RSS Feed
Twitter
March 25th, 2020 
Carl Williams 
New action platform titles are few and far between. Great ones are even harder to find. There simply are not a lot of these being made anymore. Most independent homebrew developers fall back on easier genres such as scrolling shooters, First-Person (FPS) games, or mashups of various genres. Knights of Bytes have already tackled the 2D side scrolling action platform genre on Commodore 64 with Sam’s Journey. Now they are bringing their hit action title to the Nintendo Entertainment System.
The Devil is in the details
One thing that most games miss, professionally developed or independently, is small things. The little details. Things like character animation when jumping, item pickups, enemy placement, etc. These are all things that have minute details that are often overlooked.
Knights of Bytes have taken their time in developing Sam’s Journey on the Commodore 64 and they are continuing that tradition with the NES edition. This is something that many games over the years could have benefited from – more time in development, debugging, polishing, etc.
In Sam’s Journey when you pick up an item, it has a little animation alerting you to having been successful. Jumping on an enemy and eliminating them comes with a little puff of smoke and they are gone. Backgrounds are not static, there are little touches of animation to them.
It all adds up to a game world that feels alive. Almost tangible.
The wait continues
As mentioned already, Knights of Bytes are taking their time with the Nintendo Entertainment System version of Sam’s Journey. That is great news as far as what to expect when it finally is released. It is also bad news at the same time because we must wait an undetermined amount of time before we can play it.
The wait will surely be worth it though, right? Thanks to Indie Retro News for the heads up on this one. For more Nintendo NES fun here you go.
Share this:
Posted in 
Tags: 
