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0:47 - Settings
10:55 - game list
28:06 - River City Renegade (SFC)
51:35 - The Combatribes (SNES)
59:01 - Kunio's Dodgeball Time, C'mon Guys! (SFC)
1:15:50 - Downtown River City Baseball Story ~Play Ball, Kunio!~ (SFC)
1:36:15 - Kunio's Oden (SFC)
1:44:01 - SugoroQuest++ -DICENICS- (SFC)
1:52:00 - DunQuest (SFC)
1:57:09 - Super Dodge Ball (Arcade) (Kunio Team playthrough)
2:30:45 - Xain'd Sleena (Arcade)
2:34:13 - China Gate (Arcade)
2:45:57 - The Combatribes (Arcade)
2:52:00 - Shadow Force (Arcade)
2:59:47 - wrap!
12 Arcade or Super Famicom games in this Unity-based collection, most of them made available and even translated for Western home play here for the first time--which is super cool! Well not so much the Unity part maybe but the menus are set up pretty much like the NES/Famicom collection that came out on console a year or two back, and more or less do the things you'd expect for basic emulation. (Okay so having to press both "bumper" buttons together on the menu screen to access DIP screens for basic settings like game difficulty for the arcade ports is a bit much.)
There are two basic flaws in the set-up, though:
1) None of the games with a jump function default to having Jump mapped to the bottom face button on an Xbox-style gamepad (my DualSense works but still shows Xbox-style button names ; PPP), which to anyone who has every played Super Mario Bros. or a game made by anyone who has ever played Super Mario Bros. will feel absolutely psychopathic and require immediate button remapping.
2) You can remap the buttons per game but doing so for game buttons "1" & "2"--"Punch" and "Kick" in Shadow Force, for instance--will also remap the Accept/Cancel functions used to navigate the collection's menus while in that game, rendering navigation of the collection's game management menus incredibly confusing and again making me wonder if the UI engineer ever played an actual game--because this is horrible. I posted about it on their Steam forum and hold out a tiny hope that they'll fix it but yeah probably not.
The games themselves are maybe not all so great. I liked these three enough that I'll try playing them more:
- Super Dodge Ball (Arcade)
Probably has the same basic problem the NES version has when played 1P which is that all the passing and fakeouts are useless against the CPU so you're just kind of doing the same throws over and over and hoping the CPU decides not to catch them. But unlike the NES (and SFC, see below) version, it runs at good speed; and the graphics in this, Technos Japan's final game before their bankruptcy, are insane, in a good way--ESPECIALLY since the bright screen flash that accompanies every single special throw hit in the MVS arcade game seems to have been either removed or extremely toned down here, so I can actually try to play this version without risking a migraine. = DDD
The Neo Geo version only came out in the US, in arcades, and in very limited release! I stumbled across it once in an arcade and as a formerly NES-Super-Dodge-Ball-obsessed kid was super excited but had no idea how to play it; turns out the super throws require inputting Street-Fighter-style fighting game motions like for fireballs or uppercuts, rather than being timing-based; I'm not finding any other than the basic one each character has (uppercut motion) anything close to intuitive, but it feels like maybe they'll become manageable with some practice. ... For attracting casual players it was probably a bad idea. R.I.P., Technos Japan.
- The Combatribes (Arcade)
Hard-hitting, wacky moves, high enemy count.
- Shadow Force (Arcade)
Controls are a bit funky maybe but hey, cyber ninjas! (The final sentence in the collection's "Story" summary is fabulous: "They were ninjas reborn as cyborgs to fight against evil." YES.)
I didn't like the rest of the games = P :
- River City Renegade (SFC)
Bad (and badly-paced) dialogue, hard-to-read new Western font, very sluggish action in which you just mash a single button for all your moves, bad AI to the extent that having a CPU teammate made fights a lot harder because the ally barely hit the opponents and always drifted right in between me and my opponent so I just ended up hitting them instead. : P Probably better in 2P I suppose. Inscrutable quests and direction. Got mugged like twice on every floor of my starting hotel (how does a high school kid afford this life) which was impressive considering each floor is a 50' hallway. Rather ugly graphics.
- Kunio's Dodgeball Time, C'mon Guys! (SFC)
NES Super Dodge Ball was a smash hit so let's add 10x the menus, take the old playfields and give them undecipherably muddy and dithered detailing, make the sprites muddy, indistinctly rounded, and boring, and make the gameplay run maybe even slower than it was on the NES! Horrid.
- Downtown River City Baseball Story (SFC)
I'm terrible at every Japanese baseball game I've ever tried and this proved no different; thought I had a chance at first since the fielding, which I'm usually useless at, is highly abstracted, cutting directly to a zoomed-in view of where the ball goes and who auto-fields it--except sometimes I couldn't tell what the little zoomed animated clips signified, and other times I couldn't tell it was my 1st baseman who'd picked up the ball, so my following throw to 1st went to nobody. ; DD (And once I cottoned on to this I couldn't figure out how to make my 1st baseman run to tag his base so that didn't really help. ; DDD)
Perhaps even stranger is the pitching/batting, where you choose your pitch/swing from a vertical list of up to 8 or 9 types--which SEEMS like a lotta variety, but the game doesn't show which one is currently selected, so you have to remember how many times you've pressed up or down: like, I want pitch #7, so I'll press DOWN 7 times (the first option is #0) and hope I don't mis-press too fast so it isn't counted, or accidentally hit UP at first, which I somehow kept doing and then wasn't sure if the selection wraps down to the bottom or not (I THINK maybe it did?). Probably this was done so that your couch Vs opponent couldn't see which pitch/swing you were selecting--there's a confirmation tone for each up/down press but I suppose you could try blindly juking your invisible selection up/down a few times to throw your opponent's count off...and maybe your own as well 'p'--but other sports games did this MUCH better by making play selection as a single direction-plus-button input instead.
- Kunio's Oden (SFC)
Columns-like, but maybe runs a bit too fast. I've never been able to get into Columns and this felt worse.
- The Combatribes (SNES & SFC)
On its own, a mediocre-feeling SNES beat-em-up; compared to the arcade version also in this collection, horridly slow and chunky, with vastly reduced opponent counts. There is no reason to play it after that initial comparison.
- SugoroQuest++ -DICENICS- (SFC, no English translation)
Heavily text-menu based so not particularly playable if you can't read Japanese. A 4P board game; in 1P you can't skip the 3 CPU players' turns; I mashed through two or three turns and nothing remotely cool seemed to happen for any player, we were just going around a board and numbers would appear over our heads. The Mode 7 playfield makes me feel nauseous when it animates in rare transitions, but the pixel art is gorgeous. May have some market appeal in Japan--which did have a prequel on Famicom--but its inclusion in the Western release can only be read as padding the game count. (Oh hm okay the Famicom version got a translated console release earlier this year; ah that's right, I think I'd seen it and rules it out--maybe because it looks kinda boring, and has some mildly flashy/shaky FX--nice sprites again, though.)
- DunQuest (SFC, no English translation)
Pretty much the same situation as with DICENICS (though no obvious Mode 7, thankfully) but in "action" RPG form. LOADS of NPCs in the generic starting castle/town to talk to in Japanese; once I finally found my way out and fought a tiny critter, the action was delayed to feeling kind of like it was turn-based, except it wasn't--like, pressing the sword button would work once every five seconds or so, and I couldn't tell when the opponent's attack would happen, so I slowly and boringly got sliced to death by the first, tiny creature.
- Xain'd Sleena (Arcade)
Unattractive and jerky. Sci-fi run-n-gun but I got killed repeatedly in a screen or two by rocks and space geysers.
