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Post by Ex on Mar 8, 2018 23:05:04 GMT -5
this guy named snark released I knew Snark back in the day, Snark was actually a lady! I've heard of those two Famicom games you mentioned, I didn't realize they were part of a series. This is definitely turning into HG101 article material.
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Post by Ex on Mar 9, 2018 2:22:47 GMT -5
19. Titanic Mystery: Melody of Blue | Famicom Disk System | 1987 | 6/10Titanic Mystery: Melody of Blue is a Japan-only Famicom Disk System diving simulation game, developed and published by Gakken in 1987. The player acts as a scuba diver investigating the underwater wreckage from the Titanic. The main goal is to discover the cause behind the sinking of the Titanic, but the player can also explore to find relics and treasure along the way. In order to finance the diving operation, the player must appease investors by bringing back items of worth, as well as regale journalists via periodic interviews (with user selectable answers). Each dive itself has a time limit, so yes drowning can (and does) happen. Every time the player saves the game, the date advances a day. If the player reaches a certain date before achieving the main goal (finding out what really sunk the Titanic), the player will get a bad ending. Titanic Mystery actually has three bad endings, and only one good ending. Interestingly the player is allowed to choose from three female divers at the start; Momoko, Marlene, and Reika. However it doesn't matter at all who the player chooses, as there's only one sprite set shared between all three, with not even so much as a palette swap to differentiate. The person chosen also seemed to not affect the endings either. During the diving gameplay, the player must navigate the maze-like environs of the Titanic itself. The old ship is labyrinthine, with multiple decks and many rooms to explore. While exploring, the player can find objects which can bring money into the operation, or be used to advance the plot. Collected items go into an inventory, but the inventory can only hold three items at a time. Item puzzles can be as simple as using a saw to cut a chain, but many puzzles are more strange than that. As the player finds items and uses them correctly, this will eventually trigger earthquakes which open portals to lower decks. Only by reaching the bottom deck and solving all its mysteries, can the player discover what really sunk the Titanic. However, the lower the player goes into decks, the easier it is to drown before returning to the surface. Running out of air is always a possibility, getting lost constantly is highly likely (manually created graph paper maps are necessary, there's no auto-map here), and some puzzles are kinda illogical. Lastly, if the player cannot read Japanese, they may require a walkthrough to finish Titanic Mystery. Sadly no English fan translation exists yet for Titanic Mystery: Melody of Blue. That stinks! For its time, I found Titanic Mystery to be impressive graphically. Its main character, the female diver, is very large, detailed, and well animated. The environments of the Titanic are rendered convincingly enough to sell the atmosphere. There's a cool scrolling effect as the player explores each side of a room, giving a 3D feel to the surroundings. (This effect is time consuming enough though, that there's an instant skip button built in to bypass it.) For as nice as the graphics are, unfortunately the audio is starkly the opposite. The "music", if you'd dare call it that, is absolutely horrid. There's only two tracks, and each one is about seven seconds long, not to mention terribly composed. It's quite likely the player will find themself muting this game's audio in a hurry. Sound effects are barely there, but at least they aren't offensive like the "music" is. The controls are pretty simple, making the diver swim is no issue. The way the inventory system works can be clunky, but overall Titanic Mystery is fairly simple to interact with. Supposedly Titanic Mystery: Melody of Blue is a port of the Commodore 64 game Titanic: The Recovery Mission. Said C64 game was developed by British studio Oxford Digital Enterprises, not Gakken. The FDS version received more of a backstory, including a small manga with the instruction booklet. I've read this manga was popular due to its shower scene involving Reika. I haven't seen the manga myself, so I can't confirm its potency. What I can confirm though is Titanic Mystery: Melody of Blue is a unique experience, especially for its time and platform. I say "for its time", because the whole while I was playing Titanic Mystery, I was reminded of the Everblue series on PS2. Of course the (considerably superior) Everblue series released many years after Titanic Mystery, so I'm assuming Arika were fans of this ol' FDS adventure. As someone who enjoys diving games, and has beaten many (including both Everblue entries as well as both Endless Ocean entries) I felt positive bias towards Titanic Mystery. That said, there's plenty of quirks here that irritated even me. (Hope you like flipping a disk every time you surface or dive.) I'm sure I would have enjoyed this experience far more if it were in English. This being an adventure game, being unable to understand investors, journalists, item descriptions, NPC dialogue, or event descriptions sucked a lot of the experience out. (Strangely the "good ending" is in English, despite the fact the bad endings aren't.) Also it would have helped if the OST was worth hearing whatsoever. And yet the spooky atmosphere and crazy puzzles kept the gameplay interesting enough to deal with the graph paper cartography. Lastly I will say that Titanic Mystery: Melody of Blue may be the only game that will let you grab a ghost's breasts underwater.
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Post by anayo on Mar 9, 2018 8:05:54 GMT -5
Ex,
When I began reading your overview I was thinking Titanic Mystery sounded really experimental. It doesn't come across as trying to follow in any of the conventions of the time (shmup, platformer, double dragon clone, rpg, etc.) but rather like the developers approached video games with a "blank slate" mindset. Unless it actually is based on a C64 game, then take all of what I just said and give it to Oxford Digital Enterprises.
