/vr/ - Retro Games

[Anonymous No.4523420]

What did you guys think when this came out?
What did people think at the time?
What do you think about it now? A disaster that put the first nail in the coffin of the Saturn? A work of genius that was ahead of its time?

I'm playing the PC re-release now, and it's interesting how such a simple score-attack arcade design can be made so fucking impenetrable.

[Anonymous No.4523425]

Played for the first time in 2003, I did the good ending and thought it was pretty straightforward, but then again I never bothered raising the nightopians.

[Anonymous No.4523429]

I dunno, I was like 10 years old.
Cool.
Pretty good game, although that fucking cat boss...

[Anonymous No.4523478]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nQnClqCSIfk

[Anonymous No.4523493]

So here's the story, someone at Sega made a score attack shmup without the shooting part and then they realized Oh shit, we need to pad this 20 minute long arcade game for 30 hours or the magazines are going to tear us apart in reviews and then the virtual pet raising idea was born which is basically an excuse to make you keep replaying levels indefinitely, the brilliance of the concept is that each level has its own habitat and unique species of nightopian so you can't just grind the first level forever, you're forced to replay EVERY area.

It's clever, I like the time limit and score attack concept, wish there was a stage that included shooting.

[Anonymous No.4523497]

>>4523420
Didn't look very appealing. Played it for like 5-10 minutes on a demo unit, wasn't impressed, haven't played it since.

[Anonymous No.4523542]

>>4523493
is this comment actually trying to be stupid on purpose

[Anonymous No.4523558]

>>4523542
He's only half wrong, you gain a point bonus by the 4th wave if you raise Nightopians to a happy mood in a level. I don't think you actually gain anything from breeding pians with different parts.

[Anonymous No.4523564]

>>4523558
Then again you can easily attain A ranks without touching the pet raising part so that's completely optional.

[Anonymous No.4523567]

No one cared. It was a new IP on a failing system that no one I knew owned. We all had Playstation or N64.

[Anonymous No.4523574]

>>4523567
>No one cared.
Japan master race did.

[Anonymous No.4523580]

>>4523420
>I'm playing the PC re-release now, and it's interesting how such a simple score-attack arcade design can be made so fucking impenetrable.
I don't see what's impenetrable about the game, you deposit BLUE BALLS into the cage to obtain a colored mcguffin item then you enter the palace to finish the wave. Your goal is to score enough points to reach at least C Rank in every level to unlock the final level.

[Anonymous No.4523604]

The only not immediately obvious mechanic is that you can fly over the Ideya palace to continue racking points before the time is over. The game should be a lot easier once you realize that.

[Anonymous No.4523625]

>>4523580
The controls are super finicky if you don't know what you're doing. The close camera, low draw distance, and 3D-in-2D movement can make actually figuring out where you're going and where everything is very annoying. The actual means of scoring beyond just getting the Ideyas - bonus time, flying over the pagoda to keep going, stunt rings, paralooping to reveal hidden items, the Nightopian bonus, etc - are never explained. The bosses are all defeated differently and those means aren't explained, and not figuring out how to do it in time will make you fail the entire level.

I've come to appreciate the game more now that I better know that stuff, and I can see the skill ceiling that high level play could bring. But I was utterly lost on my first couple play attempts, and couldn't figure out how I was supposed to get above a D or C (or if that even mattered). It does a lot of new shit that really could have been more clearly defined, even with the instruction manual.

[Anonymous No.4523628]

>>4523625
Ah yes the close up camera is a problem, the draw distance not so much since the 3D background is only there for eye candy.

[Anonymous No.4523631]

>>4523420
I was really excited to play the game when it came out when I was 10 or so because of the great art style and new hotness 3D graphics. Played it in a Toys R Us and realized it was kusoge after 60 seconds of play.

[Anonymous No.4523636]

I really love how it looks and sounds but I could never get into this game.

[Anonymous No.4523637]

>>4523631
>kusoge
I realized you were a faggot after 5 seconds of reading

[Anonymous No.4523650]

When you get thrown away from NiGHTS and have to jump into the darkness at the start of the final level, I felt a sense of dread. When the music starts playing and the girl flies out of the darkness on her own and you play as her as she soars through the night sky with her courage Ideya, I felt a little lump in my throat.

Guess I'm a fag.

