(no subject)

Beat Freedom Planet yesterday morning. Only started over once after reaching the final level, because the second time I beat mutant-Milla, I lost exactly zero lives, and not that many either in the respective level or the preceding battle against Serpentine. The main point of starting over for each game over was to see how many lives I could stockpile and how much further I could get once I figure out each boss's attack pattern, and also to see if I get lucky and discover anything new (such as Tao tokens, half of which took me a while to find) along the way by taking a different path here or there. With a total of 17 lives still remaining, though, I deemed it a moot point, and only started the level itself over once or twice, before continuing a total of thirteen times during the last battle's third phase. (Brevon is just too fast and unpredictable to really strategize against, except for whenever he takes flight just briefly. All you can do is try to hit him in midair and avoid that damn knife!)

After the amount of time I spent playing that, I think I'm ready now to look over and revise some of my Starbound documents again.

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The other day, I got the idea that, if Day of the Beehive ever sees the light of day, and if I either find some usable emulators or have a lot of money left over, I might commemorate by playing a whole bunch of different games for the Playstation, Sega Saturn, and PC-FX, all to top off at the end with both Freedom Planet and DotB. Started a list two days ago, and managed to list three games so far for the PC-FX, ten for the Saturn, and fifty for the Playstation. To that end, I might just continue once and for all with the Mega Man series, and also play certain other games as well, before pawning off some of my game systems for space and money.

With the lowest total number of games at 62, I decided to check out the PC-FX's library first to see which of its games would actually be worthwhile. I only ended up seeing footage of a handful, because most of what I did see, while better than Makeruna! Makendou Z, seemed and sounded generic enough to work just as easily on the Super NES. This left me wondering why Chip-chan Kick sounds so much more wholesome. I mean, this was also true with the TurboGrafx-16's CD add-on, from what I've heard from not only Dragon Slayer: The Legend of Heroes but also footage I've watched before of Valis IV and Magical Chase, but isn't the whole point of disks, as opposed to cartridges or cards, to allow people to just record stuff live instead of processing it through a chipset? (Even in MMZ, the FMV sequences did have better music than anywhere else in the game, but couldn't that have been true for the entire game?)

Well, for a perfect trinity with the Playstation and Saturn, anyone else might have more likely chosen the 3DO Multiplayer Interactive, something that actually did make its way here, despite how much fewer 2D games than 3D games it ran (still more than the Nintendo 64). I chose the PC-FX in particular because I have a personal history with it. I've played exactly two games on it, but that's two more than most people (especially outside Japan) have ever played. I never saw much footage for any of its other games besides Kishin Douji Zenki: Vajura Fight (or for any system, really), because it would've felt awkward to single any particular game or system out without any particular cue (same reason why I try to mention any given thing only when it becomes relevant; finding them recommended on YouTube is better, though). Makeruna! Makendou Z, which I discovered as a result of applying Mai from the original Makeruna! Makendou (as "Hikari") to my Yoshi's Island rewrite, was the game made this particular system relevant in the first place. The Zenki game was something someone mentioned and even posted a screenshot of on the ROMhacking.net forum during the time I sought to translate the in-game text of MMZ. And then came Lance a few years later, who expressed interest in Chip-chan Kick! in particular; I went on to check the game out for myself on YouTube, and its type of gameplay, along with its affinity with that one system, is what sparked my interest in that.

Well, I guess judging that one system's standards based on that particular game is like assuming the standards of Yoshi's Island or Donkey Kong Country to apply for most other SNES games if that's all one is familiar with for that system. For Day of the Beehive, this whole 32-bit gimmick itself, to do things better than Earthbound where Mother 3 did the same or worse (and with which Mother 4's development team seems wanting to stay in line with), was first inspired from Shadow Man's remastered theme from Rockman 3 Complete Works for the Playstation. Hardware limitations would prevent something that wholesome from finding its way into any ROMhack of Earthbound or anything else for the SNES. As for special effects, Chip-chan Kick did have some in the backgrounds of its last world and high scores screen, but those might've been easy enough by default to pull off on the SNES, unlike most of what the Playstation, Saturn, and N64 had to offer. (Donkey Kong Country pulled off such standout graphics as it had, along with how the Rareware logo forms when you turn the game on, just by using a ton of ROM, so it might've been technically possible, but then again, maybe that's what CcK did already just to have such vibrant graphics and audio as it contains already. Who knows?)

So anyway, I brought this up on the ROMhacking.net forum, and am still waiting to hear back about it there. Showed Jake the post, and he equates it with how well Tales of Phantasia managed to pull of such superior audio (including voice acting) to most fellow SNES games, and how certain N64 games like Donkey Kong 64 require an expansion pak for the system in order to work due to more ROM than it can manage by default.

In any case, yeah, I might've been mistaken to assume based on one game that the PC-FX would run along the same lines with the Playstation and Saturn (at least 2D-wise) like those two did with eachother, or its predecessor, the TurboGrafx-16, did with the Genesis just a generation earlier. But to begin with, even though hardware limitations do exist for all systems, a system itself does not equal aesthetics. For example, the Playstation and Saturn utilized both 2D and 3D graphics almost equally among their different games, which is why games like Crash Bandicoot or NiGHTS into Dreams... look nothing like Mega Man 8 or Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. Meanwhile, the Rockman Complete Works series, despite having its soundtracks upgraded to CD quality, retained most of its original graphics and sound effects from the original NES/SNES line. And then there are faux-retro games, for which people cite a specific system, rather than all systems sharing the same aesthetic capabilities, as its inspiration. For example, while the Game Boy Color shared most of its aesthetics with the NES from two gens earlier, people who aim for said aesthetics tend to cite the NES as their template of choice, because that's the more renowned of the two and anything else along the same lines. (Not to mention Angry Video Game Nerd Adventures, otherwise one such game, utilizing enemy deaths that no actual NES game could have ever pulled off.)

But hey, the PC-FX still stands out to me among all obscure things. These other systems like the Playdia, the Amiga CD32, the Wonderswan, the Phillips CD-i, the SNK Neo Geo, or the Atari Jaguar, would still be interesting to explore; just never made a point of it, that's all.