My Life in Gaming Marathon #3 - Nintendo Systems and Games

the virtual boy is famous for being one of nintendo's most visible and shortest-lived commercial failures released in the summer of 1995 in only japan and north america the virtual boy simulates 3d images with a visor display rendered in monochromatic black and red it was widely considered to be uncomfortable for both the eyes and the back and was discontinued in both regions around half a year later with 22 games released personally i kind of like the virtual boy at least for its hardware the 3d effect is clean and convincing and it's not all that uncomfortable if you play it lying down nintendo tried its hand at 3d again about a decade and a half later with the 3ds in 2011 the effect was well received though 3d is still not to everyone's liking but nintendo's history with 3d gaming actually extends back to 8 years before the virtual boy for use on a home console this is the famicom 3d system [Music] [Applause] the famicom 3d system hit japan in 1987 and was never released for its overseas counterpart the nintendo entertainment system the visor easily straps around the player's head leaving plenty of room for regular glasses underneath the cord plugs into a little box with a 3.5 millimeter headphone style jack and then into the famicom's expansion port most compatible games activate 3d mode by hitting the select button during gameplay viewers without the 3d visor will see a flickery image like this the visor works its magic by rapidly covering each eye alternately so that when the image meant to be seen by the left eyes on screen the right eye is covered and vice versa the visor sinks up to the timing standards of crt televisions used in japan and north america so unfortunately the effect is impossible on modern displays but what's cool is that today you can actually view the 3d effect in higher quality than was ever intended to be possible thanks to the nes rgb mod and yeah the 3d effect does work it's pretty neat considering the age of the technology it's far from perfect though the visor darkens your vision considerably and adds a rapid strobing effect that isn't exactly the most pleasing thing in the world but does it make the games any better only eight 3d famicom games were ever released four of them is cartridges and the other half on the famicom disk system let's take a look at all of them [Music] 3d hot rally is the only game that nintendo itself released for the famicom 3d system co-developed by hal and nintendo's ead it's also the first game that satoru iwata and shigeru miyamoto worked on together it's loosely part of a series of nintendo racing games that only incidentally star mario and other nintendo characters a precursor to mario kart well maybe sorta but perhaps most notably this famicom disk system exclusive is the first game with artwork featuring luigi and his modern style taller and skinnier than mario with a distinctly different mustache 3d hot rally has only three courses but a big part of the fun at least back in the day in japan was to submit course times to nintendo to win prizes and official competitions via famicom fax machine installations throughout the country scenery along the courses feature grumpy boulders snake head lamp posts and horrifying bushes was miyamoto going through a tough time each course also features many branching paths so you'll want to learn a route that best works for your vehicle and driving style and they're long well over 10 minutes so the race against the clock can get pretty intense at the start of a course you'll choose an automatic repair point where your vehicle instantly recovers from damage if you remember to take the right route to reach it if you're not gonna make it you can have mario and luigi waste a few seconds while they patch things up hitting up and down shifts gears automatic isn't exactly my specialty but this wasn't difficult if you collect enough h icons then you get a special temporary highest gear alright we're going hot i just love the air that you can get off the hills it's crazy how this more primitive 3d scaling trick allows for such varied terrain as opposed to the flat mode 7 racers we got on snes overall short on content but still a fun 8-bit racer attack animal goku and literally attack animal academy was the first famicom 3d cart that i came across i was so fascinated by its completely ridiculous label art that i just had to give it a shot note to publishers if your artwork features alligators falling from the sky i will play your game well what we've got here is the most blatant space harrier rip-off imaginable i mean look at this so you're this school girl flying around for some reason shooting a gun at kangaroos skeletons with sunglasses and yes flying alligators the first boss is a koala dressed like a 1920s gangster i mean that's amazing but starting with the level 2 boss the game feels like it's already blown the best of its absurdity and it also becomes nearly unplayable due to how difficult it is to dodge the sheer number and speed of the things hurtling toward you at all times it's even worse considering the game has no continues i had to resort to playing on the retron 5 with save states to record all of the footage that i wanted which seriously diminished my enjoyment of the game and of course the 3d effect only works on original hardware it looks pretty good though the sprite scaling isn't smooth enough to completely sell the effect of enemies and shots coming at you attack animal gokulan is an interesting oddity but even if it had continues that wouldn't have saved it from its troublesome aiming and cluttered boss fights the 3d battles of world runner in north america 3d world runner came packaged with a pair of red and blue 3d glasses kind of like these but in japan it was released on the famicom disk system and is compatible with the 3d system the japanese title is tobadasi daisokusa or operation jumpout 3d world runner was developed by a young and struggling square designed by hironobu takaguchi composed by nabu oymatsu and programmed by nasser jabelli the team that would go on to create final fantasy since i'm playing the nes cartridge adapted to the famicom hitting the select button won't activate the shutter effect on the 3d visor to be honest the red and blue 3d effect in the north american version doesn't really seem to work for me 3d world runner certainly has an interesting look it's very colorful and fanciful you can speed up and slow down by holding up or down on the d-pad and you just run forward dodging enemies you'll fly around and shoot a giant snake boss at the end of stages space harrier style it's not a terrible game but i was getting really frustrated and losing interest in world 2. upon restarting i discovered that bumping into columns is a good thing well it's kind of funny but this is how you get power ups but don't grab mushrooms those will kill you this kind of renewed my interest in the game for a bit but then there were these horrible giant gaps in world 3 and i felt i'd had enough it's certainly an interesting game and i don't hate it but i don't feel compelled to play much more sakaguchi and his crew weren't done with 3d yet rad racer may be best known for its appearance and infamous power glove scene in the wizard but the japanese version highway star features support for the famicom 3d system highway star actually released before 3d hot rally and has a really excellent sense of speed and i feel like superior perspective scaling the controls are also a lot simpler but that doesn't mean it's easier with 8 visually varied stages and no second chances getting to the end of highway star is a daunting task thankfully it does have a simple continue cheat and a level select code if you want to practice any course similar to 3d hot rally you're not actually racing against other cars on the track but just trying to hit checkpoints without running out of time there's really not much to say about highway star rad racer but it is strangely fun the 3d perspective is excellent and the 3d visor effect works fairly well though i feel it adds little in the way of improved depth perception the car just has a great feel to it and is really a pleasure to control i can see the appeal for 80s kids who couldn't drive just yet but that's not all from square you know the famous story about how sakaguchi's games prior to final fantasy hadn't sold all that well well square was the only company to create more than one 3d system title let alone three sakaguchi's last game prior to final fantasy was a sequel to 3d world runner released only in japan as jj this is intended to be like a dark and more hardcore version of tobadossi daisakusen gone are the cute and colorful enemies and there's only one speed fast and yet i found the game to actually be quite a bit more compelling the single speed made it easier to get into a groove and the large gaps that made world 3 so frustrating in the first game actually became somewhat manageable in jj 1ups are more plentiful and overall it just comes across as a better game i get the sense that there's a bit of intentional humor here the tough and gritty atmosphere is almost over the top and it kinda clashes with the goofy gameplay is it just me or does jumping jack kinda look like big boss the quality of the 3d effect is also one of the finest on the famicom 3d system i didn't finish and i imagine it would eventually frustrate me to no wind but if i do put more time into a world runner game this will be the one [Music] falgen is a famicom disk system game developed by konami now i'm pretty sure those guys knew how to make a space shooter yeah oh geez now i've never seen a starry space background like this before and with good reason the graphics look even worse in 3d just like with the 3ds dark scenes tend to show 3d ghosting more easily than bright colors this is especially problematic because it's supposed to look like your ship is popping out in front of the screen which totally threw off my ability to focus on the rest of the image the screen darkening that's inherent from viewing through the visor also makes the dark shot you're supposed to dodge extremely difficult to see thankfully the background does change after the first level and you do have a few continues but the perspective and scaling was so poor that i never found myself having any fun and i didn't make it very far [Music] alright cosmic epsilon now this game looks pretty rad good luck whoa does that voice take up half the cart hey actually this one seems pretty good and listen to this music it sounds straight out of mario galaxy i later learned that this is actually a straight-up cover of a japanese pop song called parachute lemon no idea if they went through the proper channels but it's super catchy i really like the look of this game i think the textured ground effect is pretty great and watch how the perspective shifts slightly left and right with your character that's neat the 3d effect in cosmic epsilon is probably the best on the system thanks to the generally bright graphics and surprisingly smooth enemy scaling aiming is also easier than in felgian or attack animal cocoon but sadly just like attack animal cocoon what starts off looking super promising becomes almost impossible by the second level this is not a particularly short game and the difficulty ramps up to the extreme very quickly it has no continues and exceedingly scarce opportunities for extra lives without any sort of upgrade system or more robust dodge mechanics to balance out this level of challenge cosmic epsilon is far too difficult to be much fun past the first level and that's a real shame because by playing on the retron 5 i got to see some pretty cool stuff check out the last level on the battle moon aria how awesome is that and who knew the nes could pull off an amazing death star trench run with just a few smart tweaks this could have been a real hidden gem i guess developers were having a hard time coming up with ideas for 3d visuals other than shooters racers and runners well we've got one more 3d game and this one is actually quite a bit different fun shaolin something well it's a fighting game by gelecko it even has a two-player mode seems maybe kind of advanced for its time i'm gonna be honest with you i have absolutely no skill in this genre so i can't fairly praise or condemn it but it seems like it might be kind of neat there's story scenes that i can't read at all but i like how there's actually branching paths that determine what fight comes next but man the computer just tears me to shreds in no time at all and i was never able to pull off any of the fancy moves that i think the manual is detailing as you might expect all the 3d does in this game is make the backgrounds look like they're farther away it's kind of neat to see 3d used in more of a mundane manner even if it doesn't really add anything to the game at all so that's all of the games that support the famicom 3d system i wish i could say more good things about them but sadly most of them are flawed to some greater or lesser degree my top recommendation is 3d hot rally which is pretty neat regardless of whether you're using the 3d visor or not so yeah maybe not the best selection of games and you know sure the technology is a bit dated and it's more of a novelty than a gameplay enhancer but it is amazing to see something like this from that time and it does actually work [Applause] [Music] when rare and nintendo released goldeneye for the n64 it defied all expectations a movie license that not only showed how a first-person shooter could be done right on home console but also pushed the genre forward in its own way goldeneye was the first first person shooter to ever pique my interest it also served as a gateway for getting me into the bond films at the time it was considered a travesty in the nintendo world when rare was not developing the game based on tomorrow never dies and it was going to be a playstation game to boot but nintendo fans weren't completely out of luck a game boy game simply called james bond 007 released only half a year after goldmine i remember it being pretty decent and i would expect that a lot of people did play it but absolutely no one ever talks about it so let's revisit james bond on the game boy [Music] [Applause] james bond 0007 was developed by utah-based developer sapphire and released by nintendo in early 1998. i'm sure many people ignored it because it wasn't something on the level of a handheld goldmine but it does draw inspiration from a very worthy source anyone who's played the gameboy zelda games will see that the base gameplay is heavily inspired by link's awakening a winning formula if ever there was one the plot is extremely basic bond is on a mission to uncover an arms cartel starting in china the game takes double 07 to the middle east africa tibet and russia what's fun is that despite the game being developed during the pierce brosnan era james bond on the game boy features a non-specific bond and feels more like the world of the 60s and 70s bond films sure they could have done better than recycling odd job and jaws as henchmen and why are they so freaking huge but all the same i do get the sense that the developers had fun getting a chance to work in the bond universe bond drops a few lame puns and there's even some q lab gags and the music is pretty great nothing wrong with overusing the bond motif if you ask me [Music] your first objective is kind of silly and very video gamey you have to find a carpenter's hammer so he can repair a bridge maybe a bit out of place in the world of james bond but this is largely a game about gathering information and figuring out how to get what you want out of people which is kind of a good idea for a bond game don't you think i mean sure bond has a license to kill but with most of his games having been shoot em ups of some form or other this puzzle and mystery solving element feels like it gets at an important facet of bond that the shooter format doesn't do as well in fact combat is definitely the game's weakest aspect though bond has a pistol and a few other guns they're a bit difficult to use you pick up a shield very late in the game but otherwise there's not much you can do to protect yourself in a gun fight other than awkwardly dodging and abusing hitboxes fighting against melee type enemies is a much more pleasant experience though a bit too simple to be interesting bond's melee weapons are only his fists and a machete which interestingly enough can be used to cut grass just like in zelda melee is probably the easiest way to fight in most situations even against enemies with guns just equip a bulletproof vest and charge on in hacking away it's actually kind of bizarre when you really stop to think about it like really a machete that's not very bond like enemy encounters actually get very difficult and tedious toward the end of the game and i found that this was the easiest way to cut through [Music] you'd think that q's gadgets would be just an excellent fit for a zelda clone but unfortunately the potential is mostly squandered new items don't open up the gameplay in any meaningful ways an electrified keychain is automatically used once in a very specific situation the laser watch is only useful on a couple of doors and that's it there's simply just not much you can do with the majority of your inventory bond eventually ends up in russia a throwback to the series cold war era by this point in my replay i started to find the game to be so frustrating that i actually had to visit the old nintendo power shelf and whip out issue 105 the later stages just devolved into thoughtless enemy-filled mazes bond finally encounters the metal gear riding mastermind behind the arms cartel general golgoth not to be confused with general gogol of the films after stopping golgoth's missile launch bond takes villain turned ally zhong may on a slow boat to china despite a promising first half that does a good job of turning the information and mystery solving aspects of bond into a simplified game boy format the frustrating second half of the game relies on obtuse mazes and far too much combat for a game that really isn't designed for it but it's those good parts that i mostly remembered from my initial playthrough almost 18 years ago sadly i can't say that it's an unexpected game boy gem like i wish i could have but it certainly does show great potential i mean who would have thought mixing up bond and zelda i think if someone did it better one day that might be the best bond game yet from its release in 1989 the game boy stormed the market and became the portable gaming unit to have no longer were you confined to your living room if you wanted to enjoy some good old nintendo gaming as the years went on the game boy name would persevere and we'd see the hardware upgraded and replaced with more powerful options culminating with the game boy advance in 2001 in 2006 nintendo would license the game boy advanced hardware to a us-based company called visteon who specialized in automobile entertainment technology this partnership would result in a portable dvd player that featured the ability to play gba games the vistion dacable entertainment system featuring game boy advance [Applause] [Laughter] [Music] at the winter consumer electronics show in 2006 this theon corporate announced their partnership with nintendo to integrate game boy advanced hardware into their line of portable dvd players while this wasn't exactly a uncommon occurrence for nintendo this would mark the first time they'd allow someone else to use their tech in a portable device up to this point we'd only seen things like the lodge net n64 which was special hardware used to play nintendo 64 games in hotel rooms after a small delay the vistian dockable entertainment system featuring game boy advance or as i like to call it the visteon would see released in july of 2006. right off the bat this device had a number of challenges stacked against it first it was only available to purchase through a couple of different car manufacturers such as bmw and nissan on top of that it'd run you over twelve hundred dollars it's important to realize that by the time this device was announced the nintendo ds was already a year and a half into its life cycle by the time it was released the ds lite was already available in most countries the dockable entertainment system looks like your standard portable dvd player that was fairly common in the mid-2000s a clamshell design sleek silver exterior and an lcd screen i don't know if it's just me but all these things tended to look exactly the same on the right rear side of the screen you'll find a cartridge slot along with an input for connecting a link cable for some two-player action if you're hoping to also play your older game boy carts then you're out of luck game boy and game boy colors won't even fit in the slot turn on the unit hit the input aux button and whatever game boy game you have inserted will boot right away the built-in screen has three levels of brightness which can only be increased using the included dvd remote control the games retain their 3 2 aspect ratio but leave a bit of the screen empty more on that in a minute [Music] included with the device is this bad boy um yeah i guess this controller looks like kind of a mess but it's actually fairly usable it uses an infrared signal to connect wirelessly to the vistion so it has to be fairly in line with at least one of the three ir receivers on the unit it's definitely easy to lose the signal but then again this thing wasn't exactly designed for living room play the d-pad on this controller was clearly inspired by the original duke xbox controller but not quite as extreme the button layout is actually pretty neat too it has your general a and b buttons arranged like they are on a game boy advance while below you have a giant gamecube controller style a button this allows for thumb rocking between the buttons like you'd get with say an snes controller going between y and b it works great on the back side you have your l and r buttons and these things are pretty much the worst because they're so low on the controller they can be hard for any adult to reach without contorting your hand weirdly but you know to be fair the l r buttons were really only easy to use on the first gba model anyways the vistian does house real game boy advanced hardware and as a result it plays almost exactly like you'd expect from using nintendo's own game boy player with a gamecube on your hd tv but the big question on your mind is how do these games look well long story short don't expect this to be some super secret best way to play your game boy advance games the gba's 240 by 160 resolution is scaled up a bit but it's blurry and doesn't come close to filling the screen it's a shame that there's no option to scale further since the screen's 800x480 resolution could have allowed for