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[PCE/TG-16|CD/SGX Discussion / Re: Memory Base 128 and Emerald Dragon - locks up and loses system save]

"Don't claim things as yours that aren't..."

That is accusing me of plagiarism which was your point originally.  I never made that claim and I take offense to you insisting that I did.  Yes, I copied your post to a pastebin in order to put a bunch of random info into one easy to view place that was supposed to be for my own personal use.  I did not publish it anywhere official, I was using it strictly for troubleshooting and I never once claimed it was mine. 

So, again, please do not call me a plagiarist.  And yes, it is sloppy.  It's a pastebin with random info in it dude.  That is kind of the point.  I copied a bunch of information from a lot of places that may or may not be valuable.  I did add your name to the pastebin though.  And I will be deleting the whole thing when my purposes are done.  Most people would have just said, "oh hey that's my post from NeoGaf" and, at worst, asked me to add a citation if it really bothered them.  Not accuse me of claiming it as my own work that I'm presenting to others when that is clearly not the case.  That's just not cool man.

All you had to do was apologize and add in the citation, you know.  Why are you trying to turn this into some big argument, I don't get it... Thanks for adding the citation though, that should solve the issue.

Anyway, I did do the test I mentioned with the MB128.  I can confirm that it does not get any power from the PCE when it is powered off and the MB128 is plugged in.  I took the batteries out and turned the machine off and after a few hours I checked and all of the saves on the MB128 are gone.  The device does work when it does not have any batteries in so I guess it does draw power of some kind...but only with the machine on.  So, in case you are worried about the built-in capacitors rapidly discharging as your change your batteries, you can turn your system on, keep the MB128 plugged in, pull out the old batteries and put new back in without issue.  I performed this several times while having the Private Eye Doll memory manager up and it caused zero issues.

Alright, this is good to know.  What I remember hearing, though, is that the MB128 has a capacitor in it that holds the saves when the batteries are removed.  Thanks to your test here we know that it will not draw power while the system is off, but can last at least a few hours with the system on.  But does it draw power from the system to keep the MB128's saves intact while the system is on, or is it just draining that capacitor and you lose your saves regardless once that runs out, presuming that that is what's going on (and I think there is a capacitor inside the MB128 from what I remember?)? 

This isn't a really important question, as if you leave the system on it certainly will hold your saves long enough to swap out the batteries, but it is something I've been wondering regardless.  You've answered one question though, and that's good.

I did create an A Train save, which has built-in MB128 support, and Private Eye Doll was able to see/move it.  I have not tried any other game with MB128 native support though.

... Oh right, that one has a manager that lets you see the MB128's files too, unlike Emerald Dragon.  I should have remembered or checked that...

I agree that the makers of the MB128 should have created a memory manager disc.  I believe somebody was actually working on just such a thing a while back but nothing came of it.  I recently ran into a similar issue with a 3DO I picked up and there was a program called Game Guru which is a memory manager that could compress save files down to almost nothing on the 3DO's memory file system.  And it would work with the very expensive external save unit as well.  Something like that would be quite nice for the PCE.

The whole save "solution" on the PCE is such a mess, with so many different save backup units, multiple types of ways to back up those backups, the absurdly small 2KB save memory space, etc.  I know that the concept of being able to save games to a console itself was new at the time, but their solutions, while they work, have issues.  But at least the PCE/Turbo CD has a built-in memory manager in the system card to view and delete the files saved to the system, though it does not display their file sizes. 

That the memory managers for the MB128, or for the system itself if you want a manager that lets you view file sizes, are attached to games and not the system reminds be a bit of the N64, though -- recall how all N64 games that support the Controller Pak have a memory manager you can access by holding down Start when you turn the system on, but it's custom for each game, not a standard application.  All games have the same exact functions, in that you can view and delete files but not move or copy them (those things you can only do with a PC backup device or a Gameshark), but the look of the screen, how many files you can see on screen at a time, whether it supports only viewing the card in controller 1 or all four, and such, varies from game to game, so some games have better managers than others.  It's a bit annoying. (Bust-A-Move '99 is one of my favorites... you see a whole card at a time and it supports all four.)

As for the 3DO though, I have one of those 3DO backup addons (a Japan-only release, for some crazy reason).  It's pretty nice, though you mostly have to use it as a backup unit, games generally can't save directly to it I think... but still, the 3DO internal memory is relatively small (what is it, 32KB?), so the 256KB backup unit is very nice to have.  And it's great that the manager is a single disc which does everything, too, not separate managers in various different games.

However, just like the 3DO itself, the manager has a welded-down battery inside it that saves the files, so just like 3DO systems those things are going to start dying at some point and need replacement.  The MB128's replaceable 4 AA battery solution may cost more in batteries, but it's really nice to have batteries that are easy to replace without soldering!

As far as the warning goes you could throw in something like, "this has caused some users to lose their system save files".  You can link to my video if you want.  I can leave it up and unlisted.  It's odd that my Japanese Duo-R, which is very common in Japan, would have that issue with the MB128 where your US released setup does not haha.  But you might make mention of my unit, my mods and that others have stated they have a similar issue.  Something to tell people that they should use at their own risk.  And maybe add in more info for Private Eye Doll to try it first.  Again, you can link to my video if you want or create your own or wait for me to do a write-up.  I did get my streaming pc/setup running tonight so I might be able to do that soon.

Yeah, I should add some info about Private Eye Dol's manager and a warning that some setups (though not mine) have problems with the Emerald Dragon/Linda Cube manager.  I'll do that soon.

I don't believe I could get the utility to show up for Vasteel 2 (going off memory here and I might be wrong) and Popful Mail I simply couldn't make heads or tails of.  It kept acting like it was doing things but wouldn't actually do anything.  It was really odd.  I might try it again though because it really looked like it should have worked.

Huh.  I don't own those games so I haven't tried them myself... but it is tricky, messing around with managers with all Japanese-language text, you don't want to accidentally hit the 'delete everything' option or something if you've got files you want to keep on the thing! :p

[PCE/TG-16|CD/SGX Discussion / Re: Memory Base 128 and Emerald Dragon - locks up and loses system save]

The whole thing is so weird.  I mean, with Linda Cube or Emerald Dragon's manager, you can copy backups of the system save memory to your MB128.  However, you cannot view the contents of the MB128 itself in this manager.  You also can't save Emerald Dragon to the MB128, though I presume Linda Cube fixes this issue? 

Additionally, most games with MB128 managers create incompatible files that cannot be viewed by the other games.  That's just great.

On the other hand, with Brandish you can view the contents of the MB128 itself, and save the game to the MB128 directly, but can't make memory backups.

And then with other games like Sailor Moon Collection and such, you can save to the MB128 but can't view anything on it.

It's such a mess... seriously, the MB128 should just have come with a disc or something that's got a good memory manager on it, which lets you make backups of the memory, view the contents of the MB128, view the contents of backup files on the MB128 (which as you say, you can't do with the MB128 as it exists), etc.

I said that I made a pastebin which includes a lot of information all located in one place so the people on this forum (and myself) can easily see relevant information about the MB128.  It was so others more wise than myself with the Turbo Duo could help easily.  My apologies for not citing the source but it's a pastebin, which by name alone, implies that it was copied from somewhere else.  I never claimed to own it so please do not accuse me of plagiarism.

When you directly quote someone, you should cite your source.  That's my point.  Lengthy direct quotes without attribution are at best sloppy and should be avoided.

Considering that myself and others have confirmed to have major issues with Emerald Dragon you might want to add a warning for it and Linda Cubed on your website in regards to potentially losing all system saves.  It might be an issue that is model specific (I have a Japanese Duo-R) or it might be something to do with mine being region/RGB modded.  But I am not the only person who has had this issue apparently.

Adding such a warning is a fine idea, but you hit on the issue here -- what is the problem, exactly?  Is it some copies of the disc?  This is possible, though it seems unlikely; I would think most disc copies are the same, unless the game has multiple revisions I've never heard of.  Is it an incompatibility between the game and certain models of the system, as you suggest?  That sounds possible; my system is a region-modded US TG16+CD addon, so it is different from yours.  What's causing this weird issue you describe, so how should I phrase the warning... or do I just say 'the menu for this game may or may not work' and leave it at that?

Linda Cubed had the exact same utility as Emerald Dragon and they both had the exact same issue on my system when trying to copy a save from the MB128 back to my Duo-R.  I never made a save in Emerald Dragon after my initial ones were wiped during testing but I'd wager that each game would see each other just fine.

That would be pretty interesting if true.  I should try to find copies of those other games to see if that works or not.  I just know that the two I do have create entirely incompatible files.  The file names are different too, if you view them through Brandish.

As far as the battery question goes, I can go make a save in a game here in just a bit, pull the batteries and let it sit overnight and see what happens.  It would be nice to know since you could simply keep the device plugged in and not worry about forgetting to change the batteries and losing your saves.  I'd wager it won't pull any power and all saves will be lost after a short amount of time...but we shall see!

Yeah, I don't want to lose my save files so I can't test this myself... but it would definitely be nice to know.

I could not get Popful Mail or Vasteel 2's save applications to work in a way that made sense.

How so?

I plan on doing a write-up and a better video on how to use Private Eye Doll with the MB128 including how to view saves from other games (since it's not intuitive) in different save banks.  I have almost completed my streaming setup and creating a video that way would be a lot better than me holding a phone.  And I'll throw in some other info about potentially avoiding Emerald Dragon and probably some information on changing out the batteries as discussed above based on my findings.

That could be some good info to put together, sure.

[PCE/TG-16|CD/SGX Discussion / Re: Memory Base 128 and Emerald Dragon - locks up and loses system save]

Here's what I know about the MB128, copied from the TG16/PCE save info page on my website:



Games with Memory Base 128/Save-kun Support (complete list)
—
J CD
—
A-Train III (A. III, A-Rensha de Ikou III)
Aoki Ookami To Shiroki Mejika
The Atlas
Bishoujo Senshi Sailor Moon Collection
Brandish
Eikan Wa Kimini
Fire Pro Female Wrestling
Linda Cube
Magicoal
Popful Mail
Princess Maker 2
Private Eye Doll
Sankokushi III
Shin Megami Tensei
Super Real Mahjong P II + III Custom
Super Real Mahjong PV Custom
Tadaima Yusha Boshuuchuu
Vasteel 2

Emerald Dragon also claims to have MB128 support, but it does not in fact work; you can copy blocks between the system and MB128 through the game (see below), but cannot actually save to the MB128, unfortunately.  Quite unfortunate!

—
MB128 games which allow you to backup your system save data (or other primary 2KB backup device) by copying the complete 2KB block to a block on the MB128.  There are 63 available blocks, understandably (128KB for the MB128, 2KB for the internal memory).  See the source link below for more info.  Note that each title's backup blocks on the MB 128 can only be accessed (and copied back to the system memory) by that game — they are not inter-compatible with the other titles on the list.
—
J SCD
—
Popful Mail
Private Eye Doll (third option from main menu)
Emerald Dragon (hold UP when you press RUN on the CD BIOS screen to access.  In that menu, top to bottom, Load, Save, Swap, Delete Bank, Delete All MB128 Banks.  This is the games' only actual support for the MB128.  This manager ONLY allows you to copy memory blocks to and from the MB128, you cannot see the files for games which save directly to the MB128 — for that see below.  Oh — if you hold II at boot instead of Up, you'll go straight to a load-game screen, skipping the intro and such.)
Vasteel 2

MB128 games with a manager that allows you to view what files are saved to the MB128, but not necessarily to copy blocks back and forth from the system
—
J SCD
—
Brandish (Hit Run, choose Load, then choose the lower-left option from the six-option grid on the screen that appears [note: this screen only appears when a MB128 is connected.].  It's in Japanese text, directly below Save.  This screen shows a list of the files saved to the MB128.  They don't have file sizes because each one is 1 'block', or 2KB.  Each memory backup (from, say, Emerald Dragon) or game save from a MB128-compatible game creates a file that takes up 1 space on the MB128.  Here you can see what's on the unit, and delete files if you want.)

MB128 games with MB128 managers that have unknown functions (need info)
—
J SCD
—
Tadaima Yusha Boshuchu – press 1+Run at boot for manager
Linda Cube – press Up+Run at boot for manager"

Thanks to this thread we now know that Linda Cube's manager is apparently similar to Emerald Dragon's.  Is it actually so similar that it can read Emerald Dragon-created save backup files though, or are they still separate in the way that Private Eye Dol and Emerald Dragon cannot read each others' backup files?  I'd presume the latter but don't have that game so I don't know myself.

I totally forgot..but a few weeks ago I made this Pastebin that contains all of the games that either use the MB128 natively or have programs to interface with it.

https://pastebin.com/wDJQEz3U

I am going to try Popful Mail and Linda and see where that gets me.

The bottom three paragraphs of 'your' Pastebin there are a copy of a post of mine from Neogaf a few years ago: http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost.php?p=162818950&postcount=2676  Don't claim things as yours that aren't...


As an addendum to one thing I say there though, on the battery life... so, I haven't replaced the batteries in my MB128 in quite a while.  I just put in Brandish though, and all of the files I've put there, either for games with direct MB128 saves or for save backup archives, are still on the MB128, fully intact.  Now, the batteries I had in it are Duracell Quantums, which have the powercheck testers on them.  I just checked the batteries, and none of the four register anything on the testers, but despite that they still aren't fully dead and do have some charge in them; I put them in a GBC and they run it, though clearly far from full charge going by the battery light's brightness, for example.  Interesting.  The MB128 has a backup capacitor to keep the files for a little while when you are changing the batteries, but that can't hold the files for very long so these batteries must still be good. 

So yeah, with Duracell Quantums at least, that "6-9 months" I said there and before on this forum as well I believe is conservative; it actually should be able to last a year, at least. 

The one question I have left though is, does the MB128 draw power from the system?  Like, when you remove the battery box the MB128 holds saves, but if you do this while the system is on is that just using the backup capacitor and thus in an hour or two or something your saves would be gone, or is it actually drawing power from the wall, while the system is on at least (I presume it couldn't when power is off?), to hold a charge that way?  I don't know.

OK, so I think I have this figured out.

I can copy the contents to whatever bank I want using Private Eye Dol fairly easily.  However, if I want to view the contents in any of the MB128's banks I first have to copy the contents of that bank to the PC Engine (make sure to backup the PCE first in another bank).  Then I load up the Erase tool (bottom right/4th option) and select the PCE.  I can then view the individual save files.

Is there a better way to view your saves on the MB 128 than that particular method?  It's not a huge issue but I would be totally fine loading up another game if I simply wanted to check out everything I had saved on the MB128 easily.  Loading up each bank individually like how I described would be a bit of a PITA in the future after I have more saves.  I guess I could always just put the info on a Google Sheet haha.

The problem is that to the MB128, that file is not separate savegames; it is instead a single save file created by the host game, be it Private Eye Dol (which, yes, has maybe the nicest of the save backup applications), Emerald Dragon (this games' save backup app works fine for me, at least, though Private Eye Dol's is better), or the other two with similar apps that I don't have (as listed above).  If you use Brandish (via the method I describe above) to look at the list of files in the MB128 itself, you'll notice that it's just a list of files.  You can't view the contents of those files because only the game apps know that anything is in that file other than just a regular MB128 save file.

So, unfortunately, as far as I know the only way to view the contents of an MB128 save backup file is to view it in that games' MB128 save copy utility.  It's annoying but that's how it is.

So basically, can anyone say if Tadaima Yusha Boshuchu, Popful Mail, or Vasteel 2's save copy applications are any different from the others?

[PCE/TG-16|CD/SGX Discussion / Re: Fans of kiki kai kai?]

Even the arcade version of Kiki Kaikai is only two player alternating, so going from that to one player only (which, yes, it is, I also checked) is not too big of a difference.

And yeah, the PCE version is a fantastic port.  I might even like the audio better on the PCE than the PS2 emulated arcade game in Taito Legends 2...

I bought the PS2 version of Heavenly Guardian because I didn't want to experience the frustrations of the inferior (IMO) Wii controls. With that said its been about 9 months and I still haven't played it At least both versions are cheap to come by still!

I have a PS2, so who knows? It might be the first PS2 game I've purchased in over 8 years...

