3rd May 2010, 4:34 PM
Dark Jaguar Wrote:Yep, but I'll tell you this. It most certainly does save your progress. Those stars at the top slowly add up, even if you erase the emulator's "quick save" on the Wii download. It also remembers high scores. It doesn't seem to do a prompt or anything, and the "flip the disk over" thing isn't there, but considering how small SMB1 is, I doubt that side b would even be needed for it to save.
Hmm, that's interesting. Looking at the rom it doesn't save your scores or progress, but stars... that I don't know. I'd have to beat the thing to test whether it saves stars, I guess. Perhaps it does save that. Argh, I don't know if I want to have to do that...
You're probably right about size; usually, FDS games require you to insert them on side A. The game will then load, and then it tells you to swap to side B. You then play. You'll have to flip back to side A when you want to save. Sometimes flipping is required even more frequently than that, but that's the most common way.
Mario 2, however, as you say is small and doesn't have a side B; the entire game is on side A. So yeah, if it does save, it'd be to that side... it doesn't save anything else (progress, scores), but you well might be right that it does save completion stars.
Oh, on an actual FDS, you did have to manually flip the disk, too -- it couldn't read both sides, you have to take it out and turn it over (in an emulator you use a keyboard command to tell the emulator to flip the disk, it's not automated). The system has load times, too, at least as bad as CD games. Plus within a year of releasing the thing Nintendo had battery-backed carts and carts as large as the disks out, too (initially one advantage of the FDS was that its disks were larger than any carts available at the time, and could save too). And the things are somewhat fragile and have some parts in them that frequently fail. Oh, and the disks were easily pirated, and lots of pirate disks are still out there.
Yeah, I can't imagine why Nintendo dramatically scaled back support for the FDS after just two years... :)
The FDS got most of Nintendo's major titles from 1986-1988 in Japan (Zelda 1 and 2, Mario 2, Kid Icarus, Metroid, various RPGs and adventure games we didn't get over here, etc.), but after that they cut back significantly; in later years pretty much all Nintendo published on the thing were a few more of those adventure or RPG games and some cart-game ports.
Oh, Doki Doki Panic is also an FDS-only game; later on they released "Super Mario USA" on cart, but Doki Doki Panic was a disk. It does save (worlds you've completed, anyway, not individual stages), and you need to beat the game with all four characters in order to beat the game. Of course in US SMB2 you can't save, but you don't need to beat it four times to complete it, either.
Quote:Oh and by the way, the game I played, Chameleon Twist, was NOT an N64 game, 1 or 2. It was an NES game. I didn't even know they made sequels.
As GR said, there's no game on the NES with "Chameleon" in the title... but there are two N64 3d platformers with that title, well, 1 and 2 in the series. What game are you thinking of? I have no idea...