Sweet Shooter Goodness...

[Kamahl]

Which Nintendo games were so revolutionnary ?

Top-view adventure games before Zelda didn't have the mechanics that zelda introduced, which where changed again for AlttP (removing the unbounded exploration and adding a proper story element). Zelda-like (refering to AlttP style) is pretty much a genre. As is metroid-like. They redefined the genres they are part of. If you look at earlier games in the genre they're just not the same, they are barely recognisable as being the same thing. The same can be said about Super Mario Bros really, yeah there were platformers before... but they weren't really what we associate with "platformers" now, what we see is SMB-like. It changed all expectations for the genre.

The most obvious example is of course Mario Kart.

That's not to say all nintendo games are revolutionary, but it was a big focus for the company. Mario 64 pretty much fixed the collectathon genre (much as I dislike the game, previous collectathons were known to be terrible platformers, 64 showed how to do them properly), Super Smash Bros is also a whole new thing.

[Mega Drive Bowlsey]

During the 8bit era Nintendo was king it's true but in the 16bit era pound for pound the Sega Mega Drive's deep and varied library of games more than matched Nintendo's SNES library. Both consoles had something for everyone, were very evenly matched and had loyal fans which is why the console war between the SNES and Mega Drive in the early 90's was the greatest in video game history. The war inspired a whole generation of both gamers and game programmers and paved the way for the video games industry to be the behemoth it is today. An industry that is now larger than both the movie and music industry in terms of value and cultural significance and all this can be traced back to the glory days of both Sega and Nintendo.

So I say long live the Mega Drive and SNES, the titans of 16bit gaming!

[retrospiel]

My point was more about SMS first party compared to NES 1st party. We got games like Hang-on & Nintendo got Zelda

A better comparison would be Zelda vs Wonderboy/Monsterworld.


- Now that I think about it: You guys didn't get the later Japanese-developed SMS games we got. You missed the Sonics, Asterix, Lucky Dime Caper, Land of Illusion, New Zealand Story, Power Strike II, Master of Darkness, Streets of Rage - some of which are even better than their 16-bit counterparts, especially Taz Mania, Batman Returns or Aladdin. But these games are basically what comes to my mind when I think about the Master System.

But even with the early library there are some real killer games there - like Alex Kidd in Miracle World and the first Wonderboy, both of which are as old as Super Mario 1 (and of pretty much the same quality) but actually look more like Super Mario 3. Then we got Phantasy Star 1 which is a brilliant game and quite revolutionary in itself.

[miked]

Compare the number of games Sega put out on the SMS vs the number of first party nintendo games. Nintendo focused on a few greats, Sega had to go for quantity by sheer need.

In the 16bit era Sega could focus a little more, but they still had way too many teams, and a lot of them did "meh" or downright "shit" games. And yes, Ristar both plays and looks better than Yoshi's Island. Yoshi's Island isn't that great looking, even for a SNES game. And gameplay? Baby mario, enough said.

It seems like your sheer biasness for sega would be the only way you could make this statement and mean it. The art style, graphics, gameplay, & sound (minus baby Mario) on Yoshi's island are OUTSTANDING!!!! The game is so pretty to look at compared to any other game in the 16-bit era. This game is never going to age poorly due to the hand drawn sprite and background. I agree that Ristar is right there with Yoshi's Island, but that would be the only game Sega published that can hang with that super awesome looking & playing masterpiece.

As for the mention of not getting master system games that were released later that were better then their 16bit counterparts; some that were mentioned were not created in house (I believe). And the only answer sega truly had had to the revolutionary gameplay of Zelda would be Wonder boy 3. Which Im fairly certain was not 1st party...but I could be wrong there. Golden ax warrior literally took everything Nintendo did in Zelda and made their one-off version of it. As for PS 1, it is a great game, but I feel Mother trumps it because of the relateablity to the setting & characters. Just my 2 cents.

[Kamahl]

It seems like your sheer biasness for sega would be the only way you could make this statement and mean it.

I think I've been called biased about every freaking console on this site, except the N64 and some other obscure crap. Funny you say that when my top post on this page (#16) is basically glorifying nintendo. Yoshi's Island just isn't that good.

The game is so pretty to look at compared to any other game in the 16-bit era.