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Post by Ex on Mar 9, 2018 10:34:38 GMT -5
Unless it actually is based on a C64 game, then take all of what I just said and give it to Oxford Digital Enterprises. I think the credit would have to be shared between Oxford and Gakken. Looking at images from the C64 version, a lot of the initial design is still there. You've got the investors and journalists stuff. But the actual "diving" appears to be done with a drone and overhead map: It's hard to find a lot of information about the C64 version, but I believe the Famicom version added an actual diver, and the 3D exploration and such. Without that stuff, Titanic Mystery wouldn't be nearly as engaging. So I'm going to give the tilt of the hat to Gakken as having created the superior version. They also completely redesigned all the graphics for Famicom, for the better.
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Post by toei on Mar 9, 2018 13:49:22 GMT -5
this guy named snark released I knew Snark back in the day, Snark was actually a lady! I've heard of those two Famicom games you mentioned, I didn't realize they were part of a series. This is definitely turning into HG101 article material. My bad! Goes to show I shouldn't just assume. And I'd probably never play that diving game, but that does sound quite original in concept.
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Post by Sarge on Mar 10, 2018 1:05:29 GMT -5
Yep, this totally looks legit. I recommend watching the speed run from this year's AGDQ. The story bits are absolutely hilarious. The game itself is... well, it looks decent enough, but the hit detection and whatnot is a bit too goofy to really give much more than a 3.0. Better than you'd expect from a Taiwanese bootleg completely legitimate and officially licensed game!
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Post by anayo on Mar 10, 2018 8:26:20 GMT -5
1) Alisia Dragoon 2) Ristar 3) Jewel Master 4) Thunder Force III 5) Elemental Master 6) Lightening Force 7) Shinobi IIIThis was great. I miss when “ninja singlehandedly takes down entire army” was a genre. I don’t know the critical and media reaction surrounding this game when it came out, but I imagine it must have been really enthusiastic. The graphics look great. There’s no crazy 3D stuff like “collect blue spheres” in Sonic 3 or the flying bits in Contra Hard Corps, but there’s parallax scrolling everywhere and huuuuge bosses. One of them is mutated brain guy where he’s shown foreshadowed as a distant figure in the distance, then in the next screen when you get up close and fight him, he almost takes up the entire screen. The game’s overall tone is one of stoic badassery, but this was before the days that gray and lifeless meant “serious and grown-up”, so there’s vibrant color everywhere. The soundtrack combines mysterious-sounding traditional Japanese ninja music with more upbeat modern tunes. There’s even one stage with a jazz-inspired bass line. The use of digitized samples punctuating the FM synth is great as well, with sword slashes, yells, and explosions. It makes me miss when sound samples in a game were a rare treat and not just the whole entire game. The gameplay isn’t as tightly fine-tuned as something like a Castlevania game, in fact this is rather easy (I beat it on my 3rd try). But the set pieces and spectacle are so great that I didn’t care. The stage where you're plummeting down a cliff hopping from one falling rock to the next while fighting ninjas was spectacular.
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Post by Ex on Mar 10, 2018 12:18:09 GMT -5
I don’t know the critical and media reaction surrounding this game when it came out, but I imagine it must have been really enthusiastic. I remember a positive review for it in EGM. Myself and friends who had Genesis consoles back then, all of us enjoyed and praised the Shinobi games on the platform. I have not played all the way through the Shinobi games since the early '90s, but I still remember enjoying them. I distinctly remember Shinobi III because it's so incredible. Of course, Shinobi III debuted three years after Shadow Dancer, so the developers had learned a lot about the hardware during that time. If this game were to release today, as a Steam indie or something, people would shit their pants over it. Sadly those self-same people won't bother to go back in time and give amazing old games such as this a chance. Oh well, I'm glad a few younger folks like you still want to explore games of this medium's golden age. Shinobi III best Shinobi.
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Post by Sarge on Mar 10, 2018 13:44:52 GMT -5
Shinobi III absolutely holds up today. Easily the best of the series.
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Post by anayo on Mar 10, 2018 16:08:49 GMT -5
Ex,
I caught the Sega Genesis era, but barely. It was between 1995-1998 when Playstation and Sega Saturn were available but too expensive for my parents to buy. I’d see a lot of Genny’s and SNES’s at other kids’ houses with games like Eternal Champions and Super Mario World. There was even a kid on my street who still had an NES with Ninja Turtles and Mario 3. He pined after an N64, though. After the dust has settled and they’re all equally outdated, I like Sega Genesis most of all. 1080p 60 fps games on a 40 inch screen are excellent, but the visual language of sprites and the otherworldly twang of FM synth just does something special for me.
Sarge,
I feel like Shinobi III just wouldn’t get made today, even if the technology was all updated. The themes in these games really say a lot about what people thought was cool during that decade. Shinobi is basically riding that wave of 80’s ninja movies. Every mascot platformer in town feels like it’s trying to get in on the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles craze, itself beget by the earlier ninja craze. Streets of Rage 2 feels like a vigilante justice movie from the “Reagan’s war on drugs” days. Contra Hard Corps feels like it’s either turning to the same inspiration as the 80’s G.I. Joe cartoon show, or a comic book that should have existed in the 90’s but didn’t. Comix Zone is literally based on such a comic book. I think these ideas could all work as modern games, but they're not fashionable anymore, so no one’s interested in making them.
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