M-Tee

Not quite phased out, just branched off! A bit of behind-the-scenes on the decision: So, Action 53 is both a multicart engine and an anthology series. Its author (Damian Yerrick) has had specific goals for the series that haven't always been in line with those of the competition, occasionally leading to some compromises/delays/etc. Eventually, we decided the best way to handle this was to branch off the competition from the mainline series, with the hope that doing so would… free up the numbering/naming of the Action 53 main series for Damian's future use/goals remove pressure to fix/improve/alter competition entries if they don't meet the above mentioned goals (authors still have an opportunity to improve/update entries, but there's no pressure to do so) give a fresh jumping on point for people buying the carts remove the pressure (and effort and delays) of sourcing additional non-competition entries for each volume help us get out a cart for each competition in a (as of yet to be seen) more timely fashion. Damian's still just as involved, and the Competition carts are still "powered by the Action 53 multicart engine", will indicate so on their packaging, etc., and will still be hosted alongside the others on itch and whatnot. They just won't follow the a53 Volume numbering. So, if/when a future mainline Action 53 is released, it will likely be something more special to its author and less directly tied to the competition.

Thanks, @Ferris Bueller. I know that's not a light a price tag.

Congrats and thanks!

For Auction: original illustrations made during productions of Action 53 Vols 3 and 4. Contents: Original A4-sized Cover Art illustration used for Action 53 vol. 3. Page of portraits illustrated (but unused) for Action 53 vol. 4 Unused Promo Picture illustrated for vol. 4 (on back of aforementioned portrait sheet) Light A6 pencil sketch illustrating a53 title, robotfindskitten. Starting Bid: $350 USD. Bid increments in multiples of $50 USD. Auction Ending Time: 9/18/21 10:00 am KST (Korea Standard Time) If a valid bid is placed within the last 10 minutes, it will extend the auction for 10 minutes, indefinitely. Please note though, all bidding increments should be made in multiples of $50 USD. Payment Method: $50 USD (of the winning bid, not in addition to it) to be paid via paypal to cover shipping. The remainder to be made as a donation to, and during, the NES Spectrum 2021 Marathon. (link) Failure to to make the donation will cancel the auction. Artwork will then be put back into storage. I will officially be bummed out. Shipping Info Earliest possible shipping date is 9/23. Shipping made by EMS through Korea post.

For Auction: the original illustrations used to create the Project Blue comic released with the First Press Games' Famicom release. Contents: All (6) A4 pages of original comic inks (each with printed rough drafts still taped to the back from production) (1) additional A4 page of assorted lettering. (5) of the 6 original rough draft sketches (6th is missing, likely gone forever. But if it ever shows up, will ship it separately) (1) of the guidelines templates printed and used during the illustration of the NES cover art (the) original thumbnail sketch used as a pitch for the Project Blue NES cover art Starting Bid: $700 USD. Bid increments in multiples of $50 USD. Auction Ending Time 9/18/21 10:00 am KST (Korea Standard Time) If a valid bid is placed within the last 10 minutes, it will extend the auction for 10 minutes, indefinitely. Please note though, all bidding increments should be made in multiples of $50 USD. Payment Method: $50 USD (of the winning bid, not in addition to it) to be paid via paypal to cover shipping. The remainder to be made as a donation to, and during, the NES Spectrum 2021 Marathon. (link) Failure to to make the donation will cancel the auction. Artwork will then be put back into storage. I will officially be bummed out. Shipping Info Earliest possible shipping date is 9/23. Shipping made by EMS through Korea post.

That's good info to have. I assume you're also causing every perishable enemy to perish as well. Even when we calculate perfect score for planning purposes, it's really impossibly perfect scores as we calculate based on a completion time of zero seconds just to be safe.

We kept perfect score calculated for cg2 because we wanted it to be possible to nearly max out the score counter without breaking it. Since Lost is much shorter, there's no risk of that. So, we haven't. I suspect a 1-player run's max wouldn't be a whole lot higher than what Red's pulling in. (Almost surely under 300,000 I'm guessing.) I'd need to count the killable enemies and bonus room gold. Lost is a little more complicated. With cg2, the bonus rooms were designed so that a skilled player could collect all the gold alone (I think). In Lost, it's impossible because of the room and enemy layout. Congrats on the final scores to everyone, btw. Very impressive.

