/vr/ - Retro Games

[Anonymous No.3395486]

Let's gripe about shit things in good games.

What the fuck is up with the inconsistent design in SMB3's Giant Land? Some elements have thick blocky pixel lines (clouds, ground, underwater reefs), while others are re-designed with thin lines (pipes, enemies, hills). This shit has bugged me forever.

[Anonymous No.3395510]

>>3395486
That was the best fire flower colourscheme. I wish it didn't disappear.

[Anonymous No.3395676]

>>3395486
>>3395486
>Some elements have thick blocky pixel lines (clouds, ground, underwater reefs), while others are re-designed with thin lines (pipes, enemies, hills). This shit has bugged me forever.

It bugs me more that the giant koopas and hammer bros. look like fat disproportionate versions of the regular foes.

And then the giant paratroopas have tiny regular koopa-sized wings and they just look weird

[Anonymous No.3395696]

>>3395676
also
>giant land
>giant lakitu clouds in the background
>lakitu comes out regular sized in a regular sized cloud

Cheep cheeps also come out regular sized (which is CRIMINAL considering there's a giant fish, the boss bass, in the game), and none of the castle enemies or the airship come out giant

Even the king and his toad isn't giant.

It's like holy shit nintendo, let's have a little consistency!

[Anonymous No.3395703]

>>3395486
>>3395676
>>3395696

My two cents are that it's probably nearly unnoticeable on a CRT.

[Anonymous No.3395709]

>>3395696
Also while we're on the subject of giants, Super Mario World it really pisses me off that there's only like 3 Banzai bills, or something like that, in the entire fucking game.

Such an awesome enemy and it could have been used more, and it only came out a couple of times, like they only did it for photo ops so Nintendo could go "oh look! giant fucking enemies! incredible graphics!!"

>>3395703
I played it on my NES in 1991 with an old 20" Curtis Mathis cabinet TV that in itself was a huge piece of wooden furniture.

It wasn't exactly HD, and let me tell you, it was DEFINITELY noticeable.

[Anonymous No.3395713]

>>3395709
Speaking of my old TV, here it is, in all its glory, in 2016.

It now rests in my parents' living room, and now mostly serves as a shelf to put things on, though it STILL FUCKING WORKS.

As you can see, it had 2 side speakers and put out incredibly good sound, specially with my Sega Genesis and its thumpy bass soundtracks.

The resolution obviously wasn't great, but many fun times were had.

Unfortunately, my apartment doesn't have room for it but if I can buy a house I will claim it back.

This thing wasn't just a TV, it was a fucking piece of furniture, beautifully crafted, at least in my opinion.

[Anonymous No.3395714]

>>3395713
found a better shot

[Anonymous No.3396683]

>>3395713
>>3395714
Looks very beautiful

I'd pay good money for one of those, do not ever throw it away

[Anonymous No.3396690]

>>3395709
>like they only did it for photo ops so Nintendo could go "oh look! giant fucking enemies! incredible graphics!!

That's exactly why they did it. It's one of the first two levels, and it's there so they can showcase them huge sprites and sweet parallax shit from the get go; the other one is a basic introduction to Yoshi, so they felt that wouldn't need that much eye candy

[Anonymous No.3396696]

Obvious, but whatever.

[Anonymous No.3396708]

>>3395486
I would need to check against the assembly, but my guess is that it is a clever compression scheme where they have a program that enlarges the normal sized graphics. I don't know if you appreciate how little ROM was available back then. You should be impressed rather than annoyed. It's a very novel idea.

[Anonymous No.3396717]

>>3395709
Banzai Bills appearing everywhere would've made them way less unique. This way any time they appear you go HOLY SHIT. If they appeared everywhere, it would be meh.

[Anonymous No.3396720]

How about Torpedo Ted then? One (pretty crap) level! The way they cockteased you in the ending too.

[Anonymous No.3396743]

>>3396717
Why did you assume he wanted them to appear everywhere?
He just complained, and rightfully, that they appeared only thrice in the entire game, he never stated that they should be everywhere.

[Anonymous No.3396761]

>>3396696
only a modern gamer would get stuck in that place

[Anonymous No.3396771]

>>3396708
I admit I wondered if that was the case, and if it is, then fuck it it's fine with me. It just doesn't seem to match up with what I know about NES graphics; scaling was an SNES thing.

[Anonymous No.3396772]

>>3396761

Yeah, a TRUE RETRO GAMER knows the only way to beat a game is to painstakingly bomb every single room in the game

[Anonymous No.3396789]

>>3396772
C'mon man, it's a glass tube. Not so hard to figure it out.

