Earthion: A New Mega Drive-Style Shoot-Em-Up
earthiongame.comA 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.
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.
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
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
As usual, the video you posted mixes up how CRTs look with composite artifacts. Games played on a good quality CRT with RGB or component signals (arcade machines, PC monitors, TVs with SCART of YPbPr input) don't look nowhere as fuzzy.
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).
I'm not quite sure what they're on about wrt bloom. CRT bloom is when a bright image displays larger than a dark image. Classically, this is pretty noticable on say Super Street Fighter II Turbo if you do a super combo finish.
If it's particularly noticeable, it probably means you need to service your CRT. But I guess, don't put important content close to the edges of the screen on very bright screens. But you've already got to be careful of putting things near the edge, so it's just be even more careful. It's not really all or nothing, you also get vertical expansion on lines that are bright; here's a video example [1]. I think you can get a bit of vertical bleeding on bright pixels too, depending on adjustment, which you might
I will say, even though bloom is a screen defect, it can be kind of a neat effect... Super Combo Finishes might not be as cool if the geometry held steady.
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.
I completely agree with you. I have all three Neofid games released to date (Demons of Asteborg, Astebros, Daemon Claw) and I played them on a nice VGA Trinitron (clean and sharp RGB), and they look gorgeous, much better that most games of that era.
And before someone mentions composite artifacts: the Neofid guys are French, if and France gave two good things to the world, those were the metric system and SCART. You guys should really try them both.
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.
"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.
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
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.
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.
If the font is proprietary then using that without permission could be copyright infringement.
If the logo can be confused as owned by another entity, then that could be argued as trademark infringement.
But these cases would need to be decided in court. And different jurisdictions might be more restrictive than others.
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:
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.
The Red Bull Music Academy web series Diggin’ In The Carts has an episode featuring Koshiro: https://www.redbull.tv/en/page/page:rrn:content:episode-vide...
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...
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.
The title of the thread itself says "Mega Drive-Style Shoot-Em-Up" (which implies it's not a Mega Drive game bit just one made in that style), so it's likely that's what's tripping people up.
We would love to have this on the Afterplay Store https://afterplay.io/play/store
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.
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.
Cave games are my absolute favorite.
DOJ is probably my favorite game of all time. It’s as close to perfection as any videogame has ever been for me.
Progear and Deathsmiles both my favorite horizontals from them. Deathsmiles probably edges it out just a bit.
As for Raiden I’m a huge fan of Raiden Fighters Jet also! Viper Phase 1 is also excellent.
Nice! I'm a HUGE DoDonPachi fan, Mushihimesama is also great fun as well. I have the Nintendo Switch port coupled with an 8BitDo arcade stick and have sunk tons of hours into it.
I think I have like 300 hours on the Steam port of Mushihimesama, such a great game. Love the aesthetics. How’s the Arcade stick? I’ve been tempted to get one since I love the regular 8bitdo controllers and would love one I could use with both my Switch and PC.
It's surprisingly decent for being kinda budget! I'm a big fan of 8bitDo because all their controllers are usu. easy to pair with all my stuff (Switch, PC, etc).
I’ve actually got my arcade stick temporarily modded with a Sanwa gate set to four-way, so it doesn’t register the diagonals like an eight-way stick. It works really well if you enjoy playing the TGM Tetris games.
I’ve been playing Tetris Effect on my PC with a keyboard (also the 8bit do mechanical keyboard, which I also love)lately and other than a 4 way gate stick I don’t think I could play any other way. Although I found the 4-button setup of the Nintendo joycon to work decently, they are so small and I have big hands so I get cramps quickly…
I have been debating between a (less expensive) 8bit do or the (nearly 3x price) Mayflash F700 but the mod ability of the 8bit do just might see me get both…both are moddable but I still want to keep one that is “pure” if you catch my drift. Seems I might be unknowingly but knowingly walking into a new weird niche hobby lol
I always thought DDP and Progear were amazingly fun, but Espgaluda (specifically the simulation mode on ps2) was the first game that made me really think about playing for survival vs playing for score.
There was a summer where I could almost layout a top score on level 1. Thinking about scoring gimmicks really unlocks a different layer of depth in shmups once you get over the bullet hell.
This looks amazing! Wishlisted on Steam, will buy it sometime.
I tried to watch the video on the website, but it auto scrolls to the next video whilst playing
Looks like a labour of love, nice! Can you buy it to run yourself in an emulator, e.g., on an Anbernic handheld?
Reminds me a lot of Contra
12 year old me would have loved this. 60 year old me can't bear more than a few seconds of the trailer.
TBF if you're 60 then you were in your 20s when the genesis game out, which also means 12 year old you was maybe playing the newly released Atari VCS, which also means this game would have absolutely blown your mind at 12.
All to say, you were never the demo for this game - then or now. I'm in my mid-40s and this kind of game feels so refreshing when compared to modern games. Not to be a jerk or anything, but a few years completely changes context of your comment as games/tech were so rapidly evolving over this period.
I quit gaming in early 2000s, tried to get back into it a few times in last 10 years and it's just not very appealing to me unless this retro style games pique my interest. The only exception has been playing the big Nintendo titles with my son (he's 7 and got a Switch at the same age I got the NES).
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)
native elf(glibc)/linux build? With "correct" binaries for broad distro support?
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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.
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.
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.
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
And Rocket Knight Adventures - which is quite colorful.
Another: Thunderforce 4. IMHO the finest horizontal shoot 'em up ever made on any system.
Insane. I wished the SNES had the MD‘s CPU, with transparency and SPC700 this would have been even better.
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.
Thats not how exceptions work.
If it's a hardware limitation, there are no exceptions. Which is it?