Category: games

Mega Man 2 Quilt

life, Nintendo, Pixel Art, Uncategorized
Comments

The Mega Man 2 Quilt Project.

In 201X, a Mega Man fan on reddit posted photos of an amazing hand-made quilt, using the Stage Select screen from Mega Man 2.

For years I wished that I could make such a quilt.

In 2023, I asked my friend Melissa if she could help me with the project, and she agreed.

Months of planning, shopping for fabric, measuring and cutting, and sewing ensued for many Sundays.

I replicated the art from the game at 1 inch per pixel, resulting in a 96×96 inch quilt. It was a fun project, and I learned a lot.

I couldn’t have done it without Melissa’s help!

QUILT, Mega Man! For everlasting peace!

– Dr. Light –

Inspiration

The original inspiration, this was posted to Reddit in 2016 and went viral on social media; I eventually found out about it and was amazed. What a cool project.

Whoever made it did such a good job, I became obsessed wanting to make one of my own! I hope mine turns out as good…

Long-time readers of my Facebook may remember a few years ago, I bought a ripoff of this quilt from some shitty e-commerce popup store who had stolen this original image to mis-represent their product, and shipped me the “Wish version” of the quilt, which was just a printed fabric version done in a cheap poly-cotton blend.

I wasn’t happy about it and got a refund through PayPal buyer protection, thankfully. But it didn’t quench my desire to have the real thing someday, somehow…

But it would be years before I could put the project together. Then, last summer, I asked Melissa, who is very crafty, if she knew how to make a quilt, and talked to her about the project, and she said she’d help.

Melissa is awesome. She is very generous with her time and I can’t thank her enough for sticking through the project and seeing it to the end.

Design

To ensure the colors were correct, I took a screen shot of the stage select screen using an emulator…

… and then grabbed the portraits of the eight Robot Masters and arranged them.

Actual dimensions: 96×96 pixels. Each Robot Master’s images is 32×32.

Based on the dimensions of Queen and King size bed comforters, I set each pixel to be one inch.

This thing’s going to be 8 feet by 8 feet when it’s done! That’s huge!

Laying it out, pixel by pixel

Looking closely at the original project photo from reddit, it looks like they cut out each and every pixel for their quilt as an individual square.

I didn’t take that approach. I thought that would be a lot of fabric waste, thread waste, and so much more labor that it would take forever, so I figured it would be best to economize. I don’t know whether that was the best decision, but it’s what I did.

To reduce the amount of cutting and sewing, I combined pixels wherever possible, grouping square areas of the same color at 2×2, 3×3, 4×4, and 5×5 inches.

I hoped that using different square sizes would create an interesting kind of patchwork appearance. But mainly I was just trying to be efficient.

Manually going through the image and deciding how to group the squares together was a meticulous and time-consuming process, taking many hours spread over several evenings, but helped to conserve both fabric and labor.

Once I had the squares blocked out, I had to count them all — accurately — so that I could calculate how much fabric would be needed.

Design sheet for Bubble Man
Air Man design sheet
Quick Man design sheet
Heat Man design sheet
Dr. Wiley design sheet
Wood Man design sheet
Metal Man design sheet
Flash Man design sheet
Crash Man design sheet

Materials

The fabric, before cutting

Picking the right fabric was SUPER important. Absolutely critical. I wanted 100% cotton fabric, and it was important to get the colors right. I am amazed at how close to the actual screen colors I was able to get with the fabric.

It took a few weeks of shopping and hunting online to find all the right stuff. I think I spent about a month shopping at different stores, if not longer. In the end we found everything in local fabric stores: JoAnn Fabrics and Pins and Needles in Middleburg Heights, OH.

The process of selecting the colors from thousands of bolts of fabric was painstaking.

I probably spent a good 6-8 hours standing in store aisles, just looking at different hues and shades, comparing, testing them against each other, and comparing them to the image on my cell phone screen, to make sure I was getting the closest match that I could find.

Being obsessive about getting the colors right was the only way I could have been happy with the final product.

Melissa was awesome and super patient, and I guess it’s a good thing she has a similar love for crafting that I do. She gets it, and I really appreciate that about her.

I took only very slight license with color. The main difference being that the light and dark red colors (most prominent in Quick Man and Metal Man) look a bit more purple/maroon/magenta in the screen capture.

But I think that going with a truer red was definitely the way to go. These colors not only look right, they look very good together. The color gamut of an NTSC tv set isn’t 32-bit RGB color anyway, so even the emulator is taking license to some degree. These colors are as true as they can be.

Some of the panels, pre-assembly, bagged… “in kit form.”

I think we took 4-5 weeks of Sunday afternoons just to measure and cut all the fabric.

In total there are 4613 squares of various sizes comprising just the top side of the quilt. If we went with all 1×1″ squares, it would have been 9216 squares, so my design layout cut that down by almost 50%.

