Now let’s never speak of it again ;) PART 1 can be found here: th-cam.com/video/yPLV-mle--o/w-d-xo.html PART 2 can be found here: th-cam.com/video/-OgiUuUnXBg/w-d-xo.html
Yeah, it's strange. Rat Trap was supposed to be released in 1991. Then it got bought and rebranded to be Krusty's Super Fun House in 1993 which the Amiga still got. Weird.
@@namebrandmason A lot of Amiga games have been ported on consoles. It was easy, a lot of older programmers learned how to code on Amiga and it was a very popular computer in Europe!
I'm a software developer and I assume these nes titles were developed using GB graphics so that it could be ported with little to no effort. This was a shortcut (laziness at worst) and a definite slight to those who bought the nes version.
And that’s honestly the clearest way to explain what I’m getting at. People keep chiming in to talk about the technical aspects of each system. I’m really just talking about the aesthetics of design.
What's funny is that you could get a much better effect by buying the GB one, playing it on Super Game Boy, and doing stuff like designing custom colour pallettes for each level. Nintendo Power even sorta encouraged it back in the day with stuff like their Super Game Boy guide.
I'd probably not consider a lot of them "ports" per se but rather concurrently made titles that shared assets and design documents, but some of them definitely favored one 8-bit platform over another.
Yoshi was developed by Game freak and was the games that got their foot in the door so to speak for Pokemon. The original Pokemon games went through development off and on for about 6 years. IIRC some Game Gear games are literally Master System roms running on the Game Gear. The Game Gear apparently shares some internals with the Master System to make it possible and can run Master System games via an adapter.
I think with a lot of them, they're multiplatform games designed with the limitations of the Game Boy in mind. I think this is closer to what goes on with modern day games. If a company wants its games to be multiplatform and doesn't want them all different, you work with the limitations of the weakest one you want it on, and it just looks a bit weaker compared to other games on the more powerful systems.
Jimmy Connors Tennis. I wonder if it's intentionally slower on Gameboy so you can see the ball easier cos motion had a nasty habit of being blurry on the original GB screen.
Every time I see only 16K subscribers I'm shocked, this channel definitely plays like it's much larger and is ready to grow into triple digit sub counts. Well done, and I hope this happens!
The whole time I was watching your Cliffhanger footage, I was just waiting for you to show the part where your character rides a dead body down the mountain. That's why I like you, James! Don't ever change!
Alfred Chicken on NES is kind of a "guilty pleasure" game for me. Sure, it gets boring after a while and it can be confusing getting all the diamonds and collectables, but the way Alfred controls, alongside the sharp and simple graphics and lovely music (I love all the Vibrato in the music) makes it amongst my go-to for a simple, fun game.
Krusty's fun house was actually a great gameboy game back in the day. It had plenty of levels to keep you busy on a car trip. Games like the original TMNT for the gameboy were more fun in the short term, better action and whatnot, but theyre so short and easy, so they dont keep you occupied long, and eventually you arent interested in replaying them anymore. So in that sense, I have very fond memories of Krusty. Provided months of entertainment off and on.
One good way to tell if the games were for the NES or the GB is to look at the sprites. To accommodate the much smaller screen real estate, sprites were much smaller, and scenes were 'scaled' to look right on them. Hook looks like a NES game, Alfred Chicken looks like a Game Boy game. That being said, I'm surprised the Indiana Jones game *wasn't* a colorized Game Boy game - the graphical style looks like it was designed for monochrome screens, but the size of the sprites makes it look more 'NES like'.
Bubsy isn't jank; the controls are actually pretty fluid, the in-air movement is forgiving, etc. it's just that it's a Sonic ripoff that forgets to rip off the most important thing about Sonic: the rings system. It's a speed game where going fast almost always kills you, because every hit is a death - so you always have to fight against the game's desire to accelerate you, instead of following it! No clue why they didn't just make you lose yarn balls like rings. They even made the animation for it, proving it wasn't a sprite limit problem! But then they only used it as a boss death animation. I feel like a romhack to make Bubsy lose yarn when hit would be pretty easy... (Also, the game designer in me tells me that the level design of Bubsy seems to assume that there's a button you should be able to press while going full-speed that does a forward-directed attack - like the cat suit in SM3DW. Perhaps they had that planned, but just gave up on implementing it due to scheduling pressure...)
@@Jackrost01 See en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bubsy_2#Development - a different team made the second game. They were likely handed the codebase from the first game, and told to do whatever. There's a general software-industry problem of "ossification" - where engineers who _are_ free to change a piece of code, but who didn't originally write said piece of code, don't feel they _understand_ that existing code well enough to change it, and so instead just build a rickety pile of "fixes" on top of the existing code. There's also the app/game-specific version of the problem, where game designers / product managers coming in to lead production of a sequel, tend to assume that there "must have been a reason" for every existing design decisions, and so don't question any of the existing design elements, instead just proposing bolting on new features/systems - usually ones that redundantly do what the existing system should have done. I have a strong feeling that the Bubsy II team didn't realize that the Bubsy I team wasn't "making a design choice" to leave out a Sonic-like spin-dash forward-attack; nor were they "making a design choice" to leave out a Sonic-like rings health mechanic. They likely assumed that the Bubsy 1 team had left out these design elements intentionally - that they wanted Bubsy as a series to "not play like Sonic" (even though Bubsy 1 level design is trying to exactly ape Sonic level design.) And so they designed Bubsy II to intentionally "not play like Sonic" - giving the level design more verticality so that the first game's "creep up and pounce" attack style is the only viable style. (You could also call this "designing to appease the kind of player who enjoyed the first Bubsy game, rather than trying to expand Total Addressable Market by making an easier-to-play game.") Essentially, the Bubsy II team observed that the only way you can actually _play_ Bubsy is as a puzzle platformer... and so they designed Bubsy II to _be_ a puzzle platformer, by taking the same game physics and making fighting against them "the point." Note how Bubsy II _did_ get a health system - but rather than the forgiving Sonic-like rings system to go together with the constant rings-equivalent yarn pickups, it was a "three hearts with rare healing pickups" system - the exact kind of system you'd expect to find in a puzzle platformer.