a perfect 3x scale so what we're left with is a lot of unused screen real estate the screen quality itself isn't too bad with just a little bit of ghosting if you want to fill the screen just a bit more hitting the screen button on the unit will stretch the image horizontally sure this butchers the game's intended look but i'm surprised i didn't take it even further because the dvd mode offers a number of video calibration settings and multiple zoom options unlike nintendo's own game boy player there's no options for borders around the image now i've never been a big fan of that kind of thing but it's surprising because this unit's target audience would probably be annoyed by the amount of unused space but that's not all on the side of the unit is a 3.5 millimeter jack that can output both composite and s-video so you can hook the dockable entertainment system up to the tv for some big screen action an optional video output cable was sold by visteon but the unit that we borrowed didn't include one so i had to find a workaround for it using a variety of cables i was able to make it work connected to a tv the vistion only outputs an interlaced signal which is about what i expected without any sort of component video cables available 480p is impossible and i guess 240p was too much to wish for right away you'll see the telltale signs of composite video the rainbowing and dot crawl all over the screen are typical issues with this low quality video signal on hdtvs although it's possible that the issues were worsened due to my custom cabling situation hooking up s-video gets an immediate improvement i've always felt that the jump from composite to s video was pretty huge in terms of video quality and that's pretty apparent here the rainbowing is gone and the dot crawl is at a minimum this looks surprisingly good if a bit blurry comparing the vistan's output of composite and s video to a game boy player using a set of the expensive gamecube component cables and nintendo's official software yields some interesting results the gbp is obviously a bit crisper and displays a progressive image but it's so much darker i have to admit this isn't quite the decisive victory i originally thought it was going to be connecting the vistion to a crt television reveals a much more appropriate experience the interlaced image looks really good with even composite looking worlds better of course s-video is superior but it can be tough to find a crt with s-video on it these days since i had it set up i took a look at how fast the built-in screen really is by comparing it to a crt as you can see there isn't a whole lot of lag between the output and the built-in screen either what's impressive is that the game boy advances three to two aspect ratio is preserved with video output unlike some other alternatives like the super retro advanced adapter for snes regardless the vistion is in no way the best way to play your gba games on your tv homebrew applications like the gameboy interface for the gamecube gameboy player offer vastly superior experiences by displaying gba games at a more fitting resolution of 240p and displaying excellent colors if you're curious about the game boy interface and a bunch of other options for playing these games on your tv then check out rgb 208 of our rgb master class here on my life and gaming so okay yeah this is all above and beyond what this unit was originally designed for you're supposed to take it on a trip play it in your car and when you got to your destination you take it out and plug it into your main tv so what about the whole portable aspect of this thing you know the dockable part of the dockable entertainment system this dock was made to be mounted to the roof of your vehicle once you lock the vision into this thing it will cause the image on the screen to flip over since i don't have a car that this will fit in let's just pretend and flip this thing over that works right the dock doesn't really offer too many benefits although it does have a composite input so that you can hook other consoles into it as well doing so with an older game console like the snes yield some actually decent results if you don't mind having the image stretched you cannot make the screen show what resolution is displaying but look at that it's not interlacing progressive content at all lcd tvs generally tend to read the 240p resolution of older game consoles as 480i causing some really nasty side effects it handles the 240p test suites drop shadow test like a champ but it's just too bad this has to be you know upside down to use this feature the vistion also included a nice pair of wireless headphones that can be used when it's docked they're not exactly the most comfortable things ever but they do sound pretty good and they can get pretty loud finally when docked you'll of course be able to charge the battery the dock feeds off the power of the vehicle but if you wanted to charge it outside of the dock then you might run into some issues like the video output cable vistian also sold a proprietary ac adapter for charging outside of the dock separately this adapter tends to be pretty difficult to find these days but you can engineer your own by using a generic 12 volt 3000 ma power block and a psp size connector strip off the input end of the power block and connect it to the input and there you go a totally portable game boy advance [Music] we want to thank ross attack on twitter for allowing us to take a look at his visteon dockable entertainment system for this video it's an obscure bit of game boy history and we're glad that we were able to showcase it the vistian tends to be pretty rare and expensive these days which makes sense since there were limited ways to purchase it in the first place while offers no real advantages over the multiple ways to play your gba games it is a pretty neat footnote to its [Music] [Applause] legacy in 2017 boutique retro console maker analog released the nt mini an nes and famicom alternative that uses modern technology and smart engineering in a way that makes it fundamentally different from software emulators and traditional clone consoles now in 2018 we've got our hands on the next logical step the super nt which despite being much more powerful comes in at less than half the cost of the nt mini analog was confident enough to let us spend a month and a half putting the final hardware through its paces providing us with all variations for review and we even had a chance to go behind the scenes with fpga engineer kevin horton [Music] [Applause] [Music] absolute cycle accuracy everything happens in real time all the timing latencies it's as close as you can get to original hardware on something modern back in the early 90s i was hoping someone would come up with a chip like an fpga it started with the commodore 64. at a time when information about programming and computer hardware was hard to come by kevin horton known online as kevtris got his start with projects like building his own eprom programmer and turning an old printer into a vector plotter i always really liked the commodore 64 music and i was thinking of ways to kind of generate it or save it this idea led captures to create many devices that could play back game music in a hardware accurate fashion but mostly for his own enjoyment this is where fpgas come in an fpga is a digital integrated circuit that is fully customizable capable of being written and rewritten into whatever configuration is needed and then installed into a mass-produced circuit board the decreasing cost of fpgas in recent years has now made it possible for capturists to distribute his work without the need to build complex devices made up of countless components the fpga itself can even work as the sum of the parts of a pre-existing hardware configuration such as a game console and potentially add features on top of that i wanted to develop an fpga video game system 10 years ago but no one was gonna pay you know that was that was my big problem is up until now you know nobody's really wanted to pay the price for us systems with the emergence of systems like the avs by retro usb this sort of hardware has finally become accessible to the broader retro gaming community analog sought out captures experience for their own fpga based nes and famicom console the nt mini the end result was actually the long-awaited implementation of nes fpga work that ketchus had completed years earlier i pretty much finished it in about 2005 or six so it's pretty pretty much what was done back then that nsf player that was put in way back then so i'm happy that finally got released you know so people can actually use that because that was an internal thing for me only as the original systems age and become more difficult to maintain over the coming decades many feel that fpgas could be the future of preserving classic games in a hardware accurate environment for now we'll just have to see where this path leads while no one can be certain that captchas work is 100 faithful to the originals his attention to detail cannot be doubted the nt-mini for example replicates every component of the nes all the way down to the exact pattern of its messy composite output if that's how you actually want to play it while incredible things have been done in the world of software emulation only a hardware solution like an fpga can interact with a cartridge at the same pace as original hardware you can do cycle accurate but you can't do the same type of latency usually on an emulator everything's processed in batches the problem is is you have to read the cartridge periodically you know pretty much you can't bulk read memory because it's too slow you know the rom is only going to give you the data at that rate [Music] everyone assumed that analog's next system would be an fpga with a super nintendo core or at least that's what they were hoping for given the huge jump in complexity from the nes to snes captures thought he couldn't deliver a finished product with an analog's desired timetable but he surprised even himself and developed a fully functioning snes core in only six months you break it down into the smallest parts possible and then you work on each part one at a time to identify issues with each piece he reverse engineered captures paired up his fpga versions with original snes chips on test boards if something wasn't working right he knew exactly which piece needed more work the pp was a pushover i was kind of disappointed actually as with most game consoles snes systems can be quite different on the inside even if they look similar on the outside around 1995 nintendo made sweeping changes to how the snes console would be manufactured going forward because they consolidated cpu and ppu functions into a single chip these boards are labeled one chip they're highly coveted in the retro gaming community for their significantly sharper video output compared to earlier systems however there are some trade-offs namely overblown video levels and minor glitches that show up in a small handful of titles they may be super nintendo's but some consider them to be official clone consoles the super nt then being based on the earlier chip design is almost a paradox some might argue that it's more of a true snes than some of nintendo's own machines it's based on a 213 model which is a rev2 cpu rev1 pp1 and a rev3 pp2 which is the by far the most common ironically super turrican the director's cup being one of two factor five games included with the super nt is known for severe sound glitches on one ship consoles flash cars like the super everdrive and super ufo are supported there has been a lot of discussion recently about poorly designed flashcards or reproduction cards and whether they could damage your consoles but keptress isn't worried oh it won't hurt the super nt even the msu one chip and the popular sc to snes works which allows for streaming audio and other impressive feats i couldn't believe it worked it does in fact catchers didn't have to do anything special to get unusual cartridges to interface with the super nt i have the tsufami turbo that works the game saver plus work doctor sf6 worked basically anything i plugged in there's worked i've tested all the expansion chips i actually bought all those cartridges off of ebay to test those speaking of cartridges the nes slot on the nt-mini was exceedingly temperamental at least on our unit but the super nt has given us absolutely no trouble with any cartridge that was at least passively clean we did report a few issues during our own pre-release testing the most difficult issues that kept us ran into during development involved games using direct memory access or dma functions in ways that are fundamentally broken but ended up working anyway you know my dma was too too good so i had um you know so i play a game and you know something wouldn't be right and then i'd have to look through and figure out why and come to find out most of the time it was because um the game did something with the dma that it wasn't supposed to do thankfully keptress was able to address these problems well before the super nt hardware was in our hands he has also fixed the scant few visual and audio glitches that we discovered with the one exception being some curious behavior with the hi-res mode and japanese exclusive marvelous but he now has the cartridge and is on the case we checked several other games that used the snes high-res graphics and did not encounter any similar issues as the super nt is tested by thousands of other snes fans it could still take a bit of time before bugs are squashed as thoroughly as with high-end software emulators like higan which had the advantage of having been around for many years but based on what we've seen virtually every game already seems to work exactly like you'd hope it's gonna be very very minor stuff i did a fairly extensive testing days and days running all the games [Music] eliminating lag in every aspect of the system was one of the key goals of the super nt as well as the nt mini the input latency is identical to original systems because the controllers are read in the same way so there's zero latency there there's no usb overhead for example there's no operating system overhead and then the video rendering is all in real time so with the zero lag mode everything is all in sync with the video generation so there's no lag of course one big difference between the nt mini and the super nt is the newer system is hdmi only the cos adding analog was just dumb you know too much you'd have to have a dac and then the connectors and it made the system bigger too however thanks to the fact that there's no delay between the render and the hdmi port analog has a unique opportunity to turn well analog output into an external option instead analog is planning to release an adapter that takes a proprietary signal from the hdmi ports of their own consoles and turn it into the same quality of 240p analog signal that the nt-mini's built-in port provides which is good news for light gun fans the super scope would work on that honestly we can't argue against a decision to provide analog as an external option because the best thing about the super nt is that they managed to squeeze it down to just under 200 well under half of the nt mini's 450 yeah i mean that's not exactly peanuts but it also means a lot more people can get their hands on it and if fpgas really are to become a revolution in how retro games are played then price and accessibility must be top [Music] priorities the super nt has a bigger fpga and more ram than the nt mini which makes possible many features that we felt were missing from its predecessor if you're not a fan of the newfangled font choose alternate font in the system menu for a more traditional sort of retro text you can also change menu animations led behavior and more you can choose between ntsc and pal in the hardware menu pal cartridges may refuse to load if the system is set to ntsc but interestingly once it's booted you can switch regions which adjust the speed in real time so you can run pal carts at a smooth 60 hertz however don't get too excited because if gameplay was adjusted for a pal version then it will play too fast in ntsc mode and likewise ntsc carts will play too slow in pal mode but you may be able to use ntsc mode to run certain unoptimized pal versions in a manner similar to their ntsc counterparts but more to the point let's dig into video settings resolution options run the expected gamut of 480p through 1080p 4k really isn't doable right now there's no chips that support it that's 20 pixels per second thankfully so long as your 4k tv does a good job of upscaling 1080p or 720p the results are still quite good in fact you may want to choose 720p over 1080p specifically if you're a fan of the scanline look as is the case with many retro upscaling techniques the super nt scanline thickness looks a bit more authentic in 720p and the softness feels more crt like the gamma boost is a nice new feature that we had specifically wished was in the nt mini this helps compensate for the darkened image when using the scan lines feature be sure to set a vertical integer scale or else the scan line spacing will be screwed up you can adjust this in the screen size menu which offers some basic height and aspect ratio presets although at this time we feel the list needs some tweaks and additional options that we've suggested and hope might be implemented the good news is that there is a way to scale the image however you like independent of the screen size menu but before we get into that we have to talk about integer scaling and interpolation in some ways integer scaling is not as crucial for the super nt as it is for similar systems including the nt mini the simplest way to upscale low res graphics is to use hard edged lines this is fine when each axis is scaled by an integer like 4x and 5x but to get the correct aspect ratio you would need a non-integer scale due to uneven pixel sizing this can cause shimmering as the screen scrolls as demonstrated here by the nes classic edition thankfully nintendo themselves fixed this with the super nintendo classic edition by adding interpolation to the horizontal axis which results in smooth scrolling at the correct aspect ratio and the super nt's upgraded fpga allowed kentriss to implement his own version the scalar in there i spent about a month and a half developing it so it's it's kind of like a framemeister and more in short interpolation calculates missing states between defined values the end result in this case is that the horizontal and vertical axes are interpolated so that instead of varying pixel sizes each line has just a slightly soft edge so that all rows and columns appear uniform this means that you can use say 4.5 x vertical sizing with the correct 4x3 aspect ratio and get absolutely no shimmery kevtris tells us that interpolation was for him a high priority feature and by our estimation the implementation is very high quality making it we feel the most important graphical feature of the super nt and one that we hope to see on all of analog and keptress's work going forward you can by the way disable interpolation the scalar menu when we first received the super nt it was a single toggle for both axes but they implement a bit of our feedback and the firmware available at launch has separate toggles for horizontal and vertical interpolation at 1080p disabling vertical interpolation has almost no perceptible effect but at 720p as well as 480p it is quite nice to disable only vertical interpolation to get sharp edged lines while still enjoying shimmer-free scrolling [Music] since most footage in this episode was recorded at 1080p we decided to leave interpolation enabled for both horizontal and vertical axes so that we could take full advantage of the system's advanced scaling features which you can access by activating the advanced mode toggle which brings us even more fun and excitement alongside multiple extra options screen size is replaced by width and height since we left interpolation on there's no reason for us to not fill the screen however we like here are the settings we dialed in which completely fills the vertical 1080p space in games with no letterboxes perfectly centers every game we tested and the aspect ratio is based on my pvm 20l5 if you want to turn off interpolation for a sharper image and use integer scales instead we recommend a height of 1200 and a width of 1536 or a height of 960 with a width of 1280. the extra features menu has a few toggles that make minor alterations to snes rendering behavior to improve visuals in specific situations the most interesting is pseudo high res blending sometimes the snes 512 pixel wide mode might be used as a striped pattern on a overlapping layer on a consumer grade crt this might blend to look like a sort of transparency but the super nt can turn it into true transparency which works great in kirby's dreamland 3. none of the features of the super nt do anything like reduce slowdown for better or worse slowdown appears to occur in just the same way as a real snes right after interpolation we'd say that the most exciting new feature to the super nt that the nt-mini could not have are buffer options by default zero delay is enabled what this means is that there is absolutely no delay on the hdmi output everything is rendered and output in real time so if you have a low lag tv or monitor then you can get a nearly crt like experience but there is a quirk to the zero delay mode that is also shared by the nt mini and high def nes the nes and snes both run at a speed a bit over 60 hertz the oss reads it as 60.08 hertz which isn't a problem at all in the analog realm but to ensure maximum compatibility with digital displays the super nt actually runs a bit down clocked so they can hit an even 60 hertz it's not something that any human being is likely to actually perceive i mean over the course of 10 minutes the super nt loses only about one second but it is a small thing that makes it just the teensiest touch removed from original hardware well there's a frame buffer now so a frame buffer gives me a lot more options by choosing fully buffered the super nt runs at the snes as original slightly faster than 60hz speed while still outputting an even 60 hertz there are two small trade-offs first a bit of lag that is never more than one frame it varies from zero to 16 milliseconds and wraps it's a it's a sawtooth second a frame must be dropped approximately every 10 seconds to stay matched up to the 60 hertz output an alternative is single buffer which is supposed to be less lag but rather than dropping a frame causes a screen tear to roll up the screen about every 10 seconds instead audio options are pretty simple if you're using a cartridge with analog audio passthrough then you need to activate the analog to digital converter manually to our knowledge this is only relevant for two types