Retro Gaming Australia

The team at Steelhouse Productions has been working on this short film about Pac-Man for a year. They call it “the greatest 80s movie that never happened”.

Basically the 10-minute or so film tries to make sense of how something like Pac-Man could exist in the real world. According to the film’s website, they wanted to know “What the heck is a Pac-Man? What are the ghosts? What and/or where is this blinking blue maze? And how exactly can a hungry yellow ball exit on the left side of the screen, and re-appear again on the right?”

It’s neat, if a bit silly.

Capcom, Namco Bandai and Sega have revealed to Famitsu that their collaborative project is a 3DS strategy RPG called Project X Zone (pronounced Project Cross Zone).

The three way crossover features characters from some of the companies’ most well known titles, and combat will see them teaming up and fighting in pairs such as Ryu with Ken (Street Fighter), and X with Zero (Mega Man).

Twenty-five characters have been confirmed thus far (see below), with more to be announced.

Capcom

• Ryu and Ken (Street Fighter)
• X and Zero (Mega Man)
• Demitri (Darkstalkers)
• Dante (Devil May Cry)
• Chris and Jill (Resident Evil)

Namco Bandai

• Sanger Somvold (Super Robot Wars)
• Jin and Ling Xiaoyu (Tekken)
• Kos-Mos and T-elos (Xenosaga)
• Yuri and Estelle (Tales of Vesperia)
• Kaito and Black Rose (.hack)

Sega

• Shinguji Sakura and Ogami Ichiro (Sakura Wars)
• Pai and Akira (Virtua Fighter)
• Kurt and Riela (Valkyria Chronicles)
• Ulala (Space Channel 5)
• Touma (Shining Force EXA)

20 years ago today, the Super Nintendo Entertainment System launched in the United Kingdom. The SNES was a lot more popular with gamers in the UK, taking a much bigger chunk of the market than its predecessor. Though the battle was hard fought, Sega still claimed victory in the 16-bit era in the UK.

Gamers from Old Blighty had to wait some 18 months from the Japanese launch for the SNES to hit their shores. Imagine the furore if that were to happen today (especially from us Australians, who had to wait another 3 months on top of that).

UK developers had quite a bit of influence on the SNES’s lifespan – the Super FX chip was developed at Argonaut and the company teamed up with Nintendo to develop Starwing and Stunt Race FX. Rare became a driving force behind Nintendo’s first party efforts following the release of Donkey Kong Country. DMA Design (now Rockstar North) became part of Nintendo’s “dream team” of Nintendo 64 developers following the excellent Unirally.

We recommend that you read a couple of issues of Super Play, the best UK SNES magazine in celebration.

Whether you think it was a neat tribute or a cruel joke, the “classic” interpretation of Mega Man featured in Street Fighter X Tekken happened.

A new book, Street Fighter X Tekken Artworks features a detailed breakdown of many of the different concepts that were devised during the creation of the game. The book is currently only available in Japanese, but there’s a remote chance that it might see an English release through Udon like many of Capcom’s other artbooks.

However, if you can’t wait until them, the Mega Man Network has posted a few scans from the book.

Shu Yoshida, President of SCE Worldwide Studios, has today announced that the much-loved RPG The Legend of Dragoon will be available May 1 as a PSone Classic on the US PlayStation Store.

The Legend of Dragoon was developed and published by Sony Computer Entertainment, and released in 2000 for North America and 2001 for Europe.

This turn-based RPG sees players take the role of Dart, the spiky-haired protagonist, as he embarks on a heroic journey to save his childhood friend and protect the world. The title has nine playable characters and eight Dragoon Spirits which transform characters into a more powerful form – a Dragoon.

Jack Tramiel (left), the founder of Commodore International – the company that brought you the Commodore 64 – has passed away at age 83.

Born in Poland in 1928, Tramiel and his family were sent to Auschwitz during the Second World War. After they were rescued in April of 1945, Tramiel emigrated to America and joined the army, where he learned to repair office equipment.

In the early 1950s, Tramiel opened a typewriter repair shop in the Bronx, called Commodore Portable Typewriter. The business soon expanded to include the manufacture and sale of typewriters from Czechoslovakia, which Tramiel had manufactured in Canada to get around US trade restrictions. The business was renamed to Commodore Business Machines.

The focus on typewriters sooned turned to calculators, and then onto Commodore’s most successful product, computers. Commodore’s computer line started in 1977 with the Commodore PET, followed by the VIC-20 and the world famous Commodore 64.

Tramiel resigned from Commodore in 1984, but his retirement was short lived as he set up the company Tramiel Technology, which purchased the consumer division of Atari Corporation from Warner Bros. He turned control over the company to his son Sam in the late 1980s, but retook the reigns after the younger Tramiel suffered a heart attack in 1995, until the company’s merger with JT Storage.

He is survived by his wife Helen and three sons, Samuel, Leonard and Garry.

The recently released alpha version of fan remake Sonic the Hedgehog 2 HD has been quite popular. Unfortunately, it turns out that there was a nasty surprise in the package.

Most anti-virus software will pick the game up as a source of infection – many assumed that this was a false positive, but an employee from one of the major anti-virus houses conducted an analysis of the code to prove that this was not the case. Sure enough, a keylogger was nestled inside the Sonic 2 HD code.

The team at Sonic Retro has put out a PSA to assure users that the keylogger hasn’t “phoned home” as they put it, but it’s still kind of nasty that this could happen.

Rockstar has announced that Max Payne Mobile, an optimised port of Remedy’s neo-noir classic Max Payne for mobile devices, will be hitting iOS on April 12. Android owners will see the title two weeks later, on April 26.

Max Payne Mobile will feature some degree of control customisation, high-resolution textures, HD graphics, and connectivity to the Rockstar Games Social Club.

Sega has announced that Sonic the Hedgehog 4 Episode II will be available on PSN and XBLA on May 15 and May 16 respectively.

We will also see the title hit both PC and iOS devices in May, Android devices in June and finally Windows Phone in July.

Episode Metal was also revealed. Exclusive content for owners of both Episode I and Episode II, Episode Metal see Metal Sonic playable in four exclusive stages.

Terrible week.

Nintendo eShop (all regions)

Nothing

PlayStation Store – SCEE

Nothing

PlayStation Store – SCEA

PS Plus users only
Silent Hill (PSOne Classics) – Free
Mortal Kombat Arcade Kollection – 50% off

Good Old Games

New releases
Wing Commander IV: The Price of Freedom – $US5.99

Discounts
Fallout – Free for another 24 hours
The Might and Magic Universe – all games 50% off