Retro Gaming Australia

Updates don’t exactly seem to be going to plan at the moment. I got sidetracked by a sudden urge to play video games over the last two weeks, and wiped a good 30 or so off the backlog. Most of the time I was meant to be spending on those Platinum games lists has been redirected into doing more book reviews, which will be appearing every Friday morning (until I run out of books).

Retro News
Jerry Lawson, creator of the Fairchild Channel F – the first machine to use programmable ROM cartridges, passed away this week from complications relating to diabetes. He was 70. If you want to know more about Lawson, you should read this interview with him over at Vintage Computing.

The homebrew project Streets of Rage Remake has been released and subsequently pulled down after a C&D from Sega. The project was in development for eight years, so you feel bad for the guys behind it, but it really highlights the dangers in working with other people’s IP without a license. Of course, the game was available for long enough to spread through many channels, so it’s not hard to find it, and it is very much worth tracking down.

The Bio Force Ape prototype has been released. The game has been something of a contentious issue over the past 20 years, with a number of people doubting that the game ever existed. The game is somewhat infamous for spawning the highly amusing butter man meme. Frank Cifaldi’s Lost Levels site has a great summary of the whole debacle leading up to the release of the prototype.

Australian web developer Soap Interactive and Namco Bandai have teamed up to produce The World’s Biggest Pac-Man. It allows players to create their own Pac-Man levels, which are then joined together to form part of a massive maze. Screen exits now move players onto new mazes, rather than looping around to the other side.

Retro Gamer #88 is out. Missile Command graces the magazine’s cover in celebration of a rare interview with Dave Theurer. There’s also an article on the making of Road Rash and all sorts of other goodies.

Recommended Reading
Developer’s Den: The Sega Technical Institute at Sega-16
The crew at Sega-16 have updated this lengthy article on Sega of America’s main development force based on recent evidence brought to light by the studio’s founder Mark Cerny.

Interview: The SegaGaGa Translation Project at Racketboy
Segagaga is #1 on my list of most wanted translations, so I tend to get a little excited every time new information from the translation project gets released. While the boys working on the project are making progress, it sounds like the patch is still a long way off. I’ll continue to sit here and stare at my Segagaga Limited Edition in the mean time.

Boogerman II: The Final Adventure review at Famicom World
Pirate carts are fascinating things – this is basically the second version of a hacked up downgrade of Boogerman to the NES.

Crap MAME Cabinets at Wicked Retarded
Thinking about building a MAME cabinet? Hope you’ve got some design skills, because this site is a veritable freak show featuring nothing but awful MAME cabinets. The commentary is a bit crass, though.

Virtual Console:
Brawl Brothers
Adventure Island II