I'm surprised how much meat there is in these games that are otherwise forgettable. That's what makes this channel so exciting for me! RIP Geoff Follin. The brothers had such an incredible musical vision.
Glad you mentioned Tim Follin in Sky Shark because his music is definitely a highlight in Software Creations games. And next time, a licensed game from Sunsoft featuring a 1960s sitcom.
The thing I love about Tim Follin is that despite being the greatest musician in video game history his passion project was to write and direct an FMV murder mystery game, of all things. And he even got Paul Darrow to star in it! What an absolute legend.
@@BenWard29 You forgot to preclude "western" before "musician in video game history", because for all this bluster, and for as common as a truthful take though this is, they still don't hold a candle to any of the likes of Noubou Uematsu, Yoko Shimamura, Yasanori Mitsuda, or Yuzo Koshiro
It's important to remember that the "follin sound" isn't really a result of the follin brothers - Stephen Ruddy deserves credit for the high sound quality with his impressive sound driver. The compositions themselves are excellent, of course, but the awesomeness of the Follin brothers' music was absolutely a team effort, at least in the NES days.
I do think Tim had hard luck working in the UK though. His music is the best thing about so many of the games he worked on. AFAIK the best games he composed for were Solstice and Plok.
@JonathanTowne plok was a joint effort between Tim and his brother, Geoff (rip), whose music people often misattribute to Tim, but yea. All three had pretty rotten luck of the draw when it came to game quality.
Hishouzame/Flying Shark is a landmark title in arcades, refining concepts from Toaplan's earlier game, Tiger Heli. By turning bombs into an abstract resource rather than a physical object and by making powerups incrementally upgrade your main shot, Hishouzame sees vertical shmups maturing into the form that they have more or less maintained for the past 37 years. You can draw a direct line from Hizhouzame to just about any shmup from the '90s, through to modern danmaku games. All we need is a few decades of refinement and a lot more bullets. As for the NES port, it's a bit of a slight game, but its modernity makes it one of the easier shmups on the system to return to, if you dare move past Konami and Capcom.
I had SkyShark as a kid. It kicked my ass. The music restarts when you die. One day, I paused it to go take a leak. When I came back, I thought I had somehow happened across some secret music I had never heard before. Nope. It just has tunes that loop at 2-3 minutes instead of the normal 30-40 seconds of the era. I was gloored by that revelation. Years later, I discovered Tim Follin. I was kinda shocked to find out he did Sky Shark, Treasure Master, Silver Surfer, Solstice, AND frikkin Pictionary! I never enjoyed any of these games, but played them for the music as a child... wild stuff, yo!
What perfect timing for this episode, since Sky Shark was just announced for the Evercade's third (& likely final) Toaplan Arcade cartridge! Yes, they're tossing in an NES port alongside arcade games, since the arcade original was already on the first Toaplan cart, but that's pretty much because there are no other Toaplan arcade games left to release (or, at least, ones that current owner Tatsujin has the rights to, or ones that can be converted for release on other hardware).
The most interesting thing about LJN’s football game is that the “NFL” logo seen in the end zones was stolen from CBS, who had been using it on their NFL broadcasts at the time since 1981. CBS ditched the logo (and their excellent theme song) with Super Bowl XXIV that January and promptly embarked on their own LJN arc with “The Dream Season”, where they aired the NFL, NBA, and MLB championships and proceeded to bungle it all, as giving up NBA TV rights just as the Bulls started winning titles, making a mess of TV coverage of baseball (alienating many fans before the 1994 strike), and helping Fox to legitimize itself by losing NFL TV rights. Yes, I’m going full hyperbole here and saying that LJN’s NFL hastened our country’s decline into what it is now because Atlus stole a logo they probably saw on a reference tape LJN sent their way.
My father and I would pass the controller on Sky Shark, One of the few Nintendo games he would really sit down to play. Now learning that this was developed by English developers, this makes sense. My father was a Commodore 64 guy. But that’s not the only fascinating realization today, no! I’ve made it nearly 38 years without having an idea what that NFL game looks like or plays like.