I know I said this earlier in the thread, but get the Wii version if you can at all!  The PS2 version does not let you freely aim in one direction while you move in another direction, only move and lock your firing direction as you move around, so it's kind of awful controls-wise compared to the Wii, where you can move with the stick while you aim with the pointer.  You'd think that the PS2 would have twin-stick controls, but it doesn't; the right stick is only for aiming your snow attack.

Also the PS2 version doesn't have level 7 in it, which is one of my favorite stages, and has no added content to make up for that.

[PCE/TG-16|CD/SGX Discussion / Re: Fans of kiki kai kai?]

Yeah, Kiki Kaikai is a pretty good game, I definitely like it.  I have the PCE version, and while it may not quite match up to Pocky & Rocky's greatness, it's a really good non-autoscrolling shooter with some amusing cartoony traditional Japanese graphics and very good gameplay.  This is a great series though, and all of the games are pretty good!  (On that note, it's unfortunate that the SNES and GBA games are so expensive, they're great games.)

I have been on the fence about picking that up for years, is it any good? Better than that cloud master sequel I hope (the monkey king...)

I wonder if the ps2 version is better or worse than the wii.

It's DEFINITELY better than the two Cloud Master spiritual successors (Monkey King:  D+, Saint:  F-).  I found Heavenly Guardian very uneven in terms of difficulty.  Either a switch flipped and I suddenly went from scrub to pro, or the RNG woke up and started giving me a fair game.  The dual sticks on PS2 probably change the game, but I haven't played to verify.

The PS2 version of Heavenly Guardian is unfortunately quite poor -- it's missing a level (and the cut one is probably the best level, too) and doesn't have dual stick support!  That's right, the right stick only lets you aim your supers, it does not let you aim your shots.  All you can do on the PS2 is lock your firing direction with a button, there is no twin-stick support.

As for the Wii version though, it's good.  It has some issues, such as that you have to beat it in one sitting since you only unlock level select after beating the game, and beating the game means beating two loops in that one sitting since that's how it works, but it is a good game and I did beat it.  I wrote up a review of the game a few years ago that you can read on my site here: http://www.blackfalcongames.net/?p=132  It's mostly a Wii review, but I also have the PS2 version so I cover the downgrades that version has in a few paragraphs at the end.  I gave the Wii version a B score and the PS2 one a C-.

As for Monkey King and Saint, while they are from Star Fish, the same studio as Heavenly Guardian (and also a few other remakes such as Devilish for the DS and also, I believe, Steel Empire for 3DS), yeah, those two games are pretty bad, unfortunately.  Monkey King is terrible, incredibly easy, and very short.  It's an awful game I would give a failing grade. As for Saint, it's definitely not good, but I do think it improves on Monkey King a bit, so I'd probably reverse those scores you gave them there.  Why do you think Saint is the worse of the two?  It's not quite as absurdly easy as Monkey King, and has more content and better gameplay too.  That's not saying a lot here, but it's something.

I thought that the PC Engine version is a port of the arcade?

Yeah i've heard it was an arcade port! Damn I wonder if i could ever find the board for it.

Your guys's opinions seem spot on with everything i've read so far..

If you can't find the arcade board, the arcade version of Kiki Kaikai is also included in Taito Legends 2 for the PS2.  It's a very good port of the game for the most part.

[PCE/TG-16|CD/SGX Discussion / Re: Review: Dragon Egg - A Good but Rushed Platformer]

I actually like reviews of such less well known games.  Reviews of stuff like Dracula X, Sapphire, Gate of Thunder, etc. are fun to read too, but who here hasn't already played the hell out of 'em themselves?

I agree with you on this, at least -- I'd definitely rather review a game which is both interesting and not super-popular, than some very popular classic I also like but everyone interested probably knows about already.  Those games don't really need the attention, but something lesser-known often does deserve it!

[PCE/TG-16|CD/SGX Discussion / Re: Review: Dragon Egg - A Good but Rushed Platformer]

ABF, while there are some here who like to rag on you, some of us are trying to give you some constructive criticism . Maybe you disagree with some of it (the way you respond, you seem to disagree with ALL of it),

"All of it"?  Of course not, I made multiple edits to the review based on critiques from this thread.

but try incorporating it, anyway. You might find it gives your review new strength. Being concise makes writing more impactful. Applying community-accepted definitions (e.g. parallax scrolling) makes your review better received within the community.

The problem with "community-accepted definitions" is, which community?  Different ones online may disagree.  Or which part of the community?  There are more than enough arguments about definitions of terms out there to know that there is hardly some monolith.

Clearly delineating your impressions and subjective content from objective content (feels rushed vs was rushed - clear evidence needed for the latter to be taken seriously) imparts greater respect for impartiality.

I always think I do this well and clearly -- differentiating opinion from fact is essential, and I pay attention to that!   But for whatever reason other people complain a lot about this anyway.  I'm sure part of it is just that it's often people disagreeing with me about something, but the general "you don't separate opinion from fact" complaint is not true and doesn't make sense, what is opinion clearly is opinion and what is fact clearly is fact...

I see the time you put into your review, but I want to see your review writing get better, rather than remaining a bit sloppy.

It's about as good as it'll get with just me writing it.  To imrpove it I'd need an editor, which would mean some kind of professional position.  I know editing passes improve writing, I've seen that before (comparing the earlier to later versions of my thesis...), but you need someone else to be that editor; you really can't edit your own work.
 

Man. I saw this review and didn't say anything at first because it's too fucking long to do anything but quickly skim. It's full of that Wiki-educated Buddy Hacket seagul lecture shit so many YT people use. "Rushed", bringing up the SFC, trying to provide "context" when the author has none themselves, etc. and sure, that's really really played out but really it's the longness that struck me as insane. And a print version? Printed by whom? Funk and Wagnalls don't do that stuff anymore.

It was a natural for a multi page flame thread splitting hairs like atoms.

As for the fake-ness of the parallax. As someone who uses "fake transparencies" a lot to describe that flickery shit that had to make do on every pre-SNES machine, I still find this similar term stupid. All you need to see fake transparencies are fake is to record them and slow them down and see that it's really alternating %100 and %0 opacity every field. That's why fake transparencies induce seizures, real ones don't. Pretty stark. "Fake" parallax looks identical to "real" parallax though so...who fucking cares? It's as real as anything.

There are two ways you can look at this -- either to say that how something is done matters regardless of whether that is visible to the player or not, or to say that the extent of the effect matters.  You make an argument against that first interpretation here, sure, but just by the second one, this game still falls a bit short, considering that the parallax is exclusively (identical) clouds and nothing else.

I know this forum is defensive on the TG16/PCE's parallax weaknesses, but it IS the system's weakness, much like how colors on screen is the Genesis's, or the slow CPU is the SNES's.

You know what game always seemed "rushed"? Dracula X. Those huge stone guys in the first level look better than most of the game, and those hidden passages in the boat that only Maria can get to lead nowhere, WTF, right?

What happens is that you have to ship the game eventually. Someone will be working on the game right up to that very second. Some parts will be uneven. That's how everything is.

Indeed, that is true, games need to be shipped sometime and this often leads to cutting features and content from the final product.  But most games, including Rondo of Blood, disguise this better than Dragon Egg! does.

For another example of a game I reviewed some time back that feels blatantly unfinished, and I commented on that at length in the review, see my review of Power Piggs of the Dark Age for the SNES: http://www.blackfalcongames.net/?p=47

Also, the part about scifi fantasy as a genre being "that all-too-common frustration" seems to indicate...well, autism, honestly, but at the very least I would say they don't know much about art if that kind of thing throws them off. Seeing a sword and a laser gun being held by the same guy is...an idea older than lasers, I'm pretty sure. There is a LOT of stuff to "frustrate" anyone who can't handle that.

Yes, there is "a lot of stuff" to frustrate me in this issue, that's for sure.  But if I like other things about something, I can and will like it anyway, despite having some things I dislike about it.  This game is good despite that, I like the Castlevania games even though they make NO SENSE AT ALL historically (seriously, random elements from Greece through modern day, all tossed together!), there are good fantasy animes with plenty of random too-modern elements (for a classic example, I really like The Slayers...), etc.

So, for me, the issue here is when writers decide that they'll just repeat common genre tropes, instead of trying to create an actual internally consistent world.  I want to see the latter, but most writers, or game designers, just make the former... and anime, and anime-inspired games, have built up a set of tropes for what anime fantasy "should" be, and following those rules ensures a historical mishmash of random stuff that could never exist at one time, all together in one world.  I love history and have degrees in the field, so of course historical accuracy is something I pay attention to!

I've got two theories for how all this happened -- first, that it's possible that because Japan is not a Western nation and does not have as much grounding in our cultural history they don't care as much for accuracy in Western historical settings as Western developers would, and vice versa for Western games and Asian settings.  I do think you see this in both directions -- look at how Western Asian fantasy settings so often randomly mix together Japan and China (Ninjas and Chinese marital artists, etc.), for an example from our side.  And second, that anime and Japanese game fantasy worlds took a huge amount of inspiration from the [Western] early '80s Wizardry and Ultima games... games which have some sci-fi elements in their otherwise mostly fantasy worlds.  Most Western fantasy games are not like that, but those set a bad precedent which Japan fell in love with.

Returning to Dragon Egg!, you have medieval castles in a medieval kingdom, swords and bows as weapons but also floating robot guns and invincible gun turrets, electricity, both modern-style clothing (for the heroine) and fantasy medieval outfits (for enemies like the orc archers and giants), and more... what people are supposed to do is just say "okay whatever" and ignore or never notice this stuff, but I don't, it bothers me.  But again, this kind of thing isn't going to ruin a game for me or something, it's just annoying.

I look forward to ABF's next review, I just hope he is courageous enough to post it here when the time comes.

Whenever I write something else for a game for this system, sure, I will.  The question I have is, should I post anything for other systems here, something I haven't done before?  Links, full text, not sure.

(For instance, I am currently working on a review of one of my favorite console games ever, San Francisco Rush 2049 (N64/Dreamcast, and a bit about the arcade version).)

I agree with spenoza: please do not think that all of us are simply "hating on you".... for me, it is my genuine 2¢...as if I were your editor.



Also, any thread that inspires COVELL to post an image is a GOOD THING.

Certainly, it's not everyone attacking me; indeed, you aren't, and are quite reasonable.  Thanks for that.  What I should do is respond to posts like this, not the insulting ones...

[Localizations, Games, Apps, Docs / Re: Xanadu I and II - General Translation Project(s) Thread]

A voiced translation would be great, but I'm sure it'd also be hard to make happen, particularly for two games at the same time.  The absolute minimum would be to have a text file script saying what they're saying in all the cutscenes, so at least you can follow along with what's going on in that part.  It'd spoil the game of course, but that's better than not knowing what's being said at all...

On a related note, is there any such file for Xak III?  It'd be nice to know what they're saying in the cutscenes in that game...

[PCE/TG-16|CD/SGX Discussion / Re: Review: Dragon Egg - A Good but Rushed Platformer]

Thanks for the review.

@ A Black Falcon, you seem to have a talent for writing reviews, have you ever considered writing your own printed fanzine?
The guy's printed fanzine who I linked to in my signature has done really well and sent loads of them all round the world.

I have actually had someone mention this, but I don't understand, what would be the demand for an actual paper fanzine if that is what you mean when the internet exists?  I do have that blog where most of my game writing stuff goes, after all...

doesn't sound like it's your thing.

Sorry, I missed this one... but no, that's not what I meant.  Of course the idea of printed versions of my stuff is an interesting idea, I just don't quite see where the market would be... it's hard enough getting people to read something on the internet! :p (Plus, it'd be a lot of work and I am not any kind of graphic artist; I mostly like the writing part, more so than finding screenshots even, much less making a magazine... but sure, despite that it's an interesting idea.)

It's not an insult

It's an insult.

it's fact that your definition of 'parallax' contradicts the dictionary.

Only trolls, fools, and biased liars argue with the dictionary.  Which one are you?

I'm not arguing with the dictionary, so none of the above.

In any case, you've changed the line to say it's limited parallax instead of fake, which is exactly what Bonknuts suggested.

I never said "fake parallax"!  I originally said "a parallax-like effect".  I did change it, and I do think it's more accurate now, but I never said, or thought of saying, the word "fake".  You're reading more into it than was there.

He made no argument about 'all parallax being equal'; that's just you making things up to support your agenda.

Uh, what?  He spent a whole paragraph saying "all parallax is parallax".

Again, it's not an insult when it's 100% true.

When you meanly insult someone, you are insulting them and that's wrong.  Debate based on facts and opinions, not personal attacks -- those get you nowhere.

You have zero proof that it being unfinished was due to the SFC; it's called conjecture, look it up.

Without something from Masaya themselves, we'll never know why it was unfinished.  It could be a response to the SFC, sure, but it could just as easily be due to budget/time constraints, staff changes, corporate priority shifts, or any number of other factors.

If you want to write something more than just a recitation of facts, as I do, what you do is first you look at the evidence, then you try to come up with a theory that explains it.  And while we certainly don't know the definite truth behind why the game released as it is, there's no harm in trying to figure it out.

[PCE/TG-16|CD/SGX Discussion / Re: Review: Dragon Egg - A Good but Rushed Platformer]

In the review, I said this about parallax: "  The developers even pull off a 'parallax-like effect; there is no real parallax scrolling, of course, but the developers do make some clouds quickly move past in many stages to give some of that feeling of movement. It's great and definitely helps.  "

I was trying to praise the game, but reading it again it can be improved.  It's somewhat ironic that I always get complaints about my writing being too long from some, and too short from others... because if the issue here is saying "real" and "parallax-like", that's just shorthand for "the whole background does not move, only those clouds".  That is what I meant there, though some here clearly misunderstand that.  So, improved version:

"  The developers even pull off a limited parallax effect.  The whole background does not have multiple layers in it, but there are clouds which quickly move across the sky in many stages, to give some of that feeling of parallax movement.  It's a great effect and definitely helps."

I imagine I'll still get complaints, but it's probably a more accurate summation of what I think of the clouds.

Because this is a very common trend with Black Falcon. He really doesn't understand underlying hardware architecture, let alone more simplistic concepts like parallax. Once he makes this connection from one idea to another, there's no changing it. It is etched in stone in his brain.

By making this quite insulting comment you ruin most value from the arguments in the rest of your post, you know.  Insults are rude and unnecessary!

Parallax means just what it is; different scroll speeds for parts of the display to give the illusion of depth. Whether they over lap, made up of sprites, backgrounds, straight pixel driven, or some other method or however complex it is... parallax is parallax. His statement could be reduced to "limited parallax" and that would be very accurate. Instead, he asserts his misunderstanding to go out of the way to point something that ends up being incorrect. It's not just PCE reviews; he does this for other systems as well.

 There is no such thing as fake parallax. It's either parallax or not. And if it is, it falls somewhere between complex and simple, hardware assisted and software driven, etc. If it's parallax, then there only exists the attribute of how it was derived. "Fake" or pseudo is not a qualifier.

I'm not "misunderstanding" anything, I'm just using terms in a way you disagree with.    Let's look at what this actually should be about, this review.  Had this game had full multi-layer backgrounds, as you see in some TG16 platformers (Bravoman, Rondo of Blood, Valis IV, and such), I'd call it parallax.  However, Dragon Egg! does not do that; it just has clouds it moves by in the sky and nothing else.  You're being too reductive by calling all parallax equal; no, the quality of the effect does matter.  Something with a full parallax background (like Valis IV) has more and better parallax than something with only strip-parallax, for example.  In my game opinion summary of Valis IV a couple of years ago, I said " Ingame graphics are great — this game has parallax-scrolling backgrounds in many levels!" with no qualifiers.  And that's accurate.  In this review I say something different because this games' clouds are not on that level.

The other connection that this game was rushed because the SFC? There's no evidence to support that. It's just haphazard speculation, which should be stated as such and not passed off as self evident. Where I come from, we call that talking out your ass.

A conclusion based on a significant amount of evidence is not just a guess that deserves such insulting language.  The game released at a time when the system was still selling but was declining from its 1990 peak, and months before NEC released the Duo and refocused onto CDs as SNES sales skyrocketed.  The game was NCS Masaya's last HuCard release; they entirely switched over to CDs after this game.  It released with the second half of the game only maybe half-finished at best.   So you have a better explanation than mine that considers all of these facts?

I'm a huge SFC fanboy but I don't agree at all that the PC Engine was fading in 91.

What would you say, just past peak?  Because it was on the decline, though it was still successful that year.

