English translation of "TAO," the coolest JRPG I've seen in a long time
http://www.boojumsnark.com/tao.html
http://www.romhacking.net/trans/1603/


Quick ROM link in this article about the developer, VAP: http://www.aquinhasa.com/lonely/?p=665#more-665 (These guys sound cool. I'm gonna have to see what the hell that tomato game is.)




I've only had time to poke around in TAO for a couple minutes but I really dig the vibe. (It helps that it does the thing I love where you shift to a different screen for dialog/examining things.)

Dude, this looks awesome. I'm going to download it in a minute, but the graphics and general vibe remind me a little of Rainbow Silkroad.

Sorry, this is kind of WASTE OF SPACE/should had done ages ago but i figured that these posts should had gone here instead/maybe you missed these. It's about my...gaming past

420 games in 1, a chinese nintendo bootleg i've had since i was a little kidbabby. This is really important to me. Including games such as: Binaryland, Sky Destroyer, Assault on Bungeling Bay, Ice Climbers, Chack'n Pop, Nuts & Milk, Popeye, Contra, Lode Runner, Wreck'n'Crew, Duck Hunt (bizarre game without the gun. actually all of these games were pretty bizarre save contra). What else uh i can't remember m- AHH Ninjaman was it?!  Ninja Kun (1985 Jaleco). CHINESE CHESE 1991 i think. Galaxian.
 
And uh... MegaTraveller 2 Quest for the Ancients, Frederik Pohl's Gateway, Battletech: the Crescent Hawks' Revenge, Eye of the Beholder 2, Their Finest Hour: The Battle of Britain, Rome AD92, Panzer General, Zool, Z, Betryal at Krondor, Heart of China, Microprose Formula One Grand Prix, Voyagers of Discovery, HoMM 1 and 2 plus Kings Bounty, Flashback and Another World. Little Big Adventure 1 and 2, Syndicate. Riddle of Master Lu. The Legacy and Creature Shock. Wing Commander 2. Space Quest IV and VI.
 
 
i got exposed to Zeliard as a kid because my big brother played it. i don't know how he had found it from the internet by then. it's still a pretty impressive game.

Quote from: Vellfire on March 08, 2011, 01:49:50 pm

you mean ninja jajamaru-kun?


because i love this game so much.  but there were other ninja kid/jajamaru games which is why i ask if it's this one.  i have the rpg in the series (forgot the name) but i've not made it very far into it because it's in japanese and i've not figured out where the save option is yet ​ 

i've seen ebay sellers that more or less sell nothing but famicom bootlegs, i'm going to buy some someday because i love bootleg games so much.  i was so excited to find my copy of telefang and the fact that it came shipped from israel in an ordinary envelope that was all bent and shit just made it feel more MYSTERIOUS and fantastic

yeah, it's the same series!! wow!! except jajamaru-kun was a uh RPG spinoff and mine is the original game where the series began? nevertheless i uh really like the minimal, kind of MYSTERIOUS esthetics of the original game. most of the time music is just one-channel bleeps doing this mysterious chinese music. the colours are really good too and the symmetry/esthetic design owns. the credits screen is a mid-shot of a japanese tower (with all those funky curving rooftops) that is PULSATING in blue like it was some kind of alien ship?! and in silence the time bonus rings until it hits the zero, waits for a couple of seconds and the tower pulsefades into darkness. every map starts with a pulsating nightsky with a moon and a relief/shadow of the castle/tower against the sky, with this short, pulselike mysterious chinese jingle plays really shortly. game over screen comes after just one death and AGAIN pulselike chinese song while watching couple of sakura leaves fall in wide arches.

idk explaining this makes it sound kinda bland but to be honest, the only way to ever catch some of that FEEL, atmosphere and mystery from interesting NES games is to really play them from a original console on a old tube/analog television. i sound goofy but this is true! i swear it! emulators only do the job technically. who gives a shit about clear graphics as a kid anyways, the television's blurriness/gaming magazine blurry screenshots were the real thing.

also a fun fact: our Nintendo has a US/EU modification in it done by dad apparently?! i don't know if it's due to this but for some reason, as far as i can remember our Nes plays games a bit too SLOWLY! Which means that every or most of the sounds and songs are played more slowly and/or lower pitch!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! wow!! which is the reason why i'm irritated to listen at youtube videos about my old nes games since everything sounds too fast and too high pitched. i can't really help this at all. this is also the reason why i thought that Nesticle played everything wrong so i turned the speed and pitch down from every game in it.

Like aaaa here's a video of Ninja-Kun. It's too fast!! too high-pitched, it sounds tinny and annoying! NOT mysterious!! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TBZFMHxYUKw

Quote

Z

yeah, maybe Dada. Maybe. Truth is that the game was too hard to play when i was young, i think the controls were bad and clumsy?



EDIT1 if you can't tell then yeah i'm indebted to games in many ways. i don't think i've ever got into music in the first place without games. uh important abstract experiences!
this chinese bootleg, old games and old VHS tapes full of bizarre old disney specials and 80's commercials with that great VHS compression.