[Anonymous No.3396792]

>>3396771
>scaling was an SNES thing.
In hardware yes. This was software scaling. It must have written the scaled up tiles to 4 free tile slots, then used a fast algorithm that simply copies ever source pixel into 4 pixels in the destination slots.

[Anonymous No.3397194]

>>3396771
That's not the case. There's plenty of unnecessary garbage graphics in the credits.

[Anonymous No.3397227]

>>3396772
In Metroid that was the case, and that shit is painfully similar to a famous "bomb shit and go up" hallway in the original

[Anonymous No.3397228]

>>3397194
Pretty sure the Koopa is praying.

[Anonymous No.3397241]

>>3396717
How about ice levels?
There is only like... 1 in the entire game.

[Anonymous No.3397284]

>>3396683
Different anon. I had one of my own for about 8 years, then killed it when I was a teenager because I put a stereo on top of it and the magnets in the stereo speakers ruined the screen.

It still hurts when I think about it

[Anonymous No.3397659]

>>3396772
>to painstakingly bomb every single room in the game

That's one of the first things you learn in Super Metroid.

[Anonymous No.3397713]

>>3396708
>they have a program that enlarges the normal sized graphics.
Nope.

[Anonymous No.3397721]

>>3397713
since you seem to know with certainty, point at the address in the rom where one of the double-sized tiles is stored. Should be simple enough to verify

[Anonymous No.3397726]

>>3396708
There's a romhack that fixes the inconsistencies. The creator notes that they were separate graphics, so Nintendo had no excuse.

[Anonymous No.3397727]

>>3397721
>Post complete conjecture
>Expect cited sources to disprove

You're a right cunt aren't ya?

[Anonymous No.3397730]

>>3397727
I did not post the conjecture, and the anon posting it was doing just that, a conjecture. Meanwhile the person saying they're stored was quite confident, so I assume they know where.
>>3397726 provides a pretty good point, works for me.

You're being an asshole though, so go fuck yourself with a rusty rake

[Anonymous No.3397758]

>>3397727
no need to be a dick

>>3397730
>Meanwhile the person saying they're stored was quite confident, so I assume they know where
I have hacked SMB3 for so long that the graphic pages have burnt into my retinas. I know with absolute confidence I've seen them, but can't remember the address. However, to prove a point, I checked it out just in case.

0x5B810

[Anonymous No.3397761]

>>3397758
You're cool, thank you very much. Surprisingly cheap route Nintendo went down, or maybe they wanted people to believe it's some real-time scaling, for the jaw-dropping effect?

[Anonymous No.3397771]

>>3397761
It's hard to imagine what the real motives were, but probably something like that. The cloud, the wood block and the ?-block are very recognisable because they've been in practically every level since 1-1, and now the exact same graphic is right there but 2x the size, whooaaa amazing.

[Anonymous No.3397904]

>>3397659
Especially since I seem to recall you don't get the X Ray specs until really late.

[Anonymous No.3397935]

>>3397758
Can you explain what this is? Sorry, I'm not familiar with what this is.

[Anonymous No.3397964]

>>3397935
Short answer: Graphics editor for games
Long answer: Tile Molester is a Java program that lets you open files and interpret and edit their data in various formats. A common use is to open NES ROMs and observe the data in the 1D 2bpp planar format, so you can view and edit the graphics of practically any game. It also works with SNES, GB, PSX and N64 games etc.
Bottom line is that it only views and lets you edit data in various ways. I have edited levels with it too, albeit the method being retarded.

[Anonymous No.3397969]

>>3395486
I hate how there's always 1 or 2 shit-weapons in Megaman games. You know that one that you use all of 1 time for 1 boss.

[Anonymous No.3398029]

>>3397758
>>3397964

So why are there some missing chunks, specifically on the "?" Block and the coral? And the brick block's tile looks all fucked up in the top right.

Does it just get those graphics from another address somewhere?

[Anonymous No.3398062]

>>3398029
Tile Molester only edits Graphics. To minimise redundancy, NES games store their graphics as 8x8 tiles. You won't usaully find the same tile in the same graphics bank twice, because that would waste precious space.

The two tiles of the giant ?-block is on top of the cloud graphic, and the third missing piece is the aforementioned tile duplicated.
If you edit one of these repeated tiles, you will also see the changes in the other tile that's a part of the block in-game.

Think of the clouds/bushes in SMB1. If you edit the bush graphics, you also edit the cloud graphics.

You can bypass this by editing tilemaps with a tilemap editor or a hex editor. Djinn Tile Mapper is one of these, but I do it by hand with a hex editor.

