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

Jay Peters at The Verge reports that, sadly, personal attacks from griefers have caused Ron Gilbert to stop posting updates on the development of his upcoming Monkey Island game. Booo! Don’t be a Gripe Monster, friends!

On NintendoLife, Damien McFerran mentions an piece in the next issue of pay fanzine Lock-On by Undertale and Deltarune creator Toby Fox, about the impact of the Japanese series Mother, known in the US as Earthbound.

Destructoid’s Chris Moyse mentions the remake of Pac-Man World mentioned at Nintendo’s indie-focused Direct has Pac-Mom instead of Ms. Pac-Man, pushing her further down the memory hole. The issue seems to be a rights issue around the character, who was not created by Namco but instead by classic indie arcade designer GCC, who has licensed her exclusively to AtGames.

It was a few days ago, but at Kotaku Jeremy Winslow posted about Simon Thomley, a.k.a. “Stealth,” of Sonic Mania developer Headcannon, about how he has complained that their work on Sonic Origins was done under time crunch, and they were not allowed to debug their work before release, and even that integration with the final product introduced new bugs they were not responsible for.

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

Graham Smith of Rock Paper Shotgun lets us know that the team who made AM2R, which infamously Nintendo sent a cease-and-desist, are working on a new game that’s a Metroidvania, but has nothing to do with Metroid, called Bō: Path of the Teal Lotus. It’s awful that Nintendo did that, and it’s great that they didn’t let the experience sour them!

Over at wccftech, Aernout van de Velde writes of an N64 emulator plug-in that supports many advanced graphics features, such as ray tracing and 60 fps output! Ocarina of Time ran natively at just 20 fps, seeing it at 60 is like opening your eyes opened for the first time. Here’s the announcement tweet, with embedded demonstration video:

At Ars Technica, Sam Machkovech reviews Sonic Origins, and notes a discomfiting thing about it: it costs $40 for many fewer games than a standard Genesis rom collection, yet on top of that also locks features and music behind DLC charges. Boo!

Matt Purslow of IGN tells us that Microsoft is confirming shortages of Xbox controllers. I’m sure some people are already trying to figure out ways to blame this on Joe Biden.

Ollie Reynolds writing on Nintendo Life relates an interesting discovery about Super Mario RPG back on the SNES: during its minecart section, if you don’t touch the controls at all, the game will play itself, and complete it for you. They found the news from the Twitter feed of splendid Mario arcana site Supper Mario Broth!

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

Late submissions for juried independent game festival Indiecade are open until May 15th.

C.J. Wheeler for Rock Paper Shotgun: Perfect World Entertainment absorbed by Gearbox Publishing.

Mitchell Clark for The Verge tells us that Apple claims right to remove software from App Store if they aren’t downloaded recently.

Brian of Nintendo Everything reports that Aspyr is open to ports of Star Wars: Rogue Squadron, including unreleased Wii versions. The source is this tweet.

“Dreadknux” of Sonic Stadium writes of fan art that adds the movies’ Agent Stone to images stills of other Sonic properties.

Brendan Hesse of Gamespot, speaking for site staff, offers a ranking of 14 Final Fantasy games. From worst to first, the ranking, all according to original Japanese numbering and not including the MMORPGs:
2 < 15 < 13 < 3 < 1 < 9 < 4 < 8 < 7 < 5 < 7 Remake < 10 < 12 Zodiac Age < 6

This is a little towards the technical end of things, but Sudden Desu on Twitter has created a framework for developing Mega CD (a.k.a. Sega CD) games, available from GitHub.

I’ve seen it elsewhere, but I’m linking to Eric Van Allen’s report for Destructoid, on Disney Dreamlight Valley, a lifesim with Disney IP. I’m imagining it as being like Animal Crossing, but with Disney characters. Do you know how annoying a neighbor Tigger would be?

Dennis Payne of Gaming On Linux tells us of a Dungeon Crawler Jam hosted by dungeoncrawlers.org, with some interesting output!

Ian Walker of Kotaku tells us of a mod for Final Fantasy VII Remake that brings Yoshitaka Amano-like designs to the generally un-Yoshitaka-Amano-like Barrett!

Alex Donaldson of VG247 snidely and suitably mocks the Denuvo DRM in the upcoming Sonic Origins for protecting the digital virtue of the original Sonic games, which have long been widely traded on the web.

Adam Conway at XDA lets us know of Skyway, a work-in-progress Nintendo Switch emulator made specifically for Android.

Christian Donlan, writing on Eurogamer, lets us know of Playdate games available on itch.io!

It fell to Sean Hollister at The Verge to inform us of a hack of a Fischer-Price toddler game controller to make it suitable for playing Elden Ring. Was it made by foone? It wasn’t, it was Rudeism? Cool.

And Steve Watts, writing for Gamespot, has, to mark the 35th anniversary of the release of the original Castlevania (the game not the anime), a listing of games not-too-subtly inspired by it, like 8 Eyes for the NES. Although this reviewer feels compelled to note they left out The Transylvania Adventure of Simon Quest!

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

Gavin Lane of Nintendo Life: Playnote gets a Flipnote Studio-style art app.

Jay Peters of The Verge, also on Playnote. Its makers wonder if its seasonal distribution model will be appreciated by purchasers of its becranked yellow joybox.

Ollie Reynolds of Nintendo Life: UbiSoft to shut down server support for a number of older titles.

Florence Ion (cool name!) of Gizmodo: Google Play is getting data safety settings.

Ollie Reynolds of Nintendo Life, again: Lego to release a huge new Super Mario set.

Thomas Whitehead of Nintendo Life (lot of items from them today): Game Freak to offer employees option of four-day workweek. Awesome!

Wes Finlon of PC Gamer: Moneyfarm Square-Enix unveils a new $11,600 statue of Terra from Final Fantasy VI riding Magitech armor that caused series creator Hironobu Sakaguchi to basically go WTF. Remember, back when he designed the first game in the series, Square was facing issues whether their little game development operation could survive.

“Master Blaster,” if that is their name, at Sora News 24, on Sega trying to bring eSports into Japanese high schools with a Puyo Puyo Boot Camp. “Listen up maggots, you’re going to spend the next hour setting up combos and fighting Draco Centauros until you get it right and I don’t want no backtalk or I’ll bust you down to facing Nohoho again!”

Rhys Wood of TechRadar: An Elden Ring demake for Game Boy is in the works.

Luke Plunkett of Kotaku: Super Mario movie delayed, Miyamoto promises it’ll be worth the wait. Aww, it’s just like that apocryphal quote often attributed to him. This reporter is overjoyed, the last one ended on that cliffhanger, Daisy was back from Dinohattan and needed Mario and Luigi’s help again, no doubt because of some scheme hatched by Koopa. I wonder how they’ll manage to bring Dennis Hopper back from the dead to reprise his role?

Alana Hauges, also from Nintendo Life: Sega plans to delist classic games from some platforms (but not Switch) in anticipation of the release of Sonic Origins.

And Ryan Dinsdale of IGN tells us Sony is creating a game preservation team, of which this reporter can only say, IT’S ABOUT FREAKING TIME.

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