This is using my gameboy emulator, binjgb[0], on the website! (well one of my gameboy emulators, heh [1][2]) It's been used as the emulator for GB Studio for a little while now, but I don't know how often people embed it in their websites, so it's really cool to see.
heh, good point! Most of the older ones are using GameBoy-Online[0] instead, since that was the GB Studio default for a while. But I think everything since GBStudio 3 should be binjgb.
Funny how people ask this while also being critical on Nintendo. If creator of emulator is to be compensated, are you going to compensate Nintendo as well?
This isn't even the first legitimately interesting video game connection to McDonalds, weirdly.
Treasure is an influential game development studio that did a lot of really interesting work in the mid to late 90s, responsible for games like Gunstar Heroes, Radiant Silvergun, Ikaruga, Bangai-o, Silhouette Mirage, Dynamite Headdy, Mischief Makers, Alien Soldier, and others. They were a bunch of ex-Konami developers (who had worked on games like Contra 3, Axelay, Super Castlevania 4, the arcade Simpsons) who were tired of making license games and wanted to make their own original games. A few of their games did well in the market, but they and their particular approach to innovation in action game rule systems has had a much, much bigger impact on other action game developers since.
And their very first game when they left Konami and started their own studio, the game they had to make to stay afloat to make Gunstar Heroes, was... a Sega Genesis McDonalds game, the 1993 "McDonald's Treasure Land Adventure".
Not even the only McDonald's branded game of the era! I played MC Kids growing up on NEWS and it also was a dramatically better game than it had any right to be. Not quite the same storied history but still recommend playing if you're looking for some hidden NES gems.
I've seen Pepsiman played at a GDQ[0] event and it is such good entertainment. I forget which year it was but I remember commentary about how the community found the guy who did the acting ("Pepsi for TV Game!") in the game and how he claimed to have been specifically directed to use broken English.
I played that alot as a kid. I struggled with staying focused to beat a game, especially with the infamouse Sonic 3 Carnival Night Zone before the age of Youtube. This game was one of the first I was able to beat as a kid.
>Just be sure to order some McDonald’s to support them. Who knows… if we keep eating McDonald’s, they might keep producing these oddball retro gaming related projects.
>I, for one, will NEVER stop eating McDonald’s. You have my word.
Uh... hail marketing! Nothing quite like getting nostalgia exploited for corporate profits. But hey, its important to support... uh... 'retro gaming?'
The anti-corporatism shtick is so lame. Just because something is done by a massive corporation doesn’t make the thing bad. Just because something is an advertisement doesn’t make it bad.
I think this is pretty cool. Maybe I’ll buy some McDonalds today too.
> Just because something is done by a massive corporation doesn’t make the thing bad
I don't think anyone was saying this. Some airlines plant trees. That doesn't make planting trees bad.
But massive corporations (with maybe ~1% or fewer exceptions) don't base their practices on anything remotely resembling bad or good, and this leads them to profit-seeking behaviours that harm people on an individual level (which I think is a "bad" thing), as well as the planet, the environment, the economy, their competitors.
McDonalds is not a good or ethical company. The corporate apologism is "so lame".
If anyone can find a spark of counterculture in 2023 I encourage it. There is no longer a battleground for the soul of society. It's safe to say the suits won.
Yeah, the evisceration of corporate-everything has really unnecessarily crowded out enjoyment of all the good parts, while at the same time somehow managing to look more ridiculous as a POV than I ever expected.
Back in the edgy days, I never thought I'd find blanket-corporate-hatred becoming quite so lame, to the point of even taking on its own corporate-style blandness, in the 2020s...
> I think this is pretty cool. Maybe I’ll buy some McDonalds today too.
Plenty of people will have plenty of issues with a major corporation. But it's worth pointing out that McDonald's is one of the most prominent fast food chains which has no problem with animal abuse in terms of products from horribly treated livestock animals. They have trouble even making their french fries livestock-torture free .
Maybe this issue doesn't personally matter to you, but it does create a huge problem for a company that does something so shamelessly unethical.
For me, it's the McChicken. The best fast food sandwich. I even ask for extra McChicken sauce packets and the staff is so friendly and more than willing to oblige.
One time I asked for McChicken sauce packets and they gave me three. I said, "Wow, three for free!" and the nice friendly McDonald's worker laughed and said, "I'm going to call you 3-for-free!".
Now the staff greets me with "hey it's 3-for-free!" and ALWAYS give me three packets. It's such a fun and cool atmosphere at my local McDonald's restaurant, I go there at least 3 times a week for lunch and a large iced coffee with milk instead of cream, 1-2 times for breakfast on the weekend, and maybe once for dinner when I'm in a rush but want a great meal that is affordable, fast, and can match my daily nutritional needs.
