Retro Gaming Australia

It’s time for what will likely be the final Retro Reading update of 2010. RGA has almost been around for a year now, and I’d be lying to you if I said that the site was anywhere near the state I wanted it to be in by the end of the year. The community is about a quarter of the size of my most conservative estimates, none of the major projects are anywhere near close to launching, and we’ve produced bugger all in the way of original content. The site looks like crap, nobody visits and nobody posts on the forums.

The good thing about this is we’re effectively working with a clean slate for 2011. My intention for the next year is to hire a designer to make the site far more aesthetically appealing and take care of technical things like a proper searchable form for the Mag Scores List and unified logins between the blog and the forums and another part of the site due to launch later. Original content is going to be more of a priority – more articles and more video content will be posted during the year. If the viewer numbers start to pick up, I’ll look at asking for contributions from other writers. Of course, all of the above is contingent on me finding a job to pump some money into the site, and things haven’t been looking rosy on that front.

Unfortunately, it looks like a lot of retro sites have abandoned updating for some time, so the number of articles I can link to has diminished greatly. If you know of any retro sources that are worth reading that are not being plugged here, please let me know. Also, Unseen64 is down at the time of writing, so no updates from them this time around.

Cho Aniki, Delphine Adventures and AKI Wrestling Games at Hardcore Gaming 101
HG101 has a few new articles up, but I’ve decided to just link to these three as they’re the most interesting. The AKI wrestling games article is particularly deep, even if it has a few minor inaccuracies. It’s sad that nothing has topped a series of wrestling games that are now more than a decade old.

Ancient Magic (SNES) translation released at Romhacking.net
It’s always good to see a translation project finished, and even better when it’s not the 5000th retranslation of something that was officially released in English.

Retrospective: FreeSpace 2 at Eurogamer Retro
Most of the recent EG retro pieces are tosh, but I picked this one since FreeSpace 2 is awesome and doesn’t get enough love.

Yu Suzuki interview at 1UP
I don’t think much of 1UP or “budding young games designer” James Mielke, but this interview sheds a lot of light on what Yu Suzuki has been doing, and more about the development of Shenmue, including some previously unknown info about Shenmue III.

Super Fighter Team announces Nightmare Busters
Super Fighting Team, the crew behind Beggar Prince, is releasing a SNES game as their next project.

Virtual Console releases
Faxanadu
Karnov’s Revenge
Super Bonk
Commando
Son Son