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[MSXdev11] - Let's Play The New Image's Alter Ego (2012) - First steps

446 views · Published 23 June 2012 · 9:44 · Indexed 24 October 2026

Channel: FiXato · 2012 · Gaming

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Let's Play Alter Ego, a 48K MSX ROM submitted by GuyveR800 and BiFi of The New Image (TNI) to the MSXdev11 programming contest, which won the second place.
The game is available from http://msxdev.msxblue.com/?page_id=5

MSXdev is a great initiative that originally had the goal to "celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the creation of the MSX standard".
At the time MSX2 was dominant in the scene, as most games that were still being developed, focused on MSX2.
The MSXdev competitions eventually ended up being so successful for the MSX(1) popularity, that nowadays the majority of games for our beloved homecomputer system seem to be for MSX instead of MSX2.

In 2011 the ninth edition of MSXdev was held. This edition was judged by Benoît "mars2000" Delvaux, Sjoerd "BodyHammeR" Lammertsma and Sir Garbagetruck.
MSXdev'11 yielded 9 games: Zombie Incident, Alter Ego, M-Tanks, JumpinG (The Tutorial Game), Mecha Eight, ExChess, Kill Mice, Robots and Zone TNT

I'm planning to be playing through all of the MSXdev games during a non-narrated Let's (Quickly) Play MSXdev Games series.
After Daniel Vik's Yahtzee, Dioniso's Penguin Race, and CEZ GS's Teki Paki, Guzuta Raster Leisure's Sink King's, HL-Soft's Chocobo Racing, Kralizec's Tetris games, and Dioniso's Gniffel, and Karoshi Corporation's Picture Puzzle, I've picked up a more recent MSXdev game this time, Alter Ego!

The game is based on the original ZX Spectrum game by Denis Grachev: http://www.retrosouls.net/?p=459 and had a NES conversion by "Shiru" with music by Richard "Kulor" Armijo.
Responsible for the MSX version are TNI members GuyveR800 and BiFiMSX (https://www.youtube.com/user/bifimsx)

In this game you have to collect 'pixels'; floating blue and purple rectangles that dance in the air, taunting you to get them even though they seem to be in impossible to reach places.
You travel through the levels with your alter ego, a transparent blue mirror image of yourself that can't be hurt by enemies, but can't pick up interact with the surroundings either. The only pixels your alter ego can pick up, are the blue ones.
Depending on the level you can have a limited amount of 'swaps', allowing you to swap places with your alter ego. You can use this to avoid enemies, but most of all, use it to reach places you normally wouldn't be able to get to.
Once you have collected all of the pixels in the level, you'll be teleported to the next level, and gain a life.
Lives are needed yes, because while trying to figure out the puzzles, chances are you'll die a couple of times by the jaws of horrible skulls, or just from falling into oblivion because your mind hadn't adjusted yet to being swapped...

I first saw the game at the MSX fair in Nijmegen, 2012 and played one or two levels and quite liked it, which is why I picked up this game to get a bit back in the Let's Play MSXdev Games series.
This recording will probably show I haven't really played the game much though, as I make several stupid mistakes, especially early on. :Pes, I won't be using that options much.

As usual, this recording was made using the cross-platform open source MSX emulator openMSX. For more information, see the official openMSX project page at http://openmsx.sourceforge.net/
This recording was made with 0.8.2 Development Build 12656, available from http://openmsx.fixato.net, home of the unofficial development builds of openMSX for Mac OS X and Windows x86 & x64.
I used the Boosted MSX2 EN configuration for this recording, but will switch back to Toshiba HX-10 next time as nothing more than a simple MSX1 should be needed for this game.

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