For the sake of conversation, let's say you (had the opportunity / were obligated) to create a title for the NES using a previously existing intellectual property. You have free reign in terms of creative control and cost to acquire said license is not a factor.
What property would you want to use and why?
What type of game would you make?
How would you incorporate the license into the game?
I would license the Power Rangers and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
Them I would do an action game called Power Rangers meets the Teenange Mutant Ninja Turtles.
A big title for an epic game!!
I think this could be a little similar to Battletoads Double Dragon.
I've been wanting to make WORM WAR II since forever. I don't even like the original game, but damn, with a name like WORM WAR I it deserves a sequel.
Also gee, I wonder what tepples and tokumaru will answer for this. I really do wonder.
oh, a new
Dizzy of course!
Even though I hand in
restoring Dizzy games before, these weren't new games.
Now...what I would do with it...
I would probably want to cover biggest problem with Dizzies on NES, namely ability to save(and some nice ending since no dizzy game have a satisfactory ending.
Aside from that, I would set the game in usual fantasy world. Probably touch on some classic stories such as
A Christmas Carol,
Aladdin or
Three Little Pigs.
Oh and a huge dragon-a must have for epic Dizzy game
Well, at least I have
romhacking.
Maybe Alien, and make a metroidvania-like game based on the story of Aliens where you'd switch between key characters and sort of cooperate with yourself in the form of these various characters in an attempt to get off the rock. Getting the protagonist to survive would beat the game, but the challenge would be getting as many as possible to survive. They have different skills/be differently effective using them. That way you need to get the right person to the right place in the right time, so it's also a bit like a slow going game of lemmings.
I would want to make ports of Infocom games to NES. Zork. Planetfall. Suspended.
Also I'm a huge fan of Futurama. I guess I would make a multi-styled game with a space shooter, a top-down Zelda like action, and puzzles, and humorous cut scenes.
I always wanted to make NES versions of the following games:
- Sonic: it's my favorite game series ever, and it'd be really cool to prove that the NES can handle a fast-paced game with interesting physics and large levels.
- Day of the Tentacle: it's my favorite point-and-click game, and making this art style work on the NES sounds like a fun challenge.
- Worms: really fun gameplay, and the destructible maps should be fun to implement.
- Kid Chameleon: I love the way the different abilities work, and this one looks like it'd fit the NES pretty well.
- Ghouls 'n Ghosts: I love the horror theme and aesthetics, and the different weapons/abilities are great too.
FrankenGraphics wrote:
Maybe Alien, and make a metroidvania-like game based on the story of Aliens where you'd switch between key characters and sort of cooperate with yourself in the form of these various characters in an attempt to get off the rock. Getting the protagonist to survive would beat the game, but the challenge would be getting as many as possible to survive. They have different skills/be differently effective using them. That way you need to get the right person to the right place in the right time, so it's also a bit like a slow going game of lemmings.
Isn't that pretty much
Aliens Infestation? (except that games was terribly bland and horribly executed)
Sumez: Huh. Well that lowers my incentive by 99% haha
FrankenGraphics: why? They failed to make the concept a great game.
You can take same concept and make it better than they did.
Well that's mainly speaking of using the Alien(s) IP. It'd be quite fun to try to copy the visual style of the movie and make it a game. The architetcure, dominant colours, the hazy, fedback feed on their monitors, etc. The synopsis for the design in itself might be worth revisiting sometime perhaps and try to make better.
Maybe a point and click adventure or limited sandbox featuring
Moomin, then. It's such a lush, dynamic world and i don't think moomin fans have ever been able to explore it themselves in that way. When i read the Moomin books and graphic novels as a kid, all i wanted was to go there myself and invent my own adventure.
Ha ha, I actually got to spend 2 years of my life working on an official Alien IP.
It got cancelled, though. At the time I thought it was pretty cool to be working on something based on one of my favourite movies. It helped keep me motivated on the project.
I'm mostly pretty cynical about IP licensing and video games, but there's much stuff that I'd still be pretty excited to work on. In particular I really want to make an Aeon Flux game, especially one that included some adaptation of the
Tide short. We only ever got
Aeon Flux: The Movie: The Game for PS2, which was somewhat forgettable. In a bit of a weird reversal Peter Chung (Aeon Flux's director) ended up adapting a video game into an animated series with
Re\Visioned: Tomb Raider, also with Drew Neumann doing music.
The original aeon flux is amazing and would make a great game.
70s Italian cinema would make for some excellent games -
Danger Diabolik or
Susperia maybe.
Avatar the Last Airbender.
What would I do with it? I'm not sure. Could be an RPG, a zeldalike, a side scrolling platformer with different characters like the SNES Star Wars games. But it would be awesome whatever it was.
I'd also like to make a proper game of one of my favorite anime series, Saint Seiya. There are already 2 RPG games of it for the Famicom, but they're kinda boring and pretty ugly.
There are also some interesting fighting games of the series for PS2, PS3, PS4 and PC, but one of the most interesting aspects of the series doesn't play a big part in any of them: the mythological armors worn by the characters.
I'd like to create a small fighting game focused on a smaller arc of the story, to keep the number of characters down, and give more importance to the armors.
Meh, maybe I'd like to get a great franchise that was abandoned by their owners (there are many) to do a remake and sequel, but it's really not high on my list to be quite honest, I'd rather put my own ideas into reality instead of others'.
Punch wrote:
I'd rather put my own ideas into reality instead of others'.
Most of my ideas are programming techniques that would be useful in ports and remakes.