[Anonymous No.3398072]

>>3398062
Adding to this, it doesn't really matter how fucked up the graphics look to us in a tile viewer. As long as all the needed tiles _are_ there (and they are, otherwise the game couldn't retrieve and subsequently display them) everything's alright. Granted, it's infuriating to search for tiles if they're all over the place, so if the ROM happens to store its tiles neatly aligned for our viewing pleasure, that's great.

[Anonymous No.3398114]

>>3398062
>To minimise redundancy, NES games store their graphics as 8x8 tiles. You won't usaully find the same tile in the same graphics bank twice, because that would waste precious space.
But what's the point if they leave the tile slots unused?

[Anonymous No.3398150]

>>3398114
It's not like they had everything 100% planned out or any optimising tools to automatically exhaust all duplicate files out.
There was probably something at some point in time in the slots that seem empty in the final.
In some cases, it's easier for the developers to just blank out or mark tiles with Xs instead of moving every tile backwards and repoint everything.
Of course, if you were an ultra purist and wanted to squeeze all the potential out of graphics, you'd use all 256 tiles in a page and have no duplicates anywhere. This is very hard, though.

Later games for some consoles did this, though, and I believe there was little human interaction with inserting the graphics to the ROM - everything was optimised at compile time and the devs had no idea/gave a shit about what graphics were in what slots.

[Anonymous No.3398174]

>>3398114
the tiles in ROM are not the tiles in RAM, and the latter limit is much harsher. So it would make sense that developers may leave redundant tiles as gaps in the ROM, to keep editing sane. They won't have these gaps in RAM

[Anonymous No.3398484]

>>3396772
C'mon, man I was 12 when I beat this fucking game

and that was seven years ago, its not so fucking hard. That puzzle only got me for a couple of seconds

[Anonymous No.3398521]

>>3395696
I can't speak for the lakitu but since I was young I always had assumed that the level with the small cheep cheeps was a gag, like "oh look in the last world the level was normal but the fish is huge and now the level is huge but the fish is normal LOL"

Sounds fuckin retarded as I type it out but that was always how I saw it.

[Anonymous No.3398585]

>>3397241
I remember 2.
One in that level that was between 2 warp pipes and let you take a look at browser's castle.
The other is one of the "special" ones.

[Anonymous No.3400652]

Not exactly a gripe but on the subject of SMB3, what was this? I don't remember seeing it when I played the game but I caught this later when I was watching a longplay.

[Anonymous No.3400676]

>>3400652
Mario's bottom half sprite is stopped being drawn as the fadeout reaches him to prevent Mario from being drawn on top of the fadeout. This is needed, because sprites cannot be placed on several ordered layers.

[Anonymous No.3400684]

>>3398585
>One in that level that was between 2 warp pipes and let you take a look at browser's castle.
I love getting the star and running through the whole level getting loads of lives. Especially if the star hasn't run out by the time you get to that column of flying Koopas at the end.

[Anonymous No.3400691]

>>3400652
Ah, it's the fortress underneath. I thought a glitch was momentarily substituting some skull tile.

[Anonymous No.3401431]

>>3397969
I almost want to go down a list.
Still, it's fucking great to find a weapon you love that wrecks shit and spam the fuck out of it.
I hate how most, if not all, normal enemies have individual weapon resistance charts, potentially making something good turn to shit against a particular normal ass enemy.

[Anonymous No.3401436]

>>3400691
Same, got spooked.

[Anonymous No.3401448]

>>3395709
I always hated Yoshi's face when jumping or swimming. He/She looks so upset.

[Anonymous No.3401475]

>>3396720
Fuck this. I unlocked every level except for that butter bridge secret level or whatever it was with Torpedo Ted. I had this game since I was 6 years old and only when playing it with a friend at 24 did we try and do a 100% run (because I was telling him every enemy turned into weird looking marios and he didn't believe me) and we found the secret exit.

>>3396761
>>3396696
When I first rolled through this area I said to myself "It's obvious I need to come back here and bomb that tube, how stupid do they think I am?" and then when I finally got the bombs (I casually played it on and off for two weeks) I completely forgot what to do and just aimlessly looked around the entire map. Then I gave up and googled it and put both hands on my cheeks and made a fish face.

[Anonymous No.3401481]

>>3397228
I always thought he was suspicious of Mario/the statue.

I don't think Nintendo even lets religious stuff into their games, or atleast I don't think they did back then.

[Anonymous No.3403093]

>>3401448
Lol me and my sister used to like pausing him on that face.

