Uploaded April 2023 | Updated September 2026, 6 days ago
No Commentary / Curated Turn Time / S-Rank
Playlist: youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7IEN-HGlR46OzPri4_kH1w1VEXkOZOVw
I'm showing all animations and dialogue BUT edit turn-time so that there's little to no wait between moves!
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I don't have too much to say yet, but I am REALLY excited to see Advance Wars back and shinier than ever! I hope you guys enjoy the gameplay!
No Commentary / Curated Turn Time / S-Rank
Playlist: youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7IEN-HGlR46OzPri4_kH1w1VEXkOZOVw
I'm showing all animations and dialogue BUT edit turn-time so that there's little to no wait between moves!
----
I don't have too much to say yet, but I am REALLY excited to see Advance Wars back and shinier than ever! I hope you guys enjoy the gameplay!
![EXTRA 01. [FPGA 4K] Blades of Vengeance (Genesis) - Longplay Version](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/pK1SRaU-18o/mqdefault.jpg "EXTRA 01. [FPGA 4K] Blades of Vengeance (Genesis) - Longplay Version
No Commentary / 4k60 (x9 Integer Upscale) / High Res Audio
Playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7IEN-HGlR47pFjCqAKmP4MlsltjL3Bvo
This is being played on an Analogue Mega Sg FPGA game console allowing for clear output in sound and audio! The video provided to YouTube is 4:4:4 and lossless! Details below in Technical Notes!
***If you want to see the entire game in one go... here you go!***
Im gonna make this description a little bit of an information dump for game mechanics, here goes:
Ducking. BLOCKS. Which is crazy. You are pretty much entirely invulnerable in the direction you are facing when ducking. This is a super important mechanic which makes the game far more easy to complete.
If you attack near the peak of your jump the momentum swings you up a bit higher. This isnt nearly as important for the Huntress who is already the most capable at jumping but its a neat touch nonetheless.
When paused you can select your items and also hold C (see?) and then use the d-pad to look around. This can help find pitfalls.
Speaking of pitfalls, there are no bottomless pits and perhaps only one drop which will result in an inescapable death in the game. Very odd for a platformer, but very cool from an exploratory standpoint. (Beware of fall damage, however.)
75k points nets you an extra continue. A really bombastic jingle plays once this occurs. I didnt check to see if the continue screen is unique but the Game Over screen is!
I havent mentioned the sparkles yet. There are, uh... sparkles. In the levels. Let me see what the manual calls them... Perhaps, its simply Power Ups. They kinda dance around the exact name of the sparkle itself just saying its a sparkling area.
ANYWAY
Touch the sparkle and you get a Power Up shown as a filled in diamond on top of your character bar. This makes your damage output stronger. You can hold two Power Ups at most (at first) and LOSE one if you lose a life! They are few and far between, so be careful!
If you buy the armor (and you should) in the store after the 3rd (or is it 4th?) area you character basically levels up into an entirely new class! You keep your title but the Huntress becomes a ranged attacker with a crossbow! The Barbarian trades in his axe for a really wonky looking flail. And the Wizard throws his hobo outfit away and steps into something more Sagely (He gets a stronger strong attack).
Oh, Strong Attacks. Hold Up while pressing the attack button and you do a...strong attack! Really useful for the Huntress when she has sword since its a far reaching overhead swing. Less useful when she has the crossbow because you have to hold to charge the attack for a bit and then release it for a spread shot. Its just better to rapid fire your normal shot unless you need a weird angle.
I think thats it. The items are fairly self explanatory - one blows things up, another turns them into money, one heals, one makes you invincible, etc. Again, I picked Huntress because she has the most interesting attack set whereas the Barbarian is just melee and the Wizard only ranged. Also she is center and front on the box art!
I liked my experience with this game and it was fun mapping out how to get all the treasures, its definitely worth a play if you get your hands on it!
Original Overview Description:
Its not too often you find a brainless hack and slash platformer that has some depth!
The level design is strong giving you what feels like plenty of options but still keeping you on track to reach the end. There are many secrets as well, all of which I catalogued here! I had some bullet points on my other screen telling me how to get to the next treasure so that I can complete the whole affair live - I didnt want to keep stopping the video, especially since the music continues even when paused. So if you see me standing still for a moment, thats probably why.
