Nobody in their right mind wants to destroy a
Legend of Zelda to make a random SNROM game. Yet Dwedit
recommended destroying
Winter Games to make UNROM games. Even with Infinite NES Lives starting to sell preassembled PCBs that you program through a Kazzo, there's still a need for cases until someone ponies up beaucoup bucks for injection molding. So I'd like to see examples of reasonably common but unloved NES games for people to buy and sacrifice as donors for reproductions. By "unloved" I don't mean cult classics that
need more love or even "so bad it's good"; I mean crap games (Japanese: 糞ゲー,
kusogê) whose gameplay isn't even worth the board, CIC, and case they're soldered on.
I've heard in the past:
- Ultima: Exodus (SNROM)
- Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (SFROM)
- Most of LJN's output, such as Friday the 13th or Back to the Future
- Yoshi (SFROM) (far more mindless and chance-based than games such as Dr. Mario or Yoshi's Cookie)
Or are some of the NES games listed on
Your Weekly Kusoge actually worthwhile enough not to destroy?
Bases Loaded. Please kill it!
BL2 as well.
Just a few I can think of off the top of my head:
Rollerblade Racer (I actually want this game to cease to exist and be replaced by better games, I hate it that much.)
Every game developed by Bethesda
Every game developed by Radical Entertainment
Every game developed by Micronics
But if we start destroying these games, they'll become rarities themselves and the only copies will belong to James Rolfe! (I wouldn't destroy my copy of X-Men anyway; since as a kid I was good about avoiding seriously bad games, that's one of the few I have).
People who see value in crappy games just because few copies exist are stupid. I say let them hoard that crap.
The main reason I'm against destroying games is that even the bad games are going to end some day. So the sooner we find an alternative affordable source of boards/mappers/cases, the better.
That's why I marvel at those who pay hundreds-thousands for MIB games. They're buying a collector's item that can't be preserved and will cease to function eventually (Well, I'm assuming the pcb/rom chips/battery/pins/whatever won't last forever).
Those components will most likely outlive the people owning them (unless actively damaged), except maybe the battery in games with save RAM but that can be fixed (unless the battery leaked, which ruins anything around it). Then again if you're doing it for collecting chances are that you won't even turn on the game in the first place.
As for cartridge cases, huh, how long before 3D printing becomes cheap enough that you can get custom molds without much cost? (unless the prices are artificially kept high) Although even then the cartridges still have to be assembled manually so that will increase the cost of the cartridge no matter what.
3D printing is really not the magical thing people want it to be. And it's definitely the wrong way to make a mold: the amount of effort and time to make a positive in some plastic using a 3d printer is basically the same as the effort to mill a negative for injection molding. Lost master casting would have no benefit beyond transforming the (relatively) soft or fragile material 3d printers use with something more robust, but that's a lot of sacrificial material for each instance.
The hard thing about making an injection mold is the number of moving parts and the precision of each of those moving parts, and that you need accuracy far above what any of the extruder printers can manage. (Probably accuracy above the plaster-based ones, but I'm less certain of that. Should be in range of the expensive laser sintering/annealing printers)
If there's going to be a "right" cheap way to make something comparable to the normal plastic shell, there's not many options... woodworking or papercraft, both with their tricky bits; or something like a a solid tray below the PCB with a single flat non-printed layer attached on top (or vice versa).
lidnariq wrote:
woodworking
I've always wanted to make a wooden cart.
tepples wrote:
And yet I know people who like this one.
As for from Weekly Kusoge, Color a Dinosaur is kind of a joke among TASers, Super Monkey Daibouken got featured on GCCX...
Quote:
Every game developed by Bethesda
Every game developed by Radical Entertainment
Every game developed by Micronics
Hmm...wait, Super Pitfall was Micronics.
rainwarrior wrote:
but it makes some of us sad when it happens.
Dimeback wrote:
Every game developed by Bethesda
TIL Bethesda was around in NES times. But if you throw out every Bethesda game, you'd have to throw out
Wolfenstein 3D and
Doom on the Super NES now that Bethesda's parent company owns Id Software. And given those games' iconic status, even despite NOA's censorship, they're unlikely to be cheap enough to use as donors.
