Oh one of the problems with Sword Master is like some PS1 games is it used a different resolution for overmap/battle/menus so each time there was like a 1.5 second screen refresh that would have been instant on a CRT.
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any TV that takes more than 5-10 frames to lock onto an analog signal is made by someone who is bad at their job (imho)
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the PCE uses its main CPU (HuC6280) for 6ch wavetable synthesis - nothing Yamaha or FM
misunderstood! this game uses what appears to be a redbook recording of FM stuff
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can probably get around this with vsync_adjust=0 (triple buffered) in mister.ini, but you add a bit of latency. might be worth it depending on the game - sword master is turn-based, right?
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Sword Master is a CD game, so it can sound like whatever it wants.
I couldn’t find any rips of the music on YouTube, so I downloaded a rip from joshw. Without any context, I don’t know where any of these songs fit in the game, but from a brief perusal some of the track appear to by FM with relatively little in the way of elaboration (mostly tracks 16-23). There are definitely other synths, recorded instruments, vocals, etc. at work in other songs, but I wouldn’t say Rudie is wrong here.
Tracks 7-12 are interesting because they sound like a bunch of variations on riverside/seaside ambience, with very little in the way of melodic content.
It’s an interesting soundtrack.
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Anyhow, I had to open a hex editor and delete the first 512 bytes of the CD system BIOS to get Mesen to recognize it, but here I am playing a game for this thread:
I hear this is a Good One.
(I might switch to another emu because the timing for the CD music feels incredibly off somehow)
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Yes, yes!!!
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switching over to bizhawk, and i am pleased to confirm that yeah my brain wasn’t playing tricks on me — the particular build of mesen i was using was starting the CD tracks like 2 or 3 seconds into the songs for no reason
anyhow, this game appears to be quite nice at first glance. i’ll report back on it later in the week once i feel i got a nice handle on it
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I see your correction. Yeah I was getting at some of these CD games use other systems soundchips. There is at least one quiz game that was absolutely made with the Super Famicom sound chip. It’s weird. Especially for these PCEngine exclusive games. I guess in some form it is a cost cutting measure? Or they switched to the CD midway through development. Pressing CDs was way cheaper than sourcing ram carts!
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There’s always a long play if folks want to sample what we are talking about.
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I finished Nadia of the Blue Water. It was pretty pleasant. I am going to go back to Patlabor and I should go back to Ranma 1/2. These digital comics are good!
The Gunbuster one is still horrible. I tried again and the sound quality is just that attrocious. It’s the only one using FMV style animation and also looks horrible. So bad.
Trying to get into Lords of Thunder and Gates of Thunder. Good games both, but the music I don’t know. I like music with melody. It all has a real background music quality that does not get me bumped. I should ask my metalhead friend to listen to it and see what they think. I think I grabbed the fan-patch that rebalanced the sound for both. The sound effects in the PCECD Lords are really loud in the mix in the original.
Then again the MiSTeR does a lot as is to balance sounds in a way the original hardware didn’t.
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Black Hole Assault
You gotta know that Micronet’s Heavy Nova was a formative game for me. That anime robot intro drilled directly into my brain. I never got very far into it. I still don’t think I’ve ever beaten it. I played it dozens of times as a competitive alternative to Street Fighter.
Finding out years later as an adult there was a sequel excited me. Then I actually played it and went “oh”. It was somehow worse than Heavy Nova. Heavy Nova isn’t good, in fact Tulpa keeps threatening to make it part of Kusoge, and I keep telling them I would cry if that happened and I am not sure what kind of tears.
I played through it tonight on the PC Engine. The cutscenes are all in English! They don’t exactly make any sense, something about a space war and drone warfare not working over 200,000 kilometers. They are well acted including a performance by Peter Griffin, holy crap @lonelyfrontier .
It was fun to cheese the AI and sad when the AI cheesed back. The backgrounds are kind of neat and it was all over in 30 minutes. For some reason this game has an in-game manual? Wow!
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Wondering how Lords of Thunder pce compares to gen/md but I got the impression off shmups dot com/hg101 or thereabouts it’s just darker on sega.
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ShmupJunkie has a whole video about the minute differences.
I got started on the RPGs of 1994, other genres can wait till the month turn over.
AlShark
This is also by the Right Stuff, makers of some other RPG I didn’t care for. All this Right Stuff games are building up to something, hopefully. This is port of a 1990 PC game, and it shows. Back on the PC where you couldn’t waste a button on confirming, so you just bump into people to talk to them, or tables to find healing items.
It’s a real bad port too. Going from town to overworld takes 10-15 seconds. Your party drags behind you and once you have 4 members all movement drags. It’s beautiful. They added cutscenes and voice acting because, PC Engine CD, but all of it has that voice mail quality.
I am now wondering where the “wake up sleepy head” trope first appeared because it shows up here, from a game from 1990, but it isn’t from any of The Good RPGs right? Until Chrono Trigger. So what started it being a bad trope on how to start your RPG? Like Ys and Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest all start with something happening. Why did amateur/worse developers all go “well first you should wake up late for something important, and then tragedy.”
This game supposedly has space travel in it’s future. The previously linked blog of the person playing through all the SFC RPGs (all the way through mind you), and their sidebar to play through PC Engine RPGs made me laugh because even they can’t be bothered to focus on AlShark.
