simplephysics

The best part about Super Mario on the 64 is the task after the task! Get all the stars and you get to meet Yoshi in person, beautiful. The game really doesn't have to end.

__________________
one font under god

boo boo

96: The decline of digitally synthesized soundtracks

Ok, I'm gonna sound like an old elitist here. But I gotta tell the truth, nothing will ever beat consoles like the NES, SNES and Genesis for classic soundtracks.

In the old days, music composers actually had to program the music using the console's own synthesizer, because they couldn't record it, a lot of these old consoles could support samples, but they sounded like sh*t, so to make both the sound effects and music using the systems built in synthesizer was necessary, back then they were quite primititve, with only around 4 to 8 sound channels. But the music and sound effects were classic. The music for Mario, Zelda, Sonic, Mega Man and many others is an iconic part of video game history. You knew video game music when you heard it, it was distintive and a genre of it's very own, Kojo Kondo was it's Mozart.

And Sonic's soundtracks sounded more like David Bowie's Low than many of the trashy industrial rock bands that album inspired.

But since the rise of pre-recorded music and samples, this golden age has sadly been forgotten by developers (but not fans), sure great soundtracks still exist. But I find many games now just use the same boring cliches over and over, sh*tty nu metal (the new Sonic games for example) or stocky orchestrations that seemed to be left over from a Hollywood action film. That's not video game music.

They should let Brian Eno or Rick Wakeman do video game soundtracks.

__________________
It's only knock n' knowall, but I like it

http://www.last.fm/user/kingboobs

mr dave

as a test don't bother with the code and try both. you'll get further in part 3... because it's an easier game.

the code DID make the original a walk through the park you had to be drunk or disabled to not be able to make it through contra with 90 lives.

the master system might not have sold as much as the NES in its day but it was not obscure or hard to find.

spot on about the combos and currency.

the idea of games absolutely 'needing' endings only really started around the end of the 80s. it was most likely a reaction to the increased PC crap being forced onto anything relating to kids at the time. it was 'detrimental' to their self esteem to actually lose at the game. now the biggest risk of 'losing' at a game is having to reload your last save. it's less like a game and more like an interactive movie the idea of playing with friends for fun seems lost on most developers. at least guitar hero and rockband bucked that current trend.

the generation gap really shows itself with your comment on SMB. i flipped out when i beat that one for the first time. same as all my friends. because it took us weeks or months to finally be good enough at the game to beat it. there was no gamefaqs.com to tell us how to get to the warp zones or which pipes to take in the final castle, no frameskip to slow down the action or save state to never have to restart. there was a sense of accomplishment that is typically lost on most titles that put as much development time and money into a closing cinematic as the actual 'game'.

the original metroid ending wasn't really much more spectacular once you go back to thinking with the head on your shoulders either. it's just the difference of 4 sprites depending on how fast you beat the game.

another big reason those old games didn't have endings was technological limitations. there just wasn't enough memory on the cartridges to handle that. all the other examples you list are from the 16bit generation and up which was a big tech jump from the 8bit days.

__________________
i am the universe

boo boo

Contra (the first one) isn't too hard for me now (but it would be without the code) but when I was a kid it was and that's my main point, the people who played these games back then were kids, and we weren't all like that autistic kid from The Wizard who somef*ckinghow knew where the flute was in SMB3 even though he or no one else had ever played it before.

And I already explained that you get those Metroid endings depending on how fast you beat the game, if you beat it really fast you're rewarded with boobs. Sure it's just an 8/16 bit sprite of a chick in a bikini, but in 1986 it was a giant leap forward from this in pornographic achievement.




So yeah.



I'd hit it.

__________________
It's only knock n' knowall, but I like it

http://www.last.fm/user/kingboobs

boo boo

95: Ridiculously complex passwords

This is something that really only applies to older games, mainly Metroid and Kid Icarus. Why do you need upper case AND lower case letters AND numbers AND question marks and exclamation points? I mean f*cking look at that picture.

It's like they did that on purpose just to be assh*les.

__________________
It's only knock n' knowall, but I like it

http://www.last.fm/user/kingboobs

Piss Me Off

Ooo good one, all i want to do is play the 2nd level straight away, why do i have to go through so much effort?

__________________


Last FM
Rate Yr Music
Muxtape

boo boo

94: People who complain about fanservice

Look, f*cking face it, I still haven't gotten laid, so yeah I'll jerk off to just about anything, even when it's pixelated. Some game developers (Tecmo and SNK in particular) realise this fact and exploit it, I'm perfectly fine with that. Brawl has Mario, Link, Sonic and the well endowed Samus Aran in a body suit which to me = best game ever.

Unfortunately some nerds still deny this reality and think it's insulting to suggest nerds jerk off to sprites, but wasting years of your life taking forum character battles way too seriously? Oh, well that's just fine and dandy.

Sex sells for any media format, and video games allow you to act out any fantasies you want. So if I want to play a game that only consists of chicks with boobs that have their own gravitational force playing sports like volleyball, tug of war, water slide, pool hopping and ass wrestling then that's my right.

I don't need players of Warcraft telling me I have no life.

