People Making New Games for Atari, Super Nintendo, and Virtual Boy | Hacker News Reader

People Making New Games for Atari, Super Nintendo, and Virtual Boy

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54 pointscpeterso42 comments

Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis games are amongst by favorite games of all time. It's probably because I had a NES and playing SNES or Genesis at a friend's place had such a huge 'WOW' factor for me. The games were so smooth and so beautiful. The stories were so much better!

Chrono Trigger has to be one of my all time favorites. The games and their stories seemed so deep, so philosophical, so transcendental. Somehow games today fail to grip me the same way. It's probably me.

While it's not a recent game (1999), a PC game that has an incredibly deep and philosophical story is Planescape: Torment. You can get it off of GOG; there's also a spiritual successor in the works.

One I've had my eye on for a while is http://morphcat.de/superbatpuncher/

A friend of mine has been doing this for the last several years as well [0]. There's still a pretty active scene worldwide, although I guess machines are still only 'popular' in the countries they were originally popular in (e.g. MSX in The Netherlands, Japan).

[0] http://www.revival-studios.com/

Yep I do some work on the MSX 2 and help with games and applications on it. It's great stuff and I really like the look and feel of the real machines (although the actual development, or at least most of it is much easier on emulators because of the many many reboots when coding in asm).

Retro gaming really is an interesting area. It was an era where game play made or broke a game. After you get past nostalgia, I think it is even more critical for success of a game.

For myself, I make regular forays into IF games (off of ifarchive) and just recent reinstalled OS/2 (as a VM) so I could play GalCiv in the original form I played it.

Chrono Trigger is still my favorite game of all time. I could never be sure if nostalgia was tinting my view, but I feel like games lost some of their magic when we went transitioned to mostly 3d games, where graphics were emphasized so heavily.

Exactly what elements of Chrono Trigger do you think modern games are missing? (Not critical, just curious)

Music is a big one. Most of the early to mid-90s Square RPGs had amazing soundtracks, and Chrono Trigger was no exception.

Today's game music is technically of a higher quality and complexity. But it's nowhere near as interesting, and I dare say, not 1/10th as good. Yesterday's game composers had to possess a certain ingenuity, working, as they did, under tight constraints.

Creativity can flourish under a constricting framework, often in ways it fails to do in the absence of limits. This is why $200 million Michael Bay movies often suck, while a movie made for a fraction of the price can kick ass. Bay doesn't have to be creative. Nothing presses him toward ingenuity. That's not to say that today's game composers aren't good, or that I necessarily compare them to Michael Bay. Rather, it's to say that the composers in the '90s had to be good. They had to go out of their way to be good. They had to achieve so much with so little.

Same with me and Final Fantasy VII - 17 years after it came out, I'm still listening to the soundtrack[1] regularly while I work, and while I'm doing so I can vividly see all the scenes from the game playing out before my eyes.

Makes me wonder how many teenagers nowadays have played the original Chrono Trigger and/or Final Fantasy VII, and how they would compare them to today's games (and their music).

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bMtlLpYcCAQ

Not too many unfortunately. Many people poo-poo video games as nothing more than mindless drivel, but I put some of these games on the same level as any great work of fiction that these same people may recommend you read. My son will be getting an SNES emulator loaded with all of the great RPG's of my childhood for his birthday sometime soon (he's three months old, I thought I should wait a bit.)

I agree on the music part - most of the recent video games music is utterly boring, but there's still some interesting soundtrack in a few recent games. There's too many game developers doing games as a day job and who have no passion for it (whereas in the 70s, 80s, most people were highly educated pioneers experimenting with the new tools of the day).

But kid you not, lots of 90s video games music was utter crap as well. You probably remember the good ones only, but there was also a lot of garbage back then.

I remember listening to the .psf files for the HE plugin on winamp.

http://www.neillcorlett.com/he/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portable_Sound_Format

Chrono Trigger had amazing music. But to say there aren't quite a few games today that have similarly outstanding music is just not true.

