Note wrote:Right now I'm playing through Beyond Oasis on the Genesis Mini. I just finished up the Forest Shine and received the plant elemental, so I've made pretty good progress in the game. Always thought the graphics and gameplay were awesome in this title, but got distracted and never finished it. Hope to beat it in the next week!
PretentiousHipster wrote: Link's Awakening DX - I am playing the DX remake, but apparently the only difference was the addition of colour.
Oh dude, you're missing out! To celebrate the release in color, Link's Awakening DX introduced a hidden dungeon, known as the Color Dungeon. It's completely unnecessary to beat the game but has a nice benefit for getting through it. The secret dungeon was also included in the Switch remake.
Thanks for telling me this. I just beat the colour dungeon in the DX version and my oh my what a powerup from getting this... well, choice of powerups. I wouldn't call this one of the best zeldas if my memory serves my right of the other entries, but this is still fantastic.
My partner's anniversary gift to me, the retrotink, should finally come in this friday. The anniversary already happened almost a week ago but that's fine. I'll definitely go back to the retro console games, and maybe finally play Silent Hill 2.
Glad you found the dungeon. I don't know if they let you change in the DX update, but the Switch remake let you go back and change costumes whenever you wished so you could do whatever worked best in a given dungeon.
Yeah, if you haven't gotten to play Silent Hill 2, it's definitely time to do it. One thing to keep in mind: the metal pipe just doesn't work the way you want it to. I recall James preferred poking things with it as opposed to swinging it.
I beat the Switch remake of Link's Awakening last week myself, but skipped the Color Dungeon. I figured I'd leave something to come back to the game for. (I'm not sure if there's a NG+ or not). Anyway. Great remake.
Note wrote:Right now I'm playing through Beyond Oasis on the Genesis Mini. I just finished up the Forest Shine and received the plant elemental, so I've made pretty good progress in the game. Always thought the graphics and gameplay were awesome in this title, but got distracted and never finished it. Hope to beat it in the next week!
Are you playing with 3 or 6 button controller?
I'm playing with the 3 button controller, as that's what I have access to on the Mini system. I read the 6 button has some added functionality though. Do you prefer one over the other? Really enjoying this game so far.
Note wrote:Right now I'm playing through Beyond Oasis on the Genesis Mini. I just finished up the Forest Shine and received the plant elemental, so I've made pretty good progress in the game. Always thought the graphics and gameplay were awesome in this title, but got distracted and never finished it. Hope to beat it in the next week!
Are you playing with 3 or 6 button controller?
I'm playing with the 3 button controller, as that's what I have access to on the Mini system. I read the 6 button has some added functionality though. Do you prefer one over the other? Really enjoying this game so far.
I was hoping you would inform me . See below. How do accomplish below with 3 button, assuming via start & menu?
You'll be able to change weapons on the fly and access menus faster!
Button X - Accesses Map screen Button Y - Accesses Weapons options Button Z - Accesses Items options
Beyond Oasis (also uses the mode button for weapon switching as MODE+B)
Jagosaurus wrote:I was hoping you would inform me . See below. How do accomplish below with 3 button, assuming via start & menu?
You'll be able to change weapons on the fly and access menus faster!
Button X - Accesses Map screen Button Y - Accesses Weapons options Button Z - Accesses Items options
Beyond Oasis (also uses the mode button for weapon switching as MODE+B)
Lol. Yeah, to accomplish the tasks mapped to X, Y, and Z, you can press start, and a small menu with four icons for your weapons, items, status, and save (save only works if you're outside of a dungeon) comes up. I don't find the menu to be cumbersome. Don't think having the six button controller would make too much of a difference for this title, as I haven't come across any issues with the controls that made the game awkward.
I would like to try with a six button controller for comparison, maybe I can test it on an emulator later to check the difference, but I think you'd be fine either way!
I've been playing the arcade titles on the SNK 40th Anniversary Collection on PS4. It's been a wild ride. Let's do a little breakdown of each arcade game from oldest to newest. It's a big post so spoilered.
Ozma Wars The oldest title in the collection, this is a pretty standard fixed shooter with some grating sound effects but some groovy colour graphics. It's fine. Apparently it has gaming's first health bar.
