It's Just Cause, Just Cause 2, Deus Ex: Human Revolution with its DLC addon, Hitman: Blood Money, The Last Remnant, Quantum Conundrum, and Supreme Commander 2, all for just $10. Yeah. Not all of those games are good, but enough are to be make it worth getting (unless you have them all already of course) for sure...
Tom Hall of course made Commander Keen and Anachronox, among others. He's working on this game with Brenda Brathwaite, who was a designer on Wizardry 8 and some other classic RPGs. It's going to be a first-person RPG with turn-based combat. It's at ~$180,000 now, so it's got a ways to go before it gets funded. It better be, Tom Hall should be making real games again! Commander Keen's one of my favorite games ever, of course... and while I'd rather see him make a platformer, honestly, an RPG from the designers of Wizardry 8 and Anachronox? Yes, I will be getting this. The only question is, which tier... it's hard to decide.
Obsidian needs no introduction, I think... Chris Avellone's studio, and makers of many RPGs now. This one will be more traditional than any of the ones they've made since founding Obsidian, even more so than NWN2 I expect. It's going to be isometric viewed and with pausable real-time combat, like that game or Torment/Icewind Dale. It's already got several million dollars, so the question here is just if you want it... but if it's anywhere near as good as it should be, it'll certainly be worth getting!
The upcoming Prof. Laton and Paper Mario Star Sticker are examples. Nintendo is really pushing people to download the games instead of getting the retail versions, so the only games this applies to are ones you can also get in retail, not download exclusives.
What do you get? Not the arcade game exactly, but instead a modified version of the NES port. This had also been released in PAL format in Europe on select Wiis and as a reward for downloading NSMB2. As you may already know, the NES port of the game lacks the conveyer belt level of the original arcade release, which was apparently due to initial NES games having extremely limited storage space even compared to later NES games (Donkey Kong Classics would later stuff all of DKJr in there but didn't code back in that missing level). Other than this, certain animations are missing like the classic DK bouncing up the girders and knocking them out of alignment and a number of missing sound effects. The core game is basically the same, though at an easier difficulty curve. So, this version codes the conveyer level back into play using that engine.
It's a fun reward, but their advertising is misleading. It's not actually "original edition" since it isn't a port of the arcade version. (Actually, they legally can't do that, because a different company is responsible for actually programming the original game, and Nintendo burned bridges with them by releasing the game boards themselves without paying them for it, so they can't get the license back now. http://gamasutra.com/view/feature/134790...hp?print=1 ) Further, they advertise it as "never before released in America". While strictly speaking, this IS true of this particular version (it had only been released in Europe as I had said), it isn't true of the conveyer belt level, which obviously had been released in America, both in the arcade and later on with Donkey Kong 64.
That brings me to my last point. How exactly was Rare able to get away with putting that port of DK Arcade in DK64 without getting Nintendo into trouble? Is it technically good because the game was actually rewritten and ported to the N64 hardware, or is it shady because it was actually the arcade game being emulated? I can't say because I don't know. In any case, one would think Nintendo could rewrite the code from scratch these days exactly matching the arcade original and go ahead and release THAT as the "original edition".
Well, either way it'll be fun to play something pretty close to the original version and it's not a bad little "extra" for downloading certain games. However, I may stick with DK64 when I'm at home for the genuine article. (Not as genuine as you might expect though. The DK64 version unlocks all 4 stages from the start. The original only had two stages in the first "loop", then the bouncing spring stage added in loop 2, and by loop 3 they add the conveyer belt stage to the loop. It doesn't quite end there though, as later loops add repeats of some of the stages to get even "higher" on the "how high can you go?" screen. Still, it's as close as any home version's ever been, short of actually buying an old DK arcade machine.)
The live video was supposed to have been on a delay to prevent something like that from airing... but apparently it wasn't, or at the very least someone wasn't paying attention and didn't cut the video off in time. Fail, Fox News. FAIL.
I think it's an old video that just came out now, but maybe someday we'll be able to play this game... it looks great, just like Rare's other N64 3d platformers, including of course the Conker game they did release (after a complete redo). I like the cute theme here, and the two playable characters. I can understand why they changed it, because they'd done three cute 3d platformers on the N64 already, but it's too bad we couldn't have gotten both somehow... anyway, it's a very cool video, watch it.
I was board this weekend so I invented a shrink ray, to bad it only shrinks things not enlarges them, I had a lot of trial runs and ended up with hundreds of tiny bowls! Anyone wan't a really tiny bowl? Actually it's a test of the new bullet physics branch in Blender it's getting more stable and better with new features everyday!
As the bowl shrinks the spoon gets pushed out, you may have to watch it HD full screen to see everything.
This kinda flies in the face of the SMB3 manual which states numerous times they ARE his kids, and again in both the All-Stars and Advance version's manuals.
I really don't care too much about Mario's "continuity" and tend to think of the Mario universe as in flux like the Looney Toons universe. If the old quartet of games has them as his children and the new set of games sets them as... um... a bunch of random koopas of no relation, then that's fine. I can just accept that most Mario games occur in their own isolated instances and the general personalities are all that get moved around from game to game. It just doesn't seem very fun or interesting to me though. Bowser Jr isn't all that interesting on his own.
Ya know what? Screw it, they're still his kids to me. Miyamoto's statements about continuity in interviews aren't really to be trusted anyway. Remember all those completely contradictory statements about Zelda's timeline before they officially released a timeline that, wouldn't you know it, ended up matching perfectly with what they originally said in the games themselves.
