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What was the Best looking NES game anyway...
- Thread starter dragonzdogma
- Start date
The panda prince
https://youtu.be/AFDxWVXx-zw?t=139
https://youtu.be/AFDxWVXx-zw?t=139
This is groundbreaking stuff
As someone who is around elementary aged kids on a daily basis, this is absolutely false. Two of the most popular games among the 10-13 ageset (at least where I live) look like this:
and this:
In fact, I know far more kids who play games with retro-ish graphics (or at best flash-like graphics) than who play games with what you would consider modern graphics. Consoles aren't really for kids these days, and the games on the platforms they do spend time with tend to look more like NES than like PS4.
iamaustrian
Member
Anyone remember 3D world runner?
I was blown away back in the days. It features ridiculously good sprite scaling for being a NES game.
don't know if serious/sarcastic or not.
it's just a bad pirate which directly takes stuff from 16bit games and horribly downscales them to fit the NES colors.
There are way more impressive pirates like some neogeo games which got "ported" to the NES.
Fatal Fury Special comes to mind which boosts some of the most impressive backgrounds I have ever seen (on nes hardware)
I was blown away back in the days. It features ridiculously good sprite scaling for being a NES game.
don't know if serious/sarcastic or not.
it's just a bad pirate which directly takes stuff from 16bit games and horribly downscales them to fit the NES colors.
There are way more impressive pirates like some neogeo games which got "ported" to the NES.
Fatal Fury Special comes to mind which boosts some of the most impressive backgrounds I have ever seen (on nes hardware)
I think there are way too many popular "retro throwback" games for that to be true. Kids definitely wouldn't put up with the janky controls, performance issues and punishing difficulty of yesteryear's games though.
valinthyne
Member
Why you do this to me? Any time I am reminded about that game I end up with this stuck in my head for days:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jPZMFzPEQc8
Link1110
Member
Even before final fantasy, Uematsu knew what he was doing
Because that's the 16BIT SNES Version actually(the lower one might even be from the GBA version), lol...
Example of the NES Map:
More GIFs
_05.gif)
_08.gif)
_31.gif)
_29.gif)
_21.gif)
Yes, forgot about batman return of the joker but after looking at the gifs fond memories of me playing the exact same passages come to mind. Those were the times...
Kain-Nosgoth
Member
i wouldn't count it since it's basically a VN, easier to do good graphics but.... DAMN that looks good even for famicom!
Mitsume ga Tooru ("The Three-eyed One") was released in 1992 and was one of the most technically impressive games on the NES in my opinion.
Keep in mind, that game looks much better in motion with parallax scrolling.
ho i need to play this! I'm a huge fan of Osamu Tezuka and i read this manga in particular too! thanks for bringing this game here!
Nitpicker_Red
Member
Unless it's a joke, 8 bits means 8 BITS, one BYTE, so eigth zero and ones. With that many digits, you can count up to 256 different numbers (00000000 to 11111111).
So anything related to 8-bit would come by amounts of 256 and not 8.
(even though others commented that the palette size wasn't related to that)
mindatlarge
Member
Probably known more for its awesome soundtrack, Journey to Silius also looked pretty damn nice. Hard to dethrone Return of the Joker though.
7DollarHagane
Banned
Any game that looks better than SMB or Zelda uses more than famicom power. Add on chips exist in almost every nes game released after 1989 or so.
-2.jpg)
At least in terms of action games. The west move to mainly computers and away from arcades, or in many European developer cases, having never done arcades, left most action game skills they did have out to atrophy. And yeah by the time the Amiga hits it could pull off console style games, but man ^I'm sorry but Europe was not good at doing them.
No strategy games, adventure games and RPGs are a different story.
Most of the NES better looking games were already cited, I just add Willow
Shit. I rented Willow once but don't remember it looking nearly that good.
This I did not know. Thanks!
Lol good question. They could have easily made it a Joy Mecha Revival game instead of a new IP.
UncleSporky
Member
Sword Master
No, seriously. It's Sword Master.
I can explain this!
Chips. Cartridge chips everywhere.
Well, not really. Kinda.
The hardware required to do this wasn't particularly special or unique as NES games went. Chips didn't tend to soup up the power of the console in any way, they primarily added more storage space and ways to interface with that storage space. Stuff like having more "virtual screens" to work with, more data banks you could swap in on the fly, etc. Honestly the most unique chips were the ones that added sound channels like VRC6 in Japan for Castlevania 3.
