I've always enjoyed playing console hockey games. When I was in Junior High I used to play console hockey practically every day after school with my friend Matt. We'd play NHLPA '93 on the SNES or NHL '94 on the Sega Genesis or some weird monster hockey game. Or golf... After that I stopped playing hockey games. Not so much because I didn't want to play them as much as when I moved to university I couldn't exactly afford to buy a lot of games and besides my roommates had copious amounts of RPGs to play. (I seem to recall starcitygames sending Josh a rather large number of RPGs. And Tekken.) A few years ago I picked up NHL '09 for the 360 and played a few seasons of their 'Be A Pro' mode where you start in the minor leagues and work your way up to being a star. The catch was you actually only ever controlled your named character. When your shift was done you got to sit on the bench and watch your team play without you. Take a penalty? That's two minutes where you don't get to play. Get in a fight? Five minutes (or more) of spectating. It was a fun enough game.
NHL '12 was announced and the cool thing they added this time around was 'legends of hockey' where they added in 9 retired hockey legends to the game. I'm not sure what criteria they used to pick their legends but three of the nine were Red Wings at some point in their career and I really want to play with Gordie Howe. So I decided I'd probably pick this version up.
The rest of the Blockbusters in Canada are going out of business and I ended up at one of the stores last week. (The subway was shut down and I knew there was one nearby so I figured I'd go browse for a while instead of taking a guaranteed to be packed bus.) Lo and behold they had copies of NHL '12 for sale with the standard 15% 'going out of business' discount and I couldn't say no!
I brought the game home and discovered that legend mode actually starts off locked. You can play with Jeremy Roenick if you want but you can't play with anyone else until you play the game a bunch as your own pro and unlock some achievements. How annoying... So I've started a new pro but it feels a lot like NHL '09 so I'm a little disappointed thus far.
One thing that did change is goaltender interference. Typically in hockey games the goalie is sacred and you simply can't interact with him at all. Way back in the NHLPA '93 days the goalie was a tower of power. If any skater ran into him the skater fell down without moving the goalie and probably got a penalty in the process. In NHL '12 the goalies are pretty flimsy. (There's an achievement for knocking someone's helmet off... I got it by plowing into a goalie.) Do this during the play and you're getting a penalty for sure. Do it after the whistle? Woohaa! Suck it, goalie! You can knock him flying and it seems like you won't get a penalty 90% of the time. It's that other 10% which is annoying... I can see always giving a penalty for it (since in real hockey you probably get suspended for doing some of the things I do) or I can see not coding it into the game at all. But letting me knock the goalie flying after the whistle and only rarely giving a penalty for it just seems cruel. Of course I'm going to do it, beating up the goalie is awesome!
I'm not sure that I'm going to actually play enough to unlock Gordie Howe mode, and that makes me very sad. He's the reason I bought the game in the first place, I shouldn't have to play hundreds or thousands of games before I can play as him.
Showing posts with label console games. Show all posts
Showing posts with label console games. Show all posts
Saturday, September 17, 2011
Monday, October 18, 2010
Happy Birthday NES!
25 years ago today the Nintendo Entertainment System was launched in the US. As anyone who has an original generation NES knows the system didn't age well. By this I mean 25 years later the consoles don't exactly work optimally anymore. Plug a game in and you're apt to see the power light blink on and off. On and off. On and off. I knew all the old wives tales on how to fix it. Blow in the game! Blow in the machine! Hold he reset button down and power it on and off! Hit the NES! Don't push the game all the way in! Force the spring thing down lower than it should go! Hold it a little higher than it should go!
Very rarely did any of that stuff work. Today I did a little poking around to try to figure out why the blinking happened and the actual reason really surprised me. You see, it all comes down to DRM, and none of that earlier stuff dealt with that underlying problem at all.
What those other things tried to deal with was two other flaws in the design of the NES. The first is they made the internal connectors out of low quality metals so they easily corroded with dirt and wear. The second is that the whole spring loaded system slowly but surely bent the low quality connectors with each use until eventually they stopped connecting as well as they used to. (Both of these problems were fixed with the second generation NES which loaded the game in from the top like the SNES did. Also, you can argue the spring loaded system was needed due to wanting the NES to look like a VCR instead of an Atari what with the console crash and all.) These two reasons would make the console not work at all, though. Lose connection with the game and the system should become unstable and possibly crash. Why would it turn on and off, on and off?
