News 1/24/22: Pokemon Collecting, Universal Mario World, Commodore 64 of Theseus

“We scour the Earth web for indie, retro, and niche gaming news so you don’t have to, drebnar!” – your faithful reporter

Let’s make it quick this week-

Oli Welsh at Polygon tells us what we already knew, that No Zelda Game is Closer to Breath of the Wild Than The 1986 Original. We can’t recommend it whole-heartedly though because it gets in some digs on the older game, saying it’s nowhere near as much fun as Link to the Past, a statement I disagree with.

Hope Bellingham at GamesRadar tells us that U.S. Customs wrecked a sealed-in-box copy of Pokemon Yellow valued at over $10,000. I rather disagree with that valuation too. I thought all the misguided young people were losing their money in crypto these days? (Note: GamesRadar is one of those sites that waits until you start reading an article then puts up a blocking box begging you to subscribe. Hint to GamesRadar: NO, and if I were interested in subscribing my generous impulse would have been destroyed by your prompt!)

Image from The Guardian, probably ultimately from a promotional photograph

At the Guardian, the very British-named Oliver Wainwright reviews Super Mario World, not the game but the theme park in California, a part of Universal Studios Hollywood. The verdict: 8/10, good graphics, some replay value. I’ve been in a melancholy frame of mind as of late, so seeing those brightly-painted dioramas makes me wonder what they’ll look like in twenty years, when Universal Studios’ attentions have drifted to another big thing. Nothing ages quite as badly as a happy prop painted in primary colors.

I said I was going to make this quick, let’s keep moving. Maya Posch at hackaday talks about a project to build a Commodore 64 using new parts.

Ollie Reynolds found some Donkey Kong design documents on Twitter, from the days when it was planned to be a Popeye game. He found them retweeted by blogfriend Mike Mika of Digital Eclipse, who in turn found them looking through Mario history site Forest of Illusion.

Forgeries in PC Retro Gaming Collecting

Image credit: Ars Technica

Kyle Orland at Ars Technica, who always does good work, has a long piece up about scandals in PC game collecting. It’s a close-knit subculture where members trust each other implicitly, but as the value of old games has gone up, it has recently been awash in forgeries.

A prime culprit in their distribution was Enrico Ricciardi, a prominent figure in the community who many members trusted. He is known for writing books on the history of the Ultima games and the early days of Ultima publisher Origin Systems. It’s not known that he was actually forging the copies of the games, but the fakes are known to have passed through his hands, and it’s considered by the group that he should have been able to spot fakes.

It’s a fascinating article that involves prominent Apple II disk imaging expert 4am doing forensics on a supposedly-legitimate disk of The Chambers of Xenobia and finding it was a cracked copy.

Ars Technica: Inside the $100K+ forgery scandal that’s roiling PC game collecting