The Gamer's Quarter

GSL · Posted: Fri Nov 03, 2006 2:17 pm Post subject:

THREAD STARTS LATER! Chalk this up to crazy Forums

Glad to hear you're liking it, Dess!

To be honest, I could never quite get into the game. I bought it knowing full well the title's reputationas a classic action platformer, but for some reason I could never bring myself to play past the game's first level. I'm not sure why, I just couldn't. I hear great things about the collection on the Playstation, though, so I might try and track that down at some point. Anyways, it's good to know it went to a good home.

EDIT: Um, what? How did this post get to be at the top of the list?

Shapermc · Hot Sake! Joined: 14 Oct 2004 Posts: 6279

I’m… I don’t know what to say. I mean, this is at least the third time that I had figured you were familiar with a game that it turns out you weren’t. Strider is one of those games that completely captivated me as a kid. Particularly the muscleman that when destroyed starts a chain reaction which results in a lot of running.

Strider is genius, and composed of dozens of really excellent set pieces. The overacting narrative (different than story telling as you have proven with your example) is amazing and epically constructed. The genesis port makes this amazing game accessible to people in terms of difficulty and playability without sacrificing much in terms of music and graphics from the original.

Strider is one of those very, very few games that I refused to lose track of from when I first bought it. Many of my games from my childhood/adolescence have just wandered away or vanished over time. Ghouls and Ghosts and Strider are the two Genesis games that are constants for me, they’re always there.

Also, being the fan of Strider that I was I was exceptionally upset with the NES game. Which I never gave a fair shot because of. Unlike Bionic Commando and Section Z I think that Capcom made a mistake with the changes between arcade and NES for Strider: rather than take what was awesome about the game and make it better, they took the main character and just made something different.

Also, this needs to be an article.

EDIT: WOW I'm above the first post
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“The average man has a secret desire to be a swaggering, drunken, fighting, raping swashbuckler.”
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"There is no place in this enterprise for a rogue physicist!"

dessgeega · Posted: Fri Nov 03, 2006 2:29 pm Post subject:

it's pretty classy how all the characters (in their voiceovers) speak their own language - russian, japanese, english, crazy dinosaur jungle speak.

osman video coming soon!
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dessgeega · Last edited by dessgeega on Fri Nov 03, 2006 2:32 pm; edited 1 time in total

THIS THREAD STARTS HERE.

i received the genesis port of strider in trade with the dare-i-say aptly named greatsaintlouis.

it's good! and a lot less tempermental than the mame version. i just one-lifed to stage 3, which i'm pretty satisfied with.

strider is theater. it is a procession of brilliant and ridiculous setpieces which all follow each other with such flair and sincerity that you never realize you're enacting a tightly-plotted script.

for example: i'm fighting wolves in the snow-covered russian mountainside. smashing through a door, i confront a giant robotic gorilla. as i destroy it, it explodes, setting fire to the floor, and i flee along the ceiling and up a pipe, the walls of which are patrolled by fast-moving razor blades. i climb out of the pipe into a great chamber of clanging machines and enormous turning wheels. i ride the wheels to an opening near the ceiling, escaping onto the mountaintop, where i am suddenly attacked by a gun-laden flying bounty hunter. killing my pursuer, i realize that the industrious hunter has covered the mountainside in explosives, and i run down the mountain (flames at my heels) and leap across a chasm to the next peak. there i discover an enormous electrical grid, the base of which is encircled by a pack of wolves. i climb the hazardous structure and grab hold of a small helicopter circling the peak. as bombs rain down on me, i leap from copter to copter, finally reaching the airship that has been dropping the bombs - where i am attacked by a trio of deadly acrobats! defeating them, i break into the cockpit and take control of the ship.

and that's just one stage. and it's done without cutscenes, fade-outs/fade-ins, or obvious seams of any kind (excepting, in the genny version at least, a short moment of load time).

and it's constant, and fierce, and holy shit, you've got a robot tiger for a companion. plus there are amazons and zero-gravity fights and giant communist robot centipedes. i give this game an A in showmanship.

this is a thread about how great it is to be alive when there is strider in the world. also suitable for discussion is the sequel, strider hiryu, which does break its stages up with cuts and cribs a lot from the original, but has many nice things as well: gorgeous sprite characters in polygon landscapes; hand-drawn art during stage transitions; battle-armed cyborg wooly mammoths.

i also cannot one-credit past the boss of the first mission, but then, you can play the missions in any order.