Monopoly is actually a *triple* offender. It also has a GBC release that is just a colorized version of the GB game, and it's a Black cart GBC game that also has the original Game Boy version if played on an original Game Boy.
I'll never be able to unsee just how pathetic the NES Lion King was. The dinky sprites and those large, ugly patches of negative space that naturally happen when you have to blow up the screen. There's probably effort they don't want to spend making the sprites more in scale with the rest of the screen. Compromises do have to be made, look at how giant the sprites are for the GB Mega Man games. But this really feels like there was a reason they just released it in European regions. Big movie license name alone couldn't sell this one.
Welcome to the Painting by Numbers world, where everything is slippery and sprites are pale white. You may already have played some of their other games... Darkman and RoboCop 2 come to mind.
I'm pretty sure that Monopoly was a NES game first, then the GB version was a secondary project. The GB version has a little bit of jank, especially the dice animation, but otherwise is very faithful to the NES version.
@@BigOleWords haha, and just like that, the music is now stuck in my head again - dah-da-da-da daaaaah da-da-daaaah da-da-dah dah dah, du-de-du-de-du-de-du-de-duuu da-da-dah dah dah…
Alfred Chicken was an Amiga game. I played the Amiga CD32 / CDTV version and I've also seen it on the Amiga 1200 before it was ever ported to any Nintendo console.
And of course Krusty's (Super) Fun House is itself a port of an Amiga game called Rat Trap. So if you're wondering what playing Pied Piper and leading rats to their deaths has to do with The Simpsons, the answer is "absolutely nothing".
you probably know that krusty's funhouse was a carbon copy of rat-trap for the commodore amiga, home system we didn't know that at the time but already all flags were raised because it was unlikely there existed a decent simpsons game [other than the arcade game that we all were begging to be released on consoles], on top of that ti didn't have much to do with the simpsons universe and made zilch sense.
On the port argument: I think the word "port" implies that it was released a considerable amount of time after the source game and was "ported over" but I recall many of these games releasing almost simultaneously with each other (and were even advertised together). Semantics, sure, but something to consider.
Jurassic Park was also available for the SNES and looks LEAGUES better than the other two, so I'm assuming they ported that one to the NES and Gameboy.
I remember renting Krusty’s Fun House for NES and actually having fun with it. Then I never thought about it again until this video 😝 anyways, because of its puzzle game format it make sense it was released on Game Boy. Definitely a solid game compared to other Simpson games. I was reading a different comment and learned it was a rebranding of something else, so I guess that makes sense
i'm sure everyone knows by now but the monopoly video games are so fast because they implement all of the rules that most people forget about or inadvertently break when playing the board game.
What's funny is this third collection is probably the best games of the three. I actually enjoy Yoshi and Alfred Chicken. And while Krusty's Fun House isn't great; It's leagues better than the other three Simpsons NES games.
I dunno, I still have lots of love for the Star Wars NES game (TESB sucks though. The graphics are worse, the music is worse, the controls are worse. It was a HUGE disappointment back in the day and only I played it like once as a rental, prior to the magic of emulation)
Some of these had also SNES-Ports: Krusty's Funhouse (a reskined Amiga-game) and Jurassic seem to have a similar level layout, the SNES-port has the first-person levels. There was an Alfred Chicken game for SNES but I don't know if it's similar. Jungle Book on the other hand is a total different game on the SNES.
Some of these games are on Game Gear, too. I found that I had Cliffhanger on a GG multi cart "Super 40 in 1" which actually 32 games with 8 doubles and more than half the games are SG-1000, I think? Anyway, I don't have to spend the $100 to get a copy on NES so I can snowboard a corpse for 2 seconds. I'll just hold the screen right up to my eyes and it'll be awesome!!
@@BigOleWords I mean.... the CRT is literally 10 times the size of the GG screen... But, it costs $300 just to go outside these days. I can't buy a $100 game for a while unless I do a trade. Did you finish reading Song of Ice and Fire? I'm like halfway through the last book.
Amazingly, a fan fairly recently ported that Game Gear / SMS Sonic game to the Commodore 64! A C64 port of Super Mario Bros. was also created, but Nintendo demanded they pull it down. (But you can still find it without searching too hard.) SMB is a bit more difficult to play since the C64 only has one joystick button and SMB was designed for two, so they had to change how the controls work.
"Most of these are PROBABLY ports of NES games and not the other way around" You do know release dates exist right? It is VERY easy to verify this information instead of just making random stuff up and looking foolish?
NES's Little Mermaid seems to be carbon copy of it's GB counterpart. And little obscure one is on Famicom: Hello Kitty World which is port of GameBoy's Balloon Kid (sequel to Balloon Fight) with kitty characters!
One and only one of Jimmy Connors Spectators has coloured hair, blue. And she's wearing rayban wayfarers. Odd. And actually now that I look at it more closely the Jimmy Connors game is different on the Game Boy! If you look for the lady with the blue hair in the top-right corner of the screen, in the stands. You'll notice that she has three people to her right. If you look at the Game Boy game there is only one person to her right it may be the same lines of code used to create the gameplay but there are slight differences between the two it also looks like the ball is bigger in the game boy version and I don't mean just zoomed in I mean bigger in comparison to the tennis rackets. Lol monopoly takes forever because everyone playes it wrong, if you read the monopoly instructions it's way harder and goes much quicker
i believe nintendo mostly wanted us to have the same experiences on the go and at home. we came full circle with the switch! only took 30 years for the hardware to catch up, no big deal.
@@dieinfire920it does though. Devs no longer have to make games twice or port the same game for 2 Nintendo systems. It's all in one now. No cheap ports.
It's funny because Link's Awakening was originally planned to be a watered-down port of ALttP for GB, until wiser heads prevailed and it became its own thing. And it only took 30 years for the division between "console" and "handheld" to be done away with! Will wonders never cease...
Some games can be designed for one system then stuff happens and its put onto another so some could've been developed for Gameboy first then something happened and it was put onto the nes first instead.
