Typical American and European attributes of NES games

Most NES games are created by the Japanese, but there were a few American and European developers as well. So, what I'd like to know: What are specific attributes of NES games that are accoiated with European and with American developers?

For Europe there is for example the use of the arpeggio effect in the soundtrack. (Which also happens in most C64 games because of its European dominance.) This is completely unheard of in Japanese NES games.

What other things come to mind?

American games: MS-DOS font. Woeful pixel art. Imagineering.

In NES games?


I don't know what do you mean.

Can you please name examples?


Examples to my own point: "Lethal Weapon", "Asterix", "The Smurfs".

The font in Crystal Mines and Joshua by Color Dreams/Wisdom Tree is the PC BIOS font. But apart from those two, I don't remember seeing any NES games that used it, licensed or unlicensed. Klax (Tengen) and Krazy Kreatures (AVE) used a different font, as did Exodus (WT). Mario Is Missing, developed by the Canadian studio Radical Entertainment, also used a font other than that of the PC BIOS.

Here's my collection of 8x8 fonts again

I assume that by "American", we're excluding the games after December 31, 1996, which I take as the date dividing the commercial era from the homebrew era.

Europe had Rare, Tim Follin (composer), Elite (game), some cool stuff.

The only good US made games I can find are ports by Atari (Tengen). You can thank us for all of the Color Dreams and Wisdom Tree stuff.

One aspect I noticed of US publishers is that they don't like to pay anything to Nintendo, and instead prefer to circumvent the lockout chip. A lot of unlicensed terrible US made games.

Partial list of US-based NES game developers licensed by Nintendo:

Absolute aka Imagineering: New Jersey
Activision: California
Acclaim: New York
Farsight (Videomation): California
Hi Tech: New York
THQ: Illinois

Yeah Imagineering had a very recognizable style. They reused sound effects in many of their games, pixel art was in a similar (not particularly great) style, and the same musician (Mark Van Hecke) made most of their music. Mark Van Hecke really liked to use triangle leads in his music, something I'm not very fond of.

However I wouldn't say those were "american" traits, more so "imagineering" traits.

BTW (from tepples' list) at least Acclaim and Hi Tech Expressions also (or only?) published games made by other studios. Acclaim published stuff from at least RARE and Imagineering. Hi Tech Expressions published stuff from Software Creations (UK) and Beam Software (Australia), and probably others.

Right. This is about things that many American developers share, not things that a specific company uses within its various games. If there even is something that's typical for the American developers.

Several games that were made outside of Japan fail to listen to bit 1 of controller reads, which means they don't support controllers using the Famicom expansion port. Not something you'd be able to notice with just an NES (unless you're a weirdo that knows how to use its expansion port), but it's a feature of the code, and comes up if you try to play these games in a Famicom with an adapter.

e.g. Solar Jetman (European made, no Famicom release), Battletoads (NA/EU releases, the later Famicom port does handle expansion controllers but it also has modified levels, etc.)

Common smells of '80s Europe games:
-Lots of arpeggios, for better or worse
-The character stares straight into the camera when idle
-Broader acceptance of sub-60fps graphical updates
-Pillow shading (harder to do on NES, though)

Of course, these are umbrella generalizations. There are great European games of the time.

I wanted to mention this, but completely forgot the name. This is *very* evident in SNES games.

If you didn't know I was American, then which country would you think my "Byelomorye Dam Zone" medley sounds like? It has both a triangle countermelody and arps.

Typical European attributes : Hard as hell, focus on specific genres (racing games, casual games, side scrollers), C64-like music and ports

Typical American attributes : Dull graphics, limited or terrible music, poor controls, movie licenses, sometimes an interesting game mechanic (A Boy and His Blob)

If we're to include elements outside of NES games, I'll add some more things which stood out to me every time I think about having a look at Amiga, Atari ST, or other comparable home computer offers from Europe:

-irritating sound effect choice (how many Amiga games have you played where the jump sound is a terrible "spring" sound sample?)
-gradient backdrops
-awkward humanoid animations where the torso of the character remains nearly stationary and the rest of the body conveys no weight (looking at you, Turrican)

So I'll sum it up:

Quality:
1st place: Japanese
2nd place: European
3rd place: American

(of course, there are plenty of examples that defy this though)

...I'm proud to be an American...

Anyone brought up Sculptured Software yet? They made the sound engine for Action 52.

Kinda hard to extrapolate from their few games though. (Monopoly, Daydreamin Davey, etc...)

Others from them that I remember off-hand: Empire Strikes Back, Stanley, Eliminator Boat Duel. Most of their games are technically quite OK, but have several issues in other areas. Still, they also had a strangely recognizable style. I think Daydreamin Davey stands out as being worse than most of their other games.

I don't think Monopoly even runs at 60FPS, but it's still one of the best computer versions of Monopoly ever made.

A very European stylistic trait is when all the text wiggles all the time. I don't mean like a "squigglevision" type of deal (like the results screen in Yoshi's Island), I mean each character is a seperate sprite and the whole text ripples back and forth like a flag blowing in the wind, or your score bobs up and down and/or changes colors continuously.

There's also a lot of shading, and I frequently see backlighting (the thing where there's a random highlight in the dark edges of objects, like if there were a bright spotlight shining directly from the side or from behind, sometimes it's a bright color like green or cyan).

