Earthion: A New Mega Drive-Style Shoot-Em-Up
earthiongame.com122 points by MrBuddyCasino 13 hours ago
122 points by MrBuddyCasino 13 hours ago
Haven't seen so many uninformed comments in a while on HN :-/ This is a MegaDrive game running in an emulator for the modern ports. Made by Makoto Wada and Yuzo Koshiro. Doesn't get mich more authentic than that imho. Original hardware, original artists. I understand it's not everyone's tea (anymore) tho.
Just to put it out there, since some people might not know, Koshiro who is probably best known for Streets of Rage, is widely regarded as a master video game composer, right up there with Nobuo Uematsu (Final Fantasy) and Koji Kondo (Mario/Zelda).
Give the Stage 1 music from ActRaiser a listen to see (or hear) what I mean:
Don't you know - everyone's an expert because they saw a YouTube video about how modern pixel art isn't authentic...
Seriously, this game is a miracle, and the amount of love Ancient put into it is unlike anything we've ever seen for a modern commercial release on hardware that came out in 1988!
It certainly beats out a good portion of the games originally released on the Mega Drive.
While this is an informative comment, did HN start deleting comments? These comments you mention do not seem to exist...
People do delete their own comments after they've had a moment to consider what they've written. It's an honorable thing to do, IMO.
A lot of people commenting seem unaware it’s an actual Sega Genesis game. It will get a cart release. The modern platform support is via emulators.
It’s extremely well crafted. I’d argue it has the level of polish you’d expect from a very well made modern release. That is not the case with a lot of Genesis era shmups.
It's not a Mega Drive-"Style" shoot-em-up, it is a Mega Drive shoot-em-up. 100% Mega Drive code, with a physical cartridge release planned for later this year. It runs on other platforms via emulation.
I bought this on Steam last year and it is a great game! A lot of pace and impressive graphics and sound. The music is made by Yuzo Koshiro of Streets of Rage II fame.
You don't even need to buy the cartridge version if you own an SD card adapter.
I was wandering around the expo floor at PAX East last year when I noticed Earthion at the Limited Run demo arcade. I had a lot of fun playing it on the floor so I bought the full game on Steam. It's a quality shmup! For me the difficulty really spikes on stage 3 and that's where I got stuck, though I did make it to stage 4 once or twice. The initial release had some bullet visibility issues that were improved in subsequent updates. The default CRT filter is fun but I turned it off almost immediately for more visual clarity.
This looks amazing! Wishlisted on Steam, will buy it sometime.
Does anyone have a video of it on an actual CRT TV? Looking at the youtube gameplay, it looks like it would have some problems with text on the overscan getting cropped.
I am curious how some of the effects look on a CRT.
There's a bunch on Youtube. The art has the typical issues of modern 16-bit and 8-bit games where the designers and artists are not targeting the full hardware stack of the era. Rather, they're targeting simulated machines (emulators) and sometimes also flash carts on original hardware but rendered on modern display hardware.
What I notice is that the highly detailed sprite work doesn't produce the elegant artifacting of the era, where pixel bleeding and whatnot would merge nearby colours together to produce desired artistic effects. More often what I see is a smudged mess with noise.
The game makes good use of dithering throughout.
Pixel bleeding? Are you referring to color distortion caused by the use of composite video? Why would you expect to see that in a screenshot viewed on your LCD screen? You'd have to actually see the game output via composite from a Mega Drive to a CRT to see it (which you would, since the art uses dithering well).
This is one of the best-looking Mega Drive games released in a very long time, developed by the company responsible for games like Streets of Rage and Beyond Oasis.
It doesn't seem that bad to me? Most of the problems that I see in that video look like recording issues where the camera isn't handling max brightness well. Recording CRTs is notoriously difficult!
Generally pixel art created for LCDs also looks good on CRTs, with tiny text being an obvious exception.
It bothers me when a new creative work tries to adopt a distinct historical style without understanding its form, structure, context, constraints and motivation. Without that understanding it's just derivative imitation which might evoke echoes of the original but can never match, add to it or take it new directions.
While it may sound odd to want new pixel art to be "authentic" in the same way as new music should respect the structure and form of styles like ragtime, blues or jazz, I think it applies equally. The skilled artists who hand-crafted pixels to look their best on CRTs did specific things to leverage CRT bloom and blending, scanlines, composite color artifacting and interlace dithering.
Are you referring to Earthion specifically or just making some grandiose comment about pixel art in the good old days?
What are "CRT bloom and blending"? Are you referring to artifacts caused by composite video output? That is not due to the CRT but rather the signal distortion. RGB output on a CRT will look pixel perfect and colors will not merge. I'd say most gamers using original hardware on CRTs these days are using RGB, so if anything, it reflects the current user trends if the Earthion designer did not use dithering (which he did, making this comment irrelevant).
Very few people are going to play this on a CRT, tho. And even if you included a CRT shader, most people will turn it off.
It's ok to pine for the old techniques, but this is a game made for a Genesis in modern times. It has to stride both.
So you believe the artists responsible for this game graphics do not understand all of this ? Would you care to explain exactly how you came to this conclusion ? Because in my non expert eyes, it looks as good or even better as any old school megadrive game on a CRT.
By the way, some of my favorite games on Megadrive are homebrews, most notably Astebros and other Neofid games.
That's usually not a problem with Mega Drive/Genesis games, as they typically don't draw beyond the 224 lines that are visible on a (correctly calibrated) CRT TV. I've played this game on a B&O MX4000 CRT using an original Mega Drive and I didn't notice any issues.
No video, but I play this on a CRT with a flash cart and it looks and plays amazing. Way better than playing it on steam via a modern display, even with the fancy CRT shaders they give you.
