On Friday May 29th, Clear River Games confirmed that they would be rereleasing the classic CAVE shooters Pink Sweets: Ibara Sorekara and Muchi Muchi Pork! on modern consoles. The developer City Connection is responsible for bringing the games to the PlayStation 5 and the Nintendo Switch. The shooters originally came out in 2006 and 2007 respectively. They were two of eighteen vertical shooters that CAVE produced in collaboration with AMI for Japanese arcades from 2002-2011.

Why these two specific titles were singled out for this rerelease wasn’t entirely clear. Pink Sweets is the third title in the Ibara series of shooters, but with a much more colorful food inspired palette. Muchi Muchi Pork! is themed around pigs and makes extensive use of a lard system as a core gameplay mechanic. The only apparent commonality between these two titles, as opposed to other CAVE shooters from this time period, is that they were licensed for an Xbox 360 release back in 2011.

The original arcade game modes will be included in this release, although there will also be multiple new arrangements that will make these shooters more accessible to casual fans as well as more difficult for hardcore players seeking a greater challenge. The compilation is set to see a digital release on October 1st on the online Playstation 5 and Nintendo Switch stores. A physical version of the game will be available for purchase starting on October 26th.

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Earlier today, Stern Pinball formally announced through a video and a news release on its website that it has developed and is now selling a Transformer pinball table, specifically titled Transformers: More Than Meets The Eye. This table is themed around the 1986 animated film, Transformers: The Movie, although it also utilizes story elements from the 1984 television series. The project was developed with a mind for the movie’s fortieth anniversary this year.

As to be expected from Stern’s retro releases, this table makes extensive use of footage and music from the original property. Peter Cullen as Optimus Prime and Frank Welker as Megatron both make custom call-outs. Additionally, there is a new special mode centered around The Touch by Stan Bush, the song from the original film. Original music from The Knights of Unicron also features heavily into this table.

Of particular interest to pinball fans is a competitive mode allowing two players to directly play against each other, one as Optimus Prime, and one as Megatron, on the same table. Lead designer Elizabeth Gieske, who also developed the Jaws table, has also brought over some of the innovations from that well-received project, like in-game currency, console style gameplay, and distinctive alternate game modes. As is typical for Stern releases, Transformers: More Than Meets The Eye is available in three editions, Pro for $6,999, Premium for $9,699, and Limited for $12,999, with extra features scaling for the higher levels.

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On March 13th, Art Whirled announced through a press release that it was bringing 26 original Street Fighter II sketches by Mick McGinty to auction. The pieces can be seen here. This artwork was created for marketing purposes in the United States. Capcom hired the ad agency Moore & Price to locate a suitable artist. They found Mick McGinty.

The most significant pieces of this set are the original inked cover sketches, accompanying the final painted versions. Mick McGinty produced the cover art for Street Fighter II Championship Edition for the Sega Genesis as well as Street Fighter II for the Super Nintendo, and also Street Fighter II Turbo for the Super Nintendo. Among the 7 cover sketches, there is also an inked alternate cover sketch for Street Fighter II Turbo. In this version, Sagat assaults E. Honda rather than enduring the sumo wrestler’s assault, with Dhalsim far more visible in the background than he is in the version that was ultimately used.

One painting, of Chun Li striking Vega with her legendary kick on her home stage, is a special commission produced for reasons not disclosed by Art Whirled. The remaining 18 sketches and paintings are of individual character art. 15 Sketches are available for Balrog, Blanka, Dhalsim, E. Honda, Fei Long, Guile, Ken, M. Bison, Sagat, Vega, and Zangief. 3 Paintings are available for Dhalsim, Sagat, and Vega.

These sketches were used for various purposes by Capcom, perhaps most notably in the advertising campaign for Street Fighter II Championship Edition which spotlighted that the four boss characters of the game, Balrog, M. Bison, Sagat, and Vega, were now playable. Other materials of note are available in the individual auctions. For example, a Sports Illustrated cover photo of Mike Tyson which was apparently used as a model for the Balrog sketch. Parties interested in owning any of these pieces of gaming history should inquire directly with Art Whirled.

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Every Boss Fight book tends to have a novel approach depending on the author, and Phillip J Reed is no different with his Resident Evil volume. In fact, his approach is distinctly unusual, with the praise for the originator of survival horror from 1996 veiled behind calling it a cheesy rip-off. Nevertheless, the story he tells is a compelling one in regard to the original game’s importance, much of which is locked behind a specific cultural moment and context we couldn’t bring back even if we wanted to.

