Vidya Game News – September 20, 2018
It is the weekly news roundup you can’t do without! Vidya Game News!
- Covered by pretty much every vidya game site this week, so why not us too? – The PlayStation Classic is coming out this December. It is billed as having 20 games, with the highlight being Final Fantasy VII, which we covered in Episode 124. The suggested retail price is $99.99.
- In other Classic System news, Sega is delaying its device to 2019, per Polygon and other sites. It is to allow for simultaneous release in all markets, but also likely because the emulation track record from the hardware company isn’t great. (But hey, a 50-game Sega collection is coming to Switch!)
- U.S. Gamer’s Jeremy Parish has an awesome long read about the development of Star Fox, indirectly, which had its roots in a 3D engine game… for the Game Boy. You can read it here. We covered the original and Star Fox 64 in Episode 7.
- Seth Rogen shared a lil tip that most people still don’t know – In Duck Hunt, you can control the duck by plugging in a second controller. We covered the game, and World Class Track Meet, for Episode 45.
- Nintendo Switch’s online classic games are now available… and they’ve already been hacked.
- Brian Fargo, formerly of Interplay, wants to buy the company back if Bard’s Tale 4 is a big success.
ON THIS DAY (OR CLOSE TO IT!) IN VIDEO GAME HISTORY…
- Mega Man 9, a retro revamp of the series, released 10 years ago. It was the first new game in the base series since the eighth installment came out in 1996, a gap of about 12 years. We covered the second installment with Friend of the Show Hawk in Episode 30. Also coming out 10 years ago – The Lego Batman series.
Video game history information comes from GameFAQs and Moby Games. When possible, we attempt to link to original sources for all reporting, and we don’t typically link to stupid multi-page galleries. And as always, if you’d like to support the show, do so via our Amazon link.
Vidya Game News – September 22, 2016
– Ohmygodness: A mock 1996 infomercial for the upcoming Sonic Mania Collector’s Edition is incredibleeee.
– From PopSugar and a bunch of other sites, Laurie Hernandez did a routine based on DuckTales on Dancing With The Stars. You can see it here! And check out our episode on DuckTales here!
– Game Rant has an article on the six biggest gaming breakups, in “honor” of Brad and Angelina.
– Nintendo News and other sites note that The Adventures of Super Mario Bros. 3 is now available on Steam.
ON THIS DAY IN VIDEO GAME HISTORY…
– Divine Divinity from Larian Studios came out for the PC in 2002. The action-RPG was well-reviewed when it came out, and it remains a bit of a cult classic.
– On Sept. 23, 2002, Star Fox Adventures was released for the Gamecube. It was the first game to take the series in a weird, non-space sim direction. (And hey, check out our episode on the better, original game and the N64 game!)
– On the same day, Tekken 4 came out. Namco’s fighter was considered very good.
– Capcom’s Mega Man 9 was released for the Wii in 2008, followed shortly by the Playstation Network and Xbox Live Arcade. It was a well-received continuation of the series, the first game in 11 years.
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 – 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.
Vidya Game News – April 21, 2016
– As you can imagine, there is a bunch of Star Fox content this week, because a new game in the series is coming out. (The initial reviews seem to suggest it’s good, but weird control-wise.) Kotaku’s Patrick Klepek has a good piece on why Star Fox 2 never made it out for the SNES, even though it was probably more than 90 percent done. Kat Bailey of US Gamer points out that the series has a long history of innovation – some good, some bad.
– Sega has announced that it’ll allow mods to be released via Steam for some of its old games. Polygon has the press release summary here. Sega hasn’t elaborated on the extent of what it’ll allow and won’t, but it could lead to some interesting creations.
– The latest YouTube Teens React video is on Super Metroid! Check it out here. Only one teen out of six (I believe) can manage to beat the second boss, the Chozo guarding the bombs. Also, if you missed it, we recently covered Super Metroid.
– From Chris Reed at The Cheat Sheet, eight SNES games you have to play!
– Sarah Gish of The Kansas City Star looks at some of the cool bars with video games in the city.
– There is a really cool looking Nintendo 64 anthology book on Kickstarter. Check it out here!
