"City Trouble" ROM now available for free

Two years after I finished "City Trouble" (and one and a half year after it was properly published on cartridges), I now published the ROM for free:


Website: www.denny-r-walter.de/city.html
Copyright disclaimer for downloads: www.denny-r-walter.de/city.html#downloads

ROM: www.denny-r-walter.de/city.zip
PDF manual: www.denny-r-walter.de/city.pdf
Artwork: www.denny-r-walter.de/city.png


Of course, you can still buy the game as a cartridge:
https://megacatstudios.com/products/cit ... ent-system


If anybody plays it, let me know your opinion if you want. Positive and negative feedback are both welcome.

Thanks and happy new year!
I tried it on my cell phone and it looks cool.
I need to try with a real joystick to have a better feeling about it.
Good work!

It's already been 2 years.. Times goes fast.

I will give my opinion once I have a chance to try it then.

Thanks. The graphics style was created specifically to look like a 1985 era game.

Some people on YouTube complained about this style, comparing it to Atari 2600 graphics, but our inspiration is closer to "Kung Fu" and "Tennis"/"Baseball"/"Soccer" etc.
My graphics artist is able to draw more modern sprites, but for this game, I specifically wanted the outline-less, old-fashioned art, so that the graphics match the simplicity of the game itself.

(Our new game uses more modern graphics as you can see in my avatar on the left. Although that game is going to be a top-down game, so the characters are smaller. But we have some larger bosses.)


Yeah, not exactly two years since I finished the game a few months before the actual release. Designing the manual and box took longer than I thought and then we hard some start issues.

I love the art style in this game. I honestly think the "1985" style of drawing sprites is underused and that there's still untapped potential in it. Not every game has to be batman/shatterhand, or the smb2/3 outline style. I also think it's in touch to what i believe would be the 1985 mindset of a nes game designer, mechanics-wise, which is nice.

This seems to be a nice game to be passing over the controller with a friend between game overs to see which can get the higher score.
It was pretty fun trying it solo as well, but i feel like another player to interact with is the best context for this game. It'd work well in an arcade. Maybe it's a good game for a streamed competition?

If i'd change just one thing to my personal preference, i'd let enemies de-spawn on the right edge of screen whileif turned right so they don't turn around weirdly and unfairly (imo) when they're trapped between said edge and the edge of a platform. Or if that in itself looks to quirky (though i think it'd be in line with that -85 game design style), maybe just safeguard against spawning enemies when the roof edge is too close the right screen edge.

I'd maybe also shorten the freeze time when getting hit to about half the length, not sure really. I see it primarily as a way to text the player that they are getting hurt, and think the punishment is a bit too severe when getting hit close to the left edge.

A more general observation: intentionally mismatching the movement speed between enemies (the dudes in this case) and the protagonist could help against the rare but death-assuring problem of being hurt and then not being able to shake the dude off since you're walking at the same pace and you can't switch direction because of the left edge kill. But that's of couse a bit of a change in difficulty and dynamics. The least invasive option would proably be to lower the speed of the dudes a smudge.

Graphics design wise, one thing stood out as a little bit confusing - it was unclear to me that the "J" object wasn't an obtainable but an enemy. Of course, the manual says so and i found out pretty quickly. But perhaps it could have looked a bit more dangerous, or drop the "J" (which to me implied that it was a type of obtainable, like how obtainables are marked with letters in contra/probotector and certain space shooters). I get that it's contextualized as a property of the jackal gang/Jones, but that is sort of already implied by the story.

It's definitely nintendo hard to me, which can be fun in itself. When the protagonists' buddy shows up offering a a glass of sparkling water, the encouragement is felt partly because of the difficulty. There's a sense of strong but temporary relief, and that's great.

thanks for sharing.
I think Spartan X (Kungfu) and some early games dont use dithering effect much.

Thanks for the review, FrankenGraphics.


Maybe I should have implemented a two player game then after all. But I originally decided against it because I always think that those two player modes where you simply wait for the other player to lose a life are a bit boring.
And implementing an actual two player simultaneous mode would probably have lagged. (The adventure game uses heavy optimization with inline Assembly, so I'm able to have about 10 characters on screen without lags, but I wasn't that experinced during the development of "City Trouble" yet to spend a huge amount on low level optimization.)