of cartridges the previously mentioned sd2snes with its msu-1 chip and the super gameboy the super gameboy itself is responsible for the game's audio processing which is passed through the cartridge is analog if the cartridge audio were not activated then you'd only hear sounds that are processed by the snes [Music] with cartridge audio activated you may hear a fair bit of noise most noticeable on silent screens [Music] you're hearing the cpu bus noise on the super game boys what you're hearing you can hear it on a regular game boy if you have headphones and turn it up you can hear it too it is much harder to hear this noise when playing with analog output on a real snes but if you balance the cartridge audio with your sound system volume you can hopefully find a satisfactory balance between audible game sound and low noise levels [Music] it's really fascinating to consider the super game boy when it comes to the super nt seen as how it's real game boy hardware in a cartridge whether you play through an snes or a super nt you're still playing a true game boy to get the correct sizing for game boy games you should set the super nt to a square pixel aspect ratio like 5x vertical and 5x horizontal something that's actually a bit easier to achieve here compared to analog output from a real snes but as you may know there are some drawbacks to the super gameboy in terms of accuracy it was designed to use a crystal oscillator to run at a game boy's true speed but to save cost the final product derives its speed from the snes system clock instead the result is that game boy games run faster than intended and you may notice frequent stutters as the screen scrolls however the japan exclusive super game boy 2 greatly alleviates these problems by including the crystal oscillator to not only run the game boy hardware at the correct speed but also reduce stuttering significantly this is interesting for the super nt for two reasons first while the original super game boy is controlled by the cartridge bus and the super nt just as with a real snes in this case losing just a bit of speed in the zero lag mode but not much super game boy 2 speed is completely unaffected by the super nt system making it a totally accurate original game boy hardware solution second the super game boy 2 stutters even less when played in the super nt's zero lag mode there is still a frame hitch every several seconds game boy speed just doesn't quite sync up to 60 hertz but our tests showed that it is less frequent than on a real snes regardless of your feelings over whether an fpga is as valid as original hardware this still qualifies as a true gameboy hardware setup that in this case performs just a bit better via the super nt and at the correct speed we can't help but wish that maybe in the future we could see the ability to scale up to 7x for game boy games or perhaps even some super game boy optimized modes to eliminate stutter altogether it feels like there's potential here to make the ultimate interface for playing pre-game boy color titles with real hardware on your tv if analog and kevtris wanted to make it happen of course the super nt has only just been released so we're hopeful that its features will be refined and expanded upon as time goes on oh yeah there's plenty of extra space on that fpga which is nice so on the nt mini i ran out of space the super famicom was released nearly 30 years ago more than ancient in computing terms it may have some of the most revered and polished 2d games ever made but you have to wonder if the guy who finished reverse engineering it even likes it it's really awesome hardware i think i mean they did a very very good job of it yeah i i can't easily go back to nes so much anymore so no i think this is about the peak for a 2d system i would say would be the peak but does it have blast processing the cpu bus is eight bits you know on the genesis it's 16 bits but you know it can execute memory reads and writes every single cycle in the genesis it takes eight cycles to do it the snes does have 16-bit video if you consider that two 8-bit vrams work in parallel but just how far can we take fpga gaming hardware playstation one neo geo that would be about it one of the systems that seems to be on everyone's mind the n64 with fantasies of hardware accurate fpga consoles that might even render at a higher resolution or with better frame rates but even if an fpga were powerful enough to do it one day you might not want to hold your breath it would be very difficult i think the problem is is the complexity you know goes up a lot much much more complicated in the right hands fpga-based game consoles offer perhaps the most exciting alternatives to the real thing while offering modern conveniences but no matter how archaic a system may be captures remains doggedly committed to accuracy i replicate hardware behavior i don't try to ask why it does it i just say this is how it does it captures mom and whether he might see a return of his personal jailbreak firmware that he released for the nt mini which made it possible to load roms and other 8-bit cores that he had already developed definitely a significant added value regardless of whether an unofficial feature like that materializes for the super nt we're already impressed with analog's new direction and hope that this trend continues through feature hardware compact portable great mechanical feel to the cartridge slot and controller ports and optional analog support the super nt feels like a collection of smart ideas and small tweaks to add up to a more sensible and affordable piece of tech so all we want to know now is what's [Music] [Applause] next resident evil resident evil has got to be one of my top five favorite video game series but during the 90s resident evil games were something that i watched friends play thinking i wouldn't enjoy them myself it wasn't until the gamecube remake of the original resident evil arguably the best remake in gaming history that i started to really get into the series this remake has since had an excellent hd remake of its own but did you know that the original resident evil the basis for the remake was supposedly during early development itself intended to be a remake of sorts of another capcom game which was a video game adaptation of a 1989 japanese horror film this is sweet home the 8-bit forerunner of the survival horror genre and the inspiration for resident evil [Music] [Applause] in january 1989 sweet home was released to theaters in japan in the years since it's fallen into obscurity with as far as i can tell no official dvd release and tracking down a legitimate vhs available for import is nearly impossible the film follows a documentary crew into the dilapidated mansion of the late ichiro mamiya a famous fresco artist whose work they aim to preserve and share with the world but the crew is soon tormented by the violent ghost of mamiya's wife who went insane before her death over the loss of their son it's certainly not a bad movie but director kiyoshi kurosawa is said to have disowned it over meddling by the producer juzo itami itami also produced a video game called sweet home with capcom concrete information on its development is hard to come by and it's difficult to say whether sweet home the video game was conceived as an adaptation of the film or alongside the film as part of a multimedia project directed by capcom's tokuro fujiwara creator of ghosts and goblins and bionic commando sweethome creates its own identity using the plot points of the film as only a very loose basis it was released on the famicom in december 1989. likely due to its gruesome subject matter that nintendo of america wouldn't have allowed during the nes days sweet home never left japan thankfully it has a fully playable fan translation released by gaijin productions in 2000 which makes it popular as a reproduction cartridge i played the fan translation via my japanese famicom cartridge on the retron 5. the main cast is the same as the film and each has a special tool which well some are accurate to the film and others are a bit of a stretch producer kazuo has a lighter akiko is portrayed as a nurse with a medical kit cameraman taguchi has a camera art restoration specialist asuka has a vacuum cleaner and kazuo's daughter emmy carries around a key that unlocks many of the mansion's doors wait a minute isn't this like whoa whoa in the original resident evil chris redfield has a lighter jill valentine is the master of unlocking and rebecca chambers is the medic whoa so what do we do with these last two well what if the cast of sweet home actually inspired more than just capcom's games everyone thinks of ghostbusters when they see luigi's mansion but what if the vacuum cleaner actually came from sweet home and the camera the let's say fatal frame the default names are kind of hard for me to keep track of so how about this chris becca mio luigi and love it pretty sure we swapped up a few genders there but whatever all right let's get gl why is everything spinning oh wait okay so the screen doesn't actually turn upside down but sweet home does have an unusual take on the top-down perspective with the sprites rotating based on which direction they're i've never seen another game do this but i got used to it easily enough unlike resident evil sweet home is actually a straight up jrpg capcom's first though the interface takes some getting used to the five characters can build parties of up to three what makes this interesting is that you can never have two perfect and balanced parties there's always going to be at least one group that you're a bit nervous to send wandering about the mansion let's call chris jill and becca team resident evil and art preservation experts mio and luigi team fresco you can switch characters at any time and anyone can be moved anywhere in the mansion either individually or as a group but don't wander too aimlessly because oh no oh geez oh geez oh geez that battle intro just gets me listen i just love how it builds the tension and feeds the uncertainty that almost any encounter could be against the most horrible creature so yes it's random encounters for the most part and super basic battle lack of a defend function is annoying but the most interesting thing is that other characters or groups can be called for help if they aren't too far away you can move them over to join the fight pretty cool but fighting monsters isn't to be taken lightly they can deal heavy damage cause horribly debilitating status effects which cause dire emergencies that only becca can cure and hp healing tonics are a limited resource you can only use what you find but they do fully heal everyone in a party while they aren't exceedingly rare you do have to manage hp very differently from your typical jrpg though i do have to admit once i got just a bit past the leveling curve about halfway through the game battles got kinda easy but you will get into other life-threatening situations than just losing hp in battle characters can sink into toxic goop or fall when crossing rickety boards oh hang in there luigi if no one can save them in time well they're dead that's right i'm talking about perma-death dang it luigi get it together if a character does die you can find items to replace their essential character specific tools much like resident evil inventory space is very limited and item management is a highlight of the gameplay each character can only hold one weapon and two items in addition to their special tool it's always a tough choice to take a newly discovered item leaving its place something else that you never know if you'll need later while i'm not completely convinced on the authenticity of sources saying that resident evil began as a remake of sweet home rather than simply a spiritual successor large parts of resident evil are undeniably faithful to its sweet home foundation like the famous door animations which cleverly hide load times well they were on the famicom too clearly not hiding load times also much of the story is revealed through documents scattered throughout the mansion i particularly like this one which speaks of this place as a house of residing evil whoa i'm sure it's just a bit of fun on the part of the fan translators but i gotta wonder what if the original japanese was warning you about biological hazards a few puzzles are pretty confusing with hints about where to go and what to do being vaguely worded at times the last bit of the game in particular devolved into scouring the entire mansion for items behind previously inaccessible rooms wish i'd taken notes upon finishing the game which took me about 12 hours you'll see a different ending depending on how many characters made it out of the mansion alive not only was sweet home way ahead of its time but it's still entertaining to this day it's a fascinating look at a rare example of a movie-inspired game having a much bigger impact than source material even though it is itself somewhat obscure due to its japanese exclusivity but no matter how you look at it there's no doubt that the survival horror genre owes a lot to this old famicom adventure starring chris jill becca mio and luigi i've had lots of favorite games over the years but sometimes i've questioned what my favorites really are it's still fun to think about but in recent years i've come to the conclusion that it's just too tough to pick favorites and i've mostly given up on having easy answers for them but if my life somehow depended on picking one favorite game of all time i've decided it's got to be super mario brothers 3. and why do i love it so much i don't know i just do i'm not going to pretend that i've got much else to add to the conversation on mario 3. but i love it so much that i decide i want to make it unique among my cart only nes and famicom collections so i bought a complete boxed copy of the north american version as well as the japanese version it's been a long time since i've had a chance to go through the paper materials of a game this old so let's take a look at these and remember how a classic from the early 90s presented itself [Music] [Applause] [Music] it's a beautiful box one of the most iconic ever the text on the back really makes you feel like this could be the biggest and most varied nes adventure imaginable and maybe it is but i'm kind of confused why it's hyping me up to go back to that last screen and get a mushroom like left and right screen scrolling maybe hardly a noteworthy feature in its time and hey look is this the origin of nintendo's insistence that maybe i should take a break whoa man this adventure's so big you'll never beat it without pausing i'd love to know more about how boxes were designed back in the day these screenshots aren't even straight and they have inconsistent light oh and this level doesn't even exist now when i took a look inside the box before buying i was sold the moment i discovered that not only did it have the manual but also a little nintendo power advertisement and an nes poster it's interesting to see a few games advertised that are hardly remembered nowadays i've never really thought that much about the extra inserts that come with a game but now that we rarely get anything more than ugly dlc slips if that well it kind of makes me appreciate it we're not going to see new stuff like this ever again i don't know it's a little sad check it out they even gave a taste of nintendo power's indispensable knowledge by sharing mario 3's most famous secret i wonder if my original copy had this insert because i sure didn't know about any of the warp whistles until at least some time after i'd had the game but the manual now this is something i remember this is probably one of the most polished nes manuals out there it's loaded with colorful artwork and gives a bit of personality to the characters i like this message from mario that it starts off with with the cool little tanooki stamp and here's the koopa kids now these guys have always been among my favorite characters in the mario universe and i can't tell you how happy i am that they've once again become a staple in modern mario games it was a long wait i love their distinctive designs and they appear throughout the manual with little word bubbles that give a bit of flavor for what's detailed on the page the koopa kids definitely made an impression and i really do have to applaud nintendo for doing them justice with their modern iterations because frankly the 8 and 16 bit representations never quite lived up to what my six-year-old self saw in the manual though i suppose we're supposed to call them koopalings these days and the text in this old manual is now considered inaccurate because this twerp is now bowser's only official child oh well the manual is over 40 pages maybe not the biggest ever but it's certainly large for a platformer it teases a ton of items back when mario 3 was new i wasn't into adventures like zelda yet so the sheer number of things you could collect and use really captured my imagination but man i sure don't remember the items looking this bad it's honestly kind of fascinating to see composite video in print form toward the end of the manual we're introduced to some of bowser's new minions or variations on the old bad guys that we hadn't seen before man i've always liked the blue thwomp's best and these things have a name you know rotodiscs though for the longest time i called them rotozidics or something like that this was also the first time ghosts appeared in mario's world a lot of people forget that they used to be called not just boo but boo diddly an homage to a musician just like the koopa kids though i certainly didn't know it at the time and at the end of the manual we get a nice little note from the mario 3 staff supposedly anyway while the packaging for the north american version goes for a bold and minimalist approach the famicom box is overloaded with detail it's a beautiful image that north american fans have had much fewer opportunities to ever see it's fun to see luigi toad and peach represent none of them even get a single bit of artwork in the north american manual i love how the koopalings are all running and tumbling down this hill from a fortress and bowser looks awesome and imposing but is also decidedly the weirdest part of the image black eyebrows blue eyes a flowing cape is that an eyeball under his chin am i misinterpreting something here did they plan another form for bowser that got cut well he has had black eyebrows before in japanese artwork but otherwise it's just so dang strange to see him appear so differently on artwork that is otherwise extremely consistent with everything else well i guess that flying blooper is weird too get out of here go bother someone in lost levels the japanese manual has just as many pages as the north american manual and for the most part presents pretty much the same information as far as i can tell though i'm not familiar with this weird picture of bowser's legs stomping mario i'm told that bowser is referring to himself in a particularly arrogant tone here a bit of characterization that's lost in the translation it's also worth noting that the koopalings didn't originally have individual names those were brought back to japan after the north american release of mario 3. the koopaling's little blurbs also seem to be fairly similar in content though there are some larger differences roy appears on a different page in the japanese manual and seems to think mario is a bit greedy collecting all of these items to use on the world map the manual even has a whole page with a really neat watercolor paint that i've not seen represented in exactly this form anywhere else the us manual really didn't give much attention to airships which are one of my favorite things in the game the japanese manual also has a letter from the game staff but there's a curious little ps at the bottom they hinted the existence of warped flutes as a way of apologizing for the lack of battery backup saves something that certainly surprises me because in western culture you'd never see official materials mention a missing feature let alone apologize for it it's been a lot of fun having a chance to look through these materials again and in some cases a few things i'd never seen before ever since games became overly tutorialized i'll admit that i've barely given most manuals even one glance for a couple of generations now and i've probably missed a lot of clever presentation and rarely seen artwork but now that stuff like this is all but gone i think it's important to preserve what we do have if you were born in the 80s then there's a pretty good chance that your first gaming memories were made with the nintendo entertainment system whether you call it the nes original nintendo or just nintendo there's no denying that this 8-bit machine and its amazing library played one of the biggest roles in evolving video games into an enduring cultural cornerstone for me the nes remains perhaps my most played retro console but it's certainly not without its flaws chief among them that it can only output composite video at best and that's not pretty especially on modern tvs nintendo loved to show giant pixelated sprites on the label art for its earlier nes titles but sadly the system just can't produce that kind of quality well not normally anyway let's take a look at what the nes hardware is really capable of welcome to rgb 202 [Music] [Applause] [Music] nintendo released the family computer better known as the famicom in japan in 1983. a redesigned and rebranded version of the hardware was then released in north america in 1985 as the nintendo entertainment system famously bringing home video games back to popularity following the american video game industry crash of 1983. the nes was also distributed in europe and other regions using the pal video standard where it faced much steeper competition from home computers like the commodore 64. the nes and famicom run on microprocessors developed by a japanese company called ricoh the picture processing unit or ppu provide the system with a palette of 54 colors displaying up to 25 colors at once most notably the nes lacks good options for yellow but the corrections for this through modification or emulation don't look all that great the nes color limitations are both a weakness as well as an accepted facet of each game's intended look as for the actual video output ricoh's nes ppu is only capable of generating composite video and as you know by now that means sub power quality and as if it needed to be any worse the original model the famicom only has one option for connecting to your tv a single cable pumping both audio and composite video through an rf modulator the nes on the other hand has an rca composite video port and a mono rca audio port on the right hand side of the system which produces better quality than rf however every nes shipped with an rf modulator and since televisions at the time