New NES Game Release Celebrates With Official Tourney This Sat!

The Star Versus Logo

You read that right. A brand-new game for the NES- that's the Nintendo Entertainment System- is being released this week. Described as a player versus player shoot-em-up, Star Versus was developed by four person team, the game features multiple areas, a surprisingly deep battle system, and a single player story campaign.The actions is very fast, and sport lots of on-screen sprites with no slow-down. To celebrate the release, the developers are having an official tournament and release party this Saturday, July 25th, at the Twenty Sided Store in Brooklyn, NY, with the winner getting a free copy of the game. Here's a trailer:


This is a great way to scratch a nostalgia itch, get a physical copy of a game in your hands AND support independent creators. You can get more details preview the game manual, and buy the game at the Star Versus site, and if you're interested in technical musings, the dev team has a blog that explores programming and graphic design for the NES too.

Pushing Pixels: How Shovel Knight Was Inspired By 8-Bit Limits

A before and after look at the original and then simplified look of the King Knight

Released last year by indie developer Yacht Club Games to critical and fan acclaim, Shovel Knight was an action platformer that paid homage to the design sensibilities of the 8-bit era in general and the NES in particular, staying close to the limited color palette of the console. But what limitations did the design team have to work with? With the power of the PC and modern console at their command, what did limitations did they choose to keep and what did they choose to discard?

David D'Angelo, a programmer for Yacht Club Games, answers those questions and more in a recent blog post on Gamasutra entitled "Breaking The NES For Shovel Knight". The image above is accompanied by an explanation on how limiting sprite detail wasn't just slavish devotion to NES hardware limits but a deliberate design choice:

A character with too many colors stuck out like a sore thumb. We worked back and forth with detail levels and colors until we found a combo that looked great, [because] a sprite too detailed is also really hard to animate! In this example, you can see the original King Knight design. While the left sprite has only 5 colors (as was our stated limitation), it was too detailed and almost felt closer to a 16 bit sprite. After taking a few passes to simplify the shapes for readability and simplicity, we ended up with the sprite that you see in game!

The entire post is a really interesting look into the design choices that were made in the goal for capturing a gaming aesthetic, so if you want to know more, check it out!

Hilarious bootleg NES game review: Titanic

The ever-irascible CinnamonPirate brings us another import bootleg review, this time of an NES game based on the popular flick Titanic.

Yes, THAT Titanic.

From the review:

I have a hard time imagining what possessed anyone to make this game. The board meeting probably went something like this:

President: OK guys, we have this terrible RPG engine for the Famicom. How can we squeeze more money out of it?
Developer: Well, Titanic has been popular with students studying English. What if we make a game based on the movie?
President: But how will it work? I mean, the only character you could play as would be Jack, and he dies.
Developer: Don’t you see! An RPG where the player’s character dies! It will be revolutionary!
President: Make it so.

Well, they made it so.

The result was the most unbelievably fucking awful game in history.

Read the whole thing so his suffering won't be in vain.

Pontiac Ad References Spy Hunter Arcade Game

Pontiac cashes in on arcade classic Spy Hunter nostalgia with this awesome new ad:

XBLA Remake of Bionic Commando Dev: 2D Gaming Will Live or Die With Fan Support

A few months ago, I linked to this totally frickin' sweet preview video of the remake of the NES classic Bionic Commando for X-box Live Arcade titled Bionic Commando: Re-Armed. Capcom held a poll to determine the price it should sell for, and the gaming masses have spoken; the overwhelming choice to price the game at was $10.

Capcom's Ben Judd posted the official reasoning behind the pricing and faith in its fans thusly:

We first asked the question to our community about how much they would pay for Bionic Commando Rearmed here on the Bionic Commando community site.

Some people said it was stupid. Human nature dictates that people will choose the cheaper of two prices. Some people said we hated money. Well, while the results may suggest that $10 is the sweet spot for most people (in the US the final tally was 83% in favor of the $10 price point and 17% in favor of the $15 price point), there is another side of the story which wasn’t represented by the poll results – and that is the huge number of user comments that we received, where a majority were suggesting they would pay $15 or even $20 for the game.

When I first posed the question it wasn’t about whether people wanted something to be cheaper or more expensive. That answer is obvious. It was about whether people would be willing to pay more to support high-quality 2D gaming. 2D games are a bigger risk (no, they are not necessarily cheap to make. BCR has plenty of 3D models and uses much of the same tech and physics as the 3D version) because they are a harder sell. However, when we started the community site it was all about hearing from Bionic Commando fans and connecting with our community. The poll says $10 so that’s what it will be. Since the title will have to do quite well at that price point to break even (no, I’m not going to give you a specific number), I guess we have to roll the dice and see where they land.

Oh well, I’m tired of meta-emulated crap. These old 2D titles are where games were born. With some solid adjustments, new modes, and updated graphics they can still provide a hell of a lot of fun. Just updating the graphics isn’t paying them enough respect.

Besides, I’d rather fail having created the best game I could, even if the end result doesn’t justify 2D games like this in the future. So $10 it is for the XBLA and PSN versions (we haven’t decided on the PC version because it may have some additional content that can be downloaded later).

Let’s ride this train to the end of the line. Thanks for your feedback and your support.

Ben

(Hat tip to xblarcade.com for the source)

Pac-Man, Space Invaders, Tetris With A Twist: Retro Sabotage

Retro Sabotage, at first blush, seems to be a collection of mini-versions of classic arcade games like Space Invaders, Pong, Pac-Man or Tetris... but there is more than meets the eye.

Some of the games, like "pong 2.0" are pure parody. Others, like "Compromise", have some very interesting nuggets of gameplay.

They update every Thursday, and if you have a single pixel's worth of gaming nostalgia, or a sense of humor, you'll want to check it it.

8-Bit NES Tribute and the WWE: Two Great Tastes That Taste Great Together!

I loves me some pro wrestling. I obviously loves me some old-school NES games.

John Cena, a pro wrestler for WWE has combined both in what is the only T-shirt related to pro wrestling I've ever wanted to a)buy and b) wear in public:
OH HELL YES.

At the risk of losing my "wrestling smart internet guy indie cred", I will say that John Cena is one of my favorite wrestlers, and him coming up with a shirt like this is just AWESOME.

And he's not frontin', either! In his very first DVD, he talks about his love of old-school NES games, is wearing a "NO! I don't need a strategy guide" T-Shirt from the webcomic Deisel Sweeties, and he did a freestyle rap for a webmaster who runs an NES video game site that namedrops everything from Excitebike to the Konami Code.

Gamers, we're EVERYWHERE.

Thanks to Nyterayn of PMO for clueing me in!