Ever stop and consider a game’s treatment of death? We’re talking death as a game mechanic, death as a story element, or maybe death as a game theme. Death abounds!
This week, we look at death in games and how it’s incorporated into a variety of genres. We also explore how the treatment of death in games has evolved over time, and how our preferences for its inclusion as a game mechanic have changed as we’ve become stuffy adults with full schedules. Various salient examples of death handled trivially or in a frustrating manner are discussed and contrasted with what we think are some better approaches.
We also go over some other fine video game traditions such as permadeath, limited vs infinite continues, forced backtracking as punishment for player death, uninformed choices that lead to instadeath, and inconsistencies with narrative death and game mechanic death (we’re wincing at you, Final Fantasy VII).
Also, how many times can you say “death” in one podcast description?
After having a couple of podcasts where we discussed the indie homebrew scene and ROM hacking, we decided to hone in on one magical source of nerd power known as Tomas Guinan who has delved into both of these worlds.
In this week’s special episode of The Vagabond Gamecast we conduct our very first interview! Can you smell that Nova Scotian musk yet? That’s right folks, today, we’ve got not one, not two, but THREE of Truro’s finest current/former citizens in your ears today. Tomas joins us for over an hour of chatting about his ongoing Kickstarter for the Eskimo Bob NES game.
Eskimo Bob for the NES is an arcade-style puzzle-platformer with 64 levels, 15 enemy types, two playable characters, two support characters, and a fully functional password system allowing you to save your progress the good old-fashioned way.
Come along as we discuss things such as:
- ・Who is Tomas Guinan?
- ・What is Eskimo Bob?
- ・What experience did he have before this project with game development?
- ・What was Tomas’ inspiration for starting this project?
- ・How long has it taken?
- ・How does one develop for the Nintendo Entertainment System?
- ・How does one go about making physical carts for the NES?
- ・ROM Hacking / Translating
- ・What’s it like to have a Kickstarter?
Let’s go!
Lots to talk about this time around everybody!
The hacker bug has bitten Stephen these days and he’s devoted some funds to a new computer purchase to feed his hobby. And thus sets up our discussion this time around about homebrew and independent development!
After a little catch-up chatter, we talk motivations for getting involved in a burgeoning development community and being part of that movement (in this case, VR) before lightly touching on some future projects in the works.
We contrast indie projects that look to create new experiences (again, VR) with those that recreate classic experiences (dev on older systems), which is a great segue into an introduction to a project Matt’s childhood neighbor and pal, Tomas Guinan currently has up on Kickstarter. It’s for an NES game he’s built based on a popular Newgrounds series of flash cartoons he created in the early 2000’s called “Eskimo Bob” that has hit its funding goal and is a great example of a successful retro game console-dev project.
We also spend a morsel of the ‘cast on the homebrew dev scene that includes GBA and PS1 dev tutorials out there, and Brian Provinciano’s classic console ports of Retro City Rampage.
Finally, Contra 4 (“Dual Spirits” in Japan) for Nintendo DS is impossi-hard and Matt can’t beat it, to his shame. Woo-hah
Hope you’ve got a great set of headphones to go along with this week’s gamecast! Today we’re sitting down to do a side-by-side audio comparison of the Famicom Disk System / Nintendo Entertainment System editions of the original Legend of Zelda thanks to the YouTube video that was put up by Clyde Madelin in support of his Legends of Localization, Book1: The Legend of Zelda.
It’s easy to go down a rabbit hole, if you’re interested in learning more about the audio hardware on these old consoles. Definitely an intersting world to delve into!
There’s nothing quite like curling up by a fire on a cold, cold, Canadian, winter night with a heartwarming book. Which is why it’s a shame that video game companies have given up on the practice of including fine literature with their titles. This week, our two heroes embark on a journey of nostalgia (what else is new) for the long lost days of instruction manuals that were ready and willing to bring us up to speed, and make us feel at home before launching us into hundreds of hours of electronic ecstacy.
No, but seriously, if you weren’t around in the early era of gaming (or even if you were!), do yourself a favour and go get your paws on some of those old papers that were filled with fun stories and artwork. Some of our favourites, which we mention in this podcast, include:
- Dragon Warrior IV
- Final Fantasy Tactics
- The Legend of Zelda
- Metroid
- Sim City
- Street Fighter II
- Super Mario Bros 3
Some other interesting things to check out is this talk on Gamasutra about how long it takes to get into Zelda games.
Also be sure to check out this analysis by Egoraptor on how Mega Man X teaches the player how the game works without relying on explicit dialogue.