2:06 Nintendo did *not* purposely design the NES & Famicom to support enhancement chips. Nintendo were taken by surprise when enhancement chips were the future. They thought the way forward was the Famicom Disk System
A quick check on the cartridge pinouts shows that the only obvious expansion pins are nametable/vram control (debatable), audio mixing (famicom only) and expansion port passthru (unused, nes exclusive).
Honestly, I prefer Kirby's Adventure over its GBA remake (though I'd be surprised the GBA couldn't handle the towers). Sure, the remake runs better, but I prefer how the NES graphics look (which I'd guess is part of the reason the game is so big), and I prefer how the NES game used Meta Knight. The GBA version left the ambushes but ditched the times Meta Knight tossed lollipops into levels, making him seem more villainous.
Yeah, I remember Nightmare in Dream Land removed the rotating tower. I never understood why. The GBA could have easily handled it even if they used the strength of the GBA's sprite scaling.
@@joeychipman5352 Yeah... while I like the Meta Knightmare Unlockable, removing him on those moments where he gives Kirby the Lollipops sucked, still, I like both versions, GBA for said unlockable as it was cool to use Meta Knight even if you had to complete the game on a single sitting... just like on the NES with it's Hard Mode (and of course, with the remake of Kirby Super Star they had to do this mode yet again, and it was cool as well... sadly no option for Arena for Meta Knight, it would have been nice), and the NES... well... it was the 1st Kirby game I played and is just a technical achievement for said console.
@@mattb6522 Sprite scaling wouldn't help with the rotating tower. All it would require is changing tiles like the NES did. My uneducated guess is maybe something to do with epilepsy? Moving patterns can trigger seizures
Somehow I knew it was gonna be Metal Slader Glory (note: not Slander). Ever since discovering it on Atarihazure's channel I've been fascinated by it. If you were disappointed by it look again, closely at the graphics, the detail and animation. It's close to a playable anime on NES hardware, and was only surpassed like this year, by Former Dawn from Something Nerdy Studios, with an FPGA-based custom mapper that makes it look like a SNES game.
I was thinking to myself "is it Action 52?" and laughed when that was technically correct, but yeah, it shouldn't count when it's 52 small crappy games.
I always wonder. If they’d scaled it down. Maybe make action 22 or something. Focus on making the games decent. I wonder if they even knew how to make better games?
Don't forget that Metal Slader Glory was a Japanese only release and that visual novels were and still are immensely popular over there. The size of the game and all the graphics combined with the text are quite impressive for an NES game. Just not what some of us might be used to.
1) Adventure Island is more of a proto-runner than a platformer. 2) There is nothing wrong with visual novels. There are great classical masterpieces among them. Considering how much space the graphics take up, I'm glad that a long visual novel has been released for the NES, which honestly uses large images. nothing disappointing. In a sense, this is an achievement.
Kirby's Adventure at least the 3DS version It feels so much like if Nintendo had made a system in between the NES and the SNES That's how much more advanced that game feels versus other NES games. I wonder if you could make an NES style game on an SNES like graphics wise because that'd probably be the closest thing to what Kirby's Adventure feels like.
There's no technical reasons why you couldn't make a snes game with the colour palette limitations of the nes and the processor used in the snes is essentially an upgraded 16-bit version of the one used in the nes. Not entirely so but you can actually use the snes processor in 6502 mode.
I think I read somewhere that people thought the game was large, but it was just the uncompressed file, and that it was actually just an average-sized game.
@@pojr It was put on cartridge of that size but the game wasnt this big, like gameboy games look as if they take a lot of space but most of it is blank on the cartridge. When dumping games from them you get whole rom space
@greatusername1668 that is certainly true...I think the entire size of the prg rom was 384k, however the entire rom space provided was 1MB. When you look at most ROMS under a hex editor you're going to see some 0ed out space as not writing the empty space to the cart will throw off the address space. This is true also in the Kirby cart. So the question is do we go by chip size or actually space where data is written?
@@chrisstone-streetlightinte5629 This is exactly what is happening. thats why most games appear to be on fixed size like 128kb 256kb 512kb and 1mb. Its simply from rom dumps. a lot of space is unused
Awesome, a pojr smile that isn't marred by dental hardware. You look so much better now. Take good care of that smile, dude. Metal Slader: Glory is a genre known today as a Visual Novel - essentially, a choose-your-own-adventure book in digital form. They're actually rather popular today, especially in Japan.
