Developers Bite The Chili Productions and Raft Labs Interactive, developers of games for retro consoles, have teamed up to create the ultimate NES action adventure: The Storied Sword. The crowdfunding campaign for the game launched this morning and has nearly reached its goal in mere hours (it’ll probably have risen past it by the time you read this).
The story goes that there’s a dark wizard who has invaded the kingdom of the Storm Coast, rampaging it in search of a lost sword. Out heroes, a Zorro-type swashbuckler named Cedric and a pirate princess they call Orchid, get to work attacking his minions and protecting the kingdom from the wizard’s wrath. Their most pressing goal is to find the Storied Sword before he does.
The Storied Sword is a loving homage to NES jump-and-slash action games like Ninja Gaiden and Batman, only perhaps not as unforgiving as those were. Modern conveniences like checkpoints and the elimination of a “lives” system have been added. “We worked hard to ensure the gameplay remained varied throughout the entirety of the game loop, and several substages are divided into smaller challenge-based chunks in order to break up the flow,” the dev team says.
The Storied Sword pushes the NES hardware with lots of sound samples and 8-way directional scrolling, which from the perspective of a fellow NES game creator, is harder to implement than you think on this system (just because Super Mario 3 had it doesn’t mean it’s not a total pain to program). Believe me, there was WORK involved here.
Physical copies of The Storied Sword are cheaper than the NES homebrew usual at $45 a pledge….that is, of course, without the packaging included. The box and manual raise it to the usual $60. If you don’t care about any of that, you can get the digital ROM for a $10 pledge. A Collector’s Edition, of which only 128 will be sold, is still available at $100.
The Kickstarter for The Storied Sword will be open until May 3 and the game is projected to ship in September.
Next: Discuss The Storied Sword on the Video Games forum
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