Category: Emulation

Emulation and games that I play on emulators

Mega Man X

Completed Mega Man X.
What surprised me after Mega Man X4 is that although you need to figth the bosses again, it is not a gauntlet. Instead, they are spread organically through multiple stages, and you also have unique bosses to figth along the way. The spider boss is difficult, but I’d say fair, after you understand it’s gimmick: it can only get to you if it has a path on the “ladder”. The “sleepy face” boss that throws its eyes at you is less fun, as it has this one-hit-kill spikes mechanic, and the “nose” has a bounce mechanic.
And by “TRex” boss I ran out of most of my ammo, so I was just throwing shit at it.
Sigma fight is three stages, but at least you start it with full health and energy tanks. First phase is the dog, which is easy. Second phase is Sigma jumping on walls, and it’s tiring, because you need to be very precise, and constantly walljump. Third phase is the wolf form, which is cool, but also random, akin to last form from Mega Man X4. Sometimes you just get unlucky and will be blasted by the plasma balls over and over, which are extremely hard to dodge.

I’ve heard some complain that this game is too easy.

In my opinion, it’s reasonably hard. You still need to know what you’re doing and be very intentional about it, and some jumps are quite ridiculous, but it’s doable even with someone bad reflexes as I am.

Tags Mega Man X

Emulation Nintendo

Mega Man X

Strangely, the midboss of the Mandril stage, Thunder Slimer, gave me much more trouble that Mandril itself. It’s hard to avoid due to its sticky slime, and still kills X in a couple of hits.

Unlike previous three bosses, Armadilo is no pushover. It’s a “bouncy” boss, but unlike second phase of Sigma in Mega Man X4, I couldn’t find a clear pattern, so I had to brawl it cyborg’o’marsupial
The Mammoth is very easy if you fought Pinguin and Eagle first to freeze the stage and get the Eagle weapon. Octopus though is tough. First, his stage is beautiful, with an impressive on SNES water effect, but it has one of the worst mini-bosses in the game, that sucks you on spikes, which are one-hit-kill. What’s also cool about Octopus stage is that I didn’t destroy the submarine, and fought mostly harmless eel. Turns out if you do destroy the submarine, you have to fight it in a spiky arena. Have no idea why someone would prefer it, though.

Then there’s the X-Buster upgrade on Mammoth stage… What can I say, the reason I won’t replay this game ever, I think, is this bullshit jump you need to perform.

Tags Mega Man X

Emulation Nintendo

Mega Man X

Post author By TheAleosha
Post date October 23, 2024

Decided to give Mega Man X a try. For SNES, this is definitely impressive. Not in terms of visuals, as I think Disney’s games and Earthworm Jim are more impressive. But the first level takes place on a bridge, and crusher enemies destroy that bridge. Terrain manipulation in a 2D platformer from ’93 is mindblowing.
Regarding bosses difficulty, I found Pinguin to be extremely easy. You stick to the top of the wall and shoot it in the face until it dies. The only issue solved in later games is that X doesn’t automatically shoot away from the wall. Which doesn’t make any sense, I know.
Also, Dash is a special move in the first game, which you need to aquire. Luckily, it’s impossible to miss it if you pick the right stage.
Eagle is also surprisingly easy. I mean, you can literally smash him in the face with regular shots, no need to charge them.
A feature no other game implemented, I think, is that killing one boss makes another stage easier. I thought it’s insignificant at first, but then the electric floor at the Mandril stage was so infuriating I went to pay Eagle a visit first.

Tags Mega Man X

Emulation Nintendo PSX Sony Switch

Mega Man X4

Post author By TheAleosha
Post date October 17, 2024

I always had a special relationship with Mega Man X4. It was the first Mega Man game I’ve seen, because for a strange reason, it was ported to PC. But also, many years later, while trying Mega Man X3 and Mega Man X5 I understood that it hit the sweet spot of looking amazing, unlike X3 which still had SNES era visuals, but still having solid core gameplay, unlike X5.