Metal Slader Glory was also ported to the Super Famicom and released in 2000, being the very last game for the console. Seems like they really wanted this game to sell badly.
Yep that one Famicom game was truly a beast there is a Engilsh Translation of the game. Unfortunately the english will cause the cart size to jump up to 1.5MB so putting it into a original cart would be out of the question most likely. As for officially licensed North American games with the largest memory there are two. Kirby which you discussed in the video is the easiest to obtain the other one is the coveted "Nintendo Campus Challenge 1991" both have the same 769KB there are two games that take 641KB D&D Pool of Radiance & Uncharted Waters. There are 24 officially licensed NA games that use the 512KB. For largest game that was on a cart that is not a compilation like Action 52 (regardless of region nor official or unofficial) that title goes to Final Fantasy VII (the demake) it requires the same 2MB sized cart as Action 52 there are 3 other games that are the same size, but I never saw anyone including Chinese cart makers bring them out onto carts. This includes a Chrono Trigger demake, Pokemon Yellow, and The Legend of Zelda꞉ Triforce of the Gods (all are 2MB sized ROMs). Lol those last two would have Nintendo's Ninja Lawyers all over them if they even tried.
This is something I’ve tried finding out multiple times before, but I could never find a satisfying answer like this video. Which I wasn’t even looking for. This was everything I wanted to know. Thank
when i first got into emulation, some 25+ years ago, i was absolutely floored to find that i could download the entire NES library and the ZIP file was soooooooooo smol
This makes a good point about modern home brews. Most don't try to fit in a size of the cart that would have normally been available during the time frame. However, home brews still rule!
The most interesting thing with Metal Slader Glory is that it got a remake of sorts in 2000, on the SNES. It was initially planned for the 64DD (The N64 Disk drive who basically was in devellopement hell, then only got released in Japan), but I guess it got put on SNES for a lesser cost (I don't remember the actual reason tbh, if there was any besides the 64DD having bombed). For reference, 2000 was the year of Majora's Mask and the PS2... Console live cycles can be wild.
As someone who generally enjoyed NES/SNES games that fell into what would normally be PC genres like simulation and point and click adventures, I might have actually liked playing a visual novel like Metal Slader Glory had it gotten as US release.
Some how I could tell from the preview pic for this video that you got your braces off, as you looked different, and I said to myself I wonder if he finally got his braces off? And low and behold you did, congrats, as those things suck, and be sure to wear your retainer 24/7, when not eating of course.
Oh, that's a visual novel. I'm actually kinda not surprised. The sheer amount of high-resolution graphics data needed for a visual novel means that at the time they were incredibly demanding on hardware, especially space-wise. These days your standard visual novel usually doesn't clear 2GB and basically any computer over the past 20 years can run the majority of them, with some exceptions for those that use more than just 2D effects (something like Danganronpa or Steins;Gate, both of which are still far from being considered "demanding" on most hardware).
If both 1mb an 2mb carts were possible, all this makes me wonder if the NES could have been expanded, using only increased sized cartridges, to perform at a level on par with the PC Engine/TurboGrafx
great vid and congrats on being done with braces. Back in the late 80's and 90's, gaming magazines started listing the metric of megabits (not bytes) and NOT kb. SO when the Sega Genesis had a whopping 8 megabit Strider game, people took notice. SNES had SF2 WW which 16 megabits, then Genesis had Streets of Rage 2 which was 16 megabits. Turbografx-16 games usually maxed at 4 megabits, if it was larger, usually went on CD, but PC Engine had a 20 megabit SF2 CE that was thicker hucard. SNES I think peaked at 32 with Chrono Trigger, SSF2 NC and Genesis with SSF2 NC at 40 (not counting modern unofficial releases). Neo Geo marketed their games which much larger memory too, but mostly in megabits.
Mate! If you do truly read every single comment, than thank you for the effort you put into your videos. I stumbled across your content when searching a Mission Cobra review and love your content! Cheers from Australia 🇦🇺
Would you mind doing a show on Wonder Boy, and Adventure Island? I would like to know how they hell they got away with it, and what they were thinking?
Hi pojr, long time subscriber but first time commenter. Just wanted to say I really enjoy how informative and chill your videos are. Thank you for doing what you do ^^
As a kid in the 90's, Kirby's Adventure was awesome. Love the boss music and the bosses like the Sun and Moon battle. In fact I love boss themes , Ninja Gaiden had that theme just before the last boss called masked devil. 4 year old me somehow made it to that boss and when that music started, It tripped me out. A quick way to ruin an Nes game was to have a bad boss theme or none at all. The one boss theme that is the theme to my nightmares is from Sonic Spinball on the Sega Genesis/Megadrive. It has such a dark vibe and I love it. POJR, this could make a good video, not sure if anyone really has touched this topic.