It turns out that Nintendo was worried about bootleggers making their own NES games, so they built a system into the console and into every cartridge to verify that the cartridge was a legitimate Nintendo authorized game. (Nintendo Seal of Quality, as Andrew would say.) So what they did is they put identical chips into the NES and into every cartridge (apparently the chip was $9 per for third party vendors) that would communicate with each other when the power was turned on. If this chip had voltage on its 4th pin and the cartridge didn't properly echo the right response to the chip then it would power off the console. Hence, if you put a bootleg cartridge into the console it would blink on and off, on and off.
But why does my NES blink? Due to a combination of the shoddy connectors and this chip if the connectors lost connection for even an instant the chip in the console would decide you were on a bootleg game and turn the power off. So even if the game itself didn't crash (maybe only the one pin for the DRM chip gave out for that instant) you were screwed.
I pulled out the NES I have here (once owned by Byung) and decided to try it out for the NES' birthday. To no one's surprise, blinky-blinky. It was time to operate! I took some pictures but sadly they didn't turn out well, but I managed to fully disassemble the console and find the DRM chip. I took an exacto-knife to the 4th pin and eventually managed to cut it apart, negating the DRM. I also took out the connector and gave it a quick wipe with windex and a q-tip in the hopes that might do something. I put it all back together and gave it another shot... No blinky-blinky! No game either, though. I definitely managed to turn off the DRM chip but the connector itself must be shot (or I blew something up playing with the motherboard, but the power light did come on). The plan now, if I want to resurrect the machine, is to buy a new connector. I just may do that, especially since I know now how easy it is to open the machine up.
But I wanted to play a game for the NES' birthday, so I downloaded Nesticle and a TMNT rom. Possibly my favourite NES game of all time, and I was surprised that I remembered the end to Shredder's speech on the TV after you save the dam from stupid bombs.
Very rarely did any of that stuff work. Today I did a little poking around to try to figure out why the blinking happened and the actual reason really surprised me. You see, it all comes down to DRM, and none of that earlier stuff dealt with that underlying problem at all.
What those other things tried to deal with was two other flaws in the design of the NES. The first is they made the internal connectors out of low quality metals so they easily corroded with dirt and wear. The second is that the whole spring loaded system slowly but surely bent the low quality connectors with each use until eventually they stopped connecting as well as they used to. (Both of these problems were fixed with the second generation NES which loaded the game in from the top like the SNES did. Also, you can argue the spring loaded system was needed due to wanting the NES to look like a VCR instead of an Atari what with the console crash and all.) These two reasons would make the console not work at all, though. Lose connection with the game and the system should become unstable and possibly crash. Why would it turn on and off, on and off?
It turns out that Nintendo was worried about bootleggers making their own NES games, so they built a system into the console and into every cartridge to verify that the cartridge was a legitimate Nintendo authorized game. (Nintendo Seal of Quality, as Andrew would say.) So what they did is they put identical chips into the NES and into every cartridge (apparently the chip was $9 per for third party vendors) that would communicate with each other when the power was turned on. If this chip had voltage on its 4th pin and the cartridge didn't properly echo the right response to the chip then it would power off the console. Hence, if you put a bootleg cartridge into the console it would blink on and off, on and off.
But why does my NES blink? Due to a combination of the shoddy connectors and this chip if the connectors lost connection for even an instant the chip in the console would decide you were on a bootleg game and turn the power off. So even if the game itself didn't crash (maybe only the one pin for the DRM chip gave out for that instant) you were screwed.
I pulled out the NES I have here (once owned by Byung) and decided to try it out for the NES' birthday. To no one's surprise, blinky-blinky. It was time to operate! I took some pictures but sadly they didn't turn out well, but I managed to fully disassemble the console and find the DRM chip. I took an exacto-knife to the 4th pin and eventually managed to cut it apart, negating the DRM. I also took out the connector and gave it a quick wipe with windex and a q-tip in the hopes that might do something. I put it all back together and gave it another shot... No blinky-blinky! No game either, though. I definitely managed to turn off the DRM chip but the connector itself must be shot (or I blew something up playing with the motherboard, but the power light did come on). The plan now, if I want to resurrect the machine, is to buy a new connector. I just may do that, especially since I know now how easy it is to open the machine up.
But I wanted to play a game for the NES' birthday, so I downloaded Nesticle and a TMNT rom. Possibly my favourite NES game of all time, and I was surprised that I remembered the end to Shredder's speech on the TV after you save the dam from stupid bombs.
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