Hmm... I never actually noticed that before. I don't know why, but the example that immediately came to mind for me was the letters before the bonus rooms in DKC3: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bZ5lRBiCCzA#t=4m43s


Can you think of an example?

I definitely think that a stylistic trait of European games is having sound effects or music but not both at once (and when there is both, they don't share the same channels.)

Maybe this is an artifact from being ported from the C64 but when C64 games were ported by the Japanese developers they tended to put some music in.

Well, I'm guessing this is too late, (It's a collection fairly late SNES games...) But the DKC games use all 8 channels for music, and that just the less noticeable instruments are dropped first in the song. (I forgot who told be this.) Maybe this was just a result of changing times, but the DKC games really don't feel very "European". One thing I wonder though is if all channels are used in Rare's NES games like RC Pro Am or Battletoads. I wonder how many sound channels this ever uses simultaneously: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=75l1FoY-oXk It's definitely using the DPCM, the triangle, and a square wave, but I don't know if it's using the other square wave.

Rare's games don't really have sound and music separated like that, but a lot of Codemasters games and Solstice and Overlord certainly do. So it's not even close to all European games, but I think it is distinctive.

On the other hand pretty much every Japanese developed game after 1985 at least had some music during gameplay. Except maybe Star Voyager? That's the only one I can think of .

I don't hear any DMC there. All the other channels are definitely in. BTW, the sound quality of that video is absolutely terrible.

What's "DMC"? Is that DPCM? Wait a minute, that "scratch" noise could probably just be the noise channel (which I had forgotten about) and not the DPCM channel. I do find that some things about Rare were generally different than most European game companies at the time though, so I wouldn't be surprised if all sound channels were being used in some of their games.

Actually, I don't think the game uses the DPCM channel for music, aside for "Title Theme With Drums". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LCFqF-IeeAk

They mean roughly the same thing
delta pulse code modulation
delta modulation channel

This is really noticeable in Robocop 3, where all the in-game music uses just one pulse channel. Title screen music is awesome, though I like the C64 version just a little better.

I think longer songs was already noted as a trait, but it seems especially so for title screen songs. I was listening to the NES version of Skate or Die earlier, I thought it was interesting that I'd had that game for ages, but I never noticed until recently how long the title screen song is, I definitely never heard it all when I was kid.

(edit: yeah I know EA is a US developer, but it was Rob Hubbard song, and ported by Konami (I think).. talk about international).

And on NES we have the example of Skate or Die vs. Skate or Die 2: The Search for Double Trouble for what the music sounds like with and without Konami's influence. Same with Rampart (J) (ported by Konami) vs. Rampart (U) (ported by Tengen-affiliated Bitmasters, published by Jaleco). But in order to do this justice, I'd need someone to rip the NSF of Rampart (U), which I think is the only NES game I own that doesn't have a ripped NSF.

The C64 version of the Skate or Die theme is just awesome. BTW, is this Youtube video a fabrication (increased pitch and speed for "NTSC version") or real? Some comments claim it's real.

Battletoads never uses any DPCM in its soundtrack.

The title theme with drums, and the pause music are both full-CPU-control PCM sounds. Some of the sound effects in game are PCM sounds too (briefly halting gameplay and/or messing up the parallax effect timing when they happen).

For the title screen, is there any significant reason they didn't use DPCM? For something static like the title screen it doesn't make a lot of sense to me, and I'm not sure there's a perceivable quality difference. In-game makes a little more sense for the sake of timing, but even with the timed PCM the parallax effects get screwy sometimes as you mentioned.

I don't think there's any technical reason. They're just goofballs.

I guess they found it acceptable as 32K banks means they'd have to go to another bank anyway to play the audio, and the DMA would steal enough cycles to mess up cycle-timed raster splits anyway.

It's the SID bass that makes the difference. It's pretty funny how the NES and C64 versions sound pretty much exactly alike in the intro.


Well, Konami didn't have Rob Hubbard, and Skate or Die NES port was produced before Konami started abusing DPCM samples in their songs...


It sounds pretty similar to the MP3 I've downloaded from Stone Oakvalley's site, which says it was recorded on a NTSC machine. I've never owned a C64 or C64 Skate or Die though, so I couldn't tell you 100% percent.

I don't think this problem applies here. The PCM samples are tied to one bank just as much as DPCM samples would be. They get interrupted at 60hz intervals causing a buzzy degradation of quality when the ongoing updates have to do other things besides just PCM. This is mitigated a bit by the samples just being quick percussive things.


Again, not relevant to their use here because they didn't preserve raster splits when using PCM, either.

They even dropped the drums from the title theme during moments where the animation was more complicated; they cut in and out at arbitrary points, very unmusically. Clearly there were compromises being made, and PCM was not working out in an ideal way for them.

I can't speculate as to why they used PCM, but I honestly can't think of any compelling reason to use it instead of DPCM, at least in all the cases they did happen to use it. There are sample quality differences, of course, but I don't think this alone is much of a reason, all of these things could have sounded just as well with DPCM and/or other APU SFX. I believe somebody on the team just liked PCM.

European games often use an isometric view.

The C64 version of Robocop 3 also has several tunes that only use one channel, but they benefit massively from C64 audio channels not being restricted to a single waveform. It leads one to think that the C64 is the original version and the NES one was just a quick adaptation, but I seem to remember Jeroen Tel stating somewhere that the NES version of the soundtrack was actually produced first (though I don't remember where I would have read that...)