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Post by Ex on Mar 3, 2023 10:38:06 GMT -5
Kick Master is one of those games by "Kid" who ended up becoming a visual novel developer in the late 90s. Some interesting history there. What's interesting to me is Kick Master was developed by a Japanese studio, published by a Japanese company (Taito), but was only released in USA. Kid actually developed a lot of action games before settling in as a visual novel house.
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Post by bonesnapdeez on Mar 3, 2023 11:21:19 GMT -5
Kick Master is one of those games by "Kid" who ended up becoming a visual novel developer in the late 90s. Some interesting history there. What's interesting to me is Kick Master was developed by a Japanese studio, published by a Japanese company (Taito), but was only released in USA. Kid actually developed a lot of action games before settling in as a visual novel house. Yeah I love finding weird quirks like that when investigating retro games. Arkista's Ring and Contra Force fall into that same category, I believe. Japanese, but on the NES (and not Famicom). Here's another one that applies to the third gen: the Vic Tokai Famicom games Aigina no Yogen and Chester Field never saw North American NES releases, but they were ported to the Commodore 64! Add the Xtalsoft/Kyodai Curse of Babylon and I believe those are the only "Japanese games" on C64 that weren't arcade ports. If there's another one someone tell me.
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Post by Ex on Mar 3, 2023 11:47:53 GMT -5
Interesting that you mentioned Arkista's Ring, as I also played that last night. Actually it was quite fun from what I played, I think I'll go back and finish that one this theme.
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Post by toei on Mar 3, 2023 12:21:21 GMT -5
I made it pretty far into Arkista's Ring years ago, it is a pretty cool game. KID also made the Genesis beat-'em-up Mystical Fighter and the Saturn side-scroller Hissatsu!, both of which are solid. They were a decent B-Tier developer.
Another example of what you're discussing is Iron Commando, a SNES beat-'em-up developed in France that only came out in Japan (it's by the Legends guys). Several Master System games were developed in Japan for the European market, too, and never came out there. Alex Kidd in Shinobi World, for example. It makes sense; Sega of Japan had it developers and its network of contractors (companies like Aspect, etc.), but the Japanese Master System had been discontinued. SMS games still sold well in Europe, though, so might as well supply that market.
A lot of Japanese games were made with the American market in mind, especially on consoles like the Genesis, but not exclusively. Final Fight, Double Dragon... actually the beat-'em-up genre as a whole was much more popular in the West, yet still dominated by Japanese developers. It's just that usually they still released them in Japan, because there were still a few million Mega Drive owners, and why not?
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Post by toei on Mar 3, 2023 21:05:13 GMT -5
Well, I made it pretty far into Sukeban Deka 2 for the Master System, but it's such an awful game that I won't bother finishing it. It does nothing right. The beat-'em-up sequences are terrible - the enemies walk as fast as you and even if you hit a pack, only one will get hit, so the others inevitable start hitting you. The best you can do is continuously try to move away and hit them, preferable diagonally. The bosses have simple patterns that make them a bit more playable. Funny to think that this might just count as Sega's first attempt at beat-'em-up gameplay, since it came out a couple years before Golden Axe. The adventure segments are worse, though. Rather than interrogate NPCs like in most menu-based Japanese adventure games, these segments consist of moving a cursor around the screen and either Examining of Hitting random objects and spots until you find something. There are some puzzles, but they're also annoying . And then you have first-person mazes; the first two are no big deal, but the third is trash as it has fake walls with bombs that Game you Over unless you can escape in... I think it was 150 seconds? I died, because those mazes are confusing. There's even a "use a random item while facing a random wall" "puzzle" that is definitely not something you would ever think of doing on your own. Pretty trash. Didn't the first Phantasy Star have something like that in the final dungeon?
This is like the very end of the game, but I don't know, I can't see myself playing this anymore (because I don't think you can even save!) and fighting any of those battles again. This is easily one of the worst games Sega made. There's almost no dialogue, either, so it's not like it brings anything to the table for fans of the TV series. This is so obvious that this was super rushed shovelware. I read the FAQ after I got tired of "clicking" on everything, and apparently to get the real ending, you have to go back through various mazes again all the way to the final boss and fight him again. Then you get another battle and one ending screen with a single line of text. Wow!
Shame there's no decent Sukeban Deka game. It's a good show. You could easily make a decent beat-'em-up with it, at least, like some of the Sailor Moon beat-'em-ups are decent. Or a good side-scroller, or something.
EDIT - As I often do after talking about how much I hate a game, I went back and finished it. That's because I watched an episode of the series - I'm about halfway through, but I hadn't watched any episode in a good while - and I liked it, so it motivated me to give the game another shot. It's pretty quick once you know what to do. I followed a FAQ for most of the adventure segments because they're just terribly designed. The action parts... well, they're still not good, but they're not complete garbage, I guess, considering Renegade might have been the only real beat-'em-up out at that time. I do like that you can throw the yo-yo diagonally - it ends up being your best attack. Speaking of Renegade/Nekketsu kouha Kunio-kun, a sukeban is the female equivalent of a banchou/yankee like Kunio, so it's pretty fitting. I was wrong about having to replay anything to get the good ending - basically, that's if you miss a certain item. Anyway, not a good game, but I'm still kind of glad I played through it - it's a fan-translated Master System game, it's Sega's first beat-'em-up, and it's Sukeban Deka.
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Post by Xeogred on Mar 4, 2023 12:50:30 GMT -5
They got the colors right!
Mega Man 2 | Difficult | ~1h1m
It's Mega Man 2. You've either heard of it or you don't like video games.
Even if I extracted Mega Man from my DNA, it's hard to imagine anything else out there that feels this good. A 200% in a "Controls" rating for magazines of the old. I get in the habit of shooting at enemies/weakspots even when I'm falling down through a stage and transitioning to the next screen. It's just perfection.
11/10.
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Post by Xeogred on Mar 4, 2023 14:08:12 GMT -5
Nice timing on a new AVGN that fits the theme haha.
Never liked Kid Icarus much myself, nor have I gotten that far. But whenever I look more into it, I'm convinced I don't need to bother. It already annoys me enough that aesthetically it looks similar to Metroid but you can't actually backtrack much.
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Post by Sarge on Mar 4, 2023 14:12:01 GMT -5
I actually like Kid Icarus a lot. Sure, it's not Metroid, but it's still pretty fun overall. Very inverted difficulty curve - if you can get your first life extension, it gets much easier.
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Post by Ex on Mar 4, 2023 22:10:51 GMT -5
"use a random item while facing a random wall" "puzzle" that is definitely not something you would ever think of doing on your own. Pretty trash That kind of design is trash, and is the rare exception where I wouldn't blame anyone for using a walkthrough/guide to progress in a game like that. Unless you count Black Belt which released a year prior: Also appears the next series entry is on Famicom... Doesn't look like SEGA had anything to do with that one though. They got the colors right! But they got the Mega Buster all wrong. I agree MM2 is an 11/10. It was a labor of love passion project, and it shows. never liked Kid Icarus much myself Me either.This 3DS game was pretty dang good though.
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Post by toei on Mar 4, 2023 23:52:36 GMT -5
Nah, I don't think of those Kung-Fu-style single-plane, one-hit-per-enemy side-scrollers as beat-'em-ups at all. I actually played Black Belt for a while years ago - well, the original Japanese version, which is a Hokuto no Ken game - but I don't think I ever managed to beat it.
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