Playthrough of The Little Mermaid for NES. Video of Mike Matei Live stream. The Little Mermaid is a pretty easy game made by Capcom but certainly a good one!
You also may enjoy Mike Matei's video live stream on Ducktales for NES https://bit.ly/2Edp4Oh Read Mike Matei's Blog: https://bit.ly/2SYfJnN See and read more of our content! Smash Bros Series Review by Mike Matei See the video! https://bit.ly/2Xrhatx https://bit.ly/2Ntx9m9 https://bit.ly/2GLtSOv Game Controllers with James Rolfe and Mike Matei See the video! https://bit.ly/2sMdh48 Discuss more in depth! https://bit.ly/2Exrx7q Garbage NES hacks - Mike Matei Live See the video! https://bit.ly/2BSSZuB Discuss more in depth! https://bit.ly/2EwRZOH Adventures in the Magic Kingdom (NES) Mike Matei Live See the video! https://bit.ly/2XnYTNt The Little Mermaid (NES) Mike Matei Live See the video! https://bit.ly/2XnYTNt Discuss the video! https://bit.ly/2GKzJ6E https://bit.ly/2BPfPmU #MikeMatei #Retro #RetroGaming #CinemassacrePlays #MikeMateiLive
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New Projects of Mike Matei on Behance2/19/2019 Latest projects of Mike Matei on behance, he has devoted his career to chronicling and promoting appreciation of retro pop-culture and video games. He has produced, edited, and starred in hundreds of videos with Cinemassacre Productions, the home channel of the Angry Video Game Nerd, James and Mike Mondays and other series.
James Rolfe and Mike Matei play BS F-Zero Grand Prix 2 for Broadcast Satellaview. James & Mike Mondays Episode 290.
How good does a game have to be to be worth more than $1000?
Ginga Fukei Densetsu Sapphire (roughly translated as Galaxy Policewoman Legend Sapphire) is my rarest, most expensive games as of this writing. This game was only released in Japan, it’s for the PC-Engine CD Rom² System, and it requires a special Arcade Card which goes in the HU Card slot to increase the system’s RAM. My system is the US released version, known as the Turbo Duo. You have to jump through a lot of hoops just to be able to play this game on a real console, and each hoop wants more money from you than the last. So is this good enough to be worth $1000? Of course not, are you kidding me? I don’t think any game is that good? If Nintendo charged that much for The Legend of Zelda, I would have just ended up taking up a different hobby altogether. The developers who made this had no way of knowing they were making a future ultra-rare collector’s item, so I don’t think it’s really fair to factor in the game’s current high price into my review of the game. It’s fun to joke about though. This is the kind of premium, deluxe character select screen $1000 can buy you. Mike Matei had to go through a long process to get this game working. First, I had to do a lot of research and ask around to make sure I could get a legitimate copy of the game without getting ripped off for the price. This game goes for so much that it’s definitely a huge score for a dishonest seller every time they trick someone into buying a reproduction copy. With how much I ended up having to spend, I definitely wasn’t going to risk being scammed with a counterfeit, which luckily didn’t happen. Here are photos of my copy which have been verified by several sources to be an authentic copy of the game. This site is a great primer for how to identify counterfeits, but bootleggers are getting better and better all the time. If you’re curious to see the numbers on the inner ring on my disc, here they are. Then I had to order an Arcade Pro expansion card… …only to discover that I was supposed to get a Arcade Duo card instead! After the Duo card came over from Japan, it still didn’t work. If you don’t have the right expansion card, the game doesn’t run and you get what I’m calling the Sexy Screen of Death. Since I need to capture footage of games in order to make videos and stream, I have a modded Turbo Duo system that lets me record using modern equipment. I discovered out that my modded Turbo Duo system didn’t have a region-free Hu-Card slot like I thought it did. Turbo Grafx systems have region-free CD-ROM drives that can play any game, but the Hu-Card slot is region locked. So, I got my Turbo Duo modded yet again, and finally got the game running. My Turbo Duo is now a Frankenstein monstrosity of random upgrades and weird cables, but at least it plays everything great. Most of the games made for the Arcade Card were fighting games, lots are impossible for me to play because I can’t read Japanese, and the rest seem to be horrible trash, so I basically went through the entire upgrade process just to play this one game. Perhaps the sunk cost of my time and money was what kept me chasing down the issues until I finally got the game running, but I can say that in the end, I feel like it was worth it. Turns out, it’s actually a really good game. Mike Matei glad that a game this expensive and rare is so awesome. As far as the Obscure Gems series goes, this is the Obscuriest Gem yet. I’m going to have a real hard time topping this one. So… 行こう! Ginga Fukei Densetsu Sapphire (referring to it as Sapphire from now on) is an overhead 2d shooter. You can pick from 4 different ships, and all of them are quite different from each other, including their movement speeds. Each one has 3 possible shot patterns for a total of 12, which results in quite a bit of gameplay variety. There’s lots of different attacks to choose from. One of the coolest features of Sapphire is the wide spread of the difficulty settings. Easy is enough to give absolute newcomers to the genre a fighting chance at completing the game, while letting veterans breeze through and get a feel for the game. Normal is probably where most players will find a challenge and Hard is an insane experience. With the 2 player mode and how mild the Easy mode is, this is a great game to introduce a friend to the shooter genre. You won’t have difficulty finding someone to play with. 2 player