Homebrews with female characters

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DRW
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Homebrews with female characters

Post by DRW »

Are there any good NES homebrew games that have a female main character?

I didn't find one that I like among the official games. (Why did they have to make "Valis - The Fantasm Soldier" such a confusing maze mess on the NES?)
But I'd like to have a game in my list where the main character is definitely a woman and is also recognizable as such.

Apart from "Zooming Secretary"* and some games where you can choose between male and female protagonist, I don't know any homebrew games with a female main character.

"Hiatus Ward" looked promising, but the developer didn't post anything for two years now.


* "Zooming Secretary" is an office game anyway. But I'm looking more for an action heroine as an addition to the Marios, Mega Men and Ryu Hayabusas in my games collection, not for the female counterpart of the Paperboy.
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Re: Homebrews with female characters

Post by tepples »

I can't think of any homebrews right now. A lot of homebrews don't really have visually identifiable humanoid characters during gameplay.
DRW wrote:I didn't find one that I like among the official games
Y u no like Metroid?
I'm looking more for an action heroine
I guess that rules out Barbie, Lala from Lolo III, and Razor from Maniac Mansion because these aren't especially action games.
I'd like to have a game in my list where the main character is definitely a woman and is also recognizable as such.
Depends on how fast you beat it and whether Samus is wearing the lightweight space activity suit she gets from someone named Justin. If you mean during gameplay without a special password, Athena by SNK. Or Chrissy from Friday the 13th. Or Ellen Ripley from Alien 3. Or Peach from Super Mario Bros. 2. Or if fused legs are OK, Ariel from The Little Mermaid.

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Re: Homebrews with female characters

Post by thefox »

tepples wrote:Y u no like Metroid?
I tried playing Metroid not so long ago, and I have to say that it's a pretty rough experience on NES, at least for a first-time player. Grinding for health gets really old, really quickly. Add to that a bunch of bullshit mechanisms like enemies giving damage inside doors where you can't move, and enemies spawning on top of the player.
Athena by SNK.
Terrible, terrible game.

The only homebrew game with a female character that I can think of is Beat Em & Eat Em: http://www.retrousb.com/product_info.ph ... cts_id=139

EDIT: For more commercial games, in The Guardian Legend the protagonist is a female (or at least femaleish).
Last edited by thefox on Thu Jul 02, 2015 11:59 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Homebrews with female characters

Post by tokumaru »

DRW wrote:I didn't find one that I like among the official games.
Which official games have you ruled out, besides Valis (and possibly Metroid or any other that tepples has mentioned)? I find Layla pretty fun.
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Re: Homebrews with female characters

Post by rainwarrior »

In my in-progress game, I implemented a random main character appearance, so I think it arguably includes female (though I think all appearances could be either gender, it's up to player interpretation).
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Re: Homebrews with female characters

Post by DRW »

tepples wrote:Y u no like Metroid?
Samus is in her suit for the whole duration of the game. (O.k., you can start the game without her suit, but that's an added bonus and not the regular way the game is supposed to be played.) But I'm looking for a game where it's clear as daylight in regular gameplay that the protagonist is a woman.

Oh, by the way:
tepples wrote:the lightweight space activity suit she gets from someone named Justin.
Why does everybody always refer to the Justin Bailey code? That's just one random password that just happened to be discovered early.
In fact, every password has a flag that encodes which suit she wears.
For example, if you want to start the game from the beginning with zero suit Samus, the password is:
000000 000020
000000 000020

Barbie is already ruled out because she's not originally a video game character. I'm looking for characters that originated in a video game, not some movie or comic conversions.

Lala is not human or human-like. If I had wanted that, I would have settled with Ms. Pac-Man a long time ago.

And Razor is just one character in a group of six. It should be a game where the one definite main character is a woman.


Believe me, as far as official NES games go, I don't think anyone could ever name me another game with a female character that I haven't seen already.
When I was generally looking for some interesting NES games, I checked the whole, complete ROM set of the licensed American, European and Japanese games. So, I also came across all the games with female protagonists:

"Layla" where the increasing speed of the character makes the latter levels unplayable.