Ill never understand anyone who wants to spend thousands upon thousands of dollars on games like this. Its the same wirh John Hancock. He'll say oh they only made 4 copies of this game and theyre $45,000 each but i own 3 of rhem! Why? It makes no sense? Nobody in their right mind will buy any of these games and when you die theyll probably all get donated to goodwill.
collectors gotta collect i guess. a lot of them barely ever get around to playing the good games, never mind the bad ones. They like the satisfaction of simply owning a rarity or complete set. :)
You honestly shouldn't be on here commenting about the things you don't understand because you can't afford them. I'm poor too dude, it's not about that. And honestly youtube is here for the people who can't afford things to live vicariously through. If your mad about it, get a better job, live in a different area, or just shut up. It's not conducive to anything
They buy a game, show it in a video and the video makes them money. That's how a lot of youtubers operate. And it's not just Gaming related, it's across many different types of content.
Why would I care what happens to them when I die, I’ll be dead! If my kids want to keep them, sell them, or burn them in a pyre to honor their fallen father that’s their call. Because again, I’ll be dead.
Even though I was gifted the game Yoshi for the nes through Nintendo Power(it came in a box with my subscription claiming i was one of a few to test out the game and say if we liked it or not) and I wasn't into those types of games, it was a fun little game that was hard to put down!(which I reported) I do believe it wasn't a port of the gameboy other then an upgrade, for they had to change the layout of the screen a tad bit! Sure, I played both and at the time, they played the same, it just felt different to me so you can take my thoughts as well with a grain of salt!
I can't be the only one who thought Rolfe was never funny. I watched a couple of his videos many years ago and his "playing games badly while making faces" gimmick got old quick. I _much_ prefer this style of review and retrospective.
I was a fan of the Super Nintendo version of Krusty's Fun House, though I was never able to beat it. Sometime I'll get the Game Boy version to have a portable version.
I would note that the NES uses a 6502-derived CPU instruction set, while the Gameboy uses a 8088-derived CPU instruction set - the assembly code for games on these two platforms is entirely incompatible, and so a game would need to be re-coded from scratch to port it from one platform to the other. (And no, you can't "just use C" or some other higher-level language - even the object code generated by C compilers of the era was far too slow and bloated for these puny systems. It was hand-written assembly all the way!) If you want to talk about "enhanced ports", you should be talking about dual-release NES and SNES games! The SNES CPU instruction set is fully backward-compatible to the NES CPU instruction set, and there are even considerations for running NES games "directly" on the SNES (e.g. ensuring the controller is memory-mapped to the same addresses, having the default tile and sprite drawing modes on the SNES match the NES, etc.) Likely many NES+SNES dual releases were made by coding the NES game first, and then taking that codebase and "adding stuff" to make it into a SNES game (with testing of the port being immediately possible directly on SNES hardware.) Might be something you could explore in another of these series :) That being said - why do those NES games you mention look like ported GB games? Very likely because the studio aimed to create two games at the _same_ time, using less than 2x the effort, by creating the _assets_ (backgrounds, sprites) only once, in a *lowest-common-denominator format* that would work for both the NES and GB. Which meant that the assets had to be legible both in black-and-white and in color - and that the color versions had to just be the black-and-white assets "with a color palette applied." The constraint of "legibility in black-and-white", leads to two options for designs for GB assets: either they are drawn mostly "empty"/white, only having sparse areas of "highlight color" - which gives the NES games an "under-colored" look; _or_, if they're clever, the GB assets are drawn with large patches of dark-grey + light-grey, and the dark-grey is colorized as color while the light-grey is colorized as white or another color depending on the particular tile. This leads to the "blocky-coloration" look on the sprites in some of the other games you mentioned.
I don't think the ports are as hard as you are implying here. Sure, they aren't binary or source compatible so you can't just cross-assemble. But I'm fairly confident it'd only take a single decently seasoned dev a couple weeks or maybe a couple months to do a lot of these ports, assuming they didn't have to hand-disassemble the original game on 1980s computers. Sure, you have to "reprogram it". But with full original source available, with all the variables and comments intact, it's far from having to do the port from scratch. The game code and hardware weren't really that complex, and those games look like they were not pushing up against limits in a way that would cause a need for a lot of hard decision making or workarounds. The ports would probably be mostly rote. I do appreciate your more detailed speculation on what happened, though. I think what you're saying is basically right. I just think the distinction you're making of port vs two-parallel-games doesn't result in a difference.
@@blarghblargh it's not like a from-scratch port, no, but it's a difficult one, because the NES and Gameboy are each very constrained but in different ways. The NES's 6502 only has three 8-bit registers, runs at 2MHz, and has access to only 2KB of WRAM; while the GB's Z80 has 14 16-bit registers, runs at 4MHz, and has access to 8KB of WRAM _plus_ another 8KB of VRAM. (Thus, squishing business-logic code down _from_ the GB _to_ the NES is an extremely frustrating optimization exercise.) Meanwhile, the NES has a PPU whose access to CHR ROM can be intermediated by memory-mapper chips; the GB has nothing like this, as all CHR data must be loaded into the GB PPU's 8KB of internal VRAM. Thus, animations that are "free" by "riding the beam" on the NES, must instead be done on the GB by pre-compositing tiles in CPU WRAM before copying them to VRAM per frame. Also, the NES PPU allows the drawing of 64 8x8 sprites per frame (with 8 per scan-line) while the GB PPU allows for 40 8x8 sprites per frame (with 10 per scan-line.) Like I said, if you plan for it, you can write code and plan asset use in a way that fits the lowest common denominator of these two sets of requirements. If you do that (by e.g. only using three registers even on the GB, not using any mappers on the NES, etc.), then porting in either direction is trivial. But if you plan one game or the other first, only thinking you're developing the game for one system first, then you'd intuitively make use of those features - and so develop yourself into a corner at porting time, that you'd have to work your way out of.