(also feel free to discuss strider hiryu's appearance in the marvel versus capcom games.)

what does it all mean? it means that i like strider a lot. discuss!
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OtakupunkX · . Joined: 23 Mar 2006 Posts: 730

NES Strider is on GBA now. I almost bought it yesterday when I traded in those games Hudson Soft sent me.

dessgeega · Posted: Fri Nov 03, 2006 10:10 pm Post subject:

i totally forgot about that one. i've never played it, but it looks completely different from the arcade game, in maybe the same way that nes bionic commando is different from arcade bionic commando?
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OtakupunkX · . Joined: 23 Mar 2006 Posts: 730

That's what I'm thinking. Could be interesting.

Bionic Commando is on that GBA cart, too, as is Mighty Final Fight, which is to Final Fight as NES Bionic Commando is to Arcade Bionic Commando.

dessgeega · Posted: Fri Nov 03, 2006 10:32 pm Post subject:

mighty final fight is really really cute.
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Swimmy · . Joined: 16 Sep 2005 Posts: 990 Location: Fairfax, VA

The only Strider I've played is the NES one. I guess I have no idea what Strider's actually about.

Edit: Damn you, future posters!
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Isfet · . Joined: 27 Oct 2006 Posts: 107 Location: A New York

NES Strider is a completely different kind of a game. it's sort of an exploration/adventure game (unlike the arcade games that are focused on action) in that you need to visit locations to find items, or discs or what have you, and then return back those stages when you have what you need in order to progress. at least, that's what i've figured it out to be. it comes off as sort of a mess. i never really have any idea what i'm supposed to be doing, and nothing about the game really compels me to delve any deeper and figure it out.

i try it out every once in a while, though, and give it another shot, hoping that it will finally click.

Strider in MvC was interesting, because it seemed to show that early, semi-retired Capcom characters could be interesting to an audience that knew nothing about them. i found many of my friends using him and Captain Commando without having any knowledge of their origin. obviously, it's a fighting game so it's irrelevant, but it's interesting that the characters can stand on their own. also, adding a long scarf makes anyone look cooler.

dark steve · . Joined: 17 Jun 2005 Posts: 1110

Man, those cutscenes in Strider 2 are hell of gorgeous.

Game developers of the world, if you need to have me put up with cutscenes, just make make them cryptic, still pieces of artwork drawn by universe-B Jack Kirby and we'll be cool.

Also Cannon Dancer kind of sucks :/
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OtakupunkX · . Joined: 23 Mar 2006 Posts: 730

dessgeega · Posted: Sat Nov 04, 2006 12:15 am Post subject:

wourme · . Joined: 01 Jul 2005 Posts: 362 Location: Maridia

Strider 1 and 2 for Playstation is very much worth picking up for any Strider fans who haven't seen the sequel. And if you happen to get a copy where Stider 1 is actually on the first disc, you might have a rarity--every copy I know of is switched.

As much as I like Strider, I have to fault the developers for some parts that I think are designed only to take lots of your quarters. I think Strider is second only to Victory Road in how much I spent on it in the arcade. Well, Time Soldiers is up there, too.

dessgeega · Posted: Sat Nov 04, 2006 12:51 am Post subject:

the genny version seems much more fairly balanced than the arcade.

i found a mame replay of osman. let's see if i can find the version of mame that will actually run it! if i get it to work maybe i'll make an avi of it.
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friedchicken · . Joined: 16 Mar 2005 Posts: 496 Location: Port Land, OR

I was Strider-obsessed during my first year at university-- the arcade near campus had a machine, and I played it compulsively.

Part of it is the theater that you mention, Dess. And it's not just the play. The character design is amazing, as is the setting, like the first stage, where you hanglide onto the rooftop, with the strange Neo-Soviet skyline in the background, with all the odd one point broken off red stars. For some reason the character design just made me want to know more about some of the characters. Like Ton-Pooh (who was a helper in MvC), and the Politburo members who transform into the Oroboros. I'm pretty sure one of the Capcom art books has some of the amazing character art in it.