EDIT2 like lion king for nes aaaa the fucking first map is painted by Mark Rothko and the music has this metallic constant unchanging drum machine and the timbre of the song is fucking DEPRESSION. the perfect fourths/fifths interval at the bass at the end of the song/one cycle is the icing in the cake. unknowingly my first introduction to depression, nick drake would have fell apart if he had played this game in his youth. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=doPbeZ7UWgs


EDIT3 so bottom line YES VELFARRE i think you should get chinese bootleg games. perhaps preferably the ones with lots of games in one cartridge. my cartridge had mindblowing/the most mysterious/inspiring/exciting chinese gold letters, blurry colourful drawings of games that i interpret with my imagination or tried to mime myself and draw. it's a two-piece cartridge, i think the software who did it was Bee-something. i think the other piece is an adaptor of sort? there's a yellow ribbon coming from the other cartridge/part from which you can pull to make sure that the things stays connected. respectively the cartridge colours are grey and ORANGE (holy shit how strange is that).
i really didn't understand that these were unofficial illegal chinese things, i thought that these were all official nintendo stuff with some funky graphics. that's all.

the old VHS my families recorded of ducktales, bugs bunny specials and old disney short movies w/ 80's advertisements had a huge impact on me as a kid (my only touch with 80's world/esthetics as a kid) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Xwi2vPHqTQ

i missed this before

Return Of The Jedi for amiga. everything about this is really good but i especially like  the awkward-looking spaceships that suddenly lurch across the screen in time with the music when you pick a difficulty level and the fantastic crashing-bike sound effects.

English translation of "TAO," the coolest JRPG I've seen in a long time
http://www.boojumsnark.com/tao.html
http://www.romhacking.net/trans/1603/


Quick ROM link in this article about the developer, VAP: http://www.aquinhasa.com/lonely/?p=665#more-665 (These guys sound cool. I'm gonna have to see what the hell that tomato game is.)




I've only had time to poke around in TAO for a couple minutes but I really dig the vibe. (It helps that it does the thing I love where you shift to a different screen for dialog/examining things.)

jesus christ this looks so good. i havent had a chance to play it yet but http://aquinhasa.com/lonely/blog/tao.jpg is the best screenshot i've ever seen. now i just have to wait for someone to discover a secret Bonk RPG betacartridge. . .
 
 
ALSO: ramci showed me Ken's Labyrinth which looks really incredible
 

 
please post more bizarre early shooter / maze games.
 
The Catacomb Abyss #recommended #cemetaries #potions
 
Legend Of The Seven Paladins 3D shaolin monk wanders around abandoned shopping mall / temple / military-industrial complex before murdering ninjas in a maze
 
La Cosa Nostra excellent sounds
 
Isle of Dead weirdly haunting
 
 
i think a few of these were actually made in the same engine as ken's labyrinth, which was also used in stuff like the first duke nukem game i think. the development kit is open source now and i am extremely tempted to try dicking around in it / make 20 incomprehensible kens labyrinth type games to be the videogame equivalent of thoseyoutube playlists with 100 30second videos that form an extremely dense personal mythos

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4D4gMuJAdpQ&feature=related oh my goodness

I played ken's labyrinth when I was a kid, but it looked a lot different than that. different version, I guess. if I can get my epic megagames trial disc working I can show you lots of loopy early 3d games

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4D4gMuJAdpQ&feature=related oh my goodness

Hahaha, yeah. Also, the people who made this game also made the one of the first Genesis emulators, Genecyst, which dripped pixelly, animated blood and guts down your screen whenever you opened the menu.

Oh my god, look at the character endings. This is Bart the General.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BNcqowFo33k&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lGyGLoWXESU&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WqSsKbyg1ww&feature=related

Uuuuuuurrrrh.......
Uuuuuuurrrrh.......

ahaha I kind of got weirded out from the whole Nesticle/Genecyst thing back in 2000-something but I thought it was just oh it's just some blood and guts you're such a prude man overly squeamish but yeah this guy are sick. Amazing I got that vibe from just the AESTHETICS of the blood though (drips form rorschach test for whether you're a bart the general dude)

Hahaha, yeah. Also, the people who made this game also made the one of the first Genesis emulators, Genecyst, which dripped pixelly, animated blood and guts down your screen whenever you opened the menu.

ahahahaha holy shit. also GENECYST sounds like something from a background poster in an old duke nukem level or something.
 
 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tf1B0f2ggZA
Nightbreed: The Interactive Movie

holy shitttttt

whoa i actually played this a lot as a kid but could never remember the name! I remember it playing like a Choose You Adventure book with the page numbers all scrambled and no apparant means of progression. Go to asylum and get arrested or go to cemetary and get eaten by dogs / bat things or go to cemetary and then leave quickly and get confronted with strange psychologist person and gunned down by police.
 
 
also Tao is incredible, the music+graphics in the first town alone jesus christ. I haven't figured out how to progress much / at all (I went to the temple and the sage guy outside town and all the buildings I could find) but yeah i really like trying to navigate the strange menus and dialogue (also the way the save(??) system is presented as a mystic scroll filled with incomprehensible letters). the mu training ghost from earthbound looks on in astonishment....

 
i dont know where this is from

Hahaha, yeah. Also, the people who made this game also made the one of the first Genesis emulators, Genecyst, which dripped pixelly, animated blood and guts down your screen whenever you opened the menu.

I remember this I think. Was it the one where the cursor was a pointing severed arm that dripped blood as well?

http://www.pinknews.co.uk/2011/04/05/woman-attacks-evil-homosexual-gaugin-painting/

ahahaa

forgot this isn't gamesthread. does my sig make anyone else's teeth hurt?