Little Sisyphus https://youtu.be/to0rkV_SbMA
A video game essay rpg with a lot of tongue in cheek references to 80’s culture, gaming, coding etc.
Back in the 90's, NES clones were all the rage in Eastern Europe:
With ludicrous names like "Gold Leopard King" https://www.reddit.com/r/crappyoffbrands/comments/1ekwzx5/go...
Or mimicking a Sega Genesis package and console look, this is the one that was most popular in Romania and I had one too : https://gadget.ro/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/terminator2.jpg
There's still a ton of old cartridges for it on sale on the flea market: https://www.olx.ro/d/oferta/jocuri-clona-nes-dischete-casete...
Back in the 90's, buying such a cartridge was a big decision, since a single one would cost the allowance for several months. And with no Internet and YouTube to run a search for "Haunted Haloween 85 NES", the only criteria for evaluating such a game in the physical flea market was the poster on the cartridge. Which, unlike the OPs which at least seem to pose a resemblance to the actual game, it had almost nothing to do with how the game will look.
Consequently I almost never got the good games and was utter disappointed after trying them. Fortunately there were neighbors who also bought and we exchanged cartridges, and so I found the best game I ever remember playing on such a console, Mighty Final Fight: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hoUPvwCcUo8
Do you know if its cartridges are compatible with Dendy or Famicom cartridges? They seem similar but maybe there was an attempt to "DRM" into it own unique form factor.
I still have my Terminator2 console at home but doesn't power up anymore, otherwise it could fetch some 150 EUR on the flea market: https://www.olx.ro/d/oferta/consola-retro-terminator-2-endin...
But I'm not that attached to it, I bought myself a new Nintendo 8-bit NES clone and a Sega 16-bit Megadrive from Aliexpress along with cartridges which contain hundreds of games, so I'm settled.
The Sega Megadrive console from Aliexpress scratches an itch dating back to the 90s. At the time, in the "Russian" flea market there was a strange exhibit of a console which looked 100% as a Sega Megadrive, it looked like this: https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/gl4AAOSwqh5h8div/s-l1200.jpg
But worryingly, the "Russians" were telling us that it works with yellow Famicom cartridges. And there were no other cartridges for sale anyway, so no way to verify if it's some unholy bastard between NES and Sega. It cost double or triple of a regular Terminator2 and given that also cost a fortune at the time respective to my allowance money, I could only dream about buying it.
Found a few over the years on the Romanian olx ( https://www.olx.ro ) site but wasn't that curious, they are 100% pure Famicom in a Sega package (a sheep in a wolf's skin). I bought a true Sega clone from Aliexpress and the cartridge is different and the games are in another league compared to 8-bit. If I had that in the 90s, I'd have been the king of the village. We had a Street Fighter arcade in the village pub and the kids would crowd themselves along drunks to wonder at the spectacle when someone felt rich enough to pay for 2 minutes of entertainment.
Maybe the original ones where Pokémon, SML 1 and 2, Donkey Kong and a few more (the ML games were Nintendo Classics and sold for very cheap). In the GBC era most people got originals, but even in these times tons of bootleg X in 1 games were sold too. Also, I was very lucky to buy the Cannon Fodder cartridge for 5 EUR (~$5 in 2002, second hand) for the GBC as it condensed the whole Amiga/PC game with nearly all the graphic quality. And with Metal Gear:Ghost Babel for the GBC I didn't miss Metal Gear for the PSX at all.
I'll let you know a secret. I bought my console in 1997! :)
1997 was maybe the year of peak hyperinflation in Romania, I've checked my parent's paychecks from the period and while both of them were employed in white collar (better paying) jobs, both their income converted in today's money didn't make $200. Not euro, dollars, although recently that seems to catch in parity. A monthly income for salaried parents of €150, taking care besides them and the household of me and my two brothers, so a family of 5. Therefore "dirt cheap" didn't apply here and I guess, I was fortunate for being to afford even such a console.
On a side note, around that period, my younger brother went with a school exchange in Austria. Thought of a lunch at Mcdonald's as the most luxurious thing one could experience. Today I'm paying some €10 for such a lunch and don't think about it but imagine you'd be paying 6.67% of your net income for a lunch (how much it cost relative to my parent's income in 1997). That'd be €267 in today's money for me, fuck, I ain't going even to a restaurant and paying that, I'm not a millionaire!
