A fellow sent me some interesting newsbits regarding super/famiclones that play real carts, and I'm pretty much reproducing them verbatim.
"The Retro Duo is like the FC Twin but looks kind of shiny and neat, plus will play games that the FC Twin won't. I've heard its made by the same people who made the FC Twin, but this being the internet there's no firm proof of that or anything else I'm going to write. Reports thus far indicate it can play Super Mario RPG, and it's speculated it can play Kirby Super Star as well. StarFox is also confirmed. Some comments on YouTube claim it even plays Castlevania III. Here's the YouTube video of a guy testing it out.
There's a new product at Retrozone that's designed to be soldered to a real NES. This is effectively a cart dumper but it's also a debugger (it attaches a USB port to the back of an NES). It would be cool if it led to people making NES homebrew on a scale of AtariAge.com.
The company that makes it is called "Sealie Computing." <Brandon's note: we've covered them in the past, as they made the NES Flash cart and USB NES controllers among other things.> This guy also makes stuff for Apple's old PDA the Newton. He got an edutainment program called "MathFaster", which has the same seal that's printed on the NES copier circuit board. More interesting, though, is that the game uses Megaman as one of the central characters." Thanks to Scott Winston for sending this in.
Just a note that you should check out Insomnia for couple-month-old reviews of some interesting titles. One is Shin Chuka Taisen, which we've discussed many times. It's the Wii shooter starring Son Son, which is supposed to come to the U.S. via UFO as The Monkey King, with Amazon calling an April 15 release date. The short version is: high res sprites are pretty much the only good thing about it.
The other review you should check out is Night Slave (not work safe), an action/shooting/hentai game for PC-98 hardware. Looks quite nice, and people don't generally talk about these games in english.
My friend Ryan of EntDepot and digitalwordsmithing needs a Russian translator to work on game text. Eric-Jon does work with them too. This is paid work (not amazingly highly paid, but still!), so you must be quick! Send inquiries to ryan at digitalwordsmithing.com.
You might've heard about the XaviXPORT a while back...or maybe not. I thought I posted about it some years ago, but I can't find evidence of it now. The XaviXPORT an entertainment and fitness console which uses motion sensing to allow you to box, play tennis, baseball, bowl, golf, fish, and even do aerobics exercises with a mat on the floor - and it was all released in 2004. There's also a psuedo-predecessor to Wii Fit. Trouble is they sold all of these games separately, each with a different peripheral, and they don't have the clout or polish Nintendo does...but there sure are a lot of parallels. The then-titled Revolution was already announced at the time, but it wasn't yet known that it was motion control-based. Reading a review of the XaviXPORT on G4's site is humorous not just because of the poor and pandering language, but also the fact that with a few changed words, this could be a newspaper-savvy level (that is to say low) review of a Wii:
"The Xavix gaming system is a neat idea and great for a party. The graphics are nothing to call home about, but the simple system provides hours of great group fun—and isn’t that what games are all about? However, if you are a video game enthusiast, the XaviX is not for you and I recommend you go buy a PlayStation 2 (with a wider selection of games) and get the EyeToy to get interactive with your games. But I've got to give props to the Xavix; it got my girlfriend to play video games with me."
Anyway, XaviX hasn't released a whole lot of new stuff in the last few years, but it did relaunch its site now that the Wii is out. It hasn't tried to reposition itself to be more similar, but it does have Jackie Chan all over the place as a spokesperson. You can check out some video of him demoing the system here - at about 2:30 you can see the game in action, and you will certainly note that it's not corresponding to his actions exactly, or even vaguely. Here is your comparable video of a 7 year old girl playing a XaviX game while holding a cat. It's all very Vii level. To sum up, the company is still around, knock knock knockin on Nintendo's door.
Taiwan is better known for game piracy than game consoles, by and large, but an original legit console was released there in 1995 - Funtech's Super A'can. One of two main sources for information on this console is Wikipedia which has some interesting information, which is also impossible to prove. It is known that the system runs on the legendary Motorola 68000 chip, and has 12 confirmed games, with several more rumored to exist. The article also reports that the company lost U.S. $6 million on the venture, which is the cost of only 3/5 the cost of a modern game's development, so they shouldn't be crying! Control pads were Genesis-like in appearance, but not compatible with any Sega system.
