Category: retro

The Issues With NES Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

The title refers to the original NES TMNT, not the arcade version or the NES game based on it. This is the version that Konami released under their Ultra label. It sold well (real well!) but is widely considered an inferior game for a number of reasons. Those reasons are the subject of these three videos, from Youtube channel Displaced Gamers. I recommend them, even if I think every place they say gamer it would be more proper to say player.

The first video:

In a long and difficult game, one of the hardest sections comes relatively early. The only swimming section in the entire game, players must maneuver their supposedly-aquatic surrogates through a difficult course that has imprecise movement, water currents, high damage, instant kill hazards, a strict time limit, and, as the video shows, buggy implementation. Many players in the NES era gave up at this point, which is rather a shame considering it’s only at the end of level two. This video examines the code and demonstrates why it’s so challenging, and how it could be made fairer.

The second video:

TMNT has notoriously floaty jumps, a low frame rate, and a fairly weird implementation of gravity. Any platform game that allows players to adjust their jump height according to how long the hold down the jump button is fudging its physics behind the scenes, but TMNT does it rather poorly.

The third video:

Displaced Gamers examines additional problems with the game’s timing, particular with that of its input reading and attack animation. Like the other two videos, they suggest code changes (sometimes in the form of Game Genie codes) that fix the problem, if you happen to have a fondness for 6502 assembly. (I do!)

If you’d like to try NES Teenage Mutant Turtles, it’s included in the “Cowabunga Collection” that was released for Switch, Xbox X/S and Playstations 4 and 5. Fortunately, it also includes twelve much more playable titles.

Romhack Thursday: Zelda in Low Res

On Romhack Thursdays, we bring you interesting finds from the world of game modifications.

When people think about NES games, they often think of pixel art. Big chunky pixels! It’s one of the defining aesthetics of our era. The NES occupies a niche between the truly blocky graphics of the Atari VCS era and the 16-bit consoles, which don’t have a much greater resolution than the NES (since the limitations of CRT displays were a big factor), but had a much greater color depth that could help smooth things out.

But it can be interesting, visually, to try to find a middle ground between the Atari and the NES. That is where the subject of this post comes in: The Legend of Zelda Chunky Edition, a graphics hack by Zero Meaning.

There are no words for how much I love this look!

Only the graphics have changed, and just to make them more blocky, instead of the prevailing trend for remakes, which is to make them less so. (Oh also, the bright cyan of Link’s Blue Ring tunic has been darkened a bit.)

For some reason, this look suits The Legend of Zelda a lot! The greatest challenge to making it, I think is figuring out how to represent letters and numbers. You can see from the title screen above that the S, R and numeral 8 posed particular challenges, as did the copyright symbol.

There’s not a lot more to say about this one! So here are a few screenshots of Zelda, chunky style.

The Evolution of Decision and Cancel Buttons

Image from the blog in question. I presume they got it elsewhere.

ABA (who makes great tiny games BTW) linked to a Japanese blog post that goes over the traditional “decision” and “cancel” buttons on a miscellany of game systems. The link is to the Google Translated version of it; here is the original. It’s fearsomely detailed!

RetroGamerNation Covers New VIC-20 Games For 2022

The Commodore VIC-20, Commodore’s first attempt at a budget color home computer, often gets lets out of the spotlight in favor of its more capable successor, the Commodore 64. Back at release it had significantly limited RAM even for the time, only 5K, and it also had only eight colors for general use, simple sound, and no hardware sprites. Even so, it did all right in the market, but was quickly overshadowed by Commodore’s more powerful followup.

But all of these factors mean that making substantial games for it is both a more interesting challenge, and a lot more impressive when it’s done well. Youtube channel RetroGamerNation did a roundup video of interesting VIC games made in 2022. Remember, when watching these videos, the VIC had no sprites. I personally like the look of Flood. Most of these games require significant RAM expansion to run (on the VIC-20, “significant” means at least 16 kilobytes), but many people who try them out will be running them on an emulator anyway, and one of the games actually runs on an unexpanded VIC.

RetroGamerNation: Commodore VIC-20 Games Roundup For 2022 (Youtube)

U Can Beat Video Games: Super Mario Bros 3

We’re brought up U Can Beat Video Games before (here’s all of the videos they’ve done to date, and here is their home page with a merch store), but this time they’ve covered Super Mario Bros. 3 in their typically completionist style, covering every level and every secret in the entire game. Sometimes they split a long game into two or even three videos, but not this time, this one video goes through the whole game, and it’s three hours and 23 minutes long! The other reason to link them this time is it’s their 100th video!

