Axelay

[turboxray]

6 hours ago, Aaendi said:

I think the game is surpassing 128 sprites too, since I can see individual 16x16 sprites disappearing, and it looks like Konami randomized it too.

It's not. I played it through to the boss.

There are plenty of sprites left over. 

(those remain cells are all off screen.. aren't used).

 

 The game does use the priority setting, but it uses it selectively. Like when the arms are in such a position that overlap is at its worst. You'rte not seeing 16x16 sprites being dropped from the table;  each arm if positioned just right is like 304 pixels over sprite overlap.. a single arm in the right position is more than the entire sprite line fetch limit haha. 

 

 The sprite rotation isn't random, because you can easily see the same patter repeat. On top of dropping out of sprites, it's also got that weird snes thing where is drop highest priority cells. This kind of boss would have been a good candidate for sprite compositing ala one of the addon chips. 

 

 

39 minutes ago, Austin said:

I won’t lie, I have never been the biggest fan of this game. A big part is the top-down stages seem like a whole lotta nothing other than cool effects. If the whole thing consisted of the side scrolling stages, it would be a much better, more consistent experience for me. The “weapons are shields/lives” mechanic doesn’t do much for me either. It sucks when you lose everything and are stuck with that rinky-dink shot for the rest of a level.

 

I am busting out the Super NT for the night, so perhaps I’ll give it another try. I have always wanted to attempt to complete its higher difficulty level.

Yeah, same. I liked it originally because it was new and flashy and had nice graphic effects. I can see why people put it up there on their list, but it's not S tier in my opinion. If not for this thread and playing through the game today, I think the last time I played through it this was like 10 years. Just not one I normally think to come back to. 

[WavyGravy]

I think I would put Axelay in the S-Tier. Stages are memorable, being able to change the weapon loadout on a per-level basis gives lots of opportunities for replay, and while it's not the most difficult shooter out there, it's very fair and thoughtfully designed. 

 

And by God, the soundtrack!

 

But I think the thing that does it for me is that thoughtfulness and level of polish. I think it might take the crown for most polished 16-bit shooter (that I've played!). The only other games of the era that give me a similar feeling of polish would be Lords of Thunder, Thunder Force 4, or Rayforce. 

[Aaendi]

5 hours ago, turboxray said:

It's not. I played it through to the boss.

There are plenty of sprites left over. 

(those remain cells are all off screen.. aren't used).

 

 The game does use the priority setting, but it uses it selectively. Like when the arms are in such a position that overlap is at its worst. You'rte not seeing 16x16 sprites being dropped from the table;  each arm if positioned just right is like 304 pixels over sprite overlap.. a single arm in the right position is more than the entire sprite line fetch limit haha. 

 

 The sprite rotation isn't random, because you can easily see the same patter repeat. On top of dropping out of sprites, it's also got that weird snes thing where is drop highest priority cells. This kind of boss would have been a good candidate for sprite compositing ala one of the addon chips. 

 

 

Yeah, same. I liked it originally because it was new and flashy and had nice graphic effects. I can see why people put it up there on their list, but it's not S tier in my opinion. If not for this thread and playing through the game today, I think the last time I played through it this was like 10 years. Just not one I normally think to come back to. 

From looking at the screenshot, I think I can tell what Konami was trying to do.  I think the game is trying to remove sprites that are hiding behind other sprites.  If the fireballs were shaped like squares, you wouldn't be noticing sprites in the back disappearing, only the sprites in the front.

[Kirk_Johnston]

4 hours ago, Aaendi said:

From looking at the screenshot, I think I can tell what Konami was trying to do.  I think the game is trying to remove sprites that are hiding behind other sprites.  If the fireballs were shaped like squares, you wouldn't be noticing sprites in the back disappearing, only the sprites in the front.

