Granaboard 2013 virtual gathering

[midnightryder259]

Well, I hope someone else says something soon. I forget what they call this when you post too many before someone else gets a word in.

I do have Streets of Rage 4 now(retail packages as of, July I believe?). Will play it a lot more in the future, just that I have other recent pick ups to get through as well. Probably still like 2 the most, but this is up there.

Despite what I said in my last few posts, I picked up Victor Vran, a hack n slash RPG. Really awesome and not like the others. Faster pace, no skill trees, etc. Lot of spiders through.

Looks like I never mentioned it, if you like "metroidvania's" I picked up Bloodstained a while back. Free updates, including playable characters(1 additional one so far, kinda surprised they level up since they don't use any other elements the main character does). Apparently it took them a lot to patch out the issues the Switch port had.

One of my more recent pickups is Warriors Orochi 4 Ultimate. Since the 2nd game, they've had Sun Wukong as a playable character. Kind of ties into the mention of what you're watching, as that's the Japanese name for the monkey king. Often it's also Son Goku, which if you ever watched the original Dragon Ball, before Z, Goku has a tail, an extending staff, and the old pervert hermit that trains him gives him the nimbus cloud to ride.

You know, when no one has anything to say, it's really easy to forget this place exists...

[HounDawg07]

Well ****, I seem to keep forgetting to stop by here after posting for a bit, and looks like I missed out on wiseman's appearance last year. But I think it's amazing that this thread has lasted this long, so I'll do my part to keep it going.

Looks like my last post here was a few years ago at this point, so I suppose a life update is in order.

As far as work, I'm still in the cybersecurity field, as I have been since 2007. These days I have the "senior" tag on my title, and I just earned my CISSP certification a few months ago. I've been working remotely since March, the pay is good, the hours are consistent, and the stress is mostly low, so all in all I'm pretty happy.

No (second) wife (yet) or kids for me, but I did adopt 2 cats at the outset of the pandemic. Unfortunately one of them passed after I had him only 6 months, but the other is still around and keeps me (mostly) sane living alone otherwise.

My gaming has leaned more in the direction of PC/Steam this year since I bought a proper gaming laptop for VR and also because quarantine and playing on Steam with friends is easy. I've been doing a lot of Divinity: Original Sin 2 in online co-op with friends. I've also spent a bunch of time playing Celeste, which is just a phenomenal 2D platformer through and through. Aside from video games, I've also picked up a D&D obsession over the last few years. I'm in 4 (virtual) campaigns at the moment, and I'm working on a Zelda-themed campaign to run once we can start meeting in person again.

I'll have to check out Streets of Rage 4. I didn't know it was a thing until I read this thread. I loved the series on the SNES. Victor Vran looks fun too. The gameplay videos kind of remind me of the most recent Gauntlet game, which I also just discovered this year.

If anyone here games on Steam, feel free to add me. My Steam username is TifiGnome (so named after one of my aforementioned D&D characters).

I'll try to keep an eye on this thread in the coming weeks/months to keep the conversation going.

Happy New Year!

[midnightryder259]

Heh, guess it has been a while for you. Streets of Rage is a Sega IP.

I've also got The Ninja Saviors: Return of the Ninja Warriors as a 2D beat 'em up with a retail release. Single plane though. Feels like the SNES game, but with infinite continues, and you unlock a character after beating it, twice. 2nd one is gigantic.

[HounDawg07]

Well that explains a lot, considering I had a Genesis but not a Super Nintendo growing up. Or perhaps I was thinking of Final Fight.

Just got my Raspberry Pi. Going to install RetroPie, maybe I'll go play through both series once I get it set up.

[midnightryder259]

For the first Final Fight, I'd go with the arcade original. If you have issue with MAME on RetroPie, Final Burn Alpha is a great alternative that might run the games that MAME won't seem to. (Otherwise Sega CD and Game Boy Advance are good alternatives for Final Fight)

Hopefully you've got a good gamepad too. I haven't always had the greatest luck with PC gamepads.

[HounDawg07]

How different is the arcade version of Final Fight vs the console version? I'm not sure I'm going to bother with MAME or arcade emulation, at least not right away.

As far as gamepad, I'm using an original SNES controller with a USB adapter. It works pretty well for everything at least through the 16-bit era, and the original controllers are way better than the bastardized USB remakes.

[mrwiseman]

Hi! How's everybody doing through this pandemic? I hope you're all safe.

My daughter was born over a year ago and is growing nicely; loves cats above all else much like her parents. She picked up COVID from the kindergarten on February, a month before we thought we could, which I thankfully didn't spread to my parents or grandparents as I'm generally careful and stay away when I have any cold. For me it was just a cold and not the worst I've had; for my wife it was a very bad cold with some weird symptoms... We added 2+2 and got an antibody test when they became generally available, and surprise surprise, it was COVID. So I have nothing to fear personally, but I do fear for my parents and grandparents. I had also sent my staff to telework 100% in late February (when people laughed at me for thinking SARS2 was serious business) so that gave me a lot of peace of mind. But 2020 was boring and frustrating overall, missed most of my trips, had to be stuck home for months which is bad for mental health (it basically made me a bigger cynic, I lost motivation and grew more irritable; things got better post wave 1), and I'd also fast-forward away the first half of 2021 as it won't be too different.