commonly had no inputs other than for an rf signal that's how most people played their nes when nintendo released the model 2 or top loader nes in 1993 they actually removed the composite video output leaving rf is the only option which is a real shame because the top loader is known for being way more reliable at connecting with game cartridges and the old front loader the similarly designed famicom revision released in japan around the same time actually did the reverse it add the familiar av multi-out port that's used on the super nintendo n64 and gamecube giving japanese famicom fans an option other than rf for the first time ever this unit is commonly referred to as the av famicom but don't be fooled into thinking you can just plug any connection beyond composite and get a cleaner video signal it just doesn't work s video is sadly not an option still if you're interested in famicom cards this is absolutely the model to get for the everyday nes fan composite video using a standard rca cable is absolutely the way to go you can split the mono audio signal into two rca cables using a y adapter like this they cost something like 5 bucks using this method the image is certainly less noisy than rf but the edges are still pretty rough if you want something more let's take a look at how you can push the nes and famicom's video quality beyond their limits if you've watched our rgb 101 video and the rest of the rgb masterclass series then you already know about rgb video and how it's so much cleaner and sharper than composite video you'll also know about the various cables and devices that can be used to receive the signal like professional video monitors or video scalers like the framemeister a lot of retro consoles that are traditionally hooked up with rf or composite video are actually generating an rgb signal that the composite video is derived from but when it comes to the nes and famicom the onboard ricoh ppu is generating composite video and that's that there's a method around this limitation that modders have performed for some time nintendo used to make arcade machines called the play choice 10. they feature interchangeable boards that play up to 10 nes games on one machine and it just so happens that the play choice 10 features an rgb picture processing unit also manufactured by ricoh if you know what you're doing you can use it to replace ricoh's composite video ppu on the nes or famicom motherboard so that's pretty neat but there are some issues the play choice 10 uses a different color palette so colors won't look quite like they should there's also the matter of the mod ruining a legacy arcade machine or consuming limited unused replacement parts as well as being pretty expensive due to availability getting better video quality out the nes has been a pretty tough nut for the modding community to crack in fact it's only been in very recent years that a superior solution has been developed the major breakthrough has been thanks to an australian modder named tim worthington he developed and sells a custom board that's called the nes rgb now remember we're not modders and don't fully understand its operation but the gist of it is that the nes rgb doesn't replace the original ppu but rather works alongside it if you're into learning how to do the installation yourself tim's website has plenty of documentation he also sells the nes rgb board on his website depending on your model of nes or famicom you may also need to select a fairly cheap adapter board with your purchase tim has distributors in other regions around the world so it's possible you can hire their modding services like i did or find another reliable modder to help you out if you don't already own the nes or famicom that you'd like to have modified the more convenient option might be to buy a pre-modded system on ebay by searching for an esrgb the mod even adds s-video support to your console which looks great on my crt you can access the rgb signal using a scart or jp21 cable that's designed for nintendo consoles you can then convert to the proper connector for whatever rgb capable device you use if you're unsure which cable to buy the nes rgb mod does support c-sync which is a pure sync signal that generally provides cleaner picture results than other sync methods a switch can be installed with the nes rgb mod that allows you to toggle between various color modes we prefer the default which is an attempt to accurately recreate the nes palette with rgb color value if you'd prefer no switch then you can ask your modder to lock output to a particular palette so which system is the best candidate for modification well it's your choice really corey bought a pre-modded nes top loader which is a great option for its reliability over the classic front loader i decided to go for a mod with my av famicom because i already had this nes the famicom cartridge converter which works perfectly with every north american cart that i've thrown at it aside from castlevania 3 and jackal modded famicom also means that i can play disc system games in rgb which is pretty neat too now here's corey with a few more interesting considerations [Music] a partnership between nintendo and sharp resulted in three very unique systems first the very rare sharp nintendo television which has a built-in nes cartridge slot and is said to display a slightly higher quality image but the japanese version the sharp c1 actually uses an rgb picture processing unit second is the twin famicom which supports both famicom cartridges and famicom disk system games in a single console and finally the famicom titler which actually supports rgb and s video in addition to allowing users to add custom text to the image for the purposes of creating videos unfortunately it's super expensive these days so it's not really a viable option except for the most dedicated of collectors there's also the matter of the french nes which included a scar cable and has a port labeled rgb but we're told that the end result is just composite quality video as hardware patents have expired in recent years you've probably seen these clone systems like the retro duo which plays nes and super nintendo cards these systems run on hardware similar to the originals but slight differences can cause compatibility issues in various games they may also have s-video ports which work with super nintendo games but unfortunately none of these systems support nes through s video the restaurant 5 outputs cleaner video because it runs on emulators rather than cloned hardware the analog nt is different from a clone system and that is built using processing chips from an actual nes and famicom console and then rebuilt into a custom aluminum case it outputs rgb video optionally scaled to hd over hdmi using a custom solution developed by analog interactive meanwhile the super 8 bit is a similar rgb capable system which also uses repurposed chips from the original hardware there's also been other projects that attempt to work 1080p scaling and hdmi output directly into the console itself of course one of the simplest official methods for playing nes games is through nintendo's own virtual console service but unfortunately nintendo's emulator for nes games fails to impress on both the wii and wii u the image is noticeably darkened and pixels are excessively blurred check out how the wii u virtual console compares to the nes composite and nes rgb through the framemeister this treatment of the nes games is even more bizarre due to how much brighter and sharper systems like the super nintendo and gba appear on the wii u but much more interestingly nes virtual console on the original wii hardware can actually output an authentic 240p resolution over component which is great for scalers and crts it's still not as good as what you can get out of the nes rgb but think twice before you transfer all of your virtual console games to the wii u [Music] so that's the nintendo entertainment system if you're looking to play real carts on real hardware it's unfortunately not the easiest or cheapest console to get great video quality out of man you know i guess i can see the argument that fuzzy composite video is just how nes games are supposed to look i mean i dealt with it for most of my life and i didn't think any less of the system but thanks to a creative modding community if you want razor sharp pixels generated by real nes hardware that dream is now available for everyone [Music] [Music] when you think of sunsoft i'm willing to bet that the first things that come to mind are some of the best tunes on the nes as was the case for many game companies in the late 90s sunsoft paid more attention to sony's playstation than the more business risky n64 but sunsoft did publish two interesting games for nintendo's platform both from the same series let's take a look at chameleon twist and chameleon twist two [Music] [Applause] [Music] sunsoft seems to have actually not had a ton to do with the chameleon twist series simply serving as publisher for the west in japan the games were developed and published by japan system supply ah isn't that the best aside from the chameleon twist series and a japan exclusive game boy game it's hard to find much evidence of japan system supplies time in the game business chameleon twist was released early on in the n64's life in late 97 and features some pretty interesting ideas you play as a curious chameleon who follows an alice in wonderland type rabbit into a magical land where you're transformed into well something that doesn't look very much like a chameleon that's for sure i can't decide if he's more of an anthropomorphized billiards ball or lolo with a body the default chameleon is davey but you can also choose three others who play identically the goal is pretty much just to have a fun adventure there's no one to save no villain out to destroy the world this game is nothing more than a vacation from davey's everyday chameleon life but he is still a chameleon which is the foundation for the game's main twist chameleon twist is a 3d platformer in which your primary tool is a long tongue that you can control with analog stick sure plenty of games are built around characters that eat their enemies but the way that davey and friends use their tongues still feels fairly unique as you'd expect any small enemy that comes in contact with davey's tongue gets eaten the more enemies you grab with a single slurp the more shots you can fire with your next attack what's interesting is that all regular enemies are sprites so there can be quite a lot of them on screen by holding z you can stand on your tongue and do a high jump the timing is kind of a bit tricky for some reason the camera angles can make it difficult for me to judge when high jumps are required i died so many times in this room because i thought the platforms were much further apart and higher up than they actually are the last two moves have to do with attaching your tongue to poles in the environment once attached you can do one of two things simply continue holding b and wait a moment for davey to pull himself over or hold a in a direction to rotate this is a pretty clever mechanic but is also by far the most awkward move in the game i like the idea but it never felt quite right to me chameleon twist was released in the age of 3d platformers but i think it deserves special recognition for living up to the platform or moniker the most famous platformers on the n64 aren't really platformers in the traditional sense if you think about it while they do have a lot of jumping and plenty of challenge in their own way games like banjo-kazooie and such are really more about exploration and discovering things in the environment chameleon twist on the other hand is something of an oddity in its generation for being designed around linear levels and more traditional sorts of platforming challenges [Music] despise some frustrating moments chameleon twist is overall a super easy game that can be finished in two to three hours checkpoints are extremely frequent and every checkpoint is forever even if you game over you always continue just a bit behind where you die the biggest challenge is collecting the optional crowns in every level many of which are located in very tricky places there are only six levels in the fantasy world jungle land ant land bomb land desert castle kids land which is mostly all about sweet foods and i personally take a lot of offense at the implication of delicious sweets being for kids and lastly ghost castle the ant queen battle deserves special mention for being a bit annoying but overall the boss fights are pretty fun even if it's not perfect and is really short chameleon twist is a good game with good ideas that any n64 fan should give a fair shot back in the day this is what we call a good rental that's exactly what chameleon twist was to me since i finished it so fast back then it didn't seem worth buying at the time but i did have fond memories of it and grabbed a copy for cheap in more recent years thankfully it isn't hard to find but i always tended to forget that there's another game you don't see quite as often and doesn't tend to be priced quite as fairly but i finally got a copy of chameleon twist 2. first things first yes you actually transform into something that looks like an anthropomorphic chameleon and high voltage screaming what okay so what i think is going on here you know the whole tactical espionage action thing right well in japan that sort of fake genre is actually very commonly attached to games to make them sound unique i guess somehow it carried over to the title screen and the western release but how it actually connects to the game screaming action chameleon twister 2 your guess is as good as mine at any rate the setup is pretty much exactly the same as before the rabbit leads your chameleon to a new fantasy world with another six stages in the western version davey is actually now the green chameleon i guess they were trying to go for something a bit cooler and less abstract but here's the interesting thing the japanese version retains the cuter and weirder original designs including davey being the blue one honestly i like both in their own way the sequel introduces three new moves first up the chameleons backpacks now deploy a parachute with the press of the z button at any time this is a decent idea but unfortunately the level design leads to it not being very necessary for most of the game second an obvious addition to the horizontal tongue rotation of the first game is vertical rotation it's similarly awkward to perform and the few areas of the game that require it are among the most difficult at least for me it's really tough to get the timing and momentum just right but i have to respect it as good use of a tongue and a platforming game the last new move is a bit more subtle but also potentially the most interesting in the first game if your tongue hits a wall you immediately pull it back in but now your tongue doesn't only stick to posts and enemies it attaches to any surface and you can pull yourself right up to it i love how this really integrates your main ability with the environment and it would be a killer move for grappling platforming and exploring in almost any game unfortunately again it's a bit underutilized in chameleon twist too i'm sure it could lead to some fancy platforming and a speed run but it's rarely necessary outside the final level speaking of underutilized chameleon twist 2 in many ways feels like it relies on the tongue mechanics a bit less in general when compared to the first game a lot of times i found myself just doing everyday running and jumping which is by no means a bad thing but with the characters making for some unique possibilities it feels like there are some missed opportunities due to the level design just being pretty average it might not sound like it but despite these misfires chameleon twist 2 feels in some ways slightly more polished than the first game it's a solid platformer and moves along at a bit of a quicker pace than the original generally favoring level design that keeps the action moving it's also got a pretty good set of bosses like a walrus on spiked wheels which is pretty rad and he's fairly challenging as are some of the other bosses like this giant toy robot chameleon twist 2 also features as a boss one of the best looking hamburgers i've ever seen in a video game despite some tough moments chameleon twist 2 took me about 3 hours to play through both games are short and mostly easy but also full of good ideas and overall decent design in addition to being sun soft's only involvement with the n64 these games are also the biggest mark the japan system supply and their adorable animated cat logo left on the gaming world and while back in the day these games may have not been much more than a good rental and they certainly don't have any high voltage screaming action i think looking at them now they stand out as enjoyable and unique examples of more traditional platforming sensibilities brought into the realm of early 3d gameplay [Applause] [Music] it's been a year since nes games finally came to the nintendo switch and now we've got super nintendo games so let's take a look at how they compare to previous releases and other ways to play these games so our previous mlig midi casual conversation style of video went over actually pretty well and so we're going to continue to sort of sprinkle these in between our proper fully scripted episodes and today we're talking about the super nintendo games on the nintendo switch through the uh nintendo online services subscription this is something that a lot of people wanted us to take a look at we weren't thinking that we were going to at first because it's very similar to the previous release the interface is almost exactly the same i mean the menu this big checkerboard of boxes all spread out and all the options are basically identical to the nes but it is worth pointing out that some features have been patched in in the intervening year so that annoying uh button prompt information that would appear on the screen at all times you can turn that off in the settings now on the nes as well as the uh super nintendo god and but unfortunately some of the flaws remain like you've still got the border at all times that that gray gradient border which is granted not the most obnoxious border ever but i still wish it could just be pure black and it is always going to display your player icon in the upper left also kind of annoying but i will say that i have not seen any image retention even after several hours of play on my oled so i'm not too concerned about i just don't like looking at and one other nice thing that was fixed on the nes app that also carries over to the super nintendo app the crt filter mode uh doesn't have this sort of rapidly flickering noise effect anymore uh so that was causing issues especially with like i think ips displays uh it was causing temporary retention on that so it is a composite crt filter but it doesn't have that rapid noise effect anymore so there shouldn't be concerns with image retention or anything like that there's 20 games available day one when we were working on this i went back to check out the nes just to see how it's changed in the year since and the game lineup on the nes is it's pretty bad i don't know if you've if you've looked at it recently but it like the amount of games on there is pretty terrible yeah i mean there there's definitely some missing games that that would be really nice to have on there but i am also impressed that there's you know you know vice project doom i mean that's i was kind of like what like i would not expect that game to be on there and that is a very good you know sort of a later third-party nes game um but yeah i mean there's a lot of things a lot of games i would have liked to have seen on the on the nes but you know i think my perspective with the lineups of both nes and super nintendo on the switch is when the nes first came i think people were disappointed it wasn't virtual console because you couldn't purchase them and just have them on your switch forever uh but for me personally my perspective is i've over the years increasingly felt less and less ownership over my digital games now just for subscribing to the online service that i would subscribe to anyway boom i've got a selection of 20 super nintendo games on my switch that you know hey if i'm on an airplane or something maybe i'll just play through super mario world maybe i'll uh you know play a few worlds of yoshi's island do a few cups of mario kart see how far i can get in super metroid one thing i thought was very interesting is that the selection of games is a lot different than i would expect uh there is no konami games this time and i wonder if that has anything to do with the fact that the contra and castlevania anniversary collections recently came out on switch so they have no way to put contra 3 or castlevania 4 on there yeah i mean i think that is very likely the reason why and you know i don't know if that it could also be the reason why we don't have any mega man games because capcom has uh their collections to buy as well and i think especially there's also new squaresoft games like a service like this you won't see certain games because these collections with older games on them are really like there's so many of them coming out now that it limits services like this back when you know when the virtual console was first was brand new all this stuff was showing up on there because a service like that had never existed or a lot of these compilations were never a thing i mean there was some on the ps2 but there was not a lot of console games being ported at the time to other platforms and now they're all over the place it took a lot of these companies a long time to realize that people wanted to play these old games and now they finally understand that and you know they're gonna they're gonna sell them together yeah so the selection of games we've got here at launch is it's interesting i mean i think it's overall a pretty good selection i mean you've got a handful of you know the obvious ones the must plays and a handful of like you know games that are good but maybe people haven't played that much and a few kind of bad games and honestly i'm kind of glad to see those there too i can't think of like the the backwards compatibility on xbox one one thing that i think that is important to point out to people is that always create a save state before you exit out of a game to play something else even if you just back out to the menu like you will lose your your place in the game because the game will reboot i'm pretty sure on the super nintendo classic edition you can back out to the menu and jump back in because you actually make the save state in the menu rather than the in-game menu this has the ability to rewind which is also present in the snes classic edition although