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Nintendo is discontinuing the NES Classic Edition
This is surprising…
In a statement provided to IGN, Nintendo has confirmed that production of the NES Classic Edition will soon be discontinued:
“Throughout April, NOA territories will receive the last shipments of Nintendo Entertainment System: NES Classic Edition systems for this year. We encourage anyone interested in obtaining this system to check with retail outlets regarding availability. We understand that it has been difficult for many consumers to find a system, and for that we apologize. We have paid close attention to consumer feedback, and we greatly appreciate the incredible level of consumer interest and support for this product.”
“NES Classic Edition wasn’t intended to be an ongoing, long-term product. However, due to high demand, we did add extra shipments to our original plans.”
The NES Classic Edition was originally released on November 11, and came packed with 30 well-known titles from the Nintendo Entertainment System’s heyday. Fans fell in love with the microconsole and supply quickly exceeded demand. Even today, the NES Classic Edition is next-to-impossible to find on store shelves. So it’s a bit baffling that Nintendo is already doing away with such a successful product.
However, Nintendo also launched the Switch this past March, and the consolemaker has likely decided to pour their considerable marketing muscle towards this new platform.
You can currently purchase an NES Classic Edition from a third-party seller on Amazon for $220. I wouldn’t expect that price to drop any lower anytime soon.
New Mega Man series headed to Cartoon Network in 2018
Capcom, in collaboration with DHX Media, Dentsu Entertainment, and Man of Action Entertainment, have announced that their in-development Mega Man animated series will debut on Cartoon Network in 2018.
The series will go into production this Summer, and it’s designed to introduce Mega Man to a new and much younger audience. The Mega Man series appears to be in good hands, as all three companies have proven themselves in children’s entertainment before. Dentsu Entertainment is responsible for localizing the popular Yo-Kai Watch series, and DHX Media has a long history of producing successful kid’s shows such as Degrassi and Teletubbies. Meanwhile, Man of Action Entertainment is most famous for the creation of Ben 10 and characters from Big Hero 6.
However, Mega Man fans have already taken issue with the upcoming show, citing Mega Man’s new aesthetic, and his “Aki Light” alter ego. According to DHX Media, Aki Light is a happy-go-lucky robotic child, who discovers that he has secret protocols that allow him to transform into Mega Man (basically, a robotic schoolboy version of nearly every mainstream superhero). Throughout the series, Mega Man will struggle with saving Silicon City from imposing threats, while trying to maintain his day-to-day life, and preserve his secret identity.
While this is definitely a break from the traditional Mega Man storyline, including that of the popular Mega Man cartoon from the mid 90s, it’s still an interesting reboot. Given the success of the companies involved with the new show’s production, this latest Mega Man cartoon is worth keeping on your radars, even if just to check it out once.
The Video Game Canon: Pac-Man
Dig deeper into the Video Game Canon with a look back at the true stories behind some of gaming’s greatest urban legends, most of which seem to revolve around Pac-Man. Here’s a teaser…
With more than 40 years of history behind it, it’s not surprising the video game community has developed its own catalog of urban legends that have been passed from player to player over the years. Everyone who played it desperately tried to resurrect Aerith after her tragic demise in Final Fantasy VII, and we all heard stories about the “nude codes” that supposedly existed in games like Tomb Raider, Mortal Kombat II, and The Sims.
Unfortunately, every one of those rumors has more in common with the hook man at lover’s lane than they do with the unvarnished truth. But some of the legends are true. And nearly all of them revolve around Pac-Man in some way.
Pac-Man is a simple creature. Just a yellow circle with a triangular wedge removed to represent his mouth. Some will say his design was simplistic because the designers at Namco were working within the hardware limitations of the day. Those people would be wrong. The inspiration for Pac-Man overcame Namco’s Toru Iwatani after he snatched the first slice at a company pizza party and noticed that it looked like a circle with a mouth.
But it gets weirder from there.
