The Physics Nightmare and Bizarre Jumping of Strider (NES) - Behind the Code

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  • Опубликовано: 26 сен 2024
  • Strider Part TWO: Investigation and fixes for collision, jump canceling, and the Triangle Jump in Strider for NES.
    If you would like to support this channel, here is a link to the Displaced Gamers Patreon page - / displacedgamers
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    Music by:
    / hariboosx
    / @wolfandraven
    #NES #Programming #Strider

Комментарии • 438

  • @TARINunit9
    @TARINunit9 Год назад +136

    From a few minutes of my own research, Strider NES was originally made by some Japanese team, never finished, then handed over to an American team who "finished" it by just translating it and leaving everything else incomplete. This entire game is just some cursed spaghetti code casserole that wasn't even put in the oven. It's _fascinating_

    • @THEGREATMAX
      @THEGREATMAX 5 месяцев назад

      Yeah, it feels a lot more like a prototype than a full release. Still a really interesting game tho

    • @kidfenris
      @kidfenris 4 месяца назад +3

      According to the game's composer, work on NES/Famicom Strider was pretty much finished when Capcom decided to only release it overseas. There's a prototype of the Japanese version that's clearly unfinished compared to the American release. NES Strider is a finished game. It's just a poorly programmed one.
      It's more likely that Capcom didn't release it in Japan due to the manga not being a huge hit (it lasted one volume) and the Famicom market being tighter. In Japan the game industry was more competitive by the end of the 1980s because of the PC Engine's success, but in America the NES still dominated everything.
      The NES version of Legendary Wings was a similar deal, developed by Capcom in Japan but never released there.

  • @Dark.Shingo
    @Dark.Shingo Год назад +234

    This went from "I imagine it might be broken" to "Sweet Jesus, how this even managed to work?".

    • @artstrutzenberg7197
      @artstrutzenberg7197 Год назад +13

      you should see his previous video (on sprite management) to see even more entertaining shenanigans :D

    • @KodakYarr
      @KodakYarr Год назад +8

      The answer is _just enough_

    • @scruffydad9435
      @scruffydad9435 Год назад +8

      You've managed to encapsulate the entire process I go through every time I look at my old code.

    • @KodakYarr
      @KodakYarr Год назад +2

      As long as it compiles it's probably good enough

    • @LorenHelgeson
      @LorenHelgeson Год назад +8

      What's crazy is the cancelled Famicom version handled things even worse.

  • @Patashu
    @Patashu Год назад +39

    'This completes our review of things Strider can do OK.' made me cackle

  • @bf1701
    @bf1701 Год назад +114

    So, the sprite logic starts late in the frame, the controller inputs are read late in the frame, and the physics calculations happen late in the frame.... What is Strider doing early in the frame? Microwaving fish soup in the NES's breakroom?

    • @DisplacedGamers
      @DisplacedGamers  Год назад +51

      Hey... What's that smell?

    • @SianaGearz
      @SianaGearz Год назад +37

      Late in the frame is specifically when you want to do all the input and input-dependent tasks. The later you can do them, the less total input to output latency you're going to have. But before the vblank hits and you have to update the scroll and upload the sprite table quickly.
      If you're wondering what you might be doing early in the frame... well the very first thing you want to do is pick a good time to run the sound/music routine to update the soundchip registers, maybe you do this on a line interrupt to reduce jitter, then you want to load the graphics tiles for the things getting scrolled in, which takes a while, update the tilemap. You might even be doing enemy animation sprite and position updates early in the frame before you process inputs, projectile updates as well. You do this in the shadow buffer in main RAM. Enemy logic too, because if the enemy seems to react to your actions rather than catch them mid flight as if it was mind reading you, its just a tad more convincing. You can process pickups before inputs as well, making them also a frame delayed, it's fine, looks even a little weighty, nice.

    • @revenevan11
      @revenevan11 7 месяцев назад +3

      It's finishing the overdue and now pointless sprite worn from the previous frame 😂

  • @sentropez1337
    @sentropez1337 Год назад +356

    This video should be shown in software engineering classes, as an object lesson for why the concept of Finite State Machines is important to understand. The programmers here clearly didn't think in terms of "here's the checks to do if the player-character is jumping; here's the checks when he's walking; here's the checks when he's standing still on the ground; etc - and he can only be doing one of those at a time"; but instead just did every check in every "state", as the ASM equivalent of a long series of if-statements, with many possible overlapping "states" active at once.

    • @wphanoo
      @wphanoo Год назад +9

      Exactly. These can be extremely hard to debug

    • @JH-pe3ro
      @JH-pe3ro Год назад +28

      It's not really an issue that an FSM addresses directly. It's a constraint programming issue, because the physics in Strider are supporting several features simultaneously that produce multiple competing answers: are we ascending a slope, is a wall colliding, are we jumping, are we trying to triangle jump? What a constraint solver does is frame the problem in terms of "filter down many competing and potentially valid answers into a single definitive one by turning it into a sorting-and-ranking problem". Applying sorting makes it much easier to reason about than trying to break it down into a large number of finite states.
      What Strider actually does, and what everyone tends to do when addressing constraint logic one feature at a time, is to add more and more state to try to adjust one answer as you go along, losing a lot of information in the process. You don't want to lose information in your physics until you know you can make the optimization(and this is why the common axis-aligned platforming logic of "run X axis physics, then run Y axis physics" manages to work well, but imperfectly - it's an optimization on solving for both permutations and selecting the one that gives free movement, it just drops one permutation from ever being considered).