[Anonymous No.4523703]

>>4523628
Draw distance contributes to the general sense of disorientation. The 3D movement is already bad enough because it's unclear what path I'm going to go on and what path is just for show, but then having stuff suddenly pop in just makes it that much harder to parse.

[Anonymous No.4523720]

I remember that I thought Saturn was a meme console, and that I was glad to have an N64 & PS1 instead.

[Anonymous No.4523782]

>>4523420
>A disaster that put the first nail in the coffin of the Saturn?

No one thought that. It was one of the greatest games of the 32 bit era when it came out.

[Anonymous No.4523841]

>>4523493
I dunno if you're joking, but there were a lot of revisions for NiGHTS, starting with it being a 2D button mashing game, though they were always explicitly against making a shmup. Yuji Naka ended up describing the game as "more like a race game than an action game." The A-Life part was one aspect of Yuji Naka wanting to make a game that rewarded replaying it. They seemed to be legitimately ambitious with what they wanted NiGHTS to be.

http://shmuplations.com/nights/
http://shmuplations.com/alife/

[Anonymous No.4523854]

>>4523841
>"more like a race game than an action game."
Which makes sense, since enemies don't kill you, they can only slow you down.

[Anonymous No.4523859]

>>4523841
Also Banpresto's Super Spacefortress Macross 2 is what happens when you take the Nights score attack gameplay and apply them to a shoot'em up.
https://youtu.be/skRrS7XxY_w

[Anonymous No.4523874]

>>4523420
it's a nice looking game, but the concept is pathetic

how the fuck was a game about flying through rings supposed to sell saturns?

[Anonymous No.4523937]

>>4523859
What makes NiGHTS so interesting is that it's a time attack that turns into a score attack. The majority of your points comes when you hit Bonus Time, which means that you need to sprint as quick as you can to get enough chips to the cage so you can get the most amount of time. But once you get Bonus Time, you then need to be as graceful and skillful as possible, which involves going slower and more counter-intuitively than what you were doing to get to BT.

The game you posted seems to just be "get to the point limit before time runs out," but something truly NiGHTS-like would be hitting the point limit causing a bunch of new risk-based scoring opportunities to appear until time ran out.

I think NiGHTS really was too ahead of its time. It's a game that really needs a real leaderboard and maybe even high score replays to foster the kind of "beautiful skill" idea that it offers.

[Anonymous No.4523967]

>>4523937
Interesting post.

[Anonymous No.4524234]

>>4523937

The HD versions have leaderboards.

[Anonymous No.4524310]

>>4524234
I meant "ahead of its time" back when it was on the Saturn

[Anonymous No.4524320]

>>4523420
>A disaster that put the first nail in the coffin of the Saturn?
Is this the newest hot narrative going around? I never heard this one before. Like most people who played it I loved it, unfortunately, not enough people owned a Saturn to play it.

[Anonymous No.4524357]

It's about the only Saturn game I ever hear talked about, but even when it was less than 2 bucks in the last steam sale I still couldn't bring myself to buy it.

[Anonymous No.4524376]

>>4524357
I can't tell you why I ended up biting the bullet on it. I tried the XBLA demo and just could not fucking understand it, but I guess there was something in me that thought "this has to be a good game, right? right?"

[Anonymous No.4524408]

>>4523420
The game is fun if you play it right. That is all that counts

[Anonymous No.4525382]

There's good ideas in it, there's bad ideas in it. The biggest bad idea was thinking that an arcadey hi score chaser was gonna fly at all, let alone as a fucking flagship game.

[Anonymous No.4527251]

It's gorgeous when you get it right but it was too annoying to get it right

[Anonymous No.4529578]

>>4523420
It's a fantastic game, it'd be a bit better if you could zoom the camera out more but whatever.
>>4525382
>The biggest bad idea was thinking that an arcadey hi score chaser was gonna fly at all, let alone as a fucking flagship game.
Who gives a shit if it failed to appeal to western mainstream audiences as long as it's a good game? Especially now when all that shit is history.
>>4524376
It is and if you have any trouble with it after learning the basic rules you've probably got brain damage.

[Anonymous No.4529584]

>>4523720
Saturn was a great system in Japan, N64 is the overrated Rare games system.

