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Shera And The 40 Thieves: New NES Game Launches Kickstarter

Shera And The 40 Thieves: New NES Game Launches Kickstarter

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Retro game maker CrazyGroupTrio has put over two years of work into Shera And The 40 Thieves, a new NES game that crosses Donkey Kong with Prince of Persia to create a solidly entertaining experience. Now the Kickstarter is active, and it’s earned its initial goal in just two days. Once there was a half-genie named Shantae Shera,whose powers of purity were discovered and quickly coveted by the evil wizard Malice. Malice was already wreaking havoc on the community, but he knew he would be even more powerful if he added Shera’s magic to his own, so he ordered his 40 thieves to kidnap her. Now he’s busy performing the ritual to absorb Shera into his body and become the ultimate menace, and only Sarzha, Shera’s son, can stop him. Thing is, Sarzha doesn’t seem to have inherited any of his mother’s powers. While that kept him off Malice’s radar, it also means he’s relying on pure skill to get past Malice’s traps. There’s a bigger problem: the time limit.

The Shapeshifter Shatters Kickstarter Goals

The Shapeshifter Shatters Kickstarter Goals

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Dana Puch, a game developer from Barcelona, has created several homebrew games for the Game Boy. He’s wrapping up work on his most ambitious project for the handheld yet, The Shapeshifter…in which you play as Elliot, just a normal dude out on a normal camping trip. What’s AB-normal is when an elf shows up, tells Elliot that he is the only one who can save elf-kind from an evil wizard, and grants him the magic power to turn into different animals. Elliot can’t just mess around with his new gift…it’s temporary and will only last through the night. He must embark on his journey and defeat the wizard before the sun rises! The Shapeshifter has performed so well that it made its most ambitious stretch goal weeks ago: a port of the game to the NES. However, the NES game is not part of the current package, as you can’t just recreate one system’s game on another system in a day. The Game Boy and the NES use different processors

The Magnilo Case Launches Kickstarter Campaign

The Magnilo Case Launches Kickstarter Campaign

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Several high-profile actors have disappeared from Magnilo Movie Studios, and no one can figure out why or how. Only one investigator can crack this case…Detective Jones! …Too bad he’s dead. The studio will have to settle for the skills of Detective Smith instead, specifically you. That’s how The Magnilo Case, a unique puzzle-slash-action-adventure from Dalyen Retrogames, opens. As Smith, you’ve got to explore every inch of Magnilo Movie Studios and find out what’s really going on. Solve puzzles, dodge hazards and look for hidden keys to open blocked passageways…but be careful. Whatever is behind those disappearances, and possibly the murder of Jones, will now be after you. The Magnilo Case not only has retro graphics, it runs on a retro machine. You can get a physical cartridge that’ll run on a real NES by pledging to the Magnilo Case Kickstarter. Launched two days ago, it’s beaten its goal already and will likely earn well beyond that at the pace it’s going. The digital ROM costs a $10 pledge. A physical

Ghoul Grind Launches Kickstarter Campaign

Ghoul Grind Launches Kickstarter Campaign

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Virginia-based development team Woog Worx has been working on a new action platformer for the NES for the last two years. Now Ghoul Grind: Night Of The Necromancer is nearly done, and the crowdfunding campaign (launched today) is your chance to get a physical copy (or a digital one, if you prefer). On the eve of October 29th 199X, a possessed Vladimir Drachovi traverses the graves of Saint Crypton. With his newfound power of necromancy, Vlad awakens the resting townsfolk from their slumber. At their local hang out spot in the Crypton Woods, Nox Francisca and Veronica Mimieux are waiting for their friend Vlad to arrive so they can discuss their plans for Halloween. Unbeknownst to them, a newly awakened dead makes an attempt to harm them, and is struck down by Nox. Realizing that the dead have risen, Nox and Veronica journey to the graveyard to find the source of the necromancing and put it to an end. What makes this one unique from most other homebrews is the

Coming To Retro Systems: The Shapeshifter

Coming To Retro Systems: The Shapeshifter

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Dana Puch, a game developer from Barcelona, has created several homebrew games for the Game Boy. He’s wrapping up work on his most ambitious project for the handheld yet, The Shapeshifter…and you can get a physical copy through the crowdfunding campaign he’s recently launched. In The Shapeshifter you play as Elliot, just a normal dude out on a normal camping trip. What’s AB-normal is when an elf shows up, tells Elliot that he is the only one who can save elf-kind from an evil wizard, and grants him the magic power to turn into different animals. Elliot can’t just mess around with his new gift…it’s temporary and will only last through the night. He must embark on his journey and defeat the wizard before the sun rises! The Shapeshifter has performed so well that it smashed its most ambitious stretch goal last weekend: a port of the game to the NES. However, the NES game is not part of the current package, as you can’t just recreate one system’s game

Take The NES To Doodle World In This Clever Indie Game

Take The NES To Doodle World In This Clever Indie Game

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Indie game developer Nate Peters has just put the finishing touches on Doodle World, his homebrew NES game….and just in time; he was running out of crayons. You might assume establishing a unique look on a machine as graphically primitive as the NES might be difficult…but Peters pulled it off. Doodle World looks like no other NES game out there, official or otherwise. The game looks like it takes place on notebook paper. The colors look like they were applied with crayon. Due to its small graphics bank, the NES can’t store enough data to fill an entire background with unique tiles, which is why 8-bit era graphics tend to repeat themselves. Though clever shading and use of patterns, Peters has managed to disguise this and give Doodle World a feel like it’s actually designed on paper. The Kickstarter campaign for a Doodle World physical cartridge was launched today. Peters says the inspiration for the game came from his daughter, and many of the designs are based on her actual

