Great Question. The compare operation is CMP $14 for the Y-Axis (where RAM $14 holds the shot's height). You would either need to change the load instruction (mentioned in the video) which would take two codes per dimension (as mentioned) in order to put a higher value in $14 (i.e. 8 instead of 7) OR (to change the "if statement" equivalent) Change the compare statement itself and hardcode the operand size to a value of 8. If you did that, you would have to change the opcode for the CMP statement to tell it "use this constant value" rather than "get the value at this RAM address...." Assembly uses different opcodes depending on the parameters for the operation. $C5 $14 (CMP $14 - Compare a value to the value stored at RAM address $14) would become $C9 $08 (CMP #$08 - Compare a value to the value of 8) So you still have to change two bytes per compare statement (two for height and two for width) and therefore end up with four bytes for the change. This compare statement is also used for the dynamite. I can't remember the dynamite's dimensions.
@@DisplacedGamers A clever 3 byte solution is to change the second LDA into a BIT so the contents of the accumulator never changes between the STA operations. This will clobber the Z flag, but so will the LDX instruction right after the second STA, so its an easy win. The original bytes of B9 4D 9D 85 14 B9 4D 9D 85 15 would instead become AD 53 9D 85 14 2C 4D 9D 85 15 and you could do this using a single gameshark device!
This explains so much. My friends in the US seem to have been traumatized by this game and I, a European, didn't think it was that bad - beating it handily over a weekend. Now I know why.
Then I was a kid; I had to tape the reset button down over night as to not lose whatever it was I had in memory, while making parents believe it was powered down. Good ol days.
You can whack pedestrians with the cane in order to increase Jekyll’s stress level. Why would you ever want to do this? Because there are times when it can actually be beneficial or even necessary to hasten his transformation into Hyde, as successfully completing a Hyde section refills the health meter and clears away all enemies and obstacles which were on the same screen as Jekyll when he initially transformed. Neither the game itself nor the manual bothers to explain a lot of the mechanics, so it's left for you to puzzle these things out.
@@willmistretta There's also one level where you absolutely want to turn into Hyde, and it's for the good ending. Fortunately the game makes it nigh impossible to progress as Jeckyll in this level.
I owned this game when I was a kid and I remember it was difficult so I needed to use a guide to complete it. I live in Sweden so I played the european version and when I saw AVGN’s video on Fester’s Quest I did remember it being difficult but not the way he experienced it. This video explains why.
You know what's bullshit? The end of level boss in Time Lord for the Western level also has regenerating health, making it so you have to pump him full of lead with the pistol if you want to kill him. Using the shotgun is a waste of time. The only savior here is that you get full intangibility while attacking in that game, so using a turbo controller shreds this boss.
Really liked this one. Wasn't aware of the European release of this game. I'd love to see you tackle Blaster Master if there's anything you feel can be discussed about it. The only thing that really bothers me about Blaster Master that I can think of as I sit here right now is that in the overhead stages, enemies will respawn even if you move their original location a pixel off the screen and back (or maybe a tile?). Not a problem that's unique to Blaster Master, for sure. I doubt that could be addressed with a Game Genie code at all. But hey what do I know? :)
Something he could talk about in Blaster Master is the cheat that let's you pause the game to defeat bosses with a single grenade. If I remember correctly it only works on certain bosses for some reason. Oh yeah also the respawning tiles that can soft lock you if you pause while walking outside of the tank.
@@FunnelCakeRyan I was thinking that Blaster Master and Fester's Quest are two of the more well-known examples of NES games that were rebalanced for the European market. I wonder why Sunsoft took the time to rebalance these when so many other companies didn't bother...
Fester's Quest also has the problematic respawning enemies Game Sack mentioned. I wonder how much code the overhead sections of Blaster Master shares with Fester's Quest? There seems to be a lot of similarities between the two in play.
Seems so weird that someone went out of their way to make the hit detection be as annoying as possible on the weapons. Why not just add a wide beam and make it a whole more convienent to upgrade your gun? Was there ever a Famicom release too?
I wonder if part of the weird bullet patterns had anything to do with flickering, that way a bullet isn't on the same scanline all the time, still flickers like crazy but it's not the same sprite(s) being left out all the time. Fester's Quest was never released in Japan, which I think is weird... If the Adam's Family is unknown or it's hard to get the license for it there a simple sprite change and you can still release it.
@@JoypadDivison I do love when a Japanese developer gets to work on a Western property they've never heard of before at the time, you get some great "anime" versions of the character designs that are severely off model. The Simpsons arcade game and Jurassic Park on the Master System especially!
@@Larry I long speculated that Sunsoft had this generic Blaster Master derivative already in the pipeline, and the licensing coup was realized and implemented very late in development. Even if I'm wrong, that's what the final product smacks of.
Im from Europe. I grew up with this game. I heard lots of people online talk trash about it for things I don't remember like walls and weak shots and such. I pretty much enjoyed the game. Now I know why!
Thanks for this! I had Fester's Quest (the PAL version) as a kid, and I've seen the AVGN video where he complains about the shots hitting the wall. I just never realized that the version I played was different. Too long ago, I suppose.
Fun fact: the same producer for Fester's Quest is also the same producer for Desert Strike and a myriad of other games we worked together on. He was quite proud of his games being difficult, telling me giddily how hard Fester's Quest was. Some of these things are probably from sloppy implementation, but it really comes down to it being the actual intent.
Thanks for your work on Crueball, Desert Strike and Strider 2014. They've been favourites over the years. I always thought that Fester's Quest was an entirely Japanese Sunsoft game. Fun to know it was a joint collaboration.
There is one question I have always thought about in Fester's Quest. There's an enemy listed in the manual called the "Giant Scorpion", which is supposed to spawn if the player is spending too much time in an unnecessary area, always respawning immediately after you kill it. However, there is only one time throughout the game that I feel anyone has ever seen the enemy spawn. When you defeat the first boss, you go into the sewer and exit at the top right corner of the map, starting a trek in and out of sewers that keep you at that point in the map to acquire the whip. Once you get the whip, you go down into the sewer right after exiting Mortica's house, and when you come out the other side, if you walk to the left, you will more than likely see the Giant Scorpion spawned, unable to get to you because you're surrounded by trees as you're supposed to make your way to the south and the next manhole that eventually leads you to the next boss. Thing is, I think I stood in the beginning spot on the map for several minutes leveling up the gun and not once did this thing ever spawn. I wonder if the manual provided incorrect information, or if there is something about that corner of the map that causes the game to think we have no real purpose there when we obviously do. If you do another dive into Fester's Quest, I'd really love to see some examination into the mechanics of that enemy and if it is just a fixed location and a lie in the manual or what in the code would cause it to start spawning.
Just letting the shots go through walls would solve a mountain of frustration with this game. When I was younger I did once beat the NTSC release legit, and I found that to be the biggest issue.
That was fascinating and a half! Saw a rom hack that "patched" the US rom with these tweaks (aka 60 fps with pal features) just recently.. So definitely fun to get this more in depth analysis of it.
Truth; defeating (old) copy protection and doing other things with RE is often just a matter of changing a single conditional jump or something similar.
Yes beat i yesterday , final boss on the first run , an i finnaly clear the game at the second run ! im french so don't have the NTSC version but i will try on emulator to beat the NTSC version
I REALLY want to see you cover Blaster Master. Specifically, how the tank can go up walls and ceilings, and how the tank is a combination of several sprites, that has a sliding up animation for aiming up. explaining how the boss 2,4,6,7 bosses take damage when paused, and how jason takes damage continually when paused, and how bosses 1,3,5,8 have elements that disappear when pausing, i think, would be very very interesting.
An additional clue that Fester's Quest may have started with the Blaster Master code base, is that you can abuse the exact same pause buffer bug with the whip.
I love how the European version is literally a ROMhack of itself to make it less frustrating to play lol Even more so back porting those tweaks seems to be incredibly easy as well, which is something pretty cool thinking about it. To me it's clear the team behind this game thought "yeah you know what let's patch a few things, we probably took it a little too far I guess" lol
Yeah, one of the producers actually said in an interview that they realised they'd made the game way too hard, but it was too late to make another revision before the US release so they just had to ship it that way and play up the difficulty in the marketing.
You've got to be kidding me, nesting Game Genies works? I thought that was a throwaway line. Robin Williams may have famously stated "ixnay on the wishing for more wishes," but he never said you couldn't wish for more genies! And there definitely are more genies in that universe, they run into at least one non-Jafar genie, named 'Eden' (after Barbara Eden of 'I Dream of Jeannie' fame), in the cartoons; and in the Disney Adventure Comics, there's hundreds of them. Nobody ever tries wishing on any of them, as apparently everyone is happily content with their lives, and I think it was this issue specifically that inspired 'the Fairly Odd Parents' series. ...kinda trailed off there for a moment... I'm like that. So, how's it work, you enter 3 codes, push start, and then it boots up Genie #2? And while, from the TV it looks like it keeps resetting, you eventually scroll through all 5 Game Genies and get a significantly modded game?
Oh... I never knew that the european version had differences like this. This is fascinating - since I've grown up with the European versions, but later started using NTSC version of roms for the 60 FPS, I've always wondered whether kid me just ignored the issues with wall collision and didn't care. I remembered liking the game a fair bit, even if I never got far - but revisiting it later (on NTSC) kind of showed problems that I simply assumed were always there. Especially the collision with sewer walls was just irritating
Fester's Quest is a reason, if not THE reason, my family bought a color TV. My father, sister, and I all played the game and we constantly got aggravated from the weapons downgrading, since blue and red both look alike in black & white.
That's just insulting. Surely they could have just programmed it so you could just hole the button. "Go buy a turbo controller." Is just extremely shitty.
Great video as always! I never played Fester's Quest as a kid, but the gameplay always reminded me of Blaster Master. Consider this my vote for a Blaster Master episode.
Love the insight this channel brings, especially for us programmer types. How easy it was to make the walls not cancel the shot makes me wonder why they didn't use that mechanic out of the chute. Makes you think they either didn't playtest it much, or they thought it was an enjoyable addition of difficulty -- as opposed to being annoying as hell. This game had great potential but a few of the quirks made a lot of folks cast it aside.
Walls blocking shots wouldn't have been such a problem if the shots didn't wobble all over the place. Walls block shots in most games, but they don't cause this frustration because the shots are unlikely to wobble in to the walls.
One possible explanation is that over the course of development, the team generally tends to become expert players at their game (through constant playing/testing) and thus have a hard time gauging its difficulty. I know that definitely happened to me when coding V-Rally 2: I was so used to driving the car around the tracks that it became second nature.
Don't forget that in the late 80's and early 90's for some of us the extra tv was an old black and white set. You couldn't tell if it was a power up or a power down!
In total, having the game ignore walls for shot patterns is plenty to make the game more playable, but it does need a checkpoint system as well as that was the final achilles' heel for a lot of players who got far in the game.
It's so simple to just item farm in the first stage and get the last gun power up and should be no problem hitting enemies. It's a great challenging game
I'm imagining if we've had your type of videos back in the NES days to learn the NES hardware.. Would've definitely had my parents buy some of your VHS tapes.
The sewers had another problem. Enemies respawn if their spawn point exits the screen - deaths are not remembered. So those green bubbles you can't shoot because your bullets hit the wall? Well, if they push you back far enough... when you finally kill them, then continue, boom there the enemy is again. Instant respawn and the whole process starts again. It can take many attempts just to get past one green jell because of this.
I just played through the game (as a ROM) a couple times to test out these codes. The game really punishes you if you walk all the way to the edge of map in some areas. Those pink aliens that tunnel through the walls are in a lot more places than I thought.
I owned Festers Quest on the NES but mostly started it up just to hear the rendition of the Addams Theme song. The 2 changes would have made a HUGE difference in how much I would have enjoyed the game back then. Especially the wall change!!!