What I didn’t understand as a kid is that Dragoon literally screams “hadouken” and “shouryuken”, because his moveset is basically Ryu/Ken from Street Fighter.

For some strange reason, Mega Man X Legacy Collection on Switch doesn’t have save states. I rarely use them nowadays, but Mega Man without them is still brutal.
My path is Dragon, which can be beaten with exosuit, and I think that’s the easy choice. Then Peacock, turned out to be easy as well with the fire sword. Then Walrus, for obvious reasons.

Then Lion, you just need to dodge the stomps. And Stingray, despite being weak to the Walrus weapon, can also be taked out with a saber, you can jump safely underneath.

The most trouble, I had with the spider. You need to dash-jump to avoid the homing webs, and even then, I feel that sometimes it’s very hard to do, as his position is quite random.

With Spider weapon, Mushroom is easy. And I left Owl for the last, although with Peacock’s weapon, I could have done it much sooner.

Tags Mega Man, Mega Man X, Mega Man X4

Emulation PC Gaming

Oddworld: New ‘n’ Tasty

Post author By TheAleosha
Post date April 9, 2024

I always thought that New ‘n’ Tasty is just a remaster of Oddworld: Abe’s Odyssey. Turns out it’s a complete remake. I never played Abe’s Odyssey, so I gave it a try as well.

And I think I prefer the remake better.

The game itself is a puzzle-platformer, akin to Another World, featuring mostly defenceless or at least not very heavily armed hero that needs to sneak past or cleverly incapacitate his enemies.
At later stages he also gets the ability to possess enemies, ride a local version of Yoshi and there are also some weird “puzzles” where you need to repeat a sequence of notes after other Mudakons.

One notable feature that the remake didn’t need, though, are particles flying into the camera:

It’s ingenius.

Tags Oddworld

Emulation

Matt’s Supreme Killer Instinct Retrospective

Post author By TheAleosha
Post date November 29, 2023

The entire Killer Instinct series went by me as a kid. I never had a friend with SNES, not even mentioning seeing one of these in the arcade.
So for me it’s interesting to hear a fan perspective on it:

There’s a more detailed video for Killer Instinct 2013 as well:

Interesting that one of the people behind the remake is the author of Weaponlord game. Makes a lot of sence, as both Killer Instinct and Weaponlord where those 90’s brutal-metal-fantasy kind of games.

Tags Killer Instinct

Emulation

Cosmic Cop / Gallop (cosmccop)

Post author By TheAleosha
Post date October 23, 2023

Shoot’em’up from Irem, which will later produce In the Hunt. And the resemblance is clear, from the design of your craft to the bosses.
The special mechanic there is the particle laser, that targets enemies automatically, but overheats, so you need to let it cool.

The game is brutal. One hit, and you’re done, the enemies can literally teleport on top of you, and the projectiles are fast and give you very little space to maneuver. I am not good in those kind of games, to be clear.

I found that the second boss is much easier than the first one. But then just getting to the 3rd boss was a struggle to me.

Tags Cosmic Cop, MAME

Emulation

Ninja Masters (ninjamas)

Post author By TheAleosha
Post date October 23, 2023

I continue to discover new games on Neo Geo all the time. This one is from the authors of World Heroes series, but instead of being “inspired” by Street Fighter 2 / Fatal Fury series, it draws its inspiration from Samurai Shodown. The mechanic where you can knock the weapon out of your opponent hands is here, for example.

One interesting detail is some of the characters start with their weapon drawn, while others have it holstered. And you need a rather obscure combination of buttons to draw it.

Tags Neo Geo, Ninja Masters

Emulation

“20 Criminally Overlooked Arcade Fighting Games From the 90s”

Post author By TheAleosha
Post date August 11, 2023

I didn’t like the video in particular, there are spelling mistakes in the captions and the facts are mostly from Wiki anyway. But I’m surprised that after almost 20 years, I still find fightings like Dragoon Might that I’ve never heard of, but look good.