I think this looks like a bit of a suboptimal solution to a situation they basically created by their own game design choices in this case. There's ways that basically the same boss could have been handled just a little differently in how everything was implemented and executed that would have worked better visually in terms of reducing the flicker. But, to be fair, I think they possibly decided that having the particular flicker here was balanced out by the spectacle of a huge fire boss like this at the time. And the flicker does actually kinda work a bit in the context of all the flames and stuff, sort of. Even with the flicker, it's certainly a cool boss and impressive scene to see in a shmup of its time, which is how I recall from the reactions at the time. I'm sure Mean Machines or some magazine like that even specifically mentioned how impressive this particular boss was. So I think Konami achieved what it was after. But, I certainly think it would be interesting to see what modern SNES indie/homebrew developers could do with a boss similar to this.

[Bloodreign]

It really is a beautiful game with a phenomenal soundtrack, and pretty much kind of reminds me of Konami's own Salamander series with the switching hori/vert view by stage. It's not the longest game in the world, Gradius 3 on the same console had 10 stages, Parodius Da also has 10 stages (SFC version got the bonus bath house stage in stage 9, pushing the final stage to the 10th slot). But man oh man, the 6 stages are eye candy, though to be honest, it took awhile for the vertical scrolling stages to grow on me, and grow they did. I still remember buying a cart only many years back off Ebay for $7.99, because I could never find the damned thing locally where retro games were sold, now the game sells for an arm, a leg, and a first born. The bosses are nice and huge, and good on Konami for giving each boss it's own unique theme song.

 

But Konami, you told us you'd see us again in Axelay 2, though to be honest with modern Konami, it's too late now.

[Kirk_Johnston]

15 minutes ago, Bloodreign said:

It really is a beautiful game with a phenomenal soundtrack, and pretty much kind of reminds me of Konami's own Salamander series with the switching hori/vert view by stage. It's not the longest game in the world, Gradius 3 on the same console had 10 stages, Parodius Da also has 10 stages (SFC version got the bonus bath house stage in stage 9, pushing the final stage to the 10th slot). But man oh man, the 6 stages are eye candy, though to be honest, it took awhile for the vertical scrolling stages to grow on me, and grow they did. I still remember buying a cart only many years back off Ebay for $7.99, because I could never find the damned thing locally where retro games were sold, now the game sells for an arm, a leg, and a first born. The bosses are nice and huge, and good on Konami for giving each boss it's own unique theme song.

 

But Konami, you told us you'd see us again in Axelay 2, though to be honest with modern Konami, it's too late now.

Yeah, I think this is probably how a how lot of SNES fans feel about Axelay. It's probably not in my personal top 5 shmups on the console, but it's still a stellar shmup for the system.

 

Parodius Da! is one of thee top shmups of the entire 16-bit generation imo, and doubly so considering it's one of the earlier SNES titles stuck running in SlowROM even. It looks gorgeous, sounds great, plays brilliantly, and just has so much quirky charm.

[Tanooki]

18 hours ago, Austin said:

I won’t lie, I have never been the biggest fan of this game. A big part is the top-down stages seem like a whole lotta nothing other than cool effects. If the whole thing consisted of the side scrolling stages, it would be a much better, more consistent experience for me. The “weapons are shields/lives” mechanic doesn’t do much for me either. It sucks when you lose everything and are stuck with that rinky-dink shot for the rest of a level.

 

I am busting out the Super NT for the night, so perhaps I’ll give it another try. I have always wanted to attempt to complete its higher difficulty level.

I'm kind of on the same sentiment.  I never was WOW on it which is why when I had to let a lot go nearly 20 years ago now it went, but I was happy to get it back last year and not eat it on the price.  The issue I have is the vertical stages, the wrapping effect almost makes it impossible to really feel out the hit boxes and you get some stupid deaths going around stuff with barriers and all that.  It's true eye candy, but I think they also realized it wasn't a great idea to do it again as they didn't go with that in future konami shooters either.  It may have really been a one and done for that reason.

