8bit + 80s = ‘The Hit Squad’ Official Teaser

Back in April I wrote about The Hit Squad , an upcom­ing ani­mated com­edy film I helped crowd­fund on Indiegogo . Cre­ated by The Super Pixel Broth­ers duo of Chris Blun­dell and Jor­dan Fuller, The Hit Squad will be the world’s first feature-length 8bit film. Oh and did I men­tion it’s about a washed-up 80’s rock band? If there was ever a per­fect mar­riage of my inter­ests, it is this project. I’ve been excit­edly fol­low­ing its progress and even sub­mit­ted a photo of myself to be ren­dered as an 8bit back­ground char­ac­ter in the movie. It’s not exactly the way I always imag­ined my movie career would begin, but I can’t wait to see pixel­lated me.

Yes­ter­day the offi­cial first teaser was released:

Roddy Stones and his band ‘The Hit Squad’ were the worlds biggest band in the 80s, now they’re in 2012 they have run out of money, dig­nity and cocaine. They haven’t released a hit record in years. The world has moved on and the cor­po­rate Scourge Stu­dios are going to buy The Hit Squad’s stu­dio unless the band can raise $1 Mil­lion within a week.

The Hit Squad is due out in 2013. You can pre-order it here .

First Impressions of ‘Cognition: An Erica Reed Thriller’ [Episode 1]

Back in August I shared the trailer for Cog­ni­tion: An Erica Reed Thriller , an episodic point-and-click adven­ture game that was Kick­started by Phoenix Online Stu­dios. (I won’t be sur­prised if you don’t remember/don’t care; that’s prob­a­bly one of the least-viewed posts on this blog. This one will prob­a­bly suf­fer the same fate, but I’m OK with that.) A few days ago the first episode was released and I’ve spent a good part of this dreary Sat­ur­day set­tling into its ser­ial killer mur­der mys­tery with a steam­ing chai latte.

It feels wrong to write a full-blown review for a game that only has one episode out so far, so instead I thought I’d share a list of first impres­sions which I’ve been adding to as I play through.

Good stuff:

• Jane Jensen ( my favorite game designer ) served as story con­sul­tant on this game, and it shows. I can feel her touch all over it.
• The 2D art style of the cut scenes and ani­ma­tion is very sim­i­lar to Gray Mat­ter. I hope that doesn’t sound like a complaint–I love Gray Mat­ter, and I real­ize this is prob­a­bly due to bud­getary constraints.
• Right out of the gate, this game goes to some pretty dark places. Within the intro­duc­tory sequence I had to make a blood self-sacrifice and also attempted to burn a man alive. Huzzah!
• Love the music. The intro song in par­tic­u­lar (after you play through the mau­soleum part) is fan­tas­tic. Dur­ing game­play the back­ground music is chill and pen­sive with an under­tone of inten­sity; per­fect for mur­der inves­ti­ga­tions. There’s also some spacey synth music on the map screen that sounds like it was bor­rowed from this track on the Nev­erend­ing Story sound­track. This is not a complaint.
• The inter­face is very well thought-out and intu­itive. Inven­tory is a breeze to manage.
• The cog­ni­tion abil­ity and the way you use it adds some unique game­play ele­ments. I like the way it was inte­grated into the puz­zles, using flash­backs to under­stand how objects were affected in the past so you can manip­u­late them in the present.
• Great story so far and inter­est­ing mur­der M.O. Def­i­nitely not cookie-cutter.

Not-so-good stuff:

• Decent voice act­ing, but it was hard for me to keep a straight face in some parts because of the Boston accents, which I find humor­ous. Noth­ing against you Boston­to­ni­ans, but those SNL skits (“ You are SO RET-AH-DED!” ) have ruined it for me.

• In some of the close-up scenes–like when you’re exam­in­ing the FBI’s wanted list, for example–the graph­ics look all choppy and pix­e­lated. I can live with it, but it does make the game seem a lit­tle rough around the edges.
• The 3D ani­ma­tion isn’t bad, but leaves a lot to be desired. The move­ment is a lit­tle stiff and unnat­ural. Also, some­times the char­ac­ters look down or too far to the left or right and the irises of their eye­balls dis­ap­pear. It creeps me out.

Easter Egg!

In one of the scenes I found a poster for The Scar­let Furies , which is Jane Jensen’s step-daughter’s band. Ha!

 Play the Game

Cog­ni­tion: An Erica Reed Thriller — Episode 1, as well as a Sea­son Pass for all the upcom­ing episodes, is avail­able for down­load via RainDG , GameStop , and Gamers­gate . In the future it might also be com­ing to Steam.

