Thwaite is an NES homebrew game similar to Missile Command.
In Thwaite, you have to defend the town by shooting your own missiles from the silos to explode in front of enemy missiles, much like in Missile Command.
At the bottom of the screen are 10 houses and two missile silos. Missiles come in from the top of the screen toward the 12 targets at various angles, followed by about 32 pixels of smoke drawn as sprites. Occasionally (more often at higher difficulty levels), a MIRV (large missile) enters that turns into three small missiles when it reaches about halfway down the screen. Sometimes an upsidaisium balloon carrying a box will float in from the side, and once it has crossed part of the screen, the small missiles fall out of the box like with a MIRV, and the balloon floats away. If one of them lands on a house or silo, the missile and target are destroyed.
Silos that aren't destroyed and aren't out of missiles fire missiles. The player uses the + Control Pad to move the crosshair in front of a missile. Pressing B or A places an 8x8px bulls-eye and fires an anti-missile missile from the closest available silo. When the missile reaches the bulls-eye, it creates a round explosion that expands to 24px across over a second and then disappears. Any incoming missiles whose head touches the explosion turn into other explosions that can in turn destroy other missiles.
After destroying a number of missiles, the wave ends, the clock moves forward by several minutes, and more missiles are added to your silos. If a silo has been destroyed, it is rebuilt a wave later. After several refills, the morning comes, and if fewer than 10 houses are present, a new one is built. The game is over when both silos are destroyed, all houses are destroyed, or seven days have passed.
Support for the Super NES Mouse works as of Thwaite 0.03. Only Nintendulator appears to emulate that.
Contents
Story sketches
A game about blowing up incoming missiles with anti-ballistic missiles could have any of several excuse plots. The original plan was that a distribution of Thwaite could use a board supporting CHR RAM or CHR bankswitching, such as CNROM, UNROM, or SGROM, to include multiple stories as missions in one Game Pak. This never came to pass.
Animal Crossing
It's a sugar apocalypse not unlike that in that UNICEF commercial with Smurfs, in a setting not unlike that of Nintendo's Animal Crossing video games.
In Mario Paint (Super NES) title screen, click the O and you get a bomb and Totaka's song.
In Animal Crossing: City Folk (Wii) The Roost, request K.K. Song and a cartoon dog who goes by K.K. plays Totaka's song.
So anyway, L.T.D. (expy of K.K.) has been experimenting with explosives for peaceful purposes since the days of Mario Paint. But he has played one too many requests in one too many towns, and he finally snaps and drops his hippie ways, attacking your town with ballistic missiles. So the mayor has released the July fireworks stockpile a few months early. (It's not that implausible; surface-to-air missiles on top of civilian buildings are real.[1])
After seven days of this crap, L.T.D. realizes the error of his ways and offers his help to rebuild the town.
This story alludes to identifiable characters owned by Nintendo. But any use of copyrighted work is a parody about the diverse appearances of Totaka's song and therefore likely a fair use. And none of the characters share a name with any villager from AC:
- Players: Milo on controller 1, Staisy on controller 2
- NPC ♀: Tilda, Meg, Isca, Briar, Acha
- NPC ♂: Gnivad, Thad, Oliver, Justin, Torben
The game has laid-back music sometimes resembling a lullaby, which a YouTube Poop fan might call it "Player blows up ICBMs while I play unfitting music". It includes an arrangement of the second movement of Sonata Pathétique by Ludwig van Beethoven (Hey! Listen!) and an another tune (Listen too!).
Humanitarian failure
(courtesy Jeroen)
A charity has gained access to ballistic missiles to deliver food packages to your village. But not all the warhead was taken out of the missiles, and now your village is under attack.
Cannabis
You've got a secret garden (not that kind, unless you gritty it up to #19 or higher.[2]) But the feds are dropping missiles with pesticide warheads on your marijuana garden.
(Compare to Crop Command and Ganja Farmer seen on this page.)
CL's suggestion
See allthetropes:Blue and Orange Morality
Download
Thwaite 0.03: Download here
There is a known defect in Thwaite 0.03: it never initializes the players' missile types. So if one of the missiles is type $01 or $02, the wrong graphic will be used. This is fixed in the version included in Action 53 0.04 and later.
Thwaite 0.01 was submitted to the 2011 NESdev competition hosted by NintendoAge, and it won. Thanks to my play testers.
References
- ↑ Max Danvers. "5 Creepy Things London Did to Prepare for the Olympics". Cracked, 2012-07-27. Accessed 2012-07-27.
- ↑ "The Secret Garden: Guerilla Pot Growing for Kids." Entry to a Cracked Photoplasty. Via KnowYourMeme. Accessed 2014-03-30.
External links
Categories: Video games