The Frustrating Weapons and TWO Versions of Fester's Quest - Behind the Code
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 27 ก.ย. 2024
- Examination of the questionable weapons design and the second release of Fester's Quest
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#NES #BUGS #CODE
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.
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
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.
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!
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
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.
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
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.
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!
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.
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.
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
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?
Displaced Gamers is honestly just such a good channel with quality content. Long live this channel. So underrated.
Thank you, Brian!
Blaster Master would be awesome. That's still one of my favorite NES games from childhood.
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
Thank you for acknowledging the Blaster Master dna in this game. Very few reviewers ever do that.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!!!
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 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.
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
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.
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!
Dude, seriously, what’s your background? This is just awesome!
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.
The power up/down system was even worse than people now realize. At the time of the NES, some of us still only had a black and white television.
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.
This must’ve been one of those “rental hard”games back in the day
One thing this game needed fixed was the RIDICULOUS ammount of damage bosses take!
From the *AVGN* script:
*Fester Nerd:* "That's the last guy. It's over."
*Wednesday Nerd:* "That's just the first boss."
*Fester Nerd:* "It's the last guy!"
*Gomez Nerd:* "It's not."
*Fester Nerd:* "I know. But let's just say that it is, because that's all I can take."
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 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!
Fester's Quest needs a checkpoint just before the final boss, because if you die at the final boss, you have to go all the way back to the mothership and navigate the entirety of the mothership without taking any damage for another shot at defeating the final boss. The game has no checkpoints at all, so even with the tweaks made in the European version, it's still hard as balls.
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
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
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.)
Okay, the life Regen explains SO much that confused me. I thought I kept running into immortal frogs when playing this.
I played so much of this game. Really loved it.
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.
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?
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.
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
So this is where Miyazaki got inspired for "weapons that don't work in tight spaces", used extensively in Dark Souls.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It was so frustrating to have my projectiles disappear in walls.
Keep up the good work!
Fixing the code in Fester's quest? You absolute madman.
Love these videos.
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)
Great vídeo and great soundtrack.
The modified gun codes make defeating certain enemies like the langoliers a lot more manageable.
I see a new behind the code, I click.
Gimmie dat sweet sweet 8-Bit ASM!
Great to finally see what's going on behind the scenes to make enemies harder/impossible to kill if you attack too slowly!
I've never finished this game, and more than anything, I blame its linear structure and/or lack of checkpoints. Sunsoft should've put in shortcuts, like having a bridge appear over the first chasm (east and north from the starting point) once you've reached the other side. As-is, there's little difference between continuing after death vs. just resetting the game.
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.
Love the math lesson you gave us there there's no way the NES and pull off that kind of trigonometry and sines cosigns and tangents lol... Fester sure is a smart guy but I still see Christopher Lloyd every time I think of him
Legitimately wondered what was up with this game. Thanks for the video!
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.
I recently found a completely unused music track inside the sound driver that never got called down at all.
What an interesting video about in depth topics! I love it
Loved this one, sucks you don't get as many viewers as you deserve.
I have a soft spot for the jank of this game, but frustrating as heck it was to beat. The shot patterns often made upgrades feel like downgrades due to the amount of narrow passages and high enemy respawn rates
I wound up just going to level 8 gun before going through any of the sewers
I'm American and I loved this game as a kid. Yeah the weapon patterns are a bit unfair and make the game harder than it should be but games in general were pretty hard back then so I never thought anything about it. It was just fun to play. Fester's Quest always reminded me of the top down parts of Blaster Master both in style and difficulty so it makes sense that it could be the same engine.
For me personally, I never liked the weapon patterns at all. The idea of upgrading and downgrading weapons only makes sense if the shot patterns were more beneficial in certain situations. Granted bullets not hitting walls is beneficial, but not when you lose a lot of damage output. Also that damage timer never should've been implemented. I didn't even realize it existed. Definitely explains why I had such a hard time with the splitting slimes and frogs.
I suspect the strange shot patters hitting walls issue was done deliberately in order to encourage gaining the whip and using it in those sections.
I remember sitting with a game genie not having a single clue what I was doing, no Internet and not much guidance... Now here I am decades later with an understanding of asm watching a guy patch games from my youth, which were dark magic back then, for fun.
If you're like me, and if you just sit and think about what we're doing here... Sitting watching this with understanding, it kinda blows hour mind.
Edit: had I had the Internet back then, I wouldn't have been a nerd... I'd have been a turbo nerd.
Despite the games patterns, I still love Fester's Quest. Challenging, but the amazing tracks keep me going. Wish I still had my copy.
In case you wanted to know YES you can nest Game Genies. I repeat YES YOU CAN NEST GAME GENIES. It's a little weird for the second one, as it will be slightly angled due to the first being clicked down into position inside the NES. I did this for extra codes in Final Fantasy, as I found some seriously fun codes for that game that would start you in a Shop in the ocean and required you to add additional codes just to give you enough HP to survive the ocean enemies.
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.
