Sadly, American players wouldn't get the best basketball game on the system: the sheer insanity of Nekketsu! Street Basket, the Kunio-Kun combat-fueled take on 2v2 b-ball. I finally got to play it a few years back in the Kunio-Kun Collection and was immediately baffled that it never came stateside.
My favorite episodes are the ones that unlock long-hidden memories… I have seen a ton of Hoops played, someone in my childhood played a ton of Hoops near me
8:36 "I'm not sure that the NES Zapper can even support multiple guns due to the way that it registers and tracks shots." I must regretfully remind you that Chiller exists. It has a co-op mode that even tracks both players' scores separately. You too can experience the unparalleled friendship bonding moment of... whatever horrible thing it is you're doing in Chiller.
Interesting, I was not aware of that feature in Chiller. The fact that the only NES game to make use of two light guns was an unauthorized release makes me wonder if they exploited some sort of tech edge case that Nintendo didn't officially sanction or support.
@@JeremyParishIt's possible. I read recently that Nintendo specifically wouldn't pass games that even used undocumented opcodes. (I wonder if that was to keep their options open if they decided to go with another supplier of 6502-like chips, that might execute those opcodes differently?)
Oh man, I remember renting Shooting Range from my local pharmacy on the weekends when I was a kid. I had totally forgotten about that game. Sure, it was boring, but I have a soft spot for its sprite work.
I think you're correct about software on game platform having distinctive looks deriving in part from their hardware limitations and in part from the culture of the developers. The NES has fairly limited space for characters (or "cards") in its tilemap, but bankswitching can give it practically unlimited numbers of tilemaps that can be switched between. It has 64 hardware sprites, but they're each only 8x8 in size, and more than eight on one scan line requires flickering or else extra sprites just won't be drawn, and each sprite can only have three colors, so more than that requires using extra sprites to make up for it. When you get used to the limitations of a platform, when a game finds a way to overcome them, like the use of the background to present extra moving elements like Little Mac in Punch-Out, or Dutch in Predator, or bosses in countless other games, it's a little shocking. The MMC5 mapper chip can do really clever tricks like overcoming palette limitations, by (I'm going by memory here) allowing certain tiles to be used as markers to the chip to change its palette while it's being drawn, all to make that little extra impression upon the player. (I think it was only used in that capacity in some of the late Koei Famicom games.)
Two things... NES sprites can be 8x8 or 8x16 in size. Using 8x16 sprites doubles the total area that could be covered by sprites on the screen. And MMC5 effectively makes the color palette selection attributes 8x8 sized rather than 16x16 size for background tiles. The palette never actually changes. Furthermore, it's possible to get 16x8 size attributes on stock hardware. Klax uses scrolling tricks to pull this off.
I think another key thing is the very specific color range the NES has- it seems like they, for one reason or another, wanted to avoid overly saturated colors and went with pastel shades, and a LOT of games make extensive use of white and grey. (Similar to how the Atari 2600 also goes for less-saturated colors.) Compare this to the SMS, which not only had more colors but leaned towards bright ones by default. Like this was something that surprised me when I got a Switch and NSO, how *grey* some of these old games are. And yet it works!
Yeah, no, I definitely knew exactly what you meant by "NES look" as soon as you showed footage lol I was GOING to specifically classify it as "early to mid life NES" because I feel like even the cheapest late-cycle games had a little more going for it than what's on offer here, but then I actually looked at screenshots of some of the lower profile entries in the final year of the console's lifecycle and... yeah. No. This is definitely an aesthetic that would stick with the console to it's final days lol From Mr Doc to Dr Jones, keeping traditions alive for a good 15 years lol
I remember randomly picking up Shooting Range from the flea market as a kid. I didn't realize you needed to use the d-pad to move the camera (cuz how many zapper games used the controller??). So I just kinda sat there staring at a mostly lifeless screen waiting for occasional targets to mosey by as time ticked down, confused.
It blows my mind how you can pull 12 minutes out of a decent basketball game without any real provenance and a bland target shooting game. As always, wonderful work!
Wow. These sure are video games you can play. Hoops at least has some soul to it, even if it isn't an all-timer, but Shooting range just makes me glad Bandai is out of games to put out on NES for this year. The quota is the real "Nintendo Seal of Quality" by preventing more Bandai from flooding shelves.
3rd parties of the day report that Nintendo also used a scoring system to evaluate their releases and made suggestions: the game that became the Immortal originally gave you a single life, for example. Nintendo's business practices may have been unethical, but they did a lot to raise the minimum standard of mainstream console gaming and prevent another North American crash. Nothing on NES is as bad as Super Monkey Daiboken on Famicom or Robocop's original unpatched C64 game. (Great graphics and sound, fun gameplay, can't be beaten because the developers locked an unfinished stage behind an impossible time limit.)