I chose to play as the Huntress because she is the most balanced and has the most drastic style change partway through.
Please read the description in this video for detailed
Technical Notes:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DUbF6VssxOE")
![04. [4K] Everspace: Encounters (PC) GYRO CONTROL - First Attempt!* - Sector 04-05](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/pLQXDtqKico/mqdefault.jpg "04. [4K] Everspace: Encounters (PC) GYRO CONTROL - First Attempt!* - Sector 04-05
No Commentary / 4k60 / Fairly New Player
Playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7IEN-HGlR47QRIEp3uYFjDSbIKZSiAjM
*This is my first attempt after a clean reset of the game following a few practice runs calibrating gyro controls and the like. Its a pretty solid go, surprisingly! Better than some of my following runs.
You know what a space exploration/dogfighting game needs? It needs to be a rogue-like/lite! I would have never thought of something like this being a thing but here we are. And its beautiful. Looking, that is. I maxed out all the settings and this thing looks magnificent.
Also, Im using gyro controls to aim/steer (yaw and pitch). The game is kinda odd in that you normally would use your mouse to move the aiming reticule across the screen and the closer you get to the edges the more you turn, but instead I mapped that to gyro. Originally I was using the cockpit view but that didnt play so nicely with certain control elements so Ive taken us outside the ship. Its actually kinda cool out here and with the odd aiming system it works out.
As for how the game plays... youve got a limited time in each section to pick up as many resources as you can while fending off baddies before super dangerous reinforcements swoop in to clean you up! Resources in early runs arent as useful because you dont have the blueprints collected yet to build the neater things, but its still a good idea to get used to the process.
And the fights can get very heated very fast. One slip-up and youll be short on energy or health or swarmed to submission! Its not a very forgiving title in that respect. I mean, it IS a rogue-like. Your best bet is to try to incapacitate as many as possible before a real fight begins and to keep moving!
Good concept, pretty game, but~... way too grindy. After playing it for a bit I feel like itll take a bit too long to pick up the credits to upgrade a ship to an amount Ill enjoy let alone all the permanent upgrades you can pick up, too. And then the resource gathering in the game takes a while too, iunno. Its good, but needs some kind of tuning to keep the game moving at a brisker pace, I think. Id almost think that if you were allowed to just sense where everything is it wouldnt be too strong a benefit because of how you have to hurry yourself before reinforcements come in. Well, maybe things are better done in the sequel!")
![07. [FPGA 4K] Wario Land: Super Mario Land 3 - All Treasures! - World 07: Syrup Castle](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/qUfpcHd0vxQ/mqdefault.jpg "07. [FPGA 4K] Wario Land: Super Mario Land 3 - All Treasures! - World 07: Syrup Castle
No Commentary / 4k60 (x15 Integer Upscale) / Experienced Player
Playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7IEN-HGlR45ZPut_wX53gpziSb7z1vEe
This is being played on an AnaloguePocket FPGA game console allowing for clear output in sound and audio! The video provided to YouTube is 4:4:4 and lossless! Details below in Technical Notes!
(Wario didnt have time to tell you all about his amazing adventure so he made this video instead. Maybe therell be a description here later!)
Technical Notes:
TL;DR: YouTube was provided a perfect video so pixels are sharp and shapes are correct. Watch in 4k if your computer can handle it.
This video has suffered no lossy compression before reaching YouTube! Its a lossless video file with no chroma subsampling (4:4:4). Essentially, its a perfect copy until YouTube works its magic which now makes it a 4:2:0 video with lossy compression, yes. However, the better the initial copy... the better!
The video was originally captured in a 160 x 144 resolution, the native resolution of Game Boy, and then integer upscaled x15 times to 2400 x 2160 for a clean 4k display!
About the Analogue Pocket: Its a FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array) based game system which to explain in laymans terms (BY a layman): Its a chip dense with circuits and stuff that can be programmed to use only so many in whatever ways necessary to replicate another chip. Basically, if you can reverse engineer a Game Boy exactly, you can pretty much program this chip to behave like a Game Boy exactly. Which is what this is.
Ive turned off Frame Blending in the options because it overall softens the picture with the minimal benefit of making transparencies not flicker. Ive also chosen not to use the really cool video mode which makes it look like a Game Boy Screen because that would mess up the lossless video Im capturing. I can always add a filter later if I want to!")