The other main source is here, through the site of an eBay reseller. There's also a page with game boxes and screens. All references to this console say it's "nothing special," but it looks pretty neat to me in the visual department at least. There's actually one for sale on Singapore's eBay, for about U.S. $190, and twogames as well. My stupid brain is tempted.
I can't find any evidence of Funtech anymore (possibly Fun Tech), so please share information if you've got it. Funtech.com.tw points to a different company, so that's a bust.
I got this image from a mysterious source - apparently the Danish version of Lego Racers (and maybe all Danish racing games, if there are many translated into that language?) has an interesting message, at least for English speakers, when you finish a race. This is confirmed as a real screenshot, not a photoshopped image. I carefully navigated Danish-themed pornography sites to determine that "slut" means "the end" in Danish, so it's not crazy. Just funny.
It's worth just going through the whole list of titles...there's lots of cool stuff in here, all with pictures. Rinkaku has a few videos up as well - there's the FFVII one linked below, but also DQ 8 and its ending, Romancing SaGa and its ending, and a game called The Hacker, which is based on the Matrix, and has floating internet explorer logos in it.
You probably saw this elsewhere... I wasn't able to post while at GDC - but if you didn't, check out this very neat find, a NES "port" of Final Fantasy VII for Famicom. The article goes quite in depth on it, including what's still in from the original and what isn't, so give it a read. Seems they really managed to squeeze a lot of it in there. I imagine that someone will eventually translate this from Chinese into English, now that it's been found?
Here's something you may not have seen though - a youtube video of the game.
Raigan and crew had a launch party for the XBLA version of N+, and we sent Mathew Kumar there to cover it. And he did! And he took pictures and made funny captions. That's all I need out of anyone anymore!
DesertDog posted in the forums that he made a screen saver out of horizontally scrolling shooters. It's got a moving starfield, and then a ship from a given game scrolls across at a random height, with the name of the game, the developer, and the year also displayed. It's a pretty fantastic thing, and even if you haven't installed a screensaver in years (like me) this is well worth a download. It's got over 30(?) ships in it, and sometimes I just leave it looping! Thanks to Luke for the new screen.
You might've seen a couple of these Indian Math Drill games...ASK made one too. Covers like this which say "What's 75x75? An Indian person can clear it in TWO SECONDS" is just general lack of cultural awareness. But Sega took it to the next level.
Take a look at Miburi & Teburi, and the first thing you'll notice is a giant white man covered in fake hair. That is what they call a 'Nazo no American,' or a hint-giving American. There are several others in the game too, such as a woman wearing an American flag, a Hard Gay lookalike, and others. Scroll down and watch the videos. The top video is the in-game stuff, and it doesn't seem so bad. They have depictions of 'hyper-Japanese' people in there too, it seems. But the lower video is problematic. It "stars" the voices of two "Americans" who say things like "I love Japan, I love Japanese people" in uniquely horribly faked American accents. It's the equivalent of someone saying "I rike fly lice" to describe how a Japanese person might talk. Of course Japan isn't the only culprit - we've still got Mad TV...somehow. But I think in Japan there's a lack of awareness that this is insulting in the first place, which increases the problem. I honestly think I'd have less of a problem with it if they were truly playing with American conventions and American Japanese fetishism - but they're just unconsciously making fun of a group of people. And I'm not sure anyone will tell Sega this isn't appropriate. It's a fine line, but I think this crosses it.
Two weeks later, I finally get around to talking about Elminage, a 2D/3D dungeon crawler in the Wizardry vein. These games are basically only still "popular" in Japan, and even there it's a pretty small niche. Pretty neat to see this stuff still coming out though. It's coming to PS2 on March 27 for a staggering 7,140 yen (tax included) - but it makes sense if you think about it. People who like this kind of game will buy it at any price - lowering the price by 2,000 yen isn't going to make anyone else buy it. Illustration work is by Takeshi Miyauchi, and Basiscape is handling the soundtrack. Hitoshi Sakimoto (Vagrant Story, as well as all this) composed the main theme. There's an OST, and I'm not sure if it comes with all versions, or if there's a special edition...
