Five NES Games That Don't Look Like NES Games

If you're a fan of the NES you can probably spot it's games from a mile away, but there's a few that do things a bit differently. NES games that don't seem like NES games.
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NES Monochrome Mode:
• The Secret 'Game Boy' ...
NES Elite:
• The Amazing NES Elite ...
Games featured:
00:00 Intro
00:45 Noah's Ark
07:17 Gemfire
11:27 Cosmic Epsilon
15:09 Metal Slader Glory
20:17 Lagrange Point
24:58 Patreon thanks and ending

[@Dwedit]

Final Fantasy 1 used the monochrome mode feature to do a light beam effect when you light an orb. For a long time, emulators didn't support it. It also combined the color-emphasis bits with changing the palette colors when you enter the menu. Meanwhile, Dragon Warrior 1 and 2 used monochrome mode for a very minor effect. They flash the screen when someone casts a spell. Not all that special.

[@B0BBarker]

Oh hey. It's you.

[@dycedargselderbrother5353]

I've always wondered how that rhombus beam was done in FF1.

[@ChibiKami]

@@wotzinator6282 probably because 1: low active engagement necessitates creating an entertaining interface, and 2: they could without worrying about performance hits

[@fungo6631]

The grayscale mode limits the palette choice to a few colors, apparently omitting some palette. It's not a grayscale mode where the color signal is removed, but simply limits you to some predefined colors that are grayscale. From nesdev wiki: "Bit 0 (of the PPU Mask register at $2001) controls a greyscale mode, which causes the palette to use only the colors from the grey column: $00, $10, $20, $30. This is implemented as a bitwise AND with $30 on any value read from PPU $3F00-$3FFF, both on the display and through PPUDATA" If you look at the palette, you'll see the grayscale mode is actually worse than the Gameboy, as you can use only 3 colors instead of 4 and you don't even get to use black.

[@DeathMetalDerf]

I absolutely LOVE your work. I doubt you'll ever see this, but thanks to you and your videos, I've gotten to play many games I missed as a kid, and some of them have truly been hidden gems for me. Thank you!

[@Sharopolis]

Thank you! My channel is still small enough that I do at least see all the comments even if I don't reply. Yours is much appreciated!

[@kirswords8587]

Worrrrd, got a new sub from me!!

[@michaeln8925]

​@@Sharopolis There are games still being made for the NES A lot of them by Shenzhen technology they put Final Fantasy 4 and 7 and Chrono Trigger and lots of Pokémon games from Gameboy onto the NES

[@jasonblalock4429]

OK, learning that KOEI ran their NES strategy games in a VM is one of the more interesting tidbits I've come across in awhile. I wonder if anyone else did that. And 19:10 holy CRAP. This may be the best animation I've ever seen in an official NES game. Wow.

[@WillowEpp]

Building games entirely in some kind of VM is surprisingly common in that era. Not sure about the NES *specifically,* but Éric Chahi's Another World is probably one of the most well-known examples.

[@jasonblalock4429]

@@WillowEpp Yeah, pretty sure you're right about Another World. For that matter, I've long suspected that the SNES version of Wing Commander is running in some sort of VM, or at least a direct engine port. But there's just no information on the technical side of it.

[@WillowEpp]

@@jasonblalock4429 One that always surprises people is Seiken Densetsu 3 runs in a threaded preemptive RTOS with three mutually exclusive bytecode interpreters. ᕙ⁠(⁠⇀⁠‸⁠↼⁠‶⁠)⁠ᕗ

[@LuwiigiMaster]

The abysmal performance of Kirby's Adventure is because all the logic was running in a VM. Someone disabled the VM routines and, while the enemies don't do anything anymore, the game does not slow down at the drop of the hat. This was made during the tail end of the Famicom's life and HAL underwent a major restructuring since being bought by Nintendo, so the skilled programmers of the pre-Kirby era were axed.

[@Mike14264]

Indeed, that was beautifully smooth...

