fcgamer

Paintings and to a lesser extent, artwork

Awesome! Great to see these lists

Awesome! It was a lot of fun watching the video you did last year. Glad to see that you're doing another video this year

See, your presumptions are where you miss the mark. Your research on the matter of homebrew and indie games misses the mark completely, which can be seen from your arrogant attitude and quick nature to turn defensive whenever someone questions the parameters of the list you cobbled together. And an example of that is Flowers in the Mirror. The game was made by Fuzhou Waixing Computer Science & Technology Co.,LTD. The company released a ton of games. Granted, some of them were just Chinese translations of popular Japanese games, but the rest are in the exact same camp as Flowers in the Mirror. Does Traitor Legend appear on your list? Lin Baned the Opium (one of my favorite games for that matter)? Not that I can find. So if I may ask, why are these games being excluded from your list, yet Flowers in the Mirror is included? I can best guess it has something to do with Flowers being a run 'n gun that was bootlegged by westerners. Such instances as this, and others that I have pointed out over the course of time in this thread highlight that your research on this particular topic just isn't that great. You mentioned earlier that any homebrew game counts if it can theoretically run on real hardware, but that again ignores the fact that a large portion of the Bob Rost early homebrew games do not (according to sources I have seen) run on actual hardware. This wouldn't be surprising to me at all, as these were very early NES homebrew projects dating from the early 2000s, but the guy was even teaching a course on NES homebrew; therefore, those games should certainly appear on a list claiming to document all the NES homebrew. And the list goes on with troubling inconsistences as these. It just smacks of poor research, and as a New York Times bestselling journalist, this could have been your chance to do something amazing. Instead, you just act in a very condescending manner when anyone questions anything about your list, when in fact, we would just like to see an accurate, unbiased list of games. Finally, no need to try to talk down to me and act as if you're informing me about games about which I am unaware. I own many of these games in the original print and remember when virtually all of them were in development. If you want to do something that's actually meaningful, listen to the constructive criticism with an open mind and go about trying to implement a more sound means of making the list. Until then, how is one to take the list seriously?

Nice! I don't think I ever saw the box before for the Bible Time Voyager.

It's a decent list, albeit a weirdly curated list. It's strange to see Flowers in the Mirror on there, for example. Rather than advertising this as an archive of every NES homebrew game ever released, as it clearly isn't, perhaps there's some better name for it like "Seth's Homebrew Picks".

Then there are those weird foods, such as "Taiwanese hamburgers". Here's an article: https://lifeoftaiwan.com/food/taiwanese-hamburger-goes-global/ I do disagree about one point though. English speakers refer to these as Taiwanese hamburgers because that is what our local Taiwanese colleagues and friends refer to them as, rather than it being something we coined ourselves! I'd personally just refer to it as a guabao, similar to how I refer to fried noodles as cao mian (chowmein), a lunchbox as a bento/biendan, etc. But the locals insist on using these weird translations...

I don't know how they did their Japanese releases, but EA has a plant in Taiwan and a large portion of their releases were just USA versions with the occasional package tweak.

Well another example would be that the Germans use (used?) the word Handy to mean cellphone...

This is something I noticed in Taiwan, though I believe I also saw it when in Germany (though that was in 2007 so I could be mistaken): a lot of books would have the title in the local language (Chinese, German, whatever) but then the English name would also be present on the cover. The first few times I saw this it through me for a loop, as the contents of the book inside weren't bilingual, yet the front cover had a bilingual text. At the end of the day, English has become somewhat trendy in other parts of the world, almost a fashion. Sometimes I sense it might be used to "show off" as if to say "Hey, I can speak another language with great fluency". I hear this sometimes on the local radio station here in Taiwan, or even sometimes when people speak Chinese, throwing in English phrases here or there, especially if they notice a foreigner is nearby. I personally don't like this and sometimes feel resentful, as if I were doing the reverse (writing songs with a lot of Chinese) or whatever, the PC police would be on my case in a heartbeat for cultural appropriation or something, despite the fact that I spent 1/3 of my life in a non-English speaking country. The situation with the Japanese usage of English is quite interesting, at least to me, but I find languages and language usage to be quite interesting as a whole. For example, there is a drink from Japan known as Pocari Sweat. That's a weird name, and someone might erroneously assume that they meant to write "Pocari Sweet" and just misspelled the word; however, the drink is actually a sports drink akin to Gatoraid or Power Aid or something. In that context, while the usage sounds weird to us native English speakers, we can definitely see the correlation between sweating and sports, and thus the need for drinking a sports drink. Although I wasn't aware of the smorgasbord example mentioned above, once again, it demonstrates the weird, yet somewhat sound logic behind the word usage. While we don't use kanji / hanzi in the States, there are some situations where we do something similar. For example, I know a lot of people who equate the term "ramen noodles" and "instant noodles", or use sushi as a catchall for sushi and sashimi. Then again, I have a lot of friends and family who equate sashimi to fish exclusively, though my Japanese friend often mentions eating "horse sashimi" as she calls it in English, i.e. raw horse meat. It's an interesting topic.

Basketball on Atari and an Asian version Tekken 3.

