Good even… err, morning. Gosh, it got late all of a sudden.
I’ve been editing a podcast today! Hurrah! Please look forward to it (hopefully) tomorrow, as you’ll be able to enjoy both Chris and me waxing lyrical about the joy of gory games. We had some rather in-depth thoughts, as it turned out!
Anyway, in the meantime, there’s a chance you might have missed something awesome in the last week, so let’s have a look back over everything that’s been going on!
Reckon you’re good at shoot ’em ups? I certainly don’t, but sometimes it’s nice to be able to quantify exactly how bad you are at something.
Enter Shmups Skill Test by Triangle Service, then, a game that attempts to analyse your performance in a selection of common shoot ’em up skill areas, including avoiding bullets, avoiding obstacles, shooting things and TANK TANK TANK TANK TANK.
It’s an unusual one for sure, and a great title to bust out for an impromptu tournament, particularly if you’re all as bad as each other!
Major Havoc is one of the more unusual games from Atari’s back catalogue of arcade titles, and it’s interesting from a historical perspective for being one of the first games Mark “PlayStation” Cerny was involved with.
Making use of vector graphics to provide seamless transitions between three very disparate types of gameplay, Major Havoc challenges you to blast enemies in space, land accurately on an enemy space station, navigate a perilous route to a reactor and then get the hell out of there before the whole thing blows.
It’s frantic, high-energy, super-difficult and a whole lot of fun. Take a look!
Find a full archive of all the Atari A to Z videos on the official site.
It’s time to check in on Rorona again! This time around, she has her hands not-so-full with preparing for the second Annual Festival of the game.
As always, the head start that the New Game Plus bonuses afforded us means we can get the assignment out of the way very quickly, which leaves plenty of time for a bit of exploration.
For today’s episode, we check out the underwater Lost City as well as the Dark Woods. And my cat “helps”.
Although I tend to use emulation to record my Atari A to Z videos for the sake of convenience, when I actually want to sit down and play something on the Atari 8-bit or Atari ST, I prefer to use the original hardware.
There are myriad reasons for this, probably chief among them being that strange sense of nostalgia for things that used to be inconvenient, like disk loading times (and the noise of disk drives!), playing on a small CRT TV (or TV-monitor in my case, since we had — and I still have — a lovely Trinitron hybrid thing) and all those delightful compatibility issues we used to have to deal with.
There’s one aspect that can prove quite annoying, however, and that’s the tendency of old joysticks to fail. While games for many home computers of the ’80s offered keyboard control as an alternative, on Atari systems it was often joystick or nothing. So clearly the way was open for a company to put out a modern joystick that would work on an old system.
Continue reading Deluxe Mini Monster: Take Your Retro Gaming to a New Level
One of the Nintendo series that I have never really explored over the years is Kirby. This isn’t for any reason other than the fact I simply haven’t really got around to it.
I picked up Wii U title Kirby and the Rainbow Paintbrush (known as Kirby and the Rainbow Curse elsewhere, I believe) a little while back, and just recently I thought I’d put it through its paces just to see what was going on.
So far I’m having a blast. I understand it’s not like some other Kirby games… but I also understand that there isn’t really a set “Kirby formula” in the way that some other Nintendo franchises have a distinctive way of doing things. So as such it’s an interesting one to start with… and an interesting one to take on its own merits.
Continue reading Delving Into Kirby and the Rainbow Paintbrush – #1
Whew, now there’s a mouthful, eh? As you may have guessed from the title, this one- or two-player arcade romp — originally developed by Atari Games — channels the very best of 1950s B-movies into a fun and satisfying isometric blaster.
Sadly, the home ports lack the arcade version’s “Hall Effect” joystick, which allowed movement and aiming in sixteen directions instead of the usual eight — a precursor to our modern analogue sticks — but the ST version seen here still plays well with a nice joystick!
Just remember to turn off Sticky Keys in Windows if you’re emulating to, say, record a video… you need that Shift key quite a bit in this game! Oh well, you live and learn, huh…?
Find a full archive of all the Atari A to Z videos on the official site.
With today’s episode of Warriors Wednesday introducing Zhu Rong for the first time, I thought she’d make an ideal subject for a Waifu Wednesday article. And it’ll probably make my podcasting partner in crime Chris happy too, because he likes her. Y’know, like likes her.
Ahem. Anyway. Zhu Rong (or Zhurong, as her name is more correctly localised in later Warriors games) has been part of the series since 2001’s Dynasty Warriors 3, putting in an appearance in pretty much every major installment as well as all the Warriors Orochi spinoffs.
Despite her obviously… appealing elements, she doesn’t seem to be a massively popular character, however, if popularity polls from over the years are to be believed. Let’s show her a bit of love, shall we?
In today’s Warriors Orochi mission, the Shu gang hit the jungle and encounter the formidable Meng Huo and his even scarier wife Zhu Rong.
Renowned strategist Sima Yi has been causing trouble for the barbarians, it seems, so Zhao Yun and company take the opportunity to forge a new alliance and demonstrate their own fighting potential.
Meng Huo isn’t so easily convinced, but thankfully his wife has a sensible head atop those broad, powerful shoulders…
This article is one chapter of a multi-part Cover Game feature!
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Sonic Generations rather ably demonstrated how the Sonic series’ gameplay had evolved over the years… but where could it go from there?
Certain members of Sonic Team were already contemplating this by the time Sonic Colours had completed development and work on Generations was underway. The concept grew from experimental attempts to make use of the Nintendo 3DS’ unique features, and the subsequent announcement of the Wii U console and the interesting possibilities it offered prompted Sega to focus the new game’s development on Nintendo platforms.
The result was Sonic Lost World; an unusual, highly creative and vastly underappreciated installment in the series, and one that would prove to be an ideal fit for Nintendo platforms. (As always, today we’ll be focusing on the home console version for Wii U rather than Dimps’ handheld incarnation.)
