Late last year, the SEGA Ultimate Mega Drive Collection had merely been a rumor. Now, it’s a reality, and it’s coming to video game store shelves this January 26, at least in Australia. Is it also slated for release in North America and Europe? I really have no idea.

All I know is what’s in the SEGA Ultimate Mega Drive Collection. Here’s a partial rundown: Sonic the Hedgehog (1, 2 and 3), Alien Storm, Space Harrier (whoopie!), Streets of Rage (1, 2 and 3), and Columns.

Here’s what, *sigh*, PC World has to say about the upcoming release of SEGA Ultimate Mega Drive Collection followed by a short clip of what you can expect:

SEGA will bring smiles and nostalgic thoughts to many next week with the release of the Ultimate Mega Drive Collection for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. Featuring 40 of the most popular games for the SEGA Mega Drive, the collection brings the retro games to the latest generation of consoles with high-definition refinements. Each of the 40 games has been enhanced to 720p, and console-specific unlockable achievements and multiplayer modes have been added. The collection is scheduled for a January 26 local release on both consoles.

Oh, and in case you didn’t like the video, PC World has a slideshow of screenshots from the collection. You might want to check it out.

Post from: EveryJoe

SEGA waxes nostalgic, to release Ultimate Mega Drive Collection for Xbox 360, PS3

The iPhone may be the newest gaming rig on the field, but it\’s starting to host its fair share of yesteryear. Some of the biggest names in retro gaming have popped on the touch screen, such as Namco\’s Pac-Man and Atari\’s Missile Command. And in just the last few weeks, the App Store has placed wayback classics like Space War and Adventure within reach of iPhone gamers. But one of the most intriguing trips down memory lane comes courtesy of Sid Player, a to-go jukebox that links you directly to a huge library of classic Commodore 64 music.\r\n\r\nThere is something special about the music of the C64. The Commodore 64 was a wildly successful platform that snuck into many homes as a productivity machine, but was primarily used as a game player. The C64 was built with audio in mind (among other things) and the SID chip was capable of producing some incredible game music. While technically limited when compared to the audio equipment of today, the SID chip, in the right hands, could sing. Some of the greats of the era, such as Rob Hubbard and Paul Norman, coaxed some fantastic music — not game music, but just music — out of the SID. Play The Last V8, Human Race, Aztec Challenge, and Forbidden Forest, and just try to disagree.

\r\n\r\nEven though I don\’t own an iPhone (yeah, it sucks) and didn\’t own a Commodore 64, I could imagine how strange it would feel playing classic or retro video games on a 3.5-inch widescreen at 480 by 320 pixel resolution. Playing these retro games isn\’t about how it looks or sounds, but how it feels, and how it feels right in the hands of a passionate classic or retro gamer.\r\n\r\nIf I owned an iPhone, however, I\’d probably go for retro or classic video games that I had played when I was young … er. Space Invaders and Asteroids, which I originally played on the Atari 2600, are probably two of the games I\’d get for my iPhone.\r\n\r\nScouring the Internet, but staying away from the Apple iPhone App Store, I\’ve found a retro game pack for the gadget at Apptism. The retro game pack has four games—Bricks, Alien Hunter, Tank Wars and Pong—and is downloadable, for a fee, of course, from Apptism.\r\n\r\nBefore you go downloading new retro (boy that sounds so contradictory!) video games to your iPhone, consider viewing this video entitled The Good, Bad & Ugly side of the Apple iPhone App Store from TekieTV:\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nOh, and if you\’re looking for a good blog to get news about Apple and the iPhone, check out The After Mac and Cellphone9.

Post from: EveryJoe

Even the iPhone is going retro

Well, regardless of which video you choose, one thing’s for certain: They’re both better than the video I showed you in my previous posting, Gordon Freeman in Mario Land.

My only beef with the guys who did the modifications is the way they presented the world of Super Mario Brothers. Come on! The game Super Mario Brothers may be side-scrolling and set in a two-dimensional world, but having Gordon Freeman walk a narrow blocky terrain in 3D isn’t exactly a good translation of the Super Mario Brothers world’s physics.

Hmmm, probably has something to do with Half-Life’s Steam engine.

Post from: EveryJoe

Gordon Freeman in Mario Land #2

Waitaminute! This blog isn’t about comic books! Duh! It’s about retro and classic video games. So where are the crossovers in the video gaming realm? Believe it or not, the most well known crossover in this world still has something to do with comic books. Ever heard of the Marvel versus Capcom series?

Here’s a little backgrounder courtesy of Wikipedia:

Marvel vs Capcom is a series of fighting games created by Capcom in which characters created by Marvel Comics and Capcom’s own characters appear together. While it was the first versus series involving Capcom, the name Marvel exists to distinguish it from Capcom’s other versus series with SNK, Tatsunoko Production, and Namco’s crossover role-playing game with Capcom, Namco x Capcom.