mode is a tremendous amount of fun, and the chief reason I want to recommend this game. There’s a lot of teamwork and communication required, and it’s a really fun accomplishment for both of you. There’s lots of opportunities to defend and rescue your buddy, like firing a bomb to wipe out enemy bullets and using your gun pods to block shots. You can also screw your partner over, but you can avoid it by being careful and courteous. This is definitely a game you’ll be throwing out high fives over after every big victory. Both players share credits in this game, so if you get your partner killed by being a power-up hog, you’re going to suffer too. You and your partner can space out your bomb usage to shut down difficult bosses. There’s a lot of visual whimsy to Sapphire, and it doesn’t take itself too seriously. There’s dragons, robot crabs, evil paintings, and space squids. Each level takes place in a different time period, from the distant past to the distant future, so every single level stands out from the rest. The first level seems to be an homage to Blade Runner, and there’s also a couple enemies that I think are parodies of other games. If this guy isn’t a parody of Andross from Star Fox, then someone has got to be kidding. I’m pretty sure these guys are a nod to the recurring boss from another super pricey Hudson Soft shooter, Soldier Blade. I’m not a huge fan of this game’s power-up system, which I’ve seen in other shooters before. Powerups bounce around the screen and they’ll cycle between red, blue, green, and start over at red again. Different colors change how your shots behave. If you get the same color that your ship is already equipped with, it’ll upgrade the power to the next level. It sounds fine in practice, and it is, but I just don’t find it very fun. You awkwardly wait for the power-up to change to the color you want and grab it. Lots of times you’ll be forced to grab the wrong one and change to something you didn’t intend. I’ve played so many shooters that have fun power-up mechanics and this old trope you see here and many other places just never really felt as exciting to me. It’s not terrible, but there’s just so many better ways to handle power-ups in a shooter than this. I would probably be less annoyed if I didn’t see this exact system in so many other games. I think Hudson Soft wasn’t looking to reinvent the shooter genre with Sapphire, and instead their goal was to give players a true arcade experience in the home. I think they succeeded, because the graphics and presentation are on a level that feels like a Neo Geo game. The added RAM from the Arcade Card expansion is really put to good use to put lots of large, heavily-animated objects onscreen, and this was pretty incredible by 1995 standards. There’s a couple quirks here and there, but this is very much draws from the bread and butter of shooter convention and doesn’t strive to innovate too much. These enemies aren’t actually 3d, just prerendered sprites. The high amount of animation frames looks great though. You don’t blow up when you hit walls, but you blow up if they squish you off the side of the screen. The game is pretty short, which I’m okay with. Short games require less investment, and it’s fun to sit down with a friend and have a complete game experience in about an hour. This game is honestly good enough to revisit over and over. Hard Mode requires a lot of practice to beat, so you’ll get the majority of your playtime out of that. A tremendous amount of effort obviously went into this game, with the large amount of enemy types and numerous boss battles. There’s very little recycled content throughout the game’s length, so I would call the game concise rather than call it short. It’s a very tight, action-packed experience. The enemy variety really goes well beyond what you see in most shooters. There are enemies in this game’s 5 levels that only appear in one single wave, never to be seen in any other part of the game. This fits well because you’ll play this game lots of times. The replayability factor is quite high on this title. I played through this game a bunch before I even started this review and played it more times since then, just to give you an idea of how fun it is to revisit this game over and over. I don’t speak Japanese, but the story is definitely about policewomen in spaceships traveling through time, that much I know. This is definitely on my list of favorite shooters. The rarity of it greatly adds to the appeal to me, as obscure, little-known games are my current obsession. I’d still really like it if it were common, just probably not quite as much. You can also play this game on the PSP via the compilation Ginga Ojousama Densetsu Collection, but that too is Japan only and it’s also pretty expensive as of the time of this writing. Something about this game just makes it constantly elude a reasonable price point. It’s a shame, because I feel like most shooter fans would have a blast playing it. There’s a lot of rare, expensive games that are absolute crap. This game is actually very awesome. If you’re a collector and you want an exotic trophy for your collection that’s actually something you’ll want to play over and over and impress your friends with, Sapphire is definitely a great choice. But… please don’t go into financial ruin over it, okay? Also, if for some reason your dad owns this game, don’t scratch the disc. You’d get a spanking so bad your body would be split in half. Source By: https://www.mikematei.com/blog/ginga-fukei-densetsu-sapphire-pc-engine-cd-arcade-mike-matei-blog/ Mike Matei serves as the official maker for Cinemassarce, the site of The Angry Video Game Nerd, and helps write, edit, and star in the channel's recordings or videos. He has developed into a to some degree scandalous figure online for his low-quality portrayals and connections with fans. Mike Matei is a performing artist, craftsman, and executive producer of Cinemassacre Productions.
