The Amiga has hardware sprites, but they’re fairly limited. Most programmers prefer to use its powerful blitter hardware to simulate sprites, drawing them to screen memory much more rapidly than non-blitter hardware can. For more information, I refer you to the video.
That’s it for today, but there be something more substantial tomorrow….
I had thought about doing this as part of a Romhack Thursday, but I didn’t get it together in time for yesterday. And anyway, it’s not a hack of another game, but a homebrew title for the Genesis/Mega Drive. And it’s quite good!
While it has a recreation of the original Q*bert, the main attraction to Mega Q*bert is Mega Mode, which adds a lot of new elements to the game. It takes inspiration, not just from arcade Q*bert, but from Konami’s Q*bert for NES and the underrated Q*bert 3 for SNES. It even borrows bits of Q*bert creator Jeff Davis’ own unreleased arcade sequel, Faster Harder More Challenging Q*bert: Q*bertha returns from that game, a chaser character that can change cube colors herself. Later on, as in FHMCQ, that are levels where Slick and Sam change cubes to an unsolvable color, and only Q*bertha can return them to play.
Some other new elements, joining the balls and baddies of the arcade games:
The Red Balls have tiny fast and huge slow versions, they behave the same but the difference in timing makes them tricky. Along with them are “Stop and Go” balls, which change speed.
There’s new purple octopus enemies that generally fall down the pyramid, but can meander unpredictably, including up and sideways.
A relative of Slick and Sam shows up later on, who in addition to wrecking your work can skip cubes on the way down, including jumping right over your head.
There’s also static disks that can be reused (a borrowing from Q*bert 3), disassociated playfields that disks must be used to travel between, cubes that can only be left in certain directions, one-hop cubes that disappear when landed on (and provide an alternate way of tricking Coily to its doom), and more. And there’s a two-player co-op mode too!
I won’t say it always has the best design. I’ve found at least one situation where the one-hop cubes can make a level unsolvable unless you lose a life, which resets them. And the way the balls move make some routes very difficult to ascend, due to their frequent tumbling down and blocking narrow paths. But these challenges, once you’re aware of them, can be overcome, and the game has passwords for every level anyway. If you like the original game, you’re sure to have a good time with Mega Q*bert.
Here is a full playthrough by its creator Jaklub. It’s pretty long (2 hours, 9 minutes)!
Mega Q*bert (rom for Genesis/Mega Drive by Jaklub, free download)
Kid Fenris is an underrated little classic game review blog. Many of their posts deserve to be linked to, but we try to keep up a variety of sources, so I try to pick out when they have particularly interesting subject matter. So it is when they posted about McDonald’s Treasure Island for the Genesis/MegaDrive, which also turns out to be the first game Treasure developed as a company.
Image from the linked article. It may be a licensed game, but it looks so vibrant!
As the article reminds us, it wasn’t the first Treasure game released, that would be the game that in many ways announced to the world that they meant business: Gunstar Heroes, as brimming with ideas as it was.
Treasure seems largely to be in preservation mode these days, and their last title was released 11 years ago. Not all of their games have been as critically acclaimed as Gunstar Heroes, but they all have something interesting about them, and McDonald’s Treasure (heh) Island has it too.
We’ve linked them before, and more than once, but they’re one of a small number of Youtubers who consistently does great work. Here they look at the effects in a number of games and reveal how the programmers coaxed surprisingly complex effects out of the hardware for each of them. (25 minutes)
The games and effects covered this time:
Art of Fighting on the PC Engine, zooming in and out from the fighters as they approach and draw away from each other
Road Rash on the SMS, which created a startling effect of a road undulating and going over hills for 8-bit hardware
Ranger-X on Genesis/Mega Drive, artillery shots firing into the distance in the background and multi-plane parallax scrolling
The Lawnmower Man on Genesis, SNES and Gameboy, fast 3D virtual reality scenes (well, slower on Gameboy)
Donkey Kong Country 3 on SNES: vertical stretching of a boss
Contra 3 on SNES: rotating both a large boss, the background and the player on the screen at once when the SNES only had one hardware scroll background layer
I’ll admit, I’ve sat on this one for months. After posting about U Can Beat Video Games, I started to worry that this blog might get a bit repetitive if I kept posting about video game walkthrough series, and they take a long time to construct because there’s so many links, but it’s been a while since then, and VG101 has been around for years now.