Reed’s narrative is framed around his own first experience playing the game as a kid in grade school, with other kids. Reed didn’t like horror games in general. He didn’t even like Resident Evil that much. Indeed, the first chapter quite literally ends with him stammering that Resident Evil is just Alone in the Dark, a game he actually did play at the time. But in retrospect, Alone in the Dark is mostly resembled for being an obvious predecessor to Resident Evil, and really, probably the only game before Resident Evil itself that can reasonably be quantified as survival horror.

Where Reed starts to appreciate Resident Evil as more than a rip-off is the distinctly cinematic scope of the title, which took advantage of the still relatively novel CD format for video games to make aggressive use of voice acting and even live action scenes. The cheesiness of video game voice acting, up until Resident Evil, had generally worked against most CD games. But Resident Evil had the surprising advantage of taking itself seriously no matter how silly the poorly translated script got. There’s a good reason why Lloyd Kaufman of Toxic Avenger fame, of all people, wrote the foreward for this book. Resident Evil almost perfectly typifies camp.

One of Reed’s more interesting arguments, although I suppose he frames them more as descriptions, is how Resident Evil and Biohazard really do need to be interpreted as completely different games. It’s not just that the Biohazard audience in Japan couldn’t easily tell that the game’s English dialog sounds ridiculous. There’s also the common practice of the time where games, upon being imported to the United States, had their difficulty ramped up to dissuade game rentals as opposed to purchases. In Reed’s memories, Resident Evil is tense in part because it is very easy to die unexpectedly. Ammo is limited, and any unexpected surprise has high potential stakes, with all the tedium implied of having to backtrack through endless loading screens.

Even the loading screens, mind you, work to amplify this vibe by raising the tension. Resident Evil is very much a paradox in that it’s the more archaic, inconvenient parts of the game, the sort of thing fixed by quality-of-life improvements in modern titles, that made Resident Evil so memorable. The game is a clumsy mess where you don’t really have any idea what you’re getting into. It’s precisely that quality which makes the various turnabouts in the story compelling, encouraging a child like Reed to pick up little notes of backstory and lore, then jumble that around in his head during the gameplay experience to build an unsettling story where man is the greatest monster of all.

Resident Evil didn’t exactly break new storytelling ground in any way that can easily be communicated in text. Rather, the game was noteworthy because of its sheer immersive qualities. The voice actors, as well as the live action models, are compelling professionals despite the poor quality of their script. In one sense, the ramshackle nature of the whole production just amplifies the mystery. Reed openly acknowledges that there are some things about Resident Evil we may well never know. Many of the actors he finds didn’t even know they were in such a famous game until quite some time later.

Resident Evil is an artifact of a time where video games weren’t quite big business yet, but some people had faith enough in the concept that they were willing to try for something big, even if they weren’t quite sure how it was going to come out. And really, I doubt anyone could have intentionally come up with this game’s strange mishmash of powerful ambience and goofy execution. Never knowing where on that spectrum the next room is going to land is a huge part of the fun.

The post A review of Resident Evil from Boss Fight Books appeared first on Old School Gamer Magazine.

My particular nostalgia gaming fixation is rechargeable batteries, of the AA or AAA variety. I have memories of going to my grandparents’ house in Iowa every summer with just a Game Boy to keep me company. And my grandparents, now dearly departed, bless their hearts, likely influenced by their own Great Depression era childhood, preferred rechargeable batteries. I have many a memory of carefully minding my batteries and swapping them in and out of the charger as a kid to get my game on.

It was from this mindset that a few weeks ago, I impulsively bought ten rechargeable batteries and two chargers at a garage sale. They were a package deal for a few bucks, and I hadn’t even tried to use rechargeable batteries since I was a kid. So, I was excited to give them a try and did so the very next day when I went on a hike, enjoying the new spring weather with my ModRetro Chromatic powered by rechargeable batteries, just like my Game Boy was back in the day.

Well, long story short, there was a reason I, and for that matter most people, don’t use rechargeable AA batteries anymore. Most modern devices have their own batteries. In general, battery life is much better than it was thirty years ago, so when AA batteries are needed, non-rechargeables are fine. And this last one isn’t about AAs in particular but definitely applies to any old batteries purchased for pocket change at a garage sale. They leak.

I’m writing this embarrassing story of my own stupidity partially just to warn you to check your old battery powered devices if you haven’t recently, since there’s a good chance that they’ve gone bad over years and might, um, explode. PSP batteries are especially notorious for this. I had direct experience with a WiiU Gamepad doing this in recent years, even if I stopped it before the situation got that dire. So, mind your batteries for leaks. Go on, take a minute to check, it’s better than the alternative.