James Rolfe and Mike Matei playthrough a great Game Boy game - Donkey Kong! James & Mike Monday’s episode 291.
Mario, why does this keep happening to you?
Follow Mike Matei on Twitch ✜ https://www.twitch.tv/mikemateilive Catch Mike's FULL unedited live streams here ✜ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCXrq... Twitter Mike Matei ✜ https://twitter.com/Mike_Matei Support Mike Matei on Patreon https://www.patreon.com/MikeMatei Read Mike Matei Blog ✜ http://www.mikematei.blog Visit our website ✜ http://cinemassacre.com/ See and read more of our content and videos! Mario Kart Wii - Mike Matei game review See the video! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9AoQS... Discuss the video! https://www.reddit.com/r/TheCinemassa... Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon - Mike Matei game review See the video! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ArkVt... Discuss the video! https://www.reddit.com/r/TheCinemassa... White Tanooki Mario Debate https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AwVPp... James to the Rescue https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mizZ0... #retro #retrogaming #mikematei #sega #genesis #segagenesis Source By: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mgif8DtvtL4 Update:
Not long after I posted this article, which details my process of creating a full animated sequence in Mario Paint a year and a half ago, my animation was taken down from YouTube due to a copyright complaint. From the very beginning, I was aware that my video could be taken down, so I purposely designed the video to be as transformative under Fair Use as I possibly could. Everything was manually drawn by hand using a reference offscreen. There’s no way to download images into Mario Paint, nor is there any way to trace anything, and the limitations of Mario Paint actually make it impossible to perfectly recreate the original (the article that follows will explain why in detail). And, a new cover version of the song was recorded specifically for this video. I was under the impression that I was so far ahead of what was required that I would be completely in the clear, and then some. If the animation I made in Mario Paint doesn’t count as transformative, then I’m not sure what even does. What if I had recreated the intro using claymation? What if I had used actors in costumes? What if I just used a recording of me singing the theme song in the shower? Where is the actual line that got crossed? I want to know what aspects of my video supposedly don’t qualify as Fair Use. Hopefully I can manage to get that question answered at least. I’m sure other creators could find the information useful as well. Anyways, the video got reposted by someone already if you didn’t get a chance to watch it. It very well may get deleted again, so save it and if you want and share it on other video players and blogs so half a year of work isn’t tossed out a window forever.. See the video here: https://www.vidlii.com/watch?v=PlV2cAO9kf1 https://www.bitchute.com/video/bfyvFFHA4Aw5/ Of all the art forms, animation seems to be the one affected by economics the most. Film is another big one for sure, but animation is such an incredibly manual, labor-intensive process that there’s a giant disconnect between creative vision and what can actually be reasonably produced, and what can reasonably make money. Since animators are painstakingly creating moving pictures frame by frame, simple creative decisions can multiply into hours, months or even years of extra work. Concessions always have to be made, and the work doesn’t always pay off. In 2016, I used the Super Nintendo game Mario Paint to recreate the intro to the 80s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon opening. Here is the original video that was taken down. Use the links above to see the animation. There were a lot of candidates to choose from (Thundercats, X-Men, Ducktales were also high on my list), but I chose TMNT because it seemed to be the most likely to reach a wide audience. I knew from the outset that this was going to be a big undertaking, and it took me roughly 6 months to complete. The reasons to animate using Mario Paint are probably what you’d figure. Since I’m known as a commentator on retro video games, it was appropriate to use an art tool from a retro games console. There aren’t really many other choices that fit the bill, and there’s no way I could have used the LJN Video Art console to do it, being the completely useless art tool that it is that’s not even suitable for use by children. Also, there’s the element of the masochistic spectacle of one man going through the grueling process animating a full sequence working within such strange limitations. I thought people would be into it, and thankfully a good amount of people were. Mario Paint was a wonderful toy for its time, and Nintendo was smart enough to add game elements, humor, and quirky flair to the experience instead of just making it a basic electronic art program. But as an art tool, the limitations are numerous. It’s very strange in that it’s essentially a tool to create pixel art, but offers extremely limited pixel precision (save for the pixel art stamps you can define, which weren’t suitable for my project). The game came bundled with a mouse, but laser mouse technology didn’t exist in 1992. The Super