Exciting Developments For NES ROMs

When it comes to the NES, everybody at one point or another has emulated the NES.  NES emulation has been around for a long time and has improved so much that often the experience of playing a game on an emulator is indistinguishable from playing the game on real hardware (accounting for video improvements via emulation.)  But NES emulation is continually evolving as we find more games to dump and understand better the hardware found inside previously-dumped games.  In this blog post let me share some recent developments regarding NES ROMs.


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You say "obsessed" as if it is a bad thing.

Deities & Demigods Face Lift - Need A New Title!

When getting serious about the production of Deities & Demigods, I had to face certain realities about the theme:

Tropes vs Cliches

On one hand, using a familiar theme is useful, because tropes are like pictures -- worth 1000 words. People can recognize things like "Ares is the one that moves your troops" because of what they already know about the Greek gods. Knowing that information up front reduces the cognitive load on the player, who can spend their cycles thinking about whether they want to build stuff rather than having to think "wait, what does Hephaestus do again?" Read this whole twitter thread for a good, technical description of what I've been thinking for years, but didn't have the knowledge or vocabulary to express properly:

Oh, boy, I keep hearing people use the term "trope" like it's a negative. So let's talk about tropes and cliches.

— Jessica Price (@Delafina777) February 6, 2019

On the other hand, gamers tend to complain when a theme is overused. To be honest, while that complaint does come up at times, I suspect it's more of a complaint that the theme was used poorly than that it's really overused, because there are several popular themes that occur in many, many games every year that don't receive that complaint. However, a bigger issue may be presentation...

Looking at the many Greek mythology themed games out there, they all look exactly the same! The typical (maybe stereotypical) depiction of the Greek pantheon may be a good example of a "trope" that has become "cliche." It's difficult to tell any one of those games from another just looking at the artwork. Santorini does a good job of setting itself apart, with the awesome chibi-style artwork, but that's a rare exception:

The chibi style is cute, and works very well for that game, but (a) I'm not sure that kind of style would work as well for Deities & Demigods, and (b) it's been done already!

So how do I make Deities & Demigods stand out from the crowd? I had a few ideas about this...

1. Allocate a large art budget, so that if the game had to look like other, similar games, maybe it could look better. However, looking at some of the Greek mythology art from recent games, it appears they've already done that!

2. Change pantheons, moving from Greek mythology to something less commonly used, such as Egyptian mythology. For a while I thought this would be the right decision, as the art could look different, and people could comment on the unusual theme rather than the same-old same-old of the overused Greek setting. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that while the outfits would look different, the artwork would still probably look similar to the Greek games, and I wasn't finding Egyptian gods that fit as well with the game action.

3. Find a new style, like Santorini did. I came across the art for SPQF in the portfolio of one of the artists I was considering, and it got me thinking. SPQF is a card based civilization building game, with very nice art of anthropomorphic animals. There have been a couple other games with anthropomorphized animals lately -- one might even say it's the start of a trend, however I don't think we're there yet. This led me to consider a cross between Clash of the Titans and The Lion King... what if we re-imagined the Greek pantheon as animals of the African plain?

Clash of the Titans meets The Lion King

In the end, I liked the sound of this third option best, and have decided to go that route -- re-imagining the pantheon as anthropomorphic animals. This allows us to keep the tropes of Greek mythology, but use art that differs significantly from other Greek themed games, and could look pretty cool.

Photo of SPQF cards by BGG user lovemyfire

My initial picks for animals to represent each deity looked like this:
Zeus (king of the gods) -- the obvious choice is a lion
Hermes (messenger of the gods) -- a macaw seemed like a good choice
Ares (god of war) -- an elephant, or possibly a wild boar
Hephaestus (blacksmith to the gods) -- an ape of some kind (the opposable thumbs could help him build)
Hera (Zeus' wife) -- at first I thought maybe a peacock, but probably better would be a tiger, jaguar, leopard, or cheetah

With a change of theme, a few details will have to change as well. For example, animals have no use for gold, so perhaps food would be a better thing with which to show devotion. That said, perhaps Artemis (goddess of the hunt) would make more sense than Hermes, and as an added bonus it would get more goddesses into the game (something I'd been wanting to do anyway). To represent Artemis, perhaps a bird of prey would make sense.

