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First impressions - Dark Jaguar - 6th May 2022
I guess I'll use this as a dump thread.
I just picked up a bunch of used games. Ninja Turtles 1 and 2 for Gameboy. I gotta say the first one just flies by. I beat it half an hour after I got home. Decent. The second is a bit tougher and I need to dedicate a couple hours to it at some point.
Here's a bizarre one, Battletoads for Gameboy. So, there's three of these right? One's Battletoads and Double Dragon, one's Battletoads in Ragnarok's World, and the last (well first) is just "Battletoads" and reuses the NES box art as it's own. Two of them are ports and one's a sequel to the first, but not the one you'd think. The one just called "Battletoads" is the sequel, for some reason! Ragnarok's World is the NES game's port, and the third is just what you'd expect, a port of the crossover game. I already own the crossover on Genesis, so I didn't need that one. Anyway, as a sequel it's competent if smaller. Good, all around.
I also picked up Contra for Gameboy. Operation C! Yeah that's it. Anyway, it's a good one, though of course it's hard to even hold a candle to that one-two punch of Contra III and Hard Corps on SNES and Genesis respectively.
I also resumed my collection of N64 games. I'm almost at a point where I'm comfortable stopping. The N64 had a lot of hidden gems. There's Glover, for example. It's controls are.... well they're not good. Direction of movement reverses every time you're on a ball. Play the game on "easy" and that's not a problem though. I just wish that setting was independent. It's got some interesting concepts, but it's a pretty average platformer otherwise. I also picked up Quake II. It's essentially a completely new game using PC Quake II's assets, and I might actually like it better than the PC version.
Space Station Silicon Valley! This is the ONE game that has issues with the N64 expansion RAM expansion pak, at least the first version. I advise picking up the second revision if at all possible (look for ones with that two digit code imprinted on the back label that has an "A" next to the number). That one works fine with the expansion pak, but there's still a critical glitch. You can't 100% the game because there's an item with it's collision detection turned off. Anyway, it's still a fun game. You run around possessing creatures and using their abilities to do things.
I've also at long last finally obtained Bombersman 64s. I remembered playing this ages ago and only just reclaimed it.
I also finally have Rayman 2! No not the N64 version, but the superior Dreamcast version. I'd considered getting the PS2 version but that's got whole new level design and can be treated as a remake. Paired with that, I got Rayman 1 for Playstation. I considered the Saturn version but after looking at a number of head to head comparisons, I found the PS1 version came out ahead for me. For Saturn, as a consolation prize, I have NBA Jam Tournament Edition. I'm not really a fan of sports games, but I make an exception when they're silly arcadey fun and not going for realism.
RE: First impressions - A Black Falcon - 10th May 2022
Nice! I believe I have all of the games you just picked up, interestingly. ... Yup, I do. Heh. I didn't get any of these recently, though. If you'd gotten Rayman 2 for N64 I wouldn't have though, I "only" have Rayman 2 for PC and DC.
GB Ninja Turtles - Yeah, the first game is pretty weak, it's incredibly short and easy. The second one is a lot better and actually is good. It's still a simple game but there's more to it than the first one in the gameplay. I like the isometridc parts too, even if the one-hit-kill enemies make those parts a bit simple. The third one, which I don't have (I should have bought it back when it was new... ah well), is fairly expensive now, but is best known for being an early Metroidvania.
Rayman 2 is one of my all-time favorite 3d platformers, it's right near the top of my list. The DC has maybe the overall best version. Rayman 1 is okay, but is a crushingly hard game I do not enjoy playing for more than a few levels, it's way too hard to be worthwhile. It looks beautiful but the gameplay, why is it so insanely hard? I will buy the Atari Jaguar version eventually, it's interesting for being a bit different from the PS1/PC/Saturn version we know...
Battletoads GB - Yeah, it's so so weird that the one called "Battletoads" is the original title, while "Battletoads in Ragnarok's World" is a port of the first NES game, isn't it? I have no idea why they did that, but they did. Anyway, I only have Battletoads for Game Boy, the original one. It's good, though I haven't played as much of it as I should. It's definitely easier than the major-console titles, which is nice, though it's still tough. Oh, I also have Battletoads Double Dragon only on the Genesis, as you do. Heh.
Operation C - As I'm not a huge Contra fan, Hard Corps excepted (I really really love that game), when I got this some years ago I wasn't expecting all that much... but it's really good. I think the main thing I like is probably that it's much easier than the console games. Operation C isn't EASY, but it's so much more playable than the NES games, I actually have fun with this one. :)
Glover, Quake II, SSSV, and Bomberman 64... I definitely covered those in my N64 Game Opinion Summaries list(s) some years ago. Sure, they're all good, though Glover's the weakest of those I would say just because of how incredibly frustrating the game is. That's one hard, hard game...