i'm pretty sure his implementation in the nes classic edition wasn't nearly as seamless as this is it was very very helpful to be able to capture footage for this this episode because super ghouls and ghost is an extremely difficult game and i could kind of cheese my way through it just for capture purposes and that's not something that we would use outside of uh capturing and variety of gameplay reasons at least me i know that you're you're very against using any kind of like rewind function fast forward anything like that i i completely forgot that function even existed uh but like even once i was you reminded me i'm like i still just i can't bring myself to do it i will admit though that i did enjoy the fast forward feature in final fantasy 12 of the zodiac age but i didn't think i would fast forward i can see the value in rewind kind of i just doesn't work with my brain now in docked mode with the 4 3 and crt sizing modes uh you've got a four and a half times vertical scale which uh if you set four and a half on the super nt uh with the 16 by nine sizing on that as well the image quality is virtually identical because the super nt has really good interpolation too uh and the the two are almost indistinguishable it almost makes me wonder if uh nintendo was looking at the super nt to uh sort of determine like what's the best way to represent this which i mean both i would say are the best visual representation i've ever seen of super nintendo games uh in at 1080p but the interpolation is like super super good on both the nes app and the super nintendo app i mean the the quality of the interpolation is almost identical and and for those who are unfamiliar what we mean by interpolation is uh the pixel edges uh are are softened just the teensiest bit uh which makes them look uniform normally super nintendo games are stretched by a crt which is you know of course the device they were originally meant to be seen on uh the pixel uh super nintendo games are 256 pixels wide and so the pixels uh as displayed in a 4 3 aspect ratio actually should be a little wider than they are tall uh and when you emulate that uh sometimes it makes the pixels uneven sizes and then when the screen scrolls you get this like shimmering effect and uh interpolation hides that and it's it's just it's really good interpolation on the 4-3 mode as well as the crt filter i mean it's it's among the best i've ever seen so visually it's just a great representation it's so good it's almost surprising they give you the option for a pixel perfect because you know just playing a pixel perfect is going to look really really skinny to most people on a on an hd tv right right and not only is it very skinny it's also a lot shorter because they're doing a 4x scale within a 1080p frame at least in docked mode and so you've got a ton of black space on the top and bottom and again it's skinny some people who grew up playing these games uh like on pc emulators they might be actually used to seeing them in this skinnier aspect but it's it's not how they were originally meant to be presented i haven't noticed any visual issues i mean it's not to say they might exist but and an interesting point about that too i we haven't noticed any anti-epilepsy stuff like the super nintendo and nes classic editions have this weird kind of like screen softening effect whenever there's like a rapid flicker effect or something similar uh and maybe the games on uh on there right now just don't have the right effects for it to kick in but speaking of nintendo perhaps being behind the scenes inspired by the super nt uh we noticed something very interesting when it comes to kirby's dreamland 3. uh kirby's dreamline 3 kinda uses this unique effect where it uses the super nintendo's high res mode which uh means that certain aspects can use uh 512 horizontal pixels which is double 256 the normal resolution normally this is used in certain games for like especially for like japanese text which can look a lot clearer when you have more resolution to work with um a lot rpgs might use the high res mode to have a high resolution text like treasure of the rouges comes to mind and kirby's dreamland 3 uses it in a unique way i don't know of any other games that do this uh where it uses it for transparency effects the super nintendo normally can do transparency effects and i'm not sure uh what technical reason was chosen in particular for kirby's dreamland 3 to use these kind of alternating lines but on a crt those effects especially with like composite or s video uh they they do look like transparency effects but if you play like an rgb at high fidelity uh you are gonna get this like dashed look with like water or any other effects that are supposed to look transparent specifically in kirby's dreamland 3. and the super nt has this function that actually lets you blend them to make it look like true transparency i don't know if that is to be honest i don't know if that is like an original kevtris idea i don't know if that's like a feature that's been other emulators but we we checked up to this point nintendo has not done that effect on previous releases of kirby's dreamland 3 like the kirby's dream collection on the wii or on the wii u virtual console it does not have that presentation so that's that's a cool feature that they've got in the emulator that is just specific to that game the nes and super nintendo switch emulation apps have been actually built by uh a european uh development branch that nintendo has had for several years who's kind of developed like sort of like more of the software technology sides of things like the super stable 3d on the the new 3ds for example um and they've also done the emulation on the nes and snes classic editions uh so it's interesting to see that uh sort of difference in emulation uh in the work from the same division but you know uh overall i have been very impressed with uh what they have done especially starting with snes classic edition because they are doing interpolation which not nearly enough people are doing and it and to me it is so important even m2 isn't really consistently doing interpolation correctly so uh to me that's a big deal and i know i'm harping on interpolation a lot you say it out of love like you want this in all these other collections and i think that it's an important it's an important aspect of it that a lot of people more people should be taken advantage of [Music] another thing that you kind of noticed with this and something that we've done some tests with to check out back and forth is uh sound delay which is a common thing in all kind of emulation that we've we've run into you know we've previously talked about it in the genesis mini we've talked about it in various compilations and what we found here is very very good it's there but maybe like two to three frames at the most there's times where i may have noticed a little bit more [Music] i mean two to three frames i mean yeah it'd be nice if it wasn't there at all but it's not that bad all things considered uh and it may vary a bit i mean we don't really know why this happens it might be because they're trying to adjust the system speed uh to match like an even 60hz refresh of modern tvs or something like that and in terms of like the quirks that we've seen in some of these games for all intents and purposes the things that we've noticed at least that you've noticed have all come down to audio you know i kind of i kind of had my ear open uh for anything that might jump out at me and something that i thought my band issue at first was i heard a few audio pops like the the easiest one to hear was in yoshi's island when the next level appears on the map it kind of does this little growing effect and i heard a pop but then i went back and listened to it on a real super nintendo and behold that popping sound effect is there too so that's not a problem i heard pops occasionally in other games like with the jet pack and pilot wings a few times the super metroid but it might have just been that i was i was listening for it uh and i didn't go back and check those on original hardware but it's it's entirely possible those issues are there as well i think it's important to state just by with that example that based on what we found it's only because we played these games so much uh but i will say there is at least one instance that i ran across that had a very obviously incorrect sound effect uh and that is uh when you beat the first castle in super mario world and mario jumps on the button that sends the fuse to go blow up the castle that sound effect immediately jumped out at me i'm like that is not what it normally sounds like [Music] aside from the fact that they won't let me turn off the border and won't let me turn off the player indicator uh i think uh the european development division is doing a very good job and speaking of which uh we did try the uh online co-op mode which we're both using wired connections with our switch using that uh that usb ethernet adapter but i was i was shocked you were hosting and i mean there was probably some added lag but it was it was not particularly noticeable when we tested it with nes we did feel more lag but i think at that time we may have been using wireless connections still you were using wireless and i was wired because i basically have used wired since i got the system because i'm using the same wired adapter that i used with my wii u it was by far the best experience i have ever had with a multiplayer mode hacked into a retro game uh and granted i don't have a ton of experience with stuff like that but like for example we did that with the genesis collection on the xbox one and you know i was able to adapt to the lag but it was there i'm sure there's lag here uh but it was it was a pretty good experience in the in the little bit we played it and sort of another fun thing to point out again you can do this in the nes app as well but you can play a single player game like breath of fire and i can watch you play for so for people that don't have the means to stream that's a great way for them to you know just have a friend uh play their game with you exactly i i think of it as a way you know i i like to go i used to like to go over to my friend's house and watch them play through games and this is kind of like a modern version of doing that now aside from you know any possible lag uh in the online play i do think it's important to you know address that you know because this is software emulation there there were almost inevitably be some degree of input lag we don't have any firm measurements on that but we know it's there it's still a good experience to me i'm i can very easily adapt to a situation where input lag is introduced to a retro game i'm not overly lag sensitive i i think it's pretty good i think a lot of people uh are going to make wild claims like oh i didn't feel any input lag or there's absolutely no input lag or you're wrong there's no input lag a lot of people want to think that it's not true people need to stop saying that there is going to be lag and software emulation unless you have like that more newer look ahead mode but you're not going to see something like that in this i guess talking about lag that's kind of a good jumping off point to talk about controller options one of the things i am excited about is that nintendo has this really cool like replica version of the snes controller coming out and it looks like it's going to be a lot better than the nes replicas that came out for you know the previous service i'm really excited about because even though they're really tiny it does have zrnzl buttons which is going to make it usable in any game that doesn't require analog sticks which is a huge deal because i i personally have like kind of a lot of like retro style games on the switch and i want to play them with d-pads i don't love the d-pad on the official pro controller so i've mostly been using the 8-bit doe sn30 pro but i will absolutely use the real deal super nintendo controllers instead of that i'm kind of curious about the ebitdo sn30 pro plus that has the grips on it i'm curious to see if that'll be even better even though it doesn't have the exact form factor as a uh super nintendo controller i'm curious to see if the d-pad is better so yeah i guess that's all that needs to be said for now uh you know nintendo has announced that they are putting an end to the monthly additions to the nes switch app and uh that is also going to be the case on the super nintendo they're going to add more games to both apps apparently uh but it's not going to be on this regular schedule so it'll be interesting to see uh how more come along i personally didn't wasn't really chomping at the bed and and looking out for more games to come to the nes on switch because i my preferred way to play nes is on original hardware but like i said i like to have these games just accessible to me for uh for travel and so it'll be good to have more super nintendo games on there in the future but for now i i think the the lineup is is pretty decent pretty well rounded obviously i'd like to see more things we'd both like to see more things but uh you know what what can i say the emulation is uh it's easily the best representation that nintendo has ever done of super nintendo games in in hd it just visually it looks fantastic i wish you could get rid of the border but uh it's you know that that european team is doing some some top-notch emulation i really gotta say [Music] i recently got a chance to visit a classic style arcade and man did it take me back thinking about it i realized i hadn't been in an arcade like this in probably 12 or so years everything felt immediately familiar and my senses made everything come rushing back had it really been so long this experience got me thinking about a lot of things and one thing that really stuck with me was that feeling you had every time you leave the arcade now if you're old enough to have frequented one then you know exactly what i mean you wanted to have that game that you just played at home on your console of choice in your mind that game would look sound and play exactly like its arcade counterpart for many game generations the idea that you could have that exact arcade perfect part at home seemed impossible the consoles just weren't powerful enough and all the wishing in the world wasn't going to make that master system version of afterburner any closer to the arcade thinking back to it now the thing i find most fascinating about this time was the way the developers would fit these huge arcade games onto this tiny little cartridge sometimes the only thing that they would have in common is their name in these upcoming episodes i'm going to take a look at some of the more notable arcade to console ports hey it should be fun [Music] [Applause] [Music] the arcade version of rygar was released by tecmo in 1986 well before they had any ninja gaidens or deader alives under their belt it tended to be just one of those games that i'd play at the local theme park the one or two times i would go during the summer nothing more nothing less as the story goes rygar is some sort of legendary hero who is out to save the fantasy world of argool he wields this spike shield that's attached to a chain called the disc armor for a weapon it's a pretty unique idea but functionally is just your typical blunt object used to smack some demons around being tethered to a chain gives the player a tiny bit more freedom than we're used to with these kind of things like being able to swing it in an arch over your head this gives you some vertical and zoning attacks that come in handy in a pinch another nice thing is that via the collection of power-ups your reach becomes longer and longer if you last long enough you'll become a force of nature and that's a big if this is your typical quarter muncher so be prepared to die a lot i mean constantly [Music] each of the 27 rounds adhere to your basic side scrolling elements there's no real exploring though the occasional vertical passages do give a nice sense of progression you can track your progress through each round with this handy little mini map in the lower right hand corner the graphics are okay there's some nice parallax scrolling here and there but you're not really going to have a chance to look closely at anything because you're just constantly being bombarded with enemies from every direction each level ends with you gently picking up a statue and moving it aside to allow passage thanks for being so careful rygar i gotta say that i didn't really care for the arcade version of ragar that much it was just one of those games that maybe i'd drop a quarter into once in a while if i saw it on the other hand i think that my brother liked it a lot more than i did because it was one of a handful of games that he asked for for his birthday when he got his nes [Music] tecmo brought rygar to the nes in 1987 making some changes that would make it a much much more interesting game tecmo was smart in realizing that home audiences were looking for something a bit longer and more bang for their buck rygar and his disc armor are back but gone was the linearity and just about everything else the quest in this port was a lot bigger you can move freely through arghul looking for these awesome looking meditating guys once you discover them some give you cryptic hints to proceeding but if you're lucky some will give you important items like a grappling hook crossbow or pulley that open up new sections of the world these overhead sections are pretty cool they spice up the adventure with a little bit of variety it's very apparent that the development team was interested in crafting something a bit more interesting in this version if this overall style sounds familiar and that's because it is we'd recently seen this style in metroid a year earlier i actually find it pretty interesting that this game doesn't get much credit for expanding the genre ragar is a fairly tough game nintendo hard if you will you only start with three hit points so you're gonna get smacked around a whole bunch at the beginning luckily with every enemy that you kill you're an experience and with that comes higher attack power and more life you can even collect these little star things that allow you to cast spells you get unlimited continues which is quite handy if i'd only known about that as a kid funny story it wasn't until revisiting this game for this video that i even discovered you could continue in general the game kicks you back to the title screen with no visual cues that this was even an option so i would usually just turn off the game frustrated i used to spend hours grinding hit points at the beginning just because i couldn't make it very far with just my playing skill one time i even stayed home from school with the intent on finally beating it i grinded hit points all day and made it to the last boss where i was defeated this whole unlimited continue thing could have saved me a lot of fear of returning to this game over the years one noteworthy aspect of this version is just how great the soundtrack is the arcade's only true decent track was probably the level end jingle and even that's not that great but the nes version has some very memorable notes right out of the gate these aren't just themes they're anthems i think it's fairly obvious just which one is the better game the arcade version is okay but there's just nothing really that special about it to me the nes version on the other hand is great if you haven't played it you should definitely hunt it down it's like under 10 bucks on ebay definitely worth it [Music] with our tips and tweaks episode on controller adapters we found a lot more to talk about with each adapter than we expected i loved all the different ways that i came up with use a gamecube controller on n64 with the highly customizable rathnet adapter the episode became so unwieldy as corey was editing it that we decide one device needed its own episode let's take a look at a receiver that lets you use modern wireless controllers on the nes [Music] [Applause] when i recently saw analog interactive makers of analog nt announced that they were partnering with 8-bit do makers of wireless controllers for pc and mobile devices release a wireless receiver for the nes i wasn't all that interested at first but my nes is too far from where guests sit and my controller extender's tight fit makes me feel like i'm going to break something so i figured for 20 bucks it'd be worth giving a try the big selling point of the retro receiver is this compatible with wireless controllers that you probably already have those being the wii remote wii u pro controller dualshock 3 and dualshock 4. i think the obvious go-to here is the wii remote i'm used to playing wii in virtual console games with the controller held nes style so it already seems like the most accessible wireless nes controller the system's controller port provides power to the receiver and all you have to do is hit the unit sync button then the sync button on your controller and it works shockingly well believe it or not i honestly don't believe the wireless adapter causes any perceptible input lag while i'm hardly equipped for a scientific assessment and there are some variables here this slowed down comparison suggests an added delay of at most one frame possibly less i've had no drops or hiccups over extended play at times i did think i was getting random a presses but that's because i wasn't being careful with keeping my fingers away from the b trigger which turns out to be rapid fire a the wii remote's a button is rapid fire b the classic controller is not supported but i suppose it's possible a firmware update could change that so this makes things easy i can leave the retro receiver in my nes second port my friends can grab a wii remote and sit away from the console it solves a problem i had and performs perhaps better than you might have expected of course to cover it here on the show i want to go more in depth on the retro receiver's capabilities and that's where i ran into a bit of a snag see while trying to update the firmware the micro usb port kind of broke i contacted analog support and asked if there was any way i could get a replacement quickly because we were including the retro receiver in this episode which thankfully they did but to my surprise they also sent four of 8-bit dues nes famicom and super nintendo inspired wireless controllers which allows me to show off more of the retro receiver's functionality than i expected to be able to with a fresh retro receiver in my hands i came to a bit of an embarrassing realization see the usb cable actually only goes in this much which to me didn't look like it was in all the way so i believe what happened was that i forced it too far in my original unit yeah kind of dumb but i like to think that i made that mistake so that maybe you wouldn't anyway