A Beginning at a GeoGuessr-style Look at the Mario Kart World… World

Posted on July 7, 2025 by Brian

Where is Mario Kart World?

I enjoy GeoGuessr.  For anyone who has not heard of it, it is a geography game that uses Google Street View images to ask you, where in the world are you?  Or rather, where in the largely road-based 80-ish countries that Google has driven for Street View are you?  It is a memory game both about actual road and national information and about learning which Google camera and car took the photosphere.  That latter part is critically important, unfortunately; at higher levels, GeoGuessr is not really about learning real-world information, but instead is about learning which cameras, cars, and years Google used in each place.  Even so, it’s a great game that I quite enjoy even if I’ll never be great at it.

So perhaps it is unsurprising that when playing Mario Kart World, I thought… where is this place?  Based on the road markings and such, where is Mario Kart World in our world? The answer is kind of interesting: it is nowhere, but also is a lot of places.

When it comes to road markings, in MKW Nintendo went with a very strange road line configuration that I do not believe any country on Earth uses.  First, MKW has a right-side driving direction.  Nintendo is a Japanese company so perhaps Japan’s left-side driving direction could have been expected, but they try to make their games with broad international appeal, so going with the American and Continental European right-side standard makes sense.  Despite this, a lot of the road signage and color choices are Japanese-based, as we will see.

The Roads and Road Lines

Roads in MKW often change surface from one instant to the next in a way that a real road wouldn’t.  This makes the game more visually interesting so I’m all for it, but it is amusing when a paved road randomly turns to sand for a bit before turning back to pavement or tile or something for a block… heh.

As for the road lines, the game has general trends but some areas are exceptions to them.  There is a usual continent-wide road coloring system, but some areas do their own thing, probably to add variety to the game or because the creators thought it would be interesting or something.  The results are strange.

Two lane, two-way paved roads in MKW usually have white lines on each side and a white dashed line in the center, as you see in many European countries and also sometimes see in Japan in two lane roads.  Okay.  Some areas have an additional color along the side, either red or green, alongside the white, and the gas stations along your route with their food stands have yellow outside lines on their pulloff, but otherwise two lane paved roads always have white outside lines.  In Japan you sometimes see a single yellow center line and sometimes see a single white, but in the game they almost always went with white.

However, this rule is not absolute.  Yellow center lines can be found in certain areas, for reasons only the designers would know.  There is a small group of two-lane roads I’ve found in Crown City with a single solid yellow center line, as you see sometimes in Japan for no-passing zones or you commonly see in Canada and Mexico for instance.  So it’s a no passing area in a hilly part of town, right?  Sure… except for the dashed yellow part marking a passing zone.  Uh.  I don’t think Japan ever uses dashed yellow passing zones so far as I know.   And maybe even weirder, there is a loop of double yellow center line and white outside line two-lane road just outside DK Pass’s skiing mountain.  How strange, huh?  But that’s it, everything else I have found so far with asphalt-paved roads has white on two lane roads.

However, four-lane highways in MKR usually have… all yellow lines, with double yellow lines in the center and yellow outside lines on the edges of the road.  There are white dashed lines in between each lane in each direction, as well.  A few four-lane areas have all-white lines, most notably the whole of the massively long Crown City Bridge, and the four lane road in Crown City leading to the rooftop track has double yellow center lines and white outside lines, fascinatingly enough, but those are the exceptions.

In the rest of MKW, the four-lane-road standard is for roads to have yellow center and outside lines.  Additionally, in the game, whenever yellow outside lines are used, there is a white checkerboard pattern outside of that yellow outside line, along the edge of the road.  It’s a fun little graphical detail that I don’t think is used in the real world, at least not regularly.  Japanese highways, as with their smaller roads, sometimes have white and sometimes have yellow in the center, but always have white outside lines, with, as I said, yellow used for center lines in areas where you should not pass.

Comparing this to the real world, the usage of yellow center lines in the game is similar to how it is used in Japan.  Those aforementioned few areas in MKW that have a single yellow line on curvy, hilly Crown City roads are good examples of how Japan would use a single yellow center line.  In contrast, roads in the United States always use double yellow in the center, and white on the outside.  Canada uses single or double yellow in the center. Dashed yellow is used in the US and Canada for passing areas, but looking it up in Japan it is a bit more complex, with gradations from dashed white to double yellow.  For center lines MKW clearly was inspired by Japan’s road lines. It’s amusing to contrast this to the right-hand-drive nature of the roads.  Remember, Japan drives on the left, not the right like MKW does.

Those outside lines deserve attention, as they are a rare configuration indeed! In fact, while in the real world many nations use yellow center lines with white outside lines, many use all-white lines, and many use yellow outside lines with white center lines, NO country uses all-yellow lines as their standard road line color scheme.  It is a layout seen in a few countries, but only in specialty applications such as national parks in Chile, a few specific roads in India, or such.  That is to say, all-yellow is a thing used in certain countries, but never just for all of their regular highways, only to mark special areas.  And yet, while they went with the very common two-lane road all white color configuration, Nintendo decided to go with the quite uncommon all yellow configuration for most four lane roads. I wonder why they did this?  It’s pretty interesting.

I should say, though, that large areas of the game do not use asphalt roads.  I previously mentioned that road surfaces change depending on where you are. Some of this changes rapidly, but for some wider-area trends, in the desert, savannah, or jungle, the roads are dirt or sand.  Around the south-center east, from the Venice-like town to Peach Beach, the roads are made of stone pavers.  In the light-colored roads paved like this dark pavers are used in the center as a center line.  Some other areas have stone roads like this also, such as blue stone or ice roads going to the ice palace in the northeast.  These areas, and others, do not have any roads paved with tarmac, only snow, dirt, pavers, etc.  The paved roads in the southeast stop at the edge of ‘Venice’, for instance.  Mario Kart World is a mixture of road surfaces and roads existing at all.  Wouldn’t it be so much fun if randomly you go over a little hill in the road and you’re driving through a river?   There is no bridge, just ford it.  That would go so well in the real world… heh.

Guardrails, Poles, and Signage

As for other forms of road markers, the standard guardrails used look like standard Japanese-style ones except with hexagonal posts instead of Japan’s round ones.  Standard guardrails in the US are similar looking, but there are a few subtle differences, most notably that American guardrail posts are usually I-shaped and are attached to the rail by one bolt. Japanese guardrails have two bolts per post with a round post.  MKW has two bolts per post and hexagonal posts.  Perhaps they aren’t round in order to save polygons, but regardless they definitely aren’t I-shaped, so they largely went with Japanese guardrails here.  As a note, European guardrails mostly look different from the styles seen in the US and Japan, though some are somewhat similar.  Oh, some areas of the game have other kinds of guardrails, such as wooden fences in pastoral areas such as Moo Moo Farm and a split metal one in a few places, but this is realistic; many countries in the real world have different guardrails in certain areas.

Electricity poles are rare in MKW. I guess that most power lines are buried?  Long-distance buried power lines are quite rare in the US, but some countries particularly in Europe use them and some areas in America have them as well.  There is certainly electricity here so the power is distributed somehow in the large majority of the game that doesn’t have lines.  The areas that do have them have wooden poles, American-style, except with Japanese-style vertical metal pole plates strapped onto them.  Some parts of the US may have things attached to the poles, but we don’t have standard strapped-on plates like Japan and MKW do.  This is a pretty interesting design because Japan uses metal poles, but despite deciding to go for a more American power pole by having them be made of wood, they put Japanese pole plates on them, something we don’t have in that design. Neat stuff.

Lampposts along the roads exist in some parts of the world, varying from biome to biome and themed for that area.  You could use them to identify regions, but given that each region has a unique environment this would never be necessary. It would be interesting to know what the real-world inspirations for each lamppost style are, though; I do not have lampposts memorized, I’m not at that level at GeoGuessr.

Continuing on, there are no speed limit signs in the game… kind of.  There are a few ‘Speed Limit Infinite’ signs, including one in Crown City and one near DK Mountain along with others scattered around.  They are kind of neat to see.  They are green like all road signs in the game.  However, I’ve got a significant criticism here: the road signs in MKW never actually give you any useful information.  They just say Speed Level Infinite, or Mario Kart, or maybe Course Ahead, that’s it.  There are no signs telling you which way to go to get to any location.  Course Ahead… okay.  Which one?  It doesn’t say.  There are also no road signs telling you the name of the streets at intersections or, most of the time, which way to go to get to the location you are going to.

As a result of this, if you want to get from point to point by driving there instead of using the map to warp there it can be a frustratingly annoying task.  You basically try to look at the very faint road lines on the overworld map and attempt to pick the right direction.  Good luck, you’ll need it!  Finding my way ot of some tracks to the main roads also can be tricky.  There’s always a road connecting each course to the road network, but if you warp to a track finding it isn’t always easy and again, there are no signs helping you figure out which way to go.  The minimap is next to useless too, all it does in Free Roam is show you a slightly zoomed out view of the same thing you’re seeing on the screen.  It’sn early useless.  Ugh.  In races the map is great, why can’t you get an actual useful route map in Free Roam?  It’s incredibly obnoxious that there isn’t one!

Now, I said “most of the time” because a few locations do have a sign at the nearest major intersection telling you what is down that road.  Boo Cinema has a large sign telling you that their theater is that way, for example.  Other things like the two Mario raceways are right on the road so you can’t miss them.  But most other locations are found off some random unmarked road at some random intersection.  You need to know where they are to find them.  Other locations such as the train stations aren’t shown on the minimap, either.  If you want to find them learn the locations.

Continuing on other subjects, occasionally random messages on the games’ main menu tell you how far you have driven in the game, in kilometers.  Despite the US being the clear secondary influence on this games’ road design after Japan, there is no miles option, annoyingly.  I have little idea of how long a kilometer is (about a thousand yards?).  Also given that you aren’t told the distances in-game, since there is no speedometer, it’s not like there is any context for how far you have driven, anyway.

Similarly, there are stoplights in MKW, in Crown City in particular, but they are always green for go, they don’t actually work.  Cars will usually stop if there is an obstruction in front of them and will eventually stop to let in turning traffic so it works, but it is kind of amusing.  The Crown City stoplights are vertical yellow ones.  In Japan stoplights sometimes use blue for go instead of green, but in MKW they went with the standard basically everywhere else by using green… unless it’s actually a slightly bluish green as you also often see in Japan? Regardless, unlike Japan I haven’t seen any in MKW that are solid blue.

Road signs telling you which way to go to get to places are green with white text. Japan uses green or blue road signs, depending on the type of place.  They went with the American standard of green for the game and not blue like Japan, or yellow like some European countries use.  Unlike in the real world, no distances are written on signs.  This matches with the absence of speed limit signs and with the games’ on-screen display not having a speedometer telling you how fast you are going.  Mario Kart games have never told you your speed, and this one is no exception.

There are few warning signs in Mario Kart World, but railroad crossings do have them.  The railroad warning sign is a small yellow diamond sign below a crossed-X railroad crossing marker, very similar to the one used in Japan.  Japan uses many American-style yellow diamond warning signs, as opposed to the white with red border European style, and that is reflected in this game.  As in most countries that aren’t the US there is no text on the crossed X part of the warning sign, it must be said, so it does not resemble a standard American railroad crossing.

All signs in MKW are always in English, even in other language versions of the game. Similarly, store names in Crown City are in English in all versions.  This made game development simpler for sure but makes you think that MKW is set in an English-speaking country, while not having the road line configuration of any English-speaking countries… not to mention that of the English-speaking world on the US and Canada have yellow center lines in common use, and neither of them would have white center lines on two lane roads.

Vehicles, Buildings, and the World’s Map

And how about the vehicles on those roads? Other than the racers’ karts, in MKW you will see a lot of very small cars, each with a single Toad or Shyguy inside.  These remind me of the small Kei cars common in Japan. Larger vehicles include tour buses, which look like a standard long-distance or tour bus, and various trucks with ramps on the back.  There are also a few 18-wheelers with North American-style long nose cabs.  These would be uncommon anywhere else. There are also police cars, and they are tiny, the same size as the regular vehicles.  They have blue and white lights on top and run them at all times during their patrols, something done in Japan but not the West.  I wonder if the designers knew that that was a Japan-specific thing?  Perhaps not.  It’s pretty neat that they actually drive routes, though they don’t pull anyone over no matter what chaos happens in this world.  Civilian cars don’t just despawn if you follow them, they randomly go between several different locations then park somewhere.  The drivers can even get out and walk around or go to a despawn point such as certain restaurants!  See this Youtube video for more on this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6vXdxJA_5sg

Following that video, other Youtubers have tried to figure out how vehicle and train movement works.  It’s pretty interesting stuff, though not related to this.  Of the train layout videos this is probably the most comprehensive one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ehWmWcIeb70  The train track layout in MKW works bi-directionally and unlike cars and people on foot, who are stuck to wander around specific areas in this game, trains cover the whole map from end to end.  It is all timed so they never hit eachother.  All of the trains are coal-burning trains of a 19th century style.  There are some more modern trains in the one rail yard, but they don’t move, only the steam trains do.  Heh.

Returning to cars though, in GeoGuessr, one very useful thing for identifying cars is their license plates.  However, there are no license plates in Mario Kart World!  Given the lack of laws this place seems to have that may not be surprising, but it is a little weird when you realize that no vehicle has an identification plate.  It makes sense that the karts don’t have them since they are race cars, but the regular cars probably should, you would think.  Ah well.  A few do have a special marker where the plate would go — the bomb cars have an exclamation point on a small yellow plate, for example — but regular cars have nothing. Some have a space where one would go, but it’s empty.

Again assuming a north is up map, one interesting feature of the map is that much like most of the real world, the west side of the continent is wetter than the east side. In our world, look at the continents.  Europe excepted there are a lot of east deserts and west green areas.  This flips in places such as southern South America but still rain and win patterns mostly line up with this.  The MKW world is a lowercase n-shaped continent.  The west side of the MKW map has a desert and badlands in the south and center, and lava field in the northwest. The center is a grassland.  The northeast is a forest.  The center east is the snowy area.  Again, why isn’t this in the north? Weird. Anyway, then the southeast has the jungle and savannah. So yeah, much wetter in the eastern part.

I must say, though, there is one really weird thing about the map: the bridge.  See, connecting the two lower peninsulas of that ‘n’ is a huge bridge.  It’s a really cool set-piece and looks impressive.  However,  it doesn’t go anywhere almost anyone would want to visit!  In no real world would such a structure be built.  Imagine, building somethiing like the bridge from Hong Kong to Macau or the Chesapeke Bay Bridge or the San Francisco Bay Bridge, connecting your major city to… uh, to a nearly unpopulated savannah, near empty, uninhabited jungles.  There are people living on the eastern half of the map, but they mostly live in the center to north-center, and that bridge may not be the fasterst way to get there from Crown City — going north from there to Peach Stadium then east would probably be a similar length trip.  Obviously, the bridge exists because this is a videogame, but it never would in the real world because nobody would build a bridge to nowhere that’s THIS obviously going nowhere many people go.  And that is why most civilian traffic on the bridge gets to the other side and turns around in the toll plaza on the savannah side of the bridge.  Where would they go, anyway?  Nobody lives anywhere near there.  The few people going on safaris or visiting the dinosaur theme park in the jungle to the south would probably go regardless of if there was a massive bridge to get over there or not.

The buildings in the world are themed, with each region having buildings fitting with its location.  The MKW world is, in typical videogame fashion, compressed, with different biomes squashed right next to eachother in a highly unrealistic fashion because that’s more fun for the player.  In the real world you could not have environments like that and it’s odd that the snowy area is in the northern east and not the far north, but as a condensed version of a fictional continent it’s perfectly reasonable.

Also, if we assume that north is up on the map, that the warm-weather areas are in the south of the continent strongly suggests that Mario Kart World is in the northern hemisphere of its planet.  If it was in the southern hemisphere, the more tropical areas would be north, not south, after all.

On one last map-related note, despite having a day-night cycle, as in most videogames there are no tides in Mario Kart World.  There’s a moon, but no tides.  The water physics in this game are outstanding, so that’s kind of too bad.  There probably should be tides, particularly in more northern areas of the continent — recall that tides are smaller the closer to the equator you go, larger the closer to the poles you go.

Conclusion

So yeah, Mario Kart World isn’t set in the real world!  Imagine that, I thought it was… heh.  But looking at Nintendo’s design here is interesting.  For the most part, Mario Kart World’s roads and infrastructure are a mixture of Japanese and American influences, with Japan’s pole plates, guardrails, road center line colors, small cars, and more, along with American-style power poles, driving direction, English language signage, and road sign color and style.  In contrast, European, African, or other Asian road styles do not seem to have had any influence on MKW’s design, I can’t think of any elements that most look like European-style signage.  Some areas have architectural influences from some of those areas, such as the Venice-styled town and the Arabian desert area, but the road signage isn’t.