I do have one question though -- what is this about an American revision of SSSV that fixes the crashing with an expansion pak? I'm not sure what numbers or A you mean. I don't think I know about that, or at least I sure don't remember anything about that... and looking it up I'm not finding anything at the moment. I doubt I have that fixed version though but if there is one that would be pretty interesting. (I don't remember the game ever crashing on me, but maybe I just didn't play enough; it's not a game I played nearly as much as I probably should have.)
RE: First impressions - Dark Jaguar - 11th May 2022
Silicon Valley had a revision, and you can usually spot a Nintendo game revision by looking for the little stamped imprint on the label. On N64 games, it's on the back sticker. Rather than ink it looks like the number was pressed in physically. The first two numbers just indicate the production run, but if there's a letter after, that indicates it's a revision. No letter means first revision, A is second, B is third if it went that far. I can't think of a single Nintendo game that ever went as far as a C though.
That said, the "letter imprinted" method is a little unreliable. Not only is it rather hard to spot under bad lighting conditions (which makes online shopping for it without tipping your hand harder), but there's always the chance someone swapped parts of the cartridge which would make that imprinted code inaccurate. I don't assume any deception though, since that could just be a matter of everything from repairing the cart plastic to an accidental switcharoo while cleaning or fixing a bunch of them en masse. The most accurate way, which these days is easier to spot since more and more people are disassembling their carts to prove their authenticity for photos, is to find the ROM chip inside the game. Look for the text matching the outside label's tiny printed "code" for that specific game, and find a dash after it. -0 means initial version, -1 is first revision, -2 second revision etc...
https://tcrf.net/Space_Station_Silicon_Valley_(Nintendo_64)
While this particular game's page lists it under "regional differences", it still indicates the revision fix for that glitch.
If you aren't aware of this site, this is "The Cutting Room Floor", which not only lists out all the dummied out or incomplete content inside games, but also lists changes between regions and even revisions. Recently I've become a semi-contributor there just adding nips and tucks when I notice details missing. (Killer Instinct Gold, you may know, doesn't work if you have a rumble pak plugged into ANY controllers connected to the system, but revision B (third version) fixed that glitch completely. Revision A may have fixed it too, but I don't have that one so I was unable to check. Once I get a N64 Everdrive, I'll be able to check these things far more reliably and quickly thanks to full revision ROM sets like nointro.
There's another detail, some nuance with Donkey Kong 64. We "knew" that it needed the expansion pak to work, then we "knew" that it didn't, but the reality is it DOES need it, but only to fix a memory leak that will eventually crash the game. It doesn't even fix the glitch, it just delays it. Remember when that game first came out and we commented on the thing "locking up" if it was on for over a day, and we'd see store displays that showed a locked up game out in the wild? That was the memory leak. It had nothing to do with the RAM running too hot like some of us assumed. Here's another important detail. The glitch was not "unfixable", it was just unfixable in the short time they had left before launch. In all honesty, they should have delayed it a little longer and fixed it anyway. Once the N64 hacking community gets around to reverse engineering the source code to DK64, we'll finally know for sure what went wrong and there will very likely be a fan patch. Heck, they might even implement proper support for the expansion pak to improve peformance. Have you see what some hackers have done with the Super Mario 64 source code? The game's been optimized into such a beast it's running at 60FPS on original hardware, though all these optimizations were done specifically to allow it to support a megamod of a whole new game world to explore, and THAT runs closer to 30FPS.
Oh I think I can speculate on the bizarre naming choice for the two Battletoads game. The sequel came out first, and the port came out second. I think it's simply a matter of the sequel makers not thinking far enough ahead to realize what confusion their name and box art choice might cause if they ever actually ported the NES game to GB.
I recently picked up two more Dreamcast controllers (I finally have four!) and some extra VMUs. It's rather annoying that the Dreamcast started the regrettable "tradition" of allowing developers to "lock" files from copying/moving. Sonic Adventure's Chao garden data and Soul Calibur's save file suffer that restriction, but neither are implemented very well. Soul Calibur literally has an in-game menu to save your data manually to whichever device you pick, so I have no clue why they bothered flagging the file that way since they clearly WANTED you to be able to move it around. Sonic Adenture? I got around it by walking into my loaded chao garden, swapping VMUs, and stepping right back out of it to trigger the autosave.