I cannot read any enthusiastic endorsement of McDonald's without thinking of the meme/patent [0] from Sony proposing that viewers skip commercials by yelling brand names at their TV:
Kinda makes me think of those tobacco advertisements of yesteryear. It's like "oh hey, Winston cigarettes sponsored the Flintstones, I'll never stop smoking Winstons."
Who knows, perhaps one day we'll look back on modern day fast food ads and consider them equivalent to cigarette ads.
I can't quite tell if this is written by an LLM (and aided by a person, re: the developer is known) or the writing style is just so prolific that LLMs cant help but ape it.
I think it's because every sentence is pretty short.
These sentences end up being related, and should probably be just one paragraph.
The writing style seems to separate everything out, I can say this might be what gives the impression of a LLM gluing parts together!
I wonder if they received a McDonalds presser, and I wonder how much of those are still human-in-the-loop.
Well the author, Anthony, is a digital nomad who's known for minimal effort fluff pieces so it would seem like a natural progression to use LLMs. At some point retro dodo might skip the middle name and render him unemployed.
I know I sound bitter but it's because retro dodo used to be a high quality production shop (still mostly is, to be fair). Though I understand that it wasn't sustainable for the original two guys to do everything alone (they've branched from blogging to youtubing to even book publishing after all)
I can't quite tell if this comment is written by an LLM (and aided by a person) or the writing style is just so prolific that LLMs cant help but ape it.
I think it's because every sentence is pretty short.
These sentences end up being related, and should probably be just one paragraph.
The writing style seems to separate everything out, I can say this might be what gives the impression of a LLM gluing parts together!
Does this have the Nintendo logo in the ROM header? Real GameBoys check the ROM for an image containing Nintendo's logo during boot up as a way to prevent unlicensed games. The idea is, to make a GMB/GBC boot, you must at least commit trademark infringement, which gives Nintendo more legal leverage to block/punish any attempts to sell anything that Nintendo didn't get a cut of.
If the logo is missing, it would still boot on an emulator that doesn't emulate the boot ROM (which is most of them) and probably most flashcarts, so there's no need for it to be in their release. But it's still possible that whatever build system they used automatically inserted the logo.
There's no way Nintendo would bother McDonalds legally over something like this if the logo's in there, but I'm still curious if it is.
Your jurisdiction may vary, but under Sega v Accolade [1], I'd expect including the logo to be fair use, as including the trademarked data for Sega's TMSS was.
No, they avoided the issue. I was hoping for it. Surely Nintendo would have worked with them to license this; I feel it would be in their interests too.
The music sounds particularly awesome, first thing I noticed is how deep the bass sounds given the limitations of the medium.
Looks like it is using a separate tone for the initial kick, and then a sweep an octave lower, it really sounds huge. This is the first time hearing a Game Boy game through nice headphones though, so I'm not sure if this is also present in older games.
They immediately broke the nostalgia spell when they used 'smh' in the opening game, that was like hitting a brick wall of anachronism. Neat effort though. Glad someone got paid to make it.
Either it's in the console ROM, in which case it's not a problem, or it's in the cartridge ROM, in which case I'd imagine it's just a matter of replacing the raster data with something else.
Readit News
[0] https://github.com/binji/binjgb [1] https://github.com/binji/pokegb [2] https://binji.github.io/raw-wasm/badgb/
https://itch.io/games/made-with-gb-studio
725 listed so far (lots of asset packs and tech demos I'm sure, but still.)
[0] https://github.com/taisel/GameBoy-Online
https://grimacesbirthday.com/
Treasure is an influential game development studio that did a lot of really interesting work in the mid to late 90s, responsible for games like Gunstar Heroes, Radiant Silvergun, Ikaruga, Bangai-o, Silhouette Mirage, Dynamite Headdy, Mischief Makers, Alien Soldier, and others. They were a bunch of ex-Konami developers (who had worked on games like Contra 3, Axelay, Super Castlevania 4, the arcade Simpsons) who were tired of making license games and wanted to make their own original games. A few of their games did well in the market, but they and their particular approach to innovation in action game rule systems has had a much, much bigger impact on other action game developers since.
And their very first game when they left Konami and started their own studio, the game they had to make to stay afloat to make Gunstar Heroes, was... a Sega Genesis McDonalds game, the 1993 "McDonald's Treasure Land Adventure".
Longplay here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LNbmJyL872c
I've never played it, but it looks really solid and vastly better than it has any right to be.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7nKywTkMnAs
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M.C._Kids
https://games.greggman.com/game/programming_m_c__kids/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p7kFfLRcHjU
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M.C._Kids
A cool game, fun and dynamic, with a bonus stage where you have to pick up garbage falling from the sky faster and faster, and sort it for recycling.
Because, yes, it was a game that wanted to brainwash you into thinking McDonald = environmentalism. What a joke.
