Tales from the Old School

Two very cool peeks into the fascinating days of the 80s and 90s games industry.

First, a half hour documentary about Ocean and Imagine games circa the early 80s. The boom and bust stuff is so over the top that it couldn't even be scripted. An absolutely amazing look into the world of the early UK development scene and gaming culture.

Secondly, listen to episode 91 of the 1up podcast Retronauts. It's a round table interview of developers from Tengen. It's a great conversation about NES development that goes into everything from unreleased games to Sega Technical Institute to how these guys are starting to find a place again in the age of Flash and iPhone development. Pretty awesome stuff.

Ripple Dot Zero

My future favorite game. Beautiful colorful spritework. Yamaha-style Sega Genesis synths. It's the real Rocket Knight sequel as far as I'm concerned.

http://blog.pixeltruss.com/
http://www.simonstalenhag.se/

Shnabubula - Playing Super Mario World While Taking Mushrooms

Holy cow, what a tour de force. This is an incredible Super Mario World Medley/Jam Session injected with healthy dose of soul and humor by Shnabubula using the original Super Nintendo soundfonts. The final few minutes are pretty mind blowing. Take ten minutes out of your time and listen to this insane thing.

Mike the Cat's Legal Defense Fund: Demo 2

I finally made some more levels for Mike the Cat's Legal Defense Fund.

You can download the demo HERE. It's about 12 MB.

It includes three new challenge levels, an overhauled engine and some tweaks to the original levels. My microphone is broken, so I unfortunately wasn't able to record new dialogue for the CEO character. If you want to level select, you can press "d" on the title screen. I think I might whip out a couple of more CBS Storybreak remixes for special levels. Now that I have a better engine and have basically made it from the ground up, I'm going to try to push myself to work on a level or so a week. It's good to have the muse back.

I'm starting a resource for Kabuki Quantum Fighter

Kabuki Quantum Fighter has always held my fascination for some reason. It is basically a mediocre Ninja Gaiden clone, but it's uniqueness is weirdly mesmering to me. I do tend to like "guy goes into the computer" stories, I suppose. I started a small fansite at kabukiquantumfighter.com. It's kind of sparse right now, but I'll add more things as time goes on. There really wasn't enough info on the game in general out there, so I hope someone enjoys it as much as I do.

The Jasper Jackalope OST

Jasper Jackalope is a theoretical platformer created by the theoretical Olivo Instant Grits Company.  In every commerical Jasper has to protect his grits from the evil Cecil Coyote.  The game itself is an homage to Sonic the Hedgehog.  I decided to make this soundtrack before I made the actual game.  The songs are fun cut and paste chiptune samples with some beatboxing laid over the top and I realy like the sound.  I offered some of these loops for Dave Kelly to use on Something Awful's Flash Tub a while back and it was pretty cool when he actually did!  Here is the first draft of most of the soundtrack to Jasper Jackalope.  I still probably need a continue song and maybe a game over.

Pandaland

Pandaland is a Windows platformer based around Swedish indie-girl culture.  It was first announced about 2 years ago, but the creators finally got around to finishing it up.  It's about as difficult and lengthy as your average promotional flash game (although there is a hidden hard mode), but the chiptunes and pixel art 110% nail a perfect "informed-by-but-better-than-NES" aesthetic that for once doesn't feel like a programmer who couldn't afford artists.  Using up to jump is kind of weird and Amiga-y, but this thing really sings and swings.  A perfect videogame after dinner mint.  Go play it!