In any case, they weren't like "let's make a special chip that can do parallax, just for this one game!" You could do parallax on the basic hardware. There was built in functionality called "sprite 0 hit," so that when rendering, if the system encountered sprite 0, it would go "whoa whoa wait a minute, the programmer wanted to do something when we got to this point on the screen, go ahead, run a subroutine real quick." And you would change the way the display was being split at that point. This was commonly used for things like horizontal HUDs like Mario 3's.
Or you could also just time your code really carefully, down to the CPU cycle, so you'd know the moment the renderer is at the end of a horizontal line so you can tweak the scrolling at that exact moment. Some cartridge mappers included timers that could make this easier too. Vice: Project Doom may have been done this way. A lot of earlier, basic parallax was done this way.
Notice how none of the physical platform/background elements jut out into the scrolling part in the top half of the screen. This is because they'd get broken and scroll at the same speed as everything else. Only sprites are allowed up there.
This particular part of Batman: Return of the Joker was done this way too, again, there's nothing other than sprites overlapping that middle section, the screen is just being split and scrolled at a different rate, and then split again:
But then what about examples like these?
This particular kind of parallax was done by essentially playing an animation of mountains/clouds moving on a set of background tiles.
One common configuration for NES cartridges was the difference between ROM graphics and RAM graphics. The default way to do graphics, and the way many early games did it, was pre-written banks of tiles that were not changeable, but you could swap in and out different banks as quickly as you wanted. The other way to do it was giving the cartridge RAM space you could write to at any time, allowing the programmer to compress the graphics in code or modify small parts or individual tiles, however this tended to be slower.
Both of these methods could animate tiles. The ROM way, by bankswitching rapidly and continuously (though this tended to be wasteful of those precious, limited banks) and the RAM way, by having super efficient code that could write new tiles to RAM every frame. RAM was much more popular toward the end of the NES's lifespan, and obviously it's the method that survived to all other platforms from then on, I think even the Game Boy was RAM only.
I can't say for sure which method the above games used, but I do know that Battletoads used RAM.
See, vertical parallax is nearly impossible, because TVs draw the screen in horizontal lines from top to bottom. It's easy to interrupt the image mid-draw during the brief period of HBLANK and tell it the screen is now scrolled differently left or right...there was absolutely no good way to interrupt it halfway across the screen and alter the vertical scroll, and do that for every single horizontal line all the way down, with pixel precision.
So they played an animation in those tiles, every time the player moved downward. If you could look at all the background graphics being used to render the level, it would look like this:
And Batman and Sword Master would look similar to that as well.
Notice that Sword Master's mountains are actually a pretty thin repeating strip, with lots of darkness above and below that don't require any graphics at all. Really very few tiles there that need to be animated.
HueyFreeman
Banned
I always thought the Untouchables was amongst the systems most impressive moments. Couldn't believe it at the time.
DarkConfidant
Member
My girlfriend recently began playing through Kirby's Adventure.
I had never seen this game before, but I never thought that I would have my mind blown by NES graphics this many years later.
Kirby has some animations that are very detailed and extravagant and remind you of how limited every other NES game is.
I wish I had a GIF of the takedown animation (which would later be down throw in Smash Bros). That one impressed me a ton.
The levels and colors also look really nice, along with some psuedo-3D and fake parallax scrolling.
I had never seen this game before, but I never thought that I would have my mind blown by NES graphics this many years later.
Kirby has some animations that are very detailed and extravagant and remind you of how limited every other NES game is.
I wish I had a GIF of the takedown animation (which would later be down throw in Smash Bros). That one impressed me a ton.
The levels and colors also look really nice, along with some psuedo-3D and fake parallax scrolling.
biggersmaller
Banned
I always thought the Untouchables was amongst the systems most impressive moments. Couldn't believe it at the time.
Is that a fireman yelling a dude to stop peeing on that building?
Omegasquash
Member
That was a good read. Thank you!
UncleSporky
Member
This is a misconception/misinterpretation of how NES games work.
All NES games use "additional chips." All NES games fundamentally are "additional chips." From Mario 1 to Kirby's Adventure. It's all just different cartridge configurations.
There's no "cheating" with NES games. To my knowledge, no real equivalent to anything like the SNES's Super FX chip. No graphics accelerators or physics coprocessors. AFAIK there was never anything that did additional calculations to take some load off the NES, unless you could timers that trigger an interrupt. The NES is still doing all the heavy lifting.
The NES development community refers to different cartridge configurations as mappers, and there are a shitload of them. There were official ones that Nintendo endorsed and used, there were unofficial ones developed by individual companies like Konami and Sunsoft, and there were even ones used by just a single game.