They’ve done some other interesting games since the last time we linked them, which was when they covered A Link To The Past. Some particular games they’ve done in the meantime:

Even if you don’t have an interest in seeing these games taken apart so thoroughly, many people enjoy using their videos as background while doing other things. In a Youtube environment where video makers feel encouraged to go nuts with editing and fill their footage with distracting noises, UCBVG is a model for how to create interesting and informative videos. They are great! And they have a couple of adorable dogs who appear in every video, too!

Romhack Thursday: Kirby’s Dream Land in Color!

On Romhack Thursdays, we bring you interesting finds from the world of game modifications.

Kirby’s first adventure was, famously, a Gameboy game. Since that system is black and white, it’s been heard that Shigeru Miyamoto didn’t know Kirby was supposed to be pink until his second major game, Kirby’s Adventure, was released as a swan song for the Famicom/NES. The last main world in Kirby’s Adventure, as a nod to its Gameboy roots, is monochrome.

Kirby games tend to have distinctive graphics, and Dream Land is no exception even if it is monochrome. But what would they look like if they were in color? Well we don’t have to wonder any longer, because of a romhack constructed by GreenAndACat. It ports the game to the Gameboy Color hardware, and it looks pretty darn great! They resisted the urge to make it too fancy, instead giving background elements broad swaths of primary color that look great when applied to the game’s simple yet iconic graphics. Have a look:

Green Greens is looking pretty sharp!
The water may look slightly glitchy, but its clarity is really appealing!
Nice color combinations inside Castle Lololo
No games do starry skies like Kirby does.

Kirby’s Dream Land DX, on romhacking.net.

Arcade Heroes Reviews Mario’s Arcade History

Image borrowed from Arcade Heroes-so that I can promote the post it came from!

It’s a great article! It starts out covering the classic-era games everyone remembers, Donkey Kong, Donkey Kong Jr. and Mario Bros., and then slowly gets less and less well-known. It even mentions the two Gottlieb pinball games!

Fabian Sanglard on Sprite Creation on the Capcom CPS-1

Street Fighter II has some really complex spritework! Its characters don’t actually use traditional sprites, but more what amounts to custom tile layers for each one. This helped unlock characters from being mostly rectangular, and allow them to have poses with radically different shapes.

Fabian Sanglard has a great article about how character art was created for that system that’s well worth your time to have a look at. Well, maybe it’s worth it? I don’t know you. For all I know you’re looking for sewing advice. This is probably the wrong site for that. No offense to all you clothes-makers out there.

ROMs were expensive, and Street Fighter II required a lot of them, so it was important to make the most out of each one. A big rectangular shape around Edmond Honda would contain a lot of empty, wasted space. Imagine how much space they would have wasted with Dhalsim’s long stretchy legs! With this system, they only had to include the graphics data that would actually contain pixels.

This was in 1991, mind you. More recent development practices would probably have the data be compressed in storage, which would take care of all those empty pixels, or at least they could make a tool to handle figuring out which tiles should contain data. What the Street Fighter II artists had to do was create physical representations of each character on a physical board, chop that up into squares, and figure out what each tile had to contain, a laborious process.

Fabian reckons this system was used for other CPS-1 games, going back to at least Forgotten Worlds. Looking at the tile layouts of CPS-2 titles, it seems a lot more evident that they used a packing tool to handle fitting their characters into the memory space. For more info, please go check out the article!

Myst Demake for Apple II

How much of Myst can you fit onto an Apple II with three 5 1/4” floppy disks? As it turns out, if you don’t really care about screen resolution, nearly all of it.

Images from the demake’s website, lined above.

In the following Youtube video, you can watch a playthrough of the first fifth of the game. A complete run is in the playlist linked here. Warning: prepare your ears for mayhem.

Apple II Myst Demake

Romhack Thursday: Amida’s Curse (Zelda II)

On Romhack Thursdays, we bring you interesting finds from the world of game modifications.

For a game notorious for its difficulty, Zelda II: The Adventure of Link has a lot of romhacks, most of which up the challenge level still more. Amida’s Curse is more of a difficulty level in keeping with the original, which is nice, and has some interesting ideas in it.

The Zelda II bosses are used mostly without change, although their new environments throw in some wrinkles.

Due to controller issues (PowerA’s cheaper wired version of the Switch Pro Controller has decided to mess up in frustrating ways) I have yet to play through the whole thing, but what I’ve seen has some interesting decisions. Amida’s Curse throws out the wandering monster encounters completely; there is no reason I can see to not wander around the landscape wherever you want. In fact you definitely should try to wander around a fair bit, for the game has bunches of secret areas waiting to be found throughout the landscape, hiding heart and magic containers, experience gems (which are a reskinned version of the original game’s P-bags) and sometimes required things.

Fall off the elevator before descending to the ground and you might have to reset the room to go back up.

