Thursday, November 10, 2011
‘Encyclopedia of Game Machines’ Covers Four Decades of Videogame History
Revised and Extended 2nd Edition of Acclaimed Retro Gaming Book ‘Game Machines’ Launches on December 5, Featuring 248 Full-Color Pages and 700 Photos.
Vancouver, BC (PRWEB) November 10, 2011
Enati Media and GAMEplan today announced the publication date of Game Machines 1972-2012 - The encyclopedia of consoles, handhelds and home computers. The 2nd English-language edition of the renowned gaming history reference book will be available in North America on 12/05/2011 and can be pre-ordered at www.gameplanbooks.com.
Printed in color throughout and featuring over 700 photographs, Game Machines 1972-2012 is the reference book for every gamer and anyone interested in the history of computer entertainment.
The first 2005 edition of Game Machines became an instant classic and has been sold out for years. For the new release, author Winnie Forster teamed up with publisher Enati Media to revise and edit the translation based on the German Spielkonsolen und Heimcomputer books. Game Machines 1972-2012 grew to 248 pages to accommodate more recent systems, now covering four decades of electronic game systems, from the Magnavox Odyssey and Atari 2600 to the Apple iPhone and Sony Vita.
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Simpsons Arcade Game Might Be Coming to XBLA
The Simpsons Arcade Game may finally be in line for its first console port. As reported by XBLA Fans, the Australian government’s Classification Board has updated its database with a listing for The Simpsons Arcade Game on multiple platforms.
Originally released in 1991, The Simpsons Arcade Game was a four-player beat-’em-up from Konami. The game allowed players to plow through side-scrolling levels as Bart, Lisa, Homer, and Marge, pummeling generic suit-wearing bad guys, Matt Groening Life is Hell extras, and recognizable residents of Springfield alike. The arcade game was ported to the PC and Commodore 64 the same year, but never made it to the consoles of the time.
In 2009, Electronic Arts released a mobile phone game called The Simpsons Arcade, but the new classification suggests that the project is unrelated. Handed down yesterday, the listing details Konami as the publisher and retro specialist Backbone Entertainment as the developer. The Emeryville, California-based studio has previously released downloadable versions of Marvel vs. Capcom 2, Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix, and Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo HD Remix. It also developed Sonic’s Ultimate Genesis Collection, a compilation of 40 games from Sega’s 16-bit system, for the Xbox 360 and PS3.
The Simpsons is another in a line of downloadable console ports for Konami’s licensed coin-op games of the late ’80s and early ’90s. Last year, Konami and Backbone teamed up to release X-Men: The Arcade Game on the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. The publisher also worked with Ubisoft for 2007’s Xbox 360 release of the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles arcade game and in 2009 saw the French publisher remake the game’s arcade sequel, Turtles in Time.
Full article: http://www.gamespot. … le-platforms-6344641
Thursday, November 3, 2011
Voxatron Alpha Now Available
Voxatron’s out! For the next 2 weeks you can grab the Alpha version exclusively from humblebundle.com. All future updates are available free of charge, and you can pay whatever you like for it. Also in Humble Bundle tradition you can choose how to split your payment between two kick-ass organisations: Child’s Play and the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Be the first to tackle Voxatron — a voxel-based, old-school-gone-new platform shooter. Pick up your trusty pea gun and shoot your way through more than twenty challenging areas. The included Voxde level editor grants you the ability to create mind-blowing new environments to share with the world. And, as a customer of the Humble Voxatron Debut, you’ll receive access to all of Lexaloffle’s future updates to Voxatron.
Dive into a twisted basement dungeon in The Binding of Isaac. Get ready for a delicious brew of randomly generated, Legend of Zelda-esque dungeons; Robotron-esque run-and-gun; and action-RPG progression. The recently launched Halloween update adds a ton of content — a new chapter, new bosses, new enemies, new items, a new character, a new ending, and more!
Learn new tricks with tetrominoes in Blocks That Matter. In this award-winning, charismatic, platform-puzzler mashup, you play as the Tetrobot, a plucky robotic drill that assimilates blocks of varying materials and properties, like sand, wood, stone, obsidian, iron, and diamond. After absorbing blocks, you’ll need to recreate them in various tetromino-shaped patterns to solve puzzles and traverse levels.
