Ninga?

October 30, 2000 1:35 PM

Ninga? Nintendo and Sega to form joint company. With Sony and M$ to contend with, it doesn't come as much of a surprise.
posted by john (28 comments total)

I prefer Sintendo
posted by owillis at 1:50 PM on October 30, 2000

Man. After 15 years of building consumer animosity (SEGA SUCKS! oops... instinct, sorry :-) towards the two products and companies, they're hooking up.

I'm intrigued, and somewhat disturbed. I wish there was more information about it.

ObNameMerge: Nintega.

(owillis' is better. sigh.)
posted by cCranium at 2:03 PM on October 30, 2000

I agree, bravo.

Perhaps, we can have crossover games like they do in comics.

Hedgehogs and Apes unite!
posted by john at 2:15 PM on October 30, 2000

How about a merged-name-anagram?

Eon Ant Design
Agent Sid Neon
Dang Sine Tone!
Saigon Needn't
posted by daveadams at 2:59 PM on October 30, 2000

The Genesis was always way better than the SNES. 6 buttons, my ass!
posted by Succa at 4:07 PM on October 30, 2000

SNES was SO much better than the Genecrap, what are you smokin, Succa? Sega has never had the classics like Metroid, Zelda, Mario, Donkey Kong, or Kirby's Adventure.....


posted by grank at 5:20 PM on October 30, 2000

Please! First of all, every sports game was always better on the Genesis.

Case in point: NHL '94 for the Genesis. Possibly the most fun game ever created.

Second of all, while the Mario games were great, their spin-offs weren't always so hot. Yoshi games, for example. And all the Wario stuff.

I just never liked the SNES controller. The controller makes the console, IMO. The Genesis controller still remains the best one I've used.
posted by Succa at 5:32 PM on October 30, 2000

Mmmm. NHL '94 for Genesis ...

Man, those were the days. 2nd-3rd year of University, playing NHL '94 until our eyes were too dry to shut. That was the only console action I was ever into (since Intellivision). Genesis controller was much, much better.
posted by sylloge at 5:42 PM on October 30, 2000

bah!
console wars.
To find the best console, all you need is one word: Squaresoft.

Hence, SNES was better than Genesis.
(though I must admit that NHL '94 was better on the Gen...)
posted by mkn at 6:21 PM on October 30, 2000

that's OLDSCHOOL squaresoft, back when all the games they made weren't the same
posted by starduck at 6:35 PM on October 30, 2000

Was NHL '94 the one where you could make the opponents bleed?

"Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned for Sega."
-- Brodie
posted by mathowie at 6:35 PM on October 30, 2000

Re: Mario spinoffs; Wario Land 2 and 3 for the Gameboy were pretty danged fun, actually. They were platformers with a twist: you couldn't die. You could be set on fire, though, or squished, turned into a zombie, turned grossly fat by donut-throwing monsters, etc. etc. Having these status changes inflicted upon you was necessary to get through the game--and there were plenty of secrets to unlock, too. (For instance, Wario Land 2 had secret branching storylines--first time I've ever heard of that in a platform game.)
posted by darukaru at 7:03 PM on October 30, 2000

I think in '94 they took fighting out and replaced it with bleeding. It was also the birth of the one-time pass.

My favourite team was always the LA Kings in the Sega games. If not for any other reason than Wayne Gretzky.
posted by Succa at 7:14 PM on October 30, 2000

I'm pretty sure they took out fighting in '95. (But I'm also pretty sure there were one-timers in '94).

In '94, Joe Murphy (#9 on the Oilers) could score nearly every time if he came across the ice diagonally from right to left and did a slapshot from the blue line.

I remember the Canucks, the Nordiques and Chicago being particularly good.
posted by sylloge at 7:50 PM on October 30, 2000

RE the games: Sure, the Genesis had better sports games, but sports games lick! In every other category, SNES ruled (still rules! :)

RE the controller: Genesis, a better controller?? HUH? For one thing, the buttons were flimsy and the control pad was too big on the Genesis, for another thing, the SNES's extra buttons and layout allowed for a lot of unique play. F-Zero and Starfox are a couple of games that wouldn't be the same without those extra buttons. And Nintendo has always led in the area of controller design... the first with a gamepad, the first with buttons on the top of the controller, the first with an analog joystick. Sony and Sega are just constantly playing catch-up in that area.

Just doing my part to further the console wars from 1991.
posted by daveadams at 7:53 PM on October 30, 2000

I dunno, the only SNES came that I thought was cool was a Macross game that played like R-Type. Bastard at the store wouldn't sell it and I was over 18 so bashing him over the head and running off with it would mean prison. If it was just juvi I might have risked it. ;)
posted by john at 8:07 PM on October 30, 2000

I also remember that in '94, Sergei Fedorov could score every time in the same way you described, except left to right. Also, if you went in on a breakaway, all you needed to do was point yourself directly at the goalie, right in the centre of the ice, and pass the puck (B button) at the goalie. It'd trickle through his legs. You could do this from anywhere on the ice. My friend once scored on me with Patrick Roy.

Any controller with buttons on the TOP is taking it a little too far. It's a game controller, not an airplane cockpit.

The Genesis 6-button controller was very good, if I remember correctly. None of that "L" and "R" nonsense.

Didn't you all see Swingers? When they talk about them taking the fighting out of NHL 93 and replacing it with blood? Or was it 94/95? I'm so confused.
posted by Succa at 8:16 PM on October 30, 2000

And, I'd like to open up a discussion about NHL '94 and the extremes to which you'd take it in university.

I remember having the Genesis in the dormatory lounge room and it being in use 24 hours a day, literally. You could go in there and have a game of NHL '94 any time you wanted, and there'd always be someone to play against. We set up big, elaborate round-robin tournaments, and you had to be in the lounge at a certain time or else you'd forfeit your game. It eventually came down to Succa versus Matt, a battle that was never fought, although I'm quite sure Succa would have been the victor.

Oh man, I'm getting a little weepy. I want to play NHL '94! Is there an online version?
posted by Succa at 8:20 PM on October 30, 2000

Wow. Did a search on Google and NHL '94 links are dissapearing at an alarming rate. (Check the cache for most of them.)

Although unfortunately this game does not have fighting which its two predecessors had, it does have the most fluid and balanced gameplay. With the introduction of one-timers, manual goalies, and line-changes on the fly, it provides enough control and realism to satisfy even avid hockey fanatics. However its gameplay is still straightforward and simple, and the flow has the type of big-play style action that every sports video game should have, but has lately been sacrificed for the sake of realism in modern games

You and Matt were right.

For me, it was the first house I rented when I moved out of home (with anywhere from 2 to 5 friends depending on the the month, plus another 5-10 hangers-on). I distinctly remember one night when my band was opening for a touring band. The other band stayed at our house and we were all 1/2 hour late for the show because we were playing. An impromptu tournament was held from 3am to 10am that night/morning after the show. When I woke up in the afternoon, they were all back at it and we had to kick them out so they could catch their ferry that night ...

Looks like you might be able to buy it right here (though I can't really tell — pretty bad for an ecommerce site). But if you scour your local thrift shops, I bet you can pick up the cartridge and a console for under $25 in an afternoon ...
posted by sylloge at 8:51 PM on October 30, 2000

On the original topic of this thread... that article was just news of Nintendo and Sega being 2 of 3 (possibly more i'd imagine) members of a new venture which seems to be about networked gaming. Chances are, it's just a shared games network, and with the involvement of this Japanese music producer, its probably just locally based in Japan. I'm not saying its not possible that the two rival companies would work on more-involved joint projects, but the fact is that this article was not indication of such. Although it does seemed to have been written to encourage this interpretation, with the use of unrelated news about Sega's losses and 'future'.

cCranium mumbled:
I'm intrigued, and somewhat disturbed. I wish there was more information about it.

My guess is... the reason why theres so little information about 'Ninsenga' is because there is none.

Mind you, I Could Be Wrong. (TM)

Now back to the ConsoleWar16.... I'm with david, SNES was The machine. The variety and quality of games oozed style and gameplay, and near the later stages of the 16bit era, the amazing stuff that developers were churning out of it made the 16bit era live on for so long, even after the arrivals of Sega's 32x, NeoGeo, Jaguars, and even the Saturn.

And its true about Nintendo's controllers, if you look at any post-SNES console controller (The PSX and Saturns..), they are heavily based on it. . And there's the Dreamcast's controller and the Nintendo64's.

john: about that Macross SNES game, try the emulators. I've played it, its very hard (as macross games are) but its very good. :)
posted by aki at 10:43 PM on October 30, 2000

Oh yeah! NHL '94 was also the first one in the series where you could control the goalie!

I remember on our floor in the residence of my freshman year, we had four guys named Nick, of which I was one. One of the other, evil Nicks was a master of controlling the goalie. He'd switch to the goalie when you were just crossing centre ice and come flying out towards you, cutting you off completely. Denying you. He'd always take Detroit and he could work wonders with Tim Cheveldae.

I always found that it was best to go with a team that had a lefty goalie. There wasn't a ton of difference between the goalies except for the right/lefthandedness, and if you had a lefty goalie, it was harder to score on the blue-line slapshot (that I so brilliantly perfected with Washington). Still, the ol' left-to-right breakaway move worked 100% of the time anyway.

I remember having games whose total score was in the fourties. My nextdoor neighbour beat me 20-0 when I was Tampa Bay. That hurt. He was the Ottawa city champ (yes, there were citywide tournaments for NHL '94...how Canadian...).

Oh yeah, it was "NHLPA Hockey 93"...they hadn't licenced the NHL name that year. NHL 94 was the first game where they had both the team names/logos and the players in the same, beautiful game.

Best sports game ever. Maybe best game ever.
posted by Succa at 10:53 PM on October 30, 2000

The NHL Line is the best sports line, period. A friend bought the Genesis just for NHL '94, and we played it constantly 'til I left for school.

sigh.

I'm a Nintendo boy though, born and bred. The only other Sega game I can remember was Moonwalker, for the Master System.

The N64 controller is absolutely the best game controller I've ever had the joy of using. It takes a little to get used to the bizarre three-prongedness of it, but it makes for a good grappling hook in a pinch.

And the L and R buttons make sense on handheld controllers like that, dammit. Before consoles started using those, my pointer fingers were just flailing about uselessly. Efficiency, dammit! Use every part of the hand. :-)
posted by cCranium at 5:53 AM on October 31, 2000

RE the L & R buttons on the top of the Nintendo controllers:

This isn't taking anything too far. If the buttons are used correctly, they are amazingly intuitive. In F-Zero they were used to put some additional lean into your turns. In StarFox (and Pilotwings, I presume) they were they yaw controls, making it easy to avoid obstacles and enhancing control over your ship. This kind of feature could not be intuitively implemented on a controller with all the buttons on top. They aren't useful for every game, but if used correctly, they're a great addition. Now, Sony's four buttons on the top of the controller is harder to deal with because it's hard to figure out which one you're pressing, and it's harder to maneuver your index fingers in that way than your thumbs.
posted by daveadams at 8:14 AM on October 31, 2000

Any controller with buttons on the TOP is taking it a little too far. It's a game controller, not an airplane cockpit.

Not true not true! If you've ever played Starfox you'd know how nice it is to be able to half-barrel role with L and R. No other button on the controller would be sufficient to perform the same manuever....

Sega's controller was simply too big and had crappy huge buttons that didn't fit to your hand at all. Except for sports, Sega's games just lacked the quality of Nintendo's. And a Sega game has yet to match the quality of the Zelda or Metroid series.
posted by grank at 11:04 AM on October 31, 2000

I never liked the top buttons much. I guess on the SNES they're not too bad. On the Playstation, they are absolutely ridiculous. It's just too cumbersome to be fun sometimes.

The best input device for games is still the keyboard/mouse combination, I feel.

I never really liked Metroid much. Zelda was cool though.

And the 8-bit NES was far superior to the Sega Master System, I'll give that. Although I won't allow any dissing of "Space Harrier".

Did anyone have a TurboGrafx 16?
posted by Succa at 11:23 AM on October 31, 2000

Oh yeah, before I forget, best players in NHL '94 were Brett Hull, Jeremy Roenick, and Petr Klima (!). I never understood why.
posted by Succa at 11:24 AM on October 31, 2000

I'd go the other way and say the keyboard/mouse combination is really the worst game input device you can have. It simply wasn't designed for games, and although it is currently the best control system for Strategic games and First Person Shooters (ie: Quake), it is still very flawed. With the exception of perhaps the former genre (strategy), the mouse, although lending great accuracy for FPS, has the huge problem of requiring you to lift up the mouse and reposition it to complete some motions. Yes you learn to cope, but i think it leaves alot to desire. For FPS's, i like the idea of Logitech's Cyberman 1 (and the apparently better, Cyberman 2) controller. I think they're on the right track.

Keyboard/mouse is only suitable for a small set of genres, whereas a game controller or joystick tends to be suitable (and often, better) control for a greater number of genres.
posted by aki at 2:42 AM on November 1, 2000

I'm gonna go smack dab in the middle, and say keyboard/mouse is the only possible way to play some games, analog-stick control pad is the only way to play others, digital + control pad is the only way to play others, and arcade joystick is the only way to play others.

Change genre, change your controls. Any FPS game requires keyboard/mouse. I have a d-pad (digital + :-) and tried playing Diablo II with it, and quickly returned to keyboard mouse. Sports games (especially NHL XX) can only be mastered with a control pad, preferably digital (though some people differ). Zelda 64, Mario 64 and pretty much any other 3D platform game can only be logically controlled with an analog stick.

And no matter what you say, Street Fighter II can only properly be played with the joystick/6 button combo on an arcade box.
posted by cCranium at 5:58 AM on November 1, 2000