    • @slipperynickels
      @slipperynickels Год назад +25

      it's very good for my imposter syndrome that the way these types of bugs are created require programming in ways that immediately set off alarm bells in my head.

    • @BetweenTheBorders
      @BetweenTheBorders Год назад +11

      It's worthwhile to note there are good times to use this kind of code, like when you want to blend logic. A string of conditionals in the right order can keep code very tight and produce muliple effects. For example, if the player is not touching the ceiling, skip to the next check, otherwise set vertical velocity to zero. This allows all previous X movement to continue to propagate while allowing downstream gravity or ejection to start from a known point. It requires extensive planning, but it allows for overlaid logic to address complicated states.

    • @jimbotron70
      @jimbotron70 Год назад +2

      So in a nutshell they anticipated quantum computing in a videogame.

  • @vtmarik
    @vtmarik Год назад +174

    I used to laugh out loud at every juddering sprite and shaking pickup when i played this as a kid, now that i have a little bit more knowledge in coding and such this just makes me realize how up against the wall the devs had to have been to have all this conflicting code. Just seeing Hiryu running against a wall like in every other NES game made me realize just how robbed we were of an optimized version of this.

    • @MaxOakland
      @MaxOakland Год назад +21

      To me it seems like the coder had no idea what they were doing and created their own "creative" ways out of lack of experience. It doesn't make sense to me that they would program it this way first and then try to fix it later. If someone knew best practices they'd do it right the first time

    • @MurderWho
      @MurderWho Год назад +33

      @@MaxOakland back in those days, no one knew the "best practices" for making video games, (platformers weren't even a decade old at that point, and it's not like many of the previous entries in the genre could be looked to as positive inspiration), and they were moreorless programming on the bare metal, not much different from the changes we see in the video, so it may not have been totally obvious what each function was doing without a lot of tracing . . . probably on graph paper. Emulators didn't exist, and nintendo didn't produce software to run the games on PC, so you had to load prototype carts, insert those into dev machines, and test that way, and that could take hours from start to starting to play the prototype.
      Strider is . . . particularly bad, but a LOT of bugs in old video games, even otherwise well-polished ones, are simple off-by-one or swap-two-instructions errors, which I think is a good indication of how difficult it was to debug on the platform.

    • @djrmarketing598
      @djrmarketing598 Год назад +21

      Times were definitely different back then. I don't think programming this logic, you would even get a chance to "run" it, you would be sitting there with grid paper and flowcharts making the jump mechanics, and maybe different people actually coded it vs writing the grids. Like think about this - an engineer with a math background "designs" the jump, hands it to some coders to "make" the jump and at this point nothing is even running on hardware yet. A month later long after thinking about the grid paper and math, you find out the code doesn't work that great and then you are finding out it needs a ton of band aids, the code the other guy wrote was sloppy and meanwhile the scroller guys decided to skip your frames once in a while. Meanwhile, another month later, a QA team plays it, says "it's not that great... " and the boss says "but is it playable?" and the QA team says "well kinda". And then 3 months later, it's on the shelves ready for Christmas.

    • @MaxOakland
      @MaxOakland Год назад +3

      @@djrmarketing598 beta testing was very common. But even if they didn't have beta testing, this is a weird and uncommon way to do physics logic. That's what makes it so buggy and so interesting

    • @mrwizard5012
      @mrwizard5012 Год назад

      @@djrmarketing598 Right? You didnt exactly have Game Maker Studio 2 to test this in at the time.

  • @larryb5677
    @larryb5677 Год назад +162

    I can't wait for the eventual nine hour long Strider omnibus episode!

    • @DisplacedGamers
      @DisplacedGamers  Год назад +62

      See you in 2045.

    • @mytwodogs4907
      @mytwodogs4907 Год назад +7

      I would happily watch all 9 hours@@DisplacedGamers

    • @sirramslot5480
      @sirramslot5480 Год назад +4

      ​@@DisplacedGamersMore like 2048 in Kazakhstan, right?

  • @tonybarnes2920
    @tonybarnes2920 Год назад +34

    I had to spend literally THOUSANDS of hours playing NES Strider, even though I'd avoided it for decades. I felt it was my duty to make sure I encompassed everything "Strider" that I could, when I made the Strider 2014 game, not just what I've loved about Strider since 1989. Oh so very painful...

    • @HelpTheWretched
      @HelpTheWretched Год назад +5

      So you're THAT Tony Barnes. Well, those efforts paid off pretty well!

    • @LonelySpaceDetective
      @LonelySpaceDetective Год назад +1

      Would that have included Tiertex's Strider II/Returns? Good lord.

    • @thatitalianlameguy2235
      @thatitalianlameguy2235 8 месяцев назад

      Your game is a pretty mediocre metroidvania with cheap design ngl

  • @Strakester
    @Strakester Год назад +21

    If you're looking to investigate fascinatingly broken games, might I recommend Super Pitfall? Everything in that game seems to be held together by string. Why do the lava bubbles corrupt the music? Why do you just randomly jump through the floor sometimes? Why do the waterfall sprites disappear so much? Why do none of the enemy sprites ever line up with the terrain properly? The game is a real treasure trove of brokenness.

