

People Making New Games for Atari, Super Nintendo, and Virtual Boy - cpeterso
http://animalnewyork.com/2014/meet-people-making-new-games-atari-super-nintendo-virtual-boy/

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ashray
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.

~~~
muraiki
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.

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minikomi
One I've had my eye on for a while is
[http://morphcat.de/superbatpuncher/](http://morphcat.de/superbatpuncher/)

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royjacobs
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/](http://www.revival-studios.com/)

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tluyben2
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).

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jmspring
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.

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EpicEng
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.

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

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jonnathanson
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.

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chongli
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](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xsj5xjoLXtE)

~~~
llllllllllll
You'll appreciate this, an entirely acapella rendition of _Corridors of Time_

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JtKCt8Afk9s](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](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c6uVnR9B2vY)

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

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bluedino
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](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hvx4xXhZMrU)

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

[http://openpandora.org/](http://openpandora.org/)

~~~
tluyben2
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 :)

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ExpendableGuy
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.

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notastartup
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.

~~~
ashray
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...](http://www.emuparadise.me/Sony_Playstation_ISOs/RPG_Maker_%5BU%5D/37508)

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darksim905
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.

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fit2rule
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...](http://www.oric.org/index.php?page=software&fille=top150gamesoverall)

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!

