Console Crunch #5 - Game Sack

[Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] hello and welcome to game tech yes it's the episode that a lot of you have been waiting for the super nintendo that's right i've been waiting for this one too and you know what it's just begun and i already know this is going to be our best episode ever ever ever from the past all the ones in the future we'll see yeah anyways but let's start out with the usual joe will give us an overview of the system and you can soak in its greatness the super nintendo entertainment system released in november of 1990 in japan as the super famicom nintendo charged into the 16-bit era in full force the system's look was then redesigned for silly americans to be more boxy and less attractive early versions of the console had a cartridge lock mechanism nintendo later redesigned the cartridge shells themselves so anyone could rip out a cartridge with the power on no matter if the system had a cartridge lock or not thank you nintendo the system's controller was the first to feature four face buttons in a diamond configuration which would influence controllers forever it also featured two shoulder buttons which again would become a common feature everywhere the system runs on a ricoh 5a 22 cpu running at a blazing 3.58 megahertz it also features powerful custom graphics hardware and a sound chip designed by playstation designer ken kuduragi the console was eventually remodeled into a cheaper form commonly known as the super nintendo junior if you want more than composite video from this well you can go to hell all in all the system sold just under 50 million units worldwide with a total of 783 officially released games all right man another great overview of the system it's gotten me really excited for this episode and what is a system without game so let's just get right on into them this is biker mice from mars and it's based on the awesome animated series that i've never seen or even heard of until this game came out it's an isometric racer that plays like other games of this sort choose from your favorite mouse or bad guy or whomever is represented here and off you go to the races the racing is easy to get the hang of but it's not an easy game your bike is equipped with a weapon that has a limited number of shots these replenish each lap but you still need to try and aim instead of just randomly blasting you'll get hit quite a bit from your opponent's weapons and they'll slow you down a lot it's not uncommon to go from first or second to sixth place in just half of a lap but don't worry you can always catch up as you go around corners you can power slide with the shoulder buttons once you come out of the corners like this you'll get a small speed boost which helps you can also gain a one-time special item each lap after completing a race you get cash that can be spent in the shop to upgrade your bike it's an addictive game that gets better the more you play with some good music give it a try you might like it [Music] here's actraiser published by enix this was released early in the system's life and brought a lot of great features to the table what table the table that my super nintendo was sitting on a long time ago yes i'm a dad and that's the kind of humor i bring to the table just deal with it alright the game starts with a 2d action level which is really fun and leaves you wanting more but before you can go into another 2d level you have to play god for a while this godsend part of the game was refreshing and really cool it's not super complex and that's why i think i like it so much you listen to your people's needs and you help them out as you do this people will build their towns and flourish guide your people to build their town towards the demon generators and they'll cover them up forever but you need to keep shooting the monsters that they generate because this is where you get your magic points to do your godly things after the land is cleaned up a new hole will open up and that's back to playing a 2d action platformer again you do this process all throughout the game and it's really fun and i never get sick of playing it oh and i can't forget to mention the amazing music which showed people early on what the system was capable of [Music] three years later annex published act raiser 2. i was sad to see the god mode gone as i really liked that part of the first game this time around it's 100 pure action and excitement so i'm not lying it says so right on the box even with the god mode gone i was still happy that a 2d platformer was released for the system because i like those games but my excitement quickly turned to frustration as i grappled with the game's controls over the years in the many times that i've tried to play this game i'm still unable to get a solid hang of the floating mechanic that your character has as you can see he has wings and instead of flying he can glide and kind of float down and to top it all off the game's difficulty has been upped and wow is it a hard game what are your thoughts on act racer 2 can you control the erratic flying pilotwings was the first game i actually ever saw running on the system it was many months before the console launched in the us but a store i went to had a super famicom on display i was blown away by the visuals alone in fact this used to be called dragonfly and it was the demo nintendo used to show the system off to magazines at the time well they ended up making a full game out of it you take a bunch of tests in various devices like a parachute hang glider and a light aircraft and of course these tests get harder and harder the further you get you'll unlock some new rides and eventually go on an actual mission it's pretty light in the gameplay department but i still enjoy it for what it is like i said the mode 7 visuals blew me away at the time turns out this game has an extra chip in the cart called the dsp1 to help it with the mode 7. so the system can't actually do this game on its own oh and i like the calm music here too makes it easier to concentrate this is a good game to just chill out with [Music] f-zero is another one of the launch games from nintendo themselves this is a futuristic racing game but it's not a battle racer thank goodness the primary draw for this one was once again the newfangled mode 7 graphics i always thought that they were grainy but i never let that get in the way of my enjoyment for the visuals they're still really cool the game itself is amazing with very tight controls the l r shoulder buttons strafe you left and right while the d-pad causes your hovercraft to rotate learning how to use the shoulder buttons in the d-pad and tandem is the key to mastering this one and i did and i still love it today it's got some great music to go along with the fast action you definitely can't write this one off as a gimmicky game and if you do you are missing out another interesting mode 7 racing game is super drift out this is a rally racing game where you can select from several different cars however this one is a top down racer you're always racing forward and the entire screen rotates around you as you steer i imagine this would turn off most players but i found it pretty cool for a few minutes the main problem here is that the tracks are very small and confined this doesn't give you a lot of room to maneuver around and it's really not a whole lot like real rally racing if the playfields were bigger and less restricted i think it'd be a lot more fun the graphics are pretty plain aside from the rotation however the music is interesting there's a normal music mode and a hard music mode the normal mode sounds like this [Music] [Applause] the hard music actually sounds like something you might hear in a ridge racer game [Music] kinda cool hearing this come from my super nintendo i guess personally i say this game is worth between five or ten dollars [Music] and let's check out race driving to see how the super nintendo handles polygons without a super fx chip oh this is glorious you can choose from three different types of tracks to satisfy all your racing desires oh a cow always gotta run over the cow man look at this this is why i bought the super nintendo and when you crash it sounds like you suddenly lost control of your bowels this is absolutely racing action at its finest though you could probably play a round of golf between each and every frame ooh look look look a cow that's not in the genesis version i must must must run over it gotta run over all cows what what the hell did i run into there's nothing there so to sum it all up i really don't know how it could get much better than this well actually i do and that's to play pretty much any other game alright let's take a look at some of the games we've talked about a lot in previous episodes but need to be mentioned here let's start out with super castlevania 4. this game has been mentioned in more than one episode of gamesack for different reasons as you may remember this game was my pick for the best 16-bit game of all time i still stand by what i said back then and my love for this game hasn't faltered it's the perfect mix of platforming action graphics and music play this game it's amazing dracula x was also released for the super nintendo this is kind of a port of the pc engine game rondo of blood or maybe it's a re-envisioning as it shares a lot of level details character and enemy sprites and even music it even retains the idea of taking you to another level if you mess up a jump for example this was one of my favorite things about rondo this is definitely not as good as the pc engine version but it stands on its own as a solid entry for the super nintendo [Music] here's the donkey kong country series for the system yes we had almost a full episode dedicated to the series titled donkey kong country and valles donkey kong country is a great platformer starring donkey and diddy kong all set in a nice silicon graphics world the game was really entertaining and each of the characters had his strength and weaknesses which helped throughout the game it also had a lot of helper animals which were really fun to ride with great controls and good music this was a great start to the series [Music] donkey kong country 2 diddy's conquest really up the fun factor from the first game donkey kong is kidnapped and now it's up to diddy and dixie to rescue him dixie has this great helicopter move that she can do with her hair that lets you float down to the ground easily while covering a lot of distance it added a bunch of new helper animals to ride and i particularly liked the spider as he could shoot a web at enemies and also make platforms the game had great level design and the best soundtrack to the series was some really great songs from david weiss not david white david wise the third game in the series is dixie's double dong trouble and i feel it kind of declined in the fun factor sure you still had dixie in her awesome hair helicopter move but you got stuck with kitty kong as a partner who is pretty lackluster as far as sidekicks go the game is basically more of the same and instead of riding helper animals you turn into them this stupid elephant who's afraid of rats is pretty annoying while still a solid platformer with better than average music it's easily the least fun in the series to play [Music] here's nosferatu by sata it's a fun cinematic platformer that is difficult to get the hang of but oh so much fun when you do get it under control you're kyle who is out to get his girlfriend back from the local vampire kyle doesn't have any weapons and uses only his fists and his feet to defeat his enemies as you make your way along and kill your foe some of them will drop crystals once you collect certain amounts of these you unlock new moves for kyle to use while fighting careful though as you get hit you'll lose these crystals and you can't recover them the platforming can be really tricky at times and the levels are fairly big there's treasure chests laying around that have items in them stuff like an hourglass to give you more time and different colored crystals for life and fighting experience be sure to look into treasure chests more than once as they usually hold multiple items graphically the game is great and really sets an eerie mood the music while not amazing adds to the atmosphere this is a pretty fun game if you can find it [Music] all right super nintendo you liking it you liking it no i'm loving it i'm loving it okay let's get back into more games the super nintendo had lots of great rpgs and while i can't possibly spend hundreds of hours playing each of them for this episode some of them should definitely be mentioned like final fantasy 2 which is actually final fantasy 4 in japan you start out playing a cecil who gets into a lover's quarrel with the king you're demoted and now you're just trying to win back his love of course the plot actually ends up being a lot more than that everything works very smoothly here and you'll have no trouble figuring things out the graphics are sharp if not a bit simplistic and the music is outstanding definitely recommended there's also final fantasy v which was only released in japan a huge meteor crashes to the ground and you find some of your party members scattered among the debris the gameplay and battle system will be familiar to any final fantasy fan however it didn't get released outside of japan because square felt that it would be too difficult to game for us english-speaking people but these days you can find fan translated roms and repro copies of the game [Music] final fantasy iii did get a release outside of japan where it was known as part six a new story and new characters round out a very familiar playing game only they put a ton of effort into this one the graphics are all much better and it goes without saying that the music is outstanding this is personally my favorite final fantasy game [Music] breath of fire 2 is from capcom and they're not usually the first company you think of when it comes to rpgs you start out as a young child you find your sister who wandered off and your father saves you both you take a nap and what follows is a dream or is it you go back to town and nobody knows who you are or who your father is well you better get used to it because you're stuck here 10 years later you're still here trying to find answers and you found absolutely none so far everything is pretty typical in this game but it does most things fairly well there's a cool day and night cycle the graphics are nice but of course the music can't even hope to compete with the square games my biggest complaint is that the random battles happen way too often early in the game and it takes a while to earn enough money to buy things you'll be grinding from the get-go still fun though if you give it a chance secret of mana is another highly regarded squaresoft game this one's an action rpg instead of turn based a lot of people are really big fans of this game i however am not one of those people i can appreciate what the game is and i don't think it's bad i was just never able to keep my interest in it anytime i played it it never grabbed me however you do get to mow the lawn with your sword like in zelda so it can't be that bad i mean that's the main reason people like zelda right i'm just kidding calm down the graphics are excellent and once again so is the music you can collect up to three characters to help you out as you battle through the land your attacks depend on the percentage meter at the bottom of the screen the higher the percentage the stronger your attack kind of works like the legendary axe or astianix but with numbers instead of a bar anyway don't let my apathy towards this game steer you away [Music] and of course chrono trigger is another really popular rpg and rightfully so this was a new ip at the time so the developers could do anything they wanted with it the time travel mechanic is really cool and there's lots of different party members to find both from the past and in the future no random battles here you can see your enemies and often even avoid them there's tons of different endings to see if you're a stickler for such things and back then this really gave you a lot for your money can't forget to mention the absolutely amazing soundtrack by yasinori matsuda in his video game music debut this one really makes you want to keep on playing like only a really good rpg [Music] can [Music] now here's a look at some games that are staples in a lot of people's collections if they're not in your collection then what the hell why not let's start with some of the kirby games first up is kirby superstar which has eight games in one according to the label five of these are awesome side scrolling platformers each one has a different storyline but they all play very much the same it's the usual gameplay with kirby sucking certain enemies to gain their powers and use them against everyone i really like these games because there's quite a few different abilities that kirby can use the other three games are basic games like a race against king ddd and another one to see how quick your reflexes are by responding to an on-screen command [Music] next is kirby's dreamland 3. this late release is obviously the third installment of the series it goes for a watercolor effect with the graphics and i don't hate it but i don't necessarily love it either i feel the same way about the helper animals in this game sometimes they're fun to use and others are just annoying still it's a great game and has that amazing music that the series is known for definitely the happiest music i've ever [Music] heard finally here's kirby's dream course now this one might not be in everyone's collection but it should be it's kind of like putt-putt with kirby as the ball and he gains his abilities by running into stationary enemies these might help you get a hole in one who knows it's highly addictive trying to get the low score for all courses i used to be really good at this game but as i play it now i feel very rusty still it's really fun and challenging and you should give it a try the mario series is a staple and it's also being covered by everybody and their mom but being an episode about the super nintendo we need to at least briefly mention them super mario world is a flagship game for the system it's worthy of that title as it's incredibly fun and in my opinion the best mario game up through the 16-bit generation it has that solid action that we knew from previous games and has a lot more thrown in to make it even better like a huge quest with lots of secrets for you to figure out yoshi made his first appearance here and writing on his back added a new dimension to the gameplay i always loved how mario punched him in the back of the head to make his tongue come out man mario's brutal [Music] super mario world 2 yoshi's island was the next game in the series and it uses the super fx 2 chip for graphical enhancements everything changed with this one and i was happy because it felt like a whole new experience as you know you take control of yoshi trying to bring baby mario back to the storks to be delivered to his parents if yoshi takes a hit baby mario falls off his back and starts crying he won't stop until yoshi touches him again and this made for some frantic gameplay more than a few people didn't like this as mario's cry is horribly annoying i find it annoying too but i still think the game is insanely fun i'm a huge fan of the graphic style and the level design yoshi is up for the challenge and throwing eggs at your enemies and just about everything is a fun play mechanic plus it has a great new soundtrack that is very unlike other mario music next is super mario all-stars this is a 16-bit makeover of the first three mario brothers titles and the japanese only super mario brothers 2. i was truly happy to see how well these games turned out in 16 bits and it made me want to play through them again [Music] and here's super mario rpg legend of the seven stars nintendo collaborated with square to make this rpg and it turned out fantastic i love tramping through the mushroom kingdom and beyond fighting goomba's piranha plants and all sorts of new enemies in a turn-based battle style it's not a difficult game and just like nintendo has always been is easily accessible to everybody the only problem that i had playing this game was with the isometric view i missed quite a few jumps and i was bewildered at times that's my only real complaint about this game but i dealt with it and didn't let it ruin a great experience [Music] contra 3 from konami is one of the greatest running gun games of all time the city has been destroyed now it's up to you to destroy the aliens or you and a friend in two-player mode if you have friends which i don't it's your typical contraction with lots of great weapons the only weapon i really don't care much for is the laser but the good news is that you can dual wield weapons and switch between them at any time despite some pretty intense slowdown here and there the action usually keeps a brisk pace there's also the overhead stages which most people hate but honestly i kind of enjoy them must be that fancy mode 7. i haven't played this for a while so i'm kind of sucking at it now but i did beat it back in the day stick with it and you'll get to the end in no time some really nice graphics and music round things out pick this one up clock is an interesting game hardly anyone ever mentions you play as a whatever he is and he's trying to get his stolen flag back but each time he sees it he's duped by another flag and is moved to another location i'm pretty sure we can all relate to having our flag stolen plaque throws both of his hands and both of his feet as punches he can also duck and jump go pluck sometimes he can find a special power which will last quite a while which is really cool you collect these shells yes they are shells for bonus clocks you know how close you are to an extra guy by how full the little plock icon here is once you get past the first group of levels you'll fight the bosses and get your flag back yay but then plot gets home and discovers that the fleas have changed all the flags on his island to their flags oh will the flag troubles never end well hey at least we're not saving the world like we are in most other games so points for doing something different the first levels are over pretty quickly but some of the levels after that can get pretty complex like this one where you need to hatch all the eggs and kill the babies before the flag will return there's also triggers in certain spots to alter the level so you can progress further the graphics aren't bad at all and are pretty colorful it feels like i'm playing in a cartoon world or something well i guess i am and of course the music by tim fallon is outstanding it sounds like it could be a playstation game or something and not a super nintendo cartridge [Music] he did an excellent job on the large majority of the tracks here this game is tough as ball so be aware of that if you're interested still it's worth checking out for sure [Music] a surprisingly cool game is the ninja warriors from taito i say surprisingly because this game wasn't that great in the arcade or on the sega cd this version is basically like a sequel or something it's a single plane beat em up like bad dudes you play as a ninja robot who's out to overthrow an evil government you can choose from three different characters and i like them all except for the blue ninja dude you basically play the game walking around and beating up someone's army there's a meter at the bottom of the screen that builds as long as you're not taking too many hits once it fills you can unleash a devastating super attack the action feels pretty responsive and it's satisfying to kill your enemies you can even block a lot of their attacks but sometimes it's easy to get caught in a swarm of enemies and have a hard time getting out of it i also don't care for how long it takes to get back up after my sorry ass has been knocked down and unlike the original game you don't get to see the robot parts as you get damaged you only see your robot form when you die but other than that it's all pretty good the graphics have been improved and while they're not amazing