A majority of the PCE's lifetime sales in Japan happened from launch through March 1991, according to NEC's numbers: http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=981407  Note how in 3/91 the system was at 3.65 million sold (including the CD addon and HuCard systems combined).  It finished at 5.84 million, well under double that number.  We don't have good separate numbers for the PCE and CD addon before 1992, but we do know the (non-CD/Duo) PCE was at 3.65 million sold in March '92, and finished at 3.92 as of 1994.  By '92 the base PCE was pretty much dead sales-wise.  Of course, the system did keep selling in Duo form, but the Duo and CD addon combined sold 1.92 million, roughly half for each of them (so a bit under a million each), so the majority of people with a PCE did not buy a CD addon.  And most games released in the Duo era were CD titles, not HuCard.

So, based on the numbers we have, the system sold better each year from 3/88 to 3/91, reaching a max of 1.3 million in the year that ended in March '91 (again, base system and CD addon sales combined).  Then in the year after that it sold a million, still pretty good though a little bit down... but the year after that saw only 300k sold.  So yeah, '91 was a good year, but just past peak.

As for Nintendo and the Super Famicom: http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=701305  In Japan, the SFC sold 1.4 million in the year ending Mar. '91, 3 million in the year ending 3/'92, and 4 million in the year ending 3/'93.  By March '92 the SFC had sold better in Japan than the non-CD PC Engine.

[PCE/TG-16|CD/SGX Discussion / Re: Review: Dragon Egg - A Good but Rushed Platformer]

I think when people hear the term rushed in the title of review it implies some sort of foundation of truth that it was rushed, when in fact it very well might not have been rushed but rather mismanaged to the point where the final project feels incomplete.

My point was that rushed and incomplete "feel" are completely separate issues, and that many incomplete feeling games are not rushed. Duke Nukem Forever felt rushed and incomplete, but took like 13 years of development. I don't imagine I'd see a review for Duke Nukem Forever that says "Rushed", but the gameplay reeks of mismanagement and incomplete ideas.

I don't think "rushed" and "incomplete" are very different terms.  If a game released unfinished and incomplete, it was rushed for some reason.  And there's no question that Dragon Egg released incomplete.  I could have used "incomplete" or "unfinished" in the review title instead of "rushed" and the meaning wouldn't change.  And I do think it's fair to mention; there's a reason why every review of the game I have seen discusses the issue.

As for Duke Nukem Forever, as a big Apogee (later known as 3D Realms) fan from the early '90s, I followed that games' development along the way.  And yes, the final game we got on the shelves was incomplete and rushed to release.  The problems started when George Broussard decide that he had to keep pace with the industry, so he kept trying to update the game to match the current trends in AAA development.  Problem is, 3D Realms' team was small, so it took a lot longer for them to do an equivalent amount of work to the huge teams AAA games were being made by by in the '00s.  So, development dragged on, as the game was repeatedly restarted and then developed slowly by a not-too-big team.  But 3DR had plenty of money for years due to previous successes and the money they made for selling off the Max Payne rights, so it kept on... until, with the game finally heading towards completion, they ran low on funds.  Eventually Gearbox stepped in to finish it, but what they basically did was just have some ex-3DR people patch together what had been finished of the game into something shippable.  I think it would be fair to call the game "rushed" because 3DR wasn't able to actually finish the game, resulting in lots of cut content and a rushed feel.  Of course, it's also accurate to call it really killed by too much money (since they could self-fund there was no publisher forcing them to stick to a schedule) and mismanagement, but the end result of all that was that when they were finally working on something Broussard considered shippable, they didn't have time to finish it.

As for the game itself, I do think DNF is okay, but it doesn't live up to the hype of things like the great trailers from the late '90s and early '00s, for sure.

Edit: it's a weird thing go read speculation stated as fact in the title of a review, just saying.

The idea is to have a title which, in a couple of words, encapsulates my opinion on a game.

[PCE/TG-16|CD/SGX Discussion / Re: Review: Dragon Egg - A Good but Rushed Platformer]

Here's another review of the game in English (thanks to BKK from Neogaf for finding this)



... and, like every review of the game I've seen, it mentions how the second half feels unfinished and, beyond that, speculates a bit about why.

[PCE/TG-16|CD/SGX Discussion / Re: Review: Dragon Egg - A Good but Rushed Platformer]

I was going to mention it yesterday, but didn't want to bag on you about a review that obviously took quite a bit of time and effort - and I appreciate that effort. I do think you prove a point for me though when I was going to say it seems more designed into a corner than rushed.

Often games go underway with a specific schedule and budget, and that doesn't mean it was "rushed" it means they were given a timeline and budget to work within. From a business standpoint, getting these devs paid, it makes sense.

They easily could have squandered their resources on the first "half" of the game, and simply didn't have the money or memory on the hucard, to one up their earlier levels. Perhaps they used those first levels to greenlight the project and then found themselves in a position to finish the game and had not enough resources.

Sure, those are all possible.  What you describe here reads to me like several good examples of how games release in incomplete states, or, in other words, rushed.  It could be that they had a set amount of time, and spent too long on the first half and they had to patch together what they had for the second to make the schedule, sure... but that's a rushed game!  It's pretty much the definition of one.  What you describe seems like just some more specific scenarios that result in a game shipping as I described, feeling incomplete and "rushed [out]".

We are all speculating, and I don't think it's necessary to insert speculation into an objective review. Sticking to what you absolutely know about the game is probably the best idea when presenting a review of that game.

Any review of this game is going to talk about the issue in some way though, because beyond the gameplay itself it's the #1 most glaring thing you notice.  I don't think a review of the game which doesn't mention how weird the game feels because of the unbalanced levels and such would be as good of a review; as most things I write make obvious, I like writing to be detailed. (The Wheel of Time is one of the best fantasy book series ever!)  Sure, it is speculation to guess at exactly why the game ended up as it did, but I don't mind some speculation, if you make it clear that that's what it is, which I do think I do.  Why do you think it's harmful?

Beyond this question in particular, a review isn't only an attempt at objective truth, it is also a subjective opinion.  There was a time when professional reviewers tried to make reviews entirely objective, but that has faded as people have recognized that it's impossible.  You should try for objectivity when you can, yes, but ultimately a review is an opinion.  I think a good review should present the reviewers' opinion, while also covering the game objectively enough to help anyone who reads it to know if the game might interest them, regardless of whether they agree with the reviewers' opinions or not.

... What are you talking about?  I specifically mentioned the clouds as a nice effect that gives a parallax-like look.  Of course they're actually sprites, not a parallax layer, but the idea was good and it works.

And you also said "there is no real parallax scrolling".  I know you're too foolish to understand this, but either a game has parallax or it doesn't; only your bias and willful ignorance of dictionary definitions defines parallax solely as "two+ tile based background layers", a made up definition you can't even be bothered to apply consistently.

As NecroPhile and Falcon remember, we had a big discussion on parallax scrolling...ultimately, the intelligent person would recognize that the ultimate test should be the user experience. If the user sees the effect, then it exists, regardless of how it was achieved.

Now, if I were writing the review, I would discuss the overall effectiveness of the effect.

As I have pointed out in the past, many, many games use parallax in a manner I have found jarring/displeasing (Final Battle on Genesis), whilst other games, using the *same* ratio of character-movement:background-plane-movement  produce a pleasing effect (name most horizontal/vertical shooters). Why? Because the speed of a spacecraft hurling through space is not the same as a big dude slowly walking across the screen...so parallax effects should be done to *enhance* the experience and not disorient/annoy the player.

It would be perfectly acceptable to say that the parallax effects in Dragon Egg are not particularly impressive and explain why.

I think the "parallax" clouds were a good idea that gets some parallax in this game on this system that doesn't support it like the SNES and Genesis do.  I like those moving clouds and they absolutely add to the game.  But yes, it's not quite on par with a full parallax background -- it is only clouds, nothing else.  Many stages do have moving clouds on them, but still, having all "parallax" objects be identical-looking clouds that can only appear in sky areas of levels, which not all levels have, does limit things versus the kinds of parallax you see in other games.

Anyway, sorry for bringing up old debates, but I feel that your reviews would be even better if they focused on the user experience, first and foremost.

I really do think that how something is done DOES matter, regardless of if it's identical to the user or not.  We disagree on this, apparently.

However, despite that, if you have software parallax-style effects that look identical to hardware stuff?  Yeah, I can see calling that the same.  Since Neo-Geo game graphics are exclusively made up of sprites they don't have "real" backgrounds or parallax, but the difference doesn't matter much for the user, certainly.  The effect in Dragon Egg! is not on that level, though.

For an example of something on the Turbo which gets closer, how about Super Darius?  It looks like the parallax in that game probably is made up of sprites, but it's a pretty nice effect and looks great.

For example, does it matter if FMV is running full-screen @256 color @ 16 frames per second if the director chose boring angles/composition etc? The technical backend is not nearly as important as the user experience front end when it comes to these games.

In this scenario both things matter, I'm not sure which one more than the other.

[PCE/TG-16|CD/SGX Discussion / Re: Review: Dragon Egg - A Good but Rushed Platformer]

Great review, but let's not jump to conclusions. The game may feel rushed, but that doesn't mean it actually was. Sometimes game designers make bad judgments when designing games (just like movie directors). Nothing wrong with saying it feels rushed, but if you say outright that the game IS rushed, you should make sure you have a source for that information rather than just your own intuition.

A review should try to list the objective facts about a game, but ultimately it's a subjective opinion.  And that's what I give there, my opinion that the game feels incomplete.  It's not just me who feels that way; the Brothers Duomazov's review says the same thing, and for the same core reason I do: " It makes you wonder if, at some point, the designers just decided to speed things up and get the project out the door. ", it says.  I agree with that idea.  The VGDen review doesn't say "rushed", but does comment on the oddest thing about this game: the shortness of the second "half" of the game, levels 4 through 6: " The game is also fairly short - the first level does feature several sub-stages, but later ones are incredibly short and you often reach the various bosses in no time."  I don't think what I say is too different from either of those.  Or at least, it wasn't meant to be.

Here are the stages in the game:

1-1
1-2
1-3
1 Boss
2-1
2-2
2-3
2 Boss
3-1
3-2 (maze level)
3 Boss
4-1 (short easy autoscroller stage)
4 Boss
5-1
5 Boss
6-1
6 Boss

See what I mean?  I can't imagine this being the original intent.  Yes, levels 5-1 and 6-1 are longer than any individual stage in world 1, but they aren't longer than the levels in worlds 2 or 3.  And here's another thing -- level 4 ends with you going off the end of a waterfall... then you drop into the boss room against this slime monster thing?  That doesn't flow at all.

[PCE/TG-16|CD/SGX Discussion / Re: Review: Dragon Egg - A Good but Rushed Platformer]

Here's my current thought for a better version of that part of the first paragraph:

"  When this game released in Japan in fall '91 the PC Engine was still popular, but the smash-hit success of the Super Famicom (SNES) was taking over the market and NEC was moving towards a stronger focus on CD games over HuCard titles.  NCS Masaya may have been a third party, but they noticed this, as Dragon Egg! was their last HuCard release.  This all might be an explanation for why this game was rushed, but whatever the reason, it's unfortunate.  "

[PCE/TG-16|CD/SGX Discussion / Re: Review: Dragon Egg - A Good but Rushed Platformer]

Thanks for the replies.

Only in Black Falcon land are background elements scrolling at differing speeds between themselves and moving both vertically and horizontally independent of the foreground graphics that often overlap them, not considered parallax. 

... What are you talking about?  I specifically mentioned the clouds as a nice effect that gives a parallax-like look.  Of course they're actually sprites, not a parallax layer, but the idea was good and it works.

Thanks for the review.

@ A Black Falcon, you seem to have a talent for writing reviews, have you ever considered writing your own printed fanzine?
The guy's printed fanzine who I linked to in my signature has done really well and sent loads of them all round the world.

I have actually had someone mention this, but I don't understand, what would be the demand for an actual paper fanzine if that is what you mean when the internet exists?  I do have that blog where most of my game writing stuff goes, after all...

Hey now, a hefty Black Falcom review out of the blue! Thanks brother!

Sure!  I have written other stuff about games since my last TG16-related review, but I don't post everything here; posting everything on like 3-4 forums feels like enough, I can't post everything everywhere so I kind of hope anyone interested checks the site too.  Unless there is demand for me to post more of it here?

Once again, I don't think that console war propaganda is a good idea to include in game reviews like this, especially when the thin context is incorrect.

Propaganda?  It's just facts -- by later '91 the SNES was taking over the market.  I guess I could have left that out, but I think it might provide some possible context for why the game was shipped so unfinished... perhaps I should add a few words into the review making that point clearer. 

As for the thing about the number of platformers, there are fewer platformers on this system (HuCard and CD both) than the SNES or Genesis, something I do consider a negative because I like this genre a lot and it was an important genre then.  The TG16 is a great console, but the slightly disappointing platformer library is a comparative weakness within its generation... even if compared to plenty of consoles from other generations it's a strength.

I 1cc'd Dragon Egg! the first time I played it and then immediately played through the hardest difficulty without dying. It's more of an experience than a game, as it is so easy to casually walk through.

Sure, on Normal the game is very easy.  I didn't beat it my first try, but it didn't take many tries before I beat it without dying.  You beat it almost immediately on Hard, though?  That is impressive for sure, for the reasons I describe in the review Hard is really tough and I still haven't managed to beat that mode...

The graphics look and feel more 8-bit gen to me and I honestly thought to myself the first time through that it makes poor use of color and is poorly drawn.

Anyone considering buying the game should play through it first on a flash card or in emulation. I really can't recommend it.

I definitely disagree about the graphics, as the screenshots show they look quite good!  The game is very bright and colorful, far beyond any 3rd-gen game, and the sprite details and general visula look are above NES levels for sure as well.

As for the game overall though, if the game was cheap I'd recommend it more definitely, but it is true that for the $20 or $30-plus this game will cost, you might want a longer game than Dragon Egg provides.  That's a fair concern for sure.  I like it enough that I don't mind having spent that much for it, but playing it first is fair, sure.

You had me at "just starting to fade"....

I'm trying to reword that part of the first paragraph to make that point better... like, in December '91 NEC released the Super CD addon, as they responded to the SNES's dominating success by focusing more on CD titles over HuCards, something the Super Nintendo couldn't do.

And on that note, consider this -- Dragon Egg! was the last HuCard game released by NCS Masaya for the system.  All their titles after it are on CD.  So yeah, I can see how the changing market could have led to them rushing this one out unfinished.

[PCE/TG-16|CD/SGX Discussion / Re: Review: Dragon Egg - A Good but Rushed Platformer]

Hard Mode

There is a big elephant in the room that I have been sort of dodging around up to this point, however: the difference between the difficulty levels.  Dragon Egg! has the usual three settings, Easy, Normal, and Hard.  On Easy, the game is a complete and total cakewalk.   Don't bother with it.  On Normal, the game is still really easy.  I beat the game on normal, without dying even one single time, the day after I got this game.  So it may have been easy, but it was a lot of fun while it lasted.  But to get a bit more out of this not-cheap game, I decided to try Hard mode... and it's a huge difference from the lower ones!  Hard makes two major changes to the game: first, all enemies and bosses take twice as many hits to kill as they do on the lower difficulties.  This makes everything a lot longer and slows down the game.  And second, and even more importantly, you now are punished not only for dying, but for getting hit at all.  If you have bought powerups from the store, you lose one level from BOTH of those powerups each time you take a hit.  You also take damage, of course. And if you don't have powerups, each hit takes away one dragon egg.  If there are no eggs in the meter at the moment you'll be downgraded to the next level down, down to the minimum of just having the egg with its way-too-close melee attack.  And you REALLY need powerups, because the final boss is brutally, near-impossibly difficult without a significantly powered up dragon; I tried to beat him in Hard with no powerups once, but eventually had to give up, it's just crazy-hard.

