952 Happy To See You.

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The first version if this didn’t have the last panel, but I just couldn’t let go of Thomas being goofy.

If you were paying attention to twitter yesterday you may have seen a few pics in the feed of my older games. I’ve kept nearly every scrap of paper that ever came with a video game, which is why I’m glad they don’t come with much now. XD I only kept them all becasue I didn’t realize that they would just keep selling the same games to me, over and over, for the next two decades. Of course the various versions have been hit and miss for some games. The Final Fantasy ports for the GBA had improved translations, but the music was not as good, and the ending didn’t synce properly. It was really dissapointing when I got to the ends and the cutscenes were off. The music was fine on the PS1, but the ending was out of sync. The DS remake of Final Fantasy 4 was essentially a new beast, so it was reset to its own standard, of course I can’t remember the ending for it. I remember the 16 bit version that I played a hundered times. With Chrono Trigger I remember both versions. I think the problem with the DS upgrades is that they are a little too N64. Polygons are not my prefered graphics choice. I even remember Final Fantasy 7 in a sort of imagined anime version that does not fit with the actual imagery. I looked it over again a while back and was like “Is my PS1 broken? Why is this so shitty?” At the time it seemed so perfect… Memory improves a lot of stuff. Kind of like how I remember all webcomics in the art style they are using now.

I save games the way other people save books, and in many ways the games I like are just novels you play. The first time I played through Final Fantasy 3 (6) I had no idea who Kefka was when he really started causing trouble. I hadn’t been paying attention, so when he popped up it was like “Who’s this d-bag?” The next time I played I was aware of him and things made a lot more sense. He was always in the background, being a dick, and somehow he escaped my notice. I was more concerned with the intertwining plots of 14 some odd other characters.

The GBA port actually cleared up some of the vague points of the plot through more accurate translation, and the chance for seeing all of Shadow’s dreams was higher, so I finally got to see the legendary 4th one after hours upon hours of trying on the SNES.

I played through the better part of Actraiser today. It only took about an hour since I know exactly how to do stuff. When I was a kid it took me forever to beat that game. I probably could have beaten it, but I finally got too sleepy to keep playing. I saw Arino challenge it on Game Center CX and it made me want to play it again. Also I wanted to see what the hell was wrong with Arino on that one, because I remember the action parts being super easy and he struggled for hours with them. I actually died a few times from being too cavalier about things, but I guess I’m just better at Actraiser than him. Of course he was able to finish Ghouls & Ghosts (more or less) so he has me there. I hate those games… I’m not real fond of Contra either, but I finished it too.

Basically watching Game Center got me to dig out all the games I have that Arino has challenged. Legend Of The Mystical Ninja (Goemon 2 I think.), Actraiser, Castlevania 3, ect, ect. I forget exactly what all I have. Castlevania 3 is still crazy hard, but I’m still better at it than him. XD The fucking owls were just as big a pain in the ass for both of us though. Cheap bastards. I’ve beaten C3 with every possible partner and without having any. I’m fairly sure i’ve played every possible path and combination of paths too. I still think a Symphony Of The Night upgrade is in order for C3, but I doubt such a thing is likely. Konami seems to have moved on from that style of play finally. I hope I’m wrong, but Lords Of Shadow does not seem to bode well for the classic style Castlevanias.

Goemon was just a hard as I remember. That game is evil. Everything that happens just dicks you over without mercy. That said, I have had the pleasure of playing the entire game in co op mode. We cheated, but it’s super hard. I wouldn’t tolerate that level of difficulty in a game anymore. I like to have fun when I’m not working… Actually that’s not stricktly true. If the gameplay is good enough i will tolerate that level of difficulty, but it has to be really fun. Such games are still produced…

Anyway, that game collection is part of why I have a problem with expensive downloads of old games. I still have them. I feel like I shouldn’t have to buy them again. I know this is unreasonable. The draw of playing old games on new systems does draw me in every so often. I mean, I had to have Punch Out on the DS. I wanted it on a handheld for SO LONG. Even though I’ve never been past Sandman. Now I need Super Punch Out…

27 Comments

Perfect on Carol’s cheeky smile and her eyes – they capture the mood exactly. And it’s nice to see Thomas having something to enjoy with someone special. There’s nothing more fun than a “secret romance”…at least until you get caught.

Okay, I’m still not over Reggie being awesome, but … that last panel… PFFFFTTT! HA HA HA HA HAAAA! It so reminds me of something from a Johji Manabe manga… that and some drunken manga male talking to his junk and calling it “Mr. Turtle”… Which may well be the same thing… Oh, wait… No, I got it… It was Gravitation (the manga not the anime). Mystery solved. I can go to bed now.

ah, FF6 on the SNES was so much fun, especially trying to find shit out when there wasn’t an internet site to find everything. Like how you can find the atlas armlet and guardian knife in Mt. Kolts, that atlas armlet was awesome with Locke and having either the guantlet or genji glove relic equipped when you’re fighting with celes in south figaro or figaro cave….

…man now i’m itching to play it.

Man, Super Punchout is friggin’ awesome. I’ve barely played Punchout since I got the Super one – though I can’t beat neither of them. My brother did, but I never could. I never understood where he got the super reflexes. He was never interested in the video games as much as I was, but then when he sat down with one and played and played he friggin’ MASTERED it. So his save on Super Punchout is my only access to the later guys…you know, if I want to get my ass kicked by them.