This meant much less cutting and much less sewing, much less thread, and much less fabric needed since there will be much less seams than if we had made it out of 1×1 squares for the entire thing.

After cutting all the fabric, we counted out the squares for each section, and put them together in ziplock bags. These “kits” helped Melissa keep the project organized by putting all the squares she needed to assemble one section together in one bag.

Quick Man, Air Man, Heat Man, and Wood Man kits.

Bubble Man is the Top-Left section, so we did him first. This is how it looked once completed. This was the first section, so I was really excited to see it. The colors look really good!

– B – Get Equipped With Bubble Lead
Melissa opted to work on the center section next. Dr. W. for some reason.
Dr. W in process.

Progress was slow at first, but we seemed to pick up speed as we made progress. I’m sure we were figuring out how to work more efficiently and as we gained experience, we got faster. Bubble Man took two Sunday sessions, and after the 3rd Sunday we were only halfway done with Dr. W. 

Looks like all that effort I put into selecting the colors paid off.
Dr. Wily completed. The blue is so close to the color on the TV screen. I think this is going to turn out really great! 

Melissa surprised me by completing this section during the week, so when we started on Sunday #4, we already had two sections done, and ready to start on the third. 

Melissa picked Heat Man for the 3rd section to work on. This was how much we had completed after Sunday #4.
The Heat Man Design sheet (printed)
Heat Man completed. I think he’s supposed to look like he’s about to blow a fireball out of his mouth, or something.

– H –

Get Equipped With
Atomic Fire 

The Squares that will become Air Man.
Air Man progress…
Air Man halfway completed.
Air Man at the end of the 5th Sunday session.

We would have completed this sooner, but we kept getting knocked off of the moving platforms by the Lightning Lords…

Message from Dr. Melissa. Air Man completed! She worked all evening on Sunday #5. Get your weapons ready!

– A –

Get Equipped With
Air Shooter. 

Back planning

Meanwhile, I still had to come up with a design for the bottom side of the quilt.

I could have just gone with a simple, solid color bottom, but I couldn’t resist the opportunity to do another large image paying homage to the Blue Bomber.

I decided to do this jumping Mega Man sprite. It was hard to decide which keyframe to go with, but in the end I thought this one seemed like the most victorious and happy. That’s the spirit I wanted to capture.

This image scaled up to 96×96 inches pretty well if I used a scale factor of 3 inches per pixel. With almost all of the squares being 3×3″, assembly is greatly simplified.

Back to the top

When we get to work on the bottom half, I expect it will take much less time to complete. 

Quick Man progress. Sewing Sunday #6.

Melissa has gotten quicker at sewing, too. I think most if not all of this progress was made in just one afternoon. it looks to me like her skill with getting the seams to be straight and the seams to align has improved, too.

I spent this afternoon cutting out hundreds of squares that will make the back. I laid out, drew, and cut something over 400 squares, by myself, in under 4 hours. That’s much faster than I was doing it when we started.

It’s so cool to see our skills improving with experience! 

Quick Man with his design sheet.

I don’t remember how many Sundays of cutting we put in on the project, or how many Shopping Sundays. I do know that we were sourcing material for the project in August – September, and by October we were into cutting.

Then we took a long break because it wasn’t convenient to get together during Nov-Dec due to holidays and what not. So how much time has this project taken so far? I’m not sure. But at least 6 Sundays of sewing for 4-6 hours, times two of us working together, plus whatever time Melissa has been putting in on it on her own, plus the time I spent on my own time to create the design docs and laying out and counting squares…. it’s a LOT of hours! 

Quick Man, completed.

Melissa finished it during the week and surprised me when I stopped by the next Sunday. Well, I wasn’t all that surprised. She’s been making great progress on the sewing during the week. We’re getting a section completed every 1-2 weeks.

-Q-
Get Equipped with
Quick Boomerang. 

Wood Man. This was how much we had finished after a Sunday afternoon. Wood Man has a lot of 1″x1″ squares, so a lot of sewing, making for slower progress. 

Wood Man, completed.

Melissa needed a Sunday to herself, but when we got together the following Sunday, she had completed Wood Man.

-W-
Get Equipped With
Wood Shield

Flash Man, about 1/2 completed after a Sunday afternoon’s worth of work. The progress with this one was pretty fast.
Flash Man completed.

-F-
Get Equipped With
Time Stopper

Get Your Weapons Ready!

Crash Man completed.

-C-
Get Equipped With
Crash Bombs

Get Your Weapons Ready!

Look how good Crash Man turned out!
Metal Man, completed.

Melissa had to take time away from the project in Summer, so nothing happened from about July until October.

But then…

Melissa surprised me by sending me photos of the completed quilt! She has done it! Beaten all 9 Robot Masters and added their powers to the MM2 Quilt!

-M-
Get Equipped With
Metal Blade

Top side, assembled.

Melissa finished assembly of the top half and bottom half on her own. Without cutting and counting and sorting squares, she didn’t think there was much for me to do, so she took it on all by herself to complete the rest of the work once I had cut and counted all the kits.