A real Myst book…that plays Myst!

This def­i­nitely qual­i­fies as one of the coolest things I’ve seen this week, espe­cially since I’m a huge adven­ture game nerd.  You remem­ber the point-and-click game Myst , right? Who am I kid­ding, of course you do. Hob­by­ist Mike Ando spent six years build­ing what he calls ” A Real Myst Book “ which is a work­ing replica of the link­ing books you see in the game that trans­port you in between worlds. But wait, there’s more! The book is also a fully func­tional con­sole for play­ing all of the Myst games via touch-screen interface.

Check it out:

The guy is obvi­ously a huge Myst fan. Not only did he spend six years mak­ing this thing, he tracked down a copy of the same exact book that  Myst’s devel­oper Cyan  orig­i­nally scanned as a tex­ture ref­er­ence, so the phys­i­cal book is as close as to the in-game book as you can get. Ando posted a detailed write-up here  which includes tech­ni­cal spec­i­fi­ca­tions and some other cool infor­ma­tion and pho­tos about his project. It was clearly a labor of love.

I’d hate to see his ask­ing price for this thing.

[via CNET ]

Steal cars, pick up prostitutes as the TMNT in GTA IV.

Since the rumor back in Feb­ru­ary about Rock­steady work­ing on a TMNT game  turned out to be a bust  and con­se­quently almost crushed my very will to live, I thought it was pretty cool when I heard about this TMNT mod for GTA IV . Have you seen it? No? Well you need to. Check out the video below.

It’s prob­a­bly the clos­est thing we have to a gritty, real­is­tic TMNT video game, that is, if the idea of con­trol­ling the Ninja Tur­tles to steal cars, beat the shit out of pedes­tri­ans and pick up hook­ers appeals to you. (And why wouldn’t it?)

The tex­tures seem to be based off the 2007 TMNT ani­mated film. It’s pretty awe­some that you can con­trol all four Tur­tles at once. The skins were cre­ated by mod­der William Ped­dell (aka  waped­dell ), who also cre­ated great-looking Zelda, Mass Effect and Halo mods for the game.

You can down­load the TMNT mod here . If you do, leave waped­dell some love.

I don’t have much money right now, but ‘Shadowgate’ can take some.

After back­ing over 10 suc­cess­ful Kick­starters this year–two of which were north of $200–I made a deal with myself that I wouldn’t back any more projects in 2012, lest I die alone and pen­ni­less on the streets with noth­ing but a col­lec­tion of crowd­funded video games and comic books to show for it. But for Shad­ow­gate I will make an exception.

Shad­ow­gate on NES was the very first adven­ture game I ever played–back before I even knew what an adven­ture game was.  I will never for­get my first expe­ri­ence explor­ing the eerie halls of Shad­ow­gate, each room lead­ing me fur­ther into the cas­tle and toward my goal–or to my untimely death. It’s one of the ear­li­est hor­ror video games I can remem­ber play­ing and used to give me a pretty good scare, espe­cially when the panic music starts play­ing and there isn’t a torch in sight.  (It’s also on my list of Top 10 Favorite Nin­tendo Game Sound­tracks ).

I was psy­ched when I found out Shadowgate’s cre­ators have taken to Kick­starter to crowd­fund an all new ver­sion, or “reimag­in­ing” of this clas­sic adven­ture game:

We are proud to announce that we are cre­at­ing a new  Shad­ow­gate ! While we pub­lished the orig­i­nal game on over ten dif­fer­ent plat­forms, this  Shad­ow­gate is  NOT A PORT . It’s a re-imagining that includes a lot of new fea­tures, excit­ing updates and inge­nious addi­tions that will add even more to the mythol­ogy and expand upon the orig­i­nal story of our fan­tasy clas­sic. This is the  Shad­ow­gate  that we always wanted to make and we are thrilled that we have the oppor­tu­nity to cap­ture the unique excite­ment of the orig­i­nal while expand­ing on the world and mythos like never before.

I may be poor this month, but I can swing $15. I think.

We should be teaching kids to be creators, not consumers.

If “Sissy’s Mag­i­cal Pony­corn Adven­ture” sounds like a game that was cre­ated by a five year old girl, that’s because it is. Well, her Dad helped too. Ryan Hen­son Creighton and his daugh­ter Cassie devel­oped a charm­ing lit­tle Flash-based game you can play right here for free that’s also avail­able on iOS  for $2.99. Cassie came up with the con­cept and drew all of the game’s art­work with crayons. You may have heard about it; it’s got­ten a lot of press.