Nintendo mouse used a rubber ball that rolled along the mousepad to manipulate rollers inside the unit to move the cursor onscreen. Everything grinds to a halt with this mouse if anything gets dirty, and the mouse is in a constant hurry to get as dirty as it possibly can. People reading this who grew up with Mario Paint will remember the cursor snagging over and over and the constant struggle to keep it clean. This was my life for 6 months. As for other limitations, lines need to be drawn extremely slowly in Mario Paint, because moving the cursor too fast will result in dotted lines streaking across the screen. Not to mention every pen stroke overwrites the color underneath, as there is no layering functionality, so trying to build colored shapes with an outline requires a bit of planning in advance. In Mario Paint, I typically lay down color blobs and then add black outlines around them as the very last step, which is backwards from the way most people draw. This is three lines drawn in Mario Paint at different speeds of strokes with the mouse. The limitation of Mario Paint that’s probably the most regrettable is the dismal color selection. There are only 15 solid colors, and 15 extra colors which are the basic colors combined in various ways in a pixel checkerboard pattern. There’s a reason why you don’t see actual pixel artists use patterns like this for coloring, because the results are usually hideous. Unfortunately, an artist working within the restrictions of Mario Paint will have to use these extra colors sometimes, for better or worse. Outside of these 30, there’s also several pages of stuff that I rarely find a use for at all. There’s no shortage of eye-melting color patterns to choose from, although these look better using the Spray tool. This is due to the limitations of the hardware of the SNES. I’m not a programmer and I wasn’t able to find any detailed information on how Mario Paint’s code works, but here’s my best guess of what’s going on: The canvas area of Mario Paint is 248×168 pixels, which means it’s made up of 8×8 tiles, 31 horizontal and 21 vertical. The SNES has 16 colors to work with in each 8×8 tile, which means Mario Paint is using the maximum amount of colors the console can support (I’m guessing that one color has to be left unused for transparency, possibly to allow the cursor to hover over the drawing area). Also, the SNES can only display 34 of these tiles per horizontal row, so there’s 31 tiles for the canvas, 2 tiles for the border around the screen, and 1 left over that allows for the cursor. Which means, as much as I lament the poor color choices, I can’t blame the creators of Mario Paint. They squeezed as much functionality out of Mario Paint as the hardware allowed. The checkerboard colors and blob patterns was the only way to extend the colors available. (By the way, if you’re knowledgeable about how Mario Paint or the SNES hardware works and anything I said is incorrect, let me know and I’ll edit this article with the correct information and give you credit). The color limitations also played a big part in why I chose the TMNT opening. Mario Paint offers two solid shades of green, which would allow me to add shadows to the Turtles’ skin. The character design of the Turtles just happened to work really well with Mario Paint’s colors, and I could get a bit more mileage out of light and shadow. There’s also an undo history of exactly one action, which is offered to you by the dog icon. Saving and loading is limited and slow, the flood fill tool is slow (although it can be cancelled in the middle to partially fill things), and the animation function is limited to 4 drawable frames… I could go on and on about the limitations of Mario Paint, but I think you get the point. So, as I just mentioned, Mario Paint has a pretty limited animation suite, so I used modern capture technology to simply capture frames when I completed them, and then edit them together later in video editing software. This could have been done in 1992 as well. I have friends who would use their VCR to record Mario Paint onto VHS and string them together to make elaborate animation projects, as well as other Nintendo art tools such as the GameBoy Camera placed into a Super Game Boy. VCRs connected to a camcorder could also be used to do stop motion animation with clay or toys, and even film individual frames of drawings to make animations. This process was super nerve wracking, because each completed frame had to be discarded from existence entirely once I was done grabbing them. At least data storage is easy nowadays and I didn’t have to worry about someone in the house overwriting my animation in order to record an episode of Roseanne from the TV. So, we come back to the concessions I talked about at the beginning. The original animated sequence for the TMNT show totals up to about 1200 individual frames of animation. So if I averaged about an hour per frame drawing in Mario Paint, and I worked 8 hours a day, that would mean I would reasonably get 8 frames done per day. Which means it would take 150 days of nonstop work to get the animation done, which would be okay if I didn’t also have a full time job and a social life that needs to be taken care of as well. My animation ended up with about 420 frames total, and took me 6 months. So doing 1200 frames would have taken a year and a half, and who