  • @dionelr
    @dionelr Год назад +28

    “I have an untested solution that will probably break 5 other things…. Let’s try it!”. I haven’t laughed that hard in a while. 😂

    • @nickwallette6201
      @nickwallette6201 Год назад +11

      Followed up by "ehh, that's enough." haha Which is absolutely what they said when they shipped this game.

  • @anonymone453
    @anonymone453 Год назад +16

    That first 50 seconds plays out like baby's first Gamemaker platformer. Certainly looked a hell of a lot like mine.

  • @nickfarace9339
    @nickfarace9339 Год назад +21

    My god this game is a gold mine of bad freaking code decisions.

    • @gordontaylor2815
      @gordontaylor2815 Год назад +5

      As seen in the comments sections of the first video, NES Strider seems to have been initially programmed by someone with no (or very little) previous experience with the system and then a more experienced programmer at Capcom (who was responsible for that game) had to jury-rig fixes just to get a "sellable" product out the door in a relatively tight time frame.

  • @dschult3
    @dschult3 Год назад +70

    I LOVED this game as a kid, but I absolutely HATED the physics. It was so bad, that I put it away for years until I was a teenager and gave it another shot. I beat it and loved it, to a point. The physics made it where I couldn't recommend it to anyone. Thanks for explaining the issues.

    • @TheSpooniest
      @TheSpooniest Год назад +5

      Right there with you. I was too young to really have the words to describe what I didn't like, but this is pretty much it.

    • @blankenstein1649
      @blankenstein1649 Год назад +6

      same. i loved the visuals, sound, story, setting, etc. but it just felt like such garbage gameplay. and now i know why.

    • @anon_y_mousse
      @anon_y_mousse Год назад +2

      There were so many games like that for me. I've always been bad at video games, which is at least partly why I like RPG's more than platformers, less frustration.

    • @blankenstein1649
      @blankenstein1649 Год назад +5

      @@anon_y_mousse well, in the case of strider, it definitely wasn't just your fault. the game is legitimately programmed terribly haha.

    • @cactoidpinata
      @cactoidpinata Год назад +6

      Yep, same for me. As broken as this game is, it's a miracle that it can be beaten. But, it's actually pretty fun and satisfying to beat!

  • @thecunninlynguist
    @thecunninlynguist Год назад +39

    even 30+ years later the NES ninja gaiden sprites are so lovely. Even if it's just a screenshot/photo. I was chuckling when it switched over to strider and that pill pickup was all shakey

  • @TheDannMannn
    @TheDannMannn Год назад +30

    You know it’s going to be a good day when you see a new behind the code in your feed.

    • @borderline_normie
      @borderline_normie Год назад +2

      Amen! :)

    • @brendn
      @brendn Год назад

      Absolutely. Deepest and most thoughtful analysis on the entire site.

  • @carn9507
    @carn9507 Год назад +11

    Heh, so the Nintendo Power tip for triangle jump is basically to button mash and hope for the best. Really was a poor implementation of wall-jumping. I still love that way Batman does it. That lil stop as his sprite animates to change direction is strangely satisfying :O

  • @VincentGuillotine
    @VincentGuillotine Год назад +46

    I kind of like how strider gets so much mileage as examples on what not to do

  • @TheDannMannn
    @TheDannMannn Год назад +28

    I’d love to see a series where you take what’s been learned from these videos and slowly build up the most optimal/feature rich nes side scroller possible. (Though that would be a monolithic project)

    • @DisplacedGamers
      @DisplacedGamers  Год назад +29

      That would be a crazy project, indeed. That said, perhaps these videos are a good resource for any other developer to do that very thing. I'll keep making more of them.

    • @vuurniacsquarewave5091
      @vuurniacsquarewave5091 Год назад

      @@DisplacedGamers I'm listening.

  • @DisplacedGamers
    @DisplacedGamers  Год назад +35

    This one was a blast. What do you think of holding down A for the Triangle Jump? Should I have gone for something else? There are so many other issues to address in Strider.
    Speaking of things to address in Strider - I think I will upload some of my Strider work to the Displaced Gamers GitHub (by the way... Displaced Gamers "is on GitHub"). This project took a lot more reversing than usual. Perhaps someone can take the work and run with it. github.com/DisplacedGamers
    Hope everyone has a great day!

    • @WillowEpp
      @WillowEpp Год назад +2

      Seems like a relatively sane solution to the problem and an elegant fix that you can do it in a single GG code.
      As far as overall "feel" of wall jumping, I think nothing has beaten the Mega Man X series for me, so I would consider it an improvement if your fall speed actually reduced down when in contact with a wall instead of sped up, but I also think Super Metroid feels awful when a lot of people tell me they have no problems with it, so maybe it's a "me" problem.

    • @GeekSHO
      @GeekSHO Год назад +3

      @@WillowEpp Super Metroid's wall jump is tricky, but the game helps you a little with a unique frame of animation to let you know the window to press the jump button. If you're spin jumping along a wall, then press away from the wall, there is a window of about 2 frames where Samus' sprite switches to one where here feet look planted on the wall. That's when you hit jump.

