meppi

Yeah, me too! Well didn't cry, but it was probably the best news I've gotten in a long time. Can't wait to play Xevious with my NeoGeo Wii sticks! I know, the game is out on the PSone compilation discs as well, but they were never arcade perfect. They either have those weird scrolling problems like you see with many vertical shooters, or the black bar on the side with the score and everything in there. It just isn't 100% the same. Not that it ever going to 100% replicate having an arcade cabinet mind, but looking at Star Force, Mappy and Gaplus have been presented it's about as close as we're ever going to get on a home system it seems. That's one thing the Virtual Console is tremendously good at and that's replicating the games up to the smallest detail. Sad to see that VC-Reviews scored Star Force only a 4/10 and Gaplus a meagre 5/10 though. Both games are awesome if you like true old school shmups, especially Gaplus which is anything but just a wannabe Galaga that didn't make the cut according to that review. I had Star Force on my Famicom before I ever played the arcade version a couple of days ago. I must say, I love the original even more! Gaplus was a favourite of mine ever since I first played in 1984. My 8 year old self couldn't give a monkey's behind that it wasn't Galaga, and I still don't until this day. I'm sure that when Xevious hits the VCA it will also be slated as a shmup has been, not worthy of a purchase even for 5 bucks, as there are plenty of more up to date shooters on the VCA. After all these years and the couple of hundreds of shmups that I have played, it still remains as one of my all time favourites. Just like Elevator Action, I can play it all day long. The one thing I find sad is that we don't have old magazine scans of the original arcade reviews of these games to put up or something...

The file has probably become corrupted. It sometimes happens with file sharing sites. I'll download it from the DM and re-up it to rapidshare right now. Oh wait a minute. Its' a 2 part archive, so you need to join both parts first before you unzip them. Just downloaded them and they both are intact. This can be done with a program called hjsplit which can be found here: http://www.freebyte.com/hjsplit/ Once you joined the .001 and .002 files into the regular .zip file, simply unzip them as you normally would.

Meh, it's dependent on the willingness of the site owner to create a web slice for users to use. And it has to be placed inside the navigation bar of your browser, so an RSS feed would accomplish pretty much the same thing. Safari on OS X has had Web Clips for a long time now and you can cut any part of a website yourself without having to wait for someone to create a web slice for people to use or not. The web clips update in real time as well as the site changes.

Virtual Console Arcade From today Nintendo will also start releasing original arcade games through it's Virtual Console download system. In Europe and the US there are 4 games available right now: Gaplus (Namco) Mappy (Namco) Star Force (Tecmo) The Tower of Druaga (Namco) The pricing for these games right now is 500-600 points a piece.

Nintendo has just released a new firmware update for the Wii which allows games on an SD card to be played virtually straight from the SD card without having to copy it to the internal memory. The new update gives you a new SD card button on the main page which acts like the regular channel interface but for all the channels that are saved on the SD card. The only thing you need to make sure of is that there is enough internal memory on the Wii itself available to load the games as the game you select gets loaded into the Wii memory before it boots up. This is pretty much the update on which we've all been waiting for. Not exactly the "play games directly from an SD card option", but as close as you can ever get without unlocking the SD card fully and set the door wide open to piracy. The load times for even the biggest games are only a couple of seconds as well. Just tested it out myself. Oh and just confirmed by Iwata: Nintendo Wii supports high capacity cards, up to 32 GB

MAXIMUM The Video Game Magazine Issue 3 - january 1996 (UK) Download page here. Rapidshare link This is the 3rd issue in a series of re-scans I'm doing for all the Maximum magazines. Besides the pages being 1440 wide now instead of 1280, they also have been color corrected and touched up more diligently. These are brand new scans of the issues, so not just cleaned up ones from last time. The magazines have been debinded to up the quality of the scans even more. These are the definite editions of the Maximum magazines, so for everyone who loves them as much as I do it's a must to download.

Well, yes I did actually. Back when Paul Davies left CVG and the whole crew followed suit, the magazine changed so dramatically and I sent a letter in about it as well as asking if they would ever bring back the retrogaming cabin as it was sorely missed. Ended up getting my letter posted (sort of) and made fun of by some nobody about how those old games were shitty anyway and all that jazz. Well looked like I wasn't the only one discontent with the direction the magazine went as they lost the bulk of their readers and ended up going out of print a couple of years ago. A good one actually happened in the 2007 Christmas edition of RetroGamer. The one with the beautiful NiGHTS cover. Contributed all the scans for the Official Sega Saturn Magazine special in there and got credited for it as well as our site.

Got it yesterday and I'm loving it to bits. Played for over 2.5 hours before I had to leave for work and nearly got there a bit too late as well. These days it's hard to find a game that holds me captivated for such an amount of time before my mind starts to wonder off, but this one, I just can't get enough of. The premise is indeed a simple one, but so were the ones for Streets of Rage and Final Fight. Just beat the crap out of everyone you see. The thing that makes it so satisfying is the enormous amounts of interactivity with the locations in the way you can kill and maim people, as well as how the insane combo system works. Do as much things to your enemies as possible before finishing them off and you'll get huge bonus points. The game will probably not be for everyone, but neither are games like shmups or lightgun games, seeing as how HOTD Overkill gets some comments about how it's "only" 4 hours long and therefor only worth a rental. People that don't "get" these types of games probably shouldn't play them in the first place. The goal of these isn't to get to the end of the game so you can say "I finished it". If you're playing it with that mentality, just move on. Same thing was said about Crazy Taxi back in the day with it's limited replayability and all such nonsense, and guess what? 9 years later I'm still playing it on a monthly basis! The commentary nearly had me rolling off the couch laughing yesterday. It's so good! Things like: A doctor says to his patient: you really should stop masturbating. The patient asks why, so the doctor replies: "because I can't examine you while you're doing it." Just like in HOTD Overkill, it's so intentionally silly and stupid at times that it's just hilarious.

Time for some more bitching about how the world isn't fair. February numbers: PlayStation 2 131K PlayStation 3 276K PSP 199K Xbox 360 391K Wii 753K Nintendo DS 588K Wii Fit w/ Balance Board NINTENDO OF AMERICA WII 644K Street Fighter IV* CAPCOM USA 360 446K Street Fighter IV* CAPCOM USA PS3 403K Wii Play w/ Remote NINTENDO OF AMERICA WII 386K Killzone 2 SONY PS3 323K Wii Mario Kart with wheel NINTENDO OF AMERICA WII 263K Call of Duty: World at War* ACTIVISION BLIZZARD 360 193K Mario Kart DS NINTENDO OF AMERICA NDS 145K New Super Mario Bros NINTENDO OF AMERICA NDS 144K Guitar HeroWorld Tour* ACTIVISION BLIZZARD WII 136K (*includes CE, GOTY editions, bundles, etc. but not those bundled with hardware)

I heard the hand canons weren't that good though, seemed to have balancing issues. I've bought 4 Nyko Perfect Shots, which I think should be released in the US as well. The only thing you need to do is stick something sharp in the middle of the orange bar at the end, since you have the V thing to aim but it doesn't have a reference point at the end of the barrel. I've taken the tip of a nail, since it's nicely round and sharp and glued it on there with a glue-gun. Works perfectly fine now. So strange that they didn't make them like that in the first place though.

Well he does now, except for TNA which gets dogged on by certain WWE sheep wile that whiny guy with the glasses. Whatshisface Todd something? Back in the good old WCW days, Vince was actually in a position where he could have gone bankrupt. He mentioned that himself several times in interviews. But yeah today it's pretty much a monopoly, which is why they get away with playing it safe all the time sadly enough.

Dodonpachi Daioujou Black Label and Ketsui which never had a home port until this point. Combine that with Konami's Otomedius Gorgeous and Seibu Kaihatsu Raiden Fighters compilation and the 360 is the shmup gamers system of choice this gen. Very strange how that turned out... On the DS in Japan Ketsui Death Label was released and is just simply amazing in it's own right. It's basically just a boss rush though, so no complete levels, but even then the game is fantastic.

Yeah, Vook is a great guy. His FAQ should be 100% trustworthy.

Off to buy a Japanese 360 now! woot! (reason for it being a Japanese one is so I can play those Cave shooters as well when she's not online )

lol, and Tom Nook has a hidden SM dungeon beneath his shop like in Pulp Fiction.

This time it wasn't me.

Someone is forgetting HOTD Overkill.

Or perhaps nWo VS WCW Revenge or World Tour. Those were great games, I especially loved the first one.

Hmm, I feel that they miss the point on several key arguments they are trying to make. trying to portray the original Puzzle Quest as a balanced game where strategy and cunning will get you success most of the time is just plain wrong. The game was so broken and the computer cheated it's butt off that it's not funny. BUT, that's exactly what made the game so much fun. So going on about how Galactrix is such a mess compared to the original because there's so much luck involved and the so called balance of the the first game is nowhere to be found doesn't jive with me. But hey, what do I know. The guy clearly states that he has played through the original 4 times so his opinion on this must be fact. Anyway, my DS copy just shipped.

Eum, just a quick heads up before things get out of hand. Condoning or encouraging piracy will get you in trouble on here and rather quickly too, if I might add.

I'm having the same problem with some of the older CVG issues and the Mean Machines ones. The pages that are supposed to be white are heavily discolored and look sometimes closer to brown than even yellow. Filling these with the bucket tool like you can do with relatively clean pages doesn't seem to be an option since the inside of the letters contrasts too much with the outside that way. I really don't know what I'm going to have to do with those... Perhaps just clean them up manually as good as possible and leave the discoloring the way it is? Problem is, I know that it will keep bothering me. :-/

Ouch, are you saying it's closer to GOW? Not that GOW is a bad game or anything, but it certainly isn't a RE4. Heard from several people that the inclusion of a partner actually makes the game less enjoyable for some reason. Perhaps like you said, it just isn't pure RE. Well RE4 that is. I loved the old style RE games and didn't have a problem with the new approach in RE4, it's one of the best games of the past generation in my book. Bought it again on Wii and liked it even moreso with the new controls. So weird that Capcom would screw things up a bit with 5. Perhaps Shinji Mikami is much more important in making a top RE game than they thought...

Oh man, only a year older then me. :( My condolences... I didn't get to see many matches since I didn't have WWE for many years and only limited WCW broadcasts, but I seem to remember him as T.J. Thunder and Test.

Yeah, saw that last week. The sounds he makes really puts it over the top.

The game is finally coming out on the DS in Europe and I've just changed my preorder since I found it for £18 instead of £24 which was already a great deal!