toma

I have some EB and Alfonzo test carts done before the Limited Run campaign, just to make sure they worked okay and I was happy with the quality. I think if you're dealing with manufacturing you pretty much have to do that, it'd be irresponsible not to

4 hours ago, avatar! said:

WOW!! Super congrats to our very own @toma -- you're in the big leagues now

Thanks! I'm super excited to get these games back out there so people have a second chance at getting a cart. I made a few updates to the ROM versions over the years that weren't in the original production runs so it'll be nice to have those changes in there as well.

For Alfonzo, you can replay levels if you missed out on a gold fish or secret exit, and getting a game over won't erase your gold fish count. I feel like those were the two biggest complaints about the original run of that game.

For Eskimo Bob, I'm using the CN-ROM version with animated backgrounds, which only had a very limited physical release before (maybe 50 copies?). The original version also didn't let you see the real ending unless you beat it with a death count of under 100. I increased that to 1000 because I noticed a lot of people never got to see the real ending (not that it's that much different). Added the password to the game over screen too, which was a common request.

I have had a few other releases with Limited Run but it's been contract work or licensed properties, so it's great to finally get a wider release for my original games. Who knows, if they sell well enough I might be able to justify a third game in the series, which I'd really love to do! I've actually been really busy on another licensed title that will be announced in about a month, so it'd be cool to follow that up with something original again.

The biggest argument for your second issue would be cost. I self-released Eskimo Bob and Alfonzo's Arctic Adventure and they were much more limited than either of my LRG releases. I produced around 500 copies or each and neither one is available any more. I'd love to have more in stock, but being in Canada, making one-off carts is expensive so it makes more sense for me to buy materials in bulk. The demand isn't super high, so it just makes more sense for me to sell them digitally. Games released by a bigger company like LRG are actually way more available than games done at a hobbyist level. Galf was their first game and they didn't know how demand would be so they went with 2000 copies. Based on the sales of other homebrew games and the simpliciity of the title, you'd think that would be plenty, but it sold out within minutes. Mall Brawl was an open pre-order and it sold way more. I don't have the exact sales figures but I'm pretty sure it's a 5-figure number, so there are plenty of carts out in the wild. Thing is, demand and scarcity aren't always the same thing and a lot of it has to do with perception. Since it was released by Limited Run, people have the idea that Galf is my rarest game even though it sold 4 times as many carts as EB or Alfonzo. Maybe it's because it didn't get a digital release, but even accounting for digital sales, it really doesn't make that big a difference. After that initial release when LRG moved to a month of open preorders, I do think that's a much better model than they used for Galf. I think NES/Famicom is still a pretty niche market though, so I doubt larger companies will do more than a single production run of most games. Maybe things will change in the future, but I don't really know.

Looking pretty cool. Just downloaded and played for a few minutes. One criticism I have is that the sprites are spawning at the left side of the screen for a split second as you scroll right which gets pretty distracting. Maybe hiding the leftmost column of 8 pixels with PPU masking would help cover that up a bit? Or alternatively, since scrolling only happens in one direction, make it so that a metasprite being displayed at both edges of the screen isn't rendered on the left side if part of it is visible on the right. Since it happens with every enemy that spawns, it's making the game feel more confusing than it should to me.

I've always found LRG to be really up front and easy to deal with. Working with them has the advantage of having a bit of extra exposure outside of the regular homebrew scene as well which is nice.

As far as porting Alfonzo's Arctic Adventure to Switch goes, I actually handled the actual port in-house myself while I was porting Mall Brawl, but LRG published for me as I didn't have approval from Nintendo to publish games myself at the time. After having Mall Brawl and Alfonzo published that may be changing though.

If you're interested in doing a Switch port, I'm definitely down to talk about it. Alfonzo and Mall Brawl were both MMC1 as well so getting Witch n Wiz running on Switch using the same porting method shouldn't be too difficult.

Personally, I consider "as-is" to be a coin-flip as to whether it's working or not. I would only buy something listed like that if I had a pretty good idea how to fix it myself

Mall Brawl is getting a PS4 physical release through Limited Run Games! The Arcade Edition has kind of branched out from being a pure NES homebrew at this point, including enhanced graphics and audio. If you've ever seen a graphics pack for mesen, it's something like that I guess. Still the same NES game at its core, but spiced up to be a bit prettier looking.

 https://www.limitedrungames.com/collections/neo-frontpage/products/limited-run-420-jay-and-silent-bob-mall-brawl-ps4

https://www.limitedrungames.com/collections/neo-frontpage/products/limited-run-420-jay-and-silent-bob-mall-brawl-collectors-edition-ps4

It'll also be available digitally on PS4/5 and Xbox on May 20!

