Retro Gaming Australia

It might possibly be a sad day for you if you’ve been with RGA since the beginning, because this is going to be the final Retro Reading post. I’ve decided to retire this style of post in favour of splitting it up into separate pieces and posting those pieces more often. The site kind of looks tragic when there’s five “Ad of the Day” posts in a row on the front page, no?

Retro News
Urban Champion is the next game getting the 3D Classics treatment on the 3DS. Who the heck selects these things? I find the game amusing, but seriously, of everything they’ve got on the NES, why this?

Sega-16 is back up and running after an unfortunate hacking attack. They took the time to give the site a nice overhaul.

Saturn information site Satakore has also relaunched with a new look.

Digger Chan, a homebrew effort for the Sega Master System is getting a cartridge release. It will be the first SMS cart released since 1998.

A translation patch for Dragon Force II is under way. Hurrah!

The NiGHTS: Lucid Dreaming remix was released in honor of the game’s 15th anniversary.

Viva Amiga, a documentary film on the history of the Amiga needs your help. You can pledge money to their project at KickStart – they’re 80% of the way toward their required budget.

The 64 Drive is almost here. If you’re the sort that’s laissez-faire about copyright infringement, you’ll be able to use this device to play any N64 ROM on your machine from an SD card. Of course, it costs an arm and a leg and isn’t exactly legal.

Events
The Melbourne location of the Mana Bar is opening up on July 16. It’s located at 336 Brunswick Street, Fitzroy. Expect there to be a large crowd for this one.

If you’re hosting gaming related events, please let us know at admin [at] retrogamingaus dot com (with the obvious spam protection removed).

Recommended Reading

Retrospective: Metroid Prime at Eurogamer Retro
Eurogamer takes a look at what is arguably one of the best games on the GameCube, and certainly up there with the all time best.

Iwata Asks: Shigeru Miyamoto on Ocarina of Time 3D at Nintendo
Iwata’s chat with Miyamoto on the development of Ocarina of Time reveals a lot of stuff that went on behind the scenes, including never-before-revealed information about the game’s original setting.

Fighters Destiny at Hardcore Gaming 101
This N64 fighting game has a bit of a cult following – never really gave it much time myself, though.

Gitaroo Man at Hardcore Gaming 101
We featured this game in a recent ad post – a top notch rhythm game that came along well before all of that Guitar Hero hooplah.

Unseen64 Updates
Spiralstone (GBA)
City Heroes (MD)
Vanished Powers (PC/PSX)
Beavis and Butthead Arcade
Scooty Racers (PS2/Xbox)
Kuma Soldier (PC-FX)

“New” releases
Good Old Games
Rollercoaster Tycoon Deluxe
SWAT 3: Game of the Year Edition

Wii Virtual Console
Super Adventure Island II (SNES)

3DS Virtual Console
Kirby’s Dream Land
Qix
Fortified Zone
Double Dragon
Radar Mission

So long, irregularly updated column!

Haven’t done a Retro Reading post for a while, mainly because we’re transitioning into producing more original content as you’d have witnessed with our Duke Nukem week series of articles. We’ve also overhauled user accounts on the site so you only need one for forums and commenting on articles.

Retro Events
The Nintendo Experience at the Swanston Street EB in Melbourne will be hosting a launch event for The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time 3D. If you’re in Melbourne and want to check it out, it’s on June 29 from 10pm until 2am.

Retro News
The Nintendo 3DS eStore has opened. In addition to the new 3DSware titles, there is a Virtual Console section offering classic Game Boy and Game Boy Color titles (with Game Gear to come) including The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening DX and Donkey Kong 94. On top of that, Nintendo is having a number of classic games remastered in 3D, dubbed 3D Classics. For the next month, 3DS owners who grab the eShop upgrade get a complimentary version of 3D Classics: Excitebike.

Electronic Arts have begun to release their back catalogue through the Good Old Games service. The first titles include Crusader: No Remorse and Magic Carpet.