Video Games 101, a side channel of a Let’s Play channel, covers much the same ground as U Can Beat Video Games. Some of the specific games are different. VG101 is a bit more about entertainment than the specifics of beating games and the strategy involved. Professor Brigands has three “TA” characters that assist him: Scary Gary (covering bosses), Blaze (a surfer who goes over the available items in each game) and Fluff the cat puppet, the most fun of the group, who explains game trivia and history.
I’m just putting it off still further at this point. Here is the intro video to the channel, followed by the list of every walkthrough VG101 has posted to date.
The Youtuber: MattKC Bytes What he did: Unexpected things to Sega’s aborted Genesis/Mega Drive add-on. The address: here. The length: about seven minutes.
The explanation: Did you ever play around with a 32X? Evidently not a lot of people did. It was straaaange. Unexpectedly powerful! A bit misjudged! Hosted a port of DOOM! Had a port of Virtua Racing that compares favorably with the Saturn version! Had that crazy hard-to-play Knuckles game that gave us Vector the Crocodile!
Have you ever hooked one up though? Its hardware is odd. It’s like a completely separate console to itself. The Mega Drive wasn’t made to support add-on processors and chips like that, so Sega used a clever solution: the 32X has its own video output, and also a video input. You plug the Genesis’ output into the 32X, and then the 32X into your TV. The 32X mixes the Genesis’ signal into its own, as if it were chromakeyed. Since the 32X cartridge supplies the program running on the Genesis as well as itself and they can talk to each other, the two processors and graphics chips should be able to sync perfectly, if awkwardly.
But: because the Genesis’ video signal emerges from that console through this external wire before reentering the 32X, it’s possible to do things to it while in transit. The Genesis supplies video timing information that the 32X relies on, so you can’t get a signal from the add-on without the Genesis’ AV plugged into it, but the Genesis does produce a viewable video signal that you can see on its own.
All the details are in the video, which has been embedded below for your convenience and amusement.
Bad Game Hall of Game is an interesting blog that talks about failed titles without the snark with which they were usually treated in the early days of the Web, or the rancor of The Angry Video Game Nerd. Snark and furor drive hits, of course, so I can respect the desire to give games many regard as kusoge their due, whatever that may be.
When you know it? It’s simple. When you don’t? It’s unfair.
Truthfully, there are lots of games that are perceived as bad that aren’t really so terrible, often due to the audience-chasing bile emitted by folk like Seanbaby and Something Awful. Games intended to be played for challenge, especially those from arcades and the earlier years of consoles, are kind of a pastime for masochists. When you lose, it often feels like it’s not your fault, but was it really? Was that hit telegraphed and avoidable? Was there some clever technique to be discovered, like jumping and slicing through an Ironknuckle’s helmet in Zelda II, that makes seemingly impossible enemies a simple matter to defeat? And when a game is intended to be played many times, not shattered in a single session but returned to many times, getting a bit further each time, isn’t it supposed to be a good thing that you may lose your first time out?
I took these screenshots myself for this post. See what I do for you.
There are lots of armchair game designers, maybe even more than armchair movie directors, since players spend more time with games generally before they put them down, and it’s easier, theoretically at least, to make games yourself without the capital expenditure and outside labor that movies require. (I can tell you though, it’s still plenty hard.) And yet, they are the players, and if they’re not having fun, then the game is doing it wrong. Even if it’s because of some information or training the player hasn’t, in their life, gained, you can’t blame them. Maturity can help a player enjoy games they wouldn’t otherwise. But this is also true of any art form, and the opposite could also be said to be true, there are games where, I’d say, maturity is an outright barrier to enjoyment. It’s complicated. Maybe I’ll talk about this later.
URG URG URG URG AIIEEE
In the article that Bad Game Hall Of Fame talks about that I find interesting today, the game in question is Sword of Sodan, the creation of Finnish demo coder Søren Grønbech, an infamous game with a much longer story behind it than your typical bad game, indeed extremely long. Out of curosity, I pasted BGHoF’s discussion of it into Microsoft Word, and it came up to 67 pages! It’s got two large sets of footnotes, goes back to the Amiga demo scene and gives insight into the difficulties of developing computer games, at the time, in the state of Denmark.