Mall Brawl has been nominated for Canadian Game of the Year. Probably a long shot, but I think it'd be really cool to see a NES game win Game of the Year for 2020. The fact that it was on the radar enough to even get nominated is pretty crazy in itself to be honest. Anyways, you all know what to do!

A bunch of Wisdom Tree games. Specifically King of Kings, Exodus, and Spiritual Warfare. The rest are basically unplayable to me, but since I grew up with these ones, they're classics in my eyes. Especially Spiritual Warfare, that's a hill I'm willing to die on.

5 hours ago, Scrobins said:

Jay & Silent Bob: Mall Brawl is the subject of my latest blog episode, check it out here: https://www.videogamesage.com/blogs/entry/461-episode-6-jay-silent-bob-mall-brawl/

 

This was a really great read. It was super interesting for me to get everyone else's perspective on it. If anyone is curious about how this project came to be, I really encourage you to take a look at this!

I doubt that they ported the entire game with all/most of the polish of All-Stars before beginning Super Mario World. More likely they just got the codebase running on the new system and went from there. Tons of sequels and followups are built on code from previous games just because it's quicker and more efficient than starting rom scratch each time. I started Alfonzo using the code from Eskimo Bob, Mall Brawl using code from Alfonzo, and a few new projects using modified code from Mall Brawl. It's pretty standard programming practice, especially when going into a similar project.

Thanks everyone!

There's a thread in Twitter suggesting that AVS firmware 1.10 should work for Mall Brawl. This could be why some users are having issues and some are not. I still haven't received my carts so I can't confirm but I will give it a shot when I can.

 *EDIT* Can confirm this fixed the issue for at least one other person. I encourage everyone to give it a shot instead of asking for replacement cartridges. If you need help downgrading the firmware, instructions are below. Just use 1.10 instead of the latest one. If a new firmware comes out that fixes it, then upgrading to that version is probably a better idea.

This feels awfully familiar for some reason... 

May I suggest a giant robotic fly as a boss?

40 minutes ago, Joshua Rogers said:

>Madden 95 was the first major game to have black players

NFL on NES, in 1989.

Pele's Soccer on Atari.

lakers vs celtics on Genesis.

political poop

"But before EA came along sports games were just toys" or something to that effect

On 8/21/2020 at 2:32 PM, captmorgandrinker said:

So far I watched the first two episodes and then part of the one with Mortal Kombat.   I'll probably check out the Sega/Madden one too, but zero interest in the D&D or 3D games ones.

The 3d one is actually pretty interesting. It's mostly about Doom and Starfox. None of the episodes are heavy on modern gaming except for one random section about esports in the fighting game episode. It tends to stick to the origins of things, or at least what made them get big. It does tend to Netflix all over itself a few times but it was overall a pretty interesting series.

59 minutes ago, ecmyers said:

So if it's using 3v, that's a whole other issue, because LRG specifically stated: "Internal boards for the cartridge are being supplied by Retro-Bit. Each of these premium boards has been rigorously tested and will be the proper 5v standard of official NES boards, so there will be no risk of damaging your hardware!"

If they only used 5v boards for the premium edition, I wish that would have been clearer. There was no reason to suspect the premium edition carts would differ internally from the regular carts, as it seemed the only difference would be the packaging and bonus items.

Please don't take my word as gospel on this because I don't really know a lot about this sort of thing, but looking at the PCB, there are three LVC16245A bus transceivers along the bottom. From what I'm understanding on Google, the purpose of these is to interface 3.3V components with 5V devices or vice versa. I'd assume that means that the voltage is being properly converted so that 5V isn't being fed directly into 3.3V components.

It definitely seems more in line with a timing issue. The garbage at the top of the screen is kind of telling me that. Mall Brawl switches CHR banks at the sprite 0 hit, so if that isn't happening properly, the top of the screen is going to show garbage like that. There are multiple bank switches happening per frame, so if the timing is being thrown off, it's going to cause a lot of issues. Not that knowing this is going to help anyone right now or not, it's more just me trying to understand what's happening from a distance.

16 hours ago, Homer said:

Just wanted to say great game toma.  I've played about 4 levels and it's fun.   I also own artic adventure and once I found out that you were involved in this new game I happily bought it.

I hope the game gets the attention that it deserves.  I haven't seen that much news about it.  

Thanks!

Feedback has been overall really good. It received mostly positive reviews and the digital release has sold quite well so far. The physical Switch version actually exceeded my expectations for sales as well. I'm really glad that people are enjoying it! It's certainly opened up some interesting doors. Hopefully I'll have news on that over the next little while.

11 hours ago, Raftronaut said:

As a total aside from the current discussion, After playing this game for a week I completely love it. 

It's a knockout homerun  my only possible complaint is that hard mode is hard....lol 

I love the save battery, it never occurred to me a beat em up could benefit from this.  I love the pixel art, sprite work and music. I have a special appreciation for the thought and care put into the sound effects. The sound of the sock full of nickels made my audibly giggle several times while I played it. 