Also let’s not forget about the long tradition of Pepsi video games including the interesting Japanese Pepsiman and the PlayStation release!
https://youtu.be/lNF3dBiSH4M
(2016: https://youtu.be/C33Xo1hE9XE 13:00 for the quote)
[0] https://gamesdonequick.com/
>I, for one, will NEVER stop eating McDonald’s. You have my word.
Uh... hail marketing! Nothing quite like getting nostalgia exploited for corporate profits. But hey, its important to support... uh... 'retro gaming?'
The anti-corporatism shtick is so lame. Just because something is done by a massive corporation doesn’t make the thing bad. Just because something is an advertisement doesn’t make it bad.
I think this is pretty cool. Maybe I’ll buy some McDonalds today too.
> Just because something is done by a massive corporation doesn’t make the thing bad
I don't think anyone was saying this. Some airlines plant trees. That doesn't make planting trees bad.
But massive corporations (with maybe ~1% or fewer exceptions) don't base their practices on anything remotely resembling bad or good, and this leads them to profit-seeking behaviours that harm people on an individual level (which I think is a "bad" thing), as well as the planet, the environment, the economy, their competitors.
McDonalds is not a good or ethical company. The corporate apologism is "so lame".
Back in the edgy days, I never thought I'd find blanket-corporate-hatred becoming quite so lame, to the point of even taking on its own corporate-style blandness, in the 2020s...
Plenty of people will have plenty of issues with a major corporation. But it's worth pointing out that McDonald's is one of the most prominent fast food chains which has no problem with animal abuse in terms of products from horribly treated livestock animals. They have trouble even making their french fries livestock-torture free .
Maybe this issue doesn't personally matter to you, but it does create a huge problem for a company that does something so shamelessly unethical.
No one needs to "support McDonalds", and no one needs to be encouraged to. It'll do fine.
One time I asked for McChicken sauce packets and they gave me three. I said, "Wow, three for free!" and the nice friendly McDonald's worker laughed and said, "I'm going to call you 3-for-free!".
Now the staff greets me with "hey it's 3-for-free!" and ALWAYS give me three packets. It's such a fun and cool atmosphere at my local McDonald's restaurant, I go there at least 3 times a week for lunch and a large iced coffee with milk instead of cream, 1-2 times for breakfast on the weekend, and maybe once for dinner when I'm in a rush but want a great meal that is affordable, fast, and can match my daily nutritional needs.
They did something cool and now you want to give them money. Why is that?
Dead Comment
> Say "McDonald's" to end commercial
> "McDonald's!"
[0] https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/sony-patent-mcdonalds/
Who knows, perhaps one day we'll look back on modern day fast food ads and consider them equivalent to cigarette ads.
I think it's because every sentence is pretty short.
These sentences end up being related, and should probably be just one paragraph.
The writing style seems to separate everything out, I can say this might be what gives the impression of a LLM gluing parts together!
I wonder if they received a McDonalds presser, and I wonder how much of those are still human-in-the-loop.
I know I sound bitter but it's because retro dodo used to be a high quality production shop (still mostly is, to be fair). Though I understand that it wasn't sustainable for the original two guys to do everything alone (they've branched from blogging to youtubing to even book publishing after all)
Artificial limitations encourage the use of short and snappy communications.
Also, who can be bothered to read through a paragraph today?
I live my life one sentence at a time.
Songwriters write songs when they haven't got anything to sing about.
Directors make movies when they haven't got anything to make a movie about.
Copies of copies of copies... It's no wonder people are tired. Where is the substance? Where is the risk?
I like to make sure my main points are easily readable.
These sentences end up being related, and should probably be just one paragraph.
The writing style seems to separate everything out, I can say this might be what gives the impression of a LLM gluing parts together!
If the logo is missing, it would still boot on an emulator that doesn't emulate the boot ROM (which is most of them) and probably most flashcarts, so there's no need for it to be in their release. But it's still possible that whatever build system they used automatically inserted the logo.
There's no way Nintendo would bother McDonalds legally over something like this if the logo's in there, but I'm still curious if it is.
https://tcrf.net/Bugs:Game_Boy_Bootstrap_ROM
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sega_v._Accolade
Looks like it is using a separate tone for the initial kick, and then a sweep an octave lower, it really sounds huge. This is the first time hearing a Game Boy game through nice headphones though, so I'm not sure if this is also present in older games.
https://nickfa.ro/index.php/HUGETracker
The accompanying website is a blast from the past too,
https://grimacesbirthday.com/
Limited Run Games does runs of physical Gameboy cartridges still. They have to restyle things to not have Nintendo branding, but it can be done.
Edit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sega_v._Accolade?wprov=sfti1
But couldn’t you also write an exception in the emulator itself? (I’m actually not sure - just genuinely curious!)