Pre-SMB Famicom history:

I never really thought about the timeline, but it's weird to me to think of the Famicom existing without SMB. It's just so cemented in my mind as a launch title.

I wonder how history would have gone for it if SMB never existed. I guess Zelda would've been the main "must have" game instead.

>>4176153
Fun fact: The sky blue levels in SMB wowed the Japaneses' minds. All games before SMB just had black backgrounds

A lot of the sellers were arcade ports that seemed old to us by the time (and if) they came out on NES but were hot in Japan including Tower of Druaga which really is a great game but there's no denying SMB was a juggernaut. Graphics, physics, level design it excelled on all levels. Truly a killer app.

Also, the NES doesn't have very fancy add-on chips the way the SNES has, it just has mappers that are mainly for just doubling (and double-doubling etc) the amount of data a cartridge could hold, and generating interrupts to fit more layers of sprites on scanlines. Most of the sweet tricks the Famicom/NES does late in its life cycle are mainly just black magic devs figured out over years of developing on the platform.

>>4176343
This, Package Ramps speaks the truth. Other than giving them more CHR and PRG ROM to work with, mappers couldn't do much to improve some of the basic limitations of the console.

It's absolutely insane what they manged to do with the hardware at the end of its lifetime.

>>4176160
It's sad I can't tell if this is someone meming or genuinely misinformed.

Colored backgrounds were uncommon but SMB was not the first. I don't know what the earliest would have been, but games like Dragon Buster and Pac-land preceded SMB.

>>4176516
Fun fact: the American SMB2 is a completely different game than the japanese

Watch Chrontendo up to SMB to get a feel for what owning the system pre-SMB was like. The library was extremely sparse but just being able to play a non-shit port of Donkey Kong at home was considered enough by a lot of people.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sjvvLUUc42c&list=PLRXRxTxAgO0exLF2bTgcHCzJ-kIaVn4By

>>4176516

that guy's just joking, but it's worth pointing out that there's no need to bring arcade titles like Pac-land into the discussion since even on the Famicom there were a shitload of games with colored backgrounds that pre-dated SMB like F1 Race and Astro Robo Sasa

What is the best non-port pre-SMB Famicom game?

>>4176605
This feels like a knockoff of Good Nintentions.

>>4176514
It's not so simple as that. The vanilla NES hardware only allows scrolling in either horizontal or vertical but not both.

I was under the impression that the bank switching that mappers allowed were utilised for animation purposes. In other words, by swapping the character memory you could animate backgrounds. Of course backgrounds could be animated in other ways but the mappers allowed larger amounts of data to be swapped and therefore larger areas of the background could be animated with more frames than otherwise. I also seem to think that fighters in Punch Out were dependent on the mappers.

>>4176637
Yeah, I was oversimplifying. Mappers also allowed for special interrupts which enabled split-screen vertical scrolling and other handy stuff.

Still, there were hard limits like palettes and sprite limits. Programmers learned to work with them, but no mapper could get rid of them (and sprite flicker was a thing even in late titles).

One of those games that used rapid bank switching for animated backgrounds was Batman: Return of the Joker, to create the parallax scrolling clouds on the first stage. In theory it could also be used for sprite animation, but I'm not sure if any game ever did this.

>>4176130
Japanese gaming scene has always been a black hole since Japanese knowledge is limited and nobody with english language skill was there to share their experience.

>>4176605
Chrontendo is a decent series, but he does not know japanese which is a prime sin if you want to do series like this.

>>4176678
>Japanese gaming scene has always been a black hole since Japanese knowledge is limited and nobody with english language skill was there to share their experience.

Most of this info is there, people are just too lazy to translate it. We have the actual physical magazines. They're all still around. Then there's GSLA, a Japanese site to archive interviews. All in Japanese, but it's there. Shmupilations translates GSLA interviews and others as well.

http://chibarei.blog.jp/gsl/index.html
http://shmuplations.com/

>>4176634
It predates Good Nintentions AND Jeremy's Game Boy World, and is actually the inspiration. Jeremy and Sparle are buds. Nintentions also only covers US released games while Chrontendo is the entire god damn fucking Famicom and NES library. He is just now getting to 1990 which is very exciting.

The early episodes are...rough, with Sparkle's mic being shit and the editing being not great, but he improves right around the 20 episode mark or so and really settles into a groove. I like his voice and tone for these too. "Today we'll be playing a classic from Konami, a well known Capcom arcade port, and a pile of shit."

>>4176615
There's a handful like Wrecking Crew and Ice Climber that are pretty well remembered, but it's arguably Balloon Fight.

>>4176678
>Chrontendo is a decent series, but he does not know japanese which is a prime sin if you want to do series like this.
All you really miss out on are, what, Ching Chong Majong 3 and Generic Japanese Text Adventure Game 4?