Friday, October 28, 2011
10 best scary video games of all time
By Dave Herndon & Dave Scanlan
Ghosts, ghouls and goblins alike will be coming to your door Monday night trick or treating, earlier this week we published lists of films to enjoy between visitors, but if movies aren’t your thing, here are the top 10 horrifying video games, many of which can still be played on modern gaming consoles.
10. Dead Rising 2 (Playstation 3, Xbox 360, PC)— This is a zombie game, no this is THE zombie game, set in the fictional Fortune City, the game follows Chuck Greene as he fights off zombies while accomplishing goals around the city. Various weapons can be picked up, and even customized to as the play makes their way through the game. Up to 7,000 zombie characters can appear on screen at a time.
9. Resident Evil —(Playstation, Sega Saturn, PC, remade and revamped for GameCube and DS, the latter being known as Resident Evil: Deadly Silence) – As a member of S.T.A.R.S (Special Tactics And Rescue Service), it’s up to you to go to Raccoon City and fight your way through hordes of infected creatures to find your comrades.
8. The House of the Dead (arcade) —One of the best arcade shooter’s I have ever played, not so much scary as creepy, this is just as the title suggests set in a house filled with ‘dead’ things, or rather the inhuman experiments of one very mad scientist.
7. Ghostbusters (Nintendo Wii, Playstation 2 & 3, Nintendo DS, Xbox 360, PSP, PC) —The movie franchise from my youth became a fantastic game a couple of years ago. The game play is fantastic, the story is wonderful and the voice cast is all the originals from the film, what more could one ask for when hunting down the ghosts and ghouls from the netherworld?
6. Uninvited (Atari, Commodore 64, NES, PC) — Your sibling’s left the car after its crashed in front of an old mansion, and you have to find them. A tricky game, not unlike a choose-your-own-adventure, in which strange and horrifying deaths are not uncommon. Keep your wits about you.
Monday, October 24, 2011
Retro Fabulous Elite Collection Hits iOS This Weekend
The Elite Collection iOS app, which brings together 12 classics of the 1980s and early ’90s, will be available very soon.
As technology gets more and more advanced, the retro movement shows no sign of slowing down. In fact, the more advanced the device, the more eager people seem to be to play titles from 20 or 30 years ago on it. As such, we have already seen apps that let your iOS device pretend it’s a ZX Spectrum in all its four-color clashing glory. Longstanding UK publisher Elite Systems has been teasing its upcoming “Elite Collection” app, featuring a selection of what it calls “near-100%” 8-bit titles from the ’80s and ’90s, for some time now — and this weekend you’ll finally be able to get your hands on some of gaming’s true classics.
The Elite Collection and Elite Collection HD apps (for iPhone/iPod touch and iPad respectively) will be available this weekend for a seven day only promotional price of $.99, after which it will rise to $2.99. For less than a dollar, you’ll get 12 games from the Commodore 64/Atari 8-bit era, including revolutionary freeform RPG Alternate Reality: The City and its standalone expansion/sequel The Dungeon; action adventure Black Magic, already available as a standalone app; shooter Uridium; racer Buggy Boy (aka Speed Buggy); platformer First Samurai; soccer management sim Bundesliga Manager; shooters Denaris and Enforcer; an adaptation of the board game Battleship; sports game Frank Bruno’s Boxing; and Arkanoid knockoff Batty. Available for purchase inside the app will also be four more packs of games which will be $0.99 each — the contents of which are yet to be revealed.
A Cube of Cubes, or a Perplexing Way to Play16 GameCube Games
Blessed with a surplus of ancient Commodore 1702 monitors and a handful of GameCubes, Personal Computer Museum curator Syd Bolton stacked them all together to form a pleasantly confusing cube of cubes.
After debuting his cube of cubes at a recent Game Night held at his Ontario, Canada museum, Bolton took a little time out of his busy schedule of discovering one of the rarest Atari 2600 cartridges in existence to explain how the project came about and came together. I conceived the “Cube of Cubes” several years ago when the museum started receiving a large number of Commodore 1702 monitors (the kind that were used on the Commodore 64 but are still useful today as small televisions for gaming systems or DVD players).