they are definitely more interesting than the original game unfortunately the music isn't anywhere near as good but it's not bad at all [Music] [Music] oh man this episode's like a dream i don't want it to end well it's not over yet let's get back into it sweet who says the super nintendo doesn't have good hack and slash games first up is magic sword from capcom this is a two-player game in the arcade but when it was released for the super nes it was single player only this is a fun game because you have to fight your way and try to reach the 50th floor of this tower you're not alone in your quest though there's plenty of treasure chests along the way that hold coins food and keys these keys are used to unlock prison cells that are on every floor the prisoners of these cells become your ally and help you fight the good thing is that they mimic your move so you don't have to worry about what they're doing there's lots of different types of allies and it'll take some time before you realize which one you like the best no matter what you're in for a good time and you've got some enjoyable music to go along with the action next up is king of dragons also by capcom this one is more akin to dungeons and dragons as you pick the class of character you want to be as you progress through the game your character will level up making them stronger and more agile depending on who you have you'll also get new weapons that make killing a lot easier the thing that i found weird about this game is the inconsistent length of the levels some are fairly long while others are unbelievably short the game usually has a lot of sprites on screen at once and yes this will translate into a bit of slowdown it's alright though and playing this game through the years i've gotten used to it and it really doesn't bother me and i'm saying this because i'm a fanboy wait no i'm not a fanboy not a fanboy with 16 levels and a decent soundtrack this game will keep you happy for quite a while here's knights of the round and i'll give you one guesses who developed this game yes capcom as you'd guessed from the title it revolves around the legend of king arthur you can choose from him percival or lancelot as your character the game primarily plays like the others where you hack and slash your way through each level and fight a boss at the end but there's a few differences here to try and make the game more unique firstly you have a block button this time around and if you don't forget to use it it can be very helpful you can also ride a horse at certain points during the game these are kind of clumsy to control but you can use them to attack enemies along with your weapon and finally your enemies and bosses are all other soldiers and knights that are in your way in your quest to unite england i like this as sometimes it gets dull fighting the same dragons lizardmen minotaurs and other mythical creatures definitely a fun game and if you have a friend with you it's even better let's check out captain commando by well you guessed it capcom but it's not a hack-and-slash this time it's a beat em up that stars the titular protagonist along with the captain you can pick between three other friend commandos for some variety as far as beat em ups go it's pretty average you fight a lot of the same enemies over and over again on lackluster backgrounds even the music isn't very noteworthy you do have a superpower that is helpful in a couple of different types of attacks i really like the captain's running and jumping attack where he lights enemies on fire i'm always amazed that the enemies get up after being totally engulfed in flames there's definitely better beat-em-ups out there but at least this has variety to the catalog gotta mention teenage mutant ninja turtles four from konami this beat em up is a fairly good port from the second arcade game pick one of four turtles and off you go and of course it's two-player simultaneous as well this one introduces a throwing mechanic where you toss the enemies towards the screen and a few other new moves the game plays with no real issues in the control department despite being repetitive it doesn't feel very repetitive and that's definitely a good thing however i think they were scraping the bottom of the barrel with some of the bosses since all the recognizable ones were used up in the first arcade game at least the graphics are vibrant and the sound is good the music is actually outstanding in my opinion and really keeps you glued to the action how could you not like this game is a kick axe shooter from konami yes i said kick axe this one alternates back and forth between overhead and side scrolling stages at the beginning of each stage you can choose your armaments a new weapon is added after you beat each stage but i always just stick with the original three the game isn't exactly fast paced but that's okay instead it offers a ton of atmosphere for example i really like how the space colony in stage 2 is partially destroyed i think this shooter is probably known most for its odd scrolling distortion of the overhead stages that's neat i guess but i definitely like to side view stages more the graphics are all really well done throughout and the music has plenty of good tracks as well be sure to check this one out space megaforce from compile is another great shooter this one is strictly of the overhead variety if you've ever played blazing lasers on the turbo graphic 16 consider this one a spiritual sequel there's even some of the original power strike on the master system in here but regardless of all that it's still a great game in its own right there's a ton of different power ups to choose from this right here is a big part of the challenge once you get a weapon you like you'll have a hell of a time trying to avoid all the others as they slowly float down the screen and there's power ups on the screen almost constantly the little orange eggs will help increase the power of the weapon you have and the green eggs will step it up a little from where you were if i had one complaint about this game it'd be that most of the stages are a bit too long and some of the stages are way too short other than that is still pretty much all good the visuals are well they're pleasant and they get the job done the music is excellent though it's kind of odd for a shooter it's too calm the sound effects sound like a muffled version of blazing laser sound effects definitely one to have if you like shooters and stuff this is legend of the mystical ninja by konami there's two main styles of gameplay here the first one is set in a town here you go about your business killing people with your pipe and hopes that they drop money scrolls or lucky cat idols which make your weapons stronger besides this there's shops where you can buy food and other items to help you along your journey and of course there's plenty of houses where you get good information on things like where you need to go to progress in the game the first time i played this game back in the day it took me forever to realize how to get around towns i was stumped for the longest time until i just pushed up or down where there's a break in the graphics duh once you get everything you need you go to a side scrolling action platformer these of course are my favorite parts of the game they're fun and they end with a boss fight i really like the graphical style of the game the character and enemy sprites look nice and have some funny animations the music isn't half bad either and it runs out a great game konami released three of these games in japan but we only got one of them i wish it would have sold better than we too possibly could have had the sequels harvest moon got his start on the super nintendo this farming simulation game was released in 1997 which is pretty late in the system's life you take the role of a boy whose parents were nowhere to be found and they left their farm empty and in need of care it's up to you to get this place organized and start growing crops and taking care of the animals i guess this is fairly close to real farming you need to get the ground ready for grass and crops you do this by building fences removing tree stumps and large rocks once you have a nice area you break the ground and plant seeds and if that's not enough you have to water them every day as time goes by you can upgrade your tools to make your farming life much easier the game has a calendar system so you know the right season to plant certain vegetables since you're doing the same thing day in and day out the game has a few festivals and whatnot that take place in town here you can swoon a woman and try to make her your girl all while enjoying the festivities i don't know what it is about this game but there's definitely something that i like and i have a good time playing it and here's some game called earthbound or something it's a quirky rpg with a good sense of humor there's more than a few funny scenes in the game and i laughed a lot when i first played through it it's your typical turn-based rpg so there's nothing new on that side enemies roam freely around the world and sometimes you can avoid them but most of the time they're on you before you can even try to get away the thing that i really like about this game is the setting i like the fact that it's not set in a fantasy world of dragons slimes and other such creatures i like the modern surroundings with cities and cars i also like that the magic really isn't magic but psychic powers if you're tired of the typical rpg this is good and feels different it's not rare or really even uncommon but it is pricey [Music] uh [Music] now let's take a quick look at the games everyone's talked about a thousand times before but surely can't be left out of a super nintendo episode games like super metroid samus returns in her best adventure yet this game is extremely addictive and i've been through it many times you explore the planet while finding new weapons and abilities you simply cannot go wrong with this one [Music] or how about star fox which was one of the few games that used the super fx chip play as anthropomorphic animals on their quest to save the galaxy you fly a spaceship that controls better than you might think if you like your video game action at around 7 frames per second this one's for you super mario kart started an awesome racing franchise race in battle with up to two players this one started the item-based kart racing genre i'm not a big fan of the permanent split screen but yeah you get used to it this one also uses the dsp1 chip like pilotwings right up there with super metroid is baebae's kids this is what the super nintendo is all about where else can you beat up multiple bill clinton's for no reason whatsoever you can go to hell final fight baby's kids is on the system and it freaking rules how about some mega man games like mega man 7 you're only allowed to select from the first four bosses at the beginning of the game and as you'd expect with mega man there's lots of shooty shoot action now i'm not the biggest mega man fan in the world but this one seems okay to me [Music] over on the super famicom in japan they got rockman and forte otherwise known as megaman and bass you play as either character in this one mega man plays like mega man though he seems to have a lot more animation than usual bass or forte has a rapid fire machine gun and he can't slide like mega man can i also can't even beat the first boss with this guy not like i care because i prefer mega man anyway the stage select in this one is more like a darius game with the branching paths the graphics are typical for the series aside from the improved animation and the music is actually really good though very downbeat it eventually made it out of japan on the gameboy advance [Music] mega man x is a new franchise for a new generation he can scale walls and cool stuff like that i like this one it's pretty cool in fact they made three of these games for the system so if you like it you have a lot to play each one tries to add some new features over the other mega man fans have strong opinions about each entry for sure but the series is generally held in a very high regard which do you prefer the x series or the original series which i'm told also includes a mega man and bass and last but not least we have the legend of zelda a link to the past once again you play as link on his quest to rescue zelda and defeat gannon this is without doubt or question my favorite zelda game of all time i love the mechanic of going back and forth from the light world to the dark world i also like how they're similar but different at the same time the dungeons are also much more wonderfully complex compared to the original game but they never get overwhelming the graphics are fitting and they don't try to be more than they need to be same goes with the timeless music that accompanies this game this is a must-have in any gamer's collection all right there we go you know i love this system very much but i want to hear what you think about it well honestly dave i think it's nintendo's best system ever and this is coming from a sega fanboy you know i i really like sega and all that stuff but i can appreciate what the super nintendo is yeah the games have aged extremely well like i said it's nintendo's best system and it blows away all their others you know with the nes being the strong second in my opinion yeah no i you know i'm in a 100 agreement with you i mean this is to me the pinnacle of nintendo they had the best first party games they had amazing third party support this is this is it yeah anyway what do you guys think of the super nintendo let us know and in the meantime thank you for watching game sag [Music] in this corner weighing two pounds eight ounces it's the super nintendo and in this corner weighing two pounds 14 ounces it's the nintendo wii [Applause] and the fight is on it's a nasty one already oh yes that was bad however i think this fight is going to be over soon because stop motion animation is extremely laborious to do and i was right the super nintendo wins it defeats the nintendo wii the super nintendo is the champion but wait a minute the super famicom has come in the trash the super nintendo it is sick of the super nintendo getting the spotlight it doesn't like its cake pan appearance representing the super nintendo library the super famicom feels it has the superior look and the super famicom trash is the super nintendo the super famicom is the champion [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] hello and welcome to gamesack this time we're doing a show that a lot of you have requested we're finally doing it the original xbox the mighty xbox so mighty in fact that i've always wondered what it looks like on the inside of this huge box that's like this big or something pretty big but i imagine you've got a video for us to watch and uh let's see yeah let's check out the xbox the microsoft xbox was released in november of 2001 and was the company's very first home console it launched only two days before the nintendo gamecube and also competed with the mighty playstation 2. the 8.5 pound console originally launched with a giant controller called the duke but people complained about its size this was quickly replaced with the controller meant for the japanese market called the controller s and the xbox controllers feature exciting black and white buttons to increase the enjoyment factor of every game on the system a year after the console was released the xbox live online service launched the xbox was the first console to only offer broadband support and not any dial up options the xbox was also by far the most robust console of its generation it was powered by a 32-bit 733 megahertz pentium 3 64 megabytes of ram with graphics drawn by an nvidia nb2a running at 233 megahertz that's right it can put over a hundred polygons on the screen also a popular media player when modded the xbox had just over a thousand games and sold over 22 million units worldwide only 2 million of that in japan [Music] eight and a half pounds indeed dude i wasn't even that big when i was born no right but you weren't either it was a damn heavy console wow and it still is and it still is it hasn't gotten later exactly anyway what is a console without the games let's take a look at some of the games yeah we've got a lot [Music] here's panther dragoon orta by sega's smile bit team it's a very solid entry into this series of rail shooters and plays just like the first two games with a few new additions first and foremost is the ability to morph your dragon there's three different types and each one is useful the small dragon can't lock onto enemies but he has a huge reticle and machine gun-like weapon and he's fast the medium dragon can lock onto a bunch of targets and is a bit more powerful the big dragon is very strong but can only lock onto a few targets at once and he's slow your dragons all now have speed boosts or can even slow down if needed the berserk weapon is still here and so is all the fun of the previous games there's just something about this style of gameplay that's simple and fun but still very challenging this is in no way an easy game but it's so pretty that you just want to keep trying the graphics are very nice and are all presented in widescreen and 480p and it looks great on modern tvs keep in mind that this game and a few others won't run in 480p on later xbox consoles though they can be patched if you have a modded xbox though that didn't work at all for joe or joe the soundtrack while not as great as the first game is still very enjoyable a must own for your system [Music] jet set radio future is another game by sega's smile bit released in 2002 this is a reimagining of the first game on the dreamcast it features similar levels and characters even though some of them are altered a bit basically you're rolling around covering up other games graffiti with your own gang's tags after you cover up all the graffiti you'll race or mimic another graffiti artist if you beat him he'll join your game and after that you do get to fight the police you do this by knocking them down and spray painting their backs i actually really like this game the skating is fun and grinding on everything is easy the cel-shaded graphics look really good and everyone dances it's funny watching the characters dance while having a conversation with each other and of course you can't dance without good music right well the music in here definitely fits the gameplay it's not something that i'd add to my personal music library but while i'm playing the game it sounds really good definitely a great addition to the xbox library and it eventually became a pack-in with the console [Music] jade empire is an action rpg from bioware well there's really not a whole lot to the rpg part but it's definitely not straight up action you choose a character and your style in the beginning of the game and like you'd expect from a bioware title there's lots of text and you're given choices on how to respond the characters in the game will react differently depending on how you respond so be sure you're saying what you really want to say and there's lots of this stuff throughout the game basically you start out as a star student of a martial arts school somewhere in china you have three different life bars which corresponds to body mind and spirit and of course if the body bar empties in battle you die so that's the one you really want to keep your eye on however you can spend chi if you have it to restore your body bar when your life gets low you start out fighting regular bandits but soon you're fighting ghosts and of course they have life bars too you can switch between styles when fighting by pressing one of the directions on the d-pad as a game it's not bad and so far i haven't gotten bored at all even with all of the dialogue the graphics are pretty good but the frame rate is variable in fact it's all over the place the sound and music do the job and all the dialogue except for yours is voiced now it's definitely not well voiced but it's not cringe worthy or anything not like game sack master lee keeps talking about restless dead but there's nothing like that around here now i haven't played it too much but so far i definitely recommend it and it was also released on the pc and mac this is this is the chronicles of riddick escape from butcher bay this is a first person action stealth type of game that apparently takes place before the movie i've never seen the movie though the game stars the voice and likeness of vin diesel who is also involved in the development it also features the voices of other people you may or may not recognize though you'd better recognize dwight schultz he was part of the a team down in engineering and star trek the next generation basically the story goes that you're ridic and now you're in butcher bay prison and you want out the game works pretty well and it's not just a first person shooter with stealth elements there's lots of inmates to talk to and often you're gonna have to do favors for them if you want to advance the game no not those kind of favors get your mind out of the gutter you sicko these favors usually revolve around killing a specific individual or getting an item or things like that often you're fighting with your bare fists but you can get other weapons to help you out guns can be hard to come by since they're dna encoded and if you don't have the right dna you can't use them unless you can get into the mainframe where all that info lives of course the game's visuals are of course dark and dreary for some reason you don't see too many happy bright colors in butcher bay prison the field of view is quite wide which is odd for a console game surprisingly i didn't get any motion sickness while playing this one and i played it for quite a while the sound design is really well done with great 5.1 dolby digital surround that comes from all over the place this one was also released on a pc but if you want to play it on a console then you've got to get it on the xbox the dark my favorite here's blinks the time sweeper developed by r2 and released in 2002 this is a very interesting game with some crazy play mechanics that ultimately ends up being a fun adventure firstly the game's titular protagonist is a cat did you just say tits now i'm really not a cat person so this might have swayed me from buying it back in the day but after i played it i realized that you can't always judge a game by his hero so each world has three levels in a boss fight inside the levels your goal is to destroy all the enemies and get to the exit you have a 10 minute timer to get this done and if you don't i'm guessing something bad will happen don't worry about the time though because you really won't have any problems killing everything the thing that makes this game so interesting are the time controls you'll pick up crystals throughout a level and if you get three or four of the same one you gain the ability to manipulate time you can do things like pause time which will make everything in the level stop except for you you can also slow down time which will make everything slow down except for you you can even rewind time which will for example let you fix a bridge that just collapsed so you can use it these are just a few of the cool things you can do i was skeptical about how this would all work but it didn't take long for me to get the hang of it and have lots of fun with very colorful graphics and a decent soundtrack this is a title that i'd recommend for your collection blinks 2 masters of time and space came out a couple of years later in 2004. there's quite a bit added to the sequel and that's always a good thing right well let's see the overall game play is very similar to the first you have a cat that you can customize this time around and i guess you can make it look like your own cat if you have one you still have the same abilities to mess around with time and the levels play and feel very similar to the first in which i mean you do three missions and then fight a boss one big difference is that you don't have to finish a level in under 10 minutes you can take as much time as you want and you also don't have to kill every enemy like before probably the biggest change is that you now do