The Hacker Who Hunts Video Game Speedrunning Cheaters
Speedrunning video games, the competitive field of playing through digital games as quickly as possible, has in recent years been elevated into something between a virtuosic form of fingers-and-thumbs athletics and a highly technical science. The best speedruns reduce epic games meant to take dozens of hours to single-digit minutes through a combination of exploiting […]
Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door Sets the Standard for Classic Game Remakes
Limitations can, paradoxically, be a boon for artists. Such was the case with the original Paper Mario on the Nintendo 64. The system could handle only so many polygons, and it’s difficult to make a collection of polygons cute, so Nintendo opted to design a world around simple, flat planes. A paper RPG brought to […]
It’s Possible to Hack Tetris From Inside the Game Itself
Earlier this year, we shared the story of how a classic NES Tetris player hit the game’s “kill screen” for the first time, activating a crash after an incredible 40-minute, 1,511-line performance. Now, some players are using that kill screen—and some complicated memory manipulation it enables—to code new behaviors into versions of Tetris running on […]
Review: Analogue Duo
The Best Console of Japan’s Golden Gaming Era Finally Gets Its Due Source link : Wired
Super Mario RPG Is Still One of Nintendo’s Best, Most Bizarre Games
There’s a scene early in Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars where Mario, alongside his new friend Mallow—a “frog” who looks like a cotton candy cloud wearing pants—is hunting down a thief. Toad, faithful servant of the Mushroom Kingdom, reports a sighting, then scoffs at the question of why he didn’t stop the […]
Weekend Thrifting: Super Ghouls ‘N Ghosts Strikes Again!
What the hell kind of weird pattern is this. Remember back in June when I went thrift store hunting and turned up a Japanese copy of Actraiser, only to find Super Ghouls ‘N Ghosts inside the box? Well, I was in the exact same Goodwill over the weekend, and found a mint boxed Super R-Type. […]
Most Insignificant Moments in Gaming
The Something Awful forums are continually mined by the site’s writers (and me), and even farmed: here Corin Tucker’s Stalker requests screencaps for their “most significant moments in gaming” article. And, what else, the goons come through. The Most Insignificant Moments in Gaming [SAForums] Source link : Wired
Pixel Scarves for Warm n’ Itchy Necks
I am usually not huge on the kitchy-pixel retro thing, having grown up on PC games and not Atari, but this is one classy item. I’m doing some scarf n’ hat shopping today, and these make me wish they were in front of me for squishing and fondling, instead of the boring offerings from Urban […]
Nintendo World Championship Gold Cart on eBay
With all the jokes about OMG RARE! games on eBay that aren’t, and $13,000 bids for PlayStation 3 that are obviously not going to be paid up, it’s interesting to note auctions for stuff that’s really, truly rare and will easily fetch the absurd asking price. So here’s one. A gold Nintendo World Championship cartridge. […]
Grim Fandango Namedropped on Channel Frederator
Episode 54 of the cartoon podcast Channel Frederator was about Dia de los Muertos, the Day of the Dead. And while the cartoons themselves were gorgeous and worth watching, the middle segment was a short live-action skit starring the goofy Frederator spokesman both as a college student and a professor. The professor is attempting to […]
Commander Keen and Friends Get Flashed
That aged classic, Commander Keen, is available in Flash form on Play.vg, along with a slew of other oldschoolers. I played the hell outta Keen when I was wee, but my favorite was definitely Jill of the Jungle (unfortunately unavailable on the site). The combination of female protagonist and the ability to shapeshift in to […]
Coleco’s Bad-Ass Retro Gun
Via GameSetWatch comes a fully-scanned Coleco product catalog from 1980. Yes, this predates Coleco’s short-lived foray into console gaming but does feature nostalgic products such as the Quiz Wiz and the wonderful Telstar Marksman, which had maybe the awesomest light gun controller ever. It was only a few years later that America threw a total […]
Double Dragon On 360: First Screens
Xboxworld, the Netherlands’ (leading? worst? only?) Xbox website, has the first screens of the XBLA version of Double Dragon. In addition to the classic arcade game, an ‘enhanced’ version with redrawn graphics (shown above) will also be available. I’m torn. Ordinarily I’d go with the classic pixels, but these graphics are actually redrawn, not just […]
Virtual Consolation Prize: Hope You Like Zelda
I do! I like Zelda! I’ll buy Link to the Past, maybe! I’m happy that Nintendo of America decided not to ratchet up the price of this classic game, like they did in Japan (it costs 900 points, not the typical 800). But… my goodness. With the wealth of content that they could be mining, […]
Weekend Thrifting: Puck Monster!