Amida’s Curse has a bit more terrain to cover than stock Zelda II. It’s got more towns (which are much smaller, a good change) and dungeons, and is split up more by item gating than before. In the first town you have to find a key, this lets you get the candle out of a cave, this lets you see in a cave leading to the next area, which has a dungeon with a Power Bracelet that lets you break blocks, that allows you to go through the next cave, and so on. It feels a bit like you’re being led by the nose, but that is often the style with these kinds of games, and it’s not like Zelda II itself didn’t have a fair amount of it.

If you find interesting spots in the overworld, it’s worth it to check them out!

The overworld map takes a cue from the Famicom Disk System version of the game and has animated tiles, but instead of just animating the water, most of the tiles in the overworld are animated now. Towns have smoke coming up from them, and grass blows around. The combat scene graphics have been upgraded a little bit too.

The difficulty balancing is pretty good. Romhacks that resist the urge to make you fight through gauntlets of enemies every step of the way should be lauded. It’s not perfect, I would say, there are places like where you have to jump over a skeleton on a collapsing passage, or make a big jump while being harassed by birds. And there are places where the design could use a little more work: it’s easy to get stranded in some rooms by falling off an elevator, requiring you to reset it, or in one notable case purposely die, to get yourself unstuck. And if you’re jumping water or lava that comes right up to the landing platform, make sure you clear it by a fair margin, as the game loves to kill you if your foot even grazes the perilous liquid.

Usefully, extra lives found don’t give you a one-time extra try, but increase the number you start each session with, which is a handy little improvement. I think a non-obsessive player can make it through, or at least from what I’ve managed to see. I look forward to trying to get further into this, when my controller isn’t fighting me every step of the way.

Zelda II: Amida’s Curse Homepage – Romhacking.net

Indie Fangame Constructor Mega Man Maker Approaches V1.8

Mega Man Maker (available for PC, Mac and Linux) is a fan project to do for Mega Man what Super Mario Maker does for Mario games, and it’s very well-made! It has a huge variety of levels available on its website to play, although what seems to be an account creation bug makes it difficult to tell you about them from experience. In addition to Mega Man (a.k.a. Rock), it allows Proto Man, Beat, or fan-favorite character Roll to be included in levels, each with their own special abilities.

It has a pretty cool tutorial as well, in which Dr. Wily and Dr. Light explain how the editor works. Their pixel artist really nailed that air of playful malevolence in Dr. Wily, who seems like he’d be fun to know if it weren’t for constantly trying to take over the world. Have a look:

I feel I should mention that it doesn’t contain all of the classic Mega Man series’ enemies and bosses, nor does it allow you to string levels together into a Mega Man adventure itself. As did Super Mario Maker, and SMM2 before its world creator update, it’s focused on designing single levels, although you can make them quite large, even big enough to be a whole adventure in itself.

Version 1.8 is due to come out in a few weeks, with a whole bunch of new features, and its creators have been busy hyping it up. We look forward to trying out the new version!

Mega Man Maker

Bubble Ghost

It’s Halloween, so let’s review a slightly spooky European computer game that got remade as a Gameboy title with an awesome soundtrack: Bubble Ghost!

It’s kind of a riff on Marble Madness, in that you’re controlling a round object with momentum-based movement through a perilous made of obstacles. But you don’t control it directly: instead, you play the part of an incorporeal spirit that imparts motion to the object, a fragile soap bubble, by applying its ghostly breath. This whimsical concept backs a wonderful little action game. All the versions are pretty much the same game, and they’re all pretty short, with just 36 single-screen levels, but it takes a lot of skill to guide your wobbly ward through the whole maze.

The ghost can pass harmlessly through objects, and the amount of motion applied to the bubble by your breath depends on how close you are to it, which gives you a fine amount of control over its passage if you’re skillful enough.

The Commodore 64 version (below) has jerkier motion for the bubble than other versions, but has atmospheric sound:

The Amiga version is pretty representative of most of the 16-bit versions:

The Gameboy version was implemented by Japanese programmers, has a cuter protagonist and graphics all around, has great music, and an actual ending (though it’s still really brief), but it’s still the same game:

Protomagicalgirl did a speedrun of Gameboy Bubble Ghost at SGDQ2016:

There’s also versions for Atari ST (has an option to play its music out the MIDI port!), MS-DOS, Amstrad (some funky screen trasitions in this one), Apple II GS (not a complete play) and Windows (from 2003, also not a complete play, and has the flair of a bootleg clone). It’s also on Steam, released there in 2018, although that seems to be a direct recreation, maybe even emulation of the DOS version, which is one of the worse versions, with terrible sound.

According to Mobygames, Infogrammes remade the game as Bubble+ on some platforms, and didn’t pay the creators for sales of those versions! I don’t know if the creators get anything from the Steam port.