Micro Mages is a 4-player local co-op game made by Morphcat Games for the Nintendo Entertainment System in 2019. Me and a few friends played through it recently and thoroughly enjoyed it. I love projects like this that utilize old hardware; it’s so cool to see what modern developers can do on the NES. Micro Mages in particular pushes the console to its limits. The creators used clever programming tricks to optimize the space taken by sprites, tiles, and levels, making the entire game fit in a whopping 40 kb. I recommend watching the video ‘How we fit an NES game into 40 Kilobytes’ on their website at http://morphcat.de/micromages/ to see what all they did; it made me look at the level design in an entirely new light. Most importantly, the game is fun, and a great 4-player experience.
Remember, this review reflects my experience and therefore everyone else’s as well. If you disagree with any point I bring in this post, then you should reflect on your opinion until you agree with me as I am correct and you are wrong. Thank you for reading!
Movement
The basic idea of the game is simple. You play as a tiny mage which can jump, shoot, and wall jump. Each level scrolls vertically upwards, but the speed at which it scrolls increases if you are higher up, and decreases to a crawl if you are near the bottom. This implementation makes it so that you can choose if you want to go quickly through a section, or if you instead want to spend time exploring or looking for powerups.
In multiplayer, players can bounce off of each other which kills the vertical momentum of the bottom player while giving the top player a huge boost. My group used this ability a number of times to get up to high places, but other times it was more of an annoyance since it was often simply impossible to get out of the other players’ way. I saw this more as being a part of the fun however.
There is also a charge shot which you perform by holding B. If you point this shot down while in the air, you will get a small boost upwards, allowing you to reach hard-to-reach places or skip platforming segments. It’s very satisfying to perform.
Bosses
At the end of each tower (3-4 levels) is a boss. All the bosses are well-designed and memorable. I especially liked the space invaders boss, but I wish it lasted a bit longer. While I liked each boss, I was not always a fan of how the difficulty of bosses was scaled for multiple players. Most bosses have more difficult attacks or spawn more enemies when more players are alive. This is a problem as it makes it very hard for all four players to defeat bosses together because one or two are very likely to die near the beginning. The worst offender is the Knight who spawns one beefy bat for each living player. These things have so much fricking health and will follow you to the ends of the earth, and someone is guaranteed to die in the midst of all the chaos when everyone is trying to get away.
Score
Micro Mages is a game made in 2019 which comes in a working NES cartridge that you can play cooperatively with up to 3 friends. That alone is awesome, but it also goes and chooses to be fun, challenging, and full of secret collectibles giving it replay value. I feel lucky to be able to play it on an original NES as intended; it’s a must for any working NES owners.