Gimmick! Special Edition Review (msx)
i've been playing gimmick for a long time, orignally via emulation, and now on original hardware for many years. this is a very frustrating release, as i want more people to play this game, but this is far from how it deserves to be showcased.
i DO recommend gimmick. it is phenomenal, and one of the best 2d platformers. tomomi sakai's design is genius. i do not, however, recommend it like this. this game deserved much better. (and you can give it that through alternate means)
- latency is acceptable on PC version (~3 frames) but could have been fixed with runahead. switch version is less playable at 5-6 frames. the original game has no jump buffering and requires fairly exact physics-based platforming, so it feels quite poor.
- no meaningful display options. both modes (regular/zoom) are 1:1 pixel ratio (which is wrong; famicom/nes stretch to 4:3 and have non-square pixels) and are simply nearest neighbor, resulting in gross shimmering artifacts. typical JP-developed emulation issues that every developer fails to address. easy to solve: nearest neighbor up to 3-4x integer, then bilinear back to the correct display ratio.
- no gamepad rebinding. PC version has keyboard rebinding though????
- PC version has some weird performance issue happening. my processor is a little old (FX-8350), but 30% CPU utilization for famicom/nes emulation is unacceptable. there were stutters throughout that caused dropped inputs. the high processing load explains lack of runahead as a solution, but it's kind of unbelivable.
- anemic "features". the achievements are all obtained in a single "true end" playthrough (minus needing both endings). the lack of acheivements for exploring some of the game's more interesting secrets is silly. as well, the lack of practice presets for the speedrun mode is nonsensical. clearly they are tracking memory addresses for some of these features, so why not build a practice mode out of save states, or give the user some control over this? save state practice mode is very simple to implement.
- menus are outrageously cheap and the "accessories" (clearly trying to do an M2 here lol) all over the screen are meaningless.
- the scans are questionable. lots of really shitty cleanup jobs, clearly run through photoshop filters. on the famicom cartridge scan there are all sorts of bad artifacts.
- sound emulation seems nice, but could use a lowpass filter.
- crashed on first boot, pretty good and funny.
beyond this there are many small quality of life features that could have easily been added to make the whole play process a lot better. things like the game requiring manual reset after the staff roll and all that
as well, there's no way (as far as i am aware) to control the enemy in the ship in stage 2, which is one of the most pleasant easter eggs in the original game and requires a second player's controller input to do.