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Stumbling through Little Nemo
I cannot believe that the demographics of videos uploaded on Youtube are so heavily weighted that putting the innocent word "through" in a video title immediately throws up the tag suggestions "fire" and "flames".
Anyway. I tried another NES game, this time with an elaborate recording setup that I was playing about with all day that allows me to record my voice through the headset connected to the computer, while simultaneously running the game's audio to the guitar processor thing I use and recording it on that, then editing the two together at the end. So you can now hear both Little Nemo: The Dream Master and my reactions to it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CQItDEQn69Y
I'd never so much as seen the game before I started recording this video, but as it turns out, it's a game in which you hop around a dream world lulling monsters to sleep by throwing boiled sweets at them and then hijacking their bodies to get yourself around the level. It also turns out I'm dreadful at it, even though I was very proud of myself for getting to the second level.
The method I used for recording worked out rather well, but I'm confused by how out-of-sync the sound gets in Camstudio - it seems to play my voice and the video at normal speed, and yet the voice always drifts slightly ahead or behind the video over time. The process of resynchronizing them in iMovie just got more and more difficult as it went on, having to re-import the same file multiple times to split it up, having the Trim menu disappear entirely and with it preventing me from scrolling down to the last row of thumbnails on the video to edit the end - it came to be so excruciating that I found myself wondering insane things like whether Windows Movie Maker might actually be better at it.
Anyway. I tried another NES game, this time with an elaborate recording setup that I was playing about with all day that allows me to record my voice through the headset connected to the computer, while simultaneously running the game's audio to the guitar processor thing I use and recording it on that, then editing the two together at the end. So you can now hear both Little Nemo: The Dream Master and my reactions to it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CQItDEQn69Y
I'd never so much as seen the game before I started recording this video, but as it turns out, it's a game in which you hop around a dream world lulling monsters to sleep by throwing boiled sweets at them and then hijacking their bodies to get yourself around the level. It also turns out I'm dreadful at it, even though I was very proud of myself for getting to the second level.
The method I used for recording worked out rather well, but I'm confused by how out-of-sync the sound gets in Camstudio - it seems to play my voice and the video at normal speed, and yet the voice always drifts slightly ahead or behind the video over time. The process of resynchronizing them in iMovie just got more and more difficult as it went on, having to re-import the same file multiple times to split it up, having the Trim menu disappear entirely and with it preventing me from scrolling down to the last row of thumbnails on the video to edit the end - it came to be so excruciating that I found myself wondering insane things like whether Windows Movie Maker might actually be better at it.
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I know I use the wrong term for he background versus the sprite layer early on, and feel terribly bad about it as you can imagine. I don't think I've noticed the phenomenon before in any NES game - perhaps it was the black background that made me notice it all the more - but you know I love this stuff, so please feel free to go into it and use terms like "panning register" as much as possible.
I was only half paying attention to the introduction as I rudely talked over it, but yes, I had definitely assumed that something else was wrong in addition to just being transported there to play with the princess. Especially as it had to be done by going through these other worlds - perhaps the whole game operates on dream logic and you have to spend the last few levels putting sunglasses on horses to power the airship.
I almost had a revelation then that the transformation animals differed from enemies because they didn't move, but the frog and lizard could hop or crawl short distances to annoy me. I believe that you can jump on enemies when you've possessed any animal, but not as your plain self - and those snails look evil enough to avoid whether inside one or not.
The artwork style did have a sort of Mega Man flavour to it, not that I've really played that either. I think that the artefacts might be a result of the intermediate format I record the video to before editing the channels together - I might have forgotten to switch it away from one of the heavily keyframed Xvid ones.
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Actually, interestingly enough (if your interest in the subject will permit me a tangent to share some trivia) scanline interrupts weren't actually built into the NES the way they were for virtually all later hardware... so, due to the relatively slow clock speed of the processor, you could never quite nail the start of a scanline precisely; and furthermore, due to the fact that the cycle length doesn't divide evenly into the drawing speed of the screen, you can't even nail it consistently in the same wrong place... watch the little white line at the top of the status bar (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TdI6wM4cnNc#t=4m25s). (The fact that glitches like these don't appear in some emulators is actually driving some people to write bottom-up cycle-perfect emulators, rather than the top-down sort that reproduce the designers' intentions... even if it means that it would take a 3 GHz machine to accurately recreate a Super Nintendo (http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2011/08/accuracy-takes-power-one-mans-3ghz-quest-to-build-a-perfect-snes-emulator.ars).)