As a Sharks fan, I thoroughly enjoyed the joke in the segue haha The team wouldn't come to be until 1991. So, before the punchline, I was like, "wait, what's going on here?!" I remember a friend of mine in 5th grade had the NFL cartridge and I would play it before school, but it was impossible without some kind of instruction booklet to tell you what was happening and how to actually play the game. Another fun trivia tidbit is that all the LJN games that get mentioned all had the same composer for the music: Hirohiko Takayama. He's story on how he came to be a game composer is really interesting. He also did music for other non-LJN games that are just as catchy and fun. "Xexyz" is my personal favorite.
When I see the ball moving achingly slowly through the air in NFL.... Moving an object smoothly between arbitrary coordinates is surprisingly involved in 6502 assembly. Remember: the 6502 has no hardware multiply or divide instruction other than bit shifts, which _can_ suffice but it requires a lot of steps, take it from someone who has actually done that. (In college, I wired up a device that could multiply two binary numbers using logic gates alone. I felt like a goddamn genius after doing that, but it was a rats' nest of wires.) Most 8-bit games that have objects firing lots of shots at each other don't actually do arbitrary trajectories. Gradius games actually have a limited number of directions that shots can travel in, which actually subtly improves gameplay. When a shot only has to move an integral number of pixels on the X and Y axes each frame, that can be done with a couple of simple additions, and it frees up a lot of time to handle other shots. But I see the ball moving so slowly in NFL, and it looks like my early pitiful attempts to make objects move smoothly in Commodore 64 BASIC. C64 music ah. The SID chip _can_ be limiting, it only has three voices and four possible waveforms, and digitized sound can only be done with makeshift hacks. But if you know how to best use its features, it's magical.
Though I hadn't seen it in 35 years probably, that Sky Shark cover art brought back memories. Then i thought... wait.. what was that game like though? And then you got to the game and i realised i had no recollection of what the actual game looked like. A good case of box art going harder than the game it was trying to sell.
Thank you again for the deep dive sports game reviews! I appreciate your earnest non-sports game fan perspective going into them. 🙏 I have very atrocious memories of NFL, and your takeaways are spot on. I was the oddball NES football kid who preferred Play Action Football over Tecmo Super Bowl however.
Jeremy, I just wanted to say that even though you aren't a sports game fan (and I don't like American football games either, besides NFL Blitz maybe) I appreciate you putting the same effort into finding out the backstory and explaining the mechanics etc.
keen-eared listeners may notice that follin took a slightly unusual approach for sky shark and limited all his compositions for the game to use only three of the nes's four tonal channels, making it so the constant shooting sound effects don't interrupt any part of the music
He is still in the year 1989 of Nintendo NES game releases... although Nintendo Power Magazine got started in 1988 and by 1989 they had transitioned from a Quarterly format to a monthly format, the fact remains that even Nintendo Power Magazine's editors could not really give all the coverage to all the official NES game releases that year and that the only way this might have been possible is if NPM had started in 1987 instead of 1988 and that the monthly transition was made in 1988... that way the editors would have been able to keep up with and make space for all the coverage for all game releases. Remember that the other gamer magazines like EGM and GamePro were barely coming into being themselves as Nintendo Power Magazine and the success of the NES proved that monthly videogame system magazines were viable and could be taken seriously. Looking at the first year of EGM and their format was a mess while GamePro looked like stuff for kids before they tried to change their style to look better. also meanwhile Sega barely had a quarterly newsletter, Sega of America as a subsidiary branch was an utter mess that Sega headquarters in Japan had to send more money just to reformat so that the subsidiary branch could handle supporting the delayed launch of the Sega MegaDrive erm Genesis... because the mess at SoA also caused the name change which also caused additional delays... otherwise if Sega of America would have had better staff and management, the Sega MegaDrive would have launched here weeks after the Japanese launch in 1988 which would have been super wild and made the console one year older and thus potentially secure a larger fanbase over time which might have affected decisions by Nintendo of America to delay the Super Nintendo into 1991 instead of weeks after the Japanese 1990 launch.
