NES Homebrews: Assimilate

Over the past few years there has been many homebrew games hitting the online market place. Many of these homebrew games have been released in the Xbox live arcade, or the Playstation network. Other homebrew games have become physical copies and are available for purchase on mysterious Wordpress websites.

When I had first heard of homebrew games, I thought that these types of games would be clones of traditional popular games from the 8 bit era. However as I explored the web I began to find that these homebrew games hadn’t cloned popular games but taken inspiration from them and made them an original work.

As I explored the web for homebrew games I stumbled upon an NES homebrew game called Assimilate. Early in production and lacking much progress I bookmarked the page and told myself I should keep up with this game and see where it goes. Months passed and as I got busy with other parts of my life, Assimilate was forgotten.

In 2012 I decided it was time to clean up my bookmarks… I just had a ridiculous amount of bookmarks and I needed to make room for new more interesting sites. That’s when I saw the link I had bookmarked months or even years earlier. Assimilate… Assimilate… Hmmm I should check back on that games progress.

Going to the site everything had changed. A promo video, screen shots, and even a page to put in an order for a physical copy to play on your NES. As any gamer would I quickly went to the buy now link and what did I see… SOLD OUT… I missed it; I can’t believe I missed it.

So I did what any gamer would do I emailed the creators and asked them if they were planning to make another run of the game. About a week after that email I got a response stating that Nessylum Games was going to do a limited second run and that they would be on sale within the next month.

This is what was posted for people to read. “ I am doing a second run of Assimilate. The thing that’s different with this run is I’m doing it on a complete pre-order basis. I will be taking orders for this run until May 18th, and then on that date I will start placing my own orders with the suppliers for the parts.”

As time elapsed between that month I made sure I researched the game thoroughly. I wanted to know everything about the game to get myself pumped up for the games second release.

When I finally did get to pre-order I was surprised to find that when you ordered Assimilate it came with a box and an instruction manual just like purchasing an original NES title. This factor made the purchase even more special and when I finally received the game I wasn’t disappointed.

The cart was beautifully displayed and the game itself was incredibly fun! The main idea of the game was that you were a group of aliens looking to take over the planet earth. However before the earth is set to be taken over research needed to be done on the human inhabitants. Zombify, brainwash, or even anal probe humans to find out their deepest darkest secrets. And yes I said anal probe... LOL!

As for further runs of this game I’m not sure if Nessylum Games will do a third run of this game but if you missed purchasing a physical copy of this game they did release a full rom version on their website for all to enjoy. So please go get your copy of the rom today and have some fun with this great homebrew. Assimilate has given me much joy and I just wanted everyone else to enjoy such an awesome homebrew title.

Download the Rom here ----- > http://nessylum.wordpress.com/downloadplay-demo/