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Post by toei on Oct 25, 2018 11:26:46 GMT -5
The last few you mentioned all sound great, and I dig that screenshot too (definitely looks more RPG than "Metroidvania"). Can you play these at all if you don't own a MSX? I wouldn't mind paying for them, but I don't have the time and money to get into the actual hardware.
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Post by wyrdwad on Oct 25, 2018 11:48:58 GMT -5
The last few you mentioned all sound great, and I dig that screenshot too (definitely looks more RPG than "Metroidvania"). Can you play these at all if you don't own a MSX? I wouldn't mind paying for them, but I don't have the time and money to get into the actual hardware. He sells digital downloads of the games on his website in addition to physical cartridges, so you can always buy a .rom download and then play it on an emulator -- though I've never done this, so I don't know how easy it is to emulate V9990-enhanced graphics, or even if it's possible at this point, so you might want to look into that before shelling out any cash for Life On Earth and/or Myths & Dragons. Here's his website, though, if you're interested: kai-magazine-software.fwscart.com/Of the other games I mentioned in my initial post, Sword of IANNA and Buddhagillie can be downloaded and played for free -- IANNA from the RetroWorks website, and Buddhagillie from the MSXdev website. And though IANNA is a pretty massive rom (720kb!), it uses a standard mapper, so any MSX emulator should be able to run either of these games (or any KAI Magazine game aside from Life On Earth and Myths & Dragons) without any trouble. Ghost and Children of the Night are not available digitally on MSX (or on Colecovision, in CotN's case), though Ghost can of course be played on Steam. Children of the Night, though, absolutely requires owning one or the other system and buying a physical cartridge. -Tom
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Post by toei on Oct 25, 2018 14:01:17 GMT -5
Got it bookmarked, will look into at length later. There's a game on that page called Nuts that rips off the graphics from Kunio-tachi no Banka on SFC (from the Kunio-kun / River City Ransom series). Do you know if that's an homage or just some kind of port? I think the main character from Myths and Dragons is a modified sprite from one of those Taiwanese Genesis beat-'em-ups (the one that rips off Knights of the Round, ironically), too, and I swear I've seen those orcs before. Do the other games you mentioned use other games' assets or are they all-original?
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Post by wyrdwad on Oct 25, 2018 14:10:59 GMT -5
Got it bookmarked, will look into at length later. There's a game on that page called Nuts that rips off the graphics from Kunio-tachi no Banka on SFC (from the Kunio-kun / River City Ransom series). Do you know if that's an homage or just some kind of port? I think the main character from Myths and Dragons is a modified sprite from one of those Taiwanese Genesis beat-'em-ups (the one that rips off Knights of the Round, ironically), too, and I swear I've seen those orcs before. Do the other games you mentioned use other games' assets or are they all-original? Most of KAI Magazine's games use a mixture of original assets/art and repurposed stuff from other games, which is always a little iffy. Some of his games do use all original assets, though -- Sector 88 is all original, to my knowledge, as is the upcoming Sorrow of Gadhlan' Thur, and Life On Mars and Life On Earth are ALMOST all original, with only one music track (AFAIK) having been ripped from a Dragon Ball game. Most of his games that use ripped assets, too, will at least have all original art during cutscenes, which tend to be EXTREMELY impressive (KAI is the best at creating full-screen anime-style, almost FMV-like cutscenes on MSX2 hardware). Also, it should go without saying, but all of the other games I mentioned that AREN'T from KAI Magazine use 100% original assets throughout. To my knowledge, nothing in Buddhagillie, Children of the Night, Ghost, or Sword of IANNA is taken from any other title (save for the secret bonus stage in Sword of IANNA, which is a trip through the worlds of several classic ZX Spectrum games, but that's obviously very much intentional; and of course the music in Ghost consists of PSG renditions of the music from Ghost 1.0, but it's the same composer, so I think that still qualifies as original! Heheh). As for Nuts, the game is inspired by Double Dragon more than anything else, I believe. It's a pretty decent game, though it runs rather slowly if your system only has the base 64kb RAM (which mine does, sadly). Shouldn't be an issue in emulation, though, of course. -Tom
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Post by toei on Oct 25, 2018 14:19:26 GMT -5
Kunio-kun and Double Dragon are basically sister series, anyway, both being from Technos. Same style of fighting. I don't think I could stand playing a slower-paced rip-off, though. I tried with Mug Smashers (a bootleg arcade game from Italy, I think, that stole a bunch of Combatribes assets) and it just felt wrong. (Speaking of which, seems like I haven't seen alphex around lately. He's a big Technos fan, too). What I'd probably do is buy Life on Earth, since I love Shinobi, and see if it's good enough to make me want to play their other games.
