DAWN OF THE MACHINE

Celebrating 30 years of Quake, the award-winning team at MachineGames—in collaboration with id Software—returns with Dawn of the Machine, a brutal new episode building on their critically acclaimed work on Dimension of the Machine and Dimensions of the Past. Delivering ferocious combat, labyrinthine level design, and nightmarish realms that twist reality beyond recognition, it pushes the legacy of the genre-defining first-person shooter even further—honoring one of gaming’s most enduring icons.

END THE NIGHTMARE. ESCAPE THE ILLUSION.

Ranger is trapped in a dimension of endless illusion—reliving the same violent cycles for what feels like lifetimes, dying thousands of times in a futile attempt to escape. Wearied but unbroken, he has heard rumor of The Nightmare Machine.

Beyond the hordes of monsters—twisted by an eternity in the Elder realms—lies the Machine. It is believed its destruction will shatter the illusion, finally breaking the loop.

FREE FOR QUAKE OWNERS

Dawn of the Machine is available as a free update for Quake owners on XBOX Series X/S, XBOX One, Microsoft PC Store, Game Pass, PC Game Pass, Steam, PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch 2 (via backwards compatibility), and Nintendo Switch versions of Quake. This expansive new episode features 19 all-new maps across a cohesive campaign, alongside a brand-new soundtrack, hidden secrets, a dedicated episode hub, and an all-new deathmatch map.

Check out the full announcement at https://slayersclub.bethesda.net/en-US/news/quake-30th-anniversary-update.

The post Quake Gets New Levels for 30th Anniversary appeared first on Old School Gamer Magazine.

Though clearly a fan of GoldenEye 007 herself, Alyse Knorr has a surprisingly functional depiction of the Bond Team at Rare in the late nineties. Her Boss Fight book, centered as it is around the working environment of the developers, provides a compelling argument that GoldenEye 007 may well have been the last major game completely built from scratch, a function of the Nintendo 64 classic predating Unity and modern animation rigging. It’s also one of many reasons why GoldenEye 007, the game, came out a full two years after the movie was released theatrically 1995, which you’d certainly think would put a damper on the game’s relevance but that’s obviously not the case.

The story of GoldenEye 007 is, fittingly, a very British one. Martin Hollis is the man responsible for getting the game greenlit. This is a non-intuitive story in a lot of ways. Nintendo wanted a GoldenEye game, but the Stamper brothers at Rare weren’t all that interested. Martin Hollis, a rookie in the game development industry without enough sense to realize that licensed video games had a bad reputation, heard about the offer, and somehow convinced the Stamper brothers that he could put a team together to make a genuinely great game. Everyone on the Bond Team was a rookie, the sort of people who built video games in their garage and most of them just really loved James Bond as a concept.

The book’s description of the Bond team often reminded me of this quote from an old game review I read back in the day: “Goldeneye 007 for Nintendo 64 remains the best James Bond game ever made because while you play it, you feel like James Bond.” While we tend to think of licensed games as bad, the reason why they’re bad is because they almost always operate under fairly onerous restrictions in regard to characterization and time crunch. It’s easy to see, from Knorr’s descriptions of the Bond Team, how these turned into advantages. Rookie programmers with no real development experience nonetheless have a pretty good idea what James Bond is.

Likewise, since GoldenEye 007 was being developed for the Nintendo 64, hardware that the Bond Team didn’t get to see until long into development, hardware which itself was delayed to 1996, there were ample excuses for the Bond Team to take their time and get it right. Although I should note that “take their time” might not be the best phrasing here, given that they were working punishing eighty hour weeks. Likewise, it’s not like Nintendo was insensitive to the delays. There was an entire extended period where the game was straight up canceled and the Stamper brothers avoided telling the Bond Team because they were confident that they could talk Nintendo out of this fairly extreme step, given time.

Factors like this led to the Bond Team having remarkably good morale, to the point they even managed to shove the game’s legendary multiplayer mode in last minute. GoldenEye 007 is a game of unusual influences, with the likes of Super Mario 64 and Super Bomberman having a more direct thoroughline than Doom. What made GoldenEye 007 such a big deal was that no one had any concept of even attempting a four-player split screen shooter. Never minding the technical challenges, why would anyone want to play a game that way when the standard of games like Quake was having a nice monitor all to yourself while shooting other players over a LAN connection?

Part of the recursive charm of Xibalba 64 to me was how it envisions the Doomclone aesthetic existing alongside the deathmatch polish of Goldeneye 007. It’s a fun contrast because Doomclones as a genre were largely killed off by Goldeneye 007. Although ironically enough, despite its influence, the GoldenEye 007 style itself didn’t last too long, being supplanted by Halo in the short term and Xbox Live in the long-term getting rid of the split-screen entirely. Part of the problem was the Bond license itself, which paradoxically became so valuable thanks to GoldenEye 007 that none of those original programmers could feasibly work on it again.

Not that they really wanted to. As rookies, they needed the guiding principle of James Bond, but as experienced programmers responsible for the biggest gaming hit of the late nineties, having to draw within the lines of that mythos was just too restricting. In all these regards, GoldenEye 007 is an artifact of its era, and its story in this Boss Fight book, one of those legends that’s unlikely to recur.

The post A review of GoldenEye 007 from Boss Fight Books appeared first on Old School Gamer Magazine.