I would have liked to watch her sewing technique, because there’s a lot of skill involved in using a sewing machine, especially doing it effectively. It’s something I would have liked to learn more of at a younger age.

This thing is HUGE. It’s hard to appreciate just how big it is, being that it is a 96 x 96 pixel image. Keep in mind, each pixel in the original image has been blown up to 1×1″. For scale, at the top and bottom of this photo, those are COUCHES.

The bottom side

I didn’t get to see any of the progress of the bottom side coming together. A little sad, but the surprise of seeing it suddenly completed makes up for it.

Now… the only thing that remains to be done is to join the top and bottom, with some batting between them, and my mission will be completed.

Quilt, Mega Man! For Everlasting Peace!

Reflections

Compare/contrast. The original that inspired my project.

Their light blue is a lot more saturated and cyan-aquamarine; ours is more sky blue. We also went with a more contrasty pair of colors for the flesh tones, with the darker being a lot more red than what the other project used.

The inspiration quilt from reddit

Both are beautiful, and I’m very impressed that ours turned out every bit as well as the original. I think we did it justice!

The quilt by Melissa and Me.

I think their light blue works better for the Air Man and Dr. Wily and Flash Man panels, where it is used for a highlight or two-tone paint job effect; the lighter blue that I went with, I think works better on the reflections on Metal Man’s helmet crest and the reflections on the glass visor on Crash Man and Flash Man’s helmets.

I like the greens that I picked a bit better than what the original quilt used. And I think I like my yellow slightly better as well. We both opted for more reddish colors than are in the NES palette for Quick Man and Metal Man, who are a bit more magenta and purple-y. But despite how the screen capture from the emulator may look, I think that what the two quilts picked for reds are truer to the intent of the game designers and truer to how I remembered and envisioned the characters in my mind.

More than anything, I’m blown away at how well all the colors work together in the image. They were really chosen with great care. I went back and forth with 4-5 and even more candidates, eyeballing them, comparing them to each other and to the reference image that I had on my cell phone, to ensure that everything was as close to perfect as I could find within the limitations of what the fabric stores had in stock. It’s perhaps the easiest to take for granted part of the project, but the color picking was absolutely critical and extremely successful.

I think the color picking and the sewing were equally important in contributing to the end result, and I couldn’t be happier with both.

The reference image, built from screen capture obtained from the Mesen NES emulator on digital RGB output.

Looking at the original colors screen-captured from emulation, I think our “wood grain” matches the contrast in the NES, and their light blue is a better match for the NES.

Of course there IS no true color. Every NES displayed on a NTSC (or PAL, in Europe) CRT TV, which used analog signals and the color rendered on every screen was slightly different due to differences in both calibration and manufacturing. So there’s really no “true” color when it comes to NES palette and NES graphics.

What you get in emulation is usually very accurate in terms of how we remember we perceived the color, but of course it’s digital signal, and usually displayed in RGB color on an LED or LCD screen. Very, very similar to what we saw on our TV sets in the 80s. And yet, in reality, quite different.

Finishing The Quilt

With the top and bottom halves assembled, we had all we needed to take on the final level: assembly of the finished quilt with batting and top stitching.

I wanted to use 100% natural wool for the batting, because I think wool is the best fiber. I went with Hobbs Heirloom Premium Wool batting. This was my choice primarily because it was available in the right dimensions to work with my 96×96 quilt without the need to overlap two pieces, but it’s also a well regarded maker.

Melissa wasn’t able to do the top-stitching to complete final assembly, as this requires special equipment that she does not have. Through my local fabric store, I connected with a quilter who had the necessary gear, a lady named Etta. I met with Etta and discussed the project and showed her the pieces we had assembled, and after looking at different topstitch patterns in her book, I eventually found one that I liked. I left everything with her and waited several weeks for her to complete the work.

I felt it was important to use a stitch pattern that didn’t rely on a grid of right angles that would not be aligned to the grid size of the pixels in the image on the quilt. This was important in order to hide very slight errors in the size of individual pixels due to being stitched together with slight variance in how much of an edge there was at the seams between all the little pixel-sized squares of fabric. So I had initially picked a stitch pattern that used a wobbly, undulating pattern that went back and forth along the length of the entire quilt before doubling back each way.

The next time I heard from Etta, it was her notifying me that my project was the next to go in her production schedule. She had taken a practice run with the stitch pattern that I had selected, and was concerned that it would not work well, because it has a tendency to bunch the fabric in one direction but not in the opposite direction, and this would lead to the finished dimensions compressing one way, making the result a squished square. I looked some more and found another stitch pattern that I thought would work well, and she agreed.

The pattern I ended up going with was an interlocking diamond pattern that I found on a quilting website, mycreativestitches.com.