I need to replay the sequel now.

dessgeega · Posted: Sat Nov 04, 2006 3:25 am Post subject:

an introduction to osman (aka cannon dancer):

in the early nineties, a bunch of the strider staff, including the game planner, left capcom for mitchell corporation (creators of puzz-loop and, more recently, tsuukin hitofude). there they created a spriritual strider sequel that is flamboyant, obscene, and purportedly very difficult to find in pcb form.

osman is off-the-hook ridiculous. of particular note is the final stage, which the player is forced to complete in a single life, and requires osman to defeat all of the game's previous bosses - three of them at the same time* - his shadow self (or anti-type), and the final boss, who attacks you with the planet earth.

* these three bosses are fought in random order during the game proper.

i've managed to find one super-play video of the game, as a mame replay. and because no one will be able to get it to run a year from now, i've captured it to avi. here it is: osman no-miss all-clear 5,901,480 points by TKY. it is what i believe the kids call "sick".
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chompers po pable · . Joined: 10 Nov 2005 Posts: 142

i love this game. i prefer the arcade to the genny version, because of the flicker in the latter.

dessgeega · Posted: Sat Nov 04, 2006 3:31 am Post subject:

i feel like i've gotten a lot more flicker trying to play the arcade version in mame. i havn't noticed much flicker at all in the genny version, actually.
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chompers po pable · . Joined: 10 Nov 2005 Posts: 142

wow. i've got the genny version and the ps1 strider 2 (arcade), and the difference in graphical quality is pretty striking.

i don't know, maybe i've got a defective cartridge? the sprites in the genny version blink constantly if there is any action on the screen, so. maybe it's because i've got a 2nd model genny, where you've got a 3rd?

dessgeega · Posted: Sat Nov 04, 2006 4:08 am Post subject:

i've been playing on a second. i really havn't noticed any characters flickering wildly, but i'll watch more closely next time i play.
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dessgeega · Posted: Sat Nov 04, 2006 4:33 am Post subject:

hey look, a cannon dancer strategy guide by the person who recorded that super-play.
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Lestrade · Posted: Sat Nov 04, 2006 8:15 am Post subject:

I owned Strider 2 for the PS1 but I sold it at one point. Perhaps I shouldn't have—I think it's kind of rare, and my copy at least had a glaring, potentially collectible error: the Strider 2 disc was labeled as Strider 1 and vice versa.

I didn't beat Strider but I had fun diving into it every now and then. I much prefered this over the Genesis port, which I played side-by-side at one point. Despite the awe-inspiring (to a child) ads back in the day of EIGHT GLORIOUS MEGS, there is a lot cut from the home version as far as visuals and animation goes, and once I realized it was there, it was hard to live without.

Strider 2... well, the game could have been a classic if it wasn't so easy. Its lack of any challenge at all ruins the game entirely. Upon purchasing the PS1 game, I took it home and beat in 20 minutes. Twenty minutes! It had so many good set pieces, locales and enemies, but it was all for naught.

But yeah; running down that mountain in Strider is one of those great classic moments...

dessgeega · Posted: Sat Nov 04, 2006 9:55 am Post subject:

are you sure you didn't credit-feed? i have a really hard time believing you were able to one-credit strider 2 the first time you played it.

so i'm still not seeing the oft-mentioned flicker in the genny version. the gravity core is my nemesis.
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Shapermc · Hot Sake! Joined: 14 Oct 2004 Posts: 6279

OtakupunkX · . Joined: 23 Mar 2006 Posts: 730

So apparently I've had the ROM for Strider NES for some time now. I didn't play it for very long, but it seemed Metroidvania-ish until I actually started playing the game. Parts of it even reminded me of Duck Tales somehow, but it wasn't as appealing.

It's really not Capcom's finest hour on the NES.

friedchicken · . Joined: 16 Mar 2005 Posts: 496 Location: Port Land, OR

dessgeega · Posted: Sat Nov 04, 2006 10:56 am Post subject:

the pce version apparently has an extra stage, which is supposedly pretty good!

the thing is you need a super special arcade card to play the game.
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OtakupunkX · . Joined: 23 Mar 2006 Posts: 730

Mister Toups · Posted: Sat Nov 04, 2006 12:51 pm Post subject:

If it hasn't been mentioned, the GBA port of NES strider is really really terrible. Constant slowdown affects both the gameplay and the music playback.