News: Lazy difinitivistic videogame titling reaches Japan
I noticed this game a bit ago, and it's got a rather fantastic title - Night Wizard The VIDEO GAME Denial of the World. They even refer to it as ナイトウィザード The VIDEO GAME in official text. Developer 5pb has broken down the barrier - this means no more re-titling games like "Ubisoft's Peter Jackson's King Kong - The Official Game of the Movie" - you can bring it over as-is! (Actually I think they did that anyway.) If for some reason you're actually interested in Night Wizard The VIDEO GAME, you can check out a trailer here. It's not exciting.
As the only person still paying attention to Tori no Hoshi, I feel it's my duty to inform you that all the new MP3s are out from the Hatsune Miku collaboration, and you can grab them here and here. There's also a 4th song, which will debut on the collaboration CD. They also made a manga! I can feel your excitement burning!
News: Oo Okuki
February 17, 2008, 12:22 AM
by brandon, via Global A Entertainment - [permalink]
Oo Okuki (or oh okuki as some people have romanized it), which we mentioned way back here is finally coming out in Japan. I've been monitoring it for a long time, because the idea of a back-stabbing harem game is pretty neat. It's coming to PS2 on April 10 for a full 5,800 yen. I found it back in May 2006, so this is coming out about two years later. Bizarre, but I'm sure all 15 people that buy it will be very happy. No matter how the game turns out, the illustration style is just fantastic.
I meant to mention this ages ago (maybe I did?), but 07 Commando, a Chinese Metal Slug clone, is coming to DS. The developer is Mana Soft, and the reason I may have neglected to mention the game is that I actually evaluated an early rom of the game from 2006. Talk about dedication to the genre, the game is finally coming to market this year, about a year and a half after the build I've played. It's quite difficult, a bit too linear, but has great graphics, decent music, really nice animation, and is all around a pretty passable product if you get it on the cheap. You can see a trailer here. That music isn't in-game, of course (thank goodness). There's a video tab on Mana's site too, but no video...they do have this awesome sentence though, which applies to the Youtube version as well: "Due to the being compressed of the video,the definition and running frame rate of the effect are damnified." They also did some nice earlier 2D games on mobile phones, like Fire Power EX (wait for the videos to load, it's worth it). 07 Commando comes out in 08, naturally.
Eric-Jon showed me this very nice video of a person going through the first level of Super G 'n G without firing a shot until the boss, with a surprisingly appropriate soundtrack, and nice titles. It's a bit difficult to describe why it's so uplifting, but it is! It's apparently the result of this Something Awful challenges thread, which has lots of other nifty stuff in it.
Some dudes sent me a pitch to link their website, Retro Sabotage, and maybe it's been around, but it deserves at least a casual glance. It's a series of flash games that try to re-imagine classic games and play with conventions in a way somewhat similar to the 'jinsei owata' or 'I want to be the guy' sense. As an aside, we were trying to come up with a genre term for these over here - closest we came was "platform hell" and "life-endingly impossible."
With these games they're sometimes attempts at humor, which can fall a bit flat. The content is touch-and-go, but it's kind of 'cute' and doesn't cost you anything. I like the concept more than anything, and they do one of these per week. As of now they've tackled Space Invaders, Pac-Man, and Pong.
I just noticed that Sega is releasing the very poorly received Golden Compass in Japan. In the U.S. the game hit PC, Wii, PlayStation 2, PlayStation 3, PlayStation Portable, Nintendo DS, and Xbox 360. In Japan, they're targeting PS3 and DS only. Just a curiosity!
Dreadfully sorry, I haven't been able to keep up with this stuff lately, but check this video of KOF XII at the AOU 08 show. It's high res 2D, and looks fantastic, from what you can see of that grainy video. The anticipation is...quite high. Well done, SNK! In case you can't tell, they're contrasting the old graphics to the new graphics, which is why you see KOF 11 in the beginning. It's coming in 2008!
