The Video Games Thread

[Garrett Gilchrist]

OpenBOR is an engine for making beat-em-up style games, like Final Fight or Streets of Rage. It's an extension of the fangame Beats of Rage, and has been used to create many games since.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PSK46MBzpwc

[Garrett Gilchrist]

Homestuck followup coming.

"President Clinton gives birth to Bigfoot!"

PS: Why does Hussie still think he can use copyrighted posters like Metroid, Tiny Toons, My Little Pony, etc? This game was funded to 2.5 million dollars ... even if .7 mill got stolen afterward ... It's a professional game, he should respect copyright.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PGk7CEA-O_s

[Uncle Sporkums]

1930's throwback Cuphead now delayed until mid-2017.
https://t.co/8NAsHSCJqG

[JustinHoskie]

I recently came across the first person puzzle action horror game "Bendy and the Ink Machine," and after playing a bit of it, I decided to share. Playing as an ex-animator, the first chapter is set in an old cartoon workshop. Summoned there by a friend and old colleague, you come to find a few cartoons have gotten a life of their own.

The first chapter is pay-what-you-want, including free. More info on the game, and how it can be supported, can be found here: http://gamejolt.com/games/bendy-and-the ... ine/231092

[AfricanShe-Hulk22]

Did anyone see any of the amazing reveals at this years E3? Not a big fan of First Person Shooters, but Wolfenstein 2: The New Colossus looks really cool. Also excited at the new Spider-man game! Might have to buy a PS4.

http://gematsu.com/2017/06/spider-man-p ... alkthrough

[Garrett Gilchrist]

Here is an impressive hack of the original Legend of Zelda. There are several hacks out there which update the graphics of the NES game to resemble the later Game Boy and SNES games, but this goes far beyond that. It really looks and plays like a much later Zelda game, either a Game Boy Color game or Link to the Past.

https://www.romhacking.net/hacks/2136/

[Garrett Gilchrist]

Super Mario USA artwork, Famicom.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DLaCV-nXcAAcBFc.jpg:orig
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DLaCU-DX4AUs5Ik.jpg:orig

[Garrett Gilchrist]

Night Trap movie edit.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AN9s3-F ... e=youtu.be

[Garrett Gilchrist]

https://cdn.flickeringmyth.com/wp-conte ... acrade.png

Both Donkey Kong and the Super Mario Bros. franchise are heavily based on Popeye. Many of the design choices early on make much more sense in that context, and the influence continues today. Nintendo (and Shigeru Miyamoto) developed a Popeye arcade game released in 1982, which is not dissimilar to Donkey Kong, but for the 1981 game they had briefly lost the rights to Popeye and Miyamoto subbed in new characters. It's not hard to imagine Popeye, Olive Oyl and Brutus or Bluto in place of Mario, Pauline and Donkey Kong.

Indeed the actual sprite of Pauline in the game is designed almost identically to the Olive Oyl sprite in Popeye, wearing the same style of dress and footwear. To an extent this even survives in the design of Princess Peach.

https://www.arcadeicons.com/media/djcat ... peye1a.png

Pauline was never drawn to resemble Olive Oyl in the promo art, however. Instead she was designed to look like Fay Wray, star of King Kong:

https://vignette2.wikia.nocookie.net/ni ... -prefix=en

But in all the Donkey Kong promo art, Mario resembles Popeye, much more than he would later on.

It's not hard to imagine an animated Fleischer-style treatment of Donkey Kong, in the style of the early Popeye cartoons, set on a construction site with oil flames which suddenly come alive, Fleischer style, and other hazards that Mario has to avoid. But Mario suddenly becomes invincible when he gets the hammer - not unlike Popeye and his spinach, and the first of many such powerups in a Mario game.

Pauline was later given dark hair to differentiate her from Princess Peach, star of the Super Mario Bros games. But are they really different characters? To this day Bowser, king of the Koopas, keeps kidnapping Peach, and it's basically the same dynamic that Mario had with Donkey Kong and Pauline - a dynamic inspired by Popeye, Brutus (or Bluto) and Olive Oyl.

Since we didn't see Peach get kidnapped the first time round, this dynamic isn't as clear onscreen in the original 1985 Super Mario Bros as it was in the 1981 Donkey Kong, but it's very clear in more recent installments. It's also clear in the original Super Mario Bros box art, by Miyamoto himself:

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-lLPZauMX0Qw/T ... xfront.jpg
https://static.giantbomb.com/uploads/or ... ros_jp.jpg

This is an iconic image of Mario, used in the US for the release of Super Mario Bros 2. It shows that Mario was no longer intended to resemble Popeye, but that this Popeye-like dynamic of rescuing Peach from the brutish Bowser would continue in the franchise to this day.

[Arnaud]

Early american promo art for Donkey Kong was all designed by Leslie Cabarga who wrote an essential book about the Fleischers and has been in charge of Betty Boop licensing artwork for many years, so it's no wonder that it seems familiar to you ;)