Sasuke Vs Commander Spices the fixed shooter up by setting it in Edo period Japan. I found this one pretty enjoyable but very tough. There's a lot of enemies to deal with and they come at you fast. When they are hit they drop straight down so you're constantly being showered with knives and corpses and both are equally as deadly. Fun for a bit, I could imagine a young Sload playing this on his school's BBC Micro and digging it. A guy in the pub told me this game has the world's first boss fights. He also told me slugs don't cast shadows though.
Fantasy Might be the best game on this collection. It's just bonkers and non-stop. Your missus gets kidnapped by pirates from your private island (of course) and you immediately decide you are not having any of that shit and bust out the hot air balloon to give chase. You get on the boat, stab a few baddies and get her back..but then a bird takes her away. And it goes on like that. It's short and sweet and contains some hilarious synthesized voices. Kind of plays like an early Wario Ware, for realz. Fun fact: along with Vanguard, this game is so old it has to have a text box to explain what a continue is.
Vanguard Early scrolling shooter also with some daft synth voices. I guess it would have really stood out in the arcades. Actually enjoyed this one a lot as well, it's claim to fame is that certain sections scroll diagonally! Cripes. Get's very hard on the second run.
Munch Mobile Kind of charming but ultimately frustrating game. You play as a car that for some reason has really long stretchy arms and as you pootle along you reach out to grab food and fuel to keep on going while dodging hazards on the road. The reaching itself takes some getting used to and the car is massive so it's too easy to crash. It's weird.
Alpha Mission Hated this. Vertical shooter, nice graphics for the time but your ship is both too slow and too big to avoid anything so it quickly becomes an absolute chore. Couldn't even be arsed to credit feed it.
Athena Oh, what madness brought me here. Athena is unmitigated trash. It has all the hallmarks of shitty 80's game design (crappy hit detection, little to no invincibility after being hit, no range to your weapons, endlessly respawning enemies) and none of the charm. What an ignominious introduction for SNK's mascot.
TNKIII Not so keen on this. It's okay as a twin-stick shooter but it's kind of bland and goes on too long.
Ikari Warriors Never been a fan of IW and this second chance hasn't altered that. Frankly it's just way too hard. Gave up fairly quick.
Victory Road Nonsense game. I rate it a bit better than IW BUT it is still pretty ballbag. Looks duller and browner than any Gears of War to boot.
Bermuda Triangle and World Wars Lumping these together as they are pretty much the same game minus a few alterations. Bermuda Triangle came first and is about you piloting a massive warship through time and blowing shit up. Someone at SNK must have realised that while in theory it's cool to be a massive gunship in practice it means your sprite is so big it's impossible to avoid being hit and despite the game's generous health system you will die A LOT. So they created World Wars where you are on basically the same mission (the music is identical in both games) but now much smaller and faster. Both have a recurrent SNK gimmick of being able to shoot in 8 directions and both scroll both upward and backward. Both are really okay games that are so close to being special it kind of bummed me out.
Guerrilla War Or Guevara as it's called in Japan. A much more competent and fun take on Ikari Warriors with the added amusement that you play as either Che Guevara or Fidel Castro and liberate Cuba. Like, no bones, you're Che and you action movie your way through swarms of soldiers and tanks to Batista's palace and kick him out. Splendid.
Psycho Solider Athena is redeemed here, although technically not as this is Athena Asamiya of King of Fighters fame but who cares? PS isn't a magnificent game by any means but is quite good fun and crucially, unlike Athena, actually works. Plays more like Son Son than Athena which is fine because if there's one thing SNK do well, it's rip Capcom off. Has an unbelievably badly sung (yes sung) opening theme song that's so shit it's great.
Time Soldiers Okay, this has promise but borks things. It's another top down shooter but the gimmick here is there is a supposed element of non-linear level design as the game is spread across different time periods kind of like Gain Ground. However, this just translates to you having to back track long sections of levels, including bosses, to get back to the right portal to send you to the time period you're supposed to be in. And if you forget which portal that is, tough shit. So it's not non-linear it just kind of wastes your time. Which is a shame because the time travel element as far as the setting goes is actually done well here and the shooting is much tighter than previous efforts. Getting closer.