Japanese video game show Game Center CX will be shown on Kotaku from June 23. There are whispers going around that the show is going to be dubbed, but it is not confirmed.

Konami will be issuing HD remastered versions of Metal Gear Solid 2 and 3, Zone of the Enders 1 and 2, and Silent Hill 2 and 3 from the end of this year. The Silent Hill games are getting redubbed but Guy Cihi, the actor who played James Sunderland in Silent Hill 2 will not be reprising his role. The collections will be released on the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, with a PS Vita release rumoured.

Our friends over at retrospekt have launched their new-look website. Go and check it out!

Nintendo has announced their plans for the 25th Anniversary of the Legend of Zelda. There will be orchestral performances across the world, a free Legend of Zelda: Four Swords game for DSiWare, two soundtrack releases and more leading up to the release of the next game, The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword.

The translation patch for Dragon Ball Z: Legend of the Super Saiyans has finally been completed! Well, it sat at 99% completion for a good decade (and was fully playable), so it’s about damn time.

Speaking of translations, the long awaited project to bring the Wonderswan version of Makai Toushi SaGa (or Final Fantasy Legend) has been completed.

Recommended Reading

Iwata Asks: The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time at Nintendo
It’s a sad reflection of our industry when a CEO is one of the best interviewers – though you could argue that he’s probably the only person in the world who can dictate what information comes out of Nintendo. This interview sheds a lot of light on the development of the game and reveals a few pre-Ocarina Zelda projects they were working on. Must read – and there are three more parts to come.

The Games of Donald Duck at Hardcore Gaming 101
Audun Sorlie has put together this massive guide to all of the video games to date which have featured Donald Duck.

Dezaemon at Hardcore Gaming 101
There’s also a feature on the shooting game construction kit Dezaemon, which is quite enlightening.

Retrospective: Jet Set Willy at Eurogamer
Considered one of the best titles on the Spectrum. All jokes aside, it’s worth a read – the author is Martyn Carroll, the original editor of Retro Gamer.

Unseen64 Updates
Blades of Passage (N64DD)
Hogs of War Beta (PSX/PC)
Sonic Extreme (Xbox)
Shinkai (FC/NES)
Scorched Earth (3DO)
GP Advance (GBA)
Gore (C64/Atari ST/PC)
Fallout (PSX)
Kuma Soldier (PCFX)

Virtual Console
Wii
Chrono Trigger (SNES)
Super Adventure Island (SNES)
3DS
The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening DX (GBC)
Donkey Kong (GB)

3D Classics
Excitebike (NES)

I am in a bit of disbelief about it being a month since our last Retro Reading post, but there hasn’t been much going on in the world of retro. There has been plenty going on behind the scenes of RGA though – new site features, content planning, and an overhauling of the forums. We’ve even started to update regularly with book reviews on Fridays and the new daily Video Game Ad of the Day.

Retro News
Guardian Heroes is headed to Xbox Live Arcade this year for 800 Microsoft Points. Frankly, I’d use that money to buy a JP Saturn copy because the cleaned up graphics don’t look so good. Apparently it’s a filter you can turn off, but still.

Atari’s Greatest Hits are now available on iOS devices. It’s $US0.99 for a bundle of games or $US14.99 for the lot. Personally, I’d go with grabbing Activsion Anthology and Atari Anthology for the PlayStation 2 or Xbox, and playing these games with a controller instead of the hopeless touch screen controls utilised on the iPhone et al.

Crimson Nocturnal, the translation group responsible for the patch for SaGa 2, has split up. You can read their reasons for calling it a day at their website.

A new translation patch for Mother (or Earthbound Zero) has been released. This retranslation is for the Game Boy Advance version of the game in the Mother 1+2 pack (note that Mother 2/Earthbound is not translated with this patch). It also adds a few optional items that help players contend with its high difficulty and encounter rates.

