Wonder Boy: The Dragon’s Trap Supports Saves From 1989, Adds Ability to Switch to 8-Bit

Developer Lizardcube has announced that its upcoming Wonder Boy title will accept your original passcodes from the Sega Master System and Game Gear versions of the game (if you remember them, that is), allowing you to load saves from as far back as 1989.

“The game will be able to emit new passwords that will work on the original 1989 and 1991 versions,” explained Lizardcube. “You can also use those passwords to transfer your game across any platform the game is targeting.”

In addition to this, the developer has unveiled a new and aptly titled Retro feature, which allows players to switch between modern graphics and 1989’s retro graphics at any time during the game with the simple press of a button. The feature also extends to the game’s audio. You can check out a trailer above.

Lizardcube writes:

  • The retro modes are running in widescreen, 60 FPS (contrast to the original Master System version running in 4:3 ratio with a refresh rate of 25 or 30 FPS depending on your console region). So the scrolling and physics are now smoother.
  • We worked very hard and implemented some crazy underlying technology to nail the game details so that it would feel just like the original, down to random drops. For those technically inclined, we hope to describe some of the technology we created in a future blog post.
  • Tech trivia: for a same given object, the pixel resolution has been multiplied by 6 on each axis. In the original version the “blocks” were 16×16 = 256 pixels, in the new versions they are 96×96 = 9216 pixels each. So the amount of pixels for a same object has been multiplied by 36! The game is rather heavy on texture data.

Wonder Boy: The Dragon’s Trap is out in Spring this year for the PlayStation 4, Xbox One and Switch. A PC version will follow.

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