    • @WillowEpp
      @WillowEpp Год назад +1

      @@GeekSHO Oh, I know exactly *HOW* it works. I _can_ *do* it. I just hate how it feels. It _feels awful_ to me. This is a subjective thing.
      (I still think that if there were more than three months between the release Rockman X and Super Metroid there's a good chance it would have turned out differently, but we'll never know for sure. ㄟ( ▔, ▔ )ㄏ )

    • @scotshabalam2432
      @scotshabalam2432 Год назад

      This is basically coder church. PREACH IT BROTHER AMEN!

    • @djmips
      @djmips Год назад

      I agree that the solution is better and a good patch but it's too easy and some timing constraint should make it more fun.

  • @RaposaCadela
    @RaposaCadela Год назад +6

    I love this game, rad themes, rad graphics, rad music, rad ideas, but JESUSCHRIST.... *THE JANK.* The game is now much funnier to me knowing all of this weird logic is going on while we play it, it's one of those games so broken it would need to be entirely re-coded in order to work properly
    PS: I'd love if you did a video comparing Menace Beach with Sunday Funday. They're unlicensed games, originally by Color Dreams, then modified by Wisdom Tree. They're essentially the exact same game with a few graphical differences, but Sunday Funday runs much smoother and detects inputs quickier, I'd love to know why (and see if that can be done for other Color Dreams/Wisdom Tree games that use the same engine)

  • @nervaaugustus7089
    @nervaaugustus7089 Год назад +4

    This is a delightful look into a game so hilariously broken it's a miracle it runs at all. Please, cover this aberration as much as you'd like; it's absolutely fascinating to watch you go through this code - it's less 'sphagetti' and more like a pile of hashbrowns.

  • @IpfxTwin
    @IpfxTwin Год назад +9

    You're honestly the best at this particular niche, and it's a huge window for many people my age to get into programming with content we can relate to that isn't at the "Hello world" level of baby steps. The understanding and presentation is simply unmatched.

  • @ShinoSarna
    @ShinoSarna Год назад +25

    This series on Strider is pioneering a new genre among programming/tech youtube : code gore. Will we examine code behind Action 52 next? :P

    • @ShinoSarna
      @ShinoSarna Год назад +3

      @@stephen-ngFuck, you're right. I even watched the Action 52 video and I just forgot about it :P

    • @abadenoughdude300
      @abadenoughdude300 Год назад +4

      There's code behind Action 52?

    • @AliceErishech
      @AliceErishech Год назад +5

      @@ShinoSarnaApparently it was so traumatic that your brain made you forget it, lol.

    • @Damaniel3
      @Damaniel3 Год назад +2

      I can't imagine how many Game Genie codes it would take to make any of those games playable.

    • @diamondsmasher
      @diamondsmasher Год назад +2

      He will never do another video if you make him analyze Action52

  • @Peter_Morris
    @Peter_Morris Год назад +9

    You know, watching these videos about Strider, I really don’t know how my friend and I beat it as kids. I know we beat it because I remember the story and everything. But holy crap that triangle jump must’ve given us fits!
    Thankfully, I did have a subscription to Nintendo Power and I did have that issue.

  • @Brocknoth
    @Brocknoth Год назад +4

    Early day programming was so obtuse compared to what we can do now. It's still really fascinating to see the weird ways early game code tried to solve problems. Videos like this make me wonder how much different older games would be with a "code update" I know that there are plenty of examples in the ROM hacking community but it's still fun to think about.

  • @LorenHelgeson
    @LorenHelgeson Год назад +21

    MY MAN! I had a sneaking feeling you'd be the one to crack this. Very impressive work! I remember renting this a couple times as a kid, without the manual, and not knowing what to do when that first required jump came up in the Egypt map. It always felt off, because everything else for those first ten minutes was so easy.

  • @michaelcalvin42
    @michaelcalvin42 Год назад +16

    Thanks for another deep dive on this broken mess of a game! This has been a fun mini-series so far, and I suspect I'm not alone in saying that I would love to see a part 3 with some further analysis on the bugs you didn't get to in this video.

    • @DisplacedGamers
      @DisplacedGamers  Год назад +15

      I wouldn't mind making a third part at some point, but I need to get this game out of my dreams. lol

    • @michaelcalvin42
      @michaelcalvin42 Год назад +2

      @@DisplacedGamers Haha, fair enough.

    • @nervaaugustus7089
      @nervaaugustus7089 Год назад +1

      Oh you're definitely not alone in wanting to see more of the code that produces this busted aberration. That said, I can totally understand if DisplacedGamers needs a break from it. There's plenty of other wonk games out there, after all.

  • @Dargonhuman
    @Dargonhuman Год назад +4

    Oh God ... those wall jumps! Bane of my childhood! Whenever I got to one of them, I had to have my stepdad do them for me because I just could not get the hang of them, I always thought I was just bad at the game but now it's a small comfort to know it wasn't me at all...