Beat this as a kid in the US. I did have a turbo button controller. I didn't know everyone else disliked the game for being hard because there wasnt an internet to complain on 😅
In 5:05 the hitboxes for blue frogs seem off when the frog is jumping, is that a quirk of the debug script or is it that the hitbox is really displaced?
I didn't test the boxes against the frogs. They are calculated from RAM values, but I do not know if they have any special logic or use different RAM locations for their dimensions since I wasn't focused on the frogs. I will say that I believe I froze a frog mid-jump at one point and couldn't hit it with my shots... which would fit with Sarcastic Guy's response.
"I Came Looking For Copper And I Found Gold". Looked up walkthrough for this game, got this video as recommended next day and when I see title, I think there is another version of Fester's Quest? So now playing on Europe one, life and hair saver, thank you! Checked your other videos too, they are great and now you got a new subscriber!
Don't know why I clicked on this video but this is amazing and indepth, you got a subscriber. I was considering if there was a market for this type of content, but you do it so much better than I ever could. Kudos.
Was glued to this video. This game drove me crazy with the idiotic powerups and walls stopping your shots. I also never noticed that the enemies life would reset if you didnt kill it fast enough!
I imagine that bullets not being able to go through walls was implemented to incentivize players to use the whip. If you allow bullets to go through the walls, then there is no real purpose for the whip.
I'm from Sweden. I remember playing this game. I could never relate to the frustration that people seemed to have and thought AVGNs review was unfair. Thanks for the explanation.
EDITED for accuracy: I made a game genie code for Festers Quest, which changes the bass and samples, it freezes their pitch at whatever they were when you turned on the code. ANKASA ( originally i enterer HNKASC on an emulator, but the game genie doesn't use the letters H or C. Using ANKASA should work on console too.)
I love these videos that dissect the code behind frustrating features. To me it's always fun to learn about why something is the way it is, especially if it's an aspect that is either seemingly broken or otherwise just a plain unfun design decision.
HI. Would you make video about how to disable flashing effect on Nes games? I love retro games but I have seizure problem and old games have heavy usage of flashing so I cannot play them. Sorry for my bad English I am just a kid and im from Laos(tiny country next to Thai) and im learning.
I think they may have buffed the guns a little too much, but it's nice that they even cared enough to address it in the first place all the way back then. Really good and informative video!
I just found your videos. I believe these are very helpful for those trying to wrap their head around game programming and how some stuff works (this includes me). Thank you
2:16 Regarding NES trigonometry: NES Game developers can use 1 of 2 ways to create sine-shaped movement. The first way is to use a pre-calculated sine table. (that's what this game seems to do) The second way is to use a differential equation -x = d²x/dt² which translates to x = sin(t). In code that's dx = dx - x * F; x = x + dx performed each timestep, with some initial values of x and dx and constant F determining the amplitude and period. IDK the exact math for it, but it's the same as a spring equation and presents an elegant way to create sine curves without pre-calculating a table.
Great video! I played this game in my childhood (in Europe, lol) and remember it as one of those mediocre but fairly fun NES adventures. Never knew the US version was so different...
I remember from renting it back then that I had a great time, so no wonder. Another great video and "hang on was I not already subscribed to this channel?" reminder
Blaster master has a hidden level select that might be fun to poke at. It's also possible to play the overhead worlds with the sidescrolling tank and vice versa. Might be interesting enough for a video? Also, tweaking things like fall damage, tank entering range, the door entry bug, the grenade pause glitch, and restoring the SPIKE item could be cool :D
Dude,I love you. I spent so many frustrating hours as a kid playing this game. Like you said, it’s JUST cool/fun enough to keep powering through the difficulty, but WTF?! the boomerang hitting the narrow sewer walls…. I never did beat it. I actually remember writing a letter to Sunsoft when I was maybe 7 to ask about some of this stuff. Haha. I actually thought someone would read it.😆. Decades later, you’ve vindicated me.
Owned this as a kid, and never knew that one color would power down your weapon. Also, never even realized a whip existed. Then again, I never got past that first 3D maze building. Frustrating is definitely an apt description of Fester's Quest.
It's worse in Time Lord. The Western level end of boss has regenerating health as well and attacking it with the shotgun is pointless. But since you're invincible in that game as long as you're attacking, the best way to beat it is to use a turbo controller.
Humn... I would remove the weapon downgrades drops. Maybe downgrade at getting hit...? 🤔 Remove enemy health reset timer, balance damage/enemy health. Alternate the projectile pattern. Would check if it is possible to replace the some drops, so you can vary projectile type against the pattern.
This was one of many games I beat as a kid (us). You walk away with being able to press buttons faster than anyone. Until now, I didn't realize exactly where I picked that skill up.
The first half felt a bit "Oh, I know this well!", and the line "The game is just good enough to keep playing" is probably the best way to describe my childhood or kusoge in general. The second half? That blew me away. I had no idea that regeneration was present. That explains so damn much about why 6-year-old me almost did an inadvertent Uncle Fester cosplay by tearing his hair out.
That one simple byte change to not stop shots on walls would have made pre-teen me enjoy this game so much more. Super simple, but the sewers caused untold frustration.
My dad (born in the 50s) was a huge Adam's family fan. Fester was his favorite character . So when this game came out he had to have it. He spent a week without a turbo controller. The most frustrating game play ever. Was able to convince my mom that we needed a turbo controller and that's when the game got really fun.
Sounds like the shot movement is done like gravity in the Ninja Garden series, where there's an acceleration value applied each frame to a variable velocity.
The source of all of this is that the gun mechanics are basically lifted wholesale from Blaster Master, but the level design and enemies were not. Also in Blaster Master you always have a dedicated and useful sub-weapon to get you through the awkward middle gun phases, while in Fester's Quest it takes a while to get the whip, and when you do its use case is situational at best.
One big difference in the wave pattern here and the one I see in Master Blaster is the variation used in the latter. The wave modulates with each shot so there are not persistent dead zones and it is great.