"Valkyrie no Bouken" which is "The Legend of Zelda" in bad.

"Valis - The Fantasm Soldier" which would have been a decent game if it had remained a linear scroller like the version on home computers and the Genesis, but no, they had to make it a confusing maze.

"Arkista's Ring", the game that you have to play four times in a row, so that it's considered beaten.


That's why I was looking specifically for homebrew games. Because if you name me one licensed game from the USA, Europe or Japan, I'm pretty sure it ran through my emulator once and was dismissed by me.
tepples wrote:Source: "Girls of NES" at SydLexia
There's an even better list:
http://www.hardcoregaming101.net/invent ... roines.htm
This one even includes some of my criteria, like only human-like characters and them visible as female for the majority of the game.
thefox wrote:The only homebrew game with a female character that I can think of is Beat Em & Eat Em: http://www.retrousb.com/product_info.ph ... cts_id=139
:| Erm, no thanks. :D
tokumaru wrote:Which official games have you ruled out
Pretty much every single one. (See above. Layla is also mentioned.)
rainwarrior wrote:In my in-progress game, I implemented a random main character appearance
Well, I guess there are also a few RPGs where you can create a party that includes females. But that's not what I'm looking for. I'm already aware of, for example, "Super Mario Bros. 2" or "Castlevania III". And even though it's not an NES game, my favorite game is "Street Fighter II".
So, it's not about having any playable female character somewhere in the game. Instead, I'm basically looking for an NES game that has a female main heroine in the same way "Tomb Raider" has. And a game that's still fun to play of course.

And I know that there's no really good example when it comes to official NES games. At least not for my taste. I have seen them all.
That's why I'm hoping that someone might name me a homebrew game or something similar.
Last edited by DRW on Fri Jan 13, 2023 5:10 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Homebrews with female characters

Post by Kasumi »

Krion Conquest/Magical Dorapie. (The Japanese version Magical Doropie is more forgiving and has more cutscenes and such.) This game actually subverts the usual trend, and you need to enter a code to play as the boy.

It's not on your 80s list because it came out in 1990 (heh).

I Love Softball is an all girl sports games that I actually rather enjoy. But you need a friend to play with, the AI is prophetic, unfortunately. But if you're looking for action heroes, that's obviously not it. It's also Japan Only, which you may not be looking for.

I bet there are a few Japan Only games that fit what you want. But you've seen them all, so~

Here's Legends of Owlia. A homebrew.

There's Project P, which you can get some demos of here. The developer will probably not work on it more, because of Super Bat Puncher.

There's also Banana Nana, which doesn't meet your human criteria, but I'm mentioning it anyway.

Edit: I'm pretty sure I've got at least one demo with a playable women, but all you can do is walk around a map. But that's as far as most homebrew gets. I mean... there's stuff like Clarine, which you can literally just walk back and forth. (Dead links, and she's actually in suit most of the time.)

There might be a lack of girls, sure. But another problem is that most NES homebrew games don't get very far or become very good. If you're cool with absurdly short tech demos, I could probably name more.

Edit2: Oh right. Utaco. There's probably a few posted on Nintendoage as well. I'd be surprised if there are homebrew games from here I haven't downloaded, but I don't browse Nintendo Age and they also have a pretty active community.
Last edited by Kasumi on Thu Jul 02, 2015 1:14 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Homebrews with female characters

Post by DRW »

Well, as I said: Name me a licensed game and the chance is 100 % that I know it when it's from the USA or Europe. And 95 % when it's from Japan. (There might be some games that I already abandoned because I didn't know what to choose in the menu.)

So, yes, I do know "The Krion Conquest". But that one is too much of a "Mega Man" ripoff for me.

And yeah, simple sports games don't count of course.

