A lot of people have been telling me about the Atari Breakout thing over the past day or two, so I thought I’d do a comic about it.

I played a lot of Breakout on the Atari back in the day, but it was always more of a tech demo to me than anything else, and it was really a tech demo about the paddle controller. It felt good to spin that sucker around and it felt a lot freer than the 8-way joysticks of the time.

The neat trivia point about Atari Breakout is that Steve Jobs and Stev Wozniack worked on it, which ranks pretty high on my list of great things that have come from Atari.

OK it’s not a very long list I have to admit.

Super Breakout on the Atari 2600 was pretty good though! I liked the progression mode where you worked your way through consecutive layers of bricks.

Oh! The box art was pretty stupid. Astronauts and stuff. I feel bad for the poor Atari 2600 box artists that had to make abstract games into actual things that you can recognise on a shelf. Hey, remember shelves?

This along with Starglider 2, heralded the age of filled polygon games on the Amiga and Atari ST that not only looked amazing but had a solid gameplay hook to keep you interested in the long term. It was a really nicely balanced strategy game of taking over nodes, using resources and taking control of individual units, although I think most people just played to whiz the camera around a 3D object.

Whizzing the camera around a 3D object was a pretty mind blowing thing back then.

The Commodore 64 version was absolute rubbish. I wouldn’t have minded the 2D presentation if the control system wasn’t stuck to the mouse and icon paradigm that the 16 bit version required, which was a waste on a version that only supported a joystick.

Hey! There was an official remake of this that came out last year. I helped organise the Australian release of it and enjoyed the pre-release builds, but there was some FPS bit in it apparently? blah. Why do they have to add stuff that doesn’t belong to everything?

NEW JAGGED ALLIANCE THAT’S ALL YOU NEED TO KNOW GO GO GO

SERIOUSLY WHY ARE YOU STILL READING THIS IT’S A NEW JAGGED ALLIANCE AND IT DOESN’T LOOK LIKE CRAP LIKE THAT JAGGED ALLIANCE 3 SO THAT’S GREAT.

(Plus you get all the old Jagged Alliance games as part of the deal, so hey there’s a deal for ya)

Road Redemption has been bouncing around my Twitter feed for a while now and I have to admit the dury is out a bit. The video we’ve seen so far looks good, but I’ve seen a lot of “Road Rash Remake / Reboot / Reimagining Pre-Vis Pitch Videos” in my time and none of them have succeeded.

But hell, trying to do a new Road Rash is a hell of a noble ambition and the dev team are solid. Designing fun combat between two fast moving objects is a massive pain in the ass to get right (trust me on this one) and if they get that right they’re onto a winner.

And even if they’re not they deserve support for trying, I reckon.

OK, Rawbots is is only retrogaming in the sense that:

a) There was a PS1 game where you programmed robots that I never got to play but it always sounded neat in when I read about it in Next Generation magazing

b) This is almost EXACTLY the kind of game that I had been pitching to anyone that listed since about five minutes after I became a game designer. My version of this was set in a desert and had trucks instead of robots, but the elements of building machines and letting the physics drive the gameplay were always there. So I’m THRILLED that someone is making the game that’s been living inside my head for the past ten years! Now I can finally put that design doc away for good and spend my spare time making that screenplay about talking CGI animals.

The Super 4-in-1 Multicart for the SNES is…well OK the games look somewhere between average and terrible but it’s an interesting project. A brand new Super Nintendo cartridge! I like the fact that there’s new cartridges being made for old machines even to this day. I also think it’s interesting that you can buy the cartridge in either PAL or NTSC format, that’s a nice touch that most people who do this kind of thing omit.

So there you go folks. I’ve backed two of these this month, how about you? What retrogaming-related Kickstarters have you found or are looking forward to seeing?

Man. Street Fighter 2 meant the world to me, and still does, but I really can’t put it much better than why than the comic I did about it. Give it a read! Sorry if it’s too long for some people, but hey.

The Super Nintendo version of Street Fighter 2 was the first version I bought, but it was by no means the last. Beyond the sequels and updates I also bought the poor Game Boy version and the woeful Commodore 64 version of World Warrior.