– From Jeff Grubb at Venture Beat, what’s the current status of Atari? Well, seemingly, it’s mostly a patent troll company. They’re claiming that they own the trademark for “haunted house” in video game titling. The company filed for bankruptcy in 2013, and now, it only employs 10 people who mostly work to protect the company’s legacy value.
– Aubrey Sitterson of Geek.com has 11 games that “secretly made the Sega Saturn a great console.” While I wouldn’t agree that the Saturn was great, it was a good system, and it unfairly gets lumped into the Virtual Boy / 3DO / 32X graveyard sometimes.
– Breaking, important news! Video game henchmen plan meetup around explosive barrels! Read more here.
ON THIS DAY IN VIDEO GAME HISTORY…
– According to Moby Games, Data East was founded on April 20, 1976. The company was one of the early arcade producers, making games like BurgerTime, Cobra Command, Joe & Mac and past YPB show topic Shadowrun. They also did more than a dozen different pinball games, most based on TV shows. However, by the mid-1990s the company’s popularity and series had faded, and their last game came out in 1999. (Revive… Sosei, an adventure game for the Dreamcast, was Japan-only in October 1999. Zombie Revenge, an arcade and Dreamcast release, was the last North American release, seemingly.)
– In 1982, Pitfall! came out for the Atari 2600. It was probably the very best game ever released at the time, and topped the Billboard charts for 64 weeks. The commercial also had Jack Black in his first role.
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 – April 14, 2016
– The Tumblr account Super Mario Broth highlighted a rare Super Mario Bros. 3 animation this week – The Hammer Bros. suit sliding. You normally can’t slide in the suit in the game, so you have to do it in this one stage.
– Also in the category of Super Late Easter Eggs, a bald guy in Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!! reveals when to throw punches to knock out Piston Honda and Bald Bull. Read about it on Reddit here.
– In advance of the release of Star Fox Zero on April 22, there is a comparison of Corneria across the different versions. And hey, check out YPB’s Star Fox episode here!
– Nerdist and a bunch of other sites had the Player Piano cover of the moon theme from DuckTales. It’s the hot game that got one out of one DuckTale from Todd on one of our first shows!
– From TechTimes, Mark Lelinwalla looks at the five console generations Kobe Bryant has spanned. Also from TechTimes, Dianne Depra has a cool preview piece on a neat new book, The Art of Atari. Some really good images here!
– And again on TechTimes… Quinten Plummer has a cool article on how the Galloping Ghost Arcade in Illinois managed to revive a prototype Beavis and Butt-Head game that only had 12 copies made. The secret? Cannibalizing a 3DO.
– OC Weekly has a story on Sega Genecide, a cover band. Headline: “Sega Genecide eat, breathe and shit 90’s cover songs.”
ON THIS DAY IN VIDEO GAME HISTORY…
– Not quite today, but on April 13, 1992, The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past came out in North America. It continued the wildly popular series, and it was a bright, vibrant 16-bit game. Per Wikipedia, it sold 4.61 million copies, good enough for fifth on the platform.
– On April 12, 2001, Big Ape Productions released The Simpsons Wrestling for the PSX to pretty miserable reviews. Of course, if you’re looking for a good Simpsons game, or want to hear about some of the horrible ones, check out our previous show!
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 – January 8, 2016
Oh man… We took a bit of a news break the past few weeks, because of The Holidays and what not. And also, Steve is sicker than the Noid after eating Pizza Hut. Regardless though, he’s powering through to deliver the first vidya games news of 2016!
– Brad Fuller, the composer for classic games like Tetris and Donkey Kong has passed away. Develop’s Matthew Jarvis has the full story here.
– A Reddit dude posts cool images from his collection of odd gaming systems. Check it out on Imgur.
– Super Metroid is a lot of fun, and you can self-impose new difficulty challenges via sequence breaking. But if you’re a complete masochist, a new hack tilts the game on its side.
– Also in bizarre hacking news: Windows 95 now works on the 3DS.
– This week’s game for James and Mike Mondays (Angry Video Game Nerd) is Killing Time for the 3DO. As one of the 20 people who own a 3DO, of course I’m linking to it.