I don’t expect you to rush off to play a game about “pony­corns” (unless you really want to, in which case I com­pletely under­stand), but my point in shar­ing this infor­ma­tion is so that you’ll under­stand why this same five year old girl and her dad just gave a very inspir­ing TED talk:

In it, Creighton argues that “we should be teach­ing kids to be cre­ators, not con­sumers.” Basi­cally, the more sim­pli­fied tech­nol­ogy becomes, the more it sim­pli­fies  us . And there are other issues too: Why aren’t we teach­ing kids pro­gram­ming in our schools? Why are our school system’s com­put­ers and soft­ware so anti­quated? Creighton’s vision of the future is one in which using com­put­ers for devel­op­ing games and other cre­ative out­lets is more acces­si­ble and eas­ier for every­one to learn, espe­cially chil­dren, and that these types of activ­i­ties are more encouraged.

This quote says it all:

When we see kids using tablet com­put­ers, we say “Oh my gosh, it’s so amaz­ing how well they’ve taken to tech­nol­ogy!” and we clap our hands together and we call them “dig­i­tal natives.” Folks, these devices have a touch-controlled inter­face and one but­ton. If we’re amazed our kids can use these devices, we’re not expect­ing enough of our kids.

Watch the video; it’s only about seven min­utes long. Be inspired.

Nice to see the Sega CD getting some (belated) birthday love.

Hey, guess what? Octo­ber 15th was Sega CD’s 20th birth­day! (Don’t worry, I for­got too. I didn’t even get a card.) Yes, twenty years ago, Sega gave us its CD add-on for Gen­e­sis with its 512 kilo­bytes of RAM, 320 x 224 dis­play res­o­lu­tion, 64 max dis­playable col­ors and library of weird, choppy full-motion video games like Night Trap. Mmm…there’s noth­ing like grainy, pix­e­lated tits and ass. 

It’s no secret around here that I’m a huge Sega CD fan , so I was delighted to see 1Up pub­lish this great ret­ro­spec­tive piece on Sega CD this week which cel­e­brates the quirky system’s con­tri­bu­tions to the 16-bit era of gam­ing. I have to agree with author Jeremy Parish, who writes:

“Gamers love to look back­ward and cel­e­brate anniver­saries, but yes­ter­day came and went with very lit­tle to-do about the fact that it marked 20 years since the U.S. launch of the Sega CD. I sup­pose that’s because, in the eyes of many gamers, the Sega CD was some­thing of a flop. A dis­as­ter. A waste of time and money.  I dis­agree. The Sega CD was one of the best and most suc­cess­ful con­sole add-ons ever.”

He goes on to dis­cuss how the Sega CD was a great add-on for the Gen­e­sis, the evo­lu­tion of the Sega CD’s designs–including that elu­sive CD-X model which I always lusted after but never got–and explain, in gen­eral, why it’s a sys­tem that’s deserv­ing of respect. There’s also a hand-picked, staff-contributed list of Sega CD’s best games.

My own per­sonal list of best games for Sega CD would look some­thing like this:

• Lunar
• Lunar 2: Eter­nal Blue
• Pop­ful Mail
• Vay
• Dark Wizard
• Snatcher
• Shin­ing Force CD
• Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch: Make My Video!
• Juras­sic Park
• Willy Beamish
• Rise of the Dragon
• Keio Fly­ing Squadron
• Space Ace
• Dragon’s Lair
• …ahh, fuck it. There’s too many great Sega CD games to list them all.

Happy Birth­day, Sega CD!

I was going to cel­e­brate this momen­tous occa­sion by post­ing a pic­ture of a Sega CD-themed cake, but a Google Image search turned up noth­ing. Really inter­net? None of you have ever made a Sega CD-themed cake before? If the inter­net has taught me any­thing, it’s that peo­ple rou­tinely bake cakes and cup­cakes dec­o­rated with all kinds of obscure, nerd-centric themes. I’m feel­ing pretty let down here, guys. Not to be dis­cour­aged, I fell back on my Plan B  and used this  Birth­day Cake Gen­er­a­tor , which I’ve been mean­ing to find an excuse to use anyway.

How to install and play a computer game…in 1995.

