I’ve not hidden my general contempt for current-day Atari, a company that has little to do with the old company, and has among other things dirtied their hands with cryptocurrency. But at least they know they have their hands on something good with the iconic Atari “Fuji” logo.
They tweeted about an article on the logo on the site Logo Design Love, which itself is an excerpt from Tim Lapetino’s wonderful book The Art of Atari. That at least is worth your time to check out! The logo is definitely one for the ages, which is probably why contemporary Atari still uses it. Atari Games, the arcade company, made use of it from early days all the way through to the end, when they were renamed Midway Games West shortly before they were dissolved completely.
“We scour the Earth web for indie, retro, and niche gaming news so you don’t have to, drebnar!” – your faithful reporter
Nicole Clark at Polygon wants us to know of a free video card game based on Pokemon that isn’t derived from the physical CCG! It’s called Pokemon Crystal League, it’s free on itch.io, and it’s instead inspired by the first portion of Inscryption. As with anything so directly related to a Nintendo property, you should probably look into getting this before it’s too late-assuming it even makes it to press time!
Cuphead: The Delicious Last Course (image source: StudioMDHR)
Also at Polygon: Cian Maher’s 14 “most exciting” games of the summer, which contains a Gloomhaven computer game update, Super Mario Strikers, Capcom Fighting Collection, and Cuphead: The Delicious Last Course.
Back once again to the crossover fighter genre. Zack Zwiezen at Kotaku looks at WB’s Multiversus and asks, with some justification, if all pop culture is merging into a thick homogeneous paste. It is, after all, a game in which The Iron Giant can team up with Velma from Scooby-Doo to fight against Batman and Tom & Jerry. Space Jam: A New Legend certainly seems to imply WB is heading in that direction.
D. Hardawar at Engadget tells us that EVE Online can now be played streaming with just a web browser and a strong-enough internet connection. The new format is called EVE Anywhere. I mean, why not? The game is already sometimes derisively refereed to as a spreadsheet simulator, so why not build Google Docs support into it too?
Also from Liam Doolan: Nintendo files a patent for a method to fight online cheating and software modification. We take the view here that all software patents are bad by definition, but at least they’re trying to do something about cheating in their games? While the article has an illustration from a Splatoon game, there is actually nothing to say which games will utilize this technique.
Finally, from way over on Video Games Chronicle, Jordan Middler mentions that Xbox S sales in Japan exceeded PlayStation 5 sales last week. It’s the first time something like this has happened in eight years! It seems likely that the limited number of PS5s available to be sold might explain the difference. The PS5 still has a higher install base in Japan compared to the Series S, by 8-to-1, but in the past year the Series S has exceeded the entire lifetime sales of the Xbox Series X. Since the release of the original Xbox back in the PS2/Gamecube era, only 2.3 million units have been sold across the entire line, most of them being sales of the 360.
This is not some fan game made to play like Marble Madness, but the real deal, a legendary lost prototype from the Silver Age of Atari Games! Cancelled because of the great arcade fervor at the time around fighting games, meaning little Atari released in that era performed well on test.
Word is that the rom has been released somewhere on the internet, although I do not know where. It had been known that all the surviving Marble Madness II cabinets were owned by old Atari staff or collectors who were averse to allowing the rom images to be released. Whether one of them had a change of heart or, as has been speculated with Akka Arrh, another legendary prototype, they may have been obtained through nefarious means.
Technically the rights are still owned by Warner Media, I believe. I’ve long been amazed that the current rights holders haven’t seeked out the owners of these prototypes and offered them a big payday to dump the roms and release something like a Midway Arcade Treasures 4. Sure, it’d only be a matter of time before someone broke the roms out of such a package, but they’d still sell a ton of units and the prototype owners would be properly rewarded for both maintaining their machines and for lost collector value, and importantly, the games would be out there among people who would enjoy them and be protected against further loss and obscurity.
The subject line says it all. It seems like it’ll still be possible to get funds into those shops for a while using a Switch, or using a funding card, but direct adding will be disabled after today.