missions as part of the enemy pig gang these are more stealthy missions where you try not to get caught by cats and for the most part they're pretty fun i haven't gotten too far into this game yet as i bought it just to show you guys but i do like what i've played again this one is pretty cheap and i got mine for 10 shift and that's what one and a half value meals at mcdonald's eat a couple of bologna sandwiches instead and you'll have this game in no [Music] time [Music] all right we're coming right along some good stuff so far you liking the console believe it or not yes i am liking the console but more about that later okay let's get back into the games [Music] the xbox had the ability to run games in high definition and many games took advantage of this games like soul calibur 2 from namco this one runs in 720p which is something no other console at the time did not only that but it runs at a locked 60 frames per second as well this is an excellent fighting game that was released on all three popular consoles at the time this one had spawn as an exclusive character normally the game can run in widescreen if you played in 480i or 480p but in 720p you can only play it in the 4x3 aspect ratio this is because the game is pretty graphically intensive even for a 480p game still besides the 4x3 shape it looks like it could be an early xbox 360 title or something one fight another game with 720p support is terminator 3 rise of the machines and you'll be happy to know that this game is every bit as crappy as the movie if not even more so it's a first person shooter where you play as on the the frame rate is all over the place and it often gets a bit choppy so i'm wondering why they even bothered with 720p but hey at least it's in widescreen i guess fantastic it's a very forgettable game let's forget about it right now a much better 720p game with widescreen is freedom fighters by ea this is a third person shooter set in the reality with an alternate history russia has taken over new york city and as a plumber you're the city's only hope i guess they clogged all the toilets or something the game is set up well but the controls are kind of odd and take a lot of getting used to still the game looks nice and razor sharp for the time the text is super tiny as well maybe even smaller than dead rising's text and lucky you you have a sewer for a hub world it's really not bad if you can adapt to the controls the best 720p game that isn't soul calibur 2 is the warriors from rockstar you're in a gang called yup you guessed it the warriors and you get to go around and do gang things things like graffiti which lets everyone know who's boss run out of paint and you got to break into a store and steal things in order to get money to buy more paint i'm not sure why you can't just steal paint but whatever you also get to beat up on other gangs and cops and have you ever beaten up a homeless person for no reason whatsoever in 720p it's way better than beating one up in lowly 480p actually it's a lot like grand theft auto where you can choose to beat anyone up or not there is a lot of fighting in this game the fighting action itself isn't horrible by any means but it's certainly no streets of rage i like that a lot of the environment is actually destructible lots and lots of stuff to do in this one check it out some games even ran in 1080i like enter the matrix here it's real 1080i too not half-assed like the ps2 did 1080i still it's interlaced so it's far from ideal anyway in this game you don't even get to play as neo at least not in the beginning i really couldn't play very long because of the way the camera moves and just look at the way this dude runs who the hell runs like that there's not much detail here but everything is smooth and sharp and it's fun to beat up the post office workers who try to shoot you with their guns i've never seen a post office this damn big before it's huge i recall reading back when this game was launched that there are a ton of bugs in it so buyer beware you're not supposed to be here dragon's lair 3d is a better game that's also in 1080i basically you play as dirk and it's still the original dragon's lair it's just an attempt to make a somewhat more modern game out of it you have a lot of the same stages but played in a 3d world with polygons and stuff instead of quick time events this game also adds a lot of new stages and it's kind of interesting to see how they handled everything despite some slowdown it looks great but you know i'd still rather play the original low-res laserdisc version the last hd game i'm going to talk about is mx versus atv unleashed wow what an exciting title for a game this is a racing game that goes up to 1080i and it looks pretty good considering you can race an mx which stands for motocross you can also race as an atv which is one of those four-wheel all-terrain vehicle thingies i didn't find these vehicles very fun to race on because they were really easy to fall off of and lastly you can race dune buggies but the game calls them sand rails these are actually pretty fun despite the extremely floaty physics and generally unpolished feel i'd say this game is worth maybe five dollars if you see it for less than that you might want to consider picking it up all the games that i mentioned in this segment were released on other consoles as well but they only run in 720p or above on the xbox well unless they were also released on ps3 and ps4 like the warriors guys high road to revenge released in 2003 it's a very arcadey flight combat game and that's exactly why i like it so much sure there's lots of story here and it's actually really enjoyable because it's so entertaining it really has some good voice acting and lots of comedy that will make you laugh the game is played in a sandbox style i mean that you're flying around a map screen and that you can activate missions by flying close to an icon and hitting the x button the missions are all really entertaining and besides flying you can actually control a gun turret to take down enemy planes speaking of planes they're all fictional fun to fly and have different attributes you'll unlock different types of planes as you progress through the game graphically it still really holds up and is a blast to play even now the only sad thing is that the xbox live online multiplayer is gone joe and i used to play quite a bit of this game online and we always had a great time probably because we weren't in the same room even though the multiplayer is gone the single player is still worth long hours of fun if you have an xbox then this is a game that i insist you have in your collection hell you can get this for less than five dollars ship so there's no real reason not to get this one the reason is so cheap is that microsoft started packing it in with the system at one point in order to show off xbox live let me know what you think of this one this is oddworld stranger's wrath released in 2005. you play as the titular stranger who goes about catching outlaws and their friends dead or alive did you just say tits the gameplay is in both third-person and first-person perspectives in third person you do your platforming climbing and melee combat in first person you use your crossbow your weapon can handle two different types of ammo at a time the ammo for your crossbow is all types of bugs and furry creatures that you can find throughout the levels each one does different things to your enemies which gives you time to collect them for their bounty there's quite a bit of detail in each level but the colors used are mostly dark and drab it's an interesting game but i had quite a hard time with the controls in the camera which really pissed me off early in the game i do like the idea behind this title but i think the tough controls and difficult camera kind of turned me off to it if you've played this game what do you think do you have a hard time if you haven't played it it's really hard for me to recommend it as i'm just not a fan [Music] here's forza motorsport developed by turn 10 studios and released in 2005. this is microsoft's answer to the popular gran turismo series of simulation racing games as you may or may not know i'm not a huge fan of simulation racers and i would gladly take an arcade style racer any day say like outrun but i'm typically an easygoing guy so what the hell i'll try it right off the bat i've got to say that i like the fact that you can just jump right into the game you buy an economy car with some credits that you have and you start racing this is much better than stupid gran turismo where you have to qualify for a freaking license first which wastes a lot of time there's many modes to play from including arcade and career mode career mode of course is the main attraction since this is what you'll race in to build up credits to tune your car and buy new ones there's different types of races here from point to point racing and also lap tracks some are real courses and others are made up and i'm fine with this as i think there should be different types racing is pretty solid and it's the usual speed up on straightaways and come to an almost complete stop at tight corners which in my opinion is boring after placing and winning races you get credits to raise levels which qualify you for sponsors these are good because you get discounts on sponsored parts graphically the game looks really good even today and there's still some very nice lighting effects here and there the in-game music is decent but the ability to add your own soundtrack is even better if you like simulation racers this is a good game in all honesty i had a decent time playing this title and may even look to buy a current forza for my xbone [Music] voodoo vince is a 3d action platformer from beep industries you're vince the third best voodoo doll of madame charmaine however she's kidnapped one evening and some zombie dust brings you to life and what's the first thing you do seconds after becoming alive that's right flash some tude dude dead monster smell anyway i didn't think i would like this game very much but it's actually quite fun you can double jump punch and do a spin attack you can also collect these purple idols which give you voodoo attacks once you have enough voodoo power you activate this by pulling both triggers at the same time this causes damage to you but since you're a voodoo doll it also damages all of the enemies in the immediate vicinity pretty clever actually you collect more and more of these purple idols throughout the game and it's always fun seeing the new attacks and watching your enemies die in funny ways the control is really good and the game has a very lively feel about it the levels are pretty big and there's often a lot of things you'll need to do in order to clear a level the visuals are really nice and the music is something else it's probably nothing i'd ever listened to while i wasn't playing the game but it's definitely unique and fun to listen to there's going to be an hd remaster of this game coming for the xbox one soon and also for the pc so be sure to check it out i think i might pick it up so the red dead redemption trailer just came out as we're making this episode so i thought i'd take a look at the game that started it all red dead revolver this game mainly plays out as a third person shooter without many frills but it's still fun but don't go in expecting any open world sandbox gameplay here this game began development under capcom believe it or not and it was going to be part of the gunsmoke universe but then rockstar purchased angel studios who were the developers making this and took over and added their own flair so as you probably figured out by now this game takes place in the old west thank goodness you have someone like me here to tell you these things you play as red and you shoot almost anything that moves in fact the enemies keep piling on at the end of each stage you get some cash and also the chance to repair or upgrade your weapons for the most part the game plays pretty well it's really fun shooting down thugs there's some challenging stages like this scene on a train where you've gotta duck under the structures and jump over the platforms in order to make it to the engineer who's at the front of the train if you don't jump over the platforms you get taken further towards the back of the train and you've got a lot of ground to make up there's also some quick draw sequences and these are hard to master they're also really hard to enjoy the graphics are average and while it supports widescreen it's also letterboxed at the same time still i enjoyed it despite not really being into cowboy type stuff it eventually came out on the ps2 and even the ps4 all right we've got some good stuff again covered here and i always wondered that you know if if sega didn't get out of the console market i mean what we wouldn't have had some of these sega games on here indeed lucky microsoft i guess and we've got one more sega game coming up at the very end so stay tuned [Music] here's conker live and reloaded released in 2005. this is a remake of the nintendo 64 game conquers bad fur day the story is simple just like it should be conker had a long night of drinking with his buddies and all he wants to do is get home and go to bed but he's distracted on the way home and ends up helping lots of characters with their problems i really enjoyed the original game so it was an easy decision to buy this version utilizing the power of the xbox i was excited to see what the game would look like on a then current gen system it looked amazing at the time and honestly even now it looks really good rare did a great job with the remaster and left almost everything intact on the nintendo 64 this game pushed the limits in terms of language and adult themes a lot of that is here but some scenes were censored and for what reason i'm not sure maybe the xbox audience is less mature than the nintendo audience oh well it doesn't matter because it's still a great time i've always loved this game because it's so colorful and all the areas you visit are just loaded with atmosphere there's always a tune going on in the background and as weird as it sounds it reminds me of disneyland the only bad thing is with many of the games we've talked about in this episode is that the online multiplayer is gone this was another great aspect of this release being able to play with up to 16 others in online matches it sucks but there's nothing you can do about it now so just enjoy the single player the nintendo 64 version goes for a lot of money now so this is a cheaper option it's around 30 or so and it's a fun time to remember what rare was like when they were at their peak another great game by rare is grabbed by the ghoulies in this one you and your girlfriend take refuge from the rain in a huge mansion that's luckily close by just like splatterhouse uh oh of course your girlfriend gets kidnapped by baron von ghoul right away and you have to find her lots of bad things happen to your poor girlfriend throughout this adventure and it's kind of funny the game has kind of a wacky control scheme where you use the right analog to attack but don't worry because it's very responsive and it's easy to get used to each room in the mansion has many enemies to kill and some of the rooms require you to meet certain criteria to move on again don't worry because it's not too tough as usually you only need to kill certain enemies a lot of the backgrounds are destructible and hold enemies or helpful items and the baron keeps it interesting by regulating how much healthy you have to make it through a room it all seems strange but it works and it's pretty fun to play i like the atmosphere and cartoony look of the mansion and the music fits perfectly rare did a great job with this title and it's a shame that there never was a sequel i recommend this game and now you're obligated to own it [Music] [Music] do you like mech games then mech assault from microsoft is a fairly decent one the control screen makes it look like it's going to be insanely complicated but it really isn't run around in your mechs shoot things step on things wreck people's lives and generally be a menace well that's not really the objective but come on that's how you're gonna play it it's pretty responsive with good sound and nice visuals kind of tough at first but that's okay this is exclusive to the xbox there's also mechasalt ii lone wolf this is another exclusive for the xbox i'll be honest i didn't enjoy this one as much as i did the first and i got bored extremely quickly you're not much bigger than a regular man at least not at the start of the game and no mech game should have such tiny ass mechs that's really not interesting at all this one is in widescreen though but the visuals are really only okay i had a really hard time aiming my missiles as they'd rarely hit what i wanted them to hit i ended up spending most of my time fight clubbing the city there's also an annoying alarm when your power is low that i'd prefer didn't exist i'd recommend steel battalion but since we don't have that we can't show it to you now burnout revenge was also released on the ps2 but believe me you want the xbox version first off you know i like the series if you saw my reviews about burnout 3 and burnout paradise basically the more crazy you drive the more boost you'll get and the higher your scores this game is insanely fast often you'll crash into something that you simply didn't see coming at all this is one of those games that you have to play for a little bit in order to get into the zone once you're in this zen state you can pretty much dodge most obstacles but it's still very challenging there's lots to do in this game besides simple races sometimes you gotta take down other racers before the time runs out and things like that so now you're probably wondering what makes the xbox version so great specifically well first of all all the versions are in 480p widescreen and run at 60 frames per second but the xbox being what it is the graphics are noticeably better than the ps2 and then there's the sound holy crap is the sound quality of this game amazing especially if you have it hooked up to a properly tuned home theater system in dolby digital you hear other cars and the wind whooshing behind you and also at your sides the sound field is intense there's plenty of discreet subwoofer when you initiate a boost in some cars and especially when crashes happen the sound in this game truly does enhance the gameplay it makes it way more intense now i've played plenty of video games in my time and very very few sound even close to as good as this one does the ps2 and gamecube have absolutely nothing that can compete with this kind of audio now you may think they do but they don't this game compares favorably to most modern games released these days at least as far as sound quality goes and if you haven't figured out by how long i've been going on about this i am a sucker for good sound quality i mean i used to tune thx movie theater auditorium so my appreciation for audio is probably a little unhealthy i really wish that i could share the sound that i hear with all of you on youtube oh and the xbox is also the only version that allows for custom soundtracks so instead of the license nonsense of the other versions you can put your own music on the console and listen to that as you race unfortunately i don't have any custom playlists on the console right now so what you're hearing here is the license stuff there's an xbox 360 version of the game and i rented it once it looks better of course but i don't recall it being quite as good in the sound department i'm gonna revisit that one again i think in the future also the way the 360 handles custom soundtracks is kind of wonky in comparison to the original xbox the music is just like playing all the time if i recall it's weird anyway this game is a must-have and if you own an xbox the ps2 version just won't do [Music] this is dead man's hand developed by human head studios and released in 2004 by atari it's a first person shooter set in the old west the story is about your character el tejon who was a member of the nine gang you wanted money but you didn't want to kill anybody the leader of the game disagrees with you and shoots you luckily you don't die and now you get your chance to take revenge on the gang fortunately you've changed your mind and have no problems killing people now i like the old west setting and even though the game is all earth tone colors i still think it looks pretty good with some decent detail you carry four weapons with you at a time a pistol a shotgun a rifle and a knife which i never use because there's so much ammo lying around levels that you never run out you can also get dynamite along the way which is pretty fun to use the gameplay is straightforward and the developers try to include a chain counter which gives you more points if you chain together kills personally i really didn't care for this or even try to change shots as it didn't interest me but one thing that i did find interesting is that between levels you get to play poker if you win you're rewarded with attributes for that level like ammunition for your weapons or power for your powershot meter while not an amazing game it's still a good time and the old west theme is a nice change from the other games in the [Music] genre and of course how can you have an xbox console episode without the flagship series well we just did so see you later just kidding this is halo i've talked about it before and you all know that i'm a fan of the series i've always liked the halo universe and master chief is about as cool as it gets for a character for this type of game hell i even like the majority of the enemy designs too fighting all over the halo ring is cool and there's at least some nice variety in the different levels albeit a lot of them are dark hey bungie there's nothing wrong with a bit of light here and there so you can see right bungie hello the ability to take control of different types of vehicles also adds to the fun halo 2 came out a few years later in 2004 and man bungie added a lot to this sequel in single-player mode you get the option of playing the campaign by yourself or co-op with a friend this was cool and really made playing the campaign a lot of fun the story alternates between playing as master chief and also a covenant elite called the arbiter this was a great idea but i did have problems at times since you're killing your own type of people let's just say there was lots of friendly fire out there speaking of fire you can dual wield weapons this time around and it's very convenient other times though i like to just have one weapon so i can lob grenades with the other hand besides these great additions you have the usual stuff that made the first game so great lots of great guns and of course being able to use the enemy's weapons is always fun i love the needler and the plasma sword vehicles again are present and are as fun as hell to drive multiplayer is fun but the loss of online action really sucks since this was a great part of the package the game was also given the widescreen treatment it was patched soon after it was released that's because the hud crept into the overscan area of the tv specifically in the widescreen 480p mode it's impossible to get this patch anymore if you don't already have it on your hard drive but these days it doesn't really matter even if you're not into the first person shooter genre this is still a great experience cold fear from ubisoft is a cool survival horror game like resident evil revelations and carrier on the dreamcast you're put on a ship during a storm you're not given too much to go on story wise in the beginning it plays in the third person pretty much like you'd expect and what it does it does pretty well it plays pretty much like say code veronica where the camera follows you but also does the angle switching thing at first you're shooting russians that are still human and very much alive but something has definitely been going down on this ship were they conducting experiments of some kind was there an alien virus or something well it's up to you to find out the gameplay is very smooth and responsive the visuals are also quite nice for the generation