@@sentropez1337 I agree that if you didn't think ahead of time about the port and were trying to maximize your use of the hardware glitz, then you'd be in trouble, or have to get creative and burn through a lot of effort. but I wasn't intending to imply that's what they did. My hypothesis: their whole team knew they were going to build for both. they built on NES first. they chose not to use a lot of fancy mapper tricks (little to no pseudo-parallax, few to no animated tiles). they used a reduced graphics complexity that works fine on the gameboy as well. I think there's evidence for this in the video. As James said, the gfx are kinda a lowest common denominator. And I'm not seeing a lot of the telltale mapper tricks in my skim-through. and we have a case of animated crowd graphics in the wrestling game just not being animated on the gboy. once the NES version was done, they ported to gboy. the port only took a few weeks, because all the register and ram and sprite count per line restrictions were already constrained to the lowest common denominator of the two systems. Maybe we're quibbling over minute details. Maybe this is close enough to "parallel development" to just call it that. Tho I think I'd personally rather manage it this way than try to have two teams working on parallel products together and bickering over features to include, or stepping on one another's toes. just tell the artist to make gfx that work on both systems, and tell the programmer "you're gonna have to port to the gboy in a few weeks, so don't do anything too fancy" and after having written this and re-reading what you wrote, I think we're basically in agreement :P :D
Save your woes for other outlets or channels. This a channel featuring media from 35+ years ago, if you can't afford this hobby maybe you should take the same effort you had commenting into filling out job applications.
@@christianhunt7382 that's kinda harsh. I don't make much money either, but due to my long term health condition which makes it super difficult to find suitable work, never mind something that pays a decent wage.
@carn9507 anyone can enjoy an emulator and download for free. Collecting is one thing, enjoying the thing your collecting is another. It may be harsh, and everyone's lives are different, but I stand by my statement, if you have the time to make ignorant comments on TH-cam about finances you have time to fill out applications or research better money opportunities instead of hating on a guy who's sharing his love of nostalgic games with the world.
@@christianhunt7382 Yeah and I do emulate and have roms (especially after having to sell off my entire vintage console and games collection I had built up since I was a child in the 80s) but you don't know anything about whether they've got a job or not or a health condition or not. Their comment didn't seem like an ignorant statement to me. I didn't think they were hating on Big Ole Words much myself, but just a self-deprecating and/or sarcastic comment about collecting old video games and the silly costs of some of those games in general. Especially lousy games like some of the ones shown here that are expensive more for their rarity than their quality.
![ทางเดินชีวิต - ธีเดช ทองอภิชาติ x อ.ไข่ มาลีฮวนน่า [Official MV]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/1f3wcG16dd4/mqdefault.jpg)
Now let’s never speak of it again ;)
PART 1 can be found here: th-cam.com/video/yPLV-mle--o/w-d-xo.html
PART 2 can be found here: th-cam.com/video/-OgiUuUnXBg/w-d-xo.html
🤐🤐🤐
Krusty's Fun House is just a reskin of an Amiga game: Rat Trap. This is why it looks out of character...
Yeah, it's strange. Rat Trap was supposed to be released in 1991. Then it got bought and rebranded to be Krusty's Super Fun House in 1993 which the Amiga still got. Weird.
This might explain why it's the least terrible Simpsons game on the NES.
@@namebrandmason A lot of Amiga games have been ported on consoles. It was easy, a lot of older programmers learned how to code on Amiga and it was a very popular computer in Europe!
That makes more sense!
Wow I had no idea. Cool info. Thanks.
I'm a software developer and I assume these nes titles were developed using GB graphics so that it could be ported with little to no effort. This was a shortcut (laziness at worst) and a definite slight to those who bought the nes version.
And that’s honestly the clearest way to explain what I’m getting at. People keep chiming in to talk about the technical aspects of each system. I’m really just talking about the aesthetics of design.
What's funny is that you could get a much better effect by buying the GB one, playing it on Super Game Boy, and doing stuff like designing custom colour pallettes for each level. Nintendo Power even sorta encouraged it back in the day with stuff like their Super Game Boy guide.
Absolute truth!
I'd probably not consider a lot of them "ports" per se but rather concurrently made titles that shared assets and design documents, but some of them definitely favored one 8-bit platform over another.
Right, i came in expecting a literal GB rom in an NES cart emulating the z80 or something.
Yeah that may be the wrong word but it’s for sure the point I’m making :)
Or in other words, they’re early examples of multi-platform games.
Yoshi was developed by Game freak and was the games that got their foot in the door so to speak for Pokemon. The original Pokemon games went through development off and on for about 6 years.
IIRC some Game Gear games are literally Master System roms running on the Game Gear. The Game Gear apparently shares some internals with the Master System to make it possible and can run Master System games via an adapter.
Did not know that! The only NES game I knew they made was Mendel Palace
@@BigOleWords Mendel Palace is a solid contender for "Games No-One Played"
The Game Gear was the precursor to the Sony PSP and PS Vita, in the fact that it was capable of home console ports.
@@HylianFox3 It's on the list!
I think with a lot of them, they're multiplatform games designed with the limitations of the Game Boy in mind.
I think this is closer to what goes on with modern day games. If a company wants its games to be multiplatform and doesn't want them all different, you work with the limitations of the weakest one you want it on, and it just looks a bit weaker compared to other games on the more powerful systems.
Jimmy Connors Tennis. I wonder if it's intentionally slower on Gameboy so you can see the ball easier cos motion had a nasty habit of being blurry on the original GB screen.
Interesting!
That's just a gameboy game in disguise!
Gameboy Game: "And I would have gotten away with it too, if it weren't for you meddling kids!"
Hahahaha
Every time I see only 16K subscribers I'm shocked, this channel definitely plays like it's much larger and is ready to grow into triple digit sub counts.
Well done, and I hope this happens!
I should’ve hired those guys that give you 1000 subscribers for a $1000!
The whole time I was watching your Cliffhanger footage, I was just waiting for you to show the part where your character rides a dead body down the mountain. That's why I like you, James! Don't ever change!
You know I can’t resist!
Thank you for mastering & exporting this video in 4:3, that was a sensible, period-correct presentation choice & great on my CRT VGA monitor.
Haha well it’s mostly so the footage doesn’t look so little but I’m glad it’s solid on your CRT :)
Alfred Chicken on NES is kind of a "guilty pleasure" game for me. Sure, it gets boring after a while and it can be confusing getting all the diamonds and collectables, but the way Alfred controls, alongside the sharp and simple graphics and lovely music (I love all the Vibrato in the music) makes it amongst my go-to for a simple, fun game.