Barnyard Blast is coming out on the DS this Friday in the U.S., and you should I know I (re)wrote the script for it and did some very small design pokes here and there. I became involved with the project a few months after discovering it, and it's the first game I've had significant influence on. Don't expect the game to be great though, because it isn't...it's very linear, a bit too hard, and has some unintuitive parts and not the best first level. Still, the scenario is neat (I didn't come up with it), the writing is alright (I did do that), the music is nice, and it's got moments of classic shooting action in it, here and there. I showed it to Koji Igarashi a while ago, and he recommended we "keep trying," which was awesome, but also had some very specific advice about how to make the whip and guns better. The whole thing is filled with retro game memes though, which I'm semi-proud of.
The scenario is essentially that you, Robert Belmart, must search for your son Cliffy after he's toilet-papered an evil castle full of ghouls. Here's a little exchange between husband and wife before the adventure:
Robert: Julia, I alone can save our son!
Julia: Robert, my love! I just want to tell you-
Robert: No no, don't try to stop me, Julia!
Julia: Get some bread while you're out, okay?
Robert: …
Robert: The time for bread has passed...perhaps forever. I'm off!
Julia: It's dangerous to go alone! Take this.
Menu: Get equipped with: Slayer Whip
And it goes on like this. The game is a bit more run and gun than it is Castlevania clone, and you can see a video of the French version at the bottom of this page. Essentially, I wouldn't recommend buying it if you have to pay the rent. But if you've got surplus income, and an extra $20, it might help us get a sequel! And we might take Iga's advice! Amazon is probably the only place you can get it. I doubt it'll be in stores...
There's a trailer up on Youtube for the DS remakes of Ys Books I & II - worth checking out if you like the series. Note: sorry about the lack of updates, lots of folks have asked about this - I was away for five days, and just didn't have time.
I hadn't seen Pixeljoint until recently, but it's a site for pixel art, pixel artists, and people who love either one of those two things. Each week there's a challenge, which is met by readers, and then judged. The results are always awesome....the 3D mockup is a good example, with entries such as 2D Okami and Dark Cloud 2. Each piece of art on the site can be zoomed in on, which is nifty. I was attracted to the site originally by this Fatal Fury Urban re-envisioning. Lots of stuff on there is worth a look, though the site is not very searchable.
Circuit City has a weekly ad for Professor Layton, which is mis-typed as Professor Lipton and the Curious Village. This teariffic title was clearly written too early in the morning. Thanks to Joel Reed Parker for the link.
Since the first screen was revealed, with Ryu's massive bulge, male genitalia has been showing up all over the new Street Fighter IV imagery. This one was so striking that someone added a little word balloon - "chinpoooooooooooooooooooo!!??!" which is essentially "peniiiiiiiiiiiis!!??!" Click the image for largeness - thanks to Joel for pointing it out.
If you’re a disgruntled Kinko’s employee or just happen to have hundreds of dollars of ink and cardstock lying around, you could download and print a homemade set of unofficial SNK vs. Capcom Card Fighters cards, which are finally complete according to the fellow who photoshopped them. And then you could cut and laminate all several hundred cards. Or you could save at least a whole tree and play it on your highly energy efficient Neo Geo Pocket Color like any sensible person. 50+ hours, people!
Steel Battalion mecha designer Junji Okubo, who also worked on the latest Appleseed film, has a small site called The Eightbit Fighters in which he renders classic 8-bit STG ships in 3D. He's got ships from Zanac, Xevious, and plenty of others. If you look at the newest work, Recca, you'll see a sketch for his work in progress. Seeing that makes me really wish he included the sketches for the rest of these somewhere. His next project after that will be Opa Opa. Frankly I think they look a little better in 2D, but it's still quite neat to look at. Thanks to Cacophanus for pointing this out in the forums.
Lots of interesting stuff going on at AOU 2008, which we mentioned just below. It's happening in under two weeks, and Arcade Renaissance has a good post about some of the highlights, including the fact that Cave will be there (as we reported), Arcana Heart 2 will be there of course, and Capcom will have SF IV, Sengoku Basara X, and other stuff. There's some more it doesn't have though...take a gander at AM.net's lineup chart. Konami will have GuitarFreaks and DrumMania 5. Melty Blood Actress Again will be at the Sega booth.