and the widescreen really helps out with a game like this the sound as always for these types of games is mostly ambient and it works be sure to check it out if you like the genre it was also on the pc and playstation 2 but it doesn't support 480p on the ps2 there's too much water pressure i can't open the door shenmue ii by sega is awesome it's not for everyone but hell if i care i love it your hazuki out to find landy to avenge your father's murder and maybe play a little space harrier on the way i mean come on your dad's dead he's not gonna mind this was the only legit way we could play the game here in the us and it's the only version with english voice acting that is of course unless you get into the hacking scene and what fantastic acting it is how about trying lucky hit a part-time job huh can i play yeah it's 50 a game and the rule is i want to ask for directions honestly i wouldn't have it any other way this version is also the only one that lets you adjust visual filters on the fly for no reason whatsoever thanks sega we really needed this feature the world is much bigger this time around compared to the first game it's also all on one disc instead of four probably the biggest flaw with this game is that if you haven't played the first shenmue it starts out kind of slow with very few objectives and next to no story however they have included a digest video of the first game on the disc for you to catch up it also comes with a more extensive dvd called shenmue the movie which covers all the events from the first game the graphics haven't been updated much from the dreamcast version and the sound takes no advantage of the xbox's 5.1 surround sound capabilities still it's an amazing game and i had a hard time pulling myself away from it when i was capturing footage for this episode i cannot wait for shenmue 3. right left left left left push the number of times that i tell you and lastly here's spike out battle street from sega this is an arcade-like beat-em-up that's an exclusive to the xbox it's based on the spikeout series from sega which i've never played aside from this particular game anyway you're battling to restore peace to the island and there's tons of characters that you can eventually unlock and play as the game is pretty damn fun at the onset but i feel it might be a little bit too difficult for most players you only get one life and then it's game over for you but once you unlock new stages you can continue from there the fighting itself is okay you have a punch kick and a jump you also have a charge move which at times can be a little difficult to pull off you also have a special attack for when enemies surround you these are represented by the little lightning bolts underneath your life meter it took me forever to figure out how to activate these which you do by pressing all four buttons at the same time there's also weapons and stuff that you can pick up and fight with how you pick these up i have absolutely no idea i've never been able to pick one up when i wanted to i've done it on accident a few times but it really shouldn't be such a chore to pick these things up the graphics themselves and the music are both pretty good but they're not going to blow you away i like that the game is in widescreen 480p and 60 frames per second like a lot of xbox games actually are it's a good game it's just not balls off the wall amazing i'd recommend it however the is really starting to get up there here comes the boss all right there we have an xbox episode chock full of awesome games mostly awesome games mostly awesome and i i think all of them are pretty much um what you would call it they're only released on the xbox and uh except for pc i know we're not forgetting the pc games out there but we're just not considering this pc yeah a lot of them were multi-console but they were definitely best on the xbox on the xbox and that's the thing when i had the xbox back in the day i'd always get the xbox version because the xbox version would quite often be the best yeah yeah 40p sometimes widescreen exactly and you know just better graphic fidelity 5.1 digital surround sound lots of great stuff i love the xbox back then i mean i still do but back then it was really really cutting edge it really was anyway what do you guys think of the xbox what did you think of it back then what do you think of it nowadays what are some of your favorite games in the meantime let us know and thanks for watching game sack [Music] hey joe oh hey dave uh can you help me move my xbox into the other room i want to play it on my hdtv let me get my back brace on cool you get the system come on i got the component cables i got hernia all right dave we've got just one more thing to carry up the duke [Music] oh let's get this in there [Music] hello and welcome to gamestack today we are talking about the retro usb avs system easy to say isn't it um yeah there's a lot of these types of things out there joe i mean this what makes this one special i i guess we're gonna find out huh indeed let's take a closer look at this interesting little thing which actually has hdmi and it comes with the hdmi cable everything it's pretty cool let's check it out the retro usb avs when you first power on the avs you're greeted with a bevy of options the default one being the ability to start the currently inserted game we'll get back to the other options later but the games themselves seem to run great and usually boot up perfectly on the first try they look great play great hell they even sound great it's not emulation or even a system on a chip like other clone consoles out there in fact if we look inside the avs system we see that it's running on a spartan fpga programmed to think that it's an nes this isn't really emulation since it's not running under another os and it certainly isn't using a stolen emulator like the retron 5 which has its very own os the avs is powered with an included mini usb cable and can be plugged into almost anything even my super low power keyboard is enough to power the damn thing all right here's blaster master as you know if it can play blaster master it'll work perfectly well with every other game as long as those games are blaster master the visuals are very crisp there's no kind of blur or interpolation filters applied the audio also sounds pretty damn authentic and there's no power supply buzz or anything like that there also seems to be little to no input lag at least not any that i can personally detect and here's the avs running mega man 2. this is a game that would be very upsetting if it had any input lag at all but as you can see here i'm playing just like the pro that i am wow look at my skills since we're here let's show the avs running side by side with a real nes that's been modified for rgb output and upscale through the framemeister the real nes is being upscaled to 1080p while the avs runs only at 720p the avs still looks fantastic though and it's much easier and cheaper than purchasing in any srgb kit and a framemeister however you got to consider that that framemeister can help out a lot of other systems some of the video modes on the avs are interesting you can adjust the aspect ratio under this pixel aspect menu item stupidly it doesn't give you any numbers so you never know exactly where the bar is but all the way to the left is perfectly square pixels this is basically a perfect three times integer scaling of the original picture it looks good if a bit squished that's because the crt tvs of the day stretched the image to fit the screen and the games back then were designed for this that resulted in non-square pixels bumping the pixel aspect slider to the right two notches from the left seems to give a decent approximation of a true 4x3 screen there's very little shimmering when the screen scrolls in this mode and honestly it looks pretty good but in some games you'll definitely notice the shimmering like in super mario 2 here the skinny pixel perfect mode of course gets rid of the shimmering but you might still see a little bit depending on your tv you can even enable scan lines if you want they look okay i guess but the good news is is that you can adjust the opacity of the scan line so it's not so pronounced and believe me it shouldn't be all the way to the right if you want anything resembling an authentic look i wish i could tell you the best value but there are no numbers on the slider setting seriously though retro usb really needs to add number values to all of their menu items there's other things you can do with the video like adjust the vertical borders and the left side of the screen to get rid of some of the nonsense garbage that some nes games have in those areas there's also an extra sprites option that you can enable this allows up to 15 sprites per scan line instead of the normal eight and reduces flicker however it only seems to benefit some games there's still flicker where i expect it like walking through doors in castlevania games but as you can see here it really helps teenage mutant ninja turtles the arcade game might as well leave it on because helping some games is definitely better than helping no games unfortunately there's no option to reduce or eliminate the slowdown that a lot of games have i would have really liked to see that there's also no save state function [Music] the external audio used in certain famicom games works great this is when a special sound chip is included on the cartridge itself in order to enhance the music such as the famicom version of castlevania 3 here you can even adjust the volume level of the external audio a level between 3 and 4 steps from the left seems to be about as accurate as it gets probably three steps is better though it mixes well with any sound generated by the abs but what really sucks is you can't close the lid when playing famicom games your friends might beat you up if they see you play in the system like this so what if we attach the japanese version of castlevania 3 to a modded famicom to nes adapter will the external audio still work good news it does and now you can close the lid on the system and not worry about getting beaten up by your judgmental friends how about the weirdly shaped splatterhouse one paco graffiti it fits just fine in the famicom slot and of course as you can see it plays fine as well well we've established that it works with most regular carts how about unlicensed stuff like tengen shinobi yep powers right up and gives you the graphics and gameplay that'll make you want to toss your master system in the you next arcade pcb the nes version kicks your ass same with afterburner runs great and that's a good thing because this is better than flying a real f-14 in fact after playing the nes version the us navy retired the actual f-14 because it just wasn't as good as this game you know i can't blame them how about reproduction carts like mr gimmick yep works fine and the controls are every bit as slippery on the abs as they are on a real nes now if i could only remember how to play this game properly how about hacked games like castlevania course of mysteries works perfectly and runs without any glitches this is a pretty good hack by the way we covered it in our home brews and hacks 2 episode or was that hacks and home brews 2. i don't know check it out [Music] so how does it work with weird multi-carts like quattro adventure well it works fine so lucky you such fantastic games to play on these things you certainly wouldn't want to be denied any of the comerica goodness oh lordy well how about this famicom 76 in one cart well things aren't looking too good on this screen we tried to start it but it just didn't want to maybe reinserting the cartridge will do the trick well at least we're at a grey screen now which is some kind of progress hmm let's try cleaning the contacts in this bad boy and see if that makes any difference yep it sure did but things are not going well here only one thing left to try and that's readjusting how the cartridge is seated in the slot ever so slightly that did the trick it works now that it's up and running gotta go straight to the amazing urban champion and prove that i'm the baddest dude on the street fighting tournament or i could play road fighter that sounds fun it's kind of fun i guess maybe i'll play a little bit more later galas sounds interesting wait what it's galaga not galaza who in china do i write an angry email to there's always milk and nuts or i mean nuts and milk this one called helicopter sounds crazy fun or radon bundling bay it's like desert strike only about 100 times better star gesture sounds intense whoops looks like that one's just space invaders i always enjoyed karateka back in high school on the apple computers watch me i'm gonna plow right through this one or not well let me try it again i can do this i have this skill or maybe i don't magmax with meg gibson should be good actually this shooter is based on an arcade game which has some really cool scrolling for his time sadly the nes version here doesn't have the scrolling but is still fun to play so as you can see after a bit of tlc the 76 in one cartridge works just fine you can even use flash carts on the abs like the everdrive this is something that you just can't do with systems like the retron 5. so far my scientific tests indicate that everything works exactly like an everdrive does on a real nes console [Music] all right we're plowing right along and dave i've got to ask you what do you think about this this lid here on the avs this very large lid a very very large layer you know it is big but i like that it says avs on the inside cover just so you know what you're playing exactly in case you forget there it is what do you think i think it's honestly i don't i mean this there because the nes had one but yeah i don't think it really needs it probably not it was removable but anyway we've got more to discuss about the system so let's get back into it attach a game genie to a cartridge and yep it boots right up let's punch in the 15 of each weapon code for blaster master here hell yeah the game genie code works perfectly but this is kind of unnecessary since there's a built-in game genie function on the avs and it's easy to select from a database of existing game genie and other cheat device codes or you can even type your own let's type in the unlimited lives code for blaster master here in the avs menu now let's start the game and punch in the 15 of every weapon code on the real game genie you think both codes are gonna work well let's find out looky there 15 of each weapon now i just need to kill myself so i can see if i still have a stock of two when i respond yep both real and fake game genie codes working together simultaneously and in harmony now there's no reason to do this but we did it anyway there's even an ntsc and pal switch so you can run games at a slower speed this of course also helps compatibility with pal only games some ntsc games have issues in pal mode like castlevania here look at the top of the screen [Music] there's even a built-in foursquare which will let you play all the hot four-player games like teenage mutant ninja turtles the arcade game or okay not that one but you can play 4 player anticipation which is just as good if not better the console also works with most of your peripherals like the power glove hell yeah the power glove enhances any game to the max [Music] it doesn't work with a zapper however and you really shouldn't be surprised at this there's even a port on the back of the system to hook famicom peripherals to or a neo geostick but sadly that doesn't work but it does work with a real famicom disk system just fine there's other features in the main menu like assigning buttons so you can go back to the main menu during your game and turn off and on cheats also during gameplay regular game saves work fine remember to hold reset there are currently no save states or in-game menu to do anything without resetting the game the expansion emulator allows us peripherals to act like famicom peripherals you'll need to enable this if you want to use the built-in foursquare in the famicom version of super dodgeball for example there's options for turbo buttons and autoplay enables you to go directly to the game when you power on the abs instead of going through the menu first no autoplay doesn't mean that the abs will play the game for you sorry regardless of how you have this set the reset button will always reset to the game itself and not to the abs menu you can also disable the fourth score so that it behaves like there's only two controller ports [Music] [Applause] there's also a feature where you can upload your high scores or some nonsense like that to do this you'll need the scoreboard app which you can download from the same page that you buy the system from the app comes in both windows and mac versions you need to register your system by putting in a key and to do that you click the link and you're taken to nintendo age where you're told to log in first mang yeah no thanks but if you want to there it is you also update the firmware with this same application you download the latest firmware update from that very same web page hell you might want to go ahead and have this page bookmarked make sure the avs is hooked up to your computer and powered up select the file and the update takes maybe a minute or so once you're done you'll have to reset all of your preferences this particular update added the ability to choose different versions of the color palette original is obviously intended to be like the real nes then there's unsaturated version six next up is yuv version three and finally fce ux whatever that is which do you like best and finally with that scoreboard app there's a function which lets you transfer save files to and from the cart but when i transferred my save file from my zelda 2 cart i got a file which measured zero bytes i downloaded a zelda 2 save file from the internet and transferred it to my zelda 2 cart which erased all my existing game saves completely from what i was able to discover this is for retro usb's power pack flash cart though i honestly have no idea why anyone would choose one of those over and over drive but they need to support their own products i suppose overall the avs is a fantastic way to play your nes games whether or not it's worth the current 185 dollar price tag is up to you [Music] all right there you have it there's some of our thoughts on the system but we do of course have final thoughts i mean we're not just going to let this go without saying something yeah would you buy it for 185 dollars i am honestly very very tempted to buy this for 185 that is a large price tag but it is it's qui it feels like it's a quality machine it really does i mean it's got a little bit of weight to it it it boots up like almost every time immediately yeah my only complaint is it's probably not even really complaining is the famicom slot when you put your cartridge in you know if you touch the cartridge slightly it could move and that could freeze your game it could have an effect of that sort on it but other than that i think it's great how about you i really like it i like all the options i like the updatable firmware i mean what firmware this has can be upgraded and you know features may be forthcoming that we didn't discuss in this video if you're watching this like six years from now it's probably a lot better than what we're talking about here right but that that's really cool i also like how it plays you know almost every nes game exactly like they really do and the compatibility is great i wish it did 1080p but 720p is better than nothing right i mean it's a hell of a lot better than it's going to get hooking your nintendo system up with composite video cables to your hd tv if your hdtv even has a composite input so it does but are you interested i mean is it something you this is not something i would buy because i already have an nes with an rgb well yes so yes but i do recommend it i mean it's it's an easy solution for a lot of people so anyway what do you guys think of the retro usb avs let us know what you think and if if you like what you saw and in the meantime thank you for watching game sack [Music] [Applause] wow you're really good at this game why thanks i've almost made it past stage one before wow i know that's amazing yeah oh this is fun joe buddy i think i got to get going all right okay whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa what are you doing what you've got the abs now i feel you don't need your rgb nes and i do so i'm gonna take it oh and since that didn't come with a controller and this did i need that too so but this was loaned to the show it's not even mine [Music] [Applause] [Music] hello and welcome to gamesack and that's all we've got thanks for watching joker just kidding we're talking about the analog nt mini another uh nes i i don't want to call it a clone style no but it's a retro style system that plays actual game cartridges indeed and this is if if you thought 185 dollars for the avs was too much then this is the system for you because it costs 450 500 for the black version yep i mean you don't want to be caught spending only 185 on an nes console you want to spend upwards of 500 here we go yeah why not and where does this money go so let's take a look this is the analog nt mini your system arrives in a fancy box which is surprisingly heavy that's because the system itself is really heavy despite being so small it's built like a tank also inside the box is an hdmi cable a usb cable a power supply with adapters for any country and a wireless controller more on that one later the console itself is made out of a solid block of 6061 aluminum contains a very powerful 32-bit altera cyclone 5 fpga and is compatible with both ntsc and pal formats in addition to outputting video and sound over hdmi you can also output both via analog means you can get composite nest video component and rgb adapter cables for the system there's also a microphone input so you can shout out those bastard poles voices in the japanese version of the legend of zelda there's even a famicom expansion port for those special peripherals also on the back is a usb slot for charging your controller and the console's power button on the left side of the system is the sd card slot which not only enables firmware updates but other fun things on the front of the system you get not one not two not three not five not twenty but four controller ports and on the right side of the system you get nothing absolutely nothing the console itself weighs a hefty 31.6 ounces just shy of two pounds like i said barely even a minute ago it's built like a tank and feels anything but cheap hell i wish all consoles were made so durably i like the shape of the system as well nice and sleek of course it's up to you if you prefer the light gray or the black version as you probably already know the analog nt mini has slots for both nes and famicom cartridges but what's the fun in plugging a japanese game into the famicom slot when you can plug the cartridge into an adapter plug that into a game genie and then plug the whole thing into the nes slot way better on a serious note don't plug in both famicom and nes carson at the same time though it'll also work with a famicom disk system if you have one to power up this system you hold down the red power button for about half of a second you can tell when it's powered on by breaking out your binoculars and witnessing the world's tiniest led light on the front you're taken into the menu where you have a lot of things that you can choose from the first option is run cartridge which of course runs the game you've inserted we'll talk about the other options later but first let's get into the settings under video you tell it what resolution you want the nt mini thankfully defaults to 1080p but you can change that to 720p or even 480p if you like you can change the height and position four times scales the original image exactly four times so what was originally one pixel is now four pixels high this only affects the height and not the width of the screen under width and position you can stretch the screen to your liking at 525 it says 4x3 for 16x9 it's not really a perfect 4x3 shape though as it depends on your height