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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
#16bit #games #rediscovering #snes
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 [...]
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 [...]
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. ^_^
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 [...]
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 [...]
#google #japan #search #technology
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
by NFG - 20th March 2013 in Games
Is this the best game cover ever? I think it just might be.
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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.
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 [...]
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, [...]
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, [...]