[@ImSquiggs]

I love that water effect in Noah's Ark... that's some SNES-era Super Mario World tech right there, haha. And even SMW can't do that without severely limiting the other sprites that can be on screen.

[@Dwedit]

SNES Super Mario World worked around the transparency limitation by using fake transparency instead for a few levels. Just put a checkerboard of transparent pixels into the tiles. Instant fake transparency. Much later games like Kirby 3 used the hi-res mode for half transparency instead.

[@MaxwelThuThu]

Mega Man X does a similar effect in the launch octopus stage. They used a blue translucent mask layer for the water instead of a tiled layer. Most games uses translucent BG3, sometimes dithered like SMW.

[@Dwedit]

@@MaxwelThuThu Thing is that you could also do that same effect by palette changes alone. That would allow you to use color math on something else.

[@CarlMakesVideos]

For anyone who, like me, just learned about Metal Slader Glory and the SFC director's cut version, I did some searching, and the same group that made the original version's english patch is working on a patch for the director's cut version. Also, apparently Metal Slader Glory Director's Cut was the final game officially released for the super famicom (if we don't count weird exceptions not released on cartridge, like starfox 2).

[@ratix98]

For Lagrange point, its like they took what they learned from MADARA and ESPER DREAM 2 and cranked the everything dial to 11. Excellent cutscenes abound and great music. Konami may not have the rpg wheelhouse staples everyone knows but what they did do was quite unique

[@serjicus]

*battle music plays*

[@hhhhhhhhhhhhh...]

i think both of those games actually came out after lagrange point lmao. or at least esper dream 2 did

[@ratix98]

@@hhhhhhhhhhhhh... oh, you're right about ed2. I thought it was a 1990 game. Well there was still ed1 on the fds, which I still have to play at some point, I'm just happy to play them in English.

[@nunyabeezwax6758]

They inadvertently created NES Phantasy Star complete with insane audio - then just forgot how to be a company within another decade apparently :(

[@Anomaly_Code]

It never ceases to amaze me, looking back, how developers of the day were able to create such artistic, appealing games in spite of the hardware limitations they were dealing with. I highly doubt many devs of today could achieve the same quality, given those same limitations.

[@BobLee-df4zh]

​@@SnakebitSTIYeah it wasn't exactly common. Let's not pretend devs now aren't as intelligent or creative as the one a from back then. A lot of this stuff came from necessity.

[@BeefJerkey]

17:18 I have to say, I really like the attention to detail, there. The computer screen has a high-frequency flicker, _and_ that flickering light is seen reflecting off her glasses!

[@mercster]

Gemfire looks really nice, good palette use! "A heavy dork game, loads of words and stuff." 😂 All of these look very cool.

[@mercster]

Hah, Lagrange Point is crazy, never knew any NES games had a sound chip like that. Apparently only one other game featured it.

[@forcedfeedbackclassicgamer5499]

NES is still my favorite console ever. So cool to you see you calling out Cosmic Epsilon! One of my favorite Famicom titles (actually prefer it to Tetrastar). Metal Slader Glory's graphics are just plain freaky, a serious technical marvel.

[@ratix98]

Super spy hunter is another game that comes to mind. Just playing through the game is pretty amazing for the amount of detail given to a game that is only about 5 or 6 vertical scrolling stages.

[@jsr734]

Metal Slader Glory also uses the MCC5 extra sound channels, mostly for sfx and the characters' voices, so every character has his or her own voice tone while "speaking".

[@HayTatsuko]

_Solar Jetman, Blaster Master,_ and _Wizards & Warriors_ are the three I can guess immediately. Let's see if I was right! Honorary mention to _Pictonary_ because of Tim Follin's intro music. Okay, so wrong on all three -- but they all seemed way more advanced than other NES games I've seen. Really enjoyed the new ones you introduced me to in this video!