- China Gate (Arcade)
Feels like they tried to see if a single-screen-ish beat-em-up was feasible. Not so much: the action isn't horrible but also isn't great, and becomes extremely repetitive; graphics are a bit squished and muddy. Might be a bit of fun in 2P 'cause you can throw the enemies into each other--except you have to switch buttons to throw them forward instead of back, and in practice I couldn't seem to wrap my head around that at all. ; D
~ ~ ~
So overall, not a great collection. Weirdos like me may appreciate having legit ports of MVS Super Dodge Ball (and especially the removal of its original screen flashing effect), Combatribes, and Shadow Force--but even I'll admit that $30 for those three, essentially, is a bit steep. (There's supposedly online play but I didn't try it.) And the menu navigation getting remapped per game is inexcusable. |
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Playing through arcade version of "The Combatribes" as "Berserker" on the default difficulty
3:45 - playing
11:48 - roller skates
22:33 - rooftop
24:47 - boss rush
33:26 - boss
35:55 - ending
36:28 - credits
37:30 - Bullova's moves
40:02 - Blitz' moves
44:35 - SNES VS MODE A
46:48 - SNES 1 PLAY (Bullova)
I keep forgetting the DIP SWITCH menu access code (pressing both shoulder buttons) has to be entered with the Super Technos World's own menu on the screen. 'p'
Also forgot the SNES version has a clunky fighting game mode--like the NES Double Dragon. |
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| | | The boss rush at the end of The Combatribes is kind of a pain. ; P The bosses are all kind of cheap in how they hit you sometimes--and the final boss is definitely cheap in how she hits you ALL the time; like, she's faster than me, so I couldn't try to outmaneuver her, and I just found no safe way to hit her at all, so it was like hit her, she hits me for more damage, repeat, pump credits. ; P Yeesh!
Seems like they wanted to make a version of Double Dragon that was better at liberating money from players' wallets: 3P simultaneous, no easy elbow move (but some other moves are straight out of DD, like Berserker's kick combo and Blitz' jump kick), much cheaper enemy attacks. : P |
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Playing through the arcade version of Shadow Force as Tengu
1:48 - disliking Kai
3:25 - Tengu
37:16 - where stuff gets weird : D
46:48 - ending & credits
49:10 - wrap!
They tried fighting game-style motion inputs for special moves here and it just doesn't work, at least not for me; eventually gave up trying to do them. 'p' And didn't like Kai--like I didn't like Blunet when I tried her briefly last time--but Tengu does throws and bodyslams, kinda like Zangief, and those are pretty fun. : )
The controls were getting to me--like they wanted to have back-to-block like in a fighting game, so you're stuck locked on to the last guy you hit, unable to turn around--but the last phase of the game gets wacky and weird, and the end boss(es) are surprisingly inept and cheesable ^ _^; it really charmed me and I ended the game with a big smile on my face. = D |
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As Riki Team - Super Dodge Ball
Doesn't matter all that much which team you play through with I suppose, 'cause you can swap two of the three characters with leaders from the other teams. All the leaders can do a special throw 2, even if they aren't the team's main leader.
Played on an arcade stick this time, and was able to do the fireball motion for special throw 2 consistently--had trouble with it on pad.
Adding SFII motion inputs to the game doesn't feel quite right. : P And at any rate the vs CPU play is still flat, it's just do they catch the ball or not, over and over. |
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| | | | The US & Japan arcade versions of The Combatribes have blood spray on certain attack hits (ground pound, head-knock, knife stabs, etc). Home version does not. |
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| | | | Unlike River City Girls Zero (see entry 2013), does NOT install loose ROMs. 'p' |
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| | | Kunio fandom wiki says of Renegade: "River City Renegade (初代熱血硬派くにおくん Shodai Nekketsu Kōha Kunio-kun?, lit. "The Original Hot-Blooded Tough Guy Kunio") is a beat 'em up role-playing game"--so yeah like River City Ransom you can like grind areas for XP and stuff.
It was Technos' first SFC game. |
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