Great Looking Limit Pushing NES Games (That No One Ever Talks About) 

Good Point! Here they are: 1. Track and Field II 2. Uchuu Keibitai SDF 3. Tetrastar: The fighter 4. Mitsume ga Tooru 5. Elite

Track and Tetra Star Elite: Uchuu Mitsume ga SDF

@@Sharopolis thanks!

@@Sharopolis Just fantastic work. How did you source info for this video, just by playing? :)

@@ALTDOK667 No. What's wrong with you?

I second this. It's great

Yeah it's a great game!

Funny the relation of shatterhand to Mitsume Ga Tooru is Hiroyuki Iwatsuki, he has done a ton of composing and sound effects on these and other great games such as Choujin Sentai Jetman and Pocky and Rocky. His work is unmistakable.

Shatterhand came to mind for me too. It's really a good game. The last boss is hard but not unfair.

Shatterhand's premise spoke to me as someone who loved punching things and getting help from robot helpers. I only ever rented the game however and the difficulty was never something I was able to overcome.

Loved that friggin game!

Or at least PCE

I say the same about Mr. Gimmick.

One of the best games on the NES. The variety involved made it the Wii Sports of its day.

Thanks for the info! I wanted to talk more about the ground effect in the video, but I couldn't work out what was going on well enough to explain it properly. I should have known GameHut would have got there first!

@@Sharopolis He talked about it in the context of a different game. I was just hazarding a guess as to the technique used by TetraStar the Fighter. I could be totally wrong!

Tetrastar is most likely switching *tilesets* on a per scanline basis, not the palette. Otherwise, your explanation is correct in principle (that the effect is basically a pattern of stripes whose appearance is modified on a per-scanline basis). Doing mid-screen palette changes on the NES requires *hideously* precise timing to avoid color artifacts, and even then you could only change a couple colors per scanline at most. Barely any games in the entire NES library do so. On the other hand, using the MMC3 to switch CHR-ROM banks mid screen is relatively quick and trivial, and is something that dozens upon dozens of games do with minimal issue.

The inverse problem -- tiled graphics on PC -- was equally difficult. Earlier PCs typically only had one tile-based graphics mode (mode 0 text) where: * You generally could NOT provide your own tile set * Everything was positioned on whole-tile boundaries (no access to per-pixel positioning or information) Whereas pixel graphics modes: * Significant tradeoffs between pixel resolution and color depth (palette size) * NO tile-based information whatsoever (text could be positioned/rendered in a tile-like manner but the VRAM only stored the output pixels, not the original text) * No scrolling support (i.e. if you wanted to scroll the entire screen you needed to manually update ALL VRAM across the screen area accordingly) A landmark title in this latter category was "Commander Keen" by id (yes, the same guys who later made DOOM) where they figured out some technical tricks to achieve console-quality screen scrolling and sprite rendering.

Damn the NES can barely draw a straight line let alone do it in 3d

Not real vector though. Some very clever bitmap work

Absolutely Gradius 2 impressed the hell out of me as well. Over Horizon -may- be the best looking of the 3...if not necessarily best technology utilization of them...

I love Gradius 2! I nearly put that in but I cut it to keep the running time down. I'm sure I'll feature Recca in a future video at some point.

Yep that game is one I would probably have to say is the most impressive use of the NES. Well Elite probably is for obvious reasons, but the low framerate does make it a slog to play by modern standards, while Recca plays just as good as the top notch shmups on the system.

Looked the game up, it can be a technical marvel or whatever, but I find that it looks ugly and goes too fast for actual enjoyment, but I also like missionary sex, so in the end who gives a fuck ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-nfY79-3AdGY.html

@@FeelingShred I mean, the game caters to hardcore shmup fans who want a challenge, so I enjoy the fast gameplay, but i'd understand why it wouln't appeal to everybody. I don't think it looks ugly, but I believe that the development of the game was rather short, as it was made for the 1992 Summer Carnival event, so further refinments weren't possible. On another note, Zanki Attack mode could actually be the first bulllet hell game ever, since it predates Batsugun by about a year.

Ian Bell rated it as his favourite version and one of his biggest technical acheivements

To be fair that had far more to do with the mapper chips/CPUs publishers added into the cartridges than the base NES hardware.