Most importantly, SNKP will show a video of KOF XII at the Taito booth. There had been some speculation as to whether this title was to still be 2D, but the AM site reminds us in the description that when the logo was unveiled back at AOU 2006, they said they aimed to redraw all the sprites, and make this the best looking 2D game ever. It also seems Samurai Spirits Sen will be there, and KOF 98 Ultimate Match of course. They expect Examu to show a new game, but that's just their speculation...
At some point I had to talk about BlazBlue in spite of my relative disinterest...might as well be now. It's the new 2D fighter from Arc System Works (distributed by AMI), with HD backgrounds, and nice-ish looking sprites (though apparently not truly HD themselves). Contrary to popular belief, it does not take place in the Guilty Gear universe, but in a completely separate one...though the character designs and especially the in-game spritework may lead you to believe otherwise. The official site is here, and of course Arcadia scans are floating everywhere. The site will be fully open on the 8th, and the game will be shown at the AOU show on the 16th. The game once again uses only 4 buttons, which is something at least. The board is the Taito Type X2.
You may already know that Love and Berry has an English site. That in itself is not too exciting. But Christian Nutt was browsing it recently and came across this page. It turns out both Love and Berry are 14 in Fashion Magic Years. That's confirmed on the Japanese page too. I wonder how old I am in Fashion Magic Years? Who determines it? If I go to Sega's offices, will they give me an evaluation? These are the hard-hitting questions I intend to get answered somehow, by someone. Oh, and their weights are both 'secrets.' Way to keep girls feeling bad about themselves!
A fellow on the forums named Sabre470 has a neat bunch of videos of the demo games that come with the PC-FXGA, which was a PC board that allowed PC-FX games to be played on the PC with an added 3D chip, and also allowed hobby development. There's a bit of info here, and some more here. Sabre470 has videos of all the demo games that came with the board, Dogagenie (a demo), Same Game, and Nnyu (both games). Sort of neat to see what the PC-FX might've been capable of...
There's more neat stuff on his site too, such as this beta version of Lords of Thunder for Sega CD (with no appreciable differences), and a post on PC Engine sample discs like we mentioned in this Mad Stalker post. Nekofan has a Gradius II sample while we're on the subject.
Turbo, as you may recall, made the Gigaton Punch song for Balrog a while ago. He's got a few more Capcom-related songs now: Balrog Bonus, Vega Cut, and Yup Yup Yup (Chun Li related). They're all good to varying degrees, if you like that sort of thing. You can get some of these in the yup package, downloadable right there.
I guess the Ikuze Gensan (Hammerin' Harry) revival is bigger than I initially thought. Chaz pointed out there's an anime coming as well. It starts on the 24th of March...pretty bizarre.
intervention: shigeru miyamoto, please get a haircut
February 03, 2008, 08:49 PM
by tim, via secret underground committee - [permalink]
Partly paraphrasing and partly pasting my recent column on Next-Gen.biz (it's not plagiarism, even if it feels like it), I say this:
Mr. Shigeru Miyamoto, you're the next contestant on Please Get a Haircut.
I've never seen a photo of him with what any rational human being would describe as a "decent haircut." According to this interview, he was born in 1952, which makes him two years younger than my father, which means he should have better hair: not so. My father, though he eats salad with his mouth wide open, has never designed a videogame, and is not in the habit of being photographed for magazines or appearing on television, has a better haircut than Shigeru Miyamoto.
I'm not saying that I want to judge Mr. Miyamoto based on his hair -- I already know he's a lovely man with gorgeous ideas. He just doesn't look right. Some people say he looks like a lovable college professor, which is maybe true, though if he was your lovable college professor, you'd probably want him to get a haircut, for his sake.
Literally almost anything will do. Something simple and manageable. Japan is home to some of the most talented hairstylists in the world; he owes it to himself. Hell, I'll even pay for it. I will literally put $200 in an envelope and mail it to him. Other Japanese videogame designers who have transcended the laws of awesome human-beingship include Square-Enix's Akitoshi Kawazu (maker of the SaGa games).
Any readers out there need only Google-image search the name "Akitoshi Kawazu" (of Square-Enix and Romancing SaGa fame). Actually, here -- I've done it for you.
It really shouldn't be too difficult to tell the difference between the before and the after, in Kawazu's case. Now what about those two shots of Miyamoto above? Would you believe one was taken six years before the other? The most recent of those two photos was taken just a week ago, for crying out loud.
