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Post by Discoalucard on Jan 15, 2011 10:52:24 GMT -5
www.hardcoregaming101.net/wotd/wotd.htmTaking inspiration from a variety of horror stories and films, War of the Dead is an action-RPG that started on Japanese computers and eventually graduated to the PC Engine. I haven't gotten a chance to play it yet myself, but I also dig these sort of games with side-scrolling combat - there's more than a few resemblances to Zelda II.
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Post by starscream on Jan 15, 2011 12:41:35 GMT -5
Thanks to MSX translation group Oasis, War of the Dead 2 has been available in English since 1997. Unfortunately RHDN and many download sites don't even acknowledge the existence of it - which is a sad indictment of the fan-translation community, since they clearly aren't keeping tabs on what MSX fans in Holland have done over the years.
The formulation here is somewhat irksome. Any MSX fan could have done what I have done for some translations, take those pre-patched disks, make patches, and submit them to RHDN along with a few lines. That's how it works. RHDN staff has to my knowledge never claimed they'd search the net for decade old translations. In fact, I don't get the line that's seemingly been drawn between a so called "fan-translation community" and players. People who like to play these translations and would like to see them hosted and give them more exposure elsewhere should be able to remedy the situation as described.
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Post by Discoalucard on Jan 15, 2011 13:06:02 GMT -5
We should get on that, then!
(And remove the above paragraph, if that is indeed the case.)
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Post by Deleted on Jan 15, 2011 15:49:29 GMT -5
Wow. Didn't expect to see this series here. I'm only vaguely familiar with War of the Dead Part 2 for MSX2, as that's the game I've tried out many years ago as a kid. Didn't play it much, because it was too eerie for me back then. I pretty much only remember this creature from the game, probably because I saw it both in-game and in a review/ad on some Japanese MSX game magazine:
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Post by lionelritchie on Jan 16, 2011 14:28:34 GMT -5
"You can run from most battles, but only if you reach the rightmost side of the screen, which means getting past and most likely touching an instant-death enemy."
This is wrong. You could escape from the left of the screen, also. During the battle, keep pressing left when your character is in contact with the left of the screen. Escape is not instantaneous, but keep pressing it and you escape in a few seconds, unharmed by the monsters. And the game was very fast (faster then dragon quest in the msx) and much funnier and more playable then dragon quest. we used to play it a lot here, very good game, so you should refrain from trying to change the past with phrases like "Put succinctly, this initial MSX2 release fails on pretty much every level, and is so bugged you can't actually play it without cheating. " There's no need for cheats, the game is not that hard, and was one of the first to introduce things like day and night cycles and was a very original game for its time, it's quests are not worst then any one from dragon quest or ys. you have a prejudiced view.
"The screens shown here were only taken thanks to BlueMSX's handy cheat menu which allows infinite health, since otherwise the game is impossible. Quite how it came to market without anyone picking up on this is baffling - and such descriptions of the difficulty aren't exaggerations."
Yes, they are. The game was pretty much winnable in its time and had a great save feature and once you got the big knife, wich was easy to find, killing monsters was very easy. Maybe you should quit playing old games and, dunno, go watch heavy rain or metal gear solid 4.
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Post by Sketcz-1000 on Jan 16, 2011 16:31:39 GMT -5
You don't have to be insulting, you know.
I don't have a prejudiced view, I liked the games enough to spend a whole bunch of time screen grabbing and writing about them.
The MSX version is unfairly and obscenely difficult. Unless - UNLESS - the act of emulating it alters its internal mechanics, in which case I might change my mind. Perhaps on real hardware it functions better and it is winnable - but the version I emulated certainly was not (a rom file taken from Planetemu's archives - the dsk image there appears corrupt). Any game which throws you into a random battle, and then after completing said battle throws you into ANOTHER battle, without having moved even a single game tile, is poorly balanced in my view.
I agree it's ground breaking, by being the first ever survival horror, and having day/night cycles. I was not arguing this. But I stand by my view that it's not much fun to play. I put several hours, and I want to emphasise this - HOURS - into it without using cheats, and on several occasions the game brought up a game over without even crossing the bridge by the church. I restarted it must be 10 or 15 times, then tried quick saving my way through it, and then I just cheated. The game is broken.
The fact you are so adamant that it is not broken, makes me ask the question again: does it have copy protection which alters its inner workings? I had a lot of trouble circumventing an SRAM error when first loading. For example Earthbound's difficulty was changed if you played a pirate copy, making it unfairly hard. When last did you actually play the original?
I'm not changing the text in the article. You need to look at this in the context of time and the games which came afterwards, especially since the later PC88 port was so improved. I absolutely stand by what I said, and I dare anyone who has read the article to load up the emulator and see for themselves if they're in any doubt as to the validity of my argument.
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Post by lionelritchie on Jan 16, 2011 19:10:16 GMT -5
1 - don't know if your rom is broken, but bluemsx emulates the game 2 - learn how to ESCAPE encounters by pressing LEFT 3 - a lot of games in that time had thousands of random encounters, like phantasy star 3 (wich is much slower and more boring then war of the dead), dragon quest and final fantasy. war of the dead does not have much more encounters than any rpg of its time and it's encounters are faster and you can easily escape from them. you can get a encounter by standing still, but if you are going to stand still activete the menu. but you certainly are doing something wrong if you died before the first bridge. don't frameskip or you will get much more encounters.