Totally agree! I had low expectations at first but it was way better than I thought.
Alfred Chicken. I keep hearing about that one. I really should play it at some point in my life. Seems to be rather infamous
Krusty's fun house was actually a great gameboy game back in the day. It had plenty of levels to keep you busy on a car trip.
Games like the original TMNT for the gameboy were more fun in the short term, better action and whatnot, but theyre so short and easy, so they dont keep you occupied long, and eventually you arent interested in replaying them anymore.
So in that sense, I have very fond memories of Krusty. Provided months of entertainment off and on.
Your quirky modest approach is honestly what makes your videos so much fun. Drawing for your patreons is pretty cool too. Stay cool
Hey thanks so much, that’s kind of you to say!
One good way to tell if the games were for the NES or the GB is to look at the sprites. To accommodate the much smaller screen real estate, sprites were much smaller, and scenes were 'scaled' to look right on them. Hook looks like a NES game, Alfred Chicken looks like a Game Boy game. That being said, I'm surprised the Indiana Jones game *wasn't* a colorized Game Boy game - the graphical style looks like it was designed for monochrome screens, but the size of the sprites makes it look more 'NES like'.
Yep good call! It’s much more obvious with Cliffhanger or Lion King than with Jurassic Park.
played the SNES version of Krusty's FH...remember seeing the NES version, but never figured it was a GB port.
Aero the Acrobat is a decent game. Doesn't deserve to be lumped in with jank like Bubsy.
Bubsy isn't jank; the controls are actually pretty fluid, the in-air movement is forgiving, etc. it's just that it's a Sonic ripoff that forgets to rip off the most important thing about Sonic: the rings system. It's a speed game where going fast almost always kills you, because every hit is a death - so you always have to fight against the game's desire to accelerate you, instead of following it!
No clue why they didn't just make you lose yarn balls like rings. They even made the animation for it, proving it wasn't a sprite limit problem! But then they only used it as a boss death animation. I feel like a romhack to make Bubsy lose yarn when hit would be pretty easy...
(Also, the game designer in me tells me that the level design of Bubsy seems to assume that there's a button you should be able to press while going full-speed that does a forward-directed attack - like the cat suit in SM3DW. Perhaps they had that planned, but just gave up on implementing it due to scheduling pressure...)
I’m not really talking about the games, more just their attempts to replicate Sonic ;)
@@sentropez1337but Bubsy 2 is exist and there is no new attack ability while you runing
@@Jackrost01 See en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bubsy_2#Development - a different team made the second game. They were likely handed the codebase from the first game, and told to do whatever.
There's a general software-industry problem of "ossification" - where engineers who _are_ free to change a piece of code, but who didn't originally write said piece of code, don't feel they _understand_ that existing code well enough to change it, and so instead just build a rickety pile of "fixes" on top of the existing code. There's also the app/game-specific version of the problem, where game designers / product managers coming in to lead production of a sequel, tend to assume that there "must have been a reason" for every existing design decisions, and so don't question any of the existing design elements, instead just proposing bolting on new features/systems - usually ones that redundantly do what the existing system should have done.
I have a strong feeling that the Bubsy II team didn't realize that the Bubsy I team wasn't "making a design choice" to leave out a Sonic-like spin-dash forward-attack; nor were they "making a design choice" to leave out a Sonic-like rings health mechanic. They likely assumed that the Bubsy 1 team had left out these design elements intentionally - that they wanted Bubsy as a series to "not play like Sonic" (even though Bubsy 1 level design is trying to exactly ape Sonic level design.) And so they designed Bubsy II to intentionally "not play like Sonic" - giving the level design more verticality so that the first game's "creep up and pounce" attack style is the only viable style. (You could also call this "designing to appease the kind of player who enjoyed the first Bubsy game, rather than trying to expand Total Addressable Market by making an easier-to-play game.")
Essentially, the Bubsy II team observed that the only way you can actually _play_ Bubsy is as a puzzle platformer... and so they designed Bubsy II to _be_ a puzzle platformer, by taking the same game physics and making fighting against them "the point."
Note how Bubsy II _did_ get a health system - but rather than the forgiving Sonic-like rings system to go together with the constant rings-equivalent yarn pickups, it was a "three hearts with rare healing pickups" system - the exact kind of system you'd expect to find in a puzzle platformer.
All of your videos are great, you youself sir are a hidden gem in NES reviews. Thanks for entertaining us!
Hey thanks bud! That means a lot :)
At least Alfred Chicken had his own political party: The Alfred Chicken Party. No joke.
I had to look it up, that’s wild!
Monopoly is actually a *triple* offender. It also has a GBC release that is just a colorized version of the GB game, and it's a Black cart GBC game that also has the original Game Boy version if played on an original Game Boy.
Huh, neat!
I'll never be able to unsee just how pathetic the NES Lion King was. The dinky sprites and those large, ugly patches of negative space that naturally happen when you have to blow up the screen. There's probably effort they don't want to spend making the sprites more in scale with the rest of the screen. Compromises do have to be made, look at how giant the sprites are for the GB Mega Man games. But this really feels like there was a reason they just released it in European regions. Big movie license name alone couldn't sell this one.
It truly is a marvel to behold
Funny thing that bootleg Lion King on NES is better than official
A bunch of these games also had SNES versions. Jurassic Park looks VERY similar, at least the over world parts.
For sure
Welcome to the Painting by Numbers world, where everything is slippery and sprites are pale white.
You may already have played some of their other games... Darkman and RoboCop 2 come to mind.
Oh snap! I see it now!
I'm pretty sure that Monopoly was a NES game first, then the GB version was a secondary project. The GB version has a little bit of jank, especially the dice animation, but otherwise is very faithful to the NES version.
Probably. They were released at the same time so I figured they just made adjustments so each would run a little smoother
Now onto Master System games that were actually Game Gear games in disguise. LOL
Somebody missed my pledge of allegiance to the NES at the end ;)
I love seeing your subscriber number continuing to go up!
All thanks to your copy of 3D World Runner ;)
@@BigOleWords haha, and just like that, the music is now stuck in my head again - dah-da-da-da daaaaah da-da-daaaah da-da-dah dah dah, du-de-du-de-du-de-du-de-duuu da-da-dah dah dah…
"I'm married to the NES, and she's not much for swinging." ---Big Ol' Words 🗽
Put it on my tombstone!
