[Dr. Floppy]

A playable/enjoyable rendition of Friday the 13th is long overdue. Stuff fixed thus far:

* The rock weapon no longer arcs.
* Jason no longer kills you in 4 hits.
* The counselor stats are tweaked so none of them suffer from Polio.

Also slated, pending resumed Adderall™ functionality:

* Simplified, intuitive map system.
* No more warped space transition-points (forest).
* Medicine actually heals you.
* A formal armory, preventing weak weapons from auto-replacing better ones.
* Use weapon while jumping! 
* JasonTracker™

What'd we miss?

[dougeff]

What'd we miss?

Music improvement, maybe?

[SunGodPortal]

Nice to see this game finally get some love. Played it a number of times as a kid. It's frustrating but it's also very original, I think. The in-cabin parts are kinda creepy too. Plus, how great is that game over message? LOL Classic...

* The rock weapon no longer arcs.

Just duck when you need to hit something close range. Problem solved.

* The counselor stats are tweaked so none of them suffer from Polio.

This will be one of the most important things right here. Only having like 2 good characters (Was it Crissy and Mark? It's been a while...) and the rest being totally useless is awful.

The only other improvements I can think of regard lighting the fire places. If the map displayed which ones were already lit that would be really nice. Also, if I remember correctly if you die and have to pick your next character, don't you have to re-light all of the fire places again? That's a pain in the ass. This may not be that important though. I don't actually remember what lighting the fireplaces accomplished. Did it give you the flashlight? You only need the flashlight on your first playthrough anyway. hehe

Music improvement, maybe?

That would be cool since there's probably less than a minute's worth of music in the entire game (despite music playing at all times). Don't know what to suggest though. If I knew what the options were here I'd have a better idea of what to suggest.

* Medicine actually heals you.

I thought it did. I forget how it worked though... Like I said, it's been a while.


Semi-related: A hack of some game where you play as Jason and hunt the counselors would be cool. Damn horny teenagers and their sex. A bad hack, perhaps?

Either way, rock n roll Doc.

[Nightcrawler]

It would be nice to include this palette fix for Jason as well.

[Chpexo]

.

[Grimlock]

This sounds like a neat project!    Makes me reminisce all those times I got my azz handed to me by Jason... 

[SunGodPortal]

I just thought of a good improvement. Remove all traces of "L J N".

[Chpexo]

.

[SunGodPortal]

Actually Atlus developed this. You can thank the Angry Video Game Nerd for unknowingly spreading the fallacy that LJN is a developer. The only thing LJN developed was the carts themselves.

Some times I forget that the company listed on the cart was just the distributer.

I should have known that LJN didn't do the developement part because of how playable it was.

[Googie]

This sounds cool, I'd play this for sure. Friday the 13th is one of my favorite games...

[Chpexo]

.

[SunGodPortal]

LJN never developed a video game. Ever. Developers went to them because they had the licenses to many movies, toys, and much more. Perhaps the reason why many games they published were stinkers was because companies had to pay a lot to get them published and get the licensed properties.

Ah. Makes perfect sense then. They weren't a crappy developer, they were just a company that would release anything that was handed to them regardless of quality so long as it came with a big enough check.

EDIT: I guess they'd get lucky every once in a while and one of the game's they'd blindly release wouldn't suck. Besides Friday the 13th, The Punisher isn't too bad.

[Midna]

EDIT: I guess they'd get lucky every once in a while and one of the game's they'd blindly release wouldn't suck. Besides Friday the 13th, The Punisher isn't too bad.

The AVGN was also pleasantly surprised to discover that Maximum Carnage for the SNES wasn't terrible.

[xorxif]

This sounds fun.

If you improve the playability, does the game get easier? If so, could the game have level edits / rebalanced difficulty / new content so old players of the original game won't know everything to expect?

Is the Jason tracker an obtainable item? If not, could it be made into one? Or have a gameplay mechanic where you have to get the tracker "on" him somehow by shooting it into him or something?

Is it possible to make a way to revive slain counselors?

Just throwing some ideas out there.

[Dr. Floppy]

Is the Jason tracker an obtainable item? If not, could it be made into one?

The item isn't in the original game. But Jason's location, both macro (area) and micro (screen #), is tracked in RAM. Thus, such a feature wouldn't be difficult to create. Despite prior claims, Jason *does* have some modest space-warping ability. He's required to go from area to connected area, but isn't required to traverse every screen involved in the linkage.

Is it possible to make a way to revive slain counselors?

Absolutely! Jason and Pamela each get resurrected twice, so fair's only fair.

[Bahamut ZERO]

  <---- My reaction to seeing this thread on the board.


This project sounds great! My best friend and I have spent a good many evenings playing the hell out of this game on the actual NES and off my modded Wii. Any improvements to this game are greatly appreciated!


What are the graphical limitations of the game? From what I remember from the game (granted, it's been awhile since I've played, and a bit longer since I've played it sober so I may be totally wrong) the counselors shared the same sprites gender-wise and had different palettes. Any way to give these guys thier own sprites?


I also had no clue the playable characters were camp counselors, I always thought they were kids haha.

[Dr. Floppy]

<---- My reaction to seeing this thread on the board.

What are the graphical limitations of the game? From what I remember from the game (granted, it's been awhile since I've played, and a bit longer since I've played it sober so I may be totally wrong) the counselors shared the same sprites gender-wise and had different palettes. Any way to give these guys thier own sprites?

Most likely, yes. The original game has four, 8kB slates of CHR-ROM tile-age. Each of these slates contains at least one instance of PRG-data encoded as 2bpp gibberish art; jailbreaking that nonsense is high on my list of Things To Do.

Because CHR-ROM is for graphics!

[Lilinda]

A playable/enjoyable rendition of Friday the 13th is long overdue. Stuff fixed thus far:

* The rock weapon no longer arcs.
* Jason no longer kills you in 4 hits.
* The counselor stats are tweaked so none of them suffer from Polio.

Also slated, pending resumed Adderall™ functionality:

* Simplified, intuitive map system.
* No more warped space transition-points (forest).
* Medicine actually heals you.
* A formal armory, preventing weak weapons from auto-replacing better ones.
* Use weapon while jumping! 
* JasonTracker™

What'd we miss?

Polio