Roguecraft GB Title Screen

For the uninitiated, the basic formula for a Rogue game, or “roguelike”, is pretty simple. You are presented with a procedurally generated dungeon. As you make your way through each level, slowly descending deeper into the dungeon, you will come across items to pick up, potions to use, and monsters to defeat. The original Rogue game has been ported to many systems since its 1980 release for Unix terminals.

Roguecraft is a variation on the Rogue formula, originally released on the Commodore Amiga. The lineage of this particular version begins with the Commodore 64 game Rogue4k, developed by Ricki Sickenger of Badger Punch Games. The “4k” stood for the fact that the entire game fit into just 4 kilobytes of RAM. The game was then expanded into Rogue64 with custom graphics and additional features.

Both Rogue4k and Rogue64 were presented in the standard top-down perspective of most Rogue games. When the decision was made to bring the game to the Amiga, one of the major changes was to swap out the top-down graphics for a three-quarter isometric view, similar to games like Head Over Heels and the original Fallout games. The graphics were given a full 16-bit overhaul, with more colors, more animation, and more variety.

Roguecraft GB Above Ground

Not long after the initial Amiga release, a new version of the game, dubbed Roguecraft DX, was released for Blaze’s Evercade retro console ecosystem. It quickly became one of their most popular single-game cartridge releases. This expanded version of the game was back-ported to the Amiga and brought to the Mega65, with a Windows version and even a ZX Speccy version planned.

Amongst those versions was a new release for the Game Boy Color. Instead of attempting a straight port of the game to the system’s tiny screen, it was rewritten to exploit the console’s limitations. Given the portable’s reduced screen resolution, it would have been extremely limiting to attempt to replicate the original’s isometric view, which would have forced the graphics to be incredibly small to fit an entire dungeon room on the screen. Instead, the view was switched back to an overhead perspective, similar to the original Commodore 64 game, but retaining much of the color and detail of the Amiga version.

The game itself is pretty straightforward. You start out above ground for the first level of the game (a change that was made for the DX version of the game). Each screen can be exited in one or more of the four cardinal directions, advancing you to the next screen in the level. Each screen has the potential to contain treasure, potions, the key to exit the level, and any number of different monsters. Starting off, you will face chickens and green tentacled monsters. As you descend through the levels of the dungeon, you will face different, stronger creatures to defeat. You’ll need to tread carefully, because if you run out of health, you’re dead. No extra lives. No continues.

Roguecraft GB Dungeon

Fortunately, you have a number of tools at your disposal during your journey. Three different colored potions will appear randomly throughout the game. The green potions will always refill your health and heal any poison you may have encountered. The red and blue potions are assigned random effects at the beginning of the game that persist for the remainder of the play session. The effects range from showing all of the rooms on the map (accessed by holding down the B button) to temporarily increasing your character’s strength or turning all of the monsters in the room into chickens. You will also encounter red and blue crystals that will increase your maximum health and strength, respectively. These will appear after killing a certain number of creatures. Hearts will refill your health and heal any poisoning. And the final pickup is the key that unlocks the level’s exit. Keep in mind, you will need a free inventory slot to hold the key once you find it.

The original Roguecraft contained a ten-level dungeon leading to a final encounter with the boss creature. In DX, that number was increased to 15 levels plus the introductory above-ground level and final boss. For the Game Boy version, the number of levels was decreased to 10, including the initial ground level, plus the final boss. The first run I successfully completed took me nearly an hour. Given that each dungeon is procedurally generated, there is quite a lot of gameplay to be had here.

Roguecraft GB Final Level

Additionally, there are three different characters to choose from at the beginning of the game. The Warrior is the default character and the easiest of the three. They start with the most health but have no additional abilities. The Rogue is the next hardest. They start with less health, but have the ability to teleport, and after teleporting, they receive a backstab ability that will kill most creatures with a single hit. The Wizard is the hardest character to play. They start out with very little health, but are the only character that has a ranged attack. This can allow you to clear a room without ever coming into contact with a monster. Thus, the different characters serve as difficulty levels for the game, providing additional challenges to complete it. There are even three separate achievements for completing a run with each of the different characters.

I have absolutely adored this game ever since playing the original Amiga version a number of years ago. I have effectively purchased the game 5 times: after buying the original, I bought the Evercade version, the DX on the Amiga, the Mega65, and now this version. And I have every intention of purchasing the Windows version when it releases next month. It is just fun. The gameplay is simple and straightforward; it is easy to pick up for a gaming session, but the challenge is real. While the graphics aren’t quite as impressive as the 16-bit versions, they are very good in comparison to other Game Boy Color games. And the fact that Badger Punch and Thalamus are supporting a system that was discontinued 23 years ago is just amazing.

If you’re looking for a good dungeon crawl, or just want something to make your aging Game Boy Color feel new again, definitely check Roguecraft GB out. One caveat, though: you will need a flash cart to play this game on your original hardware, as it is currently digital-only. While they did take pre-orders for physical copies of the game earlier this year, it is not clear whether any will be available for sale once they are released.

The post Review – Roguecraft GB for the Game Boy Color appeared first on Old School Gamer Magazine.