As you point out in the closing, there probably could have been a couple checkpoints put in, or some sort of path shortening option; something like beating the first boss putting some planks over the broken street to allow faster access to the second part of the map, or other things of that nature... just some QoL to make getting back to where you died easier.
I called the Game Genie hotline back in the day and was told that there were no codes for Fester's Quest, and that was well after its release. Unbelievable.
I guess nobody at Codemasters had done any ROM research for Fester's Quest at the time you called them (assuming that was who answered the Game Genie hotline)
The max level gun has a smaller width, thus is able to fit through most of the more cramped tunnels without disappearing. This is why I upgrade the gun to max from the stationary enemies at the start.
You have no idea how frustrating it was being a kid in the early 90s playing this game on a black and white television in the US. I had no idea why my gun would downgrade for no reason.
I had the original cartridge and played it on my NES more than 30 years ago. I live in the U.S., and purchased the game here as well. With regards to the permanent, so called secret health upgrade you get by pressing up against a wall in one of the buildings in the early part of the game, it would only increase my character's health by one box for a total of three. My friend had the game and when he did the same thing, he got an increase of two to four boxes. Was there a second revision of the game just for the U.S. region?
Strong Bad would have a very apt description of this game: "You suck just enough to be interesting," which is pretty much what I said when I used to play this game many, many moons ago.
I'm also a bit curious on item randomization/generation. It seems like after you initially power the gun or whip up, the number of blue power ups drops off to almost nothing, so you're constantly running into the issue of accidentally stepping onto a red power-down item and almost never finding a way to get back up to the more powerful weapon again.
This was the game that my uncle rage quit on when he was a kid back in the early 90's and he broke the door off a NES due to this game by punching the top of it because he kept dying over and over again. My dad also remembers my uncle punching a Gameboy whenever Terminator 2 pissed him off.
I feel reminded of exploiting shot ranges in RTS games, namely the original _Command & Conquer._ For example, if I'm playing NOD and I target an enemy with Artillery (one of the NOD vehicles), if the self-propelled artillery is facing up with respect to the screen, the Artillery will have a slightly longer reach, and thus able to attack GDI units with impunity. The Artillery is beyond the GDI unit's range, and thus not attacked. There is an invisible grid on the map that various elements align to. When facing up, the gun's muzzle is in a grid space that's adjacent to the grid space its tread is in. This is a flaw in the angle of the perspective the game is being rendered in. If the perspective was entirely a top-down view, this exploit would not exist as the gun's muzzle would instead be in the same grid space as its tread. A similar exploit exists for infantry units, but is more difficult to employ, due to infantry units keeping to an X formation, and changing their positions based on movement. In the mission involving rescuing prisoners from a GDI prison, I can destroy a GDI Guard Tower with a few Bazooka infantry through micromanaging the X formation of the infantry (in the PC port), keeping them just out of the retaliation reach of the Guard Tower. However, hits may have a shotgun-like effect, in which if one unit in the same formation is close enough to trigger a retaliatory response, units in the same formation may also become casualties.
what's funny is that the place you demonstrate gun shots dissipating on the walls in the sewers is actually a highly recommended place to farm slimes to up your weapon level to 8 so the game isn't so frustrating lol
Couldn't I just change the shot size IF statement to 8 instead of 7, like size < 8?
Great Question.
The compare operation is CMP $14 for the Y-Axis (where RAM $14 holds the shot's height).
You would either need to change the load instruction (mentioned in the video) which would take two codes per dimension (as mentioned) in order to put a higher value in $14 (i.e. 8 instead of 7)
OR (to change the "if statement" equivalent)
Change the compare statement itself and hardcode the operand size to a value of 8. If you did that, you would have to change the opcode for the CMP statement to tell it "use this constant value" rather than "get the value at this RAM address...."
Assembly uses different opcodes depending on the parameters for the operation.
$C5 $14 (CMP $14 - Compare a value to the value stored at RAM address $14)
would become
$C9 $08 (CMP #$08 - Compare a value to the value of 8)
So you still have to change two bytes per compare statement (two for height and two for width) and therefore end up with four bytes for the change.
This compare statement is also used for the dynamite. I can't remember the dynamite's dimensions.
@@DisplacedGamers A clever 3 byte solution is to change the second LDA into a BIT so the contents of the accumulator never changes between the STA operations. This will clobber the Z flag, but so will the LDX instruction right after the second STA, so its an easy win. The original bytes of B9 4D 9D 85 14 B9 4D 9D 85 15 would instead become AD 53 9D 85 14 2C 4D 9D 85 15 and you could do this using a single gameshark device!
@@DisplacedGamers just change it from CMP $14 to CMP #$14. that should be plenty forgiving...
Yeahhh what thess guys said. 🤔🤓
Wow I wish I knew this language like you guys do. I need to learn NES code before I pass on.
This explains so much. My friends in the US seem to have been traumatized by this game and I, a European, didn't think it was that bad - beating it handily over a weekend. Now I know why.
Same, I bought it and loved it. Played through the whole thing with the NES Advantage stick, with the turbo dials on fire all the way turned up.
trashgame
@@liukang3545 trash comment
Now imagine playing it on a black and white TV. Is that power-up blue or red?
Pure hell.
Holy shit. American. Traumatized. For years.
Then I was a kid; I had to tape the reset button down over night as to not lose whatever it was I had in memory, while making parents believe it was powered down. Good ol days.
Video suggestion: Dr Jeckyl and Mr Hyde on NES…. Does the cane really do nothing, or is it supposed to? Other than bees.
Seconding this.
@@kaeleklund6728 3rd
Yes, Please. 👍✨
You can whack pedestrians with the cane in order to increase Jekyll’s stress level. Why would you ever want to do this? Because there are times when it can actually be beneficial or even necessary to hasten his transformation into Hyde, as successfully completing a Hyde section refills the health meter and clears away all enemies and obstacles which were on the same screen as Jekyll when he initially transformed.
Neither the game itself nor the manual bothers to explain a lot of the mechanics, so it's left for you to puzzle these things out.
