GunHaz-Feat
Rediscovering: Front Mission: Gun Hazard

by NFG - 16th May 2013 in Games

Back in the day, c.1996, Square released Front Mission: Gun Hazard, a sort of spinoff of their RPG/SIM Front Mission. This new game was a side-scrolling action platform game that was not at all unlike Metal Warriors (released a year [...]

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Your game and Piracy: How to Do It Wrong

by NFG - 1st May 2013 in Games

If you follow things like this, you’ll certainly have noticed a company called Greenheart Games who recently released Game Dev Tycoon. Assuming it was going to be pirated, they released a broken version on a torrent site. This game, as [...]

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Rediscovering: Metal Warriors

by NFG - 29th April 2013 in Games

Back in the day, c.1993 or so, I was managing a video game store called Master Player. It was pre-Playstation, and the games industry was sort of wondering what it was going to do next as the kids started to [...]

AustraliaLOL
Australia, lol

by NFG - 18th April 2013 in Australia

While Australia fights over 25 or 100mbit internet, Japan casually starts rolling out 2gbit. #Australia #lol #cry This utter failure is all too common in the West, where the infrastructure players refuse to compete with each other, instead drawing lines [...]

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Ghouls n Ghosts Sprite History

by NFG - 14th April 2013 in Games

If you’re a gamer beyond a certain age there’s a game you’ll remember from the old days called Ghosts n Goblins, or its sequel Ghouls n Ghosts. They were mid- and late-eighties Capcom games known for their unforgiving difficulty as [...]

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A few years ago I did a Bonk’s Adventure sprite history for my book, and I put the whole thing online. Check it out if you’re into 16-bit sprites. ^_^

IntoDeadFeat
Android Review: Into the Dead

by NFG - 12th April 2013 in Reviews

Endless Runners are a pox upon the mobile market. They’re common, they’re easy, and who cares? Except once in a while they’re done right, like JetPack Joyride, or Temple Run (so I hear). Basically you run as far as you [...]

Google + Australia = Sucks

by NFG - 8th April 2013 in Australia

When I search Google for information about all I get are endless seas of links to pages selling the item, or worse, endless links to pages that have machine-created templates with inserted in the appropriate spaces. Like reviews sites which [...]

Henk
Interview with Henk Nieborg (2)

by NFG - 7th April 2013 in Games

This is a followup interview I did with Henk Nieborg, focusing mostly on the Nintendo DS release of Contra 4. Sadly I promptly lost this text, and finally published it a loooong time later. And now I’m re-posting it because [...]

Henk
Interview with Henk Nieborg

by NFG - 7th April 2013 in Games

Near the end of 2005 I interviewed Henk Nieborg, one of the greatest pixel artists around. He’s been pixelling since the earliest days of the C64, and he’s still going strong today – he recently completed all the backgrounds and [...]

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WonderBoy Sprite History

by NFG - 5th April 2013 in Games

This is one of a series of articles about sprite histories (see: Mario, Sonic, Castlevania, Bonk, and MegaMan). Unlike the other histories, this one is going to require a little bit of back-story, because there are games in the series [...]

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Chinese hackers ate my PC

by NFG - 24th March 2013 in Technology

This morning started like any other, but I hadn’t been seated at the PC for more than a few minutes before the first clues appeared, hinting at impending doom. A small Windows dialogue appeared, telling me a program I’d never [...]

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Best game cover ever?

by NFG - 20th March 2013 in Games

Is this the best game cover ever? I think it just might be.

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Donkey Kong and Sprite Hacking

by NFG - 15th March 2013 in Games, Social Studies

I could just as well have titled this post Historical Revisionism in Video Games… I used to play devil’s advocate without considering my words first. I’d rage against anyone and anything that seemed to be putting forth ideas I didn’t [...]

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The problem with Zen Pinball

by NFG - 7th March 2013 in Games

There aren’t many companies making pinball games, and fewer that are basically only pinball creators. Zen Studios do make other games, but they’re secondary (and basically irrelevant) compared to their pinball offerings. They take pinball seriously, and they make games [...]

NoEA
Real Racing 3, In-App Purchases, EA and CliffyB

by NFG - 5th March 2013 in Games

The internet is a funny thing. Where else can you read about people you’ve never met talking about games you’d never play and then participate in the conversation as if somehow it has anything to do with you? Anyway, a [...]

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The police clusterfuckery here is just staggering. Someone mis-heard Fresh Prince lyrics on a voicemail recording in Pennsylvania, and a student was arrested, held for three hours because they thought the song said he was going to go on a shooting rampage.

Nichijou
Nichijou – Utter Insanity

by NFG - 3rd March 2013 in Video

As mentioned previously I’ve been ill, and spending a lot of time watching things I normally wouldn’t have time for. Like Youtube. It’s there that I stumbled across an AMV (go watch it, I’ll wait) that mixes one of my [...]

Tron Uprising
Tron Uprising

by NFG - 3rd March 2013 in Video

I’ve been sick with the flu, and when I’m not regretting being born, I’ve been watching a lot of TV. Downloading it, mostly, ’cause most of what’s on the actual TV is pretty amazingly bad. While scouring the ol’ HDD, [...]

Foobar Logo
Volume Fluctuations in Foobar

by NFG - 23rd February 2013 in Sound

I use Foobar as my primary music player, and I have for years. Recently I noticed something odd: the volume was constantly changing, as if someone was subtly messing with the volume slider. A bit of googling revealed the solution, [...]