It has a rather unique art style, one that I don't care much for. My reaction to it was something along the lines of "Neat, it kinds looks like a kids drawing", not "Wow this is the best looking game ever". Act Raiser 2 looks better. Seiken Densetsu 3 looks better. Star Ocean looks better. Demon's Crest looks better.

And music wise? Nothing special. Songs like Big Boss and Underground are really crappy. This is my favourite track from the game:



Compare to my favourite from Ristar:



Or lets compare the final boss themes:





No contest.

[miked]

Kamahl, I hope you know I mean no insult by inferring you might be very biased. Its hard for me to imagine any gamer wouldn't like the looks of SMW 2. Do you also hate looking at puppies? What are some of your favorite snes games then if u don't like Yoshi's island?

[Barone]

Well, let's not forget about this:

Yoshi's Island was developed by Nintendo EAD and published by Nintendo for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES). According to Miyamoto, who served as a producer, Yoshi's Island was in development for four years, which let the team add "lots of magic tricks". The game cartridge used an extra microchip to support the game's rotation, scaling and other sprite-changing special effects. Yoshi's Island was designed to use the Super FX chip, but when Nintendo stopped supporting the chip, the game became the first to use Argonaut Games's Super FX2 microchip. The chip powered scenes including a drawbridge falling into the foreground, rotation effects like rolling and enlarged rather than reanimated enemies, and a psychedelic effect in a level when Yoshi touches a floating fungus.

And, to be very honest, I don't see anything really special in its graphics. It simply relies on the cheater chip to do pretty much all the background animation and all the special effects.

Ristar has far superior art design IMO (whole new concept art, stage themes differ a lot more, shadow & highlight effects, tons of slade parallax and other line-scrolling effects, stage-unique effects, minimalist animations in the far background, far superior depth contrast, etc) and all tricks are done using stock hardware.

[Barone]

The most obvious example is of course Mario Kart.

I find this recurrent reference quite annoying considering that both these games were released before Super Mario kart:

[Black_Tiger]

I still cannot believe the hype that Yoshi's Island receives to this day. When it came out, I was at my most blinded by media propaganda of how amazing the SNES experience was, but still wasn't impressed by it at the time. People who don't really understand the art style praise it as unparalleled, yet no one gives a shit about Wonder Project J. The closest the SNES got to an epic CD game and the lone killer app it has as far as aesthetics go. Not surprising that it's one of the least-SNES games for the system.

Top-view adventure games before Zelda didn't have the mechanics that zelda introduced, which where changed again for AlttP (removing the unbounded exploration and adding a proper story element). Zelda-like (refering to AlttP style) is pretty much a genre. As is metroid-like. They redefined the genres they are part of. If you look at earlier games in the genre they're just not the same, they are barely recognisable as being the same thing. The same can be said about Super Mario Bros really, yeah there were platformers before... but they weren't really what we associate with "platformers" now, what we see is SMB-like. It changed all expectations for the genre.

The most obvious example is of course Mario Kart.

That's not to say all nintendo games are revolutionary, but it was a big focus for the company. Mario 64 pretty much fixed the collectathon genre (much as I dislike the game, previous collectathons were known to be terrible platformers, 64 showed how to do them properly), Super Smash Bros is also a whole new thing.

Nintendo games (and things in general) which are considered revolutionary are really just evolutionary steps just like so many "revolutionary" and not-so-revolutionary games.

Aside from all the Japanese computer games which inspired Zelda, Metroid and others, the original Zelda game itself is pretty much just AD&D Cloudy Mountain with a larger cart size. You may not get to battle during the overworld map, because of the cart sizes available at the time, but you still make your way across it towards the final dungeon, in a quest to piece together the macguffin which ends the game. You enter dungeons with bosses to obtain items which allow you cross new obstacles. It may not be limited to single-screen gameplay, but that's the aspect which popular opinion says was the primitive part of Zelda.

Super Mario Bros is just a shameless Pac Land clone. Even if it did evolve the future cookie-cutter genre a bit (as most games do), it's still not anywhere near as revolutionary as Pac Land is.

If there are any really original Nintendo games, they're likely ones that most people don't care about.

