Video games you are playing/want to play

[Edge Guerrero]

Here are a few of the oldest games that I remember playing a LOT from the 1st NES:

- River Hanson looks fun

Ha you brazilians even mix your Rs and Hs when typing lol

Yes it was great. Better than double dragon maybe.

That Ice Hockey game was amazing, the play was not much different than modern EA FIFA games etc, it was pretty deep to get good at all the tricks and timing to set up goals and deke out the defence etc

Also they had a feature where you could instigate bench-clearing brawls lol

- I never noted that:D
NBA street was a great series of games. It's there something similar with american football?

[Edge Guerrero]

- Finally were back!

[Luigi]

Recently while testing some new controllers I was emulating Tiger Heli and its sequel Twin Cobra on the NES. These were both arcade games which were successful but highly difficult. Their popularity launched the well known developers Toaplan. My friend had the NES port of Tiger Heli and many drunk nights we tried to beat it without success. However, I was reading the wiki and noticed it mentioned there are only 4 stages. This seems strange to me as I am sure I had gotten to more than just 4 stages. It turns out the game loops infinitely after 4. So I fired up my emulator and officially confirmed victory getting to level 5, which was actually just level 2 repeated. I decided to then play the sequel Twin Cobra. I had already finished the Genesis port, which was brutally difficult(detailed in posts on pages 3 and 4 of this thread). There were 8 difficult levels and even on the easiest it was brutally hard. However, the NES one had no options menu so just one difficulty. Playing it casually I would get a few levels deep without trying to hard. This got me thinking, does the NES version even have all 10 levels? That would be pretty big for an NES game. I looked up a guide and the guy in the guide said 6 levels. So I decided this would be easy and I will finish it. I finished level 6 pretty easily, but was then confused when a new level started. I got all the way to the boss to confirm this was not a repeat level, but a real level. So the guide lied/had a typo. It turns out all 10 levels are there, yet I had already beaten 7 of those levels on my first serious attempt so decided to keep pushing and try for 10. I died on the final boss on that first attempt. So that was annoying and I knew I had to finish it now. Took a short break, started a new attempt and beat it. After level 10 theres no looping shenanigans, it gives you a proper end screen. A short while after I wanted to replay the Genesis version to remember it and compare it to the NES version. The visuals and especially the music are far superior, however despite me putting it on the easiest setting it was still hard to pass level 1. This is because the NES port sends you back to a checkpoint when you lose a full continue, the Genesis port sends you back to a checkpoint when you lose 1 life. It honestly kinda ruins the game and the NES version is actually a better game for the purposes of just picking it up for some quick fun.

I kinda have a storied history with this series now. Twin Cobra had a sequel, Twin Cobra 2, which was ported to Saturn and I will probably play soon and surely I will finish. I gotta at this point. Then the only game in the series left to play is a Playstation compilation game with ports of both Tiger Heli and Twin Cobra.

[Edge Guerrero]

- You know some games like Jungle strike? Mech Warrior for snes was similar to Jungle strike

[Luigi]

Recently I've been messing around with old shmups, and it got me wondering, what is the first game to have all the standard features of a shmup?

I knew a lot of the super primitive stuff from the 70s like asteroids let you pilot a ship that could shoot, but thats not really a shmup. Galaxian came out in 1979, everyone knows its enhanced form Galaga from slightly after that. But thats not a shmup either. In 1982 Xevious implemented a lot of the standard features, scrolling, a big enemy to fight thats harder than the others, and for the first time it kinda feels like a shmup, but, it has no levels, just an endless terrain that loops every 12 minutes or so. In 1985 Konami made their own Xevious style game but with plenty of originality, it was the birth of Twinbee, which would become a long standing series. As far as I can tell this was the first real vertically scrolling shmup. It has power ups, a secondary weapon, the game is divided into levels, and each level has a boss at the end complete with scary music. The only thing the game doesnt have is an ending/end screen, much like the game from my last post Tiger Heli, which was released only 4 months after Twinbee. It makes sense that they loop because they are arcade games, and even Tiger Heli's sequel Twin Cobra which has an end screen, will start up at level 1 after.

So I've been playing Twinbee, I've had plenty of experience with later games in the series like Detana Twinbee, and the protagonist Twinbee ship is in all the Parodius games, but I had never played the original until now. Twinbee not only created the first true shoot em up, in doing so they also created the first cute em up(the visuals are very cartoonish) and established the time honoured tradition of giving you a bunch of lives for no reason, because as soon as you lose your powerups the 2nd half of the game is unplayable without them so you might as well reset the game. Oh how I loath this feature of shmups and there it is already in Twinbee. So guess what, no only did I beat Twinbee, I came damn close to 1CCing it. Basically, to have any chance at winning you need the shield. It protects you for about 10 hits, making it an absolute godsend in an otherwise unforgiving game. Twinbee is the series with the weird bell power up system where you shoot bells until they turn different colors and you need them to be the right color to get the right power up. The shield is red, which requires you to shoot a bell exactly 20 times. So probably about 50% of my playtime for this game was the 1st half of level 1, where I had to flawlessly get a blue bell(4 shots) to increase my speed to more than molasses, then flawlessly get a red bell, before it was too late to survive. Any time it didnt work out perfectly I just reset the game. The game is 5 levels long before it starts looping, and all the difficulty lies in level 5, so you basically want to aim to get to level 5 with your shield no more than half depleted, so taking only 4-5 hits across 4 levels. IF you do this though, you have a serious shot at finishing level 5. Before the boss is a valley of death with tons of enemies shooting tons of bullets, and a cute little Konami HQ building on the ground. Many times I had lost my shield at the start of this valley and quickly had the 7 lives I had accumulated to that point destroyed as I struggled to dodge a storm of enemies while moving at snail speed. Finally though I had a run where my shield lasted until halfway through the valley. The enemies dont stay on screen forever, so if you can dodge them for like 20 seconds they will go away even if you cant kill them, and this is what gave me a small chance to make it through the final 30 seconds before the final boss. The ship's horizontal speed is slightly less crippled than its vertical speed for whatever reason, so I had to strategically fly mostly horizontally and stay alive for ideally 10 seconds per life to survive and I did just that. It sounds easy but they really make sure to give you a super quick respawn time so they can annihilate your lives quickly. By a stroke of luck I only lost 5 lives in the shitstorm of enemies before the boss, so I had 2 left to confront him. The bosses are not too complicated though and typically dont require a ton of speed to defeat, its more a matter of pattern recognition. So he was about as complex as the other bosses, meaning I had a chance even with no power ups. I played it safe, got in 2-3 shots for each of his attack cycles, and eventually he died! When it loops to level 1 it does so on hard mode, but by then I was pretty damn good at getting the shield on level 1 and I was lucky enough to get it that time, so with my final life I managed to finished levels 1, 2, and most of 3 on hard mode. Overall my impression of Twinbee is basically the same as its sequels, fair basic but solid shmup fun, hampered mainly by a bizarre power up system.



Now Im wondering what the first shmup with an end screen is. Alpha Mission from later in 1985 has one but the NES port omits it. Gradius is a horizonal shmup released 3 weeks before Twinbee, and the later NES version has an end screen, but the original arcade does not.

[Luigi]

I've been playing Gradius now, this is one of the games that uses the konami code but unfortunately its much less helpful than it is in games like Contra. Here it upgrades your weapons, but you can only use it once per level. So basically 1 cheap death can totally negate the help of the code. Gradius is definitely way harder than Twinbee. I've been playing it typically every day for 2 weeks now trying to get better, but even with the cheat code I can still only make it halfway through the game.

[Edge Guerrero]

I've been playing Gradius now, this is one of the games that uses the konami code but unfortunately its much less helpful than it is in games like Contra. Here it upgrades your weapons, but you can only use it once per level. So basically 1 cheap death can totally negate the help of the code. Gradius is definitely way harder than Twinbee. I've been playing it typically every day for 2 weeks now trying to get better, but even with the cheat code I can still only make it halfway through the game.

- Played a couple of times. But dont remember much!

[Edge Guerrero]

Recently I've been messing around with old shmups, and it got me wondering, what is the first game to have all the standard features of a shmup?