The final assembly was completed 1/21/2025. Etta sent me a photo of the finished quilt, ready to be picked up. It looks even better than I hoped it would! I am very impressed with the quality of the work that my quilting partners put into this project, and grateful for their contributions. I can’t thank them enough for everything they’ve done. It is spectacular and something that I’m genuinely proud to have had a hand in creating — even if most of the really skilled work wasn’t me.

MESSAGE FROM DR. ETTA! QUILT-1 COMPLETED! GET YOUR WEAPONS READY!

End

It made me SO unbelievably happy to take on the project and work on it. And SO thankful for the help I had in getting to come together.

Every day that I worked on it, every little bit of progress had me vibrating with joy and excitement. I was bouncing.

Yes. It is such a nice thing to have something and care about it and work on it and watch it develop over time and then finally be completed.

End.

Yars Rising trailer looks “Dread”-fully Metroidvaniac

Atari
Comments

Atari dropped a trailer for a new game in the Yars’ Revenge series, Yars Rising.

Quite a departure from OG Yars, but maybe in a good way

The game seems to be primarily in the Metroidvania genre, with a heavy Metroid: Dread influence.

It looks competent, yet uninspired.

Had Atari been ready to launch the VCS with this in 2017, the year Metroid: Dread released, that would have been something, wouldn’t it?

But as it is, it feels like Atari cribbed Nintendo/MercurySteam and created a “me too” game that recycles the original Yars Revenge, to create a “me-too-vania”.

If the mechanics, level design, and boss battles are on par with Metroid Dread, it’d be worth money and worth a play, I suppose. But something about this feels a bit too “on the nose”, like it’s really little more than a re-skinning of Dread, with all the soul and originality sucked out of it, and the wireframe of what’s left painted in with bits of Yars “lore”.

I feel like it’s a bit sad, because if Atari could put all this effort into a project and have it turn out reasonably good, then they’re firing on nearly all cylinders; they just need to have that spark of originality and innovation.

That’s what the games that original Yars Revenge creator Howard Scott Warshaw created for Atari back in the day always did with the games he created. HSW’s games on the original Atari 2600 innovated, pushed limits, and advanced notions of what a video game could be.

So with that in mind, it’s a little bit sad to see his creation, Yars Revenge, being recycled on what looks like a generic Metroid: Dread clone that will genuinely surprise me if it does bring something new to the table.

The main character of Yars Rising is a woman (like Samus), and has a lot of “attitude”, quipping wisecracks and sounding annoyed at the things she must go through all in a day’s work for a hero such as herself. I think the character model is well done, attractive without being too sexualized, and the voice acting is pretty good. Yet somehow the whole feels a bit forced, and falls a bit flat.

The graphical style of the platform engine feels almost entirely derivative of Metroid: Dread, and while I loved the graphics in Metroid Dread, here it all feels a bit too “seen before.” I’ll be honest, I’m not expecting that much out of Atari’s new releases. I’m happy to ignore what they release if it’s not my thing. It’d be great to see Atari release something that puts them on par with where Nintendo was at… 7 years ago… but I’m not exactly expecting that. I’ll be happy to be surprised, though. I’m open to being surprised by Yars Rising, but not expecting it.

It’s only a 2 minute trailer, so I am not going to speculate too much on the game. There are a few clips showing classic Yars Revenge style gameplay sequences among the clips of Metroid: Dread ripoff fare, but how this is integrated into the whole isn’t really clear. It seems they are min-games that you access through kiosks that you find in the main game.

Overall what we see looks competently executed, just not exactly all that original or innovative. Considering that Metroid Dread came out in 2017, it would have been so much more interesting if this had been a launch title for the Atari VCS.

Romhacking.net announces shutdown

Console Gaming, Indie Gaming
Comments

The website Romhacking.net announced that after 20 years they are shutting down operations.

This is, without exaggeration, probably the worst video gaming news that I’ve read in the last 20 years.

The good news is that they have turned over the content of the website to the Internet Archive, where it will continue to be available for download, hopefully forever.

This development apparently is not driven by copyright or trademark infringement issues resulting in a takedown of content. The site has always been conscientious about not hosting copyrighted content; only patch files were available for download; the patches have to be applied to a ROM file, which itself may introduce legal gray areas, but it’s generally been considered legal to have ROMs that you have ripped yourself, as a backup, from media which you own. Still, the site had to be very careful with how it presented its materials, and with what submissions it accepted for hosting, lest it run afoul of litigious copyright holders.

The maintainer of the website, Nightcrawler, stated in their post that they had tried to find a successor to take on the role of maintaining the site, and were unable to. Apparently there were candidates in talks with Nightcrawler, but things fell through in an apparently nasty way that recalls toxic internet culture. Nightcrawler also mentions that over the past few years operating the site has seen a shift from human operators to bots, and that dealing with bots is a chore.

I’m not clear what the ultimate impact of this will be. But it seems bad. At the very least new romhack projects will have to find a new place to go, and those looking for them will have a harder time finding them. The old content should (hopefully) be safe in good hands at Internet Archive, but the living community of users who made the scene happen is going to be disrupted by this, and that can’t be a good thing.

