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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   2209 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for July 12, 2024

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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So, funny story. Took my family to the beach a week or two ago, got nice and sunburnt, played with my kid in the waves a ton, had a great time. On the way back my wife wants to visit a friend along the way and catch up. Lucky for me, next door to the coffee shop they chose, is a used games store. Like, a nice one, with tons of Nintendo games at a reasonable price. Actual NES shit too, it's back catalog doesn't end at the Xbox 360. So I ended up splurging on a Retron 1 HD. It was only $40, and it has HDMI as well as composite out.

You see, I have two cases of old NES games from my childhood, but I had no system to play them on. Now normally I would have researched the living fuck out of this decision, but it was a snap decision while I was bored, so that happened after the fact.

Turns out the Retron 1 HD is actually a reverse engineered Nintendo on a Chip system, which is part of why it's so cheap. This is superior in some ways to ARM based emulation, but not as good as FPGA emulation. That said, it's got it where it counts, over composite it's input latency is identical to an NES. However it's HDMI scaler is trash and results in a terrible picture, poor colors, and I strongly suspect distorted sound. Because every Youtube video I've watched or listened to in action had color or audio discrepancies my version over composite connected to a CRT does not have, and they all use HDMI on a an HDTV. Supposedly it's also not compatible with a handful of games I never plan on playing, like Castlevania III and Battletoads.

Now I said I have this hooked up to a CRT, but that was an acquisition I only made on Monday. Found some hoarder lady on Facebook ditching a 20" CRT with a built in VCR and DVD player. It works perfectly, and it's been a wild trip to go back and play it all exactly as I remember.

I've only bothered with Super Mario Brothers to start with, because that was the first game I got when my grandmother bought me an NES back in 1987 or whenever it might have been. I actually can't remember the last time I put any serious effort in Super Mario Brothers. After playing a single session for three nights in a row, I was getting to world 5-3. I had largely forgotten most of the secrets I ever used to know, minus the warp pipe in level 1-2. I actually had forgotten there were water levels, or dark levels too!

Anyways, that's been a blast, highly recommend it.

Will you play Zelda?

The original Zelda doesn't really hold up, IMO. There's way too much reliance on brute-force trial-and-error, made even more annoying by the one use per screen limitation of the blue candle and the fact that bombs are consumable.

On the other hand, Zelda II is underrated.

The original Zelda doesn't really hold up, IMO.

It honestly blows my mind that the game was released in that state.

I guess not all the games can be hits, and Nintendo cancelling that shitty romhack they thought was worthy of the title Super Mario Bros. 2 in favor of the reskinned Doki Doki Panic was ultimately the right move and a stronger suggestion that they didn't quite have the game design format 100% perfected, but it still blows my mind the game is functionally unbeatable without the relevant copy of Nintendo Power entering the picture somewhere.

A person who played Zelda when it was released, would be aware of technological limitations of consoles of the time. This meant that yes, if you gave someone just the NES and the game cart, they wouldn't find the game as good as SMB. But the additional material required to make it a 10/10 is only the game manual, enclosed with the purchase of the game, not guides standalone or in magazines.

Edit: This is the game manual, I feel it explain the game well enough so that the player, while required to put in more thought than if they were playing a modern game, doesn't have to blindly stumble around.

Does the manual show the places where the secrets-to-everyone are? (Edit: no, it doesn't.) My main problem with the game is the "burn the random bush that looks like every other random bush"-type things, which is something that other titles would fix with affordances like cracked walls, etc. Which is something I get is a technical limitation of the system, but then again, trying to make a game that depends on a system that can't display it properly is not exactly good design.

I guess I come more from the AVGN school of software design that demonstrates that if it's not reasonably discoverable without reading the documentation it's probably a net-negative for your game design if it's there, since it's now depending on something you thought was obvious in its balance, but nobody can access it, so you're stuck trying to work around it and your game is less fun as a consequence.

Which is something I get is a technical limitation of the system

I don't think so. The space requirements to add additional burnable bush and bombable wall sprites would have been negligible. But this would have trivialized the game's "puzzles," which consisted entirely of pushing every block, bombing every wall, and burning every bush. If the movable parts are labeled, there's nothing left.

Later games added more elaborate puzzles with multiple moving parts that could be solved without brute force, allowing them to label the moving parts without trivializing the game. I think that this probably could have been done on the NES with a 128 KB ROM, but I'm not sure.

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