[@casanovafunkenstein5090]

I imagine that the black and white mode was probably intended for developers to ensure that the game would be compatible with old televisions that couldn't display colour. I'm not sure if the black and white mode takes the luminosity values and directly converts them to grey scale, but if that's its purpose it may have been a useful development tool. It's also possible that Nintendo envisioned developers providing people with old sets with an optimised graphics option, only for it to end up being vestigial due to the limited crossover between the demographics of the NES and old televisions. Another possibility could be that the original 'famicom' in Japan may have had a point during development whereby it was closer to a microcomputer system that would have been popular in Europe, so they wanted to be able to run business software.

[@gwalla]

Analog color TV signals are backwards-compatible with black & white TVs, by design. And B&W TVs were basically obsolete outside of niche markets (like closed-circuit TV) by the '80s.

[@Michirin9801]

I think you've talked about Crisis Force already, but that's easily one of the most visually impressive Famicom games, it legit looks like a 16 bit game!

[@Sharopolis]

It's a beauty!

[@refractionpcsx2]

FWIW, Castlevania 3 is also MMC5 (at least in the western version) and it does some tile swapping trickery with the mapper (I remember getting it to work in my emulator, it was a pain lol)

[@jamisreebirzick5872]

9:31 The SimCity NES prototype also uses the single tile attribute mode of the MMC5. Cool seeing how many Koei games use it. They must’ve loved the MMC5

[@i-v-l9335]

Holy smokes! Excellent selection. I was really surprised to see Gemfire of all things, mentioned in that mix. I hadn't even heard of the last 2 at all, and those were just jawdroppers.

[@Sharopolis]

Thank you!

[@megan_alnico]

One thing to keep in mind is that the NES was originally designed as a home computer, not just a game console. The first prototype shown at CES back in the day had controllers and a light gun and a keyboard. Now here in the US we use the NTSC standard and unfortunately the color television signal was kind of hacked onto the old black and white standard. This means when you display text in monochrome over a color NTSC signal, you get a lot of color artifacting. It basically looks terrible. Anyone had who had an old apple II probably knows what this looks like. I would suspect that the black and white mode would have been for displaying text if their had ever actually been applications for the NES and not just games.

[@Dwedit]

That's not what the NES's monochrome mode does. Its effect is like forcing the palette to the leftmost column, and only picking gray/white colors 00, 10, 20, 30. It doesn't disable NTSC colorburst, the picture remains in color. It's not other systems like the Apple II where colorburst is truly disabled and the picture is detected as a black and white picture.

[@fungo6631]

The NES didn't have nearly the same artifact problems as the Apple II or MS DOS CGA.

[@Mike14264]

That Lagrange Point game looks fantastic... really strange that it's not more well known.

[@anactualmotherbear]

1. Noah's Ark is a masterfully done euro platformer with a lot of the same "flash over substance" that those are known for, but it plays a bit better than many 16-bit euro genesis games. The rising water effect does look a LOT bluer on a CRT, I can confirm. 2. Any of Koei's MMC5 games can be confused for a low-end 16-bit game. The chip is really incredible, and they've released games that were around 5-6 megabits, only beaten out by Metal Slader Glory's file size. 3. Cosmic Epsilon shows off just how much power people could squeeze out of the MMC3 chip. It's the reason almost all games released in the late era of the system were MMC3. 4. Enough is already said about Metal Slader Glory, but it gets the maximum power you can get from the system with its MMC5 chip and a whopping 8 megabits of storage to put all its graphics in. 5. Enough is already said about this one too. Lagrange Point is not the only Fami game with enhanced sound, but it does use the most sound channels. An honorable mention: Mega Man 5 uses a ton of graphical effects in it that were not usual for the system, such as a mosaic effect you usually only saw on the SNES. Perhaps that can be in a part 2 video.

[@Sharopolis]

Mega Man 5 is a good one!

[@johnsimon8457]

I think the Unreleased NES SimCity also had an MMC5 and used those same palette enhancements

[@Sharopolis]

I didn't know that! I found a list of MMC5 games on the NES dev wiki but it didn't mention that. I'll put that on my list of stuff to look at, thanks!