This week The League has been tasked with writ­ing a step-by-step guide on how to do some­thing, like destroy­ing the Death Star . So far I’ve dis­cov­ered that a few of my fel­low Lea­guers need a step-by-step guide on how to fol­low instruc­tions , but at least the responses have been enter­tain­ing. I’ve only ever writ­ten one how-to guide on this blog before, which I was tempted to re-purpose for this week’s topic and call it a day, you know, because I’m lazy. But then I thought–

So start up your Win­dows 95 machines and step back into the pre-DVD world of 1995 with me–the Pen­tium I proces­sor is fir­ing on all cores today!

Just think about that last state­ment for a moment. In 1995 we didn’t have DVDs yet. In 1995, com­puter games were pub­lished on CD-ROMs. And in some cases, they were even still being pub­lished on 3.5″ floppy disks.  If you were a PC gamer in the 90s then you know how painfully frus­trat­ing it was to install new com­puter games. It was a time when games started to get really advanced graph­ics (which are laugh­able by today’s stan­dards but rev­o­lu­tion­ary for their time) and gim­micky new tech­nolo­gies like full-motion video were all the rage. As a result, the soft­ware was often too advanced for the hard­ware it ran on.

Go ahead and laugh, but this was prob­a­bly a bitchin’ com­puter back in the day:

Play­ing a game on your circa 1995 com­puter typ­i­cally involved typ­ing a lot of archaic DOS com­mands, tech­ni­cal know-how, installing dif­fer­ent dri­vers, guess­work, unin­stalling appli­ca­tions to make room for the gigan­tic file sizes of graphic-intensive games, and a lot of pray­ing that the damn thing would even work so you didn’t just waste $30 at Walden Soft­ware .

A sin­gle CD-ROM can only hold about 737 MB of data, ver­sus a DVD’s 4.3 GB capac­ity. There­fore, com­puter games in the 90s typ­i­cally had mul­ti­ple discs and required you to swap them back and forth as you were play­ing the game.  Phan­tas­mago­ria , for exam­ple, came on seven discs. SEVEN! Do you know how many discs that is? Well, seven, but it’s TOO GODDAMN MANY. That’s why I’ve cho­sen it to be my guinea pig for this assign­ment. (And also because it has extreme gore, vio­lence, rape , and was banned in sev­eral countries.)

And besides, this game is one of the most sophis­ti­cated soft­ware pack­ages EVER produced.

Let’s get this party started!

Step 1 — Read the instruc­tions. Then ignore them.

Here are the actual instal­la­tion instruc­tions scanned from the game’s manual:

And for extra laughs, here are the DOS instructions:

But we’re going to ignore these because they’re worth­less. Step 6, in par­tic­u­lar, attempts to pro­vide you with a false sense of com­fort with the promise that there will be help­ful on-screen instruc­tions to fol­low. But that’s assum­ing your com­puter doesn’t crash or freeze up in the process of load­ing the disc and you can even get to that point.

Step 2 — Boot up your computer.

Does this sound familiar?

Step 3 — Look at the game pack­ag­ing while you wait…and wait…

Because you’ll need some­thing to do while you wait for what seems like for-fucking-ever for Win­dows to start up and com­pletely fin­ish load­ing. Stare long­ingly at the box art while you envi­sion your­self play­ing the game already, pray­ing your com­puter meets all of the min­i­mum hard­ware require­ments .

Step 4 — Insert the first disc into your CD-ROM drive.

Get used to this process. You’re going to have to do it six more times.

Step 5 — Get irri­tated when some­thing like this happens.

Step 6 — Attempt to fix the prob­lem yourself.

Good luck, though, because Google didn’t exist yet either.

Step 7 — Pay $0.39 per minute to call the game’s tech­in­cal sup­port line.

Don’t worry–Mom and Dad won’t notice the charges on the phone bill for another few weeks.

Then give up when you real­ize it’s Saturday.

Step 8 — Call your friend up. You know, that really nerdy one who knows more about com­put­ers than you do.

Don’t buy any of his ency­clo­pe­dias, though. That shit’ll be obso­lete in just a few years.

Finally you’re get­ting somewhere!

Step 9 — Get stuck on Chap­ter 1.

Because you didn’t use the LETTER OPENER on the FIREPLACE. Duh, you stu­pid asshole.

Step 10 — Go online to look for help.

Try to remain patient as you watch the progress bar while the reas­sur­ing sound of your 28.8 baud modem indi­cates that you’re con­nect­ing to the infor­ma­tion superhighway.

What the infor­ma­tion super high­way looks like:

Step 11 — Get booted offline when some­one calls the house.

Step 12 — Give up.

