Five NES Games That Don't Look Like NES Games

I think the NES might be my favorite console and NES games certainly have a distinctive look sound and feel instantly recognizable if you're a retro gamer partly because of the style at the time but also because the technical limitations of the machine dictate so much about them but there are a few games that are a bit unusual games that push the limits of the system in unique ways to create something that is less typical of the NES games that stand out a bit and I've got five of them to show you that are not that well known that all have something about them that might surprise you even if you really know this system well let's start out with Noah's Ark then yes there's a couple of glaring reasons why this is overlooked why no one talks about it much one it seems to be a rare total European exclusive not released anywhere else and two it sounds suspiciously like it might be one of those terrible unlicensed religious games definitely guilty on the first charge but not on the second yes whilst it's definitely got a Biblical bent it is a Nintendo approved game created by British company Source research and development and published by Konami Europe and it is well it's far from terrible it's a sort of hybrid Auto scrolling platformer Shoot Em Up with some magic Works including a rising water effect unlike anything else you'll see on the NES yes other games have water in them but well nothing so dramatic visually what on Earth is happening here this is a game I have spoken a bit about before in a video I did about the NES is little-known grayscale mode hidden away in the graphics chip that PPU is a switch that when flipped turns everything black and white to making any game look like a Game Boy game sort of I have no idea why that is a question I asked in that video and no one in the comments really had a good answer one thing does it seem to be certain if any other game developers knew about it they didn't use it for anything except one that I found which I will talk about later here though it's used in a very clever way to create this effect using the Mason emulators Event Viewer debug feature I can actually show you what's going on the Event Viewer overlays information about what is happening in the game's code over the graphics in the form of these dots if I slow it right down we can see the key events where the game's code sends some data to what is called the master register in the PPU sort of like a little Bank of switches that have a few functions flipping the one that enables the monochrome Graphics mode this changes the color mode as the screen is still being drawn all of a sudden so it suddenly flips kind of halfway down which makes it well kind of convincing cartoon water effect and by doing this at different points in successive frames you can make the water appear to Barb up and down quickly or Verizon Falls slowly to different levels some other game systems can do a similar but different trick usually called a mid-frame pallet swap like here on the Sega Master System with this water effect in Sonic in this version it's not just flipping a switch but swapping out the entire set of colors the game is using for another one you can do it with any of the colors the system has and you can use it to double the total number you can have have on screen at once the NES can do the same sort of thing maybe but it's harder to pull off it takes so much tricky programming and it's only really suitable for static screens like this title screen for Indiana Jones where it's used to create a color gradient the limitations of the NES usually mean you can't do the same sort of thing in an animated Game scene unless you make use of the grayscale mode doing it this way doesn't take much process of time and it's easier to code but the downside is it just makes everything into Shades of Gray you can't change to any of the other 50 or so colors that make up the NES palette but you can make use of another little known NES feature at the same time the color emphasis bits more switches hidden in the PPU these actually alter the whole NES color palette slightly Noah's Ark turns on the blue emphasis bits when it reaches the water making everything below the waterline have a slight blue tinge depending on how you're watching this and what sort of device it is it might be hard to see but it is there not only that but for everything above the water line this game uses all three color emphasis bits at once which actually makes all the colors a bit dimmer again it's not a huge change but there is one a slightly different version of The Familiar NES palette a quick side by side comparison here the original on the left on the right a hacked version with all the color emphasis bits turned off not many games used to be these color emphasis switches at all making the 54 standard colors of the NES a really distinctive feature one of the reasons you can spot an NES game from a mile away the slight changes in color in this game well they're not huge but it does make it look less NES like couple that with the rising water effect and it's a bit of an odd duck compounded by a major spoiler alert I am going to ruin the ending the very last boss is maybe Satan himself or blzy Bobo or someone demonic and he has a very slightly different trick than anything else in the game he's drawn with background Graphics standard stuff for NES bosses because of sprite limitations but usually that means you can't have any other background Graphics around it without spoiling the trick in this game though we have a sort of pool of lava effect created with the