I have a weak audio memory so i suppose I am unable to appreciate it in that regard :) what else?

There's a pretty good Extra Credits episode that examines this phenomenon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CKgHrz_Wv6o

I listen to Epilogue and To Far way Friends on a regular basis. Yes... slightly lame (or so my girlfriend believes...), I agree, but the orchestral music was so good in Chrono Trigger, FF IV & VI, Lufia II, Secret of Mana, et al.

On a side note, I actually made a music box which plays the music box song (Epilogue) from Chrono Trigger for my son. He loves it.

Off topic - but do you happen to have a blog post about how you made the music box?

I do not, and I wish I could make one. I started by buying one of those cheap music box kits... not realizing that the scale was simply C Major. That didn't work.

I am fortunate to work with a mechanical engineer who is also an amateur musician. So, we built our own. It was neither easy nor efficient (nor cheap if you don't know someone with all of the tools who is nice enough to donate their time), but we got it working in the end.

Music has got to be it. Every time I hear Corridors of Time[0] it sends shivers up and down my spine. I don't know what it is but the music of Yasunori Mitsuda and Nobuo Uematsu is intimately connected with the memories of my childhood.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xsj5xjoLXtE

I love getting to Zeal for the first time, even to this day (when it's really the 50th+ time.) So eerie and fascinating :D

You'll appreciate this, an entirely acapella rendition of Corridors of Time

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JtKCt8Afk9s

He has a couple albums worth of acapella video game music out. Here's another of my personal favorites:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c6uVnR9B2vY

Haha, that's already a visited link for me. I'm a subscriber to Smooth McGroove and I love this rendition.

If you like jazz, check out "Brink of Time." It's a CD of jazz (well, more like acid jazz) remixes of Chrono Trigger's music. It was composed by the original composer, Yasunori Mitsuda. There are some tracks I'm not that fond of, but overall it's a great listen.

Did you guys play Chrono Cross? To date, this is by far my favorite soundtrack. I will sometimes go back and play through it again just to experience the music with the game (because I listen to the music so much outside of the game).

If you liked Chrono Trigger's OST, there's a good chance you will like the Chrono Cross OST. It's definitely more mellow and playful up front, but it builds in energy and intensity up until the perfect vocal closing, "Radical Dreamers ~ Unstolen Jewel ~".

Here's the title opener: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J46RY4PU8a8

This is somewhat belated, but Chrono Cross's OST (and art in general -- the backgrounds was incredible) is superb. Definitely makes up for the game's numerous other issues.

Xenoblade Chronicles is the only other recent game whose music has really stood out for me, though I'm hardly well-versed in modern gaming at this point.

I suppose it was the way in which I felt attached to the characters. Like reading a good book, that is my #1 criteria for "was the story good?"

I mean, Crono didn't even speak. Not once. But, when [spoiler] he "died"... I don't know, I still get a bit choked up at Marle breaking down in front of the tree. Same for Lufia II when Maxim and Selan [spoiler] die at the end. I felt like I was losing a friend. I just haven't found emotion like that in modern games.

For me it was all about story. I love great gameplay, but I wanted to be engrossed in a storyline while I played the game. That's why I played RPG's to begin with.

I have found games since the 16-bit era which have had the same effect (FF IX, FF Tactics, Kingdom Hearts I & II, and Suikoden I & II to name a few), but there seemed to be an abundance of them on the SNES. Modern RPG's just don't feel the same to me. I still play my SNES favorites every year when I can find the time.

I'm going out on a bit of a limb here, but I wonder if the limitations of the hardware didn't force the creators to be more creative in different areas. I mean, there was only so much you could do on the SNES (even though they managed to do some cool things on such a limited platform.)

After it was all said and done, the games had to offer more than cool looking pixels. The great games had great stories, interesting characters, and innovative gameplay (to be fair, it was probably easier to be innovative in those days.) Graphics were less of a concern.

It's easy to forget that the SNES game library was mostly a sewer filled with "character with attitude" platformers. Loads of really, tremendously bad, unoriginal stuff

I didn't forget that, but that's true of pretty much every system, no? Most games are bad.