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Post by ReyVGM on Jan 19, 2011 17:53:57 GMT -5
Some MSX games, for some reason, DO increase their enemy encounter rate when you use frameskip/fast forward. Not all of them, but some do. I always found that strange.
And it's not that you get enemy encounters faster because you are (duh!) using the fast forward key, but that you get more encounters per steps. Without fastforward you might get an encounter every 6 steps, but with fastforward you would get them ever 2 or 3 steps. It happened most recently with the game Randar no Buoken.
I don't know if it's WotD's case though.
As for that SRAM error Sketcz encountered, it's not really an error. I think you have to boot the emu while holding CTRL or something to boot in a higher RAM mode or something like that. I had that happen on a few games, but I don't remember it well now.
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Post by kobushi on Jan 19, 2011 18:41:03 GMT -5
The encounter rate is probably based on an internal timer rather than a set number of steps (+random variable). I haven't played the game on MSX, though, so I can't say for sure.
Anyway, nice article! Thoroughly enjoyable reading.
On a side note, I'm continually amazed at how influential Romero's movies have been around the world, including Japan. I was replaying the first Breath of Fire recently, and had a laugh when I reached Romero village, where the dead are walking among the living because of a witch's curse.
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Post by kal on Jan 19, 2011 20:13:20 GMT -5
The character of Carpenter appears not just to be named after the famous horror director. A great article - I hope you guys can sort out whether there's something messy with the emulation so lionelritchie can stop bitching and ignoring the time and effort you put in Sketcz.
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Post by Deleted on Jan 19, 2011 20:49:51 GMT -5
The encounter rate is probably based on an internal timer rather than a set number of steps (+random variable). I haven't played the game on MSX, though, so I can't say for sure. Anyway, nice article! Thoroughly enjoyable reading. On a side note, I'm continually amazed at how influential Romero's movies have been around the world, including Japan. I was replaying the first Breath of Fire recently, and had a laugh when I reached Romero village, where the dead are walking among the living because of a witch's curse. They must have had fanboys on the staff for those games; I liked the Vonnegut reference in 2. And I echo Kal on this - it was a really enjoyable article. I'd seen hentai of this before, but hadn't really looked into it. Now I'll have to check it out.
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Post by Gendo Ikari on Jan 22, 2011 16:40:41 GMT -5
Weird, I've heard the name "War of the Dead" now and then throughout the years and I thought it was a more famous title, or that it had a more recent origin. I particularly like how the part about the second episode is structured: it starts sounding like it is just a very dumbed-down game compared to the first but then drives the point that it's ultimately better. While the first episode was over-ambitious and succeeded only partially (even with the refinements of the PC988 and PCE versions, it's still lacking in some departments), War of the Dead 2 succeeds in its simplicity. I should consider digging back BlueMSX...
Ah, could the name Browning be a reference to Todd Browning, the director of "Freaks"?
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Post by azazel on Jan 24, 2011 11:55:09 GMT -5
About the article:
First, I think the article is in so far very good because it made me aware of a very interesting game which I probably wouldn't have known otherwise. Too many articles on HG 101 in the recent past have focused on rather unimportant and uninteresting games, and the WotD article is more like what I like to read on HG 101: very good, but not-so-well known games. In this regard, the article succeeded and I'm quite happy to now know about WotD. Thanks.
As an article though, I think it is is somewhat confusingly written. I can't describe so well myself what I dislike about it, but I think it could have been much more "streamlined", so to speak. The blog article on Magweasel, which is referred to and cited extensively by the HG 101 article, was a shorter and more concise introduction into the game.
About the game:
oh, wow. I just love this setting and the artwork. Somehow it's funny, when games like WotD came out I was wasting my time with shitty C64 & Amiga games, which were probably even worse than my memory makes them look like in hindsight, and I only "dreamed" of games in such settings! This is just what I want.
I emulated the MSX -version of the fan-transslated WotD2. Terribly interesting, but also terribly hard!
Is there any tactics to the fights? So far I only fought one monster, somewhere in the south corner of the map, and it was like standing in front of it and see who's health-bar depletes first.
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Post by ReyVGM on Jan 24, 2011 12:35:00 GMT -5
About the article: Too many articles on HG 101 in the recent past have focused on rather unimportant and uninteresting games I disagree. What is unimportant and uninteresting to you can be important and interesting to a whole other bunch of people. I seriously doubt a lot of people would consider WotD to be important and interesting. And in my case, I really couldn't care less about the game (only played part 2 for the MSX), however I do care more about the other so called "unimportant and uninteresting" games HG101 has been covering in the recent past. So condemning HG101 for focusing on "unimportant and uninteresting" games just because you consider them that way is not really right. I will assume that you didn't mean it that way though. and the WotD article is more like what I like to read on HG 101: very good, but not-so-well known games. WotD is not "very good". Unless you have a soft spot for anal rape
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Post by azazel on Jan 24, 2011 13:21:09 GMT -5
Fair enough. I disagree with you, though. HG101 is all about having an opinion. If I wanted to read reviews and forum entries were everything is relativized and put between "IMHO"s, "I think that"s etc and crap like that, I probably were on usenet or would read Gamespot instead of HG 101. If I post, it is understood that I write about my own personal opinion and I'm entitled to have one. I have read HG101 for a couple of years now, and the there is certainly a trend of reviewing games which are less interesting than there used to be. Yes you think otherwise, but I don't. If the majority of HG 101 has a different opinion than me, fine then you may stick with majority, I do not. WotD is not "very good". Unless you have a soft spot for anal rape wut
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