[Anonymous No.4529585]

>>4523720
Saturn was a great system in Japan (and thus is a great system now everywhere since you can pirate everything); N64 if judged by public western opinion is the "overrated Rare games" system.

[Anonymous No.4529670]

>>4523420
Well, the sequel feels like a game produced by people who didn't understand the original and what made it so fun so you may have a point here.

[Anonymous No.4529704]

>>4523420
honestly it blew me away.
imagine playing the usual snes/genesis games and then seeing a demo of this in a store.
even though the full game is super short, the game was creative as fuck

[Anonymous No.4530298]

>>4529670
Is the sequel really that bad?

[Anonymous No.4530305]

>>4523720
>meme console
Hi /v/

[Anonymous No.4530321]

>>4529704
this. Mario 64 looks bland compared to this

[Anonymous No.4530324]

>>4523420
Didn't Shigeru Miyamoto like this game?

[Anonymous No.4530335]

>>4530298
>long, unskippable cutscenes before and after every single stage
>no bonus time, half of your points come from finishing the level as fast as you can
>half of the game are meh filler missions that don't play anything like classic nights
it's sort of ok for what it is but the devs clearly didn't understand the original

[Anonymous No.4530541]

Who says "Auxilio!" when you run out of time and lose all the spheres and Nights?
And why is it in spanish? (auxilio = help)

[Anonymous No.4530597]

>>4530305
This is much worse than the /v/ NiGHTS threads I've seen, in fact this is the first NiGHTS thread I've seen on 4chan that was mostly negative
>>4530321
mainline Mario was never that great in terms of art direction compared to the Sega attempts at taking him down. I think both NiGHTS and Mario 64 have kickass gameplay though. Mario 64 is a great explorey game, NiGHTS is a great linear arcadey game.

[Anonymous No.4530598]

>>4523625
why do you want your hand to be held this badly?

do you even remember being a child and learning through play, trial and error?

how dense do you have to be that you fail to notice the developers wanted you to experience that sense of childlike wonder?

none of these are actual questions I need answered. you're the poster child of modern gaming. good luck with that.

[Anonymous No.4530605]

>>4530597
/v/ is not a collective, stop assigning personalities to boards of up to 10,000 users, that's fucking autistic

[Anonymous No.4530607]

>>4530598
The problem with NiGHTS today is that the ingame instructions in the ports for PS2 and PC don't have a very good ingame manual. The Saturn manual actually had a "how to score big" section meanwhile.

That said: you're on the goddamn internet. I was confused at first but a friend told me how to play and once I got the "golden orbs collection is the real meat, focus on that for points" thing it was very easy to understand. Just ask someone or google "how to play NiGHTS" or some shit. I get being confused at first but saying the game is shit even though you can find out what the rules of the game very quickly is retarded.

[Anonymous No.4530615]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZ3EiydeUsA
This song is really great though.

[Anonymous No.4530628]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BGDs5NkJiiU
I love this song from the original because it's so Chao Garden-core

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LS0Wq4jf3F0 Also I like how the "rival battle" theme has the same sort of sound as the vs Metal Sonic stage in Sonic CD. Both are Ohshima-directed games and you can clearly tell; very similar dreamlike atmosphere in the Sega stuff he directed, Burning Rangers too.

[Anonymous No.4530637]

>>4530628
>Chao Garden-core
>core
Is that what we're calling it these days?

[Anonymous No.4530946]

It was the main reason to own a Saturn.

[Anonymous No.4531349]

THERE IS NO NIGHTS

[Anonymous No.4531534]

>>4530324
he was spotted playing it at E3 back in the 90s
when asked what he thought of it he said he enjoyed it but in his opinion it was "unfinished".
I feel the same way, its a glorious experience but the player needs more to do.

[Anonymous No.4531686]

>>4530598
"Childlike wonder" is playing Super Mario Bros and being silently guided through the mechanics though simple, deliberately designed levels that give clear responses from trying things out.

"Childlike wonder" is looking at a Pac Man level and instinctively understanding the core concept "eat the dots and run away from the ghosts chasing you," but letting you discover what power pellets do.

"Childlike wonder" is a product of a game knowing what to say and what not to, so that the player quickly grasps the fundamentals needed to win but can safely experiment to discover the individual elements that aren't intuitive to grasp.

