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NEC TG-16/TE/TurboDuo => TG-16/TE/TurboDuo Discussion => Topic started by: thisIsLoneWolf on May 26, 2015, 08:50:25 PM
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The thread about JJ & Jeff inspired me to start this one.
One of my favorite hucards has long been New Adventure Island (NAI). I absolutely love everything about this game, but even before that, I loved Super Adventure Island (SAI) for the SNES.
So I thought it would be fun to see which one people here prefer, and why.
I'll start off by saying that while I initially used to think it would be hard to dethrone SAI, it didn't take too long for me to prefer NAI. While the music and special effects in SAI could arguably be considered revolutionary for their time, I still prefer the level and graphic design of the Newer adventure. I don't want to undersell the catchy tunes either. New Adventure Island gets my vote.
So, are you a SAI guy or a NAI guy? :)
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I played SAI as soon as it came out and disliked it more than most games. It not only moves and plays too slow and poorly as a Wonderboy/AI game, it's boring and feels cheap as an average game. The artwork is fugly, even though a decent amount of shading and coloring was used. But what's more off-putting is how it mixes tiny sprites with medium ones, giving the impression that the game is struggling to pull off 16-bit level sprites and action. It really felt like a cheap Western developed game/ill-conceived tech demo slapped together to cash in on a console. I dislike that style of music and although many may enjoy it, it still felt very out of place for this particular game, let alone a AI game.
I've never been crazy about NAI, but it is my favorite AI game, as it plays and feels the most like Wonderboy, which I love. But the aesthetics bother me. The artwork may be so much better than SAI, but I still don't like most of it and much of the shading/color style. Some of the parallax is alright and it's neat that they experimented with it, but some of it is just weird or wrong. I don't like the music and much of the sound. It was cool to play NAI on my Express at the time.
With that said, NAI is still a good game while SAI doesn't feel like a real complete/polished game that was intended to be enjoyed by the end user.
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The thread about JJ & Jeff inspired me to start this one.
One of my favorite hucards has long been New Adventure Island (NAI). I absolutely love everything about this game, but even before that, I loved Super Adventure Island (SAI) for the SNES.
So I thought it would be fun to see which one people here prefer, and why.
I'll start off by saying that while I initially used to think it would be hard to dethrone SAI, it didn't take too long for me to prefer NAI. While the music and special effects in SAI could arguably be considered revolutionary for their time, I still prefer the level and graphic design of the Newer adventure. I don't want to undersell the catchy tunes either. New Adventure Island gets my vote.
So, are you a SAI guy or a NAI guy? :)
You're spot on with that remark about the music is SAI. Man, to this day that game's music trips me up. It sounds unlike anything released on the SNES.
But the gameplay in NAI is faster paced and controls better.
This is a really tough call. I'd have to go with NAI. But honestly I need to replay these to get a better perspective after all these years.
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The thread about JJ & Jeff inspired me to start this one.
One of my favorite hucards has long been New Adventure Island (NAI). I absolutely love everything about this game, but even before that, I loved Super Adventure Island (SAI) for the SNES.
So I thought it would be fun to see which one people here prefer, and why.
I'll start off by saying that while I initially used to think it would be hard to dethrone SAI, it didn't take too long for me to prefer NAI. While the music and special effects in SAI could arguably be considered revolutionary for their time, I still prefer the level and graphic design of the Newer adventure. I don't want to undersell the catchy tunes either. New Adventure Island gets my vote.
So, are you a SAI guy or a NAI guy? :)
You're spot on with that remark about the music is SAI. Man, to this day that game's music trips me up. It sounds unlike anything released on the SNES.
Easily one of Yuzo Koshiro's best soundtracks. I like it more than Streets of Rage 1,2 or ActRaiser.
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Look at the fruit, weapon icons, and extra guy sprites - they're all small, undetailed, and bland compared to the rest of the game.
Because I'm not a SNERD, I prefer New Adventure Island to Super Adventure Island. :mrgreen:
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I remember having played Super Adventure Island back then as a kid. Frankly, I wasn't impressed, something just looked off to me. I had played Adventure Island 2 on NES before, which I liked and left a permanent impact on me.
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NAI has so much more personality and plays better all around.
SAI is one of those early SNES games that are all show with giant sprites but play super slow and have very few levels.
No contest in my mind; New Adventure Island is easily the better game.
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I actually found NAI good enough to play start to finish. SAI, on the other hand, leaves my system within 10 minutes of starting it. The fun factor isn't there, but I can't put my finger on a reason.
SAI2, on the other hand, beats both games hands down.
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But what's more off-putting is how it mixes tiny sprites with medium ones, giving the impression that the game is struggling to pull off 16-bit level sprites and action.
I've never played SAI so I can't comment on most of your criticism, but after watching a bit of youtubes I have to ask for clarification on this one point you make: can you share some examples of the offending sprites that make SAI a sub-16bitter, or direct me to the stuff I need to be smoking to see it? :lol:
I've not spent much time with NAI, either. So, again, I can't chime in on how the gameplay between to two compares, but to my eyes and ears, SAI is pretty amazing. NAI is impressive as well, but the limited (or shitty) parallax is a buzz kill, and a lot of the music makes my ears bleed.
