May26
gazunta

From Bedrooms To Billionaires

by Gazunta on May 26, 2012 at 5:20 pm
Posted In: Blog

Hey! We all love old video games, right? Hell yes of course you do that’s why you’re here. Well you might be interested to know about a crowd-funded documentary about the people that made them.

From Bedrooms To Billionaires is about the UK’s fledging game development scene in the early ’80s, when bright-eyed kids made a game, got rich quick and bought cars they couldn’t legally drive yet. Good times for all! Actually they were pretty rotten for most, but that’s what makes it so fascinating.

Growing up reading Zzap! 64 made me feel connected in some strange way to the UK game Dev scene in some strange way – even through the fact everything was lagged by months, separated by distance and the little fact I wouldn’t actually make a game myself for at least a decade after Zzap! 64 closed up.

They’re looking to interview people like Jon Hare (!), Geoff Crammond (!!) and ANDREW BRAYBROOK (!!!) and like a million other people who are like GODS to me. Hell they’re could have just said “oh hey here’s a 90 minute interview with David Braben” and I would have been all HUH HAVE MY CASH PLEASE TAKE IT ALL but Braben AND a couple of dozen other legends? Jesus.

Anyway! I think it’s an interesting topic to make a documentary about, so that’s why I’ll throw some dollars towards its completion…and that’s where I got SUPER interested.

$25 gets you a copy of the documentary, which is great. Super great. And there’s a couple of higher priced tiers that get you shirts and posters and stuff, but…

$750 gets your face put into a Zzap! 64 cover, DRAWN BY ZZAP! 64 ARTIST OLI FREY.

HOLY CRAP. That’s just about the best use of $750 I could ever think of. That’s…I honestly can’t think of a good analogy. Imagine Miyamoto putting your face in Super Mario Bros. Imagine Jack Kirby rising from the dead and going OH HEY MAN LET ME JUST PUT YOU ON THE COVER OF FANTASTIC FOUR #1 FIGHTING THE THING AND STUFF WON’T THAT BE A BLAST?

By the way if someone can give me $750 for no particular reason that would be smashing, thanks.

There’s a $320 tier that gets you a Zzap! 64 reviewer head sketch of yourself by Oli Frey, and I have to admit that’s so damn tempting. Like, I could probably scrape that together tempting. But then I think, I already have one, used on this site, by the wonderful Ant Stiller who drew them all for the final issue of Zzap! 64 that I was lucky enough to have helped with, and that’s special in its own way.

So anyway! Go check it out! Let me know what you think! Get yourself on a Zzap! 64 cover!

1 Comment
Jan28
meh

Atari Flashback 3

by Gazunta on January 28, 2012 at 10:00 pm
Posted In: Blog

My father-in-law walked by one of these while shopping and started excitedly reminiscing about the days of him playing Atari until the wee hours of the morning, so we decided to buy him one to be nice and keep our names in the will for another few weeks at least.

There were two problems with this machine:

One: It didn’t work. The machine turned on for a second, displayed the menu, and then went BEZZZZZAWRRRRGHHHHHHH and the screen went funny. Awesome! Thankfully the store was able to swap it for another one which worked. Not a good first impression anyway.

Two: When people get excitedly nostalgic for their time playing Atari 2600, they almost never actually mean playing Atari games. Every game the father in law was expecting to play was actually a third-party game that of course wasn’t included. Space Invaders? Nope. Pitfall? Nope. Pac-Man? (thankfully) Nope. Nobody wants to play 3D Tic-Tac-Toe. Nobody wants to play that crap Atari Basketball game. When people think Atari 2600, they think about River Raid and Frogger and Decathlon. They couldn’t have cut Activision, Konami and Namco a cheque to get some of their back catalogue on board? Having worked on Game Room I know exactly how much they charge for the rights, it’s cheap as hell in the grand scheme of things. Agh. Instead it’s just the usual Atari back catalogue, though it’s still missing stuff like Klax for no good reason.

The joysticks are authentic, right down to the 9 pin connections and spongy feel that assures you that, yes, these will break the moment you start using them. I liked the fake wood paneling on the (very small) unit. The buttons on the unit are more appealing than the old switches. There are some good games – Asteroids is still neat, Combat is great if you have two players available and there’s even some fun to be had from Basketball, even if only it makes you remember that scene from Flying High.

At the end of the day though, on the Elite scale of things, this unit is Mostly Harmless. I mean, imagin if twenty years from now you could buy a PlayStation 1 that has all the games made by Sony in it and nothing else.

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Jan07
gazunta

Donkey Kong Country Returns (Wii)

by Gazunta on January 7, 2012 at 12:58 pm
Posted In: Blog

OK, so I know I’m late to the party on this one, but it’s not like you come here for up to the minute news anyway. I got Donkey Kong Country Returns for Christmas – one of if not the last great Wii games I’ve been meaning to get around to playing.

Boy I’m glad I waited because this is AWESOME.

I was a huge, huge fan of the original Donkey Kong Country – I remember seeing video footage of it the night we bought Super Street Fighter 2 on the SNES from some dodgy importer, and I couldn’t believe the SNES had been tricked into such amazing feats. It was one of those rare games (HA) that I counted the days until the release date before gleefully playing the crap out of for days upon end. Same went for the sequels and also the Game Boy versions which I loved to bits AND the cartridge was yellow so how can you complain about that.

Donkey Kong 64 is also my favourite game for a week out of every feew years when I get a reoccurance of tonsolitis and I’m knocked out on painkillers. I don’t know why, it’s actually a pretty average game. Weird.

Anyway. Donkey Kong Country Returns is hard. I mean it’s HARD. Well actually it’s about as hard as the average platformer from the good old days but we’ve been playing wussy games for the past decade or so and our gaming muscles have atrophied to the point where I was dying repeatedly on the FIRST FREAKIN’ LEVEL.

Sheesh.

It pushes all the right nostalgia buttons – the music is there, you can still jump back into your tree house for an extra life, Rambi makes an appearance and Diddy Kong is in a barrel. There’s still vines to swing from, secret rooms to find and collect bananas in, and, most importantly, Kranky Kong.

Kranky Kong is the greatest video game character of all time.

He’s just this old guy who keeps going on about the good old days, how can I not love him? They should have just put him on the cover and I would have gotten it ages ago.

Anyway. Get it. And prepare to swear and curse and sit closer to the TV so you can have an extra fraction of a second to react to the dangers on those bastard mine cart levels while your gaming muslces reawaken after a decade long slumber.

2 Comments
Dec10
meh

Theme Park (iOS)

by Gazunta on December 10, 2011 at 1:02 pm
Posted In: Blog
There’s been a lot of hullabaloo about Electronic Arts’ decision to bring back Theme Park as one of those new-fangled freemium games. Mostly it’s been games journalists (who get most of their games for free anyway) complaining about how this new pricing model is just going to rip everyone off.But I’m not going to complain about that, because

1) The freemium model’s been around for years and it’s only because it’s being attached to a game people actually care about that all of a sudden it’s a problem, and

2) It’s totally not what people should be hating this game about.

Here’s the thing about Theme Park that people forget – it was always a “casual” game. It was just released in a time before there was a distinction between the types of games out there. Back in the early ‘90s, and especially the ‘80s, if you were into video games you played every video game. These days we specialise. Some people are retro gamers, some people are into fighters, some people are into first person shooters…and even then we specialise within specialisations. Chances are if you play Modern Warfare 3 seriously you don’t play Quake Arena for example.

So people who are complaining that Theme Park has been turned into a casual game are really missing the point. People who are complaining that EA are ripping people off are missing the point.

What’s wrong with Theme Park iOS is that it offers a broken, charmless ride.

I have started this app 24 times as of writing, and it has crashed 22 times. Sometimes it crashes when I unlock a new ride. Sometimes it crashes when I go into a ride. Sometimes it crashes when I just move the camera around. The only two times it didn’t crash is when I exited out to write this review and the first time I started it after it bugged out and wouldn’t let me progress through the tutorial properly.

I’ve had other problems too – I can get the camera to bug out and look at the sky instead of the ground, visitors get stuck in out of bounds areas and there’s just too many God damn pop up dialogue boxes alerting you of how awesome you are every five seconds. Just let me play the game!

I also didn’t like how simplified it got – you no longer micro manage the financial aspects of the park, you don’t hire or fire staff, you don’t control stock levels for your stores (this has been replaced by a simple ‘click on the store to restock it just to have something to do’ button), you don’t lay out walking paths or position rides or….well you pretty much don’t do anything. You click on an empty area, you select something to put in it, and everything else is done for you. How convenient!

What really gets me is how soul less it is now. The Advisor looks like the Monopoly Man’s weird uncle that nobody talks about, the only time you see mascots is when you level up, and the people are so blocky and uniform that I swear they escaped from some long-forgotten PlayStation 1 game that was dismissed for having horrible graphics. There’s no comical routines for attractions, no interesting animations to watch, heck you can’t even see people throw up any more. All the human interest has been stripped bare and replaced with advertisements for EA-affiliated products and services.

I really want to like this, I really do! I don’t even care that much that the UI is cluttered with ads, that you can’t move the camera back high enough to see what’s going on and still control the park or even that in app purchases are stupidly priced because let’s face it, I ain’t buying them anyway.

At least Theme Park iOS makes sense as a freemium game. God help us if they bring back Magic Carpet like this.

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Nov05

Pinball FX 2 (360)

by Gazunta on November 5, 2011 at 10:33 pm
Posted In: Blog

Pinball isn’t strictly a retro video game, but it was an essential part of the arcade experience, so he we are. And while Pinball FX 2 doesn’t have the tables that I spent all my money on back in the day (Jurassic Park and Addams Family!) it’s an absolutely lovely collection of tables for your Xbox 360.

One of the things I really like about Pinball FX 2 is that the game is free, and you just buy the tables that you like. It also auto-included all the tables from the first Pinball FX game if you bought that. It means that with new tables being released all the time it’s not long before you end up with a massive collection of varied tables.

It’s also a corker of a pinball simulation with a realistic physics system and  a rock solid frame rate that never lets you down when you need to hit the flippers at JUST the right moment. Spinners, bumpers, ramps and flippers have that certain feeling that makes you feel right at home with a coin in your pocket and an hour to kill playing.

My favorite tables so far include the Marvel tables (which feature Iron Man, Wolverine and a surprisingly good Blade table) and the Street Fighter 2 table but that’s mainly because I’m a sucker for Street Fighter 2 in all shapes and sizes. 

The Rocky & Bullwinkle table is crazy hard, and the Arabian table is boring, but if you have lots of friends on XBL that have the game even the worst table is great fun. As you’re playing the game keeps urging you on by tracking how man more points you need to beat your friend’s score, which is more compelling than a big pile of hamburgers.

Sorry I’m hungry.

Anyway, get it, and add me on XBL! I need more people to lose horribly against.

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