The "little spiky pulses of vibrating sound" are layers of trills written as a workaround to the NES's sound channel limits (namely, the fact that the NES cannot output a chord of four or more pitches).
An arpeggio is basically a chord stretched out into a melody, and can be covered by a single sound channel. A trill, however, is just the rapid alternatiion between two distinct pitches. A layered trill, then, is the rapid alternation between two different chords, and requires multiple instruments (or, in this case, sound channels) to execute properly.
Not long after this, David Wise would show us his musical chops with the soundtrack for Captain Skyhawk in 1990, working for Rare under Milton Bradley. Bizarrely, that game doesn't feature music in gameplay sections. Even more bafflingly, the very best piece of music written for the game, doesn't appear in the game at all... but is still in the code for it.
The C64 was mainly tile based too, I think it had direct drawing modes but most games used the ability to customize the ASCII tiles to build their game worlds.
Back when I was collecting NES games I came across one of those eBay listings where they had a long list of games and you'd choose any three for a set price. I had two games easily picked out but a third game didn't immediate jump out at me. I had never heard of Sky Shark so I did a little research and it seemed to be a decent game. The game looked great and was fun to play. Definitely a nice hidden gem in the NES library.
My neighbor/best friend and I were huge football junkies as kids (he would eventually go on to play for a top 10 college football team). We had spent countless hours playing John Elway's crappy football game because that's all he had. Then I traded with a kid from the neighborhood and got the official NFL football game, which we were sure would be much better with its real licensing, etc. We were back to playing John Elway in a few days.
Tim Follin's NES chip tunes do indeed sound amazing but it makes me wonder what his track record was when the Super Nintendo launched and the Sega MegaDrive Genesis caught on... did he make chip tunes in those systems?
Rock n Roll Racing is one example of post-NES music. According to Mobygames, Tim and Geoff Follin, along with Matthew Cannon worked on the music. Some other sources credit only Tim Follin. Plok is another example of amazing post-NES music, done by Tim and Geoff Follin.
@@Dwedit yeah that soundtrack is a bit disappointing imo... it does try to make a good approximation of certain songs but I was thinking more of some original tunes that did not sound derivative.
Taito would later collaborate with Software Creations for the NES adaptation of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, which also features music by Tim Follin :) Just like with Sky Shark, the music is the best part of that game.
This isn't a criticism of the video, but I could have spent the entire runtime listening to Tim Follin's Skyshark soundtrack and would have enjoyed it all the same.
Most optimized NES game since Strider. Can't wait for the "Behind The Code" Displaced Gamers episode trying to piece together what the hell happened with NFL
As far as I know, the lowest framerate game on the NES is actually Times of Lore, running at a fixed 12FPS. That's even slower than all the Micronics games. Not that it's a bad game or anything, it just happens to have the lowest framerate out of all games as far as I know.
yeah I can't imagine LJN's NFL game being even remotely fit to be compared in the same sentence as tecmo bowl. Sky Shark I did pick up some years ago, interesting playing a Japanese shmup with a euro soundtrack on NES, but there it is. may need to track down a new copy of it I think!
Maybe it's an obvious answer that you have mentioned on a previous video and I missed it. But what is the (awesome) counter for? I thought it was YT subscribers, but the numbers don't add up.
Oh, in the hosting segment? Yeah, it's a clock. It's actually a fake nixie tube clock that uses mini LED displays, but it was a gift, so I can't complain.
I was unfortunate enough as a child to have played Tecmo Bowl at firends' houses a lot and after asking for a Football game for x-mas I got NFL. I didn't understand how it existed when it reminded me of the terrible sports games I had played on Atari.
I am not even much of a football guy, let alone American Football, but revealing the pubs outsourced dev to an RPG company has me dreaming of a Persona game that actually takes place in a football league. Or maybe olympics themed, each character an olympic athlete by day, destroyer of subconscious monsters by night. Alas that Atlus has moved away from such yhings now...