The long-running Atari fansite AtariAge sells a number of carts that run on classic Atari VCS systems that make it do things you might not expect that system could do. Some of the most impressive of these are remakes of classic arcade games that go far beyond what was possible at the time. A number of these were developed by Champ Games. Here are links to a number of videos showing them off, although sone of the may not currently be in their store:
“We scour the Earth web for indie, retro, and niche gaming news so you don’t have to, drebnar!” – your faithful reporter
From Marc Deschamps at comicbook, Epic bought Fall Guys studio Mediatonic, and as a result, when Fall Guys goes free-to-play, they’re removing it from Steam. People who had bought it on Steam will still have access to it there, and they plan to still support and update that version, but new copies will no longer be sold there.
Multiple places are reporting on a new game described as Stardew Valley meets Spirited Away. I’m choosing to link to Kate Gray’s post on NintendoLife on Spirittea. I get the sense that there is a PR department around this media blitz, although I certainly don’t begrudge them that, drebnar.
At Ars Technica, Sam Machkovech calls Warner Bros’ Multiversus, their upcoming smashalike (I’m still trying to make that term happen!) “a compelling Smash Bros. clone.” I mean, it’s got Steven Universe and Garnet in it, so that’s a plus, but no Pearl or Peridot! Also: no Switch version yet.
Jez Corden at Windows Central says Microsoft’s Activision/Blizzard acquisition is moving fast. I wonder if, way back in the early 80s, those bright young refugees from Atari suspected that, one day, the company they were founding would one day contribute to the value of a corporate behemoth?
You’ve made it another Sunday! For making it this far, why not take a break with some fun things? The whole point of Sundry Sunday is to be a low effort thing for the end of the week, but to be honest I couldn’t resist putting in a little extra work on this one.
It might not be evident on the surface, but the classic riffing show Mystery Science Theater 3000 has roots deeply entwined with video games. The show’s staff were known to spend off hours playing Doom against each other on a company LAN they had made for that purpose. During the show, they produced a clip that was distributed on the PlayStation Underground magazine CDs in which they riffed on some of Sony’s artsy commercials from that time (above).
After the original run of the show ended, some of the cast and crew drifted for a bit, doing various projects. One was a short-lived web comedy magazine called Timmy Big Hands, which we might look at some day. Show leads Mike Nelson, Kevin Murphy and Bill Corbett did a couple of other things together, like a four episode movie riffing project called The Film Crew, before they eventually settled into doing Rifftrax, a project the three of them work on to this day.
While at Rifftrax, they’ve produced at least two game riffing clips. The first was made for sadly-departed gaming site Joystiq, and riffs on Mega Man, Final Fantasy X, Sonic the Hedgehog and, especially, something from the Metal Gear Solid series, which I would think is the perfect fodder for such video merrymaking:
Afterward they made another short clip for IGN riffing on Gears of War 3:
Rifftrax makes their living producing and selling clips making fun of shorts and movies, and one of those is the 1993 schlockfest Super Mario Bros. I call it schlock, but it’s one of those movies that critical opinion has slowly been coming around on over the years since its release. More and more it’s being seen as a competently-made and entertaining kids’ sci-fi fantasy movie perfectly of a piece with the era in which it was made-it’s just not a very good adaptation of the games with which it shares a title.
Rifftrax sells the whole Super Mario Bros. riff, complete with the movie on which it’s based, on their site. I highly recommend it, but IGN presents a nine-minute clip teaser from it on YouTube:
Kenta Cho is a brilliant game maker, and he’s come up with a couple of generators that can generatively make short stretches of music, suitable for classic-inspired arcade games.
Short VGM Generator is on itch.io, and works by taking a pre-existing piece of music and attempting to make another piece of a similar style.
The Good Old Game Sound Generator is on GitHub, but for playing around you might be more interested in its Demo page. It takes a bit more effort to make something with it, but it’s a much more flexible tool. I must leave you to your own devices to make something of value, or at least of interest, using it.