  • @jtothebell
    @jtothebell Год назад +2

    lol @ 4:36 "It gets better (as in worse)". Great video as always

  • @JustinKoenigSilica
    @JustinKoenigSilica Год назад +22

    This is the kind of janky collision physics code i wrote when i first dabbled in gamemaker
    edit: OH NO IT'S WORSE

  • @vineheart01
    @vineheart01 Год назад +16

    "It gets better, as in worse" is a pretty good way to describe this games coding.
    Highly doubt its the worst offender of bad NES code but its probably the worst on a game that was actually somewhat known. I never had Strider as a kid but i knew it was another NES game my friends liked.

  • @shona-sof
    @shona-sof Год назад +4

    You should turn these fixes into an IPS patch that people could apply to their games.

  • @DarkScorpion64
    @DarkScorpion64 Год назад +2

    It really looks like they were learning as they went along and just added band-aid fixes as they encountered things. Reminds me of my first try writing a pac-man clone.

  • @dayveeman
    @dayveeman Год назад +2

    I don't know if this channel has merch, but a "Better grab a TACO!" shirt should be on it.

  • @BlackieBloomberg
    @BlackieBloomberg Год назад +2

    As neat as this is to see laid out I never had a problem with the game as it was

  • @TheRedSoxMan
    @TheRedSoxMan Год назад +6

    I can't believe I, not only beat this game, but moderately enjoyed it

  • @oobgarm1
    @oobgarm1 Год назад +4

    Loved this game as a youth despite the wonky physics. I was excited to see that you were going to tackle this one, excellent video.

    • @THEGREATMAX
      @THEGREATMAX 5 месяцев назад +1

      The music is the game is insanely good

  • @lilylyons8885
    @lilylyons8885 Год назад +3

    With physics this overcomplicated I'm not surprised that Strider has the rendering issues mentioned in the last video

  • @budkin
    @budkin Год назад +4

    Man I love your videos. Absolutely fascinating!

  • @dycedargselderbrother5353
    @dycedargselderbrother5353 Год назад +2

    "Holding A and just using the controller to wall jump" is basically what I did as a kid...with the A button on turbo. I wonder how they handled it in testing. I mean, someone had to have at least played through the stages, right?

  • @daveloomis
    @daveloomis Год назад +2

    30 years later... There's wall-jumping in this game, and I now know why I never beat it...

  • @happycheese4u32
    @happycheese4u32 Год назад +5

    Always fun to find out my poor gaming skills are only half of why this game was so hard 30 years ago. ...sill love it though :P

  • @Jordan10704
    @Jordan10704 Год назад +1

    1:18 “Implemenation” 😅 Great video though, thanks for all the hard work on these.

  • @joshmiller887
    @joshmiller887 Год назад +3

    All this “simplifies” information is way over my head, but I LOVE IT! I just need to consume it until it makes sense to me 😂. Great video! Thank you!

  • @fmsyntheses
    @fmsyntheses Год назад +1

    I like that the end of this video seems to be you realizing that this is not a productive use of your time or expertise

  • @Ketirz
    @Ketirz Год назад +1

    Now, I'm not some incredible programming genius, but even I hear "jump frame lookup table" and find myself lost for words.

  • @CraftMine1000
    @CraftMine1000 Год назад +2

    The more I watch this the more I get the feeling that the devs had some severe cases of "I forgor" when developing this

  • @anon_y_mousse
    @anon_y_mousse Год назад +10

    I've started writing my own emulator, although for the PS2 and not NES, but I'm definitely going to incorporate a debugger into it because of your video series. The more I see of this series, the more I wish every emulator had a debugger built in. I know it sounds silly, but I'm also going to write a PS1 emulator at the same time because if it does PS2 games it should also handle PS1, since the original hardware could, and I don't accept the later revisions that removed those chips as valid for the purpose of writing my emulator.

    • @DisplacedGamers
      @DisplacedGamers  Год назад +7

      That's awesome! Good luck with your work. I feel the same about debuggers in emulators. I also wish they were all as good as Mesen's.

    • @MaxOakland
      @MaxOakland Год назад +4

      Mesen is just amazing in that regard @@DisplacedGamers

    • @CptJistuce
      @CptJistuce Год назад +2

      I think all revisions of the PS2 can play PS1 games.

    • @anon_y_mousse
      @anon_y_mousse Год назад +1

      @@CptJistuce If they could then it was with emulation, because they removed the PS1 chips in later revisions.

    • @CptJistuce
      @CptJistuce Год назад +3

      @@anon_y_mousse really think you're thinking of the PS3's loss of PS2 compatibility, as most of the PS1 hardware in the PS2 was a pare of the IO Processor and integral to operation in PS2 mode. That's where the R3000 lived, as well as the DMA controller, sound processor, controller and memory card port handlers...

  • @schwartzritterx5905
    @schwartzritterx5905 Год назад +3

    That code is an absolute mess. The fact that the game is functional at all is amazing. I know with the triangle jumps the easiest way to get consistency with it was to hesitate about a half a second when trying them. The presses indeed needed to be precise.

  • @BasementBrothers
    @BasementBrothers Год назад

    Amazing after all these years to finally get an explanation of what was actually going on!

  • @OneLotJason
    @OneLotJason Год назад +4

    You could make two years worth of videos about Strider's code.