Unfortunately, like many other hobby programming niches, most homebrew communities are currently dealing with the recent influx of low-effort vibe coded games that completely defeat the point of learning to work and be creative with limited hardware. Some started adopting strict no-AI stances, which is refreshing to see when seemingly every other community is going the other way; so far my own released work (mainly on the original PlayStation) is completely free of LLM contributions and I'd like to keep it that way for as long as I can.
I was able to produce a few (very) "low effort vibe-coded games that completely defeat the point of learning to work and be creative with limited hardware", but along the way I was still able to learn how to build a compiler to be creative with limited hardware for me. And that was fun.
I'll never make anything 1/1000th as impressive as the games passionate hobbyists have made over the years, and I don't think we're even building the same thing, conceptually. For me, vibe-coding the game (and the language, and the compiler) is the game itself.
https://github.com/imjasonh/playground/blob/main/nescript/RE...
My favorite thing to come out of it is https://imjasonh.github.io/playground/nes-player/?rom=subway which is a RCR clone set on the NYC subway, complete with realistic routes, schedules and transfers. There's no "point" to it really, just go from place to place punching dudes.
I took a glance at your game and Kunio fighting endless Kunio clones looks boring to me. I guess the realistic NYC subway angle might be interesting but it's not obviously an interesting game mechanic.
Vibe all you want, but don't expect others to be as enthusiastic of your own vibe as you are yourself.
If you're curious about making NES games, there's literally never been a better time to start than today. Unless you count tomorrow...
My favourite example of this effect is the large expansion to Morrowind that is Tamriel Rebuilt. Their quality standards in the last few releases have been so high, the base game wouldn't pass them anymore. Yet their release tempo is increasing. Much of this is due to big effort by its loving developers, but some of it also comes down to improved tooling that just didn't exist a couple of decades ago.
There's a similar story around the old PDP computers. People with modern computers as tooling have managed to coax old PDP computers into doing things they always could, but which it was insurmountable to get them to do without the modern tooling.
I guess what I want to say by this diversion is this: if you don't know what project to take on in your spare time, develop tooling for an old platform you like. You'll enable others to make things we couldn't even dream of before.
'Princess Peach in the Mushroom Kingdom' was the most acclaimed homebrew option, essentially a re-skin and level re-design of SMB3 with SMB2 Peach as the protagonist. So the solid gameplay remained, and the levels were HARD. Great work by the dev, and obviously a labor of love.
I'm thrilled to see that so many new and re-worked titles are out there, and even for sale. Great work by the community!
Or, if you were making a plug-and-play game device in the 2000s, it was often easy to use a clone NES SoC as a foundation.
An exception is the Game Boy and Game Boy colour. There GBStudio has facilitated a similar wealth of games. I personally don't know that scene very well, but I keep seeing it grow from the periphery.
There are plenty of new homebrew games (some really impressive, like cathode quest and junk runner), but I didn't see yet a good curated list
It’s like a modern take on Catrap, but for the NES. I believe the name might be a nod to Fire ‘n Ice, another great classic NES game in that genre.
Highly recommend it if you’re into puzzle games. I’d say that in retrospect, this is the game that is responsible for starting my interest in retro-emulation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Final_Fantasy_VII_(NES_video_g...
And it looks like there’s even an English translation patch:
https://www.greatgatsbygame.com/games/Gatsby.nes
I didn't include it in the list because it's a pretty short game and I found the gameplay rather shallow. It's almost just a short little joke. It's not bad, just rather brief.
The Jane Austen game has much more depth. It's genuinely a good game!
At least one of these (Sam's Journey) seems to run perfectly on Retropie on a Raspberry Pi 3.
I love the NES — probably my favorite console! I still enjoy playing the original games today on occasion.
I have a modest (curated) collection of about 60 games, but most are what I would consider some of the best titles for the system: Dragon Warrior 1-4, Mega Man 1-6, SMB 1-3, both Zeldas, Castlevania 1-3, Final Fantasy, Destiny of an Emperor, Guardian Legend, Faxanadu, Duck Tales — just to name a few of my favorites.
Just the other day I was thinking to myself that I should look to see what homebrew/modern third titles are out there an worth playing.
So I’d say this post was actually perfect timing!