Overall, Hard mode's changes make the game a LOT harder and much, much more frustrating.  The main reason why this review isn't happening until now, instead of a week and a half ago when I first meant to write one, is because I just can't stop trying and failing to beat this game on Hard!  I know I need to no-hit-clear it to win, and I keep messing up and dying somewhere in level three.  It's really the "taking away powerups when you get hit" thing that makes it so hard; if you've gotten to the point where you're losing eggs, it's already over.  You cannot grind to get more money in this game, there is a preset number of enemies and each one only drops one coin or egg.  So if you take a hit and it steals 10 or 20 coins worth of powerups from you, that's a hard to impossible thing to recover from.  It's frustrating, because if I could get past the first half of the game with full power I think I could beat the second half with a lot less difficulty, but that's easier said than done... argh.  So yeah, I keep trying, and putting off this review that I was initially going to "write quickly because the game is easy and fun."  Heh.  But hey, as frustrating as that is, it also shows how addictive the game is; I'm still playing it, after all.  Had the game only had the Normal difficulty setting and no others it'd have been another one of those fun but very short game, but thanks to Hard mode the game has some lasting play value.

Archers shoot fire-arrows.

Conclusion

In conclusion, Dragon Egg! is a good game I definitely like playing, but it is also a flawed title that could have been a lot better.  This game has great graphics that are among the best on the platform in this genre, variety to the gameplay due to the different enemies and obstacles you run across, and something for everyone difficulty-wise as the normal mode is short and fun, if somewhat insubstantial because of how quickly you should beat it, while the hard mode is a serious challenge.  On the other hand though, the game is far too short and was obviously shipped in a partially-finished state, as the mostly missing second half of the game and very short ending show.  The unbalanced difficulty and too-easy gameplay if you get fully powered up are also issues; though Hard mode does alleviate that second one somewhat, it is still easier powered up.  The decision to have you lose a full level of BOTH attack-enhancer powerups every time you get hit one single time in Hard mode is also perhaps inordinately cruel for a game like this; it'd have been better if you lost only one attack powerup each time, if that mechanic had to exist. These issues are significant, but still I do like Dragon Egg! overall.  I give this game a B- score.   This is the kind of game this system needed more of and I recommend it to platformer fans, it's good despite its issues.

Links

pcengine-fx.com/reviews/duomazov/2009/03/dragon-egg.html - The Brothers Duomazov's review has some nice screenshots from later in the game, read it!

http://www.videogameden.com/hucard/reviews/deg.htm - VGDen also has a review, and a translation of the backstory -- the girl's name is Eran, and she is the descendant of the legendary Dragon Warriors and is the only one who can defeat the demon who has taken over the land.  Also, more nice screenshots.

[PCE/TG-16|CD/SGX Discussion / Review: Dragon Egg - A Good but Rushed Platformer]

Platform: PC Engine (TurboGrafx-16)
    Year: Released 9/27/1991
    Developer/Publisher: NCS Masaya
    Title: Dragon Egg!

Colors aside this is representative of the game.

Introduction

Dragon Egg! is a cartoony platformer NCS Masaya published in '91.  This game is a tough one to review, because on the one hand it's a pretty good, fun game, but on the other hand it's also flawed, has an unbalanced difficulty level which is harder in the first half of this six-level game and easier in the second, is absurdly short, and feels unfinished.  When this game released in Japan in fall '91 the PC Engine was still popular, but the smash-hit success of the Super Famicom (SNES) was taking over the market and NEC was moving towards a stronger focus on CD games over HuCard titles.  NCS Masaya may have been a third party, but they noticed this, as Dragon Egg! was their last HuCard release.  This all might be an explanation for why this game was rushed, but whatever the reason, it's unfortunate.  Regardless, the game makes a great first impression with its good graphics and nice cartoony artwork, and it controls well as well, but the serious issues add up to some huge drawbacks.  The story is that you play as a young girl, off to save the world from evil with a dragon's egg.  The text is all in Japanese, but the basics of what's going on is clear enough: there is a demon troubling the land, and a young girl is the only hope to save the land from decay.  An old man, maybe her grandfather or something, gives her some goggles which are apparently dragon-rider gear, and off you go to save the day!  The intro cutscene is fairly long and looks great.  Unfortunately, it's the only real cutscene in the game; the ending is extremely short.  There is a nice credits sequence, but still, as with many things in this game, the ending feels unfinished.

The intro looks great.

Graphics and Sound

Visually, the game is one of the better looking platformers on the system.  The PC Engine or TurboGrafx, on both HuCard and CD, does not have the wealth of platformers that the Super Nintendo and Genesis do.  Its platformer library is smaller, and many of the games are more NES-like in design than most of the games you see on those other two systems. The system had an earlier peak, and that shows.  This game, though, is clearly 4th-gen in style.  The background and character art is colorful and quite well-drawn. It shows off the consoles' ability to put lots of colors on screen nicely, and the art design would look good anywhere.  Buildings do look a bit flat, I guess, but I don't mind.  The sprite art is particularly nice, and well animated too.  The heroine in her pink overalls puts those goggles on once you power up enough to ride on the dragon, for example, which is a nice touch once you notice it.  Enemies raise their weapon as they approach you too, and do a 'swing' animation if you touch them.  Nice stuff.  There are not a huge number of different types of foes, but it's enough for a game as short as this.  Those enemies are varied, and while the game has a cartoony anime look to it, there is some variety here, from the cute to the threatening.  Your dragon is somewhat adorably cute, but monsters vary from the big-headed and not too scary skeletons to the creepier flying bug-men . Other enemies include giants, slimes, and later on several kinds of gun and laser turrets.  Bosses similarly vary, from the barely threatening-looking first boss to the more serious later ones.  They all look great.  On an odd but then-common note though, the main character wears blue overalls and a yellow shirt in the manual art, but pink overalls with a white shirt in the game.  It's odd how some older games have very different art between the manuals and games even in Japan... or sometimes, within the game itself; see Alisia Dragoon on the Genesis for an example of that.

I do need to say though, as in many anime fantasy settings, this world is historically incoherent.  It appears medieval at first and enemies have armor, swords, and bows, but there is electricity in places, there are enemy laser turrets, and the heroine wears modern clothing.  The setting makes little sense.  Is this fantasy or modern ?  It's both, apparently.  But beyond that all-too-common frustration, the game looks great.  The visuals here have a more polished look to them than most platformers on the system do.  Hudson's platformers often match or beat this, visually, but I do think the game is in the upper tier visually, at least for this system.  The developers even pull off a limited parallax effect.  The whole background does not have multiple layers in it, but there are clouds which quickly move across the sky in many stages, to give some of that feeling of parallax movement.  It's a great effect and definitely helps.  The music, however, is unfortunately strictly average stuff.  It's mostly okay, but isn't exciting or too memorable.  Some songs are too short, too, such as the five-second-loop that plays during the first half of the last boss fight. Still, the audio is alright, and after playing it for a while I guess a few tracks are somewhat catchy.

The first level.  Health and lives are in the upper right, dragon egg counter in the upper left.

Controls and Game Design

One thing making Dragon Egg! game good are the great controls.  The controls are precise and accurate. You do move a little fast, so you do need to look out or you'll bump into enemies, but it controls very well.  This is a simple game, and all you'll is move around, jump, and attack.  You start with two hearts for health, though each health heart can take two hits, and you can upgrade this to a maximum of four hearts during the game.  Though you can't save your progress you do have infinite continues, but your goal should be to beat the game without dying, or without getting hit much at all if you're in Hard mode, so the continues aren't always needed.  Levels are all straightforward as well.  There is some depth in the upgrade system, however, though it's badly unbalanced, particularly in Normal difficulty.  Whenever you kill an enemy they drop one of two different types of powerups: dragon eggs to upgrade your dragon's form, or coins you use to buy other powerups.  Which one an enemy drops is entirely random, it is important to note; I kind of wish the powerups were predetermined, but which you get is purely a matter of chance.

Of the two upgrade systems, I will first cover the dragon mentioned in the title. Collecting dragon eggs upgrade your dragon between four forms.  You start out carrying an egg in a backpack, and can attack only at melee range.  You want to get out of this mode as soon as possible, because this attack is too close-range to avoid taking damage sometimes.  All four forms do exactly the same amount of damage per hit, varying on whether you have weapon powerups of course, I should say; it is the range that varies, but those range expansions are vital! It is funny how hitting a badguy with an egg does the same amount of damage as shooting them with a fireball, though.  Heh.  So, the first upgrade requires two dragon eggs.  Here, the dragon has poked its head out of the egg and breathes fire ahead of you.  This short-range fire attack is pretty good and actually will collect items, something the later upgrades' attacks will not do. The third level takes three more eggs.  Now you ride on the hatched dragon's back, and attack with fireballs that go across the screen.  The last powerup takes four eggs, and makes the dragon larger and better.  Now it's got a higher jump that has some float to it for slower descents, and it upgrades your weapon potential as well -- while the basic un-upgraded attack is the same as the level 3 dragon, with upgrades you will see the difference.  The top-level dragon is pretty awesome, and overpowered, so long as you have it.  It is a big target, though only your character is actually vulnerable and not the dragon. This is important to know for getting through the laser gates without taking a hit.

The money system similarly rewards staying alive, and is one more element making the first half of the game harder than the second -- if you can get fully powered up and avoid losing those powerups, you'll be nearly unstoppable.  You use collected money to buy powerups from shops scattered around the game. There are six different items you can buy. For 3 coins, you can buy cure items which you can use in the select menu. These heal half a heart each, and you can carry up to four.  There are three items that cost 10 coins.  First there is a firepower upgrade which doubles the damage you do per hit.  You can buy this again, for the same cost, to almost double damage again -- this reduces an 8-hit giant down to 3 hits, for example.  Next, there is a range / multi-hit upgrade.  This gives the level 1 or 2 dragon a slightly longer range attack, the level 3 dragon two fireballs for an attack, or the level 4 dragon three fireballs.  You can also can purchase this a second time as well, to add homing to your level 3 or 4 dragon's shots or a little more range to a level 1 or 2 dragon.  And last at 10 coins, you can buy additional health hearts, which, yes, you can buy up to two of, though you don't need to as unlike the attack upgrades you can also get these other ways.  And last, two items are available for for 30 coins each: a barrier which gives you an extra hit which you don't lose anything for losing if you are hit, or a skull which is a bomb you can use by double-tapping attack, or something like that.  You can only have one skull at a time in your inventory.  It is important to note that five of these six powerups can be lost, but you won't lose the healthbar-expanding hearts.  I wonder why they decided that health upgrades are permanent, while attack upgrades can be lost.  It's kind of odd. As for the other upgrades, in Easy or Normal you won't lose any dragon or store-bought powerups unless you die, but if you do die you reset to the level-one egg-swing attack, and you lose all money and purchased items except for health expansions as well.  It's painful stuff, if you were upgraded; the easiest way to beat the game is to not die.  In Hard mode the game is significantly more punishing: you lose store-bought attack powerups, then dragon eggs, each time you are hit.  More on this later.

There is no scoring system in this game, so the only pickups in levels are those items enemies drop, and a few scattered health bar-expansion heart, cure, and skull items.  There is also a roulette after each level which spins between a health expansion heart, a cure, a skull, or a 1-up.  Try to time your jump for the one you want the most.  Oddly, while they look identical, the cure items you get from the end-level roulette or that are placed in levels are entirely different from the ones you can buy in the stores, as quite unlike the ones you buy, the cure pickups are instant-use only and cannot be stored, and heal a full heart instead of only a half like the ones you buy do.  The two types probably should have used different graphics to signify that they are not the same.  Still, I like that the full-heart heals exist, they are quite useful because there is no health recovery between levels; you'll start the next stage with the exact amount of health you finished the last one with.  When you add those hearts to your health they start out empty, too, so even if you don't take damage you will need health at least to fill those.  It all works fairly well.

The shop and items.

Level Design and Layouts

The level designs are the core of any platformer, and thankfully stages in Dragon Egg! are nicely varied.  There are horizontal, vertical, and maze-like levels, and you need to approach each enemy type differently.  Enemy AI is extremely basic, as enemies mostly just move or shoot straight at you once they're on screen, but it works as other things differentiate them, such as size, whether they fly or not, and whether they can shoot at you.  The six bosses are each entirely unique as well, so no two of those fights will be the same.  All six boss fights have the exact same stage background as well, with the same platform layout on it. I don't mind this, but it does lack variety.  More importantly, one of the major issues with Dragon Egg! is that the game is badly unbalanced and sort of backwards -- the second half of the game is significantly shorter and easier than the first half is.  The first two levels each are broken up into three stages and then a boss.  The difficulty ramps up just right here, as the game starts out quite easy but slowly gets trickier.  Level three only has two stages before the boss, but the second is the games' one and only maze stage, so it may take a little while to get through.  Level 3 feels as long as either before it, and it might be the hardest level in the game.  But then you get to level four, and it all falls apart; while levels four through six are quite fun, they all have only ONE stage per level each!  One linear stage and a boss each, that's it.  There are also level design elements that only appear once, which can be fine for some original challenge, but why does is stage 1-2 the only one in the whole game with instant-death pits in it, for example ?  It's bizarre.  The only explanation I can think of is that the game must have been badly rushed, shipped before it was really done because NCS needed it out NOW or something.  These and other cutbacks are quite unfortunate, because a more complete and polished version of this game could have been great.

Now, I'd like to go into a little more detail about each of the stages.  Skip this paragraph if you want to avoid any spoilers about the game.  Level one has you traveling across some mountains.  As mentioned previously, stage 1-2 is the only one in the game with bottomless pits.  It's hard to avoid that enemy on the last jump, but you CAN do it without taking a hit if you jump at the last second.  I mentioned the first boss earlier. Level two is harder, as you travel through giant-infested caverns.  It's a fun level, though it can be tricky at points in Hard mode.  The boss is a spawning creature which can be a pain to not take any damage against.  Level three is the maze in an electric castle. It's a good, well-designed level, though it is quite challenging to get through in Hard mode without taking hits thanks to the flying bug enemies, the laser gates, and maybe worst of all the invincible gun turrets shooting at you.  The boss is this cubic thing with tendrils you need to destroy before you take out the core; it's easy powered up, but a bit trickier if not.  Level four is a river-rafting trip over water.  You have to stay on the raft in the middle of the screen and enemies are only a minor threat, so the level is very easy.  The graphics here are great though, as the level has some really nice-looking rippling water effects.  The stage ending is a setup for another stage that doesn't exist though; again, this game must have been rushed.  The boss is interesting, but again is easy at full power once you learn its pattern.  The fifth level goes through an Egyptian desert.  It's a fun level, though again it's too short and badly needs multiple areas.  The level 5 boss is one of the easier ones regardless of your power level.  And last, you go through the bosses' fortress.  The level is only moderately challenging, though the boss is really hard if you aren't powered up. This boss has two forms, and without powerups it takes a lot of hits to kill and attacks with curving fireballs that are hard to avoid.  It's hard to do even a few hits in a row against the guy without taking damage, so you want to be powerful enough to take him out as quickly as possible.

With the level two dragon, shooting a fireball.

[PCE/TG-16|CD/SGX Discussion / Re: (1/17/2016 - 1/23/2016) Game of the Week: Super Dimension Fortress Macross 2036]

This is a fun game when you're actually playing it, but the cutscenes are annoyingly long!  It isn't a long game, but like half of the game is cutscenes.  It gets tedious.  And it's a somewhat easy and basic game, too.  It looks pretty good, but while it's fun to play the low difficulty, the somewhat simplistic gameplay, and overlong cutscenes hold it back.  It also doesn't help that I have very little nostalgia for Macross, so I'm just judging it as a game and not as something connected to something else.

I mean, this IS an above average game, but I wouldn't call it the incredible classic I've seen some say it is.  It's 'just' a fun little shooter with nice graphics but some issues.

[PCE/TG-16|CD/SGX Discussion / Re: naked Memory Base 128]

Emerald Dragon and Private eye dol both have a memory-backup function.  The odd part is, the two are entirely incompatible with eachother -- system memory backups you make in Emerald Dragon can't be copied to and from the system in Private eye dol, and vice versa.  You're pretty much stuck with one or the other...

Emerald Dragon - You hold a button (or is it a d-pad direction?) when starting the game to boot in to the MB129 menu.  The game doesn't support saving to the MB128 for some stupid reason, but you can copy memory blocks back and forth between the system and backups you make on the MB128.  You cannot see files saved directly to the MB128 here, or Private eye dol memory backups, only ED's memory backups.  In Private eye dol, you see the sizes of these files on the MB128, but not what's in them.  The size is the total of all files in that block.

Private eye dol - This has a more comprehensive save backup program accessible from the menu.  You can make memory backups as in ED, though they're incompatible of course, and also view files on the system and MB128, with file sizes visible.  Private eye dol memory backups are all the maximum size of 2048, so they don't change in size based on the size actually used, unlike Emerald Dragon.

