I've been enjoying some discussions at other sites about the TG-16 and Genesis and their respective technical limits and the ways those limits were worked around by developers. I'm not the most knowledgeable on such technical matters but I enjoy learning more.

What are the most technically impressive NES games, in your opinion, and why?

I'm thinking of games that employed techniques to create parallax scrolling, exceed the sprite limitations (number and size), colors on screen, and so on.

First off, hiya, and welcome to NintendoAge .



As for the topic, my guess would have to be the Japanese release of Castlevania 3: Dracula's Curse. It employed a special sound processor to greatly enhance the musical quality. That processor, however, was removed in the US and European releases ...

I've heard of that in the Famicom Castlevania III. Do you know why exactly it was removed in the non-Japan releases? I vaguely remember reading something about a pin connector that carried sound from the cart to a speaker on one of the hardwired Famicom controllers that isn't present on non-Japan systems.

Despite this, I would say that the NES Castlevania III is still a technical marvel in many respects. I guess it is mostly owed to the unique memory mapper used in the cart. What specifically did the MMC5 (IIRC) allow Castlvania III do? PS: how do you make paragraphs show up in the final post? Mine keep getting collapsed into one big paragraph.

In the Famicom there are pins that connect audio from the cart to the Famicom. The two sources are mixed and outputted from the Famicom. Many games and FDS used expansion audio chips. In the NES those pins were removed, so there is no way to get the cart audio out. This is separate from the microphone on the Famicom controller.

Castlevania 3 barely uses the power of the MMC5, which adds more colors per area, more tiles on screen, and a hardware multiplier. You have to see something like Just Breed for more of what it can do. I think games like Rad Racer are more impressive from a hardware/programming point. Getting the road to bend is a tricky bit of timing with no extra hardware added. Using MMC5 is like adding another processor, at what point is it no longer a NES?

So the Castlevania 3 famicom cart wouldn't play the sound correctly when connected to a nes via a cart converter?

Nopes without the mixing none of the expansion sound will work. The normal built in sounds will tho. Instead we get the useless expansion connector on the bottom, some of which connects directly to the cart! Yay!

I believe there was a fairly simple mod you could do to get sound from these extra audio chips working on a NES. Been a while since I read about it but I think it just required a little rewiring of a converter and maybe a jumper or two on the expansion connector.

I was impressed by "Recca".  Its a top scrolling shooter game.

The NES has a limit of 8 sprites per scanline, and I believe that the guys who wrote Recca has to write some decent sprite management to overcome this to have so much crazy stuff on the screen.

Al

I like metal storm. The graphics and game play are great.

Recca comes to mind, along with Codemasters games.

The Happy Video Game Nerd (

)clued me in on Metal Storm, and I'm very impressed. Great detail in the sprites. I'm especially impressed with the parallax scrolling. What techniques did NES programmers use to create parallax? Sword Master appears to have three layers of parallax! How was this accomplished?

I honestly don't know anything about techniques used for parallax, but there are some really good ones on the NES. Three of them that jump to mind are Battletoads, Bucky O'Hare, and Batman: Return of the Joker. There are some really nice effects background-wise in those games.

Bunnyboy mentioned that the MMC5 was barely used in Castlevania III. Are there any games that made more extensive use of that mapper? If so, in what way?

According to Bootgod's database, http://bootgod.dyndns.org:7777/
when I do an advanced search on Mapper=5 (which is MMC5 as far as I know) I see the following:

Bandit Kings
Castlevania 3
Gemfire
L'Empereur
Laser Invasion (I was surprised by this)
Nobunaga 2
Romance 3 Kingdoms 2
Uncharted Waters

But the japanese ones (also listed when you do that search) probably are the ones that make more extensive use of the mapper's functionality
Just Breed is one of the Japanese games in the list and its been fan translated so you can play it in English.
Al

Captain Skyhawk was pretty slick.

Felix the cat.

I was impressed by the big bosses (despite the bad flicker) in Felix but not much else :/

I was always blown away by Gun Nac, there's really no slowdown and so many sprites on the screen, and it's still seamless.

IMHO the most technically impressive nes games are:

Battletoads (crazy speed and graphics including parallax) Ninja Gaiden 2 (Nice parallax too and wicked colorful graphics) Bart Vs the Mutants (only because it was the first time I was amazed with the voices)