Creating games like it's 1988
I recently received my copy of Kubo 3, a game about a gun slinging cowboy turtle made by a kid and published by Limited Run! Yes, a cowboy turtle game made by a kid! With the help of his father of course. When you are a young aspiring game developer and your father happens to…
I didn’t know what to expect when I loaded Jim Power into my NES. My jaw dropped when I saw that intro cutscene. For a brief moment, I was that ’80s kid again, coming home from the rental store with Ninja Gaiden in hand, inserting it in the NES, being blown away by its cinematic…
Micro Mages is certainly a flagship title in the NES homebrew library. It ran one of the most successful Kickstarter campaign for a homebrew game, received a lot of praises and is still very actual. So, is the game worth all the craze?
Thanks to the holidays, I took some time to play some homebrew games. And high on the list was Witch n’ Wiz by Matt Hughson. I was waiting for my Limited Run collector’s edition to come in. And it came. And I played. And it was a blast!
Rollie is a typical 8-bit platformer with a fun bouncy ball mechanic. It was designed to fit the early NES cartridge limit of 40 kilo bytes, so it feels like an early NES title, with all its pros and cons. The game concept is great in theory, but is lacking a bit in execution, probably…
Alwa’s Awakening 8bit Edition is a really good game. It is a de-make of the original. They did a really good job at downsizing the levels. It brought back childhood memories, when I was playing the original Metroid, or Castlevania II. They had huge worlds to explore. This spoiled generation will never know the fun…
Adventurequest 8-Bit Dungeons & Doomknights is a fun game. A funny game. A fun funny game. And maybe it’s my only complain: The fact that everything in this game is a joke is somewhat annoying, because after a while you start to wonder if it’s worth investing a lot of your time into a joke….
I must say that I have mixed feelings. I certainly enjoyed it. There is some nice pixel art, the music is good and there’s a huge map to explore. But don’t expect this game to be what it isn’t. It’s a monster slasher with some RPG elements, it isn’t Zelda, nor Crystalis.
I didn’t know what to expect but I did enjoy it. It is weird, it is challenging, it is fun. You play as a band member, you can switch between them, each having his own weapon. That’s a nice feature, although I played as TJay most of the time.
I finally played Spacegulls, from the creators of Micro Mages and Böbl. It’s a charming little platformer starring a space seagull who must rescue some seagull cosmonauts. The first version of Spacegulls was made in 1 week and won 1st place in the NESdev Compo 2020/21. Man, I wish I could develop such a nice…