The Flipside of Gaming
The final part of my best of next fest February 2023 showcase.
0:00 Intro
00:24 Meet Your Maker
4:24 Rin the Last Child
6:43 Xenonauts 2
9:04 Wantless
11:49 Dark Envoy
14:34 Takara Cards
15:58 Ogu and the Secret Forest
17:55 Enenra
19:23 Pizza Kidd
20:50 CursedSword
22:03 The Last Starship
23:56 Black & White
What is the SuperGrafx? Why don’t we remember it as well as its predecessor, the PC Engine/TurboGrafx 16, with which it was backwards compatible?
Sharopolis on Youtube digs into the system and its capabilities (17 minutes):
As you can tell by the video’s cover image: Amazing Power, No games. The SuperGrafx only had five games released for it throughout its lifetime, pretty harsh for a system that cost around $300 by today’s money. That cost, relative to that of the PC Engine CD, which was also expensive but could play CD games with vastly greater storage, was probably what doomed it. For those really seeking an arcade experience in Japan there was the Sharp x68000, famous at the time as the true enthusiast’s system with a good number of nearly exact arcade ports. It also cost around $6,000 in today’s money, and still $3,000 in then-money.
The system used the same chip as the PC Engine before it, a 6502 variant running at 7 mHz, meaning it was only a 8-bit system. But was that really so bad? The major 16-bit competition for it was the Motorola 68000, another venerable chip at the time that was used in the original Apple Mac, the Sega Mega Drive/Genesis, the Commodore Amiga and the Atari ST. Yet the 68000 also had some more overhead. Many instructions on the 6502 completed in from two to four cycles, whereas the minimum cycle count of a 68000 instruction was four, with some taking up to 20. This, of course, is offset by the 68000’s greater number of registers and ability to work with two bytes at once for many instructions.
Its graphics were essentially two of the PC Engine’s graphics chip, with some circuitry to interface their outputs together. This description brings uncomfortable reminders of people deriding the Wii’s graphics as “two Gamecubes taped together,” but it’s a much closer description of the SuperGrafx’s graphics. But in practice this meant twice the sprites, dual-plane backgrounds, and double the potential colors on-screen at once, while the MegaDrive/Genesis infamously was still stuck with 64.
The SuperGrafx’s failure in the market was one of those inflection points of the growth of video gaming. If it had succeeded then NEC might still be a player in gaming today, and maybe Hudson Soft would still be an independent entity, instead of just another property for Konami to mine for nostalgiabucks.
Indie Games Plus’s Joel Couture, who’s kind of a friend of the blog, reviewed this silly exploratory platformer/horror game/dating sim. They admit that they’re running a campaign to promote it, but that it doesn’t affect their review. I believe them, because the premise is way too ridiculous and charming to pass up. I can assure you that I have no connection with them! It’s on the PS Store, the Xbox Store (if that’s what it’s called, I’m fuzzy on it), the Epic Store, and Steam, which is a store but doesn’t include the word store in its name. They say It’ll be in the Switch eStore eShop later on.
You can choose to play either a male or female Dracula. I don’t see signs of a gender ambiguous version, but we are talking about a vampire here, they’re kind of notorious in popular culture for not caring a lot about what their partner’s sex or gender is. There’s 12 monsters across two genders and lots of species. Hey, it’s got Cthulhu in a dress!
Admittedly there’s lots of games that don’t live up to a great premise. The memory of the $4 I wasted on Animal Fight Club still sticks in my craw. The Steam reviews are mostly positive, with some people complaining of jank and some implementation issues, so you should know about that going in. But it’s only been out a week so far, so it’s likely to improve in the coming months. It’s up to you if you want to jump the gun now or wait to see if it gets better, but its presentation is charming already, tastefully sexy and playful without being raunchy. I can appreciate that!
Romancelvania (Indie Games Plus review – PS – Xbox – Epic – Steam)
Louie Zong makes a bunch of fun song videos! Once in a while they’re game related. This one’s a short album made with Warioware D.I.Y’s composition feature. Even though it’s only about 12 minutes long, there’s ten songs squeezed in there, and each come and gone so soon that none have the opportunity to bore your brain.
Youtuber T2norway educates us on a very commonly used font for Nintendo products from around the Gamecube era onward, especially remembered for its use in Wii Sports and other Wii software:
The video’s only four minutes long but the basic gist is that it’s actually two closely-related fonts, New Rodin and Shin Go, both based on a typeface created in 1975 called Gona. They have been called the Japanese version of Helvetica. They see frequent use in Japan in media, on signage, and of course in games too!
What’s the deal with this font? (Youtube, T2norway, 4 minutes)
Part 4 of my favorite games of Next Fest 2023 showcase.
0:00 Intro
00:18 Monster Crawl
1:42 Cavern of Dreams
3:32 Witch Guild Survivor
4:37 Extreme Evolution Drive to Divinity
6:52 MistRogue
8:08 Shattered Heaven
9:54 Baldy Bounce
12:07 Horde Hunters
13:45 A Sister’s Journey
15:37 Roots of Yggdrasil
18:34 Gods of Defense
19:40 Trinity Fusion
21:33 Wall World
One of a number of great gaming blogs you should be reading is A Secret Area, which has been around for awhile now. Back in December they did a piece covering the worst off all of the instances of The Game Awards, an institution so prestigious that this may be the first time I’ve even heard of it.
The most fun of the Oscars and other award shows is mocking the whole awful affair, and the Game Awards are no different. Please, have a look and enjoy!
