I think this is my favorite for the year. I mean, I haven’t actually played it, but everything I hear…sounds like the best game ever.
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This seems so quotable somehow. ^ _^
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Bikkuriman World
Yes, it’s Wonderboy in Monster Land. But this is actually the first console port! It’s preferable to the Master System version in some ways. Movement is smoother, my head doesn’t clip on the top of platforms, and enemies are more varied. But the shopkeeps aren’t nearly as charming. Just look at this one from the SMS and compare it to the ones above:
Also, in the SMS version, bosses die in just a few strikes. That’s a huge help, especially later in the game.
There’s a sidequest where I can visit invisible shops to trade items. Eventually, it leads to getting a huge boost for the final level. I actually locked myself into failing this final level, even with infinite continues, because I had no way of getting another revive potion. I kept hoping one would drop randomly from an enemy but it never happened and there was no way I was going to finish the final dungeon and the last boss on one life.
It occurs to me that the PC Engine had so many Wonderboy-likes in its first year between this, JJ & Jeff, Keith Courage, and Yokai Dochuki. You don’t need to play this one. Yokai Dochuki has gambling and stripteases. That’s the one.
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no-one’s mentioned it yet, and it’s not a suepr intuitive thing, so: if you hold down on the d-pad in yokai dochuuki, you’ll charge up your attack. but if you hold it too long, it blows up and stuns you for a couple of seconds
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Let the record show that I got to 10 million points in Alien crush once again but then choked at the last second and so I did not beat booji again, yet
The 8bitdo PCE controller just arrived, so that will probably put me over the top
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You can also hold down forward and store the charge while walking but I ended up never using this…thanks to rapid fire.
Also cuz it’s awkward.
In the arcade version of Monster Land there’s a bug where you gain more gold by wiggling the stick left and right when you make a coin spawn or something like that. In some Japanese arcades you’ll find that shit mapped to a button. They added that feature to the Switch Sega Ages version and it’s sick as hell. That was another game I was trying to 1CC at the start of the pandemic but never managed…maybe I could do it with Bikkuriman instead…
I’d probably buy a book with reproductions of all the old Bikkuriman stickers…that shit is kinda sick, to me…
Thanks “dizneypins”
Shit, maybe I’d buy some stickers too if I could…
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The designs are sick in sticker form but kinda dumb in these sprites. Guess I’ll need to peek through Bikkuriman Daijikai to see what CD ROM ROM technology will do for them.
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Someday I’m gonna make an 8-bit shopkeeper tier list and you better believe the upper ranks will be very Wonder Boy heavy but so will the mid and bottom tiers, because these games differ in so many key ways!! Such as shopkeepers.
This guy from Dragon Egg…A tier.
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This is a good reminder that my Galaga score is very lonely up there. Still…it’s good to be at the top.
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Well fuck, guess I gotta get back on that anbernic grind.
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i would absolutely buy this book
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Bikkuriman Daijikai
This may interest the people who want more Bikkuriman in their life. I had a lot of fun flipping through this and throwing the dice with the machine translate button. The characters are in trios based on alignment: good, bad, and neutral. Themes include popular fables like Momotaro and Snow White or concepts like TV and studying. Here are a couple of my faves.
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Sort of like how I will say “welcwelc!” sometimes insteadof “you’re welcome” when I’m thanked by someone?
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Jaseiken Necromancer
I kinda dig the music and looks of this game but the encounter rate is wild. There were times when I’d hit a monster with each step, five steps in a row. Every time I killed an enemy, arterial spray would explode out of them. I think only super-talented people were able to make good JRPGs at this era. Dragon Quest III and Saga are all-time greats. But maybe the problem was with devs trying to target older audiences with a hardcore difficulty. Like Phantasy Star II, you could do worse with a first-try, 16-bit RPG.
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PC-E/TG-16 is a consoe i seldom encountered as a kid. when i did, it was usually someone’s older brother who only had a copy of Keith Courage and maybe a sports game, which gives me the impression that most of those folks were eventually scooped up by the Genesis.
anyway, i started getting into PC-E in high school because i was obsessed with Castlevania and wanted to play Rondo of Blood. Super-CD games are really a treasure - i think they accomplish what the Sega CD dreamed of doing, but they actually pull it off a lot of the time.
anyway, here’s the pretty awesome Ryuichi Sakamoto soundtrack for the first Tengai Makyou/Far East of Eden game:
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Are you using some sort of on screen Google lens set up to translate these games?
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i think the mega cd did do a lot of cool stuff, especially in how it brought powers like sprite scaling to the mega drive. but the western press (and to be fair, the us and europe branches of sega) obsessed over fmv to the exclusion of everything else.
and when the fmv games turned out to mostly be embarassing garbage, that focus made the whole system look bad
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I’m using three things to get it to work: Retroarch, ztranslate, and vgtranslate
https://www.libretro.com/index.php/retroarch-1-7-8-ai-service-how-to-set-it-up/?amp=1
I use ztranslate for the API key. It gives me 20,000 queries for free. Retroarch has something called AI service where you can add a hotkey to send a snapshot of the screen to be scanned for text->translate text->send translated text back. Vgtranslate makes it faster I think, idk.
It works well enough for poking around in games. I’m showing off the most intelligible translations, so be aware that there is a lot of nonsense in between. Best case scenario, 90% of it is coherent.
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