I haven't used the Private eye dol memory manager recently, I think it can do a few more things but had some limitations as well.  Maybe I'll go back to it and check that out.


As for the MB128 itself, I find it useful to use batteries wit ha tester, so I can check them every once in a while.  That onboard capacitor will not hold a charge for long, so if the batteries run out you probably will have lost your saves before you notice.  A set of good batteries should last 6+ months, though, so they do last a while.  And it DOES hold saves while the system is on (I presume it gets power from the system), so you can remove the battery box without worry, though that capacitor will hold them for a little while while you switch out batteries of course.

[PCE/TG-16|CD/SGX Discussion / Re: Popful Mail Appreciation Thread!]

There is no "turbo"...it was always part of something larger...

TurboCD = TCD = BULLSHITE

I think GameFAQs is responsible for creating this BULLSHITE. It never has, and never will represent reality.

TG-CD = TurboGrafx-CD
TG-16 = TurboGrafx-16

NEC/TTi were pretty consistent with the branding over the years...

Blame GameFAQs for TCD/TurboCD silliness (watch, I'll have to eat my words if some TTi catalog uses "TurboCD")

Damn!

I don't know where "TCD" came from, so you could be right about this for all I know that it was a GameFAQs creation, but "Turbo" as a slang term for the system absolutely has always been popular.  It is even used occasionally in official magazines; I have one issue of TurboForce, the Gate of Thunder issue, and there are occasional uses of "Turbo" instead of the full "TurboGrafx".  It's very understandable that people would bring that over into the platform name as well.

Maybe it is worth noting, though, that IGN uses "TG-CD" as the system acronym on the few Turbo CD games they actually have listings for, instead of TCD, so major gaming sites don't all use that.  I like TCD because it's shorter. :p

[PCE/TG-16|CD/SGX Discussion / Re: Popful Mail Appreciation Thread!]

Both animation styles look great.   I love Slayers, it's one of my favorite anime series, and I see what you mean about the TCD version looking more like that, but the SCD games' animation style looks pretty good too.

This is a PCE forum. SCD = SuperCD. SegaCD=SegaCD.

Heh... I guess they do have the same acronym, don't they.  But really, TCD or PCECD are the acronyms for the Turbo CD.  Sure, within the TCD system there are CD, SCD, and ACD formats, but those aren't the name of the platform, like SCD is for the Sega CD.  SCD is the only acronym I've ever seen used for the Sega CD; I'm not European or something, I won't call it the "Mega CD".

[PCE/TG-16|CD/SGX Discussion / Re: Fiend Hunter?]

I have Fiend Hunter, got it for very cheap last year I think it was.  It seems like a decent game for its style.  The problem is, I'm not really a fan of the subgenre --it's a Prince of Persia-style game, and I've never cared too much for PoP or any of the games in the genre, not Flashback, Oddworld: Abe's Oddysee, Blackthorne, or what have you.  Somehow I've just never wanted to actually stick with any of these kinds of games and try to get good at them, I'd rather play other kinds of platformers like Mario, Sonic, Bonk, etc. instead.

As for the cutscenes, yeah, they are annoyingly long.  Maybe the cutscenes would be a little less annoying if I could understand what they're saying, but as it is they definitely drag on too long.  I wish you could skip them.  (Remember to save if you can after watching a long cutscene so you don't need to rewatch it if you die...)

[PCE/TG-16|CD/SGX Discussion / Re: Popful Mail Appreciation Thread!]

I didn't realize the SNES game was so bad.  What's wrong with it?  I've only really played the SCD game... I know the SCD game is a remake of sorts of the original computer game that the PCECD game is a port of, while the SNES game is entirely different.  I guess being different and the only one of the three console Popful Mail games that was actually made by Falcom didn't help it any. Too bad.

But yes, the SCD game is fantastic, I like it a lot. I haven't played the TCD game, but I'm sure I'd enjoy it as well, though the ingame graphics look quite small compared to the SCD version and I don't like that huge border.

[PCE/TG-16|CD/SGX Discussion / Re: (9/26/2015 - 10/2/2015) Game of the Week: R-Type]

The CD version really does allow for unlimited continues. There is no value for the number of continues, the text isn't there. The CD version also has a difficulty setting at the menu which can be accessed by pressing select.

Infinite continues... okay, I definitely want the CD version then.  It's too bad that Irem didn't make a Turbo version of R-Type II, but those, combined with the CD audio music and cutscenes, are some nice additions in the CD version of the first game.

[PCE/TG-16|CD/SGX Discussion / Re: Shockman Thread (Shocking Secrets Revealed!?!)]

I have Shubibinman 1 and 3, but not the second game yet, unfortunately... I have played it a bit in emulation and it seems good, but I definitely want the real thing.  The issue is that I'd rather have the US version since the game does have some story, but it's very expensive.

As for the two I do have, I like the first game quite a bit really, it's a pretty fun and quite challenging platform-action game.  The third game, on CD, is great fun while it lasts, but it's sadly insanely easy; I beat it very quickly.  The first game is a lot harder because you lose a lot of powerups when you die, meaning that if you want to win you kind of can't die at all.  The best I've done so far is to get to the final boss... but then I died, and while you can technically continue, in reality it was hopeless because of the loss of powerups and health.  I like the branching level tree, also.  The choices, and number of levels, is great; even if there are only a handful of different visual themes for levels, there are a good number of different actual stages.  Shubibinman 1 is a lot of fun and I quite like it.

Of course the third game has more polished gameplay and much better visuals, but with its seriously lacking challenge and short length I don't know if it's as much better compared to the first one as most people say.  Yeah, it looks good, has some cool scenarios along the way, has CD audio music, cutscenes instead of just text boxes, has some gameplay variety, and more... but it's over almost before it begins!  What happened to the challenge of the first game, there is almost none.  Too many of the levels are just linear corridors, too -- 3 has almost no jumping puzzles outside of maybe two segments, and that is unfortunate and hurts the game a bit.  The first game has plenty of jumping-puzzle segments, why are they almost entirely absent in 3?  This kind of game is better with them.  The third game is entirely linear too, with none of the first games' branching paths, and doesn't have the shops to buy items from either, just regular powerups.  I have nothing against a strong linear experience, but the first game probably has more content, and I do like the powerup store and alternate routes even if they aren't essential.  So, overall, as fun as 3 is, I like the first game more.  I think the first Shubibinman is quite under-rated, it's a good game.

Isn't the second game a bit more shooting-focused, though? In the first and third games, really the sword is your main weapon most of the time.

[PCE/TG-16|CD/SGX Discussion / Re: (9/26/2015 - 10/2/2015) Game of the Week: R-Type]

On the note of R-Type, does the Turbo CD version really have infinite continues?  That would be a huge help, if true, compared to the cart... I love R-Type, but it's an extremely punishing game.  I've beaten R-Type DX for the GBC, since it lets you save, but on TG16 the best I've done is getting to level six, I believe it was...

[PCE/TG-16|CD/SGX Discussion / Re: Review: W-Ring: The Double Rings - A Very Good but Obscure Shmup]

Nice review!  I enjoy reading the longer-form articles like this as well.

Thanks.

^ I was teasing you in that comment I made.

On PCE: Monster Lair has no parallax, Ninja Gaiden has poorly executed parallax.

Monster Lair for Turbo CD is a great game, and they more than made up for the removal of parallax other ways.  The graphics look really good for a 1989 regular-CD release, most obviously.  I don't mind that they removed the parallax, it looks great as it is and for the time it's really good looking for the platform.  It also kept the two player co-op, which was far from a given back then!  The gameplay is great as well, and the CD soundtrack is quite good.  I only have the TCD version, but I imagine the MD version has worse audio, it's only on a cart.  It might have been nice to see some kind of CD intro or something, a bunch of those early CD titles really are just cart-style-game-plus-CD-audio, but it's a very good game as it is.  It's kind of weird; I've never enjoyed the first Wonder Boy or any of the Adventure Island games very much, but Monster Lair and Monster World are fantastic.

As for Ninja Gaiden, I have the first two games for the NES (and I did beat the second one, because its last level isn't as insanely hard as the last level in the first game), but I really wish I had gotten the SNES collection back when it wasn't insanely expensive.  That version adds password save to all three games and I, of course, always like it a lot when games let you save.

[PCE/TG-16|CD/SGX Discussion / Re: (10/3/2015 - 10/9/2015) Game of the Week: Fray CD: Xak Gaiden]

Yeah, this game is pretty good.  Unfortunately I've only played it emulated, I don't have the disc yet.  It's too bad, I wish i did.  I did get the Game Gear Fray game, Fray Shuugyouhen, a few years ago, though, because I'd liked the TCD game in emulation and had a chance to get a cheap copy of the GG game... it's alright, for a GG shooter, but the TCD game is far better.   It's an entirely different game from the TCD game, and predates it by a few years I believe.  The slowdown is HORRENDOUS and the game is fairly short, but it was amusing while it lasted, for a GG game... though that's not saying all that much, really. 

As for the TCD game, though, it's been a while since I played it, since I rarely play emulated games now that I have a lot of games for the real systems... maybe I should try it again though, I certainly remember it being good.   Good graphics, some amusing comedy, solid gameplay... the only issue I had was that figuring out what to do in some of the towns is a bit tricky if you don't know the language; you do need to talk to people and such in the towns, it's not just a linear shooter like its GG predecessor is.

[PCE/TG-16|CD/SGX Discussion / Re: Review: W-Ring: The Double Rings - A Very Good but Obscure Shmup]

I can't wait for Black Falcon's next review.

What are the chances he will review Ninja Gaiden or Ys III?

I imagine you're making some joke here, but apart from arcade ports, I haven't really done many reviews of multiplatform console games, you know... other than Zero Wing for TCD and the GBC version of Donkey Kong Country, where I focus mostly on that version, or the one paragraph or so about the PS2 version of Heavenly Guardian in that review of the Wii game, the closest thing to a full comparison article I've done is probably be my Gauntlet Legends / Dark Legacy version comparison list.

Anyway, when I do a full review, it's of a game I have completed.  I don't like it when people review games they haven't finished yet, so I don't do that in full reviews.  So if I was going to do another TG16/CD game review soon, what would I do... my top thoughts would be Shubibinman 3 and Splash Lake.  I finished those games not that long ago, and they do have some interesting things about them worth talking about.  For a HuCard game I'm not sure... Space Invaders Plus (Fukkatsu no Hi), if I could figure out if there's any predictability to which stages you get sent to?  Or something I beat several years ago like Blazing Lazers, Cyber-Core, or something?  I don't know.

Oh, of the games you just mentioned, Monster Lair for TCD and Popful Mail for SCD are fantastic games, but I've barely ever touched the other versions of either game so no, I wouldn't do much of a comparison if I ever did review one of those two.

I definitely wish we would...

Liar.  Trolls like you just love arguing bullshit.

I like debate and discussion about games, that's great.  But when it turns into people throwing insults around, being really rude, etc, that I don't like one bit.  I said that because that's happened in this thread.  I would never write a post as insulting as yours is here, that's not how to act in a debate.  There is no good reason for that tone, why can't we just have a debate about our opinions on this?  Debates or discussions about games are good, I certainly love discussing games and debating opinions about them.  Threads full of posts pointlessly insulting others with untrue insults aren't.

Do all the games since hardware ceased using tile layers not feature "real" parallax?

I covered my thoughts on this way back near the beginning of this thread, when I said that TG16/CD games that pull off full parallax backgrounds should be considered to be the equal of games on other platforms that look like that, regardless of how they made the effect.  Games like Bravoman, Valis IV, Gradius II: Gofer's Ambition, Super Darius, Super Darius II, Rondo of Blood, etc., those have a foreground and a separate background layer, just like any two-layer SNES or Genesis game. Or for another example mentioned earlier in the thread, the Neo-Geo can do more layers of "parallax" than most consoles even though thanks to its weird graphical style (everything is sprites) it has no actual background layers at all.

My point is, how games achieve the effect only matters on a technical level and not for gameplay so long as the results look pretty much the same, and in those games they do.  I care about how it's achieved too, but the most important thing is how the resulting graphics look.

[PCE/TG-16|CD/SGX Discussion / Re: Saber Riders Kickstarter]

Yeah, that definitely makes sense. 

Oh, and I LOVE Rolling Thunder, so I like hearing that that game will be one of your inspirations... I'm probably one of the few people out there who likes Rolling Thunder more than Contra (and this goes for the NES games of those same names as well.)  My favorite run & gun series is Metal Slug, for the record, but Rolling Thunder is fantastic and one of my favorite '80s arcade games.

[PCE/TG-16|CD/SGX Discussion / Re: Saber Riders Kickstarter]

Wait, so is the Turbo CD version going to be an original game and not a port of the 3DS game?  And what about the DC version then, for whoever's doing that one? Huh.  It is good to hear Arkhan is working on the TCD version though, that does give me more confidence in it.

[PCE/TG-16|CD/SGX Discussion / Re: Review: W-Ring: The Double Rings - A Very Good but Obscure Shmup]

I can't believe we haven't moved beyond this. Damn.

I definitely wish we would...

Saying there's "no parallax" is unequivocal, and you continue to say the water isn't parallax anyway.

Make up your mind: does it or does it not have parallax?  It's a yes or no question.

But 'sort of' is the best answer in my opinion, not yes or no. Sorry.   Six of the seven levels have no parallax, but the other one (lv. 3) has some parallax-style effects that look cool, but the main background and main obstacles (the rocky walls) are actually one layer and scroll together, so the effect isn't complete; this is probably why I said it looks more like waves than parallax, to me.  But sure, I can see why you're calling it parallax.  It looks awesome as it is though, they did a great job finding a way to make it look like there is depth to the layers of waves.  As I said in the review level 3 is the best-looking level in this visually very impressive game.

The white ones that look like, um, clouds.  There's literally dozens of them in level three.

You have actually played the game, right? 

Oh, I forgot about those, obviously.  Sure, that's a parallax-style effect too.  They're obviously sprites, of course.

[PCE/TG-16|CD/SGX Discussion / Re: Review: W-Ring: The Double Rings - A Very Good but Obscure Shmup]

You said flat out that it "doesn't have any parallax scrolling" and "that for once I don't mind the absence of parallax."  That's verbatim from your original post.

Again, either a game has parallax or it doesn't.  Your wishy washy kinda-sorta-fake-parallax-but-it's-not-parallax argument is complete bullshit.

I said 'it doesn't have parallax, except for the thing it kind of does have.'  That is, I equivocated, something I do a lot; I rarely will make an absolute statement when equivocation can be used instead... and that's exactly what I did there.

If you don't want to define the water as parallax, that's fine, but what about the clouds?

Which clouds, in what level?

[PCE/TG-16|CD/SGX Discussion / Re: Review: W-Ring: The Double Rings - A Very Good but Obscure Shmup]

Typical Black Falcon bullshit: whenever your argument is shown to be patently false, claim you're arguing something else entirely or just ignore the point altogether.

I'm not sure what you're saying here, because what you describe here did not happen.  First I never said the game has no parallax-style effect, I said quite the opposite ("but the water on stage 3 has a slightly fake-parallax look to it", where the word "fake" means software parallax effects), and second my argument most certainly was not "shown to be patently false".  The water in stage 3 that I mentioned from the beginning is indeed the one thing in the game which you are mentioning as a parallax object.

There's still no parallax in W-Ring, dammit!!! 

There is a halfway-there parallax effect on the stage 3 water.  It looks cool, but as parallax isn't entirely convincing because the background and foreground move together.  That is a fact.  I've gone back and looked at it again.  It looks like parallax scrolling... until you look at the parts which don't have water between the background and the rocky foreground obstacles, and notice that the foreground and background are scrolling at the same exact speed and aren't actually different layers.

Black Falcon, this is a forum about old games, not grad school. I am not praising you or trying to feed your ego.

Please stop thinking you need to be scholarly. This is a casual place.

I think pretty much the opposite here; there are more than enough one-sentence posts about old games out there.  There should be more longer ones.

*** Three of the posters in the above discussion have ABF quotes as their signature. ***

Have you forgotten that you're not on Sega-16?  I like some things about that site, but don't make the tone on this forum more like that one.

[PCE/TG-16|CD/SGX Discussion / Re: Review: W-Ring: The Double Rings - A Very Good but Obscure Shmup]

tl;dr - Parallax is.

