That’s right. There’s a new game on the horizon for Nintendo’s humble 8-bit wonder, the NES, developed by Morphcat Games.
Micro Mages is a 1-4 player platform game where you enter a Demon Fortress in search of treasures. Of course, you’ll encounter enemies along your climb to the Boss at the top of each tower hurling magical spells while utilizing the ever-popular wall jump. The game spans 8 worlds with a total of 26 levels including a normal and hard mode.
Multiplayer brings its own benefits: as long as one player is still alive the rest remain in the game as ghosts, able to freeze enemies and search crates for a way to return to the living. 4 players can join the madness using the FourScore multiplayer adapter or the Hori adapter.
Morphcat Games is the two punch combo of Julius Riecke and Nicholas Bétoux, who have previously made Super Bat Puncher, another NES title, available to play through a NES emulator and free to download here. According to their website, Micro Mages began development as a one month project, written in 6502 assembly language, becoming a two and a half year project to make as fun a game as possible.
You’d think that it’s nuts to bring out a NES game in 2018, but at least 10 new games were released last year, including Escape from Atlantis and Wisdom Tree NES Collection from Piko Interactive. The interesting thing about Micro Mages is that it’s coming to an actual NES cartridge, playable on the old-school hardware, even falling under the file size of the launch games at an incredible 40KB.
Micro Mages is available at $45 for the NES cartridge, box sleeve, manual, plus the digital edition. The digital ROM is available for $10 which will be playable on emulators. There’s also a DELUXE package that throws in a poster and the physical OST.
As of writing the project has already funded, having only launched earlier today, plus the game is 100% finished, meaning you’re (hopefully) bound to get the game quick-snap. If this sounds like your cup of tea, check out their Kickstarter page or trailer below.