Alfred Chicken was an Amiga game. I played the Amiga CD32 / CDTV version and I've also seen it on the Amiga 1200 before it was ever ported to any Nintendo console.
Cliffhanger also came out on Amiga and looked significantly nicer on it. I wonder if that was the game's target platform too.
That Monopoly game was fun, but the CPU was ruthless. If you play it solo, it will try to run you out of business as fast as possible!
Bastards
And of course Krusty's (Super) Fun House is itself a port of an Amiga game called Rat Trap. So if you're wondering what playing Pied Piper and leading rats to their deaths has to do with The Simpsons, the answer is "absolutely nothing".
That’s actually reassuring, thanks!
you probably know that krusty's funhouse was a carbon copy of rat-trap for the commodore amiga, home system we didn't know that at the time but already all flags were raised because it was unlikely there existed a decent simpsons game [other than the arcade game that we all were begging to be released on consoles], on top of that ti didn't have much to do with the simpsons universe and made zilch sense.
I’d never heard of Rat Trap, but you’re right something feels off about Funhouse immediately
This series is how I first noticed your channel, and why I subscribed. Good stuff!
Oh word? Awesome!
On the port argument: I think the word "port" implies that it was released a considerable amount of time after the source game and was "ported over" but I recall many of these games releasing almost simultaneously with each other (and were even advertised together). Semantics, sure, but something to consider.
Jurassic Park was also available for the SNES and looks LEAGUES better than the other two, so I'm assuming they ported that one to the NES and Gameboy.
You may be right!
Krusty's Fun House was also a SNES game. I don't know if there were many examples of triple ports at the time.
I think a few of these like Jurassic Park? I honestly haven’t explored the SNES versions too much :)
I remember renting Krusty’s Fun House for NES and actually having fun with it. Then I never thought about it again until this video 😝 anyways, because of its puzzle game format it make sense it was released on Game Boy. Definitely a solid game compared to other Simpson games. I was reading a different comment and learned it was a rebranding of something else, so I guess that makes sense
Easily the best Simpsons game on the NES and maybe SNES as well!
i'm sure everyone knows by now but the monopoly video games are so fast because they implement all of the rules that most people forget about or inadvertently break when playing the board game.
What's funny is this third collection is probably the best games of the three. I actually enjoy Yoshi and Alfred Chicken. And while Krusty's Fun House isn't great; It's leagues better than the other three Simpsons NES games.
You’re absolutely right, these are the best of the worst for sure
I dunno, I still have lots of love for the Star Wars NES game
(TESB sucks though. The graphics are worse, the music is worse, the controls are worse. It was a HUGE disappointment back in the day and only I played it like once as a rental, prior to the magic of emulation)
Some of these had also SNES-Ports: Krusty's Funhouse (a reskined Amiga-game) and Jurassic seem to have a similar level layout, the SNES-port has the first-person levels. There was an Alfred Chicken game for SNES but I don't know if it's similar. Jungle Book on the other hand is a total different game on the SNES.
I don’t think I’ve seen the Alfred Chicken on the SNES!
@@BigOleWords Sorry. It is Super Alfred Chicken.
Some of these games are on Game Gear, too. I found that I had Cliffhanger on a GG multi cart "Super 40 in 1" which actually 32 games with 8 doubles and more than half the games are SG-1000, I think?
Anyway, I don't have to spend the $100 to get a copy on NES so I can snowboard a corpse for 2 seconds. I'll just hold the screen right up to my eyes and it'll be awesome!!
Yeah but we both know that there is no better way to blow $100 than that!
@@BigOleWords I mean.... the CRT is literally 10 times the size of the GG screen...
But, it costs $300 just to go outside these days. I can't buy a $100 game for a while unless I do a trade.
Did you finish reading Song of Ice and Fire? I'm like halfway through the last book.
Amazingly, a fan fairly recently ported that Game Gear / SMS Sonic game to the Commodore 64! A C64 port of Super Mario Bros. was also created, but Nintendo demanded they pull it down. (But you can still find it without searching too hard.) SMB is a bit more difficult to play since the C64 only has one joystick button and SMB was designed for two, so they had to change how the controls work.
Huh cool! And yeah Sonics one button controls probably work better with the C64
"Most of these are PROBABLY ports of NES games and not the other way around"
You do know release dates exist right? It is VERY easy to verify this information instead of just making random stuff up and looking foolish?
You got me!
Now I've just got to get my hands on Cliffhanger! You really need to stop drawing my attention to truly bad games 😂
It is my favorite terrible game :)
Hey, Nice shirt. My friend stole my RTJ shirt.
That does not sound like a friend!
NES's Little Mermaid seems to be carbon copy of it's GB counterpart.
And little obscure one is on Famicom:
Hello Kitty World which is port of GameBoy's Balloon Kid (sequel to Balloon Fight) with kitty characters!
I love how all your vids are in 4:3
You know it!
One and only one of Jimmy Connors Spectators has coloured hair, blue. And she's wearing rayban wayfarers. Odd. And actually now that I look at it more closely the Jimmy Connors game is different on the Game Boy! If you look for the lady with the blue hair in the top-right corner of the screen, in the stands. You'll notice that she has three people to her right. If you look at the Game Boy game there is only one person to her right it may be the same lines of code used to create the gameplay but there are slight differences between the two it also looks like the ball is bigger in the game boy version and I don't mean just zoomed in I mean bigger in comparison to the tennis rackets. Lol monopoly takes forever because everyone playes it wrong, if you read the monopoly instructions it's way harder and goes much quicker
Damn dude you sleuthed out the truth to that mystery!
@@BigOleWords 😂😂🤣
i believe nintendo mostly wanted us to have the same experiences on the go and at home. we came full circle with the switch! only took 30 years for the hardware to catch up, no big deal.
Thats… has nothing to do with what this video series is about…
@@dieinfire920it does though. Devs no longer have to make games twice or port the same game for 2 Nintendo systems. It's all in one now. No cheap ports.
Haha I wish any of this had that much intention!
@@BigOleWords 🤣 insert Simpsons at least you tried cake gif lol but towards Nintendo and the devs of course
It's funny because Link's Awakening was originally planned to be a watered-down port of ALttP for GB, until wiser heads prevailed and it became its own thing.
And it only took 30 years for the division between "console" and "handheld" to be done away with! Will wonders never cease...
My windshield wipers' lowest setting is still too fast.
Haha mine too!
Love ya as always, Bimmy. Great series wrap up. Kudos for saying when you have no idea lol. Looking forward to Thursday. NES monopoly is friggin great
Yeah it is!
Seems as though the nes version is always the better choice since your not playing a zoomed in screen
With a few exceptions absolutely
love the videos very cool rocking the rtj merch
Props to the wife for the shirt :)
Is Cliffhanger the worst looking NES game ever? Maybe?
Yes it is! Even Lion King is a vast improvement
Some games can be designed for one system then stuff happens and its put onto another so some could've been developed for Gameboy first then something happened and it was put onto the nes first instead.
Hmmm maybe! Sounds reasonable for sure
Ill never understand anyone who wants to spend thousands upon thousands of dollars on games like this. Its the same wirh John Hancock. He'll say oh they only made 4 copies of this game and theyre $45,000 each but i own 3 of rhem! Why? It makes no sense? Nobody in their right mind will buy any of these games and when you die theyll probably all get donated to goodwill.
collectors gotta collect i guess. a lot of them barely ever get around to playing the good games, never mind the bad ones. They like the satisfaction of simply owning a rarity or complete set. :)
You honestly shouldn't be on here commenting about the things you don't understand because you can't afford them. I'm poor too dude, it's not about that. And honestly youtube is here for the people who can't afford things to live vicariously through. If your mad about it, get a better job, live in a different area, or just shut up. It's not conducive to anything
They buy a game, show it in a video and the video makes them money. That's how a lot of youtubers operate. And it's not just Gaming related, it's across many different types of content.
Why would I care what happens to them when I die, I’ll be dead! If my kids want to keep them, sell them, or burn them in a pyre to honor their fallen father that’s their call. Because again, I’ll be dead.
Really enjoy these series😃
Hey thanks, it’s been fun making them
@@BigOleWords It was really fun to see that and also to know which one could be gameboyish or a 1:1 port but with colors. Really really cool🙂
I'm curious if Tecmo bowl also fits in this category
Tecmo Bowl? I don’t think so, the GB port came out 2 years later.
@@BigOleWords ah ic, so a true port then rather than the other way
Did you intentionally grab video of you buying St Bimmy’s Place in the Monopoly footage?
Who me?! 🐣
what's the song that's used during 9:09? it sounds pleasant
Huh I actually don't remember! Probably from one of these games!
Hey, how come Whoopi Goldberg isn't on the cover of the NES cart Star Trek The Next Generation ? 🤔 🖖
Haha she wasn’t really on deck like that :)
Even though I was gifted the game Yoshi for the nes through Nintendo Power(it came in a box with my subscription claiming i was one of a few to test out the game and say if we liked it or not) and I wasn't into those types of games, it was a fun little game that was hard to put down!(which I reported) I do believe it wasn't a port of the gameboy other then an upgrade, for they had to change the layout of the screen a tad bit! Sure, I played both and at the time, they played the same, it just felt different to me so you can take my thoughts as well with a grain of salt!
How the hell did BoO have a Gameboy port and me not know about it?
BoO?
@@BigOleWords Battle of Olympus.
I love love love Paperboy II
❤️ 🗞️📰🚲📭
Does James Rolfe know about these videos?
One can only dream :)
I can't be the only one who thought Rolfe was never funny. I watched a couple of his videos many years ago and his "playing games badly while making faces" gimmick got old quick.
I _much_ prefer this style of review and retrospective.
this has been a really fun series!
Glad you liked it!
"spitting image" is the idiom. for some reason.
It is, but not when you’re punning on a split image ;)
And here I was thinking you were referencing the 1986 home computer sliding puzzle game of the same name... @@BigOleWords
@@BigOleWords oh. you're too clever for me! :D :D
or at least too clever for me on negative hours of sleep.
cheers!
What game is that at 1:51 ? It looked like an updated version of Legend of Kage. If so, I'd like to play it.
Zen the Intergalactic Ninja. I reviewed it here: th-cam.com/video/M4mAYDSKZz8/w-d-xo.htmlsi=tGssJWiQEujLUndl
@@BigOleWords Thanks. Just found your channel last night. I like your content.
@@user-jf6ij2jm4h Thanks, glad you dig it!
I was a fan of the Super Nintendo version of Krusty's Fun House, though I was never able to beat it. Sometime I'll get the Game Boy version to have a portable version.
It’s not too bad but way more confusing than it’s zoomed out siblings
By chance, are you an Atlanta native?
What gave it away?! ;)
@@BigOleWords Being another retro gaming TH-cam Atlanta guy who recognizes the unique intersection of Run The Jewels and Atlanta United
@@ChadBonin haha that's awesome!
NES Lion King is terrible. At least the GB version is a bit better.
Too true!
I would note that the NES uses a 6502-derived CPU instruction set, while the Gameboy uses a 8088-derived CPU instruction set - the assembly code for games on these two platforms is entirely incompatible, and so a game would need to be re-coded from scratch to port it from one platform to the other. (And no, you can't "just use C" or some other higher-level language - even the object code generated by C compilers of the era was far too slow and bloated for these puny systems. It was hand-written assembly all the way!)
If you want to talk about "enhanced ports", you should be talking about dual-release NES and SNES games! The SNES CPU instruction set is fully backward-compatible to the NES CPU instruction set, and there are even considerations for running NES games "directly" on the SNES (e.g. ensuring the controller is memory-mapped to the same addresses, having the default tile and sprite drawing modes on the SNES match the NES, etc.) Likely many NES+SNES dual releases were made by coding the NES game first, and then taking that codebase and "adding stuff" to make it into a SNES game (with testing of the port being immediately possible directly on SNES hardware.) Might be something you could explore in another of these series :)
That being said - why do those NES games you mention look like ported GB games? Very likely because the studio aimed to create two games at the _same_ time, using less than 2x the effort, by creating the _assets_ (backgrounds, sprites) only once, in a *lowest-common-denominator format* that would work for both the NES and GB. Which meant that the assets had to be legible both in black-and-white and in color - and that the color versions had to just be the black-and-white assets "with a color palette applied."