![EXTRA 03. [RGB QHD] The Adventures of Batman & Robin [HARD] (SNES) - Normal Difficulty Ending](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/qVn5DZPmnCE/mqdefault.jpg "EXTRA 03. [RGB QHD] The Adventures of Batman & Robin [HARD] (SNES) - Normal Difficulty Ending
No Commentary / Practiced Run / 1440p60 (4:3 Integer Upscale) / Hard Mode
Playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7IEN-HGlR45AgjVKpmbFyyQGjHpP8Zi4
The video provided to YouTube is 4:4:4 and lossless! Details below in Technical Notes!
Hard Mode allows for no password saves and less retries!
Ive placed the entirety of the ending here even though the NEW stuff is the Alfred/Batman conversation near the stuff and the CONGRATULATIONS image at the end. But. They dont have as many character cut-ins during the Roll Call so thats why the whole thing.
Technical Notes:
TL;DR: YouTube was provided a perfect video so pixels are sharp and shapes are correct.
I went for a 4:3 output with pixel perfect sharpness via integer upscales. The video is compressed losslessly so no definition is lost.
256 x 224 - internal SNES resolution (8:7)
256* 7 = 1792 / 4 = 448
224* 6 = 1344 / 3 = 448
1792 x 1334 = 4:3
So you can fit the nearest neigbor upscales in a 1440p frame and suffer no interpolation and have it in 4:3!
***More details potentially pending.***")
![05. [FPGA 4K] Fatal Labyrinth (Genesis) - Levels 16-24](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/qeJ9MFlu2Nc/mqdefault.jpg "05. [FPGA 4K] Fatal Labyrinth (Genesis) - Levels 16-24
No Commentary / 4k60 (x9 Integer9 Upscale) / High Res Audio / Capable Player
Playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7IEN-HGlR47OU4Tbpv0lXhiKnHJ0JfTS
This is being played on an Analogue Mega Sg FPGA game console allowing for clear output in sound and audio! The video provided to YouTube is 4:4:4 and lossless! Details below in Technical Notes!
Time for some hints and tips! (More general info in first video)
As long as you have any amount of food you will heal as time passes. Very handy! Without food you lose health as time passes.
You identify items by using them and some can curse you or worse so be prepared!
Elemental rings are weird. You dont wear them and use spells... you throw them at your enemy to activate a one time use elemental bomb. You can also throw bad potions at enemies.
Chaos is one of the best spells forcing creatures to dance around aimlessly. They will attack if adjacent, however. If you choose to use or throw an item you will not change directions if youre confused.
Thats all Ive got for now!
Technical Notes:
TL;DR: YouTube was provided a perfect video so pixels are sharp and shapes are correct. Audio is high resolution compared to a Genesis system due to no processing constraints. Watch in 4k or 1440p if your computer can handle it.
This video has suffered no lossy compression before reaching YouTube! Its a lossless video file with no chroma subsampling (4:4:4). Essentially, its a perfect copy until YouTube works its magic which now makes it a 4:2:0 video with lossy compression, yes. However, the better the initial copy... the better!
The video was originally captured in a 320 x 224 resolution, the native square pixel resolution of most NTSC Genesis games, and then integer upscaled x9 times to 2880 x 2016 with black borders added along the outside for a clean 4k display!
This results in a pixel perfect output that is slightly wider than what you might have seen on your old CRT TV set! However, the pixels are sharp this way AND the art was designed in this pixel perfect resolution before being squashed to 4:3 back in the day. In short: Pixels are sharp AND circles are circles and squares are squares.
Some games were a 256 x 224 resolution, originally. These will be uploaded in 1440p to fill the screen as much as possible and maintain a pixel perfect integer upscale. The native resolution is far too thin for what the game looked like on a CRT OR for the art, so the width is integer scaled a step higher to result in a 4:3 aspect ratio (256 x 7 for 1792 and 224 x 6 for 1344 = 1792 x 1344). These will look a little thinner than the 320 x 224 games Im uploading, but the art will be crisp AND be how it looked in the old days!
