Been playing "Double Dragon & Kunio-kun Retro Brawler Bundle" on Switch, which is a really great collection of the original NES games. Having worked on three NES collections now and having played these particular games for like 20 years, I thought I'd publish some thoughts here: 
First of all, as I said before, the fact that there are 11 brand new ROM hack translations on here is incredible. ASM hacking for NES is a highly specialized skill, not one you typically have in a game dev studio. One or two is a miracle, but there are ELEVEN here!
This collection finally, miraculously, gives you the ability to play the Kunio games as one continuous series in English, with one consistent voice. The few official translations we changed the characters and story, and the unofficial ones were by multiple authors.
What I didn't expect was that some of the games have bug fixes, improvements, and added features! They also sometimes reduce lag by increasing the capabilities of the NES CPU in the emulator...something I was reluctant to do with Mega Man Legacy (we patched it in later...)
The emulation seems solid. I'm not sensitive to input lag so I'm not the one to ask about that, but the color palette looks right, the scanlines offer a nice level of fine tuning. They boost the NES' ability to show more than 8 sprites per scanline...standard now, but appreciated
There's some distortion in the audio emulation, occasionally you'll get an "off" note. I suspect some level of audio compression, a mistake we made when we launched MMLC that we were able to fix with a patch. Hopefully it's an easy fix for them!
The ROM hacks themselves are good, though maybe not "pro" by modern standards. @taizou_hori and @GideonZhi pointed some of this out already. But again, there are ELEVEN of them, so I'm sure the work had to get spread thin a bit. I wonder if we'll get hacks of the hacks one day?
The box scans look internet sourced to me...nothing wrong with that of course, but something I like doing with these projects is actually sourcing originals and providing clean scans back to the publisher. Like, "Here, don't lose these again."
Oh, but they made brand new English logos for the Famicom boxes, which is rad. It sort of gives you this alternate timeline where all the games were released in English way back then.
There's no rewind or cheats that I can see, which feeds into my biggest complaint about this collection, a massive philosophical difference from how I like to approach these:
There's no way to engage with these games other than playing them as they were 30-ish years ago.
There's no way to engage with these games other than playing them as they were 30-ish years ago.
I think the mistake this and many other collections make is not understanding that it's not 1990 anymore. I love these games, but I don't REALLY want to learn them on their own merits anymore. They're clunky and awkward and I've got 300 better games on Steam I haven't gotten to.
I think you can do this with games that stand the test of time, or that have a giant fan base. But we're talking about a dozen awkward old games that most people have never played! There should be some level of onboarding, of letting me experience them without hours of failure.
The collection, as designed, appeals almost exclusively to people who already know and enjoy these games. Which is a shame, because I think they can be appreciated in new ways by new audiences if you give them just a little bit of hand-holding. Rewind alone would do wonders here.
The other way to approach this is to at least show people why these games are cool. That's why there's so much art and text in the stuff I've worked on, I think these old games without context are just...old games. This stuff is practically my entire identity and even I get bored
But all that said, this was an easy purchase for me. If nothing else I am throwing $40 at the very idea that 11 substantial new ROM hacks in a commercial collection is something I want to see more of in the world!
Another small thing: some NES games like Double Dragon 2 here have unnecessary or garbage data on the left and right overscan (here it's black space on the left and note the long green stripe on the right). We added per-game cropping in SNK 40th for this reason and cut that off.
This gets tricky if different game screens crop differently. I think it's Mega Man 5 where the boss select screen used the whole area but every in-game section has a black bar on the left
Oh one thing they added that's perfect: you can map A, B, and also A+B. Most of these games map jump to A+B, now you can make it its own button and make these the three-button games they were always meant to be!
I like Nekketsu Hockey Bu a lot. Every time you defeat a team you gain their uniforms and special powers...including the girl's school team! Kunio looks good in a skirt.
Their special shot turns the puck into a teddy bear that hits so hard it literally throws the goalie out of the rink. If yours gets hit you actually have no goalie until the next goal is scored.
The kendo uniform lets you hadouken, and the baseball one hits the puck so hard that it warps through time and appears in front of the goalie
Also the goalie gets a bat and can smack the puck across the rink instead of catching it
Also the goalie gets a bat and can smack the puck across the rink instead of catching it
I just lost to a team called the Killers. Their nets are covered in spikes, and sometimes there's this mysterious flash of light that makes people randomly get knocked out
Excellent trolling in this game. Every goalie has the same blind spot to shoot into, making you think you're a smart player exploiting an oversight...until you get to the very last team and suddenly that spot is guarded, forcing you to learn real offense. THEY KNEW!
One big disappointment:
Back in the day Technos translated Hockey Bu as "Crash 'N The Boys Ice Challenge," but never released it. We actually have reason to believe this game passed certification and was ready to ship. I wonder if they tried to find it?
Back in the day Technos translated Hockey Bu as "Crash 'N The Boys Ice Challenge," but never released it. We actually have reason to believe this game passed certification and was ready to ship. I wonder if they tried to find it?
One of my not-so-secret projects is trying to get just one publisher to request certified-but-unreleased ROMs back from Nintendo, just to see if they're maintained. I suspect that they are but I don't know if anyone has tried yet.
To be clear: there are games that went all the way through Lot Check, but the publisher decided not to manufacture it. I know of exactly two that were dug out of this archive and sold digitally: Earth Bound and StarFox 2, both by Nintendo. But no third party stuff yet!
I suspect that current rightsholders just don't know what's in there, and if they do, they don't understand that folks are interested.
Heck yeah
