VIDEODROME

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Thad
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Re: VIDEODROME

Postby Thad » Tue Aug 16, 2022 12:34 pm

I'm enjoying these videos where they decompile old games and explain bugs. Here's one about how the minus world bug works.



Here's a followup about how it's fixed (usually badly) in subsequent versions of the game. One thing that was interesting to me is how much Mario All-Stars reuses the original game's code; I'd always assumed it was a ground-up rewrite.



And here's one about the fucking water level on TMNT.


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Re: VIDEODROME

Postby KingRoyal » Tue Aug 16, 2022 12:53 pm

When I was a kid I played enough TMNT that I had the water level down well enough that I could finish it quickly without taking damage, and yet I never beat the game because everything after that is also crazy difficult.

I think I made it to the Technodrome with all turtles still alive only once, but they were all in terrible shape and quickly died upon entry
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Re: VIDEODROME

Postby Thad » Tue Aug 16, 2022 1:49 pm

I made it to the Technodrome once (without using Game Genie). That was when I was replaying it in my twenties.

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Re: VIDEODROME

Postby hngkong » Tue Aug 16, 2022 2:16 pm

Yeah, I honestly never had real problems with the water portion of the dam after the first couple tries. The rest of the game was a fucking cheese grater to the face however.

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Re: VIDEODROME

Postby Thad » Tue Aug 16, 2022 2:29 pm

hngkong wrote:Yeah, I honestly never had real problems with the water portion of the dam after the first couple tries.

It's certainly something you can memorize and get through. It's still poorly-designed and needlessly difficult, and as the video explains a lot of that is down to shitty hitboxes, broken controls, and misleading graphical clues.

Not to mention the needlessly high damage values and the instant-death traps that have different physics from anything else in the game.

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Re: VIDEODROME

Postby KingRoyal » Tue Aug 16, 2022 2:39 pm

The only way to reasonably get through most of that game is to carefully memorize every enemy location and now how to move fast enough to get Michelangelo or Rafael withing striking range. That way you could save Donatello and Leonardo for when the game got unfair by intentional design
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Re: VIDEODROME

Postby Thad » Tue Aug 16, 2022 3:21 pm

Leaving and returning until you get the right set of enemies is important too, for the large portion of the game where enemy sets are randomized.

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Re: VIDEODROME

Postby Thad » Wed Aug 17, 2022 11:51 am

...and man, what a weird collection of enemies it was. Okay, so you've got Foot Soldiers, Mousers, those guys who impersonated the Turtles in that one episode, and classic TMNT foes Fire Guy, Bald Shirtless Guy with a Chainsaw, White Things that Bounce Around on the Ceiling...at least the Shredder Fly guys look like Shredder.

In fairness, if there's one thing Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is known for as a franchise, it's that it doesn't have nearly enough characters and its roster could really use some shoring up.

And then there's the cover. They went with a cover from the comic series, and it's a good cover, but...they didn't even recolor the bandannas; they left them all red. It was utterly baffling to kids who knew the Turtles from the toy line or the cartoon instead of the comics, which was...pretty much the entire fanbase.

What a weird game.

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Re: VIDEODROME

Postby Büge » Sat Aug 20, 2022 8:32 pm

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Re: VIDEODROME

Postby Mongrel » Mon Aug 29, 2022 1:23 am


Optical tech be wild yo
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Re: VIDEODROME

Postby KingRoyal » Tue Aug 30, 2022 11:08 pm

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Re: VIDEODROME

Postby Thad » Fri Sep 02, 2022 7:34 pm

And hey, here's a followup video explaining TMNT's jump physics and why that one fucking jump in area 3 is such a bastard.


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Re: VIDEODROME

Postby KingRoyal » Sat Sep 03, 2022 10:57 am

I wonder what the turtles impact on gaming would have been if that thing had maybe two or three more months of polish, to hammer out those weird control issues. Would the turtles have gone in the direction of a squad-based platformer instead of side-scrolling beat-'em-ups? Difficult to say, since the Arcade Game was such a perfect compliment to the series that all Turtles games since have followed suit
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Re: VIDEODROME

Postby Thad » Sat Sep 03, 2022 3:37 pm

The Riddler wrote:I wonder what the turtles impact on gaming would have been if that thing had maybe two or three more months of polish, to hammer out those weird control issues.


Yeah, if Konami had been able to bring its A-game -- well, this was after Gradius, Contra, and Castlevania. Konami's A-game was pretty fucking good.

Would the turtles have gone in the direction of a squad-based platformer instead of side-scrolling beat-'em-ups? Difficult to say, since the Arcade Game was such a perfect compliment to the series that all Turtles games since have followed suit


Yeah, that's the thing -- I think no matter how good the first NES TMNT game was, it still would have been overshadowed by the arcade game. The belt-scrolling brawler genre was ascendant, especially as a vehicle for licensed games by Konami with 4-player co-op. (Or 6, in X-Men's case.) The arcade game was always going to eclipse anything consoles of the day could do; it could do big beautiful colorful sprites, voice samples, and 4 players at the same time.

There are cases where the NES game could surpass the arcade game as the definitive version, like Contra and, on the Capcom side, Bionic Commando. But I think the very nature of TMNT meant that it was never going to be one of those.

But I suspect that if the first NES TMNT had been better, we'd have seen more TMNT games imitating it in the years that followed, especially on Game Boy and other handheld systems that didn't have easy multiplayer support. (The GB/A games are the closest to the NES game, in that a lot of them are single-player side-scrolling platformers, but they don't really have much in common with the first game beyond that. Even the ones by Konami.) We might be seeing Shredder's Revenge share the spotlight with other indie-produced Turtles games more in the style of that first platformer. Or, hell, non-TMNT games that are clearly influenced by it.

Maybe.

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Re: VIDEODROME

Postby Friday » Sat Sep 03, 2022 9:43 pm

The thing about the first NES TMNT game is that it's weirdly charming despite its glaring flaws. I think a "good" version of the game with cleaner physics and such could have really made an impact. Hell, even with all the jank TMNT 1 for NES still lives in the heads of a lot of people our age. Part of that is due to just how popular TMNT was in general, of course, but even so I think the game had its own appeal.

Walking around an overworld/city with lots of buildings you can enter and explore for cool goodies sort of hits that Zelda/Exploration itch, and the platforming is basically just Ninja Gaiden, but worse. Clean up the bad jumps, hitboxes, etc, and you could have easily had a famous classic instead of an infamous one.
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Re: VIDEODROME

Postby Mongrel » Wed Sep 07, 2022 6:13 pm

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Re: VIDEODROME

Postby Mongrel » Fri Sep 09, 2022 3:44 pm

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Re: VIDEODROME

Postby nosimpleway » Fri Sep 09, 2022 5:18 pm

"Oh, you're an evolution, all right. Just not a Mega one."
"Yeah? What's the difference?"
"PRESENTATION!"

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Re: VIDEODROME

Postby Niku » Fri Sep 09, 2022 10:29 pm

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Re: VIDEODROME

Postby Thad » Thu Sep 29, 2022 12:31 am


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