Aicom winds up reusing Hoops code in a full court game which should turn up for you toward the end of 1989. It doesn't work as well, unfortunately. You left a double line read in at the next episode preview if you want to fix that before this goes to the general public.
Hoops just felt like a “why bother?” game when I played it upon release, as I had Double Dribble and had played a lot of One On One for prior gen systems. It didn’t feel like it was anything special compared to either. Shooting Range? Have not played it but it comes off as shovelware in discount bins down the road like Orb3D and Destination Earthstar. The limits of zapper tech had become very apparent by the time Operation Wolf came out, especially in comparison to Sega’s Gangster Town, so there was little reason to break out the gun unless you wanted to play Duck Hunt.
Well, it's nice that Jeremy somewhat liked Hoops which also had a Game Boy version he's already discussed. And Shooting Range is the most Bandai game to ever Bandai or as Jeremy says "runny oatmeal".
I had a friend in Jr. high that had this game most of his library was sports stuff. so definitely sank my fair share of hours into this one! I never knew about the 'counter pick' thing the CPU does depending on who you're playing as, I suppose it makes sense. Shooting Range sure did exist. Not one I ever got around to I think 99% of the NES stuff I played never used the zapper.
I approve of Hoops, mechanically dull though it looks to just be pushing against the CPU opponent, for at least having a "story mode" no matter how light, and using that story mode to boldly discuss the abuses that can occur in college sports and make us question just what kind of thing we allow coaches and leaders to get away with. To think, an NES game that was so forward thinking...
You're certainly right that NES games have a distinctive and unique look that no other games on any other platforms share. Especially as consoles got more powerful, graphics became more and more homogenised (particularly as games began to get direct ports across multiple platforms), but even back in the day no other platform has ever been as instantly recognisable by its graphical style along as the Famicom/NES.
For some reason I played Hoops quite often as a kid. I am not sure why. I don't even really like sports games. For some reason Hoops was different, and I eventually ended up buying a copy.
Ah, Bland Bandai. Better than the other forms of Bandai we would see in the future. Hoops seems pretty fun with a 2P, whereas I actually had to remember Shooting Gallery in spite of just watching the video.
Great video as always, Jeremy. Hoops is actually closer to GBA Championship Basketball then 1 on 1 or Double Dribble. Having played all four, I take One on One first then Hoops.
Hoops was cool at least for me as a kid we only ever had one hoop so it was like a video game of basketball that we played at the time so it felt better then it prolly was
I want to say around the time Ninja Gaiden came out? I picked that one up at launch and could swear I remember struck by the revamped seal design. But it has been 35 years, so who knows if I'm misremembering. I'm old, man.
@@JeremyParish yes, some of the players don't suck at all and some are terrible. If you mean RBI sucks, I guess that's an opinion...but you are going to be very alone if you're going to posit that Hoops is somehow better
@@brandonb6005 correct. There is no rational argument to say Hoops is a better game than RBI Baseball unless someone loves basketball and hates baseball with the fire of a thousand suns.
Sadly, American players wouldn't get the best basketball game on the system: the sheer insanity of Nekketsu! Street Basket, the Kunio-Kun combat-fueled take on 2v2 b-ball. I finally got to play it a few years back in the Kunio-Kun Collection and was immediately baffled that it never came stateside.
The editing on your videos is like ASMR to me
My favorite episodes are the ones that unlock long-hidden memories… I have seen a ton of Hoops played, someone in my childhood played a ton of Hoops near me
8:36 "I'm not sure that the NES Zapper can even support multiple guns due to the way that it registers and tracks shots."
I must regretfully remind you that Chiller exists. It has a co-op mode that even tracks both players' scores separately. You too can experience the unparalleled friendship bonding moment of... whatever horrible thing it is you're doing in Chiller.
Aha, that's the game I was thinking of. IIRC it's the only game on the system that supports two guns. Which is fitting, for a game like Chiller.
Interesting, I was not aware of that feature in Chiller. The fact that the only NES game to make use of two light guns was an unauthorized release makes me wonder if they exploited some sort of tech edge case that Nintendo didn't officially sanction or support.
@@JeremyParishIt's possible. I read recently that Nintendo specifically wouldn't pass games that even used undocumented opcodes. (I wonder if that was to keep their options open if they decided to go with another supplier of 6502-like chips, that might execute those opcodes differently?)
