3 ms·

Kirby’s Adventure feels so distinctly modern in a way no other official NES game I’m aware of does. It almost feels like it’s from another time period. It was

Kirby’s Adventure feels so distinctly modern in a way no other official NES game I’m aware of does. It almost feels like it’s from another time period. It was in fact a very late release, but even so...

Shared404 5y ago
I just looked up a video, and you're not kidding! If I'd just been shown a screenshot, I would've guessed it was SNES!
- ahartmetz 5y ago
  It even has a pseudo-3D effect when walking on the outside of round towers: https://youtu.be/rJXM4EPbPe0?t=2523 https://youtu.be/rJXM4EPbPe0?t=2523
  - aidenn0 5y ago
    Other NES games had a similar effect e.g battletoads[1] 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YtDXjhVdkUM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YtDXjhVdkUM
- virtue3 5y ago
  The color palette is a good reason it's NES vs SNES. But yeah, gameplay wise this is pretty impressive. You can tell in a few spots it gets weird when there are a lot of sprites on the screen / moving. Overall I think it's similar in quality to megaman3 etc. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dmuWCwTel-g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dmuWCwTel-g Yeah wow these games came a long way on that platform.
  - salamandersauce 5y ago
    It helps that mappers added a lot of functionality. IIRC Super Mario Bros. is the "best" you could do on base Famicom hardware. Later titles typically rely on mappers to allow for not only increased game size but potentially improved sound, and graphical effects like scrolling in multiple directions, saving, etc.
- Wowfunhappy 5y ago
  I don't actually think the graphics are particularly impressive, aside from a handful of pseudo-3D effects. It's definitely recognizable as an NES game to me. But in terms of game and level design, I just think Kirby's Adventure has a more modern sensibility to it. It's the kind of game I can just pick up and play for an hour without realizing it (and not in a doomscroll-y way). Perhaps if I was more studied in game design I'd be able to pick out exactly what it was doing differently. I suspect it largely comes down to the controls and the level design—and even the simple fact that it's not punishingly difficult.
Tiktaalik 5y ago
Later Nintendo carts did add more hardware into the carts to extend their capabilities so given that Kirby is such a late release, there's good odds there's hardware in there that allows for better graphics and other tricks that a 'barebones' NES cart from day one would never be capable of.
- dormento 5y ago
  Allow me to geek out a little. I love this stuff. According to [1] Kirby uses the Nintendo MMC-3 mapper [2], which brings some nifty features like a scanline counter. This can be used for finer control of scrolling regions/screen splitting (horizontal only). The scanline counter, alongside the swappable PRG banks and a theoretical max ROM size of 3216 CHR + 328 PRG = 768Kb enabled developers to really push the system to its limits, with advanced scroll tricks, providing for impressive parallax scrolling (while also presenting a status bar). The CPU was still a limitation though. Some late NES games were at least partially written in C (at least you can see C format strings in some of the Koei strategy games), but it was mostly fine tuned, hand coded, 100% organic 6502 assembly. As for mappers, there are more advanced ones, like the MMC5 (which enables things like 8x8 color regions, scanline IRQs and expandable memory), but no game ever really took advantage of it. Maybe a matter of keeping optins open in case they had to switch to another mapper for cost cutting measures, dunno. -- [1] https://nesdir.github.io/D7794AFC_USA.html https://nesdir.github.io/D7794AFC_USA.html [2] https://wiki.nesdev.org/w/index.php/MMC3 https://wiki.nesdev.org/w/index.php/MMC3

Shared404 5y ago

I just looked up a video, and you're not kidding! If I'd just been shown a screenshot, I would've guessed it was SNES!

ahartmetz 5y ago
It even has a pseudo-3D effect when walking on the outside of round towers: https://youtu.be/rJXM4EPbPe0?t=2523 https://youtu.be/rJXM4EPbPe0?t=2523
- aidenn0 5y ago
  Other NES games had a similar effect e.g battletoads[1] 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YtDXjhVdkUM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YtDXjhVdkUM
virtue3 5y ago
The color palette is a good reason it's NES vs SNES. But yeah, gameplay wise this is pretty impressive. You can tell in a few spots it gets weird when there are a lot of sprites on the screen / moving. Overall I think it's similar in quality to megaman3 etc. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dmuWCwTel-g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dmuWCwTel-g Yeah wow these games came a long way on that platform.
- salamandersauce 5y ago
  It helps that mappers added a lot of functionality. IIRC Super Mario Bros. is the "best" you could do on base Famicom hardware. Later titles typically rely on mappers to allow for not only increased game size but potentially improved sound, and graphical effects like scrolling in multiple directions, saving, etc.
Wowfunhappy 5y ago
I don't actually think the graphics are particularly impressive, aside from a handful of pseudo-3D effects. It's definitely recognizable as an NES game to me. But in terms of game and level design, I just think Kirby's Adventure has a more modern sensibility to it. It's the kind of game I can just pick up and play for an hour without realizing it (and not in a doomscroll-y way). Perhaps if I was more studied in game design I'd be able to pick out exactly what it was doing differently. I suspect it largely comes down to the controls and the level design—and even the simple fact that it's not punishingly difficult.

Tiktaalik 5y ago

Later Nintendo carts did add more hardware into the carts to extend their capabilities so given that Kirby is such a late release, there's good odds there's hardware in there that allows for better graphics and other tricks that a 'barebones' NES cart from day one would never be capable of.

dormento 5y ago
Allow me to geek out a little. I love this stuff. According to [1] Kirby uses the Nintendo MMC-3 mapper [2], which brings some nifty features like a scanline counter. This can be used for finer control of scrolling regions/screen splitting (horizontal only). The scanline counter, alongside the swappable PRG banks and a theoretical max ROM size of 3216 CHR + 328 PRG = 768Kb enabled developers to really push the system to its limits, with advanced scroll tricks, providing for impressive parallax scrolling (while also presenting a status bar). The CPU was still a limitation though. Some late NES games were at least partially written in C (at least you can see C format strings in some of the Koei strategy games), but it was mostly fine tuned, hand coded, 100% organic 6502 assembly. As for mappers, there are more advanced ones, like the MMC5 (which enables things like 8x8 color regions, scanline IRQs and expandable memory), but no game ever really took advantage of it. Maybe a matter of keeping optins open in case they had to switch to another mapper for cost cutting measures, dunno. -- [1] https://nesdir.github.io/D7794AFC_USA.html https://nesdir.github.io/D7794AFC_USA.html [2] https://wiki.nesdev.org/w/index.php/MMC3 https://wiki.nesdev.org/w/index.php/MMC3