MAME ROW #111 - G.I. Joe

[mediamogul]

@pjft said in MAME ROW #111:

... And here I was going to vote for GI Joe. :)

It's not out of the running yet. The results are 3-2 'Gururin' at the moment. While 'Gururin' looks to be a great choice as well, Konami's 'GI Joe' is also a lot of fun and one of the best adaptations of licensed source material to ever grace the arcades. Everything comes directly from and looks identical to the classic cartoon, from the Joes themselves to the Cobra baddies, as well as the myriad of crazy vehicles.

[GtBFilms]

I had a go of these last night, but as I'm currently building a new raspberry pi desktop cab, which is already testing the limits of spouse tolerance, I tried them on my main PC, rather than bring my PICADE downstairs and fan the flames of marital discord further!

Don't mention Raspberry Pi mini cabinet projects in our house

Grand Prix Star
I thought I was going to like this one, we don't often have a racing game in the MAMEROW, so I thought it would be a good candidate. A lot of these don't run too well on the pi, so I wondered if perhaps my PC would make it play better than it would otherwise, but by fears were unfounded. I couldn't get it to play properly on the PC at all - the game starts fine, but the acceleration seems to go to 100% then immediately drop down to 0 every time I press a button. I'm sure this is just my setup, but the video preview also put me off - the game seems very twitchy, you are either going very slow, or so fast you can't react to corners. I might have judged this one unfairly, but I crossed it off my list.

Gururin
Another puzzle game! I know these are very popular, and it's the only sort of arcade game my wife will play, but I'm not keen on them at all. Too much strategic thinking, and not enough action. The mechanic of rotating the play area is quite cool, but my brain isn't capable of predicting when is a good time to to it!

GI Joe
This one is very familiar. It's practically exactly the same as Devastators. I had to look up Devastators to see when it appeared, and it predates this by four years (Devastators 1988, GI Joe 1992).

Devastators, Konami, 1988

G.I. Joe, Konami, 1992

The graphics engine is obviously different, this one is proper 3D, while Devastators was sprite based, but I'm not sure it looks better for it. I think at the time, the 3D effect would have been impressive and modern, but these early 3D engines look really dated now (I notice this with Nintendo 64 games - I remember them looking awesome, and now they all look pretty awful by todays standards). Konami produced both Devastators and GI Joe, so I can only presume they were revisiting old popular titles with a view to rewriting them for a 3D engine. I don't think this is as good as it's predecessor, but it's still my preferred game this week!

My vote goes to GI Joe.

[pjft]

I watched the attract mode of Gururin for a while yesterday while I was running some other errands (I thought I would have time to play it, but alas that didn't happen) and to be honest my heart lies with GI Joe this week.

I'm sure Gururin would be fun as well, but I imagine I'll have more fun with GI Joe. One thing I found from my only shot at it is that if you get hit your weapons go back to the basic one, and it's a bit hard to recover especially when you're overwhelmed by enemies.

Let's see how it goes!

[thelostsoul]

Wow, I had to solve 7 or 8 or so captchas to vote.

I voted for Gururin, simply because I can't add more games to my setup currently and I only have Gururin there. I always was interested in Grand Prix Star, but the control does not work with arcade stick. I think the problem is that the game needs analog input. There are several games like this input scheme and I just gave up an them for now.

When ever I think of GI Joe, I think of the side scrolling NES game, which is fantastic btw. This one also looks interesting and would make up a good highscore game, although I am not a big fan of these type of games. Which input control does the original arcade use? Often they aren't made for arcade sticks or gamepads and are no fun to play with it.

Whatever I can't play it currently, so it does not matter to me. Gururin doesn't look like a killer game, it is just a decent match block puzzle with a twist. Not sure if it is good for highscore play. But it got my voice.

[obsidianspider]

This week's winner is G.I. Joe

[thelostsoul]

@obsidianspider This looks gorgeous! And it answers my question about control mechanic, yes it would work with arcade stick perfectly.^^

[VictimRLSH]

Loved G.I. Joe, wasted many quarters on that one...

[pjft]

First stab at it: 427 points. Used Scarlett. First time in playing this game - so three attempts in total.

It's a fun game to be honest, I'm happy we chose it and I'll certainly be playing it a bit more. I was not a GI Joe kid so the characters and references elude me.

Curious about Devastators though.

Will upload picture tomorrow on my laptop as it's larger than 1MB so I need to resize it.

Edit: tried it Devastators. It's not as fun. :)

[GtBFilms]

@pjft Had a go last night, didn't manage to beat your score, I only got around the 300 mark.

I also tried Devastators again, and you are correct - G.I.I Joe is the better game - a whole lot faster with a lot more going on, and more responsive. I guess my rose-tinted nostalgia glasses made me remember Devastators being better than it actually was - they're still very similar games though!

[pjft]

@GtBFilms I played it again tonight and reached 468 but still lost at the same end of level 1-2 boss. This time I played Snake Eyes but it seems they're all functionally the same?

My main strategy is try to blow up the green barrels as soon as possible, collect the power ups by sitting them, and then just hold down fire as one of the power ups is a machine gun and auto-fires.

One thing contrary to my shoot-em-up habit it's that hoarding bombs doesn't seem to have any positive effect - you aren't treated by keeping them at the end of a level in terms of score, there's a limit of 9 and collecting more is pointless as it doesn't even get turned into score. As such, a tip is the moment you have a lot of bombs feel free to use them to clear up large vehicles or mobs as it will net you some points you'd otherwise struggle to get. I try to always stay close to 9, especially as when I get hit and lose the machine gun, I'll sometimes need to rely on bombs to survive the mobs until some barrels show up.

Hope these help!

[GtBFilms]

Sorry, just haven't had the time to play this one this week.

Spending too much time on my new desktop cab build I'm afraid.

[obsidianspider]

MAME ROW #112 is now live