GREATREDSPIRIT'S PROFILE

This won't be RBY talk, but I wish Nintendo would shake up their formula. Instead of starting in Town X in some corner where you can choose from one of three Pokemon, a Fire, Water, and Grass type that you'll never see in the wild. The first thing you'll see is a normal type, or a normal/flying type. It takes several badges before you finally have some real variety to your team (if ever, in D/P there was a grand total of two fire types and one was the starter that you'll never see again). How long does it take to get some Ice types?

The series is an incredible railroad. Sure there looks like there's a lot of ways to go but you're always being forced into a particular path (with a few minor side paths) because of stupid obstacles that you can only overcome via HM moves. Moves that mostly suck (Surf being the major exception, Waterfall isn't too bad either) and eat up your precious 4 moves per creature. HM Slaves aren't uncommon and they restrict your party: One guy is just there to deal with the bloody obstacles like stupid plants.

I think the best solution to both problems would be to make the area a non-linear style game. You start in your home town, get a wide selection of pokemon (of most/all types), maybe have it have high/max IVs to improve your 'starter', and get pushed out the door. Then you have not one, but several places to go. You could go to the Forest and find the bug/plant/flying/poison/normal types, cave for ground/rock/fire/ice/normal/notZubatorGeodude, or some other areas. Areas could be handled by having a range of leveled pokemon: Lets say Area D has level 10-25, and they levels that show up would be within 4 levels of your party's average level. It can be a place to grind for a while and not be a regular steamroll after a couple levels but it still has a cap. Gyms could work on a similar level: When you arrive at a gym all the trainers+leader have a level relative to yours so you can tackle the gyms in any order. Things like Team Rocket could be a huge sidequest.

Really, most of it is to do two things:
- Make the game less of a train ride
- Add a lot more replayability


Multiple saves would be nice too :(


And the Battle Tower is fucking cheating bastard. It can go and jump in a fire and burn to death.

I didn't mind how Suikoden 1 handled it. You lost a character and his EXP but you could plop a level 1 character in your party and in three fights he'd be in reach of the rest of the group due to how the EXP was scaled. The only significant loss gameplay wise was the money spent upgrading the lost character's weapon. The rest of the equipment shows up in your inventory ready for use. There's also scores of other characters available to take the now open slot in your party, and the character lost wasn't the greatest anyways.

Plus its possible to get that character back at the end of the game. It does kinda cheapen the loss, but its nice to get him back :)

Uncompressed a SNES game like Secret of Evermore could be around 50-70Mb, or 6-9MB.

Source: http://www.super-nes.com/evermoreinterview.htm
Its in the resposne to the 11th question.


I find non-MIDI music and sounds tend to be what drives up the size of games. I add the RTP sounds to my game to make it standalone and I make my game grow from 2MB to 10MB (to be fair there was some RTP graphics included, but all the RTP graphics don't match up to the RTP sounds). I'm not sure how much space sounds would take up on the SNES, but I can't imagine its very much (the sound would probably just be similar to music: Sound samples played like the music).

Heh, lets just move on. Maybe we should reduce the time there is for each screenshot just to keep things moving. 24 hours maybe?

Anyways, here's the solution to the last couple screens I posted that nobody got:


Ice Hockey for the NES


Hype: Time Quest for the PC (I admit the screen is pretty small for the game)


Faxanadu for the NES

http://www.square-enix.co.jp/ctds/


I'm hoping for a remake ala FF4DS instead of a port with some changes+retranslation ala FF4/5/6 Advance.


Of course, I'd easily buy either :(