Romhacking.net was like a digital mecca for video game remixers. The quality of many projects was first rate, as good or even better than many original releases that they derived from. It wasn’t just a site where you could find, seemingly without limit, unauthorized sequels, but also fan translations of games that were never officially released in English, and improvements that provided bug-fixes and “quality of life” improvements to clunky interfaces. All of which were passion projects by and for the fans and gamers who loved the original works and wanted to see them preserved and improved upon and presented in their best possible format. Rom hacking and emulation go hand in hand to preserving video game history, often in spite of the objections of the industry.

Leap Year reviewed

games, Indie Gaming, reviews
Comments

I’ve spent about 30-45 minutes in Leap Year so far, and it’s one of the stranger platformer games I’ve played.

The game’s tagline, A clumsy platformer, clues you into what to expect. The jump mechanic is unique among platformers, in that your default jump is generally fatal to yourself. Fall height is what does it; and you can only safely fall one grid-height, approximately the height of your own body, without injury.

But your standard jump height is two grid squares, making it deadly most of the time if you try to jump without a good bit of planning first. You can’t control your jump height by a light press or brief press of the button. You always get the same jump no matter how you try to press the button.

So this forces creativity. A normal jump on level ground will take you up two squares, and drop you fatally onto the ground. So you can work around that by jumping up to a higher platform, one or two squares above your starting level, and thereby avoid falling too far. Or you can jump under a low ceiling, which prevents you from going too high, and thus land safely on the same level you started from. There are perhaps a few other ways to survive falling, if you can figure it out. But I don’t want to give away too much and spoil the puzzle aspect. Figuring it out for yourself is definitely where the fun is found.

The goal of the game is to collect numbers which correspond to the dates of the month of February, 2024, which is a leap year, so there are 29 altogether…. er, I think — I’ve only managed to get through the first 15 so far. Each date is a checkpoint, which you’ll respawn from if you die. You can expect to die a lot, because most stuff you’re thinking is easy and second nature in a jumping platform game is fatal in Leap Year.

The levels provide a solution for getting safely through, and it’s a puzzle to work out for yourself how. So this is pretty clearly a puzzle-platformer. It’s fairly non-violent, despite tripping and dying constantly, and failure is never much of a setback as long as you’ve touched a checkpoint recently you won’t have to repeat much.

The game does require a bit of planning and thinking through your actions, if only because you have to carefully consider how the rules work in this game, since they’re so counter-intuitive to how most platforming games work.

I found that the level design is a bit obtuse and obfuscated — there are walls and platforms that you can move through, but the game doesn’t make it obvious. You can discover these things readily enough through experimentation, but there’s little in the way of clues or signposts. Only the bare minimum is explained: arrow keys to move left/right, space to jump, you figure out how jumping kills you, and what the rules are for surviving. About halfway through, the game throws another mechanic at you: shift will allow you to bounce safely from a normally fatal jump height, and rebound to a taller than usual height than you can jump… but only under certain circumstances, which I’ve yet to completely figure out. So sometimes you can do the bounce move, and other times you can’t, and I haven’t figured out why, and I’m not sure if that’s because I’m a dummy, or because the game design has an issue, or perhaps because figuring it out is the game, and it’s meant to be a mysterious puzzle that I have to discover through trial and error until I experience gestalt.

I’m currently stuck trying to figure out how to get to the 16th. I seem to recall seeing the 16 flag once, early on in the game, and it seemed that it was out of sequence, skipping a lot of the earlier numbers, so I tried to get it but I couldn’t, and I’m not sure if that’s because I wasn’t meant to, or because I just didn’t understand the rules for how to move and solve the platform puzzles well enough to be able to do it. So I went a different way and ended up getting all the rest of the numbers in order, and now I’ve gotten the 15th and the map sort of looped around and I’m back in an area where I’ve been already, only I’m not quite sure how to get back, or where exactly I need to go to find the 16.

So I may need to start over and play through again, noting more carefully where I saw that 16. Or maybe I’ll figure it out eventually.

So what other tricks will this game offer me? I don’t really know, but it’s been pretty fun so far. A bit frustrating, and so unlike most platformers that I’m used to that I bet it will be a game that a lot of platformer players dislike. It can be frustrating in ways that won’t feel fair to players approaching it with the expectations of the platformers that they’re used to. It’s counter-intuitive, clumsy, and a bit clunky. But that said, it tells you straight up that it’s a clumsy platformer, so you can’t say they didn’t warn you, and if you play with an open mind and with the understanding that this is a platformer that is trying to explore the space that is enabled by subverting the usual expectations of the genre, then you may come to appreciate its subtleties.

The graphics are charming, crude abstract stick figures, clumsily hand-drawn, as though doodles, and if you enjoy children’s art, you’ll find it delightful. The background music is relaxing and pleasant to listen to, although I’m not at all sure how to describe it.