[@MrMegaManFan]

Some brilliant games worth sharing, making the Sharopolis name all the more apt. Thanks!

[@TheBrazilRules]

Damn! That flickering monitor reflection on the glasses in Metal Slader Glory is mind blowing

[@jamiecampbell8855]

Great, as always. Always interesting to see how good developers push hardware despite the limits. Well done!.

[@kfUNC1]

Not sure why the color/BW selector was a apart of the internal hardware, but some people did still have their games connected to older black and white tv sets back then. We got an new ‘87 Ford van and it came with a small BW set that I hooked the NES to. And sometimes kids would have their games hooked up to an old, non-main TV in the basement or something. Maybe it was just an easy way to test how it would look during development.

[@stevethepocket]

I do wonder what the NES palette looks like through a luma-only wire. Looking at a PNG of it, it sure _seems_ like you'd get a pretty wide variety of shades of gray all together, but looks can be deceiving-I think the Atari 2600 and Commodore TED computers had palettes where every color column was the same set of luma levels with just the hue shifted, for example (and only the grayscale one had a different saturation level).

[@alexjackson7929]

@@stevethepocket The NES palette is exactly like the Atari 2600 or TED palette. Every color column except the grayscale ones is the same luma level.

[@arlwiss5110]

clicked for the visual novel in the thumbnail, which i didnt expect to see on the NES of all things. nice highlights

[@cosmicrdt]

All the early sierra adventure games were interpreted byte code and the later ones did in fact run on a virtual machine.

[@gnocchidokie]

I love your videos so much, I’m always shocked that you don’t have hundreds of thousands of followers, I love your content!!

[@joesaiditstrue]

another honorable mention is Moon Crystal, insanely smooth animation

[@HiNRGboy]

Sword Master looked incredible on NES. Looked like I was playing an early PC Engine or Genesis game

[@Emotion_Engine]

im very new to your channel but im loving this series!

[@GamingPalOllieMK]

Videos like this is what makes youtube a great platform even with all its flaws. Thank you so much, amazing content

[@itsjustagamechannel]

This was fascinating! Also interesting how that water effect actually works for the game.

[@plutoniumshore]

"The Immortal" for the NES was a game that I always thought was unique visually for the system.

[@lucretiakillingsworth8644]

I just LOVE that you mentioned Cosmic Epsilon! One of the best and most underrated games on the NES, and thanks for also teaching me a thing or two about Metal Slader Glory! I never got far because of a glitch, I either need to try repatching it or a different emulator to play that one.

[@JohnRiggs]

Metal Slater Glory looks gorgeous.

[@sourandbitter3062]

Super interesting as always

[@paperoverflow]

Wow, very cool video!!! Didn't know these games. Very interesting graphic techniques, shows how creative some designers really were back then!

[@keaton718]

Good content. I never would have heard of any of these games otherwise.

[@alexgrunde6682]

In case anyone’s curious, FM synthesizers utilize an interesting quirk of audio oscillators where if you modulate the frequency of one by an integer multiple of the frequency it’s outputting, e.g. modulate one outputting 440hz by 880hz, it creates robust harmonic characteristics or timbres. Which sound much fuller and complex than the old, standard waveform chip that was in the NES.

[@tumppigo]

Your videos are soooo damn good! So much more good content!!

[@NinjaNezumi]

I answered, Shar. I told you exactly why - The Grayscale was to ensure that everything looked distinguishable on a Grey Scale T.V., as well as for colorblindness. It's a way to ensure the sprites pass Nintendo's requirements for gradient differences. Even today there are very similar checks you have to pass, but now it's done automatically.

[@cube2fox]

Is this your theory or do you have some source? I kind of doubt it, since apparently no game ever had a "gray scale TV" or "color blindness" switch, not even official Nintendo ones. Anyway, that switch would have made more sense on the console itself, then it wouldn't have been game dependent.

[@NinjaNezumi]

God I hate people like you @@cube2fox - A black and white t.v. is a grayscale t.v.. So yes, every goddamned black and white t.v. out there operates in grey scale. That's why I used the term Gray Scale - to EMPHASIZE how black and white operate. Every time I say Black and White t.v.s I get some IDIOT like you say "But they don't operate in Gray Scale". I thought I could circumvent that by saying Gray Scale. JFC, you people should be banned from the internet. Also, to meet with Nintendo Standards (at least 13 years ago when I signed up for the Wii U program), it was still a requirement for a graphics test to be conducted to ensure that the hues of the pixels/colors didn't completely turn into a grey blob mess. If not you had to re-visit the color theory for your project. It's easier to call it a colorblindness check. I'm 90% certain that's still a requirement, and I've talked to artists who have worked on carts in the 80s and 90s who affirmed that was a requirement back then too. So yeah, that's a real goddamned thing. I don't understand why Shar refuses to accept any of this as an explanation. I'm not the only one who has said this.

[@onlylettersand0to9]

@@cube2fox The Atari 2600 had a black and white switch. The NES internals have an internal black-and-white mode but no switch. My best guess is that they intended to have a black-and-white switch at one point but never got around to actually installing one--possibly due to the hardware costs of installing such a switch. (In my hypothesis, the no-switch-after-all design change was made after the chip design was finished.) I fully acknowledge that I'm guessing here--but I can't think of any other scenario of how a black-and-white mode ended up in the hardware in the first place. (Some hardware has a high-res 2 color mode...but that doesn't seem to be the case here.)

[@meetoo594]

Wouldn't it be easier to just turn the colour down on a telly to gauge how well it looked in black and white? Im presuming you are saying it had to be a switch in a dev build to show Nintendo rather than a feature of any game as no game has visual impairment enhancements as far as i'm aware.

[@NinjaNezumi]

@@meetoo594 When you test a game you gotta do it several ways, although Devs do admittedly skip some tests just to make the project roll out on time and to save money on hourly wages.

[@JelloFluoride]

Whoa! THANKS for this! Instant sub! I can't believe I've slept on some of these for 30 years 😅

[@Sharopolis]

Thanks! Glad you enjoyed!

[@SuprousOxide]

Cosmic Epsilon looks like an attempt to port Space Harrier

[@jsr734]

There was an Space Harrier Port on the Nes, but i think it was Japan only, so for the Famicom.

[@SnyperWolf101]

There were still black and white televisions being sold in 1985 when the NES released, and a lot of the NES consoles would be hooked up to the older black-and-white TV in the basement or bedroom, while the newer color set would likely be reserved for only broadcast TV the main living room. I suspect the black-and-white mode would allow game developers to view the automatic conversion to a black and white TV. Or, the option was activated automatically when the NES was attached to a black-and-white TV. But I am guessing; I grew up in the 1980s; I did not develop games back then

[@Tatulak]

Man, as a game developer, your content is outstanding! seriously. nes wasn't my fav console, but you sure helps me to like it a little more.

[@baroncalamityplus]

I thought you were going to say that Noah's Ark looks like a Sinclar Spectrum game.

[@evibes512]

I followed Dane Olds guide on youtube to flash an eprom and swap out the mask rom on a Lagrange Point Famicom cart with the English translation patch. It worked great. I wanted to hear the VRC7 chip on original hardware and give the grindy RPG a play through. Was a fun project.

[@gabrielhowardMKE]

I take umbrage with the statement "instantly recognizable if you are a retro gamer" there are millions of us that will instantly know it is an NES game not because we are retro gamers but because we grew up with the machine as children in the 80's.... :)

[@xcoder1122]

Actually Lucas Arts and Sierra also used the same concept of using a virtual machine (VM). That's why Maniac Mansion for example was easily portable to Apple II, Atari ST, C64, Amiga, MS-DOS and NES: All that Lucas Arts had to port was the VM, the game code is the same on all these machines.