 The Genesis, SNES, and PCE were made with the hardware capability, from the core system, to reposition any part of the screen at a different scroll point (to divide the screen into different scrolling speeds and direction). That by definition, is hardware assisted parallax. The PCE uses the traditional Hsync interrupt, the Genesis uses scroll ram, and the SNES uses HDMA. They all do the same thing. The Genesis has an addition BG layer allowing for more complex parallax, and the SNES can have up to 3 layers (4 in limited color modes) for even more advance parallax layering.

 All these systems are capable of parallax. All these systems do parallax at some level of functionality when the developers make that choice. There is hardware assisting with the parallax in these consoles. There is no "fake" parallax in comparison from one to another, or better said is that they are all fake parallax - but some methods more advance than others. Even software parallax isn't fake. If you see a parallax effect, then it's parallax. The only thing to say about it, is the level of complexity accomplished for the effect. Using sprites, using dynamic tiles, using hsync interrupts, using whatever means necessary - none of that makes it fake.

 If parallax is created through palette animation, then it's still parallax. If parallax is created through sprites for star fields, then it's still parallax. If a screen is split into "paper scrolls" (scrolling parts that don't overlap one another), then it's still parallax. Etc.

Sure, all of those are different kinds of parallax, but they are not all equal in how they look, and that's what you don't mention here.

BT, you're getting a little pedantic, but you are, of course, correct. "Hardware" parallax isn't really that. Hardware support for two independent and independently scrolling tile layers is often used to create parallax, just as a strip of sprites is. Both are hardware dependent, and both are functionally very similar. The advantage of the background method is the possibility of occlusion by one of the other tile layers without wasting sprites or inducing flicker in the sprite layer, which, you have to admit, is a really nice bonus.

I often wish the PC Engine had been designed with a little more RAM and another tile layer, but it wasn't. We got what we got and the programmers still did great stuff with it, and the games are still fun. And while the absence of an extra tile layer does sometimes degrade a game's aesthetic, it doesn't affect the fundamental gameplay. With that in mind, I would be lying if I said visuals don't affect the amount of fun I have with a game. And I actually do like some of that "fake" depth BT complains about. These games aren't means to be realistic. They are meant to be spectacles. Much like movies.

Well said.  There are very few games which make me say 'that's too much parallax'; maybe Jim Power 3D for SNES, but not much else... and even there the effect is interesting even if it's hard to look at as a result.  I like parallax.

When the area "nearest" the viewer flows by more quickly than the area "furthest" from the viewer and the main background area scrolls even slower yet, what else is it?  I'm talking about the water that flows along the floor and ceiling, of course; the waterfall islands in the background are indeed just animated water and scroll in step with the rest of the background.

I do see what you mean, yes, and that's why I mentioned it as a parallax-ish effect in the review.  However, looking at it again, the problem is that the rocks and the background scroll together.  If you only look at the water there is an illusion of depth... but then you notice that the rocks that that water is flowing over are moving at the same exact speed as the background and the effect falls apart.  That's the kind of thing having a full parallax background layer allows, but W-Ring doesn't have that.

I suppose in your biased little world the clouds that scroll independently of and overlap the background scenery also aren't parallax.  They're just clouds! 

You overstate how biased I am here and understate your own bias, I think...

Getting held up on technicalities only keeps you from genuinely appreciating games as games to play and as art in general. One of the worst thing to happen to 16-bit discussion is all the fanboys who misinterpret spec sheets and argue that there are equations
which prove that their console is the bestest, instead of taking each game at face value.

Yup, this is why I give credit to Genesis games that exhibit "scaling and rotation" even if it is using various tricks to create the illusion. All the matters is what the player experiences. Clever programmers deserve credit for the beautiful illusions they create within constraints.

On the subject of Genesis, SNES, or TG16 games trying to do software scaling and rotation effects, I give credit when they are done well, but not when the framerates and animation are so bad that it's hard to look at.  Looking at the Genesis, games like Super Thunder Blade, Space Harrier II, or Super Hang-On aren't going to get much praise from me for trying, not with how nearly unplayable the results are.  On the other hand, games which do look and play well, like RoadBlasters or Outrun 2019, do.

The water in Stage 3 is absolutely mesmerizing, as well as the starfields in Galaga 88 and Gradius.

Does Black Falcon ever realize that no one cares about his massive blocks of text? He goes into basically Autism mode every time someone disagrees with a single thing he says. He probably spends hours just proofreading his stupid debate arguments.

Lukester, I enjoy reading his stuff, even if I disagree with parts of it.

I discover how I really feel about things, and I better my own priorities/biases, when I read someone else's views.


I don't mind if he doesn't see things exactly like me, because, to be honest, I have my own quirks and peculiarities.



I enjoy reading your comments, too, by the way.

I understand. Maybe it's a little harsh for me to say that.

But it is exhausting trying to read his posts. Never clear and concise.
In all honesty, I don't want to read a thesis just to hear some points about a game.

I've written and completed a thesis (it's how I got my masters' in history!), so I will take this as praise.

Back on topic though, I am glad this game is getting recognition. It's a very good shooter with some surprising depth, and could easily compete with Thunderforce 3. It's a shorter game, but does have better sound in my opinion, and the crazy extra levels.

Naxat should have brought over this one instead of Paranoia, even though I like both. W-Ring is a AAA shooter all the way. I would love the brothers duomazov to review this one.

If someone actually chose Paranoia over this game... what were they thinking?  That game is okay, sure, but this one is a lot better.

[PCE/TG-16|CD/SGX Discussion / Re: Review: W-Ring: The Double Rings - A Very Good but Obscure Shmup]

Strips-of-stars, "some of the best parallax of the generation"?  In games which don't have full parallax layers or anything else like that, you mean?  I don't know about that... examples?

As for the Neo-Geo, the difference there is that EVERYTHING is made of sprites, so  that really is a special case.  And also of course those sprites can be huge, a far cry from the little dots of light you see in NES or TG16 games and the like.  I'm not talking about the Neo-Geo here, that's an entirely different thing from any other console of the time.

However, as I said above, I think it's entirely fair to separate things based on the type of parallax effect they use, and also to say that stuff like dots-as-stars or separated strips that move at different speeds aren't things that look quite as good as hardware parallax backgrounds.

I've no problem with you saying that some parallax doesn't look as good as others, as some of it is rather mundane even on systems that have two+ background planes; the problem arises when you claim that games lack parallax altogether, simply because you don't think it looks good enough.

Your argument is analogous to saying hamburger isn't cow because it's not as good as sirloin. 

I presume you're referring to the water in level 3 here?  That looks like flowing water, or waves, not a parallax layer.  Parallax exists to make something look like it is either closer or farther to the player than the main game layer, and while there is a bit of that effect in that level in that there are different speed objects, it pretty much just looks like a really cool flowing-water effect.  I'm not saying 'that isn't good enough parallax'... is it really parallax at all?

[PCE/TG-16|CD/SGX Discussion / Re: (9/19/2015 - 9/25/2015) Game of the Week: Kabuki Itoryodan]

Hudson eventually made Bloody Roar.

Ugh. Bloody Roar... that series is basically like Toshinden or Tekken but maybe even worse.  I don't like it at all.  How did Hudson go from the unoriginal but fun Kabuki Ittoryoudan and the TCD SNK games to that thing?  Too bad...

[PCE/TG-16|CD/SGX Discussion / Re: (9/19/2015 - 9/25/2015) Game of the Week: Kabuki Itoryodan]

I do have this game.  It's definitely a lot like SF2, yeah.  It isn't as good as SFII, and I probably also like World Heroes 2 more, but it is a pretty good game for sure.  It's too bad that Hudson didn't make any more fighting games for the system after this game in early '95, more SNK games or something would have been great -- the system needed Samurai Shodown, every other platform got the game and it's fantastic!

Anyway, Kabuki Itoryoudan is pretty good, but I probably would like it more if I knew the characters, but the source games are kind of hard to enjoy thanks to the language barrier... still, it's fun stuff.  Between this and the Tengai Makyou fighting game for Neo-Geo, I"m not sure which is better -- they're both pretty good.  That one obviously looks better though, it is on Neo-Geo.  It plays differently, though, which is probably an advantage for this game -- I love SF2.

[PCE/TG-16|CD/SGX Discussion / Re: Valkyrie no Densetsu/Legend of Valkyrie thread]

Yeah, Legend of Valkyrie is definitely a pretty great game.  It might be my favorite of the system's somewhat thin lineup of topdown run & guns.  I don't have the PS1 collection version though, only the PCE game... it'd be great to get Namco Museum Vol. 5 and play the arcade game in English, but if I can only have one version I'd rather have this one, I like the TG16 a lot more than the PS1.

[PCE/TG-16|CD/SGX Discussion / Re: Review: W-Ring: The Double Rings - A Very Good but Obscure Shmup]

The game doesn't have any parallax scrolling, as usual on the console, but the animated water on stage 3 has a slightly fake-parallax look to it.

You mean it doesn't have hardware based overlapping layer scrolling.

Yes, or a software equivalent that looks equally good.  Perhaps using the word "fake" to refer to something done in software isn't the best, but it is what I have called software scaling and rotation, for instance, for a long time, when compared to hardware; I was just using similar terminology to refer to parallax.  Fake, as in, using some software technique to do something the hardware can't.  Sure though, perhaps I should have just said 'a software parallax-ish effect' or something like that.

The line scrolling and animated tiles used to make the water in stage 3 fit the textbook definition of parallax, which is simply that there's a difference in scrolling speed between foreground and background objects;

Maybe, but I don't know, moving rows of lights or something like that don't always look like parallax... I think you do need to look at each individual case, for software parallax-like techniques.

Still though, I did say that because that effect looks kind of like parallax, so I at least partially agree, sure.

how that difference is achieved is not relevant.

It's relevant so long as the results look different, and those different types of parallax I listed in my last post definitely look very different.  Moving-dots-as-stars, strip parallax, and a hardware parallax background layer or two (or software equivalent) are not the same, those first two things aren't the equal of a real parallax background either technically or in results.  They are better than nothing, and can look good sometimes, but I don't think they are equivalent to hardware parallax.

Precisely.

The experience of the player is all that matters.

If the parallax scrolling is jarring/distracting (Ninja Gaiden PCE), it doesn't matter how the parallax was technically achieved—all that matters is that it detracts from the aesthetics and gameplay.

Does it really matter how the parallax in Last Battle was achieved? Even though Last Battle exhibits horizontal parallax effects in almost all the stages (except for maybe boss battles and the interior stages)....it is not aesthetically pleasing. Last Battle is still a very "flat" game and the parallax actually accentuates how unconvincing the game is when it comes to depth of perspective.

I think this could EASILY have been fixed by simply having the farthest background scroll at a much slower/gradual speed.

There is no fixed formula for parallax—designers need to think about the desired effect and adjust when necessary.

Last Battle's scrolling speeds (for different planes) might have worked in a different game.

Anyway, it doesn't matter how Last Battle technically achieved the parallax—it simply wasn't executed masterfully. Ninja Gaiden PCE is even worse. Do you think we would feel better if the horribly distracting/chopping parallax in Ninja Gaiden PCE was the product of 5 distinctly separate background planes running on the SupahSupah²Grafx hardware? Hell no! Because, when it comes to the merits/shortcomings of a game, the user experience is fundamental.

That doesn't mean it isn't interesting to discuss technical/coding issues...it's nice to have technical discussions as an "aside"). The danger, of course, is to fall into the completely baseless logic that "better specs = better experience = better game", that "true parallax" is superior than the "illusion of parallax"...

...EVERYTHING IS AN ILLUSION when is comes to parallax. That is the entire point of parallax—to create an illusion.

Sure, a lot of things in games are illusions.  One thing that came to mind earlier is, for instance,i games like Space Harrier or Outrun -- the entire game is an illusion in a scaler game like that, you aren't actually going anywhere.  The things are moving towards you while you stand still.  For the gamer does this really matter, though?  It's kind of neat to know, but it doesn't affect play of course, that's the whole point, to create that illusion.

Or for parallax, how Gradius II or either Super Darius game (or some other titles like some parts of Dracula X, or a lot of Valis IV, or a lot of Bravoman, etc.) create their full parallax backgrounds is really only a technical issue -- the results look fantastic, about as good as parallax backgrounds on other systems, for games on those other systems with only one parallax layer of course (considering that some systems can do multiple layers of hardware parallax, but most games don't do that much if at all). 

However, as I said above, I think it's entirely fair to separate things based on the type of parallax effect they use, and also to say that stuff like dots-as-stars or separated strips that move at different speeds aren't things that look quite as good as hardware parallax backgrounds.  I like parallax, and Hudson messed up when they didn't put hardware parallax in the system, like Nintendo with the SNES CPU or Sega with the Genesis's colors-on-screen limit.  I wish more games on the system had software parallax like those I listed in the previous paragraph.  Of course games can look great without that though, as W-Ring shows.

[PCE/TG-16|CD/SGX Discussion / Re: Review: W-Ring: The Double Rings - A Very Good but Obscure Shmup]

Hey Black Falcon, I like the game a lot too. It's like Gradius meets thunder-force

But could you be more consise with your posts? You write incredibly long blocks of text. That time could be spent playing W-Ring instead.

I like writing long-ish reviews.  When I want to write less about a game that's what something like a Game Opinion Summaries list is for -- sure, the overall length of the post is long, but the amount for each game is a lot less than a review like this.

Basically, to be more concise I'd probably need an editor.

I'd love to pick up this game, but it seems to have risen up to around the $60.00 mark on ebay for a complete one. 

The Everdrive looks very attractive right now.....

This game definitely has value, yes.  I paid about $25 for a loose copy of the game when I got it two years ago, so W-Ring hasn't had some sudden jump in value I don't think, it's had value for years.   I imagine that enough people know it's a pretty good game to drive up the value; shmups can get pricey for sure.

Somehow got to a "special" stage 3



Love the effects on that level, this game gives me hard "Paranoia/Psychosis" vibes...

Yeah, I definitely agree that level 3 is maybe the best-looking level.  The water effects are great, and the music is pretty good too.  As for the alternate stages, it's fun to try to find and play through them, though you don't get any kind of special reward for doing so, the game has only one ending, and there are only alternate stages for levels 1 to 5 anyway, not the last two.  It's still a great addition that gives the game more variety than most shmups of the time.

This is another nice detailed review, but it's not a good idea to generalize the console/library every time.

It is not "usual" for a PC Engine game to not have any parallax, especially shooters. It's only usual to educate the reader with this misleading factoid in each review.

What?  Yes it is.  I have, and have played, lots of shmups for shmups for this system, but most have nothing more than maybe little tricks like moving dots across the screen as a "starfield" (see Zero Wing for example) or horizontal/vertical-strip parallax, and a lot don't have any.  I presume you're mostly talking about those two things there, because actual full multi-layer parallax is quite uncommon because it's harder to do technically, of course, though a few games manage to pull off that look by using sprites as 'ground' to add in some parallax; I presume this is how the Super Darius games do their impressive full-screen parallax scrolling.  But most shmups on the system certainly don't have parallax on Super Darius's level, and many have none. 

Most vertical shmups on the system don't have any.  Horizontal ones do sometimes, but if it's in even half of the hori shmups it'd only be because of "let's move dots in the background at different speeds"... of the hori shmups I have on HuCard for instance, if I'm getting this right, Saint Dragon, R-Type, Barunba, W-Ring, and Fantasy Zone have no parallax; Aero Blasters and Download have some strip parallax; and Gradius and Sidearms have the moving-dots-at-different-speeds thing.  On CD more games I have try to have some, but CD games have a lot more space to try to pull off fancier graphics, something the Super and Arcade CD shmups show off for sure.  I think it's most fair to compare this to other HuCard games.  And of course if you add in the vertical shmups, on HuCard at least they almost always have either no parallax at all, or only the moving-dots style, and a majority have none I think.  I guess that moving-dots thing sort of counts as "parallax", but it's not nearly on the same level as a fully-drawn parallax background.  Think of how in Zero Wing they had to replace that rocky asteroid field parallax background in one of the early levels with little dots of light as the only objects that move at a different speed from the background, surely because of hardware limitations.  It is a basic form of parallax of course, but it's not the same and it's often seen only in certain levels -- any level with a fully-drawn background in a starfield-parallax game will have no parallax in those stages -- you see this in games like Final Blaster or Final Soldier, for example.  I wish more vertical shmups on the system had something like the fairly cool looking parallax background Alzadick has in one of its two stages (the other one has the usual starfield thing).

