Vidya Game News – November 17, 2016
– Polygon has released their massive video game gift guide, which is neat to read just to catch up on all of the cool stuff you didn’t even know existed.
– The new Daytona USA game, confusingly called Daytona 3 Championship USA, has some trailers out now.
– To hype the (incredibly hard to get) NES Classic, Nintendo has interviews with the developers of Super Mario Bros. and Super Mario Bros. 3 here. And hey, check out our episodes for the first and second games of that series!
– In a fun feature, Polygon’s Owen S. Good tallies up how much it would cost to just buy an NES and all of the games on the NES Classic, instead of paying the prices online for it.
– From Motherboard and other sites, a guy is shooting for 2017 for the release of Tanglewood, a new Genesis game programmed on an authentic development kit.
ON THIS DAY (OR CLOSE TO IT!) IN VIDEO GAME HISTORY…
– Mentioned prominently in last week’s show was WWF No Mercy, which was released on this day in 2000 by Asmik Ace and AKI. It’s still considered to be one of the gold standards for wrasslin’ video games.
– The ole Xbox was released on Nov. 15, 2001. That old chestnut didn’t sell well in Japan, and ultimately came out behind the PS2 in America, but it established a firm beachhead in console sales for Microsoft.
– Three days after the Xbox came the Gamecube. Again, it finished behind the PS2 in the sixth generation console wars, but it had some very well-received games, like…
– The Metroid series is kind of a big deal in November. In 2002, both Metroid Prime and Metroid Fusion had concurrent releases for the Gamecube and GBA. The sequel to Prime came out on Nov. 15, 2004. (And hey, check out our episode on Super Metroid here!)
– On November 16, 2004, Valve released Half-Life 2. The incredible FPS was followed by sequels, Episode One and Episode Two, and then NOTHING. The third installment will never come out because Valve clearly hates us now.
– Dragon Quest VIII, the first of the series to drop the “Dragon Warrior” name for an American release, came out for the PS2 on Nov. 15, 2005. It was a solid effort, although not as long and deep as previous efforts from Enix.
– In 2006, the PlayStation 3 came out. It was a swell system, but it ceded the control of the market that the PS2 and PSX had established because of a high initial price and lack of third party support. (And by the way, the PS4 came out on Nov. 15, 2013, so Sony likes to push them consoles out in the holiday season.)
Video game history information comes from GameFAQs and Moby Games. And as always, if you’d like to support the show, do so via our Amazon link.
Vidya Game News – May 28, 2015
“I love the Power Glove… I’m the only one. It’s so bad. Like you really can’t do shit with it.”
It’s the debut of a semi-new feature! We’ve scoured some online sites in an attempt to find some retro gamin’ news you might find interesting, to whet your appetite between shows. Except to see regular news posts on Thursdays for the next couple of weeks as we try this out. So, without further adieu…
– Remember how cool The Wizard was? Well… Not actually. But similar to that movie, there will be a 2015 Nintendo World Championships, as reported by Games Radar and tons of other sites. The entry rounds being held at eight Best Buy locations. For more info, go here.
– Just as a technical project, someone is porting Wolfenstein 3D to the Genesis. Like… they’re doing it now, in 2015. You can see a YouTube video here, and there is a message board posting about it here.
– For the Genesis and the SNES, there is a vibrant homebrew / indie scene. Example: here is a Kickstarter for a new SNES (and possibly NES) platform game.
– A port of Dragon Quest VIII is coming out for the 3DS.
– Sega is pulling a bunch of different games from its iOS offerings, per Pocket Gamer. Games removed include Streets of Rage 2, Gunstar Heroes, Shining Force and Sonic Spinball.
– On Reddit’s GameCollecting subreddit, someone managed to get their hands on TWO copies of DuckTales 2 at the same time! The subreddit itself has some other nice finds.
– A deep dive from Nintendo Life on the cancellation of Star Fox 2, from someone who worked on the game and played a completed Japanese ROM of it. However, a release and translation are probably unlikely, given legal issues with the now-defunct Argonaut Software.
ON THIS DAY IN VIDEO GAME HISTORY…
– … Well, kind of. Super Mario Bros. the movie was released in 1993, and it bombed. Per Box Office Mojo, it only made $20.9 million on a $48 million production budget. It only opened fourth on its first weekend, behind “classics” like Cliffhanger, Made in America and Dave. It was out of theaters in about four weeks. The full movie is often posted on YouTube, and really, that’s a better option that expending any cash for that trash.
– Notable game releases: Mass Effect (2008), Lunar: Silver Star Story Complete (1999), Crazy Taxi 2 and Dark Cloud (2001).
For the full list of history items, check out Moby Games.
Your Parents Basement 