The process that let him to create these tools is up on a page he made on dev.to. If you’re interested in generative music you should take a look!
Jake Gable writing for Cultr lists his 10 favorite PlayStation 2 games. For the details you should read the article, but from 10th to 1st, they are Kingdom Hearts, Virtua Fighter 4, Medal of Honor: Frontline, The Getaway, James Bond 007: Nightfire, Pro Evolution Soccer 5, Ratchet & Clank, Gran Turismo 4, The Simpsons Hit & Run, and Grand Theft Auto Vice City and San Andreas, cheating a bit by combining two games into one item.
Rich Stanton at PC Gamer says Cave Story is now a roguelike. Why not? Make everything a roguelike! Let’s burn it all down! We won’t rest until you can play an @-sign in Animal Crossing and swing a parenthesis at K.K. Slider! Well back in boring old reality, this is actually a fangame called Doukutsu Randamu: The Cave Story Roguelike. It’s free on itch.io!
Anthony Wallace at Retro Dodo tells us of seven interesting recent Pokemon Emerald romhacks! Romhacks haven’t shown up on Set Side B much yet but we’re fully in favor of them here, so, look out for more on this subject in the future!
Source: Art and Artifacts – Upload credit: Melora of historyofhyrule.com
This is a collection, made by Melora, of various Japanese publications related to The Legend of Zelda and its sequels, including manuals, hint books, strategy guide and manga. There’s a lot to go through! Some of it is translated, a lot isn’t. But it’s all nice to leaf through. There’s four heads to this particular Gleeok: a home page, a blog, a Twitter feed, a Flickr image archive with tons of images, and a substantial amalgamation on the Internet Archive. If you’re as familiar with Zelda games as I am, you might not even particularly need the strategy guides translated!
I still remember the first substantial thing I read about Zelda, long ago, a review in, of all places, Games Magazine. I must have been about 13 at the time. It seemed like an awesome thing to my games-addled brain, but at that moment I didn’t even have an NES. When I first played it, it was amazing. I spent months uncovering every item and secret (finding Level 7 in the second quest was a major roadblock).
So, when I think of The Legend of Zelda, I think of challenging game play, exploring a huge world, finding deviously hidden secrets, and overcoming a formidable challenge purely by my own efforts. All of these side various comics are a bit lost of me, as it is not often that I get into the lore of the series (The Wind Waker was a major exception), but I understand that a lot of other people do, and I think that’s terrific.
I have not had that the kind of experience I got from The Legend of Zelda from many other things since the era of the NES, but two places I did get it from were Breath of the Wild, of course, and Fez. I hear Tunic‘s pretty good, I probably should look into that soon….
Some more images, from various materials related to the first game. All are from this Flickr album, and were uploaded (and many of them, scanned) by Melora of History of Hyrule:
Publication Source: Million Publishing Guide – Contributor Source: Zelda Dungeon
Publication Source: 3 Game Guide Contributor Source: Donated by Mases of Zelda Dungeon
Originally found in the comic magazine Monthly Shonen Captain May 18, 1986, discovered thanks to twitter.com/kazzykazycom
Found by kazzykazcom on Twitter, unknown originSource: From the The Legend of Zelda: The Mirage Castle by Akio Higuchi and Yuko Tanaka, 1986
Owner of Game Wisdom with more than a decade of experience writing and talking about game design and the industry. I’m also the author of the “Game Design Deep Dive” series and “20 Essential Games to Study”
I’d like to draw your attention in particular to the ad for GEOS on that page, the early C64 windowed operating system that breathed new life into the system. In the end it was probably doomed due to a number of factors: Apple’s head start and much better marketing, the fact GEOS had to be booted from disk while Mac OS was partly ROM-resident, and a bit of clunkiness. But you can do rather a lot with GEOS all by itself, and it comes with a capable word processor in GeoWrite. GEOS, and its weird legacy, probably deserves a post of its own eventually.
The image above is for a fake ad, but it’s based off of an iconic, and slightly disturbing, television ad from Austrailia, Keeping Up With The Commodore:
