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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   1923 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for July 12, 2024

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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So, funny story. Took my family to the beach a week or two ago, got nice and sunburnt, played with my kid in the waves a ton, had a great time. On the way back my wife wants to visit a friend along the way and catch up. Lucky for me, next door to the coffee shop they chose, is a used games store. Like, a nice one, with tons of Nintendo games at a reasonable price. Actual NES shit too, it's back catalog doesn't end at the Xbox 360. So I ended up splurging on a Retron 1 HD. It was only $40, and it has HDMI as well as composite out.

You see, I have two cases of old NES games from my childhood, but I had no system to play them on. Now normally I would have researched the living fuck out of this decision, but it was a snap decision while I was bored, so that happened after the fact.

Turns out the Retron 1 HD is actually a reverse engineered Nintendo on a Chip system, which is part of why it's so cheap. This is superior in some ways to ARM based emulation, but not as good as FPGA emulation. That said, it's got it where it counts, over composite it's input latency is identical to an NES. However it's HDMI scaler is trash and results in a terrible picture, poor colors, and I strongly suspect distorted sound. Because every Youtube video I've watched or listened to in action had color or audio discrepancies my version over composite connected to a CRT does not have, and they all use HDMI on a an HDTV. Supposedly it's also not compatible with a handful of games I never plan on playing, like Castlevania III and Battletoads.

Now I said I have this hooked up to a CRT, but that was an acquisition I only made on Monday. Found some hoarder lady on Facebook ditching a 20" CRT with a built in VCR and DVD player. It works perfectly, and it's been a wild trip to go back and play it all exactly as I remember.

I've only bothered with Super Mario Brothers to start with, because that was the first game I got when my grandmother bought me an NES back in 1987 or whenever it might have been. I actually can't remember the last time I put any serious effort in Super Mario Brothers. After playing a single session for three nights in a row, I was getting to world 5-3. I had largely forgotten most of the secrets I ever used to know, minus the warp pipe in level 1-2. I actually had forgotten there were water levels, or dark levels too!

Anyways, that's been a blast, highly recommend it.

Will you play Zelda?

I am biased but think that if you want a mildly old-school Zelda game without the crap, GBA's Minish Cap is excellent and sadly often forgotten

The original Zelda doesn't really hold up, IMO. There's way too much reliance on brute-force trial-and-error, made even more annoying by the one use per screen limitation of the blue candle and the fact that bombs are consumable.

On the other hand, Zelda II is underrated.

Zelda, well... I want to defend it, but you are probably right.

In it's defense, it comes from an older lineage of CRPG. Early Ultima's had a pretty narrow thread of clues you could get from talking to literally every NPC and writing down what they said for later. Might & Magic played similarly. Probably others. Then you start playing early JRPGs like Phantasy Star, Dragon Quest or Final Fantasy, and they are pretty similar, in that it's not always obvious where to go next and what to do unless you talk to everyone and take notes. It wasn't until later those series got put on pretty strong rails.

In that way, many of the important secrets in Zelda have NPCs that will give you the clues. But not all of them. And brute forcing the rest with limited bombs or the once per screen candle is odious. Then again, when I was playing Zelda as a kid, my older cousins had already beat it and helped me find things. And they figured it out with their friends around the school lunch table. Maybe one of them had a Nintendo Power subscription.

I still love it. But I get it.

The original Zelda doesn't really hold up, IMO.

It honestly blows my mind that the game was released in that state.

I guess not all the games can be hits, and Nintendo cancelling that shitty romhack they thought was worthy of the title Super Mario Bros. 2 in favor of the reskinned Doki Doki Panic was ultimately the right move and a stronger suggestion that they didn't quite have the game design format 100% perfected, but it still blows my mind the game is functionally unbeatable without the relevant copy of Nintendo Power entering the picture somewhere.

NES games were quite expensive once you account for inflation. Making things hard and obscure was the only way to get 100 hours of gameplay out of 128kB of ROM.

