mk64 wrote:

dd anyone play this back in the day?

I have the Atari 7800 version of that - it's called Tower Toppler. Rock hard.

The Firemen is on the VC right? Wii version at least?

Or is that The Ignition Factor?

Cheers btw davy

They're definitely different games;

The Firemen was made by Human Entertainment and was only released in Japan and Europe.

The Ignition Factor was made By Jaleco and released in the US and Japan where its was know as Fire Fighting.

Unfortunately its the latter thats on the Wii VC.

Right, going to put aside some time to play this tomorrow. I vaguely remember seeing a review of this on kids TV when I was younger. Possibly Bad Influence? Always stuck with me for some reason, but I've never played it before.

Couldn't get this working on my JXD after trying various emulators and roms, which is annoying. I wanted to play this on my commute to work.

Has anyone used an Everdrive for SNES or an equivalent? They cost around £80 but would be a good investment for the likes of me who wants the feel of the actual hardware.

However I hear the Everdrive doesn't support games that have extra chips on-board such as DSP, SFX etc. so I'm not sure it's worth the plunge unless there are alternatives.

They have compatibility issues all around from what I could tell but there's just no way of knowing without taking the plunge unfortunately.

In terms of how compatible each one is it seems to go:
MD>NES>N64>SNES

They're the only 4 I looked into, I should think the MS one would rate high like the MD one.

I really miss / feel nostaligic about buying and opening a brand new SNES game. Childhood memories and all that, but I dare say that I can't see myself reminiscing in the future about buying a new 360 or PS3 game. Some memories of PSOne games.... but it's probably the fact that from PS2 onwards, they just looked like DVDs.

Could the region ROM have anything to do with it? Highly doubt it but it's the only thing I can think of. Try 'Fire Fighter' that was the Jap version.

EDIT: Ignore this, Fire Fighter is the Jap version of the Ignition Factor. I got confused, sorry.

retroking1981 wrote:

There's a SNES one for £160 that has the following enhancement chips attached to the cart: •BS-X •DSP1 / 1b •DSP2 •DSP3 •DSP4 •ST-010 •Cx4 •MSU1 •S-RTC The £80 one doesn't have any so will only play standard carts. Here's a complete list of SNES games that use enhancement chips: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Super_NES_enhancement_chips

It looks like a minefield , and an expensive one at that. I was emboldened by the positive experience with the Harmony cart which lets me load every 2600 game ever and select them from a handy on-screen menu. It supports up to 32K games which means modern home-brews are supported too.

The 2600 was a simple beast though - the SNES scene looks too complicated and I think I'll give it a miss for a while.

Not that there are many more games I really want for SNES at any rate but it would have been nice.

The Firemen (SNES)

Great little game this, its basically a top down shooter at heart in the vein of Smash TV. You play a fire fighter called Pete tackling a fire with your partner Danny thats taken over a sky scrapper with the aid of the rest of your team via radio. There's a decent amount of varity of fire (enemy) types in the game which helps keep it fresh and it even has end of level boss fights.

The big negative is its length, which isn't surprising considering it was made by students. I completed it in a time of 38mins* which isn't long at all for a 16Bit title. Having said that it is quite tough and I think it would have taken most of us a few attempts even in our heyday. That being said it does feel like the first building in a game that should consist of 3 of 4 buildings, 'Worlds' if you will.

There is a postive to be found in this negative though. Replay value and speed running, its definitely a game I would have gone back to time and time again in 1994. You have rescue rate (% of people you saved) and fire rate (% of fire put out) then a total score out of 100 with a rank. I'm tempted to blast through it again now as I know I could do better.

Overall a very good game that is worth a place in any SNES collection. If it not for its short length it could have been a High Five.

4/5

*my play time would have been a fair bit longer than this but through pants emulation I knew the first 3 stages inside out and done them in maybe 10 mins on this playthrough. PSP emulation is a joke and the zsnes emulator couldn't display the outside sections with the rain effect. Third time lucky on snes9x.

End sequence and my total score for you viewing pleasure:

Finished the first stage on this.  I liked it.  Two canons + strafe mode seems to work well enough, and the boss was enjoyable.  Chances are I'll go back to it in a few hours.

I'm up to stage 5 now. I'm not quite sure what was going on with the 4th boss, as I managed to get my entire energy bar depleted without seeing what hit me (probably an emulation problem, although I had transparencies on). It's a fun game, there's not really much I don't like about it. I'm not sure it was ever worth £50 though, as good as it is. There is scope for speed runs etc, but it's not long enough or arcadey enough to have genuine 'lastability'. Very good though, I would have loved to have rented or borrowed this as a kid.

Will update this to Power Drive tomorrow. I put a good hour into it over the weekend, but so far I'm not convinced it's the game I was thinking of when I suggested it. It seems to be a fairly straightforward (yet accomplished) top down rally game, and although the headlight effects ring a bell I thought it had various parking tests/cone tests in it, aside from just racing. Perhaps the Jaguar version had a few things added to it, but it was the parking that caught my eye on Gamesmaster many years ago, although now the name Top Gear/Test Drive Rally are ringing bells, although I can picture both of those games in my head and if memory serves me correctly they were into the screen racers (and one was an N64 game). Any takers for this conundrum?

I also spent a while playing an Appaloosa (ex Novotrade) developed Jurassic Park sequel on the Megadrive called Lost World, from 1996. By this point the Official Sega Magazine had become The Official Saturn magazine, and many mags were devoting little or no space to 16-bit games, but I'm still surprised I had no idea this existed. Wikipedia suggests it was released, so it must've slipped underneath the radar completely for me. I need to play another hour or two until I'm sure, but at the moment I'd stick my neck out and say it's the best top-down shooter on the machine. It's very, very good.

Also, can we have some votes for obscure NES month please - we need five games, and I've already picked one (Jaleco's Shatterhand). Will re-post the games already voted for tomorrow.