This might have looked a bit strange. Since the screen is always scrolling right, I cannot just cancel a character when he walks out of screen to the right. It would look like he just teleported away.
Alternately, I could have saved his offscreen position and let him walk along the invisible part ahead of the screen, but in this case, you wouldn't have had a new character on screen while the off-screen character walks along the invisible part. Because the game is limited to two enemies at once plus the Choppy.


I checked again and I actually did something like that:

Maybe I could have changed the number 2 in OnScreenLevelData[OnScreenLevelDataLastIndex - 2] to some bigger value.


Yeah, o.k., if you're too far on the left, getting hit can be fatal.

Even though I'm not going to change the game anymore since it's final and finished, it's still always good to hear what people like and dislike about the game. Maybe some of this knowledge might help me for a future game.


Interesting observation. I never encountered this, but yeah, I know what you mean.

Well, as a "workaround": Amy will not die until more than half of her body is out of screen. And the Goons will never let any part of their body go out of screen unless they want to disappear completely.
So, you might be able to use the taser while you keep pressing right, so the Goon runs into the taser. Then he's not a danger anymore and you can walk forward to widen the gap between Amy and the screen border again.
Of course, if you're already half outside the screen, you're pretty much screwed.


Yeah, letters usually stand for items, that's right. I might have used the outline of a jackal head instead, now that I think about it.


Thanks.
I had no problems with making a hard game because it's a highscore game.

Although there is a definite story end if you defeat Jones in level 4, but the game loops infinitely. Loop 2 is faster opponents and only three energy points. And from loop 3 on, it's the same as loop 2, only with merely one energy point.
Later, I thought that maybe loop 2 should have been just the faster enemies and then loop 3 and 4 should have been three energy points and one energy point respectively.

In any case, if you think the game is hard, wait until you get to loop 2. It's brutal. Once you played through the story (i.e. loop 1) and are just out for the highscore anymore, the game tries to destroy you. I never ever beat the first level of the second loop legitimately.

If I had created a normal-sized platformer, like "Mega Man" or "Castlevania" where the primary aim isn't the highscore, but to finish it, I would have toned down the difficulty.

By the way, depending on your energy, you get other items instead of a glass of water.

Also, jumping is key in the game. Remember that your horizontal movement is in no way hindered during a jump. When you press left or right, you will always move the same horizontal distance, no matter if you're walking or jumping. With a bit experience it's possible to dance around and jump in and out of narrow gaps between opponents this way.

We had some guests over for the holidays and they played super mario bros for a while in our living room. I noted that they simply chose "1 player game" and handed over the control more freely at will, rather than let the game decide whose turn it is. I think the "smb" method might be nice for establishing rules for quarreling siblings or the like, but else just handing over the one controller seems to work more fluently. You can still try a couple of game overs each in turn to see who gets the better score/gets the farthest, or you could cooperate on the same character by taking turns between lives or by pausing and handing over. Cooperation probably feels more invested if you're both taking turns playing the same "player one character". At least in the mario/luigi scenario.



Yeah, you sometimes see this in NES games and the like - enemies leaving and despawning, and if you go where they went they have dissapeared (or worse, reappear for one frame only to be inactivated temporarily again). It's really quirky, though i find it endearing. But... outside childhood nostalgia, it's probably not a good design.


Oh yeah, it'd make little sense to make minor balance adjustments to a game 2 years after reaching finished status and a proper cart release. I'm mostly looking at the game (or any nes game) this way to learn something about game design myself by noting things i like/don't like and wonder what it would be like if it was like this or that.


It sometimes happens in a variety of games, though i cannot remember specifically which ones, hence labeling the remark as general. The result differs from context to context. Sometimes there's a trick to shake them off, sometimes not. Sometimes you simply lose another health point, sometimes it's the end of it.
Oh, one specific related case i can remember is the knockback in dracula x/vampire's kiss. If you get knocked back by a medusa, the knockback travels at similar enough speed for belmont to be knocked again by the same medusa without any means to act from the players' side. It just happens to depend on where in the curve the medusa is and the relative altitude of belmont when he gets knocked.