A trailer for the Tetris World Championships documentary Ecstacy of Order: The Tetris Masters has been released.

Events & Gatherings
The Mana Bar will be hosting a Mario Kart 64 tournament at their Brisbane venue on May 24th. The event gets under way at 5PM, entry is free and there are some Grill’d burger vouchers on offer for the winners.

Our friends over at Retrospekt are planning a bash to coincide with the launch of their new website. If you’re in Adelaide and are free on June 4th, head over to Hotel Metro after 8PM for the festivities. Entry is free, and music comes courtesy of DJ Tr!p and other chiptune artists.

Recommended Reading
The Making of Crusader: No Remorse at The Gaming Liberty
This article is about a year old, but I found it during the week while reading about one of my favourite games from the golden age of PC gaming – Crusader: No Remorse. The author of the article tracked down a bunch of people who worked on the game, along with two of the actors who appeared in the game’s video sequences.

31 Homebrew Games Worth Playing at 1UP
1UP’s Ryan Winterhalter has dived into the dark world of homebrew development for retro systems and made a list of the ones he considers to be worthwhile. The games are all original efforts rather than ROM hacks, and there are a few demakes, which are featured in our next link.

Best Playable Demakes at 1UP
Ever wondered what Mega Man would be like on the Atari 2600, or how God of War would fare as a Game & Watch release? Read this article to find out more about demakes, a growing trend where indie developers produce versions of new games on older systems.

Kakuto Chojin at Hardcore Gaming 101
Kakuto Chojin was one of Microsoft’s early first party “efforts” for the original Xbox. It’s a fighting game, and not a particularly good one – it’s better known for being pulled from shelves (and having its PAL release canned). One of the game’s characters, Asad, is depicted as a devout Muslim in a way that’s less than ethnically friendly, but what ended up getting the game withdrawn was the use of versus of the Koran in Asad’s background music.

10 Unreleased Video Game Consoles at PCMag
Benj Edwards of the Vintage Computing and Gaming Blog has produced an article for PCMag on a couple of consoles that didn’t make it to market. You’ll be able to guess a few of them, but there are some surprises in there.

Sonic Duel Toys at Sega Memories
There are some strange licensed items featuring Sonic out there. This is a set of dueling tops featuring Sonic characters – quite an oddity. Seeing the old style Dr. Robotnik makes me nostalgic…then sad.

Super Famicom Hotel Box at SNES Central
SNES Central recently got their mits on a Super Famicom Hotel Box, a system which as the name suggests, was a Super Famicom specially designed for use at hotels. It was a coin operated device – slot your 100 yen in and you get five minutes of playtime on a selected range of titles.

Super 8: The Ultimate Downgrade Peripheral at Dizrhythmia
Ever wanted to play NES games on your SNES for some reason? With the Super 8, you can! Dizrhythmia recently got his hands on one of these devices and gave it a thorough run through on his blog.

The Extraordinary, Underground Museum of Soviet Arcade Games at Kotaku
When we talk about the world of gaming, we so often seem to only refer to Japan, North America and Western Europe. There is, however, a rich gaming culture in many of the places of the world which get overlooked. This article focuses on the world of Russian arcade games, both video and electro-mechanical.

Unseen64 Updates
G (Xbox)
Firefly (PSX)
Professional Sports Car Racin (PSX/PC)
Monstrous City (PSX)
The Big Comfy Couch (Xbox)
Dragon Horde (PC)

Virtual Console
The Ignition Factor (SNES)

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

I’ve slowed down on the updates a little lately, but that’s due to my working on several guides for collectors like the PSX Platinum Game list and a book project that I’m hoping to finish by the end of the year. The next project due for completion is the PS2 Platinum Game list, with a major update to my old PS2 60hz guide to follow. That second one is still nowhere near complete, but I’m happy if anyone wants to help out.

I worry about people’s refusal to embrace the PS2 as a retro format, particularly when they were so quick to do so for the original PSX and Dreamcast. WWE All Stars, released on Tuesday, was the final known release planned for the system. Unless EA is planning to do another FIFA this year (they said 10 was the last, but did 11 anyway), we can pretty much call it for PS2 software. The system is over 11 years old now, and it was succeeded over 4 and a half years ago. I believe that you can pin this reluctance on three factors: the length of the current generation, the lack of major gameplay and genre innovation, and diminishing visual returns. I imagine Sony will keep manufacturing the hardware for some time, but there are already signs at retail that they are clearing out official peripherals (8mb Memory Cards are now $AU15) and preparing to draw the curtain. If you haven’t started building a PS2 collection, it might be better to start now while you can get still get new, high quality games for next to nothing.

I keep seesawing between doing a handful of ambitious feature articles for this site, or doing frequent small scope articles. I’d like to get a lot more book reviews up on the site – nobody else does them, but my traffic reports indicate that people want to read them. I know I would.

PAX East: Preserving the Digital Canon Panel at Racketboy
Racketboy took it upon himself to record this PAX Panel on game preservation, a subject I’ve been interested in for some time. Might even have some movement on that front soon.

Review – Pier Solar and the Great Architects at Sega 16
Pier Solar is one of the most ambitious homebrew projects to date. It started out as a small project on Eidolonn’s Inn, and gradually grew in scope until it became a full original game. It weighs in at 64 megabit, making it the biggest Mega Drive game to date. It’s also the first Mega Drive/Mega CD game – if you have the add-on, you can stream high quality audio from the CD for an enhanced experience. Sega 16 has done a review of the game, and they seem pretty happy with it. You can still order the reprint edition at the official site.

UK Resistance ceases updates
Delightful video game humour site UK Resistance has decided to call it a day. Who will come forward to mock the wankery of the modern games industry? Who will campaign to keep blue skies in games? Someone, probably.

EA on bringing back old IP at Eurogamer
EA’s Frank Gibeau discusses what the company thinks about bringing back old IP. Problem they don’t touch on is that EA doesn’t wholly own some of their more famous old IP – games like Desert Strike and Ultima are shared, or certain key elements are owned by forces outside of EA. A Syndicate revival is one of the worst kept secrets in the industry, though.

Virtual Console
Final Fantasy III (technically VI): Now you can play FF6 in glorious PAL 50hz with borders. Excellent!

Those good updating habits are difficult to keep up between projects and the fact that nothing interesting is happening in retro gaming right now, but we’ll do our best to continue.

We’ve got another selection of 14 Australian video game commercial to add to our collection, bringing it up to 60. They are:
Amiga CD32 System Ad
Atari 2600 System Ad #5
Atari 2600 System Ad #6
Atari 7800 Rap Ad
Burger Time for Intellivsion
F-Zero for the SNES
Intellivision System Ad #2
Mission X for Intellivision
Nintendo 64 Clear Purple Controller Bundle
Mega Drive System Ad 1990
Mega Drive: The Next Level Ad #1 from 1994
Timezone Daytona USA
Toe Jam and Earl for the Mega Drive
Zelda II: The Adventure of Link for the NES

Asura and Gaia Crusaders at Hardcore Gaming 101
Couple of interesting detailed articles on some arcade games at HG101. Burn Cycle and Oh Shit are the last two kusoge featured.

Unseen64 updates:
Urban Decay (PC)
Cyber Fighter (PC-FX)
X-COM Alliance (PC)
Necrocide: The Dead Must Die (PC)
Elysium (PC)
SwitchDeath (Jaguar)
Bounty Hunter (MD)

GB Hunter and Gamebooster at NES World
NES World has a pair of articles on these two passthrough devices that allowed you to play Game Boy software on your Nintendo 64.

