#dsiware #imports #accessories #nintendo 3ds #art #chiptunes
Fulfilling a dream I’ve held for years, and defeating schedule issues that have been in place for a shorter number of years, Jeremy Parish asked me to appear on 1UP’s Retronauts podcast during E3, to talk about some of the retro-type stuff I’d seen at the show. I got to meet the awesome Nadia Oxford and Bob Mackey in the process!
If you’ve ever talked to a journalist on the last day of E3, you kind of know what to expect from my contribution: psychotic diatribes, delivered to sleep-deprivation-induced hallucinations. I don’t even fully remember what I said, except for one particularly awful Sonic the Hedgehog joke. I hope I didn’t ruin one of my favorite podcasts forever. Thanks to Jeremy for inviting and tolerating me, and then presumably not covering everything I said with songs recorded from the radio!
Even if I go into it with trepidation, I’ll be listening: in addition to our segment, there’s another pre-recorded segment that I wasn’t around to hear, with Chris Kohler, Scott Sharkey, and Thierry Nguyen
tags / meta / jc / retronautsGameplay video for Mr. Gimmick, Sunsoft’s charming NES platformer released only in Japan and Scandinavia. The game looks fun, but I’m posting it because Retronauts’s Frank Cifaldi did a bang-up job producing the clip, making this not only the most informative video game playthrough I’ve ever sat through, but the best use of annotations I’ve seen yet on Youtube. Watch the entire playlist here (don’t miss the minecart section in part 2!).
I typically cannot listen to more than a few seconds of the longplay movies posted by talkative or preteen nerds on Youtube — though I love the way the kid in this Retro Game Challenge video sings, “This game is win! Very much win!” — so it’s nice to come across such a well-executed, annotated clip like this. Of course, it helps that Mr. Gimmick looks like one of the most fun and impressive Famicom/NES games I’ve never played.
See also: Sonic and Tails Adventure 2 trailer
[Via Retronauts. Thanks for the GCCX clip, Matty!]
tags / frank cifaldi / retronauts / mr gimmick / lost levels / sunsoft / nes / famicom
1UP/Retronauts’s Jeremy Parish and his team of writers published the third issue of GameSpite Quarterly, now available to purchase with three different editions, each boasting a different 8-bit hero — collect them all! (or don’t, if you prefer to spend your money sensibly)
Titled “The Encyclopedia of 8-Bit Heroes”, this issue profiles dozens of video game characters from the NES/SMS/GB/GBC etc. days, covering recognizable stars such as Samus and Tetris’s I Block, as well as obscure figures like the Cheetahmen and Parodius’s Takosuke.
The $16 standard edition features 280 pages of profiles, while the $12 budget edition has 160 pages, covering only “the most important of classic game heroes”. The 314-page hardcover deluxe version of GameSpite Quarterly Issue 3 is priced at an expensive $40, but it also promises eight extra characters, as well as articles on perfect rentals, noir titles, and Winter 09/10’s new releases.
You can read the issue’s Foreward and Table of Contents at the above link. For those of you interested in purchasing a copy as my Christmas gift (Hardcover Deluxe plz), feel free to use this Contact form to notify me, and I’ll send along an address you can ship the book to.
tags / gamespite / retronauts / magazine / ecKing’s Bounty in under ten seconds. On the Retronauts blog, Lost Levels’ Frank Cifaldi explains how this could be: it’s a tool-assisted speedrun that relies on messing with the game’s random number generator and restoring saves until the game-winning item, which is randomly placed somewhere in the map, ends up right next to the player’s starting position.
By the way, it is super rad to get to read more retro stuff from Frank.
tags / king's bounty / frank cifaldi / retronauts / new world computing / electronic arts / jcContra 4 played upside down by a Japanese virtuoso (nicovideo original here). Awesome to see that people are still playing Contra 4, way more than I ever did, and making my own struggle with its difficulty look laughably trivial.
As it turns out, a lot of people played Contra 4! In the latest Retronauts podcast, Konami’s Tomm Hulett and Simon Lai revealed that, in general, the game sold well. Good. So often, awesome games fail to do anything in the market, especially on the DS. Contra 4 remains one of the top games on the system, and I’m glad some unspecified, but sizeable, percentage of the population paid attention.
See also: Dude playing Rhythm Heaven with his chin
tags / contra 4 / konami / upside-down / retronauts / jcRetronauts “Bonus Stage” special, filmed in Akihabara’s Super Potato last year. Since I’m watching this video and the Mandarake Galaxy video posted below over and over again, trying to hone my mental map of Tokyo’s retrogaming stores in preparation for my own trip next week, I thought I would post them here and let you all do the same. Or learn neat things about video games and Akihabara from Parish, Kohler, et al.
Also you get to see people eating canned bread. So yeah.
tags / retronauts / akihabara / bonus stage / jc
Today, Jeremy Parish posted a Retronauts article celebrating the tenth anniversary of the Neo Geo Pocket Color, a wonderful handheld I should have purchased when it was new, or when it was reissued in super-cheap six-game bundles, or when I worked at a used game shop and stared at one from behind the counter for like six months.
There’s a lot to love about the system: weird color schemes (including clear and blue camo), the great D-pad/stick thing, the Dreamcast connection. But what I love most about the NGPC (on a superficial level) is the aesthetic of those wonderful fighting games: all high-contrast, blocky sprites on pastel, outline-free backgrounds. Nothing else looks like that!
[Image via HG101]
tags / snk / neo geo pocket color / retronauts / jc
Smile Slime aloha shirts from Square Enix Toys. These are by far the most festive Hawaiian shirts I’ve ever seen. Only $64 from NCSX, which means you can totally afford to buy the “matching” hat.
Via @retronauts — speaking of @ and (people who work on) Retronauts, the GameSpite Quarterly 1 book is now available for purchase! @bobservo (see, there’s the Twitter reference) pointed out that the code “hpfreeshipping” will reduce the cost of your order significantly.
tags / dragon quest / slime / retronauts / gamespite / jc
You guys don’t need me to tell you that there’s a new Retronauts podcast out — if you know about our little site, odds are pretty good you’ve heard of 1up as well. But I wanted to bring your attention to this one, because a) it celebrates the Game Boy (and other stuff), and b):
So, we’re trying a new format for the show: a series of smaller segments on specific topics, consisting of one-on-one (or one-on-two conversations as necessary) between the host and someone familiar with and knowledgeable about the topic.
There will be less shouting, which means people will complain because the show “lacks energy.” There will be fewer large-scale topics, which means people will complain because the show “lacks depth.” And so it goes.
If you’re not, in general, a fan of video game podcasts, you may be surprised by just how nice this new format is. It is, like Parish says, way less shouty. I’ve been struggling with podcast formats for a long time, trying to come up with something unique and listenable. The Retronauts team has demonstrated why they’re at the top of the field with this refresh. It is a perfect… podcast!
tags / retronauts / podcast / jcCongratulations! You have reached
the bottom of the page. The darkness
is finally over…
But there are still more pages to
explore. Please continue readingcontinue reading.
A new day is about to begin!
The End?