  • @dorkidori
    @dorkidori Год назад +4

    Thank you for making this video. Its one of the few i completely understood, regardless of my lack of programming knowledge. I played the game enough as a kid (and still remember) to get exactly what you were referring to via the code... and just how stupid it all is in regards to Capcom making things overly complicated, plus being absolutely sloppy as hell!
    would be really cool if you wrote a patch for the game to fix all these issues to make Strider actually worth playing AND worthy of Capcoms name down the road. Im sure a lot of us would be elated to play a PROPERLY FUNCTIONING version of this game versus one that (as you put) tied its shoe laces together and face planted! LOL! Btw, excellent use of Out of This World as a visual reference (I got a damn good laugh out of that).

  • @stephenfrechette8181
    @stephenfrechette8181 Год назад +5

    When I watch these videos, I wish I could play the game with these fixes. It would be cool if I could go someplace or someone had these rooms fixed

    • @michaelcalvin42
      @michaelcalvin42 Год назад +4

      You can! He provides Game Genie codes for most of the fixes, and the ones that he doesn't, he usually shows where in memory he's making changes. You could either hex edit a ROM or use Mesen (or another emulator that allows on-the-fly memory edits) to apply his patches.

  • @LanceThumping
    @LanceThumping Год назад

    This is a fun reminder for the GDQ "Learn to Speedrun Strider" segment from a few years ago.
    IIRC they literally had someone new to the game come up and do a run beat it in minutes because of how completely borked it is.
    Hope to see you going over moonwalking through walls as well as the others.

  • @SiLvErWaRe000
    @SiLvErWaRe000 Год назад

    This is super cool. I always thought the wall jump felt off when I was a kid, but didn't have an issue executing it.

  • @Absnerdity
    @Absnerdity Год назад +3

    There is no defense for this game, but I still love it dearly. It's like a comfy blanket... except it's really ratty and falling apart.

  • @PhaizKannon
    @PhaizKannon 11 месяцев назад

    I actually took the time to finish the game despite the awful experience of movement and every sprite interaction feeling glitchy. I had recorded the last stage on a VHS tape of games I had completed, so I got to watch it again over the years. This video doesn't even get into the difficulty of jumping effectively off of slopes which are prevalent in the game and usually interacted with while scrolling is happening. I had to figure out the wall jumping without knowing any of this too. I would just try and try again when physics broke and I definitely remember making sure to stop the screen scrolling before difficult jumps despite not knowing why this helped. Thanks for making all those hours of frustration finally feel like it wasn't my failure to learn... it helps to know that I was actually learning to subconsciously manage a handful of horrible bugs and somehow still be able to beat it without having to restart my VCR recording too many times to make it possible.

  • @erichb4530
    @erichb4530 Год назад

    Thanks for covering strider! One of the few games we had as a kid and most people have never heard of it. Those wall jumps were sooo tough, I'd run out of time for the level trying to do them

    • @eightcoins4401
      @eightcoins4401 27 дней назад

      The og Arcade game is well known, not so much the nes port though

  • @sporedoutofmymind
    @sporedoutofmymind Год назад

    I've always loved your voice - it's like Phil Hartman giving a computer science lecture

  • @idontwantahandlethough
    @idontwantahandlethough Год назад +1

    @11:27 was that.. was that a _walking taco_ reference?
    Man, I could go for one of those right now. Oh great video as usual btw

  • @Boonehams
    @Boonehams Год назад +5

    I'd be curious to see the difference in coding of Strider NES to other games that had decent wall jumping, like Batman NES.

  • @MrMarket1987
    @MrMarket1987 Год назад

    The fact people can reach the end of the game is frankly a miracle when the spaghetti is mixed in with spider webbing, silly string, cheese string, shoe string, and worms.

  • @crtinkering7323
    @crtinkering7323 Год назад +1

    New Displaced Gamers video! Great way to start the Weekend!

  • @SomeGuy712x
    @SomeGuy712x Год назад

    (18:26) This part gave me a chuckle. It'll be quite interesting when you finally cover those wacky oddities.

  • @civildisorder
    @civildisorder Год назад

    There has to be a "Strider if the game code was fixed" version floating around by now. It must feel great to play.

  • @Chubby_Bub
    @Chubby_Bub Год назад

    "Some physics are bypassed when scrolling" sounds like a cool gimmick for a platformer that actually knows what it's doing.

  • @AmeHart
    @AmeHart Год назад +2

    Would love to see another deep dive and a way to patch the game to fix these ! Thanks for this video. Learning lots :)

  • @zazelby
    @zazelby Год назад +4

    I remember when I first played Strider on the NES, I was seriously considering taking it back to the store, because I was *sure* it was a defective copy. That's how bad the physics are in this game, and it's nice to see some explanation, even if the explanation itself is baffling - why would Capcom do this instead of just using a normal jump physics routine? Was it all to (badly) implement wall jumping?

    • @zazelby
      @zazelby Год назад +3

      ... also, I was amused that Strider bounces off walls the same way as the square in Adventure, for what I suspect is the exact same reason (specifically, that it has wall ejection without wall collision). Even later Atari 2600 games like Haunted House don't do that.

    • @MaxOakland
      @MaxOakland Год назад +2

      It seems like a completely inept programmer did the work for some reason. Maybe it was an intern

    • @gordontaylor2815
      @gordontaylor2815 Год назад +2

      @@MaxOakland The game's credits highly suggest that the initial programmer was indeed very inexperienced with NES development and that a more senior programmer had to jury-rig "fixes" to get the game to a "sellable" state.