Yeah, but if you want the sequel to a Gridiron Football game worth playing you'll have to wait for the last days of the USSR. Also, wow look at that lazy drawing method that's on display. Every single menu item refreshes the choice instead of it being a static menu with a single sprite. Atlus must have been given a _week_ to develop. Ah, Sky Shark. Competent but pitiful; would have been amazing two years earlier. Which I think is all the better for their effort. I dunno, I feel like Tyrian was one of the first vertical shooters worth _playing._ At least the persistent explosion graphics are...neat?
God I hate football so much. Just a bunch of meat heads smashing into each other. One of those sports, along with the UFC that makes me think of Rome before they fell, using the Coliseum and blood sports to distract the citizens from the problems that would lead to it's inevitable collapse.
I'm surprised how much meat there is in these games that are otherwise forgettable. That's what makes this channel so exciting for me!
RIP Geoff Follin. The brothers had such an incredible musical vision.
Glad you mentioned Tim Follin in Sky Shark because his music is definitely a highlight in Software Creations games. And next time, a licensed game from Sunsoft featuring a 1960s sitcom.
The thing I love about Tim Follin is that despite being the greatest musician in video game history his passion project was to write and direct an FMV murder mystery game, of all things. And he even got Paul Darrow to star in it! What an absolute legend.
@@BenWard29 You forgot to preclude "western" before "musician in video game history", because for all this bluster, and for as common as a truthful take though this is, they still don't hold a candle to any of the likes of Noubou Uematsu, Yoko Shimamura, Yasanori Mitsuda, or Yuzo Koshiro
I do NOT complain pedantically, I complain poignantly and rigorously.
That's exactly what a pedant would say
It's important to remember that the "follin sound" isn't really a result of the follin brothers - Stephen Ruddy deserves credit for the high sound quality with his impressive sound driver. The compositions themselves are excellent, of course, but the awesomeness of the Follin brothers' music was absolutely a team effort, at least in the NES days.
I do think Tim had hard luck working in the UK though. His music is the best thing about so many of the games he worked on. AFAIK the best games he composed for were Solstice and Plok.
@JonathanTowne plok was a joint effort between Tim and his brother, Geoff (rip), whose music people often misattribute to Tim, but yea. All three had pretty rotten luck of the draw when it came to game quality.
X-Men has no credits because everyone involved would be listed as "Alan Smithee"
Didn't he play Nightcrawler in one of the movies?
Uncanny X-men has the distinction of making Athena look good.
@@JeremyParishboooooooo! *Throws popcorn*
Hishouzame/Flying Shark is a landmark title in arcades, refining concepts from Toaplan's earlier game, Tiger Heli. By turning bombs into an abstract resource rather than a physical object and by making powerups incrementally upgrade your main shot, Hishouzame sees vertical shmups maturing into the form that they have more or less maintained for the past 37 years. You can draw a direct line from Hizhouzame to just about any shmup from the '90s, through to modern danmaku games. All we need is a few decades of refinement and a lot more bullets.
As for the NES port, it's a bit of a slight game, but its modernity makes it one of the easier shmups on the system to return to, if you dare move past Konami and Capcom.
Yeah I really thought there would be more to say about Flying Shark's place in Toaplan's history.
Well now you have a chance to make a video about it yourself. Be the change you want to see in the world.
I had SkyShark as a kid. It kicked my ass. The music restarts when you die. One day, I paused it to go take a leak. When I came back, I thought I had somehow happened across some secret music I had never heard before. Nope. It just has tunes that loop at 2-3 minutes instead of the normal 30-40 seconds of the era. I was gloored by that revelation. Years later, I discovered Tim Follin. I was kinda shocked to find out he did Sky Shark, Treasure Master, Silver Surfer, Solstice, AND frikkin Pictionary! I never enjoyed any of these games, but played them for the music as a child... wild stuff, yo!
