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Off-Topic / Super Mario Bros. 1 and Lost Levels Pro Tips

« Last post by Princess Rescuer on December 04, 2021, 12:39:15 AM »

The first two console 2D Mario games, 1 and 2 (Lost Levels) are very similar and challenging. It seems you are limited on options and can only run to the right and react to enemies. You have more options than that though- the game isn't exactly The Legend of Zelda, but it is more open than it seems. Despite being Baby's First Game, these old 2D titles are still too difficult for many people. These tactics will greatly leverage the games in your favor, giving you plenty of chances and benefits. Be patient in utilizing them to your favor, but don't hesitate to learn them- Peach is lonely and has nobody to kiss.

In any level with extra lives found in visible blocks, it's important to collect them, collect some coins in that attempt as well, and lose a life to repeat the level. The 1-Up will cancel out the death and you will have gained some coins to put towards your next life. As long as you're consistent and gaining faster than you're losing, you'll be slowly but surely gaining lives. This will also give you amazing practice as well.

In LL, backwards warp zones aren't the worst- you can use them to repeat easy early levels you've already mastered for numerous life gain. You will also have more opportunities to keep Fire Flowers as well.

Within the same level, some pipes might warp you backwards. You can use these to go into the bonus rooms over and over again. You can also go the wrong way in a looping castle and hit the invisible blocks over and over again for more coins.

You have a time limit, but not a strict one. Especially when visiting a level for the first time, you can take it slow. Levels are short and you have minutes to beat them. It's not as urgent as it seems.

In a level in the final worlds (8 or D) it's fine to forgo entering/completing them if you didn't keep the Fire Flower.

Be sure to study how scrolling things onto the screen at a certain time affects position and timing. Use this to your optimal advantage.

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Off-Topic / Mega Man 1 Pro Tips

« Last post by Princess Rescuer on December 04, 2021, 12:08:03 AM »

Mega Man 1 is my favorite Mega Man game. It isn't most people's though- the game is very rough around the edges and is brutally unforgiving. There's more of an emphasis on precision platforming than any other Classic Mega Man game, and there are no E-Tanks or items to help you. You also have the fewest Weapons of any installment by far- only seven, not counting your lemon-shooting Plasma Cannon (that's what it was called before it being the Mega Buster). And while bosses in later games would execute predictable and repetitive patterns with little to no changes in tactics, Mega Man 1's bosses want you dead. In order to clear all ten levels in this short, but difficult game, you'll need to fight as dirty as possible. This will help if you're inexperienced at platform games.

This assumes you're playing the original version with no savestates. The Select Glitch will not be included as it is overpowered cheating.

A well-known tactic is to farm energy power-ups by exiting and re-entering a screen, commonly used in Wily 1 level to have enough Magnet Beam energy to reach the boss. This is useful in other areas of the game too- you can scroll the small health off of the screen in Wily 2, walk back to the left, and throw a Hyper Bomb at the enemy guarding it until you're at full health and can challenge Elec Man. And if there are no power ups laying around, you can walk back and forth or climb up and down to make enemies re-appear for unlimited chances at health and energy drops as well as the rare extra lives if you make careless mistakes easily. If you're more patient, you can repeat the same level over and over again, being sure to collect the pre-placed extra life in it. In the original version, the maximum is "09" lives (instead of 99 in Legacy) so you won't have to do this much. In addition to that, whenever you're low on lives (you have 00 or 01), game overs are your friend. Weapon energy (restored in a Game Over) is as important as lives, so you can decide whether you would rather have more or less.

Little known fact: one of the bosses, Cut Man, has multiple weaknesses. One of them is blocks thrown by the Super Arm. Problem is, you don't have any in the Wily 2 rematch. You do have the next best thing though- the Fire Storm, which does 3 damage and makes Cut Man easier to hit and his incessant high jumps more manageable.

One of the most challenging bosses, for many players, is Copy Mega Man. There is an easy method to beating him though- switch to either the Super Arm or Magnet Beam so Copy will walk away from you. Then attack him at a safe distance. If he gets close, just switch again. Tedious but effective.

The tipping platforms in the beginning of Guts Man's level give new players plenty of problems. They can be traversed effortlessly with the Magnet Beam- which is in Elec Man's level and is hidden behind blocks that can only be lifted with the Super Arm you get from Guts Man. Not to worry- if you don't feel like mastering them right then, you can simply beat Elec Man and use the Thunder Beam against the blocks on the second go. Once you collect the Magnet Beam, it won't be necessary to beat Elec Man again- you can simply Game Over then go to Guts Man or any other level you haven't completed yet.

In general, find uses for the useless weapons so you can save the good ones for later. When confronted with blocks, use the Super Arm so you have the Thunder Beam for later. When there's the ground enemies, try seeing if you can hit them with the Hyper Bomb instead of anything more useful. It takes practice and ingenuity, but it's worth it.

One last thing- learn how to risk it for every health power-up you can find (such as the alcove in Elec Man's level). Do so while using the reloading trick mentioned above to fully refill and be as safe as possible. Mega Man 1 is much easier than it seems.