Recent Virtual Console releases:
Bomberman Hero (N64)

Yeah, the weekly update thing didn’t last because I couldn’t find enough content. I spent the time doing useful stuff like looking for work, doing research, working on RGA’s major projects and working on some feature content that you’ll see up here soon.

Check Out
Game Developer Research Institute
GDRI is a project of the awesome SMS Power website which is dedicated to finding out who really developed certain games. The TOSE and SIMS entries are particularly interesting.

The Cutting Room Floor
The Cutting Room Floor is a wiki project that is documenting content present in pre-release versions of games that was cut out of the final retail release. The RPG entries seem to be the most finished, so YMMV.

Recommended Reading
The Legend of Zelda Oddities at Technolizer
Yesterday marked 25 years since the Japanese release of The Legend of Zelda. Nintendo’s not planning anything special for the occasion, but Benj Edwards (who runs the Vintage Computing and Gaming Blog) has assembled this collection of odd bits from the series’ history. I’d like to thank the awful DiC animated series for providing justification as to why the games don’t need voice acting.

Fire Emblem I Translation Complete
Sure, you could play the remake that was released for the Nintendo DS last year, but there are a lot of people who don’t like the art style of Shadow Dragon. Now you can play an English version of the Famicom release, so quit yer whinging.

Dreamcast Collection Vinyl pre-order bonus
Like the Ultimate Mega Drive Collection, the upcoming Dreamcast Collection will come with a vinyl record featuring a few tracks from each game on the set. You have to preorder it from JB Hifi to get it though. Keep in mind that most of the games on the collection are already available on XBLA and PSN, and the quality of the set overall really pales in comparison to the aforementioned Mega Drive one.

Virtual Console
Natsume Championship Wrestling
S.C.A.T.

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
Nicht

Wow, two consecutive weekly Retro Readings? Will this continue? Probably not, but we’ll try and do something every week to make it look like someone gives a damn.

Tidbits
None this week from the looks of it.

Recommended Reading
Iwata Asks: The Virtual Boy at Nintendo
It’s pretty rare for Nintendo to acknowledge that the Virtual Boy exists, but to see Satoru Iwata, Shigeru Miyamoto and Shigesato Itoi discussing it is pretty awesome. Miyamoto’s comments in particular are interesting, though you can sense a degree of discomfort in his discussing of the subject.

Game Boy 101 at Racketboy
Good introductory article for all things Game Boy if you’ve not really investigated the system much. Just don’t expect anything totally accurate – for example, the article claims Gunpei Yokoi created the Tamagotchi (that was Akihiro Yokoi of WiZ Co Ltd).

Police Quest, Blandia, Primal Rage at Hardcore Gaming 101
Another round of HG101’s fantastic in-depth articles – Kurt seems to be updating on a near weekly schedule now. And no, Blandia is not a cheeky jab Grandia II‘s story.

Gaming in the Philipines at Hardcore Gaming 101
Always interesting to see how the rest of the world does it. Not exactly much history here per se, but still cool.

Blinx: The Time Sweeper, Toe-Jam and Earl, Ratchet & Clank at Eurogamer Retro
I’ve been leaving Eurogamer Retro out lately as their articles were getting a bit dull, but since John Walker wrote this piece on just how terrible Blinx: The Time Sweeper is, I consider them to be redeemed. In my early reviewing days, someone once tried to defend Blinx by claiming that the main character’s being “a cute kitty!” made up for the mangled gameplay.

Unseen64 Updates
Unseen64 went down during this update. Stability ftw.

Virtual Console Updates
None.

And we’re back. The first update for the year follows some major floods through most of Australia – I personally was not affected, having moved out of Toowoomba months ago, but I’ve seen pictures of a few people who’ve had their massive game collections ruined. Doesn’t really compare to those who’ve lost their lives or had their houses destroyed, but it still sucks. The situation with regards to retro gaming updates hasn’t really changed over the last month; if it wasn’t for Hardcore Gaming 101 and Unseen64, there wouldn’t really be anything around worth reading.