knows how much I would slow down from fatigue after a project that long. There were a couple times I could get a break, such as some frames just being a single solid color (such as lightning flashes), and I reused the swirling TMNT logo from the beginning for the end. Hey, the original cartoon reused this animation, why can’t I? I mentioned earlier that Mario Paint doesn’t offer any layer functionality, so this is a huge problem when animating moving characters over a background. As you can see in the above example, the background is constantly being destroyed by the turtles moving across the screen, and that destroyed information has to be rebulit when the portion of the background comes back into view. Eagle-eyed readers will probably notice that this scene had to be animated out of sequence and then reassembled, which accounts for the way the background constantly changes shape. Surprisingly, the shots you would think would be more difficult to do, such as Donatello flying around the city and the background moving around really fast, are about the same difficulty as the shot you see above, because of the lack of background layers. When the background is moving so quickly, redrawing the entire frame isn’t that much worse. Oh who am I kidding, this was still painful. Another issue came from the fact that I wasn’t going to use all 1200 frames from the original animation, so I had to pick and choose which frames to use. I was referring to a television off to the side drawing these individual frames, and I tried to pick out individual frames that would convey the most movement. This resulted in a bit of a discontinuity in the framerate, which had to be corrected manually when it came time to edit. This is why you see the framerate fluctuate often during the entire sequence. This is regrettable but… I dunno. Nobody has really complained about it, and if they did I’d just shrug and say Mario Paint isn’t the optimal tool to create animation. I did the best I could, you know? Recreating an animation sequence in Mario Paint is so ridiculously transformative that it easily meets the requirements for Fair Use, so in order to keep my video from getting taken down, I was going to need a cover version of the music instead of using the original audio. Luckily I was able to get a great one by Epic Game Music that was tailored to match the timing of the video I animated. After that was done, it just needed some editing and it was completed. So there you have it. How do I feel about this animation more than a year later? I’m glad I did it because it’s something nobody had ever done before. Doing something this elaborate with the drawing section of the game. Sure a lot of people have done a lot with the music portion, and there is a very small limit to what you can do with the in-game animation tool. But to animate something like this with the basic drawing tool, I’d say I did the most elaborate thing anyone ever attempted. If there’s anything else out there even close to as time consuming, I’d love to see it. I think it was a really good personal exercise for me in diligence and determination. I’m glad that I managed to finish it. Starting a project like this and then abandoning it halfway would have been a gnawing regret I would have had to carry for the rest of my life. The end result wasn’t perfect, but it’s more important to me that I finished it. “I may lose, but it won’t be because I gave up!” As for economics… all told, I only made a couple hundred dollars off the video. I’d do the Pat-Math on how much my hourly wage was, but you can guess its low enough to be just about nothing. But hey, that’s the game we play being creatives. You never know what’s going to hit or miss, and you just have to keep consistently applying yourself until something hits. Whenever I get negative feelings about this animation, I have to remind myself that it was more than made up for with a lot of other successes that required far less effort. Not to mention I’m a Let’s Player and a streamer where I record myself playing art that other people made, and standing on the shoulders of giants to do so. I’m grateful for the wonderful life I have, and I hope you guys don’t get the impression that I made this post just to whinge about making cartoons in Mario Paint. Animation is extraordinarily difficult, but we’re in a strange time where animation is easier to make than ever before, yet independent animators aren’t making the money they probably should. And yet… so many people still animate. There’s so much incredibly good animation being made by individuals on YouTube and all over the internet. Against overwhelming odds and minimal rewards, they still painstakingly download their imaginations into individual frames, one by one. I believe strongly that things will get better for animators in the future. Just like Lion-o up there, they just need to keep running. Eventually something good will happen. Source By: https://www.mikematei.com/blog/my-tmnt-mario-paint-animation-a-retrospective-mike-matei-blog/ Amazon’s Running Diet – Mike Matei Blog1/14/2019 Last year, a new NES game came out. For real. It’s called Gotta Protectors: Amazon’s Running Diet, and it was given away for free to promote the 3DS game Gotta Protectors. As of the time of this writing, I have not played Gotta Protectors, but I’ve played a lot of this companion NES game.