Honestly, the Playstation 1 was probably the greatest system ever for RPGs.

I would tend to agree with you. It's a bit hard for me because my favorote rpg's are on the SNES, but the PSX definitely had a larger library of quality rpg's.

Old games are like books, they have to do more with less. We got generality, you can render everything under any angle but none of them says any thing, and thus lost the artistic cut if I may call it that way. Also pixels come with impressionism, surrealism .. I think for most games, running after photorealism is the wrong idea. Maybe it's a question of technology helping us to break into the suspension of disbelief more easily. Your brain can't accept previous generation graphics as a representation cause the fakeness is more apparent now you have the current gen as a comparison point. But this gen technology is as fake as the previous one, in 20 years we'll see blatant flaws in it. It's quite amazing that we could take 4 pixels for a character and live through it. Or maybe it's just that we've seen it all, in the 80s nobody knew what was possible by assembling a bunch of chips and controlling the beam on your screen, surprise was at every corner. About music I have the same feeling but also for movies. Maybe that's an age thing but many themes (star wars, superman, bttf, robocop, terminator [nerdy boy]) were really amazing, I rarely get this nowadays. Something since this era changed, can't tell what.

Exactly why Bomberman is still one of my all time favourites. It's not the graphics, its the gameplay

It's hard not to look back at the past with rose-colored glasses, but in the case of the NES, there were so many low-quality games out there that it's easy to remember how bad some of them were even back then.

I know I wasn't the only kid who would shell out $2 or $3 and rent a game for the weekend, only to find out that the game was flat-out terrible. Sure, there were a lot of good games back then that are still fun to play now (Super Mario Brothers, Contra, etc), but going back and playing a random game in an emulator really drives home the fact of how big of a bomb most of the games were.

That said, who hasn't been interested in how NES games worked or how they were programmed? There's a great video on Youtube about converting ROM city Rampage over to run on the NES

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hvx4xXhZMrU

Somewhat related: Check out OpenPandora, an open-source hackable portable PC/gaming console full of emulators for classic systems!

http://openpandora.org/

It's a great machine for playing and devving games for old machines. Made an MSX Dots (see itunes) clone on JFK on a 9 our lay over :)

Beggar Prince was one of my favorite games of the 2000s. I played the hell out of that game. I miss the SNES versus Genesis debates on the playground.

I'd love to make a game for the original PSX. Not really doing it for money but fulfilling my childhood fantasy of making my own game on the playstation and playing it. A kid in my class had the Net Yaroze I was mad jealous.

You could try using RPG Maker to create it. A lot of people made stuff for PSX back in the day like that. Not as cool/hard as making an entire game on your own but still something.

http://www.emuparadise.me/Sony_Playstation_ISOs/RPG_Maker_%5...

RPGMaker is such a classic. I've found the console was much easier to make what you wanted, where as the PC version was a bit more convoluted.

I used the PC version, enjoyed it but was disappointed at the battle scene (static image of enemies).

I tried to use Chipmunk Basic (http://sourceforge.net/projects/psxbasic/) with the Game Enhancer hooked up to a serial port on my computer...no dice

I wonder what would've happened to my career had that worked when I was 12.

The 8-bit revival scene is really cool .. some nice new titles for old, forgotten machines are being produced these days, and its really a blast to be receiving such gifts. For those of us who suffered the ignobility of having invested in the wrong 8-bit box, seeing new software being produced for the thing is, quite simply, a humbling experience. In my case, its all about the Oric-1/Atmos machines - which had their chance, but faded fast.

And yet now they are getting amazing stuff released for them:

http://www.oric.org/index.php?page=software&fille=top150game...

Of the top-10 games in this list, 5 of them are brand new, produced in the last year or so. (Space 1999, Pulsoids, Impossible Mission, 1337, Skool Daze)

Simply a great time to still have the old boxes stuffed away and discover they not only still work - but f'in kick ass beyond what anyone thought they would, 30 years ago!

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