Nintendo’s Wii console is not only fun with the slew of current generation games, it also brings back fond memories of old thanks to the inclusion of Virtual Console capability. This has made it possible for us to re-enact our happy childhood memories where 8-bit graphics and a ton of imagination were more than enough to keep us glued in front of the TV for hours on end, until our parents threaten to throw us out of the house just to get some sunshine (serves them right for purchasing a Nintendo/Sega Master System in the first place, eh?). I’m happy to announce that the Virtual Console will be receiving new titles courtesy of Interplay Entertainment Corp., where four franchise titles that hail from the Sega Genesis system will soon be made available.

The happy quartet are Earthworm Jim, Earthworm Jim 2, Boogerman, and Clayfighter, and all of them are extremely popular during the 1990s on the Sega Genesis. I personally love the Earthworm Jim series, as he was the cutest of the bunch and had all the necessary qualities to make a great adventure platformer, but alas, he didn’t really make it to the A-list no thanks to Mario’s dominance.

No idea on how much each of these titles will cost, but it sure as heck beats taking out that old Genesis and blowing into its cartridge slot, hoping that a little bit of moisture and dust clearance will get your old Earthworm Jim cart up and running again. Considering the rate of inflation factored in, a Virtual Console title is really worth your dollars.

Press Release

Adventures of Lolo 2 (NES, 500 points/$5)
Looks like Lala can’t stopped being kidnapped, and this puzzler will definitely appeal to those who have a brainier side that is sick of shooting aliens and saving the world from a first person perspective. It won’t tickle the fancy of most folks, I suspect, with all the superior puzzles games that abound these days, but for those who are looking for more Adventures of Lolo, this fits in the niche rather nicely.

Super Street Fighter II: The New Challengers (Super NES, 800 points/$8)
Now who can forget this all brawling action title! You get four new characters – they aren’t really new per se, but are actually playable boss characters that added more dimension to what was the quarter guzzling game of the early 90s. This was pretty much the mother of all fighting games back them, but hardcore Street Fighter fans will probably argue till the cows come home as to which version is the best. Cheaper than a decent sandwich at Vegas, I’m all for this title. It’s knuckle crunching time!

Source: Ars Technica

Here’s an excerpt from the press release :-

These titles were originally created for the PC Engine, a game console jointly developed by Hudson Soft and NEC Corporation (formerly NEC Home Electronics, Ltd.). In addition, Hudson Soft has also been distributing third-party released PC Engine games.

The PC Engine was a video game console marketed by NEC Home Electronics, Ltd. (release date: October 30, 1987; price: 24,800 yen) with a unique LSI “C62 System” (microchip system) developed by Hudson Soft. The console’s cutting-edge speed and performance surpassed the conventional computing wisdom of the day. Among the PC Engine’s noteworthy features were high-speed CPU processing, gorgeous 512-color graphics, and a powerful sound system with up to two output channels and six stereo audio channels. Another feature that got people talking was the small, high-capacity plastic ROM “Hu-CARD (Turbo Chip)” that the PC Engine used as software. A successor to the original PC Engine, the “PC Engine CD-ROM2 System” became the world’s first game console to utilize CD-ROM as a gaming media platform when it was launched on December 4, 1988. An overseas version of the PC Engine was marketed in North America from 1989 under the name TurboGrafx16, and subsequently in Europe as Turbografx.

Source: Gaming Today

If you’re a stickler for retro games, then the Pac-Man Championship Edition ought to whet your appetites. This retro inspired game will be available to all Xbox 360 owners, and is touted to be the honest to goodness sequel of the original Pac-Man that saw action more than two and a half decades ago. Are there actually ways to make that classic game better? Apparently, the answer is in the affirmative as the Joystiq crew check out the game. There are several interesting additions to the classic arcade gameplay that warrant more than a passing mention, and we’ll check those out after the jump.

Pac-Man Championship Edition is no high definition remake as it brings you widescreen action on your spanking new HDTV. The premise remains pretty much the same, where you try to avoid ghosts while gobbling up those pellets, but a wider field of play certainly adds more depth into gameplay. The maze has been made all the more complex as it is now separated into a couple of distinct halves, where each maze boasts an infinite amount of dots as well as frequent shape-shifting. Whenever a designated number of pellets on one side of the field have been consumed, a random fruit will appear for you to collect. Eating that fruit will trigger a shockwave toward the other half of the field, replenishing all dots while changing the entire look of the maze as well.