Haha, goes to show just how bad i'm handling the difficulty. Looking forward to beat the whole 4 levels at least once though. 2nd pass will probably be the equivalent of a sudden game over for me.

Thank you very much for the free ROM release ! I'll check this out as soon as possible.

Also, I agree I like how you limited yourself to 1985 style graphics on purpose. This is really amazing, you managed to have authentic looking graphics and not putting the NES to it's limit on purpose. I really love this concept ! And you did it really well. I can't juge the game before playnig it though, only the graphics.

EDIT : Are you supposed to kill the foes or to avoid them ? Both seems extremely difficult for me. I can't even beat the first level. Shame because I love the art style.

@FrankenGraphics:

Yeah, the two players in one player mode style is of course always possible.

Also, regarding the Medusa heads: That's why I always include mercy invincibility after a hit.


Thanks for the compliments. All the graphics were done by my graphics artist Katrin (with me watching and giving suggestions).

Next game will be in the style of JRPG games like "Final Fantasy" (see the avatar on the left). Her first draft was four characters without outlines as well, but I asked her to change it this time because I didn't want the old-fashioned "Zelda I"/"Dragon Warrior" style for that.

I did use one technique in "City Trouble" though that wasn't really common back then: I have a status bar and parallax scrolling, but I don't use timed code.
("Kung Fu" has to do a similar thing because their main character is part of the background and not a sprite. They use timed code. And I assume "Excitebike", which has parallax scrolling as well, does it in a timed way too.)

Instead, I use the nine sprites overflow bit for the status bar scrolling split (there are nine blank sprites hidden inside the status bar) and I use sprite 0 for the parallax scrolling.

That's also the reason why the game won't work on an AVS if you enable extended sprites per scanline: Because this AVS feature doesn't only reduce flicker, it actually alters the console's behavior: The overflow bit will then only trigger if there are actually 17 sprites on the same scanline instead of nine.


Well, keep on trying.
That's the modus-operandi of arcade-like games, isn't it? Destroying the untrained player as fast as possible.
Also, I partly designed the game this way because I wanted to have a fast game where you're always on the run, where you cannot just stop for a while without penalty (except if you actually pause the game of course).

I played thorugh the first loop on a real NES a few times now, so it's definitely possible.

You can defeat the enemies or you can evade them. Since your taser is limited and needs to reload, evading them is sometimes the only possible way, but attacking them is of course the thing that gives you points.

There is a video of me playing the second level of the game. (I chose the second one because that's the first time when Scarlett appears.)
It's not a perfect playthrough, I get hit a few times as well, but you can see a few situations where I narrowly evade dangerous situations:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eee0yurkIW4

I was able to play a little bit here and there and can now give some basic opinion about it.

Regarding the goal which was to reproduce a game from 1985 I would say that the art style, music and game match it very well: it feels like one of those arcade type game were the main goal is to make points. You did achieve your goal well on that part.

On a personal view, I'm not able to finish the first level yet but it may be because unfortunately you matched all the thing that I enjoy the least about nes games: random level, arcade style that make points. This is the period of the nes that I enjoyed the least so I'm not fond of the game play. The time that I started to really get into nes gaming and enjoy it is when games like ninja gaiden, mega man etc where introduced and I got hooked to it.

Doesn't mean the game is bad per se, it just means it not the type of game I enjoy the most. Still, I can appreciate how it was able to achieve it goal and to reproduce that era to some degree. In that angle I say you did a good job at it.

I still want to finish it since I was able to play games like kung fu but sometime the level feels long and when you restart from the beginning, it just remove the motivation to try it again. Once I have an idea "how long" is a level it may feel more enjoyable.

Yeah, I understand this.
I did this kind of game because I had to start somewhere. I had to test out the ground with a game that was actually doable. I didn't want to spend three years on a full-blown sidescroller like "Castlevania", so I opted for a simple game.

The next game is a "Zelda"-like action adventure with circa 500 screens on an MMC3 board. Maybe this one will be more your taste.


