It has always been easy to find not-so-honest famiclones masquerading as other consoles around here --- to this day the famed Polystation tricks customers at most small import stores. Now gamereporter.org is reporting on a recent crop of Wii lookalikes:

Wii Vision is a black Wii copycat with wireless controls. Amazingly, it comes from local maker Dynacom, a more-or-less respected company which any Brazilian knows for their Dynavision famiclone - the guys have balls! Just like the Polystation, the Wii Vision has a NES slot that'll surely disappoint the kids of gullible parents who buy this to play Wii games. Comes with (allegedly) 111 in-memory games, an extra cart with more 106 games, and a light gun.





Now the Chinese Multigame Multilaser, by contrast, actually includes six infrared games with special-purpose controllers, including a soccer shoe! It's supposed to be 16-bit, and a second cart adds 16 conventional games --- no word if they're original or if this is an SNES-compatible. If I can put my hands on one of those I'll report more.

The price is around R$279 ($165) for Wii Vision and R$349 ($207) for Multigame; of course, much cheaper than the R$1000 the Wii is going for in the gray market. Thanks to Wendel for the tip.

This weekend I went to a live performance by a local (Brazilian) videogame rock band, Abreu Project; they have some interesting arrangements with marimbas and synth. I can't necessarily speak for their recorded work, but they did the entire Rockman 3 soundtrack live. The guys enjoy playing with other people, so if you're a musician and happen to be in Belo Horizonte, Brazil and can do music, contact them to share the stage!

<Brandon's note: Silver Surfer, MM3 intro and Bloody Tears are recommended.>

Fernando has translated the Tectoy blog response to the "what should we release?" poll, in which Dreamcast was the undisputed winner. The company said that a Dreamcast re-release is not currently possible, because the Dreamcast was licensed by Sega, and discontinued years ago. This is an odd thing to say, given that they have the rights to most Sega licenses... But they said they want to re-release it, and hope that a solid showing from fans will help in that regard.

Next, they say they will have some good news for game fans in a short while (I still guess Game Gear). Here's Fernando's take on the Tectoy backpedaling, which I largely agree with: "What I think is that they can't afford it right now. Both Tectoy Master System and Mega Drive are a bit expensive for vintage machines, and a Tectoy Dreamcast would come at about the price of a PS2 in the Brazilian "gray market", which everyone is used to dealing with." So, no Tectoy Dreamcast just yet - but perhaps in a year or so as technology gets cheaper? Thanks to portalsonic for the image (beware of music if you click).

Slap Fight points out Muscle Fight, a 2D Kinnikuman (aka Ultimate M.U.S.C.L.E.) doujin fighting game from a couple years back - here's a youtube video of it that seems to have rekindled everyone's interest. There are plenty more to see as well... The game has gotten some recent updates and moves, but was originally created by a fellow called Matayan some years ago using ASCII's fighting game maker. You can download all the updates at the official site (though you need fighting game maker), but there are complete torrents out there as well. I don't feel bad mentioning it since the game is actually classified as freeware. As long as they don't contain the fighting game maker itself, in which case that's stealing!

As part of their Variable Infinity model kit series Kotobukiya are releasing the infamous Nineball Seraph from Armored Core Master of Arena and Armored Core 2 Another Age. The kit itself looks remarkably faithful to the original Shoji Kawamori designs, so much so in fact you can also transform it as per the game. This is an interesting development in that Seraph is a bespoke design, so you can't use its parts to customize other AC models (something the previous models were able to do). So we may start seeing other iconic bosses from the series as a consequence (though the giant MT's maybe pushing it somewhat, especially at 1/72 scale). It's also quite a big kit, over 20 cm tall, and a bit more expensive than the other models in the series as well. It's scheduled to be released in July.