@@willmistretta There's also one level where you absolutely want to turn into Hyde, and it's for the good ending. Fortunately the game makes it nigh impossible to progress as Jeckyll in this level.
Don’t forget this game also has “an interesting timer”. - Nintendo Power
I owned this game when I was a kid and I remember it was difficult so I needed to use a guide to complete it. I live in Sweden so I played the european version and when I saw AVGN’s video on Fester’s Quest I did remember it being difficult but not the way he experienced it. This video explains why.
fester's quest, the original modern military shooter: two weapon loadout and regenerating health
You know what's bullshit? The end of level boss in Time Lord for the Western level also has regenerating health, making it so you have to pump him full of lead with the pistol if you want to kill him. Using the shotgun is a waste of time. The only savior here is that you get full intangibility while attacking in that game, so using a turbo controller shreds this boss.
Really liked this one. Wasn't aware of the European release of this game. I'd love to see you tackle Blaster Master if there's anything you feel can be discussed about it. The only thing that really bothers me about Blaster Master that I can think of as I sit here right now is that in the overhead stages, enemies will respawn even if you move their original location a pixel off the screen and back (or maybe a tile?). Not a problem that's unique to Blaster Master, for sure. I doubt that could be addressed with a Game Genie code at all. But hey what do I know? :)
Something he could talk about in Blaster Master is the cheat that let's you pause the game to defeat bosses with a single grenade. If I remember correctly it only works on certain bosses for some reason.
Oh yeah also the respawning tiles that can soft lock you if you pause while walking outside of the tank.
@@soggytoast111 yup, 2, 4, 6, and 7. I used to speedrun Blaster Master :). There are TONS of regional differences too!
@@FunnelCakeRyan I was thinking that Blaster Master and Fester's Quest are two of the more well-known examples of NES games that were rebalanced for the European market. I wonder why Sunsoft took the time to rebalance these when so many other companies didn't bother...
@@soggytoast111 same grenade pause trick works on certain bosses in Fester's Quest too using TNT.
Fester's Quest also has the problematic respawning enemies Game Sack mentioned. I wonder how much code the overhead sections of Blaster Master shares with Fester's Quest? There seems to be a lot of similarities between the two in play.
Seems so weird that someone went out of their way to make the hit detection be as annoying as possible on the weapons. Why not just add a wide beam and make it a whole more convienent to upgrade your gun?
Was there ever a Famicom release too?
‘Ello, you!
I wonder if part of the weird bullet patterns had anything to do with flickering, that way a bullet isn't on the same scanline all the time, still flickers like crazy but it's not the same sprite(s) being left out all the time.
Fester's Quest was never released in Japan, which I think is weird... If the Adam's Family is unknown or it's hard to get the license for it there a simple sprite change and you can still release it.
@@JoypadDivison I do love when a Japanese developer gets to work on a Western property they've never heard of before at the time, you get some great "anime" versions of the character designs that are severely off model. The Simpsons arcade game and Jurassic Park on the Master System especially!
@@Larry please tell me you'll do a video on that at some point. That sounds like an awesome topic for a video.
@@Larry I long speculated that Sunsoft had this generic Blaster Master derivative already in the pipeline, and the licensing coup was realized and implemented very late in development. Even if I'm wrong, that's what the final product smacks of.
Im from Europe. I grew up with this game. I heard lots of people online talk trash about it for things I don't remember like walls and weak shots and such. I pretty much enjoyed the game.
Now I know why!
Thanks for this! I had Fester's Quest (the PAL version) as a kid, and I've seen the AVGN video where he complains about the shots hitting the wall. I just never realized that the version I played was different. Too long ago, I suppose.
Avgn is a fake gamer and his show is satire
I loved this one but you're right about that weapon upgrades. I had to max-out at the very beginning
Yeah I just walked up and down the starting corridor with enemies until my gun was maxed every time.
I also max out at very beginning saves so much time
Yes hiit!
Fun fact: the same producer for Fester's Quest is also the same producer for Desert Strike and a myriad of other games we worked together on. He was quite proud of his games being difficult, telling me giddily how hard Fester's Quest was. Some of these things are probably from sloppy implementation, but it really comes down to it being the actual intent.
Thanks for your work on Crueball, Desert Strike and Strider 2014. They've been favourites over the years. I always thought that Fester's Quest was an entirely Japanese Sunsoft game. Fun to know it was a joint collaboration.
There is one question I have always thought about in Fester's Quest. There's an enemy listed in the manual called the "Giant Scorpion", which is supposed to spawn if the player is spending too much time in an unnecessary area, always respawning immediately after you kill it. However, there is only one time throughout the game that I feel anyone has ever seen the enemy spawn. When you defeat the first boss, you go into the sewer and exit at the top right corner of the map, starting a trek in and out of sewers that keep you at that point in the map to acquire the whip. Once you get the whip, you go down into the sewer right after exiting Mortica's house, and when you come out the other side, if you walk to the left, you will more than likely see the Giant Scorpion spawned, unable to get to you because you're surrounded by trees as you're supposed to make your way to the south and the next manhole that eventually leads you to the next boss. Thing is, I think I stood in the beginning spot on the map for several minutes leveling up the gun and not once did this thing ever spawn. I wonder if the manual provided incorrect information, or if there is something about that corner of the map that causes the game to think we have no real purpose there when we obviously do.
If you do another dive into Fester's Quest, I'd really love to see some examination into the mechanics of that enemy and if it is just a fixed location and a lie in the manual or what in the code would cause it to start spawning.
Just letting the shots go through walls would solve a mountain of frustration with this game. When I was younger I did once beat the NTSC release legit, and I found that to be the biggest issue.
Displaced Gamers is honestly just such a good channel with quality content. Long live this channel. So underrated.
Thank you, Brian!
That was fascinating and a half! Saw a rom hack that "patched" the US rom with these tweaks (aka 60 fps with pal features) just recently.. So definitely fun to get this more in depth analysis of it.
I saw that patch come out while I was doing research and scripting! It was a pleasant surprise.
ha ha
Curious where you can find this patch. For research purposes, of course.