I knew a lot of the super primitive stuff from the 70s like asteroids let you pilot a ship that could shoot, but thats not really a shmup. Galaxian came out in 1979, everyone knows its enhanced form Galaga from slightly after that. But thats not a shmup either. In 1982 Xevious implemented a lot of the standard features, scrolling, a big enemy to fight thats harder than the others, and for the first time it kinda feels like a shmup, but, it has no levels, just an endless terrain that loops every 12 minutes or so. In 1985 Konami made their own Xevious style game but with plenty of originality, it was the birth of Twinbee, which would become a long standing series. As far as I can tell this was the first real vertically scrolling shmup. It has power ups, a secondary weapon, the game is divided into levels, and each level has a boss at the end complete with scary music. The only thing the game doesnt have is an ending/end screen, much like the game from my last post Tiger Heli, which was released only 4 months after Twinbee. It makes sense that they loop because they are arcade games, and even Tiger Heli's sequel Twin Cobra which has an end screen, will start up at level 1 after.

So I've been playing Twinbee, I've had plenty of experience with later games in the series like Detana Twinbee, and the protagonist Twinbee ship is in all the Parodius games, but I had never played the original until now. Twinbee not only created the first true shoot em up, in doing so they also created the first cute em up(the visuals are very cartoonish) and established the time honoured tradition of giving you a bunch of lives for no reason, because as soon as you lose your powerups the 2nd half of the game is unplayable without them so you might as well reset the game. Oh how I loath this feature of shmups and there it is already in Twinbee. So guess what, no only did I beat Twinbee, I came damn close to 1CCing it. Basically, to have any chance at winning you need the shield. It protects you for about 10 hits, making it an absolute godsend in an otherwise unforgiving game. Twinbee is the series with the weird bell power up system where you shoot bells until they turn different colors and you need them to be the right color to get the right power up. The shield is red, which requires you to shoot a bell exactly 20 times. So probably about 50% of my playtime for this game was the 1st half of level 1, where I had to flawlessly get a blue bell(4 shots) to increase my speed to more than molasses, then flawlessly get a red bell, before it was too late to survive. Any time it didnt work out perfectly I just reset the game. The game is 5 levels long before it starts looping, and all the difficulty lies in level 5, so you basically want to aim to get to level 5 with your shield no more than half depleted, so taking only 4-5 hits across 4 levels. IF you do this though, you have a serious shot at finishing level 5. Before the boss is a valley of death with tons of enemies shooting tons of bullets, and a cute little Konami HQ building on the ground. Many times I had lost my shield at the start of this valley and quickly had the 7 lives I had accumulated to that point destroyed as I struggled to dodge a storm of enemies while moving at snail speed. Finally though I had a run where my shield lasted until halfway through the valley. The enemies dont stay on screen forever, so if you can dodge them for like 20 seconds they will go away even if you cant kill them, and this is what gave me a small chance to make it through the final 30 seconds before the final boss. The ship's horizontal speed is slightly less crippled than its vertical speed for whatever reason, so I had to strategically fly mostly horizontally and stay alive for ideally 10 seconds per life to survive and I did just that. It sounds easy but they really make sure to give you a super quick respawn time so they can annihilate your lives quickly. By a stroke of luck I only lost 5 lives in the shitstorm of enemies before the boss, so I had 2 left to confront him. The bosses are not too complicated though and typically dont require a ton of speed to defeat, its more a matter of pattern recognition. So he was about as complex as the other bosses, meaning I had a chance even with no power ups. I played it safe, got in 2-3 shots for each of his attack cycles, and eventually he died! When it loops to level 1 it does so on hard mode, but by then I was pretty damn good at getting the shield on level 1 and I was lucky enough to get it that time, so with my final life I managed to finished levels 1, 2, and most of 3 on hard mode. Overall my impression of Twinbee is basically the same as its sequels, fair basic but solid shmup fun, hampered mainly by a bizarre power up system.



Now Im wondering what the first shmup with an end screen is. Alpha Mission from later in 1985 has one but the NES port omits it. Gradius is a horizonal shmup released 3 weeks before Twinbee, and the later NES version has an end screen, but the original arcade does not.

- Parodius like Sexy Parodius? Didnt kewwas a series.

[Luigi]

Recently I've been messing around with old shmups, and it got me wondering, what is the first game to have all the standard features of a shmup?