settings as well so you're still left to guess what's exactly the right shape for the screen you can also crop the borders of the image if you like and there's even so-called scaling features these are like filters and emulators which give the image a weird smoothed out look or a very nasty look i mean why is this one even here would you use this like anyone would enjoy playing a game like this you can select how the sync is handled on the rgb analog out and you can select from a few different color palettes or even load your own and yes you can apply fake scan lines to the video to make the pixels seem less harsh if you like choose the original option so it sized correctly to your resolution these scan lines look alright i guess but honestly we've never really seen fake scan lines provided by a system like this that we truly love though they seem kind of thin here over in the audio you can adjust the volume of each and every sound channel and even the panning so you can get some fake stereo in your nes games under the system settings you can adjust various things like the front led light you can even have it constantly pulsating i mean if you're easily entertained this setting is for you other settings let you disable edit which might mess up your video if you don't know what you're doing or enabling dvi you can also tell the system if you're using two controllers of fourscore or the famicom four player adapter you have a choice of 8 or 16 sprites per scan line just like the retro usb avs but many games are designed to use 8 sprites so setting it to 16 might not help lastly you have the startup settings here you can tell the system to go straight to the game inserted when powered on to the menu or to the analog logo and then the menu there's lots of options here to let you tweak your experience like crazy thanks to the standard nes controller ports you can use any nes compatible controller to play your games it works well and it's my preferred method unlike the avs though this system comes with the 8bitdo wireless controller it's built like an nes controller but has all the buttons of a super nintendo pad the shoulder buttons are kind of weird but they're usable it's not like any 8-bit nintendo games use them though to use this controller you just plug the receiver into a controller port sync them and voila the controller lasts about 20 hours before you're going to need to recharge it with the included usb cable you can take the included usb cable and attach one end to the controller receiver and the other end to the console itself when you do this nothing happens at all so don't do this i couldn't feel any lag due to the wirelessness but of course i didn't expect any it works well but i still prefer the original controller and as a bonus the 8-bit doe receiver will sync up to a wii remote a ps3 controller and a ps4 controller maybe even more that's right now you can play your nes games with a ps4 controller this is also very responsive and a good thing if you like the feel of a playstation controller as you'd expect you can take the receiver and plug it into a real nes and play using a wireless controller like the ps4 but you didn't pay 450 or more to do that so you're probably not going to but the 8bitdo controller and receiver are sold on their own so you can get them without getting an nt mini you know what doesn't work neo geo joysticks i mean it fits i blame nintendo for designing their neo geo controller port wrong honestly you can't blame analog there's also no place to plug in my sweet saturn 6 button controller seriously though the biggest problem with the control ports on the nt mini is that they feel extremely tight it's difficult to insert controllers and even more difficult to remove them however inserting and removing cartridges is easy there are nice flaps to keep the dust out and this is cool i like cartridge flaps you should too oh we should start a cartridge flat fan club and they won't leave any scratches or marks on your precious cartridges however the nes carts like to lean and they're not tremendously secure if you bump it during gameplay or the wind blows your game could get messed up and glitch out i'm not sure why the wind would be blowing in your game room but you've been warned also when you remove an nes cartridge be sure to pull it straight up and not out at an angle otherwise it might catch on the corner as far as running games goes the analog nt mini advertises being compatible with 100 of the nes and famicom library the fpga thinks it's a real nes and they didn't take any shortcuts designing it like many emulators or clone systems do analog says the timing and everything is exactly like the original system so far as we can tell that pretty much seems to be the case everything we've thrown at it plays just like it would on a real system depending on how you have the video scale you may see some shimmering in the scrolling but it's not distracting or anything if you want to get rid of it completely set both the height and the width to perfectly round numbers like 4x height and 5x width the graphics all have the same glitches as they do when they run on the original nes or famicom the audio is very authentic as well and it sounds great [Music] extra audio chips and certain famicom cards are great but you have to enable them yourself you have to go into the volume menu and turn up the cartridge audio volume to a level that seems good to you [Music] or you can just keep it all the way down and go into the expansion audio chips menu and enable the chip that your cart uses the audio will suddenly be there this is emulated by the fpga but it sounds pretty damned accurate [Music] weirdly if you put the famicom card onto an nes adapter and plug it into the nes slot the external audio can't be heard even if your adapter is modified to pass the audio through the external audio just isn't there on the nes slot at all however you can still engage the audio expansion ship in the menu and it'll play just fine the nt mini works with unlicensed games multicarts and all that stuff it doesn't dump the realm from the cartridge before it plays like the retron 5 does that means you can even use an everdrive and other nes flash cards in fact if you haven't ever drive them plain famicom disc system game suddenly becomes even more awesome with the everdrive on a normal nes you either hear no extra sound or poor extra sound the everdrive does a pretty bad job mimicking the disc system's sound chip but you can just turn it on in the audio expansion menu and bam famicom disc system enhanced audio it doesn't sound like it has a low-pass filter on it like the real hardware does but that's fine with me not every disc game supports this but those that do can finally be played without needing to own a real famicom disk system you can access the menus during a game by pressing down and select at the same time and you get back to the game by simply pressing select you can change which button combinations trigger this and other events in the menu one thing to note about the analog nt mini is that your cartridge needs to be clean damn clean i often found that it would boot into a blue screen meaning that it can't see the game properly sometimes i got a glitchy screen i was able to eventually get most games working but it's a lot more sensitive than my real nes in regards to cleanliness it can be pretty frustrating sometimes as even games i got working on the system won't work again the next day without another cleaning and even then you need to slightly adjust some games so that the console will read it properly this is my biggest complaint about this system but when it works it works awesomely if you're going to spend the cash on this system it's likely that you already take pretty damn good care of your nes games of course there's built-in game genie support for all you cheaters out there unfortunately safe states are not supported and are not currently planned the system's designer says it would take a huge amount of work to implement if it's even possible at all all right now that we've had some hands-on time with this thing joe what do you think so far i think it's an interesting system dave but there's still more to discuss so that's true let's get back into it like dave said the hdmi video output looks fantastic in 1080p but the console can output analog video as well and it also looks fantastic if you hook it up with composite you'll get the same shimmering artifacts that you would with a real nes hooked up in composite look at all that shimmering nastiness though i bet some of you have some nostalgia for that but for people like me who can't stand that hooking up the console and rgb component or hell even s video will get rid of this analog advertises this system as having absolutely no lag at all none if you experience any lag then it's something that your tv is doing and i've gotta say that i sure as hell don't notice any lag here you see me making mario jump on a crt monitor connected via the analog rgb out this is the same amount of lag that you'd experience on a real nes none and here i am making mario jump on my lcd connected via hdmi there's also the 240p test suite rom which has a mode for checking lag here i'm supposed to press the button when i see the two images line up i'm usually within three frames and being an imprecise human being adds to that a little i suspect running this same test on an lcd yields near identical results hell i might even be a little better than i was on the crt unfortunately the analog nt mini can't output both analog and digital video at the same time so there's no way to put a crt next to an lcd monitor to give it the true test oh and since you can play on a crt zapper games like duck hunt and others work perfectly fine as far as i know this is the only fpga console capable of playing like gun games it still doesn't work on an lcd but if you have a crt handy at least you can play and enjoy them overall the rgb image coming from this console looks outstanding i mean look at those real scan lines on my crt hmm not sure if you can see them well enough let's get closer good good though still not enough okay this is better but it's still not close enough to be truly appreciated oh yeah there we go look at those awesome unrecognizable pixels isn't this the most amazing jumbly incomprehensible mess that you've ever seen in all seriousness though the crt output options look superb no complaints at all the analog nt mini is capable of a lot of different things right on the home screen you have the nsf player what the hell is an nsf well it's an nes sound file this means that you can listen to the music of your favorite titles without having to play the game just download nsf files from the internet or make your own and store them on an sd card in a folder called nsf and you're good to go it'll play files that use the enhanced sound chips like the japanese version of castlevania 3 lagrange point or even famicom disk system games i've never seen an nsf for a famicom disk system game though this is fun to mess around with as most nes games don't have sound tests what's really interesting is the evil pirate jailbroken firmware created by a gentleman going by the alias of captress you can tell when you're using the evil firmware because it has skulls and skulls are evil and cool i like skulls am i evil his firmware updates are not official but they are supported by analog who has their own firmware updates so go figure keptris's firmware overwrites analogs but has all of the same features but with more keep in mind that anytime you update or overwrite the firmware you have to reset everything from your video settings to startup mode and all that for one his firmware allows you to rip your own nes carts into a rom why you'd want to do this i don't know but choose the correct mapper and rip away but even better as kev trista's evil firmware allows you to play roms off of an sd card via dedicated system cores we recommend that only criminals do this you can rip and play your own carts or get your roms in some other nefarious way playing nes roms is a lot of fun it's easy to select a new game just press down and select the new game loads up fast and before you know it you're playing it'll even play games with the external sound chip enabled like the aforementioned lagrange point now you can play it and hear the special audio without needing the famicom car this is an rpg set in space and yeah maybe i'll let joe cover this sometimes because he likes rpgs a lot more than i do you can also finally experience the extra sound that's in gimmick just as long as you're not playing the european rom here's what the game sounds like to most [Music] people and here's what it sounds like on the nt mini [Music] this should also work if you have a physical reproduction copy of the game just enable the sunsoft 5b chip in the menu or how about rolling thunder yeah yeah we all know this came from tangent but did you know the japanese version uses a special audio chip the difference isn't outstanding or anything but i'm just amazed that namco even bothered to do anything special with the audio take a listen to the difference [Music] while the nes core here uses a lot of what's already written into the nt mini the emulation might not always seem spot on this is because the nes core needs to emulate all of the thousands of different mappers that the nes games use whereas the real nes games take care of that directly in the cartridge so games like star tropics for example might seem to be messed up and not have any sound but if you download the correct rom with a header it'll work perfectly fine it still supports more mappers than in everdrive driving it doesn't half-ass anything here there's also a chord that lets you play game boy games you can make these feel almost the entire height of the screen and they all play pretty damn well it looks super pixelated but of course that's to be expected it's all green tinted like the original game boy and there's no option to make it perfectly monochrome like this for example of course that's just some editing for effect i'd like it if that were available and if the system could save my preferences for that i'd be grateful if you're gonna do game boy you might as well have a game boy color core as well well it's here for most of your game boy color needs supposedly this score is still kind of buggy but all the games i tried seem to run pretty well again it's very pixely but since the games are in color it looks better than the regular game boy did you know there was a version of rayman on the game boy color don't get your hopes up too high as it's far from outstanding the biggest problem with these games is that some are very large and take a super long time to load still it's fun to try out a lot of these games and now i can in 1080p just like the original designers meant for them to be played [Music] but that's not all keftress plans to release cores for a bunch of different 8-bit systems like the colecovision it's really fun playing all of these old games in hdmi glory the colecovision was pretty damn good for its time when it came to graphics it's just too bad that the controller sucked speaking of which trying to play some of these games with an nes pad can be troublesome as there just aren't enough buttons some games i can't even start because there's no button on the pad which will start the game for me there's also a core for the sega master system i originally had a hard time getting this to work but you've got to make sure that you have good roms but even then not all games worked and it's definitely kind of weird playing my favorite master system games with an nes controller but honestly it's not bad at all if i use a playstation 4 pad you can enjoy psg sound or you can enable fm sound for games that support it now people can play great games like kinsaden on their hd tvs with crystal clarity this is a fantastic game that more people should play um oops so yeah now people can play great games like wonder boy and monster land this is a fantastic game that more people should play so yeah the emulation isn't quite perfect yet for each game but most games play fine and the ones that don't can be fixed in future updates what's sad is that light phaser games don't work even when played on a crt yeah the zapper is a bit lower tech than the light phaser so i'm not really surprised but this problem may be solved in the future because kev trista said he'd like to make available controller adapters so we can use original controllers like the light phaser or a colecovision controller or what have you in addition to that he wants to make cartridge adapters available so you can plug in your own master system or atari or whatever console cartridges and play them directly anyway back to the cores along with master system compatibility comes the sg1000 this was sega's very first console and was released only in japan as a system it's very similar to the colecovision as far as hardware goes it can be fun to compare some of these to the colecovision version of the same exact game so you tell us which version of zach's on here do you think looks better one is more detailed and choppy and the other is smoother yet a lot more sparse still it's really fun to try out a lot of these titles and see some sega history in the process even more fun is the sega game gear core that's right now you can finally get your game gear on in full 1080p glory many of these games are tons of fun especially since you don't have to look at the original system's horribly blurry and dim screen set the scaling all the way to a perfect 5x the width to exactly 6x and it's pretty damn nice not full screen but pretty good looking regardless the fake scan lines can even look good in this mode like an axe battler here oh and hey did you notice there was a fantasy star game called fantasy star gaiden this was of course only released in japan but now you can play through the english translated version on your hdtv in 1080p using a console primarily designed to play nintendo games games that support save ram are supported in each and every one of these cores and there's lots more systems that will be supported in the future using these cores this might make up for needing excessively clean cartridge pins if you can just run the wrong but that's up to you i like the nes a lot but honestly i had a lot more fun playing around with the extended abilities of the system provided by kevtriss who i assume is a being created by surgically combining kevin and tetris [Music] all right everybody there you go there's the analog nt mini for you i hope we gave you enough information on this thing so you can make an educated guess on if you want to buy this or you pass on it or whatever but personally i think it's cool i i don't think it's a blue collar guys machine based on the price tag alone i think you're gonna have a hard time finding somebody who's who wants to pay that much money for it even though i think it is kind of worth it it it the output is awesome the video looks great the audio is awesome it just it's a all-around cool piece of machinery but um one thing that i would like to just note is looking at the old top loader es because both cartridges going face up this one is built up a little bit higher so the cartridge i mean while it wobbles a little bit it doesn't wobble nearly as much as this thing so maybe analog in your future attempts maybe you could have something a little bit more like that to keep stabilization in the cartridge joe thank you i'm allowed to talk now yes um i do like the analog nt um like dave said in the uh when we were doing the overview and stuff like that it is kind of hard to get some of the cartridges to work a lot of mine worked right away no problem some of them needed a lot of cleaning and stuff like that it's kind of finicky that way famicom carts seem a little bit more reliable the the output options are just tremendous i love it being able to output analog and s video rgb everything that you could possibly want right so it's a really cool machine i'm really blown away about what they did in here and i like being able to play all the roms and i look forward to seeing what else they can do with it yeah yeah me too so what do you guys think of the analog nt mini um is it something you would buy i mean is it something you'd even consider would you rather get a retro retro usb avs and you know let us know what you think in the meantime thank you for watching game sack [Music] hey everybody it's the exasperated gamer back here with you again with another review this time i'm taking a look at the analog nt mini system are there any games around here to play blaster master this game is ass dr mario this game is kinda ass akumaju densetsu ass green dog for the sega genesis much ass bonk's adventure for the turbografx 16. silent hill for the playstation so much ass radiant silver gun for the sega saturn fast tastic neo turf masters for the neo geo 133 megs of ass alright guys there you go the exasperated gamers played this system and you know what it plays nothing but ass games yes so therefore i've got to give it an ass rating [Applause] [Music] hello and welcome to game shack and yes we are talking about the sega game gear no my gosh you know i'm not real excited about this episode yet but being the bipartisan gamer that i am i'm willing to give it a shot and with episodes like this joe open the thing up show us what it's all about talk about it for a minute and we'll get moving [Music] why play your portable video games in black and white when you can live in a world of vivid color with the game gear by sega launched in late 1990 in japan and in 1991 and most other places the game gear was sega's first entrance into the portable market featuring a comfortable horizontal design the game gear also had a backlit screen that in many situations was almost visible based on the master system hardware the game gear featured an 8-bit z80 cpu with the same sprite and sound capabilities but in stereo the resolution was the same as nintendo's game boy but instead of four shades of grey it had 4096 different colors even more than the 16-bit genesis there's even an adapter that lets you play sega master system games on the go it ran on six double a batteries which could last between three to five hours optional accessories like the rechargeable battery dildo help to alleviate the short battery life like many electronics of the time game gears were made when bad capacitors were in widespread use so a full replacement of the capacitors in each unit is recommended all in all 363 games were released and over 10 million game gears were sold [Applause] worldwide all right man that was really good overview very funny like usual um but as we do with system episodes it's all about the games the games and the good thing is is that we were able to procure an rgb modded game gear so we're going to be playing these on a real game gear so let's just shut the hell up and get on with it i want to play games ristar was released to the system in 1995. this version shares similarities to his genesis cousin but it's also fairly different the main gameplay is the same where you traverse levels using your long arms and hands to help you get around you also use your hands to grab enemies and destroy them and also treasure chests which you can open for items i like the idea ristar using his hands to grab everything but after he headbutts them he bounces back a small distance this always worries me because i felt i was gonna fall off platforms other than that the controls are great and it feels pretty good controlling this little star theme the level design is good and there's usually many ways to get around a level if you're into collecting there's tons of stars for you to collect in each area 100 of them will give you a free life definitely collect a few hundred of these because the game's difficulty is above average and you'll absolutely be dying a few times still though it's a decent title and if you can find it cheap i think it's worth it here's sonic drift and being a fan of sega's quality racing games i was pretty excited to try this the fun of course is in the chaos gp and you can choose from one of four racers besides looks there's no difference