Some games switch between 320 x 224 resolution and 256 x 224 resolution (Sonic 2 special stage, Lion King Stampede level, etc.). I will generally upload levels containing large sections in 256 x 224 resolution as 1440p to maintain perfect integer upscales and preferred ratios. 320 x 224 does not change ratio between 4k or 1440p. You will know when the genesis is using 256 x 224 cause the screen will shrink a little in these videos!
About the Mega SG... Its a FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array) based game system which to explain in laymans terms (BY a layman): Its a chip dense with circuits and stuff that can be programmed to use only so many in whatever ways necessary to replicate another chip. Basically, if you can reverse engineer a genesis exactly, you can pretty much program this chip to behave like a genesis exactly. Which is what this is.
Im playing in Zero Delay mode so the game is running marginally faster. 0.15%, to be exact. Thats less than 1/7th of a single percent. Ive also cropped out the colored border Genesis games tend to have.
The sound has been tweaked slightly per FirebrandXs recommendations, Ive enabled YM2612 High Quality Mode for uncompressed audio, and I have not engaged the ladder effect or lowpass filter. This will definitely sound different than a normal genesis because of the latter option. Its essentially listening closer to what the source sound would be like before the Genesis muffles it a bit.
I also want to mention dithering for just a moment here. In Genesis games youll often see lines of color alternating here and there, this is because on an old CRT tv the screen would be a bit blurry resulting in those colors bleeding together and becoming a mix of the two. This can also result in transparencies if used correctly. Unfortunately with a clean digital image this wont happen. The only way to enable these extra colors is to blur the digital image and this certainly would not be pixel perfect as is my goal. I like to think that we are now able to see how the artists tried to achieve their effect! You can always squint your eyes a bit if you want to try to replicate the blurriness!")
![03. [RGB QHD] Final Fight (SNES) - Westside - Cody Run](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/qr9RkEcG4NI/mqdefault.jpg "03. [RGB QHD] Final Fight (SNES) - Westside - Cody Run
No Commentary / Practiced Run / 1440p60 (4:3 Integer Upscale) / Hard Mode
Playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7IEN-HGlR47Hgk7pIVGILWf8Jaqhhxzt
The video provided to YouTube is 4:4:4 and lossless! Details below in Technical Notes!
Westside reminds me a lot of the area of Streets of Rage 2, so Im right at home bringing the hurt to these street thugs!
Watch out for the two Andores in that arena because they will utterly wreck you if given the chance! They are hyper aggressive and get momentary boss-like invulnerability after a knock down. Sending them both to the same side and then keeping them at swords length is the best policy.
The boss here isnt so bad if you dont let him get a bead on you. Edi.e(?) slowly moves around so gives you plenty of time to jump kick him away or toss a frenemy into him. Unfortunately I decided to approach him a few times from the front instead of above or below and got whupped for it. At the end when you see him moving reaaalllyyy fast from side to side is him trying to get a clean shot at you with his pistol. Dont let him! Keep chasing him down and hell just rush around without throwing out a single attack!
First videos description follows:
Originally an arcade game, Final Fight got a port to the SNES and was pretty decently done all considered! A whole level is missing and you can only play it in 1 player mode but you still get to throw your fists and squeeze the life outta some street punks all the same! I can only figure that Nintendo wanted to show they can have cool arcade games on their console as well because thats were the Sega Genesis really shined!
Im gonna play as Cody because he reminds me a lot of my go-to-character in Streets of Rage, Axel, apparently not just in looks but moves as well! No flaming uppercut though. Just some weird spinning kick you can throw out if in trouble for a tiny sliver of life.
Speaking of life, the enemies on this game can hit HARD. The weaker ones will stunlock you so if you dont use the spinkick to break out youll take a ton of damage, and its not uncommon for some enemies to regularly take a 4th to HALF your life in a single strike. Some bosses will do even more than that.
Since getting hit hurts in such a big way, the name of the game this time around is crowd control. Learning your attacks reach and how to keep everyone on one side is what will win this. One move youll overuse and abuse is your basic attack combo. It outreaches most enemies and does a good amount of damage. You can also interrupt it after the second strike by holding a direction on the d-pad to toss the punk over your shoulder knocking down everyone in your way and granting momentary invulnerability.
Crowd control!
