10 NES Games with Bad Sprite Flickering!
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- Опубликовано: 3 июн 2024
- The NES is a great machine, but it isn't without it's flaws. One of the more prominent things you might see while playing NES games, is the infamous "sprite flickering", and from my experience, these are 10 games where they are very noticeable!
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Was so disappointed with contra force. Me and a buddy were so excited when we saw it at blockbuster, but man, saddest weekend ever. I remember thinking this wasn't a real contra game because it was so slow
As soon as I read the video title, TMNT immediately entered my brain.
As it should!
Super Dodge Ball was in my mind. Glad it was covered.
Haha I laughed out loud when I got to the end cuz I am the guy sitting here going “you know Super Dodge Ball is a great game but jeez, does it have some BAD sprite flickering!”
It really does, it's like non-stop too lol.
Great video on the shortcomings that we still can appreciate and reminisce with the NES.
Thank you!
The slow Down glitch is awesome In the dynasty warriors games. Love how it was a glitch but everyone loved it so they kept it in the game. Having massive amounts of enemies on the screen and hitting the special move and killing everyone at once with the game slowing down and blinking out was so cool.
Haha yeah 100%
Ikari Warriors comes straight to my mind when I think of an nes game that flickers like crazy.
My daughter still loves Ikari Warriors, even with the flickering, I don't even think she's notices it.
Mega man 3 with its crazy flicker and slowdowns was the first game that came to mind when I saw the topic
That's another game that almost made the list.
Funny you mention Super Dodge Ball and TMNT 3, after playing those games for so long playing them on modern re-releases like the Double Dragon -Kunio Kun collection or the Cowabunga Collection with the sprite flicker turned off feels a bit unnatural and weird at first.
I bet! You get so used to the nonsense.
Great video as always! As much as I love Blaster Master I’ll be the first to admit that some of the boss battles had a ton of flicker. The stage 6 boss in particular!
Thank you Tigmo! I appreciate the kind words! Yeah, Blaster Master did ALOT of flickering, but I didn't really notice it as much until you mentioned it.
Legend of Zelda was notorious for sprite flickering.
I don't remember it being so bad, but it's been a long time.
Especially on the Darknut screens!
And Wizzrobes
Another banger! Not sure how you don't have more subscribers yet! Keep it up! You will get there
Haha, I'm just a guy.
Metroid runs into bigger problems with sprite flicking once you leave Brinstar in favor of another area.
I was going through archive footage to see if I had anything from it, but I didn't lol.
Sprite Flickering trained us to play games in predicting what to do next even if we don't see the image always. This is especially true with games like Castlevania and beat em ups
That's a good point!
Mighty Final Fight "I think it's an alright game for what it is" I'd say it's a pretty darn good game.
It got a great fan-port to the much weaker ZX Spectrum platform a few years ago too.
Also if you want to see Final Fight on NES with big sprites, check out the 1998 unlicensed port of Final Fight 3. It's very impressive for the hardware and supports a second player. And well, yes, there's a lot of sprite flicker but still, it's pretty darn cool. :)
I want to say even Mega Man 11 had the option to add sprite flicker lol.
Still love everything about the nes, even flickering. How we used to think gaming couldn't get much better in the nes days...so fun
How did you feel when the SNES was announced?
An advantage of many emulators is "sprite limit: off" so there's no flicker and every single sprite that should be seen is displayed, but it's less authentic to the original experience obviously. Great to have the option. :)
The Flintstones was guilty of this, especially during boss battles
Yep! It was hard picking exactly 10 games, I might do a follow-up. Honestly, most if not all NES games flicker lol.
Hey, I'm the one that told you during a stream that I don't like the nes cause of flickering.
Indeed!
I don't like it either
It's annoying 🙄
This is some of the best NES content since cygnus the ljn defender
Haha, oh man, I hope in a good way!
@@Fortefyre definitely niche material. thank you!
Interesting selection! Ide have to give some honorable mentions to Gauntlet, GhostsnGoblins, Section Z, and Legacy of the Wizard.