The constraint of "legibility in black-and-white", leads to two options for designs for GB assets: either they are drawn mostly "empty"/white, only having sparse areas of "highlight color" - which gives the NES games an "under-colored" look; _or_, if they're clever, the GB assets are drawn with large patches of dark-grey + light-grey, and the dark-grey is colorized as color while the light-grey is colorized as white or another color depending on the particular tile. This leads to the "blocky-coloration" look on the sprites in some of the other games you mentioned.
I don't think the ports are as hard as you are implying here. Sure, they aren't binary or source compatible so you can't just cross-assemble.
But I'm fairly confident it'd only take a single decently seasoned dev a couple weeks or maybe a couple months to do a lot of these ports, assuming they didn't have to hand-disassemble the original game on 1980s computers. Sure, you have to "reprogram it". But with full original source available, with all the variables and comments intact, it's far from having to do the port from scratch.
The game code and hardware weren't really that complex, and those games look like they were not pushing up against limits in a way that would cause a need for a lot of hard decision making or workarounds. The ports would probably be mostly rote.
I do appreciate your more detailed speculation on what happened, though. I think what you're saying is basically right. I just think the distinction you're making of port vs two-parallel-games doesn't result in a difference.
@@blarghblargh it's not like a from-scratch port, no, but it's a difficult one, because the NES and Gameboy are each very constrained but in different ways.
The NES's 6502 only has three 8-bit registers, runs at 2MHz, and has access to only 2KB of WRAM; while the GB's Z80 has 14 16-bit registers, runs at 4MHz, and has access to 8KB of WRAM _plus_ another 8KB of VRAM. (Thus, squishing business-logic code down _from_ the GB _to_ the NES is an extremely frustrating optimization exercise.)
Meanwhile, the NES has a PPU whose access to CHR ROM can be intermediated by memory-mapper chips; the GB has nothing like this, as all CHR data must be loaded into the GB PPU's 8KB of internal VRAM. Thus, animations that are "free" by "riding the beam" on the NES, must instead be done on the GB by pre-compositing tiles in CPU WRAM before copying them to VRAM per frame. Also, the NES PPU allows the drawing of 64 8x8 sprites per frame (with 8 per scan-line) while the GB PPU allows for 40 8x8 sprites per frame (with 10 per scan-line.)
Like I said, if you plan for it, you can write code and plan asset use in a way that fits the lowest common denominator of these two sets of requirements. If you do that (by e.g. only using three registers even on the GB, not using any mappers on the NES, etc.), then porting in either direction is trivial. But if you plan one game or the other first, only thinking you're developing the game for one system first, then you'd intuitively make use of those features - and so develop yourself into a corner at porting time, that you'd have to work your way out of.
@@sentropez1337 I agree that if you didn't think ahead of time about the port and were trying to maximize your use of the hardware glitz, then you'd be in trouble, or have to get creative and burn through a lot of effort. but I wasn't intending to imply that's what they did.
My hypothesis: their whole team knew they were going to build for both. they built on NES first. they chose not to use a lot of fancy mapper tricks (little to no pseudo-parallax, few to no animated tiles). they used a reduced graphics complexity that works fine on the gameboy as well. I think there's evidence for this in the video. As James said, the gfx are kinda a lowest common denominator. And I'm not seeing a lot of the telltale mapper tricks in my skim-through. and we have a case of animated crowd graphics in the wrestling game just not being animated on the gboy.
once the NES version was done, they ported to gboy. the port only took a few weeks, because all the register and ram and sprite count per line restrictions were already constrained to the lowest common denominator of the two systems.
Maybe we're quibbling over minute details. Maybe this is close enough to "parallel development" to just call it that. Tho I think I'd personally rather manage it this way than try to have two teams working on parallel products together and bickering over features to include, or stepping on one another's toes. just tell the artist to make gfx that work on both systems, and tell the programmer "you're gonna have to port to the gboy in a few weeks, so don't do anything too fancy"
and after having written this and re-reading what you wrote, I think we're basically in agreement :P :D
This guy is a sex offender for touching a little girl. Don't support him
@@blarghblarghThis guy is a sex offender for touching a little girl. Don't support him
Yoshi is so boring. Play Hatris instead
Hatris rules!
Enjoyed this series. I will continue to check this $hit out
Glad you liked it :)
👉 🤛
Must be nice to be rich I'll never know what it's like.
Save your woes for other outlets or channels. This a channel featuring media from 35+ years ago, if you can't afford this hobby maybe you should take the same effort you had commenting into filling out job applications.
@@christianhunt7382 that's kinda harsh. I don't make much money either, but due to my long term health condition which makes it super difficult to find suitable work, never mind something that pays a decent wage.
When I get rich I’ll check back in to describe to you how it feels in detail.
@carn9507 anyone can enjoy an emulator and download for free. Collecting is one thing, enjoying the thing your collecting is another. It may be harsh, and everyone's lives are different, but I stand by my statement, if you have the time to make ignorant comments on TH-cam about finances you have time to fill out applications or research better money opportunities instead of hating on a guy who's sharing his love of nostalgic games with the world.
@@christianhunt7382 Yeah and I do emulate and have roms (especially after having to sell off my entire vintage console and games collection I had built up since I was a child in the 80s) but you don't know anything about whether they've got a job or not or a health condition or not. Their comment didn't seem like an ignorant statement to me. I didn't think they were hating on Big Ole Words much myself, but just a self-deprecating and/or sarcastic comment about collecting old video games and the silly costs of some of those games in general. Especially lousy games like some of the ones shown here that are expensive more for their rarity than their quality.
👉🤛
Bunches and bunches, punches is thrown until you’re frontless!
Love this concept another homerun my man!!
Hey thanks!
This is a good series
Glad you like it!
Always stoked to see a new video. One of my favorite retro channels.
Hey thanks for saying that!