color emphasis bits again actually switching the them all on after being all off at the top part of the screen there's also a hard line between the two sections actually that's present with the water too but it's more noticeable here done by turning the background Graphics off completely for Walnut single line and when you add in the brimstone nodules or whatever it is that's plop onto the surface of the lava it makes for a well a really interesting and original effect that no other NES game ever did in all this isn't absolutely the best game to Bear the Konami brand it's no Castlevania but well it is one on its own and worth being better known than it is it's really cleverly programmed someone put a lot of time into this and it's not a cynical caching like the Wisdom Tree Bible games that it can be mistaken for next up let's take a look at gemfire [Music] one of the fewer strategy games from Japanese company KOA released not just in Japan but in the USA too of course in English they must have sold well enough for them to keep releasing them but no one seems to ever have paid much attention to these games not on anyone's list of top all-time NES titles and not even mentioned as a Hidden Gem at most of the same gemfire is probably the most accessible of these very deep tactical games put out by this company but still very very different from your typical NES stuff on computers yes absolutely but this isn't really NES material is it a heavy dirt game loads of words and stuff can you imagine this kid playing it no you cannot but the graphics again here are a little bit different to the color palette is it's it's a bit pink but there's no color emphasis bits being used here they just picked a really bright standard palette nothing particularly unusual there is something strange though about the way the colors are used you see NES Graphics are made up of Tails or character blocks and each block of four Must ALL use the same set of colors Castlevania 3 being a really great example of Graphics cleverly designed around this restriction gemfire though uses the mmc5 mapper and enhancement chip built into the cartridge which takes this limit away here each individual tail can have its own set of colors out of the 54 that the NES has again a small and subtle change but one that does make this game slightly different and less NES like even if you're not consciously aware of exactly what's going on if you're a big NES fan you might notice something odd the only other games that ever made use of the color enhancing properties of the m C5 chip are other COA strategy games and enix's tactical RPG just breed this really helps with tactical type games because it means you can have more colorful symbols that can be placed anywhere on a map without having to rely on Sprites that can cause flicker when there's too many of them on screen at once pull these COA strategy games I'm probably not saying that right or even saying it consistently but they are a bit odd for the NES uncharted waters is another one and that goes not just for the genre and how the game plays but for how they were developed as well it seems like this and all the others were written in C and compiled into bytecode that runs on a virtual machine running on the NES if you're not familiar with programming topics or computer science stuff that might not mean much but let me tell you that is a very very weird thing for an 8-bit console game to be doing all the commercial games of any type 4 consoles and computers of this era aren't done like this it makes sense though if koe wanted their games to be very portable they all appeared on multiple platforms and doing it this way means that each game just has to have one code base which can then run anywhere that they can Port their virtual machine too common in modern systems widely used languages and Frameworks like Java and microsoft.net are based on similar ideas though of course more sophisticated Forward Thinking definitely and in fact the virtual machine that this runs can handle 32-bit operations so you could actually call this a 32-bit NES game sort of that might be stretching a point too much for some people but probably probably not stretching it too far for me to put it in the thumbnail but whatever it's another game that's not quite normal but let's move on to something that is a bit more obvious in its weirdness the amazing Cosmic Epsilon a Japanese a famicom exclusive but Noah translation needed on this one it's all in English and hardly text Heavy anyway the standout thing about this of course is that textured ground effect almost like something you'd see on the Super NES very impressive I have talked about this game's sort of sequel that Tetra star the fighter which does something very similar but here the effect is maybe actually a bit nicer certainly easier to see as it moves a bit more slowly when I last looked at this effect it did defeat me but now I think I've got more of a grip on it it does look quite a bit like the snares mode 7 and actually there are some similarities but not really in the way that it works an enhancement chip or mapper built into the cartridge does play a part in this theme NES or famicom gets a bit of extra help but this isn't like the Super NES super effects check if it's not a whole extra CPU or anything nearly so complex this game uses the mmc3 mapper the same chip used in literally hundreds of other NES games in fact nearly every game released in the later years of the NES used this chip or something similar the clever part isn't in the chip it's in the way it's used to see how this works we need to slow things