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.

You may have previously heard about the fan made HD remake of Sonic the Hedgehog 2 that’s been in production for eons – but now you can actually play it.

An alpha version of the game has been released by the team, giving players a sample of what the game has to offer in the game’s first level, Emerald Hill Zone.

It’s short, but sweet and you can get it here.

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.

There was an amusing video doing the rounds a while ago that essentially showed Mario being a bit of a jerk with the titular gun from Portal.

Indie studio Stabyourself (charming) has decided to make an actual game out of this concept, called Mari0. The game supports co-operative play for four players, has a map editor, DLC, hats and runs on Windows, Macs and Linux-based systems.

Apparently it can be a bit tricky to get running, but it looks like a heck of a lot of fun.

Wing Commander Saga is a fan-made remake of Wing Commander III: Heart of the Tiger using the freeware FreeSpace 2 engine. The project has been in development for a long time (apparently almost 10 years), but as this trailer illustrates, it’s looking like it will be worth the wait.

Not that you’ll be waiting much longer – the trailer puts the release date at March 22, 2012 – just under 3 weeks away!

Mega Man Legends is a bit of a sore spot with fans of the series following the recent cancellation of the 3DS sequel. In fact, you could say that fans of the Mega Man series are not particularly happy with Capcom in general, particularly after the awful port of Mega Man X to iOS.

Indie developer Tarbo-san has published this concept video of a demake (i.e. remake on more primitive hardware) of Mega Man Legends (or Rockman DASH), now reimagined as a NES game. Apparently a full game is planned, but we’ll just have to wait and see.

Fan remakes of adventure games were a big thing back in the days before the genre was somewhat revived by Telltale and the like. Many of these projects were never fully realised, either stopped by cease and desist orders or by internal wrangling. Such things did not stop Infamous Adventures, however, as they have just released their loving recreation of Space Quest II after five years in development.

Done in a similar style to Sierra On-Line’s VGA remake of Space Quest, the game features vastly improved hand-drawn graphics, voice acting and a much improved interface.

Best of all, the game is available for free. You can download it here

You may have heard of Super Smash Land before, but for those who haven’t the game is a demake (modern game remade on older hardware) of Super Smash Bros. for the Game Boy – although the game is actually for the PC.

Well, the game is now available for all to play – you can grab it here.

Super Smash Land was developed by Dan Fornace, whose experience in designing the game helped him to land a job with a major studio.

The game features six characters (including fan demanded Mega Man), eleven stages, a variety of game modes and online leaderboard support.

Nintendo might be doing its darndest to forgot the 25th anniversary of the Metroid series, but the fans are not. In fact, a group of Metroid music fans, Shinesparkers have released a double CD album called Harmony of a Hunter in honor of the milestone.

The album is free to download, and includes the series’ trademark mix of ambient tunes and rock music, albeit remixed in a variety of styles, from technosynth to orchestral. The entire series is represented, from the original Metroid through to last year’s Metroid: Other M.

If you want a physical copy of the album, you can buy it from the group’s website for $US12.

Via Destructoid