The Marvel characters depicted in these games were often based on their incarnations in various early 1990s animated series (particularly X-Men), and were often voiced by the same voice actors.

Many of the characters and fighting mechanics used in these games were first developed and refined in two other fighting games Capcom had developed earlier, serving as precursors to the series: X-Men: Children of the Atom, which featured characters strictly from the X-Men universe, and Marvel Super Heroes, which gleaned characters from Marvel’s entire roster (X-Men included).

Although the tag-team fighting concept was not new, it was refined with this series (although fans would argue whether this was for better or for worse). New fighting game terminology, such as “Aerial Rave” (the act of performing a combo on an opponent while the opponent remains airborne) and “Variable Combination” (the act of having two or more characters on the same team to perform their hyper combos at the same time) were added to the fighting game vernacular with this series.

Well, this post is not really about Marvel vs Capcom, but about a fantasy crossover between two very popular video game worlds, that of Super Mario Brothers and Gordon Freeman’s Half-Life. Go check out the video below:

Post from: EveryJoe

Gordon Freeman in Mario Land

The temptation, however, is hard to pass up, especially if you’ve seen Max Payne dance. Eerie and freaky.

So without further ado, I present you Metroid’s Samus Aran dancing to Usher’s Yeah:

Post from: EveryJoe

Watch Samus dance the Metroid

This video is a classic. Made by Guillaume Reymond of the Gameover Project, the video is no laughing matter as it uses stop-motion photography and a dozen or so men and women. Yes! Live human beings!

Go check out the video and tell me afterward if it doesn’t command respect:

Actually, Guillame Reymond and the Gameover Project aren’t the only ones who uses live humans to test weird ideas, such as emulating an old popular video game like Tetris. The Japanese are probably way ahead of them in terms of entertainment and ingenuity as this video proves:

Post from: EveryJoe

Tetris, according to Guillaume Reymond

Here’s the description that came with the video of the World’s Largest Tetris:

Take a Linux computer, a joystick-frequency radio, 10,000 Christmas lights, a building, and you have the biggest game of Tetris in the world. Here is the largest Tetris game made with lights in a building. Amazing!

The author of the video neglected to tell us how much they spent on their electricity bill.

Well, without further ado, I present to you (what else?) the LARGEST GAME OF TETRIS:

Check out Re:Retro’s other postings on Tetris.

Post from: EveryJoe

Playing Tetris on a building facade

I have to give credit to guys like YouTube user blairwja who seek to break the monotony of retro gaming by providing us with great and entertaining fan fiction. Now, if only someone comes up with a video of the Super Mario Brothers on a romp in the Mega Man world.

Post from: EveryJoe

Pac-Man in Super Mario Brothers world

Let’s take a closer look at the four games:

Manhole: Like in the original Game & Watch classic, you have a few people walking across a platform riddled with gaps. In this version, though, you must maneuver Yoshi to hold up a manhole cover to fill in the various gaps and prevent Mario, Toad and Donkey Kong Jr. from falling.

Oil Panic: In this game, Mario reprises the role of the pathetic blot of a character catches leaking oil in a bucket and dumps it out a window into the waiting bucket of his accomplice, Yoshi.

Octopus: Mario dives for treasure in this Game & Watch masterpiece while evading the tentacles of a monstrous octopus.

Fire: No burning skyscrapers here. Instead you have a castle burning with Toad, Yoshi and Donkey Kong Jr. jumping out the window to escape the inferno. The game, however, isn’t complete with brothers Mario and Luigi manning the tarp that bounces the three victims to safety.

Well, personally, Mario and the gang, and the once-fancy machine called the Game Boy can’t replace the real thing. But it’s always fun to play different versions of games that we have come to love.

Post from: EveryJoe

Fusion: NES and Game & Watch

What a surprise! I’ve just discovered that I suck at Space Invaders, a couple of days after learning that Frogger isn’t as easy to play now as it was back in the 80s.

It’s a surprise because I play Chicken Invaders, an arcade-like PC game that parodies Space Invaders. Needless to say, this spinoff is just as successful as the game it mimics. Hooray for Interaction Studios.

Going back to our topic, I played Space Invaders not on the Atari 2600 (on which I spent countless hours kicking alien butt back in the 80s), but on a Flash animation version made by the same guys that developed the Frogger version I mentioned in my previous post.

The Flash version isn’t as hard as the original. This is probably because in the Flash PC version, you get more mobility for your spacecraft courtesy of the keyboard compared to the 80s arcade and Atari versions of the game which made use of the joystick.

What makes the original version more palatable than this copycat is the sound. In this Flash version, you won’t hear the distinct chug-chug-chug sound that gets faster as the aliens move a notch down, to a point that it’s already unnerving.

Here, give the Flash animation version a try.

Post from: EveryJoe

Haha! I suck at Space Invaders, too