Anyway, since he was playing that stuff, I was of course into the “novels” as you said. I’ve also explained RPGs in that fashion (especialy back in the day when people required an explaination for how you could stand sitting there reading; funny how the times have changed). ‘Course I didn’t restrict myself to those, though they always confused my brother (and my dad, who was more used to the Atari days of high scores being the goal).

super punchout wasn’t hard in the special circuit. The first guy you just had to jab in the face and do super combos to the face and he’d go down in no time. The old man is difficult to figure out where to block his cane but when he does the jumping thing, that’s easy to dodge. The first bruiser brother is easy if you know when to dodge left/right or duck. The same with the other brother. it just takes a few times fighting them in the time mode to get the dodges/ducks down, then taking them on in the regular mode is easy. 16-0, i think i can still pull that off on my snes if i wanted to and only get knocked out 1 or 2 times tops.

FF6 GBA has a bug that lets you reset level and thus be able to max your stats… it was perfect for the perfectionist in me. I prefer the fan-re-translated SNES version, given the option, though.

FF4DS was a pretty neat adaptation, except that getting everything requires three (or more) well-planned runthroughs, which I only really found out on my second playthrough, so I scrapped it and did it again.

In FF7 the idea was actually to give a “blank slate” for characters so that they’d be able to convey emotions without hogging much of the graphic power… FF7 didn’t lag when a lot of other games would’ve, thanks to that. The fact that you imprinted anime over it is probably because it’s your preferred art style to some extent, while I really enjoyed the novelty of it, if nothing else. Other than that, FF7’s success came from fusing animated characters able to convey emotions in non-FMV cutscenes, ala Chrono Trigger, a deep battle system that rewarded ingenuity ala FF6, and FMV cutscenes to pull at the heartstrings ala Phantasy Star 4 (Which had manga-style cutscenes because of the limited tech at the time, and damn did they make it work). It was the fusion of the three greatest RPGs of all time, and I think it did a lot to push the industry forward (obviously), even if I still prefer my PS4 in the end.

I really enjoy challenge gaming too… Contra, G&G (Ghosts’n Goblins/Ghouls’n Ghosts) Battletoads, Dark Souls, and MOTHER FUCKING BANGAI-O, YEAH! Mostly those are best when you have people to compete against, 2P Contra: Hard Corps. is some of the best memories~

Don’t forget the 8-bit factor. Yes, yes, I know FF7 wasn’t 8-bit, but the same theory applies. Back when the first Nintendo system came out, the graphics were… okay, they were better than the Atari, hell, they were compatible with what was in the arcades at the time. Still, look at the graphics on the Donkey Kong case as opposed to the graphics in the game itself. Back in the day we tended to gloss over the imperfections in our minds because that’s just how it was.

Another good example is movie special effects. Way back in the silents there was this movie about the French revolution where they chopped the head off the queen. They replaced the actress with a dummy, early on such that she wasn’t ever in the guillotine or under the blade at all. The dummy head that was chopped off was…. well, calling it fake looking just doesn’t do it justice. It is a straw, scarecrow head painted somewhat woman-ey. But when it was shown in theaters people fainted at the sheer realism of it all. Compare that to modern special effects, though, and it is almost pathetic. So why did so many people fall for it? Evolution of technology makes more accurate images possible now, so what was once cutting edge is now just a chopped off scarecrow head with little bits of twig sticking out of it. All the glossing over in the mind was from a time when we used more of our imaginations to ‘fill in the gaps’ as it were. Add nostalgia factor on top of that, and you get sometimes wildly different images from what is remembered.

But umm, not to be a party pooper but is this a case of “don’t shoot till you see the GREEN of their eyes”? Panel 1, 2 & 7 white eyes, 3, 4, 5 and 6 green eyes.

It was some kind of error from when I made the image web ready apparently. The base file was normal. I can barely tell the difference between that green and white though. If you hadn’t said something I might never have seen it.

Comes from having freak-show accurate color vision, sorry. Looks normal now though, so either it was a temporary anomaly, or you fixed it. Either way, funny line, and I think, as has been commented, T-Shirt worthy about the wiener implications.

My favorite game that I used to play on the NES was Bionic Commando. Capcom re-released it as Bionic Commando Rearmed, where they updated it a bit with newer graphics and slightly different gameplay, but still had enough of the original to make me love the game.

They also made fun of their bad translations and misspellings in the game; there was one about “This base will explod in 60 seconds.” Some private now makes fun of that when his commander says something to the effect of, “Be careful with that, you won’t want it to explode!” and he replies back, “Don’t you mean ‘explod’?” To me, that’s just classic for someone who cut their teeth on a game like that, and I didn’t mind paying the price to get the game, because it was just too good to pass up even though I still own the original NES version.

Final Fantasy 6 is probably my favourite game. IMHO, it has the best writing and musical composition of any game. Also, each character is customizable, but still unique.

My favourite Castlevania games are the ones for the GBA and DS, as they are fairly nonlinear and reward exploration. They’re like a fusion of the classic Castlevania and Metroid games.

I almost never buy downloadable games, let alone ones I already own. I do, however own some of the Final Fantasy remakes for the PSX, and the Final Fantasy 3 remake for the GBA. I never beat that one, as I Played over an hour into the final dungeon, turned the wrong way, and was killed by an overpowered boss. I also think that the class system was somewhat lacking.

in the last few pages Reggie has maned up alot it like he was hiding a platinium man card and now is in a zen like state of supermandom

Nearly forgot about Lunar there for a bit. I remember the original with highly digitized semi-cut-scenes. They remade it for the Playstation, changing the cut-scenes to more traditional hand drawn anime style (with as little motion as possible, generally just the mouth, or the magic city falling, etc…) Funny thing is, until I went back and replayed it on the crappy Genesis CD thing, I actually thought it was a direct port with some game play changes. And we’re talking the difference between a quarter screen dragon head in a frame against a black background versus a fullscreen full on dragon for one of the earlier scenes.

Gotta watch out for that nostalgia….

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