David Kudrev
(Edited by Jen Shadski)
There’s nothing like seeing a brand new game in development for an older system, but one game that has been recently announced is coming out on not one, but three systems, including PC.
Zia and the Goddess of Magic is the new game announced by Orion Soft, who recently brought retro gamers home-brew classics like Alice’s Mom’s Rescue! And Elysar. The premise is that you play as Zia, a little girl who lives in a mountain village, who discovers a book of magic and learns the spells within.
The game is reminiscent of many top down 16bit role playing adventures such as Breath of Fire, or the earlier Final Fantasy games, and has a battle system resembling these two games. Zia and the Goddess of Magic will be coming out on SEGA Dreamcast, Sony PlayStation and Steam with a release planned for September this year.
Another retro inspired release is making its way to PlayStation, specifically the PS4 – and it isn’t Shadow of the Beast. Bandai Namco has released the Arcade Game Series 3-in-1 Pack that contains three classic arcade games.
The Arcade Game Series includes Dig Dug, Galaga, and Pac-Man, and includes an option to play around with the infamous Round 256 bug. The release is presented with high quality background artwork (considering that the original games are quite low resolution for most modern TVs), and like many other releases of classics on modern systems contain loads of graphic and sound options to tinker to your liking.
The Arcade Game Series 3-in-1 Pack is available now on the PlayStation store, and are also sold separately.
If you have a big appreciation for arcade gaming, especially Japanese arcade gaming, then you’ll probably want to get yourself this model kit of Astro City cabinets! The kit is made by Wave Corporation, who are responsible for other cool SEGA memorabilia like Virtua Fighter figures, and even a Hang-On Arcade model kit.
The kits are at 1/12 scale standing at around 15 cm, and all the pieces are snap fit plastic with no glue required. There are three variants of the cabinets that you can get with either Virtua Fighter, Fighting Vipers or Die Hard Arcade on the screens and yes, the stool is included!
Pre-order it now at Play-Asia.com as the kits will be a limited release, and should be available from July this year.
The final item of news for this week’s Retrospektive is about the future of 3D Classics for the 3DS. A recent interview that SEGA Blog had with a few developers from M2 confirms that there has been an expression of interest in bringing the 1987 classic top down shooter Alien Syndrome to the 3D Classic library.
Naomi Horii mentioned that he would like to see Alien Syndrome rereleased one day and that the Sterescopic 3D would be really effective with the game. Furthermore, Naoki mentioned that they did a little test to see how it would turn out and (quoted from the interview) it was great! Although, doing every single stage would be quite an effort.
Head over to the source for the rest of the interview and other tidbits.
Source: SEGAbits