As far as I remember, the first level should be circa 1:30 minutes long, with every new level adding a length of 10 more seconds, so the fourth and final level is two minutes.
(In the second loop, the levels start at 1:30 again.)

Rachel, Amy's best friend, always appears circa in the middle of the level, so when you see her, you know that you're halfway through.

At the end of the level is a boss that you have to defeat to advance to the next level. But if you lose at the boss, you can continue fighting him, you don't get sent to the beginning of the level again.
Also, your energy is refilled at the boss, so you always fight him at full health, no matter how you fared in the level. However, if you still have the explosion or timed taser item, it gets reset as well.

I see.

So at the least I was able to play up to half the stage but was not able to finish it yet. With a little bit more practice and not trying to play it a at 2h in the morning like I'm doing at the moment (^^;;), I should be able to finish it soon.

Like you mentioned, if your next game has a zelda vibe and more action based, I will be looking forward to it then. I did enjoy at the time games like Crystalis and even Faria (quirky but still ok). I think what gets the most attention for me is games with a story to some degree (ninja gaiden, faxanadu, mega man) or are action based with a level design that requires to remember the pattern to some degree (shadow of the ninja). For some reason, random stages, which should give you more since the level will always be different, irks me since I like to play back a specific level if it was fun to play. Doesn't mean that I hate all random level based game since I think dead cells, even though random, as some level that comes back on each game played and the game play is enjoyable. Since I knew it was a rogue style game, I knew what to expect and did enjoy it, to some degree. But it didn't keep my attention for long.

In this case, the adventure should be the right thing for you. "Faxanadu" and "Mega Man" as well as "The Legend of Zelda" and "Final Fantasy" are nothing against our game, story-wise.
Also, the story isn't just told in cutscenes like in "Ninja Gaiden", but with the actual in-game characters and locations.
So, if you're supposed to walk to a certain tower, you will actually see that tower on the overworld. You won't just finish a level and then the cutscene will show the hero arriving at the tower.

Also the story is actually on-going as you go along. You don't get the task "Find the eight plot devices" and that's what you do for the rest of the game. Instead, the plot develops piece by piece and you don't know what comes next. (The plot is still fixed, though, so when you play it a second time, you of course do know what happens next.)

Gameplay-wise, the adventure game is a mix of the various 2D "Zelda"s: We have screen-by-screen scrolling, but diagonal movement is possible.

So I managed to beat Level 1, whew...

What to say ? Aside that the game is way too hard, it's pretty good. The taser takes way too long to recharge, even by avoiding most enemies I still have to use it often. Also there's several anachronies, such as that the title screen art is way too good looking to have been made in 1985, and there's dialogue with the boss, which is not a very 1985 thing either. DPCM voices were uncommon too, but there's one in Ghostbusters 1988 (but that game is so awful it looks like it dates earlier).

I am really amazed at the title screen art, she's really natural, sexy and realistic, and that is done with BG only without any overhead sprites, it's incredible. In comparison a similar art I made for my own game of comparable size is much worse (I compared them side-by-side), and it's made with sprites including two layers of sprites in some parts so I have no excuse.

The music is without a doubt the weak point of the game. It's really average.

I am looking forward for your next game(s). Is the Dragon Quest like game and the Zelda like game you mentioned a single game or two separate games ? I hope they're/it's not Dragon Quest-like grindfest though - as much as I love story-based games I don't like grinding for levels or anything like that.(*)

(*) A little of it is OK, but Dragon Quest is way too much - (including the modern games in the series). This is not difficulty, it's just a waste of time IMO.

Yup, sounds about right.
Maybe that's the typical phenomenon: I played portions of the game so often that I didn't notice how hard it is to outside players.


For those, I have some handwaves:


While the sprite style was influenced by other games of that time, i.e. it didn't occur to us to waste one of the three colors per sprite on black outline since this hasn't been done by then, the title artwork is actually based on the idea: "We still have a lot of graphic tiles unused. Can you draw a pixelated version of an actual drawing of Amy?"

So, unlike the sprites or in-game graphics, it doesn't need to be based on actual existing title screens, only on the general idea of including an artwork.