I don’t know about you, but that alone sounds sure as heck challenging to me. If you’re interested in giving Pac-Man Championship Edition a go, it ought to have been available for download for the past five hours already.

Source: Joystiq

Own up now – how many of you guys and gals actually spent countless hours in front of the computer, engrossed in the clicking frenzy that is called Minesweeper? I myself have done my fair share of clicking, but I was never good enough to complete all three levels – Beginner, Intermediate, and Expert under the magical 100 second mark. To tell you the truth, I never really came close to that at all, but that is another can of worms for another day. What you see, ladies and gentlemen, is the world record for Minesweeper in Expert mode. Dion Tiu managed to unearth all those mines in a mere 38 seconds – more than double that of a Rubik’s Cube world record, but equally impressive at the very least.

Most people would think that this video of a 38 second speed run is a sped-up fake, which is why there is a raw MVF file for Minesweeper recorder The Clone which will dispel all doubts in an instant. It is a joy to watch somebody being one with the mouse, flying all over the place to uncover positions of dangerously laid mines with red flags. In the meantime, you can spend a little more time around Planet Minesweeper to check out a plethora of tips and tricks that will help you complete the Expert mode for the very first time.

I wonder why Microsoft Windows Vista did not include all those classic games from Windows 95 onwards. Back then, if an office was not networked to prevent unauthorized deathmatches in Doom and Doom II, there was always good old Minesweeper to fall back upon. 38 seconds – I still have that tingling sensation in my spine.

Source: The Last Boss

Is it even possible to collect every single Nintendo Entertainment System game that was ever released in the U.S.? Apparently so, if the claims of seller sonyabscott is correct. Sonyabscott is putting on the table a fully functioning NES system in great condition along with 670 officially licensed Nintendo game. The current asking price has already reached a whooping $25,300. Some cyber sleuths did some groundwork and noticed that over the months, sonyabscott has silently picked up an obscure title here and there for a buck or so, making him a brilliant strategist. In hindsight, it could be the bidders who are residing on the lower end of the intelligence scale as paying such an exorbitant amount for instant gaming street cred is just pure insanity.

Of course, there will always be debates about whether 670 is the exact number of officially licensed Nintendo games, but those who want to find out for themselves can always check out the free full NES Game List on Nintendo.com and compare it. These games do not come with boxes or manuals, but at least it looks good all stacked up in an orderly manner.

In addition, sonyabscott has even thrown in other accessories and equipment such as ROB the Robot, the infamous Power Glove, and a Power Pad amongst others. Patient gamers who prefer to get every single title be available over the Wii’s Virtual Console will pay considerably less at a sub-$4,000 price, so if you have plenty of money left over, why not head over the auction page and have a look?

Auction Page

The arcade original was a platform game where you played as Tiki the Kiwi. Your mission was to rescue all your Kiwi pals, who had been captured by Wally Walrus. As well as being able to jump around the platforms, you could also ride around on bizarre little hover pods and hot air balloons, and had a variety of weapons such as a bow and arrow, exploding bombs and even a Laser pistol that could be used to dispatch the many cute and cuddly enemies.

The game was very popular when released, with many home computer versions being produced. The Amiga version was particularly close to the arcade original, and also had a rather memorable cheat mode (MOTHERF**KENKIWIBA**ARDS – fill in the blanks yourself).

We must also acknowledge Bolak for the image on this post, a particularly good rendition of Tiki made using the pixel blocks modelling blocks. Check out his site here for some more excellent gaming related images, including Jet Set Willy and a 1 UP Mushroom.

So what’s a vector display then? Games consoles normally work using some variant of a bitmapped display, which put simply means that the screen is split into a rectangular grid of pixels. Each pixel can potentially be changed by writing to a particular area of the consoles memory which gets read and converted into a screen display line by line from top to bottom. A vector display on the other hand doesn’t have the concept of a pixel. Instead, the screen is displayed by directly controlling the position of the electron gun to draw lines. If you’ve ever played classic arcade games such as Asteroids or Battlezone, you’ll have seen a vector display in action.

The Vectrex comprised a vector display with a built in joypad, and took ROM cartridges. The display was only black and white, so each game also came with a sheet of tinted acetate which you put in front of the display to tint the colour of the lines and make the games a bit more interesting to look at. Some games may even have had fixed level layouts marked out on them, to allow the Vectrex to draw more moving images. One of the problems with a vector display is that each line drawn must be repeatedly drawn otherwise it will begin to fade away, which is why a lot of vector based games of the time tended to have a large degree of screen flicker. The Vectrex also had a built in game called Minestorm, which was an Asteroids clone.