I just discovered, though some may have known, that good old Data West made two games for the Pioneer LaserActive system, back in 1993 and 1994. The games were Vajra 1 and 2 - you can see an image of the cover of the first here, and also download a video of Vajra in action. (I've mirrored it here just in case nekofan loses his hosting at any time) It's actually a pretty poor video, as he's not really playing, but what can you do. Vajra 2 has improved graphics, and you can see screens of, and information about it here. I don't know why I care about Data West, but I keep on doing it!

The discerning PC Engine fan will want to take a look at some of the newer updates (though some are two years old!) at Superpcenginegrafx. There's an extended page of Super CD warning screens - the screens that come up when you try to play a Super CD game on a system without a super system card. There are over 100, and many of them are animated (but not all the ones that animate are actually represented by animated gifs, unfortunately).

Next, he's got a side by side comparison of the U.S. and Japanese versions of Magical Chase. The U.S. version was drastically changed, almost completely redrawn in many cases - arguably making a better product, but nobody can figure out why they bothered doing it at all. There's even a video for comparison!

Lastly, be sure to check out his videos page, with playthroughs of Magical Chase, Renny Blaster, Impossimole, Dragon Egg, Daimakaimura for Supergrafx, and a host of others.

Remember the Sapphire PC Engine fakes we pointed out some time ago? There's a new kid on the block in the form of Space Fantasy Zone. This is an odd and very obscure business to get into, but apparently someone thinks it's worthwhile to painstakingly replicate these old games! And each time I'm foolishly tempted. Only $159 for a convincing fake! Perhaps not then. Thanks to SignOfZeta for the link.

There are several movies of Astonishia Story 2 for PSP up at the official SCEK homepage - the first is a trailer, the second shows the skill tree, and the third shows several events from the game. In addition, a playable demo was released some time ago - I can't find the original location of the download link anymore, so I'll link to PSP Fanboy's description and hosted file. Ironnos is developing a mobile version as well, alongside Darkside Story M, an upgrade of the game Sonnori made prior to the original Astonishia. My fingers are crossed for this one...

Just in case you hadn't noticed it, Arc System and Capcom's System 246 (emotion engine!) fighter Sengoku Basara X is coming to PS2. It's coming on June 26 for 6,290 yen, which is too much for an Arc fighter if you ask me. Do check out the movie tab though, if you haven't seen the game in action. Choose from the left menu to see a bunch of combos for different characters. I truly do wish I could get excited by this game.

If you haven't seen the Genesis portable in action, there's a good capture on youtube. People generally complain about how the thing randomly resets, and there's nothing you can do about it - but it's still an interesting console!

Tectoy (they used to be Tec Toy officially), which is the Brazilian Sega-affiliated company we like to cover, has a new poll on the main site asking which console consumers would like to see Tectoy re-release. The choices are Game Gear, Dreamcast, and Pense Bem (think well) - a children's computer from the 80s. Anyone can vote. The stats right now are:
Game Gear (5.3%)
Dreamcast (91.0%)
Pense Bem (3.7%)

Dreamcast is a clear favorite here, and people are already speculating about what a Tectoy Dreamcast would be like. Tectoy's usual MO is to take a console like the Master System or Genesis and shrink it down, put a bunch of games on flash ram, and sell it as a stand-alone unit. However, when they re-released the Saturn and Dreamcast before, they just put them out straight (unfortunately those pages are down, but I talked about them here). So this re-release could really be a re-envisioning of the console - or it could be a re-release. My money would actually go toward a slimmer Game Gear, especially if I were the guy choosing the games to go on it! The Tectoy blog only has a cryptic statement "What should we release? Hmmmmm." So, a Dreamcast re-release of some kind seems likely, if they're going by the stats. It may not be soon, but it may be interesting!

Also keep in mind that Tectoy and AtGames have a relationship as well. What Tectoy is to Brazil, AtGames is to China, meaning the company has the rights to release OEM hardware with games based on any Sega console in the region. What's more, the portable Genesis from AtGames that went on sale a few months back is actually Tectoy's portable Genesis. The form factor and games are exactly the same. So, if Tectoy releases an OEM Dreamcast, we may see it with an English manual before long. Keep your eyes peeled! Thanks to Fernando M. for pointing this out.