Suddenly, Sixty New NES Games Are Live And Playable

Suddenly, Sixty New NES Games Are Live And Playable

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NESMaker is a PC software creator introduced last year that allows anyone to create their own fully functional game for the Nintendo Entertainment System. The program creates an authentic .nes ROM that will run on any emulator, and even includes a “Burn” function that sends the data to a cart flasher (assuming you have a blank NES cartridge lying around). Early this year, the NESMaker creators introduced the first-ever “Byte-Off Contest.” The NESMaker community was given one month to construct a demo for a 8-bit game and submit it before a panel of judges that included Nintendo’s Howard Phillips, NES box art painter Mark Erickson, and others. Approximately sixty entries made it under the deadline, and now all the candidates are playable in your computer browser. If you’ve got a spare afternoon, it is spare no longer. Highlights include: DIMENSION SHIFT: With incredible graphics that rival 16-bit systems, a killer soundtrack and unique hand-coded mechanics like the wall grip, this game could easily take home every prize. NYX: THE PARADOX

Micro Mages, Nebs ‘N Debs: New Games For The NES

Micro Mages, Nebs ‘N Debs: New Games For The NES

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With NESMaker currently in beta early access form (open as of August 8, $36), the once arcane task of crafting new games for the Nintendo Entertainment System will soon become much easier. These two projects currently being funded on Kickstarter, however, began before there was any such thing as software assistance. The folks behind Dullahan Software coded up Nebs ‘N Debs completely from scratch, using the raw 6502 Assembly code — quite the formidable task. In this game you play as Debs, an astronaut searching for a way off a distant planet. Nebs happens to be the squid-thing that attaches itself to Debs’s head. He’s both a curse and a blessing: he can help Debs gather the crystals she needs to synthesize fuel. Two years in the making, Nebs ‘n Debs contains 12 unique levels, a run-jump-dash gameplay mechanic, and a hard mode (they emphasize “HAAAAAAARD”) that can be unlocked after beating the game once. it will be released digitally, but since this is a Kickstarter campaign, you can also

This Is A Super NES Game, Running On An NES

This Is A Super NES Game, Running On An NES

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Hacker Tom Murphy has pulled off the unthinkable: he’s gotten Super Mario World, a Super NES game, to run on an NES console — a real one. How’d he pull it off? Did he cheat? …..Yeah, kinda — but it still took significant effort to get to the point where he could cheat. The NES is very limited graphically: it can render 64 colors, but it can only put 13 of them on one screen at a time, and only three colors are allowed in every 16×16 block of graphics. Murphy figured out a way to feed data into the NES so that a different color palette is allowed every eight pixels — but that still wasn’t enough. All the graphical data for an NES game is stored in a cartridge chip called the Picture Processing Unit, or PPU. Murphy created a custom circuit board and replaced the PPU with a soldered-on Raspberry Pi. The Pi computes the data — in this case an emulated Super Mario World — and

This Man Coded An Entire New Sega Genesis Game From Scratch

This Man Coded An Entire New Sega Genesis Game From Scratch

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Many, many indie developers have used the games they grew up with as kids to inspire their own retro-stylized games, but these are usually built on modern hardware. As simple as the games appear, coding them into existence was much harder back when 8 and 16-bit consoles were new and the methods of creating a video game were more primitive. (Though it’s about to get a lot easier with the NES….eleven hours to go). Matt Phillips had a dream of creating his own Mega Drive game (that’s Genesis for Yanks), but he wasn’t satisfied with just cranking something out for Steam. No, he could only settle for nothing less than the real thing! So he purchased authentic development kits and software from eBay, as well as a Windows 95 computer to run them on. “None of this old equipment works very well anymore. I’ve had more repairs on this thing can I can count,” he says. Phillips even had to go retro with the circuitry. Since modern circuit boards are

The NES Maker Campaign Enters Its Home Stretch

The NES Maker Campaign Enters Its Home Stretch

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One of the coolest Kickstarter products we’ve ever seen is for NES Maker, a PC software development kit that will allow anyone to build their own 8-bit Nintendo Entertainment System games from nothing. NES Maker uses GUI menus and graphics editors instead of code, and yet it’s surprisingly robust in options and features even at this early stage. “Early” being in terms of introduction to the general public. NES Maker’s creators started building the game creator years ago, out of necessity while coding Mystic Searches, their homebrew NES game. You may have noticed most indie NES titles happen to be hacks of popular games. This is because the NES only understands Assembly language, a primitive and cumbersome way to program. Most coding today is done with plain English words, but Assembly requires an involved knowledge of the very ones and zeroes the game is made up of. Not many people have the patience for it, especially when no job today requires it. Now the campaign is entering its final five

“Super Boss Gaiden” Theoretically Playable On The SNES-CD

“Super Boss Gaiden” Theoretically Playable On The SNES-CD

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It wasn’t too long ago that one of the prototypes for the SNES-CD system, otherwise known as the Nintendo Playstation, were discovered. Shortly after, the BIOS files for the system were dumped (basically, the operating system that would have made it run). There were no games released for it, of course, so that left the homebrew community to fill in the gaps. Super Boss Gaiden isn’t the first SNES-CD game to be created by the fans, but it’s the most elaborate (and interesting) one to date. You play as the CEO of Sony, furious that the SNES-CD and its BIOS files are now out in the wild. You’re so angry that you decide to wreck the entire company with your own fists, and there the game begins. Presumably Super Boss Gaiden would boot on an SNES-CD, but with only one surviving machine, there’s no way to tell for sure. Fortunately it was made in two formats and the first of these will work with any SNES emulator. Super Boss Gaiden

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