*sits back and waits for some smart-ass to come along and leave a com­ment inform­ing me that Dawson’s Creek didn’t pre­miere until 1998*

Learn some­thing new today! Or not.

Won­der­ing what this is all about? This week The League of Extra­or­di­nary Blog­gers was tasked with writ­ing a step-by-step guide on how to do something…like destroy­ing the Death Star. Here are the guides I rec­om­mend fol­low­ing if you want to laugh, be amused, or (gasp) actu­ally learn some­thing .

• Green Plas­tic Squirt Gun — How to Prove the Exis­tence of Bigfoot
• Under­Scoop­Fire — Four Ways to Make a Good Jus­tice League Movie
• Q the Adult — How to Find a Prince by Kiss­ing Frogs
• Adamo­tomy — How to Read a Book Like Him
• Mon­ster Cafe Saltillo — How to Toast Pop-Tarts

Dark and Disturbing Interactive Teaser for ‘Asylum’

One of my most antic­i­pated games for 2013–which has been listed on my Most Wanted page for what feels like for­ever now–is an indie point-and-click adven­ture hor­ror game called Asy­lum . I’ve posted the trailer before on this blog and tweeted about it prob­a­bly hun­dreds of times over the past year (which as far as I’m con­cerned isn’t enough). And now I’m going to post the inter­ac­tive teaser because even though this came out last month, it some­how man­aged to escape my atten­tion until today. Shame on me.

Here’s where you can down­load the playable teaser , which is avail­able for PC, Mac, and Ubuntu.

I spent a good 20 min­utes or so explor­ing the con­demned halls of Han­well Men­tal Insti­tute and I was more than suf­fi­ciently creeped out. The game seems to be shap­ing up to be a wor­thy follow-up to  Scratches, the pre­vi­ous game by devel­oper Agustin Cordes of Sen­scape . I con­sider  Scratches one of the scari­est com­puter games I’ve ever played. Here’s hop­ing that  Asy­lum  will soon share that honor.

Screenshots

My Favorite RPG of All Time is Coming to iOS This Week [Lunar]

In gam­ing news that makes me intensely nos­tal­gic for my Sega CD days ‚ Touch Arcade is report­ing that  Lunar: Sil­ver Star Story will be mak­ing its debut on iOS, aptly re-titled as Lunar: Sil­ver Star Story Touch .

In fact, a year after its intended release win­dow and details on  Lunar: Sil­ver Star Story Touch  have been basi­cally non-existent. Until this morn­ing, when SoMoGa emailed us to let us know that  Lunar Touch  was head­ing to the App Store later this week. No spe­cific day is men­tioned but we’d imag­ine it’ll come along with this week’s set of new releases on Wednes­day night.

[via Touch Arcade ]

Lunar: The Sil­ver Star , along with its sequel, Lunar 2: Eter­nal Blue , are two of my favorite RPGs of all time and one of the pri­mary rea­sons you owned a Sega CD back in the day. I loved these games so much I used to draw pic­tures of the char­ac­ters in mid­dle school.

Both games later went on to be re-released on PlaySta­tion with much bet­ter graph­ics, story enhance­ments and gor­geous cin­e­matic cutscenes that put the Sega CD ver­sions to shame–but both of those orig­i­nal games still hold a spe­cial place in my heart for intro­duc­ing me to the world of Lunar , the Drag­on­mas­ter heroes, and the God­dess Althena.

Here’s the orig­i­nal Sega CD ver­sion of the open­ing sequence:

And here’s the revamped PlaySta­tion version:

A mobile ver­sion of Lunar that I could re-play on my iPad will be awesome.

Suicidal Adventure Horror Game ‘The Cat Lady’ Coming this Halloween(ish)

I say “ish” because a firm release date for upcom­ing indie point-and-click adven­ture hor­ror game  The Cat Lady hasn’t been set, but devel­oper  Har­vester Games  hopes to release the game by Hal­loween. We seem to be in the midst of a surge of creepy, indie hor­ror games like Slen­der and Anna ; The Cat Lady looks like it has a lot of potential.

Susan Ash­worth, known in her neigh­bour­hood as the crazy Cat Lady, is a lonely 40-year old on the verge of sui­cide. She has no fam­ily, no friends and no hope for a bet­ter future.

One day she dis­cov­ers that five strangers will come along and change every­thing… But those five, “The Par­a­sites”, are also the most ruth­less, deranged and cold-blooded bunch of psy­chopaths the city has ever known. They will stop at noth­ing to hurt Susan.

