Nintendo Nostalgia Gaming

Black Barney wrote: mad dog, how did Gemfire play?

Its very simple from what I recall. Your goal is to conquer every part of the island. Each province can be used to generate more troops, money, etc. In battle you never have more than 5 different units. There's no RPG part of it. I wouldn't be surprised if Android or iOS had a variant of this game.

Gemfire is fantastic. I rate it up there as a top 3 KOEI game for me and I played the hell out of some KOEI titles back in the day. The only thing holding Gemfire back is lack of multiplayer. This is the one title I wish they'd drop on the WII U store so I could play again.
(I'd also say Shadowrun, but not sure how much fun playing through an rpg a second time would be...)

My other two favorite KOEI games were Nobunaga's Ambition: Lord of Darkness and Liberty or Death. I know folks are all into the Romance of the Three Kingdoms series, but I preferred the Nobunaga's Ambiton and Genghis Khan lines.

Other hot to trot SNES titles are Super Castlevania, Super C, Street Fighter II (any version), UN Squadron, and Super Off Road.

Fun timing that I came across this thread. We had some of those Nintendo points, and I picked up Earthbound on a lark. Never played it back in the day, and this is the first 'real' videogame playing I've done in almost a decade (I'm not talking about playing with the kids, but me wanting to actually go play on my own), but this game is a hoot! Love the enemies. Pogo Punks!

Michael Barnes wrote: Oh yeah, let's pour one out for the NES Advantage...probably the heaviest, least ergonomically sound controller ever made. God I can still feel the coldness of that metal base on my legs, its corners digging into my skin. And sitting there unscrewing the joystick ball for no reason. And those turbo buttons...which pretty much broke Track and Field...

The greatest controller ever built. Until the Super Advantage, which was even better because it was laid out even better.

I had too much money and too little intelligence about 3-4 years ago and I found a guy on ebay who built retro controllers. I had him build me a Super Advantage with a Gamecube cable for use on VC games on the Wii. Ended up running me about $120 to build and ship. A ridiculous indulgence but so fucking worth it.

Did anyone else have serious issues controlling Cobra Triangle and any other 3/4s view game when they were children? For some reason my brain had a really hard time processing exactly how your movement was supposed to work in relation to the perspective.

Black Barney wrote: can't believe the hate for RC Pro Am. Loved that game, so arcadey, so chill. What was the name of the arcade game with the four steering wheels? RC Pro Am was like a jazzed up fun version of that.

(Ivan 'Ironman' Stewart's) Super Off Road is the arcade game you're thinking of. There were console ports of it as well that were decent. Played the hell out of it, and you can put me in the RC Pro Am fan club too.

I still have an Atari 7800, NES, and Genesis hooked up to my TV in the basement. I don't play them much though, because I have an NES emulator with about every NES game ever made for my Dreamcast on the same TV.

A significant portion of my youth was spent on Blades of Steel. I can still hum the theme song and I have a perfect audio memory of the "Blades... Of... Steel!" menu screen voice.

Also Blaster Master and Journey to Silius are worth revisiting.

I didn't mean to imply that I didn't like RC Pro Am or thought it was bad. I played it a lot as a young child and I was pretty proud of myself when I figured out how to do a whole race properly instead of just grinding along the edge of the track. It's just that I only needed to a single race to reminisce and to decide I didn't need to play it more than that.

wadenels wrote:

Black Barney wrote: can't believe the hate for RC Pro Am. Loved that game, so arcadey, so chill. What was the name of the arcade game with the four steering wheels? RC Pro Am was like a jazzed up fun version of that.

(Ivan 'Ironman' Stewart's) Super Off Road is the arcade game you're thinking of. There were console ports of it as well that were decent. Played the hell out of it, and you can put me in the RC Pro Am fan club too.

Super Sprint was the track version of that. Less bouncy, and a couple of years before Off Road. But basically the same.

And Micro Machines ruled, but only some tracks. The pool table was awesome, the bathtub boats was the most tedious shit ever.

You can skip level in NES TMNT by pressing select on the start screen. Multiple select presses will skip multiple levels. Don't think the game is possible to finish without it...

I actually had Super Sprint on a cart for the NES. It was weird because it wasn't in your standard grey NES cart but some oddly diagonally shaped thing. Played it a ton, though. Was great two player, because to move on to the next level only one player had to finish first, so one of us would race and the other would deliberately crash into the computer cars. If you could push them at just the right point they'd skip a section of the track and the lap wouldn't count for them! Awesome game.