Here’s the free download link if you want to play it (requires an emulator that can play NES games): Click here to download Amazon’s Running Diet It’s an endless runner game based around the main character exercising to lose weight. She has to collect water to keep running and avoid cakes. I got addicted to this game immediately and played a lot of it, but as I kept going I started to have a lot of questions about the mechanics. The scoring system is mysterious and hard to understand, and I was really curious about what kind of scores I was shooting for to unlock the different win screens, which show the Amazon’s weight loss (or weight gain) after her workout. This game is relatively new, very little has been written about it, and only a couple YouTube videos have been posted. So, I decided to research this game and post an in-depth strategy guide so the internet has one. I had my pixel artist analyze the game’s memory with a hex editor to make sense of how the game actually works. We were able to discover a lot about the game’s scoring system and game mechanics, and also figure out what the all the score goals actually are. Before we get into all that, let’s talk about the basics first. Rules The Amazon runs from left to right. You have a water meter which slowly drains as the Amazon runs, and you get a game over if the meter runs out. Picking up water power-ups will replenish the water meter, and running into cakes will decrease your water meter. It’s as simple as that. Using the Amazon’s moves helps you collect water and avoid cakes. After the game ends, the amount of calories you burned is your final score. Running a longer distance will burn more calories, and the amount of cakes you ate while running will take away from calories burned. You get a score screen showing what the Amazon looks like after her workout, and this is the main motivation to play. Do you want to actually help her in her goal to lose weight, or do you want to be sadistic and turn her into an immobile blob? It’s your choice, and both options are quite challenging to pull off. The fact that this game has two different goals, weight gain and weight loss makes it a lot deeper than it seems at first. Each goal requires a different strategy by Mike Matei. Controls A – Jump, hold A to jump higher. The Amazon has a bit of a startup time to the jump, so this will take a bit of getting used to. B – The Amazon does a kick that lifts her off the ground a bit, pressing B again does another kick which lifts her even higher. There’s no enemies in this game, so kicking is an alternate way of jumping, and can be done in mid-air to alter the trajectory of your regular jumps. Doing well in this game requires a mastery of the triple jump mechanic. In some cases, you need to chain these kicks together very quickly to get a large vertical leap, and in other cases, you can space out the timing on them to make you fall slower to avoid cakes or nab hard to reach water pickups. During the two parts where there’s a giant wall of cakes, you have to hold the A button down to jump high, then do two quick kicks with B to get the maximum jump height. You also have to time it at almost the last second. You’ll know you did the high jump right when the top of the character sprite loops to the bottom of the screen. This cake wall is a score-ruiner, so you need to be able to get the high jump in at the right time to get past it. Remember, there’s 6 consecutive waters that scroll by before the wall comes. Down+B The Amazon does a ground slide. There are many obstacles that are difficult or impossible to jump over, so you can slide under them (some are too low to slide under). The duration of this slide is very quick, so you have to activate it pretty close to the obstacle you’re trying to avoid. Up+B The Amazon does a cool backflip maneuver, jumping up slightly and flying back. This is a very situational move that will sometimes get you into trouble, but there are certain parts of the game where this is the optimal method to collect water safely without touching cakes. As the game progresses, it will speed up and backflipping becomes more and more necessary to collect certain water pickups. The backflip is very situational, but fun to pull off. Digging into the Game All this information was obtained by analyzing the game’s memory during runtime in order to shine some light on the game’s mysterious scoring system. Scoring Kcal is your final score, and determines whether the Amazon gains or loses weight. Each tenth of a Km traveled subtracts 1 Kcal (just remove the decimal point) Each cake adds 8 Kcal Depending on your Kcal score, you’ll get a portrait of the Amazon with her new weight: The images are silhouetted out for spoiler purposes. You’ll also get a named rank depending on your Kcal score, such as “Collagen the Great Buddha.” The best weight loss name rank you can get is at -7001 Kcal and the best weight gain name rank you can get is at +5000 Kcal. Cake Multiplier Another thing the hex editor snooping found was there is a hidden multiplier for cakes, which I’m calling the Cake Multiplier. The game starts with the counter at 0, and every cake increases it by one, then that new number is added to the total number of cakes you’ve grabbed during the entire game. Grabbing a water will decrease the counter by one. So, if that counter is at 5, picking up a cake will increase that counter to 6, and the total number of cakes during the play session will be increased by 6. As you can tell, this can result in your cake penalty score skyrocketing really high if you don’t get it under control right away by collecting water. So, if you’re going for weight loss, you will be punished heavily for grabbing consecutive cakes, and this sort of Cake Chaining is necessary to get a high score if your goal is to make the Amazon fat. Summary: Eating too many cakes in a row will result in a cumulative cake penalty, and collecting water reduces this effect. Stages The game’s map layout, that is the positions of the water and cake powerups (and also points where the scrolling speeds up and slows down), loops every 16 stages. Stages increment at arbitrary points during each loop, and the stage counter serves as a rough indicator of how far you’ve traveled. Since the game doesn’t have an onscreen score counter during play, this is the best guess you have as to how well you’re doing. If you want to master this game, it would be a good idea to use each numbered stage as a landmark to help you memorize which hazards are coming up next. Water Meter This part has a very complicated and arbitrary scheme, so i’m just going to simplify the information that’s useful for strategy without giving you a huge table of data explaining every little factor. The game’s code stores the water meter in a single byte, ranging from 0 – 255. The game displays this internal figure to the player as a meter made of water droplets. Water reaching 0 results in a game over, and it passively ticks down roughly every second, starting at 4 per tick and eventually maxing out at 12 per tick (this maxes out after level 16 is over). Grabbing water always increases your water meter by 40. This amount never changes as the game progresses. Grabbing cakes depletes your water meter, and this penalty steadily increases as the game goes on. It starts out at 16 and by the end of level 32 it caps out at 90. The penalty does not increase beyond that point. Summary The water meter passively drains during play, and this amount of drain increases and eventually stops increasing at level 16. The penalty to the water meter by eating cakes also increases, and stops increasing at level 32. Speed The game’s scroll speed increases as the game progresses, getting quite fast at the end of level 32 and then not speeding up any more after that. At this point the backflip ability becomes necessary to pick up certain water power-ups. Conclusion Getting high scores in this game requires a lot of practice. I hope the information compiled here will be a useful resource if you want to master this game. It is possible to get scores high enough to glitch out the win screen, but this was done via cheating with the emulator. Time may tell if this is even humanly possible to do. This is one of the kinds of games I really like, a simple score attack game with a lot of depth hidden beneath the surface. The character animations are among the very best that have ever been pulled off with the NES, and the weight loss/weight gain mechanic is quite a fresh and original idea. I highly recommend checking it out, especially since it doesn’t cost anything. Source By: https://www.mikematei.com/blog/amazons-running-diet-mike-matei-blog My Favorite Game Controllers1/7/2019 Here’s a list of my personal favorite game controllers.