__________________
It's only knock n' knowall, but I like it

http://www.last.fm/user/kingboobs

mr dave

a little more old guy perspective.

how about the actual ending from 1986 as opposed to the gameboy remake from a few years ago (metroid was also the first game i got with my NES.) you got this ending if you beat it in less than 90 minutes.

this was another game that got the 'OH MY EFFING GOD!!!' reaction upon completion. when is the last time anyone posting in this thread had a reaction like that at the end of a game? i'm actually seriously curious about this.



still wanna hit it?

__________________
i am the universe

boo boo

Yeah, for 86 that was the best 8 bit tits money could buy.

The "OMG Samus is a chick?" factor is what made it a great ending too.

EDIT: That sprite was from Super Metroid, n00b.

__________________
It's only knock n' knowall, but I like it

http://www.last.fm/user/kingboobs

boo boo

93: The decline of the Sonic series and Sega in general

For two decades, Sega's legacy for quality games far outweighted their commercial success. The Master System, Saturn and Dreamcast sold jack sh*t but they were great systems.

Their only true commercial success was the Genesis, thanks in most part to Sonic. When a new Sonic game came out it was worth getting excited about. I don't think any video game character was as big a part of my childhood as Sonic, not even Mario. I watched the cartoons, read the comic book, anything with Sonic. Sonic was the bomb, and his old platformers still stand out as some of the best 16 bit games ever made.

I'm still a Sonic fanboy at heart, I still play Sonic games old and new all the time. Now notice my choice of words in the title, I could easly have said "All the new Sonic and Sega games", but that's the problem, some of the new Sonic games actually are good, if flawed. The Sonic Adventure games were great, the Sonic Advance games were excellent, and some of the newer ones are still decent, but dosen't help a reputation that's been nearly destroyed by sh*tfests like Shadow the Hedgehog and Sonic the Hedgehog (06). I think the real decline in the series began with Sonic Heroes. They had to cram every character in there, and for some reason they have to create a new character for every new game. If you ask me it should just be Sonic (the hero), Robotnik (the bad guy), Tails (the cute sidekick), Knuckles (the antihero) and Amy Rose (the damsel in distress/possible love interest), they all fill the basic character roles and they were the original characters in the series. Shadow is a very popular character with the younger fans though, so unlike everyone else I don't think they should get rid of him, just reinvent him as the evil twin kinda role that he originally had before they turned him into the lame "amnesiac looking for answers" archtype starting with the Shadow game, all this Maria crap dosen't belong in the Sonic universe.

One thing I really hate about the new Sonic games is the canonical changes made starting with Sonic Adventure, for one they changed Dr. Robotnik's name to Dr. Eggman, even though that's what he was always called in Japan it's not the point, in North America we always knew him as Dr. Robotnik, and we won't accept anything else. But one change I really hate is that they changed the setting of the series, since Sonic made his debut, it's been made clear in the western versions of the games that Sonic was the inhabitant of another planet, which the manuals, tv shows and comics all called mobius, and we always accepted that as a canonlical part of the series. Because us Sonic fans grew up on the cartoons and the comic just as much as the games, we embraced the idea that Sonic lived in a planet inhabited only by anthropomorphic furry animals. Then Sonic Adventure changed all that as well, by depicting Sonic's homeworld as none other than present day earth.

Which makes no goddamn sense, when was the last time you seen a bipedal blue hedgehog walking around? That's one thing that makes the new Sonic games so ridiculous, they have him coexisting and reacting with humans (and not the cartoony kind like Robotnik) who don't seem to be too bothered by the fact that he's a GIANT TALKING HEDGEHOG, and Sonic 06 even sunk so low as to formulate a romantic interest between Sonic and a human girl. What the hell? What kind of Sonic game is that? What happened to Princess Sally? She may be a squirrel so it's still interspecies mating, but that's not quite as disgusting as a human bumping uglies with a hedgehog.

Look at this.



Does that look like a Sonic character to you? Well it is.

WHY f*ck with what we grew up with? Changing mobius to earth is like if the writers of DC comics decided right now that Superman is no longer from krypton. It's insulting, I don't care if it was always supposed to be earth in Japan, here in the western world it's f*cking mobius dammit.

Anyway. I could go on about what's wrong with the new Sonic games, but Sonic is not the only thing Sega should worry about, they focus on Sonic too much, that's why theres a new Sonic game almost every couple of months, and because they're rushed they tend to range from being bad games to just very flawed ones, with common problems being bad camera, stiff controls and lame gimmicks. Sega have left so many of their great licenses to rot, Shinobi, Ecco the Dolphin, Alex Kidd, Vectorman, Shenmue. Maybe if they actually focused on games other than Sonic, Phantasy Star, Virtua Fighter, f*cking Monkey Ball and crappy movie tie in games people would actually start paying attention to them again, it also wouldn't hurt if they didn't worry so much about getting Sonic games released for a specific date and actually let the developers f*cking finish them.

I don't know why Sega have lost their f*cking minds in the past few years, the Dreamcast had some damn fine software. So why have Sega dropped the ball as soon as they became a third party developer? It might have a lot to do with Yuji Naka's departure, whatever it is, I wish they would get their act together. Back in the day, Sega were one of the best game developers period, it's shameful to see what they have become.

That being said, I am interested in Sonic and The Black Knight.

__________________
It's only knock n' knowall, but I like it

http://www.last.fm/user/kingboobs