Marcus Schmerl
Today’s post starts with a modicum of good news. You may recall that GameRoom Essentials, an Adelaide based business that specialises in arcade and pinball machines, jukeboxes, and custom built systems, had over $30, 000 of merchandise stolen a few months ago. During the course of last week, a tip-off to police afforded them the recovery of approximately $8, 000 worth of the machines. Though the owner of the business, Danny Daly, has taken a big financial hit (and even needed to find additional employment since the robbery), he hopes that this will enable his to re-start the business in the not-too-distant future.
“I got a call from police to say someone had seen the article in theNews Review Messenger and had rang Crime Stoppers with information, which lead to some of the equipment being found,” Mr Daly, 40, of Elizabeth Downs, said.
Source and full story: adelaidenow.com.au
Hardware homebrewers, tinkerers, hackers. Call them what you like, but it’s this generation’s basement dwelling geeks who are one of the main groups that are keeping the retro gaming scene going by providing hardware to prolong the useful lifespan of decades old consoles. The Everdrive series of flash-based cartridges by Krikzz have proved very popular on a number of consoles (PC Engine, MegaDrive, SNES, Master System and more…go to krikzz.com for more information). These are great ways of preserving your cartridges whilst enabling you to play a huge variety of games on the original hardware rather than on emulators. Now you can possibly add another two consoles to the list because Everdrives for the NES and Famicom are in the works. No concrete information or solid release date yet, but hopefully more news soon.
Source and more info: www.retrocollect.com
Here, have some Sonic 2 graffiti courtesy of Dorkly…pretty!
Here’s one for the ‘don’t try this at home kids’ list. A company called North Street Labs has managed to ‘upgrade’ a NES Zapper Gun with a 2W laser. A real working laser gun.
Using a 445nm diode, some batteries, wiring and imagination, the light gun was painstakingly put together, complete with physical safety lock and custom aim-assisting heat sink. The end result is a bona fide laser shootin’ gun, capable of not only setting alight matches from a distance, but setting the curtains on fire too (probably).
Definitely an impressive bit of workmanship. Why was the key based locking mechanism a design feature? You might understand more clearly when you see this thing in action in the video below.
Source: www.geekologie.com
Double Dragon Neon has finally been released on PSN and XBLA. Mainline Media News provides a relatively thorough review here. Whilst I won’t give away their final verdict, it’s interesting that the developers’ adherence to the original formula is at times a good thing for the gamer, but it also acts as a hinderance in numerous ways. Is it possible to play up the nostalgia factor too much?
Two of my favourite retro inspired iOS games are available free for a limited time from today. Mos Speedrun is a cute platformer where, as the name suggests, you need to reach the level goal in a short a time as possible (all the while avoiding pixelated enemies and collecting the maximum number of ubiquitous coins. Sword of Fargoal is an tasteful update of the 8-bit Rogue-like dungeon crawler that really retains the feel of top-down dungeon based exploration games of old. Both games are characterised by great audio, excellent touch screen controls, and that ‘one more go’ X-factor. At the sum total of $0.00, you’d be mad not to give them a go!
Download Mos Speedrun here.
Download Sword of Fargoal here.
Source: toucharcade.com
Finally, here’s another freebie for you. Mike alerted me (thanks mate!) to Rubicon, a Kickstarter project that he recently funded. Imagine the shoot-em-up style of Asteroids combined with the customisation strategy of Mechwarrior. According to the developer, no one strategy is the best as he has designed the various waves of enemies to attack in ways that may (or may not!) suit particular styles of play. Needless to say, after a few quick goes of the game, I’m quite rubbish at it, but it is definitely an interesting premise for a game. I fully expect Mike to do a writeup for this one sometime soon, so hopefully I can at least glean a few strategies from him! Now for just one more go…
Rubicon in available for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. Further information and download links can be found by clicking here here.
That’s all for today. I still have more to share but I think I’ll cut this one off as it’s already quite lengthy. No doubt there’ll be another daily very soon!