I suspect the developers had enough foresight to not include text outside the display window.
We would love to have this on the Afterplay Store https://afterplay.io/play/store
It is also an actual Mega Drive game
They said they were going to release actual cartridges in 2026. I'm not sure if it has happened yet.
I wonder how well their company logo would go down with Sega's lawyers.
Sega are famously far less litigious than most games companies. They know about modders, community servers (for example PSO servers) and even fans who release brand new games using Sega mascots like Sonic. In fact (IIRC) that’s how Sonic Mania began life.
This might be different given it’s a company logo and thus trademark. But I wouldn’t be so sure they’d get a cease and desist like if someone imitated Nintendos logo.
I wonder where's the line between using a font and copyright/trademark infringement.
This game is so close to be amazing but the bullet visibility problems bring it down greatly. If they can solve the pixel layer limitations, even if it’s only on the non-MD version, so enemy bullets are always above everything else, then it’s a an easy buy. Until then, it’s just only if you’re a dedicated shmup guy that loves MD games.
That sucks to hear - hopefully it'll be addressed! I'm a huge shmup fan particularly danmakus. Shmups from Cave in particular do a fantastic job: even when the screen is absolutely saturated with bullets like having a bag of dried rice dumped on your head, everything is still extremely visible.
Contrast that with Raiden. Some of the Raiden arcade games are notorious for combining the worst two traits: fast-moving projectiles that are also very hard to see.
"Physical editions of Earthion are coming to North America! Pre-order the Standard or Collector’s Editions at Limited Run Games"
Yikes. Seems like i'm not getting a physical copy then. I'm not giving any money to LRG. Which is a shame because it looks like a cool game.
LRG? Limited Run Games? I've never heard of them before. How come you're shunning them?
I didn't know either, so I started searching around. Just typing "limited run games" in DDG the suggested search that pops up is "limited run games controversy", which is never a good sign. Looks like there have been a few issues and even settlements.
Looks like a labour of love, nice! Can you buy it to run yourself in an emulator, e.g., on an Anbernic handheld?
Tried to watch trailer but auto-scrolling carousel won't allow it.
Same here. When you click on the video to ply the trailer the carousel keeps spinning it away.
I tried to watch the video on the website, but it auto scrolls to the next video whilst playing
12 year old me would have loved this. 60 year old me can't bear more than a few seconds of the trailer.
Looks like the gamer in 48 year old me is still 12 years old. I loved the vibe.
For me the shoutiness outweighs any nostalgia. But I'm user I'm not the target market. ;0)
Reminds me a lot of Contra
native elf(glibc)/linux build? With "correct" binaries for broad distro support?
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This isn’t “mega drive style”, this is a Mega Drive game that is also available on other systems.
Working to the limitations of 16-bit consoles to produce a modern-feel of game play is something that cannot be vibe coded.
isn't this just R-Type?
The genre is called “shoot ‘em up” or “shmup” for short. And there our thousands of entires in that genre.
R-Type wasn’t the inventor of the genre and it’s far from the last entry in it too.
I was personally put off by the fact that the MegaDrive limitations actually negatively impact the gameplay, while there are little gains that I see in that "limited space fostering creativity" that you would expect from the pitch. In particular, there are bullet visibility issues (see the Electric Underground's review [0] for a more detailed analysis) which I think show how the console limitations would need a much deeper mastery to properly support such modern game design thinking.
However, "a Mega Drive game!" is a great sales point to the majority of people invested in the nostalgia market, with only a surface-level interest of what these games are. It's why it made it to the font page of hn, and not it's perfect 'traditional' sprite art, or its Yuzo Koshiro soundtrack.
I like shmups because they are pretty much "pure game design"; games are such a complete package of story, interactive experience, etc that it's hard to separate what comes from where. This is what makes design experimentation so interesting and rich.
I cannot comment because why this made it to the front page, but new releases are still common for retro consoles. In fact you’d be surprised just how many games are still released for the 8 and 16 bit era machines.
I was always put off by the color palette of the Mega Drive. Every game looks a little sad and drab compared to the SNES or NeoGeo.
Are you judging by experiencing them on a CRT, or from modern displays? The range of colours was certainty broad enough, but I agree that the screenshots tend to look a bit bland. I wonder how much this came down to variance of the video signal at the analog stage. You had knobs for brightness, contrast, and saturation instead of the digital tweaking you have now. Perhaps it is that the color representation of live video has improved so that the knob level adjustment isn't needed anymore, but the output of the old consoles were tuned that level of adjustment people used to use to make the original video look nomal.
I don't know I liked how each video game console at the time had its own audio and graphical signature. We were a Sega house but we enjoyed swapping our console for a few months with the SNES or PC Engine of friends/cousins and I think they liked it too.
It might have more to do with the game studios ecosystem more than technicalities given some games were ported on all 3 consoles with only minor differencies though.
I would describe both the audio and graphical signature of the megadrive as "Metalic" (a bit amiga 500 like but with FM sounds instead of samples) while the SNES one was more childish/cartoony (same as subsequent consoles from the brand really) and the pc engine one had more flat[1] graphics but more saturated/rock'n'roll sound signature.
[1] probably because it was halfway inbetween the sega master system and megadrive/snes in term of gfx capabilities.
Specifically the SMD global palette had limitations around desaturated/pastel colours, with choice in saturated colours. And with no sprite blending, opportunities for subtle tones are further limited.
Sonic being the exception
Right! That one looked cheerful.
Doesn't that mean it's not the hardware's color limitations, but rather how color is used by the artists?
There are plenty of gorgeous games on the Mega Drive in terms of color. 61 colors on screen at once is more than enough.