so let's look at several other ways you can use the retro receiver [Music] the dualshock 3 doesn't have a sync button so it requires a pc with 8-bit dues pairing software to link the two devices for action games most people probably prefer a map to x and b map to square thankfully that's exactly what we've got here circle also acts as rapid a and triangle is rapid b you can make the dual shock 4 go into a wireless pairing mode by holding ps and share until you see the light bar to a double blink button mapping is identical to the dualshock 3. wii u pro controller support was added with an early firmware update in this case asa and bsb with the downward angle it's not my preference but i've had to get used to stuff like this before and i'm pretty okay with it i couldn't notice any input lag while using any controller as for the 8-bit dew controllers well i had been hearing good things and i have to admit the feel does not disappoint the shape and texture of the plastic the press of the buttons it's all shockingly spot-on it's obvious a lot of effort went into ensuring these controllers would provide a nostalgic experience with modern wireless technology if you know the pain of finding an snes controller that feels right that's saying a lot you can see that the versions paying tribute to nintendo's 8-bit stylings also include at least enough buttons to fully function as snes controllers which might be handy when connecting to a pc or mobile device but since the retro receiver is for nes functionality is limited to how button inputs are translated to nes commands at first 8-bit due controller buttons were mapped in the style of the wii u pro controller recent firmware updates have mapped a to b and b to y similar to the playstation layout i think it'd be nice if we had a choice something like installing an alternate firmware so that you could keep confirm on a and cancel on b for say rpgs but even as it is i'm pretty impressed with how the 8 bit do controllers function on the nes i played through all of gi joe with nes30 controller and most of the time i just completely forgot about it which is the way it should be right [Music] i thought i would default to using wii remotes with the retro receiver which i still think is the biggest selling point but since i have these they might actually win out for me you can actually use the retro receiver not just on the nes av famicom or analog nt it even works with clone consoles and emulator boxes like the retron 5. when i first tried the retro receiver on the retron 5 button mapping was screwed up in a way that rendered games completely unplayable retron 5 support was fixed in a firmware update shown here functioning correctly but remember that there is some input lag inherent to the retron 5's emulation of course you can also use the retro receiver with game boy games on the retron 5. but remember the retron 5 reads the retro receiver as an nes controller which means that the system won't accept the snes 30 or any of the other 8-bit due controllers as suitable for snes games which just makes me think about the potential here i mean if 8-bit do would just make retro receivers for snes and genesis i would be all about that firmware updates also improve pairing speed and with the usb connection you can even use the retro receiver as a bluetooth dongle on pc and as a way to use some of these controllers with retro style games on the ps3 in this case you can use all of the buttons [Music] i originally thought that i would simply use a wii remote with the retro receiver so that player 2 could sit farther away and even if that's all i ever did with it i still would have easily gotten my 20 bucks worth out of it but having tested out its full functionality it really does offer a lot of different ways to play and while i think alternate button mappings would be a cool feature for the future as it is i'm pretty sure most any nes fan could find a controller to enjoy it with [Music] [Applause] [Music] as a kid i was pretty big beat him up fan i'd say i owe that a lot to double dragon it's because of it the games like final fight and streets of rage were made but the genre has been pretty quiet for a couple of years now despite a few slipping through the cracks here and there you know games like scott pilgrim vs the world and the fantastic double dragon neon the virtual console helped me play some of the games that i missed out as a kid but one game has eluded me for years now super double dragon by technos all the way from seeing it on the cover of egm on vacation when i was probably 14 years old to recently at magfest and i decided to finally hunt it down and play it for real [Music] [Applause] my search led me to some interesting tidbits about super double dragon that i had never had any idea about the first that it was called return of double dragon in japan and secondly that version had several tweaks to the gameplay these range from slightly different combos between the brothers various health levels of enemies allowing a difficulty in continued select and having the story removed almost entirely it seems the us version was rushed to release for whatever reason and technos was able to go back and work on the game a bit more resulting in what most people that have played both to be the superior game so i decided to track that version down instead of the us version right out of the gate i was immediately unimpressed the double dragon theme music that i loved so much did not sound good coming out of the usually amazing super nes sound chip overall this sounds totally flat and boring it's very possible that i've been forever spoiled because of jake kaufman's perfect rendition and double dragon neon [Music] i'd argue that even the nes version sounds better [Music] i think returner double dragon's goal to differentiate its gameplay from the pack of other brawlers at the time is kinda what saves it a little bit instead of going from the grappling focus that was standardized in final fight double dragon introduces a block and counter mechanic if you hit b as soon as an enemy throws a punch you catch their arm and you can do what you will with them the focus on defense slows down the pace quite a bit and justifies the game's slower overall movement speed punching and kicking are standard i mean what kind of brawler would it be without these if you hold the shoulder button and combine that with the press of the attack button you get a couple of higher powered attacks and if you manage to let your dragon power make it to the halfway point without taking a hit you get to do this [Music] i wonder what this is inspired by maxing out your power lets you go into hulk mode where you can knock down your enemies with one hit this is good for crowd control but it almost feels like you do more damage with regular combos than you do when you're in this mode remember when i mentioned the slower overall movement speed return of double dragon is slow actually is kind of annoyingly slow until you adjust to it compared to its peers at the time everything feels choppy like there's almost something wrong with it i was kind of shocked because i've gotten accustomed to the faster pace of oh like every single brawler ever graphically we got a pretty mixed bag here return of double dragon starts out strong in the streets of las vegas and continues to kind of get worse and worse in fact i go as far as to say that there's nothing here that is particularly impressive enemy variety is pretty limited about five or six types overall with one enemy even being a pallet swap of the main characters it just feels super lazy i think with the removal of any kind of story from the us version makes the game kind of feel incomplete i can't see how much there even is in that version but the levels here end abruptly and you weren't even sure you were facing a boss there's no change in music or anything it's weird during the last level you can even jump on the walls of spikes not even enemies take damage if you knock them into it you think they just forgot to do anything about this apparently one of the areas that they changed from the us version was adding some significant length to the last level which might have been overkill because as far as i can tell the last level is about as long as every other level combined and once you beat it nothing just a credit roll damn after years of intrigue finally playing return of double dragon proved to be disappointing i'm not saying that it's bad it's just not that good for much beyond a playthrough or two there's lots of other games just like it that you've already played and you should really just go and play those again [Music] oh nestor times are changing this is the september 1997 issue of nintendo power and for me it is without a doubt the most influential and most referenced issue of any magazine what makes it so special well it's the 100th issue of nintendo power and they made a pretty big deal out of it now i'd only been a subscriber since the previous christmas but even though i wasn't yet a long time reader i could really sense the excitement and build up leading to this milestone but there's one thing above all else that made this issue so important to me nintendo power's list of the 100 best games of all time [Music] [Applause] okay so what's the big deal there's like a billion best of all time lists out there and they just make everyone upset anyway and come on this list is obviously only going to feature nintendo systems but at the time the internet wasn't what it is today and i still had very limited opportunities to access it i hadn't read a lot of other gaming magazines and to me this list seemed like a very good idea and it really opened up my mind to the idea that games for older systems are still worth playing something that obviously still hasn't left me to this day you see at the time i had recently sold my nes not realizing just how many great games were available that i'd never been exposed to and even with the snes n64 and game boy i was generally sticking to favorite series like mario kirby and donkey kong country but i was receptive to broadening my horizons and learning about great games that i hadn't played before and in those days it was pretty easy to get most older games for real cheap at stores like funko land so you can see how this list became my most valued reference for my early adventures in retro gaming let's take a look at what people in 1997 were calling the best 100 games of all time [Music] alien 3 ultima quest of the avatar super tennis final fight bust a move to be honest i've never given any of these a lot of serious consideration but correct me if i'm wrong to ignore them i know that final fight is pretty loved but brawlers aren't my usual genre alright kickle cubicle now this is a perfect example of a game that i'd have never played without this list comparing it to adventures of lolo is all the convincing i needed i love a good character-based puzzler and tickle cubicle turned out to be pretty decent i feel safe and deeming some random snes golf game as skippable at this point hey i forgot gargoyle's quest was even on this list i actually never got around to it until very recently and it was fantastic it mixes overhead exploration with some truly excellent platforming it's not expensive and is absolutely a top title in the game boy library i tried ogre battle on the n64 on two occasions and just never could get into it so i'm a bit wary of this series now this is funny luffia 2 is the game that people always say you gotta play but i never hear much love for the first game this one is way less expensive but a friend tells me that the story is better if you play the second game first demons crest is actually the third gargoyle's quest game and this list is what put it on my radar thankfully i bought it not too long before the price skyrocketed but unfortunately i don't remember much about my playthrough definitely high up on my replay list battletoads oh yeah this got me looking into what games rare had developed before donkey kong country one of my favorite developers at the time i have beaten battletoads without using any warps or cheats the speeder bikes are infamous because they're so early in the game but trust me that part's easy in comparison to the worst this game has to offer you know i kind of went through a baseball phase when i was like eight or so but i don't remember goonies two being here i watched a friend play through it a while back and it seems interesting but i don't really know if it looked all that fun blackthorne caught my attention on this list but sadly i've still never played it the screenshot here gave me the impression that it was like contra but it seems more akin to slower paced games like flashback illusion of gaia i did own this at one point thanks to this list i played several hours but wasn't really feeling it i keep questioning if i'd like it if i gave it another shot but i watched a friend play a bit more and i'm still not all that sure if i'd be much of a fan metal gear no the version the hideo kojima doesn't like i never could get into the nes game i played through the msx version on the metal gear solid hd collection which was actually a really worthwhile experience what they thought hybrid heaven was going to be like metal gear for the n64 oh geez dragon warrior four now this is a darn fine choice while i haven't played through it on nes yet i did beat the ds version and it's easily my second favorite game in the series behind dragon quest viii i like the nes game engine way more than the style used by the ds remake so i'm really looking forward to it i played through at least half of the breath of fire port on the game boy advance but to be honest i thought it was pretty boring i am interested in giving the playstation entries a shot someday though baseball 2000 on the game boy i'm sorry i can't be terribly optimistic about this one i mean the super nintendo version is pretty clunky as it is oh hey it's that game corey just did a video on i have to admit that video made me really want to play it i'll definitely keep an eye out whoa two capcom disney games in a row and what a game this is i've actually previously covered my memories of getting rescue rangers for christmas it went on to become the first game i ever beat so i'll always remember it for that i did own turtles in time at one point i know it's the fan favorite but it just never captured me quite like the port of the arcade game that's on the nes now that's my turtles game gradius 3 nor is it gradius i've got very limited shmup experience but i did beat life force it's not my go-to genre but i feel like i should be more into it than i am i have come close to buying this one several times super ghouls and ghosts it's notoriously difficult and it deserves it but it is very good this was actually the last game i've beaten my backlog i beat it on september 22nd 2008 zero unfinished games though lately i haven't done nearly as good of a job at keeping that number down you know that one game that you didn't own but played all the time at a friend's house that was rc pro-am for me man sure enough it was definitely more fun at my friend's house than when i later bought it for myself oh and this is another game by rare by the way shadowgate was actually among the first set of games that i bought when i got a used nes in response to this list getting me all interested in the system again definitely a must play for point-and-click adventure fans great music too killer instinct part of me wants to try this just as part of some effort to collect games made by rare but i'm really not a fighting game fan at all if you ask me the original wario land remains the best warrior land to this day one of the best games on game boy and so fun to collect everything in i actually just recently got final fantasy legend but i haven't started it yet i love good old simple japanese rpg so i'm looking forward to checking out the saga series on game boy i gave double dragon a pretty good shot it gets tough but i'm just not a bad enough dude to brawl with the dragons zombies ate my neighbors hard as crap but i did beat it that's okay i do appreciate its spirit but it's not that great of a game i haven't played final fantasy adventure in particular but i did play through sword of mana the gba remix i know that everyone of hates on that version but i don't remember it being bad earthworm gems artists are no doubt talented but i feel like their ambitious visuals got in the way of the gameplay not a personal favorite oh boy star tropics for the first two or so chapters i thought it was pretty great but the controls are ill-suited to an action game and i don't even want to get into how unfun the so-called puzzles are which makes me very sad because i love the atmosphere i can't remember for sure if it was this list or other recommendations that got me to buy blaster master but holy crap boy howdy is this ever one of the best nes games or what it's a bit long and tough for a game with no saves or passwords but it is absolutely not to be missed and the soundtrack is easily one of the best on the system blast core or blast corpse as i called it at the time was one of the first games that i bought to branch out from my small and safe stable of favorite series that i'd generally been sticking to i don't know if there's really anything that blast core can be compared to puzzle action what even is it i don't know but i'll like it i'm still woefully behind on lucasarts adventure games i've always been super curious about maniac mansion but is the nes version even a good choice i still can't believe that i've only played through earthbound once i'm just glad that i bought it years ago can you believe that there was a time in the late 90s when you could just walk into funko land casually ask for earthbound and they'd simply pull it out of a drawer and you'd pay 30 bucks good times there aren't too many options for action rpgs on the nes but crystallis is a great one pretty sure it was among my first set of nes purchases when i got back into the system is it just me or does crystallus seem like a game that falcom would have developed [Music] mega man x enough said right this one and x2 are the only x games that i truly love i actually like the platforming and act razor a lot more than i feel i should i know the main draw to the game is the world building sim but something about the simplistic nature of the combat along with good boss design really made me get into everything about actraiser castlevania 4 was one of the harder games for me to find in the years following this list i'm not sure if it's my personal favorite but it's perhaps the easiest game to recommend to castlevania newcomers alright funny story i decided to ask for retro games for christmas one year and bionic commando was one of my most wanted my parents said that funko land didn't have bionic commando so they recommended commando instead i'm sorry there's just no contest here no hey a fighting game oh hey another fighting game nintendo power was allowed to acknowledge the genesis you know that game that you have the vagus memories of playing at a friend's house but forgot what it was except that it was awesome i was pretty sure contra was that game thankfully i was right since then it's become one of my favorite series i know that tetrosphere is fairly loved that its music is a big part of that but when i rented it i hated both the gameplay and the music maybe that's just me ninja gaiden 2 that's a solid choice to represent the series with it's just as difficult as the first game but also more fair so what is shadowrun exactly it sort of looks like a fallout type of rpg maybe i don't remember it being on this list but the bits and pieces that i've seen of it lately have got me kinda curious isn't it funny that mario 2 used to be the weird one but now we kind of just accept it with brilliant game design by shigeru miyamoto's team and music by koji kondo mario 2 may be more than a bit different but just because it's a re-skinning of another game doesn't make it any less excellent contra 3 is amazing though for me it's more in the middle of my favorite contra games but that still means it's pretty freaking amazing dr mario yeah that game's alright i remember my dad discouraged me from renting lolo games and i never understood why he hated me playing them so much in retrospect i'm pretty sure it's because they featured the exact same repetitive tune on every single level fantastic little puzzle adventures though is this the slow version secret of mana is a game that i started a bunch of times before i ever played through to the end i always thought both its gameplay and music were kind of overrated but i replayed it with three players during a backloggery marathon stream a few years ago and now i like everything about it so much more and i even bought the soundtrack wow you can sure tell this list was made in 1997 can't you even back in its day shadows of the empire was a very divisive game i enjoyed it a lot myself but i suspect it would be very very difficult to go back to never played this version of simcity i'm not huge into simulation style games but i wouldn't mind giving it a shot someday the donkey kong country series is in my mind pretty close to platforming perfection they're straightforward without bloated gameplay and the level design is almost mathematical and how perfectly introduces a new concept and then gradually ramps up the challenges surrounding those concepts over the course of a level to this day i think pilotwing64 is one of the most satisfying flying experiences out there fun challenges great controls and just plain relaxing but perhaps most importantly little states is simply a blast to explore and discover new things in powerwing's resort on the 3ds is a very good and underrated follow-up but unless a future pilotwings brings back a tiny united states to explore it'll never match 64. as far as nes rpgs go i generally prefer the dragon quest games to the original final fantasy but i think it holds up in its own right unlike the dragon quest series i personally feel that the remakes of the oldest final fantasies are a bit better than the 8-bit originals alright the weird one of the zelda series made the list too and it deserves it i wasn't a zelda fan quite yet at the time of this issue but playing a bit of zelda 2 at my cousin's house cemented in my mind the look and feel of hyrule sure it's different but as nintendo power says right here it proved to be entertaining and challenging nonetheless though hey metroid and metroid 2. two metroids in a row i was always afraid of going back to these games having played super metroid first but you know drawing your own map is actually a fun experience in its own right give it a try it's funny how we criticize annualized series these days but we tend to forget that it happened way back too it's hard to believe that donkey kong country 2 released