Leap Year is a bravely contrarian platformer that subverts expectations, but if you’re looking for something deliberately different, and you understand the design language well enough to know the difference between a poor designer who, ignorant of the conventional rules of platformer design, just creates something sloppy, unplanned, and poor quality, and a master designer breaking the rules deliberately in order to achieve something unexpected, then you may just enjoy this game for what it is meant to be.

Leap Year by Daniel Linssen released on Steam

games, Indie Gaming
Comments

I first encountered Daniel Linssen through Ludum Dare more than 10 years ago. He was using GameMaker and created a wonderful platformer called Javel-ein. Linssen has gone on to make many other games, all of which are amazing. He has quite a knack for design and for coming up with interesting and novel play mechanics. I love everything he’s created.

His latest release, Leap Year, just came out on Steam, and without having played it yet, I can’t give it a review, but I can without reservation give it a recommendation. For just $5, it is guaranteed to be worth your time and money. Go check it out.

Boulderdash by Andrew Davie

Atari, Console Gaming
Comments

Boulderdash was a classic early 80s videogame. I remember seeing advertisements for it, but I don’t think I ever had a chance to play it. It was available on many platforms, and for some reason I think it was more popular on personal computers of the day (DOS, Apple ][, Commodore, Atari, Amiga) than it was on consoles.

Andrew Davie is a programming legend in the Atari homebrew scene. For the past year-plus, he has been developing a Boulderdash remake on the Atari 2600 that is incredible. It runs on a stock system, no special hardware mods needed, thanks to an ARM chip in the cartridge. That ARM chip is a significant power boost to the processing capabilities of the system, so really the console is just relaying controller input to the computer inside the cartridge, which uses the VCS’s Television Interface Adapter (TIA) chip to draw to the screen. The results are far beyond the normal capabilities of the 1977-vintage hardware. And the program does things that you have to see to believe. If you run this game next to a 2k launch title like Combat or Slot Racers, you wouldn’t believe that it’s running on the same exact hardware. It’s a 32kb ROM, as compared to the 2kb or 4kb of most Atari 2600 games.

Davie has announced through his website that he has obtained permission from the owners of the Boulderdash IP to release just 100 individually serialized copies of the game ROM will be produced, and they are not redistributable — this means that one may not legally obtain the ROM from anyone other than Andrew Davie, who is giving them away for free, but only for 100 lucky Atari fans. This is a must-have for an Atari collector.

It’s my hope that the Demo will be followed up by a full version of the game, hopefully in unlimited quantities. Nothing has been announced formally, but the “demo” label implies that there should be more to come. But it’s possible that the Demo may be all that he will be authorized to release.

The graphics are higher resolution than the 2600 is normally capable of displaying, very detailed, more objects on the screen, more colors, it has music, animation, parallax scrolling, asymmetrical playfields, everything that you would not expect to be possible with the stock Atari 2600 hardware. It’s literally incredible.

Atari acquires Intellivision brand

Atari, Console Gaming
Comments

Atari SA announced that it has purchased the Intellivision brand and “certain games”.

What is Atari getting exactly?

  • One less competitor
  • The Intellivision trademark and brand
  • The incomplete, unreleased Amico platform
  • The Intellivision game library consisting of some 200-ish titles.

It looks like Atari intend to bring the Amico console to market. That’s a surprising decision, considering that they are now supporting the Atari VCS and Atari 2600+ systems. It might have made more sense for Atari to put Amico titles on the VCS rather than try to launch another console. Adding another misbegotten console to their lineup will not benefit the company — it will only serve to divide up the already tiny Atari customer base and increase the companies expenses in supporting another console that doesn’t have enough customers. Considering that Atari is just barely supporting the VCS, it seems crazy for them to split their customer base by resurrecting the Amico from the dead and trying to complete the promise made by Intellivision more than five years ago.

I think it makes sense to buy the Intellivision brand and IP, if it can be had for a bargain basement price. I’m not aware of which games Atari will now own, but whatever they are, having the rights to use those titles, characters and other IPs would be an opportunity for Atari. But what games are they? What unique game titles did Mattel produce for Intellivision back in the day, that would still hold value for nostalgic retrogamers today? I can’t think of too many. B-17 Bomber, Astrosmash, Shark! Shark! …that’s about it, really. And that’s… not much. Most Intellivision titles had generic-sounding names like “Football” or “Sea Battle” and none of them produced anything like a trademarkable, charismatic mascot to carry the brand.

Meifumado kickstarter resurfaces back from dead, releasing this summer?!

Indie Gaming
Comments

In 2022, I backed a project on Kickstarter for a video game called Meifumado. I donated $20, the cheapest level to get a copy of the game when it was finished. It looked promising. The graphics were pixel art, very detailed and it looked great. The combat animation reminded me of Shank, mixed with a bit of Samurai Champloo.