What perfect timing for this episode, since Sky Shark was just announced for the Evercade's third (& likely final) Toaplan Arcade cartridge! Yes, they're tossing in an NES port alongside arcade games, since the arcade original was already on the first Toaplan cart, but that's pretty much because there are no other Toaplan arcade games left to release (or, at least, ones that current owner Tatsujin has the rights to, or ones that can be converted for release on other hardware).
The most interesting thing about LJN’s football game is that the “NFL” logo seen in the end zones was stolen from CBS, who had been using it on their NFL broadcasts at the time since 1981. CBS ditched the logo (and their excellent theme song) with Super Bowl XXIV that January and promptly embarked on their own LJN arc with “The Dream Season”, where they aired the NFL, NBA, and MLB championships and proceeded to bungle it all, as giving up NBA TV rights just as the Bulls started winning titles, making a mess of TV coverage of baseball (alienating many fans before the 1994 strike), and helping Fox to legitimize itself by losing NFL TV rights.
Yes, I’m going full hyperbole here and saying that LJN’s NFL hastened our country’s decline into what it is now because Atlus stole a logo they probably saw on a reference tape LJN sent their way.
Jeremy......
Really enjoy what you do
Nothing else to add
My father and I would pass the controller on Sky Shark, One of the few Nintendo games he would really sit down to play. Now learning that this was developed by English developers, this makes sense. My father was a Commodore 64 guy.
But that’s not the only fascinating realization today, no! I’ve made it nearly 38 years without having an idea what that NFL game looks like or plays like.
I'm going to be sad when you stop releasing these episodes. Thankfully gaming is a lifelong passion of yours
I'm afraid we've all gotta die someday, tho
Nothing good lasts forever @@JeremyParish
@@JeremyParish I'll be here until the end
Then he can continue with snes works
@@JeremyParish He's back! In P.O.G. form.
The aircraft in the box-art for SkyShark isn’t a P-51
It is a P-40 Warhawk, the USAAF’s predecessor to the P-51
As a Sharks fan, I thoroughly enjoyed the joke in the segue haha The team wouldn't come to be until 1991. So, before the punchline, I was like, "wait, what's going on here?!" I remember a friend of mine in 5th grade had the NFL cartridge and I would play it before school, but it was impossible without some kind of instruction booklet to tell you what was happening and how to actually play the game. Another fun trivia tidbit is that all the LJN games that get mentioned all had the same composer for the music: Hirohiko Takayama. He's story on how he came to be a game composer is really interesting. He also did music for other non-LJN games that are just as catchy and fun. "Xexyz" is my personal favorite.
When I see the ball moving achingly slowly through the air in NFL....
Moving an object smoothly between arbitrary coordinates is surprisingly involved in 6502 assembly. Remember: the 6502 has no hardware multiply or divide instruction other than bit shifts, which _can_ suffice but it requires a lot of steps, take it from someone who has actually done that. (In college, I wired up a device that could multiply two binary numbers using logic gates alone. I felt like a goddamn genius after doing that, but it was a rats' nest of wires.)
Most 8-bit games that have objects firing lots of shots at each other don't actually do arbitrary trajectories. Gradius games actually have a limited number of directions that shots can travel in, which actually subtly improves gameplay. When a shot only has to move an integral number of pixels on the X and Y axes each frame, that can be done with a couple of simple additions, and it frees up a lot of time to handle other shots. But I see the ball moving so slowly in NFL, and it looks like my early pitiful attempts to make objects move smoothly in Commodore 64 BASIC.
C64 music ah. The SID chip _can_ be limiting, it only has three voices and four possible waveforms, and digitized sound can only be done with makeshift hacks. But if you know how to best use its features, it's magical.
12:25 So close to breaking (again) the days without mentioning Xevious. Nicely dodged. What is the countdown about in the lower left?
That's the time. 15:05:xx.
Jeremy loves any excuse to include Slalom and its Flanders-esc graphics in a video.
...*nothing at all*...
Stupid sexy Flanders
stupid sexy slalom
really had to dig into the vaults for some of your insults on this episode. great stuff
Don't underestimate me... dated insults are second nature.