NiGHTS is a ton of unintuitive shit thrown at once with no way to isolate what each element does on its own along with a grading scale that tells you "you're doing it wrong" with no way to immediately understand what "doing it right" is. I still think it's a really good game, but as >>4530607 mentions, it takes outside explanation to meaningfully understand it.

[Anonymous No.4531703]

>>4531686
nights single handedly brought the saturn back from the dead. Show some respect.

[Anonymous No.4531708]

>>4531686
It's not a hard game, you put the balls in the cage, how hard can that be

[Anonymous No.4531728]

>>4523493
Anon you can access every single music variation on the christmas nights disc

it's not there for you to get autistic about it, it's there for you to waste time doing random shit in the stages and get access to hundreds of different variations of music when you replay the stage, if you actually got all OCD about it you missed the point

[Anonymous No.4531737]

>>4531708
You put the balls in the cage, fly back to the start, get a D, do that three more times and beat the level in like 3 minutes, maybe beat the boss if you can figure it out, and then turn the game off because if you're just gonna hold right, pick shit up, and fight a boss, you'd rather play Sonic.

>>4531703
Look man, I said NiGHTS is really good. NiGHTS is fun. I just got all the achievements in the PC version a couple days ago. But I don't think it's unreasonable to say that it's weird as hell.

[Anonymous No.4532798]

>>4523420
all i know it's the game sonic team wants to make instead of sonic

[Anonymous No.4532847]

>>4523574
No one cared outside of Japan and Japan alone wasn't enough to keep Saturn going.

[Anonymous No.4532908]

>>4523420
>What did people think at the time?

That it is a nice pretty game but so stupidly simple (you fly on a fixed route) that it would only catch the attention of children.

[Anonymous No.4532912]

>>4523580
>Your goal is to score enough points to reach at least C Rank in every level to unlock the final level.

And the single trick to achieve that is to fly over the finish line so you can do another run of the stage, with all multipliers you still have, until you run out of time.

It's a fucking grinding game at that point.

[Anonymous No.4532917]

>>4532912
>It's a fucking grinding game at that point.
Well that's the nature of score attack games. Although getting a C rank is so easy you can barely call it a grind, you can do it in 15 minutes.

[Anonymous No.4532919]

>>4523937
>I think NiGHTS really was too ahead of its time.

The game is about as complex as two NES games put together, one with the time attack and one with the score attack like you mentioned. If Balloon Fight's adventure mode had the loop-de-loop attack, it would be nearly the same thing as Nights.

[Anonymous No.4532923]

>>4532919
As a child that actually would have sounded terrible, I wanted my money worth out of a purchase and every game to be a 60 hour long epic. But as an adult who spent 2 bucks on steam or pirated the Saturn version, eh, Nights is fine, it's ok for games to be short with lots of replay value which is exactly what Nights is.

[Anonymous No.4533081]

>>4531686
I won't give you any compelling, objective arguments. If I managed to do all of the things you described, in Nights into Dreams, and no manual, no outside explanation other than "here, play this" was given, then your description of this game must be inherently wrong. However I will make no further attempts at convincing you because it's just a waste of time. Look, even this post is a waste of my time.

Yes, I realize this is just a polite version of posting "fuck u ure wrong", but eh, what can you do. It's just that you're wrong ON THE INTERNET, of all things. I guess I am also childish and hate to lose. Have a nice day.

[Anonymous No.4533369]

>>4532919
Combining genres, even simple ones, can make interesting and unexpected results, and I'd say NiGHTS falls into that. Also, games are more than just their raw mechanics. With the speed, analog control, and overall audio-visual spectacle that comes from chaining and doing tricks, NiGHTS's feedback is almost like a Tony Hawk game.

>>4533081
Games are subjective. We use objective language, but everyone feels feedback differently. We can both be right about our own experiences.

[Anonymous No.4533749]

The paternal horn is the single most joyful and uplifting piece of music from any game ever. It deserves special recognition for that alone.

[Anonymous No.4533862]

>>4530605
sadly boards do jump on bandwagons and tend to push people into cults of opinion, like holding the ''right'' opinion makes you a more worthy user and gets you praised more frequently, holding the ''wrong'' one gets you eschewed. You see this happening all the time. Patterns like this exist in every society to steer people into particular directions.

[Anonymous No.4533865]

>>4530628
the music still sounds so fresh and fun today, I wish more scores were in this vein.