Chopper 1 Another absolutely fine vertical shooter. I kind of feel vertical shooters aren't in SNK's wheelhouse. You're a helicopter, obvs, blowing up bits of some desert-y looking country. Came out pre-Desert Storm so is slightly ahead of that curve. It kind of cheats as well as it loops halfway through instead of having new levels.
P.O.W Sucky early belt scrolling beat'em up. Way too easy to get overrun, enemies take too many hits, not enough variation in those enemies. It looks nice but it sucks. Probably better with two players but would still be only half as sucky which still puts it some way below average.
Paddle Mania Looks like a tennis game but plays more like air hockey, at least in theory. You move with the left stick and can use the right stick to either hit the ball with your left or right hand. Sounds dead simple but plays like ass and is kind of broken, or at least to me anyway. Big NAH on this one.
Beast Busters Now this is the good stuff. It's basically Operation Thunderbolt but with zombies and then dialed up to eleven. Kind of gave me a Troma vibe as well. Unrelentingly gory, bonkers stuff. They really don't make them like this anymore.
Ikari III I'll give some credit for mixing things up and making I3 a top down beat'em up instead of straight shooter. It also looks really good still. However, it suffers from the same problem as P.O.W in that the enemies just take too much to knock down and you can get rounded on fast. Most boss fights are against some kind of APC or helicopter and if you don't have a gun you have to dodge for ages while you wait for a soldier to steal one from. Also it's sooo long. Ikari Warriors just ain't for me.
Prehistoric Isle The second best shooter on the disc after Vanguard. It's got a fun premise being set on an island full of dinosaurs and stuff and the ability change your options firing style depending on where you position it is also cool. It's not top tier but it is fun enough to credit feed.
SAR: Search and Rescue In which you do very little searching and absolutely no rescuing. What you do do instead is violently gun down every last alien creature until they burst into piles of bloody guts and twitching tendons. It's another top down shooter, this time with the aliens from Alien but not really please don't sue us, and it's finally the point where SNK have got it all right because SAR is legit great. Unlike their previous efforts the controls finally match the frenetic pacing of the genre and it's also got the unremitting violence of Beast Busters on top. Some genius also added a dodge jump move so you can do some proto-Shock Troopers style bullet dodging as well. It's just, mwah, perfecto.
Street Smart Woeful. I feel like this game might have its fans but I most certainly am not one of them. It's a hybrid beat'em up/fighting game that fails on both aspects. It's like the Street Fighter 1 to Aggressors of Dark Kombat's Street Fighter 2. Apparently Street Smart features the first combo system. And, yeah, it kind of does. At least if we define combos as constantly hitting punch to keep the opponent trapped in the corner (which obviously the computer loves to do to you) until you either win or your arm falls off. In this respect I guess it also invented air juggles though I suspect neither on purpose. Big fat nope.
It was fun to dig into SNK's pre-Neo-Geo days It's nice to see them as innovators before they kind of became trend followers. The few innovations that set them aside such as synthesized voices, multiple scrolling angles and continues are pretty important as well. Then there's these weird idiosyncrasies that pop up all the way through like distance meters, time travel and references to Space Battleship Yamato. Kind of feel early SNK is like Data East in that respect, though Data East's fetish is for Soviet era-Russia. I also feel like SNK just don't bother with music much because it's all pretty bland. Honestly most of this collection is either average or plain bad but the stand out tiles like Fantasy, Vanguard, Beast Busters and SAR more than make up for the rest. Also, I was just playing the arcade games, I know Crystalis is probably the best game on here I'll get to it one day.
@Note, I'd think that mode trigger button + B for weapon swap would make it a more seamless experience. I haven't played the game so I'm not sure how often you're weapon swapping. XYZ I see as convenient bonus. Been on my list to test for forever. I may finally visit this one this year.
@Soap, I was just reviewing the SNK 40th game list. Nice write up.
I think I'm about to deep dive into some of the recent arcade ports to console. I'll personally be on XB1. The ACA Neo Geo library looks to have great reviews. Game list:
. See below. How do accomplish below with 3 button, assuming via start & menu?