We can also say that Mario Kart World’s continent is probably in the northern hemisphere of its world presuming that its planet is oriented the same way as Earth is due to all tropical areas being in the bottom of the map and thus likely in the south if the game follows the standard North = up convention, as maps usually do.

Overall, Nintendo’s design decisions with Mario Kart World make sense.  Nintendo wants to amke games with strong worldwide appeal, and I think that everything they did in the road and building design in MKW achieves that.

 

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First Impression Reviews: The Nintendo Switch 2 Hardware and Mario Kart World. Also a bit on Fast Fusion, and F-Zero GX: Switch 2 Emulation vs. Real Hardware

Posted on June 8, 2025 by Brian

Yes, I know, it’s been a while again.  I really should be able to write something at least once a month… bah.  Well, I’ve got something now, at least: a Nintendo Switch 2!  It is probably unsurprising that I got a Switch 2 preorder, but I did and here are my impressions so far.

Table of Contents

  • What I Got
  • The Hardware
    • Design and Function
    • The Pro Controller 2
    • Storage and Game Key Cards
    • The Hardware –  Final Thoughts
  • The Games
    • Mario Kart World – First Impressions Review
      • Introduction and Game Basics
      • On the Tracks and Modes
      • Multiplayer
      • Conclusion
    • Fast Fusion
    • F-Zero GX – Switch 2 Emulation vs. Real Hardware
  • Conclusion

What I Got

So yeah, it’s here! I thought about going to the midnight launch, but didn’t; I picked my Switch 2 up later Thursday, I saw no reason to do extra driving for little return, it’s not like I’d set it up at like 1am or something.  I got the bundle with Mario Kart World.  I did set it up Thursday night but didn’t end up playing anything, only did the initial setup, system transfer, bought a couple of digital things (redeemed the MKW code, got Welcome Tour despite it obviously being something that should have been free, got Fast Fusion, and the Zelda Tears of the Kingdom upgrade pack; there’s not all that much released for Switch 2 so far), and such.  I also caved and finally subscribed to the higher tier of the subscription service; yeah, I have the original for Gamecube of course, but F-Zero GX with online play and stuff is something I want to try.  More on that at the end of this article.

Oh, as for physical things, I got the system, a case, and a Pro Controller 2, along with one physical game –I got Rune Factory Guardians of Azuma for some reason, even though I didn’t particularly like the one previous game in the series I’ve played.  Haven’t tried it yet.

The Hardware

The Switch 2 is similar to the first system, but larger and more powerful.  Its basics of design follow the first.

Design and Function

Graphically, the Switch 2 is impressive.  The system supports 4k 60hz or 1440p or 1080p 120hz, but does not support 4k 120hz, unfortunately; it’s not powerful enough to match things that the PS5 and XSX did years ago.  Given that I got an XSX day one this isn’t the best graphics I have seen, but it looks nice for sure.  It does have HDR color.  Visually, ‘close to XSX but not equal to it’ is probably a good description, which makes sense given the small size and portability of the device.  It is still true that you lose a lot of hardware power to gain smaller size and portability.  It has very nice graphics for sure but for the amount the thing costs it better.

One thing to note here is that the large handheld screen is 1080p now instead of 720p, which is great for new games, but iffy for old ones as this means that Switch 1 games will be upscaled.  How this looks will depend on the game but I’m sure some will look worse than on the Switch 1 in handheld mode due to the scaling — think of how Nintendo DS games look a lot worse on a 3DS than a DS because of being scaled to its higher-resolution screen.

The Switch 2 is a pretty large thing. I think that the original Switch is too large to be a decent handheld; the New 3DS XL, Vita, maybe Game Gear and Atari Lynx 2, those are about the limit of size for handhelds, I think.  The Switch goes a bit above that in size and is awkward to use, and the Switch 2 is even larger.  Yeah, that means it has a huge screen which looks great — though you get the not so good battery life that you’d expect from that and its significant power — but it also means that it’s big.  I want real handhelds back!  Who actually thinks that things this big are handhelds?  They’re not, they are semi-portable consoles basically.

Anyway, the system looks decent, though like a lot of modern electronics it has a very simple styling that doesn’t exactly look good.  It’s sad how ‘flat’ design has destroyed anything with actual style, I hope design trends go away from excessive simplification soon.   The Switch 2 has a little bit more to hold on to than the Switch 1, though, so it’s got slightly better ergonomics than the Switch, but it’s still far, far behind Nintendo’s last actually ergonomic device with a screen, the Wii U Gamepad.  Despite the little bit of added plastic, Joycon 2s are very close to as horrible to hold as Joycon 1s are.  I hate having to use those things, they are so tiny, uncomfortable and badly laid out!  I use my Switch docked with the Pro Controller like 99.99% of the time, and I think things will be similar here.  Just adding a little bump at the bottom as they did isn’t enough to fix the issue of everything being extremely cramped and horribly un-ergonomic.  The analog sticks still aren’t Hall Effect or similar, either, so they are sure to die on you eventually. Great.

The new magnets in them do attach them to the console very strongly, which is nice, though.  Also the Joycon 2’s come with these loop/strap attachments you can latch on to them if you want a more stable grip while using them separately.  Removing the loop-strap is a little harder than it probably should be since you need to take them off before putting the Joycons back on the console, but oh well.  They look nice at least.  One is colored in blue and one in orange.  Those colors match these little bits of background color in the analog stick wells.

The Pro Controller 2

As for the Pro Controller 2, it’s pretty good.  Of course, it’s a shame you need to buy it separately, and at $85 it is quite expensive — getting a full regular setup for the Switch 2 costs a lot, though part of that is paying for Trump tariffs — but it is good.  Getting the best news out of the way first, so far it’s instantly woken my Switch 2 up from sleep every time!  Given how almost every time I turned on the Switch 1 with its Pro Controller I’d need to hold the button down for like 10 seconds as it struggled to connect, then watch it fail and have to try another time or two before the stupid thing finally worked… well, this is a nice change to say the least. Also, the Pro Controller itself wakes up when you pick it up, using the tilt sensor.  This is a very cool feature I’ve never seen before. I love that.  Note, it won’t wake the system up from sleep at a nudge, that requires pressing the Home button as it did on Switch 1.  If the system is on though and you just put down the controller for a while, picking it up is all you need to do to turn it back on.  Nice.  One design change from the Switch 1 Pro Controller is that the the ‘which controller is this’ light is not on top of the controller instead of on the side facing you, so you can’t see it unless you flip over your controller, but so long as pairing and wakeup works this well going forward that should be fine; on Switch 1 the light being where it was is pretty necessary given how bad it is at waking the system up, so you can see if it’s worked or not.

As for the controller itself, the design is familiar but good.  I’m not sure how good or bad the D-Pad is this time, I haven’t used it much yet.  I hope that it is better than the Switch 1 one, it better be.  The ‘it likes to randomly push a direction you didn’t press because of poor d-pad design’ issue of the Switch 1 Pro Controller was unacceptable.  The controller is slightly smaller than the Switch 1 Pro Controller, which makes it pretty small by modern controller standards, but it is comfortable.  It’s got a more premium feel than the first Switch Pro Controller, which is nice.  That controller didn’t feel as nice as its price suggested it should have, but here the gap between Xbox Series controller feel and Nintendo has closed a lot.  I’d still give the XSX controller the edge but by much less.  The plastic feels less ‘hard and stiff’ and has a little more give to it. It has everything features-wise from the Switch 1 controller plus two more buttons on the grips called GL and GR.  These buttons aren’t on the Joycons, only the Pro Controller 2 or Charging Grip 2 (an accessory I don’t have yet, not sure if I’ll get one or not given how much I dislike joycons…), so games won’t be requiring them very often I imagine, but the option is nice I guess.  The new Pro Controller has a standard somewhat looseish analog stick with a circular gate, same as all other Wii and Switch controllers.  Oh well, at least Gamecube controllers still work on this system for something with more precise sticks.

Storage and Game Key Cards

The new system stand is a dramatic improvement over the old one.  This U-shaped stand folds out easily and attaches to the system on both sides, so it’s easy to use and works well. The Micro SD Express card port is behind the stand also, on the top, easy to access.  That is good.  Not at all good is that you can only use new, expensive Micro SD Express cards, and not regular ones, not even for unenhanced Switch 1 games.  That’s really obnoxious of Nintendo, this system needs more storage than you can get from just one card.  Two SD ports would have been fantastic, maybe one for regular cards for games that aren’t enhanced… for this price it should have had something like that.  I haven’t bought a card for the system yet but certainly will have to; the 256GB in the system aren’t anywhere near enough, the new games are larger than old Switch games and this thing is fully backwards compatible and I have like nearly 500GB of Switch 1 downloadable games…

On that note, one large controversy on the Switch 2 is that many games are being \sold in a box with only a Game Key Card inside.  These are basically download keys.  The game isn’t on the card, you instead need to download the game, but in order to play it you have to put the key card in, which has a bit of data on it to verify the license.  It’s a weird hybrid of physical and digital.  A LOT of third party Switch 2 releases are Game Key Cards, and this is marked on their boxes fortunately.  So, having lots of space for game installs will be even more important on Switch 2 than Switch 1.  With only the one SD Express port you will need to either switch cards or delete stuff a lot.  Very annoying.

I’m not as angry about Game Key Cards as some — at least it gives people a physical box to put on their shelf and that is nice — but I do have something to say about all physical Switch 2 releases, Game Key Card or full game on card.  I am obviously a fan of physical media — note my large collection of physical games — but Switch 2 games have an issue: like all modern “cartridges”, including the Nintendo Switch, DS, and 3DS, PS Vita, and one older system, the Neo-Geo Pocket Color, Switch 2 carts are not masked roms with a centuries-long lifespan.  Instead they are flashed chips with a lifespan of decades, not centuries.  Disuse can cause them to lose data as well over years.

So, Switch 2 carts are not forever, not even close, unfortunately.  The discs of a physical XSX or PS5 game are not forever either but they should last a lot longer than a flashed cart if stored properly.  That physical Switch 2 cart may well fail before the Switch 2 servers get shut off and that Game Key Card becomes a little paperweight, who knows?  The main downside to Key Cards is the amount of storage on SD EX cards that those Game Key Cards will require.  The only real preservation here is piracy, but pirates aren’t having an easy time cracking the Switch 2 so far.  Maybe they will eventually, we’ll see.

The Hardware – Final Thoughts

So far, I would say that the Nintendo Switch 2 is a very good system.  It certainly has drawbacks, with its high price and continuation of bad things about the Switch like the very similar Joycons and its bland modern hardware design, but for your money you get a 4k60-capable system with good graphics and some promising early games.  The game library is limited so far, though free or paid updates to games like the Zelda games and others hugely improve those titles by giving them stable 60fps framerates and in some cases also graphics resolution upgrades.  I can’t say that the Switch 2 is a definite buy right now system, not at $500 for the MKW bundle version, but it’s a good console and if you can afford it, why not go pick one up?  There is definitely enough here to be glad you can play one now instead of waiting who knows how long for a price drop that may well never happen or more games.  Is the Switch 2 the best console, no.  But it’s a good console I’m glad I got.  Nintendo fans will like it and are unlikely to regret their purchase.

The Games

Anyway, as for the games… starting Friday I did play some of Mario Kart World and Fast Fusion, though, along with F-Zero GX. Yeah it’s an all racing games launch pretty much, which is interesting. I haven’t tried the non-racing games I got yet.  I will be focusing on Mario Kart World here, with some mention of those other two games after the MKW impressions section.

Mario Kart World: First Impressions Review

Introduction and Game Basics

Mario Kart World… well, it’s Mario Kart. I should say, I have played MK8 but not recently and not on Switch; I’ve only played the Wii U version.  So, I’m going to miss some things I’m sure.  For instance, until playing this I had completely forgotten that Mario Kart removed lap and race times from the series some years back. I had to go look this up and found that it’s MK7 for the 3DS that removed all times from the game.  Up until MKWii the games did keep track of times, but not after that. I think this was a bad decision; having a racing game where your time literally isn’t even tracked in normal races, AT ALL, kind of removes one of the major elements of racing games that keeps you coming back. MKWii is probably the last MK game I really liked… oh well.  My favorites are 64 and Wii. Looking back, the series hasn’t really been the same since they dropped lap times, I guess.  There is still a solo Time Trial mode with times but that’s not entirely the same thing.

Anyway, the audiovisual presentation here is fantastic, MK World looks very nice and runs great. The music is great as well, with a large selection of remixes of lots of classic Mario game music here.  Between the constant references and nostalgic scenery bits all over most of the tracks and the remix-heavy music, this game definitely wants you to think about past Mario games as you play it.  Of course there are new things here as well, it’s not all old.  It’s a mixture done just about right.  I love when the Mario Land 2 or Wario Land 1 remixes play, for instance!  It’s awesome that Nintendo is referencing those games more than they ever have.

The controls are kind of floaty and meh, though, even at the highest current speed class of 150cc; it kind of feels like you’re maneuvering around a boat, slowly, in this game.  The contrast from this to the extremely intense precision of F-Zero GX’s controls could not be any larger, it’s pretty insane to go back and forth between them and try to adjust.  You have the usual options, such as a little jump that skids you as you hold that button down and item weapons to collect.  As in the Switch version of MK8 you can get one or two item item boxes, though you can’t switch between them, just use each in order as in MK8.  They are not bringing back MKDD’s item switching, ah well.

Anyway, there are some new items and ideas here, but I’m not really sure which are new offhand, it’s been years since I played a Mario Kart game.  Here is the good news: whether a new player or old, MK World has a full and comprehensive in-game manual describing how to do all of the moves and everything in the game.  It’s fantastic that this exists in these days of paper manuals no longer existing; most games simply have dropped the manual entirely in favor of either nothing – ‘go figure it out’ – or mandatory tutorials that you better remember.  This game instead has a very nicely done manual section with descriptions and pictures.  Wonderful.

On the note of items, like all the Mario Kart games for a while now, coins return, unfortunately.  This may be an unpopular opinion but I’ve never liked this system at all, and wish it was gone like it was in the best Mario Kart games.  The max is 20 like usual, and the more you have the higher your top speed is… though what that speed IS is unknown, because there is no on-screen speedometer showing how fast you are going, as always in the series there is no speedometer.   Coins were brought back in Mario Kart 7, the same time that the in-game timer was removed from all modes other than Time Trial, as I said earlier.  Both of those decisions were mistakes.  What positive do coins do, exactly?  Punish the player without them because they got hit or missed the ranndom drops or whatever?  How exactly is that fun? It isn’t.  So I get them not because I have any idea of waht they’re doing, but because like, maybe I’ll lose if I don’t have enough, right?  Or maybe I’d win anyway, if the speed difference is small?  I’m sure analysis of how large the difference is exists out there but the game sure won’t tell you.  This contextless, ‘punish the unlucky’ system is not good.  Coins are a bad mechanic the series shouldn’t have brought back.  Oh well.

Regardless, the core is very familiar: it’s Mario Kart in its modern form of MK7 and beyond, with a few tweaks.  I have always liked but not loved Mario Kart; it’s a series that is too random for me to love.  It’s such a shame that this games’ great graphics and engine are spent entirely on this slow-controlling, highly-random kart racer and not something more interesting like Wave Race, F-Zero, etc… ah well.  Anyway, in MKW there are several modes, but it’s all just variations on standard races.  Don’t expect any kind of story here, as always in the series there isn’t one.  You’re just playing for cup medals like always.  That’s fine with me, but some of the details are odd.

For difficulties, this game launched with three speed/difficulty classes, 50cc, 100cc, and 150cc. I haven’t tried 50, but I found 100cc extremely easy; the first circuit on 100cc was pretty much impossible to lose. Some tracks can be a bit tricky on 150cc, but I think ‘Very Easy’, ‘Easy’, and ‘Normal’ would be good descriptions of the three difficulties as they are now. On 150cc is still not especially difficult but does present more of a challenge, I’m not winning every time. Some tracks can be a bit tricky on 150cc, though it isn’t hard, more Normal. 200cc is likely to be added later in a patch or DLC addon, I imagine. I hope it is, it’s something the game needs. The pace of 150cc is decent, but faster would be great.

MK World has a lot of characters.  You start with 32, and lots more are unlockable. , seemingly 25 but perhaps there are more hidden ones.  However, this number is deceptive because for whatever reason they decided to count each alternate costume a character has as a separate character.  So, as you unlock costumes this adds to the character roster.  So yeah, the ‘there are like 57 or whatever characters!’ number is inaccurate.  All the characters you’d expect from the Mario series are here, though, plus more.  Of course this means a bunch of white people and a bunch of creatures, with no non-white human representation, but oh well.  At least there are more creatures to race as now, along with new human characters like Pauline.  This is a Mario-only game right now, though — no guest characters.  It’s sad that the Squid Kids from Splatoon are thus excluded, it was pretty cool that they were in MK8 Deluxe.  However, I do love that Wario’s default outfit here is his classic orange and purple costume from the first Wario Land, not any of his later looks.  As a huge fan of Wario Land 1 who doesn’t like some of the later games as much this was a fantastic choice.  Many of his newer outfits are available to unlock later.

