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Post by Sarge on Feb 16, 2020 21:44:30 GMT -5
My next few weeks are likely to be bonkers as well. Lots of travel. Might be a good change of pace, though.
So, another Game Gear game down: Bishoujo Senshi Sailor Moon S. Umm, yeah.
It's a pretty simple platformer-brawler, although I don't think the brawling elements feel all that great. Still, I've played a lot worse, and for a licensed game, it's downright great. I'd say it's a 6/10.
There is one element you have to watch out for: at the end of each stage, you'll get an item, but you'll also need to find some other item (a bracelet?) or you won't get the "Sailor Moon" transformation to take on the boss.
Also, I actually found a tune that I liked! This one will suitably amp you up for the last area:
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Post by toei on Feb 16, 2020 22:24:03 GMT -5
Sarge I played through Sailor Moon last year. I think of it as the Game Gear's equivalent of the first Ninja Turtles game on the Game Boy; not only are they similar gameplay-wise (basic single-plane beat-'em-up gameplay with a little bit of platforming thrown in), but they're both good "car rides" games, meaning I wish I'd had them on a few occasions where I spent an hour or more sitting on some backseat bored out of my mind as a kid. I might give it a slight edge because it's prettier.
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Post by Sarge on Feb 16, 2020 22:33:28 GMT -5
That's pretty fair. I think the Sailor Moon game has a little more complex platforming, though. They're both decent times, for sure.
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Post by Xeogred on Feb 17, 2020 16:41:44 GMT -5
53 minutes on this one.
Think I liked it a little more than Ex, but the problems he mentioned earlier in the thread I'd agree with. I can enjoy the maze like gimmicks in some 2D Sonic's, but I guess moreso just in the Genesis blend when the games are Blast Processing fast and have a lot more screen space. The 4th underwater world with the tubes in this one was the worst. The teleporters in the 5th world weren't too bad, it did give me nightmareish flashbacks of Revenge of Shinobi's final level, which was far, far more sadistic. I thought it was hilarious how easy the final boss in this was. Hid detection was pretty weird too at times.
Truth be told yeah, I'll probably forget about this one tomorrow. But it was fun overall, it did run well for the most part, the graphics were cool, and the music was a lot better than Triple Trouble to me. By the way, in both games I just played as Sonic. Tails and Knuckles' having additional abilities, seems like it would just slow you down in these shrunken down takes on the formula, so they didn't seem ideal. I sampled a level with them though, for a kid that wanted some replay value, multiple characters can't hurt.
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Post by Sarge on Feb 17, 2020 16:48:24 GMT -5
There's one weird thing I keep picking up on in these games, and that's the fact that a lot of these games slow down a lot when there's just a few objects on screen. I noticed in the Sailor Moon game that just one enemy and a moving platform was enough to make the game chug. I'm curious, is this something endemic to the SMS/GG architecture, or just iffy coding? The NES certainly has its share of slowdown, but it feels a bit smoother to me when it does slow down, and seems like there are more sprites on screen when it does happen.
Or maybe I'm just playing the wrong games on here - we've already established that Sega wasn't getting the top-tier talent, and being a handheld meant that even Sega's output was likely their lower-tier teams. The NES I suppose had the advantage of overlapping less with the 16-bit cycle, as well; I'd think teams for 16-bit games got a bit larger than the last generation's.
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Post by Xeogred on Feb 17, 2020 17:29:33 GMT -5
What about the SMS/GG Compile games?
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Post by Sarge on Feb 17, 2020 17:37:10 GMT -5
Not those, ha! There's slowdown, of course, but they feel a bit smoother overall. And I'd expect there to be slowdown, because there's a lot of stuff going on there! It's just weird to come across games that look like they're not doing much at all, and they're struggling to stay afloat.
Honestly, I do wonder, given what Konami achieved on the MSX/MSX2, what their stuff might have looked like on SMS/GG. Did they even support either system? I don't think they did. Capcom didn't either, although I know there were Capcom games on there, typically reprogrammed by Sega.
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Post by toei on Feb 17, 2020 17:41:46 GMT -5
There's one weird thing I keep picking up on in these games, and that's the fact that a lot of these games slow down a lot when there's just a few objects on screen. I noticed in the Sailor Moon game that just one enemy and a moving platform was enough to make the game chug. I'm curious, is this something endemic to the SMS/GG architecture, or just iffy coding? The NES certainly has its share of slowdown, but it feels a bit smoother to me when it does slow down, and seems like there are more sprites on screen when it does happen. Or maybe I'm just playing the wrong games on here - we've already established that Sega wasn't getting the top-tier talent, and being a handheld meant that even Sega's output was likely their lower-tier teams. The NES I suppose had the advantage of overlapping less with the 16-bit cycle, as well; I'd think teams for 16-bit games got a bit larger than the last generation's. The sprites are generally bigger than on the NES, though. The sprites in Sailor Moon especially are enormous. It's the same phenomenon as the SNES with actions games slowing down like crazy whenever there's a few enemies on-screen or explosions, except I haven't seen any GG game with slowdowns as bad as Super Ghouls N' Ghost or even Castlevania IV. Probably not coincidentally, the only SNES shmup among all of those I tried last year that wasn't slow moving and and riddled with slowdowns was Super Aleste, aka Space Megaforce. The NES tends to have small sprites and few colors, so it has to be easier on the CPU. I don't think the actual Sega teams that worked on the GG were lower-tier, necessarily, but most of those games definitely had very short development spans (I'm guessing based on the number of games the same people get credited on in any given year), so they probably didn't have time to optimize things. Also, Sailor Moon was made by some company called Shimada Kikaku under license from Bandai, which didn't necessarily have high quality standards, and Sonic Blast was the one Sonic game that seems to have been all Aspect. Triple Trouble seemed to run pretty well to me. |
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Post by Sarge on Feb 17, 2020 17:46:00 GMT -5
toei: Yeah, the Sonic games do seem to be an exception. And it does seem like in my statement about the Aleste games that it really answered my own question: it's not an architecture thing, it's an optimization thing. You're probably right about them pushing out games quickly without optimizing much, too. And it could be that they didn't care quite as much, given that folks were playing on a small, hard-to-see screen, so many of the scrolling flaws would get hidden.
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Post by Ex on Feb 17, 2020 17:46:27 GMT -5
Truth be told yeah, I'll probably forget about this one tomorrow. Completely understandable. The only 8-bit Sonic entries that impressed me were Sonic Chaos on SMS and Triple Trouble on GG. (Edit: I'm talking about classically-styled Sonic games here.)
Although, if you're a fan of Sonic 3D Blast on Genesis, you would likely enjoy the Game Gear exclusive Sonic Labyrinth. It is very much the same sort of thing, and seemed well made when I tested it out (granted I only beat the first stage). There's one weird thing I keep picking up on in these games, and that's the fact that a lot of these games slow down a lot when there's just a few objects on screen.
I'm not intimate enough with the SMS architecture to wager a guess why it's so prevalent in SMS/GG action games. However, as bland as Sonic Blast was on GG, I don't recall running into any slowdown playing it. So this may very well be a coding issue rather than a hardware one.
Why you're beating Sailor Moon and Ronald McDonald games over the likes of Triple Trouble and Tails Adventure I can't even pretend to understand.  |
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