Retro Gaming Australia

A fan translation of the 1993 PC Engine classic Castlevania: Dracula X Rondo of Blood is now complete. Titled Castlevania: Rondo of Blood, the patch translates the in-game text to English and replaces the games audio with the PSP remake’s English dub.

Castlevania: Dracula X Rondo of Blood was first seen outside of Japan in 2007 in the form of a 2.5D remake featured in Castlevania: The Dracula X Chronicles for the PSP which also included an unlockable port of its sequel Castlevania: Symphony of the Night.

The patch can be downloaded here.

Source: Retro Collect

Pokémon Trading Card Game, titled Pokémon Card GB in Japan, is a video game version of the super popular tabletop trading card game based on the Pokémon video game series. Pokémon Trading Card Game released in 1998 (2000 outside Japan) for the Game Boy Color and was received well by both Pokémon fans and industry critics alike. It is no surprise that game received a sequel, entitled Pokémon Card GB2: Great Rocket-Dan Sanjō! (Pokémon Card GB2: Here Comes Team Great Rocket!) – sadly, it was Japanese-exclusive and never saw a western release.

Enter Pokémon Trading Card Game 2: The Invasion of Team GR!, an English fan translation of Pokémon Card GB2. ROM hacker Artemis251 has completed the patch which enables English-speaking fans to finally play the Pokémon Trading Card Game sequel, featuring a new group of baddies called Team Great Rocket, the ability to play as a female character and cards exclusive to Japanese vending machines.

All you need is the original ROM file for Pokémon Card GB2: Great Rocket-Dan Sanjō! and the fan translation patch which you can download here, and you’re good to go.

Source: Retro Collect

A demake project for The Curse of Monkey Island is currently underway, giving the 1997 classic LucasArts adventure game a pixelated makeover.

The fan-made remake seeks to recreate the third instalment in the Monkey Island series in the style of the first two games The Secret of Monkey Island and Monkey Island 2: LeChuck’s Revenge. This entails an overhaul of The Curse of Monkey Island’s art, animation and interface.

The demake has been underway since May 2010, was cancelled in late 2011 and has now been resurrected by a Spanish programmer. The project is still a work in progress and no date for release has been given, but an English version has been confirmed.

Source: Retro Collect

Wolfenstein 3-D recently celebrated its 20th anniversary. Fun was had by all. In celebration of this event, Russian independent developer Chain Studios has released their remake of the game, entitled Wolfram.

Unlike many recent Wolfenstein 3-D upgrades and remakes, Wolfram isn’t just the original game with OpenGL support and nicer textures – it’s been built from the ground up on the studio’s inhouse engine Volatile 3D II. This makes for an almost entirely new game with modern bells and whistles like per-pixel lighting with bump-mapping and parallax mapping; soft stencil shadows; refractions, cubemap reflections, mirrors, ragdoll physics and an achievement system. Hell, you can even aim up and down.

At this stage, only the shareware portion of Wolfenstein 3-D is available for play in Wolfram. You can download it here.

A fan translation of Ash Guine Story II: Citadel in the Void for the MSX2 has been released.

Ash Guine Story II is an action RPG released by in T&E Soft in 1987, for Japan only. However Ash Guine Story II, the second instalment in the Ash Guine trilogy, can now be enjoyed in English thanks to MSX Translations.

You can download the translation patch here, and preview it here.

Fairy Well, the winner of RGCD’s 2011 Commodore 64 16KB Game Development Competition, is now available in cartridge format.

The game is a unique and highly ambitious collect-a-thon with a huge game world, ton of interesting characters and some neat boss battles.

For £21 (shipping included), you get a boxed copy of the game with manual and a bonus sticker. The game is compatible with both PAL and NTSC sets, and is joystick control-only, so you can play it on a Commodore 64GS if you’re one of the handful of people who owns one.

The cancelled Sega Saturn port of Atomic Runner Chelnov – Nuclear Man, the Fighter, a 1988 Japanese side-scrolling action arcade game, has been found in prototype form and shared online.

The port was in development in 1997 and shown at the Tokyo Game Show, but was cancelled for unknown reasons. The title has now seen the light of day thanks to the SEGA Saturn´s Lost Games Recovery Program, whose team is dedicated to searching for lost and unreleased Sega Saturn games and sharing them.

Atomic Runner Chelnov, and artwork packs featuring mock-up boxarts, can be downloaded from the game’s release page for play on a modded Sega Saturn or an emulator.

Flash games based on the original Super Mario Bros. are a dime a dozen, but Super Mario Summary does something totally unique – cutting the game’s 32 stages down into single screens.

The game was created by Swede Johan Peitz as part of Ludum Dare, a 48 hour game creation challenge event.

Each level has a number of challenges, with up to three stars to be obtained through collecting every coin, squashing every enemy and reaching the top of the flag pole when completing a level. Completing all three tasks gives you a time.

You can play the game here.

MaJoRa, The Legend of Zelda fan and member of the Zelda Fan Game Central community, has spent the last two years meticulously recreating Ocarina of Time’s Hyrule using A Link to the Past style sprites.

The maps, created pixel by pixel, depict the entire Ocarina of Time overworld and other non-dungeon locations in 2D SNES style graphics. The Lost Woods (pictured), Hyrule Castle, Kakariko Village, Lake Hylia and even the Fishing Pond and all represented – and much more. It is an impressive feat.

You can view the complete overworld map here.

5th Avenue Frogger is a new Frogger hack that aims to have players dodging real time traffic from New York’s 5th Avenue.

The project is the brainchild of Tyler DeAngelo, who started the project in celebration of “Frogger‘s 30th(ish) anniversary”

You can follow the project’s development here.