Battletoads 2020 - Chug my dumptruck you stinky wimps, BEEP BEEP, GARBAGE BUTT BACKING U-U-U-UP!

[Smaug's Smokey Hole]

Games were hard because the developers had an arcade mindset and arcade games are not long. A game like Contra is 20-25 minutes long and that goes for a lot of the other side-scrolling action games and shmups. The first wave of games for the NES, the black box games, were either arcade games or arcade-likes. This changed with games that could never be arcade games like Zelda, RPGs, action-rpgs and other games. Arcade Shadowgate would have been funny to see, it would be like the "My Dinner With Andre" game from The Simpsons.

Rare knew what they were doing, they talk about it in the Rare Replay interviews. The last boss of the Battletoads arcade game was straight up rigged.

 

[Celebrate Nite]

Incidentally, if you're not a fan of "hard as balls" difficulty in games (especially NES ones), some regions (like japan) actually change a few things to make the games playable and not "hair-pulling" frustrating.

The Japanese version of Battletoads is one example. Another I can think of is Dynamite Headdy

 

[ducktales4gameboy]

Goldeneye 25

It got C&Ded and is becoming it's own thing. Actually makes me more optimistic since they can improvise without pissing off fans of the original and I always loved the higher difficulty = more objectives style.

Also regarding Treasure's difficulty spikes, I'd blame the localization teams rather than the devs. Most of their J releases are pretty fair midrange but any of them that got an english release requiring text/graphical editing got a difficulty bump as well. Dynamite Headdy and Silhouette Mirage are two I know got huge changes, while Gunstar Heroes is notably easier than the rest of their 16-bit output due to it being an unaltered global release containing all langs in one cart.

Pokemon Clover, AM2R, Sonic Mania, that demo of Sonic Genesis for the GBA that's actually playable, Newer Super Mario Bros. for both the DS and Wii, etc. I wonder how many other examples i'm missing.

Super Demo World and Mega Man Maker come to mind. Neither are perfect but both take the original mario/megaman formulae and expand on them without going into kaizo hell difficulty.

E: Come to think of it, the Dynamite Headdy fan translation probably fits here too. Restores the original J difficulty and a whole lot of plot/text/story that got axed in localization for whatever reason.

 

[Haramburger]

Startropics (including that goddamn "oh dip your instruction booklet in water to find out wtf the code is to get to chapter 5" shit that if you didn't own, then fuck you)

To be fair Nintendo Power proliferated the code for people who "lost" the letter from Dr. J. and it spread quite a bit. I always remembered it by associating it with airplanes, 747 is pretty easy to remember, possibly to even guess if you're trying to think of significant 3-digit codes.

 

[Back me up!]

Did the original Battletoads sell well because of Rare or the TMNT ripoff?

As a kid from that era I would say it being Rare was a big part of it with the TMNT stuff just helping. Another one was that Battletoads was a unique as hell game that really had some novel concepts each and every level. The shock of fighting the boss from the boss perspective was a little mind blowing as a kid and then each and level afterwards was its own unique thing with a its own unique gimmick.

 

[SamTheEagle]

Did the original Battletoads sell well because of Rare or the TMNT ripoff?

I just really liked frogs and toads and video games (heck, I still do). Don't remember thinking of Battletoads as a Rare property or TMNT ripoff when I was a kid.

 

[BrunoMattei]

Incidentally, if you're not a fan of "hard as balls" difficulty in games (especially NES ones), some regions (like japan) actually change a few things to make the games playable and not "hair-pulling" frustrating.

The Japanese version of Battletoads is one example. Another I can think of is Dynamite Headdy

The Genesis version of Battletoads is easier too and is more generous with getting extra lives.

 

[Archeops]

>skip to random point in video
>first thing I hear is "this version of Battletoads NEEDS to be a cartoon series"
View attachment 1552536

What’s even funnier is that a pilot for a Battletoads cartoon exists, but these dullards wouldn’t want it since it’s based off of the OG game and it’s made by DiC.

 

[Creep3r]

Biker Mice from Mars had a decent run.

It also had a sequel series I think where they took stuff more seriously apparently and lasted two seasons.

 

[Commander X]

Having looked over what's going on in the Neo Battletoads, you have to really wonder who the people behind them are pandering to in reboots like this. Only older people would even get the "self aware" jabs, it's all part of the weird trend of sequels/reboots going out of their way to poo-poo on fans of the originals. How much is it to ask for writers of reboots to actually have any degree of respect for the project and don't just go into it to "own" the "chud" fans or whatever.

What I've seen with Battletoads, like other such reboots, is that it draws the people who just kneejerk go to bat for any reboot of anything because it (in their minds, not in actuality) owns people they don't like (in theory, they made these people up). People like this didn’t play the OG game or watch the original movie/tv series, or whatever, and they’re not interested in the new ones either- they only rush to defend it because the aforementioned venomous jabs taken at fans of the originals are something they instinctively align with. And as more and more of these reboots, especially the explicitly "woke" ones, run aground on the shores of failure, these people just seem to get madder and madder about that.