Mega Man 1 is a cheap and frustrating game with many tricks up its sleeve, so you need your own tricks to trounce it. Master these methods, and little will faze you.

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Off-Topic / (Negative) Lasting Through The Gaming Nuclear Winter

« Last post by Princess Rescuer on November 25, 2021, 01:30:11 PM »

KawaseFan.net is usually a happy place. If you are not interested in being depressed and sad, this is not the thread for you.

As everyone knows by now, there were two gaming crashes in both 1977 and 1983. Both were the result of lost goodwill from a deluge of low-quality games. I feel that this is what is happening in the 2020s- except the current companies are much bigger than before and have plenty of money to make mistakes (especially Microsoft). So instead of an outright crash, we are going to have quite a while of declining quality and huge money mistakes to wait through. Since plenty of companies have reserves and little urgency to right the ship, you will have to resort to retro gaming. Which type of retro gaming? I'll guide you.

If you are collecting a console for the first time, I would recommend the Japanese variant of it. If this were 15 years ago, I wouldn't be thinking about Japanese at all. But times have changed. English games are more expensive and in worse condition. The older retro gamers have bought and kept them before you grew old enough to be conscious of them. Japanese games, on the other hand, not only have more choice, but the demand stays low due to how many more people know the English language compared to Japanese. And they are in great condition which will make them last and age well. Plus recording Japanese games for the internet will not get you as many views most of the time. Although they are in Japanese, you can read guides on the internet or just learn Japanese and do lots of training and trial and error in the games if that's not an option. It's more effort, but it is worth it. Be brave.

The types of games I would recommend the most are JRPGs. These are not the best games (or maybe they are?) they are not my favorite, but they last. As someone who has already mastered numerous other types of genres, and has barely dipped into JRPGs, I await my coming obsession with them throughout the decade. Even challenging action games (including the Umihara Kawase series) don't have that same lastability. And when you add replay value into the mix, it gets even better. JRPGs will be the "army food" in your bunker.

Another genre I recommend is sports games. Huh? Yes, sports games! While JRPGs can be expensive (unless you import dirt cheap NTSC-J ones) sports games are cheap across the board and lastable. They are based on sports that have lasted decades/centuries and have produced their own long-lasting leagues and tournaments in real life. They essentially don't have any real "end point" so they will be excellent for lastability. But what about multiplayer? Personally, I prefer the challenge of AI opponents for personal reasons. And even without multiplayer, you will still find a lot in many sports games. They are the furthest thing from one-and-done visual novels.

Another type of game I recommend is shovelware. Does not have the lastability (unless you use your imagination) but does have the prices. There are many shovelware games to discover, they fatten up your collection, and they can be kind of fun. There's also a metagame as to which type of shovelware games to discover.

Going away from consoles, there are also handhelds. Handheld games are cheap and the better handheld games have reproductions. Handhelds, outside of Japan, have never been taken seriously and have some overlooked gems of their own. Discovering handheld games is part of the experience, they can be pretty unique! Even if you stay inside to play them, they're still good. Just be sure to have a rechargeable backlit version of every system. Handhelds and handheld games are cheap and will be new to discover for most people.

Another thing is unpopular consoles. If you were a selective fanboy back then, now's your chance to experience the other consoles. Also now's your chance to play the Famicom Disk System, the Turbografx-CD, the Sega Mega CD, and the Amiga CD32. You will eventually go for the more obscure consoles/handhelds if you have a cutoff time for when games stopped appealing to you. If you only play Nintendo, and you find games after the GameCube to be unappealing, you will probably go for popular competitors like the Master System and Mega Drive, then you will probably want to try out the Turbografx-16, then buy increasingly obscure ones until you're going for really obscure consoles like the PC-FX and 32X eventually. Why do this? Part of lastability is discovery. Childhood games or popular games are the WORST CHOICES for the Gaming Nuclear Winter because they have been figured out already. The more undocumented, the better.

Lastly, we have PC Gaming (if you are rich). The PC is more convenient than ever now, and it has services like Good Old Games (if you're retro) and other such services. You also have a more global library with the most available languages and countries of origin, not to mention all the beta prototypes and free early access demos you can download. Will require lots of money for all the games as well as a good internet connection and lots of storage space for all the games. Old platforms such as Spectrum, MS-DOS, and Amiga and numerous others will emulate easily on new computers whereas consoles have more of a problem with ports of previous games. The good thing is, you will only need one good PC and you won't need to upgrade often. It's region free, doesn't require different hardware for different games (unlike consoles, which you will need different regions of different consoles per generation) and they are rapidly decreasing in cost (and that's if you don't research putting one together yourself with cheap parts). The PC isn't everyone's favorite though and it can be less instant and comfortable. It is new to most gamers so there is the first-time element of discovery.

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Myastere -Ruins of Deazniff- / Re: Retranslation project?