Dimeback wrote:
Every game developed by Radical Entertainment
Hey, I liked
Mario Is Missing. But
Mario's Time Machine could have used more Morlocks. And I agree with you on the rest.
Quote:
Every game developed by Micronics
If Bethesda and Micronics had a baby, would it be Super Pitfallout?
Myask wrote:
Quote:
Ultima: Exodus
And yet I know people who like this one.
I wonder if it'd be good to just let the market decide. If it's real cheap and there are multiples of it at your local retro game store, buy them for the cases. (The multiples are to keep strat's fear from coming to pass.)
Myask wrote:
Color a Dinosaur is kind of a joke among TASers
Case in point:
Color a Dinosaur is a joke, but it's an expensive joke. Do people collect it for the same reason people collect
Action 52?
tepples wrote:
Dimeback wrote:
Every game developed by Radical Entertainment
Hey, I liked
Mario Is Missing. But
Mario's Time Machine could have used more Morlocks. And I agree with you on the rest.
There are multiple platforms' versions of both, and my understanding is that they are very, very different. Mario is Missing (SNES) is fun, certainly.
Quote:
Myask wrote:
Color a Dinosaur is kind of a joke among TASers
Case in point:
Color a Dinosaur is a joke, but it's an expensive joke. Do people collect it for the same reason people collect
Action 52?
Well, I'd consider getting
Color a Dinosaur if I happened upon it. I think people collect Action 52 for a few reasons. It has unique hardware, it is (in)famous, and Cheetahmen has pretty good music.
Mario is Missing on NES is an interesting case of multi-layered sprites being used to render Mario or Luigi with a fully colored outfit. The closest official Nintendo case of this is either the Yoshi's Cookie title screen (mario's overalls are drawn with color 0 allowing the sky to be the blue component, pretty cheap) or the sprite being the whites of Mario's eyes in SMB2.
Sik wrote:
Those components will most likely outlive the people owning them (unless actively damaged), except maybe the battery in games with save RAM but that can be fixed (unless the battery leaked, which ruins anything around it). Then again if you're doing it for collecting chances are that you won't even turn on the game in the first place.
Game collectionism, the Nintendo Age kind of VGA grading, is in many ways dumb in my opinion. Not only you won't actively use the item you bought (since it is sealed), preventing another person actually interested in having the game to play, but also placing carts in plastic coffins DOES NOT guarantee that the items will be preserved. In fact I think that battery gamepaks in VGA cases are all going to crap out and damage the PCB internally. Also you will die someday and all your hoard will be most likely scattered around the world much like your mortal remains in ash form. What's the point to hoard all those items if you're not even preserving them properly (i.e. proper museum work)?
As I always say, people should stop playing pretend museum and enjoy what you have while you can. And if you're really interested in preservation of game items, either donate your rarer ones to a proper museum, or start your own (with the proper training and courses, and whatever else! VGA boxes are not magic).
Punch wrote:
And if you're really interested in preservation of game items, either donate your rarer ones to a proper museum, or start your own (with the proper training and courses, and whatever else! VGA boxes are not magic).
Or dump the ROMs so we can preserve them with emulation, although the big problem there is that copyright law gets in the way =/ (also undocumented peripherals need to be reverse engineered, I did that with some unusual Mega Drive peripherals that are never emulated but there's still a lot missing)
tepples wrote:
Most of LJN's output, such as Friday the 13th or Back to the Future
I thought Friday the 13th was LJN's best NES game.
never-obsolete wrote:
I thought Friday the 13th was LJN's best NES game.
Being the best out of a bunch of crap doesn't necessarily make something good...
tokumaru wrote:
never-obsolete wrote:
I thought Friday the 13th was LJN's best NES game.
Being the best out of a bunch of crap doesn't necessarily make something good...
I'm a NES music enthusiast, so the only Ljn games I really care about are the ones developed by Software Creations, because they have the music of the Follin Brothers!
I doubt anyone will miss that one.
