Door Door redrawn

by Matt Sephton — Sat, 19 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000

I redrew the box art from Door Door (1985, Famicom). It’s a great game and worthy of your time.

Door Door was designed by Koichi Nakamura, known as one of the creators of Dragon Quest. The game was the runner-up in the Enix-sponsored “First Game and Hobby Program Contest” in 1982, winning the “Outstanding Program Award” with a prize of 500,000 yen. Enix was given the rights to the game and ported the game to several Japanese home computers.

Out of all the versions I think the Famicom one plays best, even though it has an annoying squeaky walking sound. I just lower or mute the audio.

Affinity Designer is my tool of choice for doing most of my vector illustration work. Below are the vector outlines for the above drawing. As you can see I like to keep things fairly minimal! Lots of gradients were used, and the noise function to give things a bit of texture.

The coloured image was originally posted on my Dribbble account, but the outline image is new for this blog post. I hope you like it!

Review: Binary Land

by Matt Sephton — Thu, 14 Oct 2010 18:00:00 +0000

A tale of enduring love, spiders and spray cans. This charming little maze game is interesting for one major reason - you control both characters simultaneously.

It’s not as difficult as it sounds, though, so don’t worry. Both characters walk up and down the screen as directed, but when you attempt sideways movement the first character does as directed and the other does the opposite - making for some interesting brain work. The characters start on opposite sides the screen and you have to figure out how to navigate the maze so that the characters arrive at the goal at the same time. Judicious use of dead-ends and the maze walls can prevent movement of one or the other characters and allow you to move them one at a time, albeit only in a limited way. Things get more difficult with the addition of spider enemies that need to be avoided, and also spider’s webs that will trap either character if walked into. At this point you’ll have to get to them and then use a spray can to destroy the web and free them.

As with most games of this age, the graphics are functional at best but they do have a certain charm of their own. The music is Eric Satie’s “Je te veux” (I want you) - a sentimental, slow waltz that lends itself wonderfully to the NES chip music stylings. But the game is really all about the puzzles provided by the maze layouts of which there many - the first three are always the same but after that the rest of the mazes are presented in a random order.

Hudson Soft first released Binary Land in 1983 for the MSX and a bunch of other Japan-only home computers and this version of the game featured a boy and a girl. The game was later released in 1985 for the NES/Famicom with the two main characters replaced by penguins, which whilst being reminiscent of Pengo adds a lot of charm to the game. Even more so when you look at the cover. The MSX version saw release in Europe by Kuma Computers Ltd in 1984, but the NES version never made it out of Japan.

More recently a poor java mobile phone version was made and the game was released as Hudson Best Collection Vol. 4 on Game Boy Advance, which contains a bunch of NES games running under emulation. Whilst emulation is the most convenient way to play the original game these days, there have also been a couple of fan remakes which can be played on your desktop computer.

Get Info: #nes

Door Door redrawn

Review: Binary Land

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