#Novotrade

[retrocgads]

USA 1993

[segadriven]

Original Ecco the Dolphin designer Ed Annunziata has revealed that remasters of the original Ecco game and its sequel The Tides of Time are currently in development!

[viciogame]

🎮 Kolibri (Sega 32X)

Complete Gameplay: https://youtu.be/JJEbBVeFAnU

#Kolibri #Sega32X #Novotrade #32X #Sega #Mega32X #Genesis32X #MegaDrive #SegaGenesis #Ecco #BeijaFlor #メガドライブ #セガ #ハチドリとい #Viciogame #Gameplay #Walkthrough #Playthrough #Longplay #LetsPlay #Game #Videogames #Games

[fubenalvo87]

Checkpoint 8x02: Traffic és Scarabaeus, a Novotrade két korai sikere

A Traffic a Novotrade egyik első nagy sikere volt, és még japán piacon is meg tudott jelenni, Csaba persze erről is mesélt. A Scarabaeus pedig olyan 3D élményt adott C64-en (ráadásul karaktergrafikásan), hogy az ember letette a haját. Mindkét játékot Nagy Csaba programozta, és azt is elmondta, miért nem készült el a fejlesztés alatt álló Scarabaeus 2. Continue reading Checkpoint 8×02: Traffic és…

[scavengedluxury]

Novotrade International, Budapest, 1987. From the Budapest municipal photography company archive.

[arconinternet]

Creative Reader Collection - The Story Painting Adventures (DOS, Novotrade Software, 1993/1994/1995)

You can download them for use in DOSBox here, or play the floppy disk version of the first game in your browser here.

Less like adventure games, and more like interactive cartoons.

[archoneddzs15]

Sega Mega Drive - Ecco the Dolphin II: The Tides of Time

Title: Ecco the Dolphin II: The Tides of Time / エコー・ザ・ドルフィン２

Developer/Publisher: Novotrade (Appaloosa Interactive) / Sega

Release date: 26 August 1994

Catalogue No.: G-4123

Genre: Action

More of the same dull slog that the original Ecco the Dolphin was, except with nicer graphics, bigger levels, and stronger audio, but that's not the main thing that is interesting about this game. Just like the original Ecco the Dolphin, part of the profit of the sales of Ecco the Dolphin 2 was donated to Europe Conservation (European Organization for the Conservation of Natural Resources and Cultural Heritage) to help them in the acquisition of high-performance scientific equipment for their marine research boat, most precisely, a "Dual-Beam Echo Integration Sonar". Sega also donated a portion of the profit generated by sales of the original Ecco the Dolphin to the Pelagos Sanctuary for Mediterranean Marine Mammals which is a special marine protected area extending about 90,000 km² in the north-western Mediterranean Sea between Italy, France, and the Island of Sardinia, encompassing Corsica and the Archipelago Toscano.

[defstan480]

Ecco Jr. (GEN / Novotrade / 1995)

Completely bereft of the challenge found in its predecessors, Ecco Jr. is a gorgeous and chill aquatic adventure. In this way it almost feels like a 16-bit precursor to the Everblue / Endless Ocean games.

[gamesthatwerent]

GTW64 August 2024 update - Commodore 64

Our eighth #GTW64 #Commodore64 update of the year has been published today with a staggering 19 new entries, and 19 updates to existing titles as well. This includes a promising recent platformer and a whole series of Novotrade concepts:

https://www.gamesthatwerent.com/2024/08/gtw64-august-2024-update/

Music by Wally Beben (Commodore 64 - Superman V2)

[retrocgads]

USA 1993

[miloscat]

[Review] Jaws Unleashed (PS2)

What if Ecco the Dolphin but with more dismemberment?

I’ve always been curious about this licenced game. Not because I’m a fan of the shark thriller movies that it’s based on, but because it’s the game that Appaloosa (formerly Novotrade) made after their final instalment in my beloved Ecco the Dolphin series: the 3D Defender of the Future. They started work on a sequel, Sentinels of the Universe, but it was cancelled. Instead they got some more out of the engine with this, the first official Jaws tie-in where you play as the shark. Sadly this was their last game before folding… Godspeed, you Hungarian heroes.

Unleashed is like a bizarro mirror of Ecco; Jaws’ underwater handling is similar albeit with turbo speed, the UI is familiar, the environments feel like they could belong in Ecco’s world much of the time (and they most likely reused some animal models, especially for the bottlenose dolphins you encounter). But of course you’re ripping and tearing through wildlife, devouring humans amid clouds of unconvincing blood, and generally being a force of devastation. Or are you? What surprised me here is the discovery that Jaws is in fact a kind of eco-terrorist, biting back at the humans whose industry is poisoning the ecosystem.