A Console-Style Front End That Can Replace Your Home Screen

iiSU is, by design, nothing more than a frontend. Emulators must be sourced and configured separately. That constraint is also its clearest statement of intent: the app is built entirely around the experience of browsing and launching games, not running them.

The visual language draws directly from Nintendo’s Wii U and 3DS interfaces, per XDA Developers, giving the launcher an immediate familiarity for anyone who grew up with those consoles. Users who prefer something different can switch to an XMB-style view modeled on Sony’s PlayStation 3 and PlayStation Portable when browsing the full library. That choice alone signals a level of design consideration that most mobile emulation setups never bother with.

Controller integration is thorough. Every step of the initial setup and every navigational action within the UI works with both touchscreen and physical controller. Xbox controllers are explicitly supported alongside dedicated mobile controllers, and button prompts remain visible on screen at all times, so users are never left guessing. The experience does not feel like a phone app wearing a console costume. It feels like a console.

The deepest expression of that philosophy is the launcher mode. iiSU can replace the phone’s standard home screen entirely, functioning as a full Android launcher. Apps, widgets, and system notifications are all accessible through its own interface. For a device dedicated to retro gaming, the phone’s stock home screen becomes unnecessary.

Social Tools, Achievement Tracking, and a Path to Streaming

A frontend that only organizes games is useful. One that populates artwork, tracks achievements, connects to friends, and eliminates the need for local storage is a different proposition.

iiSU supports two game data scrapers. Screenscraper requires no account to use and supplies artwork and metadata automatically; TheGamesDB offers an alternative source for the same function. Both services work to give a library the visual weight of a polished collection rather than a flat file list.

RetroAchievements integration goes further. The service hosts community-created achievements for retro games that never received them officially. Inside iiSU, users connect via an API key, browse achievement lists for individual games while navigating the library, and track recent activity through a dedicated Achievements tab on the home screen. For players who want ongoing progression in games that predate trophy systems, this is a material addition.

Discord sits inside the launcher as well. Users can access a friends list, pin frequent contacts, and send messages without installing a separate app. Typed responses still require the touchscreen — no Android keyboard currently handles controller input cleanly — but the integration means conversation happens without leaving the frontend. That friction point is real, though minor given the workaround.

Library management reaches beyond the phone itself. iiSU can import an existing collection from ES-DE, another widely used emulation frontend, making migration straightforward for anyone already organized elsewhere. It can also stream games from a self-hosted RomM server, removing the need to store ROM files on the device at all.

Alpha-Stage Crashes and a Release Pace That Keeps Moving

iiSU launched its first alpha in October 2025 and remains in alpha testing. That designation carries real meaning. The app crashes, and the circumstances have been documented specifically enough to be useful.

Connecting a Discord account during initial setup can trigger a crash. General use produces random crashes at no predictable interval. The most disruptive documented failure involves adding a widget, which has caused a permanent blank screen on every subsequent relaunch until the app cache is manually cleared. That last scenario requires deliberate recovery steps and represents the kind of bug that can genuinely strand a user.

The counterweight is pace. Fifteen public releases have shipped since the October debut, and paid supporters have received newer builds ahead of the most recent public version. That cadence suggests active development rather than a stalled project, and the gap between supporter and public builds points to a functioning feedback loop.

Desktop Platforms on the Horizon, With ES-DE in Its Sights

The project’s stated ambitions run beyond Android. Per a post on iiSU’s official Discord server, support for Windows, macOS, and Linux is planned. Some components of the app already have desktop versions in place, though current development remains focused on Android.

That roadmap situates iiSU squarely in competition with ES-DE, the established cross-platform frontend it already integrates with for library imports. Whether a project still in alpha can close the maturity gap is an open question, but the direction is clear. A frontend that begins on Android, absorbs existing ES-DE libraries, and extends toward the same desktop platforms ES-DE already covers is not positioning itself as a companion tool. It is positioning itself as a replacement candidate. The interface quality and controller-first design that distinguish iiSU on mobile are the same qualities that would need to carry it there.

The post iiSU Turns a Spare Android Phone Into a Retro Handheld Worth Taking Seriously appeared first on Old School Gamer Magazine.

Technically speaking the box sold by Homebrew Factory just says Yap, but the original game by CeL does have the full subtitle, which is also a lot easier to search for. Bit of a weird name for a hero. I do like his character design though. He’s like something halfway between a farmer and a mechanic, wielding a slingshot that looks like a weapon for a kid half his age, but hey, if it’s the only weapon you have that can burst magic bubbles, it’s what you’re stuck with. More than the slingshot Yap’s real power is his defense mechanic. But more on that in a moment.

Yap and the Enchanted Bubbles is a Pang clone. The game might be better known as Buster Bros. depending on what territory you live in. You might more easily remember Pang as that game where you play the guy that shoots up a harpoon to blow up bubbles, dividing the bigger bubbles into smaller bubbles. Not to give Pang too much credit, since Bubble Buster for the ZX Spectrum had an identical concept. Nor am I trying to give Yap and the Enchanted Bubbles a hard time for being a variation on this kind of arcade game, which surprisingly enough, was never actually popular enough to get a Game Boy port, despite the gameplay being perfectly suited for a mobile platform.