This is where I stopped playing. The story seems potentially interesting and some of the gameplay elements might work, but it just feels like a 1991 game and with the PC Engine I’m not interested in a game where I’m just going to be holding down a turbo button for every fight.
The music is horrible too, if that wasn’t obvious.
The craziest part of this game was your childhood friend finds her dad’s hidden gun so you decide to just use that to kill the monsters outside of town. Which well, casual gun finding is a common American Tragedy. Not a weird story novelty like in Japan.
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dragon quest 3
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I’m BAAAAaaaaack! Sure, I may have a case of ear barotrauma, but that doesn’t mean I can’t enjoy video games. (There are many other reasons why I can’t enjoy video games).
Downtown Nekketsu Monogatari
It’s River City Ransom! They haven’t done much to make things look better, but there’s no flickering anymore. It’s real buttery smooth and so many of the lines are voiced now. I never really played this game before, so I was surprised when the first real tough guy I met beat me up and throw me to the previous screen. That’s so rude! I’m not sure what I would need to do to get past him except grind, so I’m stopping there!
Double Dragon II: The Revenge
Compared to Downtown Nekketsu, this feels like a major step down. It’s different enough with the odd “hit left” “hit right” control scheme, but why can’t Dragon run? I was able to grab an enemy and throw them once. I’m not sure how I did it, but it feels key to the whole exercise, especially if I’m playing alone. Another key to the exercise is kicking baddies off the edge of the screen or waiting by their body to just punch them once they wake up. Dragon has no honor.
Yū Yū Hakusho: Yami Shōbu!! Ankoku Bujutsu Kai
This does not have the opening song and it is not a fighting game! It’s basically a light gun game, having more in common with Operation Wolf than anything else. The problem is, the PC Engine never had a light gun. I just move my cursor around and try to spirit gun people running back and forth. It’s really bad! We never leave this dumb forested beach. Chu barfs before starting his fight with me. I need to get out of here. I need to play on a Genesis now…
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I also played this and thought “the NES version is better, just like everyone says.” The music is really really weird and deserves listening to it while playing a better game, like Streets of Rage.
I did not get to Stage 3, and listening to it now, this owns.
River City Ransom is weird. I only played it last year on the big Techmo collection. I was impressed that you really just wonder around and get into fights and level up and eventually the game is over. I now gotta try the PC Engine version!
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God all these PC Engine music compilations use Level 5 which is the most normal song on the soundtrack. It’s fine, but One Night In Neo Kobe City is the same thing but way better.
Dang Stage 6 is cool.
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Metal Angels
In the future of 2014, competition is decided by young women getting into robots that have boobs to do…something.
See you’re the new coach for a team of 5 girls. You can choose how they train and then you choose one to do an action like “Marathon” or “One on One.” Then you watch some cute animations of them training for the week, including them showering naked at the end of every day. That’s right not one pixel shower girl, but 5!!
Anywho, after the week, nothing happened. You are dumped back to the horrible, mouse cursor menu that reminded me of Destiny right down to confirm constantly moving to a different location. The menu to choose their activities for the week is awful.
It wasn’t ever clear why I was raising their stats or for what purpose. There had been no story. I trained for 4 weeks, just to see if something would happen. No, I just got kicked back to the New Week menu, except now one of the girls was sick and another hated me for working them too hard.
Yeah whatever, keep your secrets game. If you are a game.
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Faussete Amour
Have you ever wanted to play a hornier, stiffer version of Castlevania? The PC Engine has you covered. After watching some risque cutscenes, I started walking to the right and whacking monsters with my chain. Whenever I got hit, my armor would pop off. First, I’d be stripped to my skivvies, then a fully naked corpse. This was motivation enough to never get hit. Walking feels awful, but they added another way to move around. I can strike the ceiling with my chain, swing from it and then launch myself in a rolling ball. That actually feels pretty great. The level design is pretty rough, however, so I don’t think I’m going to be playing anymore of this. There are blind jumps, death pits, and bland enemies. I really don’t want to see the clothes get torn off the protagonist again!
Cotton: Fantastic Night Dreams
I remember when @meauxdal sat me down to try this in Washington. I was pretty overwhelmed by its mechanics then and I’m still overwhelmed now! It’s biggest inspiration is probably Twinbee. There are gems that fall unless I shoot them, but shooting them changes their color. Different colors do different things. Some refill spell ammo; others give me experience points. When I’m presented with so many baubles, I am guaranteed to make risky decisions.
This probably isn’t the version to play. Oddly enough for a PCE Engine game, the colors look washed out and it’s clear that a lot of detail had to be sacrificed to make it work. Still, it’s a better than average shooter on a console that’s full of the genre.
Nexzr Special
Remember that shooter that Rudie hated? Well they made a special Summer Carnival edition and it’s actually very sick. This may be one of the strongest caravan modes I’ve seen in these games. There are all sorts of multi-segmented enemies that score you more points for taking them apart piece by piece. There are spawners that shoot out tiny threats that will also net you more points if you can keep the mothership alive. It’s constantly throwing out different power up options at you, daring you to figure out a loadout that will vacuum up as many points as possible. Unlike Alzadick, this game also includes the full original, so it doesn’t even feel that skimpy in comparison. Good job, Kaneko. I knew you had one last good work in you.
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