Topic: The best undiscovered SNES (and other classic console) games?

[Cobra951]

There was a really interesting conversation on IRC last night on classic games.  Though I missed it, I was logged on, so I was able to read it earlier today.  Of particular interest to me was a link to a page showing what the author thinks are the best lesser-known SNES games across the different genres.  I've spent hours on a couple of these since, one in particular.

Do Re Mi Fantasy: Milon's Quest is something I missed entirely before, probably because it only appeared in Japan.  I located an English IPS patch and went to town on it.  This is a nifty platformer which starts out easy enough.  I've completed the first 3 stages.  I need to play it a lot more to get a good feel for how involved it gets, but the menu screen makes me think there is some good depth here.  It looks very good for the SNES, in a colorful cartoony way, and has some surprisingly good music to accompany the running and hopping.  The controls are exactly what they should be.

The Firemen I also missed, but this time I'm not sure why.  This game grabbed me and has not let go.  I absolutely love it.  You are a fireman running through a burning building with a sidekick who helps with an ax, and also carries out injured victims.  Your weapons are a hose, a spray extinguisher and a couple of water bombs.  Fire is everywhere, and the flames come in all sorts of nasty varieties.  Your goal is to make it through the floors of the building, surviving while putting out as much of the fire as you can.  At the end of each stage, you get your fire-extinguished rating as a percentage.  The mechanics are excellent for SNES pad limitations, and work very well with the 360 controller and the left analog stick.  Chasing the fire into all the corners of the rooms becomes quickly addicting.  The perspective is overhead.  I highly recommend this to anyone who still enjoys this kind of game.

Illusion of Gaia I had tried before, but somehow I got distracted and lost track.  It seems like a good alternative for Zelda 3 fans.  I went through some of it quickly to refamiliarize myself, and unless something else pulls me away again, I'm in for a longer haul this time.  This is still just about my favorite kind of classic game.

The page has many good suggestions, some of which I am very familiar with.  Two other games it considers tops I can recommend wholeheartedly:  Space Megaforce / Super Aleste is an amazing shootemup.  I spent weeks on this on the SNES in its day.  The same is true about Tetris Attack, a superb puzzle game, though I would dispute that this one is undiscovered.  A terrific new take on Tetris Attack is called Poker Smash on XBLA.  The mechanics have been extensively refined, but the premise remains basically the same.  There's plenty more here for the diehards.  Don't be shy.

[iPPi]

D-Force, top down vertical scrolling shooter... I loved this game but it was insanely challenging and extremely unforgiving though.

[idolminds]

Yeah, I've been meaning to try more of the games on that list. Its good stuff. Cybernator is turning out to be pretty cool.

If youre interested in other systems, check this out. Hes done lists for just about every other system available.

[Quemaqua]

Between this and the indy thread, this place is kicking ass.  I'm in Que happy heaven.  I definitely want to check out some more of these SNES games, but unfortunately my PSP emu seems to be broken for some reason.  A bunch of my homebrew suddenly started giving me error messages, yet others still work... no idea what's going on.  But once I fix it, I'm going to try some more of these out (particularly Soul Blazer, Illusion of Gaia, and Terranigma, which all sound quite cool).  I'm also going to work at getting DOSbox on there again and seeing if any later versions have improved the sound support.  I did get the old Epic Pinball packs to work, but without sound before, and without the sound and music it's just... too sad.  It hurts me.  I loved the music on those games.

I should check out the Genesis page that guy did too, though there's tons of mainstream Genesis games that I still haven't played.

[sirean_syan]

Ah. Illusion of Gaia. That takes me back. I played through that a bit after it was released when I found it for a few dollars in a used bin and had a good time with it. For some reason I always place it with Secret of Evermore even though they play fairly differently. It might have had to with the timing of when I played through them. At the time I was probably going through one of my first experimental stages with games and trying things out that I missed. It always amazed me that Secret of Evermore sorta died off and never really got a following, especially since it was a Square game. It was a pretty great game all around and had lot of interesting stuff going on. It wasn't on a Final Fantasy level of things, but it was completely enjoyable.

