Parteibuch Aggregator Feed - Items from date 2010-07-30

The Old Bits: Adventures of Lolo 3 - Video Review

The Old Bits — Sat, 31 Jul 2010 00:01:00 +0000

Destructoid: Dragon's Lair Trilogy packs in the classics for Wii

Destructoid — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 22:30:00 +0000

Wanna hear a joke? Laserdiscs! Hah. I kill me. Seriously, though, maybe the best thing to come from the doomed technology was arguably the Dragon's Lair interactive videogames and porno flicks your parents couldn't really hide . With arcades dead in most parts of the country, and Laserdisc players buried in a pit somewhere, what's a retro gamer to do?

Destineer has the answer. The publisher has announced that it will be releasing The Dragon's Lair Collection, a Wii compilation that features Dragon's Lair, Dragon's Lair 2: Time Warp, and Space Ace! all on one disc. The future of the past is now with current day technology!

The disc will feature all of the original gameplay modes, remastered animation, standard and widescreen versions, and a "moves guide" for beginners. Don't want to play? Don't! Destineer is also including a "Watch Mode," which will let you just sit back and enjoy the show.

The game's out this fall, and it's only $29.99.

Dragon's Lair Trilogy for Wii: one step closer to porting Dragon's Lair to everything

Dragon's Lair Trilogy for Wii — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 21:50:00 +0000

Filed under: Weird But True, Opinions, New In Pop Culture

Hey, Mad Dog McCree: Gunslinger Pack, there's a new sheriff in town -- the "town" in this case being the set of "Collections of Three Laserdisc Games on Wii." Digital Leisure and publisher Destineer are partnering to release Dragon's Lair Trilogy on Wii this fall.

Despite the name, the "Trilogy" is only two-thirds Dragon's Lair: in addition to Dragon's Lair and Dragon's Lair 2: Time Warp, the disc will include Space Ace. And for those of you who want to watch the remastered animation, but who firmly insist that these aren't video games, you can remove any vestige of interactivity and just enjoy the games in "Watch Mode."

The collection will retail for $30, which is relatively good news for this guy.

Dragon's Lair Trilogy for Wii: one step closer to porting Dragon's Lair to everything originally appeared on Joystiq on Fri, 30 Jul 2010 16:20:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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JC Fletcher: Intellivision Lives! comes back from the dead this September

JC Fletcher — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 17:30:00 +0000

Filed under: Weird But True, Opinions, New In Pop Culture

Virtual Play Games unearthed a collection of ancient relics, believed to have been called "Intellivision games" in their time. To allow modern audiences to examine these historical artifacts for themselves, Virtual Play has built a mobile exhibition called Intellivision Lives!, which requires only a Nintendo DS for admission. In other words, the publisher's putting a bunch of old games on a DS cartridge and selling it this September.

The collection includes classics like Astro Smash, Armor Battle, Night Stalker and Shark! Shark! a precursor of Flow , as well as six unreleased games, for a total of 60 titles from Mattel's console. The DS touchscreen substitutes for the Intellivision controller's number pad, with an image of each game's custom controller overlay!

The last we heard of this project, it had been banished from DSiWare. It'll finally be out as a cartridge-based game this September, and we'll get a chance to play ... these games that have been out since 1982.

Intellivision Lives! comes back from the dead this September originally appeared on Joystiq on Fri, 30 Jul 2010 12:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Film Review: Scott Pilgrim Vs. the World Does Retrogaming Right

Film Review — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 16:58:00 +0000

A movie review on the Retronauts blog? Well, yes, because I can think of no better home for this one. Scott Pilgrim Vs. the World is the best comics-to-film adaptation since Ghost World, and that's no mean feat. But even more to the point, it's best movie about videogames since... well, ever.

Maybe that's not entirely accurate. Scott Pilgrim isn't really about videogames per se; it's actually a coming-of-age movie, a story about romance and growing up and coming to terms with your own flaws and your loved one's baggage. Yet it's steeped in videogame references and concepts on every level, and both the rapid-fire editing and the over-the-top action are blatantly inspired by games. The connection goes deeper, though: The characters play videogames, discuss videogames, even use videogame trivia as admittedly ill-advised icebreakers at parties. Dream sequences and segues are accompanied by ethereal tunes taken straight from the The Legend of Zelda. And the plot itself -- the eponymous hero winning the right to woo his literal dream girl Ramona Flowers by defeating her seven evil exes in single combat -- is the plot of half the NES library writ large.

Scott Pilgrim isn't a movie about videogames, but it speaks their language fluently and with more authenticity than any other movie besides The King of Kong in which gaming was the entire point . The trick, I think, is that the movie like the comics it's based on simply treats videogames as another facet of its characters' lives, the same as the garage rock their bands play. Rather than be content to simply make fleeting references to standards like Pac-Man, Scott Pilgrim's creators took the time to get them right. So yeah, Pac-Man gets a mention, but it's in the context of an etymological treatise -- and an accurate one at that. The film's rock bands take their names from second-tier NES games like Clash at Demonhead and Crash 'N the Boys: Street Challenge. At one point, Scott tries to duck out of an uncomfortable conversation by mentioning how he taught himself the bass line to Final Fantasy II's battle theme... at which point actor Michael Cera proceeds to play the actual melody in question.