There are two ways to unlock characters.  Some unlock as you beat cups in the two main modes.  These unlock a specific character once you finish at least third in the required cup.  Costumes, however, are unlocked by getting food items at these gas stations and food shops scattered around the tracks.  Grab the food powerup there and you’ll get a random draw of some new costume for a character, or a character, or something.  Who knows?  In the options menu you can choose whether you will transform into this new outfit for the rest of the race or not.  This is an interesting feature, but that this is the ONLY way to get costumes isn’t great as it makes it a complete game of chance as to whether you get them or not.  Characters don’t all have the same number of costumes, either.  Some characters have more outfits than others, it’s not balanced.  I’ve got three outfits for Rosalina so far for instance but apparently the very popular online Cow character has only one.  Due to how costumes each take up a full character slot, finding the character you want can be a pain on the long list.  There is a sort option which puts a characters’ other costumes together with the character but it’s only somewhat helpful.

As for the vehicles, there are a good number of starting vehicles and you unlock lots more as you go.  All vehicles will instantly transform into a boat or jetski form when you enter water, which is nice.  The water physics and visuals here are fantastic and beg for a Wave Race game.  If you go through certain giant star objects, you will also transform into an airplane form.  The wings disappear when you touch ground again, but the flying is fun.  However, one feature that doesn’t return in MKW is the antigrav racing from Mario Kart 8.  This game has ground, water, and air racing, but not antigrav or underwater, for whatever reason those are out.  Maybe antigrav at least will be added again at some point with DLC.  You can also add stickers to your vehicle if you want, and will unlock more stickers as you go.  There are lots of different vehicles at the start and you unlock more as you go.  Each has different stats, so there’s reason to go keep playing and unlock more of them.  Nice.

On the Tracks and Modes

The major new feature in World is the Open World, but it’s basically a side-note here, not a main feature.  You can drive around but all there is to do in the open world is find little mini-missions, if you want. I haven’t tried it so I don’t know if the game keeps track at all of which ones you have tried or completed, but it might not.  The real main reason for the open world’s existence is to connect the tracks together with roads you will drive through in the structured main modes, not for free exploration.  As someone who doesn’t like open world games much I am fine with this, myself.  Still, if you do want to drive around you can.  There are five ? Mark block challenges to find and complete on each course and a bunch of P-Switch challenges scattered around the world.  The game does keep track of how many P-Switch challenges you have cleared but maybe just as a total and not as a thing marking exactly which ones you have beaten, unfortunately.  The ? Mark Block challenges you have cleared are marked on the Open World mode map, though, so that’s good.

Regardless of where you go in the world, the tracks, and the roads that connect them, are very wide most of the time. This was surely done for the new 24 player maximum in races, but it does make the tracks feel almost overly spacious at times.  You almost always have huge amounts of space to drive in, even though you are usually in races along a preset path and not just wandering around.  The tracks have good variety and are a mixture of classic remakes and new courses.  Looking it up, 14 of the 24 tracks are classic remakes and 10 are new, which is a lot fewer new tracks than I thought from having played the game as unlike some past titles this one does not tell you which tracks are remakes and which are new, but the remakes are so heavily visually redone that despite the rough layout similarities of many of them they don’t feel like the same tracks.  Track width, backgrounds, environments, track length, all of those things changed significantly.  So yeah, some general layouts, themes, and elements return from old MK tracks, but the tracks here feel original even when they aren’t due to how much they changed.

Design styles are very different between tracks and the world between them, as the latter is mostly made up of straighter roads.  The main driving challenge of the game is concentrated in the tracks, while the in between parts have more straight line driving as you avoid enemy attacks and try to hit them back with your own weapons.  But beyond that, in general in this game the largest change compared to past Mario Kart games is the increased track width.  I’m not sure what I think of the new super-wide courses but it works with this player count.  There are still some rare tight turns that can be hard to get around smoothly, so there is still challenge to be found in these track layouts.  They are just wide.  You will need to control your kart well, or as well as you can with the games’ slow controls, to do well on all tracks.  The world and the tracks are masterfully designed with a great balance of easy and hard, simple and complex, and all with beautiful visuals as well.  It’s great stuff and a visual showcase.

The two main modes are Grand Prix and Knockout.  They have similarities and  differences.  Similar is that both have eight cups with the same names, the last being unlocked.  First select a cup then a difficulty. The main cup selection menu in the GP or Knockout modes shows the best medal you have won on that course regardless of difficulty.  Once you select the cup, however, it shows your best finish in each difficulty separately, which is great.  In addition to the gold, silver, or bronze for 1st, 2nd, or 3rd, you also get one to three stars for your performance, mobile game style.  I’m not a fan of 3-star rating things in general but eh, it’s something I guess.  To get 3 stars you have to finish in first on all races, which is easy at 100cc but a definite a challenge at 150cc.  Getting all of those would add to the playtime for sure.  Even so, 200cc would be a welcome addition.

In the main GP or Knockout modes, the major new feature is point-to-point races.  Instead of everything being a circuit, this time most races are point-to-point and very few actually involve multiple laps on a single circuit.  In Grand Prix mode, the way this is done is kind of bizarre, though — each cup is four tracks, as usual.  However, it’s not four similar races; the game mixes point-to-point and circuit races within each cup.  Instead, for example, in the first circuit, on the first track of the cup, you do a regular full 3-lap race.  After completing this, you drive to the second track, then do one lap around that track.  Then you drive to the third track, then do one lap around that track.  And then you drive to the last track, and finish with one lap around that track.  The segments in between tracks are about two laps long each so the amount of time evens up, but it’s just bizarre design!  Which track of a cup is the lap-course track can vary from cup to cup, but the general design doesn’t: this is mostly a point-to-point game even when you are racing on a circuit.

As a result, despite being a game with 24 circuit courses,  in GP mode MKW feels like only about one race of each circuit is a regular race, while the rest is a series of long point-to-point races.  Generally the circuits are more difficult, with tighter turns than you usually see in the cross-country parts of tracks, so an option to spend more time on the tracks in the regular GP mode would be nice.  This game would be better with an option — and I mean option, this setup is fun too — to do normal races on all four races of a circuit instead of always having to drive between tracks; as it is you really don’t spend enough time on most courses to learn them or treat them like a regular track.  I’m fine with point to point races as a concept, but at least the last track of each circuit should have also been a full race also!

The actual major new mode isn’t the open world, it is Knockout mode.  This is similar to GP mode, except it’s all point-to-point, you don’t even have that one starting 3-lap race.  Each Knockout cup is a 6-segment point to point race.  After each segment, people too far back in the race get eliminated.  It’s a classic idea but new to this series I believe.  It’s fun enough and provides some tension in multiplayer, and occasionally in 150cc as well.  This is a good mode that so far seems to be the most popular with a lot of people.  There are eight Knockout circuits to choose from, the same number as there are GP Cups, though each have different layouts.  That the other main mode in this game is also point-to-point focused really emphasizes the focus MKW has on these races… despite, again, also having 24 circuit tracks.  Why not also have Knockouts on circuits?  The setup would work well!  Just knock out players periodically.  This should be an option.  Both point to point and circuit have a place, as it is this game probably focuses a bit too much on the former over the latter.

As for the amount of content in the game, as I said GP and Knockout modes have eight championships each, with medals and stars to play for if you want to beat everything on all difficulties.  After finishing the first seven circuits of a mode in at least third place, the eighth unlocks.  Complete that circuit and the credits roll and you have kind of beaten the game, at least in that mode.  This doesn’t take long; I finished GP mode today.  I guess I could call this a review now and not just first impressions?  I’d need to spend more time with the other modes as well to really do that, though.  Of course there is a lot of replay value, but don’t expect more time to credits than past Mario Kart games have had, you won’t find it here.  And even on 150cc, while I found myself certainly challenged at times, I’ve finished every circuit in at least third place even when it felt like I did badly, and all you need to do to move on is finish in third, so the difficulty is questionable if you’re not going online and playing against humans.  If you don’t want to do that, one other option is to play the other, smaller modes.

The first of those other modes is Time Trial, to practice on a track with no other players and actually have your time recorded since in this mode times do exist unlike the rest of the game.  I’ve never found solo time trial to be all that interesting in racing games for whatever reason.  It’s good that it is here though.  Staff ghosts return and you can challenge yourself by trying to beat their best times.

Battle mode returns, this time with eight battle arenas. For some reason, in single player you can’t play a single battle; instead, you choose the length of the battle circuit but the minimum is 3, like VS Race mode. The winner is the person with the most points at the end of the predetermined number of battles. The arenas are all blocked-off chunks of the world map. They are all large, though the sizes vary from ‘probably too big even for 24 players’ to ‘decent amounts of action here’. None are Block Fort N64. 0/100 points for that. There is a track with SNES Mario Kart visuals that would be perfect for Block Fort, so where is it? The closest to that design-wise is probably the water city map, which is my favorite battle map here for sure, but I want to see Block Fort. This game is dripping with nostalgia so it’s a surprising exclusion.

In the primary mode, Balloon Battle, battles consist of a 3 minute timer and the winner is the person who popped the most balloons in those 3 minutes.  You cannot change or disable this timer, unfortunately.  There are options for other things, but not the time.  Each driver starts with 5 balloons and loses one each time they get hit.  You CAN hit yourself with your own weapons.  If someone runs out of balloons in the 3 minute battle they are eliminated and get zero points towards the championship, no matter how many they had, so try to avoid this!  It’s basically the only way to lose to the AI.  Most of the time though everyone survives and winning is based on hits.  This is a fine mode but it’s not as good as some battle modes of the past.  I think that timed-only isn’t the best, a ‘eliminate’ mode would be good to have.  Arena size is an issue too, the meadow one for instance is so large that in 3 minutes you’ve probably spent most of the time not seeing anyone.  It’s alright and surely better in multiplayer — the AI isn’t much for competition, a human should win almost every time against them even on Hard unless you get knocked out multiple times.

Alternately, in Battle mode, instead of Balloon Battle mode, you can also play Coin mode.  In this mode your goal is to have the most coins.  Just like in the other mode, there is a mandatory 3 minute per map timer and you play 3-plus maps.  Unlike the other mode you can’t be eliminated in this mode, so it’s for younger players I imagine; losing 5 balloons in 3 minutes isn’t easy but is certainly possible, I’ve done it against the AI a few times.  Instead, in this mode when you get hit you lose some coins.  Coins spawn in specific spots on each track, and also are dropped when enemies get hit.  The dropped coins disappear after a little while, though, so get them quickly.  The regular coin spots stick around until collected, after which they eventually respawn like item boxes.  This mode is alright fun but not as good as Balloon Battle mode, I’d say; winning here is more about camping the right spots for coins.

Lastly, the definitely misnamed VS Race mode is a pretty nice custom championship mode.  Here you can choose the number of races to play, from 3 to 32, and then choose the tracks you will race on one at a time.  Yeah, just like in Battle mode for some odd reason you can’t do a single race.  Why is that?  For each race you can either select a track itself to just race that track for 3 laps, as you do on the first track of a GP, or connect that track to another to do a ‘drive point to point starting from the exit of the first track you choose, then once you get to the second track race one lap on that track’,  much like how races 2 through 4 in a GP circuit go.  So yeah, you can play a championship with only regular circuit races if you want, it just won’t unlock anything other than costumes if you get those from the random drop powerups at those gas stations along the track.  That’s nice.  VS Race mode is pretty good, great option.  This is one of the most fun modes, I’d say.

However, you can’t just do a full custom championship here using any track — from each course you can only go next to a track near it.  This limitation makes sense when doing point-to-point races, but given that you can also choose to do only circuit races and skip the drive in between, it would be much better if you could choose any track and not only the close ones.  That would make this a real full custom circuit mode instead of a limited one.

Multiplayer

Additionally, the game has two through four player local splitscreen multiplayer and online play for up to 24 racers.  I think that all single player modes can be played in splitscreen, but haven’t tried it yet.

For online, four modes are available: GP, Knockout, Battle, or unranked private game with people on your friends list.  Each of the three main modes has a separate MMR rating, and you start with 3000 rating in each mode, gaining or losing points based on your finishes.  Races have 24 players so it’s somewhat chaotic but it can be a fun time.

In GP mode the game gives you three races to choose from, and you pick one.  Once a lobby of 24 random players is assembled, the game randomly chooses one players’ pick to be the next track you will drive to.  So yeah, it isn’t a popularity contest, it’s a random draw.  Interesting.   Races are usually ‘drive to the place then do one lap around it’, as you’d expect in this game, but occasionally you will end up in a 3 lap race.  While waiting for a lobby to fill up, or in between races during online play, you can drive around the world with the other players in the lobby.  That’s kind of neat.  The multiplayer here is fun but all it keeps track of is your rating and nothing else.  Still, there’s enough here to keep you coming back for a while for sure.

In Knockout mode, the game instead chooses a random Knockout course, so the players get no choice.  You just race on the 6 point-to-point segments or one-lap circuits that the game tells you to.  You still can drive around waiting, but less than in GP mode since this time it only happens between full 6-race Knockout games and not after every race.  After the game the lobby empties, as well, you don’t seem to be able to continue with the same group indefinitely as you can with GP.  Still, it’s a fun and somewhat intense time.  Online Knockouts are definitely competitive.  Of course luck will play a large factor, tis is Mario kart and items will decide many races, but it is fun at least for a while.

Battle mode in multiplayer works the same as GP, each player chooses one of three tracks then you fight on that course.  It’s fun and much more challenging than fighting the computer.

Conclusion

As for Mario Kart World, after playing a few hours I’d say that it’s a good but not great game. The controls are sluggish, the AI a moderate challenge at best most of the time, the playtime to seeing the credits is quite short, and it has some odd feature omissions that really should have been there — an option for classic four track, 3-laps-per-race GPs, was having the costume unlocks be random drops actually a good idea?, 200cc, harder AI, and such — and for anyone buying it at retail $80 is a LOT for what you get, but the $50 bundled price is reasonable. You get dozens of tracks, a decent selection of modes, and enough to unlock to take a decent number of hours to get stuff. It’s fun but I really wish that games like Wave Race existed too, this game teases you with great water but… just for Mario Kart. Bah. Still, MK World is a good time.

Fast Fusion – Impressions

Fast Fusion is a new game from Shin’en, and it’s the long-awaited sequel to Fast RMX from the Wii U and Switch 1.  It’s a Wipeout-inspired futuristic racing game and is really nice looking and fun. The game has great visuals indeed and is very fast, so it’s a fun time.  The controls are good and feel fairly tight. It’s nowhere near F-Zero GX levels of precision, not even close, but it controls fine, and certainly better than Mario Kart World. I’ve only played a handful of races but the game seems good.  Tracks are narrow and have obstacles along the way that you will need to avoid.  The key mechanic is that you can switch between two colors, blue and orange (as per the controllers…), and will need to be on the correct color when you go over a boost pad in order to get the boost.  This seems like a pretty good, classic futuristic racing game and one of the better ones in the genre in a while.  There have been many little indie futuristic racing games over the past decade but most aren’t at this quality.  While a bit loose the controls here are better than most, I’d put it over games like Redout for sure.  This seems like at least a solid B game, fun stuff.

F-Zero GX  – Switch 2 GC Emulation vs. Real Hardware

And now the main event, right? How does this exceptional, but exceptionally difficult, classic play on the Switch? Well, visually it looks insanely good. F-Zero GX always looked exceptionally great and still holds up very very well (apart from the low-poly character models in the post-race screen…), and it looks even better here upscaled to high res.

However, the controls here are somewhat insanely impossible to handle.  The GameCube controller is unique, unlike any major controller since, in two key ways: its high-resistance sticks that push back against you more strongly than other controllers, making precise stick motions easier to perform than they are on just about any other pad, and it has octagonal gates on those sticks instead of circular, also helping you precisely point the stick in the eight cardinal directions.  It’s a shame that features like those, along with the analog trigger buttons and their second-tier click, are unseen since the Gamecube.  Of course, the Gamecube controller is missing a bunch of buttons — not ZL, no GL or GR, no – button, no R3 or L3 analog clicks.  I do not have the new Switch 2 Gamecube wireless controller, but it adds a tiny little ZL button and the system menu and C (camera) buttons, but not the other missing buttons.  Ah well.

