Popeye retrospective: An echo of what might have been | NES Works

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  • Опубликовано: 23 дек 2024

Комментарии • 65

  • @JoshuaJacobs83
    @JoshuaJacobs83 3 года назад +8

    I know I’m late to the party but this is becoming one of my favorite video series to watch. Only complaint is they’re over too soon yet they’re the perfect length to binge.

  • @MCastleberry1980
    @MCastleberry1980 3 года назад +4

    I love to come back to these older videos as a refresher. It does bum me out though that Nintendo's Popeye will probably never see a reissue because of licensing, and it's such a fun game. The camp ground my family used to visit back in the 90s actually had an old Popeye cabinet in its little arcade, so I dumped a ton of quarters into it on camping trips.

  • @CplEthane
    @CplEthane 4 года назад +11

    The reason the arcade sprites looked so good in comparison to everything else, and why the Famicom port sprites look so sqaushed, is because the arcade hardware for Popeye had a sprite layer that was 512x448 (actually 448x512 given arcade screen orientation) while the background layer was 256x224. This means the sprite layer was able to give 4x the detail to a character tile than what the background could manage.
    The Famicom simply could not replicate the 512x448 sprite layer the arcade enjoyed, instead being limited to 256x224. This was a hard limitation on the hardware, and had nothing to do with the limited cart sizes of the era or lack of MMC chips. All the Famicom's enhancements and trickery that came about at the end of its life on the market wouldn't have enabled it to recreate this essentially high definition graphic output for its sprites.

    • @superleviathan
      @superleviathan 2 года назад +2

      Had Popeye come later in the Famicom's life, Nintendo would have gotten around that with the old stand-by of cobbling characters out of multiple sprites. Not arcade-perfect, but a sizable improvement.
      The license issue is probably why the Famicom Disk System didn't get an update like it did for Mario Bros., Excitebike and other early games.

  • @necrotick
    @necrotick 7 лет назад +40

    It's purely cosmetic, but it always bothered me that the NES port was missing Wimpy. Not as good on graphics, but the Atari 5200 had Wimpy included like on the arcade. I love this game! Perhaps with the release of Cuphead there might be a renewed interest in Popeye.

    • @necrotick
      @necrotick 3 года назад +9

      I would gladly pay you Tuesday for a necro post today.

    • @ramengamer4806
      @ramengamer4806 Год назад

      @@necrotick I'm pretty sure the reason for the NES ports omission of Wimpy was because of licensing fees. Like how the Popeye cartoons made by Famous Studios got rid of some things that the Fleischer Studios Popeye had.

    • @angeldejesussanchezgonzale9968
      @angeldejesussanchezgonzale9968 11 месяцев назад +1

      ​@@ramengamer4806 and also because the game was launched in 1983 back then the nes memory was limited for just few sprites so they have to sacrifice some memory

    • @ramengamer4806
      @ramengamer4806 10 месяцев назад

      @@angeldejesussanchezgonzale9968 Yeah, that too!

    • @Savannah_Simpson
      @Savannah_Simpson 2 месяца назад

      Well, we have a “remake” of this curtesy of Sabec. The genius behind such classic games as …Piano for the Switch.

  • @KuraIthys
    @KuraIthys 5 лет назад +10

    Those arcade sprites are quite the thing.
    Really drives home the point of how far ahead arcade machines were at the time compared to home systems.
    Even if the underlying reason was something as simple as a larger ROM or more RAM, it still had a big impact...

    • @JeremyParish
      @JeremyParish  5 лет назад +6

      Popeye ran on strange hardware in general. The sprites were rendered in a high-resolution mode, but the backgrounds were super low-rez, almost like Atari 2600 graphics.

    • @ChristopherSobieniak
      @ChristopherSobieniak 5 лет назад

      @@JeremyParish Interesting it was done that way.

    • @Desmaad
      @Desmaad 3 года назад +3

      @@JeremyParish A lot like Midway hardware in the mid-'80s.

  • @kevinbowyer7205
    @kevinbowyer7205 7 лет назад +9

    Amazing episode as always!

  • @jlc992
    @jlc992 7 лет назад +6

    As with your talk with Activision on Retronauts with license games (Activision having Ghostbusters in 84). You can tell that Nintendo at least had some feeling of guess either respect or at least feeling they needed to make something more than just your typical license game on the shelf.