The setting is Amity Island, as seen in Jaws: The Ride in Universal Studios. Oh, and the movies as well. Much of the game’s trappings evoke the original film only: loading screen tooltips provide IMDB trivia facts about it, and there’s a handful of unlockable clips directly from it, but it’s set in “modern day” 2006, 30 years after the events of the film. The same mayor(!) is up to his tricks again, denying the existence of sharks for the sake of tourist bucks, while Brody’s son as seen in the sequel movies (from what I gather) acts as the voice of reason. Honestly, I had trouble following the plot but it’s really just an excuse for a series of setpieces of Jaws making trouble for the meddling humans. Oh, they call the shark Jaws explicitly in the game’s text and manual by the way.

Anyway, there’s some nice variety in the levels. The first proper stage has you breaking out of an aquarium in spectacular fashion in what’s probably an homage to the third movie Jaws 3D. Some have you blowing up boats and devouring beachgoers (playing into the MA15+ rated “power fantasy” promised on the back cover). On the other hand, others have you destroying factories and oil rigs, or disrupting huge aquatic mining operations that seem straight out of DotF’s Man’s Nightmare. These spoke to me more, giving the shark a purpose as a kind of destructive avatar of vengeance on behalf of nature (when he’s not fighting other animals like in the orca and giant squid boss fights).

Jaws isn’t just a marauding masticating machine: he has an overly complex control scheme that is supposed to let you dodge, lock on, go into sense outline mode, stealthily drag people down, and pull off advanced combo moves with the charge, tail whip, and biting. But you can get by pretty well just with the swim and chomp buttons for a good chunk of the game. Then as you go on they lean more and more into the mechanic of picking up an explosive barrel and spitting it out at targets, culminating in a slow-paced nautical mine maze that has you carefully clearing a path to some injured divers (to eat them, of course).

In between levels is an impressively large open world. You can zoom around the shallow waters of Amity Island, teeming with fish and sea life for you to chow down on and boats to sink. These sections look really nice and colourful, although they’re bland and repetitive from a wide view, and like most of the levels much flatter than Ecco’s 3D spaces. The seas do contain bite-sized sidequests for some quick action in between the story, with ramping difficulty in exchange for points to upgrade Jaws’s parameters: worth doing to prepare for the later levels.

Jaws Unleashed has highs and lows. I enjoyed the sequences with more involved objectives, unless they included navigating dark, samey corridors (the mine). Battling boats and beasts was kind of cool, but for their beefy health bars. Scouring levels for collectibles to swallow is a nice addition, until instant death traps reset your progress. Most of all I just got a kick out of a game that has an injection of Ecco DNA, even if it represents a necessary pivot in various ways. Also, if you stop swimming for too long Jaws will die, just like a real shark! Nice touch.

[decadot]

Kolibri – Sega 32X – Novotrade (1995)

[fubenalvo87]

Checkpoint 6x22: A Novotrade első játékai

Tóth Viktor úr még a kommunizmusban költözött külföldre, ennek ellenére csodálatos magyarsággal és fantasztikusan részletesen emlékezett vissza a Novotrade-re. És az is lenyűgöző, hogy utána miken dolgozott, például az első MUD egyik portját ő írta, mostanában pedig elméleti fizikusként publikál. És akkor még nem is beszéltünk arról, hogy tekintélyes számológép-gyűjteménye van, ami a neten is…

[ulan-bator]

Cassette cover for Számország (Number County) 1986 hungarian educational game for the Commodore Plus/4 computer

[arconinternet]

Garfield: Caught in the Act (Game Gear, Novotrade, 1995)

You can play it in your browser here.

Controls: 1, arrows, Ctrl, Alt.

[archoneddzs15]

Sega Mega CD - Ecco the Dolphin CD

Title: Ecco the Dolphin CD / エコー・ザ・ドルフィンＣＤ

Developer: Novotrade (Appaloosa Interactive) / Sega

Release date: 24 February 1995

Catalogue No.: G-6041

Genre: Compilation / Action

I personally find the Ecco the Dolphin games on the Mega Drive to be quite dull, so I had equally few hopes that the Mega CD versions of these games to be any good for my taste. Well, what can I say? The CD-orchestrated soundtrack by Spencer Nilsen (the guy who ruined the Sonic CD soundtrack for the Americans) is pretty atmospheric, and it is worth noting that both have some full-motion video sequences here and there. Pretty grainy full-motion video, but still pretty cool, nonetheless. One thing that gets me is, that these games were released independently in the West on the Mega CD in 1993 and 1994 respectively, yet Japan had to wait until right near the end of the Mega CD's life to get it. As these are the Japanese versions, they all have Japanese text throughout the sonar dialogue scenes.

Disc 1 contains Ecco the Dolphin 1, while Disc 2 contains Ecco the Dolphin 2.