The games Nintendo didn't want you to play: Tengen
nicole.express
nicole.express
Hahah I didn't think about that
I don’t understand how they can Do that and still maintain backwards compatibility with old cartridges?
I can’t remember which one I had now (it might have been Bible Adventures but it might have been the one that was the Menace Beach clone), except that it exists in my parents basement somewhere along with my other oddities of childhood.
IIRC, Wisdom Tree was the first company to bypass the lockout chip, before even Tengen/Atari. I have to think the low market for those games, unlike Tengen which was for sale at Toys R Us like real games, probably prevented them for being caught up in some of the legal stuff.
(It was originally supposed to be a straight-up adaptation of the movie Hellraiser, but they decided this was insufficiently Christian after it became clear that it would look like a cheap knock-off of Doom, which was released during the game's early development.)
I'm making an open 3D action MMO engine to sort this out. If your computer does not have a keyboard/mouse it's useless for eternity.
And indeed, some people made use of them. But for most people, it's easier to play games than to create them, just as for most people it's easier to read books than to write them.
But tool-wise, we've been living in paradise for a long time now. Whether we take advantage of that is up to us.
Tools are peaking and linux with TWM from the 1987 is winning! ;)
For more depth on my reasoning: http://move.rupy.se/file/park_engine.html
In any case, I was able to start programming my first games using a pirated copy of GW Basic on a PC XT. That's all you really needed.
Then I think around the 286 or 386 PC clones I discovered open source libraries like Allegro (a competitor of today's SDL), and it wasn't even pirated anymore! Really, all you need to program games.
Basic is not performant enough to make games that are interesting.
If you could afford a 286/386 you are not really in the majority of the human population.
Energy as an abstract concern is a very low priority for any hobbyist games creator. You care about building cool stuff. You only care about energy if it impacts your game.
> "Basic is not performant enough to make games that are interesting."
This is simply not true. There are even commercial BASICs that specialize in game creation.
> "If you could afford a 286/386 you are not really in the majority of the human population."
Nobody with an interest in videogame creation is. It was a very cheap 286 PC clone anyway; we couldn't afford a brand PC. But I acknowledge most people weren't programming at home back then.
My point: Raspberries aren't at all needed for programming. Any computer would do. You don't need a magic device.
have access to literally dozens of free game engines and are making their games en masse
They own those games
> on knowledge they don't own
On knowledge that is freely given to them that they can build on. Also, there's now an unbelievable wealth of knowledge available to forego any of those engines and develop everything from scratch if they so chose.
> they can't sell for real money without being exploited
Only... They can and they do sell for real money. No idea what "exploitation" you're talking about.
For the exploitation part:
$0.30 + 2.9% Itch
10% Epic
15% Apple
30% Android/Steam/Nintendo/Sony
70% Roblox
$1,500/yr Unreal
$1,800/yr Unity
0-25% VAT
~30% Income TAX (Healthcare)This is entirely irrelevant to "I wish kids today created their own games". They do, and it's easier than ever to do so.
> you don't have control over your future
Let's see: people create and sell their own games, there's a veritable indie renaissance happening, young people can get into game development (or into programming in general) easier than ever, but... they somehow "don't control their future".
> For the exploitation part
So you want: everything to be free, but you also want people making games to earn "real" money (as opposed to fake money they are earning right now)?
If you cannot create original concepts the real value of a game is zero!
And you can only create new things if you control the fundamentals.
Good luck with money, it's going to get complicated soon.
> If you cannot create original concepts
Your original claim: " something where kids could make their own games and instead they are playing mobile games."
This is patently false, as it's easier than ever to create your own games, and kids are creating their own games.
> And you can only create new things if you control the fundamentals
This statement is as false as it is stupid. What you're basically saing is "kids should go ahead and learn how to make game engines from scratch before even knowing how to create a game" which is a huge barrier for entry for any kid. There's nothing wron with using abstractions first.
Additionally, once again, there's so much info on fundamentals now, too, that anyone can go ahead and "control the fundamentals".
> Good luck with money, it's going to get complicated soon.
Yeah, nebulous statement predicting future doom when original statement was the patently false "they can't sell for real money without being exploited"
>I'm making an open 3D action MMO engine to sort this out.
Yes, I'm sure this will be the Unity killer that everyone is waiting for. rolls eyes
Minecraft is owned by Microsoft and has issues (does not run on ARM well and the Java/Bedrock are incompatible)
Roblox is extortion and ugly.
VR Chat is only VR.
Neither scales.
I'm trying my best, here is the status from 2 years back: http://talk.binarytask.com/task?id=5959519327505901449
Now I'm building the voxel world.
This is incorrect. VR chat (and Rec Room) has a non-VR client
VR does not blend well with non VR unless the headset is the camera!
Last time I checked both of those where 1st person not 3rd?
VR blends perfectly fine with non-VR actually, and there are many games that let you play as VR in a non-VR lobby. Check out Paranormal Activity on steam. The game was designed as a normal mouse and keyboard video game, with awkward controls and a strong horror focus, but they added a VR option so if you want, you can feel fully immersed while being chased by evil ghosts and you can pee your pants in fear while your friends stuck with a normal screen are only moderately afraid.