Super Mario Bros is designated UxROM and contains a 32k programming ROM chip and 8k graphics ROM chip. It's as close to the default state of the NES as possible, but it's right in line with other types of cartridge configurations. Some games were identical to that setup only with double the graphics...some with double the graphics and code...some with battery-backed save RAM. There's not really a line where basic NES games end and advanced/chipped NES games begin.
Different mapper configurations were primarily about how much storage space you had for various things, but the NES still had to deal with all of it with its little custom 6502 processor. Even some of the more unique configurations like Gauntlet's implementation of MMC3 was just to store 4 screens of graphics at once instead of 2. Maybe it's a bit of an oddity or technical marvel, but it's still just more space.
The most advanced features were things like more sound channels in Castlevania 3 via Konami's VRC6.
Even a crazy shooter like Recca is just MMC3, a common config later in the NES's life.
MrSaturn99
Member
Kirby's Adventure.
Nothing's more impressive than the Butter Building 3D stuff, to my mind.
Nothing's more impressive than the Butter Building 3D stuff, to my mind.
Robdraggoo
Member
Tmnt arcade looked pretty good. Not as good looking as done but I was pretty blown away back in the day
MightyHedgehog
Member
So many choices. I'll go the safe route and pick Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!!
mattwhite924
Member
As someone who is around elementary aged kids on a daily basis, this is absolutely false. Two of the most popular games among the 10-13 ageset (at least where I live) look like this:
and this:
In fact, I know far more kids who play games with retro-ish graphics (or at best flash-like graphics) than who play games with what you would consider modern graphics. Consoles aren't really for kids these days, and the games on the platforms they do spend time with tend to look more like NES than like PS4.
I would be willing to bet that kids these days would be way more receptive to NES games than kids from around 10 years ago. In that time 2D games and pixel art have gone from that thing that older gamers love to be nostalgic about to the style that a good chunk of popular games use.
So those 20-25 year old late millenials that are always putting down the NES today will be the out of touch ones. Good.
hans_castorp
Member
Hands down.
GIF from the last time this thread came up:
Wow. Whoever developed this must have been a wizard
Kaji AF16
Member
Captain Tsubasa 2: Super Strikers (Tecmo, 1990) is still a technical marvel to me, and my favorite game of all time because of several reasons.
The outro / credits scene that begin around 11:50 is a nice showcase of some of its graphics:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GtaefrIeqUs
A sample from the final match:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AYgb8LRpBSI
The outro / credits scene that begin around 11:50 is a nice showcase of some of its graphics:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GtaefrIeqUs
A sample from the final match:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AYgb8LRpBSI
My 6 year old prefers SMB sometimes to games like Skylanders, Disney Infinity, Far Cry 4, CoD, Just Cause, etc. all on PS4.
While this is mostly true (most mappers did have some extra registers that helped offload the CPU, some carts also included extra RAM, that wasn't for saving), the unique way NES handles graphics means that you get a lot bigger advantages from simple memory mappers than you would on most other consoles. Since the tile data is read directly from the cart rather than loaded into VRAM you can switch out all the graphics at virtually no cost, or do complex tile animations by setting up the data into specifically tailored chunks. Doing animated tiles on NES without memory mappers would be a lot more costly
UncleSporky
Member
Yeah, I think this is something people tend to forget.
When you're talking about so little graphical space already, 8k worth, to the point where Mario is reusing bushes as clouds, doubling or quadrupling that has incredible tangible benefits. You don't need a Super FX chip to make the games look vastly better.
The Shadow
Member
Little Nemo. I remember playing this and thinking 'holy shit!'
Metalstorm had some sweet animation indeed, it was always impressed.
Moon Crystal also has great sprite animation, I think it has already been mentioned, but here's a gif.
I would say 91 actually but yeah 91-93 were crazy times for the NES.
People say Batman looks like a genesis game but there is a clear world of difference between it and even this:
And that's the system's launch title.
Obviously this is all opinion but I think it's hard to poke any holes in Kirby's style, visuals, color, effects, content, and variety. All around I think it's the best choice. Just my opinion obviously.
The NES version of the Batman game did actually look better than the MegaDrive version however!!!
Battlesmurf
Member
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7BBiaVwgUo
It's been a bit, but I do remember Zen looking pretty good. Most of the ones that come to mind have already been said. Shame Batman is getting more rare since people are using them to make Gimmicks.
It's been a bit, but I do remember Zen looking pretty good. Most of the ones that come to mind have already been said. Shame Batman is getting more rare since people are using them to make Gimmicks.
So good. My thumb and index finger burn thinking about playing that arm wrestling. Tons of fun.