Gamecube Controller Nintendo was known for bizarre game controllers around this time. Unlike the N64 controller, the Gamecube one actually benefits from its weirdness. The face button layout is unlike anything seen before or since, but for certain games, this layout works better than the standard 4 button cross arrangement. You have a big chunky A button for the thumb’s neutral position, and you can roll off it to easily hit any of the others. You never have to worry about being confused about whether A or B is confirm or cancel, every Gamecube game (that I’m aware of) adhered to the green button being confirm and the red button being cancel. Games that require a lot of multiple face button presses benefit from this arrangement, which is why I think this is still a highly preferred choice for Smash Brothers to this day. The analog stick quality is just about as good as any I’ve ever used. The texturing on the control stick minimizes slipping and the octagonal plastic surrounding the stick is a really smart idea that I wish was still used in modern controllers. If you press up you know you’re going exactly up and not veering off slightly in a different direction. I’m sure I’m not alone in saying that sometimes it’s fun to just idly swirl the joysticks around during a loading screen because there’s something oddly satisfying about how it feels. A big complaint was the small d-pad offset below the analog stick, but I’ve never had an issue with it. If the size and placement really are the issues, you can’t blame the quality of the actual component. It’s accurate and solid, and has a nice texture that minimizes thumb slipping. The top of the controller is where I start to take issue. The analog shoulder don’t feel quite right because they need to be depressed straight down instead of rotating into the controller like modern controllers do. They click when you depress them all the way, which some games took advantage of, but requires a bit of extra force than you would likely want. The Z button is oddly positioned and needs to be pressed in a specific fashion in order to get it to fire. I have no idea why they didn’t put an additional bumper on the left side of the controller when there was space for it and an extra button could have been helpful for the console. The Gamecube controller differs wildly from convention in a way that makes it fun to use. I overlook the flaws in favor of its strengths, and I wish some of the better aspects of the design would show up in future controllers. SNES The SNES controller was a very good early attempt at shaping a controller to fit human hands comfortably. It builds upon the phenomenal design of the NES pad and adds more buttons, and curved the edges for additional comfort. I miss the old days when Nintendo was more conservative with their controller upgrades with each generation. Here we have a good followup to the previous design that doesn’t add insane stuff like multiple controller grips, analog shoulder buttons, crap you have to wave around and crap you have to plug into other crap. Nobody liked having a WiiMote sitting in their lap with a Classic Controller plugged into it, it’s just something everyone had to put up with at the time. One big improvement that the SNES generation added was the concept of rolling your thumb upwards in games that require a simultaneous button pressing. You can use the joint of your thumb to use B to jump and the tip of your thumb to hit Y to attack. This was a clear advantage over this controller’s main competitor, the Sega Genesis gamepad. Shoulder buttons were a great addition, although they are in somewhat of an unnatural spot and don’t conform exactly to the natural position your index fingers want to rest when holding a controller, something that modern controllers do a lot better. If you’re right handed, the L button going to be your least favorite button on the controller to press. This one tends to make creaking noises during intense game sessions, but it’s very durable and reliable overall. Turbo Duo Controller This one is more of a personal preference. I just really like how this one feels, and it always works well for me. I’ve favored this controller over recent years because of how reliable it is, even though there’s nothing particularly special about it, apart from how awesome it looks. The turbo switches are pretty superfluous, but they don’t get in the way. It’s solid, it feels nice, and it’s reliable. For me, the D-Pad functions perfectly every time, as do the buttons. It’s a controller I have literally zero complaints with. DualShock 1 or 2 Controller Sony did themselves a big favor by designing an excellent controller to compete with Nintendo when they were first starting out. If this one is your personal favorite, I’m not going to argue with you. The DualShock 1 and DualShock 2 are pretty similar with a couple minor differences, and it’s hard to find yourself wanting for anything else in a game controller. These controllers are so close to perfection that every iteration of DualShock onwards just got weirder and weirder instead of better. The D-pad will never let you down. No erroneous inputs, no thumb slipping. Nintendo and Sony offer the best D-pads, and they’re pretty much tied for 1st as far as I’m concerned. You can always depend on this D-pad to correctly read your intended inputs. I’ve always been fond of the aesthetic choices. Sony obviously wanted to break away from Nintendo’s