Another lesson for me in not giving up. I was tired and pretty much wanted to skip the last few stores on my usual route this Saturday, especially one that was a bit out of the way and doesn’t usually turn up anything good. But I went down there, looked around, saw nothing, and was […]
Virtual Consolation Prize: Shooters for MLK Day
Virtual Consolation Prize: Shooters for MLK Day Source link : Wired
Tabletop Arcade Reborn
Those old Coleco tabletop arcade games were the shit, weren’t they? We had three of them set up in our bedroom — they were pretty fun for LCD games, but really, it was all about the style. At the Excalibur booth, they were showing off two very similar machines, in Space Invaders and Frogger style. […]
Qualcomm’s Gaming Graveyard
Qualcomm’s booth is a giant excavation site, with mounds of dirt sitting in the middle of CES’ South Hall. In it are buried piles of old pieces of consumer electronics. The message, courtesy the attentive b.b., is this: now that Qualcomm has unveiled its new products, you can throw away everything else. Unfortunately, playing “guess […]
More Crazy Standalone Games
Here we have the 2udu-9o. Or the Qudo-Go. Or the Zudu-g0. Or something. I didn’t play this and thus don’t really have anything to say except for the fact that I looked all around the random Chinese area of the CES’ version of Kentia Hall, and didn’t see any actual out-and-out piracy. I kind of […]
Best Generic Plug-and-Play Game Ever? Maybe.
Tell me this isn’t fantastic. It’s hard to see inside the box, but the controller is a bizarre chimera hybrid of a PlayStation pad, an N64 pad, a fishing controller, and a light gun. Just think: this could have been the Wii controller in some alternate universe. Also included is a second-player controller shaped and […]
Hands-On: Castlevania XBLA
Another fun surprise from the Xbox 360 area — Castlevania Symphony of the Night, the fan-favorite, nearly-a-decade-old PlayStation game that revolutionized virtual vampire killin’, is coming to Xbox Live Arcade. Well, we knew that, but the surprise is that it’s apparently coming soon. Because it’s fully playable on the floor. And it ain’t lookin’ bad! […]
A Look Back At Rare
1up’s reigning Englishman John Davison does his countrymen proud with a retrospective on the Stamper brothers’ quarter-century at Rare, the game developer they founded (and recently left): Having spent a full year reverse-engineering the hardware in order to work out how to develop games for it, their efforts were rewarded in early 1985 with a […]
Ketchup Day: Virtual Console, GTHD Demo
I skipped out on a good deal of downloadable content over Christmas, mostly because I was away from my own consoles. Today I decided to scratch off some Wii points cards and go to town on that big ol’ Christmas blowout — not to mention Gran Turismo HD Concept Whatever It’s Called. Thoughts after the […]
New Year’s Thrifting: Frogger x2
One last run around southern Connecticut’s assorted Goodwills brings a find that begs several questions: where were the rest of the Atari 5200 games? Where was the Atari 5200? Why were there two copies of Frogger? And why did I buy them? No answers. Just… two copies of Frogger. Oh, and something else after the […]
Virtual Consolation Prize: Shit Sandwich
Another Monday, another batch of Virtual Console games. But there’s just no explaining this week’s lineup, which consists only of NES barrel scrapings Urban Champion and Baseball. Skip ’em both and buy some more of the awesome games that hit on Christmas Day… even if they did jack the price up on R-Type for no […]
Final Fantasy V: The Funnest, Most Boringest Part
As I’ve mentioned before, Final Fantasy V is probably the last Final Fantasy game that I well and truly geeked out over, even going so far as to put together a FAQ. Having memorized all the ins and outs of the game, I was planning ahead for one crucial moment in the Game Boy Advance […]
Holiday Thrifting: Enter Swagman
I might be home for Christmas but the retrogame search continues unabated. The local Goodwill stores were having a huge day-after-Christmas sale: 50% off everything in the store. As you might imagine, they were pretty picked clean, but that didn’t mean totally barren. And a trip to the mall, of all places, turned up some […]
The Holiday Haul