Oh, and if you're curious why the color always seems to be wonkier than the actual tiles when dealing with a can't-hide-the-scrolling situation, it's because (oddly enough) you can actually only define the palette for every four (2x2) actual tiles. It's kind of strange that they'd make an assumption that forces gameplay to revolve around logical pieces of a certain size, but allow you to define graphical information SMALLER than that size... I guess the idea is to be able to put bevels on corners and such?
Anyway, part of me wanted to say "why did they bother having two whole maps but only in one axis, instead of having one spare column and one spare row which is all you'd need for clean scrolling", but the fact is, the edges of these images couldn't even be seen on cathode ray TV sets; on my friend's TV, I could see some of UndoDog, but I was taking the existence of that arrow to his right on faith (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ki15GoFn0Io&feature=related#t=3m03s)... so, for hardware like the NES that was really counting on the glass working that way, a filter like this (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=09jU1roDz9Y&hd=1&t=7s) might be ideal! (Although it makes me wonder why they didn't just make the deadzone on either side of the image bigger if they weren't expecting it to be seen anyway...) I guess the two-screen system was meant for Zelda-style scrolling, with the assumption that developers would want to pre-load the entire new screen rather than doing it column by column?
Anyway, I've now spent like three hours getting distracted doing research and watching youtube videos, so I think that's all I have to say on the subject for now ;) Although, the process of it has given me some interesting ideas, and I always relish the chance to get out some of the information I compulsively stuff my head with, so thank you ;)
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It's fascinating how the things that you think are just random artefacts all have a reason somewhere deep down at the hardware level, like that white line that happens because you can't quite pick up on the line being drawn with completely accurate timing. I, too, wondered why there wasn't just the memory to store an additional row and column rather than an entire screen's worth of tiles... I hadn't realized that CRTs were imprecise enough for a chunk of the screen that large to go missing, when we all used them, even though I know most games of the PS era offered a "screen position" option.
I say quite often now that I realized that my impossible life's ambition was to be a game developer in the early 90s... and I'd probably have loved the puzzle-like aspects of tricking the hardware or coming up with the multi-layered workaround of the Doom engine in the absence of true 3D if there hadn't been any better way at the time, but at the same time, now I'm very glad that the abstraction exists to be able to concentrate on actual... game design.
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The only reason I can think of the horizontal or vertical method of the tilemap was due to the simplicity of games like Super Mario Bros, where you could only move to the right. My guess is that they at least gave the ability to move in two directions (left/right or up/down) but maybe never considered that developers would want all four directions (i.e. "640k should be enough for everybody"), so it required some software finagling as you've mentioned above.
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And, I find when watching videos of anything from that era that I had only ever seen in magazine screenshots, your imagination tends to assume a much more impactful experience than the awkward direction that cutscenes of the era got could actually provide...
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I might try Harvester at some point, now that I'm thinking about it again, and face that lifelong fear/curiosity - though I'm accidentally developing a reputation for liking horror games, even though it's not so much a liking as a continuous being roped into playing them.
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(Also, the frog has no problem jumping on the snails.)
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You really were expected to do a lot of experimentation for yourself in games then, even besides the issue of most things being explained in the manual rather than the game - I'm suddenly reminded of the Lolo games, where some squares the enemies regenerated on were very important, but you couldn't tell if they moved or not until you tried. Now, it's important that you're able to recognize a game's language and cues very quickly.
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But those were the only real issues--everything else was just rules of the game you had to learn once, and then it was consistent from then on. If I see a screenshot of a Lolo level, I would need someone to tell me A) which, if any HFs give shots, B) how many HFs it takes to unlock the hammer/bridge/arrow powers (if you have any that stage,) C) if there are any spawn-blocking shenanigans, and D) whether the Don Medusae (if there are any) move horizontally or vertically. Once I know that, I could just study the screenshot and solve it in my head.
God, I love Lolo games. I really need to go back and finish Lolo 3 at some point....
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I went on to the Backloggery for the first time in ages to check where I'd got with the Lolo games, and suddenly remembered that I'd stolen their circular U/B/C icon style for one of the later things I did at my last job. Strange what sparks memories. Anyway, yes, apparently I did complete the first and second, which feels like a bit of a feat to me given how impossible they sound. I think that I remember the exact layout of the first level that stuck me in the third game, and even though it wasn't linear like the others, that felt discouraging enough to put me off it. I'll have to load it up again.
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I think you more than deserve an M for Trauma Center 2, even if you're not using it anywhere else!
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I tended to use "Mastered" if I'd written a reasonably comprehensive guide to a game, though I haven't done that in a number of years now.
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