I was wandering around the expo floor at PAX East last year when I noticed Earthion at the Limited Run demo arcade. I had a lot of fun playing it on the floor so I bought the full game on Steam. It's a quality shmup! For me the difficulty really spikes on stage 3 and that's where I got stuck, though I did make it to stage 4 once or twice. The initial release had some bullet visibility issues that were improved in subsequent updates. The default CRT filter is fun but I turned it off almost immediately for more visual clarity.
Haven't seen so many uninformed comments in a while
on HN :-/ This is a MegaDrive game running in an emulator for the modern ports. Made by Makoto Wada and Yuzo Koshiro. Doesn't get mich more authentic than that imho. Original hardware, original artists. I understand it's not everyone's tea (anymore) tho.
Don't you know - everyone's an expert because they saw a YouTube video about how modern pixel art isn't authentic...
Seriously, this game is a miracle, and the amount of love Ancient put into it is unlike anything we've ever seen for a modern commercial release on hardware that came out in 1988!
It certainly beats out a good portion of the games originally released on the Mega Drive.
A lot of people commenting seem unaware it’s an actual Sega Genesis game. It will get a cart release. The modern platform support is via emulators.
It’s extremely well crafted. I’d argue it has the level of polish you’d expect from a very well made modern release. That is not the case with a lot of Genesis era shmups.
It's not a Mega Drive-"Style" shoot-em-up, it is a Mega Drive shoot-em-up. 100% Mega Drive code, with a physical cartridge release planned for later this year. It runs on other platforms via emulation.
I bought this on Steam last year and it is a great game! A lot of pace and impressive graphics and sound. The music is made by Yuzo Koshiro of Streets of Rage II fame.
You don't even need to buy the cartridge version if you own an SD card adapter.
Does anyone have a video of it on an actual CRT TV? Looking at the youtube gameplay, it looks like it would have some problems with text on the overscan getting cropped.
I am curious how some of the effects look on a CRT.
There's a bunch on Youtube. The art has the typical issues of modern 16-bit and 8-bit games where the designers and artists are not targeting the full hardware stack of the era. Rather, they're targeting simulated machines (emulators) and sometimes also flash carts on original hardware but rendered on modern display hardware.
What I notice is that the highly detailed sprite work doesn't produce the elegant artifacting of the era, where pixel bleeding and whatnot would merge nearby colours together to produce desired artistic effects. More often what I see is a smudged mess with noise.
Pixel bleeding? Are you referring to color distortion caused by the use of composite video? Why would you expect to see that in a screenshot viewed on your LCD screen? You'd have to actually see the game output via composite from a Mega Drive to a CRT to see it (which you would, since the art uses dithering well).
This is one of the best-looking Mega Drive games released in a very long time, developed by the company responsible for games like Streets of Rage and Beyond Oasis.
It doesn't seem that bad to me? Most of the problems that I see in that video look like recording issues where the camera isn't handling max brightness well. Recording CRTs is notoriously difficult!
Generally pixel art created for LCDs also looks good on CRTs, with tiny text being an obvious exception.
It bothers me when a new creative work tries to adopt a distinct historical style without understanding its form, structure, context, constraints and motivation. Without that understanding it's just derivative imitation which might evoke echoes of the original but can never match, add to it or take it new directions.
While it may sound odd to want new pixel art to be "authentic" in the same way as new music should respect the structure and form of styles like ragtime, blues or jazz, I think it applies equally. The skilled artists who hand-crafted pixels to look their best on CRTs did specific things to leverage CRT bloom and blending, scanlines, composite color artifacting and interlace dithering.
Are you referring to Earthion specifically or just making some grandiose comment about pixel art in the good old days?
What are "CRT bloom and blending"? Are you referring to artifacts caused by composite video output? That is not due to the CRT but rather the signal distortion. RGB output on a CRT will look pixel perfect and colors will not merge. I'd say most gamers using original hardware on CRTs these days are using RGB, so if anything, it reflects the current user trends if the Earthion designer did not use dithering (which he did, making this comment irrelevant).
So you believe the artists responsible for this game graphics do not understand all of this ? Would you care to explain exactly how you came to this conclusion ? Because in my non expert eyes, it looks as good or even better as any old school megadrive game on a CRT.
By the way, some of my favorite games on Megadrive are homebrews, most notably Astebros and other Neofid games.
That's usually not a problem with Mega Drive/Genesis games, as they typically don't draw beyond the 224 lines that are visible on a (correctly calibrated) CRT TV. I've played this game on a B&O MX4000 CRT using an original Mega Drive and I didn't notice any issues.
This game is so close to be amazing but the bullet visibility problems bring it down greatly. If they can solve the pixel layer limitations, even if it’s only on the non-MD version, so enemy bullets are always above everything else, then it’s a an easy buy. Until then, it’s just only if you’re a dedicated shmup guy that loves MD games.
Sega are famously far less litigious than most games companies. They know about modders, community servers (for example PSO servers) and even fans who release brand new games using Sega mascots like Sonic. In fact (IIRC) that’s how Sonic Mania began life.
This might be different given it’s a company logo and thus trademark. But I wouldn’t be so sure they’d get a cease and desist like if someone imitated Nintendos logo.
I was personally put off by the fact that the MegaDrive limitations actually negatively impact the gameplay, while there are little gains that I see in that "limited space fostering creativity" that you would expect from the pitch.
In particular, there are bullet visibility issues (see the Electric Underground's review [0] for a more detailed analysis) which I think show how the console limitations would need a much deeper mastery to properly support such modern game design thinking.
However, "a Mega Drive game!" is a great sales point to the majority of people invested in the nostalgia market, with only a surface-level interest of what these games are.
It's why it made it to the font page of hn, and not it's perfect 'traditional' sprite art, or its Yuzo Koshiro soundtrack.
I like shmups because they are pretty much "pure game design"; games are such a complete package of story, interactive experience, etc that it's hard to separate what comes from where. This is what makes design experimentation so interesting and rich.
I cannot comment because why this made it to the front page, but new releases are still common for retro consoles. In fact you’d be surprised just how many games are still released for the 8 and 16 bit era machines.
I don't know I liked how each video game console at the time had its own audio and graphical signature. We were a Sega house but we enjoyed swapping our console for a few months with the SNES or PC Engine of friends/cousins and I think they liked it too.
It might have more to do with the game studios ecosystem more than technicalities given some games were ported on all 3 consoles with only minor differencies though.
I would describe both the audio and graphical signature of the megadrive as "Metalic" (a bit amiga 500 like but with FM sounds instead of samples) while the SNES one was more childish/cartoony (same as subsequent consoles from the brand really) and the pc engine one had more flat[1] graphics but more saturated/rock'n'roll sound signature.
[1] probably because it was halfway inbetween the sega master system and megadrive/snes in term of gfx capabilities.
Are you judging by experiencing them on a CRT, or from modern displays? The range of colours was certainty broad enough, but I agree that the screenshots tend to look a bit bland. I wonder how much this came down to variance of the video signal at the analog stage. You had knobs for brightness, contrast, and saturation instead of the digital tweaking you have now. Perhaps it is that the color representation of live video has improved so that the knob level adjustment isn't needed anymore, but the output of the old consoles were tuned that level of adjustment people used to use to make the original video look nomal.
Specifically the SMD global palette had limitations around desaturated/pastel colours, with choice in saturated colours. And with no sprite blending, opportunities for subtle tones are further limited.
Seriously, this game is a miracle, and the amount of love Ancient put into it is unlike anything we've ever seen for a modern commercial release on hardware that came out in 1988!
It certainly beats out a good portion of the games originally released on the Mega Drive.
It’s extremely well crafted. I’d argue it has the level of polish you’d expect from a very well made modern release. That is not the case with a lot of Genesis era shmups.
You don't even need to buy the cartridge version if you own an SD card adapter.
I am curious how some of the effects look on a CRT.
What I notice is that the highly detailed sprite work doesn't produce the elegant artifacting of the era, where pixel bleeding and whatnot would merge nearby colours together to produce desired artistic effects. More often what I see is a smudged mess with noise.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RWlprFDAobs
Pixel bleeding? Are you referring to color distortion caused by the use of composite video? Why would you expect to see that in a screenshot viewed on your LCD screen? You'd have to actually see the game output via composite from a Mega Drive to a CRT to see it (which you would, since the art uses dithering well).
This is one of the best-looking Mega Drive games released in a very long time, developed by the company responsible for games like Streets of Rage and Beyond Oasis.
Generally pixel art created for LCDs also looks good on CRTs, with tiny text being an obvious exception.
While it may sound odd to want new pixel art to be "authentic" in the same way as new music should respect the structure and form of styles like ragtime, blues or jazz, I think it applies equally. The skilled artists who hand-crafted pixels to look their best on CRTs did specific things to leverage CRT bloom and blending, scanlines, composite color artifacting and interlace dithering.
What are "CRT bloom and blending"? Are you referring to artifacts caused by composite video output? That is not due to the CRT but rather the signal distortion. RGB output on a CRT will look pixel perfect and colors will not merge. I'd say most gamers using original hardware on CRTs these days are using RGB, so if anything, it reflects the current user trends if the Earthion designer did not use dithering (which he did, making this comment irrelevant).
By the way, some of my favorite games on Megadrive are homebrews, most notably Astebros and other Neofid games.
This might be different given it’s a company logo and thus trademark. But I wouldn’t be so sure they’d get a cease and desist like if someone imitated Nintendos logo.
Yikes. Seems like i'm not getting a physical copy then. I'm not giving any money to LRG. Which is a shame because it looks like a cool game.
Working to the limitations of 16-bit consoles to produce a modern-feel of game play is something that cannot be vibe coded.
R-Type wasn’t the inventor of the genre and it’s far from the last entry in it too.
However, "a Mega Drive game!" is a great sales point to the majority of people invested in the nostalgia market, with only a surface-level interest of what these games are. It's why it made it to the font page of hn, and not it's perfect 'traditional' sprite art, or its Yuzo Koshiro soundtrack.
I like shmups because they are pretty much "pure game design"; games are such a complete package of story, interactive experience, etc that it's hard to separate what comes from where. This is what makes design experimentation so interesting and rich.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ELcS_IyXygs&t=2788s
It might have more to do with the game studios ecosystem more than technicalities given some games were ported on all 3 consoles with only minor differencies though.
I would describe both the audio and graphical signature of the megadrive as "Metalic" (a bit amiga 500 like but with FM sounds instead of samples) while the SNES one was more childish/cartoony (same as subsequent consoles from the brand really) and the pc engine one had more flat[1] graphics but more saturated/rock'n'roll sound signature.
[1] probably because it was halfway inbetween the sega master system and megadrive/snes in term of gfx capabilities.
There are plenty of gorgeous games on the Mega Drive in terms of color. 61 colors on screen at once is more than enough.