Red's score's a total beast. I got closer to bertsampson's when I played through with savestates. But I know some stages I took a long time to exit, and I didn't get too creative in grabbing gold in the bonus rooms. Love that y'all are enjoying/tolerating it enough to get that tight with it.

There it is. The owner of the 2nd Adv. original cover art for a reason. Did you need to play with the 2nd player active to reach it?

Interesting. Is there any way at all, you might have some conflicting key bindings in nestopia settings? Player 2 start and A should be the only buttons to spawn player 2, IIRC.

Glad you dig it. If it helps any, you shouldn't get over him.

Yeah, I flipped his tiles incorrectly and didn't notice until I finally did an Ace playthrough right before the competition. I had to use savestates for that playthrough, so most of y'all are doing better than me so far.

Now that someone's beat it on Ace, I can apologize for the graphical glitch in the Ace ending, @bertsampson We plan on getting that fixed in an update.

Not at all! Please enjoy the games. We need more folks "new to the homebrew thing" every day. That's how we all got hooked in the first place.

mteegfx.com That should lead to my itch page. You can play the predecessor to this game, The Cowlitz Gamers' 2nd Adventure. It has a manual included that's applicable to Lost as well (it explains the hidden switches for instance). Gruniożerca 2 and 3 were both from the same development team as these games (myself and Łukasz Kur). They're different genres though, a puzzle platformer and a puzzle game.

There's an invisible switch, about 8x8 pixels in size in every stage, that's triggered by contact. There's a "secret revealed" sound effect that plays when you hit it. Depending on the stage, the switch will either: * spawn a diamond * grant access to a diamond -or- * grant safe passage back from getting the diamond Collect 8 diamonds to get access to a hidden chamber (bonus stage) that opens up quite a lot of extra points. Happy hunting!

There are already 108 label variants... (54 NES, 54 FC).

