Post for: #video games ^{(30 Posts)}

Sometimes (a lot of the time) I'll look back at my blog posts and realize that there's some really big thing I've been doing or working on that would have made for an interesting blog post, and while I might post about them on my socials, like Mastodon or Tumblr, I won't ever remember to mention them here. This is going to be one of those topics, and there may be several more that I go back to shortly. In this case, I started having fun converting pixel art into vector art a while ago, and then converting the vector art to 3D that could then be sent to a 3D printer. For a while I was doing it just to have fun and print cool things for me, but after a while I thought maybe other people would be interested too, and made an Etsy shop, Minus World Prints.

Monster Party for the NES was one of those consistent rental games for me as a kid. The gameplay was solid, and the setting had a unique charm to it with its creepy atmosphere. And the game was *just* challenging enough that I could make good progress with it, but never get very far in the game. I decided to go back and put in a solid effort to fully finish the game this time, and knock it off my ever growing backlog. What better time to talk about this weird game full of weird half fish monsters and surprising-considering-Nintendo's-censorship-policies blood than the Halloween season?

What features do you think make good selling points for games? An immersive world and interesting character development? Challenging obstacles and boss fights? Or what about how big the file size is to download? Because for some reason, video game marketers in the 90s suddenly started doing a lot of bragging about how big the game was. And when I mean big, I don't mean "the world is so expansive". No, I mean "32 megs". It felt perfectly normal at the time, but it's so totally ridiculous now to imagine.

Beetlejuice came to theaters in 1989, and while I didn't see it on the big screen, I caught it as soon as it came to our local VHS rental place. It was the perfect mix of creepy, funny and fun to get me absolutely hooked. We eventually got an action figure line from Kenner, makers of the wonderful Real Ghostbusters toy line, as well as a cartoon show that took quite a few liberties with the source material to make it work, but I still found it enjoyable, especially since it made Beetlejuice and Lydia the main stars, not to mention that great opening with Danny Elfman's score!

So of course with any hot franchise kids were into in the 80s, there were video games as well, and while none of them were fantastic, they had enough Beetlejuice charm in them to keep me happy. Two of the three I'll go over I enjoyed from my childhood, while the third I'm coming at with a completely fresh take.

I mentioned in my last post that I was delaying working on the Steamboat Willie Rides Again game to work on a short game for the Byte Off IV, a five week competition where you make a game, or at least a demo, for the NES using NESMaker. The theme this year was New Frontiers. After wracking my brain for a short while, I decided on a game about the migratory journey of a monarch butterfly!

This is my first completed NES project, so I'm pretty pleased about it. It's really short, and occasionally buggy, but at least I finished it! It's three levels, with the first level taking place during the day, the second at sunset and the third at night. It plays like a sidescrolling shooter, only there's no shooting, you're just a monarch butterfly. You have to avoid environmental hazards as well as predators like wasps and praying mantises.

I thought it might be fun to talk a bit more about games that I'm playing as I'm playing them. After all, I think I play more games than I realize, and it seems my memory is such that if I played something a week ago, it might as well have been ten years, I'll just forget. Also, sometimes I'll look back and think that it would have been nice to talk about things as I was playing them, and see what I was thinking then. If you go back far enough in this blog, back when it was hosted on a different service, you can see that I put up a blog post on the day of the Wii launch. But I thought I would be cheeky and not talk at all about my thoughts on the Wii, or Wii Sports, or The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess. No, instead I wrote up a post on Sneak King, the Burger King stealth title for Xbox 360, which launched on the very day of the Wii release. That was fun and all, but maybe I should have talked about how awesome Wii Sports was! Or heck, talked about the launch, since I was working at GameStop at the time!