Right on about sega getting better with their in-house games. My point was more about SMS first party compared to NES 1st party. We got games like Hang-on & Nintendo got Zelda. Then during 16-bit era Nintendo publishes gems like Mario World 1 & 2, Metroid, LTTP, and I believe Earthbound would be considered in-house. All the games sega came up with in house for the genny just fail to compare to the epic-ness. I love the Shinobi series and streets of rage 2, and PS 4; but its hard to back these as better games then Nintendo's.

The fact that you would cherry pick Hang-On vs Zelda to represent how Sega's SMS titles compare to Nintendo's NES titles shows that there's not much point trying to reason with you.

[QuickSciFi]

The fact that you would cherry pick Hang-On vs Zelda to represent how Sega's SMS titles compare to Nintendo's NES titles shows that there's not much point trying to reason with you.

Lol

[The Coop]

I know this thread's going off the rails a bit, but I'll jump in with something about the original topic...

Why isn't there more love for the genny's harder to find shooters like Vapor Trail, Gaiares, and Air Buster? I personally think that Gaiares is freakin awesome, and just might be the greatest on the system. The graphics and gameplay are much better then Truxton; which I feel gets very repetitive. And yet people pay out the ass for Truxton, and somehow rank it above Gaiares!!?? I find Vapor Trail much more entertaining then shooters like Thunder Force 3 because of 2 player action. There in NOTHING on the snes that can touch the greatness that is Air Buster, Gaiares, & Vapor Trail!! Screw Twin Cobra; that game is stupid hard with hardly any fun factor to balance it out!! If you can beat any of the 3 shooters I focused on here, youre truly a skilled gamer.

Vapor Trail is a good game, with rather nice music (even if there are painfully few tunes). But in the shmup category, it's not at the top for me when it comes to Genesis verts. The enemies and stages are pretty standard "enemy military" fare, and outside of the twirling bomb, it doesn't really do anything all that spectacular in the gameplay department. I also find that the game isn't that hard. It's not a bad game per se, as it has good visuals, solid controls, the aforementioned great music, and what have you. But it's missing the spark that gives the creativity or character to push it up to the next level. As such, I enjoy the likes of Elemental Master, M.U.S.H.A., Undead Line and Ganada considerably more, with games like Raiden Trad, Truxton, Verytex, Task Force Harrier EX, Fire Shark, Twin Hawk and Phelios being about even with Vapor Trail IMO.

As for Air Buster, I've got a bit of a soft spot for that game. I actually got to play it regularly in the arcades, so when it showed up one day at an Eletronics Boutique, I was thrilled to grab the only copy they had, and find out that it was a rather faithful port of the game (sans the missing ending). The visuals were clean and big, the music was decent, and the powerup choice was plentiful (even if about half of them aren't really that useful). It was a pretty easy game until you got to the space stage with all the momentum drifting, which made the game feel kind of split in half between the easy beginning, and a tougher ending. But even with that nostalgic soft spot, the likes of Thunder Force IV, Steel Empire, Gley Lancer, Thunder Force III, Eliminate Down and Sol-Deace still surpass it IMO. It's a solid game, but like Vapor Trail, it doesn't have that extra something in it's visual design, audio or gameplay to really make it stand out.

When it comes to Gaiares, I'm kind of split on it. The visuals are quite nice and it can be a good challenge, but the stages drag on at times when there are few or no enemies on the screen for longer stretches. The music is pretty good, but I'm not thrilled with the instrument choices that were used. The gameplay is solid with a neat weapon-stealing mechanic, but about 1/3 to 1/2 of those weapons really aren't anything you're ever going to use. The game feels like the people behind it said, "Let's see how much shit we can cram in here" and then ran off to their development kits. It's a big game with lots of stuff to love, but sometimes it feels a bit too much like a showcase game for the people making to show off a cool idea they had.

Do Air Buster, Gaiares and Vapor Trail deserve more love? Sure. They're all good games that got kind of forgotten about. But I don't feel they're the pick of the Genesis litter.

[Kamahl]

I find this recurrent reference quite annoying considering that both these games were released before Super Mario kart

Yeah neither of which plays like Mario Kart, which is what everyone means when they say "kart racer". Those two play like perfectly regular racing games where you happen to drive karts. But there's no point in having this discussion in Sega-16. It was like trying to explain to people the iPhone would be a massive success when it came out. They just couldn't understand what was special about it (and I bought my first apple product years after the iPhone came out, and never actually bought an iPhone. I don't even like the original mario kart, nor the original zelda for that matter).