  • @severeerror52
    @severeerror52 7 лет назад +15

    I legitimately laughed when you said "zone of danger"
    I've been watching too much Archer.

    • @fumanchu7
      @fumanchu7 5 лет назад +2

      Lana.
      Lana.
      LANA.
      LAAAAAAANAAAAAA!!!!!!!!
      What?!?
      Danger Zone

  • @malasdair
    @malasdair 7 лет назад +11

    Always secretly loved this game. Hard to argue for, but there's something about the hand-to-hand combat for me. Great vid!
    (is there some video flicker during the ship sequences on the right?)

  • @christopheralberne5153
    @christopheralberne5153 4 года назад +3

    I remember playing this in the arcade when I was a kid I didn't know that it was a nes game too.

  • @jeffreyrussell4874
    @jeffreyrussell4874 5 лет назад +2

    I really enjoy these! Thanks!

  • @keimakoh
    @keimakoh 7 лет назад +12

    The comments about Bluto's behavior were quite interesting, as I never actually considered this game as much more than a brief 10 minute annoyance back in the day.

  • @underdog1117
    @underdog1117 4 года назад +1

    Love that game..played it in the arcade all the time..

  • @OzeroCa
    @OzeroCa 5 лет назад +2

    No mention of the Coleco version? I played THAT sucker to death!

  • @magnusdiridian
    @magnusdiridian 8 месяцев назад +1

    and I wanted to play Super Popeye Bros and Popeye Kart so badly too

  • @STEVEHEROLD
    @STEVEHEROLD 3 года назад +2

    always loved this game. remember playing it in arcade a lot when it came. always wished Nintendo had made a sequel to this game... or even some hombrewer making a new version with more boards like DK II Arcade.

  • @robertlauncher
    @robertlauncher 5 лет назад +6

    Brutus? That looks like Bluto

  • @dennisluchesi
    @dennisluchesi Год назад

    Great video, I watched it before earlier, think of what could have been!😀😃

  • @me-xz8zf
    @me-xz8zf 6 лет назад +9

    Popeye for Smash Ultimate!!!

  • @mrcrushin
    @mrcrushin 7 лет назад +7

    Great stuff! I wonder why they chose to go so simple with the background sprites in the NES port. They look like chunky Atari-style half-assed attempts a replicating the original, when the NES Sprites are capable of much more fidelity. Like the girders in Donkey Kong, for example. Was this just because of the memory limitations?

    • @JeremyParish
      @JeremyParish  7 лет назад +10

      If you go back and look, the arcade backgrounds were equally simplistic - the mast lines on the ship stage, for example. Presumably due to storage or display issues, yeah.

    • @gabrieleriva651
      @gabrieleriva651 7 лет назад +5

      Jeremy Parish yeah, like the first generation of Pokemon used blocky sprites for the backs.

    • @KuraIthys
      @KuraIthys 5 лет назад +4

      My guess would be storage space.
      When you go back and look at games of the 80's and 90's and correlate their appearance and complexity to the amount of storage space they had to work with, the results really say a lot about how important a factor that actually is.
      The NES Kirby game that released in 1993 for instance is 768 kilobytes, and could be mistaken for a SNES title if you don't examine it too closely.
      The average early SNES game meanwhile is about 1 megabyte, so they look similar, and they're in the same ballpark in terms of how much storage space was available...
      It's a really important yet easy to overlook technical improvement over time.
      The difference between Mario 3 and the original has as much to do with having nearly 10 times the storage space as it does anything else.

    • @mresturk9336
      @mresturk9336 4 года назад +4

      Probably storage space. Those first generation NES cartridges were hard capped to a maximum size of a mere 40 kilobytes. And being a launch title its unlikely Popeye had even that much space. NES cartridges didn't start to expand in size until mapper chips started being used, which began around early 1987.
      Same reason the NES Donkey Kong port is missing a stage, despite later NES games having WAY MORE content.

  • @FloatingSunfish
    @FloatingSunfish 5 лет назад +11

    I played the crap out of this as a kid.
    Goooood times... 😄

  • @riverdealer
    @riverdealer 5 лет назад +1

    i still have this game for the Atari 400/800 so it was released outside of nintendo

  • @kevinmcqueary7395
    @kevinmcqueary7395 4 года назад +5

    Somehow, sometimes I wish that this version of Popeye was released on the Nintendo Switch, and I don't just mean like part of the NES online thing, or as a dlc on its own. I just mean like in general. Any way that they want to do it doesn't matter to me, just as long as it's possible.