It's funny how much of Sky Shark they reused for Silver Surfer
That's pretty on-brand. Software Creations: Our Games Hate You, But Dig Those Sweet Tunes
@@JeremyParish Really bringing the ethos of British microcomputer game design to the NES!
@@RabbitEarsCh oh that reminds me, have you seen what follin did to the zx spectrum beeper?
Though I hadn't seen it in 35 years probably, that Sky Shark cover art brought back memories. Then i thought... wait.. what was that game like though? And then you got to the game and i realised i had no recollection of what the actual game looked like. A good case of box art going harder than the game it was trying to sell.
Thank you again for the deep dive sports game reviews! I appreciate your earnest non-sports game fan perspective going into them. 🙏
I have very atrocious memories of NFL, and your takeaways are spot on. I was the oddball NES football kid who preferred Play Action Football over Tecmo Super Bowl however.
Xevious was not mentioned, but I think it might have been beamed into our eyes with the speed of a blipvert.
Atlus can make some slick looking menus, I'll give them that.
Jeremy, I just wanted to say that even though you aren't a sports game fan (and I don't like American football games either, besides NFL Blitz maybe) I appreciate you putting the same effort into finding out the backstory and explaining the mechanics etc.
keen-eared listeners may notice that follin took a slightly unusual approach for sky shark and limited all his compositions for the game to use only three of the nes's four tonal channels, making it so the constant shooting sound effects don't interrupt any part of the music
Nintendo Power didn't even give these two the light of day?
He is still in the year 1989 of Nintendo NES game releases... although Nintendo Power Magazine got started in 1988 and by 1989 they had transitioned from a Quarterly format to a monthly format, the fact remains that even Nintendo Power Magazine's editors could not really give all the coverage to all the official NES game releases that year and that the only way this might have been possible is if NPM had started in 1987 instead of 1988 and that the monthly transition was made in 1988... that way the editors would have been able to keep up with and make space for all the coverage for all game releases.
Remember that the other gamer magazines like EGM and GamePro were barely coming into being themselves as Nintendo Power Magazine and the success of the NES proved that monthly videogame system magazines were viable and could be taken seriously. Looking at the first year of EGM and their format was a mess while GamePro looked like stuff for kids before they tried to change their style to look better.
also meanwhile Sega barely had a quarterly newsletter, Sega of America as a subsidiary branch was an utter mess that Sega headquarters in Japan had to send more money just to reformat so that the subsidiary branch could handle supporting the delayed launch of the Sega MegaDrive erm Genesis... because the mess at SoA also caused the name change which also caused additional delays... otherwise if Sega of America would have had better staff and management, the Sega MegaDrive would have launched here weeks after the Japanese launch in 1988 which would have been super wild and made the console one year older and thus potentially secure a larger fanbase over time which might have affected decisions by Nintendo of America to delay the Super Nintendo into 1991 instead of weeks after the Japanese 1990 launch.
And what did Nintendo Power say?
Pretty sure it was "Meh."
Source: Used to be subscribed to Nintendo Power.
Looks like LJN were a few yards short of a first down with NFL...
Whoa! Gentle Giant? Awesome!!!!
I like to throw in little treats sometimes for the people who really GET it
The "little spiky pulses of vibrating sound" are layers of trills written as a workaround to the NES's sound channel limits (namely, the fact that the NES cannot output a chord of four or more pitches).
Known as "Arpeggio" is that right?
An arpeggio is basically a chord stretched out into a melody, and can be covered by a single sound channel.
A trill, however, is just the rapid alternatiion between two distinct pitches.
A layered trill, then, is the rapid alternation between two different chords, and requires multiple instruments (or, in this case, sound channels) to execute properly.
@@x14113 I'm not good with names
Not long after this, David Wise would show us his musical chops with the soundtrack for Captain Skyhawk in 1990, working for Rare under Milton Bradley. Bizarrely, that game doesn't feature music in gameplay sections. Even more bafflingly, the very best piece of music written for the game, doesn't appear in the game at all... but is still in the code for it.
