Grade: A
Love letter to a bygone era of gaming
Micro Mages is a new game for the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES). It is a vertical 2D platform scroller based around an occult theme where you save the “princess” from the dungeon tower. You can play on your own or with friends, and it has local multiplayer support for up to 4 players at once.
NES discontinued this product line in 1995, a full 25 years ago. There’s still a strong community of retro gamers out there, though, as evidenced by the 4,100 backers on the 2018 Micro Mages Kickstarter. I guess there’s a market of gamers still chomping at the bit for new NES releases!
I am just old enough to remember what it was like to play on an NES and have fond memories of conspiring in a friend’s basement as a 2nd or 3rd grader hunting ducks and defeating Bowser. However, I can’t remember the last time before Micro Mages I played an NES game, so this was quite a trip down nostalgia lane.
The itch.io or Steam download has the NES emulator embedded to play Micro Mages, so no hardware is required, and it runs on any standard PC.
Gameplay is surprisingly fun
As you travel through the game, your character can wall jump and shoot magic. The camera continues to pan upwards as you climb the dungeon tower. If you don’t keep up with the camera pan, you die. Along the way, there are various monsters, traps, and bosses you face of increasing hardness.
Even with all the limitations of developing on this antique platform, Morphcat Games made a surprisingly robust game. There are 26 levels and once you get past the regular difficulty levels, then there’s a hard mode that ramps up the difficulty and unlocks the final boss. From Nicolas Bétoux, one of the game authors, this setup was a callback reference to an NES game “Ghosts ‘n Goblins”.
Of the four big bosses, my favorite was the death knight. I liked how they did the art for the suit of armor, throne, and the creepy staff. Gameplay was pretty challenging, and you have to have reflexes to get past the end.
As another classic trope, you get a password when you get past a world so that you don’t fully lose your progress. There is no “save” feature in the game.
The “how it was made” is the most interesting part of the game
I didn’t realize the incredible limitations that the designers put on themselves to create this game. For example, The first-generation NES cartridge had a 40 KB storage limit. 40 KB is nothing! For context, a 5-page word document with only text is about 30 KB. Or, 2-3 seconds of an MP3 is about 40KB. In later generations, the NES cartridges evolved to include mappers that allowed extra storage to be used to run the game, but the original setup was stuck to 32 KB for the game program and 8KB for the graphics/tile data.
In the “behind-the-scene video, the Devs break down all the techniques they used to maximize every single byte they stored in the NROM NES cartridge. It’s a captivating watch and is a great instructional video on low-level programming and the kind of fussy details that modern technology has often allowed us to avoid.
Micro Mages is the equivalent of those artisans that can create perfect reconstructions of architecture from ages gone by. These artisans research and reuse techniques that most artisans have lost to the ages. Kudos to the designers for not only making the NES game but explaining the techniques so well in their wrap-up video.
Beyond Micro Mages, I think this talk by Christian Joudrey says a lot about how this felt for the late 80s/early 90s programmers working on the NES platform. The tremendous successes are getting a ball to move across a screen or displaying any picture on the screen at all. A fascinating reminder of how far things have gone in such a short time for technology. This is a moonshot away from low-code or no-code game dev platforms like Roblox Studio or Minecraft MCreator.
Packaging
As a couple of last notes, if you want the 40KB version of Micro Mages, you can download it when you buy the game in a ROM emulator file. The default game version you download from Steam or Itch is a 20 MB version of the game composed by an emulator and made by Morphcat games that had the ROM directly inside. Just packaging the file to run in an executable took 500x what could fit into the first-gen NES cartridge!
Finally, you should check out the cool old-school color manual that describes all of the info that couldn’t fit in-game. It comes complete with descriptions of characters, stories, controls, items, towers, enemies, and bosses and a bunch of little jokes as well.
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Credits: Thanks to Nicolas Bétoux and the Morphcat Games discord for the follow-up information about the game.