My most realizable game idea, other than ports and trivial practice games, is probably an F-Zero sequel for the SNES, using a huge whack of ROM with an SA-1 and MSU1. F-Zero, after all, came right at the beginning of the system's lifetime; it was a 512 kB SlowROM game with no special chips, based on a concept dreamed up more or less from scratch, written in a relatively short period of time by a handful of programmers who were new to the console, using tools that were available in 1989. With the resources and hindsight available now, and no time limit, it should be possible to create a more impressive game. (Plus I have issues with the direction the physics went in for X and GX...)
But I'd still want a bunch of help, especially with designing the courses and fine-tuning the balance, not to mention composing the music. I have no confidence that I'd be able to do the series justice all by myself even with an arbitrary amount of time; that "handful of programmers" were EAD core personnel supervised by Miyamoto himself...
Very unlikely this would ever happen, and it's a tad off topic (I'm not big on attempting an F-Zero game on the NES), but I find it fun to think about.
The Last Airbender totally lends itself to video games, but apparently all the ones that exist pretty much suck.
Punch wrote:
I'd rather put my own ideas into reality instead of others'.
Commercially, doing a licensed game has a huge marketing advantage because it borrows its rep from the licensed property.
Conversely, the disadvantage of it is that the license doesn't make it yours. Publishing your game necessarily involves deals between license holders that have to be actively maintained, and in general this gives it a shorter lifespan than other games. You can't give it a "remaster" for new systems, or otherwise repackage it without a new deal. Sequels are out of the question. A lot of stuff that you could "own" about a game you made is off the table when it's a licensed property.
Example: the
Scott Pilgrim game was delisted from all the places it was previously sold, and will probably remain buried forever, or at least a very long time.
Similar thoughts about cover songs, though licensing is different for this, but basically you borrow interest from fans of the original, and on the other side you lose a lot of control over various things, like you have to assume some legal risks to put it up publicly, etc.
Reminds me that Silicon & Synapse (later Blizzard) and Condor (later Blizzard North) both worked on a Justice League game respectively for Megadrive/Genesis and SNES without each other knowing about it and that's how they came to talk once it got mutually known at a convent.
Not for NES, but I've wanted to do a Moomin shooter, in 3d. Pappa finally gets enough, loads up his trusty musket and goes around slaughtering the valley.
Interesting reads.
I think if I were to design a licensed NES title, I'd want to do a version of the board game, Hive. Player pieces made with background tiles, movement animated as sprites (each bug crawling or flying as they tend to do) before locking into their new places.
Quote:
Not for NES, but I've wanted to do a Moomin shooter, in 3d. Pappa finally gets enough, loads up his trusty musket and goes around slaughtering the valley.
A comedy radio show did something conceptually similar in the 90s where they rode on the nervousness about video violence. The premise was that they reviewed a the newest, hottest game based on
That boy Emil by Astrid Lingren where they mixed speech samples from the movie from 1971 with violent samples from.. i think it was Duke Nukem, not sure.
The reason i think Moomin might be a good game IP is because the moomin valley is so dynamic and transformative on an all-encompassing scale. The locale is confined and familiar in scope, yet because of cosmic events, it changes drastically all the time. At one point the comet causes the rivers to dry up and sunken caves along the coast are revealed. Strange seeds transform the whole valley into a labyrinthine jungle at another point. Moomin waking from hibernation in the middle of winter means a wildly transformed landscape inhabited by seasonal creatures he's never encountered before in the summer. Then there's the flood when everything turns into a floaty island world. All within the same, recognizable area.
But what would Snufkin's game look like? Solomon's Key?
(Oh wait, it already is.)
Breath of the wild is not too far off, if you remove weapons and add a tent + harmonica.
Btw the moomin boardgame (muuminpeli) is all about finding the lost key to the jam cellar. Note how snufkin is eyeing the key on the cover
https://d1vxw9s9d8pjrr.cloudfront.net/w ... i_1950.jpg
I always wanted to make another Final Fantasy game for the NES. I had a thought that it would be fun to create a new NES Final Fantasy called Final Fantasy π, as a way to escape the numbering system, but also as a way of saying "somewhere between 3 and 4", at least in terms of quality of graphics/gameplay. I really enjoy coming up with elaborations on existing stories/concepts, almost like writing fan fiction, so I think this would be a lot of fun. The chances of me actually doing this, however, are virtually zero.
Fisher wrote:
Power Rangers meets the Teenange Mutant Ninja Turtles
There's been
such a crossover.
M_Tee wrote:
For the sake of conversation, let's say you (had the opportunity / were obligated) to create a title for the NES using a previously existing intellectual property. You have free reign in terms of creative control and cost to acquire said license is not a factor.
What property would you want to use and why?
What type of game would you make?
How would you incorporate the license into the game?
A few years ago, I would have said "Bomberman", because it had been years since Hudson Soft was bought out by Konami, and promptly executed. But, since there's actually a
new Super Bomberman game now, that's no longer an option!
So, I'll go with dB-Soft's "Layla", one of my favorite Famicom games.
In fact, the Metroid-like platformer I was working on a few years ago, was heavily inspired by Layla!
If I had the Layla license, I'd just continue with what I was doing with "Project Eden". Create a large solar system, with a dynamic level select, with the secondary function of also acting as the game's difficulty select. (Think Starfox)
The game would be developed to be almost more Metroid-like, instead of the weird Mario-ness of Layla. (Specifically, one-way scrolling)