Unless, she hurts them first…

A playable demo  of the game is now avail­able, and here’s a teaser fea­tur­ing a few min­utes of gameplay:

JESUS CHRIST WHAT IS THAT THING??

[via IndieGames.com ]

‘Pac-Man Portal’ is just like Pac-Man, but with Portals. Duh.

You might remem­ber Mari0 , that awe­some Super Mario/Portal mashup game we saw ear­lier this year which armed Mario with a por­tal gun to solve physics-based puz­zles in the made-over but com­pletely famil­iar Mush­room King­dom. Now Namco’s clas­sic Pac-Man has been given the Por­tal treat­ment, so I guess adding por­tals to old, iconic video games is now offi­cially “a thing.”

Pac-Man Por­tal  is an indie game devel­oped by user DJ_smart for Russ­ian gam­ing site IGDC. It’s not quite as awe­some or finely-tuned as Mari0, but it’s a fully-functional Pac-Man game. With por­tals. And hey, it’s free.

The game is in Russ­ian, which might be a turnoff, but it’s freak­ing Pac-Man so it’s not like you need words to play it any­way. Move Pac-Man around with the arrow keys, and use the mouse but­tons to aim and shoot portals–left for blue, right for orange. The IGDC site is also in Russ­ian, so here’s a direct down­load link so you don’t have to bother with Google Trans­late. Just un-RAR it and run the .exe file.

[via  IndieGames.com ]

Give Trick-or-Treaters a Free Copy of ‘Plants vs. Zombies’ this Halloween!

Hal­loween candy has always been the bane of the Amer­i­can Den­tal Association’s exis­tence and every year it seems they’re out there, some­where, actively pro­mot­ing non-sugary Hal­loween treats and ruin­ing everybody’s fun. I’ve always blamed them for those houses that give out raisins.

Well this year the Amer­i­can Den­tal Asso­ci­a­tion is actu­ally doing some­thing kind of cool. They’ve teamed up with Pop­Cap to offer free copies of everybody’s favorite adorable tower defense game , Plants vs. Zom­bies  to “Stop Zom­bie Mouth.”  (Zom­bie mouth = tooth decay, hurr hurr, I get it!) Treat-givers are encour­aged to hand out these print­able coupons marked with redeemable free game codes, which are valid from Octo­ber 30 — Novem­ber 10.

Of course, this cam­paign isn’t going to stop ass­holes like me from hand­ing these out to all my trick-or-treaters in addi­tion to  piles of sac­cha­r­if­er­ous, tooth-rotting candy. That’s right, kids, I’m an enabler.

And for those of you too old to go trick-or-treating, hey, free game!

‘Pitfall’ and 45 other Activision classics now on iPad!

It was just a month ago that I was express­ing my dis­ap­point­ment over the iPad’s lack of Pit­fall , despite offer­ing an Atari’s Great­est Hits app with 100 clas­sic Atari games. As if Activi­sion was read­ing my mind (or my blog!),  last week, the Activi­sion Anthol­ogy app arrived to rem­edy that prob­lem and answer my prayers.

Here’s the full list of games avail­able in the app; see the iOS column.

I also want to point out that the on-screen con­trols, as shown in the Pit­fall screen­shot above, are not your only option. The app gives you three dif­fer­ent con­trol options, includ­ing touch and tilt; what­ever is most com­fort­able for your play style. How­ever, not all of these con­trol schemes are avail­able to all games, BUT I do like that the app lets you set uni­ver­sal con­trol pref­er­ences when available.

The Activi­sion Anthol­ogy app itself is free and comes with a free copy of KABOOM!, but if you want the full col­lec­tion of Activi­sion games, includ­ing Pit­fall, it will cost $6.99. Or you can pur­chase 11-packs of games for $2.99 each. All in all, not a bad price for so much mobile retro gam­ing goodness.

Guess I’ve got no more reasons not to buy a 3DS now. [Ace Attorney 5]

As I explained in an ear­lier post, I’ve been hold­ing off on buy­ing a 3DS because it’s hard for me to jus­tify spend­ing money on yet another gam­ing device when my old DS Lite still gets so much use . On top of that, there haven’t been too many 3DS games that I’ve been absolutely dying to play, apart from Kid Icarus: Upris­ing , Spirit Cam­era: The Cursed Mem­oir , and of course the Mario titles. Last year’s price drop wasn’t even enough to win me over.

But yes­ter­day the news broke that Ace Attor­ney 5 , Capcom’s much-anticipated sequel to the Phoenix Wright series of games, was con­firmed for a U.S. release . Well now, that just changes everything!