    • @Ginormousaurus
      @Ginormousaurus 4 года назад +2

      I want the arcade version to be released for the Switch as part of the Arcade Archives series. The rights issues would have to be worked out, of course, but it's a classic from the golden age of arcade games that deserves to be available again. I'd also like Popeye to be a playable DLC character in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, although I know that's never going to happen.

  • @jamesmoss3424
    @jamesmoss3424 4 года назад +1

    I like popeye cartoons and I play the game it's pretty cool. 😀👍🎮

  • @mindcrome
    @mindcrome 3 года назад

    One of the most important video games

  • @wheeledjustice7381
    @wheeledjustice7381 6 лет назад +2

    I'm working my way through the NES Library at the moment and honestly, Popeye is my favorite out of the three Famicom launch titles. There's something addicting about it.

  • @OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOq

    I swear I know the exact cartoon of Popeye he watched that that inspired him.
    They was fighting in a sky scrapper Brutus and Popeye.

  • @thewolfgabe3656
    @thewolfgabe3656 Год назад +3

    Did you know there was actually a 3D remake of sorts of Popeye released on Switch recently and its a steaming pile of flaming hot garbage?

  • @patrickw.2887
    @patrickw.2887 Год назад +1

    please for Nintendo Switch 😍🤩 my favorite game on the c64

  • @whyllian1234
    @whyllian1234 6 лет назад +2

    Oh the nostalgia...

  • @rocfanatic13
    @rocfanatic13 4 года назад +1

    Great memories playing this game. The bad guys name is Bluto not Brutus

    • @JeremyParish
      @JeremyParish  4 года назад +3

      No, you're mistaken. I did my research. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bluto#Bluto_vs._Brutus

    • @rocfanatic13
      @rocfanatic13 4 года назад +2

      @@JeremyParish cool I didn't know that. I assumed it would be Bluto. I'm a recent subscriber to your channel. Keep up the great videos! :)

    • @ChristopherSobieniak
      @ChristopherSobieniak 4 года назад +1

      @@JeremyParish I wouldn't doubt King Features still kept using Brutus that late in the game. The video game itself feels like it was based on the 1960's cartoon series that King Features made on their own to compete with the older Popeye cartoons that were owned by a different company.

  • @LethalBubbles
    @LethalBubbles 3 года назад

    If Nintendo had went with Popeye-licenced DK they wouldn't have gotten the Universal lawsuit damages & Howard Lincoln wouldn't have become VP.

  • @michaelsegal3558
    @michaelsegal3558 3 года назад

    Actually the sea hag throws sculls not bottles

  • @GeoffreyToday
    @GeoffreyToday 6 лет назад +5

    Presumably when you say Brutus, you mean Bluto :p

    • @bonytologna
      @bonytologna 6 лет назад +1

      I was wondering about this too

    • @zerocooler7
      @zerocooler7 5 лет назад +2

      Actually, for a time Popeye's rival was indeed called Brutus. Check here for more: sweethaven.wikia.com/wiki/Brutus

    • @EdgedShadow
      @EdgedShadow 5 лет назад +2

      This always confused me as a kid too, but the manual does indeed call him Brutus.

    • @iami3rian394
      @iami3rian394 5 лет назад +2

      He was ALWAYS Brutus in many foreign countries, for example Brazil.
      Considering Japan's issues pronouncing "L's" I have no trouble believing his name was Brutus there as well. I'm not even sure you can write Bluto in Japanese...
      Also, Gojira. Just saying.

  • @jeffreyrussell4874
    @jeffreyrussell4874 5 лет назад +3

    its Bluto!!! not Brutus lol

    • @JeremyParish
      @JeremyParish  5 лет назад +6

      No. Check the manual. It's Brutus in this game. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bluto#Bluto_vs._Brutus

    • @billbobaggins5734
      @billbobaggins5734 5 лет назад +1

      Nuts to the manual

    • @elvistwatty
      @elvistwatty 5 лет назад +1

      Jeremy Parish kind of crazy the flip flop in use of the names.

    • @ChristopherSobieniak
      @ChristopherSobieniak 4 года назад +1

      @@elvistwatty Well blame King Features for not knowing what they had when they had it!

  • @johnforkner
    @johnforkner 4 года назад +2

    Et tu Bluto?