Anayo's Year of the Sega Genesis (2018) Closing Thoughts
Dec 22, 2018 9:57:14 GMT -5
Post by anayo on Dec 22, 2018 9:57:14 GMT -5
I beat 19 Sega Genesis games this year:
1) Alisia Dragoon
2) Ristar
3) Jewel Master
4) Thunder Force III
5) Elemental Master
6) Lightening Force
7) Shinobi III
8) Contra Hard Corps
9) Mega Turrican
10) Twinkle Tale
11) Darius II
12) The Revenge of Shinobi
13) Herzog Zwei
14) Dune: The Battle for Arrakis
15) Trouble Shooter
16) Battle Mania 2
17) Sonic the Hedgehog 3D (Nintendo 3DS shop)
18) MUSHA
19) Panorama Cotton
1) Gaming to add entries to my “beaten” list is not the same as having a Sega Genesis in the 90’s. In 2018 I can “cherry pick” the very best games, making it easy to discard stuff I may have played back in the day if it was all I had. This also made it harder to play things on a whim. For instance I wanted to play Castlevania Bloodlines and Mercs, but didn’t because I had played those before and would have felt “guilty” for re-playing them instead of experiencing other untouched titles in my library. This also raised weird questions about acquiring more games and the prospect of completing them in my lifetime. It took me a year to beat 19 Genesis games. What does that tell me about my 300+ backlog?
2) I own games I never intend to beat. I tried to beat these and either lost interest or threw in the towel out of frustration:
-Demolition Man
-Midnight Resistance
-Shadow Dancer: The Secret of Shinobi
-Sunset Riders
-Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Hyperstone Heist
-Atomic Runner
3) Old games ask things of the player that would be considered impositions today. For example:
3A) Enemies and hazards often lurk off-screen where you can’t see them. The best way to contend with this is to memorize the stage. I had to get Revenge of Shinobi and Darius II down to a precise choreography. I accepted this for what it was, but younger players are far more averse to it. Examples:
“Like its predecessor, Sonic the Hedgehog 2 is not a perfect game. Many of the flaws from the first one still persist into the second one, including the problems with memorization. “
“‘How do we stretch out a 30 minute game into something that will take months to complete?’ The solution? Ah, just put a bunch of stupid fucking bullshit everywhere. Cheap-ass one hit kills, oblique puzzles, broken enemy spawns, impossible jumps, enemies that constantly knock you off a ledge…”
3B) When you lose all your lives, you have to start over from the beginning. This doesn’t jive with modern notions of convenience. Personally I have mixed feelings about it. I was OK with it in Revenge of Shinobi and Darius II, since I just enjoy playing those over and over. I didn’t like it in Sonic 2 because I always wanted to get all the chaos emeralds, but that meant backtracking for 50 rings at each goalpost, and the bonus stages don’t get challenging until chaos emerald #5 or so. This makes each play through feel like a considerable time investment that may or may not pay off. (I think a compromise would have been to let you keep your rings if you beat a bonus stage. Resetting the ring counter to zero after earning a chaos emerald feels like a random penalty.) Atomic Runner felt similar, since the first few stages are really languid. It’s the later stages that flummoxed me. But I had to beat the easy preliminary stages over and over and over again to reach those hard stages.
Not all the games were hard though. I beat some of them in just a few days, like Battle Mania 2 and MUSHA. Starting over from the beginning in those felt reasonable, although after each setback I’d want to take a break. As result I found it hard to play for hours on end unless I was on the verge of a breakthrough. Thankfully these breakthroughs felt really triumphant in a way that modern gaming rarely does, since modern gaming is so reluctant to inconvenience the player. It’s interesting that entertainment requiring any exertion from its participants has become so out of vogue. Maybe this says something about an “instant gratification” mindset gaining traction in our culture since the 90’s.