Well yes and no, but I will concede to the fact that I am not Len Herman, and I should have worded things differently / better to say that I am generally a pioneer in the fields in which I collect / research.

This is your list, but setting such parameters removes a lot of early homebrew from the running, so this might be something worth thinking about. https://www.nesworld.com/article.php?system=nes&data=neshomebrew

I cannot speak for the author of this thread; however, many of the entries (NES Maker demos) as well as the notorious Blade Buster were not officially released as cartridges, though in the case of the latter, as I recall, the author allowed people to burn cartridges of it (possibly as long as they weren't being sold)

Thanks for the clarification. With that, I'll amend my list of games I'm voting for. Here's my real list of top indie / homebrew games, in no particular order. Final Fight 3 Tiny Toon Adventures 6 Bomb Sweeper Hot Logic Time Conquest Super Dr. Mario Bros. The Lion King V: Timon and Pumbaa Tom & Jerry 3 Actually, Final Fight 3 is one of my favorite NES / Famicom games of all time. I

Man those hand / knuckle tattoos.

Grammarly lol

As an aside, I was trying to explain to my dad once why I wasn't concerned that a certain cart didn't work (it was an obscure bootleg of Super Mario Bros or something, and I got it cheap) and he didn't get it. I told him I wasn't buying it to play the game, rather as it was a rare shell variant or label variant or whatever.

For me it's a historical thing, those are some of the games I want. I have more games than I need, and aside from aftermarket indie and aftermarket homebrew items and my favorites, I rarely play games anymore. I generally spend more time research and writing about games than actually playing them.

I'll leave it with this, as I'm not going to derail the thread anymore. That being said, I think the reason people are jumping into your thread and discussing these points likely is because we feel strongly about this segment of gaming, and want it to be discussed, archived, and preserved in a non-biased way, rather than in an inaccurate way that pleases the knee-jerk reactions and whims of a few.

Wow, I find this all very rich and arrogant. As someone who has been following the NES homebrew scene from the very beginning, I suggest that it would do you some favors to turn things down a bit, rather than attempt to justify poorly-laid out criteria as to what does and doesn't belong on a list. You mentioned that you are an attorney - as such, I would have thought you would have taken an initiative to hash out a framework that is a bit more sound than what you have presented here. Going back to the Dr Super Mario Bros. game I mentioned. It has been extensively hacked, was worked on by a team of people, etc. Whether it deserves to be on lists, documented and archived and remembered in history shouldn't really be up to one person to decide, based on the merits of whether it is an extensive enough hack or not in the eyes of the author of the project at large, i.e. you. Even defining aftermarket is kind of weird, as the Famicom was supported until the early 2000s, and it was very much still popular during the late 90s in some regions, areas where new, original (unauthorized, indie) games were being made. Sure, that would be Famicom, but the consensus amongst many is that the Famicom and NES are the same thing. If you want to be serious about this project, here's what I would probably do: 1. Drop the term "indie", strictly use the terms "aftermarket" and "homebrew". You may not like it, but viewing it from an objective mind, those "unlicensed" studios back in the day were indie studios by definition. Similarly, all homebrew and aftermarket games are "unlicensed". It's a tough pill to swallow for many when pointed out, but we are in an era where indie is a much better way of classifying those old games than unlicensed is. 2. With homebrew, there was a lot of homebrew games being made using Family Basic, and I've also heard of homebrew existing on the Famicom Disk System back in the day. It is a disservice to those folks to ignore and try to remove such offerings from an archive of homebrew games, just because they don't fit into your notion of what homebrew is. So the best way of addressing said issues would likely be to define what you consider "aftermarket" to mean, then refer to everything on the list as "aftermarket homebrew" or "aftermarket indie". This way there is no confusion created or caused when discussing things or working with archivists who document and examine homebrew from its roots. Finally, let's address this: Source? This seems like a very bold statement to make, especially when you don't know the relations anyone else here has to homebrews and hacks and ports and demo carts and tech demos, etc. Do you remember the Ninja Turtles theme demo when it came out?

He ordered the book. The idea was to create some cartridges to go with the book as a fun hobbyist thing, i.e. the cartridge itself was supposed to be a fun hobbyist supplement rather than the entrée. It's coming, it's on my list of things to get finished this year. Finally incase anyone wonders, I did not take money or presales or anything like that for the cartridges, unlike the folks that are still waiting for their Project Blue cartridges that they paid $$$ for in advance.

I think an argument could be made for it. Super Dr Mario Bros., for example, is a game I'd put on the list. It had a paid (?) development team assembled and led by a director. The game was extensively hacked and the code / programming altered quite a bit. Similarly, a ton of research was done to match the content with old source materials. I mean, if any hack would be a candidate for going on the list, this would be the one, and that's coming from the position that I have direct insight into the game's development.

It's coming. I'll be jobless come August, should have a lot of free time on my hands and no money, which I guess is the perfect combination for staying at home and getting projects finished.

Yeah, I mean if sprite hacks with stolen IP count as indie games yet Master Chu and the Drunkard Hu is qualified due to its age, I'm really not sure what to say.