i’m actually the same here! i had an amiga and sometimes had access to a c64 as a kid, but i don’t know anything about the spectrum or the cpc (there’s lots of other computers from that time, but the ones listed here are the main players)
i know about the msx from emulation, but i always think of it more as a japanese system than a european one.
this is a little odd to me, actually. i know it was different in american with sony america being very restrictive of what got released, but the ps2 was something of a wild west in europe and japan. i always call it the vhs of videogames, since there was a ps2 in every home, and it had such an incredibly huge library with all kinds of niches being filled alongside the big money blockbusters and the other mainstream stuf
I think the point is that there are far fewer of those on the SNES, though. this has been aderack’s main bugbear forever, and he can make the argument much more eloquently than I can, but for whatever reason – cheaper SRAM, the codification of Nintendo’s big fanchises, etc. – there are a lot fewer cool, experimental game designs in the SNES canon compared with the NES.
[quote=“aderack, post:36, topic:2473, full:true”]
I guess I mean to say that the experience of the NES is one of uncertainty. The system is like a Schrodinger’s Box. Nothing is clearly defined except in the moment of experience – a moment that for all you know may never be recaptured.[/quote]
I’d rephrase this a bit – this is really a tension. Videogames by nature have clear and predictable rules, they are a system. The experience of playing, especially, SMB1, is a learning process of these rules. The seeming chaos and mystery at the edge that appeals to you, is appealing precisely because everything you’ve seen in the center is so predictable and rule-bound. But, one realizes at some level that this too is part of the machine, this seeming chaos too has a deeper predictability. It hints at the true rules behind the superficial intended rules of the game designer.
Sky Kid is good although I guess it is a port! Magic of Scheherezade and Faria both for clanky sprawl feelings. Faria also has a very good joke early on. Atlantis no Nazo seems like very pure uncut abstract endless mystery ruin thing but I never put aside time to get into it. I guess Doki Doki Panic is included in the Mario games now but I kind of wonder if it’s better played with the original characters as way of emphasising the gormless fever dream aspect of the entire game… Like it’s one thing if Mario invades a pyramid and steals keys from an ominous mask but another thing if it’s just some historyless videogame witch lady… I guess there was some horrible blackface shit in the original though so nvm. Definitely seconding Legend of Kage as well.
I have a completely unverified feeling that Esper Dream 2 is really good…?? I also got really into the Fist of the North Star game one day just because it has that really slow, dogged battering-ram quality old action games are good for and the graphics 100% fit that mood.
The inscrutability of the NES black box was offset for me by the accessibility of running the cartridges. I remember playing old C64 games at around the same time and the witchcraft you had to perform just to get anything to appear on the screen (even if it then immediately froze or demanded you insert disc 3) made the entire enterprise feel very provisional and unreplicatable. Cart games were labyrinths, discs were like collections of sealed and discontinuous rooms that you had to smash through basically at random.
Yeah, I’m pretty sure that’s how most game developers on the NES felt. Not really satisfied with what they could do with limitations, feeling their original ambitions were compromised, wanting to do something more like was eventually produced on the SNES.
So, it strikes me that the glorification of the weird and chaotic is dismissive of the intent and ambitions and ideas of the game designers. It’s precisely valuing what the designers did not value, the accidental and the in tension with the plan. It’s treating NES and PS1 games almost as found art.
I wonder if the way of achieving on purpose a NES-style experience in this sense again would be to work with constricted, difficult materials again. Not just by setting a technically-inspired aesthetic like a Mega Man 9 or VVVVVV whose details can and are ignored at will, but actually working within technical limitations. Let your ambitions push outward against the limitations and see what creative workarounds you can find, just as they did in the 80s. I know there’s a small community around making actual NES games and actual C64 games, I wonder if they’ve produced anything interesting I haven’t noticed.
The Genie was a glitch machine, that you plugged into your Box of Uncertainty. This is some kind of alchemy. Later systems just don’t feel as analog as this. The Genesis, a little.
We entered a code into the Game Genie incorrectly once after plugging in ToeJam and Earl, and we were just trapped in that first elevator, for ever and ever. The memory is still kind of terrifying…
Yeah, absolutely. What I’m describing is the impression. Which is significant, as NES games are so impressionistic. What you describe is a concept I ruminated over for years before exploring it a little in Builder…
And yeah, I used RSD Game-Maker for just the reasons you get into: it’s a hugely limited closed box that, with some ingenuity, you can bend to achieve all manner of unintended things. I was familiar with it, and was curious how it could be bent to do something relevant. So, I built tenuous things then focused on the unavoidable glitches as a system leading the adventuresome into enlightenment.
I think you’re leaning towards willful mischaracterization in the service of mysticism. A deliberate misinterpretation of what you probably understood even as a child to be a deterministic and soulless machine, so you can experience a slightly forced sense of wonder.
Some appreciation along these lines is fine as far as it goes, but I think we also should not shut out the parts of the experience that put the lie to this, but appreciate the NES as it is. I think the misleading impression should be kept in balance with the fact that the NES is one of the easiest to understand and predict videogame consoles, if you stop being obscurantist and analyze what’s happening. What lies at one end of a path of appreciation of what the Game Genie is doing is a rather dry sort of technical knowledge. And I think actually it’s this tension between the machine and the human that really gives digital glitchiness its value, after all this is an electronic box we’re appreciating not a Buddhist temple.
It may be tempting to dismiss this reading as disrespectful or revisionist or something, but this was exactly what I appreciated at the time: the terrifying lip of the void between every two glowimg pixels. It was like an early John Carpenter movie. Whether it’s what the authors intended or not, the fabric of the medium creates an expressive and an interpretive context. And working within that comtext creates certain implications within the discussion, certain assumptions. The tension here between what is being created and the void against which it is set, and the clear fragility of the former against the latter, is enthralling in the way a silent horror movie is enthralling. It’s like, this shouldn’t exist. It barely does. It has to fight so hard just to present itself, and it does it so confidently… until you start to pick at the seams. And then out pour the nightmares of all mankind.
Super metroid was entertaining and I really enjoy and appreciate everything about it, but I’ll always feel like I own every moment of the first metroid because making progress felt like such an accomplishment. Also, it didn’t have to use any setpieces or gimmicks to maintain a sense of pace
You can replace “metroid” with every nes/snes game ever actually
I mean… probably not, they are rather similar as the NES version is basically a straight down-port of it. I don’t think the arcade version has the power-ups present in the NES version, and I like the simpler rendition of the game theme. The one thing I would give to the NES version is that since your character sprite is smaller your jump seems so much more ridiculous, which is a good thing.