[Anonymous No.3403095]

>>3401475
>When I first rolled through this area I said to myself "It's obvious I need to come back here and bomb that tube, how stupid do they think I am?" and then when I finally got the bombs (I casually played it on and off for two weeks) I completely forgot what to do and just aimlessly looked around the entire map. Then I gave up and googled it and put both hands on my cheeks and made a fish face.
Gutted as fuck. You figured it out then destroyed any potential satisfaction from it.

[Anonymous ᵛᵉʳᶦᶠᶦᵉᵈ ᵃᶜᶜᵒᵘᶰᵗ No.3403158]

>>3395486
>Anchor and Music Box are mostly useless
>Most fun power-up in the game is only available in one level and can't be taken outside of it
>Levels are pretty short

All I got, really.

[Anonymous No.3403168]

>>3395486

Anyone here ever play Case of the Rose Tattoo?

It's a GREAT point and click adventure game, framed as a Sherlock Holmes mystery. You start off as Watson, actually, and your first main goal is to bring to Holmes's attention that there really is a case to investigate, upon which Sherlock takes over. You look around, solve puzzles, find clues, figure things out, etc.

In addition to being a great game, it's one of the most atmospheric I've ever seen. You look at anything and you get a fairly detailed description of it, and you get a lot of what late 19th century London was like, clothing styles, the impact of various books on the political scene, musical commentary, you name it. (Also, a fun note: What Watson sees when he looks at something is often very different than what Sherlock sees when he looks at the same thing).

But midway through the game, you need to get a clue out of this one lounge guy. And he'll tell you, but only if you beat him at darts. So cue in stopping the point and click adventure game to play fucking darts with this fucking guy, who is actually really good. Maybe I'm just lousy at hand-eye coordination, but it took me like an hour and a half to practice at this stupid mini-game to be able to proceed. Unlike the game before it in the series (which also had a darts interlude) there's no way around it this time. You have to beat Mahoney or you can't progress.

/rant.

[Anonymous No.3403181]

>>3396761

No and fuck you. I rented the game when it was new and got stuck at that exact fucking spot.

Everything else in the game signposts that you can use items on it. They either light up with a color (doors, gates) or they have a little symbol on it if you bomb or X-ray it. The glass tube had neither - the ONLY hint you got was the other broken glass tube, which is easy to mistake for just being a cool prop.

[Anonymous No.3403184]

>>3401481
Nintendo was strictly anti-religion back then, unless it was a false made up religion for that game.

[Anonymous No.3403196]

>>3401475
What? But you're supposed to be going back down to Norfair to get the Grapple Beam after getting the Power Bombs.
Even then, you're heading back up to the Wrecked Ship after that.
And beyond even that the most common route into Maridia afterwards is via the Crateria elevator.
So I don't know what guide you found but it was pretty fucked up.

[Anonymous No.3403214]

>>3403181
It also had enemies crawling round that were only vulnerable to super bombs.

[Anonymous No.3403218]

>>3403214
No it didn't.

[Anonymous No.3403285]

SMB3 has no save system or password system.

[Anonymous No.3403380]

>>3395486
This faggot ate my entire party once. That was some bullshit

[Anonymous No.3403410]

>>3403218
Maybe it was the room next to it.

I dunno. Sorry you're a faggot then I guess?

I got it at the time without a guide or friends telling me how to. I was a bit desperate to progress and was bombing shit but it did finally make sense to me and it was fucking awesome to do.

[Anonymous No.3403416]

>>3403410
Cont:
Sometimes games can break their own rules and have it be a cool special treat.

The tube didn't follow the video games rules-- it didn't have bomb-reveal tiles or x-ray reveal tiles. On the other hand it made more logical sense than most shit, this super soldier throwing missiles and plasma everywhere never leaves a mark on a wall unless it's special breakable wall? These super missiles and shit don't even dent this glass tube?

Then, okay, this small sealed glass tube, sealed on both ends by doors, and I'm going to set off this huge 1.5screen bomb in the middle of it. That's gotta do something!

Then it does
OMG.

[Anonymous No.3403581]

>>3403184
I think they still are, actually. A couple years back there was a big deal made because they wouldn't let Binding of Isaac into the 3DS library due to its religious themes.

[Anonymous No.3403704]

>>3397904
>>3396772
>>3397659
>>3397227
It's bad game design because it has a completely unique tileset and doesn't show any signs of being breakable like every other object of its kind in the game. It's one of those situations where even if you use real life logic to deduce that you should be able to break the glass, the game design doesn't seem to suggest it at all. It's like if you stood in front of a rock wall shooting it over and over until it breaks because in real life it actually would break eventually; it makes sense in real life but obviously they wouldn't actually program that into a SNES game. Since this glass tube just looks like a setpiece in the background you just assume it's part of the graphics.