For the player boards, I figure smaller animals would make sense, something like meerkats, gazelles, monkeys, and I don't know, some bird species perhaps. These are animals that are found in packs or groups, so it would make sense that you have 12 of them under your control. To represent your troops on the board, a regular meeple doesn't really evoke animals, so I've been thinking of something better. One thought is a sort of generic "animeeple" -- a 4 legged something-or-other which is not necessarily related to any of the player boards. The graphic designer suggested a paw shape, which could be cute, and would stack well, but might not be as fun for players to move around the board.

I'm open to suggestions for a meeple shape that would be good. I don't think it can really relate to the player board animals, or else (a) the player who insists on playing red all the time would always have to be meerkats, and (b) if we add more player boards with player powers in an expansion or something, we'd have to add 12 meeples to go with it!

What's in a name?

Deities and Demigods was a title I was kind of OK with, but it was always only a placeholder. 90% of the people who play the game point out that there's an old Dungeons and Dragons sourcebook with that title, which I don't actually think matters. In any case, I've always wanted a better title.

About 4 months ago, I finally put some effort into finding a better title, but didn't come up with anything fantastic. Some of the options were:

Titan's Tribute
Divine Interest
Quid Pro Quo (change pantheon to Roman deities)
Chrysos (Greek for "gold")
Favor of Olympus
Buy The Gods (pretty good, but maybe too "cute" for a real/serious title)

And for a good laugh:
In Gods We Trust
Invest In Vesta

However, now that the game is about animals in the African plains or Savannah, I don't think any of those would really work anyway. I could really use a title for this game, and the sooner the better so the graphic designer can make a logo for it! Please comment with your suggestions.

So far, the only idea I've had that I like at all is Pantheon of the Plains, but I'm sure there could be something better...

10 (11) Reasons Why I Might Skip A Product (Tradecraft)

I have purchased $10,000,000 in games. I know a thing about buying. Yet, I'm often in the dark. I mostly buy from gatekeepers, distributors who use their buyers to know what to buy. Some of those buyers used to work for me. On rare occasions, I'll play a game before buying it, and my instincts are usually pretty good, although not nearly as good as those who do this all the time.

Increasingly, relying on distribution is a failed strategy. More of what I buy needs to be through firsthand knowledge, or at least firsthand risk taking. Backing Kickstarters is a thing I regularly do now and I've gotten better at it, mostly because I can spot an inexperienced mess of a product pretty well now. It doesn't mean I don't get burned, I really do (Dark Souls stretch goals), but I'm making enough money up front to offset the losses.

Telling you what to buy would be one heck of a holy grail blog post. I can't do that. I'm good enough to stay in business after buying my ten million, but I can't tell you what to buy. If I could, I would crush your store with my national franchise. We're still specialty retail with individualized hand selling to an idiosyncratic base of customers that is different just ten miles away.

So why wouldn't I buy something? Here are some reasons:

• Margin. Of course margin. I often don't know the margin until after I pre order something, in which case, if the margin is too low, I kick myself and set a product not to re-order.  50% is a great margin. 47-49% is reasonable. 45% and I better see above average performance. 40%? I better see stratospheric turns like with a CCG. There is technically no floor to margin. I'll take 10% if I know I have a guaranteed sale. Car dealerships make their living like that. Then again, give me a medium to low margin on a run of the mill product and I'll kick it to the curb (Tiny Epic).
• Packaging. Is your game in a brown paper bag? Unless it's Poop: The Game (really, that sells like that), I'm likely not to re-order it. Same goes for tubes. Nobody likes a tube, unless it's full of counters or dice. Tubes and boobs. Meaning I also don't want explicit graphics on a game. I'm looking at you play mats. We recently had a long thread in a retailer forum about the logistics of dice bag packaging and how few companies have figured this out. This stuff is critical. Kickstarter products often fail here, although much less lately.
• Installed Base. If you're trying to sell me a collectible card game, just no. If I need a community to support a game, I need that community to ask me to carry it, not a publisher. How do you get that community? Don't care, your problem. Most stores will tell you they can only support perhaps three games in a community at most, and they probably already have those three. I've simply passed on several CCGs lately as companies seem to have some arcane inner motivation to break into this realm, and I'm not going to be their guinea pig.
• Devalued Online. I'll often look to see if a product is already being sold when I'm solicited by a distributor. If it is, it's not a disqualifier, but if I see it's going for 30-40% of the MSRP, that game is dead before arrival. There are ways to protect your brand value and often that product is under assault before I'm even asked to order it. If Dungeons & Dragons were a new game today, I would shun it (same with Magic).
• It's Everywhere. There are some games I don't have that I've seen at Target that look kinda neat, but Target has it. I think they're doing fine satisfying the demand. This is not to say I won't try such things. There are perhaps 18 Hasbro games I keep in stock when I can (I can't right now). They sell just well enough to make sense for me, despite being everywhere.
• I'm Poor. I could easily increase my inventory by 10-20% or even double it. That's right, I have room to double my inventory. But I'm poor. For me to say yes to one game, I have to stop carrying another one. Sometimes that lines up wonderfully. Whenever a store has a clearance sale, that's the sign of a mis-alignment (all stores have clearance sales).
• My Customer Base. I have demographic envy, a desire to have my competitor's customer bases. My customers buy what they buy, and it's not always the interesting stuff I want them to buy. I would love to have more exotic stock for them to purchase, but I'm in the suburbs. Sometimes I buy something and tell myself I'll buy it myself if nobody picks it up. Then, six months later, I don't pick it up, because I've grown to hate the site of it.
• Line Extension. Line extensions marketing theory has been debunked, but it basically says when you add more products in your line, the line eventually becomes too confusing for customers and they stop buying. I can see this with Munchkin, Red Dragon Inn, versions of D&D, LCGs and many miniature games. There is debate about line extension theory, and it's likely nuanced, but it has increasingly become more true. Endless supplements will eventually collapse a line, and I increasingly avoid them and often desire to dump the whole thing. I'm always on the look out for that tipping point.
• Bad Company. How terrible a company would you need to run for me not to carry your game? Well, money talks. I'm not happy with a lot of companies, but they make me a lot of money. Usually my irritation with a company is directly related to my inability to make money with them. The more irritated I am though, the higher that company needs to perform. So you can be a giant dick and if I'm paying my mortgage with your game, we're good. But when your product slows, retailers look for excuses to let you go, often with a vengeance. There is a brittleness with companies with ill will, and we make excuses for you if you're good people. There are companies with people I just really like and their stuff is marginal and often gets a pass.
• I'm Ignorant (or I can't get them). There are 10 new board games released a DAY. My gatekeepers might present me with what, three? I might pick one to sell. I may not know of a games existence. A game might not be available to me at wholesale prices. I really want to sell Matthew Colville's Strongholds and Followers, but he has no love for the middle man. I'll have to be content with my personal copy. I regularly bug one of the distributor buyers to look into a game and I'm often told they're not interested in distribution. Fair enough. There are a lot of games I have no access to either because I don't know or just can't get them. I suppose that's two reasons right there.

Anyway, ten reasons why I might pass on a product. Why might I buy something? You're one of my 30 top companies of proven performance in the marketplace. You personally impress me with your cleverness or innovation. You provide me early copies before the rest of the marketplace. Customers ask for it (number one reason). It's not just good, but cheap, which bypasses online price competition. See, I'm not all negative today.