A lot of people commenting seem unaware itâs an actual Sega Genesis game. It will get a cart release. The modern platform support is via emulators.
Itâs extremely well crafted. Iâd argue it has the level of polish youâd expect from a very well made modern release. That is not the case with a lot of Genesis era shmups.
Yeah, with some effort it's possible (or at least it was) to extract the ROM from the Steam release and play it on the real hardware. They went to a fair bit of trouble to prevent that though. ROM isn't even stored in the clear in-memory while it's running. I guess they wanted to make sure they didn't cannibalize the cartridge release
Neat, love seeing people make games for older platforms but presumably with modern tools to get more out of it. More as in better performance or more as in higher productivity leading to higher quality art and / or more content.
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.
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.
The video I linked is taken of a CRT and is not a screenshot of an LCD.
This is an excellent deep dive on the issues I spoke of: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bC-8y2R6IxI
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.
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) thatâs how Sonic Mania began life.
This might be different given itâs a company logo and thus trademark. But I wouldnât be so sure theyâd get a cease and desist like if someone imitated Nintendos logo.
"Physical editions of Earthion are coming to North America! Pre-order the Standard or Collectorâs 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.
Theres a lot of reasons. One is that their CEO is an unhinged ass. If you complain about something or return a defective product the ban you from buying form them ever again. And that they are basically scalpers. the "Limited" in theire name is an outright lie as they usually print a lot more copies of "rare single run games" and then sell them on ebay for an extra profit.
just your general allround asshole business. You can find more detail information on youtube
Oh dear. Thanks for the heads up. Sorry if you had a bad experience.
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.
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.
> Haven't seen so many uninformed comments in a while on HN
Can you link to the ones you mean? As another commenter has pointed out, there don't seem to be "many", but without links it's impossible for anyone to know what you mean.
It's not cool to slur the community like this. HN users are of a highly diverse age range and awareness level of older technologies. It would be much better if you can point to the ones you mean and respond to them constructively.
(It's also against the guidelines to comment like this: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)
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:
The Red Bull Music Academy web series Digginâ In The Carts has an episode featuring Koshiro: https://www.redbull.tv/en/page/page:rrn:content:episode-vide...
I know some people who know him, and by all accounts he is also a very friendly guy, he loves attending all sort of gaming events, both within Japan and abroad.
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.
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While this is an informative comment, did HN start deleting comments? These comments you mention do not seem to exist...
We (moderators) don't ever delete comments (except in rare cases where a user later asks us to do so for privacy reasons).
The most obvious candidate for what the parent commenter is referring to is this one, which has been flagged/killed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48275838
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.
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