[Quemaqua]

Secret of Mana got more attention, and Evermore wasn't as good (at least not from what I played of it, which admittedly was very little).  A lot of people thought the games were related because of the name, even though they weren't.  Even now you'll see that on the internet from stupid people.  I think that has a lot of do with why Evermore didn't succeed.  I know that I and several friends wanted to try it because we thought it was a sequel to Mana, but about 2 minutes into the game you realized that completely wasn't possible, and it was such a letdown I didn't even bother to keep with it, nor did anyone else that I know.

[MysterD]

Yeah, I've been meaning to try more of the games on that list. Its good stuff. Cybernator is turning out to be pretty cool.

If youre interested in other systems, check this out. Hes done lists for just about every other system available.

I see on his SNES List for Action-Adventure, Flashback: Quest For Identity made the list for other great ones Action/Adventures; but was his Features Game for the Action-Adventures on the Genesis list.

Ahhh, Flashback was a great one...
And yes, I did like Fade To Black (PC version), but it sure as hell ain't Flashback.

[PyroMenace]

Yea Flashback was a great game, definitely had some amazing looking graphics for its time, another similar one was Out of this World though it was much more difficult. The sequel of Flashback, Fade to Black was terrible, I tried to like it but it really had nothing in common with Flashback.

Though this isnt a SNES game, its a genesis game, but you all need to play it, Beyond Oasis. Its on the Wii virtual console now and its an amazing top-down vibrant and colorful zelda-like style adventure game.

[Cobra951]

Yes, absolutely.  Beyond Oasis is one obscure gem not to miss.  I played that one all the way through.

Edit:  I was actually thinking of Crusader of Centy.  I remember Beyond Oasis now.  It is definitely worthwhile also.

[PyroMenace]

Crusader of Centy? Never heard of that one. Is it similar to Beyond Oasis?

[Quemaqua]

No, it isn't a game about 50-Cent.

[Xessive]

I was wondering why I had never heard of Crusader of Centy! I knew it as Soleil! That was a beautiful game!

Beyond Oasis is actually known as The Story of Thor out here. Also a great Zelda-style adventure. I had The Story of Thor 2 on the Sega Saturn as well, it was actually a prequel.

Man I miss these games.

[K-man]

I enjoyed Illusion of Gaia, but I would have enjoyed it a lot more if I hadn't paid 75 bucks for it.

It's fun to reminisce about SNES games and such, but back in the day buying a decent game would take most  of a kid's savings.  Don't get me wrong, it was a very good game, and I replayed it multiple times.  But damn when you spend money you've managed to scrape together for the summer on one game and you finish it in less than a week. 

I mean we bitch and moan about 60 for 360 games and such, but I know for sure I saw SNES and N64 games approaching the 100 dollar mark.

Edit:  I remember Illusion being marketed pretty aggressively back in the day.

[Quemaqua]

Yeah, I remember how tough it was to save for games back then.  I don't remember ever paying $75 for anything, though.  If it was more than $50, I didn't play it.  Or I rented it.

I think I'm going to try Wonder Project J again.  I gave it a shot once, and it was cool, but I didn't stick with it.  I'll have to be more serious this time.  It's a Jap-only game, but there's a fan translation like there is for almost anything popular these days, and as I recall it was pretty solid.  The game, for those who don't know, is sort of just... well, Pinocchio.  Except he's a robot named Pino, and you have to teach him how to interact with objects in the game by praising/scolding so he'll do the right thing.  Sort of like Black and White, but not.  It's quite interesting.

[Cobra951]

The most I ever paid was $75 for Turok.  I remember it was priced at $80 at a toy store, and I told them I'd never pay that much for a game.  I found it a while later at the nearby EB or Babbage's (forget what it was) for only $5 less, but it made the cut.  I was used to paying $70 for some 3rd-party Genesis games.  That's a lot more real money than $60 for console games today.  But wages in this country are flat, have been for the whole decade.  Inflation means you buy less things you don't need, or you go into a deep pit of debt.  I.e., it's just as hard to come up with $60 today as it was 10 years ago.

I was wondering why I had never heard of Crusader of Centy! I knew it as Soleil! That was a beautiful game!

Beyond Oasis is actually known as The Story of Thor out here. Also a great Zelda-style adventure. I had The Story of Thor 2 on the Sega Saturn as well, it was actually a prequel.