right down to the point that we can see each line of the graphics being constructed and take a look into the NES video memory that's the bits on the left and also we've got the Event Viewer on the right the yellow line represents the current line of pixels being drawn and sent out as a video signal notice that as the line moves down the screen the image in the video memory changes what's happening is the game is Shifting through a series of templates sections of floor pattern just drawing a bit of each before skipping on to another one there's a whole load of these stored in the cartridge ROM and the textures on the ground are all made by stitching bits of them together to create different shapes this is where the mmc3 chip comes in because one of its functions is to allow games to use many different banks of Graphics data original NES curse which is allowed for only eight kilobytes of Graphics but the mmc3 allows much more to access these Banks of Graphics data the NES just needs to send a signal to the cartridge telling it what it needs it's extremely quick and doesn't require any CPU time or memory bandwidth to load new graphics in which Cosmic Epsilon explodes brilliantly there's limitations in this method you can't just use any image like the Super NES mode 7 and you certainly can't rotate it but it does look quite good it might seem like a really straight strange way of doing things but the NES architecture just doesn't allow an effect like this to be drawn directly so this is a very clever hack to make it happen it's actually a sort of advanced version of the effect used to create the track in many old school driving games and probably was inspired by squaresoft's 3D World Runner which has a slightly more primitive version of this ground patterning it's a real shame these have never got a western release I think it was planned at one point but it never happened but now on to something much less accessible to non-japanese speakers it's metal Slater Glory yes this game has two main issues that will put most NES fans off one it's very dense with Japanese text and two it's a visual novel one of these problems we can solve thanks to a fan translation in fact there's two the first Bay Stardust Crusaders in 2018 and a slightly different version by FC and Chill from 2021 for a long time a sort of white whale a Legendary game not available in English that's many pinned for but now it's playable At Last I feel like the whole visual novel concept is much better known these days but if you're not familiar with the form it's an illustrated and maybe minimally animated interactive story heavy on the story less so usually on the interactive stuff not unheard of on the NES or famicom I should really say in Japan and even in the west they were maybe one or two games in a similar vein like deja vu even in Japan though a visual novel like this aimed at a more mature audience with some complex themes is far more what you would expect to see on a home computer than a console but again the graphics are surprising for an NES game you just don't expect to see so many detailed illustrations on a system like this if you're a fan of manga visual style broad as that is but if you're a fan of this type of thing I'm sure you'll appreciate it the artwork really is fabulous it's no surprise then that this is the largest officially released game for the famicom or NES clocking in at one hole a megabyte 25 times the size of a game like Super Mario Brothers and it's even twice the size of Super Mario World on the Super NES and clearly a lot of that space is filled with Graphics data for home computers even 8-bit ones disk storage meant that games this size were relatively common there's bigger c64 games but for a consolvo devoting so much space to graphics on an expensive medium like a cartridge is unusual but it's not just storage concerns that makes these Graphics difficult yes theme NES has other limitations I've already mentioned color palette the NES has around 54 colors to work with but also within any 16 by 16 pixel Square you can usually only have just four of those colors and you're limited to how much unique detail you can have on screen normally you can have only 512 unique tiles or character blocks to make your graphics up out of 256 for the static backgrounds and another 256 for moving objects or a Sprites there are ways to increase this and metal slider story does use a technique to double this number but still there are serious constraints a big reason why this game took four years to make they had to construct all the graphics very carefully to fit within these limitations hardly excessive now but back then it was a long time this also uses the mmc5 chip like gemfire though not in all the ways it could have done you can't really blame them for that though it wouldn't have been available till late on in development and it seems like the graphics were made for something simpler like the mmc3 chip which can do less some sources say the game uses the mmc-5 for Parallax scrolling but I I can't find any of that no actual true Parallax backgrounds there are some really impressive battle scenes though with some really nice effects but nothing that can't be explained by a clever use of Sprites the game does use the chip to sort of split the screen up into two sections basically the text part at the bottom is constructed separately from the main graphical Elements which probably makes the text easier to manipulate it also means that you can have a new set of graphics for this bottom part which makes it possible to have both detailed Graphics at the top and a full text character