Yap and the Enchanted Bubbles differs from previous iterations of the genre by making use of limited scrolling and colors. The limited scrolling has the effect of making you feel like you’re on the run. Yap’s magical slingshot is quite slow, at least before getting any power-ups, so if you miss your first shot, it might take awhile before you get another chance. And as you wait, you have to dodge the other bubbles. This is where the colors come in. You have to destroy all of one color before you move on to the next one. Consequently, you might be dodging for quite some time trying to get the last tiny bubble of one color before you can move on to the other ones, which only bounce around slightly upon being hit.

These minor changes actually do quite a bit to distinguish Yap and the Enchanted Bubbles from the existing Pang formula, resulting in the bubbles feeling genuinely menacing despite their entirely predictable trajectories. The game includes a defense mechanic (just press B right before getting hit by a bubble) that doesn’t even the scales quite as much as you’d expect since it requires fairly precise timing. Of the sixty stages across six environments, the last one is the most difficult mainly because the use of fire mechanic makes it harder to escape the bubbles, which until that point, was the best way to play the game.

The levels being devoid of any features aside from the bubbles themselves is a welcome simplification of gameplay. I also liked how it affected the worldbuilding, to the limited extent there even is any worldbuilding. The world of Yap and the Enchanted Bubbles feels almost post-apocalyptic (because of the bubbles presumably destroying everything), with Yap and his magic slingshot being a fairly inexplicable last hope. The bubbles are surprisingly effective antagonists, almost mocking with their geometric precision, such that the showdown with the wizard who created all these bubbles at the very end is a letdown by comparison.

While I enjoyed Yap and the Enchanted Bubbles, I should note that the cartridge I received from Broke Studio had a pretty glaring flaw. The save battery didn’t work. Yap and the Enchanted Bubbles doesn’t strictly speaking need a save battery, as it’s perfectly possible to beat the game in a single sitting, but it definitely benefits a lot from being able to put the game down and take a break after a particularly frustrating loss. CeL hints that this game has a Konami Code but I couldn’t get it to work for the sake of rigging a stage select, which is all the game really needed. I should also note that it’s possible the game itself had faulty save functionality rather than the battery, but I can’t really test that without another cartridge.

The post A review of Yap and the Enchanted Bubbles appeared first on Old School Gamer Magazine.

Here are five Master System titles that you’ve probably never played, but definitely should.

Power Strike II for the SMS

Power Strike II

Power Strike II was developed by Compile, the Japanese studio responsible for Zanac, Aleste, Gun-Nac and numerous other technically accomplished shooters. It is a genuine Master System entry in the Aleste lineage and should not be confused with the separate Game Gear game also marketed in some regions as Power Strike II. It was released in Europe in September of 1993, with TecToy subsequently distributing it in Brazil.

Rather than using the overt science-fiction imagery associated with many Compile shooters, Power Strike II takes place in an alternate version of the early 1930s. Economic collapse has led unemployed pilots to become airborne pirates. The player is a professional pirate hunter piloting the Falcon Flyer and accepting contracts to clear the skies and seas around Italy.

September 1993 was exceptionally late for a Japanese-developed Master System exclusive. The Mega Drive had already been established in Europe for several years, and players interested in shooters had access to titles such as Thunder Force IV, M.U.S.H.A. and Raiden Trad. North American and Japanese Master System owners had no official way to buy it at all. Its limited production and regional distribution also made the cartridge comparatively scarce. For many years, emulation or importing an expensive PAL copy was the only practical way to experience it. The Aleste Collection for the PS4 and Nintendo Switch finally gave it a broader official release 27 years later.

Land of Illusion for the SMS

Land of Illusion Starring Mickey Mouse

Land of Illusion was developed internally by Sega as the 8-bit successor to Castle of Illusion and released in Europe in 1993. It is not an abbreviated conversion of the Mega Drive’s World of Illusion. The Master System and Game Gear editions were created as separate games, although the portable and console versions share the same underlying design.

Mickey falls asleep while reading a fairy-tale book and awakens in a village whose magical crystal has been stolen by the Phantom. Without the crystal, the surrounding land has become dark and hostile. Mickey must cross the countryside, consult the princess, and ultimately reach the Phantom’s castle in the clouds.

By 1993, the Master System had left the US and Japanese markets, so American players were far more likely to encounter Mickey on the Genesis or Game Gear. Its family-friendly license also disguises how sophisticated it is. It is frequently assumed to be a simplified children’s platform game, when it actually combines precise controls, item-gated progression, secret collection and unusually varied stage mechanics. It deserves to be discussed alongside Wonder Boy III and Asterix as one of the Master System’s best original platform adventures.

Ninja Gaiden for the SMS

Ninja Gaiden

The Master System’s Ninja Gaiden is neither a port of Tecmo’s arcade brawler nor a conversion of the NES trilogy. It was developed by SIMS under license from Tecmo and presents an independent story, its own stages, its own bosses, and several movement mechanics not found in the NES games. It was released in PAL territories on July 16, 1992.

Ryu Hayabusa returns to his village to discover that the Dragon Ninja clan has been massacred and the sacred Bushido scroll stolen. The scroll supposedly grants its possessor the power to control the world. Ryu pursues the thieves across Japan and eventually confronts the Shogun of Darkness. The game uses illustrated narrative panels between stages, imitating the cinematic presentation that helped distinguish the NES series. The story is simpler and less elaborate than the NES trilogy, but the cut scenes give the adventure continuity and showcase artwork unusual for many Master System action games.