Oh man, I remember renting Shooting Range from my local pharmacy on the weekends when I was a kid. I had totally forgotten about that game. Sure, it was boring, but I have a soft spot for its sprite work.
I think you're correct about software on game platform having distinctive looks deriving in part from their hardware limitations and in part from the culture of the developers. The NES has fairly limited space for characters (or "cards") in its tilemap, but bankswitching can give it practically unlimited numbers of tilemaps that can be switched between. It has 64 hardware sprites, but they're each only 8x8 in size, and more than eight on one scan line requires flickering or else extra sprites just won't be drawn, and each sprite can only have three colors, so more than that requires using extra sprites to make up for it.
When you get used to the limitations of a platform, when a game finds a way to overcome them, like the use of the background to present extra moving elements like Little Mac in Punch-Out, or Dutch in Predator, or bosses in countless other games, it's a little shocking. The MMC5 mapper chip can do really clever tricks like overcoming palette limitations, by (I'm going by memory here) allowing certain tiles to be used as markers to the chip to change its palette while it's being drawn, all to make that little extra impression upon the player. (I think it was only used in that capacity in some of the late Koei Famicom games.)
Two things... NES sprites can be 8x8 or 8x16 in size. Using 8x16 sprites doubles the total area that could be covered by sprites on the screen. And MMC5 effectively makes the color palette selection attributes 8x8 sized rather than 16x16 size for background tiles. The palette never actually changes. Furthermore, it's possible to get 16x8 size attributes on stock hardware. Klax uses scrolling tricks to pull this off.
@@Dwedit This just goes to show what going by pure memory gets me, hah.
I think another key thing is the very specific color range the NES has- it seems like they, for one reason or another, wanted to avoid overly saturated colors and went with pastel shades, and a LOT of games make extensive use of white and grey. (Similar to how the Atari 2600 also goes for less-saturated colors.) Compare this to the SMS, which not only had more colors but leaned towards bright ones by default.
Like this was something that surprised me when I got a Switch and NSO, how *grey* some of these old games are. And yet it works!
@@EvanCWatersI hadn't thought about the SMS having brighter colors, but I think you're right. Good observation!
Yeah, no, I definitely knew exactly what you meant by "NES look" as soon as you showed footage lol I was GOING to specifically classify it as "early to mid life NES" because I feel like even the cheapest late-cycle games had a little more going for it than what's on offer here, but then I actually looked at screenshots of some of the lower profile entries in the final year of the console's lifecycle and... yeah. No. This is definitely an aesthetic that would stick with the console to it's final days lol From Mr Doc to Dr Jones, keeping traditions alive for a good 15 years lol
There's nothing bizarre about Bo Jackson's dominance. The cat knows football.
Bo knows...
Bo don't know Diddley.
Maybe it's nostalgia talking a bit, but I actually enjoy Shooting Range quite a bit. I did as a kid and when I played it last, I still do.
As a native United Statesian, I never leave home without my cowboy hat! Cheers from New England.
“The only threat to your health is your own incompetence.” A succinct description of most modern medical advice.
I remember randomly picking up Shooting Range from the flea market as a kid. I didn't realize you needed to use the d-pad to move the camera (cuz how many zapper games used the controller??). So I just kinda sat there staring at a mostly lifeless screen waiting for occasional targets to mosey by as time ticked down, confused.
The Hoops background track can't help but remind me of the Sesame Street theme song.
It blows my mind how you can pull 12 minutes out of a decent basketball game without any real provenance and a bland target shooting game. As always, wonderful work!
Wow. These sure are video games you can play. Hoops at least has some soul to it, even if it isn't an all-timer, but Shooting range just makes me glad Bandai is out of games to put out on NES for this year. The quota is the real "Nintendo Seal of Quality" by preventing more Bandai from flooding shelves.
3rd parties of the day report that Nintendo also used a scoring system to evaluate their releases and made suggestions: the game that became the Immortal originally gave you a single life, for example.
Nintendo's business practices may have been unethical, but they did a lot to raise the minimum standard of mainstream console gaming and prevent another North American crash.
Nothing on NES is as bad as Super Monkey Daiboken on Famicom or Robocop's original unpatched C64 game. (Great graphics and sound, fun gameplay, can't be beaten because the developers locked an unfinished stage behind an impossible time limit.)
Aicom winds up reusing Hoops code in a full court game which should turn up for you toward the end of 1989. It doesn't work as well, unfortunately.
You left a double line read in at the next episode preview if you want to fix that before this goes to the general public.
Is Mr. Doc meant to be Julius Irving, who happened to be passing when teams were picked, a la Ralph getting Jose Canseco on his team?