I was prepared to be impressed judging by the trailer footage and screen shots, but here I am impressed even with my heightened expectations. 

Bravo Spoony Bard! Bravo...

Thanks for the praise! I sunk a year of my life developing this game full-time, so I'm glad the reception has been positive overall. I've been a Kevin Smith fan for two decades, so getting the chance to develop this was huge for me. I hope that it shows in the final product. 

I know that coming from me might sound biased because of my relationship with Limited Run, but you do need to remember that they are a relatively small business. They've got a good-sized following and they're bigger than the average NES homebrewer, but in the gaming world they are still quite small. The chances of them having a standardized response for a situation that has happened to (by my count) three confirmed people is pretty low. I guarantee that they are just hearing about this at the same time as everyone else and are probably trying to figure out what is causing the problem to avoid this sort of thing happening with another game in the future.

I know that Limited Run generally wants people to be happy with what they get, but they also have a well-known problem with scalpers and scammers. My guess is that she was probably just trying to make sure that you weren't trying to scam a free cart out of them before instantly sending out a replacement. If she asked you to try on a stock NES console and to send some evidence of the problem, instead of coming back with a "Yeah, no. That’s not happening" attitude, something like "Sorry, I don't have access to an original NES, but here's some more evidence of the problem on my AVS" and attaching some screenshots or video of the game glitching at its worst could have been helpful. When you start throwing in accusatory stuff about testing and not guaranteeing which systems it will work on, it starts things out on the wrong foot and you're less likely to get the response you want. I know that "the customer is always right" or whatever, but as a customer there are also better ways to handle a situation that can help you get what you want. 

I genuinely hope that you get a new, working cart and things work out for you. In fact, if they do come back saying that they can't help you, feel free to dm me before unloading your cart and I will see if there is anything I can personally do to fix you up.

1 hour ago, Scrobins said:

Absolutely, I wanted to push back on the notion that the carts hadn’t been tested.

Makes sense, I gotcha :)

13 hours ago, Scrobins said:

Hang on, toma himself said in a post just yesterday they did test on an AVS, and so did he. See his quote below:

“I know that they had tested production samples on the AVS without any issues and they're looking into things to see what's going on. I have an AVS myself but don't have my production carts yet to test. During development I used an INL SKROM board for testing and never ran into this. I tested on an AVS, a top loader, two front loaders (one with BLW), as well as a Retrobit system.”

Just to be clear, even though I tested on the AVS during development, I'd really prefer if people don't go to Limited Run with a "toma said it should work" type of message when reporting the issue. I'm not a Limited Run customer service rep, I just personally want everyone to be able to enjoy this game. The only reason I know they used the AVS themselves is because they used it to demo Mall Brawl and Galf on Twitch.

We've got people who are confirmed to be playing on AVS with no problems, so that indicates that there are most likely isolated issues with some cartridges which hopefully should be enough. Referring to other customers who have working carts on the same hardware probably carries more weight than anything I've said about the dev process.

1 hour ago, WaverBoy said:

I just received my Mall Brawl cartridge. Unfortunately there’s a huge problem. I load the cart into my trusty RetroUSB AVS, the game boots up fine, looks and sounds great all through the intro and opening cut scene with security chasing the boys, but as soon as the gameplay starts and you throw your first punch, the game graphics and sound get all glitchy and the game freezes. I’ve tried powering the system on and off and reinserting the cartridge several times, with the same result (although once in a while I can get past the glitch and continue to play). I have no problems with playing other cartridges in my AVS, including my PowerPak  Is anyone else having this problem with their Mall Brawl cart? I’m thinking of asking for a replacement but if they’re all like this then it might be a while...

EDIT: I’ve placed a ticket with LRG’s customer support; I’ll post about what happens with that.

This is the second instance I've heard of the game acting weird with the AVS. I definitely encourage anyone else having issues to contact Limited Run about it. I know that they had tested production samples on the AVS without any issues and they're looking into things to see what's going on. I have an AVS myself but don't have my production carts yet to test. During development I used an INL SKROM board for testing and never ran into this. I tested on an AVS, a top loader, two front loaders (one with BLW), as well as a Retrobit system.

In the meantime, if anyone is able to try different firmware versions to see if that affects anything, that would be really useful as well. As soon as I'm able to test out a production cart for myself I'll post about it.

I always kind of thought doing Spiritual Warfare 2 as a Zelda 2 clone would be a fun project. Not one I'm going to pursue any time soon but if anyone else gives it a shot you've got my full support hahaha

Lots of cool ideas here. Just kind of clarifying that I'm not thinking "what if it had happened back in the day", but I'm trying to gauge interest for possible opportunities for new games. Without saying too much, Jay and Silent Bob has opened up some new doors.