Anyway, it is perhaps because of the unique features of the GC controller that Nintendo has probably misguidedly abandoned that have caused Nintendo to keep the GC controller around.  The GC controller now works with FIVE generations of Nintendo hardware, a pretty insane and special fact that surely has no equal across the industry.  Yes, original GC controllers work on the Switch 2.  You just need a Wii U / Switch GC adapter.  I plugged my Wii U GC adapter in and it worked great, my GC controller works on Switch 2.

So anyway, with the Pro Controller 2, F-Zero FX is nearly uncontrollable.  You careen across the track, barely able to fly in a straight line never mind towards, say, a boost, or away from a wall.  I’m sure that people could eventually manage to improve enough to get good enough at moving this average-resistance stick the very tiny amounts necessary to control this game well without crashing into things, but that would be a challenging accomplishment indeed.  Also the game is designed around holding one face button while having instant access to the other three, which of course is impossible on Switch 2.  You can’t just map one of the buttons easily to ZL; maybe there is a way of doing this but I didn’t find it yet. So yeah, a GC controller of some kind is highly recommended…

But I thought that even that didn’t entirely fix the problem.  While the higher-resistance GC stick does reduce the extreme over-precision of this version of the game somewhat, it still feels almost uncontrollably over-precise.  This isn’t a calibration issue, I tried several stick calibrations. It’s something else.  To confirm that it was just the emulation, I got out my original F-Zero GX disc and played it on Gamecube, with the same controller (my orange one).  I immediately noticed the difference — on GC I was able to handle the game as expected.  It’s a very challenging game with extremely precise controls, but on GC it works as it should.  On Switch 2… maybe I just don’t have it configured correctly but so far it feels unacceptably off.  It was surprising when I managed to actually hit boost pads on Switch 2, for instance… ah well.  I will try it again and see if I can get better.

Conclusion

In conclusion, the Switch 2 is great!  It is expensive, but any Nintendo fan definitely should get one once they can afford it.  You won’t regret it.  Mario Kart World is a good classic Mario Kart game and the hardware’s powerful and promising.  It’s good to great despite various flaws — price, ergonomics, and such.

(Meanwhile, while watching this I’ve been watching a pro Starcraft Brood War match video.  Yes I am still completely addicted to SC.  Best game ever.  I will definitely get to making more recordings of old replays of mine.)

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My (Bad) Classic Starcraft Replays – A Game from 2/12/2002

Posted on March 18, 2025 by Brian

Yes, I finally got around to making another one of these.  I actually recorded this game in the Remastered version back when I made the first video, but after seeing how broken that replay was in Remastered I decided that it’d be better to not upload this, and instead re-record it in the classic launcher.  I finally did that this week and here is the result, a recording of this classic Starcraft multiplayer match from 2/12/2002.  Yes, that’s February 12th 2002.  I do not remember this game specifically, but it’s easy enough to see why I saved the replay, you don’t see nukes used this much very often.

Nukes have always been uncommon and still are, but a lot of other things about this game really make it stand out as old — the insanely large map, how slow we mostly were to expand, and more.  Really old Starcraft games are something else, aren’t they? Like many people I had owned the game for several years at the time this game was recorded, but the level of play is very different from modern games. That’s part of what makes it interesting to watch, though, I think.

The video may look similar to the first one, but on a technical level I made a lot of changes this time when compared to the first videos from January.

– The new video was recorded at 4:3, the correct aspect ratio for the classic Starcraft launcher, instead of my monitor’s resolution of 16:10 as the first one was. Sorry about that. I’m thinking about uploading another version of that first video but at 4:3 this time, it would probably be a good idea — I’m sure it’s more likely to fill more of the screen for most people this way, at 1600×1200 4:3, than at 1920×1200 with black bars on the right and left since only 1600 is actually filled horizontally. (Any modern videos will be in 1920×1200, though. Sorry not sorry.)

– I increased the bitrate of the recording quite a bit. Is the difference noticeable?

– I did the first video entirely in OBS. This time I only recorded in OBS but used separate editing software, something I have never used before. I definitely don’t understand it well but managed to figure out enough to make this video… on the fourth attempt, it took a while to get it to render correctly at 1600×1200 instead of 1920×1080. It worked though, as this video shows! Nice.

What about text articles?  I have some partially finished stuff I could post, and will — there’s a thing about remasters I wrote that I guess I could post, though it doesn’t really have much of a point — but haven’t made any new reviews or anything, unfortunately.  I’m too obsessed with Starcraft to write retro game summaries or reviews… heh.  I do still play Mario Maker 2, but haven’t made a new level yet this year.  I really need to do that.  I have 29 uploaded levels, why am I waiting so long to make it 30?

Posted in Articles, Classic Games, PC | Tagged , , , , , | 1 Comment

My (Bad) Starcraft Replays: A Youtube Series – Intro and First Game, from 10/20/2001

Posted on January 13, 2025 by Brian

Introduction

Of the games I play the most, Starcraft, GeoGuessr, and Super Mario Maker 2 stand above all others not only because they are the games I am playing the most, but also because they are also the games I watch other people play on Youtube the most.  I also watch a fair amount of retro gaming Youtube, though less than I used to before I got back into Starcraft a year ago now.  The other games I play, including Diablo IV, Dead or Alive 6, and a few others I play occasionally such as Overwatch and Splatoon, are games I don’t watch video of, I just play them once in a while.  I got back into Diablo IV yesterday, actually; I bought the expansion when it released but didn’t really play it until now.  I will certainly continue with that, it’s still a great game.

With that said though, as much as I overall prefer text to video I waste way too much time watching Youtube, so why not make some videos of my own?  I don’t yet have the ability to record from my TV — the problem basically is that I would need a computer in my living room area to record to but I do not have that and it would not be easy to have such a thing unless I buy a pretty nice laptop or something and hope that works — but even though I’ve never used it I can record on my PC, I have OBS and two monitors.

Starcraft: The Greatest Game

And so, yesterday I finally got around to recording something: my oldest Starcraft replay.  I bought Starcraft the week it released back in 1998, after much excitement.  I have never been more hyped for a game release and surely never will be, but it fully lived up to my expectations.  In fact, it was even more amazing than I expected!  Starcraft is the greatest game ever made, with the most amazing mixture of strategy and skill imaginable.  There are other games with deeper strategy and other games with more direct action, but no other game matches Starcraft’s perfect blend of the two.  Chess or a wargame may have more strategy, but you have infinite time to make each move.  Starcraft requires not only good strategy but also exceptional physical skill.  It is an uncompromising, stressful game to play, you need to be at the top of your game to have a chance.  I rarely manage that.

Despite that Starcraft is the most fun and rewarding game you can play.  Even though I am hopelessly terrible at the game, do I quit forever?  No.  I’ve stopped playing for years, but always return to this game because it’s the best.  There is nothing else like it and probably never will be.  Games today have more player aids, more automation, and either less basebuilding, as you see in many modern RTSes such as Battle Aces, or a focus exclusively on that side of the game but with much more detail and economic complexity, as you see in They Are Billions.  Starcraft is what it is:  The great.  Gaming’s most exceptional masterpiece, and its best representative to the world about what an electronic game can be.  When I think of humanity’s great accomplishments in art, music, and such, Starcraft is gaming’s top entry on the list in my book.

However, as amazing as Starcraft is, unfortunately we couldn’t save replays in the early years.  I’m sure I would havesaved at least a few if we could have before then, but we couldn’t.  Replays were not added to Starcraft until May 2001, about three years after its release.  Unfortunately, I did not often save replays once they were finally added.  I only have 45 replays from 2001 to March 2017, before the release of Starcraft Remastered and its fantastic automatic replay save feature, and a majority of them are games against some people I knew on the internet, one guy from Tendo City particularly.  Games against random opponents?  I rarely saved them, for whatever reason.  And while I played a lot of Use Map Settings games — Starcraft invented one of my favorite strategy game subgenres for example, Tower Defense — I have no UMS replays from before Remastered, if the game allowed you to save them.  Oh well, what can you do?  At least I have a few replays of random multiplayer games, plus a bunch against people I knew.

My Oldest Starcraft Replay: A 3-player FFA from October 2001

And of those games, this is the first one: a game of me against two random opponents on the then-ubiquitous map Lost Temple from October 20, 2001.  It’s really unfortunate that this is my only replay from 2001, but it is.  Oh well.  Considering how bad I am, and was, at this game I was not expecting all that much from a game from my late teens, but this is a surprisingly fun match that I recommend Starcraft fans watch.  It’s fun stuff.  Back then, like most players, I played as all three races.  In this game I’m Protoss but in other games I play as Terran and Zerg.  Nowadays I mostly just play Terran.

This was recorded with the original Starcraft patched to version 1.08b, the correct patch for when I saved this game game replay in ’01.  The video is recorded in the original Starcraft and not Remastered not because I prefer it — I actually prefer Remastered, both for significantly improved replay features and for the really nice HD graphical overhaul — but because the replay breaks very badly in Remastered.  Even though Starcraft has not had a balance change since early 2001, there were many patches over the years fixing various bugs and adding other things.  Some of these changes break replays unless played back with the correct old version of the game, as there is no built-in patch changer function to make old replays work.  Most classic, pre-2017 replays have issues when run through the Remastered engine and this replay is no exception.  When run in the classic game patched to the correct patch via a fantastic fan-made patcher utility, however, the replay works great!  I decided to record a video of myself watching the replay, and uploaded it to Youtube.

The ending to this game may be somewhat cliche for a FFA, but despite this I think this was a pretty fun game, some entertaining things happen and there are some nice, if poorly microed by all contenders, battles. It’s too bad I don’t have more replays this old — this is sadly my only replay from 2001, the year replays were added to Starcraft, and I only have 45 from 2001 to March 2017 combined — but I have at least these few and I’m going to upload recordings of some of them, starting with this oldest replay I have of my games.

On a related note, I also have a similar number of Warcraft III replays but uploading them will be challenging, getting the game to the correct patches for replays mostly from the mid ’00s won’t be easy. I do want to try, but I haven’t found a WCIII patcher utility that allows you to easily change to the early versions of the game, and that is what I would need.  Otherwise I would need to try to find all the patches, install base WCIII, and then watch the replays for each version one version at a time before installing the next patch.  That sounds like a huge pain, but I might do it.  I have not gotten back into Warcraft III as I have Starcraft, as its focus on hero skills is something I find much harder to go back to than SC’s focus on pure skill and mechanics, but still it is a game I loved and considered the best game ever for a while after its release.  I would love to watch those old replays as well.

In conclusion, I am not very good at Starcraft, and never have been, but despite this it is my favorite game ever and a game I still play and enjoy.  I think that just because I have never wanted to learn serious keyboard micro doesn’t mean I can’t enjoy this greatest of games as much as anyone better. I am better than you see in this video now, though I haven’t played much Protoss in a long time as I mostly play Terran now, but everyone else is a lot better as well.  I’ll probably eventually record some of my modern games, though they are about as far from the skill you see in professional Starcraft games as is possible; I am a 900 to 1000 rated player and only am that high because of how often people quit instantly in order to falsely tank their ranking.  I usually lose, and I don’t use keyboard hotkeys to build buildings because that has never been my idea of fun.  Again, though, I am fine with this and love playing it anyway.  I hope any potential viewers can accept this.

I have learned something from all the pro Starcraft I have watched over the past year, though.  I may still usually lose, mostly just use the keyboard for some control groups, and struggle at both micro and macro, but have I learned anything since this game from 23 years ago?  Yes I have.  Executing on what I see is more difficult than it would have been when I was younger, but despite this I’m better at the game now than I ever was before.  I build more than one unit production building of each type most of the time now, for example.  I get a lot more workers, more than the one per patch I often did before.  I use somewhat better strategy, and make more use of control groups than I used to.  You will not see me doing much of those things from these games from the ’00s, sadly.  But nobody was as good then as players are now.  As you will see in this video, the other two players in this game are every bit as bad at the game as I was, or worse…

The Video

Me, A_Black_Falcon: Brown Protoss (center)
Red, sw-firefanatic: Red Zerg (lower left)
Blue, {HD}DarkShadow: Blue Protoss (upper right)


Not The Video

This video is of the same replay as above, but as it looks when recorded through Starcraft Remastered.  Do not make this the only version of this game you watch, you won’t have a very good time.  Probably do not watch this video at all unless you are really interested in the kinds of ways replays break, which I guess perhaps someone out there might be.

Conclusion

So yeah, I won!  That didn’t happen often and probably was part of why I chose to save this game and not any of the others from 2001.   It was a pretty crazy game too, it was close and with different decisions anyone could have won as I said previously.  Fun stuff to watch.

Outside of the events of the game itself, the most interesting thing about making these videos is that contrary to what I might have expected, the video that is mostly 640×480 upscaled to 1920×1200 is quite a bit larger filesize than the one that is about the same length and is entirely 1920×1200– recording it using the default settings on OBS, the former video is ~650MB while the latter is a bit over 1GB.  Huh.  I guess the scaling takes up a lot of space? How odd.

Anyway, in conclusion, Starcraft is the best.  Play it.  If you haven’t, well, play the campaign; the original-graphics, non-HD version of the campaign is actually free to download.  Though the multiplayer is really what makes Starcraft immortal, it’s a great campaign, one of the best.  I will be recording more videos of some of my other replays, both old and new.

I’d love to have any comments about how to do a better job recording the replays.  It’s trickier to do in the classic game than in Remastered because the game minimizes when I click on my second monitor and doesn’t always lock the mouse onto the screen, resulting in the camera sometimes moving to the left uncontrollably when I accidentally move it just a tiny bit too far left towards my second monitor, and making adjusting anything in OBS impossible while recording a game.  This is not an issue in Remastered, but as you see above you can’t use Remastered for replays like these, so oh well.  I figured out how to make it work but certainly could have done a much better job.  Sorry about that.

Posted in Articles, Classic Games, Legos, Modern Games, PC, PC, Saturn, SNES | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

On Doom CD32X Fusion – An Amazing Homebrew Accomplishment for the Sega 32X CD

Posted on December 18, 2024 by Brian

Doom CD32X Fusion is a brand-new homebrew version of Doom for the Sega 32X CD. It’s really amazing with fantastic performance, and makes use of all five CPUs in the Genesis with Sega CD and 32X in order to get the best performance and graphical output possible on the hardware. DJ, you’ve probably heard of it but have you tried it yet?

Features: 100 levels, 96 FM music tracks, a fully redone from scratch port that takes nothing from original 32X Doom, a game which makes full use of a complete Genesis with Sega CD and 32X setup.

In order to run the game, you either need to use the Ares emulator or have real hardware. For emulation, Ares is required because other emulators don’t support cart+cd combo releases like this, only a CD-only or cart-only game. For real hardware, you must have a Genesis with a Sega CD and a 32X, a flash cart like an Everdrive, and a computer with a CD burner and a blank CD. Fortunately I have all of these things. I’ve never actually used my Genesis Everdrive Pro before this, for whatever reason I’d bought the thing a year or two ago but never used it, but now I have.

Yes, it requires both a flashcart and a real Sega CD drive with disc, since the game is a cart game with additional data on the CD so it requires both. The release is entirely legal because it doesn’t come with the Doom or Doom 2 game files; instead, Doom CD32X Fusion is a pair of rom patches and a cuefile. You use a rom patcher to apply the two patches to your Doom and Doom 2 WADs, then prepare and burn the CD with the cue file. Then load up the game rom on the Everdrive while the disc is in the SCD’s drive and the game will load. The game could have its own cartridge and CD, of course, instead of needing an Everdrive or similar and a disc you burn yourself, but I don’t know if this will ever have an official release, I doubt it.

As for why the game requires a working real Sega CD and can’t run through the Everdrive Pro like the cartridge does, that’s a somewhat complex question. Part of this is because the cartridge port is using the cartridge with the main base game data, and I’m not sure if it would be possible to emulate both CD and cart at the same time… but this doesn’t matter, because while the Everdrive can emulate a Sega CD (but not a 32X), you can’t run CD images on an Everdrive with a 32X attached to your console. This is because the 32X locks out some Sega CD access from its cartridge port. The only way around this limitation would be a hardware device which plugs into the Genesis accessory port, and so far no such device exists. And so, as an aside, with an Everdrive Pro basically you have a choice: have your 32X attached to your full ‘tower of power’ setup and be able to play 32X game files, or remove the 32X and be able to play Sega CD images, play Sega Master System game roms, and to use the in-game menu to do things like quicksave. SMS games are disabled because the 32X disables SMS support, but I don’t know why that last one is that way… but yes, for some reason the ingame menu is disabled with the 32X attached. So yeah you lose a lot with the 32X and an Everdrive, but I love the 32X so I don’t know if I’d ever remove it.

