Retro Gaming Australia

Japanese translation blog Yomuka has posted an English version of the three way interview between Shigeru Miyamoto, Satoru Iwata (then HAL Laboratory President) and Mother series creator Shigesato Itoi which was posted not long after the official announcement of the cancellation of the Nintendo 64 version of Mother 3 (known to us as Earthbound 64).

The interview is long, but goes into a lot of detail about where the game was at, what was going wrong with it and why the cancellation occurred.

It’s a fascinating read.

Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles for the GameCube marked the triumphant return of the Final Fantasy series to Nintendo hardware after 5 years. It was quite the departure from the standard Final Fantasy fare – it was a multiplayer action RPG which required use of the Game Boy Advance link feature for the full experience, much to the chagrin of some at the time.

Mario’s Super Picross is a member of a rather exclusive club: Mario games that Nintendo never localised. As you’d expect, it’s very close to Mario’s Picross on the Game Boy, but the lukewarm market response to that title meant Nintendo passed on releasing the sequels outside of Japan until the rise of the Nintendo DS.

Finally. A few days ago, the Super Nintendo RPG classic Earthbound was released for the Wii U Virtual Console.

Until now, Earthbound had never been released in PAL regions. Many of us have been eagerly awaiting this digital release, with it representing our first opportunity to play this much loved and much raved about game. When Earthbound originally released in North America in 1995 it was accompanied by a Player’s Guide, so Nintendo have made a digital version of this guide available on the game’s official web site – it has also been optimized for use on the Wii U GamePad, so it makes for a rather nice little bonus.

Earthbound is currently available on the Wii U Virtual Console for AU$13.00/US$9.99, which is a tad (read: a lot) cheaper than purchasing a physical version of the original SNES release on eBay.

30 years ago today, two consoles were released in Japan; Sega’s SG-1000 and Nintendo’s Family Computer, or Famicom. Guess which one is getting the bulk of the attention?

If you answered Famicom, you are correct. Nintendo’s console took Japan by storm, and 3 years later revitalised a depressed console market in America as the Nintendo Entertainment System. The system would go on to bring us great games such as Super Mario Bros., The Legend of Zelda, Metroid, Castlevania and many more.

The impact of the SG-1000 should not be ignored, however. Sega’s first home console effort, while not the smashing success the Famicom was, did well enough to encourage the arcade giant to continue to pursue home console development. Without it, there would be no Master System, Mega Drive, Saturn or Dreamcast.

Happy birthday, you old consoles!

ROM hacker, Drenn, has created a fan-made patch which adds both full colour and more detailed sprites to the well-loved monster catching RPG classic Pokémon Red.

FroggestSpirit colourised much of Kanto but had left the project incomplete, so Drenn completed the ROM with help from Danny-E 33’s graphics patch. This means that Pokémon Red, originally for the Game Boy, has both been colourised and includes sprites used in later Pokémon games.

The patch can be played via emulator or on the Game Boy Color using a compatible flashcard, and you can check it out here.

Source: RetroCollect

Masahiro Sakurai has revealed in a recent interview with NowGamer that the WiiU and 3DS versions of the next Super Smash Bros. game will feature the same characters.

Sakurai stated that “Fundamentally we’re going to have the same characters on both systems. If there was a character you couldn’t play on Wii U but you could play on 3DS, or vice versa, that’s rough for consumers. So we want players to be able to have the same character experiences on both devices.”

Not all previous characters will be returning however, as Sakurai elaborates “We don’t have the time to fully recreate every single character who’s been in Smash Bros at this point. Adding new characters is not a simple addition – it’s really multiplication. The amount of work, adding a character is multiplied and becomes bigger and bigger as you go.”

So perhaps we won’t be seeing the long awaited return of Dr. Mario.

Before Act Zero came along, Bomberman Hero tended to be regarded as the worst game in the Bomberman series. The reason? It abandoned the series trademark multiplayer action, and focused entirely on single player. Bomberman Hero also abandons the maze based single player of previous games, playing a lot more like a 3D platformer.

Nintendo’s finally showed off the fourth iteration of Super Smash Bros., so we’ll take this opportunity to bring you an ad for the game that started it all. Super Smash Bros. arose out of an experiment at HAL to make an accessible fighting game – the Nintendo mascot characters were a last minute addition. Nintendo didn’t feel Super Smash Bros. would catch on and planned it to be a Japan-exclusive release. Fortunately they changed their mind.

Killer Instinct did indeed make its way to the Game Boy, not long after it hit the SNES. It loses Cynder and Riptor, but you can play two player head-to-head if you run it on a Super Game Boy, which is pretty neat.