Crazy how the media was able to grow so much in size from its original intention. Like 20 fold. It's kinda sad how with the Switch, so many developers often opt to not even bother trying to fit their games on appropriately sized cartridges and often go for a cart that is too small to actually fit them and then screw the customer over to save a couple of pennies and then have you download the rest. Nintendo said years ago they were gonna roll out 64GB carts but I guess it just never happened. But seeing as you can basically count every cart that used 32GB carts on one hand, I guess they didn't feel the initiative. It's cool to hear how creative develops back in the 80s and 90s had to get, pushing the hardware to fit their needs I'm personally really curious/excited to see that upcoming game Former Dawn. The developers say that the on-board ROM could be up to 4MB in size But even at that size, that's just the on-board chip stuff. The game will apparently be able to stream even more data into its ram ala how the Famicom Disk system did. And they say the actual final game could be as big as 700MB! That's utterly ridiculous for a NES game. But it IS really pulling of some crazy visuals I would never have thought the NES was capable of. I believe they recently launched a Kickstarter for their game. I'm curious to see if it can really deliver on the tall promises tho.
I wonder now what homebrew and Retro styled modern games developed on or near NES hardware could make use of such space. Retro City Rampage originally began as an NES demake of GTA 3 for instance. Must have been massive before being converted to modern platforms.
An issue is that the NES extended ROM was paged. This means only a certain amount of ROM was accessible at a time, maybe 32-48k. You can easily hit a wall with how much extra cartridge ROM storage will affect a game. One crazy thing I have seen for homebrew is using something like a Raspberry Pi inside an NES cart. Metal Slader looks like it would have been better on PC. PCs back then were limited on how fast they could do graphics, but the graphics can have higher fidelity
no more braces~ i hope you're gonna be ok now~ i bet that metal slader glory is very fun and intricate if you can read the language. the artworks alone are very detailed for NES i feel. i think the ROM space makes sense - but i am not knowledgable on the technical stuff the same time, so maybe i am wrong. nice video. thank you.
Thank you! I'll admit, I'm not a big fan of text-based games, but I imagine there are people who like them. There is an English patch I believe, so it might be worth checking out with that.
@@pojr that's fair! i guess what blows me away is how detailed the sprite art is in that game since most common games on the NES are not nearly as high-definition (if you can call it that) thank you for letting me know about the patch. might try and check it out~
You aren't misremembering anything, while the game is 512KB in size, there is a common overdump of the game that is 1MB in size. This overdump repeats the same 512KB twice.
Just skipping over Koei's strategy games. They were the largest Famicom cartridges besides Metal Slader Glory. Most would be over 5 or 6 megabits (that's bits, not bytes,) before Kirby's Adventure came out, which just happened to be the largest NES rom released in the west.
Imagine if HAL wouldn't have whiffed so hard to be owned by Nintendo? It's crazy to think of how powerful they would be today as an independent with the revenue from Pokémon.
5:30 Had AVGN played the Japan version instead of the United States version although the PAL version is more fluent, this game could be decent for him.
For that last game, it seems that the uncreative nature of the game was a huge downfall as well. I have seen footage before, and it's just a generic anime story. I would hardly even call it a game, more of just a story. With that much space, they could have really made a decent game, with more actual gameplay than just selecting answers/actions from a menu. Kirby's Adventure is a good example of that, and with less space. One of the best games on the platform, and one of the top games of that decade, even against the 16, 32, and 64bit consoles to come later. They put a lot of creativity, and gameplay into Kirby's Adventure. It was just sad that it came so late, because it would have been an even bigger hit.
What do you mean Contra doesn't reuse Assets what about the 2 stages. Were you're walking forward from behind The back perspective those are almost identical to each other. So it's very much reuse some of its assets.
I wonder how big the Ninja Gaiden games were considering all of the cut scenes and what not. I use to love the first Ninja Gaiden. I would get to the very end just to die. I never beat it and that still bothers me and ever now and then.
Nice video. As much as the gameplay of a visual novel isn't really that potent, the animation in Metal Slader is just amazing for an NES cart. Your thoughts bring to mind a recent video by Jacob Geller ("The Best Looking Game Ever") which touches a lot upon the idea of major graphical achievements in games often coming at the cost of, well, the gameplay.