Just to make sure you're kept up on internet game/music memes, note the Airman ga Taosenai (can't beat Airman) phenomenon from a few months ago. There are lots of videos on the subject as you can see. It's game reference-tastic, and it's worth watching a few of them. There's even a version for Osu! which I mentioned yesterday.

That song evolved once again into this one - Eroge ga Owaranai (I can't beat H-games), which is pretty funny if you understand Japanese. And hey, looks like there's an English subbed version!

While you're at it, there's the Caramelldansen stuff, which like the Iievan Polkka evolved from someone randomly using a random song they found with a few frames of animation from a series, and then grew to incorporate different things.

Then there's the ridiculously huge NicoNicoDouga. There are a lot of versions, and the one I pasted is a compilation/mix of several. Poke around in 'related' to find the rest. Or look here. No child left behind, these memes won't evolve themselves!

Dux is a new/upcoming shooter from some of the same folks that made Last Hope for Dreamcast, Neo Geo home cart, and NGCD - specifically artist and designer René Hellwig. The game does look quite nice, and you can see a 90% complete stage 1 video on their May 3rd post (or alternately here on youtube). I'm sure I'll hear more about this as it's updated, as René usually keeps me up to date on this stuff. Let's hope the design matches the graphical style! The clean look of the early post about weapon patterns is pretty appealing. Right now it's looking extremely R-Type. My guess is it'll keep looking like that!

You've probably heard this everywhere today, but Cross Edge, a collaboration of licenses from Capcom, Namco Bandai, Nippon Ichi, Idea Factory, and Gust was just announced. There's a scan around that's simple enough to find. The game appears to use a 'direct action' battle system, in which the face buttons are pressed to utilize specific skills. Characters can change form, and thus costume, depending on their status, and certain in-game events. There's also something about souls that I don't really understand! The developer/publisher is Compile Heart (the Agarest Senki team), the platform is PS3, and the genre is fantasy RPG. We'll see how they do.

Discussion recently came up on the S:NGP boards about an old peripheral that was to be released, third-party, that would allow Game Boy games to be played on a Neo Geo Pocket Color. Such a project was indeed in the works at Ganksoft, of DC Tonic fame. The emulator was almost complete, but the hardware was not started. There are screens of the emulator though. Interesting to think about what might've been! Thanks to Flavor for the reminder.

Just in case you're not aware of it, Osu! is a free PC-based Ouendan-like game/service which allows users to play and create songs of their choosing. A neat concept, and one which seems to be somewhat popular - but it's possible not everyone knows about it. So here you go! There are Hatsune Miku mixes, Caramelldansen, pretty much everything you'd expect, but also Danny Elfman and They Might Be Giants. All beatmaps are downloadable, and ranked according to registered user votes. Pretty solid product.

In case you haven't seen the Otomedius gameplay, (the game is coming to 360 now, you know!) here's a video. This is Konami's new Parodius entry, essentially, and worth paying attention to, though I haven't really seen many impressions of the game yet.

Persona is once again doing a comic for GameSetWatch, which you can view the first installment of here. The (reaction to the) punchline does it!

Just a reminder that Solvalou.com exists - particularly his collection of JAMMA boards, many of which all have information, screens, and other excellence, like vintage game review scans. Browse by numbers or years for maximum gains.

The ION Game Conference sent a press release just yesterday, titled "Gourmet Food and Outstanding Content on the Menu at the 2008 ION Game Conference." Here's an excerpt:

"On Wednesday, John Smedley, President of Sony Online Entertainment, takes on the heady question of what it takes to reinvent the tried-and-true massively multiplayer online game genre with his keynote, "Reinventing the MMO". During Mr. Smedley's talk, attendees can partake in Pacific clam chowder with Manila clams; Greek pasta salad with feta, tomatoes, red onion, and herbed vinaigrette; chicken kabobs with garlic, lemon, and rosemary; whole roasted salmon served on a cedar plank; and Washington apple tart with vanilla bean whipped cream."