Man I miss these games.

Crusader of Centy (U)
Soleil (E) -- I love this name.  The American name is so generic.
Ragnacenty (J)



As a related aside, I was checking out these games and other Genesis gems on an emulator that now seems out of pace with the SNES wonders that are ZSNES and Snes9X.  I found Fusion, from Steve Snake.  So far, it looks like an excellent effort.  It's the evolution of Kega (for those who have been into emulators across the board as I have).  It handles several other Sega systems too.  Version 3.51 is from '06.

Fusion:

* Emulates the Sega SG-1000, SC-3000, Master System, and GameGear with a
  high degree of accuracy.

* Emulates the Sega MegaDrive/Genesis more accurately than any other
  emulator.

* Emulates the Sega MegaCD/SegaCD more accurately than any other emulator.

* Emulates the Sega 32X more accurately than any other emulator.

* Emulates the Sega CD+32X together, no other emulator can do this.

* Has many other interesting features.


Fusion is written mainly in hand optimised x86 ASM, with small parts
(Windows interface, DirectX interface, File Handling) written in C.
All code is written by me - Steve Snake.

  From the Readme file

I also found some good info about it at Wikipedia.

What bugged me most about DGen (which is the older emulator) was the huge square pixels on zoomed displays.  Fusion is DirectX-friendly, and the displays are nicely filtered in carefully chosen zoomed resolutions.  Here's a screenshot.  Looking great so far, and I may just have to check out what the Sega CD and 32X were capable of.

[idolminds]

Heh, I hate that filtered look. I love my pixels all chunky, square, and sharp.

[Cobra951]

Heh, I hate that filtered look. I love my pixels all chunky, square, and sharp.

You can do that too, by turning off the filter.  Whatever floats your boat.  I got the 2xSAI plugin too, and while it does an amazing job with lines that are clearly defined, it botches up a lot of other areas, dithered ones in particular.  Overall, I don't like it.

[idolminds]

Yay!

[Quemaqua]

I'm with idol.  I don't need filtering, just some nice rough-hewn chunky pixel goodness.  I haven't checked out that emu, though... might have to at some point.  Right now, though, I just want a new version of DGen for PSP.  I do all my emulation on there for the most part, and it'd be nice to see some better support for the stuff.  On the SNES side, too.

[Cobra951]

You do understand that the blockiness is false resolution, artifacting caused by insufficient data to render directly into that many fixed pixels.  Image filtering is analogous to audio filtering in music CD playback.  The analog waveform assembled from 44.1-kHz samples is similarly blocky, and the jaggies have to be filtered out by removing the ultrasonic frequencies entirely.  Otherwise it sounds like shit.  A properly filtered image will look as good as its resolution allows, even though looking at it in a window surrounded by higher-res wallpaper and icons makes it appear blurry.  Heh, you should see the TV modes in this emulator.  They make the normal DirectX filtering look sharp and crisp.  Yet they are the only way to make the jaggies at that low res go away completely, and make those cloud shadows in Centy look like shadows instead of window screens.

But I do understand the (nostalgic? old school?) appeal of blocky pixels.  I've even seen it used on purpose, like in PacMan Championship Ed (XBLA).

DGen looks like it hasn't been getting any more development since about '01.  Does the PSP have a version of Gens?  That seems like the better bet for porting.

Whenever I get on an old-school kick like this, I end up going through my whole collection of 16-bit console games (and occasionally 8-bit as well).  I've been basically going through my Genesis catalog, and rediscovered a few titles which got a lot of love in their day.  I'll mention them when the mood strikes me.  For starters:

Kid Chameleon may be the most under-appreciated Genesis game of all time.  This is such a good, creative and pretty platformer.  Its biggest problem is that you can't save, at all.  No battery and no passwords.  I played through the whole cart by leaving the system on for the duration, which was more than one sitting, and more than one game, because the sucker is fairly hard.  Oftentimes, you learn by dying.  Finding extra lives becomes a survival skill.  Like the best Mario games, it got my complete attention and addiction.  Of course, there are no saving problems on emulators.  But to really appreciate the game, save states should only be used between levels.