You should never destroy anything like a videogame console or cartridge because once its gone, its gone forever. They never will make any more of those.
It annoys me to see the Angry Videogame Nerd destroying NES cartridges. He even had a Super Mario Bros. 3 cartridge with fake vomit spewing out of it. Least he didn't destroy the golden Zelda cartridge or that other rare silver one.
never-obsolete wrote:
tepples wrote:
Most of LJN's output, such as Friday the 13th or Back to the Future
I thought Friday the 13th was LJN's best NES game.
Not sure if you are aware but LJN never actually made any games other companies did and LJN put their logo on the cover.
WedNESday wrote:
You should never destroy anything like a videogame console or cartridge because once its gone, its gone forever. They never will make any more of those.
If there are several copies at used game stores, and the game is common and cheap on online trading sites, does anyone
need to make more of those?
Quote:
LJN never actually made any games other companies did and LJN put their logo on the cover.
Even if a publisher doesn't own its developers, it's still a publisher's job to make sure that what its developers make doesn't fall into the bottom 10th percentile.
tepples wrote:
WedNESday wrote:
You should never destroy anything like a videogame console or cartridge because once its gone, its gone forever. They never will make any more of those.
If there are several copies at used game stores, and the game is common and cheap on online trading sites, does anyone
need to make more of those?
Considering how now the prices of those old games are starting to spike up because they're starting to get considered collector items, yes, it's an issue and I doubt it's going to go away any time soon.
So if you're right that use of original carts as donors is already causing prices to shoot up, what's the other way? We have PCBs and CICs from INL and possibly bunnyboy if he wants to get back into that business, but no reliable source for cases or sleeves.
Quote:
We have [...] no reliable source for [...] sleeves.
By sleeves, do you mean dust covers? videogameboxprotectors are selling dust cover repros, so you can buy as many as you like (you may have to contact them first if you need more than a few hundred).
Well, to be fair I was referring to the market in general starting to make the cartridges scarce. I doubt there are many donor carts out there (and that's assuming all of those come from working cartridges in the first place). It also doesn't help that NES and Famicom need different cartridges (you can't make an universal cartridge that will work on both), especially since homebrew is usually made for the former but bootlegs are made for the latter (otherwise there'd be a very high amount of usable cartridges from bootlegs, maybe even standalone shells).
The only feasible solution in the long term would be to organize for somebody to have molds ready for everybody else - if I recall correctly this is what Watermelon is trying with the Mega Drive. I guess the biggest problem is that for this to make sense we'd need to have cartridge releases more often (or possibly large enough runs), otherwise there will be a hard time making up for the initial expense.
tepples wrote:
WedNESday wrote:
You should never destroy anything like a videogame console or cartridge because once its gone, its gone forever. They never will make any more of those.
If there are several copies at used game stores, and the game is common and cheap on online trading sites, does anyone
need to make more of those?
I'm not talking about
making anymore, its about
losing anymore. Easy to say that today, but what about in 100 years time when the cartridges are even less in number.
In 100 years time, in fact in 75 for the games that most people care about, few will need the cartridges because the ROMs will have become free to distribute. The licensed NES game whose copyright expires last is Wario's Woods, and under current law, its copyright expires in 2090.
tepples wrote:
In 100 years time, in fact in 75 for the games that most people care about, few will need the cartridges because the ROMs will have become free to distribute.
Yes, and we all know that everyone has been respecting the copyright so far and is patiently waiting for these 75 years to go by so they can download their legal ROM packs. Right?
In all seriousness, a lot of consoles will have stopped working in 75~100 years, rendering the carts useless. The only thing that will change that is if current and future FPGA NES projects achieve enough success to stay in the market for several years, keeping up with the new technology while still using the old cartridges.
Sik wrote:
It also doesn't help that NES and Famicom need different cartridges (you can't make an universal cartridge that will work on both)
I remember hearing about some old double-ended bootleg NES cartridges which could fit in both types of slots, you just had to flip the cartridge appropriately. That would be a great solution for homebrew releases.
Some Atari 2600 carts were also double-ended, but not because they needed to fit different types of slots, they just contained 2 different games.