And plus, with the 32X you can play this amazing homebrew release, Doom CD32X Fusion! Again this is basically a cartridge game which uses the CD for additional data, so the core Doom 1 files are mostly on the ‘cartridge’, while the Doom 2 files, the other levels on this collection, a lot of FM music tracks, and anything else you add — CD audio music tracks if you want them, additional levels, and such — go onto the CD. For the record this game has a 4MB (32 Megabit) cartridge and a 17MB CD. Could this have been done with a large bank-switched cartridge, instead of cart+CD? Maybe, I’m not sure, but either way on that but this way it’s more like a real Genesis game — the largest Genesis game ever was like 5MB, so a 20MB bank-switched game or something would not be realistic for a real Genesis game, but this setup certainly could have happened. By default there is no CD audio on the disc, but there is a CD audio option for if you add any wave files to the disc (and add in the files into the cuetable, of course). The 3DO Doom soundtrack would probably be an ideal addition. The FM music is good and there is a lot of it — over 90 tracks I believe they said — but not every track is equally good. When comparing this music to SNES Doom music some is better on each platform.

I need to make it clear though, yes, because there is a CD there are load times. All loading is in between levels though, not during stages, and the loads aren’t very long, five or ten seconds or so probably. The way it works is that the cart has the core Doom textures on it. Any level using anything beyond original Doom’s textures puts them into the 32X’s RAM from the CD during the pre-level load. This is ideal because you don’t want to be having to load data from the CD during play, Doom would not be a good fit for live-streaming data I would think, a pre-load into RAM is the better choice. Obviously this uses up 32X RAM so the number of added textures is probably limited, I don’t know the details. Level sizes are also more limited than PC Doom due to memory limitations or somesuch. This doesn’t affect Doom 1, but does affect the other games.

Still, this release is pretty amazing stuff for multiple reasons, and one is the performance. You have some nice graphical options here, including whether to have full textures on the ground and ceiling or to remove them and what resolution to use. The game also has an on-screen framerate display. The framerate maxes out at 30fps, you can’t go over 30. Sure. At the default ‘one step below full screen so there is a decent-sized border but it’s totally playable and is similar to the original SNES or 32X versions of Doom’ screen size the game runs quite well, over 20fps almost all of the time and often close to 30. Turn it up to full screen with full textures though and it’ll often be like 15fps, less in areas full of enemies. Turning off the ground textures bumps it over 20fps though. Comparing this to ’90s console versions of Doom… seriously, this significantly outclasses most of the “more powerful” consoles! This really shows how much power the Sega Genesis’s two processors, plus the Sega CD’s processor, plus the two in the 32X, can do when all used together by modern programmers.

As for in-game features, you start out by choosing to either run Doom (original PC Doom), Doom 2 (straight from the PC!), Resurrection (this is based on Doom 32X Resurrection, which was an enhanced version of original 32X Doom, so it has the cut-down Jaguar level maps and such), run (Mini-)TNT, or go to a file browser to run something else if you put more levels on the disc. TNT is a selection of 5 levels from the TNT Evillution part of Final Doom. A full conversion of Final Doom was abandoned because a lot of its levels are too large to fit into this games’ limited memory size, or something like that, so converting the levels to 32XCD took a huge amount of work. That any of Final Doom at all is here is really cool, though.

Once you choose a game, you can start a new game in either single or multi player. The game supports both two player split-screen and two player link play. I’m not sure how the link cable play works, you’d need quite the setup to try it, but it exists. It’s probably designed to use the Zero Tolerance controller 2 to controller 2 male to male controller cord? I’m not sure.

As for the controls, obviously since this is the Genesis it can’t use L and R for strafing as you could on SNES. Instead, you hold C to strafe. It works but you can’t circle-strafe, oh well. I don’t care. The other two buttons are fire and use. With a 6-button pad Z opens the map and X and Y switch weapons, or you can hold Mode and press a button for instant access to each weapon. The game also has Mega Mouse support, but I don’t have one so I don’t know how well that works. (I really should have the light gun and mouse for the Genesis, but for some reason I don’t…)

You also can “save”, with two save slots, and load your save game. The two slots are universal and it doesn’t tell you which game each file is from, only the level name. That’s a little annoying, but oh well. Also, you can’t save anywhere. Instead this game only saves from the beginning of the level, much like a classic console game. Ah well.

In terms of enemies, everything is here other than the Arch-Vile, Pain Elemental, and SS Soldier. I have heard of the Arch-Vile but don’t know what it is offhand, and don’t know what those other two are I presume they’re from Doom II? Never played it. It does have reverse sides of enemies, unlike the original SNES or 32X versions of Doom, and does have the invisible demon.

Visually, this is extremely accurate to the PC game, except for areas where levels had to be reduced in detail in order to fit in memory. Some things did need to be changed, particularly in the few levels of Final Doom that are here but also some in Doom 2, but it’s as accurate as possible. It has all of the little added graphical details of PC Doom that were missing from the ’90s console releases.

To mention a few other issues with this game, the map is the same as on the PC, so you don’t have the cool Mode 7 map of SNES Doom. It’d be a neat option but I understand sticking to the base design.

Also, while Doom’s levels are here, some of the rest of Doom’s presentation is not here. That is, the map screen between levels doesn’t exist here. There is still some in-between-level text, though, but not really the original episodes given that the map is gone and levels are numbered 1 to 27, not within each episode. You pretty much just play the 27 levels of Doom one after another. That’s pretty disappointing! The original 32X version of Doom was like this as well, and it’s one of the reasons why it’s worse than the PC (or SNES) versions. I hope that the map screens can be added back in at some point, I at least miss them.

Overall, I haven’t played this a lot but I have played it and it’s quite impressive. I’ve never played Doom II before, actually, despite owning it for PC. Maybe I’ll play it now. With a lot of levels and fantastic performance considering — with only minor sacrifices this game runs at a pretty stable 30fps — Doom CD32X Fusion is just amazing stuff! This is the first and only game to make full use of the whole Genesis setup, with a cartridge 32X game with a CD for additional data, and making use of all the processors for the best performance possible. Yes, this release has a few limitations, with its limited level size keeping them from converting most of Final Doom, FM music that is pretty good but sometimes doesn’t match SNES Doom’s greatness, no map between levels in Doom 1 — seriously, this is so unfortunate — and no circle-strafing, but still this game looks incredible and plays fantastic. It’s amazingly PC-accurate with only minor cuts. This is probably the best way to play Doom on a classic console, only the Playstation version compares and it’s stuck with the cut-down Jaguar level maps in Doom 1.

Find the game here:
https://www.doomworld.com/forum/topic/148783-doom-cd32x-fusion/

Posted in 32X, Articles, Classic Games, Genesis, Legos | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Warcraft I Remastered & Warcraft II Remastered: A Badly Broken Dream Come True

Posted on November 25, 2024 by Brian

Just as a note, this is not a full review of Warcraft I or II, so if you know nothing about the game you probably will miss some of the context here.  Sorry about that.  The section about the missing multiplayer features should be clear enough to anyone, though.

Introduction

For many years now, the game I have most wanted was a remaster of Warcraft II. It’s something  I have often thought about… like, how amazing would it be if WCII got a remaster?  It’s one of the best games, it deserves it!  And Blizzard has been making remasters of its classics for years now.  First Starcraft got an amazing remaster, then Warcraft III a pretty bad one, then Diablo II got a great one, and they re-released their SNES games as well… but where was the re-release of Warcraft II, an exceptionally great game deserving of high praise?  Warcraft II has a permanent place in my top 10 best PC games ever list, and I don’t think that’s just because of nostalgia; it really does have some of the best of everything.  I would pick Warcraft II as having the best soundtrack ever in a game, the best voice work ever in a game, and some of the best gameplay as well.  Oh, and its cartoony art still looks absolutely exceptional and barely needs anything more than a resolution boost to match the best sprite art out there today.  Warcraft II is one of the best games ever and deserves an absolutely top-tier remaster, one that isn’t just a nostalgia piece but that brings this top-tier classic to the prominence it deserves.

Well, the good news is, it just got a surprise remaster!  The bad news is, that remaster, while fine for single player play, is very very badly lacking in online features, falling far behind the featureset of Warcraft II Battle.net Edition, a release from 25 years ago.  Ouch.  So let’s begin.

Warcraft II versus Starcraft

First though, I would like to compare WCII to the game I have been most obsessed with again this year, the greatest game ever made.  I should say right now, while I deeply love Warcraft II, Starcraft is the better game.  Starcraft is a work of genius that the industry has never managed to match again. The game is still played professionally for a reason: the game is, while flawed in some ways as all games are, exceptionally special. And yes, unlike pretty much any other game from the 1990s, Starcraft 1 has a very lively pro scene in Korea, for any who don’t know.  The most prestigious tournament happens twice a year; look up SSL Autumn 2024 if you want to watch the most recent one.  Starcraft balances a very high physical skill requirement and a high strategic requirement for what is, overall, one of the most challenging and intense competitive games ever made.  There are plenty of games which require deeper strategy, and some which require faster inputs, but few to none that require more of both.  It is as amazing a thing to watch as it is to play.

But what of Warcraft II?  It is a truly amazing game, accessible and yet deep, fun and challenging.  This remaster makes a few small tweaks to the game, such as increasing the unit selection count to 12 from the former 9, but otherwise it’s Warcraft II as it ever was, just higher resolution.  And there are reasons why Starcraft is the better game.  WCII is simpler, with less strategic depth than SC; is less balanced, with two races one of which is clearly better than the other; doesn’t have different terrain heights; has poor unit pathfinding so you will need to micromanage units to keep them from getting lost; doesn’t have features like waypoints or unit queueing in buildings that build units; has a whole naval component to the game that you will only ever use in certain specific maps but more often will have to ignore; is more random because where in Starcraft a unit may do, say, 9 damage, in Warcraft II a unit will do a range of damage instead, such as perhaps 2-50 or somesuch; and more. Warcraft II is one of the greatest games ever, but it doesn’t quite match Starcraft.

Regardless, Warcraft II IS one of the best games ever and it does have a whole lot of strengths.  For one, since it is simpler than SC, WC3, or SC2, the game should have a bit lower barrier to entry.  Yes, it’s archaic in ways such as pathfinding and unit queueing, but the gameplay’s perfect balance of simplicity and depth makes for something anyone can get into with a little practice.  That is not to say that Warcraft II is easy, though; there is plenty of challenge to be found, both in the expansion campaign and in multiplayer.  The game has significant strategic depth and is incredibly fun to play.  I think that if the online is improved on and if the racial imbalance could be fixed to make Humans as good as Orc, WCII could have a great future as a popular online game.


Warcraft I Remastered (Originally, Warcraft: Orcs and Humans)

Before I continue with talking about the new features and problems of Warcraft II Remastered, however, I should talk about the other new part of this package, Warcraft I Remastered.  This Battle Pack comes with a remaster of Warcraft I, also, remember! Warcraft I is a game I got for my birthday back in 1995, and it is the game that introduced me to the RTS, so I have a lot of nostalgia for it.  Despite that, though, it isn’t a game that I have revisited much at all.  Going back to the original release now, I had forgotten how primitive it was features-wise in a lot of ways!  Warcraft II still feels reasonably modern; yes, it’s missing things like waypoints and unit queueing, but those things are minor compared to the gulf between Warcrafts 1 and 2. Warcraft 1 as originally released didn’t have control-grouping units.  You could save three map positions with Control + F1 to F3, oddly enough, but not save unit groups or buildings.  Warcraft II does have control-grouping units.  WC1 doesn’t scroll when you push the mouse to the edge of the screen, either, only when you click the mouse button down while at the edge of the screen.  You can center-click to center the view on your mouse cursor, though, or move the screen view around with the arrow keys.  Given how awkward scrolling is otherwise these features are important.  WC2 scrolls when you push the mouse to the edge of the screen, as you would expect.  Warcraft 1 doesn’t have right-click support for things like auto-harvest or auto-attack, either, so you need to either use the keyboard hotkey or click the interface button to have a worker mine or cut wood, for example.  Units won’t attack if you right-click on an enemy, either, use that hotkey.  Warcraft 2 changes all of that with right-click commands.  WC1 does have a way to bring up a box to select multiple units at once — you hit a keyboard key to bring it up — but it has a maximum unit selection count of four.  WC2 increased that number to 9, SC to 12, WC3 to 16, and SC2 to infinite.  WC1+2 remaster went with a limit of 12.  But back to the original release of WC1,  even if you have, say, only peasants selected, you can’t give them all a group Mine command; you’ll need to do that one at a time, with each of them.  That is one fault that Warcraft II unfortunately did carry over, you still can’t, say, tell two Paladins to heal one unit if you have both selected.  Too bad.

But as for WC 1, that isn’t even all of it.  For a few things that are both positives and negatives, your basic workers in WC1 cannot fight, at all.  Yeah, if all you have is Peasants or Peons, even one enemy is Game Over, you cannot fight back.  That was something I had totally forgotten.  WC1 is also a 1v1 game only; it’s always one against one, Human against Orc, you against either the computer or another human.  That’s fine.  The game doesn’t have a map editor to make your own maps, unfortunately, though.  It does have the somewhat interesting feature of a unit stats editor, however, so you can modify the game by changing unit stats and play around with that.  It also does let you play single games against the computer on a variety of premade maps.  And lastly, while Warcraft II was originally a high-res- for-the-time SVGA game designed to run in 640×480 or even 800×600, Warcraft 1 is a regular VGA game, running in 320×240 or so, and it has the very low-rez, blocky look typical to VGA games of this detail level.  Visually, Warcraft 1 looks old in a way Warcraft II doesn’t.  WCII was a next-gen game for its time thanks to its SVGA graphics and it holds up much better than this game.  It’s hard to believe that they released only a year apart, it looks like so much more than that.

That may seem like a lot, but Warcraft I was a pioneering game at the time of its release! It was one of the early titles in the Real-Time Strategy genre and pushed things forward in quite a few ways.  The interface and controls were more advanced than prior RTSes like Command & Conquer, for one thing.  Another thing was the multiplayer, from this point on an areaa of Blizzard special focus.  Having multiplayer at all in an RTS in 1994 was a somewhat big deal.  The original game supported two player multiplayer by either LAN or modem.  That was pretty cool.  The 12 mission campaigns  were reasonably challenging, too; I remember it taking me quite a while to finish.  The single missions against the AI can be tough as well.  The game is definitely not perfectly balanced — archers are much stronger than melee troops and summons are overpowered — but it was good enough for the time.

So, how is the remaster?  On the one hand, it is single player only, shamefully.  On the other hand, it modernizes the interface across the board, bringing things up to Warcraft II’s level in terms of controls.  Now you can have workers mine by just right-clicking on the mine, you can select up to 12 units just like the WCII Remaster, you can attack an enemy by right clicking on them instead of having to hit A or the Attack button on the interface and THEN clicking on them in order to attack the enemy, you can scroll around by just moving the mouse to the edge of the screen, and more.  It’s utterly fantastic, game-changing stuff that dramatically modernizes this title.  I love the results of this.  You can go back to WC1-style inputs if you want, as a menu option, but the WCII style is so much better that there isn’t all that much reason to.  I’m sure this will lead some to say, well, why couldn’t both games have been further improved with features like the aforementioned unit queueing and waypoints?  And yeah, that’s a fair point, perhaps it should have been.  I know that Age of Empires II has added some modern quality of life improvements, why not Warcraft II?  I don’t mind not having those features, but if most people would prefer them they should be added.  I think that such additions should be limited, I don’t want the game to become too automated, but features from Starcraft 1 like queueing and waypoints would fit well in these games.

But yes, the elephant in the room is that Warcraft I Remastered is single player only.  Yeah. The multiplayer is entirely removed! Warcraft II Remastered’s multiplayer may be shamefully bad features-wise, as I will soon explain, but at least it HAS it!  Warcraft 1 Remastered doesn’t have any multiplayer at all, for whatever reason.  The graphical upgrade looks very nice, with sprite art that is true to the original designs but much higher resolution.  I never thought I’d see HD Wolf Riders, WC1 Peasants, and the like!  It’s pretty cool.

Comparing Warcraft 1 to Warcraft II, Warcraft 1 has a more realistic art style than WC2 went for, with much more of a standard fantasy look, so it’s really cool to see it in higher quality.  At the time I liked some things about WC1’s art design better than WC2’s; it all depends on what you think of realism versus cartoon art design.  It’s also much easier to heal with WC1’s dedicated healers, the Priests, than it is with WC2’s knight/healer hybrid unit, the Paladin, who have to take time from their fighting to heal eachother and heal less per heal.  Warcraft I also has a few interesting cave missions during each campaign where you don’t build a base but instead have to explore and accomplish an objective with just the units you are given.  I wouldn’t want that in every mission, I love base-building, but having a few of these to mix things up is nice.  WCII doesn’t have them, unfortunately.

