Industry choosing iphone, abandoning wii?

I think the iPhone makes a difference in the videogame space in a sense where it allows the industry to re-invent itself. Let me explain to you why.

If anything over the past few months stood out to me in terms of news and announcements, then I’d have to go with this trend of big developers and publishers seemingly losing interest in Nintendo’s white box of fun and starting to show their love to Apple’s iPhone. We’ve all seen big name publishers statements, thought mostly informal, with regards to the slow game sales on the Wii. And where some developers switch to PS3/360 development, others turned to the iPhone (or both). EA, Sega, Capcom, Square Enix and others have all started creating iPhone games in one form or the other. Read more

NES gaming review: Gun.Smoke

Gun.smoke is a nice vertical scrolling, shooter arcade game, which was released in 1985 in Europe by Capcom, also known from games today like the Resident Evil and the Megaman series.

In each level you have to shoot your way through a horde of criminals which all try to kill you, because you are always trying to kill their boss. Every boss has a bounty on his head, because they are wanted criminals and you are the nameless bounty hunter that has to kill them.

The more levels you finish, the more criminals will try to kill you at the same time and eventually, like in most games, it will get harder and faster.
I recommend when you play this game, to play it with a NES Advantage and not with a regular controller, because your left thumb will get a pretty good beating after several levels.

As you shoot your way through a level, different power-up’s pop up from either killing the criminals or shooting down barrels.

Some will give you more fire power, 1up or just some random pickups that are worth money.

With the money you can buy better weapons which will need ammo that you can get from the same merchants.

Some of the weapons are: a Magnum, a Shotgun, a Machinegun and Smart bombs.

Also, there is a horse you can buy which will let your character take two hits until you die instead of just one.

Oh, and if you pay close enough attention, you can see ‘’CAPCOM’’ on every wanted poster, nice little gimmick.

NES gaming review: Duck Tales

Duck tales is probably one of the easiest games on the NES.

The game is from Capcom and was released in Europe on December 1990, in Japan on January 1990 and in North America on September 1989.

When you start up the game, you hear the lovely music from the Duck Tales animated series where this game is based on.

And you also get to choose your game difficulty from the options: Easy, Medium and Hard.

The player controls the character, Uncle Scrooge from Duck Tales throughout the entire game, searching for high worthy treasures to become the wealthiest duck on the planet.

As for attacking the enemies, you can use your cane to pogo them into oblivion, the pogo cane can also be used to open treasure boxes and passages. You can pogo even higher on a treasure that is in the air (which would be most unlikely in real life, because I have never seen a floating treasure box in the air, have you?).

The five stages are basically known areas on the planet. The Amazon, African mines, Transylvania, and the Himalayas., but also the Moon.

Of course every stage has its own kind of enemies. Like the mummies in the Transylvania stage, spiders and other tropical animals in the Amazon and African mine stages, some yeti like creatures in the Himalayas, and some science-fiction like robot ducks at the Moon stage.

Every stage has their own boss you have kill, after they die they drop the stage treasure. After getting your hand on the treasure that drops from the boss of that stage, the stage is no longer playable.

After the stages are all completed, the game is done.

But there are 2 hidden treasures in the game, when you have found them and completed the game with at least 10.000.000 Dollars, you will get an alternate ending screen.

When crossing a certain spot (that is invisible) in the screen in a stage or kill an enemy, they will drop either food to regain health, or a small or big diamond to get more money.

There are some characters in the game you can just talk to that give hints throughout the stages, like non-player characters. Heuy, Dewey and Louie –Your nephews, who pop up in various places in the game, mostly to give hints or to restrict areas. Webby – Does about the same as the nephews, provides hints and restricts areas. Gizmo Duck – Comes for a brief moment to blast a wall open for you in The Moon stage. Launchpad McQuack – Helps you to get across a pitfall in the Amazon stage and is found in every stage except for Transylvania, where you have the option of returning to Duckburg. When you meet to certain of his conditions, you will enter a bonus round. Launchpad can only be used once per stage. Gyro Gearloose – (got to love his name, Gearloose ha-ha) can only be met in the bonus stage, where he launches diamonds at Scrooge. Mrs. Beakley – Turns up in certain stages and drops food for you to regain health. Bubba – He’s a caveman that provides you with an extra heart, if you free him in the Himalaya stage. Magica De Spell – You will get to fight here in the Transylvania stage, you can say she is like a boss. Flintheart Glomgold – You have to stop him and reach the treasure box before he does. The Beagle Boys – They show up occasionally in the game to either guard a passage or to take your nephews captive.

As I was growing up I used to love to game and I still do today, we didn’t own this game ourselves, so I had to borrow it from a friend. But it was totally worth it. If you like retro gaming, you should really try this game. The stages are nice, the music is good, over-all it’s just an excellent game.

Capcom has proven itself worthy of making games back then and today they still do with games like Resident evil, Devil may cry, Lost Planet and Monster hunter.

