Anyone else gonna buy it? I've been meaning to buy the other ones anyway, cos I already have the dragon's trap. I love it, even though I'm very bad at it and constantly need a guide to work out what to do next, where to go etc. It's a metroidvania from before metroidvanias were really solidified as a genre, so it's lacking in certain expectations from players, ease of use and ease of working out where to go next and what to do etc. Modern metroidvanias are much easier to wrap your head around and work out where to go next than these earlier metroidvanias like these wonder boy games.
But I still really love the dragon's trap. It just has a certain quality to it. Like nostalgia, for the master system and mega drive that I grew up with, even though I never owned any of these wonder boy games back then, I never even heard of them. So I'm nostalgic for something I never played until a couple of years ago. I'm just weird lol
I get the same feeling from, of all things, the Home Improvement game for the SNES. I never had a SNES as a kid in the 90s, I never watched Home Improvement the TV show, and I never played the SNES game of it until a couple of years ago. Yet I don't know why, but it gives me nostalgia feelings, it grabs my nostalgia bone and gives it a good old tug. I can't explain why. But the Dragon's Trap gave me that feeling too, when I used the 8-bit graphics instead of the new handrawn graphics.
Anyway the wonder boy collection is apparently gonna have:
1) the original arcade wonder boy game from 1986
2) wonder boy in monster land (which version? I can't seem to find out, because it was ported to like 2 dozen different platforms, including the NES and master system and ZX spectrum among others)
3) Wonder Boy in Monster World (seemingly the Mega Drive/Genesis version, cos that was the original version, it doesn't seem to have had an arcade version either before or after)
4) Wonder Boy IV
It's crazy, cos this collection had 4 games yet it still doesn't have ALL the wonder boy games that are available on switch in it as part of this collection. There's so many wonder boys. There's originals ported to switch, there's multiple remakes with each seemingly made by a different company
From what I can find out - which is surprisingly little - the developer for this wonder boy collection is a Japanese company called Inin. They handled all the recent ports of the Cotton games, and the port of Clockwork Acquario which is an old arcade game that's never been ported for any console, until now. I bought that one, because I thought the game looked beautiful. An arcade side scrolling platformer, those are usually a lot of fun. So I thought why not buy it. And that port seems absolutely fine to me, I've had no problems with it.
Also I have a couple of the ports of the Darius games cos I love Darius. And looking it up now, it turns out that Inin handled all the switch ports of the Darius games too, so I have multiple games from this studio
I heard one of the cotton ports they they did was completely borked and had unacceptable input lag, which made the game impossible to play because it's a shoot em up with stuff flying at you constantly. But I did hear they were gonna fix it with a patch (I heard it like 4 months ago), but that's a while ago now and I don't know if they've managed to sort it out yet. But from what I've heard, all the other Cotton games they ported were fine. I believe it was just this one cotton game that was much more difficult than normal to port it, cos it was a Sega saturn game and so it was uniquely difficult to port because of the Saturn's infamously difficult hardware to program for, with it's two separate CPUs that can't really interact with each other and share processing power, they have to do two individual separate things. The saturn was so great, but nobody wanted to make games for it because it was so much more complicated to program for.
But anyway yeah it seems that in general this Inin company is great with ports, with one or two that weren't, but then we're fixed later anyway. They're not on the level of M2, because nobody is on that level, M2 are the undisputed kings of porting old games. But this Inin seem alright. The wonder boy collection is in good enough hands
I still need to buy the cotton games though. This has reminded me. They released so many at once for switch that I was overwhelmed and I had no idea which to buy first. I know little about the cotton series other than they're meant to be tons of fun, but I've never properly played them. I guess I'll Google for which cotton game is the best to start with
Yeah, published by ININ. Those wonderful Germans have been doing a great job of providing the classics to a modern audience. As well as offering physical releases for games most publishers would release as digital only. Although this collection won't be complete, it'll be nice to have.
Switch Physical Collection - 1,252 games (as of April 30th, 2024)
Favorite Quote: "Childhood is not from birth to a certain age and at a certain age the child is grown, and puts away childish things. Childhood is the kingdom where nobody dies." -Edna St. Vincent Millay
The original pixel version of Wonder Boy IV in english sounds especially nice. I like the remake, but I'd really like to play the original version, too.
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Topic: Apparently there's a Wonder Boy collection coming out for Switch
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