[midnightryder259]

@HounDawg07:
SNES is the worst port of the original Final Fight, missing content(including Guy as a playable character, then there was a rental exclusive called Final Fight Guy, that just replaced Cody with Guy), no multiplayer, etc. Ironically, they nailed the effectiveness of weapons, then somehow screwed that up for the console exclusive sequels. So my advice for 2 & 3 is to ignore the weapons entirely, find the best damage combos you can(the whole series, if you hold up/down during a strike combo, you'll combo into a throw, forward/away respectively, I think), and focus on taking the out the most annoying(the most likely to get to you, and do some damage while you're working the others over) of the 3 enemies that show up first.

That also explains a lot. I love arcade games, and have a wireless Retrobit Genesis pad, which actually has enough buttons to be a Saturn pad, which covers the best of both worlds. You get the 6 face buttons to feel authentic enough for Sega, and the shoulder buttons for SNES/PS1(though I guess C & Z would have to fill in for the extra shoulder buttons there). Personally, I gotta have the buttons on the face of the pad, closer to what you would be dealing with when it comes to arcade cabinets. (I actually did the same thing as you, but with the same 6 button Genesis pad I now use on my actual console)

RetroPie handles PS1 pretty damn well, btw. N64 not so much, some games will run fine, but a lot of favorites won't. It can handle Turbo CD/PC Engine CD as well, it's just that those games go in the same folder with regular TurboGrafx-16/PC Engine, instead of having it's own section(like Sega CD and 32X do).


@mrwiseman:
I'm not sure, but I may have had it as well. Was sick for 3 or 4 weeks, through Thanksgiving. Didn't realize random pain was a cold/flu symptom. You move to get comfortable, then once you are, your elbow, shoulder, hip, knee, or whatever else flares up. ...yet, somehow you're perfectly fine when sitting up.

I'm an introvert, so the situation around it doesn't bother me as much, I can stay in and play video games or whatever else(one does need other hobbies, or the single one become more of a daily grind), without going stir crazy.

Here's hoping to a better year, and that no one comes across/manufactures another disease like this.

[HounDawg07]

Hey wiseman! Glad to hear your family's bout with COVID was relatively mild. We're pretty sure my dad had it a few months back. Had all the symptoms, including lack of taste/smell, although he did test negative at the time. Fortunately for him it was also not really much worse than a cold/flu, and I don't think my mom ever had any symptoms.

Since working remotely and moving almost all of my social life online, it does feel isolating at times. But also being an introvert, I think I'm managing better than a lot of people. Still, I'm anxious to get enough people vaccinated that we can start socializing in person again. And I'm likely going to take a trip abroad once it's safe to do so again. That is, if the rest of the world ever decides to let Americans in their countries again.

@ryder: Apparently there's a lot that I didn't know about the series. Considering my childhood memories of the game were mostly "I like the game where you punch everyone" I suppose that makes sense. Knowing my younger self, in all likelihood I had a Game Genie with infinite health enabled, so didn't really care much for strategy.

My brother actually has a large arcade cabinet he built, with a PC running MAME, for arcade emulation. We don't play it all that often, but when we want to get a 4-player arcade game going, it's awesome.

Didn't know it could handle PS1. I never actually had one, went straight from N64 to PS2. Sucks that N64 is so hit or miss with emulation.

[midnightryder259]

Beat 'em ups were always my favorite genre since my uncle had the NES port of Double Dragon. Even to this day, I don't care for fighters anymore, since I prefer beating up multiple targets to just the 1(plus, fuck those 360 motions and whatnot). Having been into wrestling from '91, the one simulation style wrestling game it has, despite it's framerate issues, is probably my most played Switch game(has a ton of classic era guys to use). Even though it's it's own thing, I've always seen wrestling games as a sort of mashup of fighting and beat 'em ups. Especially with backstage brawls and hardcore matches, mix them up with handicap matches(at least one more opponent on the other side), and it begins to feel like a beat 'em up.

3 player+ arcade games seemed rare. A lot of Konami's games, hell X-Men had a 6 player cabinet. The bitch of it is you often need to put the coin in the slot for the character you want to play. That's why I recommend going for the 2 player roms when you can, so you can freely choose(X-Men defaults on the 4 player, so the parent rom is perfectly fine for selecting your character). Capcom has Cadillacs and Dinosaurs. 3 player, which is odd, as they created a 4th character that the IP doesn't typically have, the strong guy, like Max from Streets of Rage 2(/4 in a couple of ways) and Haggar from Final Fight. I think even Sega's Quartet was 4 player, and there were games earlier than that(I mean the 2600 even had some).

I went from Genesis to PC(discovered emulation, so it worked out ) to Dreamcast. Nowadays I'd probably be disgusted by 20% of the Dreamcasts library, but the other arcade-like games were awesome. No console since has been quite as fun for me.