Retro Gamer issue 141 is out, and here is some of the things to read about:
This time, Retro Gamer have put togheter the The Sega Book/The NES Book bookazine. The Master System articles are on the one side, flip the magazine and you get the Nintendo NES articles.
Sega Master System articles:
Nintendo NES articles:
You will find Retro Gamers bookazine The Sega Book/The NES Book at Imagineshop.co.uk (if they’re not sold out).
Some days ago, issue 140 of Retro Gamer landed in my postbox. Here’s what you can read:
I’m not sure if Nintendo knew what sucess they starter, when they released their first Game & Watch game on April 28, 1980.
Ball is a game where you controll a juggler. You have to make the ball stay in the air as long as possible, to score as many points as you can. While you had three tries in the later Game & Watch games, in Ball you only have one. You loose the ball on the ground and you’re out.
You have two difficulties in Ball. In Game A you have two balls in the air at the same time, while you in Game B have three balls. You get 1 and 10 points respectively for each catch. In the start, the ball moves slowely back and forth, but the speed increases over time. When you reach a certain score, the speed slow down before it speed up again. When the ball hit the ground, it crush like a egg. A bit strange…
Ball (AC-01) belong to the Silver Series. These games have a silver frontend. Like the other game in this series (Flagman, Vermin, Fire and Judge), the screen doesn’t have a background. The colourfull background first appeard in the Gold Series.
The original from 1980 is hard to get by. Luckily, Nintendo reproduced Ball in 2009 for Club Nintendo in Japan an later came to the US. This is the version I bought on eBay, and it’s my very first Game & Watch game. You can also play Ball on the Game & Watch Gallery on Nintendo Game Boy and as a DSi Ware.
In Retro Gamer issue 139, you can read about:
You can get issue 139 of Retro Gamer from Imagineshop.co.uk.
It’s time to support another Kickstarter. This time it’s From Bedrooms to Billions – The Amiga Years! It’s a 90 minute long documentary of the making of Amiga an its life.
To qoute from the campaign description:
Welcome to our Kickstarter campaign to produce From Bedrooms to Billions: The Amiga Years! A 90 minute feature documentary that will explore the influence of the Commodore Amiga and how it took video game development, music and publishing to a whole new level and changed the video games industry forever!
We used Kickstarter to fund our previous film called From Bedrooms to Billions that told the story of the UK video games industry from 1979 to the present day and we are turning to it again now in the 30th anniversary year of the release of the Commodore Amiga in the hope that you will support us once again to produce a film that not only celebrates this fantastic machine, but importantly what it did for the video games industry and development in general due to the many ground breaking games that appeared on it.
The Kickstarter-campaign ends on March 29, 2015.
In 1996 some small animals appeared on the Nintendo Game Boy in Japan. These Pocket Monsters is later known as Pokémon when the games was released in USA and Europe some years later.
In Pokémon you controll the main character in birdperspective in a part of Kanto in a hunt to master Pokémon fights. The goal is to become region master. To do that, you have to beat the best Pokémon trainers in the country, the Elite four. You’re training your own Pokémon and challange the other trainers in the game.
Another goal in the game, is to get a complete Pokédex. It’s an encyclopedia which can hold 151 Pokémon, if you can catch’em all.
To collect all the 151 Pokémon, you have to play both Pokémon Red and Pokémon Blue. The 151th Pokémon (Mew) was only available at special Nintendo events and with the use of Pokémon Stadium on Nintendo 64. But it’s also possible to catch it exploit a bug in the game.
The two first Pokémon games, Pokémon Red and Pokémon Green was released on February 27, 1996. Later that year, Pokémon Blue was released in Japan on mailorder only. Blue had updated graphics and new dialogue. Pokémon Red and Pokémon Blue was based on the Japanese Blue when these games was released in September 1998 in USA and May 1999 in Europe. Because of bad source code in the Japanese versions of Pokémon, the developers couldn’t just remove the Japanese text and exchange it with English. The games had to be re-programmed.
These means that the Japanese Pokémon Red and Green is exlusive for Japan and also have Pokémons that is not availbale in Red and Blue released in the West.
There was also an enhanced version of the games, released as Pokémon Yellow. The graphics was closer to the anime-series of Pokémon. The game also utilize the grahics powers of Game Boy Color.
Pokémon became big business and the most known Pokémon, Picachu, have appeared on everything from t-shirts, lunchboxes to you name it… Including anime shows and movies.
Pokémon have had a lot of sequals over the years on different Nintendo consoles, but the games main platform have always been the Nintendo handhels.
This article is a translation from my original Norwegian article published in retrospilling.no.
They are small. They are dressed in blue, have green hair and is 8 x 8 pixels.
Lemmings started as a small PC-demo in 1989. The game was shown to Psygnosis, but they didn’t want to publish the game. DMA Design made more levels and worked more on the game, and in the end, it was Psysgnosis that published the game. Lemmings was released on Valentines Day, February 14, 1991 on the Amiga.
The reason for the choice of colours on the Lemmings, was that EGA on PC only supported 16 colours and was at the time the weakes platform the game was developed for. With green hair, a white body and blue clothes, the Lemmings would look the same on all platforms.
The idea of Lemmings is simple and ingenious. You have to guides as many Lemmings as you can through the levels. Some times you will save them all, sometimes you have to sacrifice a Lemming or 10.
Lemmings can originaly have eight different abilities: Climbers, Floaters, Bashers, Miners, Diggers, Builders, Blockers and Bombers. In later games the got more abilities, some of the them quite confusing ones.
The original Lemmigs made use of the Amiga support for two mice. In addition to 120 levels, it had 20 levels for two players. The Atari ST version had the same, but had to use one mouse and a joystick. Some of the console conversions also had 2-player support.
Lemmings was followed by Oh No! More Lemmings – also released in 1991 – it was as a data disk and as a standalone game. It added 100 new levels to Lemmings. In 1993 Lemmings 2: The Tribes was released. Christmas Lemmings was small demos which was released around Christmas time between 1991 and 1994. The third Lemmings game was released in 1994, All New World of Lemmings. This was the last game to be made by DMA Design. Like most of other games in the midle of the 90’s, Lemmings turned in to the world of 3D. 3D Lemmings was released in 1995. Lemmings Revolution came out in 2000. The last Lemmings game came out in 2006 and this was back to the original of ’91.
Lemmings was a very successful game. It sold 50-55 000 copies on Amiga on releaseday. So the game was converted to almost all format known under the sun at the time. Some of the consoles and computers that got a conversion of Lemmings was Commodore 64, Sinclair Spectrum, MS-DOS, Sega Game Gear, Master Syste, Mega Drive, Super Nintendo Game Boy, 3DO and Playstation.
I remember playing Lemmings in 1991. It was a good game then and it’s a good game now.
“Take command of the wackiest collection of misdirected rodents
ever seen on your screen.
A forgotten Blocker, a rogue Miner or a misplaced bridge
could spell disaster for every Lemming on screen.”
Just got Retro Gamer issue 138 in the mail, and here is some of things to read:
As usual, you can get Retro Gamer at Imagineshop.so.uk.
I loved playing The Sims at the dawn of the new millennium. The games was released on February 4 in 2000, so that makes its 15th anniversary today.
It was fun creating and decoration the house. I could spend hours on doing just that. And it was fun to let the people into the house and see what they did and how they reacted. A bit like Big Brother. Make them cook food, watch TV or dance to music. It was quite fun!
So, happy birthday Sims!
The screenshots are taken from Wikipedia.