That's amusing enough in itself, but thinking about it carefully, it looks like what they're doing here is the equivalent of matching one's dinner with the correct wine. Do you like Won Il Suh, Vice President of Neowiz? We recommend the minestrone. Interesting concept, if intentional - shame the conference is just about boring MMOs and virtual worlds!

Million Knights Vermillion is a new doujin fighting game from NRF, the team that created Bigbang Beat: 1st Impression, which I'm still surprised hasn't been ported to the arcade yet. The new game has high res-like characters, which the Professor at the MMCafe boards likens to GGX, which seems about right. He also postulates that this hasn't been done with a doujin fighter previously, which I think may be correct. Shouji Sogabe of Senko no Ronde fame has done the character illustrations, and if you check the download tab you can check out an 80 meg video with more illustrations, and some sample fighting, which I'm too inept to grab a screen from just now. Tokyo Kids is doing the animation too, who apparently did some animation for Gurren Lagann. The music is by Mint Jam, which does lots of rock videogame covers. Are doujin games getting to the level where the creators are paying their workers/illustrators? The presence of Shouji Sogabe and Tokyo Kids might indicate so. Keep your eyes peeled for more on this! And if anyone wants to grab a screen of the in-game stuff from the video and send it to me, that'd be very nice. Thanks again to the Professor for the news.

Update: Zepy has a very plausible theory for why BBB hasn't reached arcades, in spite of being semi-announced some time ago, and in spite of being somewhat more popular with fans than Monster and Blitzkampf. And here it is: "I have a feeling the NRF programmer ARESU wanted to dump the BBB project because it wasn't selling well enough (like how he did with Fate/Sword Dance), which caused a split in the team as team members left and created the new doujin group AJA.

So BBB is thrown to AJA and AJA becomes responsible for all future support of the game. But since they don't have the programmer ARESU on their team, and ARESU doesn't want to share the game source code, there isn't much they can actually do with the game. Hence we'll never see an arcade port of BBB. "

Well sort of. I was speaking with my coworker Christian a bit ago about this old arcade game that CSK (Sega's old parent company) ported to the FM Towns Marty, which was essentially the original FPS - a behind-the-back shooting game in a 3D maze in which the player character was 'see-through,' making the game first-person through an avatar. He hadn't heard of it, so we went on an exploratory journey through the internet. That game is Last Survivor, made in 1988. For reference, Wolfenstein 3D was created in 1992. (Nevermind about Maze War or AD&D for the 2600. That's why I said modern!) See flyers here, and two screens here. And here is a review of the game from back in the day. Pretty interesting stuff, to the point where it even uses dynamic 3D mazes, and it plays very much like a rudimentary arena FPS. Shame I don't have any video!

Update: Frank pointed me to MIDI Maze, which came out one year earlier, and actually sort of does the same thing. Boo Frank!

Gamesetwatch has an interview with Flavor, who made the Card Fighters Clash 2 English patch. It was an ambitious project, and it's pretty neat to see how it all came together, and specifically what the challenges were, and what graphical and textual compromises or changes had to be made.

DesertDog, who you may remember did the Fate/Stay Night intro port which we mentioned a while back, has done a whole lot more stuff. Check his site for the Snatcher demo, which is based on the PCE Snatcher Pilot Disc but uses the Sega CD version's assets, Fate/Hollow Ataraxia Prologue, and Game Melody Oratorio one and two,. which teach players to play simple retro game melodies using a virtual piano. All great stuff, all worth checking out.

Shrek Pinball is a new standing pinball machine from Stern Enterprises, designed by Pat Lawler, who according to Frank "designed Fun House, Whirlwind, Addams Family (I think), and pretty much all of the best pinball machines ever made." So keep an eye out for it, even if the green is horrifyingly ugly. You can read the press release at coinoptoday.

You may have heard of this, but even if you have, there have been lots of new updates to the site. Mugen no Frontier - Super Robot Wars OG is part of the Original Generation line of SRW titles - the twist here is that instead of just robots, there are also big breasted girls. It's fanboy exploitation to the extreme, with needless bra-breaking and cleavage festivals. The videos are worth watching. It's coming out on the DS on May 29th for 6,090 including tax - it's got Kos-Mos in it, so what else do you need? Preorder it here if you want!

Again, rather old, but it hasn't been linked around. In order to promote the Gyakuten Saiban (Ace Attorney) series in Japan, Capcom created this story creator/editor. You can't actually create a scenario to solve, but it basically lets you put the text and images together in a linear fashion. Pretty neat, and still very active. You have to register a Dalett ID here, then use that to log in here, and you're good to go. You can see examples of what other folks have done here, and you can see examples of some English ones here and here.

I've never liked Smash Bros, but I do like this comic Persona did back in February before the new game was out. It essentially chronicles Sonic's emotional arc after receiving an invitation to participate in the game. Quite good stuff.

My interview with Gamevil's Bong Koo Shin just ran on Gamasutra...it's one of the many interviews I completed in Korea, but this was one of the more interesting. Shin has really interesting ideas about game design and life in general, and is pretty far out there. The guy translating said he had worked with the guy for a long time, and had never heard so much of his unique philosophy as he heard that day. Shin is the brain behind the Nom mobile games, which I've mentioned many times. You can see postmortems of the 2nd game here, and the third here. Every once in a while you get it into your head to make something known to people, and I tried to do that with Grasshopper starting in 2002, and I think Shin is another of those cases. Here's an excerpt from the creation of Nom 3, which I've used before:

"The subtitle of Nom 3 is "A Beautiful but Cruel Square." I remember last Valentine's Day when female co-workers gave out meaningless Valentine chocolates to their male colleagues for the day's sake. Since I was not dating anyone at that time, I was delighted to have the chocolates and finished them right away. As I enjoyed the chocolates in my mouth I thought to myself, "Ahh, they are melting in my heart, beautifully but cruelly." That was an honest monologue slipping out, as I felt both the sweetness of chocolates and the bitterness of solitude. Right at that moment, something came across my mind: "A Beautiful but Cruel Square!" (Most low priced Korean chocolates are in a rectangular shape). All the objects in gameplay except the main character were to be designed in a square form and those squares were to be enlivened and move and dissolve in coordination. On that day, Nom 3 was born."

When I met him in Seoul, I brought him some chocolate squares - seemed like the right thing to do. Here's an excerpt from the interview. Keep watching for this guy!

"Have you heard of this mind controlling device -- it's a device with some sort of amplifier, and you have to wear special glasses. It gives you repetitive colors -- constantly changing, it kind of controls and soothes your brainwaves.

Then, when you hear sounds, you see something visual, amongst the color changes and stuff. It controls your brainwaves. It's all very preliminary stuff, but it's like the infant level of this digital drug.

After all, eventually I would say we don't need game characters -- no saving the princess or saving the world or fighting against evil and stuff. That's not related to the core. That's boundary stuff. Just like I said about those addictive points of a game -- I could pull out those very little points, so that if you could hit all those points in at once, it would make someone addicted right away. That's the digital drug that I would expect to see in the future."

Alan Noon, designer of the Street Fighter The Movie arcade version, has moved to Incredible Technologies, after previously being at Day 1 Studios. Incredible Technologies is one of the few arcade companies still in business in the U.S., mostly with boring things like golf and bowling, but who knows what might happen with mr. Noon on staff! This happened last year, but I noticed it now, so it's news to me! I also still kind of need to put up an awesome article he wrote a really long time ago. Sorry Alan! More info at coinoptoday, which has redesigned its front page in order to make the thing completely unreadable and impenetrable. Great job guys!