SAI feels like Bonk NES. Lots of sprites look and feel too small, like it's a port to weaker hardware. Part of it is how everything feels while playing. My SNES loving friend rented it as soon as it came out and we played straight through it at his house that afternoon. We both felt the same, that it had a tech demo kind of coat of paint but felt awkward and unbalanced.
Those screen shots aren't great examples of what I was talking about, but already you can see that in SAI the bananas are the size of Higgins' head, while in NAI they are 3/4 the size of his body. The first stages of each look pretty clear to me, but playing makes it obvious. In NAI, Higgins is always running and he has decent animation and the games actually moves at a decent pace (still not as fast as I'd like though). In SAI, Higgins has poor and awkward animation, which is not timed correctly for what it is supposed to represent and how it reacts to your actions. At full speed, the entire game moves at the speed of a poorly optimized SNES launch game during slowdown. Higgins looks like a Western junior highschool student's notebook doodle. Many enemies are literally as tiny as they can be depicted by 240p pixel art and much of the stage layouts only draw attention to this imbalance.
If I can spare time when I am near a computer, I could throw together some example images. If my stuff was unpacked, it would be very easy to do a video comparison.
Even Wonderboy pulled off effective sense of speed and momentum with minimal animation. Good artwork helped a lot, but so did actual speed. If they were going to make SAI play like the anti-AI/Wonderboy game that it is, they shouldn't have attempted to do a more "realistic" player sprite with gangly limbs and a permanent expression of constipation. Swapping in the NAI sprite with all of its animation would really help, but it would all the obvious how floaty the jumps are and how slow the games moves.
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Meh. Can't say I care for either one. I much rather just play Wonderboy for the Master System.
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Though I like both NAI and SAI a lot, I have to go with SAI. I've always had a soft spot for SAI since I first played it back in the early SNES days. The soundtrack just blew me away and I still love it to this day. One of Yuzo's best soundtracks ever. I just love the graphics and gameplay from start to finish. Yeah, it's short and not that deep but it's still good fun. The beach theme on level 2 is classic.
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Meh. Can't say I care for either one. I much rather just play Wonderboy for the Master System.
Wonderboy 1 on Master System plays great. It's one of the reasons folks should get the Master Sustem :)
However, how can you not love the Adventure Island NES games, since they are the spiritual successors to Wonderboy 1?
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Meh. Can't say I care for either one. I much rather just play Wonderboy for the Master System.
Wonderboy 1 on Master System plays great. It's one of the reasons folks should get the Master Sustem :)
However, how can you not love the Adventure Island NES games, since they are the spiritual successors to Wonderboy 1?
They lack the rpg elements the other Wonderyboy Monster series have. :P It has been some years I admit since I played the nes games or the SAI series. Might give it another go at some point as long as it doesn't break the piggy bank.
Edit:
Just a quick look on ebay, good lord SAI 2 and Adventure Island 3 what the hell? That's craziness. Might as well at that price point get a freaking everdrive!
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Meh. Can't say I care for either one. I much rather just play Wonderboy for the Master System.
Wonderboy 1 on Master System plays great. It's one of the reasons folks should get the Master Sustem :)
However, how can you not love the Adventure Island NES games, since they are the spiritual successors to Wonderboy 1?
The first Adventure Island is my second favorite AI game to play, but the aesthetics really bring down the experience quite a bit. The music kills the pacing theme, the color is bad by NES standards and I don't like the redrawn artwork. Just like how I love the early Shining Force games as much as anything, but the GBA remake kills everything that made the original special.
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Hudson Soft made the first Adventure Island's difficulty scale to the point where it just wasn't fun anymore. I don't know why they found a need to multiply the number of enemies like the octopi so significantly. Wonder Boy is a blast from beginning to end while Adventure Island near the end makes me want to piss razor blades out of my dick. Still managed to beat it in one afternoon last time I played it but it wasn't really fun by the end, and I'm not looking forward to doing it again.
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I much MUCH prefer Super Adventure Island. I like New Adventure Island a little bit but to me it seems like a very basic retread of the original Wonder Boy.
Super Adventure Island
PROS:
Fun Gameplay
Fantastic music with lots of bass
CONS:
Way too easy
Can't press start at the title screen until the stupid intro starts.
New Adventure Island
PROS:
Kind of fun
Somewhat catchy music
CONS:
Gets boring pretty fast, very basic retread of the formula coming out long after Super Adventure Island
No bass whatsoever. After Super Adventure Island, the bar had been set too high in the music department.
The Blocky intro to each stage looks really rough and doesn't fit since it's only 2 quick frames. Unnecessary.
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I haven't played either. I was ready to dismiss Black Tiger as SNES hate, but his reasons seemed well stated, then Joe, a bona fide SNES hater, comes out in support of SAI.
I don't know what to think.
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I have no snes to sai with... but my encounter with nai tonight resembled that of everyone's favorite forumite, DICKFACETAS (formerly known as dickkobold).
I want to love it. It looks all prettyish (sprites are, anyway)... but playing it feels like charging my crystal with a rubber in a sock while watching the golden girls.