3C) Even harsher than starting over is when taking damage removes all your power ups. This really messed me up in Gaiares and Atomic Runner (both unbeaten). It was a total mood killer in Truxton. In that game, taking one hit not only reduces you to the default peashooter, it slows your ship to a snail’s pace. I couldn’t even avoid incoming fighters while collecting speed power ups. I have no idea how I’d beat Truxton except by a perfect, no-damage run, and there’s no way I’m doing that.
4) Random observations about graphics:
4A) I’ve always thought it was funny how bosses in 16 bit games will change color as they take damage, like that Terminator lookalike in Revenge of Shinobi who turns greener and greener the more you attack him. I’m sure it’s just because a color palette swap was an expedient way to telegraph damage, but it has a wacky logic to it. Kind of like how in Streets of Rage you can eat entire cooked turkeys from trashcans to gain health. Games don't seem to do that stuff anymore.
4B) Graphics on the Sega Genesis are good when they look like illustrations rather than sprite tiles. The most glaring example of “tiling” was probably Thunderforce III, which was full of obviously repeated patterns. Jewel Master, while super fun, also had rough sprites, like the work of an artist unskilled in drawing human figures or character animation. But in Shinobi III the graphics were full of dynamic character poses and style. The artist probably could have been working on comic books just as easily as Sega games.
4C) Spectacle and set pieces in Sega Genesis are very different from today. It isn’t like today where the camera moves around on the set of a virtual movie, or where lighting and shaders are nuanced enough that they have to hire a guy to light the scenes. In Sega Genesis everything’s basically an XY grid with shapes sliding around on it. So anything done to trick you into thinking the scene has depth and isn’t just flat was spectacular looking. In MUSHA there’s a part where the floor tiles drop out from underneath of you and fall into a river of lava. It looks mundane today, but phenomenal for the standards of the time.
In Shinobi III there’s a part where you see the boss lurking in the background. Later he emerges into the scene with you. Moments like these were really cool back then.
In Contra Hard Corps there’s a part where you’re riding on the back of a ship. The ship rotates 90 degrees in the air, changing the perspective of your midair-battle. The rotation is a clunky 3-frame animation and the clouds don’t scale accurate to the laws of perspective, but compared to how games usually looked then it was awesome.
1) Alisia Dragoon
2) Ristar
3) Jewel Master
4) Thunder Force III
5) Elemental Master
6) Lightening Force
7) Shinobi III
8) Contra Hard Corps
9) Mega Turrican
10) Twinkle Tale
11) Darius II
12) The Revenge of Shinobi
13) Herzog Zwei
14) Dune: The Battle for Arrakis
15) Trouble Shooter
16) Battle Mania 2
17) Sonic the Hedgehog 3D (Nintendo 3DS shop)
18) MUSHA
19) Panorama Cotton
1) Gaming to add entries to my “beaten” list is not the same as having a Sega Genesis in the 90’s. In 2018 I can “cherry pick” the very best games, making it easy to discard stuff I may have played back in the day if it was all I had. This also made it harder to play things on a whim. For instance I wanted to play Castlevania Bloodlines and Mercs, but didn’t because I had played those before and would have felt “guilty” for re-playing them instead of experiencing other untouched titles in my library. This also raised weird questions about acquiring more games and the prospect of completing them in my lifetime. It took me a year to beat 19 Genesis games. What does that tell me about my 300+ backlog?