  • @BigHailFan
    @BigHailFan Год назад +1

    Nintendo: "Do the physics in your game work?"
    Devs: "......We have physics, yes."

  • @sigma20xx
    @sigma20xx Год назад

    As a kid, i had no idea Stixer had all these problems. Despite that, i still managed to finish it. I still remember my save file code from over 30 years ago. I played the hell out of that game.😅

  • @michaelsinnreich6626
    @michaelsinnreich6626 Год назад +1

    This was an exercise in frustration. No idea how i beat this as a kid.

  • @atalleywak
    @atalleywak 10 месяцев назад

    This informative video just made me even more impressed with 13-year-old me for having finished this game, bugs and all.

  • @David-ln8qh
    @David-ln8qh Год назад

    I absolutely love these Strider videos.

  • @Iristallite
    @Iristallite Год назад

    Hearing the short version of doing the Triangle Jump: "Oh, so it's like Super Metroid?"
    Hearing how broken it is: "Wow, that's... not a good implementation"

  • @lacquerware6962
    @lacquerware6962 8 месяцев назад

    This is FASCINATING. I've always loved this game, warts and all, and think it'd be a prime candidate for something like a Blaster Master Zero-style remake. I take some pride in having gotten pretty good at this game's finicky triangle jump, and although it's a happy accident at best, conceptually I like the idea of it being a very hard technique to pull off. I mean, it would be!
    Incidentally, I never took to the arcade/Genesis Strider, despite trying to get into it roughly once a year.

  • @bpelectric
    @bpelectric Год назад +1

    Awesome. Thanks for continuing to look into Strider. I mentioned in previous comments as well, but definitely have a look at the leaked Japanese unreleased ROM sometime too, it's broken, but in different ways. Now having seen some of the weird choices you found in this video (+1.5, wtf) I'd guess the JP ROM might be a build before it got given to someone who didn't know the code to "polish" before dumping it out to the US market.

  • @DiceDrivenGameDev
    @DiceDrivenGameDev 9 месяцев назад

    Haha all the problem described are the pretty similar to the ones I'm having trying to implement jump/collisions in GM, thanks for the detailed analysis on this and the Ninja Gaiden games. Its a great guide platforming designing.

  • @slipperynickels
    @slipperynickels Год назад

    "we are just getting started" nearly 1/3rd of the way through the video is so ominous, lol

  • @theghostofthomasjenkins9643
    @theghostofthomasjenkins9643 11 месяцев назад

    this is gold. pure gold. my sides legit hurt at how busted this game is, lol.

  • @TwinOpinion
    @TwinOpinion Год назад

    That look up table blew my mind. 🤣

  • @ThePoly-Tessollate
    @ThePoly-Tessollate 19 дней назад

    I'd love to see a part 2 for this.

  • @ThickCutOhio
    @ThickCutOhio Год назад +2

    Cool video I’ve learned so much watching these videos.

  • @diamondsmasher
    @diamondsmasher Год назад +1

    “It gets better. As in, worse.” 😂

  • @7thangelad586
    @7thangelad586 Год назад

    The triangle jump reminds me of the wall jump in Super Metroid. It took me over 25 years to execute it properly.

  • @matthewlane518
    @matthewlane518 Год назад

    Played it, loved it, beat it, and never had a problem with the triangle jump

  • @habeang304
    @habeang304 Год назад

    My childhood game and I'm so glad to see I'm not the problem the game is 😆. So happy to see you explain and fix the game. Looking forward to seeing more😄😄

  • @andriypredmyrskyy7791
    @andriypredmyrskyy7791 Год назад +1

    I love your commentary. "Grab a taco", lovely.

  • @stakfallt2040
    @stakfallt2040 8 месяцев назад

    Wow. Just crazy. First, the amount of work you went through to set up all that testing and output just to figure out just what in the world is going on with the game lol Second, I'm experiencing that weird feeling of remembering how the jumping felt and now having the understanding of the code's logic present the connection between the experience and the problematic code. Sort of like that innate feeling you eventually gain in physics class when understand what it feels like for falling objects and centripetal force and then applying it to say being on the moon and almost being able to envision-experience the feeling of what it would feel like. I always chalked up the triangle-jump jankyness to the frame rates of the game and me needing to be slower because the game just couldn't keep up with the input. Now I see (and can almost feel) the effects of the routines in place causing that sense I had so many years ago, and now understanding just how affected the jumping was, not because of the performance, but because of the code design.
    On a similar note of performance. There's a little known-game that might be worthwhile looking at is Bio Force Ape. Back in the NES vs Sega days, there was that whole rivalry that was taking place and the blast processing marketing that Sega kept marketing to compete against NES' slower performance. They used Sonic's speed as their main marketing tactic. However, Bio Force Ape which was never released but someone discovered a playable copy in 2001 (I think it was 2011), and it's speed is, what looks like to me anyhow, right on par with Sonic. It might be interesting to see a breakdown of the tricks they used to achieve the speed increase. My guess is a lower sprite count, but that's probably way oversimplifying it since they probably did tons of other things too.