NES gaming review: Faxanadu

To be honest I think this one of the most interesting games for the NES, and I don’t think it’s all that well known.

It has this medieval-fantasy style and different gear you can equip, sounds a lot like a RPG doesn’t it?

Let me tell you something about it, it’s a one person side scrolling game, was released in Europe on December 28th 1990 and was published by Hudson soft.

The Faxanadu that was released In Japan had an option to choose one, but sadly we don’t have this option in Europe.

The story is about the elves and dwarfs that live in harmony among the world tree until The Evil One emerges from a fallen meteorite, against their will he transforms the dwarfs into monsters and set them against the elves.

The dwarf king Grieve swallowed his magical sword before he was transformed, hiding it away in his monstrous body to prevent The Evil One from ever claiming it his own, for this is the only weapon which can obliterate The Evil One.

When you start the game up, u get to see a short clip where the ‘’hero’’ from the name is now known walks into a town called Eolis, which is also his hometown. The first thing you can do is talk to the king in Eolis,  he will give you some gold to start with and a ring, after that you can kill monsters for gold.

With the gold you can buy new weapons, gear, food, potions, keys etc.

You practically move from dungeon to dungeon to keep going forward in the game. To unlock the next dungeon you usually have to get a certain key.

Some keys are sold by merchants and some drop from a boss you have to kill in a dungeon.
As you kill more monsters, you get more experience to level up, get a higher rank and reputation, and of course as in other RPG’s your health and magic will increase.

It’s a nice and fun game, and to me the music and monsters where never boring.  I used to play this game for hours when I was still a little guy, we didn’t own the game I just borrowed it from a friend, and when I was going into retro gaming I bought this game again to see what it was like, and I still like it today … but the thing is, I never got to finish the game … maybe, some day, I will, ha-ha.

TomRyuKen: The new deal is too good for me

The games of today and the future in the eyes of the retro gamer

While I sit back and look at the many TV-screens around me, filled with lots of colours, and full of carefully rendered 3-d character models blending in with the awesome backgrounds, wondering how much time it must have taken for the players to get used to the intricate gameplay-system, I do wonder about the future of gaming too, every now and then. Will games in the future be even more beautiful? Very likely. Will they be much bigger and longer? Quite likely. Will their theme or general gameplay change into something completely new? Absolutely unlikely. The problem with the gaming after so many years is that it is hard to come up with original ideas. The new games are so much more ‘powerful’ in the sense that their graphical capabilities are far superior to their predecessors, whereas the actual gameplay is sort of but a copy of previous games.
Nintendo can design a new Mario in the future, and it will have both better graphics and sound, but it’s gameplay will possibly let us down. With us, I mean the retro gamer. Let us down in the sense that we can play a more beautiful copy, but we can also forget about that, because we already possess the more original and virtually identical predecessor on the SNES!

Okay I admit that Mario isn’t really that good of an example. Mario 64 did something completely new with the series: but for the series only. Nintendo is known to be quite innovative but sadly they cannot keep pulling these stunts off, and if they prove that they are able to do so, they have my blessing.
The main thing with retro gaming and retro gamer (besides whining about ‘good old times’) is a sceptic look towards the future and distrust in what the upcoming games will give us. At least, that is how I see it, but this is probably the case for many of my fellow retro gamers. That’s right, I’m a retro gamer. I’m the kind of guy who still sees the SNES undefeated as a console and jumps for joy whenever an arcade machine is sighted. I’m a great fan of the games that are now considered ‘old’. Just think about ‘Donkey Kong Country’ and the entire series on the SNES, ‘Super Mario World 1 & 2’, ‘Crono Trigger’, ‘Super Street Fighter 2’, ‘Lufia’… all of them are classic games on the SNES that most people still consider good, and some people consider them better than the games of today (that would be me). But their were dozens of games on the NES that I liked, I’m particularly a fan of Probotectors, Gunsmoke, Double Dragon and the Mario series (and Mario 3 the most).

However, it would be a misconception to believe that I dislike the games of today. I own several ‘modern’ platforms and their games accordingly, and I enjoy them probably as much as I would enjoy the old games. The only difference is, that I tend to ‘travel back in time’ every now and then to re-discover the world of retro gaming on my SNES, my Gameboy, or the NES., or find an arcade machine and play for the highest score (that is worth some money ).
I’m not trying to write a piece of propaganda for old games, I’m just telling what I think about. I don’t feel like explaining a lot, or delving into the minds of the casual retro gamer in a futile pursuit of evidence about what a retro gamer could be – I hope I can make you people think about they days that are now gone, but shouldn’t have been. The days where you played West Story and KICKED ASS! Those days, you know.

And as I go home after a night well-spent (with gaming, what else?), I forget all about this, go to sleep, and the next morning a turn on my GC and give the Resident Evil baddies another run for their money. And for the romantics out there: who knows whether I had any unconscious dreams about a moustached carpenter chasing an oversized ape, dreams that I don’t remember…

Author: Tom Kerkhof