Its greatest disadvantage was that it was part of a franchise strongly associated with Nintendo hardware. Players in the United States and Japan often assume the classic series consists of the arcade game, three NES titles and several handheld adaptations. The Master System game fell outside that familiar lineage. It also appeared after the Mega Drive’s The Revenge of Shinobi and Shadow Dancer, which offered superficially similar ninja action on newer hardware. Even European Sega owners could easily treat it as an aging 8-bit alternative rather than a distinctive game in its own right.

Micro Machines for the SMS

Micro Machines

Codemasters originally created Micro Machines for the NES, releasing it in 1991 as an unlicensed cartridge. The design grew from an earlier prototype called California Buggy Boys and was transformed into a licensed Micro Machines game after Codemasters reached an agreement with toy manufacturer Galoob. The Master System edition was programmed and graphically adapted by Ashley Routledge and David Saunders, with original design credited to Andrew Graham. Lyndon Sharp provided its PSG music. Codemasters published it in Europe on March 10, 1994, making it one of the last significant commercial Master System games released in Great Britain.

The game views its races from overhead. Because the vehicles are miniature toys, ordinary household environments become enormous racing circuits. Breakfast tables, billiard tables, desks, gardens, bathtubs and workshops contain improvised tracks whose hazards include pencils, cereal boxes, spilled liquids, rulers, tools and pool balls. Vehicle types include sports cars, Formula One cars, off-road vehicles, powerboats, helicopters and tanks. The handling varies enough that a course designed around boats or helicopters does not simply feel like the same race with a different sprite. Tanks can also fire at opponents, adding a combat element to certain events.

By its March 1994 release date, European players could purchase Micro Machines on the Mega Drive, Amiga, and Game Gear, and Micro Machines 2: Turbo Tournament was approaching release. The Master System edition was an excellent conversion of a game many consumers already associated with newer hardware. It was also completely absent from North America, despite the Micro Machines toy brand’s popularity there. American Master System owners who had remained with the console never received this unusually suitable version.

Lemmings for the SMS

Lemmings

The original Lemmings was created by DMA Design and published by Psygnosis for the Amiga in 1991. Probe Software handled the Master System conversion, with Krisalis contributing audio work. Dominic Wood is credited as the programmer, Mark Knowles as the artist, and Neil Young as the producer. Matt Furniss arranged the Master System music. Sega published the cartridge in Europe in 1992 under license from Psygnosis, with Brazilian and South Korean editions also appearing. It fits 120 levels into a 2-Mbit cartridge and uses passwords rather than battery-backed saving.

Each level releases a procession of lemmings that walk forward without regard for cliffs, water, fire or traps. The player must save a specified number by assigning one of eight jobs: climber, floater, bomber, blocker, builder, basher, miner and digger. The challenge comes from limited resources and timing. A builder creates only a fixed number of steps. A blocker may save the group from immediate danger but must eventually be bypassed or removed. A poorly positioned miner or basher can create an unusable tunnel. Later levels require coordinating several actions across different areas before the time limit expires.

Most players experienced it on the Amiga, Atari ST, DOS, Mega Drive or Super NES. The Master System edition arrived after the game had already become synonymous with computers and 16-bit machines. North America did not receive the cartridge, and the lack of the two-player mode gave owners of newer systems an obvious reason to choose another edition. Nevertheless, the 120-level campaign, exclusive Sega stages, and strong music make it more than an inferior curiosity.

The post Sega Master System Games You Probably Missed appeared first on Old School Gamer Magazine.

By Charlotte Reber’s own admission, Dragon Age II is a somewhat counterintuitive choice for a Boss Fight book. After all, Dragon Age: Origins is the main famous, well-regarded game of the series, a fantasy epic role-playing game in the Bioware house style that takes place in an original fantasy setting. Reber’s book, while mostly a depiction of the Dragon Age II writers’ room, is framed in the context of Reber explaining why it is that this game, specifically, struck a chord with her, motivating her to grab a copy years later despite her being a part of the mushy majority that vaguely liked Dragon Age: Origins but never actually finished it.

Dragon Age II, both the book and the game it’s about, functions as a sort of roundabout story about a story in this way. Why Dragon Age II specifically has this odd character focus is largely due to corporate drama. Electronic Arts bought Bioware in 2007, started paying more attention to the acquisition in 2009 as its long-term MMORPG plans started to take shape, and just sort of arbitrarily demanded that Bioware release a new Dragon Age game by March of 2011 because they noticed that Bioware didn’t have anything else scheduled for that specific year. Reber namedrops The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask as a similar kind of spiritual successor and even just going from the rushed timeline, there are definite parallels to that Boss Fight book too.

The relatively unambitious replication of the prequel’s game engine features in both too, but the main aspect of Dragon Age II that intrigues Reber is the scaled down plot, which doesn’t feel any less dramatic despite having far less intense world-ending stakes. In Reber’s argument, it’s precisely because Dragon Age II has these lesser stakes that it’s much easier to identify with the characters. The whole game is framed around character interactions, specifically, the dwarven hustler Varric who narrates the full story to an inquisitor, a metatextual thread that begs a lot of questions about the narrative’s general accuracy, even if it never quite gets to the absurdity of the opening sequence.