[@Sharopolis]

That's a good point but and you're dead right, but I hate to say actually, but actually SCUMM was way higher level than what KOEI did here. They compiled to a low level bytecode that runs on a virtual CPU, not a tokenised interpreter like SCUMM. Pointless technical distinction I know, but it's sort of a different thing.

[@xcoder1122]

@@Sharopolis It's not pointless at all and I was well aware of it, when you said that technically it was a 32-bit game on NES, but SCUMM also has a 57 instruction bytecode and is Turing complete. It has addition, subtraction, multiplication and division of integers as well as all boolean operations, bit shifting and if-else checks you would expect of a VM. It has branching and function calls and is a stack based VM, just like Java. While it does have some high level instructions as well (like "Run dialogue tree" or "Play character dialogue"), the Java VM also has pretty high level instruction. Further physical CPUs that were able to process Java Byte code have been built in the past, so you cannot say that when you have Byte Code, you don't have code for a virtual CPU. The video itself mentions Java and Microsoft CLR as samples for such a VM and SCUMM is no different than those. So if KOEI was ahead of its time, Lucas Arts and Sierra were even further ahead, as using Byte Code (or similar) is the way how it is done today.

[@stevethepocket]

@@Sharopolis Yeah that's what we would nowadays just call "having a game engine," I think.

[@JMFSpike]

Hearing someone from the UK say that the NES is their favorite console is quite a surprise. I never understood why most Brits prefer the Master System over the NES. It's a great console and all, but you look at the game libraries and the NES blows it away. Also, the controller had two less buttons and the pause button was on the console itself. That's not what you'd call ideal by any means. In the game Cyborg Hunter, they actually resorted to using the 2nd controller for more buttons. They really should have thought about these things a bit more when they designed the console.

[@jsr734]

Sega should have redesigned the Master System for western markets as Nintendo did with the Famicom.

[@Sharopolis]

The NES really wasn't big here, at all. It's my favourite console, but I only discovered it though emulation years later. I didn't own one as a kid, still love it though.

[@allluckyseven]

It's kind of weird, though, that Castlevania 3 used the 4x4 tile attribute restriction even though it also had the MMC5 chip.

[@Dwedit]

With MMC5, there's an extra 1K of RAM. It can either provide extended attributes (colors for 8x8 tiles) for a *single* nametable, or act as a regular third nametable. Castlevania 3 was originally written for the base system without extended attributes, and it would have been too much work to rewrite the scrolling system to work for a single screen with extended attributes. But it did use the third nametable feature to add a rising water hazard.

[@fungo6631]

That's because the Japanese version used a different mapper.

[@phoenixdowner]

Seems like you should have way more subscribers. Good content.

[@Sharopolis]

I appreciate that!

[@Jabjabs]

A theory about the Black and white mode. I suspect this could be a kind of legacy function of the VPU that was probably for use with Black and White TV's similar to how the Atari 2600 used to have a physical switch to do the same thing. It is probably a hold over from the idea that as a 'Famicom' it could eventually be used as a computer which still had B&W monitors as standard in the early 80's. Just a theory as I say.

[@fungo6631]

That's just BS. It just limits the color palette to the first column.

[@atmaweapon2803]

I'm a huge fan, love all your videos. Frustrating that we've sort of run out of consoles to do for your "games that push the limits of" series! Lagrange Point and Just Breed are two great games for the NES that I was absolutely waiting for before they were translated. We're really in a golden age of fan translation over the last decade, but especially recently. We are finally getting the rather comically extensive RPG catalogue of the PC Engine CD translated (slowly). We've even got some PC-FX games translated (of all things!) Life is good.

[@Sharopolis]

The VIC-20 is up next and then I think back to more modern stuff. The Dreamcast will be fun and the GameCube too. I'm going to need a better capture device for modern consoles though, emulation doesn't really cut it and what I have right now doesn't look as good as it could.