In short, change is good. Seriously. I know game designers don't need good hairstyles; consider it a token of my reverence for the man that I'd like to see him not look so clumpy. And what better way to express the glorious bounty of Nintendo's recent financial and spiritual wealth (. . .) than outwardly? Who knows? If Miyamoto gets a good haircut (I would recommend growing it out for two months before cutting), maybe gamers will start paying $200 for hot hairstyles instead of purchasing every single last god-forsaken menu-based Bleach fightingesque PSP game, and the horrible parts of the industry will all wither away and die.
Alternate last sentence: in addition to confirming that Nintendo will make new Mario and Zelda games within the Wii's lifecycle, in his recent review in Famitsu, Miyamoto says, addressing internet rumors that Wii Fit stops being fun after a few weeks and starts to feel like exercise, "I want you guys to not give up! Soldier on!" Hard to be motivated by a guy who is obviously too lazy to creatively apply a comb!
<Brandon's Note:> Hideo Kojima would be a handsome man if he got a decent haircut once in his life. Are people scared to tell him?
A fellow sent me some interesting newsbits regarding super/famiclones that play real carts, and I'm pretty much reproducing them verbatim. 
The company that makes it is called "
Just a note that you should check out Insomnia for couple-month-old reviews of some interesting titles. One is 
My friend Ryan of EntDepot and 
You might've heard about the 
Anyway, XaviX hasn't released a whole lot of new stuff in the last few years, but it did relaunch its site now that the Wii is out. It hasn't tried to reposition itself to be more similar, but it does have Jackie Chan all over the place as a spokesperson. You can check out some video of him demoing the system 
Taiwan is better known for game piracy than game consoles, by and large, but an original legit console was released there in 1995 - Funtech's Super A'can. One of two main sources for information on this console is 
A commenter in that 
You probably saw this elsewhere... I wasn't able to post while at GDC - but if you didn't, check out 
Raigan and crew had a launch party for the XBLA version of N+, and we sent Mathew Kumar there to 
DesertDog posted in the forums that he made a 
You might've seen a couple of these 
Two weeks later, I finally get around to talking about 
I noticed 
As the only person still paying attention to 
I meant to mention this ages ago (maybe I did?), but 
Eric-Jon showed me this 
Some dudes sent me a pitch to link their website, 
I just noticed that Sega is releasing the very poorly received 
Dreadfully sorry, I haven't been able to keep up with this stuff lately, but check 
Barnyard Blast is coming out on the DS this Friday in the U.S., and you should I know I (re)wrote the script for it and did some very small design pokes here and there. I became involved with the project a few months after discovering it, and it's the first game I've had significant influence on. Don't expect the game to be great though, because it isn't...it's very linear, a bit too hard, and has some unintuitive parts and not the best first level. Still, the scenario is neat (I didn't come up with it), the writing is alright (I did do that), the music is nice, and it's got moments of classic shooting action in it, here and there. I showed it to Koji Igarashi a while ago, and he recommended we "keep trying," which was awesome, but also had some very specific advice about how to make the whip and guns better. The whole thing is filled with retro game memes though, which I'm semi-proud of. 
I hadn't seen 
If you’re a disgruntled Kinko’s employee or just happen to have hundreds of dollars of ink and cardstock lying around, you could download and print a homemade set of 
Steel Battalion mecha designer Junji Okubo, who also worked on the latest Appleseed film, has a small site called 
At some point I had to talk about BlazBlue in spite of my relative disinterest...might as well be now. It's the new 2D fighter from Arc System Works (distributed by AMI), with HD backgrounds, and nice-ish looking sprites (though apparently not truly HD themselves). Contrary to popular belief, it does not take place in the Guilty Gear universe, but in a completely separate one...though the character designs and especially the in-game spritework may lead you to believe otherwise. The official site is 
You may already know that Love and Berry has an 
A fellow on the forums named Sabre470 has a neat bunch of 
Turbo, as you may recall, made the 
I guess the Ikuze Gensan (Hammerin' Harry) revival is bigger than I initially thought. Chaz pointed out there's an 
Partly paraphrasing and partly pasting my recent column on 
