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 Shovel Knight is an action adventure platformer released in June this year on 3DS, Wii U,PC and Mac. It is the first game to be developed and published by Yacht Club Games with music by WayForward composer Jake "Virt" Kaufman and Mega Man composer Manami Matsumae. The game was funded through a Kickstarter campaign which launched in March last year, with a goal of raising $75,000 and ended up raising $311,502 by the campaigns end in April. Now say what you want about Nostalgia grabbing. It's undeniable, this game pulls all kinds of influences from games so many of us have fond memories of; Castlevania, Mega Man, DuckTales, and of course Super Mario Bros. 3. While aping the greats, as sincere as imitation is often claimed to be, can sometimes fall flat, this game takes it one step further and actually pulls more influence from modern games than you might think. The most obvious of the more modern influences is Dark Souls, as when you die, you drop some (not all) of the currency you can collect in the game and you then have a chance to respawn at a checkpoint and reclaim it. This game does a lot of things really well. It endears itself to you, not by ramming references in your face every five seconds, but by being brave enough to pick up the source material the game pulls from and adapt it in a new and inventive way. It's self-aware but not in that irritating "turning to look at the camera and winking" kind of way but by just acknowledging how silly the games situation is. On top of that, it looks great, it's bright, colourful and vibrant. The music has such an ear-worm infectiousness that you'll tap your foot without noticing it. The controls are tight,responsive and perfect for a game of this style. But you know what? none of that is the impressive thing that this game does. The impressive thing this game does is pose the question: What if? What if, big companies had never stopped developing software to be sold at retail for our old systems and they had evolved alongside modern games? and honestly, the answer is: We'd all be playing Shovel Knight Videos! Shovel Knight Part 1: Intro & Level 1 (Plains) -[YouTube]/[Polsy] Shovel Knight Part 2: Level 2 (Lich Yard) -[YouTube]/[Polsy] Shovel Knight Part 3: Level 3 (Pridemoor Keep) -[YouTube]/[Polsy] Shovel Knight Part 4: Level 4 (Explodatorium) -[YouTube]/[Polsy] Dex01 fucked around with this message at 19:16 on Oct 18, 2014 |
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Sep 26, 2014 00:01
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Man, Shovel Knight's been getting a lot of love since release. I'm pretty sure races for the game are already going down, and I recently did a video dissecting various facets of the game. I'm really hoping the devs add the extended game modes soon though, since their advertised alternate players sound fantastic. Also, JordanKai is incorrect about parallax scrolling. Many late-gen NES games like Shatterhand and Vice: Project Doom had parallax scrolling.
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Sep 26, 2014 00:13
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Highwang posted:Also, JordanKai is incorrect about parallax scrolling. Many late-gen NES games like Shatterhand and Vice: Project Doom had parallax scrolling. Well that's technically not the same, as those games use a series of sprite layers that move along with the player character at variable speeds rather than background layers that are controlled by the camera.  Although I guess that still counts as parallax scrolling so maybe I am the fool after all. 
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Sep 26, 2014 00:27
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The best way to put it is that it could not pull of multiple background layer scrolling. The poor nes had only a background layer and a sprite layer, and that sprite layer had so little space for tiles. A lot of the end-of-life nes stuff was crazy, with mastery of the console pushing the limits. Even some of the pirate carts for the nes did strange things with the expansion-on-game chips. I agree with Dex on Shovel Knight though, it never tries to shove in your face winkwinknudgeugh stuff. It's great.
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Sep 26, 2014 00:40
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JordanKai posted:Well that's technically not the same, as those games use a series of sprite layers that move along with the player character at variable speeds rather than background layers that are controlled by the camera. In fact, there is only one thing this game does wrong; three specific colors in this game are outside of the NES/Famicom color range. Can you spot them through the LP?
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Sep 26, 2014 00:42
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I'd love it if you turned up the game audio a bit more when you two are talking.
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Sep 26, 2014 01:21
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Ah, man, I need to get this game. Maybe after I get paid next. My Wii U needs some more love. I had not heard about the music being sequenced with an actual Famicom. That is pretty awesome.
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Sep 26, 2014 01:34
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Well it wasn't actually made on a Famicom. It was made in Famitracker, which does indeed output files that run on actual Famicom hardware. Though I recall reading somewhere that the Shovel Knight soundtrack would take up most of a game cartridge's storage due to being so elaborate.
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Sep 26, 2014 01:40
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Admiral H. Curtiss posted:Well it wasn't actually made on a Famicom. It was made in Famitracker, which does indeed output files that run on actual Famicom hardware. Though I recall reading somewhere that the Shovel Knight soundtrack would take up most of a game cartridge's storage due to being so elaborate. The soundtrack takes up 150MB on my hard drive, so I don't think any cartridge can handle all that music without downsampling.
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Sep 26, 2014 01:50
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Highwang posted:The soundtrack takes up 150MB on my hard drive, so I don't think any cartridge can handle all that music without downsampling. Actually the nsf version that you can get with the soundtrack is 602 kb.  Though NES carts seem to be about 224 kb, so that's still way too much for one cart.