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Post by wyrdwad on Oct 25, 2018 14:22:42 GMT -5
KAI claims Life On Earth is the game he's most proud of from his entire portfolio, so that seems like a good plan!
(I refer to KAI as a he, BTW, because even though he does have other people working for him, he's mostly a one-man team -- KAI is an initialism for creator Kenneth Albero Ingles. Though why he's "KAI Magazine," exactly, I'm not really sure!)
-Tom
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Post by Jungyin on Oct 25, 2018 17:55:56 GMT -5
It's a bit over a year old at this point, but for the three year anniversary of the Japanese release of Gotta Protectors, the 3DS sequel to Protect Me Knight, Ancient released free .NES ROMs (one English and and one Japanese) for an endless runner game called Amazon's Running Diet. It's pretty simple but the sprite for the Amazon is quite large and well animated, they did a pretty good job at faking parallax scrolling for the background, and like the main Protect Me Knight games has music composed by Yuzo Koshiro.
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Post by surnshurn on Oct 26, 2018 0:46:49 GMT -5
It's a bit over a year old at this point, but for the three year anniversary of the Japanese release of Gotta Protectors, the 3DS sequel to Protect Me Knight, Ancient released free .NES ROMs (one English and and one Japanese) for an endless runner game called Amazon's Running Diet. It's pretty simple but the sprite for the Amazon is quite large and well animated, they did a pretty good job at faking parallax scrolling for the background, and like the main Protect Me Knight games has music composed by Yuzo Koshiro. omg that is cute as hell. 2017 is definitely new. I'd consider anything in this thread as new that would be developed later than the "normal" dev cycle (94 or 95 for the NES). That said, would all of those weird bootleg NES games count? I know there have been a ton of them (street fighter 2 comes to mind)
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Post by toei on Oct 26, 2018 18:24:12 GMT -5
The weird bootlegs were probably produced in markets where the NES was still a thing rather than made as an homage, so they're not really the same thing, but they're an interesting topic, anyway. I say start a thread if you know about a few.
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Post by Bumpyroad on Oct 27, 2018 0:49:25 GMT -5
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Post by Gendo Ikari on Oct 27, 2018 2:24:12 GMT -5
There's this new Kickstarter: Hazelnut Bastille is not coming out on retro hardware but looks more period-accurate than many others (which take liberties especially with the sound), in this case looking like a lost SNES game. They got Hiroki Kikuta as a guest composer. It has reached about 2/3 of funding in three days and may be able to reach a few stretch goals by the time the KS ends on December 1st. Very tempted to back it but they don't expect to deliver before late 2020.
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Post by Bumpyroad on Oct 27, 2018 5:46:15 GMT -5
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Post by toei on Oct 27, 2018 10:35:42 GMT -5
@gendoikar They weren't kidding when they called it "Zelda-like".
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Post by kingmike on Oct 27, 2018 12:21:55 GMT -5
Is something wrong? That post links to itself.
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Post by Bumpyroad on Oct 27, 2018 12:36:46 GMT -5
Is something wrong? That post links to itself. Should work now
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