Edit: Here's the cart:



Any love for Base Wars? Baseball with robots where any tag-out was settled with a battle. You win the fight, you're not out. And you could upgrade your players between games giving them better weapons, better throwing, better hitting, etc. The laser sword was practically unbeatable. Hit them once and hold the button down and watch their HP go flying down. Oh, and you could win by forfeit if you managed to destroy several of your opponents guys.

Stonecutter wrote: The greatest controller ever built. Until the Super Advantage, which was even better because it was laid out even better.

This. Not only did the Advantage have turbo, it was adjustable with a knob so you could fine-tune it to get a steady stream of fire in Contra instead of the four bullet burps that you'd get with the Max. The Advantage also had the brilliant slow-mo feature that was basically just a turbo setting (non-adjustable) for the Start button so you could cheat your way through frenetic hard parts or abuse the hit detection on Elec Man's weapon in the first Mega Man.

I play Castlevania and Castlevania 3 at least once a year. Lately I've been trying not to use save states but they're both hard as balls. You can coast through Castlevania with the Holy Water, it wreck every boss save Dracula, but you're always one random weapon drop or mistimed jump away from being screwed. Castlevania 3 is easier in some respects but the longest path is very difficult and the flooding underground temple level is as hard as anything in part 1 if you don't use (or have access to) Alucard's bat form.

@Jeff White: Super C was the pretty decent follow up to Contra on NES, Contra 3: The Alien Wars was the SNES classic.

In addition to a bunch of the other games already mentioned, I've always had a soft spot for Golgo 13: Top Secret Episode, and its sequel, The Mafat Conspiracy. It's a weird hodge-podge of James Bond spy thriller (complete with talky cut scenes, double-crosses, and getting laid), side scrolling platformer, and proto FPS. It's a mess in several ways but I really like it and it's not a bad globe-trotting adventure game. The fact the game has 52(!) continues and a level select help to smooth some of the rough edges. The sequel, while being more refined, doesn't have quite the same charm but the sniper bits in Mafat are one of my all-time favorite things in gaming.

@phandec: Tengen was an Atari subsidiary and they produced a small line of unofficial Nintendo games for the NES, hence the weird cartridge shape, and Nintendo sued them for it. You can read about it here. Rolling Thunder was one of their unlicensed games and it was great. Capcom ripped it off when they made Code Name: Viper.

SebastianBludd wrote: @Jeff White: Super C was the pretty decent follow up to Contra on NES, Contra 3: The Alien Wars was the SNES classic.

Yes, Alien Wars is what I meant.

Castlevania III is hands down my favorite in the series, but then I was turned off by the castleroid games.

phandec wrote: Any love for Base Wars?

I just thought about that yesterday. My brother and I played it a decent amount. I seem to remember him getting mad all the time when I would beat him in fights.

phandec wrote: Any love for Base Wars? Baseball with robots where any tag-out was settled with a battle. You win the fight, you're not out. And you could upgrade your players between games giving them better weapons, better throwing, better hitting, etc. The laser sword was practically unbeatable. Hit them once and hold the button down and watch their HP go flying down. Oh, and you could win by forfeit if you managed to destroy several of your opponents guys.

I dig Base Wars. It doesn't seem to get a lot of love but it's definitely a fun non-serious sports game that I'm always happy to play.

Most of my NES time was spent watching my older brother and his friends play. He had Base Wars which I thought was super cool, and that TMNT game that just seemed brutally hard. There were a ton of games that we didn't own but either rented or borrowed from his friends. I don't think we owned a single Mega Man title, but I remember watching them.

Most of my early gaming was on the SNES. I bought Lufia and the Fortress of Doom for about $74 (including tax) from a Toys R Us after renting it at a Blockbuster. That was about 50% of my annual income at 8 years old! When I wasn't playing it, I'd be reading through the full color rulebook... Next game was Super Street Fighter II Turbo, and then a ton of JRPGs- Breath of Fire I and II, FF II and III, Chrono Trigger (probably my favorite game of all time), and 7th Saga, which I remember thinking was punishingly difficult. I somehow avoided acquiring Link to the Past, Earthbound, and Super Metroid. Whoops.

I don't know if it's against the rules of this thread, but I remember seeing Earthworm Jim and Gemfire on the Sega Genesis, not the SNES, mostly. My friends had them. One close friend got Sega Channel back in 1995, which was the coolest fucking thing ever. It essentially used cable internet to give you 50 different games a month. Usually 45 of them were shit you didn't want to play, but 5 titles in a month were plenty.

I never had a Nintendo (or other console), so I only played it at a friend's. We played lots of Mega Man 2 and Super Mario 3, and hardly anything else.