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Sep 26, 2014 03:06
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Yeah, MP3's were never a NES standard. One of the largest NES games is Dragon Warrior 4, and it's only 512 kb. The soundtrack in 'nes' format is 100kb bigger than that.
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Sep 26, 2014 03:36
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Kirby's Adventure was the example of the needed cart size that Virt gave. I'm not sure how big that one was though.
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Sep 26, 2014 04:22
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Spikey posted:Kirby's Adventure was the example of the needed cart size that Virt gave. I'm not sure how big that one was though. 476 kb apparently. Still not enough for the soundtrack.
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Sep 26, 2014 04:31
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Where are you getting your cartridge sizes from? Kirby's Adventure was on a 6 Mbit cart, so 768 KB.
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Sep 26, 2014 04:49
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Oh is it? My bad, I was looking at a ROM site that had a list of sizes but I didn't realize that those were compressed sizes. 
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Sep 26, 2014 04:52
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In gaming lingo, parallax scrolling seems to include anything that displays multiple layers scrolling at different speeds, no matter if it the system actually supports additional layers or if it's pulled off using trickery on 8-bit systems most of which only supported a single background layer. The thing with how Shovel Knight does it is that there are many elements in it that actually overlap, which I don't think I've ever seen on an NES. This wasn't possible on, say, the Genesis either as it only supported a single parallax background. There may be Genesis games with what seems like a multitude of layers, which comes from scrolling segments of a single background at different speeds (linescrolling), but if you look closely, they never overlap or obscure each other. If you wanted to do that, you'd have to use sprites, or animation trickery like Sonic 3 and Sonic 3 & Knuckles do it in some levels. The way Shovel Knight scrolls only ever became widespread on 32-bit systems. OK, that's enough for now, I'm gonna go back to moping over the fact that this still isn't out in Europe on Nintendo systems yet. Highwang posted:The soundtrack takes up 150MB on my hard drive, so I don't think any cartridge can handle all that music without downsampling. Some people have touched on it already, but chiptune soundtracks work by having the music files supply the instructions telling the sound chip what to play, not the actual music itself. So they kind of work like MIDI, but instead of relying on samples (which tend to take up quite a bit of space), the NES sound chip generates sounds by frequency modulation, which is why it sounds like it does. Some NES game soundtracks do use samples, but it's usually only a handful really low-quality ones as, like I said, the cartridge would have filled up pretty quickly otherwise. As far as I know, Shovel Knight actually replicates the sound chip of the Famicom Disk System which sports a bunch of extra channels for richer music. As the Famicom Disk System was never brought over, the games for it that were ported to "standard" NES all had redone music with fewer channels. fixelbrumpf fucked around with this message at 05:16 on Sep 26, 2014 |
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Sep 26, 2014 04:57
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If you want to see what samples were like (for three words anyway) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LxJNZWCoRes
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Sep 26, 2014 05:22
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I was super on-the-fence about this game last Steam sale, and I didn't go for it. I'm excited to see how wrong I likely was.
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Sep 26, 2014 05:46
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fixelbrumpf posted:As far as I know, Shovel Knight actually replicates the sound chip of the Famicom Disk System which sports a bunch of extra channels for richer music. As the Famicom Disk System was never brought over, the games for it that were ported to "standard" NES all had redone music with fewer channels. Shovel Knight's music replicates the sound of a NES/Famicom game with a Konami VRC6 expansion chip, ie the one used for the Japanese version of Castlevania 3, which adds three extra channels on top of the stock NES sounds. Interestingly enough, virt almost completely ignored the NES' DPCM channel for this game - it's the sample channel that would generally be used for drums or other percussive sfx, but he generates all the percussion via the noise channel and only uses the DPCM channel once in the entire game, as a joke. (The Famicom Disk System does have one extra channel over a stock NES/Famicom, but it wasn't used in the Shovel Knight OST.) As for the question about sfx in the video: the tracks were composed on Famitracker but the actual in-game playback is all streamed audio, so no, the soundtracks don't intrude upon the music like they would in a NES game, they're just sounds played over the top of the music.
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Sep 26, 2014 13:41
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I stand corrected. I just read up on the VRC6, it's really kind of weird that the US/EU NES didn't support it.
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Sep 26, 2014 16:44
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Yes, I just beat this game. I absolutely adored it, and I'm not usually a fan of Megaman games and their ilk. If I had one complaint I would say that you get knocked back a little too far if hit by an enemy, but otherwise it;s fantastic. Also you missed a cracked wall in the room with the Troupple King acolyte and Chester 
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Sep 27, 2014 01:27
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Oh boy, been waiting for someone to LP Shovel Knight!