But I also wanted to briefly discuss what happened when I discussed the issue with ModRetro. The short of it is, my Chromatic wasn’t playing sound anymore. Not through the speakers, nor through the headphones, which puzzled me because it implied a firmware issue, and updating didn’t fix it, is why I reached out to ModRetro. After some back and forth, including documentation of my device’s issues, we finally concluded that the issue was somehow caused by a battery leak. I still don’t quite understand how, as the Chromatic was fully functional aside from the sound issue.

I was as transparent with ModRetro about my stupidity as I’m being with you now. So, it was a bit of a surprise to me when they offered to replace my unit, if I mailed my defective one to them. I know what you’re thinking. Was this just special treatment, because I write for Old School Gamer Magazine? To which my answer is, I can’t rule it out. I used my real name when contacting customer service, but not my work e-mail, and I was careful not to give them any information which would unambiguously identify who I was.

If I absolutely had to guess, I’d say no, because I hinted that I would rather have a different color Chromatic than the one my ex picked, but they sent me another Inferno, probably because sending an identical unit is the policy, not that this happens very often. I had to ask them whether they also wanted the original box and ModRetro Tetris back. They thanked me and confirmed that yes, this would be their preference since they would be sending a new retail unit as a replacement.

It probably helped that I was polite and courteous, which is always good practice with customer service. They responded in kind and were quite prompt and professional. Anyway, the main takeaway here is, to please please please mind your batteries and don’t damage your devices for no reason through failing to appreciate that batteries are fickle and destructive. Even the Chromatic, which I find to be a very sturdy device, is vulnerable to a leaky battery. Granting all that though, if you do mess up and damage your Chromatic like I did, ModRetro will likely be accommodating and understanding.

I’d like to think that as we speak, their engineers are poring over my old Chromatic, trying to figure out how a battery leak could break the sound and only the sound. In any case, I’m comforted that it’s in good hands. Now if you’ll excuse me, I really ought to check some of my other batteries.

The post How I broke my Chromatic and ModRetro fixed it appeared first on Old School Gamer Magazine.

Earlier this year, I had a realization. The SIU Student Center, like so many buildings that have been around a long time, has a bunch of old CRTs in storage. What if, instead of just letting them sit there collecting dust, they could be brought out to serve their original purpose? By which I mean, of course, letting people play Duck Hunt on the NES with nice, satisfying Zapper Gun clicks at Saluki Con this past weekend, from the 18th to the 19th.

When I first contacted Saluki Con about the possibility of setting up free-to-play retro games at Saluki Con, Nathan Bonner of Student Affairs was enthusiastic about the idea. So was Ryan Burger, the publisher of Old School Gamer Magazine. He offered four Ataris from his personal stash for the event. Unfortunately, there were only two gamepads in that stash, one of which can’t go down. Fortunately, Nathan Bonner had an old copy of E.T., so on that first day I just set E.T. up with a broken controller, figuring no one would understand the game well enough to realize that they’re supposed to be able to go down.

Unsurprisingly, even when I changed up the display on the second day, consolidating the Atari games to a single 2600, no one could figure out what they were supposed to do. One family did manage to figure out how to beat Adventure though (the little Stormtrooper was one of them), and a teenager who initially hated H.E.R.O. got to appreciate the obscure, late age Atari title. Pac-Man is, well, Pac-Man. I did get the idea to set up an old Pac-Man plug-and-play just to show off how crude the Atari 2600 port is compared to something that more clearly resembles the Pac-Man we all know and love. I also set up the Epilogue Playback with some Game Boy games, mostly because a lot of people asked for Tetris that first day.

Overall, the event was quite successful! I thought three TVs would be plenty, but demand was high enough that I requested a fourth one for the second day. Now that these CRTVs have been awakened to their true purpose, they can slumber for the next year awaiting the moment when they will be called into service again, dazzling children with their beautiful scanlines. Maybe next year we can have a second NES too, with Hogan’s Alley. Until then, a merry welcome to any new subscribers who scanned our QR code for that free digital subscription!

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The NES metroidvania game Annalog has already been confirmed for a physical release via The Retro Room thanks to generous Kickstarter backing. With ten days left to go in its funding drive, Annalog will almost certainly hit the $20,000 goal, guaranteeing a release for the Nintendo Switch. And it may or may not get the last $5,000 needed to guarantee publication of a Gamefaqs style ASCII walkthrough. While mdsteele, the man behind Annalog, is a nights-and-weekend game developer, Annalog isn’t his first title to earn a physical release. That honor goes to BIG2SMALL, so I thought to review the indie title to offer a bit of a preview as to just how mdsteele’s new game is likely to play.