But if you need a game-based inspiration:

"Hogan's Alley" has some nice artworks, so this could have been the place where we got the idea for a detailed artwork of a person.
The ending of "Vs. Mach Rider" might be another inspiration.

Furthermore, our official backstory is that we found the NES in December 1985, created our game inspired by the launch titles, but actually finished and published it in December 1986.
So, the game is not supposed to be a first party black boxart title, but still a game by a third party company (Den Kat Games).

This means, some of the anachronisms can be explained by us seeing more modern games in the meantime.

So, the sprite style is of course still old-fashioned because it was one of the earliest graphics that we did, the stuff that defined our game. And we wouldn't redraw all the game's graphics just because we saw a new art style in, for example, "Castlevania" in the meantime.
But the title screen artwork was pretty much the last graphical thing we did, after the programming was almost done. So the fact that "Urusei Yatsura: Lum no Wedding Bell" came out in October 1986 may be another explanation of where we saw an anime artwork of the female main character in the title screen.


Yeah, I'm unsure whether there's something like that. Maybe in old computer RPGs?
But in this case, maybe it was just my personal style to add a bit of story to the game.
Sometimes, you might come up with something new yourself.


"Kung Fu" has opponents laughing, so adding an actual voice sample is just the next logical step. Not unlikely since "Kung Fu" was one of our main inspirations.


Yeah, that's Katrin's masterpiece in the game.
As you can see on the box artwork and in the manual, she can draw at professional levels.


That's the advantage if you have a dedicated graphics artist. If I had drawn all this stuff myself, it would have looked like shit.


Hmm. I like the main song, but what do you expect from an arcade-like 1985-inspired game? Apart from "Super Mario Bros.", is there really a game from 1985 that has a kickass soundtrack? As far as I remember, I even asked the composer to make something that's not too fancy.


There are no two games, only one. I only mentioned those names in regard to the graphics style, like in:
My new game shall have the more modern "Final Fantasy"/"Pokémon" graphics style, not the old-fashioned "Zelda I" or "Dragon Warrior" or "The Magic Candle" style.

And no, that's one of the things that I absolutely detest as well, so there's no grinding in the game.
The game won't have experience points. Attack and energy boosts are item-based, and important items are story-bound, i.e. you get them in fixed locations.
The only thing you might need to grind for occasionally is if you need to collect money to buy disposable healing items or the like.

By the way, it is an action adventure/action RPG. Not a game with turn-based fights.

All in all, the play style is closest to the "Zelda"s while the graphics style is similar to "Final Fantasy".

The way the story is told: There's only one game I know of that does it our way, and that's "Final Fantasy Adventure" for the Game Boy, which, all in all, can also be seen as our number 1 primary inspiration for the entirety of the game, with the first three top-down "The Legend of Zelda"s being on place 2 in regards to inspiration.

Oh, P.S.:
Another thing that the new game will not have is obscure riddles that you need to solve to advance in the game. You know, like burning every bush and bombing every wall.
If you are in a dungeon and you don't know where to go, then you simply didn't walk through all the doors yet or didn't open all the chests. But you will never encounter an actual dead end where the game expects you to push a random block for a way to open.
If we actually include a secret passage that has to be taken to go on, then some character in the story that you are guaranteed to have spoken to will have told this to you. Actual secret rooms only contain optional bonus items.
This is the other thing that I hate in these games: Endlessly walking around. A problem in the NES "Zelda" as well as in "Final Fantasy Adventure".

I stand corrected if the game was from 1986 rather than 1985 then it allows a few more things :p


Hogan's Alley has nice artworks, but they're still simple compared to artwork of City Trouble's title screen - people have just plain surfaces colored clothes and hair, and only the face is detailed. In your colleague's artwork, everything is shaded and detailed, it looks more 1990+ than 1986. That could be the title screen of a cartridge re-release of a formerly FDS game for example... but since that's not your story anyway who cares.

(EDIT: Also watched the ending of VS Mach Rider on Youtube, well the art is not very good looking. They tried way to hard to make her sexy but the shading and colours are awful - definitely much worse than the title screen of City Trouble which shows much better taste and incredible shading).