« Last post by Alc on September 18, 2021, 03:48:02 PM »

Just had a quick look. I can find the file that contains all the localisations, it's in
Steam\steamapps\common\MYASTERE\fsroot\common\game_strings.rson
I did get waylaid on my first attempt by "script_tat", which seems to instead be the game script in the sense of "the flow of game logic via scripting".

The file "game_strings" is where the game stores localised text. There are null characters between most characters that make it difficult to parse what's actually written. I did a proof of concept edit, changed the string "there are four elements" to "there are nine elements" on the intro screen and it worked, but I'm definitely not working through the script in a hex editor. I picked "nine" instead of "four" because it's the same number of letters in the word, I'd expect the game to break if I just start inserting characters. Opening the file in Notepad does hide the null characters but I'd expect using Notepad would add characters or otherwise break.

Incidentally, I don't think it can be a machine translation, or at least, not entirely, because there are multiple spelling errors that a machine simply wouldn't make. I was reminded of this just now on the intro screen, which has "exsit" instead of "exist". Elsewhere as someone else mentioned there's "portion" instead of potion, "granade" instead of grenade, and so on. The number of these errors makes me think that someone had to type in a machine translation line by line for some reason. There's the appearance of machine learning nonsense-speak elsewhere, I guess it's at least partially based on an ML translation. I wonder if they were using a mobile-based translate utility and typing it into a PC? That's a crazy inefficient approach, of course, but I don't really understand how else you get those typos.

I'm really hoping that someone's tackled Fresh/Bazooka and that their tech is broadly unchanged - it certainly looks of a piece.

In fact someone has taken a look at a game that uses the same file system tools, weirdly it was an otome title called Jakou no Lyla ~Allure of Musk~. So if anyone ever goes looking for a way to extract the contents of this game, take a look at aluigi's BMS script for QuickBMS.

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Myastere -Ruins of Deazniff- / Re: Retranslation project?

« Last post by Alc on September 18, 2021, 01:21:43 PM »

Simply working with the English that's already existing and tightening it up, which I don't mean to presume but I believe that's the current goal

That's my goal, yes. Honestly, I don't like the game enough to want to create/manage a full translation group. There's only a relatively limited amount of English in the game anyway so I'm really hoping that someone's tackled Fresh/Bazooka and that their tech is broadly unchanged - it certainly looks of a piece.

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Myastere -Ruins of Deazniff- / Re: Retranslation project?

« Last post by CyanideBlizzard on September 17, 2021, 04:57:48 PM »

I've run a few translation projects before, so I could definitely scout around to see how doable it is.  The biggest thing we'd need is to be able to unpack/repack the files that house the script(s).  Been meaning to pick up the PC version anyways, so this is a great excuse to see exactly how its all set up.  There'd be two approaches we could take from that point.  Simply working with the English that's already existing and tightening it up, which I don't mean to presume but I believe that's the current goal, or work with a translator to re-translate the game from Japanese.  Unfortunately, as I've only ran the projects I would be useless in that area so I can't say exactly how well the game was translated to begin with.

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Myastere -Ruins of Deazniff- / Re: Retranslation project?

« Last post by Alc on September 11, 2021, 05:28:57 PM »

Don't really know. Primarily I'd be after technical assistance. It does need doing though, the translation is a joke and the comedy wears thin before too long.

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Myastere -Ruins of Deazniff- / Re: Myastere: Ruins of Deazniff - new Studio Saizensen game (Switch/PC) on APR-15-21

« Last post by Alc on September 11, 2021, 05:24:06 PM »

So having finished up the first boss at around 7 hours I am currently mulling over whether to push on for the secret bosses. I've got down there but had to quit, and there's no save, or none I found. I'm not hugely motivated to re-explore that particular part of the game.

I've got mixed feelings about this one. It's definitely a step up from Fresh in some respects, but the English translation is among the worst I've ever encountered in a commercial game (it reminds me a bit of 80s/90s shmups, Zero Wing and suchlike). I also personally not a fan of the "generic Unity asset" feel to the level geometry and some enemies. None of it feels aesthetically coherent or contiguous. The 2D character sprite art is excellent, which if anything makes the bland 3D assets stick out even more. There are 3D skulls that feel only one step removed from a dancing baby, it's some real clipart shit. The physics engine is great, though, and it provides largely the same entertainment now that it did back on the Super Famicom.

I hope they get back to the classic Umihara design next. I can't fault them for wanting a break from that mould, but I'd take a few dozen small, highly polished levels over another sprawling map like this.

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Myastere -Ruins of Deazniff- / Re: Retranslation project?

« Last post by imgibbon on September 10, 2021, 02:56:44 AM »

What would be involved? I'd love this to get the localization it deserves heh

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Myastere -Ruins of Deazniff- / Resolution fix for PC/other graphical improvements?

« Last post by Alc on September 07, 2021, 02:03:42 AM »

The game looks alright on my laptop, but on the big monitor, not so much. On the plus side it's only using 3% of the GPU, which is good news for as long as we keep getting hot days like this.

Anyway, I've had a poke around the installation folder, which for me is C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\MYASTERE\ but I can't see any config files or anything else obvious. Is there a way to force this game?