I love this stuff. Developers making an unreleased game freely available so people can see their art. They even threw in the source code.

One of my friends let me borrow heroes of might and magic. Through being lazy, I ended up misplacing it and it was either destroyed or lost for good.

Years later I bought him the whole collection on Steam.

At the time I was something of a fan boy for final fantasy, but ff9 was the first one I didn’t finish. I played through all the way to the beginning of the end… and then decided I didn’t care and that I was forcing myself to play a game I didn’t enjoy.

I don’t remember having the technical issues you mentioned, but I just didn’t click with the characters and the world felt meh to me. I can’t recall a single song that I enjoyed from 9 either.

X was probably the last FF I finished before the series lost its magic to me. (FFXIV was fun but a bit too costly)

So after a fellow lemming pointed me to the digital version. I threw 10 dollars away to find out… that it appears to be identical to the proto rom (and the gameplay footage).

Plausible more content was added or something, but the early gameplay is identical complete with the “you can’t use this yet”

So, the article appears to be a bit wrong in that… the game was finished ages ago… just no one wanted to invest the money to release it.

Oof I went to buy this and they’re charging a 10 percent fee for ShipAid Delivery Guarantee… I mean it’s a digital copy. What gives? There doesn’t appear to be any way to remove it from my cart.

(3rd times the charm… I was able to get it into my cart without the delivery guarantee. I have no explanation of how it was getting automatically added.)

Nice! I went to that site and somehow didn’t find it! Thanks for the link

I’d like to know as well.

The leak or whatever it is, appears to be fully featured though. There’s at least one gameplay video of someone beating all bosses (without getting hit) and reaching the ending. Presumably they smoothed out a few rough edges. In the rom I played, it would constantly drop weapons or spells that you can’t “use yet”. Implying that you will be able to after you level up.

I am super confused by this. I read the article and then went looking to see if I could buy a rom or something… The gba cart is 60 dollars (oof) and I don’t have anything to play it on. The publisher doesn’t appear to sell roms. The article didn’t seem to mention anything but… there’s a bunch of gameplay videos of this game that have, apparently, been around for years. The gameplay looks pretty much identical to the latest trailer. There is also a rom available from the standard rom sites… that seems to have been there for awhile.

Was this game released ages ago or was it leaked years ago or what?

(I played the rom and it’s…. not great. Mostly just spamming A)

Submit the PR to fix it! The link to the GitHub is right there

Since everyone’s mentioned the standards.

I’ve really enjoyed playing Tails of Iron (metroidvania with a focus on learning bosses attacks) lately. For programming games, I really liked Shenzhen IO (You create hardware with something resembling an Assembly language and a printable manual) and Human Resources Machine (drag and drop assembly programming)

I also have a soft spot for anything from Ska Studios (I maed a game with zombies in it, salt and sanctuary, salt and sacrifice, dishwasher, Charlie murder, and a bunch of older games that are probably not playable anymore)

Also looks like everyone else forgot to mention the great game that is Undertale as well.

Thanks for the info! I had no idea this existed!

I’m old and haven’t grown out of video games and now enjoy playing them with my kids! Video games rule for all ages!

Apparently it’s called AI Shark now! Because it uses AI to cheat!

I’m 40. Can I have some more of that time too?

For anyone confused about the Netflix bit. If you’re subscribed to Netflix, they offer a bunch of free mobile games that you can download and play. This works pretty similar to Apple Arcade. If you log into Netflix on your phone you should see a row of games that you can play.

Haven’t played that particular Shantae game, but I found the series off putting to play in front of my kids due to the high amount of fan service. Seems like not what op might not be going for here.