BIG2SMALL is not a metroidvania, of course, but rather a puzzle game. You play as Ellie the elephant, Giselle the goat, and Melanie the Mouse in a format I think can be best described as sliding ice puzzles. In each stage, you try to get the animals onto their favorite food. They will go forward until stopped, with obstacles changing depending on the specific animal. Each puzzle is a deceptively simple looking 10×9 board. Gradually, new restrictions and abilities are introduced to the animals until by the final board, there’s a puzzle that uses every single one of the game’s mechanics at once.

The game looking and reads very adorably, with simple dialog that sounds like something out of a snarky children’s book that clearly explains every new quirk to the gameplay. But don’t be fooled. BIG2SMALL requires some fairly incredible spatial reasoning skills in order to move forward. Despite the fact that at any given time only twelve moves (and usually not that many) are available to the player, as each animal can only move in four directions, each move greatly complicates the board such that if you can’t conceptualize what the screen will look like several moves ahead, you may quickly get hopelessly stuck.

The design of the puzzles in BIG2SMALL are such that it isn’t really possible to get stuck, although you do have the option to restart the puzzle in the original position whenever you like anyway. BIG2SMALL is quite well designed for play on real hardware in this regard. I can easily imagine someone taking out a Game Boy and playing through a puzzle or two while waiting for something. Only if they’re really good at these kinds of puzzles though. I’m definitely not, and while I eventually managed to force my way through most of the game, I had to give up on the last two and look up the online solutions.

Oh yeah, the online solutions. For now, the Annalog Gamefaqs style guide is just a dangling Kickstarter prize, but there’s a very real Gamefaqs guide for BIG2SMALL available right now. While this isn’t the most artistic looking piece of ASCII, it will answer any flabbergasted responses you might have upon seeing a puzzle that supposedly can be completed in thirteen moves, even though you simply cannot see any way to do so. Again, I’m bad at these puzzles, and I could only just barely limp to the end of regular gameplay by cheating. I expect anyone who’s good at them will find quite the formidable challenge trying to complete every puzzle on par, earning a modest little star next to the stage name.

What, in the end, does this bode for Annalog? I would say plenty of good! The design of the puzzles in BIG2SMALL are challenging and complex, requiring dozens of careful chess-like precision moves to pull off. Yet the game is quite fair and transparent in its explanation, and at no point did I feel like the difficulty was unfair, even if I certainly would have liked a hint or two every so often. Word to the wise, don’t interpret BIG2SMALL literally. The exact order you need to get the animals into place varies constantly, and mdsteele packs a lot of variety and even replayability into such a simple concept.

The post A review of BIG2SMALL appeared first on Old School Gamer Magazine.

It’s the thirty-year anniversary of the very first Pokémon games which were released back in 1996. Nintendo is pulling out all the stops reminding us. But unofficial historians are getting in on the act too, with The History of the Pokémon Games by James Batchelor coming out on March 30th courtesy of Pen & Sword Books. The title’s a bit of an odd choice for an imprint best known for military history, although really, when you think about it, Pokémon is a war of its own.

Whether this unofficial volume qualifies as a true history will likely depend on how nitpicky you want to get in regard to the exact details. There are several factual errors in here, but all of them are roughly on the lines of statements like saying shiny Pokémon were only aesthetically different from their counterparts, with no stat differences. This wasn’t actually true, for the second generation in which they first appeared anyway, although there are very few contexts where the technical difference is all that important.

Batchelor’s history in broad strokes is accurate, although the detail goes down as the book goes on. Part of this is just because the development of Pokémon has grown so complicated over the years that by the time we hit the sixth generation, there’s really no longer any pretense of this being any kind of underdog operation. That doesn’t make the details of the first generation any less fun, mind you. The origins of Gamefreak as a literal game zine (which you can read online if you like although obviously it’s all in Japanese) never stop being fun.

Although the lack of a Gunpei Yokoi acknowledgment irritated me. We all know Shigeru Miyamato was involved, but Gunpei Yokoi is an unsung hero of Pokémon for helping Gamefreak afloat by interceding to give them the right to use Nintendo licensed characters for their puzzle games, which Batchelor incorrectly implies were premised as having Nintendo character licenses from the outset. Again, this omission doesn’t doom the book’s overall scholarship, but it does beg the question of why we need an unofficial compendium of the Pokémon games if Batchelor is just going to use the usual Nintendo story that tends to obfuscate Yokoi’s existence.