Those do it as well! I hope you enjoyed the video. Thank you for the suggestion!
Ooooh… Gauntlet.
As soon as I saw the title of the video, I knew TMNT II or III wiukd be on the list.
It HAD to be lol
Bubble Bobble is weird because like you said how fluid the gameplay is surprisingly it kind of makes you not notice the flicker as much
Exactly!
Got me with the shout-out to Mirko and Bas. Good stuff.
It's true!
The Sega Master System also had the same "no more than eight 8x8 sprites in a row" flicker issue too. Some games tried to get around it. Ever play Golden Axe on Master System and wonder why it feels 'choppy' in movement and scrolling? Because it's largely displaying the characters as background tiles rather than sprites. The NES and MS can display as many tiles in a row as they want but gotta stick to 8x8 placement. GA on the MS using tiles to build the characters means they gotta walk in chunks of 8x8 so cannot move smoothly. When the characters run they move in chunks of 16 pixels. :O The main advantage the MS had in sprites was it could have a lot more color in them.
Thank you for the quality information!
Yeah, the NES can only show eight sprites of 8x8 in a horizontal row at any time. For example Mario's small state is 16x16 which is four 8x8 sprites, two for his lower half, two for his upper. So that's two on any horizontal line all the time and leaves only six before you even add enemies, projectiles, moving platforms or anything else that uses sprites (basically any moving objects).
Mega Man is three 8x8 sprites wide. Four when he's shooting with his gun-arm out. PLUS he has an extra sprite overlaid to add his face colours. So he's already using quite a bit before adding all the enemies and such. That's why there tends to be a lot of flicker in Mega Man games. But there are still clever tricks going on in programming and level design to try mitigate it somewhat.
Also RIP Geoff Follin. Sympathies to his family including brother Tim he worked with on many great game soundtracks.
I was really upset when I found out Geoff passed.
Great idea for a NES video, of course my favorite childhood game TMNT 3 leads it off 😂
🤣 it's a good one!
Man, the Mega Man games had a bunch of flickering too.
Flicker was a solution to only having 8 sprites per line. The real trouble was not flickering and instead having whole rows of blank pixels.
Facts!
I had a game called "Legendary Wings" that was one of my favorites but the flicker would get so bad it would slow it down to a crawl in certain stages. It was quite frustrating but still an awesome shooter that also had vertical and horizontal stages.
I agree whole heartedly! Fun game but the flicker on LW would give me a headache sometimes.
Is that the one where you're like a pegasus? Lol.
@@Fortefyre more like an angel with a gun. It's a mostly top down shooter with some side scroll shooting sections; basically like a reverse "life force"
@@VonSpyder ah gotcha!
Contra Force really suffered from being given to an inexperienced development team. However the soundtrack kicks all kinds of ass.
Judging by its original name Arc Hound, it sounded like more of a Metal Gear spinoff.
I was thinking the same. Was metal slug an idea yet? Lol
Godzilla Monster of Monsters was a flicker and slowdown beast
I was honestly expecting to see that on the list. I'm one of those rare people, though, that actually enjoys that game.
I had to kind of go based on memory for this one. One day I hope be able to clear the whole NTSC library and make an actual top 10 :)
While thankfully sprite flicker was becoming much less common with the SNES and Genesis, it could still happen.
Like in the case of Super Bomberman 5 (especially with the final boss), Super R-Type, Final Fight, Space Harrier 2, and Eliminate Down SG.
I still need to check out Eliminate Down lol.
Not to pick on you but there have been a couple of videos where you have games that are Japan only games I guess I could go back and look at the videos but I probably won't do that. Also with some Konami games that the Japanese ones have custom mappers which make it easier for the NES to process what's on the screen.nintendo of America would not let specific companies use their own mappers like Konami or Capcom so those foreign versions will have less Sprite flicker generally. Also ironically the Japanese ones are lower priced than the sought after overpriced use USA ones this was good I appreciate the effort. Thank you.