I assume it's based on those old Spalding Basketball ads that you saw in comic books.
got a "46 seconds ago" and I still wasn't first.. you've got some dedicated fans JP! Must be "Patreons"
I honestly thought the fact that the "next time on NES..." was kept in was a reference to the next in the series for a moment.
Played a lot of Double Dribble and One on One, somehow always missed Hoops. It does have a charming look.
"Get your weapons ready"...
A Mega Man 2 episode in the offing? Please say yes. Please say yes...
Next episode 128 please!
It's gotta be. I can't think of another game that has that exact dialog, let alone one from 1989.
Hoops just felt like a “why bother?” game when I played it upon release, as I had Double Dribble and had played a lot of One On One for prior gen systems.
It didn’t feel like it was anything special compared to either.
Shooting Range? Have not played it but it comes off as shovelware in discount bins down the road like Orb3D and Destination Earthstar.
The limits of zapper tech had become very apparent by the time Operation Wolf came out, especially in comparison to Sega’s Gangster Town, so there was little reason to break out the gun unless you wanted to play Duck Hunt.
Hoops is entirely skippable and the relative praise it receives here is baffling
damn...never expected to see jeremy flub a line lol
Well, it's nice that Jeremy somewhat liked Hoops which also had a Game Boy version he's already discussed. And Shooting Range is the most Bandai game to ever Bandai or as Jeremy says "runny oatmeal".
The video on TMNT can't come soon enough!
Even though shooting range looks like it sucks always cool to have another lightgun game since there wasn't that many
I had a friend in Jr. high that had this game most of his library was sports stuff. so definitely sank my fair share of hours into this one! I never knew about the 'counter pick' thing the CPU does depending on who you're playing as, I suppose it makes sense.
Shooting Range sure did exist. Not one I ever got around to I think 99% of the NES stuff I played never used the zapper.
I approve of Hoops, mechanically dull though it looks to just be pushing against the CPU opponent, for at least having a "story mode" no matter how light, and using that story mode to boldly discuss the abuses that can occur in college sports and make us question just what kind of thing we allow coaches and leaders to get away with. To think, an NES game that was so forward thinking...
You're certainly right that NES games have a distinctive and unique look that no other games on any other platforms share. Especially as consoles got more powerful, graphics became more and more homogenised (particularly as games began to get direct ports across multiple platforms), but even back in the day no other platform has ever been as instantly recognisable by its graphical style along as the Famicom/NES.
Hoops! has a tremendous two player cooperative mode. I'm sure you'll get to All-Pro Basketball by Vic Tokai soon enough!
For some reason I played Hoops quite often as a kid. I am not sure why. I don't even really like sports games. For some reason Hoops was different, and I eventually ended up buying a copy.
Ah, Bland Bandai. Better than the other forms of Bandai we would see in the future. Hoops seems pretty fun with a 2P, whereas I actually had to remember Shooting Gallery in spite of just watching the video.
Great video as always, Jeremy. Hoops is actually closer to GBA Championship Basketball then 1 on 1 or Double Dribble. Having played all four, I take One on One first then Hoops.
Hoops was cool at least for me as a kid we only ever had one hoop so it was like a video game of basketball that we played at the time so it felt better then it prolly was
Both felt like very "games of their time"..! 😅
When did the Nintendo seal of quality change from the original circle to the oval we know today? Maybe I missed the change in an earlier 1989 video...
I want to say around the time Ninja Gaiden came out? I picked that one up at launch and could swear I remember struck by the revamped seal design. But it has been 35 years, so who knows if I'm misremembering. I'm old, man.
I get what you mean by the NES look at the time.
Always great content Jeremy!
Man I played the hell out of Hoops back in the day.
There are definitely VERY substantial variances in player skill in RBI Baseball
Varying degrees of suck
@@JeremyParish yes, some of the players don't suck at all and some are terrible. If you mean RBI sucks, I guess that's an opinion...but you are going to be very alone if you're going to posit that Hoops is somehow better
Hoops has an exhibition mode that means you don't have to play it yourself, which automatically puts it in the top tier of 8-bit sports games.
@@JeremyParishMost of the Tecmo sports games had that same option, I believe. I think RBI 1 and Baseball Simulator 1.000 did as well.
@@brandonb6005 correct. There is no rational argument to say Hoops is a better game than RBI Baseball unless someone loves basketball and hates baseball with the fire of a thousand suns.
Sounds like my all-time favorite game is coming up next week, can't wait
My favorite player was Doctor Senator.
Hoops looks excellent. 😀👍🏀🎮
Hops, i really like that game
𝘔𝘦𝘨𝘢 𝘔𝘢𝘯 2 is next. I know it.