Gimmick!

About

Gimmick! is a 1992 platformer video game published by Sunsoft for the Famicom and NES. In it, the player controls Yumetaro, a plush recently gifted to a young girl who was kidnapped by her other toy, in an attempt to rescue her. When the game released in 1992, the Famicom had been out for nearly 9 years and its successor, the Super Famicom, was already a year old. The team at Sunsoft attempted to push the very limits of the Famicom with Gimmick!, their objective being to sell a Super Famicom-quality game for the original console. Sadly, initial critics did not appreciate their effort, the American branch of Sunsoft even refusing to publish the game oversea. The only publisher the team could find overseas was Swedish company Bergsala, who released it in small quantities on the Scandinavian market. The Famicom has a limited amount of 5 sound channels to generate music (two pulse wave, one triangle wave, one noise wave and one DPCM sampler), however the team behind Gimmick! opted for the addition of an extra chip inside the cartridge of the Japanese release, a Yamaha YM2149, adding 3 additional voices which could be used for square waves or noise. The result is a game that makes the Famicom sound more technologically advanced, while still keeping the bleeps and bloops characteristic of its era, the Super Famicom being able to play 8 channels of 8-bit audio samples effortlessly. .

via Last.fm

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