But anyway, in this case, W-Rings' impressively animated stages look fantastic!  Most 4th-gen games don't have animated backgrounds in almost every level, after all, but this game does and it looks great.  I don't care much that the game doesn't try any parallax, the graphics it does have make up for that.
 

Your SNES and N64 reviews would be much longer if you wasted time pinting out typical negatives in games from those libraries. But I'm only assuming that you don't.

Of course I would mention negatives about a game if I'm reviewing it, that's what a review is for!  I don't mention things like SNES slowdown, TG16 lack of parallax, or Genesis lack of color every single time I write about those systems, but I do sometimes, because those three things are each respective system's biggest graphical flaw and of course I mention that sometimes.  Not every time, though, only some of the time, and that goes for TG16 parallax (or the lack thereof) as well.  Seriously, stop making every single post into an attack, there's no reason for that.

http://www.blackfalcongames.net/?page_id=78 Read some of my stuff for each respective platform and you'll see I mention those major graphical flaws (SNES slowdown, Genesis/Sega CD lack of color, TG16 parallax) some times but not others.  This is true for parallax in TG16 games as well, of course -- I don't always mention when it's not there, only occasionally.  My Avenger and Tiger Road reviews don't mention that those games have no parallax, for instance, and of the TG16 or TCD reviews I've done only in the Zero Wing review mentions parallax at length, there to compare the game to its arcade and Genesis counterparts.  And anyway, in this review I was trying to say that the graphics the game does have are good enough that I don't mind the absence of parallax; W-Ring looks great!

[PCE/TG-16|CD/SGX Discussion / Re: Review: W-Ring: The Double Rings - A Very Good Shooter]

Difficulty and Expert Mode

I beat this game on Normal several years back; it may seem challenging at first, but even I don't have too much trouble with it anymore and I'm far from great at this genre.  A month or two ago, though, I played the game again for the first time in a while, and started the game on Normal difficulty.  I found it surprisingly easy -- on my very first try, I beat the whole game without getting a game over!  There were a few hairy moments in level 6, but I got through and beat the game.  That's impressive stuff for me, I haven't 1-credit-cleared many shooters, for sure.  So I was feeling good... and then it looped over into Expert (Hard) mode, after the short endgame sequence.  Everything changed; Expert is an entirely different story! As easy as the game is on Normal, it's BRUTALLY hard on Expert. I got my first game over early in stage 1, and it took a fair number of tries at each of the first five stages to get past each one.  I was working my way through Expert mode at a reasonable pace, though.  In addition to wanting to complete this great game on its more challenging setting, I also I wanted to see if the game has a different ending on Expert difficulty versus Normal -- nobody online had mentiond if there is one, and there are no gameplay videos of Expert mode online.  And then I hit stage 6, and a brick wall of bullets and enemies.

You see, stage 6 plus X in Expert mode is INCREDIBLY difficult.  Again, there is no continue point at the last stage, 7 aka "Stage X", so you have to go back to the start of stage 6 upon game over, had me frustrated for hours as I kept trying, and failing, to beat the game.  This stage-and-a-half of game is super, super hard on Expert. I did beat it, finally... sort of: I ended up having to use a cheatcode to win because I just couldn't quite manage it otherwise.  I came very close once to beating the game without the cheat, though, in my time trying, but more on that soon.  I spent more hours trying to beat stages 6+X than I did level 9 of Zero Wing for the Turbo CD, to compare it to another tricky shmup I played recently, and to less avail.  Stage 6 is so narrow and confined that sometimes there is nowhere to go to avoid bullets, and there are SO many enemies on screen all shooting at you! Not getting hit is near-impossible at times, even with the best weapon for the stage, the Red + ? weapon that sends bouncy spheres around the screen forwards and back.

In all my tries, I defeated the final boss twice, once without the cheatcode and once quite a few hours later with it. See, that first time, I beat the final boss, but somehow died moments later. I don't know how, I should have been safe with the boss dead. Killing me after beating the game was incredibly cheap, and I never managed to get that far again, frustratingly.  Perhaps the worst was a time I got to Stage X with four lives left, only to waste all of them and reach the boss on my last life since Stage X is really hard unless you have weapon powerups when you reach it, which I didn't because I'd messed up at the Stage 6 boss and got hit. Eventually I gave up and turned off the game... then looked the game up on the PC Engine FX forums and found a cheatcode. If you go into the sound test and start playing music tracks 7, 9, 3, and 10 (in that order), you get an additional pair of sphere-shields rotating around your ship. You're not invincible, but this help was enough to get me through Expert mode on this second attempt, though it did take more than a few tries to get past level 6+X even with the help. I'll count it as a win.

Level 2 looks like something straight out of Alien. (Screenshot from Youtube.)

Conclusion

So, W-Ring is a great game, but the difficulty level is a bit unbalanced.  I do love W-Ring, more than many people seem to, but still, the stratospheric jump in challenge between the rest of the game and Expert mode is a bit much.  This is a very easy game on Normal, and even EASIER on Easy... and a near-impossible nightmare of frustration on Hard ("Expert"). And in Expert, the last level (6 and X combined) is exponentially harder than any other stage in the game. A smoother difficulty curve would be much better than what you see in this game; it doesn't need to be much easier, just not have as massive a gulf between the rest of the game and this.  Just having a checkpoint in Level X so that if you get game over you start from there might have done the trick, really.  It's too bad they didn't do that.

My other main issue with the game is that I never really felt like I could just get through with pure memorization -- I felt like there is a random element to the hit detection in this game, more so than a highly-precise game like R-Type or Zero Wing has.  It's very hard to tell when a bullet was going to hit my ship versus and when it was going to harmlessly bounce off the shields, and the bullets are fast, small, and SERIOUSLY blend in to the background too, particularly in level 6. So, I often just had to take my chances, and this often resulted in getting hit. And in a level where taking even one hit is doom because you lose your weapon when you get hit and weapon powerups in lv. 6 are far apart, so you'll get hit again and die, that is a problem. I still like this game, but I wish the bullets were easier to see and it was clearer about whether something is going to hit the ship or the shield ring. The game has great graphics and music, with impressively animating backgrounds and lots of color and variety, but the hard-to-see bullets are its one visual flaw.

Finally... why is the title "The Double Rings" when that shield around your ship is a single ring? There are some things constructed out of two rings, such as the red-weapon balls or that twin rotating shield from the cheat, but I don't know if it's meant to refer to any of those things, the single ring around your ship is the most obvious thing. It's a weird title. I wonder if the manual explains it... but I don't have the manual, just a loose card for this game, and it'd be in Japanese anyway of course.  Someone on PC ENgine FX has speculated that the cheatcode's added double shield explains it and the "double rings" refer to those, but I'm not so sure; each of those balls is made up of two rings itself, so that adds up to well over two rings, between teh two of them and that single ring around your ship.  So it's a bit of a mystery.  Regardless, though, W-Ring is a very good game I highly recommend.  The game has flaws, but it also has strengths, and overall I quite like it even if it's not Gradius or R-Type precise.   With great graphics and music, varied levels, and plenty of challenge, I give W-Ring: The Double Rings an A-.  It's good.

Video

- This is a longplay video of Normal difficulty.  The player does not enter any of the hidden alternate versions of stages in this run.

- In this longplay the same player as above enters all of the special hidden stages.  Note that many of them do have multiple entry points so this doesn't show every way to get into the special stages, but it definitely is a nice help for anyone who doesn't want to have to find them the hard way by just shooting at stuff or lucking into one.

[PCE/TG-16|CD/SGX Discussion / Review: W-Ring: The Double Rings - A Very Good but Obscure Shmup]

I expanded out that post I made here about how hard the last couple levels of this game are in Expert mode into a full review.  Enjoy!


Platform: TurboGrafx-16 / PC Engine (Japan Only Release)
Year: 1990
Publisher/Developer: Naxat Soft
Single Player Only

The cover art is pretty nice.

Introduction

W-Ring is a great shmup for the Turbografx from Naxat Soft, one of the stronger third-party supporters of the platform on both card and CD.  I've liked this game since the first time I played it, but I went back to the game recently and finished it this time (pretty much) on the highest difficulty setting.  As I will explain, this was quite a task; Normal is quite easy to beat once you've learned the game, but Hard is an entirely different story.

This game is a horizontal scrolling shmup released during that genre's peak which lasted from the mid '80s to early '90s.  The game was clearly inspired by Gradius, but isn't just a straight clone of that series.  W-Ring has normal weapon pickups, instead of the Gradius powerup system, and has a narrow shield ring around your ship that can protect you from some hits from above and below. You also can, as in many TG16 shmups, change your ship's speed with the press of a button between three speeds, instead of needing to use powerups for that as you do in Gradius.  Also unlike classic Gradius games, you have infinite continues in W-Ring, which definitely makes the game a bit more approachable.  Dodging bullets is much less predictable here than in Gradius or R-Type, though, an issue which is my biggest problem with the game, particularly in Expert mode; the lower difficulty settings are fairly easy and disguise how frustrating the shield and bullet-dodging mechanics can be when the game gets hard.  This means the game should be playable by players of almost any skill level; just choose the appropriate difficulty setting for you.

For the plot, I'm not sure what the story is in this game, there isn't really one in the game itself and while I don't have the case or manual for this game, only the HuCard, even if I did it'd be in Japanese so it probably wouldn't be too helpful.  I can say that the game is set in the Solar System.  I presume that you are defending the Earth from evil aliens who have set up camp in the outer solar system. The game does have an English-language name for each stage -- Stage one is Saturn, 2 is Uranus, 3 Neptune, 4 Pluto, 5 Main Gate, 6 Death Hole, and 7 (if you count it as a level) Stage X.  If not for those names you'd never guess where the stages are set, though -- they don't have much of anything in common with their supposed settings.  They are just fairly standard stage settings for shmups of the day.  I'm fine with that, though.  Each of the seven stages looks different, and there is a good degree of variety in the game as well, with nice gameplay variety from stage to stage, great graphics and music, lots of enemy types, interesting bosses, secret alternate versions of most or all stages for you to try to find, and more.  The game does have some issues, which I will cover below, but for the most part it's a pretty good game.

Flying through level 1. Note the ring around your ship and the rocky green and brown visage of ... Jupiter?

Basic Design - Weapons and Your Shield

For weapons in this game, your basic gun shoots a gun ahead and bombs angle down.  One enemy type drops weapon powerups which replace your default armament.  The powerups alternate between five colored weapons.  If you collect several of the same color powerup in a row without getting hit, you will power it up several times.  However, it's important to note that if you get hit you lose your weapon powerup and go back to the normal gun, so don't get hit if you want to stay powered up.  Getting hit without a weapon powerup will kill you of course.  And just like in Gradius (well, the '80s Gradius games at least) or R-Type, when you die you go back to the last checkpoint, you don't continue right where you died. There are infinite continues as I said, but only from the beginnings of levels 1 through 6, not from the last checkpoint in a stage.  The final stage isn't a continue point either, it sends you back to the start of level 6, but much more on that later.

There are also alternate versions of those weapons if you are in a stage with a hidden "?" weapon-modifier item to find.  The five weapons are colored blue, green (both straight lasers), pink (spread shot), red (shield-orbs), and orange (missiles).  Each weapon is potentially useful in different situations, though some are maybe a bit too similar --I'm not sure why the game really needs both blue and green.  Still, there is nice variety here, particularly with those hidden "?"-mark alternate weapon variations.  These secret powerups will appear if you shoot in the right places.  One of the most interesting weapons is the alternate version of the red shield-orbs weapon.  Normally, this 'weapon' just gives you the normal gun but with a trail of round shields which follow your ship, ship protecting you from enemies and doing some damage if you maneuver them onto an enemy.  It's too close-range to be useful most of the time.  But with a secret "?" powerup, this weapon is great!  Now it shoots out a constant stream of balls which bounce off of any walls in the stage, taking out bullets and enemies along the way!  This is very useful in stage 6, particularly.

A key mechanic surely inspired by R-Type is that shield-ring.  Bullets which hit it will bounce off and can hurt enemies.  Bullets are very small, fast, and can blend in to the backgrounds, however.  Trying to bounce bullets off of your shield ring can be a 50/50 thing sometimes -- the shield-ring is very narrow, it's not large like in R-Type or R-Type Leo, and you NEED to deflect bullets with it at times, particularly in stage 6 of Expert mode, the games' hard mode.  W-Ring does have good, accurate controls, but it's not as consistently predictable as those other games are and that is an issue.  This game can feel unfair at times.  In Gradius or R-Type, with tight controls and clear graphics, when you die it is your fault.  To beat those games, next time learn the levels better and don't mess up.  In W-Ring, though, sometimes it feels like I did nothing wrong, but just got unlucky.  Even so, with only seven levels, infinite continues, and forgiving lower difficulty levels, W-Ring isn't anywhere near as hard as Gradius or R-Type.  It's only in Expert difficulty where the issues I just discussed help make the game a serious challenge, and even there Gradius and R-Type are probably even harder, but also more innovative and more fun.  Overall, while it is pretty good, W-Ring isn't quite as great as the Gradius games are.  Gradius is my favorite shmup series, though, so that is a very high standard.  W-Ring is a very good game that I like a lot.

Game over already? Whoever played this on Gamefaqs for these shots wasn't very good. Do note the ship in the upper right, though — that's the type of ship that drops powerups.

Graphics and Music

In addition to playing great, W-Ring also looks and sounds great.  This game is one of the better-looking, and better-sounding, HuCard shmups for the TG16/PCE!  Every stage looks good, and the background environments are very well animated for a 4th-gen console game.  While the actual background behind the playable space only animates in some levels, there are often animated elements on the platforms and other areas you can't fly over on the screen.  From the flowing water in stage 3 to the giant spinning mechanical wheels and moving lights in stage 6, every stage background is interesting.  The game looks better than you might expect a HuCard shmup would look, and that animation is cool.  Those two levels probably are the two best-looking ones in the game, but every stage looks very good.  The game also can throw lots of enemies and bullets on screen with no slowdown to speak of, which is reasonably impressive.  Sometimes, particularly in Expert mode, the screen can be loaded with stuff.  The lack of slowdown does make the game harder, and the bullets sometimes are too hard to see versus the background colors, but still, it's a nice technical accomplishment to see so much stuff on screen running so well.  The game doesn't have any parallax scrolling, as usual on the console, but the animated water on stage 3 has a slightly fake-parallax look to it.  The graphics in this game are good enough, though, that for once I don't mind the absence of parallax.

Aurally, W-Ring has a really fantastic soundtrack!  This game sounds very, very good.  I'm very far from an audiophile so I can't really explain why in detail, but I love chiptune and early CD console game music, and the electronic music soundtrack here is richer than usual on this platform.  Every level has different music of course, and each boss as well, but all of the hidden special stages (see below) have unique music too, surprisingly enough.  It's very cool, and encourages exploration to find all of them and hear all of the great music!  The normal stage 3 theme might be my favorite track, but there are lots of good music tracks as you go through the game.  The good graphics and sound definitely add something to this game.  This game really sounds fantastic.  If you want to hear all the music watch both videos at the end of this post, one for the regular stages and one for the special stages.

The boss of level 3, the water level. The moving blue 'waves' along the platform edges look very cool. (Image from Youtube.)

Level Designs - Graphics and Gameplay

The level themes are not original, though., just well designed and interesting.  I like the designs, and the game has a great and very well thought out difficulty curve, but there's noting too original in the level settings and such.  Stage 1, Jupiter, has grassy rock platforms with alien ships scattered around.  The stage is several screens high and is a good starting point for the game.  Stage 2, Uranus, is a brown stage that looks like something straight out of the movie Alien, with the usual alien heads, dripping fluids, and such.  Again the stage is two screens tall.  Alien clearly made a huge impression on games, seeing how everything from Contra to W-Ring copy its style.  Stage 3, Neptune, is the water level, because Neptune is blue so it's got water on it, right? :p  As I said that water looks great. Stage 4, Pluto, is another base, this time a research lab with biological cell and robot enemies and a green circuit-board-like background.  There is some animation on the circuits on the platforms.   Stage 5, Main Gate, is the fast stage, so you have to set the speed to max and try to learn the layout.  This stage is another all-metal base.