Tidbits
– Pier Solar has been released. It’s the first new Mega Drive game in many years. As far as I know, they sold through their shipment (which was 1,500 split between three regions), and another one is not planned.
– A new Dreamcast release, Sturmwind is planned for 2011. Surprise, surprise, it’s a shooter. It was originally in development for the Jaguar CD. You can view the trailer here and preorder the game here. It’s due in Q2.
– Ghosts n Goblins for the NES was briefly removed from Virtual Console after the arcade version was released on the service. Capcom claims it was a mistake, but that was only after people complained about it. People need to realise the importance of preserving all versions of a game, not just the best ones.
– The 25th Anniversary Edition of Super Mario All Stars is pretty much completely sold out. There are whispers of a reprint for the US version.

Recommended Reading
Kenseiden, Usagi Yojimbo and Metal Wolf Chaos at Hardcore Gaming 101
A couple of choice selections from HG101. Kenseiden is a dastardly annoying Master System game that I played a ton of but never finished. It gets a lot of comparisons with Castlevania, but I never really saw it that way (though it’s been about 18 years since I played it). Usagi Yojimbo is a classic from the now entirely defunct Beam Software. Metal Wolf Chaos is a memetastic mech shooter that was one of a handful of Japanese exclusives on the original Xbox – if you haven’t already heard about it, you play as a mech-piloting President of the United States, who is fighting off a coup led by the Vice President. Due to the sheer ridiculousness of the game, it’s developed a reputation and is rather costly to procure.

Asterix at Hardcore Gaming 101
I celebrate the quality articles that come out of HG101 whenever I can, but this Asterix article is something else. It’s ridiculously in-depth and tells you everything you wanted to know about Asterix games and then some.

The Weekly Kusoge at Hardcore Gaming 101
Normally we retro writers celebrate quality games, but HG101 has started a weekly column dedicated to examining the kusoge, a Japanese portmanteau of kuso (shitty) and geemu (game). The column explains the kusoge phenomenon further and already has two entries up.

The SegaWorld Sydney Puppet Show at Sega Memories
Remember SegaWorld? The giant amusement park at Darling Harbour Sega Ozisoft operated unsuccessfully for a few years in the mid 90s? A few dedicated fans out there have tried scrounging up details of what went on at the park, and Sega Memories have chanced upon an interview with the fellow who designed and operated the Sonic the Hedgehog puppet show which ran a few times a day. Interesting, if a little disturbing.

Unseen64 Updates
Assault Korps (PSX/PC)
The Strangers (MCD)
Lucifer (PC)
ICO Beta (PS2)
S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Beta (PC)
Grease and Grudge/Road Race Tech Demo (3DO)
Gothic Beta (PC)
Magic Carpet Beta (PC/PSX/SS)
Grand Champion’s Rally (PSX)
Infiltrator: Shadow Wars (Xbox)
Dark Empire (GBA)
Christopher Columbus (SNES)
Good & Evil (PC)
Aqua Prophecy (PSX)
Curly’s Adventure (PC)
San Francisco Rush (GBC)
The Swamp Thing (MD)
Dark Eyes (DC)
Worms Battle Rally (PS2/Xbox/GCN)
Lufia III: Ruins Chaser (PSX)
Warriors (PSX)
Joe Blow (PSX/PC)
Seed (PC)
World Builders Inc. (3DO)
Sega VR Documentary
Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater Beta (PSX)
Freedom Fighters Beta (PS2/Xbox/GCN/PC)
Saffire (GBC)
Covert WARS (PSX/PC)
Renegade Zero (PS2/PC)
Skies (DC)
Dragon Booster (PS2/Xbox)
Death Race (PSX/SS)
Sonic Adventure 2 Beta (DC)

Virtual Console
– Mario Party 2 (N64)
– Exed Exes (Arcade)
– Ghosts n Goblins (Arcade)
– Magical Drop III (Neo Geo)