Well in my case I don't have any dedicated graphics artists but at least if I ever release my game it might be more authentic 1986-era like than if there were so maybe that's not a bad thing.

Also I didn't mention it, but the box could really be a NES game box in 1986 with the art style and all, so I really like that.


Now that you mention it, not many, but there's definitely many 1986 games with a killer soundtrack, and many of them were probably already developed in 1985. Gradius, Castlevania, Zelda, Dragon Quest, The Goonies, etc, etc...

As for your next NES games I'll preorder a copy if I can :p It sounds like it has similarities with the game I've been developing since 13 years (also inspired by Zelda and Final Fantasy Adventure and also female protagonist), but in much better and more complex. So we could say the game I'm developing since 13 years is a crossover between your two games, it's supposed to be "simple", very retro and "arcade like" like City Trouble but its gameplay is based on Zelda and Final Fantasy Adventure (and also a 3rd game I won't mention because I might be taking a little too much from that game :p ).

My 2 cents on mid-80s nes music:
The composers and driver programmers had not yet taken advantage of all the tricks the APU can do, but composing and arrangement skills are still somewhat universal. Zelda evokes emotion and adventure. Castlevania paints an expressive picture through suspenseful blues and baroque musical memes.

Even megaman 2 from 88 doesn't do anything obscure from what i can tell, but it's good rock arrangements and people love that stuff. pulse envelopes are a bit more refined, i think.

the underground theme of SMB is super minimalist but it has tons of melodious attitude and people still hum it.

People in general won't hum metroid but the composer made a good work on doing moody, eerie synth music that pretty much carries the game theme.

Focus on the melody. (not all games do this. only the ones we like to remember). Maybe add a countermelody to give it flavour (SMB is imo a good example of early good use of harmonies to convey something emotional - listen to overworld and win fanfare, one channel at a time).

tl;dr
for an -85 sound, you might need primitive envelope juggling (one or max two envelopes per percieved "instrument", sharp cutoffs, no echo), maybe no volume separation between the two square channels.

Maybe use hardware sweeps instead of software pitch shifts.

Since you "can't" work on chiseling the sound, focus all the more on melody (...this is not my strong suite, btw).

Have a look into the last pages of the manual. There, I give our fake 1980s story and the actual real way how this game came into existence.


Well, the difference in quality has nothing really to do with the time frame, but with the talent of the actual artist.

We can pretend that we got the inspiration for a full-size artwork from games like "Mach Rider".
But the fact that our artwork looks much better is simply because Katrin is a better artist than the person who drew the girl in "Mach Rider", not because the image was really drawn in 2016.

After all, that general anime style existed back then. And so, Katrin simply drew her pixel artwork in that typical anime style.


Yeah, but we wouldn't have seen those soundtracks in 1985, only when the game came out in 1986. And by that point, our composer, who only had the launch titles to work with, would have already created most of our songs.

Also, even in this fictitious backstory, we are not a major company like Capcom or Konami. We're just a small developer who cannot even afford to publish our game ourselves, so we need a separate publisher.

Hence, every instance where the game is more primitive than other games from 1986 can be explained away with the fact that we are just a two person company who created our first professional videogame ever. Unlike Capcom and Konami, we didn't have a huge development history in the arcade and home computer scene.
And we don't even have an in-house composer, but had to hire someone external.


This will still take quite a long time. Well, not 13 years, but still a while. I hope that we will be able to finish all the gameplay features and all the graphics by June 2019, so that we can design the screens and clean up the code until the end of the year. If this works out, then it's box and manual design and ROM testing.

But I can offer you right now to review the game's plot and try to look for plot holes or open questions if you want.

Yeah, as I said: Simple graphics and simple music for a simple game. I never intended "City Trouble" to rival the big players like "Mega Man" or "Castlevania". It was always supposed to be a game in the line of "Kung Fu", "Paperboy" and the like.


The next game is different:

With our adventure game, we need our composer (whoever this may be ) to create atmospheric and fitting songs.
This game isn't limited to an old time frame anymore. "Final Fantasy Adventure" didn't come out before the end of 1991, so if we invent a fake backstory for the new game, the release date could be in 1993, i.e. the music can include all the tricks that are possible with the sound driver.