However, removing the multiplayer entirely is pretty unforgivable.  Is the Warcraft Battlechest worth getting, yes, absolutely, but I very much hope that eventually they patch in the 1v1 multiplayer mode that this game should have had.  Warcraft II is the better game, but it’d be pretty amusing to play WC1 multiplayer online sometime.  Still, this remaster is a lot of fun.  WC1 with WC2 controls was a fantastic idea and it’s great.

Warcraft II Remastered: The Release and Single Player

But anyway, I should get back to the main point here, about Warcraft II.  In terms of interface, WCII Remastered is very similar to the original, with almost no changes other than the aforementioned 9-to-12 selection limit increase.

To reprise, just a few weeks ago, Warcraft II Remastered shadow-dropped, in a Warcraft Battlechest collection including a patch for the very troubled Warcraft III remaster and a remaster of Warcraft I.  Wow, what a deal, two brand new remasters of some of Blizzard’s best games, and fixes for the WC3 remaster as well!  How can it go wrong?

Well, this is modern Blizzard we’re talking about here, a company that is sadly far from its ‘clearly the best game developer in the world’ status that they had from about ’95 to ’03, but hey, the Diablo II remaster from a few years ago was great, so this could be good, right?

Well, unfortunately, it’s not.  Oh, if you are only planning on playing in single player, the remaster is pretty solid.  The interface for selecting custom maps is bad — it shows everything in one list and there is no folder support — but otherwise it’s fine. The music is as amazing as ever, the graphics have a mostly great-looking high definition overhaul and are still beautiful sprite art, all four single player campaigns from the base game Tides of Darkness and its expansion Beyond the Dark Portal are here, and more!  Hours of classic RTS single player fun are here for anyone to enjoy, and I’m sure plenty of people who have not played the originals will enjoy these campaigns.  The new graphics look fantastic, everything is very true to the original designs and look amazing.  I should say, though, that both Remasters call the CD audio soundtracks a “remaster” but they are not, that’s a lie; it’s the CD audio music from the original discs.  The “Original” option is the optional MIDI songs that you could enable if you wanted.  This is a bit unfortunate because an orchestral redo of WCII’s exceptional, Baroque-style musical score is something which the world deserves.  WCII’s music is from a time before all fantasy game soundtracks went for a cinematic-style score and it is better for it.  Warcraft III, for example, goes all-in on cinematic extravagance in its soundtrack and it’s pretty great, but overall WCII’s is better.  And those voices… unchanged is perfect.  They’re the absolute best.  I love how serious the Paladins are, particularly.

The game has some nice new features like a level select screen that lets you start from any level you have reached without needing to remember to save at the beginning of each mission, also.  The mission briefing screens have been redrawn and look good.  The menu fonts are pretty basic but work fine enough.  I will not spoil the stories of any of the games, but they tell entertaining fantasy tales, full of tragedy, violence, and humor.  They are certainly not the most complex plots ever and almost all characters and units are either white men or green orcs, something which bothers some I am sure, but I am fine with this; that’s fantasy genre-accurate, and is pretty much how it would have been had a portal to an Orc world had opened in a medieval European-style kingdom.  If you’re thinking about buying this to play through the single player, either as someone who played it back then or as someone who has never played the game before, I highly recommend it.  It’s fantastic and a lot of fun.  The base campaigns probably won’t challenge a skilled gamer all that much until the later stages of each one, as the challenge doesn’t really start until about the eighth mission of 14, I would say based on playing the game again now, but the expansion campaigns are indeed still pretty tough.  I could never beat them back in the ’90s, they were too hard.  I haven’t tried to play through them again yet but surely will.  I am sure I will do better than I did as a teenager.  It’s unfortunate that the expansion adds no new units or game mechanics other than Heroes with higher stats than regular units, but oh well, at least it added new full campaigns and plenty of challenge.  You will get your moneys’ worth out of the single player.

Unfortunately, however, right now you probably will not be getting your moneys’ worth out of the incredibly basic, nearly feature-free multiplayer.  Despite being quite new Warcraft II Remastered’s online is already sparsely populated.  You will soon understand why.

Warcraft II Remastered: The Multiplayer

The multiplayer in Warcraft II Remastered… exists.  There is a Multiplayer button on the main menu, and it opens a games list.  There you can either join a game in progress, or create a game of your own.  Okay, that’s alright.  The problem is that the list of missing features is insanely long.

  • WCIIR comes with 39 maps, all original Blizzard maps from 1995-1996.  The three maps Blizzard published after the release of the Battle.net edition in 1999-2000 are not included, and nor are any new maps.  So, there are no modern, balanced maps here, only mid ’90s maps with their entertainingly imbalanced designs, where depending on your start point you surely will be at an advantage or disadvantage over some other players.  This is map design that Starcraft’s online map pool weeded out over a decade ago or more.  Yes, I love Garden of War, it’s one of the all-time-great RTS maps, but is every start point as close to equally fair as you can get?  No, of course not.  It isn’t symmetrical, it is designed in a more ‘realistic’ manner without regard to equal balance for all.  But the WCII map editor is included with this release.  It’s buried in a subfolder, is entirely unchanged from the WCII BNE version of the editor, and doesn’t have an icon in the Battle.net Launcher, but it’s there.  So okay, you can solve the maps problem by just making new maps and letting other people download them in-game, right?  Automatic map download has been a feature of all Blizzard RTSes with online play… except for this one.  That’s right, if you create an online game with anything other than one of the 39 built-in maps, nobody else will be able to download the map, so you will not be able to play the game.  In my experience it’s actually even worse than this, and I can’t even stay in the game MYSELF!  The game falsely gives a “map not found” error whenever I try this AS THE MULTIPLAYER GAME CREATOR.  The map in question is in the maps folder on my hard drive, I put it there.  It is not “not found”.  This is a missing feature that absolutely must be fixed as soon as possible, limiting people to only the under 40 maps from ’95-’96 and nothing else is insanely awful.  Of all the missing features this is by far the worst one.  Obviously in custom games Starcraft Remastered has auto-map download, and lets you create custom games with your own maps.
  • WCIIR does not have any kind of replay-save feature.  Of course, Warcraft II never has had a replay system, but Starcraft had one added back in 2001 and WC3 and SC2 have had them from day one. Putting replays into WCII should have been a no-brainer, it’s a hugely useful feature for helping people to get better at the game by studying replays and for remembering great moments.  I watch a lot of Youtube videos of casts of Starcraft replays, and it’s fantastic fun to watch.  There is one channel I know of that frequently posts WCII gameplay, but that channel needs to record from outside the game since, again, no replay system.  It’s just pathetic that BLizzard actually shipped this game without adding replays.  It shows that they don’t care about WCIIR’s success like they should. Starcraft Remastered obviously has replays, and all SC:R replays can be played by anyone with the game since SC has not had a balance patch since 2001.
  • WCIIR does not have an Allies button or menu during games.  In all other Blizzard RTSes, including WCII: BNE as well as SC, WC3, and SC2, there is a menu you can open that shows you a list of all players with their player color.  This menu allows you to change alliances if the game mode allows for it and otherwise allows you to see who is who.  There is also always an easy way with a button to enable Allies-only chat in team games, so you aren’t talking to everyone, and the games distinguish between allied chat and chat to everyone.  WCIIR, as you might be able to guess, doesn’t have much of any of this.  There is no in-game Allies tab, and no listing of who is which color.  Pregame you know which race and which team each player was on, but not their color. There is no way to change alliances in-game.  There is no button for Allied chat, either.  There is a keyboard hotkey for it if you know it, but the game doesn’t show it any differently from other chat so it’s hard for anyone to know which chat is to everyone and which is only to your team.  Again, it’s just pathetic that the game actually shipped without such incredibly basic, fundamental features as this.  Obviously Starcraft Remastered has all the missing features.
  • WCIIR does not have a ladder of any kind.  There is only one multiplayer mode, which opens as soon as you open the Multiplayer menu: a list of games to enter.  When a game finishes, you return to the main menu to play again if you want.  That’s all you get.  There is no ladder, no ranked mode, no player rankings, nothing.  Blizzard doesn’t care and doesn’t want anyone else to care about this game either, apparently, which is strange given how much effort went into the again great-looking graphical overhaul.  Starcraft Remastered has a full ladder with player rankings, a map pool change every 6 months, and automatic matchmaking.  The auto-matchmaking is a particularly fantastic feature addition given that the original Starcraft and Warcraft II: Battle.Net Edition, while they did have online play and a ranked ladder, did not have auto-matchmaking; instead you needed to join games for ladder matches like any other.  This game should have had that too. Surely more people would be playing if it did.
  • WCIIR does not have a multiplayer chat lobby, unlike all other Blizzard RTSes. You can chat in the lobby when you join a game and in-game, but that’s it.  I know that open chat lobbies in online games are less common today so I get why it was left out, but it’s a feature that many in the community expected, I’ve seen many complaints that there isn’t one.  Starcraft Remastered kept its chat lobbies, of course.
  • On a related note, WCIIR does not have LAN support.  The multiplayer is online on Battle.net only.  If you want to do an offline LAN tourney… well, go play the DOS version, you won’t be playing this one.  Starcraft Remastered does have LAN support, surely because of demand for it by the Korean pro leagues which do offline tourneys.  Unfortunately there is no WCII pro scene to demand its inclusion here, too bad.
  • WCIIR doesn’t let multiplayer game lobby creators kick people out of the game or limit access to the lobby with a password. Anyone can join any game, and the creator can’t kick out an unwanted player. Now, given how often in many RTSes people would get kicked out constantly for, for instance, not having the map already and thus not knowing how to play the map yet, I can see a case for this as kicking people for reasons like that is quite frustrating, but ultimately there must be a way to kick someone out who isn’t behaving. No such function exists here, so if one person is MIA or wants to be annoying and won’t team up properly there’s nothing the creator can do. Obviously no other Blizzard RTS has anything like this insane lack of a basic feature.
  • On a related note, WCIIR has very few game mode options.  You can choose the map tileset between the four in the game, change the resource level of the mines on the map, and choose between starting with only a single worker or with a town hall and a worker, and that’s it.  There is no way to set a game for Top vs. Bottom play, or 2v2v2v2, or whatever.  And lobby creators can’t change any players’ team, either, only players themselves can do that and only in the pre-game lobby, too; remember, no teams can be changed during the game, the Allies menu does not exist anymore for some insane reason.  So if you want a team game you must ask people to team up correctly in the lobby before you start. It’s bizarre and incredibly limiting when compared to any other Blizzard RTS, or probably much else in the genre either.  And since there is no TvB mode, where your allies appear is completely random.  Some maps were designed for TvB but too bad here the option doesn’t exist.  Absurd.

Conclusion

So yeah, that is a LOT of critical missing features.  Warcraft II multiplayer games have always been mostly centered around Free-For-All or two to four player team games with four to eight players, and that is very much how WCIIR is today.  In that way, it’s a charming relic of a time when most online RTS games involved a bunch of random players of various skill levels either working together or against eachother on a map that may be decently well designed but certainly isn’t equally fair for all.  It’s great that such things still exist!  However, as much as I like group FFAs or team games, wouldn’t it be better if there was also support for the kind of 1v1-focused ladder play that largely defines the RTS multiplayer experience in the current century, with WCII’s gameplay, unaltered except hopefully for finally a fix for the racial imbalance caused by Orcs’ Bloodlust ability being much easier to use than Humans’ Heal, a problem which causes as much as 80% of players to play as Orc?  I sure think that it would be better that way!

Even so, I mostly am thrilled that the Warcraft I and II Remasters exist.  Yes, the online features are unacceptably limited, but… the game exists at all! It’s Warcraft II, one of the best games ever, with nice 2d sprite-art upscales of its fantastic graphics.  Warcraft II’s oroginal graphics hold up so well that I have sometimes, while playing this, hit F5 to switch to the original graphics and then forgotten to switch back for quite some time because of how great the original looks, and how similar the remaster is, and I cannot think of higher praise than that.  The audio is entirely unchanged from the original, too, so it’s still the best game music and sound effects ever.  The gameplay is a simple and yet deep classic real-time strategy game with some of the best and most fun design around.  Building a base, building an army, perhaps also building a fleet if you are on a naval map, and fighting the enemy is one of the most fun and rewarding things in gaming, and this remaster is the best way to play one of the best games ever.

Overall, Warcraft II Remastered is a dream come true and I am thrilled that this collection was released.  I only hope that Blizzard can be shamed into eventually fixing its online features so that it is worth playing against others a lot more than it is today.

Even so, though, despite its flaws, absolutely buy the Warcraft Battlechest.  Even as it is this is a must-have collection, no question about it.  The single player remaster is fantastic stuff, then maybe play a few multiplayer matches if you can find a game.

Posted in Articles, Classic Games, First Impressions, Modern Games, PC, PC, Saturn, SNES | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

A Review of Tempest 2000, One of Gaming’s Greatest Masterpieces, And its Arcade Forbear Tempest

Posted on October 23, 2024 by Brian

I decided to try to review some of my favorite games.  I’m starting with the classic console game I have played the most this year so far, and one of the all-time best.

Title: Tempest 2000
Platform: Atari Jaguar
Release Date: 1994
Developer: Llamasoft
Publisher: Atari Inc. (1984-1996)
Format: Cartridge in cardboard box (A music CD of the soundtrack was also released later on)

Ports: There are many ports of this game. Emulated ports are in the Atari 50 collection for PC, Nintendo Switch, Xbox One/Series, and PS4/PS5.  Older, more heavily altered ports were released back in the ’90s on PC, Saturn, and PlayStation (as Tempest X3).  This review is of the game being played on real hardware on an actual Jaguar.  I have discussed the PlayStation version of Tempest X3 and the Atari 5200 version of the original Tempest before, but not the Jaguar title or the arcade game itself.

Introduction

Tempest 2000 is Jeff Minter’s magnum opus.  This exceptional masterpiece is is one of my favorite games ever. T2K is one of those ‘peak of the mountain’ games, one of those titles that shows how amazing gaming can be at its absolute best.  And that’s the problem, for this review at least: praise is hard! It is, sadly, often easier to criticize than to praise, to write or say reams of reasons why something is bad than to write ones why something is great.  I guess we’ll see how this goes, because there aren’t many things to criticize about T2K.

Tempest, the original arcade game, was released in 1981 in arcades by Atari, and was programmed by Dave Theurer, the same man who also designed the famous megahit Missile Command.  It was a successful game, but not on Missile Command’s level of popularity.  While Tempest 2000’s developer Jeff Minter was not involved at all with its development, Minter was an active game developer at the time.  However, at that point he was making smaller games for home computers, not arcade games.  He may not have worked with Atari until the early ’90s, but Jeff Minter is probably gaming’s longest-termed programmer.  He with an amazing record of consistency for spending the last 45 years almost exclusively making simple-looking, pre-crash-styled arcade-inspired score-focused games.  If you look at a Jeff Minter game from the early ’80s such as Aggressor or Gridrunner and then his most recent releases such as Polybius or Akka Arrh, you will see the most consistent record in gaming.  All four titles are easily recognizable as Jeff Minter productions.  I have loved Minter’s games ever since I first played Llamatron 2112 back in the early ’90s.

A Review of the Original Arcade Game Tempest

At its core, Tempest 2000 is a remake of the 1981 vector-graphcis arcade game Tempest.  So, I should discuss the arcade game first.  Tempest is a space shooter, a popular genre at the time, except instead of shooting enemies on the top of the screen, you shoot from the edge of the screen at enemies coming at you from the center.  It was inspired by Space Invaders turned vertical, crossed with a nightmare of Theurer’s about monsters crawling out of a hole. (Source: https://arcadeblogger.com/2018/01/19/atari-tempest-dave-theurers-masterpiece/)

Learning that makes sense, because I have long seen the nightmarish, horror-esque element of this game and Tempest 2000 as well.  Tempest is kind of a horror game.  It isn’t, but it is.  This is a game designed to make you focus, but also to kind of creep you out and instill a sense of dread in the player, as the monsters just keep coming, and coming, out of the depths… until eventually, you get overrun.  Tempest and T2K are maybe the best horror games ever.

Again, the central gameplay of both titles is the same: you control a little ship, and can move around the outer, and upper, edge of the play area, which is called the ‘web’.  The web is made up of lines going from the middle of the screen to the upper edge where you are, connecting them in a vector shape.  Your ship is pointing towards the center of the screen, aiming towards the middle where the enemies come from.  If the enemies reach the top of the web, they move around the top and once either an enemy touches your ship or you run into one of their shots you die and lose a life.

When you move left or right you flip around the edge, moving between sectors of the top of the web.  You can only move in two directions in this game, so while the game is three dimensional in that enemies move up a 3d angled route towards you, you only need to worry about moving horizontally to shoot them.  For controls, the original arcade game used a spinner-style stick, giving you precise analog control of your movement.  You shoot with one button and use the Superzapper, a superbomb which kills all enemies on screen.  You can use the Superzapper once per level.  Once all enemies in a stage are dead you clear it and move on to the next web.  If you die, you restart the stage from the beginning.