Which ones? It won't bother me. Are you sure you aren't thinking of European/Japanese exclusives? Because I do loop in European releases as it was known as the NES there as well in PAL regions.
Zelda 2 had lots of flickering, but only because I died a lot.
Death Mountain was the bane of my existence lol.
Mario Bros. on NES had bad 8 Bit flicker, it's like everything on the screen would be flickering the moment it enters. The Sidesteppers crabs were the worst.
I bet!
Super Dodge Ball is probably the best competitive game on NES
Hands down!
Super Dodge Ball was the first game that came to my mind.
Same here!
Super Dodge Ball is one of my favorite sports games on the system, but man, that sprite flickering and slowdown really take it down a few notches. Super Dodge Ball Advance is for all intents and purposes the same game, just with better graphics, no sprite flicker, and very little slowdown. Its a revelation by comparison.
Have you ever tried the arcade version? It's not that bad either.
@@Fortefyre I haven't actually; should check it out one of these days
While Mega Man 5 and 6 look quite good for the NES; sadly this came at the cost of there being more notable flickering than with the original.
Exactly!
Ironically MM6 is my favorite mega man game on the NES. Don't get me wrong I love all the others, but 6 is my preference. MM1 is my 2nd favorite.
As long as you got cheerleaders, Y'all goood!
Facts.
Bubble Bobble is my favorites game of all time! The nes version that is, as i felt the arcade original wasnt as fun or perfect as the nes version
I like all versions to be honest lol.
@Fortefyre don't get me wrong the arcade is awesome, it's what got me into it, but the nes feels more complete. The amount of hours I've invested into it is crazy haha. Wore through both nes mini controllers on that game alone in recent years lol.
Games with flicker and/or slowdown....
1. TMNT- first game
2. Gun Smoke
3. Kid Icarus
4. Mega Man
5. Mega Man 2
6. Mega Man 3
7. Strider
8. Double Dragon
9. Double Dribble
10. Karnov
11. Guantlet
12. Legendary Wings (2 players)
13. Ghosts n' Goblins
14. Ikari Warriors
15. Guerilla War
16. Narc
17. Stinger
18. Jackal
It's not an exhaustive list just some that I remember having issues.
Don't forget Rygar!
The first ninja turtle game also has a lot of sprite flicker and slow down. Still a great game though, but even the cowabunga collection has to address it by fixing it
I was wondering if the cowabunga collection fixed it.
@@Fortefyre it’s an option so if you want it to be authentic to you choose to enable to fox or not
@@cubah1 interesting! It sounds like the same thing Mega Man 11 did.
The problem was exacerbated by the programmer(s) using a vertical strip of black sprites on the right side of the screen to hide the "attribute glitch", seen in games like SMB3 where the colors on the right side of the screen are wrong. So, the 8 sprite limit became 7.
You're probably right about the European region NES stuff I didn't consider that's how you classify your stuff not so I'm probably wrong. Also, Recca is available for Nintendo switch and other current handheld Nintendo download domestically as well. God, that is a great shooter true story the only us cartridge that has the exact same guts as that is BUBBLE BOBBLE 2 BUT IT'S SO VALUABLE YOU WOULDN'T OVERWRITE THAT FOR THE OTHER. MAYBE?
Haha I have to stand by my lists, or else I'll go insane.
Good vibes and welcome home everybody.
Before the vid starts. Rygar. Good god rygar
FACTS
GIJoe is my favorite NES game.
I still need to play it!
I loved playing cabal!
It's a truly fun game!
Have you done unworthy sequels on NES yet? Or is that too obvious? You mentioned Kunio, and I was thinking that Target Renegade definitely qualifies as a lame pseudo-sequel. It's not included in the Kunio-Kun bundle on Switch, probably because Technos doesn't want anything to do with it. It's the NES version of Strider II on the Genesis.
I added it to the list :)
How about tmnt ninja turtles 1 wich does suffer alot from sprite flicker and slowdown and those later levels are painful aswell,phew🤣
The whole game is pain.
Double Dribble also guilty of this.
Double dribble is guilty of alot of things lmao.
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