[Anonymous No.3403710]

I figured out how to broke the tube when I was like 12, get reked.

[Anonymous No.3403724]

>>3403704
>completely unique tileset
>a setpiece in the background
One of these things is not like the other. The completely unique tileset is plenty a clue in those days to figure that this location is special. The "game design" strongly suggests that something is up with that room.

>doesn't show any signs of being breakable
... it's glass

>like every other object of its kind in the game
but you just said it's unique

[Anonymous No.3403726]

>>3403184

Then why did they add the Tower of Babel in world 5 of SMB3?

[Anonymous No.3403740]

I fucking hate Oil Ocean in Sonic 2. It looks awful, like the color palette has been inverted. You often don't even know whether you should go left or right, the level feels like it was designed by Chinese hackers. The ecology in Sonic world is surely fucked.

[Anonymous No.3403778]

>>3403168

Git gud you cock mongering faget.

[Anonymous No.3403780]

>>3403740
I'm glad that in the special edition they replaced it with the No Blood For Oil Zone

[Anonymous No.3403789]

>>3403704
Sort of like in real life where Trump has literally no skills, no value to humanity, and no capability to make useful decisions for the rest of humanity, but we still let him be rich and run for president even though we could just ignore him or take his shit or beat him up.

[Anonymous No.3403792]

>>3396696
>Not posting the REAL /vr meme

[Anonymous No.3403801]

>>3403789
shillary, pls gb2/pol.

[Anonymous No.3403805]

>>3403801
We really shouldn't elect either of them, but for some reason we really believe we have to.

[Anonymous No.3403821]

>>3403285
But it has warp whistles
Granted, I have no idea why Nintendo didn't just put a save function there. It's not like they were short on money.

[Anonymous No.3404343]

>>3403821

I played the game a few weeks ago and didn't know about warp whistles until I read about them online. They're not obvious at all.

[Anonymous No.3404362]

>>3404343
Doesn't Toadstool explicitly tell you about them in one of her letters? Not sure.

[Anonymous No.3404386]

>>3397228

The manual has a picture of a koopa being suspicous of the statue too, i Think

[Anonymous No.3404563]

>>3403724
>>doesn't show any signs of being breakable
>... it's glass
>>3403704
And there's a broken one just down the road.

[Anonymous No.3404692]

>>3404343
>They're not obvious at all.
They're not. But maybe that was the intention. Hearing about things like this on the school playground made it all feel like some clandestine, forbidden knowledge. It was kind of naughty, if you know what I mean.

[Anonymous No.3404821]

>>3404692
>It was kind of naughty, if you know what I mean.
I think I know.

[Anonymous No.3405145]

>>3401481
>>3403184
Someone post the Mario praying to Allah pic. I'm like 99% sure it's official art.

[Anonymous No.3405190]

>all the backtracking elements in Spyro 2 and 3

I can't deal with leaving levels before they're 100% complete
I just can't

[Anonymous No.3405203]

>>3404692

What did adult players of SMB3 do? They have no playgrounds to gossip on

[Anonymous No.3405229]

>>3405203
BBS probably? Wrote into magazines?

[Anonymous No.3405271]

>>3403095
>>3403196
I just looked up a guide and found the point after the boss I had beaten and found the tube part mentioned.

Yeah I wish I didn't play it so sparsley and actually remembered what I had figured out. The same thing happens when I play Zelda games. I will see an item and know that I need the flippers or the gloves to get it and completely forget about it when I get those power ups and then I'm searching the entire map for it.

[Anonymous No.3406907]

>>3405203
Watercooler? Pub?

[Anonymous No.3406937]

>>3401431
>fucking great to find a weapon you love that wrecks shit and spam the fuck out of it.
...
>MM2
>Metal Blade cuts everyone's nuts off
>MM3
>Shadow Blade is similar except has blatantly nerfed distance and ammo
They're onto you, anon.

[Anonymous No.3407301]

>>3395486

this bugged me too, OP

[Anonymous No.3407554]

>>3395713
>Unfortunately, my apartment doesn't have room for it but if I can buy a house I will claim it back.
Why don't you just dwell within the TV itself? It's big enough.

[Anonymous No.3407654]

>>3395676
I liked that the koopas and hammer bros were fatties. It added a bit more character than if they were just giant sprites.

[Anonymous No.3407860]

>>3403380
Actually impossible, but okay

In the first fight he can only swallow mallow, and in the second any character eaten and copied are spat out in the same turn