The game has 16 stage layouts, and after you clear stage 16 the web color changes.  There are six colors: blue, red, yellow, cyan, invisible, and lastly green.  After level 99 the levels stop increasing and you just play at that difficulty until you run out of lives, if you were so lucky to get that far.  One interesting feature, though, is that there is a continue function of sorts!  When you get game over, you can continue from the last checkpoint level that you reached.  You can select which level you want to start from from the checkpoint levels you have reached.  The game doesn’t save these permanently, of course, so if powered off the checkpoints and scores will be lost, but still it’s a very interesting feature, as continuing in arcade games like that was not really a thing when this game released in 1981.

When enemies reach the top of the web, you have two options. One is to try to shoot them as they flip onto your section of web.  Yes, you can do this, so letting enemies get to the top is not an instant loss, but timing that shot is tricky.  You can also use the Superzapper of course, if you still have it.  It’s much better to get rid of enemies before they reach the top, but sometimes it won’t be possible as you get farther in and enemy counts increase.  Overall Tempest is a great game, with a creepy vibe and a great balance of challenge and the feeling that if you play well you can get far in the game.

As with most pre-crash games, Tempest has no music and simple presentation, but the graphics were groundbreaking at the time.  The graphics are amazing looking with that color vector display, and the sound effects are fantastic and fit perfectly as well.  The striking look of this game is extremely memorable.  Color vector displays were a rarely seen, expensive technical feat, and this game uses that kind of display and it looks amazing!  Still, as was common at the time there is no background other than black space except for some stars that appear while you fly from one level to the next.  The result focuses you on the action.

It is of course an endless game you play for score . Tempest is intense, though.  Where a game of Donkey Kong or Space Invaders can last many hours, the world record for Tempest at its hardest settings is a video about 20 minutes long.  You will die.  There are several different web designs, but the stage layouts repeat after a few stages and then you’re on the endless loop until Game Over.  And while there are a handful of enemy types, there aren’t all that many of those either.  There is no background either of course, just black space.  Still, the wireframe 3d vector graphics look amazing, and the gameplay is a lot of fun.

However… however, I find it hard to play Tempest because as good as it is, I could be playing Tempest 2000, the game that takes Tempests’ model and improves on it in almost every way.  And when I want to play a Tempest game, that is usually what I do: play Tempest 2000.  Tempest 4000 (for modern consoles) is also quite good, but while Jeff Minter has made multiple Tempest-style games over the past three decades and all are great, none quite match the exceptional genius of his first effort.

Tempest 2000: The Fundamentals and Features

Tempest 2000 is a modernized update of Tempest.  The main mode is called Tempest 2000 mode.  The core gameplay is identical, with you moving around the top edge of weblike stages, shooting in at the enemies moving up the web at you.  You again need to dodge their fire while taking them out before they reach the top.  This time there are interesting varied backgrounds, though, as the game has trippy light synthesizer-style backgrounds and pounding techno music.  There are also new powerups, new enemy types, a lot of new maps, an actual ending when you reach level 100, a harder difficulty unlocked after clearing the game, the ability to continue from every few levels so that you don’t need to start the game over every time you get Game Over, and more.  Outside of the main Tempest 2000 mode the game has several other modes as well.  There is a two player multiplayer versus mode; a port of the original Tempest game but of course with regular graphics instead of vector ones; Tempest Plus, a mode which is basically standard Tempest but with T2K’s visuals; and an options menu with some interesting options in it.

The game saves your settings, which levels you can start from, as you can start from the last odd-numbered level you have beaten if you wish — and the high score table.  The game saves everything necessary.  The Jaguar is the first console where almost every single game supports saving, and it’s a hugely important and wonderful change versus what you see on other classic consoles.  Even in years after the Jag’s release a lot of console games didn’t have saving in some genres — no Sega CD shmup supports high score saving, for example, and even some PlayStation shooters don’t.  But on Jaguar all official games save at least scores and settings.  It hugely helps this kind of game for the game itself to keep track of your scores, no need to write down your best scores or take screenshots or something. And because all Jaguar saving is done to EEPROM flash memory chips and not batteries, the system has no problem with old batteries, unlike most of its contemporaries.  I think that that everything saves is the number one most next-gen thing about the Jaguar as a console; even the games that otherwise look like last-gen ports almost always have saving added. Tempest 2000 takes advantage of it well.

In the single player modes Tempest 2000 plays almost exactly the same as the original Tempest, just improved in every way other than losing that amazing color vector display. T2K has the best graphics possible with its regular pixel-graphics display, but vectors do look amazing in a way no regular display can match.  Ah well.  So, as with the original Tempest, you move around the top of levels, shooting at enemies climbing up at you.  All enemies from the original game return, with some new additions to the roster.  New enemies get introduced once you get farther in the game, as well.  As with the original the web colors change every 16 levels, but this time you don’t only see the same 16 levels over and over, new webs are introduced as you progress.  It’s Tempest, but more.

The Controls and Powerups

The controls are, by default, a small step below the arcade game, because the standard Jaguar controller only has a d-pad on it for movement.  I think the digital controls are just fine, as each press moves you to the next section of the web, but if you want analog controls the game does support them, which is pretty awesome — Jeff Minter made sure to include hidden support for a rotary-stick controller, even though no such controller existed for the system at the time other than a homebrew one hacked together.  I do not have one right now, though I really should get one, but it’s just fantastic that the option exists.  It means that controls are even with the arcade game.

As for buttons, T2K uses three, the three regular Jaguar face buttons, for Shoot, Jump once you have it in a level, and Superzapper.  On the last of those, yes the Superzapper bomb returns to help you out, as beofre usable once per stage.  Also, once again, if you die you restart the current level from the beginning.  Otherwise, Start pauses as you would expect.  The keypad is used for muting the music as usual — a keypad music mute feature is common on Jag games with music — and for shifting the view around, adjusting how the web moves on stages that go slightly over one screen in size, adjusting the screen size, and such. It’s a good use of the keypad for something a game for a newer platform would put on a second stick or somesuch.  You won’t need to touch it during play, thankfully.  The Jaguar controller is surprisingly comfortable, I think; its bad reputation is hightly over-stated.  Using the keypad during play is awkward and not great for anything fast-paced, but for games that only use the dpad and three main face buttons, or for games that just use it for options, I think the Jag controller is just fine.  T2K controls well with the regular controller, I’ve never had any issues with it.  I’m sure that the rotary controller controls are even better, but these are quite good.

On top of that, some other new powerups have been added.  These powerups all only last for the current level, as everything resets to default no powerups once you get to the next stage.  The way it works is that some enemies drop a powerup which then moves up the screen.  Get in position to grab it as it flies upwards and you get one level of powerup.  The first enemy you kill in a stage will always drop a powerup, and this powerup gives you a more powerful shot.  It’s essential to get this because the gun without it is very weak. Some time later more powerups will drop.  The next few will give you a Jump button and an AI droid ally.  The Jump button uses your third face button and jumps upwards, moving you out of the way of enemies if they reach the top of the web.  They can’t jump to hit you up there, but you could still get hit by shots, and of course you will need to land somewhere clear at the end of your jump so while helpful the jump won’t keep you alive if there are too many enemies on top of the web.  Still, it’s great.  The AI Droid is similar to the one in Llamatron 2112, and moves around on its own a above the web shooting down at enemies.  It cannot be killed and is fantastic if you can get enough powerups to get it.  There is also a rare random-drop powerup which immediately skips the current level, and once you have all other powerups in a stage further powerups give you a 2000 point bonus.

The Bonus Games

There is one more powerup, however.  Lastly powerup-wise, getting enough powerups in a level will give you a green triangle.  You can only get one green triangle per level.  Once you get three green triangles, you go to a bonus stage.  There are several different types of bonus stages, changing as you proceed through the game. The first bonus stage type has you flying through space, trying to fly through gates.  There are no enemies, you just move with the d-pad to get through the gates.  This bonus game is a lot of fun, it’s very calming after the intense action.  However, if you want the best possible scores you will want to avoid actually completing the bonus games, because if you finish a bonus game you warp forward five levels.  You get a point bonus, but the point bonus is a whole lot less points than you would have gotten if you played those levels.

There are three different layouts of each bonus game, though you will never complete all three in a single game because after a few skips you are sure to have progressed far enough to get to the second bonus game type.  That one I find much, much harder — you have to stay on a green track that curves around a tube that you are driving through.  I must admit,  I don’t think I have ever completed a stay on the green track bonus stage, and if I ever did I sure haven’t again.  Still, it’s fun enough.  After that… well, there is a third type of bonus game later on, but play the game to find out what it is.  The bonus games are fun stuff and do a great job of giving you a break from the frenetic action.  I particularly love the first bonus game, flying down a tunnel through those rings is great fun.

The Enemies and Scoring

When you fire, enemies in front of you and their regular shots die.  That latter point is important: your shots and most enemy shots kill eachother.  Some enemy attacks cannot be stopped, however, so you need to stay on your guard.

The enemies you will face include: basic ones which go straight up one path, heading towards the top; ones which do that but also shoot upwards; larger ones that split into multiple regular enemies once shot; ones which move around between paths as they go, trying to get closer to your position; a strong monster which has these two invincible scythelike limbs it shoots out you before going to the top that you must avoid while trying to shoot the main body; small enemies which stay at the bottom and electrify a whole section of the web, killing you instantly if you are in that section after it lights up; spikes, which can be in lanes towards the centerand will kill you if you run into them while traveling through the web after beating the level; and some more that come in to play later.  There are a total of ten enemy types.  The enemy variety is enough to keep things interesting while remaining easy enough to remember and identify each type.

As you kill your foes you get points, and scoring in this game is simple: kill stuff, get points. There is no complex scoring system and that is entirely fine with me, there’s more than enough here to keep anyone hooked.  As you get points you will earn 1-ups, and there is no maximum.  Your life count is displayed as a row of ship images instead of a number, though, so once you get past about eight lives in reserve you won’t know exactly how many you have.  It’s enough, though, to know that once you know how many lives you have left things are starting to go wrong… heh.

The Graphics in General

Tempest 2000’s graphics are exceptional, and are one of the many reasons why I love this game so, so much.  The visualizer-style backgrounds are incredible, first.  And somehow, T2K has some of the best-looking graphics ever.  Even though the game is running at 320×240 regular graphics, not the ultra-sharp lines of the originals’ arcade vector graphics display on its special vector monitor, it looks exceptionally sharp. I don’t know what wizardry was done here but somehow T2K’s lines look straight and not jaggy. 

Of course the game is made of pixels, and some of them are noticeable square ones, but they are used perfectly — the moving square pixels that form the background’s laser-light-visualizer style show are the exact right thing to use for that job.  Minter would go on to use a similar look for the visuals for his VLM, or light synthesizer, for the Atari Jaguar CD, and my opinion is that that is the best-looking visualizer ever.  And that’s not said because of nostalgia, I did not have a Jaguar or Jag CD in the ’90s. It just looks incredible, better overall than more powerful visualizers do.

Tempest 2000 is similar; sure, newer games, including some from Minter himself such as Tempest 4000 for modern consoles, look ‘better’ than this game and run more smoothly, but T2K’s overall visual style just cannot be beat.  The enemy sprites, the web, the creepy fear this game instills on the player, it’s all nearly perfect.  So, the sharp, clear graphics look unbelievably good.  The game does have problems with dropping frames or slowdown when the screen gets full of enemies, I will admit, and I have died because of this for sure, but despite that I do think T2K is one of the most amazing looking games ever.

Everything works together to make the game both look and play great.  The stage layouts are each interestingly different, giving you something new to look at and changing the gameplay; the enemies are varied and stand out and all look nice and are each immediately recognizable even when the game becomes more cluttered with foes because of their distinct designs and colors; and the sound effects of the enemies and your shots fit perfectly with the visuals.  Jeff Minter definitely likes that early ’80s pixel art slash vector graphics look, so Tempest was a perfect game for him to remake, and he did a fantastic job of it.

Overall, despite the occasional slowdown, as I mentioned I think that T2K has some of the best graphics ever.  While playing T2K I often think, is this the best looking game ever?  The look of this game is just exceptional, every element is done fantastically.  When output via RGB, in my case via a Jag to SNES adapter that I use my SNES component cable with, connecting to a Retrotink 4K that I have attached to my 4K TV, T2K is so amazingly great looking that it is kind of hard to believe that it is actually a game from 1994 and not a 4K remaster of the game on my Xbox Series X, or something.  I do not say that to brag about my setup; honestly, most games don’t really look different enough on the Retrotink 4K to definitely justify the high expense.  Tempest 2000 is the one game that has actually made me think that maybe it was worth the money.

An Aside on the Scanlines Option

The game has a few graphics options, too.  Most notably, you can turn on or off an optional scanline-style effect.  So, CRT television screens work by not drawing every line, but by drawing every other line and having the lines blend together due to the nature of the technology.  For a long time, despite this consoles worked by drawing every line they could, progressive scan style, because that was much easier technologically.  Of course the screen would then display the results with scanlines, so your standard 224×240 or 320×240 console would display at the TV’s effective resolution of 640×480 because of the scanlines doubling the output.

However, at some point in the early ’90s developers started adding interlaced scanline output right into the consoles’ hardware, in order to increase output resolutions. By adding interlacing, you can draw 640×480 for a similar amount of graphical power required for 320×240 without interlacing.  The first model of 3DO in Japan actually has a switch to turn on or off the scanlines; all other 3DOs are interlaced-only.  The N64 and PS2 particularly were designed around interlaced output.  The Jaguar, however, was not, and like a classic console displays a usually 320×240 image drawing all the lines.

However, in Tempest 2000, Jeff Minter tried to program a scanline option to increase resolution, but apparently couldn’t get it to entirely work so instead an option was added which calls itself a scanline option but in fact adds a sideways jitter effect to the screen, blurring the graphics.  The results look alright on a CRT, but I think that on a HDTV, with an upscaler, the interlacing option makes the graphics look significantly worse, as the blurry jitter does not look great.

I do think that the ‘interlacing’ mode performs a bit better, though. I am very bad at judging framerates, but I do think that while the jittering looks kind of awful interlacing reduces slowdown.  While Tempest 2000’s graphics are exceptional and are among the best ever, it is true that things can slow down very noticeably in areas dense with enemies, particularly as you get deeper in the game.  I noticed the framerate problems less with interlacing on, though it negatively affects the graphics so much that I cannot recommend using it.

Some information in this section comes from this this thread: https://forums.atariage.com/topic/51325-why-nothing-beyond-320×240-why-no-interlaced-screens/

The Music and Sound

In addition to everything else, Tempest 2000 has an exceptional soundtrack as well. With an intense euro-style techno score, Tempest 2000 has what is easily one of my favorite game soundtracks ever.  I do like the music CD version of the songs maybe slightly better than the versions on the actual cart, but the music on the cart is shockingly great!  This may be music on a cartridge but it’s some of the best cart chiptunes I’ve ever heard, and it has great variety and dynamism too, as the music changes depending on which level you are on and what’s going on.  There are even vocals in some songs.  On that note, there are also a lot of vocal sound effects in this game too.  Quite unlike your usual budget bargain-basement Atari Jaguar game, and that’s how most exclusives on this console feel, Tempest 2000 feels like a top-flight production for its time, and the audio is very much a part of that.  Every song is just so fantastic! I love techno music and game soundtracks and this is one of the best ever at both.

Strategy

I would say that I am decent at T2K. I’m not amazing at it, but I’m not bad either. My best score is a bit over a million points, which I think is an above average score.  I will admit that my best score on real hardware is a bit lower than on emulator, because in emulator it runs fully smoothly, but despite this I have more fun playing on real hardware so that is what I play now.  My best on real hardware is about 650,000; decent, but I know I can do better.  So what is the best way to play this game? It’s best to keep moving and focus on getting rid of the most dangerous foes.  Always make sure to get out of lanes that are about to electrify, kill those large enemies, and try to keep the web clear if possible and focus on timing your shots correctly to take out enemies on top of the web before they get you if you can’t do that.

It’s fun to just hold left or right and fire and shoot stuff, but this won’t get you very far once you get past the first set of levels.  You need to pay attention and move carefully, though you don’t want to just stay in one place either, that will lead to a quick death.  Balancing this can be difficult given how fast-paced the game is, but quickly scanning the bottom of the web for what foes are coming at you while also avoiding whatever is on top is vital for survival. T2K is the perfect game to get ‘in the zone’ with.  Focus, move to defeat the most important threat at each moment, and stay in the zone, staring at the monster-filled abyss in front of you.  Yeah, again, there’s something about Tempest that is disturbing to look at, but there is also beauty to it.  Hours feel like minutes when you’re in the zone in Tempest.