The Vectrex also had a couple of add-on peripherals including a light pen, and the 3D Imager, a headset that predated VR technology. The Imager was a higher tech method of printed 3D with those silly acetate glasses. The Vectrex would draw lines on screen, and a rotating disc in the image blocked the image from one of your eyes. When the disc was in front of the other eye, a slightly different set of lines were drawn, and so you ended up with a 3D effect of the lines coming out of the screen at you.

The secret weapon of the Amiga chipset was the Blitter, which may seem surprising considering that all it really did was move data from one part of memory to another. The reason it was such a big deal was because it could merge together three streams of data, making sprite based games very simple to achieve, and that it was able to do all this without needing the CPU to get involved. Whilst the Blitter was busy copying data around, the CPU could get on with more important tasks.

The Amiga’s operating system AmigaDOS was also a revolution in that it was capable of proper pre-emptive multi-tasking. Whilst this is taken for granted now, at the time other computers could only run a single program at a time. Microsoft Windows was still years away, and even when it was released programs had to be coded in such a way that they allowed multi-tasking to happen. AmigaDOS was much simpler to program for, as it would automatically switch between programs to ensure each task got a slice of the processor time.

The A1000 was marketed by Commodore as a business machine, but it wasn’t until the scaled down and improved A500 was released that the machine really took off. This machine had 512K of RAM, with an additional RAM pack that slotted into a bay underneath the machine to provide a then whopping 1MB of memory. It was also reduced to being a single box with built-in keyboard, and was intended for sale into the home. The A2000 on the otherhand, launched at the same time as the A500, kept the separate desktop and keyboard configuration and was marketed for business use.

Whilst the Amiga did find itself a niche as a video processing and 3D graphics creator (thanks mainly due to Newtek with their Video Toaster hardware for the A2000 and Lightwave, still a popular 3D modelling package today) it was games which most people used their Amiga for.

The Cinemaware games, for example, were graphically rich games with strong storylines. Games such as Defender of the Crown, Rocket Ranger and It Came From The Desert plundered classic movie genres, and sold in huge quantities to gamers eager to show off the power of their computer. The Bitmap Brothers were another prolific development team, producing hits such as the much loved Speedball and Xenon shoot ‘em ups.

The Amiga suffered in the end from staying the same for too long. PC’s overtook the Amiga in graphical specification with the launch of VGA graphics cards, offering 256 colours on screen at a time. The Amiga attempted to catch up with the launch of the A1200 and A4000, boasting a new chipset capable of displaying 256 colours. Unfortunately the way the Amiga’s graphics chips worked didn’t lend themselves well to the creation of fast 3D graphics, and as more and more PC games using 3D were launched, the Amiga struggled to keep up. Processor upgrades helped, but ultimately the final nail in the coffin was when Commodore finally went out of business, taking the Amiga with it. The Amiga name continued to live on as it was bought and sold between various companies, with plans for new machines to be released which never bore fruit.

You can still sample the delights the Amiga had to offer today via the emulator UAE.

The games premise was to simulate a virtual life, which it did by taking the player from birth, through childhood, adolescence, middle age and into their twilight years by presenting the player with various different reactions to different situations, the kind of normal everyday things most people will have experienced.

As an example, you start the game unborn and still inside your mother, with your first choices being to stay in a bit longer, come out peacefully, or come out kicking and screaming. The game progresses through the different stages of life by offering a number of icons which represent different kinds of events in a typical life. How you react to these situations gradually forms the kind of person you will end up being. If you’ve ever wondered what might have happened in your life were you to have done something different at a particular point in your life, then perhaps now you can find out!

As your virtual life progresses you get to attend school, have relationships, get married and have children, whilst also experiencing those other things which build a persons character such as dealing with a dead pet, losing a favourite toy, becoming unemployed and so on.

The game was originally created by Dr. Peter Favaro, who has since gone on to write successful books on anger management and appears regularly on US TV, so the situations and their outcomes are generally pretty accurate to how similar events would play out in real life.

Whilst you can still play the original C64 version by downloading it for an emulator, the good news is that a version is now available on the web to play via a browser. Give it a whirl here, and you may even learn something about yourself!