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“City Trouble” for the NES

by Denny R. Walter
(November the 8th, 2017,
December the 31st, 2018,
September the 3rd, 2020)

Synopsis

Screenshot 1

The Jackal Gang is causing Trouble and it’s up to Amy to stop them.

You are Amy and your mission leads you to the rooftops high above the town’s not so pleasant districts.
So, take your trusty taser and electrocute all evil scumbags that stand in your way. Show those muscle-headed Goons and them jumpy Paradudes who’s boss. Use your agility to pass over deep and dangerous gaps and outrun that pesky helicopter.
It’s a tough job, but not all is dire: There’s your best friend Rachel waiting in the middle of the action to provide you some useful stuff to help you on your way.
You’ll need it since it’s only a matter of time until bad girl Scarlett bothers you again or you’ll have to face another one of the Jumbos.

Do you have the guts and the skills to rid the City of the Jackal Gang in this fast-paced arcade action game?

Watch gameplay of level 2 on YouTube

Download the ROM:
See below

Artwork

Screenshot 2 Screenshot 3 Screenshot 4

Copyright disclaimer for downloads

While the ROM and the manual files are freeware and can be used and shared as long as they remain unaltered, the game and all its additional materials is still copyrighted by Den Kat Games.

This means you are not allowed to put the game on an NES cartridge for commercial purposes.
The only legitimate cartridges for “City Trouble” are the ones that were sold by Mega Cat Studios.
Every other cartridge with the game on it is technically a pirate cartridge.
However, since the game is sold out, feel free to create a reproduction cartridge for your personal, non-commercial usage.

Likewise, you are not allowed to put the game on commercial devices, like clone consoles or game collection disks that are sold.
You are not allowed to sell the game in digital form either.

You are allowed to put the ROM and the manual on websites (for example sites about homebrew games or ROM sites in general) or on physical mediums under the condition that the download or the physical medium is available completely free of charge and without any obligations.

You are not allowed to couple the game with malicious or annoying software, like viruses or adware.
You are not allowed to hide the download behind a link that requires payment to be visible.

If you want to put the ROM or the manual on a product where the product itself is commercial, but the ROM is just a bonus feature (for example a book about NES games that contains a CD with homebrew games on it), please contact me first.
Furthermore, when in doubt about the distribution rights, contact me as well.

Of course, you are free to review the game and to show game footage in still image or video form for informational purposes, even in commercial products, just like the press is allowed to do such things.
(If you review our game or do a Let’s Play or something like that, it would be nice if you could send me a link to the work when it’s published.)

Don’t contact Mega Cat Studios about issues regarding the ROM or the contents in general.
They were the publishers of the physical NES cartridge, but they don’t own the copyright to the game itself.
You could have contacted them if you had trouble with your cartridge or if the box was damaged or something like that, but for any issue that refers to the game in general, independent from the medium it is played from, write me directly.

My e-mail address is denny_r._walter@web.de.

The downloads:

Development history

I wanted to have a game with a female protagonist in my list of NES games that I own. But none of the existing games were good candidates:
In “Metroid” you never really see that Samus is a woman. She wears a robotic suit throughout the whole game and you only see her face in the end if you were quick enough.
Other games have the female character as just one of many selectable characters. Or there are non-human females like Ms. Pac-Man. Or it’s just a conversion of a movie and the protagonist isn’t really a video game character. Or it’s not an action game where the heroine fights against evil.
Then there are games that match the criteria, but where I don’t like the games themselves for various reasons.

That’s why I finally decided to program my own NES game.
I had played around with NES programming in the past, but never really seriously. But now I had a definite goal and I was eager to really do this.

I planned a small highscore game, so that I would actually be able to finish it.
I wouldn’t have had the patience to write a whole game in low level Assembly language, but C was not a problem.
And since I wanted to do a game that fits on a standard 1985-era NES cartridge and I didn’t know how much space would be taken by the overhead of using C, I decided to do randomized levels.

The graphics style of the sprites was inspired by the NES version of “Kung Fu” as well as the early NES sports titles: “Tennis”, “Soccer”, “Baseball”. All four of these games have a pretty similar drawing style for the sprites that don’t look too cartoony and comparatively “realistic”. We took inspiration from that style to evoke the feeling of an early 1985-era game.
Since I had a game with a female protagonist, I wanted her to be prominently shown on the screen. That’s why I used a character size of 16 x 40 pixels instead of the typical 16 x 32 from most other NES games. (The same size is used for the characters in “Kung Fu” while the sports titles take different sizes.)

So, the overall idea was that my game shall look like it was finished in 1986 by a third party company who started their project after seeing the NES launch titles in 1985.

My colleague Katrin drew me a sprite of the main character, Amy, and I liked it so much that I asked her to do the graphics for the whole game. She did so and now we created the game together.
Not only did she do the graphics, but she also contributed gameplay ideas. Decisions were made by both of us.
When the game was about to be finished, Katrin also drew all the artworks for the box, cartridge label and for the manual.

I invented a name for us as the development label:
Den Kat Games.
Those are of course the first syllables of our names. And our logo is a cat sitting in a den:

Logo

Music, sound effects and all other things were done by external people that I found on the internet.

Programming started in June 2015 and was finished in November 2016.
The game was finally published on a real cartridge in 2017, complete with a physical box and manual. The publisher is Mega Cat Studios.
The ROM became freeware on December the 31st, 2018.

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