established ABXY face button labeling scheme, and they came up with a really simple and pleasing set of colored basic shapes that were well used in their advertisements and promotional materials. They’ve become synonymous with the PlayStation brand and it’s always been elegant and fun. I’ve always liked how the shapes of the start and select button are reminiscent of the Stop and Play buttons on a VCR/CD Player/etc. I prefer these over the DualShock 3 because the analog L2 and R2 buttons feel terrible on that controller. Analog triggers rarely are required to play a game, they feel springy and gross, and they wear out quickly. I like a good solid digital trigger that doesn’t require a lot of pressure to activate. The analog sticks are unfortunately where this controller falls short of perfection. They aren’t terrible, but they could have been textured a bit better to reduce slipping. I prefer the octagonal plastic around analog sticks like what the GameCube controller has. Depressing the sticks to get the L3 and R3 functions feels strange when the stick isn’t in the neutral position, but it still works. And unfortunately, these sticks can wear out over time and become unusable. When all else fails, the DualShock always works as a fallback, and the design is more focused on function and reliability than flashy gimmicks. NES Controller This is the controller that saved the gaming industry. There was no way to continue the trend of crappy uncomfortable joysticks that were ubiquitous before this time, and it had come to the point where customers needed a proper tool to play home consoles in order for the art form to move forward. For intents and purposes, this was the first truly good controller for a home console, and the design still holds up more than 30 years later. Nintendo (specifically, Gunpei Yokoi) invented the cross style d-pad, and it’s one of the most important innovations in all of gaming. For the first time, the controller itself was no longer an obstacle, and games could be a contest between the player and the game’s challenge instead of fighting with a controller that isn’t comfortable, accurate or responsive. After this controller was brought into the world, game design was off and running by Mike Matei. Sure, other controllers have more buttons and analog sticks, but those are innovations are dependent on the type of game being played, and don’t make a controller better in a universal sense. If a game only needs a d-pad and a small amount of buttons, this is the best controller to use. The build quality is top notch. It remains fully functional after years of use, and doesn’t break when it gets thrown at a wall. It’s also a design that will never become obsolete, because of its simplicity. No matter how advanced games get, there will always be games made that don’t require anything more than a d-pad, two face buttons and two function buttons. And this controller does everything it sets out to do at the highest level of quality and accuracy. I will always favor games that let me use the NES controller, because it’s the game controller I want to use the most. Honorable Mention: Arcade Stick An arcade stick doesn’t get a spot on the numerical list because it’s more of a concept than a specific design or model I can point to. There’s a lot of different types of arcade stick setups, probably more than you can count. Different manufacturers make different joysticks, buttons and full units, and each have their own feel that people have different preferences for. It’s no surprise that many professional competitive game players use joysticks. D-pads are great, but even the best ones don’t quite give you the precise level of control over diagonal directions that a well-made joystick can. You can feel the click of the gates inside the mechanism that let you know exactly which direction you’re moving in. And for games that require rapid button presses, hitting a large button on a flat surface is superior to your thumb. This becomes obvious when you think of how lots of people tend to switch to their index finger or middle fingle away from the thumb on a handheld controller during minigames or other segments that require the player to push a button as fast as possible. I like using them, but it’s unrealistic for me while doing videos and live streams. Mainly because of the button tapping being harsh on the ears. The problem with arcade sticks is they’re a muscle memory investment. You do need to relearn how to play your favorite games with an arcade stick and you will likely suck at first. Although, it’s not all bad because arcade sticks are inherently fun to use, so that process of practice isn’t entirely sacrifice. I would encourage anyone who is into retro or retro-style games to look into purchasing an arcade stick, you might discover it breathes new life into the experience of playing games. It’s very easy to make the case for the switch if you play bullet hell shooters or fighting games, but other genres can benefit from them as well. Source By: https://www.mikematei.com/blog/my-favorite-game-controllers-mike-matei-blog/ AuthorMike Matei serves as the executive producer for Cinemassacre, the website of The Angry Video Game Nerd, and helps write, edit, and star in the channel's videos. He has grown into a somewhat infamous figure online for his low-quality sketches and interactions with fans. Archives
February 2019
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