 

[Dom Cruise]

Having looked over what's going on in the Neo Battletoads, you have to really wonder who the people behind them are pandering to in reboots like this. Only older people would even get the "self aware" jabs, it's all part of the weird trend of sequels/reboots going out of their way to poo-poo on fans of the original. How much is it to ask for writers of reboots to actually have any degree of respect for the project and don't just go into it to "own" the "chud" fans or whatever.

What I've seen with Battletoads, like other such reboots, is that it draws the people who just kneejerk go to bat for any reboot of anything because it (in their minds, not in actuality) owns people they don't like (in theory, they made these people up). People like this didn’t play the OG game or watch the original movie/tv series, or whatever, and they’re not interested in the new ones either- they only rush to defend it because the aforementioned venomous jabs taken at fans of the originals are something they instinctively align with. And as more and more of these reboots, especially the explicitly "woke" ones, run aground on the shores of failure, these people just seem to get madder and madder about that.

The "appeal" of everything made by SJWs is so that other SJWs can look at it and go "I bet THIS will really piss off the manbabies!" and pat themselves on the back for being so much better people than them and laugh at the idea of the "manbabies" seething that they took another thing away from the "toxic" fans.

They are essentially cultural barbarians cutting a swathe through nerd culture which they see as something "toxic" that must be destroyed, they have no genuine love or appreciation for any of this stuff.

 

[Wonderful Id]

Incidentally, if you're not a fan of "hard as balls" difficulty in games (especially NES ones), some regions (like japan) actually change a few things to make the games playable and not "hair-pulling" frustrating.

The Japanese version of Battletoads is one example. Another I can think of is Dynamite Headdy

A lot of this was also reversed, stuff from Japan getting more difficult. Japan did not have a rental market for games (illegal there), so if you could easily beat a game within a couple of hours of buying it, wasn't as big of a deal. A major example I remember is the US version of Ninja Gaiden 3. The biggest change is the removal of the password system so you had to beat it in one go, but enemies did more damage, you had fewer continues I believe, and there were fewer power ups.

 

[Pissmaster]

Nintendo Hard exists as a thing because rentals were a big thing back in the 90s. When a game can be plowed through in a 24-hour rental you're going to lose a potential sale, so a lot of games either rely on a really high skill ceiling (solar jetman is a good example of Rare doing this) or just having one level that's really, really fucking hard to wall off the rest of the content from normies.

See also : the Earthworm Jim underwater bubble ship level, TMNT's dam/bomb defusal, Stampede in genesis Lion King and the increasing ramp of bullshit in the later levels of the NES ninja gaiden games.

There was an episode of Game Center CX where Arino asked Satoru Iwata why old games were hard. Satoru said it was because the designers tended to get really good at video games, and just didn't think to tone down the difficulty for the customers. They were making games for their level, not ours, more or less.

 

[Dom Cruise]

A lot of this was also reversed, stuff from Japan getting more difficult. Japan did not have a rental market for games (illegal there), so if you could easily beat a game within a couple of hours of buying it, wasn't as big of a deal. A major example I remember is the US version of Ninja Gaiden 3. The biggest change is the removal of the password system so you had to beat it in one go, but enemies did more damage, you had fewer continues I believe, and there were fewer power ups.

I really wonder whether the fact that you can't rent games in Japan helped or hindered creativity.

Did Japanese games used to be so creative because of the lack of a rental market or would a rental market have helped oddball games like Rule of Rose be more profitable?

 

[Marissa Moira]

I heard about the official NES Re-issue cart that is happening.

It's 100 bucks for a cart only release, the NES cart doesn't come in a flat gray but it's the clear neon green color shell that those 101 in 1 knock off carts have. It's from the same people who made that Street Fighter 2 re-issue cart that fried your SNES.

I bought the original battle toads cart only (and from gamestop) for like 12 bucks.

 

[Rover]

Why didn't they just shit out a pixel art battletoads in like a year or two that changes nothing from the nes game besides maybe higher quality pixel art and new levels.

Even that would've been better.

 

[Smaug's Smokey Hole]

I really wonder whether the fact that you can't rent games in Japan helped or hindered creativity.

There were tons of demo stations where people could test the game to make up for it, I don't know what the limitations of those were but making a game easier instead of harder seems counterproductive if someone can beat it without paying.

 

[No. 7 cat]

I thought Battletoads was something to prank Gamestop or whatever.

 

[BOONES]

Lol more like BattleTards.

 

[Marissa Moira]

People were not hurting in japan if they wanted to try out a game before paying for it.

They had Arcades back then and arcade owners would set up console rooms for a small entry fee, companies had demo stations they would also position in arcades. You also had actual arcade games and shit that console ports would be based on. You also had a fuckload of magazines.

Word got around if a game sucked or not.

The best documented instances of people early on going apeshit over a game is Dragon Quest 1, the night before nobody cared. Suddenly on release day it was everywhere.