only one year after the first game while being even more perfect in its level design easily my favorite game in the series super mario kart is unquestionably the game that sold me on a super nintendo i wasn't so sure i needed to bother my parents with asking for a system more powerful than the nes but mario kart just blew me so far away that it finally gave me the courage to ask if maybe i could get one for christmas punch out punch out man i don't even care about boxing but punch out is just too fun to be missed i'm so terrible that tyson himself took me every evening for most of a week to actually beat but wow what a satisfying accomplishment i have pretty much zero concept of how football works but it does make me happy that so many people still call an nes game the best of its kind i spent a ton of time in mario paint i wish i'd actually been smart enough to record my creations to tape the one thing's for sure it never helped teach me a darn thing about music okay okay to be fair i do hear the nba jam features some pretty fun mechanics but there's just so many other games that i could play you know anyway super bomberman 2. i sort of enjoy bomberman but i've never been a huge fan but multiplayer is just okay to me any recommendations for the bomberman with the best single player mode wow turok made the list huh we were easily impressed back then weren't we the original f-zero has never done that much for me i love mode 7 graphics just as much as anyone but this is one series that's shown most brightly in the later polygonal 3d installments i can't agree with putting dkc3 above the first two games but i still think it's a great game just certainly not as great as dkc2 remember the phrase play control that used to be a big one i haven't heard it in years castlevania certainly has its own distinct brand of play control and it's tough to get used to but dang i sure do love this game i used to not like rpgs you know i had no idea what rpg even meant on this game's title all i knew is that it looked amazing when i learned that rpg minute was like final fantasy i was very concerned but as a mario fan i resolved to give it a shot it went on to become the first rpg i loved and one of my most frequently replayed games ever when this issue came out i hadn't yet delved into the mega man series given two's popularity i'm surprised it's not the series representative here you know i used to think that the first wasn't all that good but recent replays have gone a long way to change my mind mario rpg may have been the first rpg i loved but i still didn't think that rpgs in general were for me but after hearing enough glowing recommendations i decided to take the plunge on chrono trigger it was already worth about 75 dollars in the late 90s but its impact on me was well worth the cost may have not been my first rpg but it was the one that turned me into a fan yoshi's island was huge for me it was the first game that i was actively aware of and anticipating before its release at the time i considered yoshi to be my favorite game character and yoshi's story to be my most wanted upcoming game but so far nintendo just hasn't come close to recapturing what made yoshi's island special but i'm hopeful for yoshi's woolly world oh hey another yoshi game this is the localized version of japan's panel day pond or as my friends call it panel day awesome while my personal favorite puzzler of this style is wario's woods tetris attack is a very close second oh hey another yoshi game sorta don't get me wrong i love super mario world it's a fantastic game but something about its look has always seemed a bit off to me i think that's a big part of how i convinced myself for three years that oh nes is just good enough for me i don't need no super nintendo to this day wave race 64 blows my mind how did they pull off this technology so flawlessly in the first months of the n64's life sometimes racing games on older consoles just don't hold up and i didn't even own wavery 64 until after the n64's day but boy let me tell you it's something pretty special the first video game i ever played when put into the context of other games from 1985 and even from a few years later it's stunning to realize what this game really was even nintendo's early nes titles are a far cry from this unbelievable achievement that to this day holds up as pretty much flawless star fox 64 is pretty great i wasn't yet a fan of the original snes game but i put a ton of time into doing everything that the n64 game had to offer i remember the brilliant vhs pro mode that nintendo power sent out i watched this so many times link's awakening is a pretty special zelda game not only is it likely the best game on the original game boy but it somehow brought out a strong emotional connection to the world and characters that the zelda series has since rarely come close to matching it's almost unfathomable that nintendo achieved this in black and white with an 8-bit handheld i like the original zelda i played it at my cousin's house back in the day but i didn't really get into it at the time of course i own it now and i like it and all it's a series that i identify with so much that i feel a little bad for not having more strong feelings on the original game but oh yeah it's good definitely play it alright top 10 almost there final fantasy 4. i watched a friend play bits of the snes final fantasy games before and that's where i got the idea that i didn't like rpgs but after i played chrono trigger i went back to experience the final fantasy games for myself nowadays i actually respect ff4's rigid party structure and preset abilities more than i used to sounds like nintendo power had a bit of a scuffle debating ff4 vs ff6 final fantasy 6 is my traditional answer to my favorite final fantasy game but i have to admit i kinda love them all wow having hardly been around any time at all nintendo power just couldn't resist putting goldeneye at number seven it sounds like they weren't sure of the game's staying power but they weren't wrong to predict it not only was it an enduring n64 staple but its multiplayer mode redefined popular modern gaming as we know it for better or worse though personally i had just as much fun messing with the open-ended single player levels when i first saw this list i thought wow i had no idea this metroid thing was a big deal i got lucky and paid six bucks for a complete inbox copy from my local rental store as they were clearing out space for the dreamcast the first time i tried it i actually kind of didn't get it and i had no idea what to do i gave it another shot a few months later and thought it was the best thing ever well as you may know i think super mario bros 3 is pretty deserving of a number one spot but hey i'll take this well no doubt mario kart 64 was a frequent resident of my n64's cartridge slot but nowadays no one can really agree on what the best one is top 3 tetris wouldn't have been my pick but i can't deny its influence and popularity i was fairly into falling blocks puzzlers at the time but tetris was never really a staple of mine despite being my first a link to the past this appearing at the number two spot was a big head turner for me like metroid i hadn't yet grasped just what a huge deal zelda was i thought it was just something my cousin liked i wanted to figure out why people loved the series so much and to not feel left out on the hype for the so-called zelda 64. so i borrowed a copy from a friend and well i go by triforce so needless to say it had an impact for a long time i did consider a link to the past to be my favorite game of all time and on some days i think it still could be and finally number one super mario 64. according to the blurb it was a unanimous decision among nintendo powers 12 voters and at the time i'm pretty sure i remember a green with this choice and as much as i've loved the later 3d mario games i've grumbled a bit about the shift towards slower movement with less momentum mario 64 just still feels so right to me i don't know a lot of people disagree and feel like it hasn't held up but i just can't remember if any other game is so fully giving me control of versatile acrobatics like this mario 64 is the game that isn't afraid to let you find your own way to do anything you want everyone tried to copy what mario 64 did right but it's hard to say if anyone ever did it better and that's it that's the list it's amazing to see a lot of games here that were thought to have endured in 1997 but are now either forgotten at best or made fun of at worst and at the time i certainly had played a whole lot of these games but it was those that i hadn't yet played that made the biggest impression since then word of mouth and other lists have been helpful guides for digging deeper and deeper into retro games so the next time you see a top 10 or top 100 or top whatever list instead of arguing about it or complaining that lists are so stupid or whatever try looking at as a potentially valuable resource you might just discover a lot to love that you never would have even tried [Music] [Applause] otherwise [Applause] [Music] i really don't care about cars they take me from point a to point b now this hasn't stopped me from enjoying a racing game here and there in the past i actually used to rent stuff like top gear rally back in the 90s but pretty much all i can bring myself to care about anymore is mario kart and f-zero but about a year ago i was in the arcade room at magfest in washington dc and a buddy and i played a bit of crews in exotica this really brought back a rush of nostalgia for cruisin usa not from the arcade but the n64 version which a good friend of mine bought during the game drought that followed the system's release in 1996. this is a game that i always accepted as being kind of bad but we enjoyed playing it anyhow i knew it would be a stupid decision but i actually came close to buying a copy for myself way back when but nowadays when n64 racing games are worth about five bucks it seems pretty harmless to give into the guilty pleasure so over the past year not only have i revisited cruising usa but i've also checked out the other games in the series that i'd missed so is there really something there or was it better left as a fond memory the hook of the series is that it's a linear racing game through famous locations no laps just a straightforward world tour of sorts or in the case of cruisin usa a tour of the united states from california eastward to your destination in washington dc i think this is what appealed to me most back in the day especially because we were in the early days of 3d graphics it really felt like going on a road trip across the country and getting to see some well-known signs though in retrospect the representation leaves a little bit to be desired so this is the grand canyon not really scenery is very repetitive and scrolls past your vehicle in a distinctly choppy manner and i have to say there's a bit of a california bias here don't you think give the east coast and midwest some love too but hey back then who wasn't blown away by how realistic it was that bugs splat on your windshield while driving through iowa in first person view the game has a pretty darn good sense of speed and actually controls very easily the only levels that have much in the way of tricky maneuvering are chicago and washington dc now the game does require that you get first place to advance to the next race but this is a breeze on lower difficulty levels it would be a stretch to say that cruisin usa is much of a good game but if you have any love or tolerance left for the 3d graphics of 1996 across the u.s is still a pretty fun and mindless way to kill about 20 or so minutes so my friend that i was playing cruisin exotica with back at the magfest arcade room later found a cheap copy of cruising world and gave it to me as a surprise i'd never played cruisin world in the arcade or on the n64 and i was actually kind of immediately impressed while i can't compare it to the arcade version i felt like i was playing a smartly optimized port similar to the first game the draw distance is not terribly far but the core scenery blends well with the backgrounds creating a colorful and appealing look and even if the draw distance is lacking it's a necessary sacrifice for a rock solid 30 frames per second which honestly feels like a bit of an accomplishment for the n64 so all in all it's surprisingly technically sound for a series that i had written off as being kind of bad as you might expect cruising world takes you on a world tour that begins in hawaii goes through japan australia africa all through europe and then ends in florida where you catch a ride to the moon kind of cheating don't you think that's not exactly in the world cruising world is far less demanding than usa in terms of advancement only third or higher is required but it's also more challenging on default difficulty settings compared to the easy breezy feel of the first game world feels like it's trying to ground itself very slightly in reality very slightly all i mean to say is that there is some feeling of weight to the vehicles and that crashes and bad turns feel more punishing this takes a bit away from the feeling of constant and easy movement but does seem like a compromise that might have made the game appeal a bit more to racing fans the developers also create a light trick system that adds a little bit to the gameplay the most practical way to use tricks is to pop a wheelie by double tapping the gas which lets you vault over other cars as you approach them from the rear or get over oncoming traffic without any penalty it's a pretty decent addition but they made the tricks way more fun and easy to use in the third game cruising exotica i only just got this game and to be honest it's the reason i wanted to make a video on the series cruise and exotica turned out to be a lot harder than i expected it to be but also a lot more fun just like the first game you have to earn first place to advance but now there are limited continues the more miles you drive while making attempts at cruising mode the more continues you'll have for the next time this was a nice addition that let me get acquainted with the feel of the game without making an eventual victory too difficult to achieve and made me spend a little more time with it than i probably would have otherwise and i have to admit i didn't really mind that this is a dumb game and it knows it's dumb and it's all the better for it it takes the trick system from cruising world and makes it far more entertaining check it out flipping all over the place it's hilarious similar to the first cruising game there's not a whole lot that slows you down in fact there's even less in exotica you're moving forward and moving forward fast hitting stuff going off the road a bit it doesn't feel like any of that makes a huge difference compared to even slightly realistic racing games combining this light and easy feel with popping a wheelie results in something truly magical you can flip over your opponent's cars or flip over oncoming traffic and it looks kind of terrible but it's so fun and lets you get ahead pretty easily not that the game is easy at all it took some work to get through it but it was a fun little journey it's difficult for me to tell if all this flipping was technically all that beneficial in gaining ground and getting ahead but it really made the game for me if you're an n64 fan i'd say that cruising exotica is the cruising game to get so yeah these are all pretty dumb games but it's also obvious to me that they were built with some love and an understanding of the limits of the console that they reported to and even if each course features a pretty simple track design and repeated visuals you get to visit a ton of places throughout the series 41 locations across three games check it out golden gate park san francisco u.s 101 the redwood forest beverly hills the la freeway death valley arizona the grand canyon iowa chicago indiana appalachia washington d.c hawaii japan australia china kenya egypt russia germany italy france england mexico new york florida the moon korea atlantis the sahara hong kong alaska las vegas india ireland holland the amazon tibet and mars even if the games aren't that impressive they certainly have a ton of variety i went into this journey with the cruising series expecting it to be a terrible idea but you know i'm glad i did it i had a lot more fun than i expected and i wouldn't have bothered to waste my time making a video about it if i hadn't i'm probably just crazy though so i'm certainly not giving these games a wholehearted recommendation but beneath all their layers of age and overtly dumb design i think there's still something worthwhile here so the next time you run across a 90s racing game for 5 or 10 bucks that you used to enjoy well maybe it's asian to an irredeemable pile of garbage but hey if you give it a chance maybe not [Music] [Music] 1993 was a great time to be in the video games 16-bit generation was in full swing with both sega and nintendo finding ways to push their respective hardware seconded it with a hardware add-on like the sega cd hey you still don't have a sega cd well nintendo took a different approach with the super nes using tech developed by an 18 year old dylan cuthbert and his team at argonaut software the first graphical processing unit was born and along with it one of nintendo's most unique and groundbreaking games star fox we'd seen polygons using the occasional console game but they didn't have the power to utilize them in any meaningful way the super fx changed all that calculations required for polygons were being handled by the chip and this allowed for a greater number of them to be used at any given time things finally had real depth and scale that you'd never seen before on a home system star fox definitely received a lot of attention in magazines but it was hard to understand just how truly revolutionary it was until you saw it in motion on june 23 1993 the us was formally introduced to fox mccloud slippy toad balco lombardi and my personal favorite peppy hair and a game that took the forward-facing shooter and flipped it upside down the genre became known as the on-rail shooter [Music] i can pretty much pinpoint the exact moment i fell in love with star fox and the unreal shooter in general upon arriving at stage three the space armada your ship comes out of light speed and you're instantly thrust into this immense space battle it's like something at the star wars not only were you fighting tons of enemy spaceships you actually got to fly inside the larger space cruisers shooting the core and flying out the other side i'd always dreamt of playing something like this and here it was better than i even thought possible it was like nintendo reached inside my head and pulled out exactly what i wanted to play i think the space armada remains the very best level in any star fox game a few weeks after its launch in the us nintendo put together a competition called the super star fox weekend held at thousands of stores across the us over the weekend of april 30th to may 2nd 1993 gamers could win various prizes while the top scorer would win a star fox flight jacket the super star fox weekend used a cartridge that contained a unique version of the game they're given four minutes to rack up as high of a score as possible across three levels the first two are abridged versions of the first two levels from the full game and stage three being more of a bonus level where you fly through rings to supplement your score once time is up so is your turn i've seen the ads and thought i'd never have a chance to participate but to my surprise it showed up at a local department store [Music] and even crazier by the end of the weekend i'd landed the number one position at my location the 2000 or so cartridges used at each location remains one of the most sought after rarities on the super nintendo to this day you'll find it routinely starting at over 500 on ebay which figures because the only way you could acquire it was via an ad in the back of nintendo power [Music] as well as the game sold and despite it canceled at the 11th hour sequel we wouldn't get a follow-up for a good four years on the nintendo 64. 