EDIT: Here you go:
http://www.neswarpzone.com/brazilnesmarket.html (check the "Hydron Cartridge" on the right)
tepples wrote:
In 100 years time, in fact in 75 for the games that most people care about, few will need the cartridges because the ROMs will have become free to distribute. The licensed NES game whose copyright expires last is Wario's Woods, and under current law, its copyright expires in 2090.
Sigh... I'm not talking about the games themselves, but the hardware i.e. the cartridges and consoles that people destroy. Once they're gone, they're gone.
Perhaps there's a difference of mindset that I'm not understanding with respect to the difference between preserving cartridges and preserving the games on them. Why do each?
WedNESday wrote:
tepples wrote:
In 100 years time, in fact in 75 for the games that most people care about, few will need the cartridges because the ROMs will have become free to distribute. The licensed NES game whose copyright expires last is Wario's Woods, and under current law, its copyright expires in 2090.
Sigh... I'm not talking about the games themselves, but the hardware i.e. the cartridges and consoles that people destroy. Once they're gone, they're gone.
In 100 years it's likely that we won't even have the means to make an usable upscaler for them or even power them up, not to mention all the discrete components having already failed and it's likely there will be some corrosion around (enough to make the PCB unrepairable).
I personally don't like to dismantle old cartridges, but I think if someone owns a cartridge they can do what they like to it, for the most part. If I wanted that copy of Jaws, I would buy it myself, I don't think we need to reserve it for some future person who wants it. Maybe you just want to smash it up in revenge for what it did to you? I can see a value in that. Go for it.
If it's some undumped rarity though, please don't ruin it before you dump it. That's a big exception.
I'm more interested in getting emulation up to snuff. If the games are well preserved in terms of function, we're in good shape. The systems and cartridges will all crumble someday, but we can copy the software forever. I think the "feelies" part of it all is mostly for the people who lived it and want to remember. If you never played an NES growing up, getting to see/touch/feel the original format is probably a neat novelty, but not particularly essential as long as the game still plays well. You could go out of your way to hear Chopin on a period instrument, but he sounds great on a modern piano too.
Sik wrote:
WedNESday wrote:
tepples wrote:
In 100 years time, in fact in 75 for the games that most people care about, few will need the cartridges because the ROMs will have become free to distribute. The licensed NES game whose copyright expires last is Wario's Woods, and under current law, its copyright expires in 2090.
Sigh... I'm not talking about the games themselves, but the hardware i.e. the cartridges and consoles that people destroy. Once they're gone, they're gone.
In 100 years it's likely that we won't even have the means to make an usable upscaler for them or even power them up, not to mention all the discrete components having already failed and it's likely there will be some corrosion around (enough to make the PCB unrepairable).
I can get behind many of the original ICs not working, but how would we lose the means to make a usable upscaler? The only way that can really be the case is that everybody has forgotten the concept of it.
I think the correct way going forwards of keeping games playable is full proper reverse-engineering followed by FPGA implementations of the hardware, integrating a form of low-latency up-scaling to maintain compatibility with new display hardware as well as older displays. But, that's not the point of this thread. If you "ruin" one of a million copies of even Super Mario Bros. 3, it's not the end of the world. I don't think anyone needs to be concerned with how that would scale up given how few people would even do something like that in the first place.
"NES games that will not be missed if destroyed."
Basically, 90% of pirated/bootleg NES/Famicom games. About 82% of unlicensed games. In addition, I really am not fond of Zelda II, which is the 'black sheep', if you will, of the Zelda franchise. --ShaneM
The problem with bootleg games as I said is that they use Famicom cartridges but for homebrew we usually want NES ones instead =/ (though amusingly, I have a Famicom so I'd actually prefer the former for me)
Sik wrote:
The problem with bootleg games as I said is that they use Famicom cartridges but for homebrew we usually want NES ones instead
I always thought the biggest turn off about bootlegs was the fact that most of them use glob-tops, making them virtually useless as donors unless you feel like going through the painstaking task of cutting dozens of traces and soldering dozens of wires, after tracing each one of them from the cart's edge so you know where to connect them to.