Conclusion

What more is there to say? Well, I didn’t mention the multiplayer mode, but honestly I’ve never played it.  It’s just a two player versus mode though so it’s definitely not the main attraction.  Beyond that though, Tempest 2000 for Atari Jaguar is the greatest shooting game ever made.  One of gamings’ great masterpieces, T2K is unmatched in its field.  The stunning visuals, the sense of tension this game evokes, the feeling of getting into the zone, the amazing soundtrack, the pretty much flawless controls, the interesting and varied level webs you will face, the varied enemies and how as you proceed new foes are added at just the right moments, everything here is peak.  Tempest 2000 is an A+ classic and is flat-out one of the best games ever made.  This is a top 5 all time console game without question and the only non-Nintendo game that high on my best console games list.

So that’s my review.  I think I spent too much time saying ‘this game is great’ and not enough saying why, maybe I will continue working on improving this.  But that’s it for now.  Also please correct me if I got any facts wrong, which I may have.

 

Posted in Atari Jaguar, Classic Games, Full Reviews, Reviews | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

How to Unlock Level Select in Eliminate Down (Sega Genesis)

Posted on September 1, 2024 by Brian

Sorry about the long break, the past month was absolutely awful for multiple reasons.  With everything going on I forgot to pay the hosting bill, then I did pay it but the site had multiple technical problems keeping me from accessing the site and posting for a while.  The problems have been fixed now, thankfully.  For anyone who ran into that SSL security error, it’s fixed now.  So here’s one article I’ve wanted to post for a few days now but couldn’t until today since the issues are finally fixed, and expect another one soon, I’ve got more Guild Wars images to post.  Anyway, on to this little article.

Eliminate Down is one of the Genesis’ best shmups.  The game was originally only released in Japan, but finally got a licensed modern homebrew release from Limited Run this year.  I got it and it has a very cool holo-cover.  The game itself is identical to the original, so this applies to either an original or modern re-release copy of the game.  Either way the game is absolutely amazing, with some of the best gameplay and music in any shmup that generation… and it has something that my searching has not managed to find any mention of online, a hidden level select option that you can unlock.  It’s not a full level select as far as I’ve seen, but it’s a lot better than nothing, particularly in a game which has limited continues as this one does.

So, if you go into the config menu, notice how there is a one-line gap in between Mini Game and Exit.  This is where the level select will appear, if you’re good enough.  What you need to do is play the Mini Game and do well at it.

The Mini Game is a twitch reaction test thing.  On the screen there is a grid of boxes with your ship’s image on them, and a cursor selecting one of the boxes near the center.  The boxes will randomly flip over and then back.  Each run starts out slowly, with one box at a time flipping, before speeding up as things go until lots of them are flipping at once by the end.  Each Mini Game run is 60 seconds long, and goes similarly each time though with new random box locations so you can’t memorize it, you just need to get better at reacting quickly.

At first, how to play the Mini Game may not be apparent.  You’ll hit the button while a ship is flipping and nothing will happen, then other times you’ll get the explosion marker and get a point.  What’s going on?  Well, the trick is that you have to hit the fire button while the tile in question is flipping BACK to get the point, not while it is flipping forward.   Yes, you have to hit the button in the SECOND half of the animation to score, you won’t get anything if you hit it while it’s flipping over, only back.  Once the animation has finished you have missed your window, so the timing is tight.

With some practice, though, I found myself getting better at the Mini Game.  It’s kind of fun.  If you score at least 30 points in the Mini Game, you get a little musical number and the configuration menu adds a new option in the missing slot, allowing you to start from levels 1, 2, or 3 with each new game.

if you score at least 45 points, there is a longer music piece after the minigame completes, and levels 4 and 5 are added to the round select list in addition to 1, 2, and 3.

You’d think that there would be a third unlock to start from levels 6 and 7, but if there is I haven’t gotten a good enough score for it.  The most I’ve done so far is 52 points, but sadly getting a score over 50 did not unlock anything new.  I’m not sure if a score of 60 is possible, that would be insanely difficult; 50 was pretty tough.  I got 50 but didn’t unlock anything new, ah well.  Maybe 60 does it but good luck getting that.

So, in Eliminate Down, get a score of at least 45 in the Mini Game and you can start from up to level 5.  Given that this game has 8 levels, limited continues, and no save system, this lets you start from the halfway point of the game.  This is a lot better than having to start it over every time, that’s for sure.  Enjoy!

 

Edit: Corrected the score required — you need 45 points to unlock levels 4 and 5, not 40.  Thanks to the comment.

Posted in Articles, Classic Games, Genesis, Strategies | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

Guild Wars Memories and Screenshots, Part 14: 2008

Posted on June 30, 2024 by Brian

Yes, Guild Wars returns!  This article will have the twenty screenshots I took in 2008.  As I mentioned in the last two articles, I wasn’t playing GW much anymore but did launch the game once in a while to appreciate the graphics on the much more powerful computer I had gotten and maybe get a bit farther.  I’ll just post all of them even though some are quite similar.  That definitely won’t happen next time, maybe I’ll just have to skip that batch, it’s a mess… but this one has some really nice scenery in it.  It’s just amazing how beautiful Guild Wars’ graphics are and how well they hold up.

1

I wonder why I took this screenshot, by accident? It’s my only screenshot from January and it’s literally empty, either nobody is there or there was a graphical glitch that has caused the characters and skills to vanish — note how the skillbar icons are also missing. Huh. Yes I’m posting it anyway. Why not?

2

This is the first of three shots of this area. This underground area has some seriously impressive art design, with the lighting and giant tapestries, as well as the rest of the environment!  It looks like I’m fighting with the Henchmen and Heroes.  This is a Hero here in the foreground, and a bunch of enemies in the distance.

3

This is the same scene, but it’s a few moments later in the fight now. Cynn, Gwen, and Mhenlo are on screen now as Cynn casts a spell.  Gwen’s a Hero and the other two are Henchies (and main story characters).

4

And now it’s the Assassin hero on screen, while those enemies in the background are now all dead.  The battle has been won.

5

This ceiling is ridiculously good looking, with those V-shaped openings revealing the sky above.  Guild Wars is still a somewhat amazing-looking game even all these years later.  You can’t say that about most 3d games released back in the mid ’00s.

6

What a nice, if absurdly giant, fireplace…

7

And now we have a foggy cavern. How nice, if ominous, what could be lurking here?

8

Ah, it’s Sorrow’s Furnace! It’s embarrassing that I have never managed to beat the boss of this super cool dungeon that they added to the game in later ’05 post-release, but I’m sure I will go back to trying.

9

This is the next bit of the Sorrow’s Furnace cutscene from the last shot. The art design here is just so interesting, with that metal thing from the last shot attached through that high hole in the ceiling by this long chain.

10

And now this piece of the furnace is resetting back up into the fiery ceiling area.

11

Is this the Sorrow’s Furnace boss? If so I’m about to lose again, it’s so hard without a human party with those different spots you need to go to during the fight! It’s possible solo with Heroes and the separate control of them you have, but it’s quite tough to multitask well enough and I’ve never managed it.  Also, yeah, the contrast here between the dark environment and bright red lava is great, good design style.

12

More dark cavern with bright lava. Sorrow’s Furnace is a pretty great looking area, even though it released only a few months after the base game it really stepped up the art design over a lot of what the original game had.

13

And now I’m in an area with giant spider webs.  I admit I forget where exactly this is in Sorrow’s Furnace, but I think this terrain was on the edges of the zone, outside of the main area.  Regardless, it sure does look impressive, with the green tint to the area and whatever that is on the wall in the background!

14

The ‘interiors only’ trend continues with this, another interior in Sorrow’s Furnace. This time it’s not only some amazing scenery, though, but we’ve also got a battle going on between me and my Hero/Henchie party taking on some Charr.

15

By the way, my party is 3 Heroes and 4 Henchmen because at this point that was the limit. At some point you were allowed to purchase, for real money, the ability to use up to a full party’s worth of Heroes instead of having to use Henchmen. I’m not sure if that option was available for purchase in 2008 or not but if it was I hadn’t bought it yet, so I was limited to three. Heroes are much better than Henchies with how you can customize their skillbars and give them direct movement commands, so going for an all-Heroes party is the best approach for anyone who has enough skills unlocked on their account to be able to fill out a whole party of Heroes’ skillbars with good skills. You have to have the skill unlocked on your account for your Heroes to use it, you see, unlike Henchmen which each come with a preset skillbar they will always use.

26

Creepy…

27

No, no, these two screenshots are different, it’s totally worth posting both… :/  Still looks really cool, though!

18

It’s dark out, maybe too dark to see. Heh.

 

19

And now I’m back in the snowy lands, looking at a wall of ice. Nice. Winter is the best!

20

Ah yes, this area. It’s such a great looking zone, I love it. Any real person would need clothing though, that scarpattern ‘armor’ of my characters’ wouldn’t get you far… heh.

 

Posted in Articles, Classic Games, PC | Leave a comment

Guild Wars Memories and Screenshots, Part 13: April – November 2007

Posted on May 30, 2024 by Brian

Introduction

Yes, this series is back, though it surely won’t be as interesting as before due to my interest in the game being highest in its first few years.  This article will be short, with 19 screenshots, but the shots are much higher resolution and detail now as I got a new PC.  The next update, covering my shots from 2008, should have about the same number of images as this one does.  Expect that article soon.

In early 2007, I got a new computer.  No longer was I using a rapidly-aging Pentium 4 with WinME, instead I had a brand new Core 2 Duo machine with the then-new Windows Vista OS. Despite this, I found myself playing computer games less and less.  By 2007 I had mostly abandoned modern games in favor of my growing retro game collection, and that’s  very much where my attention focused.  I remember wondering if the new PC would revive my interest in modern games, but for the most part it did not.  That wouldn’t happen until 2017.

As an aside, while I still have the WinME machine and it still works, though, sadly the Vista computer stopped working several years ago and I haven’t been able to figure out how to fix it.  At first I thought it was the motherboard, but replacing that did nothing.  So maybe I managed to break something in the power supply?  Argh.  Oh well.  I miss Windows Vista and its nice transparent windows, it’s so much more interesting to look at than Windows 10 is on this machine I have now, but… oh well.  If only one of the two older machines could work, it’s far better for the WinME machine to work than the Vista one since a lot of games do not run well on a modern machine but do on that one, while there are very few games that don’t work on Win10 but do on Vista.  Still, I’m one of the few people who really liked Vista, so I miss the PC that these screens come from working… ah well.

But anyway, getting back to Guild Wars, as the article title suggests I wasn’t exactly playing much Guild Wars in 2007 or 2008.  I never would go back to playing hundreds of hours of the game, instead just playing the game a bit here and there instead of playing GW1 all day as I did sometimes particularly in 2004-2005.  And so, the 700-something hours I was at in April 2007 would take a long, long time to get to a thousand.  In fact, checking today, I’m at 1013 hours.  Yeah, barely more than than I had in early ’07.  Oh well.  On the one hand this means that there is a huge amount of content in Guild Wars that I’ve never experienced, including finishing most of the dungeons, playing most of the harder free content they added in the runup to Guild Wars 2, and more, but on the other hand, it means there’ still something to do in the game, you know?

And there are reasons why I  stopped playing.  One is that I particularly loved the random player groups in this game, and after ’06 that element of the game mostly faded away.  These screenshots start in April 2007, right when random player groups were dying off.  One part of that probably was declining interest in the game — most of the people I was playing with at college lost interest within a year or two, for instance — but also it was because of the addition of Heroes, those much more customizable and controllable AI allies Nightfall added.   As I said in a previous part in this series the late 2006 addition of Heroes in the Nightfall expansion was fantastic for solo players and the long-term playablity of the game once the playerbase was too low to rely on other people always being around, but it mostly killed off random player groups so I’ve always had mixed feelings about the change.  I liked the game better before Heroes than I have since, that much I know.

So yeah, to repeat from previous articles, I love the base game of course and really liked the first expansion to Guild Wars, but I wasn’t as much of a fan of the second expansion, late ’06’s Nightfall.  It took me something like ten years to finally finish the Nightfall campaign.  It’s actually pretty good, I should have played the rest of it sooner.  Maybe if player groups had survived 2006 I would have, but they didn’t.  But we’ll get to my finishing Nightfall much later.

Making the whole situation worse, I’m not one to be in a large guild or often be able to play the game with friends after the mid ’00s, so from this point on I was playing mostly solo or in the Random Arenas only.  The problem is, a lot of the later content that ANet added to the game after 2007 is very difficult for the solo player.  With good builds for you and your Heroes, people can beat that stuff solo.  I always preferred to just play the game with whatever build I’ve come up with myself and like and not look up good builds, though, so my attempts at the harder added content mostly ended up in frustration and with me giving up.   I probably should have spent more time looking up good Hero builds, but I didn’t do that enough for them to be good enough to get me through the harder content, and without any other humans to group with like 99+% of the time after 2006, I often found it too hard to proceed.  It’s nice that they added more content after the last of the too-few expansions, but most of it is aimed at the dedicated, very good players with humans to play with and such.  I’m neither of those things.  I love games a lot but never have been great at many of them.  Oh well.

Despite that, though, and despite that I haven’t really played Guild Wars at all in several years now, I deeply love this game and know I will get back into it sometime, like how I’ve really gotten back into Starcraft for the past month or two.  And so, here it is, my mostly-forgettable screenshots from 2007.  Though maybe that’s wrong; I really like the last two, they look great…

My Guild Wars Screenshots, April to November 2007

1

Here I’m talking with some random group party member about how much we’ve played the game.  As mentioned, between declining interest and Heroes random groups were dying by this point but you could still find one once in a while.

2

The map, showing my progress in the city.  Yes, I was continuing to play through Factions again instead of playing Nightfall, even though I’d finished Factions before and very definitely not Nightfall.  It was probably the right decision, Factions is a great campaign…

3

733 hours played since launch? That’s not much higher than my last hours count.  As I said it’s only at 1013 hours today.  But yeah, I’m back to playing as my main, Talindra, some.  That skillbar’s very similar now to how it is in this 2007 screenshot, and my character’s costume, the 15k scarpattern set, is unchanged.

4

Here is a shot of the first panel of my inventory.  Look, it’s a birthday gift!  ANet gave characters one each year.  Now you just get a birthday voucher, which is still nice I guess.

5

This is very similar to the last shot, but note the sellers in chat. For some reason the Nightfall main city, Kamadan, quickly became the main community hub in Guild Wars, a position it still retains.  I honestly have no idea why.

6

Looking at how weird it is that some things disappear underwater while others don’t is endlessly entertaining.   Why does hair disappear, for instance?  How strange.  Anyway, this is the Random Arena hub area.  Player populations have clearly declined, given how it hasn’t found a match.

7

Well, it finally found a match, and here we are fighting in the Random Arenas.  I hope the match went well…

8

Bah, that run must not have gone long.  It looks like we won that last match but not many, if any, more.

9

I’m probably looking at my Ranger’s two year birthday present now, and maybe exploring Seared Ascalon some as well.

10

A timed mission? I’ve always hated timed modes in games unless the timer isn’t tight. I don’t think this one was bad, though.  The graphics sure do look a LOT better on this computer though, don’t they?  The post-processing effects and such add so much.  Guild Wars’ exceptional art design has held up extremely well, this still looks great.

11

Run…

12

Here we get to some of the best-looking GW1 screenshots I’ve taken.  The ‘disable the interface for this shot’ command results in some impressive stuff at times. This winter forest scene looks beautiful.

13

And for another of the best shots in this update, an image of the sky and the crescent moon.  Guild Wars really does have some of the best art design ever.

14

Winter is my favorite season.   I’ve never been in an ice structure or cave like this but I’m sure it would be quite beautiful. The one in Guild Wars sure are.

15

Don’t get too distracted by the scenery, watch out for those ice golems… they’re not hard, sure, but still, in this game you can never be too careful.

16

It’s a new environment in this ice area, with a lot of squared-off somewhat diamond-like ice blocks.  Impressive stuff.

17

Some of my AI party members, running through the snow.

18

The rest of the shots I have from 2007 are from this tournament from a quest. You fight the tourney here against a bunch of your Henchman allies, including some members of the main four heroes. I took screenshots of a bunch of the text lines because I thought it was interesting to see their thoughts about the tourney.  Each character says something before and after your match against them.  I won’t post most of them for now, though; play the game yourself instead of being spoiled!

19

I’ve got to post this one, though. A Joe & Mac reference, really? Heh, that’s random… amusing, however!

And with that, my screenshots from 2007 end.  I would not play the game much in 2008 if my screenshots are to believed; I’ve got just one shot from January and only 18 for the rest of the year combined.  I hope some are as good as some of these are.

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