Vidya Game News – June 30, 2016

Image from MobyGames.
– The Nintendo 64 turned 20 last week, which led to retrospectives from plenty of places, like Nerdist and Tech Insider.
– The fine folks at Shmuplations are dong the lord’s work, as they’ve unearthed an old interview from developers on Super Mario Kart. You can read it here.
– The new Toejam and Earl game has gotten more funding, and it’ll see a console release! Read more about it in a piece by Brandon Orselli from Niche Gamer. And, check out our episode on the original!
– RZA will be doing some music inspired by old Atari games, which actually sounds kind of cool. Read more on Billboard here.
– Good news, everyone! Adventures of Mana, a 3D remake of the old Game Boy game Final Fantasy Adventure, is now out for the Vita. Read the release from Sony here. It’s the first game in the Secret of Mana series, which we covered in the past.
– From MCV, via Famitsu, the new Harvest Moon game for the 3DS is #1 on the Japanese sales chart. It’s scheduled to come out in America at some point in 2017.
– It’s short notice, but Nintendo is hosting a festival in Montreal this weekend! For more details, go here. And if you’d like to head Down Undah, there is an 8-bit festival in Melbourne later in July, according to Time Out Melbourne.
– Yougurtland is partnering with Nintendo.
– A Final Fantasy VII version of Monopoly is coming out in April 2017. It’s by Merchoid, and you can read more on Examiner.com here.
– A Kickstarter campaign has been launched for a “complete remake” of System Shock. Read more on the project page here.
– The producer of the Tetris movie now claims it’ll be a three-movie series! Yikes. Read more on Empire.
– The Angry Video Game Nerd re-visits Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles for the NES, 10 years after he first covered it. Check out the video here. For James and Mike Mondays, they played Alex Kidd in Miracle World.
ON THIS DAY IN VIDEO GAME HISTORY…
– Star Fox 64 came out this day in 1997. And hey, we reviewed it! Check out our show here.
– On June 29 in 2000, Icewind Dale by Black Isle Studios was released by Interplay. It was a well-reviewed game based on Dungeons and Dragons.
– In 1996, Bruce Jenner’s World Class Decathlon came out for the PC. It was 20 years ago Jenner won a gold medal in the decathlon, so, that was kind of weird.
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.
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.