With FC games you don't need a CIC or clone thereof so you can just discard the PCB and make your own for the case. Bootlegs that aren't based on cloned MMC3 tend to use obscure mappers to which a homebrew game is unlikely to have been ported.
Alright guys; back on topic.
I have one more official game to add to this list. It is sort of controversial. Super Mario Bros. 2 USA. Now hear me out. I'm not saying DDP is a bad game, I'm saying its NES counterpart is.
1) It lacks originality.
2) It lives a lie.
3) It is a really odd Mario game.
4) ***I feel sorry for the people in Japan, really. In addition to getting DDP on FDS (good thing), they also got a rerelease of this in 1992, named Super Mario USA. It is the exact SAME thing as the NES counterpart PRG1.
5) It adds nothing new except Clawgrip, at the expense of the Albino Mouser.
6) SFX were cut since the NES does not make use of the FDS' extra channel.
--ShaneM
7. It's MMC3 with SRAM, which makes it a flexible donor.
8. Earlier copies are on boards with all 72 pins, including PPU /WR, which makes it an even more flexible donor because it can be rewired to TNROM.
tokumaru wrote:
Sik wrote:
The problem with bootleg games as I said is that they use Famicom cartridges but for homebrew we usually want NES ones instead
I always thought the biggest turn off about bootlegs was the fact that most of them use glob-tops, making them virtually useless as donors unless you feel like going through the painstaking task of cutting dozens of traces and soldering dozens of wires, after tracing each one of them from the cart's edge so you know where to connect them to.
The PCB is cheap though, it's the shell the issue, and bootlegs really aren't going to help you due to what tepples said. So yeah, for this matter pretty much any game with a suitable shell counts, and the problem is that ones with Famicom shells are normally the ones that are not desired.
In defense of the overseas version of Super Mario Bros. 2,
1. We didn't have to buy a disk system just to play it
2. Characters run and there is more animation
3. Many elements from that game, like carrying items, certain enemies and riding on enemies, would find their way into later games
4. Luigi jumps higher than Mama
5. You don't have to beat the game four times to see the good ending
6. Super Mario Bros. 2 for the FDS wasn't very original either, its not far removed from a ROM hack.
7. Difficulty is much more fair in the overseas version than SMB2 FDS.
8. How often do you get to play with the Princess or Toad?
Great Hierophant wrote:
4. Luigi jumps higher than Mama
"
That's Mama Luigi to you, Mario!"
Were the writers of the
Super Mario World animated series aware of
Doki Doki Panic?
Quote:
8. How often do you get to play with the Princess or Toad?
Let's see...
In Wario's Woods you play as Toad.
In Super Mario RPG, Super Princess Peach, early Mario Party games, Super Smash Bros. Melee, and Super Smash Bros. Brawl, you play as Peach.
In New Super Mario Bros. Wii, player 2 can play as Yvan (the blue Toad who appeared in SMB2:MM) or Wolley (different colored Toad).
In Mario Kart, Mario Tennis, and later Mario Party games, you can play as Toad or Peach.
I think one of the Wii U games has both Toad and Peach too. Is it the one that ripped off Syobon Action?
In Disney's Aladdin you play as Aladdin (essentially a Toad without the cap).
And if you rearrange the sounds in Kinopio (Toad's Japanese names) the slightest bit, you get Pinocchio.
But I'm sort of disappointed that New Super Mario Bros. 2 wasn't New Doki Doki Panic. It was (New Super Mario Bros.) 2 instead of New (Super Mario Bros. 2).
Am I the only one who could never beat the boss of the 1st level in neither Doki Doki panic or SMB2 ?
I'd like to add that Baseball Stars and similar sports games are a dime a dozen and not worth the plastic they're encased in.
For the league-licensed annual titles that became common in the fourth generation, I'm inclined to agree. But on the NES, what makes Baseball Stars (which I assume isn't a compilation of Baseb, Baseb: The Lost Levels, Baseb 2, and Baseb 3) less worth keeping than classic sports games like Blades of Steel and Tecmo Bowl?