@@Skycrusher i dont belive that, you gonna play fester's quest aint you?
The European version actually looks playable! What power a single byte makes.
Truth; defeating (old) copy protection and doing other things with RE is often just a matter of changing a single conditional jump or something similar.
Yes beat i yesterday , final boss on the first run , an i finnaly clear the game at the second run ! im french so don't have the NTSC version but i will try on emulator to beat the NTSC version
I REALLY want to see you cover Blaster Master. Specifically, how the tank can go up walls and ceilings, and how the tank is a combination of several sprites, that has a sliding up animation for aiming up. explaining how the boss 2,4,6,7 bosses take damage when paused, and how jason takes damage continually when paused, and how bosses 1,3,5,8 have elements that disappear when pausing, i think, would be very very interesting.
The bosses were drawn as the background layer, so I'm guessing any elements that disappeared when paused were objects/sprites.
Agreed. Such a great game. Amazing music.
An additional clue that Fester's Quest may have started with the Blaster Master code base, is that you can abuse the exact same pause buffer bug with the whip.
@@Starhawke_Gaming and TNT.
I love how the European version is literally a ROMhack of itself to make it less frustrating to play lol
Even more so back porting those tweaks seems to be incredibly easy as well, which is something pretty cool thinking about it.
To me it's clear the team behind this game thought "yeah you know what let's patch a few things, we probably took it a little too far I guess" lol
we don't call regional balances "rom hacks"
Yeah, one of the producers actually said in an interview that they realised they'd made the game way too hard, but it was too late to make another revision before the US release so they just had to ship it that way and play up the difficulty in the marketing.
@troywright359 They still are, though. Unless it stops being a romhack when you have source code.
5 game geinies load 15 codes just fine. I used to buy them at garage sales and it helped.
How did you fit them all in the console? Do you have an NES 2?
@@jimmyhirr5773 they just stack out... I some books under the cartridge
You've got to be kidding me, nesting Game Genies works? I thought that was a throwaway line. Robin Williams may have famously stated "ixnay on the wishing for more wishes," but he never said you couldn't wish for more genies! And there definitely are more genies in that universe, they run into at least one non-Jafar genie, named 'Eden' (after Barbara Eden of 'I Dream of Jeannie' fame), in the cartoons; and in the Disney Adventure Comics, there's hundreds of them. Nobody ever tries wishing on any of them, as apparently everyone is happily content with their lives, and I think it was this issue specifically that inspired 'the Fairly Odd Parents' series. ...kinda trailed off there for a moment... I'm like that.
So, how's it work, you enter 3 codes, push start, and then it boots up Genie #2? And while, from the TV it looks like it keeps resetting, you eventually scroll through all 5 Game Genies and get a significantly modded game?
@@Wendy_O._Koopa yup 3 codes start and then continue... Can use 3+ line edits that way
Oh... I never knew that the european version had differences like this. This is fascinating - since I've grown up with the European versions, but later started using NTSC version of roms for the 60 FPS, I've always wondered whether kid me just ignored the issues with wall collision and didn't care. I remembered liking the game a fair bit, even if I never got far - but revisiting it later (on NTSC) kind of showed problems that I simply assumed were always there. Especially the collision with sewer walls was just irritating
"The whip in particular looks a lot like... nah I'm sure it was just a coincidence."--1:09
LMAO
Fester's Quest is a reason, if not THE reason, my family bought a color TV. My father, sister, and I all played the game and we constantly got aggravated from the weapons downgrading, since blue and red both look alike in black & white.
Regarding the hit boxes: From a game design perspective the hit box should actually be bigger than the sprite though
Thank you for acknowledging the Blaster Master dna in this game. Very few reviewers ever do that.
That's just insulting. Surely they could have just programmed it so you could just hole the button. "Go buy a turbo controller." Is just extremely shitty.
Great video as always! I never played Fester's Quest as a kid, but the gameplay always reminded me of Blaster Master. Consider this my vote for a Blaster Master episode.
Seconded, Blaster Master was one of my top NES games, would love to see an episode.
Love the insight this channel brings, especially for us programmer types. How easy it was to make the walls not cancel the shot makes me wonder why they didn't use that mechanic out of the chute. Makes you think they either didn't playtest it much, or they thought it was an enjoyable addition of difficulty -- as opposed to being annoying as hell. This game had great potential but a few of the quirks made a lot of folks cast it aside.
Walls blocking shots wouldn't have been such a problem if the shots didn't wobble all over the place. Walls block shots in most games, but they don't cause this frustration because the shots are unlikely to wobble in to the walls.
One possible explanation is that over the course of development, the team generally tends to become expert players at their game (through constant playing/testing) and thus have a hard time gauging its difficulty. I know that definitely happened to me when coding V-Rally 2: I was so used to driving the car around the tracks that it became second nature.
Don't forget that in the late 80's and early 90's for some of us the extra tv was an old black and white set. You couldn't tell if it was a power up or a power down!
Memories of playing SMB2 in monochrome.
Blaster Master would be awesome. That's still one of my favorite NES games from childhood.
In total, having the game ignore walls for shot patterns is plenty to make the game more playable, but it does need a checkpoint system as well as that was the final achilles' heel for a lot of players who got far in the game.
It's so simple to just item farm in the first stage and get the last gun power up and should be no problem hitting enemies. It's a great challenging game
I'm imagining if we've had your type of videos back in the NES days to learn the NES hardware.. Would've definitely had my parents buy some of your VHS tapes.
Thanks!
The sewers had another problem. Enemies respawn if their spawn point exits the screen - deaths are not remembered. So those green bubbles you can't shoot because your bullets hit the wall? Well, if they push you back far enough... when you finally kill them, then continue, boom there the enemy is again. Instant respawn and the whole process starts again. It can take many attempts just to get past one green jell because of this.
I just played through the game (as a ROM) a couple times to test out these codes. The game really punishes you if you walk all the way to the edge of map in some areas. Those pink aliens that tunnel through the walls are in a lot more places than I thought.
