fcgamer

24 minutes ago, Seth said:

It is called exactly what it is: the largest archive of its kind in the world, and an archive that includes all games presently detectable by the only New York Times-bestselling journalist working in the field. It is professional work product being given to you for free so that you can complain about the most significant act of service journalism in the subfield rather than simply enjoy the hundreds and hundreds of homebrews I have found for you that (in fact) you most certainly did not know about previously. If you were in this for the games rather than the drama you would go play some of the games rather than act the way you have acted here, which is fabulously shabbily.

My semipro take, as someone who used to work professionally with antisocial people as a public defender, is that you have some sort of oppositional defiance disorder-adjacent or anxiety-group condition that causes you to want to be cantankerous and stir the pot. But again, if you actually cared about homebrews—as your efforts to produce them suggest you in fact do—a better use of your time right now, and specifically in this thread, would be to make a list of what the archive is missing rather than mischaracterize my hundreds and hundreds of hours of free labor as a professional art critic and video game journalist. But you are not going to do that, are you? Because that would be productive and drama-reducing and a service to your peers rather than spiteful and petty and noxious.

I do not mind the fact that I am an attorney, journalist, editor, academic, and nonfiction author and that other people are doctors or engineers or homebrewers or fighter pilots. Meanwhile, the fact that I am also a professional art critic and art historian and you are not appears to upset you to the point that you want me to mislabel the product of years of professional research as nothing more than a blog entry. I am not going to do that, anymore than I would pretend that your homebrewing efforts are a Cabbage Patch Kid.

I can only take solace in the fact that I have met many people like you before; you are fueled by conflict and drama and the unhappiness of others, a vampiric tendency I realize I have fed here. My own inclination is to work on projects that benefit other people, as I have been in public service in various manifestations for 30 years now. I hope that, having feasted on this drama you have worked so hard to create, and the disrespect for my professional work you have so gleefully spread throughout this thread, you can move on to being toxic in someone else’s perimeter. Your particular act may be extremely lucrative in this subcommunity as a matter of transient cultural capital, but it does not do anything for me or the serious work I am doing in an effort to benefit homebrewers like you.

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? 

2 hours ago, RpgCollector said:

How about 5 unique items. 
Ben Heck portable Atari 2600
Ben Heck portable NES
Big Box GBA - Racing 4 Pak
Big Box GBA - Nickelodeon 4 Pak
Original Wisdom Tree Plug N Play 

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

3 hours ago, Seth said:

I’ve completed the next volume of the archive of every NES homebrew game ever released

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".

15 minutes ago, Link said:

Maybe it varies by country but in school I was taught "hamburger" in Spanish is "hamburguesa". Loan words are a thing (see: "los blue jeans") but a quick trip down Google Translate Lane tells me that even excluding those with different character sets there are quite different words for hamburger in many languages, e.g. pljeskavica (Bosnian) or jauhelihapihvi (Finnish).

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...

35 minutes ago, Tyree_Cooper said:

Though many PS2 games in Japan have full cover in Japanese and full manual in Japanese, but the game remains 100% in English (many EA games for example). So the opposite problem also exists

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.

1 minute ago, Sumez said:

This is not a Japanese thing, it's true for literally any culture in the entire world that has regular exposure to the English language

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.

3 hours ago, port said:

I know I've known you for a long time and this is a little harsh, but sorry brosef, no you fucking are not lol. You're not Len Herman.

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.

9 minutes ago, Seth said:

It has to be theoretically playable on a standard NES (I only add the word “theoretically” here because of your second question, the answer to which is that yes, ROM-only homebrews are fine, provided that they could in theory be put on a cart and played in a standard NES).

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

7 minutes ago, Ankos said:

2. Does the game have to have been released on cart? Some homebrew stuff is just limited to ROMs available for download, like Silk Road on Gameboy. Would NES games that are download only be allowed for submission?

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)

7 hours ago, Khromak said:

f I understand it, it sounds like the goal of this project is to recognize and encourage the people who are making NES games after nintendo stopped supporting it, basically anything post-Wario's woods (roughly). Essentially, the system should've been dead in the water after the last official release, but even now, 30+ years after that, games are still being made which is what this project is about

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 

On 4/26/2024 at 7:19 AM, a3quit4s said:

This dude picked up a Donkey Kong Jr math and doesn’t even realize it’s value as a 3-screw 

The peeling label is suspect though as maybe a re-shell but I doubt it

edit: OMG - so I don’t have any social media but I was able to reach out to this dude via eBay to ask if he knew what he had. He said he didn’t but he sold the game for the going rate of a 5 screw DK math not even a few days ago! @ThePhleo what are the chances this was a legit 3 screw??

ebay sold listing here: https://www.ebay.com/itm/186314414310?itmmeta=01HWBZMT64FK5D93E498JVNEZE&hash=item2b613458e6:g:8fwAAOSwDQVl2m-6&itmprp=enc%3AAQAJAAAA8K1bxqq0LWLJ1PJ7Sw7HUxWkCWouO9C2Ko16NL9yU%2FyelzSZ8fXQj9Obnu3NLaXgJBhQD2VDUmcVsToJYZXoQEM7YbiVYIgyXYJpmzONUnGVTLJbGimKtJZGI0EsNjwWh%2Bmr7SWJsRGNhOIoN2NbPj3pncUnWVyQv1LuGUVIcr%2F6xycGVktBKb7WSENqRyqYW4u6fkaUFJGPg3Lr0PZEpDL8RWfG0H5ExQClfu0QqV6cmKqKd%2B%2B%2BUVC2gb%2BPxM1LdFLMIIRx4ETRHAjlJnem4iAK3JHE5O5jbAWJ7vlgIEqWyNIhZSQY%2BwAOIc7GGdbHTg%3D%3D|tkp%3ABk9SR4yj0__iYw

Man those hand / knuckle tattoos. 

On 11/14/2023 at 7:12 AM, RegularGuyGamer said:

I just used a mixture of Chat GPT, MS Bing chat and Grammerly to write what were, as far I could tell, where completely original emails to parents. 

Grammarly lol

23 minutes ago, GPX said:

Same, I’ve barely playtested the bulk of my collection, let alone played them. Most games I’ve already got on emulation, digitally downloaded on my X360, or can be found in juicy compilations on the various consoles I own.

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. 

22 minutes ago, GPX said:

I think it’s because your collection stems from a gamer mindset. That is, you aim to pretty much play all the games you own. Collections from a collector mindset aims more of adding contents of the rare and the oddities, often mixed with personal nostalgia, without the need to play the entire collection. It’s not necessarily an investment mindset, as the rare items that are well known and sought after often happen to be damn expensive too!

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.

1 hour ago, Seth said:

I am happy discuss all this at more length in a thread that is not intended for a completely separate purpose. I really hope we can return to people voting because that is going to have much more of a long-term impact on the community. Why? Because it celebrates the work of others rather than our own ability to craft an argument.

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.

48 minutes ago, Seth said:

I will just add this: The project I’m working on is about celebrating those who are keeping the NES alive after its lifespan. That includes developers, gamers, collectors, critics, journalists, publishers, composers, archivists, and many other groups of persons working really hard to do a very hard thing: keep a dead console alive.

That is an idiosyncratic and surprising and arguably even unprecedented (at least in its present scope) task that they have taken on, and an honorable one, entirely different from the project that small independent NES publishers took on during the lifespan of the NES in the 1980s and 1990s. Anyone who wants to run a completely different project that celebrates unlicensed NES games released during the lifespan of the system is free to do that.

Second, under the definition of “homebrews” both hacks and original aftermarket games qualify. We cannot say that the difference is in artistic merit because I have played the very worst indie aftermarket NES games and the very best homebrewed NES hacks and there is infinitely more artistry present in the latter. The difference, and I say this as an attorney, is in the legality of hacks versus aftermarket indie games. But from a cultural standpoint, there is natural crossover between the hacking and hack gamer community and what is somewhat erroneously referred to as the “homebrew” community (erroneously because that term is being used more narrowly than its definition) that is actually not happening because of a soft mutual contempt. Homebrewers of original games view hacks as easy to make, disrespectful of gaming as an enterprise, and generally of lower quality than any decent entirely new game. Meanwhile, because those working on hacks are working with some of the top IPs in the history of digital art, it is easy for them to look down on original games as being inferior by and large in their gameplay, level design, and so on (particularly given that a good hack takes an already incredible game to an entirely new level).

What I said here was that there are probably thousands of hacks out there, and that my historical archive has identified 30—such a vanishingly small percentage as to almost be a rounding error—that have added so much custom code to existing code, well beyond mere sprite hacks, that they deserve to be seen as original homebrew *equivalents*. For that to be seen as objectionable in a community that had no problem accepting as “homebrews” all manner of illegal ports like Ultimate Frogger Champion and E.T. and the literally scores of additional ones listed at RETRO is a little rich.