Lowlights of the Game Awards (A Secret Area)
Edit the Frog is still taking a break from covering romhacks, there’s thousands to sift through on romhacking.net, but in the meantime, here’s a fan-made, browser-playable version of Metroid! Although it looks a lot like the NES game, it’s no hack, but a from-the-ground-up reimplementation.
It was made specifically to help overcome the limitations of the NES platform, so Samus animates much more smoothly, there’s particle effects, multi-directional scrolling areas, built-in mapping, and the music uses later, more orchestral versions of the original’s music, although with an option to switch to the 8-bit originals. (I find that the music is a bit reluctant to play in the current version, though.) There’s other interesting features new features to find as well.
Most interesting is a built-in randomizer mode, and a second, alternate planet to explore! It’s designed along the lines of the original Zebes (here called “Zebeth,” a nod to the on-screen Romanization of Zebes in the NES game), but has some new elements, including areas that scroll in all directions, and new bosses!
Metroid is approaching 37 years old, and it was looking a bit long in the tooth three decades ago. Yet it’s still remarkably atmospheric for its age, and I find there’s something evocative about how the game’s world doesn’t feel designed like a challenging obstacle course for the player, like it just exists on its own and doesn’t particularly show any care for the player. There are some item gates, but like the original NES Legend of Zelda, many fewer than you’d expect, especially compared to their SNES sequels.
Screed time! Will Metroid still be played 20 years from now? I think so, although I find that most of the internet energy around these classic NES games now is focused on speedrunning, randomization and romhacks, and two of these three things Nintendo is actively fighting against. It’s a good example of how copyright law and corporate control has the potential to hold back both fan interest and property longevity. The rights to these games should be released to the public, while there is still a public that cares about them. Nintendo would probably get more money out of it, in the long run, from making sequels anyway.
The era of the 3D shooter was inaugurated in 1992 by the shareware release of Wolfenstein 3D by id Software, for 80286-based DOS computers. It wasn’t until this year though that the game was backported to the 8088, the chip the original release of the IBM PC used, and CGA cards. The port was made by James Howard, who showed it off in a Twitter thread. Rees at RetroRGB wrote an article on this “updated” version.
While the monitor colors for CGA are pretty harsh on the eyes, the code also has support for CGA’s little-known 16-color composite output, as well as Tandy graphics and monochrome.
Wolfenstein 3D Comes To Even Older PCs With New 8088 / CGA Port (RetroRGB)
WolfensteinCGA source code repository (GitHub, requires shareware or commercial Wolf3D data files)
The always excellent Nicole Express has a great post on the Japanese gambling game Pachinko, especially the imported machines that made it to the U.S. when for a brief time we liked it too. It contains the fact that we probably got video pachinko before Japan did, through the Odyssey2 game Pachinko! (The exclamation point there is part of the game’s title, as it is with all Magnavox-produced Odyssey2 games. While I enjoy that bit of trivia, I am not actually hugely excited about it.)
Physical slot machines were, and maybe still are, illegal in Japan, so all the ridiculous graphic and sound flourishes those demonic entities bear in North America are instead put in the service of the Tiny Silver Balls. I’ve always shied away from these forms of gaming for the same reason I never got into Magic: The Gathering: by tying profitability to gameplay, they feel to me like they’re more business model than game, really. I might not be able to earn my quarter back at Pac-Man, but at least there isn’t someone figuring out how to work those odds against me.
Nicole Express: Vintage Pachinko: Going Back And Forth Across The Pacific
This is part 3 of my favorite games of next fest February 2023 showcase.
0:00 Intro
00:18 Bleak Sword DS
1:27 Yog-Sothoth’s Yard
3:38 Full Void
5:30 Striving for Light Survival
7:04 Teslagrad 2
8:38 Desynced
10:48 Afterimage
12:41 Mika and the Witch’s Mountain
14:30 Gamma 19
15:46 Shumi Come Home
17:24 Dragon Bell Xi
18:53 Death or Treat
20:23 Darkest Dungeon 2
22:38 Highwater
Overseeing the early days of computing was Compute! Magazine, properly stylized with an exclamation point. They got their start as The PET Gazette, changing over to Compute as their focus spread into more types of home microcomputers. Compute stuck around as a multi-platform for some time, but ultimately spun off a couple of manufacturer-dedicated magazines. One of these was Compute’s Gazette, whose name harkened back to those PET-exclusive days. It focused on Commodore machines, and would then outlive Compute itself by some years.
The early years of Compute magazine are joyous. They’re filled with esoteric data, geeking out over low-level coding matters, and lots and lots of type-in programs. But it is depressing to me, reading over the early issues, knowing how numbered are its days. This whole genre of computer magazine, that encouraged users to type in programs, that offered coding tips, sometimes even offered add-on disks of software, is now only a memory. We are all poorer for it.
The writing on the wall for this style of magazine could perhaps be seen as early as September 1982, when Compute published an article about a great new upcoming product from Commodore, the Commodore 64. Not because of the style of the article or anything specific about the computer. Just that, by being so greatly popular, the C64 greatly expanded the magazine’s audience, which would inevitably steer it towards becoming more “mainstream,” which ultimately would be the death knell for a publication like this.
Still, it’s fun to look back on. Here is that article in image form, or you could find it on the Internet Archive, where the archives of Compute live on, for a time.
An extra, from that issue, is an ad for one of Microsoft’s first peripherals, a memory card for the Apple II:
