Articles tagged with: macscene

The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening

seanstar on Sunday, 24 July 2011. Posted in Retro Game of the Week

First, thanks where thanks are due. This article would not have happened were it not for the Commonwealth-Edison electric company of greater Chicago leaving me 56 uninterrupted hours to enjoy no games requiring more power than a pack of AA batteries. Way to go.

With that out of the way, let's talk about the game. The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening has aged REMARKABLY WELL. Released in 1993, it is the first "out-of-canon" Zelda game in the series. Rather than focusing on gathering eight pieces of save-the-princess/defeat-Ganon hardware, Link finds himself on a mysterious island collecting musical instruments in order to awaken a mythical entity called the Wind Fish ("The Wind Fish in name only, for it is neither...") from within a giant egg on top of a mountain. Along his way, he encounters a cast of unusual characters -- some eerily reminiscent of people he knows from the outside world, some making cameos from other contemporary games, and many simply unique.

News Roundup: June 5 - July 9

mossy_11 on Saturday, 09 July 2011. Posted in News

After a year of frequent incremental updates (around 2500), Nintendo Wii and Gamecube emulator Dolphin has been bumped up to version 3.0. If you haven't been paying attention since the 2.0 release, Dolphin has ditched the plugin interface in favour of a integrated architecture, in addition to reaching near-perfect audio emulation and much improved levels of performance and accuracy. See the Release Announcement for a more detailed rundown of the changes. You can get a pre-compiled build of version 3.0, as well as the more recent source changes, from the Dolphin download page.

Keep reading for more emulator updates.

Skate or Die

Pixelcade on Sunday, 03 July 2011. Posted in Retro Game of the Week

1987 -- how rad was it? I had my Vision skate clothes and my Nash board. The NES was well on its way to making history before anyone knew it. Then there I sat at my local rental shop looking at this awesome cover of a dude doing a hand plant, with the words SKATE OR DIE emblazoned in graffiti above him

I MUST PLAY THIS GAME.

Ultra Games produced this title for our enjoyment. It featured many different play styles from downhill racing, pool jousting, and half pipe shredding, plus a couple more. We saw a few characters in the game -- like Rodney Recloose, who was the crazy dude you saw when you started the game in the skate shop. He sported a purple mohawk and tattoos. He had a crazy kid named Bionic Lester with green hair and a nasty attitude in events like the joust and downhill. He would cut you off and knock you on your face faster than you could say "shredded."

Shinobi III: Return of the Ninja Master

seanstar on Friday, 27 May 2011. Posted in Retro Game of the Week

For some reason, all the ways I can think of starting to describe Shinobi III: Return of the Ninja Master involve Essence of Ninja packed tightly into a 16-bit cartridge by ninja highly trained in the art of packing Essence of Ninja into 16-bit cartridges.

Shinobi III was released by Sega for the Genesis in 1993. While the Shinobi series is broader and more complex than even I was aware of prior to researching this article, RotNM has one very key distinction over its predecessors and even some successors. Previous Master System and Genesis titles were about walking around slowly and throwing shuriken at things. Previous Game Gear titles featured flips, ceiling-walks, and slashing stuff, but never as the same character. They were also about rescuing Power Rangers and recovering magical rainbow crystals. The most recent PS2 game is about some magic demon wizard stuff and getting killed by your own sword.

Shinobi III, by contrast, is about flipping out and killing people. More specifically, it's about flipping out and killing explosive zombie-soldiers armed with automatic weapons, slicing up giant bioengineered meat-golems, horse-stomping ninja super-soldiers, jetboard-flying-kicking heavily armed marine tank robots, destroying robo-godzilla, scaling cliffs by jumping between falling boulders, navigating entire areas using only wall-jumps, katana-ing heavily armed airships out of the sky, and I think something about an evil super-ninja trying to take over the world, but that's only the plot, and if you know what the plot is, you obviously aren't very familiar with the concept of Ninja-ing.

