Dreamcast Chus On An NES

NES I CHUSE YOU!

The newest in the demake stakes is a port of ChuChu Rocket to NES from Dreamcast:

There is no sound or music yet.

It does not yet keep track of which levels you have cleared.

Puzzle mode is basically complete.

Stage Challenge mode isn’t finished:

* Missing the 30 second time limit
* The 100 mice and Cat Soccer levels don’t do anything.

There is no multiplayer mode yet.

Controls:

* Start or A: Confirm or select something
* B or Select: Cancel or go back
Puzzle Mode:
* A + Arrow: place an arrow, replace an arrow, or pick up an arrow
* B: Take back the latest placed arrow
* Select: Quit, or return to puzzle mode if the game is running.
* Start: Set the game in motion! Also toggles double speed mode while the game is running.
Stage Challenge:
* A + Arrow: place an arrow. You can only have 3 on at a time, and can not place arrows on top of another. Arrows last for 10 seconds before they expire.
* Select: Quit

Emulator Compatibility:

Works great in FCEUX, Nintendulator, Nestopia, VirtuaNES, QuickNES, Mednafen.

Grab it here.

2D Forever: Thunder Force IV Returns

Want. This. NOW:

What you need to know:

1. It is not a Game Maker project: it’s actually being done from scratch in Open GL and Java.
2. Right now it’s using recycled TF sprites, music, etc. but there will be new weapons, enemies, etc. as the project progresses.
3. There has been discussion about including both a ‘casual’ mode and an RPG mode, I imagine in the vein of Radiant Silvergun. (The ‘casual’ mode would just be the vanilla game without the leveling aspects.)
4. There’s talk about making a galaxy map with, basically, unlimited levels (in theory) but, of course, in practice limited to only several million.¹

Anyway, there is no release date, etc., but wondersonic (the creator) is taking suggestions, etc., at his YouTube page and he could probably use a hand if you can provide some expertise, so get on it!

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^{1 OK, OK: just thousands.}

Wondering Where This Has Been All My Life

I’ll admit it: I squealed like a little girl when I first saw this scene¹

A Wonderboy RPG! Set in Monster World! OMG! *squeals like a little girl*:

What is “Monster World RPG”?

Monster World RPG (MWRPG for short) is a new free rpg videogame developed with RpgMaker2003.

MWRPG is based upon the Wonder Boy/Monster World games series by SEGA/Westone.
You need only to download the game and play it, there’s no need for you to have any libraries or other stuff, because the download has everything you need to play.

OK, so yes, it’s a fan-made game built entirely in RPG Maker. And, yes, it’s not a world-shattering epic, but it’s a Wonder Boy RPG! And it’s pretty well done for what it is! *squeals like a little girl*

The only real downside is it needs a serious script edit as English is clearly not the first language of the creators (I hope), but even with that slight speech impediment you can feel the humor and personality seeping through its pixelly facade. And it’s a Wonder Boy RPG! *squeals like a little girl*

Also: It’s a Wonder Boy RPG! It’s a Wonder Boy RPG! It’s a Wonder Boy RPG! It’s a Wonder Boy RPG! It’s a Wonder Boy RPG! It’s a Wonder Boy RPG! It’s a Wonder Boy RPG! It’s a Wonder Boy RPG! It’s a Wonder Boy RPG! It’s a Wonder Boy RPG! It’s a Wonder Boy RPG! !!

Go play it now! Now! Go! Shoo! Play!

Quick Edit/Update:

This is the game from which it sprang:

Shion’s the hero dude w/ the blue hair, in case that wasn’t entirely clear in the above shot.

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^{1 Which probably means nothing to anyone but a very, very select few of extremely enlightened fans of one (kinda two) of the greatest Genesis games ever.}

A 4ce With Which To Be Reckoned

Unless you only own a PS3, then you’re SOL:

It looks pretty good, if little more than a straight arcade port, but it’s Virtual On, so how can you complain? Unless you only own a PS3 then, well, I’d complain. A lot.

1969: Duck Hunt Hits Arcades (No, Really)

The wild arcade cabinet, Gamus Arcadeus, in its natural habitat

By SEGA:

Not just moving targets, but flying ducks from one side of the back scene to the other, these animated ducks fly from the left to the right on a special screen, disappearing from view when hit.

I can actually remember–just barely!–playing some of these electro-mechanical contraptions at Rye Playland when I was very, very young (pre-5 years old), though I can’t say I recall any more specifics other than my Dad holding me up to play them since I was, naturally, too young to actually reach the controls myself¹. I also certainly can’t say this was among the games on offer, but my delusional side² is screaming yes, yes it was there and foreshadowed a life of servitude to gaming in all its myriad forms.

Still it’s kinda cool to find a curio like this wandering the wilds of the Internet, long before Nintendo made the name commonplace, and by SEGA, no less.

h/t: GDRI

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^{1 Some would say this is still a problem even today, but they are filthy, much taller, liars!
2 Which oddly accounts for about 98% so it’s really more like my delusional self.}

I’m CROSS With SEGA

Superhuman Japanese player S Ranks a game we’ll never play, *shakes fist*

This isn’t new by any stretch, but one of my hobby horses (and, man, are there so many splinters from the herd) is when cool-looking games–arcade or otherwise–get stranded in a limited geographic locale whether for financial or licensing reasons, forever denied a broader audience as has been the case, for a while now, in regards to this game. (It is, essentially, a Diablo clone, much like Shining Force EXA & NEO.)