How bad was it? It was THIS BAD:

But man, the Super Nintendo version version was perfect. Even when it had the PAL slowdown and borders I still played it all the time. I’m going to play it now!

And Ryu is the best character, people. Fact!

There’s a lot of video games where you discover shops hundreds of miles below the Earth’s surface, and you’d figure that the proprietor would be a bit more eager to haggle considering there isn’t much foot traffic down there.

I liked this game! You had this cool weapon where you threw knives all over the place, and there were lots of secrets to find, which is enough of a winning combination when you’re 14. The C64 version was pretty well done although the music wore out its welcome by the time you finished the first level.

One thing I thought was neat was that the currency in Black Tiger was the Zenny, which was the same currency in Forgotten Worlds. More games need to use the Zenny, it’s a valid form of video game currency and the coins are about six feet tall.

Oh and I never found a tiger in it, I hope someone at Capcom got fired for that blunder.

Have you ever gone inside one of those full 360 degree hydraulic things that Sega used with a heap of games back in the day? Those things were nuts! And they were really good at making you lose your glasses, your loose change and probably also your lunch. Good times!

There were two versions of this for the Commodore 64 for some reason, and they were both terrible, it was really one of those games that just shouldn’t have been ported to home machines at all. Even the MegaDrive version wasn’t much fun once you took the arcade cabinet novelty away.

This game was stupidly tough, but it was such a great little novelty to even just “be” Spider-Man AND The Uncanny X-Men that nobody really minded.

I just feel kind of sorry for Arcade though. Even back when he first got introduced I thought he was a pretty old-fashioned character and that was back when the Amiga was considered crazy future technology. Time has not been kind to the concept of an arcade, and far less kind to people who wear bow ties.

Tiny Games: OK this has got nothing to do with video games but MAN is this clever. So so so damn clever. Basically it’s an iOS app that asks you some basic questions about where you are, who you’re with and what items you have around you – then gives you a game you and your friends can play right away. It’s like one of those apps that tells you what you can cook for dinner based on what you’ve got in your fridge, but this is so much better because it’s about fun instead of food and besides I was just going to order pizza anyway. Did I mention how clever I thought this was?

Bik is a point and click adventure written, designed, coded, visualised and uh…audiolised…by one guy. As someone who’s spent a fair amount of time in Adventure Game Studio over the past few years I know what an absolutely mammoth task this is. And what makes it even more crazier is that this guy is building it all in Unity, which is kind of like hiring NASA to fix your car radio. So what the heck, throw some bucks his way, he deserves it and it it looks neat.

Draw and Race isn’t exactly retro, but it’s such a nicely simple idea that I can’t help but like it and think you will too. One pound – one measly pound – gets you a PC or Mac build of a game where you draw a race track on a piece of paper, scan it in and then you’re racing around in it. Neat idea.

And finally I would be remiss in my role as “guy who spends way too much money on retro-gaming related Kickstarters” if I didn’t mention Shovel Knight, which is a really slick looking 2D platformer that is created by some ex-WayForward people. I have been a fan of WayForward for a long time, they don’t get enough respect for the stuff that they do. Back this game! It looks cute.

Oh yeah before you ask – the Richard Garriott Kickstarter. Now on the face of it a new RPG by the guy who created Ultima was such a no-brainer that I immediately threw down my money to get in on the ground floor. However, last week I withdrew my pledge, which is something I had never done before and don’t plan on doing again. Was it Garriott’s oddly-contexed comments about the suckitude of modern game developers? Nope. It was the fact I was recieving a new update about the game every day that drove me nuts. Just take my money and shut up, people!

Many people think Spider-Man and Venom have a history involving an alien symbiote, a pissed-off photographer and an all-consuming thirst for revenge, but it was actually started the night Eddie Brock had a sleepover at the Parker house.

The sequel to the greatest game of all time is also the greatest game of all time, how weird is that?

Man. This game was huge. It literally had the entire galaxy in it, and you could explore every single part of it, and the whole thing fit on a 720 kilobyte floppy disk. I remember buying the game and unfolding this incredible map and just staring at it for hours, imagining the adventures I’d be getting up to and the trade routes I’d be establishing while waiting for the PC to be available.

And then I’d start playing and get killed in five seconds by the cops. Those buggers could never take a joke.