Reber attributes the depth of the story to the character conflicts because, well, because that’s the main thing the writers had to work with. While the book never really discusses what was going on from the programming side, it’s a clear, ever-present concern from the writers how they can’t really script anything all that ambitious from a gameplay perspective because the technical team just didn’t have the time to expand on the game’s engine in an especially impressive way. Even the conceit of the game mostly taking place in a single town, with a lot of refused locations outside that town, is only just barely justified by the writers coming up with a three-act structure, allowing the passage of time to let the town feel different despite mostly just looking at the same.

The Dragon Age II Boss Fight book is oddly open about the game’s shortcomings, certainly more than any other Boss Fight book I’ve read to date. The game’s reception, far from being a triumph, instead becomes an almost anticlimactic disappointment, with fans trashing the title. What makes this ambiguous tone especially weird is that Reber dedicates a lot of energy to emphasizing that this was an early example of bigotry in gaming, tying that practice to Gamergate years later. Yet there’s no real sense of perspective about how much gamers were criticizing the game, rather than the story specifically, or how representative any of the more bigoted responses really were. It all comes off as a very stupid Internet argument, and for whatever it’s worth, Reber does discuss the topic so little it’s not clear she thinks there’s really that much to be said about it either.

In the end, Dragon Age II is one of the more flawed Boss Fight books I’ve read, on account of the fact that I’m still not entirely sure what the game is really about, from a story perspective. Reber discusses the storybuilding from a fairly mechanical perspective, as might be expected from a person who is described on the back of the book as a writer of fiction, but doesn’t integrate those mechanics into the game’s actual content as well as Tremblay’s recent tome on Life Is Strange. At least part of this is a problem with the script of Dragon Age II, which as Reber notes, can’t really be interpreted on its own as if it were a screenplay because there are too many potential variations between major plot points.

In short, both in book and game form, Dragon Age II is a series of difficult challenges not quite convincingly surmounted, even if the high points are strong enough that they’re easier to remember than the weaknesses. Indeed, the oddities and the contrasts engendered by these issues make up a lot of the charm. It’s always worth remembering that distinctive games with personality tend to weather historical perspective better than technically better generic ones.

The post A review of Dragon Age II from Boss Fight Books appeared first on Old School Gamer Magazine.

If you’ve never heard of the original Xibalba, that’s not too surprising. The 2014 browser game from Phobos Lab is a weird little artifact of its era, a chonky retro styled Doom clone premised around the Mayan underworld. The blocky aesthetic exists alongside Oculus Rift functionality, allowing players to immerse themselves in the weirdly blended aesthetic of New World iconography, nineties era first person shooters, and the spooky ambient music of Andreas Lösch. ModRetro’s decision to bankroll a Nintendo 64 version of this game adds another level of eerie recursion to the whole concept, creating a demake that feels like a delightful, disturbing trip from a parallel universe.

It certainly helps that Dominic Zablewsky seems like a genuinely sweet and enthusiastic guy. As he tells it in the game’s instruction manual, Xibalba was mostly just a demo for his JavaScript game engine, and not even a “real” game in and of itself. Building it up to something worthy of the fifty-dollar asking price required, among other things, that Zablewsky rewrite the entire game in the C programming language. This is the kind of ambitious task a programmer takes on only if they have genuine passion and curiosity, and Zablewsky’s enthusiasm bleeds through every one of Xibalba 64’s seventeen levels.

What really sells this title as something special is how despite the sheer sense of scale of this world, we ultimately know surprisingly little about it. The story as outlined in the instruction manual is vague and cryptic. So is the opening crawl that prefaces each level, eerie, ominous poetry about the nameless protagonist’s descent into this world, culminating with an equally strange encounter with a god and a ray of light.

We never really do find out what exactly was going on, causing the entire text to read like a nightmarish fever dream. Even Zablewsky’s flawed English goes a long way to maximizing the vibe. It’s not always entirely clear what certain technical instructions mean, for example, but in a game this simple, there are only so many ways to interpret them. Who’s telling us these instructions anyway? The shamans? The tree monsters? The robots? A disembodied voice somewhere? Not knowing just makes it that much creepier.

Even getting lost is just an excuse to take in some of the details, trying to figure out what exactly is going on with this worldbuilding. One of the few technical flaws I noticed in this game was a lack of a map. Although I realized upon further consideration this was a deliberate choice to maintain the immersion, and it works wonders. Especially with the lights out, I consistently felt as if I was wandering through a deeply unsettling place. That I was using a small collection of high-powered weapons to blow up every other living or mechanical thing I found down there just contributed to that sense of unease.

The actual gameplay of Xibalba 64 is nothing new, not just compared to Xibalba but relative to Doom clones in general. In some ways it’s beneath the capabilities of the M64. There’s no vertical shooting for example. Again, though, the simplicity of the overall game design is what makes it much easier to focus on the smaller details. This isn’t a game about shooting monsters, even if it’s difficult to finish any given maze without killing everything in the level. It’s a game about being tested, or judged, by who or what, it’s hard to say.