– From Nerd Reaction, you can buy your own Star Fox statue for “just” $79.99! Story is here.
– Ken Griffey Jr. was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame this week. His SNES game was weird, and Tech Times’s Jason Serafino has a rundown here.
ON THIS DAY IN VIDEO GAME HISTORY…
– Much like the motion picture industry, January can be a dumping ground for the vidya game industry. The most significant releases? Harvey Birdman: Attorney at Law came out in 2008 for the PS2, PSP and Wii, and Total Eclipse came out for the 3D0 in 1994.
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 – September 24, 2015
Would you kindly read these news stories?
– The U.S. never got the SNES game The Amazing Spider-Man: Lethal Foes. Until now! A translation patch is out for the Japanese ROM, which is said to be one of the few 16-bit licensed games that didn’t suck. It was done by kepeb.
– Jacob Kauffman of an Arkansas NPR station has a cool interview with Dona Bailey, one of the few female programmers for the Atari 2600 and the creator of Centipede.
– From Sonic Retro and other sites, a lost arcade game, Waku Waku Sonic Patrol Car, is going to be preserved soon via backup means. The game itself isn’t all that good, but hey, it’s a neat bit of history.
– Amanda Bell of MTV.com has a collection of modern songs done by the ole Game Boy.
– The Local Voice of North Mississippi has a piece on Daniel Lee Perea, who’s an expert NBA Jam player and who holds 72 different video game records. You can read it here.
– Jonesing for a modern day version of Myst? Then the long-developed The Witness might be up your alley. It finally has a release date of January 26.
ON THIS DAY IN VIDEO GAME HISTORY…
-Hey, speaking of Myst… It was released on this day in 1993. If you didn’t catch our episode on it, along with special guest Jovial Jackee, check it out here.
– In an actual bit of history, on that day in 2002 Rare was purchased by Microsoft for a reported $375 million. Thus began an “interesting” phase for the company, as games have generally slid in quality and sales since that time, instead of being a killer first-party developer for Microsoft.
– Speaking of weird departures from established standards and practices… Star Fox Adventures came out 13 years ago for the GameCube, between Sept. 22 and Sept. 27, depending on the country. It took Star Fox into the area of Zelda games, and away from traditional space shootin’. And another shameless plug! Check out our Star Fox and Star Fox 64 episode here.
– Ico, a well-respected, unique puzzle platformer, came out 14 years ago for the Playstation 2. It was considered one of the games of the year.
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 – August 27, 2015
I never actually saw a store that sold this by itself…
School is unfortunately back in session in many states, but hey, that doesn’t mean everyone has to leave the comfort of their parents’ basement! Keep cool and read some of this here news:
– Out this week is the Mega Man Legacy Collection, which has gotten a rave review from IGN and other sites. It’s a collection of various Mega Man games, faithfully emulated and with new features, for the PC, PS4 and Xbox One.
– From Fortune and tons of other sites, Shigeru Miyamoto says Nintendo is open to making more movies with its IP. It’s not like they could do any worse than Super Mario Bros…
– In other Nintendo news, they’ve put release dates on a bunch of their 2015 games, including Star Fox Zero, Mario Tennis: Ultra Smash and Xenoblade Chronicles, according to Gamespot.
– Garrett Martin of Paste has a full ranking of the 18 games that use the NES Zapper.
– Konami has a ton of great franchises, but oddly, most of them have gone dormant. Ryan Lambie from Den of Geek looks at 14 of them here.
ON THIS DAY IN VIDEO GAME HISTORY…
– Disgaea: Hour of Darkness came out for the Playstation 2 in 2003. The games were unique because they featured tongue-in-cheek humor, references that constantly broke the fourth wall – like recurring boss named Midboss – and ridiculous training, like being able to get your characters to level 9999 and stats in the millions. The series has now spanned to nine games, with the 10th (Disgaea 5) scheduled for release on Oct. 6 in North America on the Playstation 4.
– Also in 2003, SoulCalibur II was released for Playstation 2 and Gamecube.
– In 1992, Super Mario Kart came out, and in 1994, EarthBound came out… In Japan.
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 – 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.
Your Parents Basement 