November 2011

Stuff done in October:

• Updated that old dizzy meters script, and expanded it to the SF3 series.
• Improved on the old 3rd Strike hitbox script.
• Added Warzard to it.

Next month I plan to:

• Update some old scripts to use the Lua breakpoints in the new FBA-rr.
• Add the Jojo hitboxes to the CPS3 script and correct any other imperfections.
• Update the hitbox wiki page.

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This month's banner was from Tenchu: Stealth Assassins, the seminal action-stealth title developed by Acquire. It shares a lot of elements with Through the Looking Glass's Thief: The Dark Project, which also came out in late 1998. The characters are slow and sneaky, enemies are obstacles that can be either dispatched violently or avoided, and the design encourages the player to remain unseen. A major selling point of Tenchu was the cinematic stealth kill sequences that varied depending on the relative posture of the ninja and the victim.

If you like the idea of hiding behind a tree for thirty seconds, waiting for a guy to turn his back, then popping out and slitting his throat, you'll like this game. Enemies freak out on seeing the bodies, so a lot of time is also spent waiting for them to chill out again. (The ability to drag corpses around was added later in the series.) But the way the grading system works, you start out with enough points to get Grand Master (and unlock ninja schwag) without killing anybody, provided you don't get spotted.

Maintaining stealth is not that hard thanks to a HUD that shows the proximity of the nearest enemy and its state of awareness, the ability to peer around corners, and the enemy's inability to hear anything short of falling in water. There are a variety of evasive maneuvers and gadgets to help stay out of sight and manipulate enemy behavior, the most useful being a grappling hook that can get you anyplace higher. The ninjas are far from helpless in real combat, however, with the ability to block, dash, lunge, chain attacks, and use various subweapons. This is good since most of the missions have one or two boss battles, though on the whole combat is a little too easy.

The soundtrack by Noriyuki Asakura is exceptional. (He later did the not so exceptional music for Capcom Fighting Jam.) The narrator, Robert Belgrade, is better known as the voice of Alucard in Symphony of the Night and the announcer in the Tekken games. (The rest of the voice acting isn't anything to write home about.) The tracks are encoded as streaming XA files which can be digitally ripped relatively easily. On the other hand, the official soundtrack versions are extended with content not present in the game, though some tracks are missing.

I found something by accident some time ago when my original disc became unreadable by the PSX and I picked up a used copy: There were two versions of Tenchu. Both play the same, have intercompatible saves, and have a serial of SLUS-00706, but they have different intro movies. According to tcrf, there were two Japanese versions which also had the different movies, in addition to gameplay changes. But apparently the difference between the NA versions was subtle enough to go unnoticed.

old
new

The earlier movie consists of scenes that only vaguely evoke the setting, including video footage that someone must have taken on a stroll through the woods. It's almost entirely in black & white. The later movie prominently features characters and places from the game, and while the CG looks great it loses some of the abstract charm.

Comments

[Jedpossum]

http://i.imgur.com/7A5Hb.png
Remember this it'll help. Plus it'll help the Jojo's Community with documenting.

[error1]

weird, does it also have the gameplay changes of the jappenese version?
that debug mode looks cool, never knew about that
Monster of Monsters?

[dammit]

Jedpossum: Set the region byte to 0x7X, right? That dev stuff should make this easier than Warzard was.

error1: The gameplay of the two NA versions I have is identical afaict. Neither has the level editor and both have the features missing from the older J version. There is a small addition in the Shinobi Gaisen/Hyakusen releases though: the intro movie has a short silent clip of Ayane (seen in the tcrf screenshot) before the rest of it.

Yep, that's Monster of Monsters.

And a coincidence to tie these two topics together, "The World" debug item in Tenchu was apparently named after za warudo.

[Jedpossum]

Yeah 0x7X just got done trying it out on FBA-rr. The emulator supports it now but, you can still get a guru meditation error if you go down from Jotaro. But any error that happens on fba doesn't happen on Mame.

[error1]

haha I knew his stand was called the world, but I didn't realize "za warudo" was him saying "the world" in english

[miloyoyo]

thank you SO MUCH for doing the jojo hitboxes. I can't wait to see jotaros air C!

[dammit]

I'll try to get to it this month, but first I want to clean up some of my other messes.