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World Video Game Hall of Fame announces 12 finalists for the Class of 2017
Street Fighter II: The World Warrior fought against Mortal Kombat for the hearts (and quarters) of arcade players in the early 90s. Next month, they’ll square off again as two (of the 12) finalists the World Video Game Hall of Fame’s Class of 2017.
Announced this morning by The Strong’s International Center for the History of Electronic Games, this year’s finalists also include Donkey Kong, Final Fantasy VII, Halo: Combat Evolved, Myst, Pokemon Red and Blue, Portal, Resident Evil, Tomb Raider, Wii Sports, and Windows Solitaire.
“These 12 World Video Game Hall of Fame finalists span decades, gaming platforms, and countries of origin… but what they all have in common is their undeniable impact on the world of gaming and popular culture,” said Jon-Paul C. Dyson, the Director of The Strong’s International Center for the History of Electronic Games. “Whether it’s a pop culture icon like Donkey Kong, an innovator and true original like Portal, or a game like Wii Sports that transformed millions of living rooms into interactive zones for all ages, they’re among the most influential games of all time.”
An international advisory committee made up of journalists and scholars familiar with the history of video games will advise the Hall of Fame’s selection of this year’s inductees, which will be announced on Thursday, May 4, at 10:30 AM (Eastern Time).
You can learn more about all of this year’s finalists after the break. (more…)
The Video Game Canon: The Secret of Monkey Island
Dig deeper into the Video Game Canon with a look at The Secret of Monkey Island and the many inspirations developers plundered from to make it. Here’s a teaser…
Game publishers have been concerned with digital pirates illegally copying their games since the very beginning of the medium. Some have even gone so far as to include booby traps in their code for these would-be thieves. But when it comes to depicting actual pirates, gamemakers (along with major Hollywood players and one of the most celebrated fantasy authors of the last few decades) are content to pillage, plunder, and steal all the best ideas from each other.
It all began in 1967 when Walt Disney himself oversaw the construction of the Pirates of the Caribbean attraction at Disneyland. Over the years, the ride would go on to be recreated at Disney World, Tokyo Disneyland, and Disneyland Park in Paris. Borrowing a bit from Treasure Island, the ride’s exciting ship-to-ship battle, raid on a coastal outpost, group of prisoners trying to bribe a dog for a key, and the frothy ditty “Yo Ho (A Pirate’s Life For Me)” created the quintessential image of a pirate that was shared by kids the world over.
Tim Powers was not one of these kids. Already a teenager by the late 60s, Powers rose to prominence as one of the earliest authors of steampunk (and he, along with K.W. Jeter and James Blaylock, helped coin the phrase). In 1987, he published one of his most famous novels, On Stranger Tides. The novel tells the tale of John Chandagnac, an inexperienced youth who becomes the debonair pirate “Jack Shandy” and rescues the girl after he has a run-in with several undead buccaneers.
A few years later, Lucasfilms Games’s Ron Gilbert took his experiences with the ride and mixed them with the magical seascapes of On Stranger Tides to create The Secret of Monkey Island, a point-and-click adventure game first published in 1990. The Secret of Monkey Island starred Guybrush Threepwood, an inexperienced youth with floppy hair who battled his own pirate nemesis, the undead LeChuck, in an attempt to rescue the girl. Most people would chalk these coincidences up to happenstance or cliche, but not Ron Gilbert. He’s the first to tell to you that what he did was out-and-out piracy. Or, in his words, “We in the business call it ‘stealing’.”
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Posted in Features, PC, PS3, Retro, Top Story, Video Game Canon, Xbox 360
Tagged The Secret of Monkey Island
It Came From 200X: Spider-Man
The tail-end of the 90s wasn’t a great time for superhero games. With the likes of Superman 64, Batman Beyond: Return of the Joker, and Spawn: The Eternal clogging store shelves, the average comic geek had few options for playable superheroics. That is, until Neversoft and Activision took it upon themselves to create one of the best comic book-based games of all time: Spider-Man!
