link love 092209
Classic gaming edition.
A gallery of photos from GCC, the company responsible for Ms. PacMan, Food Fight, and a slew of home console titles for Atari (they’ve since moved on to the printer business).
The 30-year invasion: The making of Space Invaders Infinity Gene.
The latest from Ben Heck: A new Atari 800 laptop mod. I’d love to score one of these.
The Best of CGE ’03 DVD set, featuring Nolen Bushnell’s Atari Story panel, arcade designer highlights, and more, is now available. In related news, the latest word is that Classing Gaming Expo 2010 is a go, and will be taking place here in Las Vegas.
Filed under gamedev, MLP, nostalgia, video games | Comment (0)American Laser Games
In 1990, five years after the birth, boom, and death of the arcade laserdisc craze, a small spin-off company called American Laser Games released Mad Dog McCree, a live-action laserdisc light-gun game.
Mad Dog McCree was based on Robert Grebe’s I.C.A.T. (Institute for Combat Arms and Tactics) system, a police trainer built around an IBM PC, a modified handgun, and a series of pre-recorded scenarios that could be selected at will by the training officer.
From Game Chronicles, here’s how ALG’s laserdisc arcade setup worked:
All nine games were filmed on location in New Mexico and Chicago. Once filming was complete, it was then edited and transferred to laser disc. ALG designed a RAM/ROM software board that could attach to the Amiga 500 computer. This board provided the game software that controlled the Sony LDP-1450 laser disc player. The hardware was the same for all nine games with the exception of the RAM/ROM board and the laser disc. The guns used in all of the games were aluminum casting with a photo-optic diode. When the trigger was pressed, the computer whitened the screen for an instant to allow the diode to detect a particular pixel on the screen. This action registered a “splotch” on the screen for the game player to see. It also told the computer to make the laser disc player scan to the correct scene (either the game player getting shot or the bad guy getting shot).
Moderately successful in the arcades, American Laser Games then looked to the home market, focusing development efforts on Trip Hawkins’ unsuccessful 3DO console, and then the PC market, until a 1999 buyout by Her Interactive (itself an earlier spin-off of ALG).
One year later, Digital Leisure, the current holder of the Dragon’s Lair and Space Ace franchises, acquired the development and licensing rights to the entire American Laser Games catalog. They then published light-gun compatible PC versions of most of the ALG titles — unfortunately, cooperative play was omitted, and all of the Digital Leisure home releases were single player experiences only. That is until this year, with the release of the Mad Dog McCree Gunslinger Pack (featuring Mad Dog McCree, Mad Dog McCree 2: The Lost Gold, and The Last Bounty Hunter) for the Wii. B-movie gaming at it’s finest.
And now here, just for you dear reader, are some of the highlights of the American Laser Games library…
Filed under arcade, video games | Comments (2)link love 091109: DC anniversary edition
I was a latecomer.
By the time I bought my first Dreamcast, the system had already lived and died, games were only available on the internet and in dusty stacks on the used software endcaps of dedicated video game shops, and the console itself could be purchased for thirty bucks easily.
I was looking for something new, a change of pace from the titles I had been recently playing. I don’t know why I’d gone with the original Xbox over the PlayStation 2… No actually, that’s not true, I do remember. Halo. You see, I’ve been a Bungie fan since way back in the day — played the hell out of Marathon, and Myth is one of my all-time favorite series — and I was one of those folks watching with wary trepidation when it was announced that Microsoft (Microsoft!) would be purchasing the studio.
Anyways, so I had an original Xbox, I was tired of XTREME games about dudes shooting dudes, and I wanted something different and interesting. After a bit of shopping, I came home with a Dreamcast, two controllers, and used copies of Seaman (with microphone), and Grandia II.
And so, a very special link love.
History and Introspection…
9.9.99, A Dreamcast Memorial from 1UP.
Gamasutra Feature: The Rise and Fall of the Dreamcast.
Peter Moore, on the Dreamcast: 9/9/99 Ten Years After.
From Ars, The Swirl That Shook Gaming.
Still want more? Bitmob has been thinking about the Dreamcast all week.
Highlights of the library…
Destructoid celebrates 10 years of Dreamcast: the games.
The Sega Dreamcast Shmups Library, revised edition, at Racketboy.
A Decade of Dreams, a bunch of Dreamcast Quick Looks from Giant Bomb.
And the ultimate software retrospective of the week: THE DREAMCAST TOP 100.
They still make games for this thing?
Gaming on the Dreamcast is not dead. In fact, new titles continue to be developed and released every year, primarily by German publisher redspotgames. Here are some of the newest…
Announced this week, Rush Rush Rally Racing.
Yuan Work’s supercute Wind and Water: Puzzle Battles.
Dux and Last Hope, two shmups designed by NG:DEV.TEAM’s René Hellwig.
Filed under MLP, nostalgia, video games | Comment (0)Divers 2000 series CX-1 Dreamcast
Here’s the Divers 2000 series CX-1 Dreamcast, a rare all-in-one console unit developed by Fuji, intended as a video communications and gaming device for the consumer and hospitality markets. Released just one year before production of the entire Dreamcast platform ceased, the CX-1 was unique, short-lived, and expensive, selling for over four times the 19,900¥ price of the standard Dreamcast console at the time.
Highly sought after by collectors, the Morolian-iMac hybrids are generally difficult to find, although several years ago, Rklok, a reseller in the Netherlands, managed to acquire a fair number of new-in-box units and he’s been trickling them out ever since, so they aren’t quite as rare outside of Japan as they once were. Expect to pay around $600-800 (hey, less than original retail!) for a boxed and complete Divers.
If you’re patient, and don’t mind either incomplete or slightly abused merchandise, the occasional deal can be had; it just may take a year or two of waiting before it happens.
Filed under crap I buy, video games | Comments (3)