20 years later the impression that star fox made is still recognized the tech of the super fx chip opened the gates for consoles that would follow it's actually very surprising we've never seen a faithful and true remake of the original game sure there's star fox 64 but that was more of a reboot than a remake which was a pretty big disappointment for me but let's save that story for another time i am glad the first game got some love in super smash brothers brawl it's very much deserved especially with all the great music remixes i always found off that the sequels never did anything with the first game's amazing soundtrack i should mention that months after the conclusion of the super weekend competition i did get my flight jacket in the mail unpacking it i put it in my bedroom closet where it sat for the next 20 years i'd even forgotten i had it until recently maybe one day i'll wear it probably not the game boy library is loaded with titles that are easy to dismiss as downgrades from their console counterparts at a glance it's tough to tell the difference between a totally skippable port versus a full-fledged portable entry that can stand on its own alongside bigger siblings but it's thanks to games like these that the game boy has made a bit of a comeback for me lately games i've ignored but have finally started getting around to giving a fair shot so i recently decided to play through the real third game in the contra series initiate operation c [Music] [Applause] [Music] when it comes to running and gunning and blowing up aliens contra is simply the best in the business for my money contra has got to be the most fun 2d shooter series out there the first two games contra and super contra were adapted to the nes from the arcade bringing extra levels and more finely tuned gameplay to the home console operation c released for the game boy in 1991 became not only the first portable contra but also the first contra to be originally designed for a consumer system one of the things that i enjoy most about the contra series is the sense that i've really gotten to know the game through the course of multiple attempts at finishing it honestly i think it's kind of ridiculous that the original contra appears on so many most difficult game of all time lists in the grand scheme of things even among nes games it's really not one of the most difficult games out there and i'm i'm not even particularly good at them but yes contra games are hard and operation c is no different you're going to start from the beginning a lot of times [Music] at a glance it's clear that operation c takes after the nes games more so than the arcade style definitely for the best if you ask me the most obvious difference is that your horizontal movement speed running if you will is a bit slower than the nes games but you'll get used to it aside from that this really feels like a proper contra experience lots of enemies bullets flying everywhere uncompromised action gameplay on the game that's impressive really operation c introduced a few cool things that the series took with it into the future machine gun is the default weapon nice the homing missiles that you probably used more than you should have in contra 3 appeared first right here on the game boy and it works way better than i would have guessed probably the best weapon in the game the signature weapon of the series the famous spreadshot can actually be upgraded by picking up a second s icon the spread is way wider with more bullets but for whatever reason this upgrade mechanic only applies to the spreadshot still this most likely served as the inspiration for the two-tiered upgrade mechanic that applies to every weapon in contra-4 best game in the series by the way these plus the fire weapon the good type with a big explosion not the stupid slow spinny fire thing are the only weapons in the game a small assortment but the nice thing is that you really can't go wrong with any of them operation c seems to have provided inspiration for contra 4 in a few other areas like the little scene at the start of each level and contra force harbor definitely seems to resemble operation c's first level especially with the submarine boss up to this point the game has been pretty easy so far if there's one mark against the contra series it's that most of the games are intent on offering some sort of alternate gameplay style that while passable is simply never as awesome as the side scrolling stuff well operation c borrows from super c it uses its overhead commando style gameplay for levels two and four i'd have just preferred two extra traditional levels instead but these are fine and work well enough [Music] it's easy to see how you could mistake operation c as a rehash of the other games in the series i mean level three is pretty much just a mashup of the first two games third levels and the music while it has its own twists is for all intents and purposes just recycled for the game boy where things started getting really tough for me was the end of level three this stupid little jump should not be this hard i never did manage to hang on to any of the good weapons through level five the final level but once i figured out that you don't have to worry about platforms squishing you on this elevator things weren't quite so bad anymore despite mostly unoriginal themes and heavy recycling operation c's level design is all its own and we'll challenge contra fans that are just looking for another run and gun to master the boss designs are also completely new and i thought were pretty good so sure it's not the most original contra game and its few innovations since became standard for the series but for me the most fun part of a contra game is feeling like you're really getting to know the game over the course of multiple attempts the famous extra lives codes just don't do them justice you gotta learn to pick yourself back up after getting beat down and give it another go it starts off so hard but as you learn the game and finally beat it you feel like you could totally do it again and that's what makes a great contra game and even though it's a bit shorter operation c delivers you probably know game freak is one of the company names that appear when you boot up a pokemon game game freak was actually founded as a magazine before getting into game development and while it's true that they haven't developed very many games outside of pokemon they've actually made a few other very unique but much lesser known games including platformers like drilldozer one of the last great game boy advance releases but in this episode we're going to take a look at another game freak developed platformer released on the super nintendo almost five years before pokemon [Music] [Applause] i'd never heard of smart ball until fairly recently and i was surprised when i ran across a copy in a local store for only five bucks i'd say that's a small price to pay for an interesting bit of game freak history and check it out published by sony so from the americanized artwork we see what looks like a real cool ball with some tude or whatever a fierce looking bird with fire raining down from the heavens upon a modern metropolis that we can probably assume is dark and gritty turn on the game and the illusion is shattered surprise smart ball is actually loaded with bright colors and all of the cuteness that you'd expect from japan with absolutely no doomsday cityscapes to be seen but there are firebirds that drop the fire well sony you tried so what we've really got here is a game known as jerry boy in japan and the main character is not so much a smart mouth ball as a cute little jelly blob huh get it jelly jerry [Music] anyway the story setup which is totally excised from the north american version aside from the ending is that jerry is a prince who was turned into a jelly slime thing by a wizard because jerry's brother was jealous of his fiancee princess emmy jerry's abilities are fairly simple but different enough from the norm to feel refreshing he can stick to walls and even ceilings it would be nice if there were a way to leap from wall to wall but it's still pretty neat attacks are a bit unique too you sort of like stretch out by holding the up or down direction if you time the hit right the enemy you connect with will be defeated it is a bit weird but it works you also collect red balls that spawn from plants how nice that they tell you what you've picked up you can hold up to nine at a time and throw them at enemies in an ark but you can also find a few other types of balls blue recovers your health clear expands your health meter for the level green grows a vine that helps you get to places that you couldn't reach otherwise and white lets you jump much higher than normal there's also an iron ball that slows you down but it can pass through multiple enemies and can be reused pretty handy in the right situation one annoying thing is that if you're carrying any upgrades you can't pick up any health recovery or additional balls without dropping the item kind of a tough call sometimes especially when it comes to the jump upgrade the game does have infinite continues and actually has some pretty tricky stuff it's not especially difficult and can be beaten in just a few hours but it's also mildly frustrating at times a sequel was supposedly cancelled by sony at the last minute it would have been great to see these mechanics expanded upon but smart ball is still a pleasant little platformer that's just different enough to stand out on its own if you see it for cheap it's definitely worth picking up as the credits roll you'll see names like satoshi tajiri founder of game freak and creator of pokemon as well as kin sugimori pokemon art director and lead designer of the original 151 pokemon it's kind of surreal to play a game made by the same people as pokemon that has absolutely nothing to do with pokemon i wish that game freak had more opportunities to branch out from pokemon because games like smart ball drill dozer and the relatively few other games that they've developed show that they're capable of far more than just rpgs as it turns out they've got a lot of fun and creative ideas for other genres too [Music] as a kid i'll admit i wasn't too big of a reader i never had that book that absolutely hooked me so much that i had to have more instead it was video games that were my escapism of choice and a majority of the reading that i did was firmly of the video game magazine kind so if you were going to try to get me to do some heavy reading your best bet would be to put something related to video games on the cover capitalizing on nintendo fever that had swept the nation by the late 80s and early 90s that's exactly what author and entrepreneur seth godin did with worlds of power a series of books that were adapted from popular video games each was written by a different author under one pseudonym fx9 and was aimed directly at young adults my mom recently sold her house my childhood home while we were prepping the mover out i unearthed almost a complete set of world of power books from when i was a kid man i loved them back then but i barely remember anything at all from them so i thought now would be the perfect time to revisit them so let's start with volume number one blaster master [Applause] follow jason into a mysterious underground cavern full of strange alien beings soon he's locked in battle the gang of radioactive mutants fighting to save the earth from destruction the complete story of the nintendo action adventure game with loads of game solving hints throughout you know even as a kid i knew that blaster master had a super flimsy story heck that was part of the appeal for me it felt like the kind of b-movie you'd see on a saturday afternoon movie marathon jason frednik was your normal teenager one day his pet frog named fred escapes from his aquarium hopping out of the house fred comes in contact with a radioactive box that causes him to grow in size then he sinks into a hole in the ground of course jason chases after him and then he ends up finding a four wheeled tank buried deep within a subterranean passageway the book follows this setup to a t but it doesn't take long before the author begins to take some liberties with a story instead of just discovering the tank and going after fred like in the game jason meets an alien girl named eve now eve is the lone survivor of an advanced civilization that was eradicated by an evil alien creature the hilariously named plutonium boss using her tank called sophia the third she has tracked the alien entity here to earth what's kind of weird about all this is how close it seems to the story of the japanese version of blaster master called metaphyte the story and setting in that game is totally different but you have a girl named neurosatellite who is the only survivor of an attack by an evil intergalactic emperor bet on total domination come on that has got to be a coincidence right there's no way that sunsoft gave the author of this book the materials from the japanese game to draw inspiration from maybe a developer would do such a thing these days but in 1990 no way before you know it eve hands jason a flight suit helmet and laser gun and they're off to save the world you know i never really thought of game worlds and enemies in real world context describing things that just makes sense in games and transferring them to another medium doesn't always work so great it's here that the author really seems to struggle to sometimes hilarious results what is that thing was all jason could say standing in front of a thick wooden door was a guard its eyes stared at them from high above and when its mouth opened its chin scraped the ground all jason and eve could do was stare in shock then three deadly missiles shot out of its mouth in the game jason often has to jump out of the sofia and explore on foot i never liked playing these segments in the game but a majority of the action in the book is spent outside the vehicle while searching for more energy power for the sofia jason stumbles upon the first underboss he's greeted with the same clanging alert noise from the game [Music] this entire battle is described in detail dodging some flames jason gets in close and kills the pulsating mass afterwards he's convinced that that was the plutonium boss suddenly a booming voice rings out through the underworld you thought that pickling pile of uterescent protoplasm was me you thought that i the plutonium boss would let myself be out thoughts by a half-witted child blaster master dedicates a good portion of its 119 pages on the first two areas of the game and most of that time is spent on only a couple of enemy encounters the in-game levels are pretty big so it seems like there could have been some more interesting predicaments for our heroes to get into after jason takes down the giant crab in level 2 he returns to sofia to find that eve has been kidnapped at this point the book completely glosses over levels three and four with just a few sentences level three whizzed by on a hail of laser blasts and vaporizing robots there he was attacked by a group of eight killer robots keeping his wits about him jason defeated them after a long battle in level four jason felt a rush of energy when he got past this level he would be halfway the vehicle's power was becoming awesome it could shoot in all directions it could hover for long periods of time it could climb walls and ride along the ceiling obviously the author didn't want to keep jason on his own for too long hey it'd probably be too difficult to keep that interesting so it's only a matter of time before he rescues one of his classmates this kid named alex who has been in the underground for two weeks he's been tortured and experimented on eventually just discarded by the plutonium boss that's pretty rough for a kid's book don't you think [Music] the two fight together through level five and six finally arriving at level seven at last we get the big reveal fred jason's frog has been mutated into a sick and twisted version of himself faced with the harsh reality that he must now kill his best friend jason goes into a full-on no-doubt jason grabbed alex's shoulders listen to me will you you know the kind of stuff that plutonium boss is into genetic engineering nuclear mutations he turned my little pet frog into that that thing after alex finally talks jason into brutally killing his pet frog the underworld starts to crumble it's here that the book finally escapes from the shackles of the source material and just does whatever it wants to in order to rush to the conclusion completely foregoing the final area of the game the kids are transported straight to the plutonium boss who in typical villainous fashion reveals his grand plan he's built a machine called the cyclotron that will allow him to consume the earth's resources instantly a couple of well-placed laser shots to the contraption is all it takes to finally defeat the plutonium boss after all that there's no big battle with the true face of evil a guy with a shield and a flaming whip [Music] after escaping the collapsing underground we're met with a happy ending jason wakes up in his bed convinced it was all a dream fred is somehow totally alive and safe suddenly jason's face got serious what about you eve where will you go now i've told alex's parents about my past eve said they love that kind of stuff alex said we'll tell everybody that eve is a distant cousin who's been orphaned and mom and dad had to take her in eve promised to tell them all kinds of outer space stories you know it's pretty admirable what the book is able to do with the source material for better or worse it stays pretty close before totally losing focus at the end if anything it made me appreciate just how stupid the entire story setup is hey one thing is for sure though revisiting these books is a ton of fun and 25 years on i can kind of rebel in how quirky and weird it is that they even exist they're a relic from a time-long past and one of those oddities that made being in the video games in the 80s so much fun i can't wait to check out the rest [Music] [Applause] [Music] while we were prepping to move her out i unearthed almost a complete set of world of world remember taito they're responsible for some of the most iconic arcade games of the 70s and 80s but to be honest i haven't actually played too many of them most of my space invaders experience comes from a knockoff called avenger for the commodore vic-20 and then there's bubble bobble but that's not really my thing back when i lived in ohio i was probably eight or nine i have this memory of going with my next-door neighbor and his mom to big lots and she said he could get a nintendo game of course that means you gotta pick something so he ended up with this strange little game kiwi craze i loved playing kiwi craze at my neighbor's house the character designs kind of made me think of kirby and i guess something about how it looked just appealed to me but the coolest thing about kiwi craze are these i guess you can call them vehicles you can steal these maybe they're clouds from these gummy bears and i think these are eggs and like flying ostriches or emus or whatever you hold the a button to fly up and release to fall it feels very unique and satisfying i do remember beating the first boss back then but the game has limited continues and is actually fairly difficult between levels you'll see this island map i seriously doubt that i knew back in 92 or 93 or whenever that kiwi craze was set in a real place and actually if you live outside north america you are much more likely to be familiar with kiwi craze but you know it by a different name the new zealand story it's originally an arcade game from 1998 and it was poured to master system mega drive commodore 64 pc engine amiga and pretty much every other system of the day especially consoles and computer systems that would be familiar to audiences in europe south america and japan and as far as i can tell the nes version was only released in north america and is the only version that north america ever got until we got an arcade port on the taito legends compilation and a remake of sorts on the ds i recently borrowed a copy of taito legends for the ps2 to see if the original arcade version could hold up to my nostalgia for the nes port obviously the graphics are a lot more colorful and the sound is very different as it turns out the nes level design is actually pretty faithful to the original but kind of compacted larger rooms use fewer tiles in the nes version but the intent of the original design seems to carry over one of the most significant differences is that the various vehicles controlled differently from one another the ostrich things are fast and squirrely in the arcade version but the eggs are kind of slow maybe they're actually tiny hot air balloons the arcade also has vehicles and weapons that the nes version cut out like the ufo which is very easy to fly and shoots overpowered lasers and the cane which is simply an invincibility item on the nes shoots fireballs that bounce all around the room warps are in the same locations in both versions which are activated by shooting the empty space where they're hidden the most interesting feature that was cut from the nes version involves heaven levels that you have a chance of visiting in areas three four and five when you get a game over if you reach the goddess at the end of the level you get an ending of sorts what you actually want to do is avoid the goddess and find the secret exit which lets you skip the rest of the level that you died on of course having played the game on taito legends which allowed for infinite continues i didn't have to bleed quarters to reach the ending but the game was still sufficiently brutal especially on the last level which i spent over an hour on before i managed to get past its unforgiving slipperiness so then i wanted to get an idea of what another console port was like and i bought a copy of the mega drive version of the new zealand story i was particularly interested in this one because i read that it has totally different levels almost like a sequel well that's true to a point every level in the first area is new aside from the returning whale boss and the second area is different at first until it starts to become area three from the other versions totally skips the second boss and then takes you straight to a super frustrating version of the third boss the third area continues to use recycled levels and the memorable pirate ship is missing entirely level 4 1 is mount cook the final level making the whole game much shorter than the other versions which end at 5-4 despite being shorter and having more continues than the nes version the new zealand story on the mega drive is much more frustrating i feel like it relies too much on mean enemy placement and overuse of enemies like these star things which kill you by touch unlike other enemies which kill you with attacks something that i felt was relatively unique for a platformer in its day so some of what made the game fun and special was taken away i even expanded my genesis cartridge slot just so i could play it and now i kind of regret that despite its less vivid graphics and the fact that some features are cut the nes version still feels like the real deal it has every level aside from the heavens and maybe it's my nostalgia talking but it just feels right and is easily my favorite of the three versions that i've played a year or two after i left ohio for delaware i learned through old-fashioned letters that my neighbor had gotten a genesis not too long after that i guess he got rid of his nintendo stuff because what did i find the mail but a package with kiwi craze i hadn't even had my nes hooked up since i got my super nintendo but i did bring it up out of the basement just to play kiwi craze for a few minutes since i didn't really play the nes anymore i soon sold it and all of my games including kiwi craze to help save up for the n64 when i later realized how stupid this was i got another nes and began to build a new collection i found a copy of kiwi craze at my local funko land and of course i had to have it who knows it may even be the same card i mean how many copies of kiwi craze could have been floating around in northern delaware anyway years later in 2008 i was nearing the end of my gaming backlog which was heavily populated by some tough nes games kiwi craze being one of them and you know it's not an amazing game or anything but by the time i actually beat it i'd had a lot of fun with it and i do think it's pretty good beyond just nostalgia it's kind of weird that square enix now owns taito even sending out space invaders goodies as member rewards i doubt we'll see a new zealand story revival anytime soon if ever there's certainly a lot more popular and valuable taito properties to choose from but as for me i'll always remember kiwi craze as my taito game

Channel: My Life in Gaming

Views: 635,702

Keywords: video binge watch, nintendo games, super mario, super nintendo, NES, famicom, game boy, star fox, nintendo switch, RGB, nintendo, sega, sony, microsoft, console, Component, SCART, Composite, resolution, 240p, 480i, 480p, 720p, CRT, PVM, Mod, HDTV, Framemeister, OSSC, video game, retro gaming, game hacks, game setup, mlig, modern tv, vintage gaming, console port, emulation, fpga, nintendo switch online, analogue super nt, nintendo books, roms, nintendo controller, classic gaming, nintendo power, GBA

Id: odhf1l7GiGo

Length: 229min 41sec (13781 seconds)

Published: Thu May 27 2021