This as much as anything else nails the retro gaming experience. Why do we play games at all, really? Why play Nintendo 64 games instead of titles on new, shinier consoles? It’s not just the nostalgia factor, it’s about that spiritual connection with other fans. Zablewsky nails that vibe long before the end credits, expressing immense appreciation to the Nintendo 64 homebrew community for all their help in getting him to figure out how to make this game work. Whether as the disembodied prologues or just the guy who uses the end credits to write in little hearts directed to his fiancé, Zablewsky is a real person, and Xibalba 64 is his genuine labor of love.

Not to suggest that the main value of Xibalba 64 is its connection to Zablewsky. There’s a lot of replay value in here, from extra difficulty settings to loads of secrets and cheat codes. This isn’t even getting into the multiplayer options, from a co-op mode in the main campaign to a four-player bug hunt or, for that real nineties magic, a deathmatch to the last person standing, with enough options to change up gameplay to keep it spicy without being overwhelming. This is the kind of game you can play at parties. Nerdy parties, perhaps, but Xibalba 64 is the kind of game that makes you proud to be a nerd. It just feels really considerate, right down to the bevy of customization options.

The post Testing the M64: Xibalba 64 appeared first on Old School Gamer Magazine.

With the release of the M64, most hobbyists concern themselves with the technical aspects of the machine. How does it compare to the Analogue 3D, or original Nintendo 64 hardware? Worthwhile questions to be sure, but I prefer to try and evaluate the console on its games and how they play. To start out, let’s take a look at Xeno Crisis, one of ModRetro’s four inaugural launch titles for the console. As is the case with the Chromatic, ModRetro isn’t just releasing hardware, they’re also publishing physical software that we can buy in cartridge form and own forever, instead of being tied to an online account.

Xeno Crisis is on-brand for ModRetro in that Xeno Crisis is a retro throwback title made by an Indie developer, Bitmap Bureau. But it’s off-brand for the M64 in that Xeno Crisis isn’t a throwback to the crude 3d modeling that defined the fifth generation of console gaming. Xeno Crisis is a top-down room-to-room shooter game with arcade sensibilities much closer to the fourth generation. Designed for the Sega Mega Drive (Bitmap Bureau is an English company after all), Xeno Crisis looks fantastic in the 16-bit style. But it doesn’t exactly push the limits of 64-bit hardware.

And to be entirely frank, Xeno Crisis warrants a bit of a re-evaluation at this point. Coming out in 2019, it’s nearly old enough to be a retro game in its own right now. With new games on older platforms being less of a novelty now, its flaws are that much more glaring. The lack of native save files, for example, particularly rankles as one of the Nintendo 64’s few advantages over its CD based competitors was save batteries. Even if you argue that the difficulty curve of Xeno Crisis, and the whole gameplay tradition it represents, should eschew the very concept of save files, I can think of no good reason why this version of the game doesn’t at least save the high score. There’s almost certainly a save battery on the cartridge that just isn’t being used.

On the topic of difficulty too, Xeno Crisis is too tough for its own good. The problem is less that the game is particularly unfair so much as the enemies are unreasonably tanky. Xeno Crisis is borderline unplayable unless you make a point of getting the weapon power up upgrades as quickly as possible. If you don’t, even on the second level, every room becomes a marathon because it just takes too long to kill anything such that soon there are a dozen enemies breathing down your neck. With the ones that have projectile moves, the game feels less like an action shooter and more like a bullet hell, which isn’t the best genre to play with friends.

For what it’s worth, Xeno Crisis does play better with a friend, as the added firepower goes a long way to preventing enemies from quickly amassing an outrageous numerical advantage on the field. The revival mechanic is also much appreciated as a way to keep less skilled friends in the game when they keep dying. Annoyingly, this mechanic doesn’t function in the boss rooms. It would be no more overpowered there than it is anywhere else and serves little purpose except to force your teammate to watch as you struggle to survive the boss’s attack pattern long enough to achieve marginal damage against its huge health bar.

Cheat codes might have helped, but I couldn’t get the Nintendo 64 ones I found online to work. Incidentally, they really should have been in the manual anyway, and that’s such an obvious asset to having a physical edition I’m honestly surprised they weren’t in there. While there is an easy mode accessible from the options menu, it doesn’t help as much as you’d think either, because the creators of Xeno Crisis don’t seem to quite understand why the game is hard. An extra hit point and slightly less spread on certain attack patterns doesn’t help that much with overwhelming numbers of tanky enemies. Xeno Crisis badly needs to even the scales with more firepower. Despite featuring a bevy of special weapons that do just that, the drop rates for them are quite low. Annoyingly, the game will often provide useless medpacs or grenades.

It also rather awkwardly forces the player to empty their guns at the end of a room instead of giving them a free reload, or else they run the risk of running out of ammo at the beginning of the next room with the ammo pack more likely than not spawning in a place overrun by enemies that can’t be killed owing to the lack of bullets. This isn’t even a critique of the difficulty, it’s just a basic quality of life improvement. A similar one would be displaying the bullets, grenades, and hit points of the space marines when the game is paused, instead of making this yet more information that’s all too easy to lose track of in the ongoing chaos.

