We were already looking forward to Sega’s upcoming Mega Drive Ultimate Collection, with 40 16-bit era classics including the Streets of Rage trilogy. Now, even more so. JB Hi-Fi has landed a world exclusive offer, where those of you who pre-order the game will receive a limited-edition soundtrack on individually numbered blue vinyl.
Music producers in search of that unmistakable 8-bit sound have a plethora of options available to them, but few are as authentic as Super Synth Drums - an actual cartridge that works on a real (or pirate) NES system. Granted, its sound palette is so narrow you could spit across it, and the Midines is a far better bit of kit, but it’s half the price and we always like to see more labor-of-love projects supporting discontinued hardware.
The Super Synth Drums cartridge is available from ElectroKraft for $49 plus shipping. Click through for a terrible demonstration video, which demonstrates as much of the demonstrators crotch as it does the actual product.
Whenever I think of LucasArts, I wonder why they stopped making graphic adventure games. According to LucasArts PR manager Chris Norris, this kind of question is all too common.
“We have looked at it,” admits Norris. “It is something we are continually looking at - new venues to put out our library of games on. We’re not announcing anything about that because honestly I don’t know anything about it.”
And why don’t they release the games on the Wii or DS, both formats sporting interfaces which are undeniably perfect for a translation?
A video game collector in Oakland recently found their holy grail - an Atari 2600 game that was never finished, and never released. Unfortunately the game in question, Cabbage Patch Kids Adventures in the Park, isn’t likely to entertain anyone when the collector inevitably connects with someone who can dump Atari 2600 ROMs.
Got huge wads of cash burning a hole in your pocket? Check out this eBay auction for 741 NES cartridges, including all 670 Nintendo-licensed games released in North America.
The bidding is now at $3,600 however the reserve is not yet met. The shipping alone will set you back $400, but this is unlikely to bother anyone who spends this kind of money on piles of shitty old games.
Starting out with a cheap NES clone and a Super Mario Bros. cartridge, French modder Kotomi has created perhaps the coolest NES mod yet by squeezing the console into one of it’s own cartridges. It’s fully functional, with a cartridge slot, power and reset buttons, two controller ports and a composite AV out.
Owen Good over at Kotaku, and his brother, are huge Pac-Man fans. A recent IM conversation between the two led to a fairly in-depth conversation about the size of the stool Pac-Man would produce if he went to the toilet after every board - and the pixel art to go with it. Read and see it all at Kotaku.
A LiveJournal user by the name of studiojfish has found a massive amount of artwork from the original NES version of The Legend of Zelda lying around on his computer - and it’s of a completely different style than many of us have become accustomed to.
This NES port of Final Fantasy VII is far from your average rip-off. It’s the work of a gifted group of Chinese programmers, who utilized revolutionary techniques to squeeze a relatively complete version of the PSone classic onto a cartridge that plays on ancient 8-bit hardware.