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Tengo Project working on a new remake.

Holammer

Member
The developers of Wild Guns Reloaded, Ninja Warriors Once Again and the recent Kikikaikai/Pocky & Rocky Reshrined, tease a fourth remake project in the works and that'll be shown soon.
Unless they license other SNES classics, there's not much left in Natsume 16Bit IP repertoire left to work on, so... Harvest Moon?
Yes, we all know the rights issues and history involved with Harvest Moon.

"We will also be showing information on the fourth new title in the TENGO PROJECT 16Bit remake, following on from "The Mystery of the Black Cloak". Enjoy!"

An interview on Game Spark also mentions a 4th port in the works and answers the question of a PC version of Kikikaikai.
"When asked about a PC (Steam) port of "The Mystery of the Black Cloak", they stated that they have received many requests for a PC (Steam) port, but due to funding and development resource issues, it is a 'when the opportunity arises' situation."
 

CamHostage

Member
Natsume is the development studio on a TON of games (including some games they're barely credited for; they also published a lot of stuff they didn't develop, or developed ports of stuff they didn't originate, which makes crate-digging complicated), so it's possible they're pulling from something that people don't automatically associate them with.

...That said, not much is coming to mind that they could bring back which would make sense for this team. Spanky's Quest? Natsume Pro Wrestling? Medabots maybe? Their SNES remaster projects made a lot of sense going off of the quality of sprites and backgrounds that they could redraw and expand upon, but could they dip down and pull out NES games like SCAT or Shadow of the Ninja?
 

Holammer

Member
Natsume is the development studio on a TON of games (including some games they're barely credited for; they also published a lot of stuff they didn't develop, or developed ports of stuff they didn't originate, which makes crate-digging complicated), so it's possible they're pulling from something that people don't automatically associate them with.

...That said, not much is coming to mind that they could bring back which would make sense for this team. Spanky's Quest? Natsume Pro Wrestling? Medabots maybe? Their SNES remaster projects made a lot of sense going off of the quality of sprites and backgrounds that they could redraw and expand upon, but could they dip down and pull out NES games like SCAT or Shadow of the Ninja?
I thought of Shadow of the Ninja, or rather 'Blue Shadow' as it was known as in Europe. It would probably be the best candidate for uplifting to 16Bit.
The Game Spark article mentions there's a hint in a brochure TGS visitors get from their booth. Something about "8-bit realism action", so who knows. All of Tengo's projects thus far have been basically redrawn from scratch, with very little original art left in the final product.

i hope they remake other titles that are not from Natsume !
Eventually they'll run out of IP to work on, so I'd love to see new games or even remakes of other SNES games. The sky's the limit if they do that.
 

CamHostage

Member
Something about "8-bit realism action", so who knows. All of Tengo's projects thus far have been basically redrawn from scratch, with very little original art left in the final product.

8-bit, good to know, there's a lot there!

And true, the Tengo games have been redrawn, but they have had a lot to work with. (Wild Guns was a good-looking SNES game with giant sprites, Pocky & Rocky was also sharp plus had a couple spin-offs to further influence it, and then Warriors had that gigantic arcade cabinet version.) These remakes look disarmingly like how you remember the originals looking (or when you go back to the originals, you're surprised how nice they looked for mid-tier and somewhat forgotten games,) only of course they're massively improved in resolution and detail and even recomposed for widescreen displays with almost imperceptible changes in how the game plays and challenges players.

Whereas the NES games, those would be a new challenge for them to upgrade, even moreso for the GB/GBC titles. There's a lot of abstraction in 8-bit graphics to make use of very little material (parts of SotN and SCAT are just a black background and tiles/sprites on top with partial BG plates here and there, so they'd have to reconceive those areas for instance because a modern game can't be that empty,) and the fine detail isn't there to expand upon. There's a necessary degree of reimaginging in what the original design was trying to look like and what it would have looked like if it wasn't under 8-bit limitations. (And yet, if you're good, your reimatination process should retain the carefully assembled style that the original designers worked out in efforts to make the best of these conditions; the games are beloved in part because of those limitations leading to such creative, masterful work.)

Not an insurmountable challenge though, and one I'm eager to see Tengo Project take on as Natsume have a few bangers from that era.

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