[@WillowEpp]

20:45 Might be worth mentioning that when you say "not the same as but similar to" the YM2413 in the Mark III _et al,_ the VRC7 sound _is_ still an OPLL derivative. The preset patches are different and some channels are missing, but it's still the same operators, limitations, and general sonic quality as all the other 2413s. They're all a bit of a far cry from other members of the OPL family (which DID appear in 16-bit computers and contemporary sound cards like Adlib and Soundblaster) in practice, though.

[@Spokavriel]

The Grey Scale mode is in the chip because at the time Nintendo was put in production more people had B&W sets than color. There was even a proposal to put a switch on the case next to the channel select one to force it into monochrome mode. I wish I could link to it but there was a memo about it in one of the leaks.

[@swampdonkey4919]

Damn, Cosmic Epsilon looks 🔥. Got a space harrier feel to it. Sad i missed that one.

[@ugarit5404]

You should do a video in which you cover gameboy games with weird chips and headers in cartridge

[@Sharopolis]

More Gameboy action coming on this channel soon!

[@deptofcarstereorepair]

I played a lot of Gemfire back in the day ... but on SNES

[@pluvius9265]

Another Famicom game that often gets overlooked is Moon Crystal. It doesn't look unusual in screenshots, but it has absolutely gorgeous animations.

[@mattporter7983]

Have you ever looked at Laser Invasion for NES? There's an impressive looking ground effect when you take off at the beginning, sort of similar to Cosmic Epsilon but not quite the same - possibly utilizing the MMC5. Check it out some time.

[@Sharopolis]

I very nearly put that in this video, but I decided to save it for another video I'm thinking about. It's a really interesting game though.

[@Dwedit]

The hatch opening effect is done by updating the tilemap, then covering up the seam with sprites. The ascent effect is just split vertical scrolling (with an added sprite for the building).

[@phirenz]

Many 8 bit computers (like the apple II) had the ability to turn off the colorburst signal, resulting in black and white graphics. For video chipsets based on the idea of composit artifact based colour, this black and white mode doubled the horizontal resolution, but even with better designs, it could still result in sharper text. I don't think the PPU's grayscale mode is implemented by disabling the colorburst, but I suspect the mode exists because other home computers had grayscale modes. It appears to have been implemented more as a box checking exercise than an actual useful feature.

[@HelpTheWretched]

I don't think it does anything technically out of the ordinary, but as a kid I thought the Tengen unlicensed Fantasy Zone looked kind of like an SNES game. The backgrounds were super-colourful and had a lot of shapes that reminded me of Super Mario World! I also had a Jack Nicklaus golf game (it was mainly my dad's) where before every shot, it would fully (and kinda slowly) render the scene based on your position and angle. You'd see that kind of thing in PC and 16-bit games around that time, but I found it really impressive for NES.

[@rodzandz]

Real video title: 5 NES games that look exactly how you'd expect NES games to look.

[@gwalla]

I think the use of the grayscale mode for a quick and dirty fade-out/fade-in effect wasn't uncommon, and was probably the main use case for that feature. Switching it on mid-screen is definitely an unusual and creative application.

[@vidarlystadjohansen9829]

excellent channel!

[@jonothanthrace1530]

Have you ever covered Gyruss for NES? I watched Jeremy Parish's video about it last week and was really impressed by how fast the sprites in that move.

[@aretnap3653]

Tiger·Heli on 8-Bit NES... *NEVER ENDS!*

[@amaiorano]

Maniac Mansion is another game that ran on a VM, famously called SCUMM (Script Creation Utility for Maniac Mansion). It was used for so many Lucas Arts games in those days.

[@ericclaptonsrobotpilot7276]

I’d put Kirby’s Adventure up there too. The parallax scrolling, wide variety of weapon animations, sheer size of the game, and the rare battery back-up feature.

[@Artsyca]

Truly inspirational

[@shamra1245]

I imagine it's already been brought up but the original Famicom release of Sunsoft platformer Gimmick! (also called Mr. Gimmick in a limited Scandinavian release for some reason????) also has an audio enhancement chip much like Lagrange Point. Absolutely INCREDIBLE soundtrack and the graphics are gorgeous, I wouldn't be surprised if it also has an enhancement chip there too.

