As promised, Hand Circus head Simon Oliver has continued his guided tour through Rolando 2‘s worlds, first stopping at the Savage Island, where he demonstrates both the various fruit and veggie powered new Rolando techniques (including the titular ‘bad reaction’ to in-game chilis), and explains the game’s new ‘golden idol’ mechanic, which lets users skip levels deemed too frustrating to pass normally.
And then, the Temple of Doomishness, in which Oliver demos the fact that Rolando 2 will also be a bit easier on the player by allowing a stun-state versus an instant death when rolling into enemies (with death now following any player hit while stunned), and more action-based sequences with rising lava and Indy-ish rolling boulders as the Rolandos make their way through the temple.
This started to make the rounds a few weeks back, but hasn’t gathered nearly as much attention as it should, for as outstandingly wicked as it is: you may have originally heard of Moscow State Technical University ‘Soviet Arcade Games Museum‘ from an April 2009 Edge article that told the story quite well, but was accompanied by painfully tiny images.
Of the collection, the most playable is Sea Battle (above, dig the fantastically ambient faint whirr of its machinery as you play, and its rustically smudged viewfinder), but there’s also the Street Racer-esque game Magistral (right), Rally, another competitive racer, and finally Gorodki, a digital adaptation of a traditional sport that, even now having read about, I still don’t quite understand.
In addition to the recreated versions (look around for the ‘play’ link on each page), the site’s collected PDF versions of the machine’s manuals, close-up money shots of its coin slots, and more gorgeous photography of each machine than you could ever want.
The only thing it currently lacks is a full English translation (I’ve somewhat annoyingly linked to Google translations of each of the pages above), but presumably they’re being added over time, as the museum itself continues to restore and collect more historical information on each game.
Kicking off a series of official posts for Sony’s PlayStation blog on Namco’s upcoming PS3 ‘tribute’ release Katamari Forever, producer Kazuhito Udetsu relays a message from longtime series (and Noby Noby Boy) sound designer Yuu Miyake, who explains the process of collaborating with various Japanese acts to remix classic Katamari tracks.
Saying he wanted a split between ‘organic’ and ‘electric’ sounds, Miyake highlights oft-blogged NES-samplers YMCK and the chiptune swing of their “A Crimson Rose and a Gin Tonic” remix. Unfortunately, we don’t get the whole track, but we do get enough to hear that it’s going to be another must-buy collection.
Click through to the original post to hear precisely the opposite: an all-live rendition of the original game’s You Are Smart.
The morning’s most high profile story of exclusives and rebirths: Rockstar sends word that their DS exclusive Grand Theft Auto entry, Chinatown Wars, will be making the jump to the PSP “this fall”, with “upscaled widescreen graphics, enhanced lighting and animation, and… all-new story missions.”
The game will be available in both UMD form and pure digital download for the by-then-released PSP Go, making it currently one of the highest profile third party games (alongside the next Metal Gear Solid entry) to buoy the handheld back into gamers’ consciousnesses.
In preparation for their upcoming show, taking place 8pm, Friday, June 26 at San Francisco’s 835 Geary St. Caffeine location, DUTYCYCLE have released another of their free samplers — possibly their most accessible lineup to date — ranging from nicely traditional anthemic chiptunes from Nonfinite and LURV, and some fantastic downtempo beats and glitches from starPause, Harbour and Kallipolis.
Above, the PixelJunk Eden: Encore version marked with the game’s various garden portals, and below, the simple series logo itself. Both are apparently quite limited, but Q-games head Dylan Cuthbert gives a glimmer of hope that they might make their way out of Japan at some point in the future.
You may or may not have caught Offworld contributor James Kochalka’s recent American Elf comic, in which the artist stays up all night with “obsessive compulsive narcissistic twiddling” to insert himself into a hacked rom of Super Mario Bros, and you may have thought, “well, now that’s a version of Mario I’d like to play,” and you’d be in luck, because you can download a patch to mod the game yourself right here [use these tools for Mac or PC to apply the patch to an original SMB rom].
It is what it is and nothing more: he hasn’t thematically updated any of the enemy sprites or extra art, it is simply a version of the game where you play as James Kochalka. And that is fine by me.
