Great Looking Limit Pushing NES Games (That No One Ever Talks About)
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 31 พ.ค. 2024
- The NES library was littered with classics, most of them discussed at length here on TH-cam and else where, so I thought I'd go off the beaten track a little bit and uncover some impressive NES games that don't get so much attention.
For anyone who's asked here's a complete list of the games in this video:
1. Track and Field II
2. Uchuu Keibitai SDF
3. Tetrastar: The fighter
4. Mitsume ga Tooru
5. Elite
Music:
Space Navigator
Yellow Flamingo
Sarah, The Instrumentalist
/ @sarah2ill
The Morning After
In The Atmosphere
Bad Snacks
/ @badsnacks
Sleeplessness
The Bothers Records
/ @donguyrockwell
Background image:
Paweł Czerwiński
unsplash.com/@pawel_czerwinski - เกม
Is there a way we could get a text list of these games? I have no idea how to spell the japanese ones, kind of hard to look a game up.
Good Point! Here they are:
1. Track and Field II
2. Uchuu Keibitai SDF
3. Tetrastar: The fighter
4. Mitsume ga Tooru
5. Elite
Track and Tetra Star Elite: Uchuu Mitsume ga SDF
@@Sharopolis thanks!
@@Sharopolis Just fantastic work. How did you source info for this video, just by playing? :)
@@ALTDOK667 No. What's wrong with you?
Thank you for including so much technical detail in this video. I've seen "games that push the limits of the NES' vids before, but all the interlocutor really had to say was stuff like "the sprites are nice and big, the graphics are colorful" and handwavy references to "Mode 7", so this is refreshing.
Speaking of Mode 7, the (actually!) Mode 7-like effects in TetraStar the Warrior were probably done with the palette technique. This technique was explained in one of GameHut's videos. Basically you set up a static image that consists of a repeating pattern of stripes, one of each color in a single palette. Then on each scanline you reprogram that palette register such that the palette entry corresponding to the X coordinate of the texture image holds the color of the texel at that location on that scanline. (This is where the MMC3's scanline counter comes in handy.) On the NES this could be used to set up a repeating texture four texels wide -- eight if two palettes are used -- with only a few bytes written per scanline.
Thanks for the info! I wanted to talk more about the ground effect in the video, but I couldn't work out what was going on well enough to explain it properly. I should have known GameHut would have got there first!
@@Sharopolis He talked about it in the context of a different game. I was just hazarding a guess as to the technique used by TetraStar the Fighter. I could be totally wrong!
Tetrastar is most likely switching *tilesets* on a per scanline basis, not the palette. Otherwise, your explanation is correct in principle (that the effect is basically a pattern of stripes whose appearance is modified on a per-scanline basis).
Doing mid-screen palette changes on the NES requires *hideously* precise timing to avoid color artifacts, and even then you could only change a couple colors per scanline at most. Barely any games in the entire NES library do so. On the other hand, using the MMC3 to switch CHR-ROM banks mid screen is relatively quick and trivial, and is something that dozens upon dozens of games do with minimal issue.
I still remember getting The Guardian Legend and Super Mario 3 for Christmas of 91. Christmas of 92 was Little Nemo The Dream Master and Operation: Wolf. Never forget that feeling of looking under tree on Christmas Eve.
Damn, Track and Field 2 could pass for an early SNES game.
Loved that friggin game!
Or at least PCE
I say the same about Mr. Gimmick.
One of the best games on the NES. The variety involved made it the Wii Sports of its day.
The coolest obscure game I've played on NES has been Shatterhand. I'd recommend everyone try it, it feels like a modern indie title.
I second this. It's great
Yeah it's a great game!
Funny the relation of shatterhand to Mitsume Ga Tooru is Hiroyuki Iwatsuki, he has done a ton of composing and sound effects on these and other great games such as Choujin Sentai Jetman and Pocky and Rocky. His work is unmistakable.
Shatterhand came to mind for me too. It's really a good game. The last boss is hard but not unfair.
Shatterhand's premise spoke to me as someone who loved punching things and getting help from robot helpers. I only ever rented the game however and the difficulty was never something I was able to overcome.
I never realised just how difficult wireframe 3D was on the NES. Thanks for the video
The inverse problem -- tiled graphics on PC -- was equally difficult.
Earlier PCs typically only had one tile-based graphics mode (mode 0 text) where:
* You generally could NOT provide your own tile set
* Everything was positioned on whole-tile boundaries (no access to per-pixel positioning or information)
Whereas pixel graphics modes:
* Significant tradeoffs between pixel resolution and color depth (palette size)
* NO tile-based information whatsoever (text could be positioned/rendered in a tile-like manner but the VRAM only stored the output pixels, not the original text)
* No scrolling support (i.e. if you wanted to scroll the entire screen you needed to manually update ALL VRAM across the screen area accordingly)
A landmark title in this latter category was "Commander Keen" by id (yes, the same guys who later made DOOM) where they figured out some technical tricks to achieve console-quality screen scrolling and sprite rendering.
Damn the NES can barely draw a straight line let alone do it in 3d
Not real vector though. Some very clever bitmap work
Summer Carnival '92 Recca by Naxatsoft is another game I can scarcely believe actually runs on a Famicom. Not only is it super fast and throws an insane amounts of sprites on screen, it also has weird twisty turny scanline effects going on in the background while maintaining the gameplay speed.
Absolutely Gradius 2 impressed the hell out of me as well. Over Horizon -may- be the best looking of the 3...if not necessarily best technology utilization of them...
I love Gradius 2! I nearly put that in but I cut it to keep the running time down. I'm sure I'll feature Recca in a future video at some point.
Yep that game is one I would probably have to say is the most impressive use of the NES. Well Elite probably is for obvious reasons, but the low framerate does make it a slog to play by modern standards, while Recca plays just as good as the top notch shmups on the system.
Looked the game up, it can be a technical marvel or whatever, but I find that it looks ugly and goes too fast for actual enjoyment, but I also like missionary sex, so in the end who gives a fuck th-cam.com/video/nfY79-3AdGY/w-d-xo.html
@@FeelingShred
I mean, the game caters to hardcore shmup fans who want a challenge, so I enjoy the fast gameplay, but i'd understand why it wouln't appeal to everybody. I don't think it looks ugly, but I believe that the development of the game was rather short, as it was made for the 1992 Summer Carnival event, so further refinments weren't possible.
On another note, Zanki Attack mode could actually be the first bulllet hell game ever, since it predates Batsugun by about a year.
I'm just blown away by some of the late-generation NES games. It's really impressive what they managed to do with the hardware. I got a Sega Genesis in 1989 and never looked back, so I missed out on all of them. Thanks for the video.
To be fair that had far more to do with the mapper chips/CPUs publishers added into the cartridges than the base NES hardware.
@@yellowblanka6058 True enough. But accommodating such mapper chips is an intentional part of the design.
That's why the video bus is on the cartridge port.
And why audio In was present.
It's also why the SNES has 16 additional pins on cartridges with expansion chips.
Plus it's not a new concept at all.
The only reason Pitfall is possible on an Atari 2600 is due to a memory mapper chip that let it use 16k instead of 4k.
For that matter, several Atari 2600 games contain a POKEY chip. (the sound chip later used in atari's 8 bit computers and the 5200) which let them have better sound than normal atari games.
This concept goes back almost as far as cartridge based games.
And it's hardly fair calling a cartridge based system out for this when computers had all kinds of similar stuff going on.
From the expansion slots on a PC, to the memory upgrade system on an Amiga.
Even just going from a tape drive to a disk drive would let you do much more complicated things.
Might not sound like much, but having 130 kilobytes to work with instead of 64 can do a lot.
(and you can use multiple floppy disks, so you can get much, much bigger games that way using multiple disks)
While expanded capabilities were certainly a thing, the main thing that NES mapper chips do is provide more storage space over time as memory chips got cheaper.
This is no different from providing your computer with something like a floppy disk drive later in life.
(indeed the first upgrade later in life to the NES hardware's japanese counterpart - the famicom. Was a disk drive - the famicom disk system. And the first mapper chips were simply trying to provide a way to play FDS games using only a cartridge.)
SMB 3: Let's put the MMC3 scanline counter on the status bar at the bottom.
Tetrastar: Let's use the scanline counter EVERYWHERE
The tetrastar ground used the scanline counter to swap color palettes on the ground on each line, effectively streaming in bitmaps on the ground. It actually is a neat trick that comes from Amiga computers to fake some 3D effect, that was cleverly used in megadrive/genesis Mickey Mania level of the moose chase
Oh my goodness, Elite looks amazing on the NES!
Ian Bell rated it as his favourite version and one of his biggest technical acheivements
Had no idea Elite was ported to the NES, dayum!
I remember getting track and field 2 as a kid. Was so impressed with the graphics in Nintendo Power, and I wasn't disappointed once I got it.
And it wasn't a bad game, either.
Ram used to be super expensive during console early days, but by 1990, prices started to quickly drop. This enables cartridges to increase...I think there was an Best version of Alladin with a 512kb cartridge.
Anything with parallax on the NES impressed me.
Most NES parallax was implemented via scanline counting (e.g. Wave Man's stage in MM5), but scrolling the background tile assets _themselves_ is a genius approach that yields an almost-perfect parallax layer.
@@Stratelier Animating the background to replicate the effect of parallax was still processer intensive for even the most advanced enhancement chips available at the end of the NES life cycle. That's why the patterns are simple and repetitive.
@@ostiariusalpha Yeah, it's not like the character table had its own scrolling support. It must've been like trying to implement any kind of smooth scrolling on early PC graphics.
@Denny of Den Kat Games Yes, Stratelier already mentioned scanline counting to start with. We're talking about overlapping parallax though, which the NES imitates by animation of background tiles like on Sword Master. You can claim that it's a short command, but it quickly gets more processor intensive as you make the animation longer or the scrolling mult-directional. Sword Master takes it easier on itself by making the animation non-reversible (the screen only scrolls in one direction), and on a single plane.
@Denny of Den Kat Games You seem pretty unfamiliar with how much adding that "single command line" of animation taxes those primitive NES enhancement chips when they're trying to do everything else already. And yes, swapping the animation scrolling direction is an added complexity for the processor to deal with. Have you ever written any NES programs that try to coordinate multi-directional background scrolling with multi-directional tile animations? Pretty clearly you have not.
Tetrastar is mindblowing. It looks more like a prototype of Star Fox than Elite does.
It sure is a beauty!
The scrolling floor in Tetrastar seems to work as follows: at the top, as detected by the scan counter, the game swaps in a different tileset with the basic floor pattern. Then, for each line of visible floor, it sets a different variation of the floor's palette, which helps create the illusion of it scrolling in perspective.
This is not unlike the standard classic racing game road effect, where the lines in the center and the red-white edges are a palette effect, while the road itself is an image going straight ahead that's shifted into a curve the same way that wavy boss is made all wavy.
Thanks for the insight!
I really expected "Gimmick!" on this list. But I guess people talked about that one.
Also, I actually had that game with the three-eyed baldheaded guy back in the day. Got it on a bootleg cartridge in Poland. :D
I left Gimmick out because it seems to be so well known now, but it's an amazing game.
Mitsume ga Tooru and Tetrastar: The fighter are really damn impressive! Stunned honestly.
Seeing a proper 3d game on the NES, let alone the very first 3d vector game I ever saw in the home (Elite on Apple IIe) is... the most unexpected thing of this month.
Except it’s not vector graphics at all. It’s very clever
11:59 Excuse me, w h a t. Wireframe models on an NES??? Nintendo, please put this on NES games for Switch.