[@violet_turning_violet8702]

Gimmick! Or Mr. Gimmick, is also very pretty and very impressive to me.

[@Strideo1]

Metal Slader is my favorite Saved by the Bell/Metal Gear crossover.

[@daftcruz]

Good video. I would add Jim Power too, looks amazing for a NES game.

[@ioloavatar8430]

I think Castlevania 3 on the NES used the gray scale for fog / mist effects .

[@sorenpx]

I've never heard of Metal Slander Glory and definitely never played an NES game like that when I was a kid. If I had though, I probably would've thought it was very cool. Too bad we just didn't really get games like that in the US. I haven't felt compelled to play an NES game in probably 20 years, but maybe I'll have to track that one down and give it a shot.

[@SomeGuy712x]

(1:48) Is that what's used to make the screen briefly turn gray when the player lands the finishing blow on the final boss of Double Dragon II?

[@oakvalleycreativestudios]

dropping a like for the quick Deja Vu name drop. Along with Shadowgate, one of my favorite NES games

[@matty6247]

I had Gemfire, but my friend's cousin stole it from them while they were borrowing it. I happened to borrow Baseball Stars and forgot to return it.

[@customsongmaker]

I.just got a mod for the NES that plugs into the bottom port and allows it to play the Japanese expanded audio channels. It was about $35 on Etsy, a must-have for the Pac-Man Championship Edition NES cartridge.

[@brubsdubs4529]

Atari VCS/2600/Whatever had a black and white mode switch for when you were playing on a black and white television. I'd wager the feature was considered for the NES as well just not implemented? Black and white TVs were still around at the time for sure.

[@CherniavskyDen]

cool games! Downloaded later two to play on my Wii U

[@The_Nametag]

As a quick note, Noah's Ark, the NES game there, is available for purchase on Steam.

[@sarysa]

Noah's physics remind me of the controls for Tiny Toon Adventures, another Konami game.

[@michaellong8812]

Wow... some great games here. Metal Slader Glory looks like it was ahead of its time.

[@PrekiFromPoland]

No Recca '92? C'mon, this game straight-up laughs at Sega's "blast processing" in the secret intro! Not to mention the DPCM-heavy soundtrack, and all of this runs on MMC3 mapper.

[@RTPJu]

Metal Slader Glory, Snatcher and Stein's Gate is everything a gamer need to play to became a visual novel fan

[@FindingsOfAnArmouredMind]

One game I played for the original famicom that doesn't look like a famicom game is the Mitsume Ga Tooru game ("The Three Eye One). It's based on an anime/manga series created by the same man that created Astro Boy. It's an amazing, underrated hidden gem. A platform that looks like a Mega Man game (in terms of graphics/artstyle) with really great music. There are some bootlegs out there that replace the main character with pokemons lol but lucky me I played the original.

[@peculiarpreacher9083]

Ah Bro have some mercy, two unskippable ads over 10 sec each!

[@dooshmasta]

Gemfire reminds me of the Romance of the Three Kingdom games that were popular in Japan during the FC and SFC era.

[@theeraphatsunthornwit6266]

when i pushed a leg of the IC in the game cartridge the other half of 190 in 1 games works. .. feel like yesterday doing this.

[@SonicBoone56]

Amazing video!

[@nIghtorius]

The emulator fails to emulate Noah's Ark flawlessy. It does the monochrome part, but it seems it does not do the "blue emphasis" part of the "water". It should have a blueish tint on it.

[@matthewrease2376]

I wonder if black and white mode increases the quality of the RF output... The Atari had a similar (hardware) switch on the front panel.

[@mustachewalrus]

Wow, I learned a lot about obscure NES games, and I thought I knew most of the titles

[@conflictmagazine]

Loved the Koei Strategy titles, had all but a couple for the NES, and just sold them recently...was sad to see them go.

[@enshk79]

Games that make you go, how TF is that an NES game!? lol