Jets vs. Sharks will have to wait for 1991 and 16-bit platforms.
:snaps fingers rhythmically:
I've heard those audio flourishes referred to as arpeggios, cycling between notes on a chord. I associate them with Euro trashware 😂
@@BenWard29 And pirated PC software
The C64 was mainly tile based too, I think it had direct drawing modes but most games used the ability to customize the ASCII tiles to build their game worlds.
Back when I was collecting NES games I came across one of those eBay listings where they had a long list of games and you'd choose any three for a set price. I had two games easily picked out but a third game didn't immediate jump out at me. I had never heard of Sky Shark so I did a little research and it seemed to be a decent game. The game looked great and was fun to play. Definitely a nice hidden gem in the NES library.
My neighbor/best friend and I were huge football junkies as kids (he would eventually go on to play for a top 10 college football team). We had spent countless hours playing John Elway's crappy football game because that's all he had.
Then I traded with a kid from the neighborhood and got the official NFL football game, which we were sure would be much better with its real licensing, etc.
We were back to playing John Elway in a few days.
At last, Tim Follin mentions begin! Solstice and Solitaire, here we come!
Out of curiosity, do we know for certain that Atlus did NFL themselves? IIRC they outsourced at least one of their LJN games.
It uses Atlus' sound driver according to TCRF, so Atlus had some direct development role.
@@JeremyParish Fair enough, thanks.
Tim Follin's NES chip tunes do indeed sound amazing but it makes me wonder what his track record was when the Super Nintendo launched and the Sega MegaDrive Genesis caught on... did he make chip tunes in those systems?
Rock n Roll Racing is one example of post-NES music. According to Mobygames, Tim and Geoff Follin, along with Matthew Cannon worked on the music. Some other sources credit only Tim Follin.
Plok is another example of amazing post-NES music, done by Tim and Geoff Follin.
@@Dwedit yeah that soundtrack is a bit disappointing imo... it does try to make a good approximation of certain songs but I was thinking more of some original tunes that did not sound derivative.
Sucked Chunks is my new metal band’s name.
Tim Follin's music on the C64 was awesome.
Taito would later collaborate with Software Creations for the NES adaptation of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, which also features music by Tim Follin :) Just like with Sky Shark, the music is the best part of that game.
My favorite part of Sky Shark is dying because of projectiles that were clearly multiple planes away from me.
Preposterous hitboxes are just part of the challenge!
entirely an invention of that port. highly recommend playing the arcade original! it's a great game!
Turning American Football into an RPG, truly a game ahead of its time.
Uncle Buck is awesome. RIP John Candy such a funny guy.
Amazon affiliate link to that cool clock. Easiest money you ever made. I must have it.
Your Golgo shelf closely matches mine
I.lack.the leed publishing volumes but i do.have the comic book.voluemes and the Encyclopdia of G
I’ve been playing LJN games - sometimes regrettably - for almost 40 years. And it’s never occurred to me to wonder what LJN stands for.
Have you seen their output? They don’t stand for anything! Okay, maybe not, but they’ll always be the Laughing Joking Numbnuts to me.
It's actually the founder's initials spelled backwards, in fact they were originally a toy company prior to the NES craze.
Let's Just Not
This isn't a criticism of the video, but I could have spent the entire runtime listening to Tim Follin's Skyshark soundtrack and would have enjoyed it all the same.
I kept trying to scroll the page up during the intro because of how the camera was angled >.>
Never played NFL. Does it actually run *that* slowly? Good lord!
Yes, yes it does. Lol
Most optimized NES game since Strider. Can't wait for the "Behind The Code" Displaced Gamers episode trying to piece together what the hell happened with NFL
As far as I know, the lowest framerate game on the NES is actually Times of Lore, running at a fixed 12FPS. That's even slower than all the Micronics games. Not that it's a bad game or anything, it just happens to have the lowest framerate out of all games as far as I know.
yeah I can't imagine LJN's NFL game being even remotely fit to be compared in the same sentence as tecmo bowl. Sky Shark I did pick up some years ago, interesting playing a Japanese shmup with a euro soundtrack on NES, but there it is. may need to track down a new copy of it I think!