It's still worth it for Bionic Commando!!!
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Lestrade · Posted: Sat Nov 04, 2006 9:00 pm Post subject:

Dracko · . Joined: 10 Oct 2005 Posts: 2613

Fucking giant robot dinosaurs!
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"This is the most fun I've ever had without being drenched in the blood of my enemies!"

dark steve · . Joined: 17 Jun 2005 Posts: 1110

dessgeega · Posted: Sun Nov 05, 2006 2:50 am Post subject:

lestrade, you did not just credit-feed a game and then complain it was too easy.

i don't have words. i have no words.
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TheRumblefish · . Joined: 29 Jan 2006 Posts: 258 Location: Florida

It's all about the scarf, it's the scarf that captivates me. Also, Strider's weird Sword has always held my attention.
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OtakupunkX · . Joined: 23 Mar 2006 Posts: 730

I'm not going to lie, that scarf is really, really badass. If I could pull that look off I'd wear a badass scarf all the time.

Lestrade · Posted: Mon Nov 06, 2006 1:04 pm Post subject:

dessgeega · Posted: Mon Nov 06, 2006 1:53 pm Post subject:

it's going to take a lot more than phallic metaphors to earn my forgiveness.
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Lestrade · Posted: Mon Nov 06, 2006 2:12 pm Post subject:

dessgeega · Posted: Tue Nov 07, 2006 7:42 am Post subject:

finally reached stage four on one credit! boomerang-wielding amazons! exploding mushrooms! friggin pirahna-infested waters!
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Shapermc · Hot Sake! Joined: 14 Oct 2004 Posts: 6279

Ages ago I use to be able to make it all the way to the last level on one credit, then I would have to start continuing there (on the Genny version). Those drills that come out of the ground and can send you to an instant death in space are what get me everytime.
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“The average man has a secret desire to be a swaggering, drunken, fighting, raping swashbuckler.”
-Robert E. Howard in a letter to a friend circa Decmber 1932

"There is no place in this enterprise for a rogue physicist!"

friedchicken · . Joined: 16 Mar 2005 Posts: 496 Location: Port Land, OR

Strider is one of the only games I've been able to come close to one-crediting (and sometimes one-life-ing)-- I was forever getting to the final boss and then dying. For some reason he was awfully tough.

Ugh, now I've lost all my skill.

By the way, I finally played Osman yesterday. It's clearly a lot of the same folks with a lot of the same ideas. OtakupunkX suggested that Forgotten Worlds is the third great PCE Super CD game, and is correct. Does anyone know if any of the FW team was involved with Osman too? Or maybe the Strider team=FW team (both are Capcom, after all)? Because I found Osman to be a weird melding of Strider and Forgotten Worlds in a lot of ways.

dessgeega · Posted: Wed Nov 08, 2006 6:01 am Post subject:

final stage! but just barely. the first part of stage four, with the vines and amazons, is vicious. but the dinosaur-riding is amazing.
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Isfet · . Joined: 27 Oct 2006 Posts: 107 Location: A New York

dess, that Osman video you posted inspired me to go back to the game and actually give it another shot. i played it a few times but assumed it was far too unbalanced to actually be played normally. so far i can make it to the halfway point of the second to last stage (Prague, i think?) on one credit.

i feel like it's actually possible to improve one's playing of this game, which is something i didn't think a few months ago, so it's actually pretty fun. also, the dialogue really makes the game.

"my beautiful killer machine"

Shapermc · Hot Sake! Joined: 14 Oct 2004 Posts: 6279

Dracko · . Joined: 10 Oct 2005 Posts: 2613

dess, is it blasphematory if I always set myself up starting with 5 lives instead of 3?
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"This is the most fun I've ever had without being drenched in the blood of my enemies!"

dessgeega · Posted: Thu Nov 09, 2006 9:44 am Post subject:

probably!

on the genny version, default settings, i have no trouble earning extends. i usually have five lives by the time i reach stage 3, which is pretty fair, i feel.
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Dracko · . Joined: 10 Oct 2005 Posts: 2613

Then call me heathen or just a piss-poor player at this game!

Mortifiying Christ, those drills are annoying!
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"This is the most fun I've ever had without being drenched in the blood of my enemies!"

OtakupunkX · . Joined: 23 Mar 2006 Posts: 730

So Strider is apparently going to be on Capcom Classics Collection Vol. 2. The whole compilation looks really, really similar to the PSP version but with Super Street Fighter II Turbo.