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Blog Project 2012 Personal Video Games

Topic 1: Mega Man X

Topic 1: A First…

That was all it took. One screen.

I was around six at the time, in love with video games (how things have changed), and really into one game series in particular. Mega Man.

Let me indulge you with a small backstory to give context. All you want to be when you are a little kid is cool, like your older cousins. I was the youngest of my cousins (until my sister came around in 1990 and my other cousin years later). They were all about video games and thus I became enraptured while young. I got my first NES from one set of cousins when they upgraded to the Super Nintendo. I would try games like Zelda and even though I knew there was more to the game, I couldn’t figure it out. This resigned me to easy to comprehend and play games such as Super Mario Bros. and Mega Man. Now while Mario was fun, you pretty much only jumped, but with Mega Man you could jump AND shoot. I mean, no contest. Even as a youngin’ I made it to the Wiley Stages, but never beat them.

This brings us to that screen. Now, in my mind I want to say it was a Blockbuster commercial. I keep thinking it was some generic Blockbuster commercial showing the latest games to rent, but I can’t find evidence of this anywhere on YouTube (I looked for hours). I did however find two old SNES commercials for the Play It Loud advertising push by Nintendo which illustrate my point swimmingly.

If you watch carefully they contain minute traces of Mega Man X sprinkled in with other games from the time. This is about as long as the potentially, figment-of-my-imagination, Blockbuster commercial showcased Mega Man X.

When it first came on I was like, “Was that Mega Man? It kinda looked like a more modern Mega Man.” I would wait for the commercial to come on just to get the chance to examine that one second clip. You have to understand, now it’s super easy to find this stuff out, but this was pre-internet and pre-me-having-a-subscription-to-Nintendo-Power.

I finally did find out from my cousins that there was a NEW Mega Man for the SNES and it was out NOW.

Here is an accurate account of my reaction.

 

I proceeded to pester, bug, annoy, and terrorize my mother until we figured out a way that I was going to bask in the glory that was this game. It was decided (yes, let’s make this sound like there was a choice) that I was to get a SNES for my birthday. Here is the nuts part, I was so crazy obsessed that I actually went out and purchased the game before I even had the system.

I remember holding that box, trembling with excitement as to what adventures lie within.

I read that manual cover to cover just about 100 times. I read it about every day until my birthday when the day of reckoning would be upon all of us.

The game turned out to be magnificent, even by today’s standards. It remains one of my favorite games ever and many hold it up as a pinnacle of great game design.

This video exemplifies exactly what I mean:

I have to say it, if you haven’t played Mega Man X. Play it. Now.

 

*UPDATE 8/31/2018*

I found the commercial! This post popped back into my head the other day when I was listening to a podcast about Blockbuster. So, I opened up Netscape 1.0 and started looking at YouTube and lo and behold, there was the commercial. I modified it from the original post to restore it back to it’s proper aspect ratio, but here it is. It is almost exactly what I described about six years ago. My memory isn’t that bad yet.

Categories
Video Games

New Life for Old Games

I have been doing a little research lately on game engines. Game engines are those things that make all those great looking video games work. It’s the core, like a car engine (crazy, right?!?). I won’t go down that particular rabbit hole any further, but it got me thinking about old games and how you could theoretically upgrade those engines. These upgraded engines could really modernize gameplay and graphical fidelity. I started with a game series/engine that defined the FPS genre, Doom (Doom II to put a finer point on it). Here are my findings.

Here is a list of all the resources I used:

The game can be bought on the cheap on Steam and works on any modern Windows install.

High resolution texture packs really make a huge difference.

Two of the most popular Doom engines.

I was surprised at what I found. Doom II has no reason being able to look this good. I mean fully realized 3D models and true polygonal environments. If it can be done on a game that came out in 1994 think about how much can be done with games now. Yeesh. I made a video comparing the differences. There are so many modifications I could of made, but these seemed to look the best to me to bring it as close to a modern shooter as possible. Doom originally didn’t allow for free-looking even though the environments had levels. The new engines do allow for that to happen, but I turned it off for the video because I wanted the comparison to reflect visual changes not gameplay changes.

I didn’t get into the nitty-gritty of installing and configuring everything because that wasn’t necessarily the point of this post, but if anyone is interested and can’t get it working let me know in the comments, Facebook, or Twitter and I would be more than willing to help out.

Categories
Projects Video Games

Game Gear Resurrected!

It is finished! I am thoroughly glad with how this project turned out. I wasn’t sure If I would be able to resurrect my Game Gear from the grips of death, but I am pleased to announce that it is currently back up and running like a champ. I will do a quick recap (that very well could be a pun here in a second). Many electronics at the time of the release of the Game Gear had some poor capacitors in them. They would often break and leak electrolytic fluid. This fluid tends to corrode traces on the board. This happens not only on the main board, but also on the audio board. What is the solution to fixing this you ask?

18298004

 

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Here is an example of some corroded point. If you see the nasty stuff next to the 22 microfarad cap. All of this needed to be scrapped off and cleaned to create a  good solder point. Kind of a pain.

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This is what it looks like with the new caps in place and the corrosion cleaned off to the best of my ability.

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I replaced all the caps on the board. ALl the blue cylinder things are the new ones. 11 in total. There was probably 3 or 4 leaky ones, but it was a good idea to just replace them all.

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WOOO! Go get’em Sonic. The small board in the upper left is the audio board before I replaced the caps.

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This board was surprisingly worse than the main board. It was extremely corroded. Almost all the caps were leaking, too.

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This is the Game Gear all back together. Everything works again including the audio.

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Ditto.

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These are all the bad, old caps that were replaced.

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The aftermath.

I am very happy with how this turned out and it gives me more confidence to do this kind of stuff in the future so watch for more projects of this nature.