I understand that gatekeepers want to pretend that we are not working on a spectrum here but in two entirely different camps. But with respect, I have played more homebrews and hacks and ports and demos and music carts and tech demos and utilities and on and on and on for the NES than anyone here, and there is no question about the fact that what we are discussing is a spectrum and not a binary. And that is a good thing, because by recognizing that we are working with a spectrum we can bring two communities together that have a lot in common. 

So please understand how little interest I have in the gatekeeping that I think some people are interested in here. Not because I think I am better than that gatekeeping, because gatekeeping is something we all do and find enjoyable when it is appropriate to the task before us. But I’m doing the work I am doing as a historian and journalist and gatekeeping of the particular sort being discussed here is not appropriate or useful for the task before me, especially not when it is predicated on all sorts of historical inaccuracies.

I am happy discuss all this at more length in a thread that is not intended for a completely separate purpose. I really hope we can return to people voting because that is going to have much more of a long-term impact on the community. Why? Because it celebrates the work of others rather than our own ability to craft an argument.

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:

Quote

But with respect, I have played more homebrews and hacks and ports and demos and music carts and tech demos and utilities and on and on and on for the NES than anyone here, 

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?

1 hour ago, Gloves said:

You're making him wait until August!? 

Didn't he order it in September 2022?

You define "soonish" in November 2022, two months after he ordered it, as this August!?

 

Bruh.

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. 

6 hours ago, Tulpa said:

To be honest, I'd rather debate the merits of including sprite hacks in a homebrew discussion than listen to Dave rant about how caravan shooter development is akin to writing short stories.

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.

6 hours ago, a3quit4s said:

I’m still waiting for Hot Pot Runs I bought the book and everything

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.

On 4/27/2024 at 7:03 AM, Gloves said:

I'm not Seth so I can't really say, and I didn't honestly look. I just assumed, frankly, cuz I see no reason to include sprite swaps and asset relocation mods as eligible in a "hall of fame for indie games". Cuz they're not that. 

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.

11 minutes ago, Code Monkey said:

I'm reading his book Once Upon Atari, here is a photo of him handing over the cartridge. The third paragraph down explains the quick change he made to the title screen.

 

Thanks! This is the first time I've heard about this but that's awesome

35 minutes ago, Code Monkey said:

I'm choosing rare because I have everything I want to play.

• Nintendo World Championships (grey)
• Nintendo World Championships (gold)
• Nintendo Campus Challenge
• Mah-Jong
• Air Raid

The last 2 would be complete, there are only single digit quantities of each known to exist.

Honourable mention to the 2 Atari cartridges, E.T. and Raiders Of The Lost Ark which Howard Scott Warshaw handed to Steven Spielberg with Spielberg's name on the title screen in place of the copyright. When you mention something unobtainable, this is the very definition.

Does Spielberg still have these? Has it been confirmed that these actually exist, or are they just some sort of urban legend?

On 4/25/2024 at 10:03 PM, T-Pac said:

"Cool for a purpose" is the operative phrase that I 100% agree with, but get confused about how it applies to certain high-end stuff like NWC. Sure, plenty of people genuinely think it's cool, but just as many only see it as the "must have" game because other people have convinced them to think that way (when they wouldn't have otherwise). I mean, if you actually participated in the competition back in 1990, an NWC cart would be the best thing ever. But otherwise it's basically some 90s kid's video-game equivalent of a little-league participation trophy...

I respectfully disagree with your opinion here. I never participated in the NWC (for context I was three years old when I first started playing NES, was four in 1990 and my older brother is on the spectrum so something like the NWC we never even learned about until years later), but when I first heard about the event, probably around 1998, I was amazed. I saw photographs, and the whole thing just clicked with me, it felt like something I would have liked to be a part of. Sadly, such hype and promotion just doesn't occur anymore, well it didn't really occur back in 1998 either. It's sort of like how my grandmother attended the world's fair, and the things she saw and remembered from then. I would have loved to do that too, but sadly we just don't do things like that anymore, at least not on such a memorable scale with all the hype and pomp and circumstance.

So that's why I chose the NWC. I'd likely prefer the gray version tbh. I'll most likely never be able to afford one, and even if I could, unless I were super rich, I doubt I'd ever feel the desire to drop that sort of cash on a single shelf piece, as I'd rather go on holiday or something. That being said, it is a cartridge that I've wanted for decades, and I think it is safe to say that this cartridge means more to me than just something that is cool or trendy, as I was into this stuff way before that even became a driving force.