Of course there is still the possibility that sometime, this lifetime, SEGA will port Shining Force CROSS to PS360 (or, gasp!, Wii)¹ but it’s been out for quite a while and there hasn’t been so much a peep about it, leading me to believe that it’s a willful act of defiance on their part in holding it back!²

Useless personal trivia: If there’s one mythos I’d like to see converted into an MMORPG, it’d be SEGA’s Shiningverse. (Or the one based on my incomplete novel, but that’s just a little self-serving.)

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^{1 Where I can then downshift and start bitching about it not being announced for the West, natch.
2 Or it’s still making lots of cash in Japanese amusement centers and they don’t want to disrupt that market, but I like my much more sensational, Malstrom-like, take on their base, insidious, motivations! MWAHAHAHAHAHAHA!! NO GAME FOR YOU, GAIJIN!!}

Great Moments in Philosophy: Aristotle, Aquinas and Sonic the Hedgehog

I can’t tell if he’s joking, but I don’t think he is as he appears to have put way too much thought into this (which is scary in and of itself):

Another victim of public education or daring philosopher king of the new millennium??¹

Juxtapose: likening the fictional (farcical?) elements of an imaginary, blue, anthropomorphic hedgehog borne of the minds of a few Japanese guys looking to sell video games to kids, to the sacredness of the world’s great religions–talk about absolutely, screamingly, desperate for something to believe in.²

Bonus level: read the comments at YouTube where you get the distinct impression that a sizable portion of the respondents, without irony or humor, seem to believe he’s really onto something profound with this discovery for the ages that’s right up there with Bugs Bunny’s contributions to duck hunting and Calvin and Hobbes’ contribution to mud flaps and urinating on Chevy stickers.

h/t: The Wanderer

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^{1 I’m going with smokes a lot of weed for $1000, Alex.
2 As long as it isn’t God or anything that could be construed as an extant, higher power, e.g. Dr.Robotnik (to hell w/ this Eggman nonsense!) good; Jesus bad.}

Shiren Returns 2 Life

The Wi-Fi Rescue Code worked! He’s back!

If there’s one translation of anything I most want, it’s this:

Aaaaaaand school is over for the semester, so work can resume on both translations! In the past few days, I’ve gone back to working on Shiren the Wanderer 2. Its kinda embarrassing to say, but I didn’t figure out how pointers worked in that game until just now I was never able to find the points for any of the text in the arm9 file, so I just assumed that I would have to work with the predefined limits in that file. Oddly enough I found it out due to the fact that crystaltile2 can “extract” the arm9 into multiple files(never noticed that before ^^;;). It ended up that the pointers were using the locations in the extracted file, so I just had to subtract 4000 from the normal arm9 to get the pointers. SCIENCE!

Visit him and encourage him to ‘get ‘er done!’

Egg Hatches, Goes to PCs

No, not that Billy Hatcher–the popular one

Every once in a while, I stumble across the odd PC port that I didn’t know existed: generally revs of various shooters and the like and, every now and again, an RPG like Lunar, so it’s somewhat surprising when one like this comes completely out of left field¹–one like Sonic Team’s Billy Hatcher and the Giant Egg:

Producer Yuji Naka stated in an interview with IGN that eggs were chosen as the focus of the game to give the player joy from caring for and hatching eggs, and a feeling of anticipation “because you don’t know what’s going to come out of eggs”. Animals were incorporated into the game to convey a mood of adventure, in contrast to the digital pet-based Chao creatures highlighted in previous project Sonic Adventure 2. The GameCube was chosen for development over the competing PlayStation 2 and Xbox because of its wide audience that Naka felt would appreciate such a family-friendly game. The game uses an engine that Naka called “an evolution of the Sonic Adventure 2 engine.”

What’s more, it apparently got a US release but hell if I noticed.

So, yeah: it’s also on PC and, apparently, YouTube and NicoNico have no video of it whatsoever, but you have something even better–me!²

It looks like this, only way way better.

But, uh, there isn’t much to say: it’s basically the Cube game with the ability to bump the resolution up to 1600×1200 which, while nice (and just kills the jaggies), hardly justifies the asking price, unless you simply must have every piece of Sega memorabilia the world has ever seen. (And, oddly, you can’t even force Vsync, etc., via the driver control panel.)

Still it’s out there, somewhere, waiting to be had on this slow, sloooooow, Sunday afternoon.

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1 Billy Hatcher also played left field.
2 That is to say: better than nothing…almost.

How Come It’s Never Gunblade Des Moines or SF Machineguns?

Pretty much says it all

I mean, there are other cities in this country besides LA and NY (not that Angelenos or New Yorkers would know that…or, apparently, the Japanese):

These games were a blast in arcades, though I’ll miss the 800lb., mounted and vibrating¹, machine guns cannons attached to the arcade cab.

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1 These would probably be banned in Des Moines and celebrated in SF.