Retro Gaming Australia

Flash carts have always been a bit of a contentious issue among gaming fans – they allow you to test homebrew projects and play translated versions of games on the original hardware, but also allow for mass piracy.

Whatever your stance on the issue is, you may be intrigued by the Mega Everdrive, an upgrade to KRIKzz’s original Everdrive which adds support for save states, so useless old sods like me can beat the American version of Contra: Hard Corps/Probotector and other stupidly hard games. The access speed for ROMs has been massively increased, and the main menu can be accessed without having to reset the console.

The Mega Everdrive can also act as a back-up save cartridge for your Mega CD, in addition to allowing region free play. Of course, all of the functionality of the original Everdrive is there, allowing for full support for almost every Mega Drive and Master System game, along with the 32X if you have the original hardware.

All of this functionality doesn’t come cheap – the Mega Everdrive is $US209.99 for the deluxe boxed version with a cartridge shell, or $US149.99 for just the circuit board.

Independent developer Holmade Games has released a demake of God of War, taking Sony’s visually intense and highly cinematic brawler and turning it into an 8-bit platformer.

The demake, entitled Bit of War has been in development for five years, and is now available to download for your PC, free of charge.

A summary of the week’s re-releases and deals.

Nintendo eShop – Australia and Europe

3DS Virtual Console
Metroid (NES) – $AU7.50

Wii Virtual Console
Strider (Mega Drive) – 800 points

Nintendo eShop – North America

3DS Virtual Console
Sonic the Hedgehog: Triple Trouble (Game Gear) – $US4.99
Shinobi (Game Gear) – $US3.99
Dragon Crystal (Game Gear) – $US2.99

Wii Virtual Console
Samurai Shodown IV: Amakusa’s Revenge (Neo Geo) – 900 points

PlayStation Store – SCEE (PAL)

Discounts
Note – PS Plus users get an additional 10% off
ICO (Classics HD) – $AU18.95
Shadow of the Colossus (Classics HD) – $AU18.95
The Sly Trilogy (Classics HD) – $19.99

PlayStation Store – SCEA (NTSC)

Discounts
Call of Duty Classic – $US7.34
Grandia (PSOne Classics) – $US5.99
Myst – $US12.99

Good Old Games

New releases
Hind – $US5.99
Anachronox – $US5.99

Discounts
Duke Nukem 3D: Atomic Edition – $2.99
Duke Nukem: Manhattan Project – $2.99
Rise of the Triad: Dark War – $2.99
Blake Stone: Aliens of Gold – $2.99
Blake Stone: Planet Strike – $2.99

Blaze’s GameGadget, an open-source retro gaming handheld with a download service often compared to iTunes, will be on sale on March 30 for £99.99.

You can pre-order it from the Blaze website now.

Very little has been said about what games the GameGadget is going to run (the website claims “100,000s”), or how much those games are going to cost. Guess we’ll find out on March 30.

Online magazine Gamerzines has reported that a source close to Sega has suggested that the company has been working on HD ports of Shenmue and Shenmue II for quite some time.

Not only that, but both games are finished and Sega has been sitting on them until they have a clearer picture of the future of the Shenmue series – which probably means whether or not the company is willing to do Shenmue III.

I’ll believe it when I see it.

Back in January, we reported a rumour from a Japanese site that SNK was preparing a Neo Geo handheld. That rumour has turned out to be partially true, with yesterday’s revelation that the Neo Geo portable is happening – but it’s being developed by Blaze in conjunction with SNK.

It’s called the NeoGeoX.

With the architecture of the Neo Geo, and the game selection previously revealed, it’s highly possible that this is another cheap system-on-a-chip job that’s going to cost bugger all and produce the kind of sound that’ll make your ears bleed.

The system will sport 20 built in games (World Heroes, Ultimate 11, Top Player’s Golf, Sengoku, NAM-1975, Mutation Nation, Last Resort, King of Monsters, Frenzy, Cyber-Lip, Fatal Furty Special, The Art of Fighting, Super Sidekicks, League Bowling, Metal Slug, Magical Lord, Baseball Stars Professional, Samurai Shodown, The King of Fighters ’94 and Fatal Fury) and SD card support.

No price of release date has been announced as yet.

Remember the Sega Vintage Collection on Xbox Live Arcade? It’s been a while, hasn’t it? Well, they’re relaunching it, starting with Monster World Collection, a three in one collection that includes Wonder Boy in Monster Land, Wonder Boy in Monster World and the previously Japan-only Monster World IV.

On top of that, the collection is being done by Japanese studio M2, a developer known for producing painstakingly accurate ports of old games to new systems. For those unfamiliar with M2, they were responsible for a lot of the emulation technology behind Virtual Console, and produced the lion’s share of the second half of the Sega Ages 2500 collection – which included Monster World Collection (but that version had Wonder Boy III: The Dragon’s Trap, which is not in this collection – Oh Sega!?!).

The collection is launching on April 25th, and will boast a few neat little extras.

With Sega acknowledging that Wonder Boy exists, could a revival happen in the future?

Paul over at Retrospekt has just posted an interview with Justin Mansour, better known as Mutlee, one of the cast from The Zone, the first video game-centric television show which aired between 1994 and 1995.

At AVCon later this year, Paul will be presenting a screening of three episodes of the show, courtesy of Beyond Productions’ archives.

10 years ago today, the Xbox launched in Australia for $649.95. It was actually a failure at first, selling less than 10,000 units on its opening week. Microsoft pulled the damage control lever, dropped the machine’s price by $250 just two weeks after launch, and sent out two free games and a free controller to everyone who bought one in the first two weeks.

And people thought the 3DS launch was bad.

The move worked for Microsoft, who sold close to 700,000 Xboxen in Australia – their best marketshare for the console in the world.

Why not share your experiences of the Xbox launch and your memories of the console with us in the comments section or in the forums.

Sonic the Hedgehog 4 has a lot of detractors whom Sega is hoping to convert to believers with Sonic the Hedgehog 4: Episode 2 later this year, but this entry looks like it will be Sonic 4‘s final stand, according to producer Takashi Iizuka.

In a recent interview, Iizuka stated “We are looking forward to hearing the feedback from the users for Episode 2, but we are currently not planning to release another episode. We just want to see how the users accept this episode.”

Sonic the Hedgehog 4: Episode 2 will hit Xbox Live Arcade, PlayStation Network, iOS devices, Windows Phones and Android devices later this year.