http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p–dHQIeagE
Here’s a music video for a Space Invaders remix by Ken Ishii & FLR (who is also Ken Ishii).
(Source: http://www.youtube.com/)
A daily miasma of frivolity by two wanna-be cultural critics. Or: just, like, some good links, dude.
Tag Archives: video games
Wikipedia: Don’t Buy This
Don’t Buy This (also known as: Don’t Buy This: Five of the Worst Games Ever) is a ZX Spectrum compilation. As described on the box, it contains five of the poorest games submitted to Firebird.
Instead of rejecting the submissions, they decided to mock the original developers by releasing them together and publicly brand it as “unoriginal” and “awful”. Firebird even disowned all their copyright to the game and encouraged buyers to pirate it at will.
I wonder if a game company could get away with doing this today.
Tomorrow’s a big day for video game releases, so let’s add one more to the pile: Nitronic Rush. It’s free!
(Source: http://www.youtube.com/)
Beautifully animated and directed video from Arin “Egoraptor” Hanson, examining the differences between Mega Man and Mega Man X.
The 20 minute video covers a lot of ground, but the segment that resonated the most with me was the one about how Mega Man and Mega Man X teach players how to play through good level design, rather than through an explicit tutorial. Specifically, the bit about how Mega Man X teaches you to wall jump blew my mind. Required viewing.
And if you didn’t see it already, don’t miss his analysis of Castlevania and Castlevania 2 as well.
(Source: http://www.youtube.com/)
Here are Super Guitar Bros. with a medley of three tunes and one sound effect from Super Mario World arranged for two guitars. These dudes meet the bar for YouTube covers by having tuned instruments and being competent performers, but the arrangement of the castle theme in particular is really well done. Great, faithful adaptation of often more than two parts at a time for two guitars. I didn’t like the boss theme arrangement as much, since it lacks some of the rhythmic oomph of the original without much to make up for it, but it’s certainly still a jam.
(Source: http://www.youtube.com/)
Here’s a Japanese TV spot for Ace Combat: Assault Horizon, out today for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3.
I’d play it.
(Source: http://www.youtube.com/)
Super Mario Genderswaps! This was a super fun design challenge, and I’m pretty pleased with how they all turned out — especially Luigi. My favourite thing is how Waluigi just looks the usual design, but in drag.
Absolutely fantastic.
(Via Scott Jon Siegel.)
This is a photo of Robin Mihara, age 13, sipping a soda at the Nintendo World Championships in 1990. It’s part of Chris Kohler’s article for Wired’s GameLife blog about participants and the extremely rare cartridges from the event.
This photo is so fantastic.
This is page 3 of issue 1 of Johnny Turbo, an extremely misguided advertising “campaign” by NEC for their TurboDuo system. In it, implied superhero-esque person Johnny Turbo farts lightning and occasionally battles against the inhuman monsters of “Feka Corporation” and their devious plan to convince the world that the “Feka CD” was the world’s first CD-based game console.
Sardius has uploaded scans of all(?) three issues of Johnny Turbo, with commentary! It is marvelous.
Above is part 1 of 11 of a playthrough of a ROM hack entitled Sonic the Hedgehog NES.1 It’s an NES game2 hacked to include facsimiles of the levels from Sonic the Hedgehog. And it’s tremendously, tremendously bad. The gameplay is maddening and glitchy, the music is a pale, tuneless imitation of the original’s, and most of all the level design is just atrocious. For example, in the Labyrinth zone (which all told is nearly half an hour long) our host “jackaroo” passes through the same tired feature of the level so many times I lost count. Probably the only good thing about the game is the graphics, which look pretty good for an 8-bit NES game.
Oh, and jackaroo’s annotations are hilarious3, as is his cheesy custom pre-roll before every video.4 Good times.
Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11.
-
Also known as Somari — in that version, you play through the levels with a crude Mario sprite doing Sonic-esque moves, even including a spin dash. Nrgh. ↩
-
Super Mario Bros 3 perhaps? ↩
-
I’m not always laughing with them however. ↩
-
And as if “jackaroo” wasn’t an unimaginative enough handle, he’s since created a newer Youtube channel under the name “ssjjackaroo”. Oh boy. ↩
(Source: http://www.youtube.com/)