Almost nothing gets through these giants’ defenses, and your encounter with them puts one on either side. As a connoisseur I must say, the frustration is exquisite.
Sword of Sodan for the Sega Mega Drive/Genesis, as it turns out, is a port of an Amiga game. Both games are extremely hard, but the Genesis version actually has more interesting design decisions behind it, in the form of its potion mixing subgame. You can hold up to four potions, each of one of four different colors, and can choose to drink any number of them at once. Drinking different combinations of potions has different effects, most good, some useless, a couple actually bad. (Hilariously, if you drink one of each color at a time your character immediately dies, and the game flashes a message on screen: “WINNERS DON’T DO DRUGS.” Gee thanks, William S. Sessions.)
Many games of the time talked the talk, but Sword of Sodan would outright kill you if you got too experimental with your potions.
67 pages is a lot to read about a game that few people might want to play, but it’s okay to skip around. I won’t tell anyone.
Been looking through the RSS feeds and found another item from Time Extension, a fairly lengthy piece where they talked with lead programmer of overlooked Mega Drive/Genesis classic Crusader of Centy, Yikihiko Tani, a.k.a. Bugtarou.
There’s something about this style of promo art that really appeals to me. Images from the article at timeextension.com.
Crusader of Centy’s generic name caused me to pass on it back then, but it has a lot of interesting elements, including a surprisingly dark story, a system where you can collect up to 16 animal companions and use them two at a time, an animation style for its main character where it was composed of several individual pieces that were animated separately (while avoiding the problems that system had in Ernest Evans) and generally Zelda-like gameplay.
Of particular interest in the article is that the game was at one point pitched to be an entry in the Shining series, with the working title Shining Rogue. That turns out to also have been a WIP title for Landstalker.
Remember Crazy Taxi? How they got licensed punk music from Bad Religion and The Offspring for it? Remember how awesome that was? I’m not even a music person mostly, but I could still recognize that the soundtrack of those games was special. (I’m talking about the arcade and Dreamcast versions-other versions may or may not have that soundtrack, probably due to licensing issues.)
You want to know what game doesn’t have a great sound track? Crazy Bus.
Crazy Bus is a homebrew Sega Genesis/Mega Drive game that was created as a test for the programmer’s BASIC compiler. It wasn’t meant to be a real game. As a result, its soundtrack is almost a masterpiece in cacaphony. Listen for yourself… but you’re going to want to turn the volume down for this one.
It’s awe-ful-some. I encourage you to play it for for friends, family, co-workers, prospective employers, random strangers and household pets. I’m certain nothing bad will come of it!
“We scour the Earth web for indie, retro, and niche gaming news so you don’t have to, drebnar!” – your faithful reporter
Computer issues kept me from filing last week’s report. That is the reason. It is not true that I got so drunk at a Globmas Party that my chemical composition was 50% alcohol. Don’t listen to those rumors! Let us begin.
It’s funny. Corbin Davenport writes an article at How-To Geek titled Atari’s New Gaming Console Isn’t Dead Yet. But it’s URL is: https://www.howtogeek.com/855757/ataris-new-gaming-console-is-dead/ Don’t you love how URL slugs can reveal a piece’s working title? The article itself is more about how it’s mostly dead, so someone call Miracle Max.
Gavin Lane at NintendoLife discusses the upcoming shutdown of the 3DS and WiiU eShops. You haven’t been able to add funds for a while through the stores, although you could still add them using the Switch’s shop then use that money to buy there. The piece mentions that Nintendo has been almost anxious to close the shops, due to poor sales of the WiiU. You’ll still be able to download purchased software… for a while.
While we’re on the topic of 16-bit Sonic, revealed last year by Lapper on Twitter, and recently boosted by Classic Sonic Deconstructed, it turns out that, because of a misplaced hitbox, you’re completely immune to the bomb attacks of the boss of Chemical Plant in Sonic the Hedgehog 2 if you’re crouching.
This is the boss’s only attack. If you’re standing on the middle platform and just duck when he’s attacking, you’re completely safe.
