GEMVENTURE: 8-BIT PUZZLE QUEST FOR YOUR NES
Very well spotted by the always reliable Tiny Cartridge: GemVenture, a homebrew NES game by Tom Livak that manages to capture basically all of the underlying spirit of Infinite Interactive’s PuzzleQuest shrunk down to 8-bit form.
There’s no quest, and no real sense of character beyond picking a class for its set of spells, but where I honestly thought I’d give the ROM a quick run and never think about it again, it honestly sucked me in for longer than I’d like to admit.
What it does differently, and perhaps smartly, for its size, is provide both spiked gems to inflict damage on your opponent and heart gems to heal yourself on the same playfield, which, combined with its move-timer, gives a much faster paced push and pull feel to the puzzle battles than the game that inspired it: a true one-more-go-er.
See more posts about: homebrew, Offworld Originals
DRESS YOUR RACERS IN RED AND BLACK
A very good update comes via Tiny Cartridge today, who missed (as we did) news of a homebrew contest for Nintendo’s much-beleaguered Virtual Boy that netted not many entries, but at very least two racing remakes: the ubiquitous Mario Kart (of course), and, even better, a fancified duotone version of Outrun.
Not only that, but it’s pointed me toward the fact that Vectrex.biz’s Richard Hutchinson, creator of the first flashcart for 80s home vectorbeam console Vectrex (which I’d be all over if I didn’t already own Sean Kelly’s excellent 60 game multicart) has also produced a flashcart for the Virtual Boy. The cart currently appears to be sold out, though, so it looks like I’m going to have to wait to emerge again from those long VB nights with that trademark panda-eyed visor-line around my face.
VB Racing, a homebrew Outrun clone for the Virtual Boy [Tiny Cartridge]
See more posts about: homebrew, Offworld Originals