I’ve said it many times before on this blog, if there is one thing that will com­pel me to spend money on a new gam­ing sys­tem, it is platform-exclusive titles, espe­cially if they hap­pen to be part of one of my favorite series (rare excep­tion: Uncharted: Golden Abyss for Playsta­tion Vita, which at this point I doubt I’m ever going to purchase).

The Phoenix Wright games, along with the Pro­fes­sor Lay­ton series, have been the biggest draws for me on the DS plat­form. I’ve played every sin­gle (Amer­i­can) game in each series, and I’m still anx­iously await­ing any news on that Phoenix Wright/Professor Lay­ton crossover game; namely, whether or not it will be local­ized.  Ace Attor­ney 5 com­ing to the west is a great sign.

The Most Insane ‘Beatmania’ Video I’ve Ever Seen

If you’re not famil­iar with Beat­ma­nia (and there’s a good chance many of you aren’t, since a lot of non-gamers read this site lately), you might not be able to fully appre­ci­ate what it is you’re look­ing at here. But trust me when I tell you it’s impressive:

Beat­ma­nia is a music/rhythm game by Bemani (Konami’s music video game divi­sion), the same label behind Dance Dance Rev­o­lu­tion . But unlike DDR, Beat­ma­nia never achieved the same lev­els of main­stream mass suc­cess in Amer­ica. Whereas there was once a time you could walk into prac­ti­cally any arcade and find a DDR machine, you’d almost never see a Beat­ma­nia cabinet.

The game is played by press­ing black and white piano keys and spin­ning a turntable in sync with the music notes that fall from the top of the screen. Most Beat­ma­nia music is extremely fast-paced Eurobeat or trance with heavy beats and catchy melody sequences, but there’s also a cou­ple of laid-back, groovy tracks like Jamiroquia’s “Vir­tual Insan­ity.”  My favorite Beat­ma­nia songs are “Remem­ber Me”  and “Yes­ter­day.”

My intro­duc­tion to Beat­ma­nia was through a friend of a friend back in 2002 or there­about, who had a hacked PS1 and was run­ning all kinds of pirated Japan­ese games. Beat­ma­nia 6th Mix was one of them.  The game hadn’t been released in the United States yet, so pirated copies of the Japan­ese games were the only way to play them. Later on in 2006 I bought myself the PS2 Beat­ma­nia game , which was the first U.S. release of the game and came with a ver­sion of the IIDX con­troller (7 keys instead of 5). I was always dis­ap­pointed it never included my two favorite songs, though.

Though I was never very good at Beat­ma­nia (I’m much more skilled at play­ing fake gui­tar in Rock Band), at least enjoyed play­ing it for the chal­lenge and lis­ten­ing to the kick­ass music. Every now and then I have a desire to hook up my PS2 again and dust off my Beat­ma­nia con­troller and have another go, but then I see videos like the one above and it just makes me want to cry.

What would ‘Super Mario Bros.’ be like on the Atari 2600?

Now you can find out for your­self! An indie devel­oper from the AtariAge forums  is in the process of “demak­ing” the clas­sic Nin­tendo game Super Mario Bros. for the less-powerful Atari 2600. He’s call­ing it Super Mario Clone World , and as you can see from the above screen­shot, it looks retrotastic.

Here’s a brief review of the game in-progress:

Not that I actu­ally played the fan­tas­tic demo of this  Super Mario Bros demake  on a proper Atari 2600, but even an emu­la­tor can con­vey the sheer awe­some­ness of the expe­ri­ence. This is both a tech­ni­cal mar­vel and an excel­lent port of the tra­di­tional Super Mario game­play to such an under­pow­ered plat­form; the con­trols are excel­lent, the graph­ics rec­og­niz­able, the ene­mies famil­iar and the music sur­pris­ingly decent. Even Mario can grow and shoot fireballs!

[via IndieGames.com ]

World 1–1 of the game is avail­able as a demo. If you’ve got an Atari emu­la­tor, you can down­load and play it right here .

Please, for the love of God, bring ‘Professor Layton vs. Ace Attorney’ to America!

In case you’re won­der­ing, that head­line was directed at Cap­com , on the off-chance they’re mon­i­tor­ing social media men­tions as a means to gauge inter­est in local­iz­ing Pro­fes­sor Lay­ton vs. Ace Attor­ney .