[turboxray]

14 hours ago, Aaendi said:

From looking at the screenshot, I think I can tell what Konami was trying to do.  I think the game is trying to remove sprites that are hiding behind other sprites.  If the fireballs were shaped like squares, you wouldn't be noticing sprites in the back disappearing, only the sprites in the front.

I think you're right. Like the underarm lower pieces. Also, as I was posting those pics I realized the sprite viewer doesn't actually show the full damage haha. As-in the actual cells getting dropped don't show as being dropped in the viewer. The situation is really bad/ugly when the arms are at "level" with the perspective of the screen view, but that doesn't happen too often so it's not too bad.

[turboxray]

18 hours ago, WavyGravy said:

I think I would put Axelay in the S-Tier. Stages are memorable, being able to change the weapon loadout on a per-level basis gives lots of opportunities for replay, and while it's not the most difficult shooter out there, it's very fair and thoughtfully designed. 

 

And by God, the soundtrack!

 

But I think the thing that does it for me is that thoughtfulness and level of polish. I think it might take the crown for most polished 16-bit shooter (that I've played!). The only other games of the era that give me a similar feeling of polish would be Lords of Thunder, Thunder Force 4, or Rayforce. 

I can totally understand why others would put it in their S-tier list. 

[Wayler]

Interesting to read about different experiences and views. It's totally reasonable why someone wouldn't want to dedicate their whole existence to Axelay. Not ideal but reasonable. 

 

Anyway, here's a small tidbit. Level 5 has these fire dragon enemies that pop out from time to time:

Turns out they are a homage to Konami's other series: Gradius

Those pesky things also bear a strong resemblance to the main character of Taito's weird procedurally generated shooter Syvalion. But this last one is probably just a coincidence. 

 

[OldSchoolRetroGamer]

On 1/6/2024 at 1:14 PM, roots.genoa said:

To be fair, Tommy Tallarico wasn't credited either in Metroid Prime.

 

 

 

 

Oh wait.

Likely the fault of "Gaming Racists"

[Shaun David]

Arms installation is complete Good Luck!! Axelay is one my favorite shooters of all time.

[Wayler]

I'm going to quote myself like a chump to give you a tale full of wonderment.

On 1/5/2024 at 7:51 PM, Wayler said:

Stage 2 has a part where a glimpse of an earthlike planet is seen. Stage 3 is played on an earthlike planet. Brilliant foreshadowing.

Here is the scene:

 

As a kid, I was totally robbed of this amazing piece of visual storytelling. You see, living on the edges of civilization here in Northern Europe, our console was naturally the PAL version of Nintendo's 16-bit powerhouse. Pretty soon it was evident though that US imports were the way to go, as they arrived on stores months before the PAL-versions did. The only real drawback was to buy an adapter to be mounted on top of the console. Of course, Nintendo seems to have noticed this naughty business because every once in a while you would find out that the newest US import wouldn't work anymore. Luckily there would already be an updated version of the adapter in stores by then. So it was screw you big N, the games will go on! (I think we ended up with 3 adapters at the end of the system's lifespan and around half of our games were NTSC carts). And if you got a game working with the adapter, it was usually a bug free experience.

 

So anyhow, Axelay was purchased as an US import and the trusty AD-29 Universal Adaptor gave life to the sweet sights and sounds....until the game got to a certain spot in Stage 2. This is what I always saw:

For the longest time I thought this was just a bug that got left in or that there was something wrong with the cart. But visually it also works as space debris if you squint a little. The game always reverted to normal after this 10 second scene, so I really didn't think too much about it. You can imagine my surprise when that magnificent blue orb came into view when I first played this game on an emulator.

 

And how did I replicate this error now, as I only have my Super NT hooked up, I hear you ask? Well funny thing, I had just completed Terranigma and had accidentally left the system hardware as PAL when firing up my Axelay USA rom. So when I came to the familiar spot in the game, it was the picture of my childhood all over again. This also came with a realization that there is no actual region lock in the cart in these earlier titles, it's just the outer plastic shell that prevents you plugging it in. I think later on there were other countermeasures, because the earlier adapters wouldn't work on all later titles.