That three-bar riff is a sterling example of what makes Scott Pilgrim so impressive from the gamer's perspective. While the bass riff exchange was taken practically verbatim from Bryan Lee O'Malley's graphic novels, it was simple a fleeting reference in print. In adapting the comics to the screen, director Edgar Wright went to the trouble of making sure he substantiated O'Malley's serial name-dropping with the appropriate audio and visual cues. There are references to other mediums, too; the main character's name came from a Plumtree song, and he wears the band's T-shirt at his debut concert. Yet it's the nods to games that are most eye-catching, because they've never really been done right by Hollywood before.

Wright plays up Scott Pilgrim's game-obsessed nature in creative ways that make for a visually arresting film. Sound effects frequently appear on-screen during action sequences, not so much in a campy Batman sort of way but rather as part of a patina of stylization that helps mask the seams of special effects. The series frequently dabbles in the realm of magical realism, and Wright has indicated the movie plays out from the unreliable, media-addled perspective of the hero himself, and the game effects play off of this. The film even adds its own thoughtful embellishments beyond the audio/visual effects. At one point in the books, Scott loses a fight and is forced to redeem the 1UP he collected in an earlier battle; in the movie, this sequence is cleverly reworked in a way that will be painfully familiar to anyone who's ever lost a battle in an RPG.

That being said, all the spot-on allusions in the world would be worth nothing if the movie itself couldn't stand alone; just look at the Internet's glut of absolutely wretched gaming webcomics. Fortunately, Scott Pilgrim's source material is strong, and at times becomes stronger in the move to the screen. The dialogue, largely taken verbatim from the books, goes from being amusing in print to head-spinningly snappy in motion. The dialogue consists mostly of quips and snark, it's true, but they're delivered in a rapid-fire style with just enough breathing room to avoid leaving the viewer reeling from the sensation that they're suffocating in cleverness. Wright frequently plays with time, preserving the comics' ambiguous use of dialogue and panel layouts with overlapping cuts and transitions. The effect this has on the flow of conversations -- allowing them to bleed from one scene to another -- is, like so much of the rest of the film, engagingly stylized, and it helps compensate for the film's deficiencies.

No, Scott Pilgrim isn't perfect; the act of compressing six books into two hours of screen time -- and, concordantly, six months of story time into about two weeks -- squeezed out a lot of books' character-building. Fan-favorite supporting cast members like Kim Pine are less characters than presences here, with the more prominent Ramona and Knives picking up a lot of their slack. That's understandable, because adaptation demands change, but fans of the books will find certain edits off-putting. The brisk pacing keeps the characters from being properly fleshed-out. You'll like them because they say witty things and perform amusingly ridiculous actions, but it's difficult to genuinely sympathize with them.

Despite these shortcomings, Scott Pilgrim Vs. the World works. It's a faithful rendition of the books, despite the necessary edits, and it manages to channel an entire generation's shared nostalgia for games, television, and music without feeling shallow or forced. In other words, it's the sort of movie you can enjoy on a number of different levels -- as an adaptation of great graphic novels, as a romp through familiar media references, or just as an entertaining summer movie. People who hit puberty before the NES launched may not necessarily get the videogame-saturated presentation, but the movie does a pretty good job of explaining the broad game themes that end up being key to the plot by sprinkling exposition throughout the script. That means the really juicy references the obscure ones that fans of this blog are most likely to appreciate end up being Easter eggs for the game fans in the audience -- Wright and O'Malley's way of rewarding us for sharing their nerdy adolescent memories.

Destructoid: Our gaming history is threatened by antiquity, copyright

Destructoid — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 07:30:00 +0000

The preservation of art so that it can be discovered by future generations is incredibly important. Videogames should be no exception and a new paper published in the International Journal of Digital Curation outlines the challenges our preferred form of entertainment faces in being protected. Painting a bleak picture, it suggests a not-distant future where some console games could be lost to time forever.

Satisfactorily preserving a game is difficult. In order to present the exact experience as designed, games really need to be run on their original hardware. As any retro fan will tell you, it's just better that way.

Game consoles have never been built to last, operating under the expectation that the devices would eventually be replaced with more powerful hardware. But once the last ColecoVision or Magnavox Odyssey stops working, so does the game as originally designed. Emulators attempt to fix this problem but, as they are not typically produced by a commercial entity, compatibility may not be across the board and even emulators run the risk of being made obsolete as computer systems continue to evolve.

Copyright laws, too, present challenges which will have to be overcome. In order for a game to be preserved in such a manner that it could be played decades later, everybody who has a stake in the ownership of that title would have to agree to do so. Beyond the crass suggestion of a loss of profitability, just tracking people down and getting their signature could be a bureaucratic nightmare.

I don't know if it is possible to properly preserve our history in games. The paper suggests ways in which we can improve the situation and, as with every creative endeavor man has undertaken, some things are always going to fall through the cracks and become lost. But games are unique in that, even if a lost and forgotten game should be discovered decades from now, it's entirely possible that nobody will ever be able to experience it. Sad, sad things to think about on your Friday morning.

Keeping the Game Alive: Evaluating Strategies for the Preservation of Console Video Games [International Journal of Digital Curation via Technology Review]