As much as I disliked the LJN X-Men game, that soundtrack had some interesting tracks on it. I can still remember the title screen tune to this day.
I kinda like Sky Shark's pew pew noise.
What's the timer in the bottom left corner for during the live action segments?
Neo Tokyo is about to E-X-P-L-O-D-E
"Samizdat teams." Hahahahaha.
I have to be honest, I've always hated that wavy sound, but it kind of works in Sky Shark.
Always fun to see the AVGN nemesis themselves, LJN
nice nixie tube clock!
Alas... in the words of Ambassador Vreenak, "It's a faaaaake!"
Maybe it's an obvious answer that you have mentioned on a previous video and I missed it. But what is the (awesome) counter for? I thought it was YT subscribers, but the numbers don't add up.
Counter?
@@JeremyParish I am guessing he means sitting on your desk, bottom left as the viewer looks at you?
Pretty sure that's a 24-hour clock, made out of Nixie tubes.
@@jasonblalock4429 You are right! Went back and noticed that it resets to 00 after 59 so it's a clock.
Oh, in the hosting segment? Yeah, it's a clock. It's actually a fake nixie tube clock that uses mini LED displays, but it was a gift, so I can't complain.
Go team! Go sports!
In this economy????
I was unfortunate enough as a child to have played Tecmo Bowl at firends' houses a lot and after asking for a Football game for x-mas I got NFL. I didn't understand how it existed when it reminded me of the terrible sports games I had played on Atari.
I believe Nintendo Power accurately bashed NFL (with kid gloves) when comparing it to Tecmo Bowl.
What X-Man is that supposed to be at 6:59?
Iceman.
@@ginormousaurus8394 from Top Gun?
Glad you're not a football fan, either!
Unfortunately this week's games are kind of dull, but I appreciate the Gentle Giant cameo.
Yeah!
I guess NIntendo power had nothing to say about these games.
Handegg!
But what did Nintendo Power say?
No sense in me covering non-coverage at this point. We’ve seen it enough that I trust everyone to make the connection on their own.
I am not even much of a football guy, let alone American Football, but revealing the pubs outsourced dev to an RPG company has me dreaming of a Persona game that actually takes place in a football league. Or maybe olympics themed, each character an olympic athlete by day, destroyer of subconscious monsters by night. Alas that Atlus has moved away from such yhings now...
Music aside, I do _not_ like Sky Shark. It's far too difficult while offering nothing redeeming about it over other shooters on NES.
Talk about two games on the opposite end of the quality spectrum.
And so the evil reign of the laughin', jokin' numbnuts reaches its darkest chapter. But lo, in a far off land, a legend sings for the first time.
Yeah, but if you want the sequel to a Gridiron Football game worth playing you'll have to wait for the last days of the USSR.
Also, wow look at that lazy drawing method that's on display. Every single menu item refreshes the choice instead of it being a static menu with a single sprite. Atlus must have been given a _week_ to develop.
Ah, Sky Shark. Competent but pitiful; would have been amazing two years earlier. Which I think is all the better for their effort. I dunno, I feel like Tyrian was one of the first vertical shooters worth _playing._ At least the persistent explosion graphics are...neat?
Tyrian isn't even a good game.
“Even to my idiot eyes”. Dude, I’m using that.
God I hate football so much. Just a bunch of meat heads smashing into each other. One of those sports, along with the UFC that makes me think of Rome before they fell, using the Coliseum and blood sports to distract the citizens from the problems that would lead to it's inevitable collapse.
This is the most pretentious hipster thing I've ever read, my god. I just envisioned it in the Simpsons Comic Book Guy voice entirely.
NFL by ljn sucks.
I had a helicopter game that looked alot like that sky shark game , but I can't remember it's name , been driving me nuts for years