The last time gamers heard news about the upcom­ing Phoenix Wright/Professor Lay­ton crossover was way back in 2011. Despite the long silence, Ace Attor­ney cre­ator Shuu Takumi has said that the devel­op­ment process of the upcom­ing 3DS adven­ture game Pro­fes­sor Lay­ton vs. Ace Attor­ney was still going fine and, in fact, was near­ing its end.

Accord­ing to a Famitsu inter­view (viaAn­dri­asang) fea­tur­ing Takumi and Ace Attor­ney movie direc­tor Takashi Miike, Takumi said that his life is totally focused on com­plet­ing the game. “The pro­duc­tion of Pro­fes­sor Lay­ton vs. Ace Attor­ney is at its cli­max. While I still can­not say much, [the game devel­op­ment] is pro­gress­ing well, so please wait a bit more.”

[via GameSpot ]

OBJECTION! It’s great that the game is near­ing com­ple­tion and all, but we’ve still heard noth­ing about an Eng­lish lan­guage release.

Your move, Capcom.

Game Over for ‘Nintendo Power’ Magazine

Sorry for the cheesy head­line. I couldn’t resist. After 24 years, Nin­tendo Power mag­a­zine is end­ing. Joys­tiq reports:

Nin­tendo has cho­sen not to renew its licens­ing agree­ment with Future Pub­lish­ing (the com­pany that cur­rently pro­duces Nin­tendo Power) and has no inten­tions to take over the pub­li­ca­tion itself, accord­ing to insider sources speak­ing to Ars Tech­nica. This infor­ma­tion is cor­rob­o­rated by Nin­tendo Power senior edi­tor Chris Hoff­man, who tweeted that he and his staff will “try to make the last issues memorable.”

Report­edly “dif­fi­cult to work with,” Nin­tendo is said to have taken no inter­est in work­ing with Future on expanded online ini­tia­tives to strengthen the Nin­tendo Power brand. Edi­tors and staff mem­bers were told that the mag­a­zine would be shut down some­time last week and have since begun tran­si­tion­ing to other Future publications.

[via Joys­tiq ]

For gamers, it’s truly the end of an era. The mag­a­zine has been a source of news, reviews, pre­views, tips and strat­egy for all things Nin­tendo since 1988. I haven’t actively main­tained a sub­scrip­tion since the early 90s, but I’m still sad to see it go.

Just for old time’s sake, here are my favorite TMNT-themed issues of Nin­tendo Power through the years:

‘Dungeons & Dragons: A Documentary’ Rolls the Dice on Kickstarter

Ear­lier this week West­paw Films announced Dun­geons & Drag­ons: A Doc­u­men­tary , an upcom­ing film explor­ing the his­tory of the fan­tasy role-playing game all the way back to its hum­ble begin­nings in 1974. From cre­ators Gygax and Arneson’s orig­i­nal goal to “just sell 1,000 copies” of the game, to the for­ma­tion and tur­bu­lent his­tory of TSR, and how ulti­mately D&D became a world­wide phe­nom­e­non and major influ­ence on soci­ety and pop culture.

Now the project has come to Kick­starter, where the trio of filmmakers–Andrew Pas­cal, Anthony Savini, and James Sprattley–are hop­ing to raise $150,000 by Mon­day, Sep­tem­ber 17.

Here’s the trailer:

And here’s a snip­pet from the film’s synopsis:

“In a very real sense, Dun­geons & Drag­ons changed the world. From its early years, Dun­geons and Drag­ons became a train­ing ground for careers in the realms the imag­i­na­tion and has influ­enced gen­er­a­tions of com­puter pro­gram­mers, design­ers, writ­ers, actors and many oth­ers. Its affect on soci­ety can be seen in every­thing from com­puter games to mod­ern teach­ing the­o­ries and treat­ment for PTSD. Through inter­views with pub­lic per­son­al­i­ties, psy­chol­o­gists and soci­ol­o­gists, D&D:AD will explore how this game has touched the lives of every­one, even if they have never played the game.”

Though I was never heav­ily into D&D beyond cre­at­ing one char­ac­ter and play­ing a few games (mainly because I never had any­one to play with–not to men­tion I’m like minus 15 in math IRL) as a gamer and all-around nerd I’m well aware of its influ­ence on pretty much every­thing I’m into–video games, movies, tele­vi­sion, books, col­lectibles, board games, art. What aspects of geek cul­ture  hasn’t D&D helped shape?

You can sup­port Dun­geons & Drag­ons: A Doc­u­men­tary by back­ing the Kick­starter project and fol­low­ing the film’s progress on Face­book .