Japan-only is not a problem, though. I have the original Famicom-to-NES converter from Nintendo (the one that can be found in "Gyromite" and other first generation games), so whether it's NES or Famicom doesn't matter. I have "Nuts & Milk", "F-1 Race", "Over Horizon" and "Cross Fire" in my collection. (On the other hand, the Famicom Disk System would be a bigger problem unless someone hacked the ROM into cartridge form.)


With "Legends of Owlia", this is more a personal preference, but: I prefer the smaller games like "Super Mario Bros.", "Mega Man", "Ninja Gaiden" etc.
I have "Zelda" and a reproduction of "Tower of Radia" (the latter one specifically because it provides a really sophisticated in-game story), but I don't need any more of these really huge games where you solve riddles and explore dungeons etc. and need 10 hours to play through the entire game.
And this game looks like one of these.

For my female protagonist game, I'd rather have an action-oriented game that can be played in maybe an hour or so.


Does anybody still have contact to the developer of "Hiatus Ward"? I'm pretty sure if he fixed the glitches and improved the level structure so that you don't have to aimlessly walk around so much, this could be a really good example of a game with a female hero. She's a cool action girl in a serious atmosphere (not some 10 year old child in a fluffy bubblegum world) and the whole graphics style looks quite sophisticated.
Also, it's individual enough not to be considered a clone of a single other game, so that it's not only "Mega Man" with a witch ("The Krion Conquest") or "Ninja Gaiden" with aliens ("Ninja Crusaders").


And no, simple tech demos don't suffice. Otherwise I could probably even hack something together myself.
Kasumi wrote:Edit2: Oh right. Utaco.
What is that? :shock:
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Re: Homebrews with female characters

Post by thefox »

As the list of requirements grows and grows, I can't but be reminded of this old post from tokumaru: viewtopic.php?p=122282#p122282
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Re: Homebrews with female characters

Post by DRW »

Yup. And I actually did what he said: I grabbed the whole GoodNES collection and went through all the games (minus bad dumps, pirate cartridges, Russian and Chinese games, everything with Baseball, Tennis Golf, Football, Mahjong or Derby in the title and some other minor stuff). That's why I can be pretty sure that I have seen every game that I would want to have.

So, if you can get me a similar zip file with all homebrew games that aren't just tech demos, I'd be happy to look for them myself. But I really can't go through every ROM that has "(PD)" in the file name since these are thousands of ROMs that just contain nonsense.
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Re: Homebrews with female characters

Post by Sik »

tokumaru wrote:
DRW wrote:I didn't find one that I like among the official games.
Which official games have you ruled out, besides Valis (and possibly Metroid or any other that tepples has mentioned)? I find Layla pretty fun.
Dang it, I was gonna say that. The problem with Layla though is that the game really shows its age, so it's not really for everybody.
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Re: Homebrews with female characters

Post by tepples »

DRW wrote:Well, as I said: Name me a licensed game and the chance is 100 % that I know it when it's from the USA or Europe. And 95 % when it's from Japan. (There might be some games that I already abandoned because I didn't know what to choose in the menu.) [...] Japan-only is not a problem, though.
Which brings me to Lum's Wedding Bell, also released to arcade without the Urusei Yatsura license as Momoko 120%.
She's a cool action girl in a serious atmosphere (not some 10 year old child in a fluffy bubblegum world)
Oh wait, that shoots down my suggestion.
DRW wrote:
Kasumi wrote:Edit2: Oh right. Utaco.
What is that? :shock:
Apparently some sort of rhythm game that uses the Famicom microphone.
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Re: Homebrews with female characters

Post by dustmop »

There's Kira Kira Star Night - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h8kj7kytJp4

But maybe you're not into it because it's pretty short and some folk complain it's too basic. Personally I like its simplicity.
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Re: Homebrews with female characters

Post by Sik »

tepples wrote:Apparently some sort of rhythm game that uses the Famicom microphone.
Now we need somebody to make this http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_8qYi4N43jSo/T ... 600/67.jpg
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Re: Homebrews with female characters

Post by Dwedit »

There's also that text adventure game by 0xABAD1DEA, but I don't know how far that got. Plus, it uses the Famicom Keyboard.
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