Lurker > WazzupGenius00

Hes not wrong about there being something intriguing about Dirty Harry but he still rated that shit way too high. Its definitely no Dynowarz: The Destruction of Spondylus.

EXPLODED in laughter when the Rad Gravity theme just suddenly started blasting

The secret to this song is that if someone performed it live it would be fucking sick. Ive seen one video of a live performance but they played it at like half speed

Spiritual Warfare is definitely decent, Ive beaten it once or twice. Look up the last boss fight, it has a freaky animation every time you hurt it. If it had more music than just the same three hymns looping over and over it would go a long way toward making the game more tolerable. Even if you didnt want to make original music there are plenty more hymns out there

He was basically the Data East mascot, appeared in a decent number of their games. Though I guess the next question would be have you even heard of Data East

I don't care about the NES versions (there are actually two of them) but I have a lot of respect for the arcade version of Rainbow Islands just because of how deep the secrets go in that game. And unlike other games that were popular for their secrets like Tower of Druaga, there are actually hints for many of them in RI

I think most people consider Super Hydlide for Mega Drive to be good. And honestly while I agree it's a bad game, Virtual Hydlide is at least interesting and worth looking at. It was built on a golf game engine for christ's sake! I've never played them but I bet at least some of the computer versions were better than the NES port too

Robowarrior is like all of that Super Pitfall/Milon's Secret Castle type bullshit of "just try hitting every wall until one reveals the thing you absolutely need to progress" but made even worse since it's top-down. It's the thing people who've never actually played Zelda 1 think Zelda 1 is

Robowarrior, is that the weird Bomberman spinoff one

Maybe we get Dragon Power today in honor of Toriyama

Im blaming it on the Game Scent

its fine to not like Warios Woods, but like half of his criticisms of it were fucking nonsense

The Famicom came out in 1983, its hard to say that a game in 1990 isnt late in the systems life. Theres just an unusually high amount of games for it in the late period. (Though looking at the PS4 now, maybe not all that unusual anymore.)

Jeff is right about the level design sensibilities of Western game developers during this period but I think M.C.Kids is one of the least offensive versions of it. The levels are big, but not horribly mazelike as often happens in Euro platformers.

Dr Mario does not have enough going on to be interesting or fun. Its not quite Yoshi levels of boring, it at least has a couple of advanced techniques you can go for but theres not much to it. I think most people who are big fans of the genre rank this one pretty low.

One thing Jeff didnt find that might helpif you collect the same letter sequence (btw it is a and b, not l and b) while you still have the robot from the first set active, you will transform into a robot yourself, during which time you cannot be hurt (getting hit reduces your invincibility time though)

Theres a chance we get a remake of Shatterhand somewhere down the line herea group of the original development team at Natsume Atari (not to be confused with Natsume Inc, the former US branch which split from the company in 1995 to become its own publisher)(also not to be confused with Atari, whom they are entirely unrelated to) came together to form TENGO PROJECT and have remade a bunch of their old titles with more detailed pixel art, improved gameplay, new levels/characters, etc. So far they did several of their SNES games (Wild Guns, The Ninja Warriors Again, Pocky & Rocky) but now theyve moved on to NES and are about to release a remake of Shadow of the Ninja. Shatterhand could very well be next after that.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0cZrjELizNo

00:00:00 - Intro
00:03:42 - The Legend of Kage
00:25:50 - Golf
01:00:27 - Shatterhand
01:27:45 - KickMaster
02:42:10 - Gyruss

Any day where you play Shatterhand and Kick Master back to back is gonna be a good day

We're still front-loading too many good games though. Shine I need you to nominate a Koei simulation game or something. We need Jeff to play L'Empereur

Imagineering just kept reusing the same sound effects in every game they made. Though that's a different jump sound than they usually used, it's still a sound effect I recognize from Bart Vs. The World.

Once you get the powerup that makes you immune to bombs, the rest of the game is just going through the motions as you instantly detonate bombs every possible frame

if the game cut the first four or five levels and just started you with those levels powerups it would be a lot better

Intro is correct, he needs to start sprinkling in more of the sports and strategy games, the patrons have frontloaded too much of the good stuff

Isquen posted...

Skate or Die 2 (it's obvious when a sound designer for a game used to primarily work on the C64.)

It's Rob Hubbard, one of THE C64 composers

I ultimately agree with Jeff that original RC Pro-Am is better, but some of his criticisms of 2 made no sense. Like he kept talking about item distribution on the track, but its not any different from the first game in that regard.

Dynatron is a real drag

Bionic Commando has one of the most incredible moments in any 8-bit video game that I have no idea how it got past Nintendos compliance checks before release, especially considering all the other things they -did- have to change in the game

Also the grapple really does feel good and cool when you use it well

I hate Wizards & Warriors so much, I hate the annoying 3 second long music loops, I hate the controls, I hate the gameplay mechanics, I hate the level designs, and I hate that fucking two-inch sword swing. Can't understand why that game is loved as much as it is. It was too early for Nintendo Power so it's not because it got a bunch of coverage there or anything, though the sequels showed up there of course.