Emulation History

King of Fighters Retrospective

Post author By TheAleosha
Post date July 6, 2023

A monumental work, hours of footage on evolution of King of Fighter series.
This series always was one of my less-favorite on Neo Geo, since I never liked the tag-battle 3×3 format.
But the retrospective is still brilliant. For one, little did I know that the storyline didn’t make much sense to me, because SNK were creating their own universe. So a lot of the critical plotlines were told only in manga, for example. Even if you finished the game and managed to get through terrible English translation, you still wouldn’t understand a thing, and this is the way it was intended.
Next surprise: KoF ’99 has a different style, because the lead designer worked on another postapocalyptic fighting game… Fallen Angels. Yes, the unfinished fighting game I wrote about some time ago. And a lot of new characters, including K’ (hate that name) are straight from Fallen Angels.
And KoF 2001 had the artist from Real Bout Fatal Fury. That’s why the character portraits are much more anime-like than in any other game in the series.

Tags King of Fighters, Neo Geo

Emulation

Daraku Tenshi

Post author By TheAleosha
Post date March 9, 2023

Another obscure fighting game. Uncharacteristically gritty: edgy characters, dimmed palette, even blood. Plays like SNK’s Art of Fighting: rather slow, almost no projectiles.

Rare case where prerendered backgrounds actually look good. The animations are outright impressive. There’s one particular stage, in a bar, where one of the tables is flying into the camera. That’s something Metal Slug pulled, but I don’t remember other games trying to do it.

Tags Daraku Tenshi

Emulation

Virtua Fighter

Surprisingly for a very well know game, it isn’t emulated well at all.
MAME has collision issues. And I mean real issues, like a lot of strikes passing through opponents. Saturn emulation is iffy as well.
The game is impressive to this day, though. It’s a game from ’93, and they modeled all fingers, animated hair and fabric, like Sarah’s ponytail or Akira’s headband.

Unfortunately all of the versions lack training mode. It’s pretty hard to practice moves while fending off the opponent.
My impression is that although animations are super impressive, the mechanics are somewhat lacking. I was able to beat most of the opponents by simply crouching, and many of them, except Akira, Jeffrey and maybe Sarah, had a hard time hitting me.

Tags Virtua Fighter

Emulation

MAME

Post author By TheAleosha
Post date February 25, 2023

Something I think I knew, but forgot, and rediscovered only with Rival Schools. MAME is extremely sensitive to ROM quality.
Some ROMs will play on some versions of MAME and crash others, because someone didn’t put all the right files inside.
The correct albeit slightly more annoying way is to get an entire romset, look up the names of the games you want (they are usually 8 characters long and not very descriptive, so you’d better use an online DB) and keep only those.
Another peculiar bit is that MAME doesn’t differentiate between BIOS and ROMs. So you need to put your BIOS in the same directory. And of course you need a lot of BIOS, for different platforms.

Also, Retroarch by default doesn’t write logs. Which is a problem, since different games crash MAME for different reasons. Logs can be enabled in Retroarch settings, though.

Tags MAME

Emulation

Rival Schools Art

Post author By TheAleosha
Post date February 13, 2023

Rival Schools marketing team was focusing on what’s real important, it seems.

Tags Rival Schools

Emulation

Rival Schools

Post author By TheAleosha
Post date February 12, 2023

Another rather obscure fighting game series, which I thought about due to one of the characters, Akira, appearing in Street Fighter 5.

And who doesn’t like bajiquan fighter? She’s not to be confused with a male bajiquan fighter Akira from Virtua Fighter series, though.

As far as the game goes, it resembles Street Fighter Ex a lot. Awkward 3D models, QCB/QCF moves, projectiles and all that.

There’s a tag-team element to the game. Once you pick your main character, you can pick one of two teammates from their school. Mate participates in tag attacks that act as powerful throws (get close, wait until opponent blocks). You can also switch between characters before round starts.

One bit that really impressed me was that they tried to emulate reflection in Akira’s motorcycle helmet. They got the reflection totally wrong, of course, but just the fact that they went to all that effort is impressive.

