Footage of Lost PC Engine Ports of Marble Madness, Popils and More Released by Tengen

[Barone]

Actual footage of unreleased games is always good to see, but these clips- of Marble Madness, Off the Wall, Peter Pack Rat and Popils on both the Famicom and PC Engine- are particularly interesting for a few reasons. For a start, Off the Wall and Peter Pack Rat were Atari arcade games that received no home console ports (Peter Pack Rat made it to the Commodore 64 and Amstrad CPC but that's it), and while no comment is given for Peter Pack Rat, Off the Wall was cancelled because it would need an 8MB cart and a paddle controller.

http://www.retrocollect.com/News/los...n-staffer.html

The videos can be found here:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCt3...w=0&shelf_id=0

But what really matters to me is Marble Madness, since I'm a big fan of this game.
It feels like the PCE version was just as good as the Tengen's MD one. The PCE version seems to be running at the same (or very, very similar) resolution of the original arcade game whose both vertical and horizontal line counting are a bit higher than what the Mega Drive can pull of in NTSC/60Hz mode.
The music renditions are obviously not as close to the arcade as the MD ones due to much different hardware, but they sound pretty good IMO.
The segment where the "birds" appear also doesn't seem to have noticeable slowdown.
It's a shame it was never officially released but I hope it "leaks" now.

[Mad Moham]

I have a feeling those games won't leak any time soon, but I hope they do. Its good to see footage being made available and Marble Madness does look impressive. I think these are the exact types of games that the PCE needed as there were way too many scrolling shooters on that console.

[goldenband]

Awesome stuff. All three ports look really impressive. Since the black marble doesn't move in the Ultimate stage (EDIT: or at all), I'm guessing there were one or two more bugs yet to be squashed, but otherwise it looks and sounds like a first-rate port.

There was some sort of drama involving the prototype for Marble Madness, wasn't there? I don't remember the details but I remember seeing it named as a hotspot of activity.

[gamevet]

I noticed that the black marbles and the acid pools aren't moving in the demo. I wonder how far this was from being completed.

[xelement5x]

One of the Nolan Bros has the PCE/TG16 Marble Madness Prototype I believe. I'd love to buy it from them and dump it (or at least convince them do a limited release or something), but I'm sure it's an expensive proposition either way.

[Jeckidy]

I loved Popils on Game Gear, such an underrated puzzler. Would like to have seen it released on other platforms.

[Gogogadget]

You can never have too many versions of Marble Madness.

[tomaitheous]

Never was a big fan of Marble Madness, but any port of it to a tile-based system kind of impresses me (translating that unique map detail to a tile-based rendering could not have been fun).

[OverDrone]

Marble Madness looked to be on it's way to being a great PCE port! Interesting regarding resolution compared with the MD port.

I'm a big fan of the game since my arcade got a brand new machine on release (yes I am really that old), and I couldn't believe how good the FM music and sound FX were through those speakers.