Watching the new one live, I think we might have a new #1 on our hands
https://www.twitch.tv/jeffgerstmann

If Kid Klown was zoomed out a bit I think it would instantly be way better than it currently is. The player is both too big on the screen and moves too fast relative to the size of the screen.

The thing where the bottom of the table is visible at all times while the rest scrolls is a technical feat

Radix posted...

never heard of buglebay. didnt look good but boy that is some good audio

Raid on Bungeling Bay is mostly only significant as the game will wright made before simcity, that made him want to make simcity. This version was one of the early hits on Famicom though, over a million sold in Japan. (Pre-Super Mario Bros. games on Famicom often sold way higher than they really deserve in hindsight.)

This is maybe outside the true scientific method of this project, but I am also not super high on this version of Tetris because there are at least five other versions I would rather play

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=OTRnYs1D21k

Tetris (Nintendo version)
Raid on Bungeling Bay
Road Blasters
Kid Klown in Night Mayor World
The Black Bass USA
Yoshi
Pin-Bot
Krazy Kreatures

bit of a rough one! Krazy Kreatures was a nice discovery for me a few years ago, I think its kinda cool.

I think Jeffs high ranking for Rygar demonstrates the weakness of judging games by 20-40 minutes of gameplay, without consulting the manual or knowing anything about the game aside from knowledge he already has. If you were to judge Rygar purely based on the gameplay he demonstrated it would probably go significantly lower. But it was a game he grew up with and knows inside and out, so he can rank it with all of that in mind. He cannot do the same when he sees Werewolf: The Last Warrior for the first time in his life and without the manual cant even figure out what hes supposed to do.

As a result, certain types of games are inherently likely to score higher, while others will have a negative bias. (Cant wait for all the Koei simulation games to start popping up.)

Rygar doesn't suck but it is far worse than Jeff thinks. I'd put Conquest of the Crystal Palace above it

The movement feels weird. Kinda fitting for a game where youre on rollerblades but can definitely be off-putting.

Hes colorblind so it took him a while to even notice they were different

The non-RNG manipulation speedrun beats the game at level 18, while the average player probably beats it at 19 or 20. Theres only a little bit of wiggle room on strategy versus just having bigger numbers to make the difference.

European version of Festers Quest made the bullets able to go through walls and reduced enemy health, it makes a big difference.

Street Fighter 2010 is a game that forces you to learn its rules quickly and if you dont do that you will have a bad time. Jeff did not learn its rules (he did start to pick up on some stuff after getting through the first stage). Also I think he was accidentally mashing past some cutscenes, not that it would have improved its rating at all

The Doom reboot has a good amount of exploring for secrets though

Also he spent a longer than usual amount of time talking about it after he was done playing where he laid out some of the context

Iconoclasts is fine if you know what it is going into it, some people call it a metroidvania and they are objectively wrong. If you go into it expecting a metroidvania you will hate it. Its structure (but not gameplay) is closer to something like Cave Story, which is also often erroneously called a metroidvania. It's not a game I heartily recommend to people but I wouldn't call it bad

Johnbobb posted...

well now I'm curious

Rogue Legacy. Looks and feels cheap, has terrible combat design, isn't actually roguelike in any meaningful way. Started the trend of "roguelikes" that are based around grinding to add permanent stats to become powerful rather than learning how to play better

I'm also going to anti-recommend The Messenger. I don't understand how anyone can play that and compare it favorably to the Ninja Gaiden games. Then you get to the second half of the game and it gets even worse.

Oh nice, the game I was expecting to be on this list that I absolutely hate never showed up

Necrodancer has been on sale for 2.99 probably over a dozen times. In fact its 2.99 right now!

edit: apparently its been 2.99 since 2021! Maybe once they started adding expansions they reduced the base price

Hes played Kid Icarus before in his life, pretty sure he knows about the other level types

I think they directly called it a playable pop album in their promotional material. And yeah its great

counting Hellblade as an indie game is fucking bonkers man, it's by Ninja Theory

Ape Out owns

I dont really like it either, but if you already did everything else in a level its not too bad to just rush to the end, skip the wonder flower, etc

Super Mario 3D Land required all flagpoles for the final level. Pretty much all of them lock something behind all star coins

edit: 3D World also required all flagpoles. I would probably just expect this to be the standard moving forward

The Ben episodes of the Jeff show are consistently great

I have to disagree with the placement of Baldurs Gate 3 in the Most Ideas category because those arent its ideas, theyre all Dungeons & Dragonss ideas

My one criticism of Celeste is the strawberry that requires you to know about a secret in Super Mario Bros. 3 to unlock. Nothing else in the game suggests how to do it. Obviously I knew it, but that felt like it was not in the spirit of everything else in the game.

They have like 400 employees. Theyre not indie today for sure. Probably not by the time WA came out either, but maybe at an earlier point they were

Yeah that Gilligans Island game has some novel concepts but it doesnt all work great. Same can be said for most of Human Entertainments output. Theres definitely a line you can draw from the design of Gilligans Island to their later stuff line Clock Tower, S.O.S., and Twilight Syndrome