Immediately after they reached goal and the fundraising period ended, the developers apparently disappeared from the face of the earth, and it seemed like everyone had been had to the tune of some $48,000. People were pissed.

Today, developer OldBit resurfaced and posted a rambling, long-overdue update on the project page. The post is visible to backers only, so the short of it is that OldBit is located in Belarus, and was affected by the embargo on Russia and its allies in the days following the Russian invasion of Ukraine in March of 2022.

It’s odd to me that these events are linked, because man did it feel like Meifumado was a lot longer time ago than just two years ago. Apparently, Kickstarter doesn’t offer service to Belarus, and so to even get listed on Kickstarter in the first place, they had to partner with an intermediary in another country. Then they couldn’t get the funding transferred as expected after the embargo went into effect.

And… it took two years to provide this update? People were asking questions, for months, with nothing but silence, and they couldn’t respond for two years? Seems really weak. OldBit admits that they should have come forward to let backers know what was going on much earlier, and apologizes for it. I can’t say that the apology resonates with me, because there just isn’t any excuse after so long with no update. My confidence in OldBit was shattered, and I wrote off the $20 as a lost cause and forgot about the project.

However… OldBit says that they are close to having the project completed now, and will be releasing in the summer (it’s almost June, so that’s going to be rather soon if it indeed happens, but I’m not holding my breath; I’ll believe it when I believe it.)

If it does come out, and I get my copy for my $20, then I’m satisfied, and it’s certainly not any later than most of the other projects I’ve backed on Kickstarter, GoFundMe, or IndieGoGo. So from that standpoint, the only real difference between this project and most of the others the complete dead silence from the developers. And if that’s all it is, hey, whatever, right? Results matter, and if they do deliver the game they promised, it’s an unexpected nice thing. Like seeing someone you thought was dead, alive and well.

It’ll be anybody’s guess if the game is as good as the kickstarter pitch video made it look. But if it is, it’ll be something special.

A pair of remade sequels, perfected

games
Comments

In 1987 a pair of NES games had noteworthy sequels: The Legend of Zelda, and Castlevania. Both games were successful and popular, yet as the years went by they came to be regarded as flawed games that aged, let us say, less well than nostalgia would have wished.

More than 35 years later, two fan-made projects to remake and pay homage to these classics have been released.

Zelda II Enhanced Edition: Link is Adventuresome

Hoverbat has created an incredibly faithful homage to the Legend of Zelda franchise’s sophomore entry, Zelda II: The Adventure of Link. A remake and expansion of the original, Zelda II Enhanced: Link is Adventuresome is available (for now) at itch.io. I’m not going to link directly to it, but it is not difficult to find. Created in GameMaker Studio 1.4, it runs on Windows. It’s one of the most impressive projects made with GMS 1.4 that I’ve seen — right up there with the Mega Man Maker project and Hyper Light Drifter.

The game boldly reimagines the original, taking license to fix a number of “quality of life” issues and add new content and challenges while looking, sounding, and feeling exactly like the original did on the NES. I’m blown away at just how well the Zelda II engine has been reimplemented in GaneMaker. This game is a must play for anyone who enjoyed the original version in the late 80s.

Zelda II is remembered these days as being the (so-called) “worst” of the Zelda games on Nintendo hardware. (No one counts the Philips CD-i games,which were truly awful, as official anymore). While many LOZ fans defend Zelda II, it’s not unreasonable to call it the least-best Zelda game in the mainline series. But to call it a “bad” game is really unfair. At the time of its release, it was the most highly anticipated a video game, a sequel to what was probably the best video game ever made to that point in time.

As a sequel, it daringly changed up the formula and offered a completely different experience to the player. Featuring side-scrolling action, and introducing a new magic system and RPG-like elements like leveling up, it was an ambitious and innovative game. It was extremely challenging, and it was imperfect, to be sure, but it was extremely popular and well received by gamers at the time.

Famously, a chip shortage made it very hard to come by during the Christmas season that year, amplifying the demand. It wasn’t a perfect game, the main complaint being that some of the secrets and solutions to puzzles were too cryptic and made buying a guide book necessary to win the game. And while these criticisms are certainly valid, they don’t stop Zelda II from being one of the top releases in the storied history of the NES.

This fan remake addresses much of these issues, and improves the quest design in ways that surpasses the original. It’s essentially a re-telling of the original game, which looks in most ways exactly like the original, but with embellishments. That’s all I really want to give away about it; there’s a lot of new things to discover, and some things have been changed, but pretty much all for the better.

There’s no chip shortage this time, but we all know how protective Nintendo has always been with their IP, so probably don’t expect the game to be available indefinitely. Get it while you can.

Transylvania Adventure of Simon Quest

The Transylvania Adventure of Simon Quest project, demo available on itch.io and coming soon to Steam, started out as a remake of the 1987 Konami classic, Castlevania II: Simon’s Quest.

Originally it was intended to be a faithful remake that addressed numerous problems with the original, which suffered from a poor translation, cryptic puzzles, numerous programming glitches and errors and weak boss fights. Despite all these shortcomings, the core game concept was strong: a non-linear adventure quest with a day/night cycle, towns full of shops and people to talk to, hidden secrets and puzzles. Exploration, a sense of narrative progression, building your power, and finding secrets/solving puzzles were given emphasis roughly equal to the action-based elements of fighting undead monsters.

The remake project ended up evolving into its own thing, rather than trying to remake Castlevania II, it’s become a completely new game, albeit one which owes much inspiration to the original, and is a wholly new game built with the same engine. It feels just like the original, with a look, sound and feel so much like the original, you’d think that they brought the original development team back.

You definitely will want to get this one, too.

Is it too much to hope that someone will do this for Metal Gear? A properly done remake of Metal Gear, which was a hit on NES despite being ridden with numerous bugs and glitches, has been on my wish list for quite some time.

140: A late review

games, Indie Gaming
Comments

140 is a synaesthetic rhythm puzzle platformer indie game released in 2013. I remember it getting favorable reviews, and bought it, but like so many people who buy games on Steam, I didn’t play it for a long time. I finally got around to it, and I’m glad I did.

So far I’ve completed the first four levels.

The design of this game is so, so good. Let me tell you that straight off. I’ve never played a game where the various design elements are do tightly and intricately interwoven. The graphics are abstract, shapes and colors. The background of the levels animate in sync with the music, which has a strong beat, I presume, of 140 beats per minute. The platforms and obstacles in the game move in synch with this beat as well, so if you are attuned to the music, it helps you time your jumps and when to move to avoid death and achieve success.

The title of the game symbolically represents the 3 states of your avatar. 1, represented as a rectangle, or square, is you when you are motionless. 4, represented as a triangle, represents you when you are airborne, jumping or falling. And 0, represented as a circle, is you when you are moving, rolling on the surface of the ground. Thus, the title serves as a subtle reinforcement of the basic play mechanics: wait, jump, run. It’s brilliant.

The game uses this subtle, abstract visual language pervasively throughout the game, communicating to the player without words what they are supposed to do. This lets you discover the game on your own terms, and you don’t feel like the game is ever holding your hand or hitting you over the head with tutorials. The early stages of the game are simple and very gently pull you in to learning how to read the visual cues, as if instinctively.

The result is that you get get really deeply immersed in the action. As you learn how you can move, at just the right time the game provides you with a new challenge, and it’s up to you to work out for yourself how you’re supposed to overcome it. There are pits to jump over, ledges to jump up to, moving platforms, disappearing and reappearing platforms, platforms that alternate between being safe and being deadly, ceilings that will crush you, platforms that have a trampoline effect that will bounce you with a super jump in rhythm to the background music. There are keys which you can pick up by jumping into them, and you can carry them to a circular “doorway” which the key will unlock, changing the level in some way, activating dormant platforms or introducing some new play mechanic or transform the level to up the challenge.

It’s a combination of hand-eye coordination, rhythm, and figuring out puzzles for how to get through the obstacles. At the end of each level, there is a special challenge, a kind of boss battle, where you have to quickly learn a new puzzle mechanic and master it, handling iterations of the obstacle repeatedly until you’ve succeeded in defeating the level.

The first four levels were a fairly quick play, I probably completed each one in about a half hour or so, dying a lot, and taking breaks here and there. It felt like after the fourth level I had won the game, but after watching what seemed like some kind of ending, I found myself back in the starting room, which serves as a level select, and discovered that there appears to be another four levels waiting to be unlocked and played.

I started the fifth level (or is this more of a “second quest”? and found that now instead of moving to the right, this level seems to be all about moving to the left, which for some reason feels less natural and therefore more difficult. I guess since English is read left-to-right, and most platformer games tend to follow the convention established by Super Mario Brothers, and treat scrolling to the right as “forward”. It makes the level seem more difficult than it really is. The obstacles are simple, but then I died and instead of starting over at a checkpoint the game kicked me all the way out back to the starting level select screen. So it’s super-hard, you have to beat the entire level on one life, no mistakes. Yeah, this definitely feels more like “second quest” level difficulty increase. Well, as much as I died in order to get through levels 3 and 4, I have no idea if I’ll be able to get through level 5 at all, so this might be as far as I get.

I really enjoyed the challenges of the game, and have a great deal of appreciation for the style and design of the game as a whole. Everything feels so purposeful and deliberative, like every single thing in the game was done just as it was after a good deal of thought had been put into it — its purpose in the game, how it relates to other elements of the game, and how to tie those elements together to make everything seem like a unified whole.

It does seem a bit brief, but if the difficulty continues to ramp up from levels 5-8 as it has from 1-5, you might well never get to see all the game has to offer.

Everyone should give this one a try. It’s timeless and will be just as good another 10 years from now as it was back when it was first released.