Vidya Game News – June 18, 2015
Box art, from FF6 (top) and FF3 (bottom).
Tons of new news, with the yearly E3 conference happening in Los Angeles this week! Scouring the web and Google Alert for some of the noticeable reboots, retreads and re-releases, along with the usual odds and ends…
– Square might not be done with just the announced Final Fantasy VII remake. According to the director of that PS4 remake, he’s also interested in redoing the fifth and sixth installments. (The box art in this post comes from a review of the games here.)
– Piggybacking on the interest from our last show, clearly, Nintendo has announced that Star Fox Zero will be out this holiday season for the Wii U. Game Informer has an interview with Miyamoto, and like some other interviews from the past month, he says it’s unlikely Star Fox 2 ever gets a proper release. Per most reviews of Nintendo’s E3 performance, they’re paring back on their Wii U offerings, expanding their 3DS array, and not talking about their console-after-Wii.
– From CNET, a gamer proposes to his girlfriend by hacking The Legend of Zelda.
– Also from CNET and their E3 coverage, Shenmue 3 looks to be a reality after a successful Kickstarter campaign. The series debuted in 1999, and the sequel came out in 2001.
– And yet another interesting CNET article, this one from Danny Gallagher on AI programs playing Super Mario World.
– Atlus says Persona 5 is still scheduled for a 2015 North American release, despite widespread layoffs at parent company Sega.
– From Super Compressor, 14 things in your parents’ basement worth serious money.
ON THIS DAY IN VIDEO GAME HISTORY…
… Actually, not much happened, unless you have deep, resounding love for games like Cruise Ship Tycoon and Zoo Tycoon Complete Collection, which came out in 2003. The most “significant” game release is probably Neverwinter Nights in 2002.
Game history info from Moby Games.
Episode 007 – Star Fox (1993) and Star Fox 64 (1997)
Episode 007 – Star Fox (1993) and Star Fox 64 (1997)
This week in Your Parents Basement, it’s quiet… Too quiet… Be careful, it’s a trap! Do a barrel roll!
The gang covers Star Fox this week, both the Super Nintendo and Nintendo 64 installments, since they’re somewhat similar. We fight through the overly shiny polygons of the first game to find the splendid gameplay underneath, and just generally heap praise on the second installment. (We also express wonder at the seemingly weird direction the series has taken, and the murkiness of animal species in this universe.)
As always, you can listen to this week’s show by downloading from the iTunes store – be sure to give us some starrrrssss! To manually download, click here. To manually subscribe to the pod, input this link to your device of choice. You can also follow us on Twitter, or ‘like’ us on Facebook.
The show notes for this week:
– Thanks to twitter user Tecmo Bowl vs. RBI (Baseball) for writing in! If his user name excites you, check out his website.
– At several points, Steve mentions an interview with one of the programmers from the never-released Star Fox 2. It was for Nintendo Life, and you can read it here. A mastered ROM exists, but hasn’t been released, in contrast to the weird, alpha versions floating around the Internet. Surprisingly, the subject of the article, Dylan Cuthbert, also gets involved in the comments.
– Although it was widely rumored that there would be some sort of Star Fox presentation at E3, as of 7:30 p.m. EST on Sunday, there was nothing on the web. Nintendo’s main event is scheduled for Tuesday, June 16, so if there is something new, it’ll probably be covered in the Thursday news post. As of now, the next Star Fox installment is scheduled for release on the Wii U sometime in 2015, probably Christmas.
Vidya Game News – June 11, 2015
The weekly news post! Good times, good times. It’s a bit shorter this week, because we’re all still decompressing from traveling, and Steve either has a sinus infection or black lung or the plague. Looking around at classic video game news and tidbits…
– Eight Bit Cinema presents… Jurassic Park.
– Via Destructoid and some other sites, there is the “Fake Nintendo releases at E3” generator. My best results? Yarn Splatoon Party and The Legend of Zelda: Disgusted Appendix.
– Ars Technica’s Kyle Orland has a fascinating article on the long, twisted path it took for Chip’s Challenge 2 to see the light of day, more than 15 years after it was completed.
– Kotaku, via iRetroGamer.com, has video of a kid opening a SNES on launch day in August 1991.
– A cool story about a guy buying some of the garbage from the infamous Atari 2600 cartridge and E.T. dump in New Mexico.
– Exactly what it says on the tin: Watch Teens Fail Hard At Contra.
– The usually stoic Washington Post actually has a neat story on how to play the first six games inducted into the World Video Game Hall of Fame. (Oh, you wanna know the games? No big surprises – Pong, Pac-Man, Super Mario Bros., Tetris, Doom and World of Warcraft.)
– Bloomberg says that leaving your parents basement is good news for the economy, which seems like hogwash to us…
ON THIS DAY IN VIDEO GAME HISTORY…
– In 1983, Capcom was formally established.
– The Legend of Dragoon, an RPG that was not Final Fantasy 7, came out for the Playstation in 2000. It is a somewhat mediocre game, with a MetaCritic score of 74, although it has its fans.
– The Game Boy Advance came out in 2001. Although it was only out for three years before the DS came out, it still sold 81.51 million units.
Your Parents Basement 