@@yellowblanka6058 True enough. But accommodating such mapper chips is an intentional part of the design. That's why the video bus is on the cartridge port. And why audio In was present. It's also why the SNES has 16 additional pins on cartridges with expansion chips. Plus it's not a new concept at all. The only reason Pitfall is possible on an Atari 2600 is due to a memory mapper chip that let it use 16k instead of 4k. For that matter, several Atari 2600 games contain a POKEY chip. (the sound chip later used in atari's 8 bit computers and the 5200) which let them have better sound than normal atari games. This concept goes back almost as far as cartridge based games. And it's hardly fair calling a cartridge based system out for this when computers had all kinds of similar stuff going on. From the expansion slots on a PC, to the memory upgrade system on an Amiga. Even just going from a tape drive to a disk drive would let you do much more complicated things. Might not sound like much, but having 130 kilobytes to work with instead of 64 can do a lot. (and you can use multiple floppy disks, so you can get much, much bigger games that way using multiple disks) While expanded capabilities were certainly a thing, the main thing that NES mapper chips do is provide more storage space over time as memory chips got cheaper. This is no different from providing your computer with something like a floppy disk drive later in life. (indeed the first upgrade later in life to the NES hardware's japanese counterpart - the famicom. Was a disk drive - the famicom disk system. And the first mapper chips were simply trying to provide a way to play FDS games using only a cartridge.)

It sure is a beauty!

And it wasn't a bad game, either.

Most NES parallax was implemented via scanline counting (e.g. Wave Man's stage in MM5), but scrolling the background tile assets _themselves_ is a genius approach that yields an almost-perfect parallax layer.

@@Stratelier Animating the background to replicate the effect of parallax was still processer intensive for even the most advanced enhancement chips available at the end of the NES life cycle. That's why the patterns are simple and repetitive.

@@ostiariusalpha Yeah, it's not like the character table had its own scrolling support. It must've been like trying to implement any kind of smooth scrolling on early PC graphics.

@Denny of Den Kat Games Yes, Stratelier already mentioned scanline counting to start with. We're talking about overlapping parallax though, which the NES imitates by animation of background tiles like on Sword Master. You can claim that it's a short command, but it quickly gets more processor intensive as you make the animation longer or the scrolling mult-directional. Sword Master takes it easier on itself by making the animation non-reversible (the screen only scrolls in one direction), and on a single plane.

@Denny of Den Kat Games You seem pretty unfamiliar with how much adding that "single command line" of animation taxes those primitive NES enhancement chips when they're trying to do everything else already. And yes, swapping the animation scrolling direction is an added complexity for the processor to deal with. Have you ever written any NES programs that try to coordinate multi-directional background scrolling with multi-directional tile animations? Pretty clearly you have not.

Thanks for the insight!

Thanks!

Thanks, I tried to make it a deep dive. There's a lot more lesser known NES games I could talk about if people are interested!

Thanks a lot, I wasn't sure if it would work as a visual aid, but I'm glad you think it did!

Well thanks Vinny!

Except it’s not vector graphics at all. It’s very clever

I left Gimmick out because it seems to be so well known now, but it's an amazing game.

Thank you!

Thanks!

Thanks for watching!

Thanks!

Thanks!

Oh yeah! I just found that video, makes the SuperFX look pretty weak!

I need to see that, I've seen 16 bit Doom

Ah yes, that Pi NES cartridge. It's impressive how the maker basically turns Raspberry Pi into an "expansion chip", without any outsourced power input.

What?! Larry man, we need a link like stat! ;)

Doom isn't actually running on the NES, its running on a separate CPU in the cart with the NES being used to output video & sound and input controller inputs.

wow good recommendation, that one was actually worth looking up ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-nfY79-3AdGY.html

Thank you!

Thanks!

Thanks!

Thanks for watching!

Thanks for watching and thanks for subscribing! I've just returned the favour!

Thanks!

Thanks!

😢

I had a lot of trouble too, until I got a NES MAX. I discovered a glitch, on the Hammerthrow, use a 90 degree angle, the graphics will show it properly going straight up, but give you incredible distance, at least it did on mine.

Thanks!

Thanks!

Thanks!

It plays good too!