Seeing this thread makes me wonder why it was called the "FM Towns Marty."Quote:
Originally Posted by TrialSword
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Seeing this thread makes me wonder why it was called the "FM Towns Marty."Quote:
Originally Posted by TrialSword
cause no one listens to AM?
I actually saw a Marty in person (albeit in the packaging) for the first time last summer, and part of me still wants to waste money on obscure game systems and PCs just because of that curiosity I had when I was a kid. I know there's nothing to play on PCFX, but I'll probably get one someday anyway. Maybe I'll play Return to Zork... again.Quote:
Originally Posted by N3kr0kvlt
I wish the Marty looked anywhere near as cool as the FM Towns desktops, though. That CD drive on the front is cooler than any vertically-oriented console or PC I've ever seen.
http://www.illusionware.it/marty/beast.htm
Shadow of the Beast FM Towns compared to Amiga.
The FM Towns Truxton 2 I find a little disappointing. It lacks Tate, part of the play area is cut off, and it is missing a parallax layer. There's more slowdown than in the arcade one.
I agree, Tatsujin-Oh sucked on FM Towns. Fortunately, this isn't well-known and I sold it without any trouble. I wonder how the other shooters on the system ended up. Raizing apparently ported a couple of their games to FM Towns. Has anyone tried those?
My favourite games on FM Towns are Western-developed games. Many of them had tons of improvements over the equivalent Amiga or PC versions. Loom, for instance, has redbook music, 256 colour graphics, and no dialogue cuts. Ultima 6 (which I still can't find a real copy of!) is Origin's first CD-ROM game and has voice acting done by the actual inspirations for each character. Richard Garriott voices Lord British for instance.
I wanted to get a FM Towns way back when after I read that it had a perfect (or close to it) of Afterburner... But then 32X's version was so good that I forgot about the system.
Having owned most of the worthwhile titles, I can give you quick summaries:
Emerald Dragon - like the other Towns Glodia ports, better music but different in-game art than the PC98 original, also less bugs...the PC versions are almost a totally different game from the console versions
Xak III - Micro Cabin never mastered the art of smooth scrolling so it's still jerky like the PC98 original and PCE port...actually it runs kind of slow on the Marty
There was never a Daimakaimura port on Towns. Genocide Squared, Super SFII and Mahou Daisakusen require more memory than the Marty has and they still don't run as well as the X68000 versions on a real Towns. The best Towns games are the adventure game ports such as the Lucas stuff. I like the Towns King's Quest V as well. Towns Ultima I-VI are the best versions of the games Japan has seen while VI is the best version period as it is bilingual with great music/voice. All of the arcade ports by Ving are competent but none are 100% perfect; favorites being Pulirula, Splatterhouse, and Tatsujin-ou. CRI's stuff is passable with Turbo OutRun being much better than the MD port, After Burner III just sucks no matter where it is, GalaXy Force II is decent but the Saturn port is better.
It does have the original Rayxanber though which to this day is an exclusive. Ku2++ is a shooter set containing both serious and light-hearted games but I again prefer the X68 version. Besides those, I can only think of Muscle Bomber and Raiden as being friendly to non-Japanese speakers but again for the money, you can just get the PCBs. Asuka 120% and Mad Stalker are absolute crap compared to the X68 originals...you can probably sense a theme here.
Viewpoint is much better on the Towns than the X68000, FWIW. So is Image Fight, with a larger screen and smoother action.
As for the name, FM = Fujitsu Micro. They had several older machines (FM-7, FM-77 etc) before the Towns. Why 'Towns' and 'Marty' I dunno.