Post for: #games ^{(3 Posts)}

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.

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.