The second game in the series first released on PSX only in Japan, with a crazy name “Shiritsu Justice Gakuen – Nekketsu Seishun Nikki 2”.
That’s why when you look for “Rival Schools 2”, you only find the Dreamcast version. The Dreamcast version, though, is an entirely different game!
While “Rival Schools 2” for PSX was basically the same game with a new story and a few new characters, Rival Schools 2 for Dreamcast has new game engine, new models and even the movesets for characters are different.
Akira, for example, doesn’t have a second stance anymore.

Comparing to the arcade version, there’s no significant differences compared to PSX:

Tags fightings, Rival Schools

Emulation

Hibiki from Last Blade

Post author By TheAleosha
Post date February 12, 2023

Let me make a confession. I dislike ShoryuGame videos. I don’t like his accent and his sense of humor. But this video was an exception:

It was a surprise that the authors of Last Blade 2 included an alternative ending for a character. After all we’re talking about a 2D game on a space-limited cartridge. Drawing and storing stuff is expensive.
And what’s even more unexpected, that they kept that feature over all those years.

Tags Last Blade, Neo Geo

Emulation

Tekken 3

Post author By TheAleosha
Post date September 6, 2022

The differences between Tekken 3 for Playstation 1 and for the arcades turned out to be quite astonishing. Even more than Virtua Figher 2, I must say. I didn’t notice that previously, even though I’ve seen Tekken 3 arcade cabinet live a few years ago.

If there’s one detail to note, it’s the fingers. In PSX version most characters have stubs for their hands.

But in the arcade version you can see fingers, which is very impressive, considering the age of the game.

It plays fine on MAME 2016. The difficulty isn’t overwhelming, like in some other arcade titles, and I even managed to beat the entire game with a few retries.
Funnily enough, the final boss, Ogre, went down quicker than pre-final boss Heihachi. And the second phase for Ogre was easier than the first. Maybe that’s just because I’m a natural with Hwoarang, though. It’s the only character in Tekken series I grasp pretty well.

Tags Tekken

Emulation

About Buriki One

Post author By TheAleosha
Post date September 6, 2022

Obscure fighting for the Hyper Neo Geo 64 arcade:

The craziest part is that the author of the video actually bought the arcade and made his own fighting stick, it seems.

Tags Buriki One

Emulation

About Primal Rage 2

Post author By TheAleosha
Post date September 3, 2022

Today I discovered that there were plans for a sequel of Primal Rage fighting game. And apparently there’s even a playable version of it.

As some may remember, Primal Rage was basically Mortal Kombat with dinosaurs (and a couple of huge apes).
Interestingly here they switched to humans that sometimes turn into dinosaurs from the original game. They even switch names when that happens.
Can’t say it’s a shame that fighting never came out. But it’s a wonder someone managed to preserve as much.

Tags Primal Rage

Emulation XBOX

Project Gotham Racing and Forza Motorsport

Post author By TheAleosha
Post date August 6, 2022

I already wrote that I tried out Forza Motorsport on Xemu emulator a few days ago. Now, I decided to compare it with Project Gotham Racing, another predecessor of my much beloved Forza Horizon. And I was surprised how a more realistic Forza Motorsport plays better than “arcadish” Project Gotham Racing.

Now, to be clear, I suck at racing games. The only two racing games I ever finished, I think, are Need For Speed: The Run and Forza Horizon. And that’s only because both had rewinds.
But still, Forza Motorsport feels so much better thanks to its guidelines mechanic.

It also is emulated better at the moment. Project Gotham Racing has some issues with either depth of render or transparency, but on one of the tracks I’ve seen trees disappearing and appearing again. And also it seems there’s an issue with shadows from the cars, so cars seem to hover, never touching the track.

An issue both games share, and that’s because it’s the same engine, I would guess, is that during replays there are strange black bars at the top and bottom of the screen. Guess it’s some transparency issues again.

Tags Forza Motorsport