Always up for it, will fire up the Pi at some point over the weekend.

In.

I had that! Super Play liked it iirc

Now I’m humming Crysta tune from Terranigma. *sigh*

Played a good 45 minutes of this.

From what I can tell it has a World map like Super Mario World, I've done the equivalent of the first island/castle. Through doing that I've unlocked two additional spells/abilities.

First impressions are positive. It seems tough but only in the traditional trial and error, perfection through repetition sense. The controls are responsive, when I died it was my own fault etc. It's also a nice looking game with a few decent effects early on.

Not sure how long it is, will play more over the weekend and report back Sunday evening.

Skyblazer (SNES)

Lovely little 16-Bit action platformer, from an unknown company called Ukiyotei. They must have been a talented bunch because the quality of this particular title is almost at Konami/Capcom levels.

You have a basic one button punch attack which culminates in a round house kick which inflicts more damage. This same round house can also be used as a flying kick which is a quicker way of taking care of the standard enemy fodder.

Where the game opens up a little is in the magic system, there are a total of 8 spells you unlock throughout the game. While not needed to complete the game they're all useful, especially against the bosses.

Talking of bosses, for the most part they're all decent. Not the best of the era but much better than most. Only one stood out as poor imo.

Most of the game plays out as a left to right platformer but it does shake it up a few times with an underwater maze and scrolling shooter levels for example.

The sprite artwork is sublime with most of the Super Nintendo's visual trickery such as mode 7, transparencies and sprite rotation put to good use.

The music on the other hand is quite poor. It won't insult your ears but it's very forgetful and doesn't push the SNES sound chip in any way.

The real shame however is the length. At just 2hr 30mins the credits were rolling, sometimes that's a good thing. Scrolling beat em ups for example have far outstayed their welcome by that point but it's a genuine shame here.

It feels like you don't see enough of the variety the game teases and it could have offered so much more, especially with the unlocked abilities. I guess this is where Ukiyotei's resources and budget show and how someone like Konami/Capcom would have done a better job.

A solid addition the the SNES library and a must play for retro enthusiasts, but there's better 16Bit games out there.

4/5

I'd love to get on this but work commitments have reduced my gaming time down to a minimum at the moment. Hopefully post March if we're still going I'll be in!

I'm up for this too by the way despite the fact I haven't got around to trying the latest game yet.

retroking1981 wrote:

I'd love to keep this going, maybe one game a month or every other month as to take up to much time? That would still amount to 6-12 retro games a year which is a nice amount.

Happy to trial one per month if it sustains interest?  Gives us plenty of time for more than just a dip in and out too.  Even with the amount of plates I spin each month with indies I reckon I could get most 80s/early 90s retro games done in four weeks.

hylian_elf wrote:

Is ZSNES still the way to go on PC? Any good sites for ROMs?

ZSnes is what I use on the 3DS. 

Loads of the ROM sites don't work anymore. https://romhustler.org/ is still up. 

Or https://archive.org/download/no-intro-rom-sets has all available ROMS for a console zipped up in one file to download. I grabbed a load of these last year when ROMS started becoming a bit trickier to get. 

Or you can let me know and I can send you something if I've got it.

I wouldn't object to the character's attack reach covering a few extra pixels.

monkey wrote:

Is ZSNES still the way to go on PC? Any good sites for ROMs?

ZSnes is what I use on the 3DS.  Loads of the ROM sites don't work anymore. https://romhustler.org/ is still up.  Or https://archive.org/download/no-intro-rom-sets has all available ROMS for a console zipped up in one file to download. I grabbed a load of these last year when ROMS started becoming a bit trickier to get.  Or you can let me know and I can send you something if I've got it.

I use this one if I'm missing anything: https://the-eye.eu/public/rom/ seems like they have a decent selection.

Over the last few years I've been painstakingly deleting games from my collection of ROMs. There's no need for complete sets imo.

So far Im down to:
NES: 502
SNES: 160
N64: 135
Mega Drive: 318

Youtubers SNESdrunk and Glenn Plant have helped a lot whittling down the SNES and N64 respectively. They do great little 5-10min reviews that do enough to know if I think they're worth trying or deleting.

Unfortunately for NES the only youtuber I know of is Jeremy Parish who is doing an amazing series of chronological reviews on everything Nintendo, up to and including N64. Again at 5-10mins per review they're great easy viewing. Its a great channel well worth watching if your a Nintendo fan, only problem is they're few and far between and unfortunately for me I have zero interest in the Game Boy coverage.

If anyone knows of any similar channel that would help me with the Mega Drive please let me know. So far I've only been able to delete the MD versions of the crappy SNES games SNESdrunk reviews.

Oh and for head to heads, Console Wars is decent. Again there's no point in keeping both ROMs to something like Lion King which are identical games on SNES/MD but far better on MD.

The Mexican Runner might be a decent second NES option? Haven't watched him myself but he was at AGDQ earlier this week, and has played through the whole NES library. His YouTube channel doesn't seem to have short videos, but there's a Google spreadsheet that has scores and a paragraph of review.

monkey wrote:

No there’s no need at all. It was just a pain getting the ones I needed one by one. And I can’t be arsed sifting through them.

That's half the point of this thread for me, to find the hidden gems.

Was messing about with my setup last night and realised I had forgot I had obtained a new RGB SCART lead for my Nintendo consoles - so I have RGB SCART for SNES for the first time. Up until now I had used s-video.

To put it through its paces I booted up a little game called Caravan Shooting Collection which is a compilation of 3 NES shmups developed by Hudson. So named because of their use in the national high score competitions that they used to run in Japan. Some shmups now have 2 and 5min score attack modes that is now called caravan mode.

They have been beefed up very slightly for the SNES - dealing with the scroll glitch the NES had and tarting the music up a bit. So they feel like playing on a suped-up NES. Very pleasing.

Might be worth a look for those who like their shmups old school. The games were used for the 85,86 and 87 competitions and it is interesting to see how they develop in sophistication over that period.