Retro Gaming Australia

Not much to talk about at the moment, but I am committed to near weekly updates, dagnabbit. RGA Major Project B seems to be consuming all of my time lately, even though Major Project A was meant to be launching by the end of March. At this stage, both projects could technically be launched, but I want them in a more complete state before they go live. I’d also like to get the site redesign done too, but that’s not going to happen til I top up the site’s capital.

Some anti-spam measures are being put into place on the forums, so bear with us on that.

Check Out
Retrospekt
A fellow Australian retro community site run out of Adelaide. These guys update a hell of a lot more than I do and are involved in organising a few events in the Adelaide area. There are some really good thorough roadtests of some obscure consoles up on the site too, so check them out.

Old Game Mags
Many of you are probably aware of the work that Retromags and Out of Print Archive do – Old Game Mags is another site dedicated to the preservation of video game magazines, but has a different scope. It’s run by a New Zealand based fellow called KiwiArcader, who has been a prolific contributor to both Retromags and OoP. He’s got a few Australian mag scans up there too, which is something you almost never see.

Tidbits
Sarien.net is gone. The iPad/Flash based adventure game site, which allowed players access to a number of old Sierra adventures has been torpedoed by Activision. Hardly surprising given that it was blatant copyright infringement, but one can’t help but feel that there should be a “use it or lose it” stipulation on copyrights and trademarks that companies leave dormant for in excess of 15 years.

The Last Express, Body Harvest, Cyvern: The Dragon Weapons, Monster Maulers at Hardcore Gaming 101
I’m really enjoying these regular HG101 updates. The Last Express was unique real-time adventure game by Jordan Mechner which was a critical hit but retail bomb on release. Body Harvest is one of the more interesting stories from the N64 era – originally DMA Design was part of Nintendo’s “Dream Team”, ace SNES developers who were brought in to develop key N64 exclusives. After years of delays it ended up being published by Gremlin and Midway, and the tech and game designed formed part of the basis of Grand Theft Auto III, which was developed by the Space Station Silicon Valley team.

Snatcher at Hardcore Gaming 101
Kurt Kalata has overhauled HG101’s Snatcher entry, so it’s worth taking a look. It’s sad that Kojima won’t revisit this one for a proper, higher profile English release, but the amount of good old fashioned 80s-90s Japanese copyright infringement would probably mean the game would need some major overhauling.

Interview: Gary Penn
Gamasutra has been posting the full transcripts of interviews from Tristan Donovan’s book Replay: The History of Video Games. This one is with Gary Penn, a former designer at DMA Design/Rockstar North. He discusses how Grand Theft Auto was almost canned due to shitty controls and boring gameplay before a glitch turned the game into something fun.

Retrospective: Nintendo World Cup at Eurogamer
Nintendo’s localisation of Technos’ Kunio soccer game gets a bit of a roasting at EG.

Virtual Console
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