 

But I just wonder what is it about that specific scene that trips up the PAL system.

[Tanooki]

Oh yeah there are definitely counter measures.  A game like DKC for instance will put up a block screen as will various others noting you're either a pirate or using a game outside your region and basically freezes there.

[Yakumo1975]

4 hours ago, Tanooki said:

Oh yeah there are definitely counter measures.  A game like DKC for instance will put up a block screen as will various others noting you're either a pirate or using a game outside your region and basically freezes there.

One of the SNES NBA Jam games has issues with certain 3rd party controllers.  It throws a message up on the screen telling you to use an official controller. 

[Tanooki]

5 hours ago, Yakumo1975 said:

One of the SNES NBA Jam games has issues with certain 3rd party controllers.  It throws a message up on the screen telling you to use an official controller. 

Wow that's strange, talk about some pretty poor coding on the game if it triggers something like that with a basic accessory.

[jeffythedragonslayer]

7 minutes ago, Tanooki said:

Wow that's strange, talk about some pretty poor coding on the game if it triggers something like that with a basic accessory.

Doesn't that mean that the third party controller sucks too?  If the game can distinguish it from an official one?

[Tanooki]

11 minutes ago, jeffythedragonslayer said:

Doesn't that mean that the third party controller sucks too?  If the game can distinguish it from an official one?

Maybe.  It's kind of hard to really say on that.  It's like what parts were used exactly in some warped collection that somehow triggered some line in the code to set off its piracy feature, and of all things, why I controller and not the console itself?  Why would a game even care if you used a third party controller either and look for such a thing.  It really makes no sense.

[jeffythedragonslayer]

1 minute ago, Tanooki said:

Maybe.  It's kind of hard to really say on that.  It's like what parts were used exactly in some warped collection that somehow triggered some line in the code to set off its piracy feature, and of all things, why I controller and not the console itself?  Why would a game even care if you used a third party controller either and look for such a thing.  It really makes no sense.

Maybe they used a different 4-bit signature and thought they were doing people a favor.

[Tanooki]

10 minutes ago, jeffythedragonslayer said:

Maybe they used a different 4-bit signature and thought they were doing people a favor.

Maybe, considering who coded up NBA Jam, anything is possible.  They may have been called Acclaim, but usually their works were more THQ(total horrible quality) level and I'd see them regularly punned in name as 'Ack, Lame!'

[SegaShooters]

No doubt Axelay is a top 16-bit shooter and one of the few excellent shooters on the SNES.

 

Like Gunstar Heroes for the Genesis, it's too bad a sequel was never made.

[WavyGravy]

Gunstar Heroes did get a sequel, though. Gunstar Super Heroes on the GBA.

[Tanooki]

Few excellent SNES shooters?  How many more decades are needed for the lies of the 16bit console wars to drop off about that one eh?

[SlidellMan]

Even Shmup Junkie knows that the Super NES has several quality ones with few stinkers.

[Tanooki]

6 minutes ago, SlidellMan said:

Even Shmup Junkie knows that the Super NES has several quality ones with few stinkers.

Yeah there are many, it's the case of the long sustained vocal minority from the throwback troll pits of Sega fandom and those who towed the line going with the flow.  SNES and Genesis both had a pretty good solid selection of quality shooters, yet both got dwarfed by NEC when you throw the full PC Engine at it for quantity of them that were quality too.  Sadly some of the best SNES shooters stayed in Japan and not for the case of Sega as much so that didn't help much.  Yet given most people started coming online around 1995-2000 who would have been the peak players of such goodies it would take intentional fanboy blinders to avoid that reality.  Once the walls dropped from cells of people bound to dial up BBS to the bigger picture, the info was out, and extremely shortly later so were the roms and the infancy of emulated 90s and 80s consoles.