The answer? Batchelor includes, at the end of each chapter of the mainline games, an extended compendium of every licensed Pokémon game that was released during this time period. While the individual entries in this compendium are much shorter than the chapters, they’re an incredibly useful reference for anyone trying to keep track of all these games. And there’s probably no better resource than this book for keeping all these games straight, as these titles range from sleeper classics to forgotten abandonware to games Nintendo quite literally tried to destroy. Apparently, Nintendo was furious when Warner Brothers overstepped their contract and hired Cyberworld International Corporation to make a browser game based on the Pokémon 2000 movie, and the game was thought lost until 2023 when DidYouKnowGaming was able to find a copy.

The compendium tells a sort of story in itself of just how much game development has changed over the last thirty years. The crude edutainment titles of the nineties and the aughts give way to the gacha games of the teens, a trend that feels more than a little ominous when put together in a timeline like that. Only a true expert on Pokémon is likely to be familiar with even half the games that Batchelor discusses here. Sure, I might know about EV functionality and Gunpei Yokoi but I still learned a lot about spin-offs and apps from this book I doubt I ever would have found out about otherwise.

This, coupled with high quality photos, nice glossy pages, and reasonably large type make The History of the Pokémon Games a very good coffee table book. The presentation allows for much of the trivia to exceed the sum of its parts, making for a remarkably coherent narrative that reads more like a corporate history intended for internal use than marketing copy intended to sell us on more Pokémon merch. This is an easy book to recommend for any fan of the series, and even those who are just a little curious what Pokémon is even all about.

The post A review of The History of the Pokémon Games appeared first on Old School Gamer Magazine.

On March 31st, Boss Fight Books confirmed that it had acquired enough funds via its Kickstarter campaign to go forward with its latest project, a book about the 1997 strategy game Age of Empires, written by Richard Moss, an Australian gaming historian whose work is catalogued on his website here. Richard Moss has already interviewed 29 employees from Ensemble and Microsoft in this time period for the project.

The huge scope of the project is such that Boss Fight Books had hoped for, and now will be, publishing the Age of Empires book in two volumes, one the paperback copy that is standard for the publishing house, and a special edition hardcover edition featuring color photos, which are not typical in Boss Fight Books. The last such special edition hardcover was for the Goldeneye 007 book, which was the 29th title published by Boss Fight Books. Additionally, going forward Boss Fight Books is revamping their cover style, and is now commissioning original art instead of relying on stock images. Jack Grimes designed the cover for this book from the concept art stage.

As of this writing, the Kickstarter campaign has amassed $8,472 as it sets its sights toward stretch goals. At $10,000, Boss Fight Books will commission bookmarks based on the cover art, to be included alongside the special edition. Rewards continue in $5,000 increments until the final level, $50,000, where all backers who ordered physical books will receive free eBooks. Backers will also receive eBooks of Video Game Maps: SNES – Volume 1 at the $15,000 stretch goal level and Bottomless Pit: Running and Jumping Through Platform Games – Volume 1 at the $30,000 stretch goal level.

As is typical for Kickstarters, the pledges function as preorders. An $8 will yield a standard eBook, $16 for the paperback or the special edition eBook, and $30 for the special edition hardcover. All versions, plus bonus contents and special thanks in the hardcover and online, require a pledge of $60. The Boss Fight Books edition of Age of Empires is expected to see publication sometime in June as an eBook, July as a paperback, August as a deluxe eBook, and October as a hardcover. The Kickstarter campaign ends on April 28th.

The post Boss Fight Books confirms Age of Empires as 41st title appeared first on Old School Gamer Magazine.

The Kickstarter for Annalog only launched on Tuesday, but the NES game has already achieved its initial $7000 goal and then some. The Retro Room Games has confirmed that it has hit its first stretch goal of $10,000 with 28 days left to go in the campaign. Backers are now guaranteed to receive their physical and digital editions of the creepy, machine-centered Metroidvania in October of this year.

The game itself is already finished, and the source code is freely available. The main purpose of the campaign was to fund the production of physical NES cartridges. Now that this goal has been met, The Retro Room Games is eyeing its ultimate stretch goal, $25,000, at which point they will publish a 1990’s GameFAQs style text document providing ASCII art and solutions to all of the game’s puzzles. The first stretch goal, $10,000, guarantees the publication of Game Genie codes for the Annalog.

At the $12,000 level, The Retro Room Games will add pins and sticks for all backers of physical copies. At the $15,000 level, they will produce a short digital 1990’s style gaming magazine article about the game with maps, tips, trivia, and codes. At the $20,000 level, they will port Annalog to the Nintendo Switch. Annalog was developed by mdsteele. It is his fourth retro game title, and the second one which will be published in physical form by The Retro Room Games. The first, Big2Small, can be purchased as a physical cartridge for the Game Boy, Nintendo 64, and Sega Dreamcast here.

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