I owned Festers Quest on the NES but mostly started it up just to hear the rendition of the Addams Theme song. The 2 changes would have made a HUGE difference in how much I would have enjoyed the game back then. Especially the wall change!!!
I tried both, and it definitely pushes it towards the "too ez"
Beat this as a kid in the US. I did have a turbo button controller. I didn't know everyone else disliked the game for being hard because there wasnt an internet to complain on 😅
In 5:05 the hitboxes for blue frogs seem off when the frog is jumping, is that a quirk of the debug script or is it that the hitbox is really displaced?
I don't think you're supposed to be able to hit them while they are in the air. They are copy/pasted from Blaster Master and that was the case there.
If you can imagine them jumping in the air, not moving vertically it makes sense.
I didn't test the boxes against the frogs. They are calculated from RAM values, but I do not know if they have any special logic or use different RAM locations for their dimensions since I wasn't focused on the frogs.
I will say that I believe I froze a frog mid-jump at one point and couldn't hit it with my shots... which would fit with Sarcastic Guy's response.
I feel like the first two levels of GUN are immaterial and that you can just ignore changing their hit box since they go in a predictable line.
Finally a video about Fester's quest!!! 😁
"I Came Looking For Copper And I Found Gold". Looked up walkthrough for this game, got this video as recommended next day and when I see title, I think there is another version of Fester's Quest? So now playing on Europe one, life and hair saver, thank you! Checked your other videos too, they are great and now you got a new subscriber!
3:01 +1 like for the hit detection analysis. Totally floored by how well you broke this down. Kudos!
Don't know why I clicked on this video but this is amazing and indepth, you got a subscriber. I was considering if there was a market for this type of content, but you do it so much better than I ever could. Kudos.
Great vídeo and great soundtrack.
this game was supposed to be Blaster Master 2 but they used the Addam's family Franchise instead...
Was glued to this video. This game drove me crazy with the idiotic powerups and walls stopping your shots. I also never noticed that the enemies life would reset if you didnt kill it fast enough!
I imagine that bullets not being able to go through walls was implemented to incentivize players to use the whip. If you allow bullets to go through the walls, then there is no real purpose for the whip.
The whip is considerably more powerful than the gun as well. It is the traditional "slower attack with more power" weapon.
So the whip got buffed in the EU version as well?
I'm from Sweden. I remember playing this game. I could never relate to the frustration that people seemed to have and thought AVGNs review was unfair. Thanks for the explanation.
Man I love these videos, new favourite series on youtube. You've got to do an episode about the star in Gimmick. I wanna see behind the curtain.
EDITED for accuracy:
I made a game genie code for Festers Quest, which changes the bass and samples, it freezes their pitch at whatever they were when you turned on the code.
ANKASA
( originally i enterer HNKASC on an emulator, but the game genie doesn't use the letters H or C. Using ANKASA should work on console too.)
Fixing the code in Fester's quest? You absolute madman.
Love these videos.
I love these videos that dissect the code behind frustrating features. To me it's always fun to learn about why something is the way it is, especially if it's an aspect that is either seemingly broken or otherwise just a plain unfun design decision.
I recently found a completely unused music track inside the sound driver that never got called down at all.
This game was the worst Christmas present you could ever ask for as a kid.
HI. Would you make video about how to disable flashing effect on Nes games? I love retro games but I have seizure problem and old games have heavy usage of flashing so I cannot play them. Sorry for my bad English I am just a kid and im from Laos(tiny country next to Thai) and im learning.
I think they may have buffed the guns a little too much, but it's nice that they even cared enough to address it in the first place all the way back then.
Really good and informative video!
Dude, seriously, what’s your background? This is just awesome!
It was so frustrating to have my projectiles disappear in walls.
Keep up the good work!
I just found your videos.
I believe these are very helpful for those trying to wrap their head around game programming and how some stuff works (this includes me).
Thank you
2:16
Regarding NES trigonometry: NES Game developers can use 1 of 2 ways to create sine-shaped movement.
The first way is to use a pre-calculated sine table. (that's what this game seems to do)
The second way is to use a differential equation -x = d²x/dt² which translates to x = sin(t). In code that's dx = dx - x * F; x = x + dx performed each timestep, with some initial values of x and dx and constant F determining the amplitude and period. IDK the exact math for it, but it's the same as a spring equation and presents an elegant way to create sine curves without pre-calculating a table.
Great video! I played this game in my childhood (in Europe, lol) and remember it as one of those mediocre but fairly fun NES adventures. Never knew the US version was so different...
Thanks for commenting! I regret not asking (in the video) for people to comment if they had played the game back in the day in Europe.
I remember from renting it back then that I had a great time, so no wonder. Another great video and "hang on was I not already subscribed to this channel?" reminder
2:28 It seems power level #2 is like an x-axis sine wave more than a x-axis cycloid: since it doesn't go backwards at any point
Blaster master has a hidden level select that might be fun to poke at. It's also possible to play the overhead worlds with the sidescrolling tank and vice versa. Might be interesting enough for a video?
Also, tweaking things like fall damage, tank entering range, the door entry bug, the grenade pause glitch, and restoring the SPIKE item could be cool :D
Also the pause+jump bug in the european release.
Dude,I love you. I spent so many frustrating hours as a kid playing this game. Like you said, it’s JUST cool/fun enough to keep powering through the difficulty, but WTF?! the boomerang hitting the narrow sewer walls…. I never did beat it. I actually remember writing a letter to Sunsoft when I was maybe 7 to ask about some of this stuff. Haha. I actually thought someone would read it.😆. Decades later, you’ve vindicated me.
Owned this as a kid, and never knew that one color would power down your weapon. Also, never even realized a whip existed. Then again, I never got past that first 3D maze building. Frustrating is definitely an apt description of Fester's Quest.
Whoever decided to implement that enemy health resetting mechanic should get a gold medal for "most evil idea in NES game design"
It's worse in Time Lord. The Western level end of boss has regenerating health as well and attacking it with the shotgun is pointless. But since you're invincible in that game as long as you're attacking, the best way to beat it is to use a turbo controller.