Stage 6, Death Hole, has a similar theme to the last stage, but with some pretty cool machinery around the stage as I said earlier, and some animation in the main background  behind your ship as well.  I love the large spinning wheels of lights, they look pretty cool.  Also, things have slowed down; you are now nearing the final stretch, and have a narrow pathway to make your way through, the titular 'Death Hole' I guess. While earlier stages often give you a screen or two of vertical space to move up and down, this level varies between half a screen and very narrow passages, so you are very constrained and there often isn't much room to avoid the enemies.  This level is tough!  And last, Stage X plays over an animating wavy red screen.  The background looks great, but it can be very distracting.  This stage is short but the enemies are tough, the background crazy, and the boss hard.  And if you get a game over here, you learn one of this games' crueler tricks: if you get a game over on stage 7, you go back all the way to the beginning of stage 6; Stage X doesn't count for continues.  This makes the game so much more difficult than it needed to be, when you try to play the game in Hard mode!  I wish Stage X was a continue point.  Ah well.  What's here is mostly quite good.

There is one last thing to mention here, those alternate stages.  As with the ?-mark alternate weapon powerups, alternate stages are accessed with hidden "EX" icons which you have to shoot to see.  If you touch the secret warp point, you'll go into an alternate version of the level in question. These levels are generally shorter than the regular stages, but can be harder -- the speed stage is even faster for example, in alternate mode.  Interestingly, the color palette changes in the alternate version of each level, so the water level has red water instead of blue if you're in the secret variant version.  It's cool stuff.  It's more fun to try to find them for yourself, but if you want to be spoiled watch the video at the end of this post which shows ways to get into all the special stages.  Many do have multiple entry points so there are other ways to enter some special stages, but still it might be handy.  I found almost all of them myself without that video, only perhaps missing the one in, oddly, stage 1.  That explains why I never have been able to can't find a special stage in level 6 -- there apparently isn't one.  Too bad.  Stage X doesn't have one either, but I never thought it would with its short length and focused design.

The level 4 boss, from the computer/bio-research stage. (Screenshot from Youtube.)

[PCE/TG-16|CD/SGX Discussion / Re: What game would YOU have packed in with the Turbo?]

Blazing Lazers is one of the system's best games and would be a fantastic packin, yeah, but it wasn't one of the first games out... though it was a July '89 release in japan, so maybe a launch release could have been possible?  It'd be close, though.

Anyway, what the TG16 needed the most  was a Christmas '88 US release (with actual marketing) and a European release within a year or two, so Blazing Lazers is not ideal because it wasn't out yet in '88. :p  (Legendary Axe and Keith Courage are both '88 releases in Japan.  R-Type as well, but only the two-part Japanese release and not the combined US one; that larger cart size probably wouldn't be great as a packin anyway even if an earlier release was possible, it would release costs and Legendary Axe is probably better for the mass market since it's a sidescroller.

But yeah, if you're sticking with an '89 release, Blazing Lazers almost certainly is the best game the system had that year, in my opinion at least, so it'd be a fantastic packin.

[PCE/TG-16|CD/SGX Discussion / Re: What game would YOU have packed in with the Turbo?]

Yeah, the correct answer really is Legendary Axe.  I don't care for the game too much -- I probably actually like Keith Courage more -- but Legendary Axe was popular and got awards, while Keith Courage has been hated on for decades, so the correct choice is clear.  Legendary Axe has better graphics too, certainly.

I'd like to say that the best answer is R-Type -- it's clearly the best game of the three (and those three are the obvious top choices for packin games) and it looks absolutely amazing (clearly a generation ahead of stuff like the SMS version) -- but as incredible as R-Type is, it is more of a love-or-hate game thanks to its difficulty level, so I can understand the reasons to go for a platformer instead.  But R-Type as the pack in would have been an interesting thing to see...

Don't let the spirit of Sega-16 seep into this forum, where any discussion that mentions any technical thing turns into a fanboy dig at SNES accompanied by the usual strawman attacks.

Agreed.

Instead of returns, the SNES only spawned the first generation of Nintendo zealots like A Black Falcon, who reverse engineer reality to claim that Super Gradius III is the best and definitive version and that when slowdown happens frequently enough, it becomes the new standard and is in fact creating new and superior gameplay experiences. I really wish that was sarcasm and not literally a sampling of ABF's cross-forum preaching over the years.

Seriously, stop it with the personal attacks, as Gentlegamer said there's far too much of that at Sega-16.

But to talk about Gradius games in general, I love the whole Gradius series, it's amazing and my favorite shmup franchise by a mile!  Gradius is my favorite shmup on the NES, Gradius II is my favorite shmup on the Turbo CD, Gradius III is my favorite shmup on the SNES, Gradius: The Interstellar Assault is my favorite shmup on the Game Boy, Gradius V is my favorite shmup on the PS2, Gradius Gaiden is at least one of the best shmups on PS1, Gradius ReBirth is my favorite shmup on the Wii (not including Virtual Console)... the series in general is amazing and has been my favorite series in the genre ever since I played, and loved, the original Gradius back probably in the late '80s.

For Gradius III in particular if you can't handle the slowdown that's too bad, but it's as great a game as any other game in the series.

Oh yeah, and I know that I've said that Gradius III is my favorite 4th-gen shmup, but actually, that's not entirely true; if we include the nostalgia factor, there's only one possible answer to that question:" Gradius: The Interstellar Assault for the Game Boy!  I didn't own a SNES until 2005, remember.  Gradius III isn't a game I had played much of until the '00s.  I loved the original Gradius for the NES when I'd played it, but the first Gradius game I owned myself was Interstellar Assault, and I'd still rank it as one of my favorites in the genre.  Probably the main reason I mention Gradius III as better is because the SNES game has probably twice as many levels and is many times harder than the short and fairly easy Interstellar Assault; as incredible a game as it is, it is pretty short and easy, or maybe it's just easy because I've beaten it so many times; I've probably finished that game more than almost any other game I've ever played, I absolutely love it.  Gradius III, though?  Haven't played it much in some years now, since beating it back in the late '00s.  So yeah, Gradius: The Interstellar Assault is one of my favorite shmups ever made.  Exceptional game.  I love everything about it other than its small number of levels.  It has better boss variety than Gradius III, the levels connect and flow in a way not seen anywhere else in the series other than maybe Gradius V, it doesn't have much slowdown, etc.

And on a related note, it really wasn't until I got the Turbo CD version last year that I'd played much of Gradius II; I didn't see it in arcades, and in emulation and such hadn't really played it past that first level.  I'd always wrongly overlooked it in favor of the newer Gradius III.  And yeah, Gradius II is amazing.  I don't know if I like it more than Gradius III, it's hard to say when looking at two games that are so incredibly great!  Gradius II is a fantastic, fantastic game, and certainly is worth considering for best shmup of the generation.  It might just be my new favorite shmup of the generation, in fact... though The Interstellar Assault is hard to beat, for me.

It's unfortunate, because I find that most blind fanboys don't really appreciate the SNES library and spend most of their time defending its lackluster games or praising the typical top game list entries, instead of discovering all the great games that receive little fanfare, which they are completely oblivious to.

Every successful console ever has its popular classics as well as its less popular great games that people don't know as much about despite their quality.  There is nothing special about nay Nintendo platform in this regard, everything is like that.

Totally agree.  Rastan 2 was the worst.  But is it worse than china warrior?

I think that China Warrior is pretty bad... but no, it's not as bad as Rastan Saga II, no way.  That game is so horrible, it's kind of bizarre that somehow they thought that would be an okay sequel to a great classic like Rastan...

(Oh, and on the TG16, I dislike Battle Royale and Takin' it to the Hoop even more than I do China Warrior.  Maybe those are okay games if you learn how to play them, but on first impression I hate both of them and haven't really gone back.  Jinmu Denshou (PCE) also is pretty horrendous.)

[PCE/TG-16|CD/SGX Discussion / Re: Some questions about playing Efera & Jiliora]

Wait, wait, wait, wait, please, I have to stop laughing, you are making my ribs hurt. You just said that you want a balance between easy and hard because too easy is basically Bullshit, but then you just complained that you can't use magic whenever you want and blah, blah, blah, the game is too hard.

Uh, what?  Are you making some false assumption that magic makes games easy or something?  That isn't true at all.

For example, if she had some basic 'free' magic attack instead of a sword as her basic attack (that's mostly the same but just looks different) and you could restore magic as easily as health that'd solve the issues I mentioned with magic in Efera & Jiliora.  I don't think those things would make the game too easy, but it's not like that so who knows.

Ys Book I&II on Turbo CD is too easy and Effera and Jillora is too hard...what kinds of games do you even play?

Wrong, Efera & Jiliora isn't objectively too hard, that's not what I said; it's just annoyingly difficult if you don't grind or enjoy grinding.  If you do grind it's not hard, I just find grinding like that incredibly boring so I don't often do it in games.

plus to boot, you complain Ys was too easy, but barely even played it.

What I said about Ys I & II (TCD) is certainly just a first-impressions opinion, yes.  I made that clear.  The beginning of the game is a lot easier than the beginning of the SMS version, that's all I said.

Don't get me wrong, I understand legitimate gripes, but you seem like you are just complaining to complain and disagree with people. I am suspect as to if you have actually even played the games, to be honest..... And no, watching videos of them on Youtube doesn't count.

There's no need for insults like this, come on.  And no, I do not complain just to disagree; I always state my honest opinions on games.  If people disagree with me that's too bad, and I will defend my opinions when criticized, but  I'd never throw around personal attacks like that in this quote here.  "If you don't agree with my opinion you haven't played the game at all"?  What are you talking about? 

To respond to this even though I shouldn't, there are exactly zero gameplay videos of Efera & Jiliora on Youtube, so even if I wanted to watch parts of the game there I couldn't.  In general though I do like watching Youtube gaming videos, but you never know how a game will play until you actually try it for yourself; a video could never replace gameplay.  If I haven't played a game I say so, and if I have played one I say so.

Oh, and most of the time I play TG16 and TCD games -- and it's one of my most-played consoles over the past couple of years, I like it a lot! -- I'm playing platformers or shmups, not other genres.  The system is my favorite console ever for shmups, but definitely not action-RPGs.  Most of the TG16/TCD games I have finished are shmups or platformers, along with a couple of puzzle games, Dungeon Explorer (good game!  I'm a big Gauntlet-series fan, and that's a good Gauntlet clone.), and a few other things.

There is plenty of strategy to the Turbo CD Ys and yes, it does play a bit different than the Master System version.

Such as?  I didn't play it enough to see it.

Just because you are used to a particular version of a game also doesn't make it the end all of said game. For the longest time when I was a kid, my only version of Street Fighter II was the Commodore 64 version. I don't think anyone would ever say it's a much better version because they are used to it over any of the other versions...that's just a cop out too...

Sure, but I don't see how this has much to do with this here... I've never played a Commodore 64, but isn't the C643 version of SFII fairly infamously bad looking compared to the arcade or SNES/Genesis/TG16 versions?  Are you really saying that you'd put SMS v. TCD Ys on that level of difference?

I'm not even that great at games and can play Effora and Jillora...

I'm sure, you just need to enjoy repetitious grinding and I'm sure you'll get far in it.  I've played a few hours of the game, I don't know exactly how much because it's quite spread out over time, but haven't gone back since somewhat recently getting to that boss I'd need to grind a lot more levels to be competitive against (in the room with the archers, as described earlier in the thread).

[PCE/TG-16|CD/SGX Discussion / Re: W Double Rings thread]

I liked this game the few times I played through it.  But, doesn't this game have a hidden collectible on EVERY level?  Maybe it's only in difficult mode, but I seem to recall that the game won't finish until you collect each one on every stage.

There are two kinds of special (and usually hidden) collectibles, one which sends you to an alternate version of the stage you're in that is shorter but often harder than the regular one and has a different color palette, and another which changes your weapon into an alternate form -- so the shield weapon turns into a weapon which sends out spheres which bounce off of the walls, instead of just circling around you.  Those are the only two kinds of collectibles I know about, unless I'm missing something, and I don't know if every level has both of them -- there are some stages I've never found either one on.

As for endings, are you saying that there is some alternate ending if you get the alternate-stage-version item and beat the alternate versions of all the levels, presuming that alternate versions of all the levels actually do exist?  That would be really interesting if true, the ending as it is is fairly short... but no, there is an ending if you just beat the game normally, so maybe you're misremembering.  The game does loop back to the start after the ending (on the next difficulty up, if you played on anything below the top setting), of course.

Any more details would be appreciated, I know I haven't found everything in this game -- for one thing, there must be more stages with alternate version items hidden somewhere!

[PCE/TG-16|CD/SGX Discussion / Re: Some questions about playing Efera & Jiliora]

They should give you unlimited MP so you can do nothing but spam the most powerful spells and heal over and over.  Fuck skill and actually trying!

That's not how a good magic system works and you must know that.  My favorite kind of magic system is that from D&D, ,but that's obviously too complex for a game like this.  Just some normal magic-points system is fine, if you can recover them without too much trouble.  Anytime you can heal your health you also should be able to heal your magic just as easily.  The point of playing as a mage character is to actually be able to use magic, not to be a really weak sword-fighter!  Some traditional turn-based JRPGs also make magic a bit too limited in terms of MP and such, which is always kind of frustrating; I don't like it when an RPG makes it so hard or expensive to recover magic that I'm stuck using normal attacks most of the time with my mage(s).  Sure, magic can be powerful, but the best way to balance that is definitely not to make using it so limited that you can't use it as much as you'd like.  You just need to balance the spell system a bit better.  There are plenty of games out there that do that.

For an example, I recently tried out the two Mahoujin Guru Guru games for SNES, two simple little RPGs on the SNES based on a childrens' anime license.  The games are nice-looking and quite easy, but have some big differences.  Relevant here, in the first game magic spells for your mage character (you have a warrior and a mage in your party) cost a lot of MP, so you can't use many spells at all before running out of magic and having to use a mana-refill item.  It's a bit annoying.  The second game, though, makes the basic spell cost a lot less MP, so you can use it more.  That doesn't make the game way easier though, because they balanced it for that.  It's just more fun, because now you can cast more than like three times early on without running out of MP!

[PCE/TG-16|CD/SGX Discussion / Re: W Double Rings thread]

First, the correct name of the game is W-Ring: The Double Rings.  What the "Double Rings" in the title refers to is anyone's guess; there is only one ring, not two, that circles around your ship.

Well if you read my review then you would see where "the double rings" come from.

Also I found out there is a cheat to make a ship barrier that is kinda cool. Go to the sound test and listen to tracks 7, 9, 3, 10 then start the game and you get a second ring that acts as a shield for a lot of bullets. I guess that's the second ring in "the double rings".

The code you input adds a second ring around your ship making two ring shields. I imagine this was how the game was intended to be played originally but was probably too easy so the hid it via a code in the test menu.

I did read that review, that's where I got the code from that I needed to finish the game on Hard, as I said; that's why I linked the thread.  But as for that being the reason why it's called "The Double Rings", I"m, not sure; the thing is, you do have one ring shield around your ship at all times that protects you from some fire from above and below.  Then with the code, you get two more spherical shields that rotate around you a bit farther out.  Those two aren't just each a single ring like the one around your ship is, and adding them to that shield makes three, not two... so you might be right here, but there are still some unexplained elements to it.  I'd love for some Japanese speaker to read the manual and say if that says why the name is what it is...

I love this game. The best stage is the alternate high speed level. New music and super fast Gradius speed stage style. Naxat made some really solid games

The high speed stage's even faster but enemy-free alternate version is pretty cool too; it's a nice one because the normal stage is pretty tough, but the alternate version I find easier -- it is faster, but shorter and has no enemies.  Either way though, that boss is one of the harder ones from before the final stage, it's easy to die on that guy.  It is a good level though.  The coolest looking one is probably the one with all the waterfalls though, that one looks great... though level 6's highly-animated ship environment also does look cool, apart from how the background and enemy shots are almost the same color.

OK, if the HARD mode isn't a cakewalk, then this game did it right: offering something for all different skill levels.

I wish all games did this (offered a challenging mode for the veteran players), because then everyone is happy.

Yeah, Hard's really tough and will challenge about anyone.  It is nice to have the different options, but Normal mode could be a bit tougher, I think... it is maybe too easy.  Gradius games are still very hard even if you know what you're doing, but W-Ring is easy with some practice, on Normal... and then the difficulty spikes up way high once you try Hard mode.  But sure, it is good that they give you both options, a legitimate easy option or a definite hard option.