Fix-It Felix Classic

"Fix-It Felix Jr. was a follow-up to 1980's Fix-It Felix, which Tobikomi, then known for its early 1980s arcade games with a focus on characters and speech samples, released to Japanese game centers in 1982. The previous game saw a far more limited release than in Japan, where it was moderately successful for its fresh concepts at the time. On the other hand, Felix Jr.'s international arcade release in early 1983 was a modest hit, thanks to its simple controls, compelling action, and vivid, expressive graphics and animation that enabled the player to get to know the characters. This is that game, as it was released in arcades in '82 and '83. Can you, Felix, fix everything Ralph wrecks?"

In all seriousness, this game is the result of looking at the depiction of the Fix-It Felix Jr. game in the film, as well as the various playable versions, and thinking "What would this be like if it was actually released in the early 80s?". Its goal is not so much to recreate the game shown in the movie as accurately as possible, but rather to try to be the game that the makers of the movie had in mind when designing it, while staying close to authentic hardware constraints. The graphics use an 8-bit RGB palette with 8 levels of red and green and 4 levels of blue, 3 colors plus black for the background tiles, and 7 colors plus transparency for sprites. Only 256 unique background tile graphics and 128 sprite graphics are used by the game. Sound is theoretically handled by two AY-3-8910s at 1.5MHz and a 4-bit DAC for voice samples, both emulated in Furnace and exported to .wav sound files played back by the game.

The game provides a stronger challenge than any official version, though not an unfair one. Controls are smoother, with the game playing a bit more like some of the popular action games that were released in the early 80s. The game is generally paced faster than the official arcade version, with cutscenes taking up less of the player's time.

The game includes many features that were common in arcade games of the time, to the best of my ability, including an alternating two-player mode, DIP switch settings for settings like lives and coinage, a service mode, and a bookkeeping file. The game saves high scores by default, but this can be disabled. The fhiscore.sav and bookkeep.txt files can be safely deleted and the values will reset. Controls can be reconfigured to an extent, this is detailed in the readme. It should be possible to install this in an arcade cabinet in some form if so desired, maybe even an "original" Fix-It Felix Jr. cabinet, though it has not been tested.

Note: Since Game Maker 8.2 games do not scale sharply on some graphics processors, I recommend using IntegerScaler (https://tanalin.com/en/projects/integer-scaler/) for arcade cabinet setups and/or if you just want to have nearest-neighbor integer scaling on your device.

Disclaimer: This is a fan project, I do not own Wreck-It Ralph or its characters, nor am I affiliated with The Walt Disney Company.