I knew a lot of the super primitive stuff from the 70s like asteroids let you pilot a ship that could shoot, but thats not really a shmup. Galaxian came out in 1979, everyone knows its enhanced form Galaga from slightly after that. But thats not a shmup either. In 1982 Xevious implemented a lot of the standard features, scrolling, a big enemy to fight thats harder than the others, and for the first time it kinda feels like a shmup, but, it has no levels, just an endless terrain that loops every 12 minutes or so. In 1985 Konami made their own Xevious style game but with plenty of originality, it was the birth of Twinbee, which would become a long standing series. As far as I can tell this was the first real vertically scrolling shmup. It has power ups, a secondary weapon, the game is divided into levels, and each level has a boss at the end complete with scary music. The only thing the game doesnt have is an ending/end screen, much like the game from my last post Tiger Heli, which was released only 4 months after Twinbee. It makes sense that they loop because they are arcade games, and even Tiger Heli's sequel Twin Cobra which has an end screen, will start up at level 1 after.

So I've been playing Twinbee, I've had plenty of experience with later games in the series like Detana Twinbee, and the protagonist Twinbee ship is in all the Parodius games, but I had never played the original until now. Twinbee not only created the first true shoot em up, in doing so they also created the first cute em up(the visuals are very cartoonish) and established the time honoured tradition of giving you a bunch of lives for no reason, because as soon as you lose your powerups the 2nd half of the game is unplayable without them so you might as well reset the game. Oh how I loath this feature of shmups and there it is already in Twinbee. So guess what, no only did I beat Twinbee, I came damn close to 1CCing it. Basically, to have any chance at winning you need the shield. It protects you for about 10 hits, making it an absolute godsend in an otherwise unforgiving game. Twinbee is the series with the weird bell power up system where you shoot bells until they turn different colors and you need them to be the right color to get the right power up. The shield is red, which requires you to shoot a bell exactly 20 times. So probably about 50% of my playtime for this game was the 1st half of level 1, where I had to flawlessly get a blue bell(4 shots) to increase my speed to more than molasses, then flawlessly get a red bell, before it was too late to survive. Any time it didnt work out perfectly I just reset the game. The game is 5 levels long before it starts looping, and all the difficulty lies in level 5, so you basically want to aim to get to level 5 with your shield no more than half depleted, so taking only 4-5 hits across 4 levels. IF you do this though, you have a serious shot at finishing level 5. Before the boss is a valley of death with tons of enemies shooting tons of bullets, and a cute little Konami HQ building on the ground. Many times I had lost my shield at the start of this valley and quickly had the 7 lives I had accumulated to that point destroyed as I struggled to dodge a storm of enemies while moving at snail speed. Finally though I had a run where my shield lasted until halfway through the valley. The enemies dont stay on screen forever, so if you can dodge them for like 20 seconds they will go away even if you cant kill them, and this is what gave me a small chance to make it through the final 30 seconds before the final boss. The ship's horizontal speed is slightly less crippled than its vertical speed for whatever reason, so I had to strategically fly mostly horizontally and stay alive for ideally 10 seconds per life to survive and I did just that. It sounds easy but they really make sure to give you a super quick respawn time so they can annihilate your lives quickly. By a stroke of luck I only lost 5 lives in the shitstorm of enemies before the boss, so I had 2 left to confront him. The bosses are not too complicated though and typically dont require a ton of speed to defeat, its more a matter of pattern recognition. So he was about as complex as the other bosses, meaning I had a chance even with no power ups. I played it safe, got in 2-3 shots for each of his attack cycles, and eventually he died! When it loops to level 1 it does so on hard mode, but by then I was pretty damn good at getting the shield on level 1 and I was lucky enough to get it that time, so with my final life I managed to finished levels 1, 2, and most of 3 on hard mode. Overall my impression of Twinbee is basically the same as its sequels, fair basic but solid shmup fun, hampered mainly by a bizarre power up system.



Now Im wondering what the first shmup with an end screen is. Alpha Mission from later in 1985 has one but the NES port omits it. Gradius is a horizonal shmup released 3 weeks before Twinbee, and the later NES version has an end screen, but the original arcade does not.

- Parodius like Sexy Parodius? Didnt kewwas a series.

Yes thats one of the later ones in the series. I mostly have experience with the earlier ones. I finished one of the 2 SNES ones.

[Edge Guerrero]

Yes thats one of the later ones in the series. I mostly have experience with the earlier ones. I finished one of the 2 SNES ones.

- I only knew about the one for psone. Sexy Parodious. Too politically incorrect for today audiences?