Merry Christmas! My family knows better than to buy me video games for Christmas. Mostly. Christmas is the time when they stop just outright telling me about their good thrift-store finds and start wrapping them up and putting them under the tree. This year was no different; probably the most surprising gift I got was […]
Virtual Consolation Prize: Crash Week
This week’s Virtual Consolation Prize almost didn’t happen. My Nintendo Wi-Fi USB Connector, which I use to take Wii online, decided that at some point between last week and now it would stop working. At first I reinstalled the driver, but that didn’t work, and only a three-hour troubleshooting marathon (with Jenn giving me orders […]
Weekend Thrifting: Race to BK
Didn’t have too much time to do the thrift store thing this weekend, but some other errands I had to run took me by a few places. The searches are turning up next to nothing these days, mostly because the spring-cleaning season (which in San Francisco runs from about March to November) is over and […]
Another Coupla Podcasts With Me
It’s true — it is time once again for me to address the nation in one of my world-renowned “fireside chats.” Two of them, actually. For an in-depth discussion of how Japanese games will affect America in the future and vice versa, tune into a scintillating GAFCast. To hear a bunch of Zelda nerds fight […]
Development Atari 2600 for Child’s Play
Okay, we’ve seen some awesome Child’s Play auctions this year, but this is absolutely nuts. It’s an Atari 2600 that was specially tricked out by third-party publisher Imagic for game development. Specifically, says the guy, “the CPU chip on the outside in a quick-release socket; this was to allow the use of an “in-circuit emulator” […]
Go Retro (But Not Old) For Your Game Gifts
I agree with the sentiment of SF Chronicle writer Peter Hartlaub’s latest column: if you’re too broke to buy modern-day video games for the holidays, go retro. But I have to take serious issue with some of his choices. Dreamcast? That’s not vintage, that’s just old and busted. Hey, I loved the Dreamcast and it’s […]
Virtual Consolation Prize: 12.11.06
Hello and welcome to Virtual Consolation Prize, the weekly column in which we examine the scraps of stale bread that Nintendo has tossed us this week on the Wii’s Virtual Console to distract us from the fact that Japan still has it ten times better (how’s Link to the Past, you jerks?) This week’s games: […]
Retronauts Podcast: Wii Talk VC
In case you haven’t heard enough out of me about Virtual Console, you can now listen to the reborn Retronauts podcast over at 1up, which features myself, Jeremy Parish, and Ben Turner in a heated argument over the merits of Nintendo’s downloadable content initiative. My favorite line: “Somebody coming in with absolutely no knowledge of […]
NES — Excuse Me, “8-Bit” — on GameTap
Hey, remember Tetris on the NES? When I say this, you’re probably thinking of one of two different games — the Nintendo version or the Tengen version. What you’re likely not thinking about is the Bullet-Proof Software version of the game, which was only released in Japan. But now, it’s actually on GameTap. While researching […]
Virtual Console Announcement Roundup: Ninja Turtles!
Nintendo likes to keep their Virtual Console announcements secret until the minute they’re uploaded to the service, but that doesn’t mean we can’t divine the future. Here’s what’s on deck for the next little while. NES: Over at the ESRB page, where newly-rated games are displayed for parental guidance, a bunch of new Konami games […]
Quiz a Virtual Console Team Member on ABC News
Do you have questions you want to ask about Virtual Console? If you’re reading this blog, I bet you do. ABC News is looking for questions for Amber McCollum, a product tester at Nintendo of America. Apparently you can submit them in video form, and get on the actual television. Or something. I’m unclear about […]
Nintendo UK: Foriegn Games For Euros, Too
It’s not just America that might get previously unreleased games on Virtual Console. A Nintendo UK spokesperson told Eurogamer today that it could very well be in the cards: There is always the potential for games that haven’t seen the light of day in Europe to be on the Virtual Console. The Virtual Console is […]
Virtual Consolation Prize: Rage in the Kage!
Virtual Consolation Prize: Rage in the Kage! Source link : Wired
Rereleased Classics More Broken Than Not?
