Edmond Dantes
01-08-2018, 04:27 PM
So recently, I've been hitting up the Emulation scene again, and while doing so I wound up getting a glimpse of just what the Chinese piracy scene is doing. It's some amazing stuff, some of this I'm surprised even effing exists.
Here's three I found while perusing just the NES/Famicom library.
Biohazard
When I saw that title, my first thought was that, like the Genesis game Bio Hazard Battle, this probably had nothing to do with the Resident Evil series (which is called Biohazard in Japan) and was probably just a coincidentally similar title.
Nope. Its a demake of the original Resident Evil, ported to the NES. I don't know Chinese but I recognized the scenes early on from just the visuals, and I got as far as the first zombie encounter, in which I discovered this port, though telling the story of RE1, is actually based on the engine (or at least borrows the combat mechanics) of the Gameboy Color game Resident Evil Gaiden! Unfortunately, I didn't play much longer than that because the music was ear-piercingly bad.
Harry Story
I wasn't surprised to run across a Harry Potter bootleg--I had seen a SpaceHamster video that covered several of those. But I double-checked his video, and this is one he actually does not mention.
If Harry Story is a spritehack, I'd love to know what the original game was, because its pretty fun (and no, its NOT Panic Restaurant--that's one of the ones SpaceHamster covered). It's a side-scrolling platformer, but it has a Gradius-style upgrade system where magic wand icons move the indicator: The first two slots are weapons--one a music note that you lob like a grenade and the other a beam that shoots straight ahead but I think takes a moment to fire. Third slot gives you a broom that allows you to slow your descent a la Mario 3's raccoon and tanooki suits, except its far more generous here. Fourth slot refills your health. The first level starts off in some mountains with a lot of rolling boulders and rock dudes, and you collect gems in addition to magic wands.
Truth is I almost got addicted to this game, which is another reason I'd like to know what its a hack of... if its even a hack of anything.
Tiny Toon Adventures 6
Yes, Six. Another case of them slapping a random number onto an entry I guess.
As seems to be the trend so far, I loaded this up expecting a simple sprite hack, but to all appearances its not--its an actual new Tiny Toons game as far as I can tell, and even more impressively, all the text is in English. The storyline concerns Babs wanting to take a trip around the world and Buster and his pals are, I guess, trying to clear the way for her. The gameplay style is similar to the first NES Tiny Toons game, but you can take more hits and switching characters happens at a predetermined point in each level as opposed to by picking up an item (and the character in question is also predetermined). One thing I did find a little odd is that Buster can throw carrots as an attack (they're limited by the way, but jumping on heads is more reliable anyway) and to get items out of blocks you have to hop on TOP of them, so that aspect is sort of a reverse-Mario. In fact there's a couple of Mario-esque elements such as pipes you can enter to go to secret areas or treasure hordes, which I don't remember being a part of Konami's games.
Tiny Toons 6 is clearly not as polished as the licensed classics, but it overall still struck me as a fun and enjoyable game, arguably it could almost be a a well-done fangame if I could at all confirm that the programmers were fans of the franchise. If there's a repro cart of this, I would totally buy it.
Yu-Gi-Oh
My jaw dropped that there was a goddamn Yu-Gi-Oh game on the NES, and dropped even farther when I saw that it wasn't a card game, but rather seemed to be some sort of RPG that roughly combines the Capsule Monsters stories from the manga with the Monster World chapters--you get monsters from a CapMon machine but the battles seem to play out using the percentile die mechanics of Monster World.
Truth is, what most impresses me is not only does a Yu-Gi-Oh game exist for a console that was dead in the water when this manga began, but that this game takes inspiration more from the early chapters before the manga was totally dominated by the card game (which was technically introduced very early on but only became the focus of the series with the eighth graphic novel). Yes, I'm a huge Yu-Gi-Oh nerd... at least for the manga. The real-life trading card game can go screw itself.
So you start out in the lobby of some building (which makes me think this is based on the Death-T story arc), Jonouchi makes a comment, then Seto Kaiba comes up and says something and Yugi turns into Yami, then you can walk around and talk to people but every person I talked to initiated a monster battle--it's literally like an RPG with your party being your capsule monsters, I'm not sure if they level up or anything, and without knowing Chinese I wasn't confident enough to play further. If I ever win the lottery I'm definitely gonna pay someone to translate this.