in the way these guys handle speaking of handling is pretty bad the controls feel sluggish at times and when you're going around corners it likes to wing you to the outside of the track you can of course overcome this by drifting around corners but it takes a lot of practice and if you don't drift and you can forget about winning it just won't happen along the tracks or icons you can run over that will activate instantly things like invincibility and a speed boost oh and you can also collect rings each character has a special ability when using them these come in a few different forms such as a speed boost or the ability to jump the tracks are decent in design but the backgrounds are pretty lackluster and they really didn't do anything for me this is an okay racer but i really can't recommend it [Music] [Applause] but i can recommend sonic drift 2 the sequel is light years ahead in quality everything feels like it was overhauled this time around you can pick from seven racers the most notable upgrade is in the control department your car actually controls really well you don't get thrown off the side of the track at corners now and the drifting is even easier your car also doesn't feel sluggish and you actually feel like you're in control the tracks that you race on are really well designed not only do they have lap checks there but there's also non-lap tracks which are a nice addition the graphics this time around look great there's more variety and now even stuff outside the road which makes it all look more interesting again there's power-ups that you can collect on the tracks this time around you can save them and use them when you feel the time is right there's also a lot more obstacles on the tracks which may or may not slow you down even the music sounds much better with more variety if you're gonna play a sonic drift game be sure it's part two [Music] want an rpg well then how about axe battler a legend of golden axe yes that's right one of several golden axe legends i imagine i don't know anyway this takes place after the hack and slash beat-em-ups from what i gather from the story the golden axe has been stolen by the evil army yes that's what they're called the evil army you as ax battler must embark on a quest to retrieve it as you wander around the overworld you'll get into random battles these battles are performed from a side view kind of like the adventures of link i mean it's not menu driven it controls exactly like an action game if you defeat the enemy you get vases vases not only power your magic but they're also the game's currency so obviously you're going to want all of them you can get be careful in battle though because if you get hit even once you lose the battle you'll eventually make your way to caves and other special areas the game turns into kind of an action platformer here with the same rules as the random battles well except that now you can get hit multiple times if your life bar allows the towns allow you to rest and get a password which you'll need to continue and the good news is that the password is really short and easy however the random battle encounter rate is ridiculously high and it gets very frustrating overall it's a somewhat decent rpg that could definitely be a lot worse [Music] want a turn-based rpg oh cool then how about defenders of oasis in this one you play as the prince and your kingdom is under siege now it's up to you to save it and possibly even the entire world the battles here are random and they take place on a plain grey background they're also very very slow but they're also fairly simple and easy to manage however you're going to need to grind quite a bit at the start of this one in fact you might want to grind every chance you get during the game because new enemies will often be much tougher than you are you'll eventually get others to join you like this genie of course you can buy and sell items and equipment just like you'd expect one unique thing is that this game features an auto save if you die in a battle the save will start you off right before that battle takes place it's good if you know this before you start playing otherwise you're going to freak out when you can't find anywhere to save other than that though it's fairly cookie cutter but it's definitely not [Music] bad [Music] okay let's check out fantasy star gaiden this was only released in japan but it has an english translation patch i played this briefly in the analog nt mini episode now i'm playing it on a real game gear this takes place after the first fantasy star game but before the second in a nearby star system from what i'm able to gather combat is turn-based but unfortunately you can't see your stats on screen during a battle except before you make a command anyway you are alec you and mina are off to find your dad who was attacked and saved the entire world in the process unfortunately many things conspired to bring this game down to the point of being downright annoying first of all is the grinding you have to grind a ton in this game more than i have in any rpg ever the battles are really quick but gaining levels isn't then there's the random battle encounter rate hell you'll be lucky to take three steps before getting into another battle lastly is the sound not only is the music very high pitched and annoying but every time you press the button the game makes a ding sound sad to say that i can see why this one didn't make it out of japan you're not missing much [Music] another japan only game with a fan translation is sylvan tale this one is an action rpg that might remind you a bit of secret of mana you're off to rescue the land to start out and you have your sword as well as the ability to push and pull things man you're not even trying to save the entire world or are you damn well better be i mean can you imagine if i was just trying to save a country or a continent or something that's not worth anyone's time you encounter towns with clues and labyrinths with puzzles and these labyrinths can be fairly clever in their puzzles and they're always fun beating the boss of the labyrinth usually gets you a new ability and of course this new ability opens up new areas to explore like the faster sword slash here which can mow down leaves to open new doorways or even the ability to turn into a mermaid to swim across water the graphics are really good and the game moves at a brisk pace if you run the music is also extremely enjoyable this game is just loads of fun to play and it's sad that it never got released elsewhere you could probably fumble your way through it in japanese but either way this game is highly recommended by me let's check out deep duck trouble released in 1993. we talked about this sega developed disney game on our master system episode it's such a great game that i want to mention the game gear version at the beginning you can choose which order you want to tackle the game's four levels each level is divided into two parts which result with donald running away from something to save his little duck behind while this is a great part of the master system version i feel that is slightly lacking in controls i had a harder time controlling this version i don't know what it is but there's been a few times that i felt button presses weren't recognized anyway the game is still loaded with charm and i just love all of donald's animations if you own a game gear don't miss out on this great title [Applause] another great title starring donald duck is the lucky dime keeper starring donald duck in this one you're off to rescue your nephews and uncle scrooge's lucky dime from magicka dispel donald starts off his platforming adventure with a big hammer for a weapon it's quite useful in dispatching enemies but he can also get a deadly frisbee this is even better since you can throw it and don't have to be standing almost on top of your enemies to hit them the platforming is fun and the levels are designed fairly well the music is also enjoyable for what it's worth donald has lots of animations which i always find to be a plus and this time around there's actually boss fights at the end of levels these are typically pretty easy but they're still entertaining while we're at it let's take a look at a couple disney games starring mickey here's land of illusion which is the second game in the illusion series mickey's off on another adventure to retrieve his stolen crystal and save a village your main form of attack is your butt stomp which if you played any of the illusion games should be sick in nature by now mickey can also lift up many objects he can throw blocks at enemies he can throw treasure chests for items and springs to help them get to higher places the game isn't all straightforward and there will be some backtracking through previous levels once you meet certain requirements the gameplay is good but if i have one complaint is that it doesn't have freely scrolling levels when you have to move vertically otherwise it's just fun to play with 14 levels good graphics and a decent soundtrack is something i think you should check out and here's the last game in the illusion series legend of illusion things were switched up a bit in this one you can still jump on enemies heads but the bud stomps been taken out however they did add the ability to throw soap at your enemies you have an unlimited supply and it does a really good job of killing who knew soap could be so dangerous and of course you can still pick up other objects and use them as weapons the game is completely linear and there's no backtracking at all it's also the easiest game in the series and you won't have much trouble blazing right through this one that's fine though as it's a great game it looks great and there's even a few areas with some parallax scrolling i was really impressed with this they even added a shoot em up stage to break things up a bit it's simple but of course it's still fun again another quality title that everyone should play at least once [Music] all right we're back dave i'm kind of enjoying the game gear a little bit more than i thought i would i hate to say it but i am too i really don't know how to feel about it but i am enjoying it but let's just keep going we got a lot more games to talk about let's do it oh hell yes green dog the beached surfer dude someone gave this game to me at a convention a few years ago i didn't even have a game gear but now i'm finally able to plug it in and play it and it's every bit as amazing as you'd expect and hopefully you're not expecting much it's basically a simplified port of the genesis version but come on how can you simplify such awesomeness yeah it's got some crappy controls bad hit detection and runs incredibly slow but who the hell doesn't love all that each stage is divided into two segments in the first segment you wander through an area attempting to kill creatures that are all very very difficult to kill you can even collect food from some of them make it to the end of this and you go inside some ancient ruins there are two types of these the first type you wander around defeating enemies and avoiding traps and you eventually fight a boss the second type you just need to make it to the end while thrashing on your wicked skateboard dude did you just cringe a little listening to me say that good what's especially neat about this game is that you need to pause it to see your life meter you never know how you're doing unless you're willing to interrupt the game to find out they did manage to pull off some nice parallax scrolling in a few areas but this really slows the game down the music is also incredibly simple and they didn't try very hard porting it over but hey what can i say it's green dog [Music] let's check out alien syndrome this is a quick and easy port from the master system right nope this one was completely remade by sims and it's a hell of a lot better as a result this one actually has scrolling and a lot more weapons to choose from it takes a few liberties from the arcade for example now you're able to power up your weapons a bit you also have to shoot doors open now to gain access to new rooms the stage music is all new and it does kind of lose its sense of foreboding but it's an interesting change nonetheless the boss fights are still fairly difficult what else can i say really it's alien syndrome and it's not half [Music] bad [Music] gun star heroes even got a port to the game gear but only in japan it was brought to the system by m2 and at first it looks like a really good port and in many ways it actually is the entire first stage is here along with all of the enemies you've grown to know from the 16-bit version hell even the bosses are here but this is just the first stage after that the game starts getting some cuts like here in the second stage for example you're riding around on some sort of personal helicopter thingy instead of a little cart on the ground in the ceiling this stage is super short and it's mostly just a seven force boss fight and this is kind of tough to do in your slow ass personal helicopter but i do find it impressive that most of his forms are here other stages are altered slightly like here where you're climbing up now you can move all over the screen instead of just on the left side in the beginning you can choose from the first three levels that's right stage four is completely gone that was the dice stage i'm okay with that screw that stage the shooter stage is gone too what is here though is tons of flicker and slow down making it frustrating if you're used to the 16-bit version like i am however i do like that they have some parallax scrolling here and there and the music is decent with some stereo effects but it's kind of hard to recommend importing this unless you're a die-hard gun star fan all things considered though it's amazing what they were able to squeeze in here [Music] this is coca-cola kid only released in japan where they love coca-cola you are the coca-cola kid and damn it you need some coke you'll do anything to get that delicious taste of coca-cola where is it coca-cola isn't just a drink it's a lifestyle and these enemies are discriminating against you where is that delicious coca-cola i'm gonna tear this damn town apart to get a coke you gotta run through two big stages in each area to get all of the cook that you can who are you get the hell out of my way i'm on my way to get a coke then there's a boss trying to keep your coca-cola from you so yeah you've gotta kick his ass i just freaking love coke the power of coca-cola allows you to cling and jump off of walls in order to get all the coke in town get this you can even ride a skateboard wow enjoy coca-cola [ __ ] [Music] here's fantasy's own gear released in 1992. this is a cool game because it's almost completely different from the other games in the series yes that means new music and new levels which is totally awesome one cool thing is the amount of stuff that's crammed on the screen a lot of the time of course this results in a lot of slow down and sprite flicker but what are you gonna do because of these issues the game is no walk in the park and actually is really tough also the crappy hit detection makes the game that much harder your best bet is to go to the shop as early as possible and buy things that will help you out like guns that will shoot both forwards and backwards or auto fire and all the extra lives that you can this will help but be careful because once you die all these nice weapons will be gone one thing that i wish would have made it to the handheld version is a map showing you where the bases are that you need to destroy despite its issues i was still able to have a good time with this one streets of rage was released on the handheld in 1992 in this one or two player game you can pick from only two characters axel and blaze the game plays pretty well once you figure out the best way to kill your enemies regular punches and kicks are hard to pull off because once you get close to your enemies you automatically put them into a hole from here your only option is to throw them so yeah for most of the game you'll be throwing everyone around instead of punching them there's more than a few throw moves so it doesn't get too mundane if you do get a hold of the pipe though it's devastating to everyone who comes your way there's specials in this game but you don't get to choose when to use them they're found when you break boxes or whatever and take effect immediately the music was done by yuzo kashiro and it's good for the game gear but it's a far cry from the amazing genesis soundtrack still i beat this game the first time i played it and i did enjoy it [Music] a year later streets of rage 2 was released again this is a one or two player title with a link cable and you can choose one of three playable characters and again the game controls pretty well this time around you can actually punch your enemies when you want to and throw them when you want to each character also has their special moves and i really didn't have a problem pulling them off consistently actually axel's grand upper was almost a go-to move for me since it really kicked some ass the music again is by uzo but all it makes me want to do is hear the genesis soundtrack if there's one problem this game has its cheap enemies they can keep knocking you down leaving you no chance to recover or fight back it's just poor programming on sega's part but it doesn't make the game unplayable or even unenjoyable if you have a game gear i hope you have these two titles [Music] gg allest is a vertical shooter released only in japan and gg stands for game gear this is a pretty fun shooter there's a few different weapons to collect and you're always firing two different types at the same time you can power up your normal shot by collecting these little p-chips that fly out of some enemies your secondary weapon can be one of a few different things but i like the laser the best these can be powered up by collecting the big p icon when you die your weapons power down a level it plays smoothly and there is a little bit of slowdown but that's not really that surprising there's even some bonus levels that play like galaga only really really easy in fact the entire game is kind of easy it picks up around level five or six but it won't take you too long to finish this one the visuals are pretty good for the system and take advantage of the game gear's wide color palette the music is superb and features excellent use of stereo its sequel is called power strike 2 and it even got released in europe just not north america this is a different game than power strike 2 that's on the master system it plays a lot like gg elest but now you get to pick your weapon at the start of the game you also have a bomb at your disposal this one's also a lot more difficult the first stage here is harder than any stage in the original game there is a lot more going on and everything is moving so much faster on a really positive note they sure as hell seem to fix the slow down issues with this one you can power yourself up to ridiculous proportions and once you do the game becomes much easier this one will still take a lot more effort to beat though the graphics have improved a bit though i don't think that the music is as good i mean it's definitely not bad though and good luck to you if you're playing this on the blurry ass game gear screen and not on a tv like i am [Music] gg doraemon is the best doraemon game on the system you know what gg stands for you already know you play as a weird blue cat thing and your goal in life is to find the exit of whatever stage you happen to be on along the way you'll open up boxes or crates or eggs and they'll have these weird chips in them some boxes will even have power ups like this gun which stuns enemies and your enemies all seem to be robots lifted straight out of the mega man universe you kill them for good by bouncing on top of them be careful though because one hit and you are dead but if you have a weapon you're allowed to take an extra hit when you do you'll lose that weapon on the surface the game is pleasant and controls well the graphics are extremely colorful producing colors at the master system and even the genesis can't the music is bouncy and fun but don't let the aesthetics fool you the game is not always simple there aren't a ton of worlds here and they each have three areas plus a boss fight but what i really do like though is that each and every area looks different than the last i often get bored in games like sonic where each area looks the same until you get to a completely new zone i just wish that the music here changed as often as the graphics sometimes you'll even be swimming by the way if you're playing on the crappy game gear screen these nasty blue lines appear as transparent water other times you'll even be flying this is a pretty good game for the system that never made it out of japan [Music] all right man this thing is actually pretty dang cool i mean it's not game boy cool but it's it's starting to approach that level you know i didn't really get into the game gear back when it was new because at the time the genesis was what one or two years old yeah and i was like this is a step back yeah i don't want to play with this this is like yeah i'm i'm a 16-bit guy but now that i play this yeah i'm kind of liking it yeah and we're not done so let's get back to it this is shinobi or as the title screen calls it the gg shinobi and gg stands for well joe already told you this is a completely new game in the series with joe musashi instead of rescuing hostages all throughout a level you must rescue other shinobis at the beginning you can tackle four levels in whatever order you want once you make it through you fight a boss who's actually one of the shinobis you're trying to rescue that's been put under a spell once they're back on your side you can switch between them at any time while playing this is great since each shinobi has his own type of attack you want some ninjutsu well then you've got it once you collect icons you'll be able to let loose a screen clearing attack the game is really fun and it's tough but what makes it even more fun is the soundtrack done by yuzu kushiro the gameplay action and music really bind together to make a highly enjoyable experience if you like what you see then you can get this game on the 3ds eshop and it's definitely worth it [Music] shinobi 2 or the gigi shinobi 2 was released a year later in 1992 similar to the first game you can tackle levels in whatever order you want again as you progress through the game you gain the ability to play as other colored shinobis each with his own weapon and special i like the green one as it reminds me of revenge of shinobi with his double jump in being able to shoot a bunch of shurikens down on his enemies this time around you have to collect crystals as well to move forward in the game these are hidden in each level and are a [ __ ] to find basically it's just one more thing to do to make the game a bit longer than it really is still it's fun and it might be a touch easier than the first game on the portable the control is great and switching between shinobis and using your ninjitsu is really easy to do again the music feature is yuzo kushiro and it's really well done sadly though this one didn't make an appearance on the eshop here's panzer dragoon mini this japan only title was released in 1996 which was at the end of the system's life over there this is part of sega's kids gear lineup game so it should be easy right well it is easy it plays very much like space harrier but with a lot less action you pick one of three dragons and off you go you have your normal shot and of course the lock-on shot which is a huge part of the series when you lock onto an enemy and release the button they just explode no tracers or any effect i mean they just die there's only a few enemies besides bosses that'll take more than one hit from a lock-on shot the action is really slow a few enemies pop on screen and you kill them and wait a second and then more enemies pop on screen and again die with little resistance do this for a bit and then you'll get to a mid boss once he's very easily dispatched you fight a few more enemies and then fight a very easy in boss did i mention this game was