Sega remade a bunch of those games for the 3DS and they look truly cool in 3D!
That tech was a great stopgap until actual 3D was able to push past just polygons and use bitmaps on surfaces.
Those Sega Super Scaler games (produced over four generations of arcade hardware) were really impressive for their time. The Y board used for Power Drift was also used for Galaxy Force.
Super Hang-On, After Burner, Out Run, Super Monaco GP and Power Drift all really hold up in their arcade formats!
If you're a North American like me, you definitely owe it to yourself to check out Where Time Stood Still. It's an impressive isometric adventure game with multiple characters to control, dynamic gameplay and a cool black and white B-movie aesthetic!
When people tell you Super Mario Kart is the original kart racer, just remember Power Drift came first*, and it was actually quite a bit more impressive due to its scaling sprite technology and fun courses!
*The Guinness Book of World Records is the source for this distinction, not my own opinion!
I learned this lesson with Onlive way back when - never, ever purchase cloud games on a subscription service. Subscribe, but don't buy.
If you must stream (and there are good reasons why!), buy on PlayStation or Xbox and stream that way. You'll have a much better chance of keeping your games!
Looks very cool! I'm always intrigued by games that have a strong musical performance vibe.
Here's a trailer for Junk Head, which came out in 2017:
I never saw Junk Head, and I guess I need to!
Junk World looks like one of those films I absolutely need to catch in a theater when it makes it to the US!
TowerFall is one of those games we fire up regularly at my house. It's fun for newcomers, but it also rewards skillful play and always pushes you to think about how you can be better!
It's one of the best couch multiplayer games there is - co-op or deathmatch! If you haven't tried it, you should!
Every subsequent game in the Sakura Wars series has included a new intro and song. Here's the whole collection!
The opening credits song and accompanying animation for Sakura Wars for the Sega Saturn is one of the all-time greats, perhaps because it had an accompanying anime series!
It was rare in the 90s to see animated FMV intros like this with voiced music tracks!
#vgm #videogamemusic #gaming #videogames
Pitstop II is a fun split-screen racer from Epyx that really looked and played great on the Commodore 64. If you enjoy the Pole Position-style competitive racing it delivers, it's worth firing up to see if you can send the other player back to the pit for repairs!
#videogames #gaming #retrogames
Signal boosting!
Don't miss this game! It's a fantastic adventure and has a wonderful story that will keep you hooked!
Thanks for the recommendations! I'll look into them.
Octodad has one heck of an opening theme song to set its tone, featuring a vocal track that's both about blending in wearing a 3-piece suit and also escaping a crazy chef by spraying ink in his face.
It's "Octodad (Nobody Suspects a Thing)" by Ian McKinney
#vgm #videogames #gaming #videogamemusic
Wings of Wor (also known as Gynoug) is a truly grotesque scrolling shoot 'em up, but it's also a fun and interesting Genesis/Mega Drive game!
And you've gotta love that Boris Vallejo cover art in North America!
#gaming #videogames #retrogames
Recommendations?
Aside from a little bit of sci-fi I have found very little modern stuff that's engaged my brain.
Here's an amazingly cool and cute music video from the wonderful Laura Shigihara (Rakuen, Plants Vs Zombies)!
BTW, a significant part of my day is thinking about why products, brands or services fail (many do). Video games are no different.
If you want to make stuff just to make it, you should! Have fun and experiment like crazy.
But if you want people to buy your stuff, you have to consider their needs.
Reminder to review fishbowl on Steam to help others find this heartfelt narrative! It deserves it.
Yay! Quinty/Mendel Palace is a brilliant and eccentric game everyone should play!
I'm glad it's becoming less obscure. I think it's a really neat concept super well-executed on the NES/Famicom hardware!
The biggest marketing mistake I see smaller game devs make over and over and over is believing in the fallacy that "if I love this, other people will embrace my vision and love it too."
Maybe.
But most of the time, you're better served by tuning your idea to the market via research and UX testing.
If you want to understand why your game's not selling and someone else's comparable title is, it's almost always because they spent more laying that marketing groundwork and building an audience before launch.
And if they didn't, hey, people do get lucky sometimes.
But Lady luck is very fickle!
A few tips:
1) Make your core game concept easy for anyone to understand
2) Spend lots of time on your polish and presentation
3) Build up hype and anticipation BEFORE you launch, especially with previews/reviews!
4) Have a plan for how to keep your game relevant with content drips AFTER launch
One of my goals this year (you guys know I teach marketing in an MBA program and am a marketing research professional, right?) is to write up a simple, free guide to video game marketing for the modern era.
I see many mistakes being made CONSTANTLY by well-meaning game devs.
There's a better way!
There's a great, respectful discussion in this thread well worth reading!
My argument: Quality is NEVER a guarantee. I can show you all sorts of great games that never took off due to poor timing or changes in the market.
Marketing a game well matters a lot.
So does luck.
So does timing!
Quality is NOT a guarantee. I've found so many 80s and 90s games that were high in quality and which were completely ignored.
Marketing matters. So does luck and so does timing.
Case in point: there are like 50 Metroidvanias coming out this Spring. They're gonna get buried because of poor timing.
This looks neat! Contra meets Bionic Commando with big ugly bosses? Sounds like my kinda game!
I've really tried to get into Ralph Bakshi animation, which also often used rotoscoping, but it's very rough around the edges even at its best, and the stories are often bleh.
The Amazon series Undone (by the Bojack Horseman studio) was really good and made good use of the rotoscope style, though!