! and honestly, being unpredictable on a console i’ve heard literally hundreds of soundtracks from is definitely something.
this one has some really sick (both in the sense of “cool” and “possessing disease”) rhythms to it and is my favorite from the OST:
Sugoi Hebereke okay this is actually competitive. It’s like top down single screen 4 player Smash Bros. It’s simple. Reminds me of towerfall and capsule force and all those indie games that should have been released in a six month window not a 4 year period. We definitely played enough rounds to have an opinion about it. It looks good but lots to have weather effects and fog so you can’t really see anything.
Sunset Riders: obviously I should have played the Konami Cowboy game before. I actually haven’t. Not seriously. It’s a good confusing time. Difficult for us-half-paying attention how to dodge bullets. The genesis version has prostitutes.
Twinbee Rainbow Adventure SONIC ON YOUR SNES. You can play co-op. The giant problem is the game constantly switches who the camera is following. It can’t decide so it really is a one player game. The behind player will eventually teleport but you have a rocket jump. The bosses seemed kind of trash. Bright beautiful, probably great in single player. We couldn’t get annoyed at each other but were definitely getting annoyed at the game being unable to make up it’s mind on who to follow. This was also a huge problem when we later played the PC Engine Super CD version of Bonk 3. That made the-behind player feel sick because of camera bob.
Pop’N Twinbee owns. As good as it gets. Trying to explain the bell system with a partner. Impossible. So bright and beautiful though.