Its hard for me to imagine any gamer wouldn't like the looks of SMW 2. Do you also hate looking at puppies?

Are they in a game? If so yes .

What are some of your favorite snes games then if u don't like Yoshi's island?

Man, so many. I have around 50 I still play on a regular basis. This is getting totally off topic, if you want the list send me a PM and I'll send you a PM with it.

[Barone]

Yeah neither of which plays like Mario Kart, which is what everyone means when they say "kart racer". Those two play like perfectly regular racing games where you happen to drive karts. But there's no point in having this discussion in Sega-16. It was like trying to explain to people the iPhone would be a massive success when it came out. They just couldn't understand what was special about it (and I bought my first apple product years after the iPhone came out, and never actually bought an iPhone. I don't even like the original mario kart, nor the original zelda for that matter).

I'm not buying this cheap excuse.
At least you could have come up with a better one other than "there's no point in having this discussion in Sega-16".

A lot of games commonly categorized as "kart racer" play very, very differently from Super Mario kart as well.

Several elements found in Power Drift are really common in most of the kart racers, like the way the grid is set, how the drivers positions are presented, the humor tidbits during the game play and how you can be quickly overtaken by the whole grid after a minor mistake. You can also have a visual notion of the opposite straight line (and some of other parts of the course) unlike most of the racing games at the time and like most of the kart racing games.

Road Riot 4WD has the fundamentals of the combat system you'll find in most of kart racers; and also lots of short jumps and a good dose of oversteering.

IMO to ignore all that and state that Super Mario Kart is the first kart racing game is an awful stretch and it just shows how much people are usually willing to give all credit to Nintendo or how little they know about gaming outside the well known titles.

[Kamahl]

Most of the things we call "revolutionary" are never really new. The iPhone is not magical, no matter how much Steve Jobs liked to say it. The technology was already there, scattered through many different phones. A few missing bits added, a lot of cruft removed, plenty of polish and (most importantly) the right time and place, and you got yourself a revolutionary product. Same applies to the "revolutionary" nintendo games. You guys can mention all those previous games with some of the elements in them all you want, they weren't there yet. Nintendo had a knack for that sort of thing back then.

The revolutionary product is the first one to get it "right in all the right places". It doesn't need to be perfect, it just needs to have the right combination of elements that no one fully put together up to that point. Peanut butter and chocolate and all that. And I'm saying this as someone who'd take Power Drift over the original Mario Kart any day. My tastes do not reflect the general preference.

[Barone]

Most of the things we call "revolutionary" are never really new. The iPhone is not magical, no matter how much Steve Jobs liked to say it. The technology was already there, scattered through many different phones. A few missing bits added, a lot of cruft removed, plenty of polish and (most importantly) the right time and place, and you got yourself a revolutionary product. Same applies to the "revolutionary" nintendo games. You guys can mention all those previous games with some of the elements in them all you want, they weren't there yet. Nintendo had a knack for that sort of thing back then.

The revolutionary product is the first one to get it "right in all the right places". It doesn't need to be perfect, it just needs to have the right combination of elements that no one fully put together up to that point. Peanut butter and chocolate and all that. Peanut butter and chocolate and all that. And I'm saying this as someone who'd take Power Drift over the original Mario Kart any day. My tastes do not reflect the general preference.

None of what you said justify you (or Game Sack or any Nintendo fanboy or the rest of the Internet) saying those game can't be considered "kart racers" and that Super Mario Kart pioneered the genre though.
It really seems that the only "reason" you have to make that claim is that the Nintendo game is the only one allowed to create the genre.

Go back to games like Monaco GP or Continental Circuit. Applying your "logic", we shouldn't be allowed to call them "F1 Racers" because they don't have many of the elements of the most successful games released later on which are called "F1 Racers".
Heck, maybe even the legendary Geoff Crammond's Grand Prix is in danger of not being a F1 racing game anymore if someone come up with a later released Nintendo F1 game which has animated wheel in the cockpit view or something AND better sales numbers.