For the two games in question, the non-VR client lets you play homemade games and chat with your friends or strangers who have VR or also happen to play the non-VR version of either. It's literally just a different control method, like using TrackIR in a racing sim.
I don’t know about the Amiga, but the C64, Atari, and TI computers of the era either booted into a BASIC prompt or you could get there with one or two key presses. Many of us spent a lot of our youth making games and sharing them with our friends.
Nevertheless, it was my first programming language ever.
https://web.archive.org/web/20220410034726/https://nicole.ex...
I do wish Nintendo was a bit pickier about clearing games for sale on the Switch. On the estore specifically there’s a lot of low quality shovelware.
I find myself a lot more nuanced about walled gardens sometimes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghostbusters_II_(NES_video_gam...
I am sure I shoveled a lot of garbage that I rented at the video rental store that was inside the grocery store into my NES, but that one just stood out.
Getting the keys to your device's walled garden does not imply you're compelled to leave that garden. You can stick to the official store, that contains only high-quality games blessed and vetted by Nintendo.
But an app store doesn't have the limitation of inventory. No number of low-cost games will impair the ability to sell the premium titles. Not needing to worry about dilution, the store operator reverts to rent-seeking behavior and will approve the most number of games as they can. Or will create artificial scarcity by restricting access to popular titles.
When buying physical media, licensing balances the needs of the publisher, producer, and customer. But in the digital world there's almost no overlap.
I think they do in a different way. An expensive phone game is $5. Every once in a while a game will try to break that mold and they get mocked.
Edit: And by high budget games I mean games with a high development budget, not games that costs a lot to buy. Genshin impact is a AAA game that runs on phones, they invested $100 million to make it, that is what I meant by it being a high budget game.
It's not totally unheard of. Among Us is paid on PC/console but free on mobile. PUBG was similar before it went free to play on all platforms earlier this year.
I’m the early days of smart phone gaming there was a brief push for immersive 3D games like Deadspace. The games were good but not enough people were willing to pay for it when gamers generally already had better devices for gaming on.
Backtrack a few more years, before ads were prevalent on phones, and you had a massive library of Java based games for feature phones plus Windows CE / PocketPC ports of popular PC games (like Tomb Raider). In fact this market appeared to be growing so much that Nokia released a phone/ console hybrid device (the Nokia N-Gage).
So there was a culture of bringing quality titles to mobile phones and PDA but the economics wasn’t there.
Netflix also has unlimited inventory space and they spend tons of engineering effort in optimizing the content they show people when they launch the app.
This hasn’t changed much since the NES days.
That AVGN made his career reviewing - to start - shitty NES games, indicates that the ‘Nintendo Seal of Quality’, or it’s ‘curation’ - really didn’t matter much.
And it’s not like the NES was alone, even more recently, the Wii was the literal king of shovelware - if you haven’t heard the story of ‘Gingerbread Ninja’ and it’s related clones hilariously sold as different titles, you should check it out.
It’s always been this way. The walls of ‘Walled Gardens’ don’t seem to really hold up to any potential scammer with a ladder. The iOS App Store is filled with scammy garbage copies of legit apps.
I was confused by "Klax", thinking it was a pirate version of old Colecovision platformer Zaxxon but it was actually quite different. I didn't experience NES until 1988. Up to that point (<5 years after early home consoles like 2600, Intellivision and Colecovision had petered out) people of my age cohort had hoped that the pre-Windows PC platforms like the Atari 800, Apple IIe, or the first Macintosh would provide good gaming experiences but we were mostly disappointed. There were a few bright spots like Dark Castle and Choplifter, but the chasm between those experiences and what you could find in the arcades were significant. The NES was a huge development.
I understood it was about setting traps for the other spy, but what the overall goal was eluded me. And I didn't even know it was based on some obscure comic or cartoon.
I was surprised to later find out just how many other end-of-life platforms it was ported to: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klax_(video_game) - who even signed off on all of this nonsense?! In particular, I have no idea why they bothered with the Atari 2600 version... how much did they make from that? Though I'm glad they did, because it's actually surprisingly good.
(The ZX Spectrum version is decent too! You'd think it'd struggle, what with all those colours, but it's well done.)
As the article said the Afterburner port was pretty good. The Gauntlet II port was far superior to the Gauntlet I version. The Gauntlet II game also supported the NES Satellite / Four Score attachments so you could have 4 players just like the arcade version.
So it expects a series of numbers. If you record those numbers, you are violating Nintendos copyright. But asking for them from the copyright office to use in court and then productionize them is okay?
Also, recording the numbers doesn't necessarily work. The chip is essentially an algorithm.
I haven't dug through the source to understand the algorithm, but imagine a basic scenario where the algorithm is "challenge * 3"
If the challenge is "1 2 3" and you record a response of "3 6 9", that response won't work if the next challenge is "2 4 6". If you actually dig into the chip and copy their algorithm, that can be copyright infringement (yes there's clean room reverse engineering, but if the logic is convoluted enough that can be rather difficult and take time)
If you open up some chip and look at it under the microscope and translate the transistors you see into C code, that's not copyright infringement. (But it might be patented. Patents are super weird in that if you come up with an idea completely independently of someone else, and the other person patents it, you're not allowed to use the idea!)