a kid's title the best thing this game has gone for it is its music which is actually pretty enjoyable otherwise it's quite a boring game and you should stick with one of the saturn [Music] games [Music] road rash is a really good port of the genesis game in this one your goal is to win races by any means necessary and usually that means beating up the other racers you also need to avoid traffic which is all over the place and be sure not to get caught by the po-po you can beat them up as well for such a drastic difference in the hardware this really doesn't look much different than the 16-bit original the frame rate isn't much lower the hills are still there and the game feels very complete even the music is really good though it's all in mono granted the genesis version was in mono as well rob hubbard do you even know about stereo i don't think rob did the game gear version though this is a good one to pick up for the game gear [Music] the game gear even got a version of space harrier they tried to make it look original but honestly it's just a sprite hack of the master system game a really bad sprite hack i knew this even back when this version was originally released i mean it's damned obvious even from still pictures the screen now scrolls around a bit since it's smaller and i swear harrier moves a bit slower there are now only 12 stages instead of 18. to add a touch of challenge they now put you back at the beginning of the stage when you continue they give you a limited number of continues but they also give you an easy to memorize password when you run out so i whatever they did redo the music and stereo though and it doesn't sound bad this version's okay but i'd still much rather play the master system port but if you've ever wondered what it'd be like playing space harrier after dropping some acid play it on the game gear [Music] g-lock air battle was a launch game for the system that i never saw in action until now and the first impressions here are not very good basically you have dumb missions like shoot down 10 planes or shoot down 10 boats and whatnot it doesn't matter which 10 planes or boats just as long as you meet your quota i guess maybe the game is about population control of the enemy i i don't know the action is very slow and hard to control between rounds you can upgrade your plane with the points that you earn even on the beginner mode the game is very difficult as it's so easy to run out of fuel which of course doubles as your armor some interesting animation of the background is all that this one really has going for it [Music] i bet some of you are wondering how the game gear version of mega man is and the ones who aren't well i'm going to talk about it anyway this one was released only in north america by the brilliant masters at u.s gold it takes some aspects of mega man 4 5 and 2 believe it or not utilizing the unparalleled power of the game gear you can select from a whopping 4 stages right off the bat the first thing you'll notice is that the screen often scrolls vertically when you jump and this is super weird for a mega man game why does it do this well because these stages were designed for the nes and the screen here is a lot smaller and as a result of this tiny screen you'll also have some blind jumps to deal with the game plays okay but it just doesn't feel quite right it'd be a lot better if the stages were designed with this screen size in mind like the game boy versions hell seriously they should have taken stages from those and colorized them instead of the nes games still there is some decent platforming action here as well as lots of challenge the graphics are done pretty well and everything looks nice even the music is pretty good this is the best mega man game on the game gear it's also the only one [Music] echo the dolphin even made an appearance on the system in 1993. this is a part of the master system version where the levels are slightly different and you have some different quests to do to unlock the path that you need to follow since there's only two buttons on the game gear the start button is used for echo sonar the one button is dash and the two button swims the game is still fun to play but damn the music has taken a turn for the worse i guess the music in every version of the game is ruined after you've heard the sega cd music still if you need your echo fix this game will do echo tides of time came out a year later it's like the first game where the objectives are overall similar but the puzzles and paths are different i like that you can morph into other sea creatures throughout your adventure all the controls have remained the same as the first game and that's okay hitting start for sonar is still weird at first but you do get used to it pretty quickly the graphics are okay but i wish there was a little bit of detail in the backgrounds and not just a solid blue of the scene and again the music is just not good [Music] devilish got a port on the game gear this tells the story of a prince and princess who were turned into paddles of stone by a jealous demon all of a sudden a blue sphere dropped from the sky and was capable of destroying the evil demon's armies what a great story for a breakout style game you control the two paddle people and use them to break your way through each level the cool thing is that you can change the orientation of the paddles four different ways to serve your needs this is good because the game boards scroll both vertically and horizontally each board has a time limit and if you don't finish the level in time it's game over fortunately it's not too difficult to finish a board in the allotted time the game comes complete with a few boss fights here and there while they're interesting there's not a lot of challenge since the bosses can't harm you they shoot projectiles at you but it's just for show the real struggle is killing them within the time limit the control is pretty good but not perfect there's been many times where the blue ball slipped right through the first paddle when it's coming at you graphically though i think the game gear is capable of better there's a few areas that look great but overall it's just well there as far as the music goes it's good but not nearly as good as the one on the genesis imagine that still it's a fun game and worth a try this game even got a sequel on the ds back in 2005. the game gear even got its own version of ninja gaiden like every other version of ninja gaiden this one is pretty much its own unique game but it does share some things with the first nes version like sticking to walls every chance he gets and some of the special powers are similar like this ring of fire but ryu feels awkward to control like the character is too lanky or something honestly that's really the best way i can describe it i feel like he should be a slightly smaller sprite also he bounces back a bit when he gets hit and you can get stuck in this sometimes your secondary weapons are limited by the amount of force that you have which is shown in the top right of the screen you use these by pressing down an attack one exciting feature is that when you die fighting a boss you get to start all the way over from the very beginning of the stage only good games do this well and i guess this one [Music] batman returns is one that sure surprised the hell out of me the genesis version which is also made by sega is absolutely horrid so imagine my surprise when i discovered that this game is actually good in fact i might even say it's excellent what the hell is going on here obviously you play as batman you have a boomerang attack which reminds me of one of the weapons in the nes version of the original game what's cool about this though is that at any time you can change the strength of this weapon so you can have a long throw but it's rather weak or a short throw which is much stronger of course the normal throw is right in the sweet spot and it's good enough for most situations if you press jump again while you're in the air you'll extend your grappling hook this will latch on to any ceiling type structure and you can use it to swing around or jump up levels however you can only jump through thin floors lastly you have a special item which we'll call in the batmobile or hell even the bat ski boat for a special super strong attack throughout each level are bats which you can shoot that'll drop extra health or a special attack item what's also interesting is that each stage gives you a choice of which route you want to take both routes are similar but the stages are arranged differently route 2 i find tends to be slightly more tricky than route 1. both however will end up at the same boss fight the graphics are really nice and i like how colorful everything is yet still feeling kind of gloomy like batman should the music is also quite enjoyable and only makes the game better this game is very satisfying to play in its league superior than the cruddy genesis version [Music] tempo junior is the sequel to the 32x masterpiece and of course is still a platformer your tempo a bug who's really into music the levels are quite large and you need to find this keynote icon to reveal the exit the enemies can be defeated or stunned by throwing notes at them and bouncing on their head always kills them they get what they deserve many enemies will leave notes behind which fill up your life gauge the cd icon adds a lot of life the other items allow you to do a few different things the flat icon makes the notes that you shoot fly downwards the sharp icon i'm sorry i mean twitter hashtag makes the notes fly upwards and of course the zigzag icon makes them zigzag sometimes the screen will get dark and temple will look all sad and stuff well just kick this thing to turn the sunlight back on and cure your depression oh man if only life really were that simple after every two stages you'll fight a boss these guys are generally pretty easy hell the entire game is really easy it's almost impossible to die even the bottomless pits won't kill you at least that's what i think they are i don't know if they're supposed to be something else but the game runs at a snail's pace i feel that this one wasn't programmed as well as it could have been and it has wrought with slowdown but still this is a decent game for the younger set [Music] all right that's the game gear for you dave what are your final thoughts on the sega game gear well joe since we got this rgb modded system my impression of the game gear has gone up through the roof the games are actually fun to play on an actual tv i mean i hated this system back in the day because of the washout screen you just couldn't tell what the heck was going on but now playing it this way brings a whole new level of awesomeness to it what about you i like it a lot better for a lot of the same reasons i like being able to play it on a tv i think you can get a screen replacement get a new screen that also increases the battery life if you get an led backlight but the rgb thing playing it on the tv is awesome yeah and it's true because i'm actually going to have my game gear modified to output rgb videos you should and what do you guys think let us know and in the meantime thank you for watching gamezac and hopefully they did that on the game gear through that little tv connector thing yeah that would be awesome if you have the tv connector thing game sick game gear set [Music] [Music] playing the game boy huh only the best well you should try the sega game gear man check this out [Music] [Applause] ah [Applause] [Music] hello and welcome to game sack and at long last we are talking about the msx oh man this is a good one because for me anyways i really don't know anything about this thing as back in the day i was never mentioned around and what does it stand for anyway the m is for matsusta system no no let me tell you a little bit about the msx oh good the msx platform is not a specific computer in and unto itself but rather many different models were manufactured by many different brands around the world it was actually an attempt by microsoft of japan to standardize home computers there were four iterations of the design the msx the msx2 the msx2 plus and the msx turbo r each one was backwards compatible with the ones below it for this video we're using a japanese panasonic msx2 it contains a zylog z80a cpu running at 3.58 megahertz 128k of ram 512 colors 32 sprites on screen and psg sound the msx1 offered only single color sprites and far less color overall most machines feature two cartridge slots for connecting things which extend the capabilities of this system like sound expansion carts like the sharp x68000 which we covered before games were not released in any standardized form often appearing in different box styles and even different cartridge shapes even the boxes for the computers themselves were different the box for this one features a green soldier creature with tubes going straight into his leg and if that doesn't tell you that you need to buy an msx nothing will the msx enjoyed its greatest popularity in japan selling more than 5 million units there alone and least popular in the us where people barely even knew of its existence [Music] wow microsoft really yeah that's very interesting i had no idea but now you know i do that video is very enlightening and knowing is half the battle day well hopefully more than half the battle is the games yes because we've got a lot to show you what's a good computer system without lots of good games and some maybe even some mediocre ones we'll find out [Applause] sky jaguar from konami is a fairly early msx1 car released in 1984. this one is a pretty simple vertical shooter just shoot things and don't get hit every now and then you'll get a power-up which can make your shot a little bit better you'll fly through three scenes before you get to what i guess is a boss who is fairly easy to beat then you'll do it all again only it gets tougher the scrolling is pretty choppy and that's just how it is when most msx games decide to scroll there's also not much music here and the sound effects can be kind of grading still it's kind of fun in small doses frontline by taito is another simple 1984 game for the msx1 it's an overhead running gun and you can shoot but the enemies can shoot too but you have something most of them don't have and that's unlimited grenades i just wish that they were more effective now i suppose you're a soldier invading an evil camp or something like that but to me it kind of looks like you're some kid going on a shooting rampage in the law is just out to stop you let's face it you are the bad guy eventually they bring out rudimentary tanks to get you but this is pretty much what to expect with early msx1 games contra came to the msx2 in 1989 from konami like a lot of msx games this one doesn't scroll so all of the action takes place on static screens what's interesting about this is that it helps make the game a lot easier among other things which i'll get to in just a bit you don't have to kill everything on a screen you can usually just run by it if you want and once you get to the next screen the enemies you left behind won't follow you this makes the vertical levels a breeze because really all you need to do is jump to the top of the screen and suddenly you're taken to the next one and there's no way to fall to your doom at least not in this stage here another thing that makes things easier is that now you have a life bar if you get hit you just bounce back and lose a bit of life and once the bar is gone i'll bet you can guess what happens you only have three lives no continues and no konami code but you can earn a lot of extra lives by scoring high enough the weapons are also handed out differently you can collect the weapon icons but they don't give you a new weapon right then and there instead you'll need to get to large gun icons this lets you choose from the different weapons you've collected and there's no spread at all that sucks so yeah the game's pretty easy i mean i completely beat it on my first try here and wait nope there are some extra levels in fact there's quite a few extra levels here in this lava stage you can die by falling into it so be careful overall the game is still really fun the visuals are well done for the system and i like how the trees look here in the snow stage the msx is a graphical powerhouse that's so hot that it must have melted all the snow in this stage i'm just kidding it's not that hot the music is also really good with the familiar tunes that you know but they sound really nice here thanks to konami's special scc sound chip that they like to put in a lot of their cartridges pretty much a must have for the msx [Music] penguin adventure from konami is definitely one of the more interesting msx1 games you play as a penguin off to rescue his beloved girlfriend or wife or something the game plays in a third person perspective which is not something you saw often on the system at all basically you're just running along the stage and you have a distance meter at the top of the screen which tells you how far you have to go you also have a timer that's counting down so you better hurry along the way you'll need to jump over pits and if you can catch the fish that jump out of the holes you can control your speed by pressing up and down on the directional pad but when it's too slow it can be harder to jump over pits and the like if you bump into anything or get caught into a pit you'll come to a complete stop until you regain your composure or jump out some pits have a shop where the guy demands that you buy something these items range from a weapon which will let you shoot some of the enemies to others which are far more cryptic in nature and this shop owner gets really mad when you stop buying things but there are other shop owners out there that are friendlier and with lower prices if you can find them one item that you'll really want is the feather which lets you control yourself during a jump it's really hard to get this one early on as i don't think there are enough available fish but it really really helps the little propeller beanie will also keep you in the air longer during your jumps so try to get these as soon as you can there's also in-stage power-ups that you can get when a heart floats in from the side as the heart's on screen it will change colors each time you land a jump if you can try to grab it while it's blue and that will let you float in a little cloud for a while this helps you avoid obstacles and grab fish more easily or yellow which turns you invincible for a little bit but be careful because you can still get stopped by pits and some other objects every third stage ends with a boss encounter and you just really need to break the ground around him this game might be a touch too difficult for newcomers there are things that sometimes feel completely unavoidable and the game moves too slowly for you to react to them also your hitbox feels quite large and you only have three lives unless you earn more still though this is one of those games where i keep trying the key is to get those items i mentioned as early as you can sure there are warps that you can use if you find one accidentally or look at an online guide but i spent way too much time looking for a specific hole which looks exactly like all the other holes to properly enjoy playing plus i want to see all of the stages not just some of them and the game has a ton of stages there's also bonus stages you can go to if you happen to jump at the right place at the right time here you're suddenly above the earth collecting space fish and avoiding meteors just like penguins tend to do the aforementioned third person visuals are great and i love how each stage is different at least all the ones i've seen so far even the music is really good this game is actually the sequel to antarctic adventure which was released for the system two years prior in 1984. it's similar in both concept and execution but penguin adventure is by far the better of the two games and yes this little penguin is one of the ships that you can select in konami's proteus series this title also has a distinction of being the very first game hideo kojima ever worked on he wasn't the head guy but you know he worked on it this is a fantastic little game that's a must-have for every msx owner if you can get it [Music] all right moving right along enjoying the msx so far dave um yeah for the most part i mean it isn't as strong as i thought it would be but it's it's not bad it has its qualities that's for sure oh i agree with that anyway always more games to talk about black onyx 2 from ascii is a primitive dungeon crawler for the msx1 old computer fans might appreciate this one the original 1984 black onyx bears the distinction of being one of the first rpgs made specifically for the japanese market though it was brought to the european msx in 1985 i'm not sure how black onyx 2 here differs as it was brought out in 1986. the japanese version i'm playing here is of course mostly in japanese but enough is in english to figure out what you're doing you play this one entirely with a keyboard moving around a dungeon to kill monsters and whatnot the yellow walls are doors you get into battles which can be hard to win you'll also find other items and stuff not really my type of game especially since there's no music and very little sound check it out if you like old dungeon crawlers it's better than you might think once you get used to it sega's fantasy zone got ported over this is an msx1 game as a result the colors are very limited and the scrolling is extremely choppy basically the premise of this one is to fly your ship in either direction and destroy all of the bases in a stage i mean if you can actually see them the choppy visuals here make it hard to see bases and enemies and the slowness of it all makes it even harder to react once you destroy all of the bases you fight the stage boss as you kill enemies they'll drop coins for you to collect occasionally a shop appears where you can temporarily power up your ship or buy new lives and stuff it's fun for its time but i really don't recommend playing it on the msx here it's almost painful in 1988 taito brought rastan saga to the system and you need at least an msx2 to play this one this is a game about a conan like barbarian on a hack and slash adventure killing mythical creatures and stuff the arcade original is fantastic and the master system port is fun as well the msx2 version here seems to take after the master system version in many regards even some of the sound effects are the same of course there's no scrolling but be careful not to go back to a previous screen as enemies do regenerate along the way you'll grab icons which can help you out but a few can actually hinder you you'll also get better weapons which will last for a limited amount of time each stage consists of an outdoor area followed by an inside castle or cave type area after that is your boss fight and most of these are more faithful to the arcade than the master system version the graphics are pretty good at least the backgrounds are the sprites are a different story rastan looks fine but the enemies have three colors max and one of those colors is transparent and you can see right through them the music is definitely rastan and sounds like the master system version if the console was hungover after a night of heavy drinking that is [Music] in fact as a whole the entire game feels pretty sloppy like it's struggling really hard there's tons of slowdown and just a general lack of polish still is a fun game and really easy too anyone can beat it congratulations [Music] golvelius got it start on the old msx1 here where it's called devil govilius it's kind of a zelda clone but not really you have an overworld that you wander around on and kill enemies holes will open up and you go in and talk to fairies or buy items you even have to buy the ability to carry more money or find as the game calls it once you increase the amount of money you carry you can buy better stuff which will allow you to explore further but the game also has side scrolling levels the problem here is that you must press up to jump and that makes it really tough to control and not run into the enemies there are