  • @markgervais9094
    @markgervais9094 Год назад +4

    I'm just gonna wait a few more months until you've finished fixing this game before I give it another playthrough.

  • @marcellosilva9286
    @marcellosilva9286 Год назад

    Dude, watching this video makes me so grateful that the people who programmed Strider weren't in charge of programming the controls in the NES Mega Man games, imagine how much worse they would've aged!

  • @DaWhiteTyger
    @DaWhiteTyger Год назад

    10:28 STILL WANT THE CODE! Just requesting again... I probabily will never be able to, but I LOVE your vids, just keep on Keepin' ON!

    • @DaWhiteTyger
      @DaWhiteTyger Год назад

      Oh good greif man, My apologies. This is the one thing that's always kept me from completing Stryder and was a bit inebriated when asking. You gave it, thank you. This is the best surprise game genie code from your videos ever!

  • @OriginalMasters
    @OriginalMasters Год назад +1

    A wall-jumping animation would be nice.

  • @InsaneFirebat
    @InsaneFirebat Год назад +4

    Walljumping in Super Metroid has roughly the same requirements. You must turn away from the wall before you can jump. Likely because there's a special pose for preparing to wall kick. I like it this way, but it does get a lot of complaints.

    • @GeneralBolas
      @GeneralBolas Год назад +1

      Interestingly, wall-jumping in Metroid: Dread is the exact opposite. You must still be pressing into the wall in order to jump off of it. Now, this works in Dread in part because the game won't allow you to move Samus towards a wall until you've reached the height of your jump (and therefore cannot wall-jump up a single wall).
      But it also exists because you can speed boost into a wall and wall jump off of it, retaining your speed boost. Having to switch directions to wall jump would mean potentially losing your speed boost if you pull back too early. So there's enough time to visually confirm that you speed-boosted/wall-jumped correctly *before* you have to switch directions.

    • @zanegandini5350
      @zanegandini5350 Год назад

      Was wall-jumping even an intentional part of Super Metroid or was it just something people figured out to do after it was released? It feels more like an exploit than anything else, seeing as no part of the game requires it.

    • @GeneralBolas
      @GeneralBolas Год назад +5

      @@zanegandini5350 No, it was deliberate.
      There is an entire room and creatures that populate it which exists to *teach you* how to wall jump. A room you can't leave without demonstrating some mastery of wall jumping (or infinite bomb jumping). It may be optional, but it was an option explicitly put there by the designers.
      Indeed, this fact is a big part of why SM became what it became. An optional move like wall jumping that could be employed to bypass certain "required" stuff or get some stuff early encourages players to find *other* tricks to break the sequence.

    • @LonelySpaceDetective
      @LonelySpaceDetective Год назад +1

      The difference between walljumps in Super Metroid and Triangle Jumps in Strider NES are that SM not only has a visual cue for the button timing but they're also _consistent;_ there's a technique to doing them well, and you don't feel like it's the game's fault if you miss a jump.
      While Strider NES's Triangle Jump is not _quite_ as bad as one may get the impression of from this video if they've never played the game, it's still janky and inconsistent-feeling even with the right technique, and there's no visual indicator for them to indicate timing or even that you're supposed to turn around before trying to jump off the wall. Not to mention that you can't immediately Triangle Jump again after doing one, so that's another bit of timing to learn and one that adds to the inconsistent feeling.

  • @apollolux
    @apollolux Год назад +1

    I’ve seen enough of these videos to recognize the speech cadence, but if I didn’t know better I could swear you sounded a bit more angry or bitter at this particular game’s jump physics than in usual videos, and I wouldn’t blame you one bit given how frustrating the Strider NES coding has been shown to be.

  • @DaWhiteTyger
    @DaWhiteTyger Год назад

    I simply love you and your explinations.................. Kudos!

    • @DaWhiteTyger
      @DaWhiteTyger Год назад

      You ARE the MAN! With the master PLAN!

  • @OptimusNiaa
    @OptimusNiaa Год назад +1

    Excellently done, as always.

  • @sirflimflam
    @sirflimflam Год назад

    You know the real hilarious part of all this to me is when I was ~14 back in 2000, I was working on my own game and every issue they have with collisions, I also had with my own game...when I was 14, learning how to actual write 2D platformer physics, and the end result was functional if not a bit stiff movement. Really kind of makes you wonder what sort of standards they had.

    • @snackerfork
      @snackerfork Год назад

      none, it was the famicom/NES. there were no standards, so your situation is likely exactly what happened. other people suggested the credits show that an inexperienced programmer was on the project and then a more experienced one had to clean up the code as best they could before shipping

  • @Altirix_
    @Altirix_ Год назад +3

    you just know this became practically impossible to debug

  • @jnwms
    @jnwms Год назад

    I think we need to remember, when this was made there was no internet, deadlines were tight and the programmer did the best with the knowledge they had at the time. The programmer who made this is probably way more skilled than anyone in the comments now.

  • @FlaudLogic
    @FlaudLogic Год назад

    Other versions of strider (16bit) seemed kind of buggy to me as well. As a kid, I didn't know exactly what it was that made it look "cheap" overall (aside from obvious stuff like being able to jump through walls etc..), but videos like this one give me a glimpse into what might have been going on there from a code perspective.