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Sep 29, 2014 05:05
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Virt posted a Famitracker video breakdown of how an upcoming stage theme was put together. He acknowledges that his setup assumes the use of a VRC6 chip, which Konami used to add 3 extra channels to NES games, for a total of 7 music channels (not counting the differential pulse-code modulation (DPCM) for playing sound samples, rather than a waveform. You can see in the following video that DPCM isn't called at all.) There aren't any spoilers in here except the name of one of the bosses and the music itself, but if that's too spoilery for you, don't click! Link to Youtube
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Sep 29, 2014 05:51
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Shovel Knight Game of the Year 2014 also 1994
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Sep 29, 2014 06:43
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BottledBodhisvata posted:Shovel Knight Game of the Year 2014 also 1994 I'm adding this comment just to plausibly claim that I'm not empty-quoting. Also to note that I am thrilled Dex is doing this one, the last LP was wondrous and I'm sure this one will be too.
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Sep 29, 2014 07:18
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Agent Interrobang posted:I'm adding this comment just to plausibly claim that I'm not empty-quoting. Also to note that I am thrilled Dex is doing this one, the last LP was wondrous and I'm sure this one will be too. aw, thanks for the kind words 
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Sep 29, 2014 17:43
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This game is absurdly good and great fun. It's one of the games I actually managed to 100%. I never had a console growing up, so I am pretty much immune to nostalgia bias. But the game is great either way. If you are on the fence, get it!
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Sep 29, 2014 17:53
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Speaking of console nostalgia, I'm really curious as to how Shovel Knight is going to do in Europe where hardly anyone owned an NES in the 80s and early 90s due to the absurd prices for games and the popularity of home computers. I don't think I knew anyone who owned an NES but regularly saw one in action at a toy store in a big-ish city next to us. I did aknowledge that it seemed to have better graphics than my C64, but never even dared to dream of owning one due to the games costing like three times as much as a C64 would set you back if you actually bought it.
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Sep 29, 2014 19:09
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New video! an appropriately spooky level for an appropriately spooky month! we go up against frogs, ghosts, skeletons and Giant Skeletons in the Lich Yard! Shovel Knight Part 2: Level 2 (Lich Yard) -[YouTube]/[Polsy]
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Oct 2, 2014 21:39
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I love that little dance the barfly does for you, that was adorable.
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Oct 3, 2014 01:09
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Quick correction of something you said in the video. The DLC coming out (eventually) only lets you play as three of the Boss Knights, not all of them. I won't list all of them here because *spoilers* but you can find out who they are by going to Shovel Knight's press kit and looking for "Coming Soon". https://yachtclubgames.com/shovel-knight-press-kit/ (It also mentions the other three upcoming features: battle mode, challenge mode, and gender-swap mode) I will say that one of them is Specter Knight, and one of them is the Knight we're gonna meet next. 
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Oct 3, 2014 02:46
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I'm sorry I yelled at you Dex, I meant it in jest, honest. I've actually been a fan ever since the Banjo-Tooie LP  Just remember to head left immediately in the next level, that one took me forever to find (turns out an NPC tells you and I am dumb) ManlyGrunting fucked around with this message at 04:40 on Oct 3, 2014 |
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Oct 3, 2014 04:38
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dijon du jour posted:Quick correction of something you said in the video. The DLC coming out (eventually) only lets you play as three of the Boss Knights, not all of them. I won't list all of them here because *spoilers* but you can find out who they are by going to Shovel Knight's press kit and looking for "Coming Soon". https://yachtclubgames.com/shovel-knight-press-kit/ (It also mentions the other three upcoming features: battle mode, challenge mode, and gender-swap mode) There's also gonna be a Shield Knight mode, IIRC.
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Oct 3, 2014 05:21
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Will you be showing off any cheat codes? Namely "WSWWAEAW"?
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Oct 3, 2014 05:29
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Disappointed that you haven't shown Shovel knights dancing yet. 
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Oct 3, 2014 05:46
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So I figure you wont show of 100% of the game, right? The fishing rod is actually one of the most useful relics. You can use it on any bottomless pit to get some fish which restore life. That's imensly important in NG+. Furthermore as you mentioned, if a pit sparkles there is either a golden fish which gives some money or something different in there. Also you can use the rod to reach gems or your dropped money. This comes in handy if you die in a pit and can't reach it. EDIT: And in some levels there are music sheets you can only get with the rod. cant cook creole bream fucked around with this message at 09:31 on Oct 3, 2014 |
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Oct 3, 2014 09:28
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Air is lava! posted:So I figure you wont show of 100% of the game, right? There is a very real possibility this will be a 100% run from what I have heard from him. Ill talk to him and see if I can get a direct answer from him in terms of what he is planning on exactly so there isnt any confusion.
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Oct 3, 2014 14:17
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I kind of like how the dancer's greatest treasure actually turns out to give you some cash. That's a nice touch.
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Oct 5, 2014 04:01
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This was on sale?! Dammnit, I must've missed that! I remember a lot of people calling this Megaman meets Dark Souls, so I will be following this, most certainly. Also, is speculation allowed at all? 'Cause if so, I think the enchantress is Shield Knight.
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Oct 5, 2014 10:12
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New video! We pay Pridemoor Keep a visit, this place looks like it would be fit for a king! at least it would be if it wasn't occupied by a FAKER Shovel Knight Part 3: Level 3 (Pridemoor Keep) -[YouTube]/[Polsy]
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Oct 11, 2014 01:26
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