Just in case you didn't see, if you preorder R-Type Command for PSP, you get a little R-9 figure as well. The game is $40, which is pretty damn high, but I'm getting it anyway, because hex-based tactics games are worth supporting. Plus, Nich Maragos did the localization, which is also worth supporting.

Recently people got very excited about a feature on Gamasutra about using Microsoft Excel as a 3D engine. But few seem to recall that it's been used as a game engine for some time already. From the first time someone discovered that there was a playable Microsoft Flight Sim in Excel, the program has been dissected. Witness a post I made back in October 29, 2003. There were some pretty good fan-made Excel games back then. There are even two books on the subject. But fast-forward to now, and see what you get. The fellow who ran the original site (Chikada) is still going at it. His page is difficult to navigate at first, but there is some ridiculously impressive stuff on there. That game to the left, DEX-EV, is running in Excel.

On the site there's a bar at the top, where there's an orange rectangle - the tabs there are for genres of games. I'll link them here: shooting, puzzle, typing, golf and tennis, arcade (lots of puzzle games in there too, like Puyo Puyo 2 for example), block breaking, and finally race/other which also includes fighting games. Worth browsing through these, as they're all free, and many of them are quite interesting.

A while ago, Christian showed me this blog, about one man's love/hate relationship with EGM reviewer Shane Bettenhausen. It's mostly silly. In the author's own words: "Nobody has caused me to laugh as hard or get as angry as Mr. Shane Bettenhausen. You either love him or hate him. So I've decided to track the ups and downs of the Man God's fandom, giving Shane the props he deserves and the criticism he needs. Wow, this sure sounded a lot less creepy when I was thinking it up."

I say it's mostly silly, not all silly, because in a way, this is the kind of thing we need. Most reviewers have opinions about things, and people get mad at them for it, and say they should be objective. Well as I've said time and time again, they can't. Ebert isn't objective, but you know where he stands on things, so you can weigh his opinions against yours. That's why we need to know the names of reviewers, and what they think though some would disagree. This blog is silly - but the extension of the concept isn't! Maybe Shane's not the one to focus attention on, but as long as somebody decent makes it... Note that the man rocking out next to Shane in the pic left is INDEED mutual friend Christian Nutt.

Old news, but I have to report it since it's Sting. Knights in the Nightmare's official site has been updated a couple of times. You can check out the system, world and unit types, and story at this point. Should be coming out on July 17th for a robust 6,090 yen. Check screens and images at Gpara. They're calling it an "active and tactical" RPG...they seem to think they're inventing a new genre every time, so we'll see.

Browsing around I discovered the Tamsoft-developed DS title Yajoukeiji Toukyou Doujitahatsu Tero Chinatsu, published by Success, which roughly translates to Wild Detective: Tokyo Repeated Simultaneous Terrorism Suppression. Or something like that. If the name weren't enough, it takes a 70s style approach to the character design, and is an oddly-animated polygonal side-scrolling beat 'em up. There's a video on that page I linked, and another one here. If you look here you'll find the full dedicated site. There are movies in the 'system' section there too. There are multiple playable characters, and it seems to have some detective-y bits in it as well, which they're probably hoping will offset the full-price release (5040 yen). Interesting that Tamsoft is getting back into making full-price products now, with Oneechanbara Vortex and all. It's supposed to be out May 15th, but Play Asia has it as a July release. The official site has postponed it to "undecided." Uh-oh!

Regular posting will resume on Wednesday, as internet has been restored! In the meantime, watch our dear friend Persona's new short film, Robochi gets flamed. It's a story about getting flamed on the internet - as a pink robot. Also, it features names of a few ic regulars, and some game sound effects which you might be able to identify. Our very own Vincent Diamante did the music. It's really quite nice! As his first 3D project, I have to say it's pretty impressive.