David Kudrev
Happy new year everybody! It’s great to be back in the swing of things here once again. I hope you all have had a decent holiday of sorts with loads of sweet geeky gifts! A lot has been happening whilst I took a break, like the fact that iMAME came out on the App Store for iOS, and then got pulled down. So I hope you folks did manage to score it as it does support the iCade and other controller devices supported for the iOS. In case you didn’t grab it in time and you run Google Chrome as your browser? This may be of interest to you.
Something more important than iMAME was the news of the artist line-up for Australia’s first 8-bit/Chiptune music festival; Blipfest 2012. It doesn’t stop there, there’s also two events happening in Adelaide prior to Blipfest: Ultracade Live having it’s 2nd Birthday extravaganza, and the debut of JoyPad hosted by Retrospekt and the Two Ships bar there will no doubt be old games to play, and an arcade machine to boot. As Blipfest is getting closer (17th February to be exact), Little-Scale and Hugepedlar will be doing live sets at JoyPad. Little-Scale will be performing at Blipfest in Melbourne so be sure to come along to support local talent! :D
Do you remember Sonic 4 Episode 1? Came out in late 2010, new story, and an interesting attempt at bringing back the Sonic franchise prior to Sonic Generations (review). Regardless, the teaser to episode 2 has hit the internet with some cool hints as to what to expect. I do hope that the game controls will feel more like Generations as SEGA have nailed it perfectly there, oh well time will tell.
Playing Tetris on a proper games console is one thing, but many have attempted (quite successfully) with other mediums, like a board game, or manually down a ramp at a shopping centre, on a tall building, but under the microscope? Students at the University of Amsterdam have devised a little game of Tetris with lasers and light-trapping devices called Optical Tweezers, for more information on how the technology works, head over to New Scientist.
If there was one thing I found a bit off-putting by the Atari Jaguar isn’t the games library, no quite the opposite! In fact it’s the controller. Quite a bulky item, and I guess it needed to be considering it has a numeric keypad on it. Although one thing I didn’t consider with the Jaguar, is fathoming it as a portable device. Don’t worry, as Ben Heck (infamous console modder, primarily for converting consoles to portable form factors) has done it back in ’06. A lot of time has passed since, and Evil Nod from the Made By Bacteria forums has recently given it a shot and has pretty much compacted the original Ben Heck design. Looks pretty sweet if I don’t say so myself!
And finally something that really blew my mind, for those of you who don’t know, Nintendo was planning on releasing a CD-ROM based device that would fit snug underneath the console to compete against SEGA’s Mega CD platform. Some clever boffin decided to cram a laserdisc title, in particular Road Blaster on to a SNES Cartridge. Some of you may be thinking “How in the heck can that be done?” Well with a special SNES cart which has support for full motion video (or FMV as it was called back in the day), and a download of the game (located at http://dforce3000.de). Keep in mind that the ROM is over 500MB, which a SNES cart originally couldn’t handle, let alone support FMV. Either way it’s fascinating that this can be pulled off, which again goes to show that the SNES console is such a superior device (of course with the help of modern technology).