It’s no secret that games from bygone eras are enjoying a rebirth on the Virtual Console and Xbox Live Arcade, but are gamers so happy to be reliving their childhoods that they’re overlooking egregious flaws in these rereleases? This is the question posed over at ArsTechnica as it dissects just what’s broken about some of […]
NOA: Game Boy Advance Games “Possible” on Virtual Console
In the future, we might possibly see Game Boy Advance games — like the Japan-only cult hit Mother 3 — on the Wii’s Virtual Console, Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aime told MTV News’ Stephen Totilo: I asked him about whether Mother 3 being a GBA game should count it out of contention, or if […]
Q*Bert Hops Onto PlayStation Network
Q*Bert will be available to download from the PlayStation Network (80s arcade game in high def ftw) on Feb. 22, and that’s pretty much all you need to know about that, so I’d like to take this moment to ponder what it must be like to have to write a press release about Q*Bert being […]
Japan-Only Games Possible for US Virtual Console
Nintendo is open to the possibility of putting Japan-only classic games on the US Virtual Console, says senior VP George Harrison. I just spoke to him on the phone with some questions about VC, so here you go: We are aware that there are some very successful Japanese franchises that have a small following in […]
Virtual Console Versus Reality: VC Wins
Ars Technica’s Ben Kuchera decided to test a few different NES options on his high-def display. Clockwise from left, that’s an original NES, a Generation NEX clone, an FC Twin clone, and the Wii. It’s official: Virtual Console beats the pants off reality. Opposable Thumbs [Ars Technica] Source link : Wired
Virtual Consolation Prize: These Broken Wings
Virtual Consolation Prize: These Broken Wings Source link : Wired
Virtual Consolation Prize: Military Madness Fixed
Fans of strategy games, i.e. not me, will be pleased to know that Military Madness for the Wii’s Virtual Console has been fixed. The game, which went out onto the download service in December, was plagued with emulation bugs that caused scrolling stages to — I don’t know, do something bad. Bad enough that the […]
eBay: Nintendo World Championship Grey Cart
We already had a post about the Nintendo World Championship gold cartridge, of which only a handful are known to exist. So here’s an auction for the gray-cart version, which is a bit more common insofar as there are ninety of them. The auction calls this the “Holy Grail” of NES collectors, with which I […]
Fine Art Made From Old School Arcade Games
Rosemarie Fiore is an artist who uses many non-traditional methods of creating her pieces, including time-lapse photography of vector-based arcade games. She is, obviously, my new best friend. Qix, Tempest, Gyruss, and Quantum are currently the only games from which she’s rendered her art, but she’s produced some surprisingly beautiful pieces. Quantum is my personal […]
Downloads Ahoy: Tekken, Tapper, flOw
I continue my research for a piece on digital delivery in the next generation of game consoles, and so I’m trying to stay on top of all the announcements pertaining to PlayStation Store and Xbox Live Arcade. Here’s what’s going on this week: Namco Bandai announce that a port of the arcade game Tekken Dark […]
Virtual Consolation Prize: Save Madonna!
Vigilante is a game in which you have to save Madonna from neo-Nazis. That alone makes it worth downloading this week on Virtual Console. Put aside, if you will, the fact that it is an utter piece of crap, with gameplay designed to resemble Irem’s other crappy martial arts side-scroller, Kung Fu, only without the […]
NES Collection Auction: It’s Baaack
Hey, remember that NES auction from last week that got up to $225,000 because it was widely publicized and a bunch of jerks decided to screw with the bidding? Well, it’s been reposted. I post this again mostly because of the new wording that’s been added; besides an explanation of how Mike Tyson was charged […]
PS3 Updates: Blast Factor, Jet Moto
Sony has finalized this week’s updates to the PlayStation Store. The Blast Factor multiplayer pack — which I’m still not really sure if it’s online or is just local — and Jet Moto for the PSP will hit on Thursday. $3 for the Blast Factor pack, $6 for Jet Moto. Then, on Friday, it’ll be […]
No Ghost Data for Mario Kart 64, No Fix Coming
Mario Kart 64 fanatics are saying that the version on Virtual Console looks pretty nice, what with all the 480p and all, but they’re bummed at the lack of ghost data. If you had an N64 Memory Card, you could save your best track runs and compete against yourself. This isn’t possible in the Virtual […]
EGM’s Retro Virtual Console Reviews
Reviews of Virtual Console games are all well and good, but what did people think about them when they were released? To answer this question, EGM editorial intern Brooks Huber has taken to scanning the reviews out of back issues of their mag and posting them on his blog. Even better than getting to read […]
(In)Complete NES Collection on eBay
An auction like this shows up every now and then on eBay, but man if I am going to pay some sixteen thousand dollars for a stack of Nintendo games you figure maybe every licensed game should be in there. The guy says they are, but he’s missing Pac-Man, Gauntlet, and RBI Baseball (yes, there […]
Wired’s Editor on Virtual Console
I’ve been pretty hard on Nintendo for not taking full advantage of the Long Tail opportunities offered to them with the Virtual Console service. So it probably weakens my argument that Wired’s EIC Chris Anderson (who wrote The Long Tail) thinks they’re doing okay: Yesterday’s hits are today’s niches. Most back catalog sales in anymedium […]
Virtual Consolation Prize: Calling In Sick
Virtual Consolation Prize: Calling In Sick Source link : Wired
Mindcandy: Amiga Demos on DVD
I remember the demo scene from back when I was a kid. Cracked versions of software would circulate for Apple II and Commodore computers, and the pirates would insert a short animated tag with their cheesy hackerhandles before the game began. These demos grew more and more elaborate as time went on, especially on the […]
Weekend Thrifting: Speak of the Devil…
I haven’t been thriftstoring in a while, so I decided to set out today and hit up every store I know of. It wasn’t exactly a red-letter day (although I don’t think anything will ever top The Best Day Ever), but I found it odd that, the very week that we discussed Pro Wrestling for […]