OF all the many games I rented as a youth, for some reason I distinctly remember the night that I selected Fester's Quest from the pile of NES titles in this tiny little video store I sometimes went to, and I have no idea why that is. I also distinctly remember the day I rented Eye of the Beholder for SNES from Blockbuster. The mind seemingly picks and chooses what moments to remember and forgets the bulk of the rest.
Is it *truly* forgotten though? How come years later you can have the exact same dream, or a dream taking place in the same universe with continuity, even if you would have never been able to remember it? Surely this stuff we think is forgotten, is actually stored somewhere.
@@videotape2959 Well everything we ever see or hear creates a memory somewhere in there, even if it's never actually referenced again. Those of us who can be hypnotized could probably recall a lot of things we didn't realize we remember. What I mean was it's interesting how the mind seems to keep certain seemingly insignificant memories closer to the front of the memory line, available for fast and sometimes often reference, while others are packed away deep in the dusty basement of memory central. Picking up Fester's Quest off of that shelf holds no real significance to me at all, yet I remember it crystal clear. Maybe it was a moment of happiness that my mother took me to the video store on the way home when I asked to stop and my brain just likes to hold onto what few little blips of joy I've actually had in the past, as life continues to get ever darker and less joyful the older I get.
I uploaded a go-through of this game for some reason. Don't ask me why. Invisibility Potions are hilariously overpowered against bosses.
You said that maybe Blaster Master code was used, those frogs certainly look like the boss frog in Blaster Master.
Those black ball shots, they really hurt your eyes.
All you had to do was spend a long time getting your gun powered up to 8 and then proceed past the opening area. It was better than going into that sewer with anything lower. And of course, once your turbo button was worn down enough, you could just kinda cram it under the gray controller casing and just use the joystick to move. The more siblings someone had, the more those big red buttons were worn down. Europe people had it cake walk with the gun power upgrade.
I'd say that the US version is 'normal difficulty' and Europeans got 'easy difficulty' modes. A nice hack would allow choosing difficulty level on the title screen.
The thing is... it seems like originally, the developpers wanted something like :
- the player use the shot to kill ennemies
- the player use the whip to kill ennemies in cramped places because it's the only weapon that can go through wall.
What makes that vision not understandable is the fact that the shot seems BETTER underlevelled (because you can kill ennemies in cramped places with it ) than when it has those weird shoot pattern. If the game didn't had that, i think this idea would be better conveyed.
If i was on the developpement team i would remove the weird pattern entirely and add more levels of shoot depending of graphics and speed... Maybe we can have spread shot, additional shot or stuff like that though, as long as you can still shoot in front of you.
Impossible to do that in Game Genie of course... So yeah, let's not care about what the developpers wanted and let's let the whip be not that useful.
You can just walk back and forth on that first street until you upgrade the gun all the way. Barries respawn.
Reminds me of AVGN. I remember how mad he was about the slimes in the sewers. It just looks broken.
From memory, I liked playing Festers Quest back then (EU). The US version would have hurt my brain back then and still would. Quite impressive how much more easy we EU player had it back then.
I am really happy they made those changes before releasing it in Europe. My goodness.
I had this game as a kid, I REALLY wanted it to be like the top-down segments in Blaster master but just wasn't as fun.
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.
Honestly the main things I think need changing are the shot pattern, shot hitbox, and making the whip not grab weapon downgrades (maybe making also not grab weapon upgrades). Letting the bullets go through walls is definitely an acceptable tweak on the level actually feasible for a Game Genie but I'd kinda prefer for walls to still block bullets.
I haven’t thought about this game in years but I remember playing it as a kid and always getting super frustrated by… everything. But particularly the shot patterns on the gun that mostly fired around enemies.
It’s nice to finally have an explanation for WHY the game worked that way. And now I want to track down the European ROM and see if I can finally beat the game 😂
I would have had the walls stop shots fired on the axis Fester is facing, but not the the perpendicular axis. This seems like it would be a fair compromise that would eliminate a ton of frustration while still keeping the "spirit" of the gun's limitation in tact. Not sure how hard that would be to code, it might be too complicated given the limited space NES games tend to work with.
Eyyy! Very nice! This game definitely has a lot of fame
I actually played the game when it was released, and completed it. To me, it was just another NES game. I just accepted the games as they were, and played them for the challenge.
One suggestion is to point out the UNGODLY amount of damage bosses took! I had to hit that ugly dinosaur roughly 40-50 times to win!
This game scarred me, lol. It _was_ _just_ good enough to keep playing. I usually just gave up because of the aforementioned issues, only to come back for more punishment. _Thank you, sir, may I have another!_
Batman on gameboy has the same kind of trigonometry looking wave patterns like the guns various levels here, for one of its guns.
I wonder if the shot size was smaller so that you could shoot the wavy shots in the sewer a little more easily. Making them just pass through walls seems like a better idea.
1:11 Nope! The third whip in Castlevania doesn't have that arrowhead at the end! Tooootally different, man!
Completely!