Once you get the rhythm down the game can be rather simplistic but any slip up can punish you very badly so your attention is maintained. Bosses can be super cheap and evil hitting stupid-hard, overriding your attacks, and having invulnerability after being hit but once learned arent the worst thi g in the world. Mess up and youll easily eat through a whole continue though! And these continues send you back to the start of a round, yaaay. (If you start in area with less than 5 lives it may be better sacrificing them to start over.)
Gonna also quickly mention the horrible slowdown this game can have. If there are too many enemies and items/containers on screen the game can struggle to keep pace AND eat your button inputs in the process. This is the worst thing ever. They try to mitigate this problem by limiting to 3 enemies on screen but even this isnt always enough.
Also many item containers have randomized contents meaning you might only heal 1/10 your hp instead of 3/4. Or maybe therell be nothing at all!
Another piece of info that comes to mind is your special panic button attack doesnt come out if you attempt it after another attack. It treats it as another attack. Indefinitely. You either need to wait a moment beforehand or get hit before the special will be a special and not an attack.
Technical Notes:
TL;DR: YouTube was provided a perfect video so pixels are sharp and shapes are correct.
I went for a 4:3 output with pixel perfect sharpness via integer upscales. The video is compressed losslessly so no definition is lost.
256 x 224 - internal SNES resolution (8:7)
256* 7 = 1792 / 4 = 448
224* 6 = 1344 / 3 = 448
1792 x 1334 = 4:3
So you can fit the nearest neigbor upscales in a 1440p frame and suffer no interpolation and have it in 4:3!
***More details potentially pending.***")
![02. [4K] The Swindle (PC) - One Thief Attempt - Warehouse District](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/r6YedWVY8KI/mqdefault.jpg "02. [4K] The Swindle (PC) - One Thief Attempt - Warehouse District
No Commentary / 4k60 / Experienced Player
Playlist: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7IEN-HGlR44DWZlv4i_GGml2iM6kbVty
Steampunk Thievery at its finest! Procedurally generated so its always a surprise!
Starting with the Warehouse District youll begin seeing more elements to burglary defenses such as the floating drones. These guys will be the number one wildcard when it comes to the success of your heist! Their sight beams can point in ANY direction and have very little rhyme or reason to them. In general theyll stay pointing in one direction for an extended amount of time, but this cannot be relied on! What makes them worse is they take two hits to dispatch before you upgrade your baton and they have an invulnerability period following the first strike. Fortunately their light takes a moment to come back on and with good timing you can get the second hit in before much risk is involved.
Thats a lot said about the lowly drone, but unpredictability is the main foe in your crooked endeavors! Your first task in any heist (once you have the upgrade) is to deactivate the security station(s) which will shut off all cameras and drones.
Anyway, at this point in the game youll want to be able to plant some bombs and be able to hack through locked doors. This will allow you the run of most buildings! One Steam Jump will help with your travels also negating long falls and being able to stick to walls will give you ample opportunities for hiding and timing your attacks!
Its still early on so youll want to be careful with how you approach your targets!")
![02a. [QHD] XCOM: EW (PC) Abridged - Alien Abductions: Operation Patient Sword](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/rDqVX3nYjdY/mqdefault.jpg "02a. [QHD] XCOM: EW (PC) Abridged - Alien Abductions: Operation Patient Sword
No Commentary / Edited Dynamically* / Classic Difficulty / 1440p60
Playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7IEN-HGlR44G2wWcVD13Q891zTPTOjOk
*Wait times, overplanning, and dead time is edited out to make viewing much more interesting! I do try to include moments of forethought so it makes some sense and isnt just constant shooting.
I remember being very fast and loose on this mission. Did I mention yet that death is permanent in this game? Losing a person youve leveled up is very VERY bad. Thats why you send the rookie out as bait, er, to scout!
First Video Description Follows
Quick breakdown for you: XCOM is a long running series that set a definitive style of turn based battles using ranged weapons, various powers, and other equipment to repel the aliens menacing Earth!
Whew.
Anyway, this is the reboot which brought nice graphics and other doodads. The Enemy Within expansion pack is being used on the base game XCOM: Enemy Unknown. It basically tightens up the mechanics and adds a couple new classes and the meld pickup to reward people for quickly moving through maps rather than biding their time.
Hopefully this abridged playthrough will be a refreshing way to view the series!")
