You don't even need to buy the cartridge version if you own an SD card adapter.
I am curious how some of the effects look on a CRT.
What I notice is that the highly detailed sprite work doesn't produce the elegant artifacting of the era, where pixel bleeding and whatnot would merge nearby colours together to produce desired artistic effects. More often what I see is a smudged mess with noise.
Pixel bleeding? Are you referring to color distortion caused by the use of composite video? Why would you expect to see that in a screenshot viewed on your LCD screen? You'd have to actually see the game output via composite from a Mega Drive to a CRT to see it (which you would, since the art uses dithering well).
This is one of the best-looking Mega Drive games released in a very long time, developed by the company responsible for games like Streets of Rage and Beyond Oasis.
This is an excellent deep dive on the issues I spoke of: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bC-8y2R6IxI
Generally pixel art created for LCDs also looks good on CRTs, with tiny text being an obvious exception.
While it may sound odd to want new pixel art to be "authentic" in the same way as new music should respect the structure and form of styles like ragtime, blues or jazz, I think it applies equally. The skilled artists who hand-crafted pixels to look their best on CRTs did specific things to leverage CRT bloom and blending, scanlines, composite color artifacting and interlace dithering.
What are "CRT bloom and blending"? Are you referring to artifacts caused by composite video output? That is not due to the CRT but rather the signal distortion. RGB output on a CRT will look pixel perfect and colors will not merge. I'd say most gamers using original hardware on CRTs these days are using RGB, so if anything, it reflects the current user trends if the Earthion designer did not use dithering (which he did, making this comment irrelevant).
If it's particularly noticeable, it probably means you need to service your CRT. But I guess, don't put important content close to the edges of the screen on very bright screens. But you've already got to be careful of putting things near the edge, so it's just be even more careful. It's not really all or nothing, you also get vertical expansion on lines that are bright; here's a video example [1]. I think you can get a bit of vertical bleeding on bright pixels too, depending on adjustment, which you might
I will say, even though bloom is a screen defect, it can be kind of a neat effect... Super Combo Finishes might not be as cool if the geometry held steady.
It's ok to pine for the old techniques, but this is a game made for a Genesis in modern times. It has to stride both.
By the way, some of my favorite games on Megadrive are homebrews, most notably Astebros and other Neofid games.
And before someone mentions composite artifacts: the Neofid guys are French, if and France gave two good things to the world, those were the metric system and SCART. You guys should really try them both.
This might be different given it’s a company logo and thus trademark. But I wouldn’t be so sure they’d get a cease and desist like if someone imitated Nintendos logo.
If the logo can be confused as owned by another entity, then that could be argued as trademark infringement.
But these cases would need to be decided in court. And different jurisdictions might be more restrictive than others.
Can you link to the ones you mean? As another commenter has pointed out, there don't seem to be "many", but without links it's impossible for anyone to know what you mean.
It's not cool to slur the community like this. HN users are of a highly diverse age range and awareness level of older technologies. It would be much better if you can point to the ones you mean and respond to them constructively.
(It's also against the guidelines to comment like this: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)
Give the Stage 1 music from ActRaiser a listen to see (or hear) what I mean:
Seriously, this game is a miracle, and the amount of love Ancient put into it is unlike anything we've ever seen for a modern commercial release on hardware that came out in 1988!
It certainly beats out a good portion of the games originally released on the Mega Drive.
The most obvious candidate for what the parent commenter is referring to is this one, which has been flagged/killed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48275838
Yikes. Seems like i'm not getting a physical copy then. I'm not giving any money to LRG. Which is a shame because it looks like a cool game.
just your general allround asshole business. You can find more detail information on youtube
Contrast that with Raiden. Some of the Raiden arcade games are notorious for combining the worst two traits: fast-moving projectiles that are also very hard to see.
DOJ is probably my favorite game of all time. It’s as close to perfection as any videogame has ever been for me.
Progear and Deathsmiles both my favorite horizontals from them. Deathsmiles probably edges it out just a bit.
As for Raiden I’m a huge fan of Raiden Fighters Jet also! Viper Phase 1 is also excellent.
I’ve actually got my arcade stick temporarily modded with a Sanwa gate set to four-way, so it doesn’t register the diagonals like an eight-way stick. It works really well if you enjoy playing the TGM Tetris games.
There was a summer where I could almost layout a top score on level 1. Thinking about scoring gimmicks really unlocks a different layer of depth in shmups once you get over the bullet hell.
All to say, you were never the demo for this game - then or now. I'm in my mid-40s and this kind of game feels so refreshing when compared to modern games. Not to be a jerk or anything, but a few years completely changes context of your comment as games/tech were so rapidly evolving over this period.
I quit gaming in early 2000s, tried to get back into it a few times in last 10 years and it's just not very appealing to me unless this retro style games pique my interest. The only exception has been playing the big Nintendo titles with my son (he's 7 and got a Switch at the same age I got the NES).
Working to the limitations of 16-bit consoles to produce a modern-feel of game play is something that cannot be vibe coded.
R-Type wasn’t the inventor of the genre and it’s far from the last entry in it too.
However, "a Mega Drive game!" is a great sales point to the majority of people invested in the nostalgia market, with only a surface-level interest of what these games are. It's why it made it to the font page of hn, and not it's perfect 'traditional' sprite art, or its Yuzo Koshiro soundtrack.
I like shmups because they are pretty much "pure game design"; games are such a complete package of story, interactive experience, etc that it's hard to separate what comes from where. This is what makes design experimentation so interesting and rich.
It might have more to do with the game studios ecosystem more than technicalities given some games were ported on all 3 consoles with only minor differencies though.
I would describe both the audio and graphical signature of the megadrive as "Metalic" (a bit amiga 500 like but with FM sounds instead of samples) while the SNES one was more childish/cartoony (same as subsequent consoles from the brand really) and the pc engine one had more flat[1] graphics but more saturated/rock'n'roll sound signature.
[1] probably because it was halfway inbetween the sega master system and megadrive/snes in term of gfx capabilities.
There are plenty of gorgeous games on the Mega Drive in terms of color. 61 colors on screen at once is more than enough.
It’s extremely well crafted. I’d argue it has the level of polish you’d expect from a very well made modern release. That is not the case with a lot of Genesis era shmups.