Humn... I would remove the weapon downgrades drops. Maybe downgrade at getting hit...? 🤔
Remove enemy health reset timer, balance damage/enemy health. Alternate the projectile pattern. Would check if it is possible to replace the some drops, so you can vary projectile type against the pattern.
This was one of many games I beat as a kid (us). You walk away with being able to press buttons faster than anyone. Until now, I didn't realize exactly where I picked that skill up.
The first half felt a bit "Oh, I know this well!", and the line "The game is just good enough to keep playing" is probably the best way to describe my childhood or kusoge in general. The second half? That blew me away. I had no idea that regeneration was present. That explains so damn much about why 6-year-old me almost did an inadvertent Uncle Fester cosplay by tearing his hair out.
That one simple byte change to not stop shots on walls would have made pre-teen me enjoy this game so much more. Super simple, but the sewers caused untold frustration.
My dad (born in the 50s) was a huge Adam's family fan. Fester was his favorite character . So when this game came out he had to have it. He spent a week without a turbo controller. The most frustrating game play ever. Was able to convince my mom that we needed a turbo controller and that's when the game got really fun.
I played so much of this game. Really loved it.
Sounds like the shot movement is done like gravity in the Ninja Garden series, where there's an acceleration value applied each frame to a variable velocity.
The source of all of this is that the gun mechanics are basically lifted wholesale from Blaster Master, but the level design and enemies were not. Also in Blaster Master you always have a dedicated and useful sub-weapon to get you through the awkward middle gun phases, while in Fester's Quest it takes a while to get the whip, and when you do its use case is situational at best.
One big difference in the wave pattern here and the one I see in Master Blaster is the variation used in the latter. The wave modulates with each shot so there are not persistent dead zones and it is great.
Thanks!
Thank you!
As you point out in the closing, there probably could have been a couple checkpoints put in, or some sort of path shortening option; something like beating the first boss putting some planks over the broken street to allow faster access to the second part of the map, or other things of that nature... just some QoL to make getting back to where you died easier.
I called the Game Genie hotline back in the day and was told that there were no codes for Fester's Quest, and that was well after its release. Unbelievable.
I guess nobody at Codemasters had done any ROM research for Fester's Quest at the time you called them (assuming that was who answered the Game Genie hotline)
So, who decided red money adds your money but red powerups subtracts your power?
That is weird lol the keys are green colored and the money is red.
They could make the money green, make the keys orange.
The max level gun has a smaller width, thus is able to fit through most of the more cramped tunnels without disappearing. This is why I upgrade the gun to max from the stationary enemies at the start.
Also interesting that Fester's was a combo of Castlevania and Raiden.
You have no idea how frustrating it was being a kid in the early 90s playing this game on a black and white television in the US. I had no idea why my gun would downgrade for no reason.
Ouch
I had the original cartridge and played it on my NES more than 30 years ago. I live in the U.S., and purchased the game here as well. With regards to the permanent, so called secret health upgrade you get by pressing up against a wall in one of the buildings in the early part of the game, it would only increase my character's health by one box for a total of three. My friend had the game and when he did the same thing, he got an increase of two to four boxes. Was there a second revision of the game just for the U.S. region?
Strong Bad would have a very apt description of this game: "You suck just enough to be interesting," which is pretty much what I said when I used to play this game many, many moons ago.
I'm also a bit curious on item randomization/generation. It seems like after you initially power the gun or whip up, the number of blue power ups drops off to almost nothing, so you're constantly running into the issue of accidentally stepping onto a red power-down item and almost never finding a way to get back up to the more powerful weapon again.
What an interesting video about in depth topics! I love it
The X and Y position of a shot based on a time interval is the powerhouse of the Nintendo
Does that mean that it should be just as easy to make a Walk Through Walls game genie code?
Yes in fact there is a walk through wall g.g code listed that I found online. AEUKKGEA
The eu update does remove the terror you felt when a frog came at you in a narrow area.
I litterally cant get enought of your videos !
This game has been a favorite of mine since I was a kid, it's really interesting to get a deeper look into this stuff.
Legitimately wondered what was up with this game. Thanks for the video!
This was the game that my uncle rage quit on when he was a kid back in the early 90's and he broke the door off a NES due to this game by punching the top of it because he kept dying over and over again. My dad also remembers my uncle punching a Gameboy whenever Terminator 2 pissed him off.
Does the whip become pointless in the PAL version then?
Not entirely. Bosses 3 and 4 have shields that block your gun and most of the missiles when you launch a volley of them.
Would love to see Metroid next. Especially how the Zoomers crawl along the walls.
I would love a video on Blaster Master!
I feel reminded of exploiting shot ranges in RTS games, namely the original _Command & Conquer._ For example, if I'm playing NOD and I target an enemy with Artillery (one of the NOD vehicles), if the self-propelled artillery is facing up with respect to the screen, the Artillery will have a slightly longer reach, and thus able to attack GDI units with impunity. The Artillery is beyond the GDI unit's range, and thus not attacked.
There is an invisible grid on the map that various elements align to. When facing up, the gun's muzzle is in a grid space that's adjacent to the grid space its tread is in. This is a flaw in the angle of the perspective the game is being rendered in. If the perspective was entirely a top-down view, this exploit would not exist as the gun's muzzle would instead be in the same grid space as its tread.
A similar exploit exists for infantry units, but is more difficult to employ, due to infantry units keeping to an X formation, and changing their positions based on movement. In the mission involving rescuing prisoners from a GDI prison, I can destroy a GDI Guard Tower with a few Bazooka infantry through micromanaging the X formation of the infantry (in the PC port), keeping them just out of the retaliation reach of the Guard Tower. However, hits may have a shotgun-like effect, in which if one unit in the same formation is close enough to trigger a retaliatory response, units in the same formation may also become casualties.
what's funny is that the place you demonstrate gun shots dissipating on the walls in the sewers is actually a highly recommended place to farm slimes to up your weapon level to 8 so the game isn't so frustrating lol