Blaster Master

seanstar on Friday, 13 May 2011. Posted in Retro Game of the Week

Chou Wakusei Senki - Metafight was published by SunSoft in Japan in 1988. It was a traditional modern Japanese tale of a blue-haired transforming vehicle combat driver saving the land from an invading robot army, with the help of a cute female sidekick who was also the vehicle's engineer. For reasons which remain ambiguous, the story was ever so slightly reworked for American audiences, and the result was Blaster Master -- a touching tale about a boy and his frog, a big hole in the ground, radioactive mutation, and underground aliens (which are at least still set on taking over the world).

News Roundup: April 4 - May 5

mossy_11 on Friday, 06 May 2011. Posted in News

Apple released updates to its iMac line earlier in the week, bumping performance with the latest Sandy Bridge processors and AMD Radeon HD graphics cards. The new iMacs also sport ports -- one in the 21.5-inch models, two in the 27-inch -- for the new Thunderbolt high-speed peripheral connection interface that was introduced with the new MacBook Pros earlier in the year. Tested did a breakdown of the gaming capabilities of the new iMacs, determining that the best choice for many gamers will be to get the 21.5-inch model with a 6770M graphics card.

Apple also released the long-delayed, much-anticipated white iPhone 4 last month. If I may editorialise for a moment, the excitement over what is only a colour change is utterly ridiculous -- it almost makes me ashamed to be an Apple fan.

Arcade emulator MAME has a new project manager. After six years at the helm, Aaron Giles, a legend in the emulation scene, has stepped down to make way for Angelo Salese. Giles will still be involved as a developer on the project, however. The latest version of MAME and its OS X port, SDL MAME, is 0.142u2, which as usual offers a wealth of source changes. See here for the list. Head over to the SDL MAME website for a precompiled version, or grab the source straight from the MAME site.

Super Nintendo emulator Snes9x has received a long-awaited update. Version 1.53 offers a wealth of fixes and improvements, which you can see in the changelog listed here. Downloads are also available at the preceding link.

Nintendo Gamecube and Wii emulator Dolphin now has official Mac OS X builds. The emulator is updated on a more-or-less daily basis, so keep a close eye on its download page for the latest binaries.

Keep reading for more emulator updates.

Gorf

Pixelcade on Saturday, 23 April 2011. Posted in Retro Game of the Week

Let's take another trip down my memory lane to about 1983/84. I was at an arcade with my favorite aunt when I heard in an electronic voice, "tatatatatata."

The game was taunting me! Oh, how it mocked me with its electronic voice -- unheard of when it was released in 1981. I remember the G.O.R.F. (Galactic Orbiting Robot Force) cabinet looked similar to a Tron cabinet using the same controller method -- except for the neon glowing handle, anyway. It had everything a person wanted in a shooter! EVERYTHING!

News Roundup: March 5 - April 3

mossy_11 on Sunday, 03 April 2011. Posted in News

We’re building a better MacScene, and we need your help. Developers, designers, writers, editors, and anyone else with expertise that will be useful for a bigger, better MacScene should check out this forum thread for more details on the changes and how you can help. And yes, the emulator database is set to return.

Apparently, March is a slow news month. Here are the updates in the world of emulation on the Mac.

Boxer, a powerful DOSBox front-end that can wrap games into individual OS X apps, has officially reached version 1.0 -- and subsequently received a minor update to fix a bug with System folder icons being overridden when they are set as game folder. See the official site for full details and a download link, and also check out the blog for an interesting discussion about the future of Boxer -- which includes distribution on the Mac App Store.

In news we missed last month, multi-platform DOSBox game launcher DBGL has been updated to version 0.72. Changes include support for forced scaling and configurable dosbox.conf locations. See the official site for full details and a download link.

Open-source MSX emulator openMSX has been updated to version 0.8.1. The update fixes a number of minor issues, adds scripts to help with Tool Assisted Speedruns, and adds emulation for a few MSX devices. See the changelog here, and check the official site for download links.

Keep reading after the jump for more updates.