I don't know but it took time for people to actually draw such detailed graphics on the NES/FC. Most games started having good graphcics in 1987 and only had really good graphics ca. 1989. That's 4 and 6 years after the console's release in japan. I wouldn't be surprised if it was because programmers drew the graphics before 1987.

Not that this is a big deal, just a detail. I imagine it's hard to make art bad on purpose just like it's hard for non-artists to make good art.

Also it would have been hard for your company to survive between 1986 until 1993 without any release, only with the sales of City Trouble... It would have sold really really well. Or they did games on other platforms, or the games released between those dates are going to be released later. Actually it's not a bad idea to release games "out of order" like that.

You gotta use your fantasy here.

Our sprite style was equal to early NES games because we took inspiration from those very games. So, yeah, I understand that I cannot have graphics like in "Shatterhand" and still claim that it's a 1986 game. This way, we would have been huge pioneers in NES graphics.

But the artwork looks awesome because it isn't based on anything from a game, but it's an actual pixelated drawing. And the drawing itself, this one is based on 80s anime.

That our artwork looks much better than the one in "Mach Rider": Well, that's because we had a bit more passion for our work.
Our primary goal was to create a game with an attractive female lead and the artwork was done by CEO number 2 (an anime fan) for the title screen instead of just some random artist for whom it's merely a job that only gets seen in the ending anyway. So, of course ours is better.

Also, have a look at the Japan-only game "Layla". The title screen has an actual high quality anime artwork of the protagonist's face:
https://r.mprd.se/Nintendo%20Entertainment%20System/Titles/Layla%20(J).png

And this game came out in December 1986 as well.
So, for our artwork, we don't need a predecessor. If the developers of "Layla" from the obscure company dB-Soft can draw an NES pixel anime artwork in 1986 without having previous examples on the console, so can we.

(In real life, I actually used this specific title screen to show Katrin a way how to create an anime artwork on the NES.
In our fictitious story, again: "Layla" came out in December 1986 and our game came out there as well, so whatever their artists could do in that day and age, our artist could have done too.)


Yeah, a bit suspension of disbelief is required: Who knows what we did in the meantime? Maybe after the sales of "City Trouble" we went back to our regular programmers jobs and came back for the adventure game some time later.

(Also, I have no idea how our company could actually afford to become a licensed NES developer. Because that's an implicit part of our story: Of course our game was a legitimate release and not one of those unlicensed games with their ugly cartridge shells and the potentially console-damaging methods to disable the lockout chip.)

The out of order idea might become a thing if I decide to create more games.
If I ever get an idea for a game based on "A Nightmare on Elm Street"*, then this will most likely be our second game, even if it comes after the adventure game in real life.

* Yes, I know, there is already a game with that name on the NES. But I'm talking about a game that is actually based specifically on the first movie, and the first movie alone. The game by Rare/LJN is based on some separate story that would maybe fit somewhere around part 4.

played a little bit again and now I can reach the end of the stage more easily but cannot beat the boss yet: for some reason, I cannot find what you are supposed to do. The taser seems to not harm it, you cannot bounce the bullet with the taser either. I think once it reacted but I'm not sure why (maybe I hit it in the back, cannot remember).

Once I figure that one out, it should be more smooth.

Nice catch ! I didn't remember that Layla came out that early, it really looks good for a 1986 game !

Since he's carrying that huge flamethrower, you cannot attack him from the front. So, yes, you have to attack him from the back when he runs to the other side.
(When in doubt, also have a look into the manual. Each character is described there.)


Yeah, the artwork looks good. The game itself look only average.

Oh, I didn't realize the instruction manual was available ^^;; I just read it and yes, it mention how you are supposed to approach them in it so my guess that the weak point is while attacking from behind is now confirmed.

I should be able to do another run, once I find time. Thanks!

I thought the difficulty level was just about perfect. Hard enough that I felt challenged, but easy enough that I didn't get frustrated.

I love the aesthetic. it reminds me of Kung Fu. I don't think that early NES look gets enough love.