From 3-D WorldRunner to Zombie Nation
January 23, 2014 7:43 AM   Subscribe

 
Cool.
posted by timshel at 8:11 AM on January 23, 2014


I started to watch this and then realized it was almost three hours long.

There are a lot of Nintendo games, you guys!
posted by curious nu at 8:13 AM on January 23, 2014


Now I want to play them all.
posted by bayani at 8:22 AM on January 23, 2014


I need to watch this sitting cross-legged on 70s era carpet with a Max controller in my hand looking up at a Zenith 19" television on a faux-wood tv cart.
posted by stltony at 8:35 AM on January 23, 2014


I was actually just wondering about the start screen. Why do video games always have them, right before the main menu? Is it some sort of calibration thing?
posted by Think_Long at 8:44 AM on January 23, 2014


Is it just me or is the 720° guy wearing nothing but his safety gear?

I was actually just wondering about the start screen. Why do video games always have them, right before the main menu? Is it some sort of calibration thing?

In the case of modern games, I'm pretty sure this is an XBox certification thing.
posted by neckro23 at 8:52 AM on January 23, 2014


Start screens actually predate menus by a while. Arcades had them as part of the attract mode: there'd be a catchy title screen/intro movie in between them showing off the gameplay to get you to toss your quarter in.

The more sophisticated consoles got, the more they tried to be arcade-accurate, so you gotta have that start screen if you're trying to bring the Arcade Experience home.

Menus were often part of that start screen rather than distinct from it. As in, the option would be right there on the start screen on load: START, OPTIONS, SAVE, LOAD, etc.

As far as calibration was concerned, many (if not most) arcades machines had a calibration screen of some sort that loaded up when you turned the machine on. The user never needed to see it, and home console owners playing on their home TVs didn't need the configuration/calibration options of an arcade machine (past what the options menu provided), so that part didn't carry over.
posted by griphus at 8:53 AM on January 23, 2014 [2 favorites]


I want to play Contra now. Like I really, really want to play. Is it on the virtual console?
posted by cashman at 9:11 AM on January 23, 2014


The emulation scene has giant, curated packs of these things. Along with gameplay screenshots, manuals, cartridge art, etc. Looks great in your NES jukebox.
posted by Nelson at 9:12 AM on January 23, 2014


Clearly not in alphabetical order, as Dragonstrike was shown before All Star something or other.
posted by MartinWisse at 9:17 AM on January 23, 2014


Clearly not in alphabetical order, as Dragonstrike was shown before All Star something or other.

"Advanced Dungeons & Dragons: DragonStrike"?
posted by zamboni at 9:26 AM on January 23, 2014 [1 favorite]


I would like to see this as a solid brick layout on a single web page.
posted by Theta States at 9:34 AM on January 23, 2014 [1 favorite]


Yeah, I figure he's using something like GoodNES for the name list, which means the title screen name isn't necessarily what the "actual" game title is.
posted by griphus at 9:35 AM on January 23, 2014


Wish they would port these old classics to IOS.
posted by Clustercuss at 10:00 AM on January 23, 2014


It's. So. Beautiful. I miss being a kid and the sheer unbearable sense of excitement that a new loading screen would bring when I'd biked home from the video store.

Some of my fondest childhood memories are just reading and rereading all the NES and SNES boxes in the tiny video store in my town.
posted by OnTheLastCastle at 10:16 AM on January 23, 2014


Clustercuss: "Wish they would port these old classics to IOS."

Nintendo won't do it with their first-party games until the day comes when they no longer have a dominant handheld (or at least a profitable one) on the market.

There are a few third party publishers, notably Square Enix, who have released their older games on iOS and Android, but often those are graphically spiffed-up to look more "modern" than the original releases, so it's not quite the same.
posted by Strange Interlude at 10:56 AM on January 23, 2014


Bob Mackey just had a great article in the AV Club about that: A new wave of “Turnerization” is tearing up video games’ artistic legacy.
posted by griphus at 11:11 AM on January 23, 2014 [2 favorites]


I was actually just wondering about the start screen. Why do video games always have them, right before the main menu? Is it some sort of calibration thing?

In a manner of speaking.

Y'see, random numbers are kind of hard for computers to do well. When you turn on a game, its processor is in a pre-determined state. Getting from that state to one that can add some degree of uncertainty to the play is surprisingly difficult. One thing a game program can do is use the number of frames from startup to the pressing of the Start button to seed its pseudo-random number generator.

This might seem like a minor thing, but there are exploits in a number of games based on predicting what random numbers will be. These are beloved of tool-assisted speedrunners of course, but some can be taken advantage of even without tools; at least one Fire Emblem saves the state of the random number generator in its save file and only spins it when the user presses keys, so with persistence you can cook your own successes. (The things I learn from reading random pages on GameFAQs....)

I've only gotten up to around Air Fortress in the video, but man, Air Fortress is great. If you haven't you should all play Air Fortress.
posted by JHarris at 2:45 PM on January 23, 2014 [1 favorite]


Play Air Fortress in your browser, via Flash.
posted by Nelson at 3:01 PM on January 23, 2014


Warning: Air Fortress appears to have eight levels, but it actually has sixteen! And when you destroy the core of one of them, and the lights turn off in the fortress, the spooky music starts, the fatal timer begins to the thing exploding, and you have to rush for your life to find the escape pod while the screen starts shaking.... it is the most atmospheric thing on the NES, and is scary as hell.
posted by JHarris at 3:21 PM on January 23, 2014


See for yourself.
posted by JHarris at 3:25 PM on January 23, 2014


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