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.

A Quit To Go Galga For!

This Galaga quilt from Carolina Patchworks is, according to the etsy listing, it "is fully compatible with the XBox 360, Wii, PlayStation III, all high-definition televisions, most models of fireplace, and a wide variety of good books."

It is also 100% AWESOME.