Great video. Yes Track & Field 2 was amazing looking. I remember being amazed at seeing the pictures in magazines like Nintendo Power back in the day. My favorite mode was the gymnast high bar. I think people dont remember it so much because the NES was in its last days in 1989, 16 bit was right around the corner and the Genesis was out that same year.
Thanks!
Fascinating as usual. I love how these game devs were so enthusiastic and creative.
I was impressed by the tile list you put in the video. I habw watched ton of these "greatest" or "best of" lists and never seen anyone even bother to use those as a visual example.
Well done.
Thanks a lot, I wasn't sure if it would work as a visual aid, but I'm glad you think it did!
I'd put Vice: Project Doom up there. Really good animation in its background tiles, stages rarely resemble any other level in the game, even some parallax scrolling effects (most noticeable with the clouds as seen in some cutscenes and fights).
Helps the game is also really damn good, with three types of stages (platforming, top-down driving, first-person shooting). Basically a good way to think of it is "Adventures of Bayou Billy" without bullshit ramped-up US difficulty (it's tough, but fair, with unlimited continues), cutscenes quite reminescent of Ninja Gaiden, and a pretty damn good soundtrack to boot.
Hidden gem for sure!
wow good recommendation, that one was actually worth looking up th-cam.com/video/nfY79-3AdGY/w-d-xo.html
I really loved this video. Discovered some new games in it. The "that no one ever talks about part" was key because there's many videos that always mention the same hardware-pushing games. Great job.
Thanks, I tried to make it a deep dive. There's a lot more lesser known NES games I could talk about if people are interested!
Great list and great video! Usually if youtube recommends a video with a similar title, I expect the same old games. Way to be unique and informative.
Thank you!
I used to play track and field 2 at my friend Max's house....bringing back memories!
Vinny vinesauce recommended this vid on his stream tonight. Great recommendation
Well thanks Vinny!
Great video, these are very interesting, nice to run into some rare games I don't know that are actually interesting.
I remember Elite but I guess being in the U.S. I missed that port.
This is the best kind of TH-cam video, in that it provides a service as well as being entertaining.
Awesome informative video! Always great to learn about lesser known and impressive NES titles
Some of these look like genesis games! Thanks for showing and telling! Really interesting stuff. Your narrative style reminds me of getindiegaming a lot
always entertaining! another superb documentary, Sharopolis!
Thanks!
Thanks for a great video! Im currently remaking the sprites of Zelda 2 and its nice to get some more knowledge about how things work back there in the gfx department. Zelda 2 really is badly planned and seem to has wasted great oppertunities to a variety of great stuff. :(
Really great video and comment FS on other NES games - I’m seeing this video 16-May-22 love seeing some great obscure NES games - still great after all these years. We will be saying the same about Switch games too as there are so many of them already
great video! All the titles were new to me and I love the detailed info provided!
I had Track & Field 2 on the NES when I was a kid. That brought back some memories seeing that.
Wow, right off the bat great choice on Track and Field 2. I HAD to have that game back in the day based on screenshots alone!
Excellent video. You're really good at this.
Dude, these are QUALITY videos. Can't believe you've only got 6k followers- I hope you blow up soon. I only discovered you yesterday, so hopefully the algorithm starts showing you to more people like me.
wow very interresting video. Didn't know that shooter you was talking about. There're very interresting tricks they achived to pull out of the machine... very interresting. MMC3 and 5 was pretty powerfull discrete logic chips. SMB3 was truly a technical acheivement...
Nice video! I was expecting to see a some other titles like Willow and The Immortal on here too, but you definitely covered most of the best.
Absolutely loving your videos.
Didnt know any of these gems! AWESOME vídeo.
Nice video, I don't think I've ever seen these before :), they look great for NES games!
One game i think deserves some mention on the technical side is battletoads.
The mapper this game use absolutely primitive as hell.
No line counters, the tile memory is dealt by just sticking 8KB of memory there (which means the tiles must be updated manually with the CPU), and to rub salt in the injury, the mapper switch the whole 32KB of ROM memory at once, which means you have to repeat "bank changing code" on ALL the banks.
On MMC1 and other sane mappers, there's generally a portion of the memory that stays stuck at the first 8-16KB, but not on battletoads.
All the effects you see on this game are made with very careful timing and somehow still having CPU time for the rest of the thing.
You can tell the NES to tell you once per frame where the TV is with the sprite 0 hit trick, but after that, you're on your own.
I bet the game is hard as it is because the developers had to vent the frustration somewhere.
This is a really great Video. Thank you so much for doing it!
Thanks for watching!
Track and Field 2 was effing impossible when I was a kid! I couldn't figure out how to play it...the mechanics and such. PLUS, I was too young to know the rules to any of those Olympic sports...it haunts me!
I had a lot of trouble too, until I got a NES MAX. I discovered a glitch, on the Hammerthrow, use a 90 degree angle, the graphics will show it properly going straight up, but give you incredible distance, at least it did on mine.
This was a great video with pretty unique content. I learned things! Maybe there are other videos with similar subject matter, but I haven't come across them.
Thanks!
Impressive video! Well documented and actually talking about obscure games
Thank you!
Track and field 2 is an outstanding visual achievement. I discovered some years ago. I was so surprised. Even the voice tracks are remarkable
Love love love the channel dude I watched every video now so good
Thanks!
Well, if you're talking about extra hardware...
Normal Castlevania 3 is well-known to anyone, but in Japan it was released as Akumajou Densetsu, which was one of the three games on the Famicom system to use Konami's VRC6 chip for music thus allowing a VASTLY superior version of the soundtrack. Hidenori Maezawa himself took part in its creation process.
VRC7 is even more rare, it was used only in two games, and only in one for the music - Lagrange Point. Its music capabilities are super awesome because it is an inferior version of YM2413 OPLL.
Did not know SMB graphics fit on one unchanging page. Amazing what they did with that. I did know the bushes are reused as clouds. Edit: also my pick is the forward scrolling shooter. the third one I think. That giant building or enemy scrolling beyond the horizon, buttery smooth, clean 3d looking graphics.
Loved the first one! Played it for hours and years
Glad to see more people talk about Mitsume Ga Tooru. Personally I think in terms of licensed games for the NES/Famicom it was EASILY on par with the like of DuckTales and Batman (maybe even a bit better).
If you plan on doing a sequel, one game I'd like to see talked about is Super Spy Hunter/Battle Formula. I'm not sure how many people talk about that one.
Wow! Thank you! This is a very informative video! I enjoyed it! :)
Thanks!
I loved Track & Field in the arcade because you could hit the buttons super-fast with a comb or pencil! When Track & Field 2 came out, I got the dance pad thing for it...it was a nightmare! Me and my little sister running on it was always a bad idea.
Good stuff so far bro. Keep it up.
Great video and good job unearthing some stuff you don't hear about often!!
Thanks!
Ufff. I am reminded of how much gorgeous and amazing I always thought Track and Field II was
Track and Field II was one of my favorites! Loved archery and karate.
Good information, well presented! Subscribed.
Thanks for watching and thanks for subscribing! I've just returned the favour!
One of the best hard pushers vid I’ve ever seen
Cool video!
Good video. There were quite a few in here I hadn't heard of before.
Thanks!
Nice list. They are really pretty games.
Cool video! I appreciate this info
Mitsume ga Tooru looks really nice! Its sad it don't have much recognition, but at least we know now about all the features it have! xD
I actually have a copy of SDF! I got it as a gift when one of my cousins was returning to Canada from Hong Kong. The cartridge itself is even larger than the standard Famicom cart.
The difference between track and field to it's sequel might be the biggest jump in graphics I've even seen to this day.
Really good looking games. Impressed.
I loved Chrisis force bought it by chance my friends and I always wondered why it looked that good compared to other nes games until now , thanks
Thank you!! Great video!!
11:58
“Everyday, I imagine a future where I can be with you”
I can’t be the only one, right?
😢
Mod Nes Classic
I had Elite for C64, didn't realize it was also NES. Cool game.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Uchuu Keibitai translates as Space Defense Force, which is clearly what the SDF is meant to stand for. I suspect the game was meant as a sequel to EDF (Earth Defense Force).
I played all the game you showed in the video. The only exception was elite because its pal. I could not play it on my NTSC hardware.
Battletoads double dragon the ultimate team is also graphically amazing to me excellent use of color and wonderful Sprite work.
I also need to mention the guardian legend for its ambitious idea of blending a shooter with zelda exploration mixed into it. Lots of enemies are designed with eyes all over the place but some designs for the bosses were pretty cool.
If you were to crack open the palette on the game you would see what I mean. they squeezed everything they could onto the mapper used. According to the guy behind rollie there was not much room to add anything
Now i wanna look more into why Elite doesn't run on US hardware lol. Great job on the video man, nice to see a list full of different games for once.
Very nice analisis!
I had a lot of fun playing Track and Field when I was a little kid
I was looking for something 'new' to play and now I got it! Thx!
Thanks for watching!
That extra ram in the support chips also meant faster tile swapping with a reduced flicker rate. If you had seen Track and Field 2 for the first time on a home console, you would be hard pressed to believe that it was a 16 bit system game. That game really upped the bar of what I would expect out of the NES in the future of that time. Sadly, I was let down more than blown away! The NES is still one of the greatest systems ever made in my opinion! Do you realize the money that Nintendo would have saved with 3rd party developer costs if they would have just made their systems disk related rather than the early cartridge based systems.
Thanks for this!!
TetraStar and its predecessor Cosmic Epsilon really blow my mind.
Love Track and Field 2. Back in 1994~95, probably one of the first games I ever played in my life, and a really great 2 player game. Never could get the long jump and down though. "Foul. Foul. Foul."
These are amazing
I've been looking for Mitsume ga tooru's real name for over a decade.
I played it on an emulator for the playstation 1. I used to think it was a game about Krillin from Dragon Ball lol.
What a neat surprise from a youtube's recommended video.
Great list!
Some pretty damn great looking games. Now I need a Japanese Famicom and these little gems!
Cheers, Tobi
Metal Storm is possibly my favorite graphics on the NES, though not as obscure as this. Great use of parallax and great animation.
Bucky O' Hare is another one. Again, not as obscure, but definitely not mainstream like Mega Mans or Kirby or Contra/Super C.
Oh the sweet background music
this video was incredible! its exactly the sort of thing I've been searching for, and I've since liked and subscribed. one thing, some of the titles are rather obtuse, is there any way we could get you to list them in the description?
excuse me, I saw you've posted the list on another comment. still, great video!
I've added it to the description too now. I should have done that to begin with!
Sharopolis
thank you so much!
You have a very animated head. I LOVE IT!
Really impressed Elite ran on the NES. Always wondered whether it was possible to use that technique.
Something cool I noticed in Elite- The "death animation" for the ship exploding appears to be randomized. It's been a while since I've looked at it, but as I recall, the various bits of wire frames will separate at different speeds and angles every time. It might just be simple randomization, I have no idea, but it at least gives the illusion that there's some kind of physics behind it. And it makes the 3D feel all the more legitimate. Really neat.
Great vid bro you earned a subscriber 👍
Thanks!
great video and great graphics!!
Thanks!
I had track and field 2. It was amazing. The graphics were as good as the best Sega Master System game, and it was quite fun.
Great video. Yes the NES developers started adding extra chips in their games as standard around the time the turbo graphics system came out. Also anther reason why games were closed to $70 and such
They added expensive chips and the games werent that much better also those carts dont work on "knockoff" NES consoles usually
At least one of them I've played once, the Three-Eyed Boy, or Mitsume ga Tooru. Indeed a good platformer!