Okay, so the title is lazy — but it also set the expectation that gamers could finally become Spider-Man like no previous video game could achieve. Launching in 2000 for the Sony PlayStation (with ports appearing over the next 12 months on the Nintendo 64, Dreamcast, and PC), this game oozed authenticity from minute one. From the very beginning, we were living an adventure narrated by Stan Lee, hanging out with the acrobatic Black Cat, swinging by the famous Baxter Building (home of the Fantastic Four), and putting an end to a daring bank robbery.
It was, quite frankly, a revelation. Suddenly, superhero games didn’t have to be cheap cash-ins like all of those terrible movie-based atrocities. There were a few pioneers on earlier consoles, to be sure — Batman on NES and Spider-Man and Venom: Maximum Carnage for SNES/Sega Genesis come to mind — but this gem captured my imagination like no other. However, does it hold up to those sugary-sweet memories in these darker modern times? (more…)
The Video Game Canon: Tomb Raider (1996)
Dig deeper into the Video Game Canon by checking in with Tomb Raider (1996), the debut adventure of one of gaming’s most famous female characters. Here’s a teaser…
For better or worse, Lara Croft is the most famous woman in all of gaming. But all her fame might be a fluke, because the developers behind her creation claim it was all an accident.
Formed in the late 80s, Core Design was an unlikely candidate to be creating a wide open 3D title like Tomb Raider. The developer’s biggest claim to fame at the time was Rick Dangerous, a game that could charitably be called an “homage” to Indiana Jones. Other gamers might remember Chuck Rock, a platformer created by Core that starred a dimwitted caveman. But like many British developers of the time, they didn’t think about their limitations and just went for it. This definitely applied to Toby Gard, the artist behind Lara Croft’s original look.
Like Rick Dangerous, Lara began life as a man with no name that bore a striking resemblance to Harrison Ford. Fearing a lawsuit, Gard redrew the character as a woman and began tinkering with a number of different personalities. The artist told IGN in 2008 that the proto-Tomb Raider began life as a “sociopathic blonde” before morphing into a muscle woman, a “flat topped hip hopster,” and a “Nazi-like militant in a baseball cap.” None of these looks fit the game that Core envisioned, but Gard’s final pass at it proved to be the winner. Laura Cruz, “a tough South American woman in a long braid and hot pants,” was born.
We’ll never know if Laura Cruz would have received the same reception, but Gard continued to tinker, and eventually, the character became a descendant of British royalty when the developers plucked the name Lara Croft out of a City of Derby phone book. The final piece of the puzzle fell into place when Gard was playing with a slider that controlled the size of Lara’s breasts and accidentally inflated them to 150% their original size. The Core Design team gathered around Gard’s computer and hooted their approval, even if the artist himself was skeptical of the character’s inflated curves.
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The Video Game Canon: Ms. Pac-Man
Dig deeper into the Video Game Canon with a look at the accidental creation of Ms. Pac-Man. Here’s a teaser…
It’s easy to forget nowadays, but Ms. Pac-Man was actually created by accident. Like Doc Brown’s invention of time travel after a tumble from the toilet, Ms. Pac-Man was created when a group of game developers from MIT attempted to release an unauthorized sequel to Pac-Man known as “Crazy Otto.”
Before turning their sights on the biggest arcade game of the day, the development team, General Computer, first used their programming skills to create an “enhancement kit” for Atari’s Missile Command. Instead of creating their own game from scratch, the enhancement kit hooked into Atari’s code and altered it to provide a new gameplay experience. Essentially, General Computer created the first expansion pack.
Even though the enhancement kit required an original Missile Command cabinet, Atari later attempted to sue General Computer for copyright infringement. But rather than become mired in a protracted court case, the arcade giant and the enterprising college students reached a settlement. Atari would hire General Computer to design original arcade games so long as they agreed not to create any additional enhancement kits without the permission of the original game publisher. The developers quickly signed on, but first they took a nearly complete version of “Crazy Otto” to Midway, the North American distributor of Pac-Man.
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