Comment on Ninja Gaiden for DOS: rated M for "mistake"
zod000@lemmy.ml 4 days agoI don’t feel that those ports, or this Ninja Gaiden one, were horrible or “mistakes” (I owned this game and Megaman 3 for DOS). The PCs at the time didn’t have the specialized hardware to do smooth side scrolling, and John Carmack and crew’s novel way to do it without the hardware was still their secret. It was honestly the best side scrolling game you’d find on PC despite the jank.
atomicpoet@lemmy.world 4 days ago
I’ve played many games from the era. There were quite a few DOS games that had much smoother scrolling even if there wasn’t specialized hardware for it. Thexder, made in 1987, is a good example of this:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=WwHKg2aUB0I
The truth is, a good many Japanese games that were converted to DOS just weren’t very good.
There were exceptions, though. SEGA games tended to be excellent. And I have to say that anything by Nihon Falcom was amazing – to this day, Sorcerian is a standout on DOS.
zod000@lemmy.ml 4 days ago
Come to think of it, I think it was parallax scrolling that Id Software figured out that hadn’t been done properly before. I had never encountered any of the Japanese DOS games in the DOS days. I imagine there just wasn’t distribution of then in the US I guess. I would have loved to see some Nihon Falcom games.
atomicpoet@lemmy.world 4 days ago
Both Thexder and Sorcerian were distributed by Sierra.
Thexder, in particular, was quite popular—got a Western-only sequel called Thexder 95 that was a showcase for Windows 95:
youtu.be/iI_qGdgybmU
It’s still playable on modern Windows.
As for Japanese games, they’re largely hit or miss on DOS. If it’s a Capcom or Konami game—it’s probably terrible. SEGA is good.
I think the game that really humiliated Capcom was the DOS port of Street Fighter II. In the early 90s, a bunch of Koreans made their own unofficial port and it shamed the official port.
This might explain why Super Street Fighter II for DOS was so much better.
zod000@lemmy.ml 4 days ago
Interesting, I never saw either Thexder or Socerian in local stores at the time, nor I had even heard of them. It doesn’t look like GOG has them listed, but I’ll keep an eye out so I can possibly give them a try.