2) I own games I never intend to beat. I tried to beat these and either lost interest or threw in the towel out of frustration:
-Demolition Man
-Midnight Resistance
-Shadow Dancer: The Secret of Shinobi
-Sunset Riders
-Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Hyperstone Heist
-Atomic Runner
3) Old games ask things of the player that would be considered impositions today. For example:
3A) Enemies and hazards often lurk off-screen where you can’t see them. The best way to contend with this is to memorize the stage. I had to get Revenge of Shinobi and Darius II down to a precise choreography. I accepted this for what it was, but younger players are far more averse to it. Examples:
“Like its predecessor, Sonic the Hedgehog 2 is not a perfect game. Many of the flaws from the first one still persist into the second one, including the problems with memorization. “
“‘How do we stretch out a 30 minute game into something that will take months to complete?’ The solution? Ah, just put a bunch of stupid fucking bullshit everywhere. Cheap-ass one hit kills, oblique puzzles, broken enemy spawns, impossible jumps, enemies that constantly knock you off a ledge…”
3B) When you lose all your lives, you have to start over from the beginning. This doesn’t jive with modern notions of convenience. Personally I have mixed feelings about it. I was OK with it in Revenge of Shinobi and Darius II, since I just enjoy playing those over and over. I didn’t like it in Sonic 2 because I always wanted to get all the chaos emeralds, but that meant backtracking for 50 rings at each goalpost, and the bonus stages don’t get challenging until chaos emerald #5 or so. This makes each play through feel like a considerable time investment that may or may not pay off. (I think a compromise would have been to let you keep your rings if you beat a bonus stage. Resetting the ring counter to zero after earning a chaos emerald feels like a random penalty.) Atomic Runner felt similar, since the first few stages are really languid. It’s the later stages that flummoxed me. But I had to beat the easy preliminary stages over and over and over again to reach those hard stages.
Not all the games were hard though. I beat some of them in just a few days, like Battle Mania 2 and MUSHA. Starting over from the beginning in those felt reasonable, although after each setback I’d want to take a break. As result I found it hard to play for hours on end unless I was on the verge of a breakthrough. Thankfully these breakthroughs felt really triumphant in a way that modern gaming rarely does, since modern gaming is so reluctant to inconvenience the player. It’s interesting that entertainment requiring any exertion from its participants has become so out of vogue. Maybe this says something about an “instant gratification” mindset gaining traction in our culture since the 90’s.
3C) Even harsher than starting over is when taking damage removes all your power ups. This really messed me up in Gaiares and Atomic Runner (both unbeaten). It was a total mood killer in Truxton. In that game, taking one hit not only reduces you to the default peashooter, it slows your ship to a snail’s pace. I couldn’t even avoid incoming fighters while collecting speed power ups. I have no idea how I’d beat Truxton except by a perfect, no-damage run, and there’s no way I’m doing that.
4) Random observations about graphics:
4A) I’ve always thought it was funny how bosses in 16 bit games will change color as they take damage, like that Terminator lookalike in Revenge of Shinobi who turns greener and greener the more you attack him. I’m sure it’s just because a color palette swap was an expedient way to telegraph damage, but it has a wacky logic to it. Kind of like how in Streets of Rage you can eat entire cooked turkeys from trashcans to gain health. Games don't seem to do that stuff anymore.
4B) Graphics on the Sega Genesis are good when they look like illustrations rather than sprite tiles. The most glaring example of “tiling” was probably Thunderforce III, which was full of obviously repeated patterns. Jewel Master, while super fun, also had rough sprites, like the work of an artist unskilled in drawing human figures or character animation. But in Shinobi III the graphics were full of dynamic character poses and style. The artist probably could have been working on comic books just as easily as Sega games.
4C) Spectacle and set pieces in Sega Genesis are very different from today. It isn’t like today where the camera moves around on the set of a virtual movie, or where lighting and shaders are nuanced enough that they have to hire a guy to light the scenes. In Sega Genesis everything’s basically an XY grid with shapes sliding around on it. So anything done to trick you into thinking the scene has depth and isn’t just flat was spectacular looking. In MUSHA there’s a part where the floor tiles drop out from underneath of you and fall into a river of lava. It looks mundane today, but phenomenal for the standards of the time.
In Shinobi III there’s a part where you see the boss lurking in the background. Later he emerges into the scene with you. Moments like these were really cool back then.
In Contra Hard Corps there’s a part where you’re riding on the back of a ship. The ship rotates 90 degrees in the air, changing the perspective of your midair-battle. The rotation is a clunky 3-frame animation and the clouds don’t scale accurate to the laws of perspective, but compared to how games usually looked then it was awesome.