I would know.
Get a SNES and join the SNERDside.
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I generally dislike the Adventure Island series in general, but the second and third NES games (and the Game Boy games, the second one particularly) are probably the closest the series got to being interesting, thanks to stuff like the dinosaurs you can ride on. Super Adventure Island released after the second NES game, but it's just too simplistic, I find it boring. It's not very good. As for New Adventure Island, I've played a lot less of it (emulation only), but it seems alright... for an Adventure Island game. It's a bit too much like SAI in design, though -- there are still no dinosaurs, just basic "run to the right" gameplay, and such. But for some reason it did seem a bit better.
I strongly prefer the more interesting, more varied play of the Monster World series over the not-that-great original Wonder Boy, so that I'd find the AI games the most like the first WB not that great either should make sense. But yeah, based on playing it a little, I'd probably go with NAI; worse graphics than SAI, but the game seemed a little bit more fun to play.
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Super Adventure Island
PROS:
Fun Gameplay
Fantastic music with lots of bass
This. SAI was all about that bass!
One can only wonder what NAI would have been like, if Hudson brought Yuzo on.
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I would have loved to hear what Yuzo would do with the PCE... err... I mean the TG-16 hardware.
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I would have loved to hear what Yuzo would do with the PCE... err... I mean the TG-16 hardware.
Considering how great Sonic 1 for SMS sounds (or even Streets of Rage for SMS), I'd imagine he could blow the doors off the PCE sound chip.
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I am not sure if I've played Super Adventure Island. But I owned New Adventure Island for the TG-16 back in the 90's (wish I still had it, I could say that for a bunch of my games sadly) and it was probably the first true Adventure Island game I really liked. I was more of a fan of the Wonder Boy games that split off from the beginning of the series (Dragon's Curse, etc.), but I played NAI a ton regardless. Great music, as I remember pretty tight controls too. Never a big fan of that original Wonder Boy arcade game, but NAI is a great title.
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Wonderboy1 = Adventure Island (NES) = JJ & Jeff = NAI
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Hudson's versions of Wonder Boy games were always inferior to the real deal. A slight exception may be made for Dragon's Curse vs Wonder Boy 3, but I like the characters much better in Wonder Boy 3. Hudson's character designs have always sucked pretty hard.
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Hudson's versions of Wonder Boy games were always inferior to the real deal. A slight exception may be made for Dragon's Curse vs Wonder Boy 3, but I like the characters much better in Wonder Boy 3. Hudson's character designs have always sucked pretty hard.
I take it you mean the character designs in Wonderboy series games developed by Westone? Hudson itself has a great history of character designs. From everything I've read and the fact that Westone developed original games for the PC Engine, they were the ones designing everything. In Wonderboy III, the sprites were heavily compromised compared to the actual character designs. In Dragon's Curse, they made some of the sprites more faithful to the original character designs and others were simply evolved to accommodate more detail.
(http://superpcenginegrafx.net/misc/wbiiicc1.png)
The only way that Dragon's Curse/Adventure Island is inferior to WBIII as an overall game, is the removal of the bonus content. But the addition of backup saving is still a pretty big deal.
Adventure Island is of course disappointing overall compared to Wonderboy, including the character design, but Master Higgins was simply a joke character.
Bikkuriman World is basically a 1-for-1 port, only re-branded with a license. Hudson didn't come up with new character designs.
Monster Lair again appears to be a perfect port minus the parallax (many assets were actually resized, even though it's difficult to tell). The character designs are not only the same, but much more faithful than Sega's Mega Drive port of the game. The quality of the overall game is also superior to the Mega Drive and most people seem to feel that the CD soundtrack makes it more enjoyable than the arcade version.
Wonderboy V/Monster World III has a main character which ranges from painful to boring depending on which artwork you look at.
(http://superpcenginegrafx.net/misc/wbvcc1.png)
The main character in Dynastic Hero also looks better and worse in various artwork, but the character designs of him and the heroine are both faithful to the series as they are evolutions of the characters from Monster Lair.
(http://superpcenginegrafx.net/misc/wbvcc2.png)
(http://superpcenginegrafx.net/misc/wbvcc5.png)
And the main character in Monster World IV is an evolution of the heroine in Dynastic Hero. They even included a similar side profile opening cinematic. The Wonderboy/Monster World series all about reoccurring themes and callbacks and Hudson's version are interwoven as much as Sega's.
The in-game player sprite in MWIII is pretty bland anyway and the Dyna sprite fits in perfectly.
(http://superpcenginegrafx.net/misc/wbvcc3.png)
It's a nice reward for fans of the original that Dynastic Hero updated some of the sprites and bosses, instead of simply doing a lazy straight port. Westone was bad at parallax, but at least they game us interesting variants to the bosses and gave them increased detail and animation. The final boss is also more faithful to the series, as it recreates the ending of Monster Land, while still giving us an original cyclops alien.
I prefer MWIII, but DH's changes aren't a radical departure from the series and among other improvements/additions, all of the carried over graphics have been updated with improved shading and color. It's fair to say that overall it balances out, but for fans of the series it's more about having a cool variant to play.