From what I can tell, despite Xeno Crisis being a ModRetro branded rerelease, this is just the 2019 version of the game that Bitmap Bureau themselves released on Nintendo 64 cartridges a few years back. It’s possible that there’s a contractual reason why ModRetro wasn’t allowed to modify Xeno Crisis, although it’s disappointing in any case because it would only take very few tweaks to significantly improve this title to a genuine party game. Even something as mildly ambitious as upping the coop play cap from two players to four players would upgrade Xeno Crisis from a mere gimmicky rerelease to a genuinely impressive update that warrants the fifty-dollar price tag. The Mega Drive might not have been able to handle that much action, but the M64 certainly could, and again, one of the central features of the Nintendo 64 was making a big bet on four player couch co-op play being the future of gaming.

This particular version of Xeno Crisis is one of the better ones, incidentally, if only because it takes advantage of the goofy yellow C buttons to allow players to easily shoot in a different direction than the one they’re facing. Despite eight direction movement being standard, I often found myself wishing Xeno Crisis only had four directional movement since the roll move, essential for getting out of danger, almost always defaults to diagonal movement even when using the control pad. This might just be an issue of the M64 Pro Controller being too sensitive for its own good. Whatever the cause, more controller customization options would have gone a long way to improving Xeno Crisis, a game that’s good for what it is, but could have been genuinely great with just a bit more polish.

The post Testing the M64: Xeno Crisis appeared first on Old School Gamer Magazine.

Micro Machines NES Title Screen

As with any popular kids’ property, a video game was sure to follow. Galoob partnered with European developer Codemasters to turn the mini micros into a video game racer. They already had a relationship with Codemasters as Galoob was the North American distributor of their popular Game Genie video game enhancement device.

Unlike most European game development of the time, Codemasters created Micro Machines first for the Nintendo Entertainment System, then ported it to various computers and consoles. Due to the ongoing legal battle that Galoob was involved in with Nintendo of America over the Game Genie, it never received Nintendo’s Seal of Approval. Codemasters released a couple of different unofficial carts for the game, including a gold cartridge (similar to the Tengen releases) and smaller black carts.

The game itself actually started life as a racing prototype called California Buggy Boys, programmed by Andrew Graham. It was an overhead racer featuring dune buggies. Codemasters founders David and Richard Darling saw an opportunity to turn the prototype into a licensed Micro Machines title.

The toy line’s small size inspired the environments for each race. Instead of treating the cars as full-sized vehicles in a standard racing game, Codemasters set each race in everyday surroundings, but on a toy-sized scale. One race takes place in a bathtub. Another takes place on a pool table. Yet another takes place at a breakfast table. The surroundings for each track reflected their theme. The bathtub track is outlined with tiny soap bubbles. The pool table track is denoted with cue chalk and pool balls. And the breakfast table track is created with lines of breakfast cereal, with sticky honey hazards along the way.

Micro Machines NES Screenshot

The game incorporates a variety of vehicle types from the Micro Machines line and doesn’t limit itself to cars. While we do get standards like sports cars and four-wheel drive vehicles, there are also speedboats, helicopters, and even tanks. Racing a Formula 1 car around a billiards table, dodging pool cues and skipping in and out of the pockets, is truly a unique experience. Even though the route around the courses is clearly marked, it isn’t a strict barrier. Racers are allowed to race outside the lines, to a certain extent. If you go too far out, you will be returned to the track.

The single-player racing challenge pits the player against three computer opponents. As you progress, the tracks will become increasingly harder. In order to progress to the next track, you must come in either first or second place. If you finish third or fourth, you will need to rerun the race in an attempt to improve your standing. You have a total of three chances to run a track again. Once you use all of your chances, it’s game over.

The game also includes a two-player head-to-head mode. Instead of a split-screen race, the two-player race takes place on a single screen. At the beginning of the race, there are 8 colored lights at the top of the screen. Each player has four lights in their color. During the race, if one player gets a full-screen length ahead of the other, one of the lights will change to their color. This will go back-and-forth until one player has managed to change all 8 lights to their color, thus winning the race.

Micro Machines Amiga Screenshot

As I pointed out at the beginning of this article, unlike most European games at the time, the NES console version was developed before the game was ported to any other consoles or computers. Two years after the initial release, versions for the Sega Game Gear, Sega Mega Drive, and Commodore Amiga were released. While it isn’t the most graphically advanced of the initial 16-bit versions (that would be the Mega Drive version), I have a personal affinity for the Amiga version, as it was the port that introduced me not only to this game but also to Codemasters as a developer.

The next year saw the release of the Sega Master System, MS-DOS, and Super NES versions. One of the most distinctive releases would follow the next year, with a full release of the Philips CD-i system. It is unique among CD-i games as it wasn’t transformed into a multimedia title, which is where the system excelled, and where game development on the system was most focused.

The final two versions released were a monochrome conversion of the original Game Boy in 1995, and then a version for the Game Boy Color in 2000. This version was actually released in a combo cartridge with its sequel, Turbo Tournament.

Codemasters would continue to develop and co-develop new games using the license until Micro Machines World Series in 2017. While sequels like V3 and V4 brought the game to more modern systems (at the time) and were moderately successful, the mobile-focused World Series failed to revive the brand. Additionally, Codemasters’ corporate identity was evolving as it focused on titles such as GRID and the DiRT series. At that point, additional Micro Machines games were no longer developed.

If you’ve never delved into this franchise, give the original Micro Machines a try. It offers a unique perspective and is accessible on almost any platform thanks to modern emulation.

The post Micro Machines: Pocket-Sized Racing appeared first on Old School Gamer Magazine.