These are just some games I discovered I wanted to give people a "hey, heads-up, these exist!" about.
Here's three I found while perusing just the NES/Famicom library.
Biohazard
When I saw that title, my first thought was that, like the Genesis game Bio Hazard Battle, this probably had nothing to do with the Resident Evil series (which is called Biohazard in Japan) and was probably just a coincidentally similar title.
Nope. Its a demake of the original Resident Evil, ported to the NES. I don't know Chinese but I recognized the scenes early on from just the visuals, and I got as far as the first zombie encounter, in which I discovered this port, though telling the story of RE1, is actually based on the engine (or at least borrows the combat mechanics) of the Gameboy Color game Resident Evil Gaiden! Unfortunately, I didn't play much longer than that because the music was ear-piercingly bad.
Harry Story
I wasn't surprised to run across a Harry Potter bootleg--I had seen a SpaceHamster video that covered several of those. But I double-checked his video, and this is one he actually does not mention.
If Harry Story is a spritehack, I'd love to know what the original game was, because its pretty fun (and no, its NOT Panic Restaurant--that's one of the ones SpaceHamster covered). It's a side-scrolling platformer, but it has a Gradius-style upgrade system where magic wand icons move the indicator: The first two slots are weapons--one a music note that you lob like a grenade and the other a beam that shoots straight ahead but I think takes a moment to fire. Third slot gives you a broom that allows you to slow your descent a la Mario 3's raccoon and tanooki suits, except its far more generous here. Fourth slot refills your health. The first level starts off in some mountains with a lot of rolling boulders and rock dudes, and you collect gems in addition to magic wands.
Truth is I almost got addicted to this game, which is another reason I'd like to know what its a hack of... if its even a hack of anything.
Tiny Toon Adventures 6
Yes, Six. Another case of them slapping a random number onto an entry I guess.
As seems to be the trend so far, I loaded this up expecting a simple sprite hack, but to all appearances its not--its an actual new Tiny Toons game as far as I can tell, and even more impressively, all the text is in English. The storyline concerns Babs wanting to take a trip around the world and Buster and his pals are, I guess, trying to clear the way for her. The gameplay style is similar to the first NES Tiny Toons game, but you can take more hits and switching characters happens at a predetermined point in each level as opposed to by picking up an item (and the character in question is also predetermined). One thing I did find a little odd is that Buster can throw carrots as an attack (they're limited by the way, but jumping on heads is more reliable anyway) and to get items out of blocks you have to hop on TOP of them, so that aspect is sort of a reverse-Mario. In fact there's a couple of Mario-esque elements such as pipes you can enter to go to secret areas or treasure hordes, which I don't remember being a part of Konami's games.
Tiny Toons 6 is clearly not as polished as the licensed classics, but it overall still struck me as a fun and enjoyable game, arguably it could almost be a a well-done fangame if I could at all confirm that the programmers were fans of the franchise. If there's a repro cart of this, I would totally buy it.
Yu-Gi-Oh
My jaw dropped that there was a goddamn Yu-Gi-Oh game on the NES, and dropped even farther when I saw that it wasn't a card game, but rather seemed to be some sort of RPG that roughly combines the Capsule Monsters stories from the manga with the Monster World chapters--you get monsters from a CapMon machine but the battles seem to play out using the percentile die mechanics of Monster World.
Truth is, what most impresses me is not only does a Yu-Gi-Oh game exist for a console that was dead in the water when this manga began, but that this game takes inspiration more from the early chapters before the manga was totally dominated by the card game (which was technically introduced very early on but only became the focus of the series with the eighth graphic novel). Yes, I'm a huge Yu-Gi-Oh nerd... at least for the manga. The real-life trading card game can go screw itself.
So you start out in the lobby of some building (which makes me think this is based on the Death-T story arc), Jonouchi makes a comment, then Seto Kaiba comes up and says something and Yugi turns into Yami, then you can walk around and talk to people but every person I talked to initiated a monster battle--it's literally like an RPG with your party being your capsule monsters, I'm not sure if they level up or anything, and without knowing Chinese I wasn't confident enough to play further. If I ever win the lottery I'm definitely gonna pay someone to translate this.
These are just some games I discovered I wanted to give people a "hey, heads-up, these exist!" about.