NES 8x16 Sprites Overview Following is a brief summary to using the 8x16 sprite mode offered by the NES. I wrote the bulk of this sometime back in February of 2015 for @KHAN Games to pitch this mode for Isolation. To make this write-up useful for beginners, I have explained some things further for this post. For most people reading here, you can skim over these parts. I can thank @Optomon for my understanding of the subject. Preamble: So, the NES displays background graphics with 8x8 pixel tiles. It can display foreground graphics using either 8x8 or 8x16 pixel tiles. These individual tiles are referred to as sprites, and their combination to make larger graphics would be referred to as metasprites. All tiles for sprites and background accessible for display are stored in two pattern tables, which are viewable through the PPU Viewer menu options of Mesen or FCEUX. Arranging Graphics with 8x16 Sprites As you may know, this is the order of tiles as loaded into the pattern table of the PPU: Standard PPU Tile Arrangement This does not change when the pattern table is loaded for 8x16 sprites. However, the manner in which the NES displays sprites from the pattern table does. This is the order in which tiles are arranged when pulling 8x16 sprites: 8x16 Tile Arrangement To cycle between these two views, select the FC/NES x16 setting in yy-chr: Building Sprites with 8x16 Sprites To display an 8x16 sprite, the tile ID pulls two adjacent 8x8 tiles and displays them one above the other. (This is why $01 is below $00 in an 8x16 layout.) Now, since a single sprite tile ID references what would—in 8x8 sprite mode—require two IDs, half of the IDs have seemingly been freed up. What’s the good in that? Now, sprites can be pulled from both pattern tables: the sprite pattern table (00, or left) or the background pattern table (01, or right). Sprite IDs for Pattern Table 00: Sprite IDs for Pattern Table 01: As you can see, tile IDs ending in an even digit, or nibble, such as 0, 2, 4, … A, C, E, etc., pull sprites from the left pattern table (00). Whereas, tile IDs ending in an odd nibble (1, 3, 5, … B, D, F) pull sprites from the right pattern table (01). Download the above Tile IDs as a CHR file here. (For better understanding, open this file in yy-chr and view it in both 8x8 and 8x16 viewing mode.) But What About the Background? Have no fear, you can still build backgrounds from whichever pattern table you've assigned for background, just as you would have in 8x8 sprite mode. But now you can use the same tiles for either background or sprites. You just have to arrange your background tiles within the pattern table in an accommodating order if you want to use the exact same tile for both. For Example If we place the tiles for, let's say, a ceramic pot within the background pattern table… …we can construct the pot using background tiles like so: …or construct the very same pot as a sprite, like so: (The tile IDs shown above assume that pattern table 01 is set as the background table. They would be $04,$06 ) Therefore, the pot as it exists in the pattern table (and as it would be viewed in a PPU viewer): When are 8x16 sprites useful? When you want very large sprites (since each tile is twice as tall, larger objects can be defined with less data. You can also cover twice as much screen retail before you hit the 64 sprite limit.) When you have many vertical elements that need to be displayed as sprites (the tiles can’t be rotated though, they're always 8 wide by 16 tall ) When you want to reuse graphics as both background and sprites. When you want a larger variety of sprites, and need less background tiles. When you want players to interact with background objects (ex. pick up a pot from a row of pots, you can use the same graphics to make the row of pots with background tiles until the player picks it up, then you can rewrite its area in the nametable (background) with blank tiles and load the same graphics in its place as a sprite for interaction.) This is helpful to get around scanline limits, such as pushing boxes in a Sokobon-like.) When are they a hindrance? When you have many objects smaller than 8x8, such as bullets. Remember, even the transparent pixels in a tile count toward scanline usage. When you need to rotate vertical objects (ex. an arrow being shot vertically would be perfect for 8x16, but would require more space in the pattern table to be shot horizontally or diagonally than 8x8 mode would.) When your characters’ heights are an odd number of 8x8 tiles. (For example, large Mario is three tiles, or 24 pixels high. It would be a waste of chr space to use a stack of 8x16s to draw him.) When you need to pack as much as you can into your pattern table (in 8x8 mode, a 16x16 character might animate a walk by just changing the bottom half of the tiles. With 8x16 tiles, you would need to duplicate the top half, wasting chr space. More Info: For instructions on how to activate 8x16 sprite mode, refer to the PPU OAM page of the NesDev Wiki.

The Xbox Live Arcade Bionic Commandos were really gold.

Yeah, not necessarily more sci-fi (although that was the result). The goal was to convert it into a game that would have been an accurate representation of the cover art. (I suspect that the development of Bomber King, which would later be released as RoboWarrior, had the exact same inspiration.) I put an early, graphics-only patch up at RHDN, but shortly after, Optomon gave the game a new, original soundtrack, and put in some time-of-day palette transitions. It has literally just been sitting on my hard drive, unreleased, waiting for me to have the time to do a final playthrough and touch-ups since... 2014. This shows Optomon's music and the palette transitions:

There are too many sequels that were disappoints over their predecessors for me to list a genuinely great game as needing a sequel. And games that could have been great, but flawed, would probably be better fixed with an improvement hack. Instead, I would say games that came out early in the console's lifespan that could have had amazing sequels a few years (and mappers) later. (i.e. what Bomberman II is to Bomberman) Something like Excitebike. Maybe cross country with a number of different environments... and I realize I'm pitching a sidescrolling Road Rash. Layla's pretty amazing for '86, but a bigger budget remake in '91 or so could have been even better. Separate stages with unique themes, ala Megaman / Bucky O'Hare would be my pitch. Finally, Warpman. The original's a 2P co-op overhead arcade-style action game like Bomberman. I'd pitch a sequel that played like a co-op versiom of Hal's Ghostbusters 2. Stages to traverse, varied weaponry, big bosses.

@Gloves I'm really sorry to continue this discussion in this thread, but for the sake of anyone making any judgement calls based on it, I just wanted to point out that this seems inaccurate. Rob argued that the time mark at 54:40 is what folks should hear. The "Thank You to Rob" was 5 seconds before the time mark posted. After that timemark (54:40-55:20ish), he lists how many copies he's made, that he's not making any more, and then states that Rob is releasing the game separately through INL and encourages folks to get it. I could be mistaken, but it seems to me like that would be what he was referring to.

...and therefore, I am.