A person who played Zelda when it was released, would be aware of technological limitations of consoles of the time. This meant that yes, if you gave someone just the NES and the game cart, they wouldn't find the game as good as SMB. But the additional material required to make it a 10/10 is only the game manual, enclosed with the purchase of the game, not guides standalone or in magazines.

Edit: This is the game manual, I feel it explain the game well enough so that the player, while required to put in more thought than if they were playing a modern game, doesn't have to blindly stumble around.

Does the manual show the places where the secrets-to-everyone are? (Edit: no, it doesn't.) My main problem with the game is the "burn the random bush that looks like every other random bush"-type things, which is something that other titles would fix with affordances like cracked walls, etc. Which is something I get is a technical limitation of the system, but then again, trying to make a game that depends on a system that can't display it properly is not exactly good design.

I guess I come more from the AVGN school of software design that demonstrates that if it's not reasonably discoverable without reading the documentation it's probably a net-negative for your game design if it's there, since it's now depending on something you thought was obvious in its balance, but nobody can access it, so you're stuck trying to work around it and your game is less fun as a consequence.

Which is something I get is a technical limitation of the system

I don't think so. The space requirements to add additional burnable bush and bombable wall sprites would have been negligible. But this would have trivialized the game's "puzzles," which consisted entirely of pushing every block, bombing every wall, and burning every bush. If the movable parts are labeled, there's nothing left.

Later games added more elaborate puzzles with multiple moving parts that could be solved without brute force, allowing them to label the moving parts without trivializing the game. I think that this probably could have been done on the NES with a 128 KB ROM, but I'm not sure.

To be clear, I did play the original Zelda a couple of years after it was released, and I liked it, but I was also eight years old and mildly autistic, so I didn't mind wasting hours systematically trying to burn every bush and bomb every exposed rock surface on the overworld. But in retrospect, that's just really bad design and not much fun compared to games that came out just a few years later.

I think that there was probably intended to be a social aspect to the exploration, where friends would get together, divvy up areas to search, and then share findings with each other. And we did do that a little, but not really systematically. But I lived in a semi-rural area and didn't have many friends who owned the game.

When I was a kid playing Zelda, or Mario, or most games for that matter, "beating" them never entered my mind. Mostly because I was terrible at games. So I used them more like a toy clockwork world I enjoyed exploring. I'm under the impression this isn't dissimilar from how a lot of small kids still play games, and now there are tons of open world games without any win conditions that kids especially love.

So all that said, whether Zelda was fair or not, or beatable out of the box without any outside information, didn't matter to me as a kid. I only wanted to explore the far corners of the map, to see if I could even survive that far. Or maybe I'd really go nuts in a dungeon I'd already beat trying to wring every last secret out of it, not for any power gaming aspect, but because the limited technical vocabulary of the game wasn't immediately obvious to me and I thought anything was possible. I remember being particularly excited when I'd stumble onto one of those stairwells that took you to the small sub dungeons that had a side view instead of a top down view. Something good was always in one of those.

I don't know if Nintendo knew any of these things when they made Zelda, or if they tried to make a massive game you were supposed to beat fairly and failed, and lucked into making a fun, primitive, open world game with win conditions you could mostly ignore.

I am sorry to have doubted you. That you are aware of the idea of playing games collaboratively, shows your age. Such games are rare today, but were common in the era of Japanese arcades. There and then games such as The Tower of Druaga or The Quest of Ki would have a notebook on the arcade machine, for each player to document their possible discoveries. An implemention of collaboration was notably implemented in much later Dark Souls in the form of messages players can leave for eachother.

No offense taken. I'm assuming that you were just misled by my youthful figure.

Asking the important questions.

Probably! I still have an old cart for it. I tested it to see if it still had saves and it did... maybe. Names were there, but I strongly suspect they forgot the actual progress. All had only 3 hearts. So I'll replace the battery I guess.

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