also auto scrolling overhead scenes where you need to be really careful to avoid the enemies and also the walls of the caverns these end in a boss fight overall this is much weaker than the master system version that we all know and love well a few of us who are familiar with the master system know and love anyway but it's still good [Music] after the master system version came out govelius was remade on disc for the msx2 as new devil govelius this is pretty much completely different than the msx1 cartridge version and some people refer to this as golvilius2 but it's not a sequel the graphics are much more detailed since it's on the msx2 now and it begins in a more traditional rpg style set in a town you need to talk to people and unlock this and that before you get out to sit on your journey the side scrolling levels are back and holy crap look how smooth the scrolling is did someone sneak a voodoo graphics card into my msx when i wasn't looking the scrolling here is much much smoother i'm not even sure how they did it whatever the case compile clearly had the most skill when it came to programming for the msx2 this one takes a lot of stuff that was in the master system version and fleshes it out here and even rearranges it if you have an optional fm pack as it's commonly called you can even play the game with fm music it's actually pretty good it sounds better than the master systems fm music somehow despite using the same exact sound chip but hey if you prefer psg then just boot the game up without the fm pack plugged in this is a great game and it's even better if you happen to understand [Music] japanese [Music] snk made sure that msx2 owners didn't miss out on akari warriors simply called akari here this is kind of an interesting version as there are often tons of enemies on screen at once trying to kill you one thing that i really like is that after you kill an enemy their bloody corpse stays on screen so you can admire your work and all these dead bodies let you know just how many people you actually kill in games like these the tanks are just an icon to be picked up and once you get in one it's a simple one colored sprite which looks a bit out of place with the rest of the visuals but hey it's good for killing enemies so that's all i need you can get a bunch of different power-ups and of course you always have your trusty grenade which is vital in this game extra lives seem to be handed out pretty often that's a good thing because there's no continues otherwise this is a pretty good game of akari warriors [Music] the ease games are even on the msx2 and as you know we love ease here on game sack you're eight all and you're off to find the six books of ease you'll also get to fight monsters without swinging your sword or pressing a button most people hate this but you know what i'm used to it so i'll live they can hate all they want the graphics are similar to the master system port in many regards but seem to be at a higher resolution most of uzo kashiro's music is here but they changed it in a few spots and put new stuff in if all you have is an ms6 this is a good game for it [Music] however ease 2 steps it up with an animated intro similar to the turbo graphic cd version with some nice smooth scrolling the gameplay has to be smoother too right well kind of obviously it's still pretty choppy but it runs much faster than the first game i don't really know ease 2 as much as i do the first one but everything seems to be here there seems to be a bit more detail this time around in everything and overall i feel it plays better than the msx2 version of the first game for sure ease 3 is also on the msx2 spanning a mass of 5 discs wow i don't know why they even bothered just look how slow it moves i can appreciate that they did some parallax scrolling but i really wish they hadn't so it could run faster plus there's a lot of disk swapping almost everywhere you go and it gets old really fast this is definitely the last system you'd ever want to get your e3 fix on not recommended the elast shooter series from compile got a port to the msx2 this series got its start on the master system and was brought over to the west as power strike basically it's an overhead shooter where you always have a main weapon and a sub weapon the little yellow p chips power up your main weapons but it takes a lot of them there are eight different sub weapons represented by the different numbers that you can grab sadly they're on a timer of 80 seconds and they'll revert back to sub weapon one when they run out subweapon one kinda sucks if you die you'll also revert back to number one and also the weakest form of your main weapon my favorite sub weapons are numbers a and then three and so are yours this game is pretty relentless as the better you do the more intense the game tries to get that means you're always on your toes no matter what the screen often gets really crowded i wonder if compile even knew the limitations of the msx2 before deciding to put hundreds of things on screen everywhere at once so as a result there's a lot of slowdown it's easier than the master system game mainly because they give you a ton of extra lies but it's in no way easy the graphics are good with smooth scrolling and a bit more detail than the master system original they even added a few brand new stages for you to sweat through the music is similar to the master system but it sounds a bit different in both psg and fm not necessarily better or worse just slightly different but play this one in fm if you have an fm pack [Music] so a lest 2 came out for the system the very next year this one sticks to the same formula as the original collecting numbered sub weapons and powering them up however this one lets you choose a numbered weapon in the beginning if you like this is the weapon you'll begin the game with and also the one you'll start with after losing a life which will happen this one's a lot tougher than the first mainly because the enemy patterns are so off the wall sporadic a lot of them will make a beeline straight towards your ass and follow you around so yeah you're gonna die a lot still though it's a very good shooter that's well designed throughout its three discs there are fewer weapons here this time but they do very different things my favorite number eight isn't here but number three is and that's a good go-to sub weapon however i'm really starting to like number four as it's a homing shot even at its weakest it's fairly effective i'd love to see how it is if i could stay alive long enough to get it powered up the stages are quite long most of them having at least one mid boss the boss fights have also evolved as well instead of stationary objects just shooting at you like in the first game this one has bosses that actually move around the screen there's tons of enemies on screen a lot of the time and of course this slows down the msx quite a bit but that's to be expected it really doesn't detract from the fun and honestly i rarely even noticed it the graphics are good and once again move smoothly and while not as nice as in the first game the music is still fairly pleasant to listen to [Music] so [Music] elast gaiden is an offshoot of the series and can only be had on compile disk station 4 which was a demo disc magazine type of deal this one is unusual that you don't fly a spaceship but rather a little dude running around similar to elemental master on the genesis but in this one you can jump and you'll often need to over large holes and chasms and whatnot there's three different weapons you can get a ninja star a red thingy and a blue laser each weapon can be powered up a bit by collecting more like icons seriously though the only weapon worth having are the ninja stars as the other two are way too slow to be useful you can also get up to two shadow guys that act as options which will definitely help you out the game itself though really isn't that great the enemy patterns can be rather annoying and there really isn't a whole lot to this one the visuals are decent i guess i mean how many statues of liberty did we need that ended up getting buried in this future but the music is not very good at all and there's not a whole lot of variety in it in fact the psg music actually sounds better than the fm overall this one really doesn't have that much to offer i can certainly understand why it's not a full retail game all right man this is actually shaping up to be a pretty cool little computer thing with a game attachment to it but of course the thing that would push it over for me is a good castlevania game well thankfully we have the game attachment for the msx that'll let you play the castlevania really game of catch what the hell is he talking about anyway we've got more games coming up and maybe dave will get to talk about some vampire killers skyon from sony and hitbit is a vertical shooter that will blow you away well okay not really but for a 1985 msx1 game it's kind of interesting you fly a ship around which can of course destroy enemies every once in a while you'll get an add-on for your ship which will let you fire off a ground shot use this to destroy all of the flashing targets below once you do that the upper layer disappears and is on to the next scene at the end of the third you face a huge end boss actually it's pretty anti-climactic win that and then the game loops i like that they even have some parallax scrolling in this one and it's pretty fun once you get used to the choppiness super lay dock from tne soft is pretty damn ambitious for an msx1 game this one is also an overhead shoot em up but it doesn't play like something from 1985 i mean this came out in 1987 that's probably why but it plays like a more modern game you'd expect to be able to get power-ups in each stage but you don't instead you earn them after you beat a stage and between stages you can choose your sub weapon one of them for example lets you hit targets on the ground just like in sky on and then there are others which are definitely more fancy but be careful because if you choose the wrong one you could end up screwed as not all of them destroy stuff on the ground and often you're gonna need to be able to do that this one has boss fights music during the gameplay and even cut scenes it can also be enjoyed by two people simultaneously pretty cool i say xerion from jalico is one of my favorite msx1 shooters this one is more of a third person style believe it or not kinda like space harrier or even afterburner obviously your mission is to shoot everything you can and get the highest score possible as you move around the background shifts to and fro it probably looks really bad to you but somehow it just works i always know where my ship is even when you think it'd get lost in some of the crazy colors and designs you have two weapons a basic double shot that you can fire as much as you'd like but you can only fire one at a time the other button fires a very rapid single shot which pulverizes the enemy formations but it's going to run out pretty quick you'll need to wait for it to recharge itself and this number here indicates how many shots you can fire yeah the game doesn't take long before the backgrounds and the enemies start to loop but it's still really fun no matter what i was actually really surprised by this [Music] one [Music] castlevania got a release on the msx2 called vampire killer which came out a month after the famicom game this one plays a bit different from your standard castlevania game of the time sure you have the platforming whipping action that you know and love what's different is the flow of each level along the way you'll find yellow keys that'll open up blue treasure chests laying around these will give you items that for the most part feel useless there's a white key hidden somewhere in the level and you have to find it to move on typically it's hidden in the walls there's also people hidden in the walls that will give you items for the hearts you collect sadly though it has some issues that really make the game feel incomplete firstly whipping candles should be easy and if you whip a camel it should break on the first try not in this game you can whip the candle many times before it finally breaks it gets to the point where you don't want to put out the effort so you just bypass all of them secondly there's lots of cheap areas where you walk into the next screen only to be hit immediately by an enemy nothing is more annoying than this not even joe seriously dude what the f especially since there's no castlevania pot roast laying around for you to devour and restore your health there's not a single slab of meat anywhere in this castle then there's your whip which is very short which means you have to be closer to your enemies which means better chances for you to take damage you can get other weapons in here like the axe or cross of fear these are awesome especially the cross of fear it goes all the way across the screen and gives you that much needed distance between you and your enemy the bad part is that if you don't catch it on its return it's gone yes it's gone for good and you're back to your little whip but hey the game does have some sharp graphics and of course an amazing soundtrack the music is so good that you want to keep trying while this isn't anywhere near my favorite castlevania game it's still fun to play if you can forgive it it's flaws [Music] if you like shooters and also hate having money you can play space manbo from konami the galaxy is threatened and your fleet is attacked but you managed to make it out in your little ship at the last moment you are space manbo and you need to save the entire galaxy you go spaceman bow this is a horizontal shooter for the msx2 and like most of them you get power-ups to upgrade your ship these include a speed up a missile and either a wave type of weapon or a more condensed linear shot there's also options which you can reposition with the tap of the other button and you'll need to use this to get ahead especially in some of the later levels where it starts scrolling vertically finally there's a smart bomb type of thing which activates a couple of seconds after you grab it at the top of the screen you have a large power bar this of course indicates the strength of your weapons that you're using and it's raised by grabbing the red icons once you get it high enough part of it will turn yellow the yellow part decreases over time unless you keep grabbing the icons eventually it settles on the highest red part which is about 50 percent of its overall potential strength at the end of each stage of course are some very large bosses which are pretty fun to fight once you figure them out which isn't difficult by the way they go down pretty quick the game scrolls smoothly for an msx2 game in every direction but it's still kind of choppy especially the sprites i'm not sure if it's any better if it's played on an msx2 plus or not but this sprite choppiness along with some of the generously sized hitboxes can make the game feel pretty tough when you first start playing it again the choppy sprites make it very hard to react but you are space manbo and after some time you grow more accustomed to the choppy visuals and what you can and can't get away with and once you do that you'll start performing a lot better that's when the game starts becoming really fun this reminds me of an r-type game and it's challenge there are unlimited continues that start you back at the same checkpoint you do if you lose a life so basically you have unlimited lives this really makes me want to keep trying again and again and if you do you'll eventually get past the part you're stuck on the visuals are pretty damn nice and to their credit they attempt a lot with the system like diagonal scrolling and even a touch of parallax there are times when there's quite a bit on screen as well and of course since it's a shooter and since it's konami the music is absolutely outstanding hell it might be the best part of the game when it's all said and done this is the best horizontal shooter for the system for sure so if you like choppy but good shooters with plenty of challenge pick this one up maybe get two or three since it's only 500 or so on the low end [Music] [Music] [Applause] oh [Music] here's metal gear for the msx2 this was the first metal gear ever released and it differs quite a bit from the nes version that was released later that same year as you know you play a solid snake and it's your job to infiltrate outer heaven and destroy metal gear the way they'd like you to play it is as a stealth action game personally i've always hated this i hated being sneaky and just wanted to go in kill people do my mission and get out the problem with doing it that way is that you won't last long if you're noticed by guards or cameras the alarm goes off and you get bum rushed by more guards and then it won't take long before you're dead if you do choose to be stealthy like the game wants you'll be doing a lot of traversing back and forth finding items here and there that will help you progress things like key cards guns and gas masks overall the game plays well and the music is pretty damn good this was a well received title for the system [Music] in metal gear 2 solid snake saw released in 1990 for the msx2 the game was again developed by kojima and is the actual sequel to the first game snake's revenge on the nes is not the true sequel as it was developed by a completely different team anyway as you can see the game got a graphical overhaul and everything looks different even solid snake looks different he looks like a sad mix of sylvester stallone and emilio estevez plus his face looks rather fat like he's in no shape to be infiltrating zanzibar land maybe he thinks that zanzibar is a type of candy bar that he's willing to go to any length to find but while he's looking for the candy bar he might as well rescue a kidnapped scientist and destroy another metal gear everything from the first game applies here from the sneaky gameplay to finding items that will further your quest it's a bit slower this time around but it doesn't hinder the gameplay the game isn't easy and you'll know this when you fight the first boss it's okay though if you want to continue you can just use the easy to remember password again the music well for me anyway is the highlight but still if you like this type of game and don't own an msx2 you can unlock it on metal gear solid 3 for various [Music] [Music] consoles snatcher from konami is great but how about sd snatcher which is exclusive to the msx2 that's right snatcher needs to be cutified in the worst way or is it the best way yeah maybe this is basically an rpg style remake of snatcher with super deformed characters you're gillian seed the newest junker a junker is the one who hunts down snatchers and destroys them and of course a snatcher is a terminator slash replicant or whatever you want to call it same thing the story is more or less the same but lots of things have been changed around for example in this one you get to actually meet gibson in the beginning of the game while he's still alive and although you're a junker and you're working for junker headquarters you now have to buy weapons and medicine from them i guess they're not too serious about stopping that snatcher menace the game takes place in an overhead view with little sd characters that walk around totally unlike the original's digital comic style enemies walk around openly and if you touch them you get into a battle these are pretty cool but you might take a bit of damage before you truly get the hang of them you have a crosshair that you aim to attack certain parts of an enemy this will have different results for example shooting their legs or their wheels will slow them down so they're less likely to move out of the way and dodge your attacks and they do have a very bad habit of moving out of the way of your shots shooting the so-called eye will make it harder for them to aim at you when they shoot shooting their guns can stop them from attacking you but they may also self-destruct if you do that giving you very little in the way of experience points also shooting their antennas can prevent them from calling for reinforcements you can also select metal gear and this is basically the auto battle mode and he'll select what he thinks is the best option at the time this works well for a lot of things but personally i like doing it myself there are plenty of items that you can buy back at junker headquarters which can help you out in the battle these can do things like paralyze an enemy for a few attacks to give you an advantage or even completely destroy them you'll also need to charge your gun as you don't have unlimited ammo just like any rpg you'll be wandering through large maze-like structures filled with enemies and even treasure chests sometimes you'll even find extra shots for your gun after defeating an enemy you'll need them this game is pretty grindy you'll have to be about level 10 or so to beat the first real boss here and you're going to need to get into a ton of battles to get to level 10. gillian doesn't move around smoothly at all which can make it an exercise to place them in front of people or objects but it is in no way game breaking i like how enemies are just wandering all over the place even inside apartment building hallways of course once you get what you need from the room in the apartment the enemies are all completely gone inside and out this game comes on three discs but it requires an external cartridge to play which contains the scc sound chip as well as 64k of extra ram if you want to play it on a flash cart you're gonna need a patched file the music is really good and a lot of it is unique to this version of snatcher the graphics are very well done for the system looking really good for an 8-bit computer and seems to use the msx2's higher resolution there's also english translations out there for your emulator or your flash cart one is free and isn't of the greatest quality the other one from melancholia which is what i'm playing here is absolutely fantastic but the patch is going to cost you 12.5 euros or just over 15 us dollars it's all up to you melancholia sounds like something you get from a mosquito bite the game is really really good though and it's fun to see this kind of a take on snatcher [Music] all right there you have it the s x day what did you think of the msx um as i said before it has some strong points and some not so strong points but uh surprisingly the controller for as ugly as it is is actually fairly comfortable i thought i thought it was kind of well you can always get different controllers you know different manufacturers have their own but you're lucky to get the little tiny panasonic one yeah that we had in this video nicely in my hands so what did what are your thoughts i mean this is your thing so yeah well it's it's a good little system i mean it's interesting i mean it's it's kind of primitive but that's okay you know things don't always have to be super advanced like the x 68 000 right but you know it's interesting to see where a lot of these games like metal gear and whatnot came from golvelius i really enjoyed it it's fun to see this kind of stuff yeah definitely a nice little oddity from the past yeah and what are your guys's opinion of the msx do you have any favorite games that we didn't check out that we should check out let us know in the meantime thank you for watching gamesat [Music] you know i was thinking i really like those less games on the msx but what what's this power strike two that's gotta be in the ls game it's the last two isn't it [Music] oh oh oh my god i don't think it was supposed to happen um i think i'm gonna leave the hell's that smell [Music] my msx

Channel: Game Sack

Views: 763,543

Keywords: sega, nintendo, turbografx, gameplay, videogames, retro, genesis, nes, msx, super nintendo, snes, avs, retrousb, retrousb avs, analogue, nt, nt mini, analogue nt mini, xbox, og xbox, microsoft xbox, marathon, episode marathon, game gear, sega game gear, super nintendo entertainment system

Id: x3Zygl-D_d4

Length: 212min 1sec (12721 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 18 2020

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Dave is back? DAVE IS BACK?!