set at the same time this game was coded by none other than it sadly missed Nintendo Legend satoru Iwata in his younger years adding to which legendary status it's really though the magnum opus of artist and writer yoshimiru Hoshi the creative force behind it despite having a larger cult following there's never really been a sequel or really any sort of similar work at all from the same guy the super famicom did see metal Slater Glory the director's cut like it sounds an Expanded Edition and that was the last game for the system but that's been it since then though apart from various merchandise don't get excited for an official English version of this anytime soon okay now on to another game which spent a long time untranslated konami's LaGrange point there's a lot of things you could say about this it's an 8-bit epic one of the very few games that can compete with metal slider Glory's enormous Ambitions it's the music and the sound though that he's absolutely the standout feature unique on this system because LaGrange point is enhanced with an extra sound chip in the cartridge an FM synthesizer not the same as but similar to the more advanced sound chips available as expansions for the MSX line of computers and the Japanese version of the Sega Master System you could even probably put it in the same sort of league as what you would find in the 16-bit machines of the era too a much much richer sound than what you could ever expect from the standard famicom which really gives the game its own ambiance [Music] this though is very much a family computer game to give the system its full Japanese title usually when I feature Japanese exclusive games in videos like this someone always pops up in the comments to point out that it's not an NES game at all it's a famicom game and my title is a lie my usual response would be well it's the same thing they're the same machine with different names what works on one will work on the other with hardly any exceptions this though is one of those exceptions because of that extra sound chip the output of it is routed through one pin on the cartridge Port that the Western NES just doesn't have so even if you've got the required adapter or even if you run it from an everdrive you won't get the full sound for this game it's not a complicated job to modify though and enable the extra sound there's even add-ons you can buy to help this isn't a major architectural difference it's just what seems like a fairly arbitrary change that Nintendo made so absolutely this doesn't sound like an NES game because it's not but it doesn't sound like a famicom game either it wasn't the only game with some sort of expanded audio released in Japan the original version of Castlevania 3 has expanded audio two for one and metal Slater Glory does but it's hardly used in that case no other famicom game though makes use of such a sophisticated FM synthesis chip as LaGrange point in terms of Graphics well this is on the high end of what you can expect from the NES stroke famicom compared to what was coming out just a few years previously it looks really superb when this was released in 1991 Konami knew every trick in the book they wrote the book they were better at nesing than Nintendo were at this point so this is replete with all the clever hacks workarounds and General Old School Wizardry they could cram in which is quite a lot including a literally blink and you'll miss it appearance of grayscale mode used in it fading between scenes and there's lots of sprite manipulation for all kinds of effects I'm surprised this game doesn't seem to be that well known doesn't have more of a cult following yes it's a Japanese exclusive but that didn't stop at many other games from becoming legendary amongst Western Gamers begging for official releases and sometimes even getting them it wasn't translated until 2014 although maybe that's a chicken and egg problem no translation means no reputation and no reputation means well you get the idea but most revered 90s jrpgs up 16 bit and above the Super NES being a big platform of course and mostly they're from just a handful of well-loved Developers Konami was never really known for their RPGs and it's not like this is part of a popular series either it is a one-off and yes the sound may be top-notch the graphics really impressive but this doesn't play like a turbocharged 8-bit RPG rather than the stuff developers like Square made famous later on this isn't Chrono Trigger it's a bit grindy quite linear and well my God you'll be doing a lot of random battles play the game for half an hour and you will know the battle music off by heart but still if you're an RPG fan and you haven't played this it is worth having a look at and now I think the end wants more another video comes to its close thank you to my wonderful patreons please feel free to join them I would really love it if you did as it helps me out enormously it really does I do keep coming back to the NES no doubt more to come on this subject and any suggestions as to what I should cover would be greatly appreciated as always Elite here is an obvious choice for a very non-nes like NES game but I have already mentioned this quite a few times including doing a video devoted solely to it if that interests you well check out the link which I will put below and I won't go over old ground so this is goodbye I'll say thanks for watching and I'll see you again next time

Channel: Sharopolis

Views: 113,558

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Id: qIz6rq1yl90

Length: 25min 54sec (1554 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 15 2023