Joygasm – Afterburner Climax coming to PSN/XBLA?

The wonderous people over at Kotaku have reported that Afterburner Climax looks like its coming to next-gen download services.

Why is this retro-worthy? Because it’s one of those rare cases where Sega got it right and made an arcade game that simultaneously looked stunning, was a joy to play, and echoed the beautiful and glorious blue skies from the days of yore.

And while the home version won’t have the amazing hydraulic arcade cab (obviously), the game is still a ball.

Man, if I had $20k, I’d totally buy one of those Afterburner Climax cabs. I’d have nowhere to store it so it’d have to sit in the driveway, but for that one day before it got ruined by the weather/neighbourhood kids/ninjas/etc, it would be a slice of pure awesomeness ๐Ÿ˜€

Kung Fu gets rebooted – Revenge of the Wounded Dragons

Indulge me, this is the second post with more than a passing glance at the current generation of gaming (be warned there might be one or two to come – Braid and Trine are now up on PSN).

So, this round of hooplah surrounds Revenge of the Wounded Dragons, a new game coming to PSN shortly-ish (release date is TBA, was supposed to be coming in the next week or so or somethingorother?). Why is it awesome? It borrows from the plotless (and awesome) Double Dragon for its duo-toned heroes, hails back to the arcade with its ‘avenge your family/girlfriend/dog/mortgage broker’ premise and, most importantly, is using the classic formula from Irem’s classic Kung-Fu Master but giving it fresh coat of paint, a few tweaks, 2-player coop and plenty of awesome:

See, you can’t tell me that isn’t full of awesome. Assuming it doesn’t play like a giant douche or something.

There’s more info on the official PS Blog at: UPDATED: Coming to PSN: Revenge of the Wounded Dragons.

Revealed: Awesome Mortal Kombat re-imagining artwork

Vincent Proce's Scorpion

Can’t take credit for uncovering this one – that goes to Kotaku’s original newspiece. Ex-Midway staffer Vincent Proce has posted an awesome entry on his personal blog revealing some re-imagined character art for a Mortal Kombat reboot – while they’re all awesome, I thought the Scorpion pic above would do for a great preview of his artwork.

I know I tend to keep discussion on here about old video games and this maybe straddles that line, but back in the day I loved Mortal Kombat. Mind, these days I only boot them up for nostalgia or to have a laugh (unlike SF2, which has aged extremely well!), but still, MK was a big part of the gaming scene in the early-mid 90s.

The disappointing thing is that the fresh direction from the above shows that there was obviously plenty of talent sitting at Midway, despite the company’s lackluster performance over the last decade. Personally, I found Mortal Kombat: Shaolin Monks to be an amazing watershed moment for the series as Midway did the impossible and re-imagined the series, tipped the hat numerous times to old-school fans like your truly and changed the game into a coop brawler that not only looked really nice, but played extremely well. The game was just so much fun!

And so as I sit here and trawl through Vincent’s post and admire that truly awesome artwork, it leaves me thinking – if they gave the series a reboot, combined with this really cool art direction and moved it into a coop fighter, action-adventure or something else entirely, it could have been a great current-gen entry in the franchise. Would make for another great tribute to the series for old farts like yours truly, and would bring another local, arcade-style coop game to the incredible lack thereof in gaming over the last two generations. But that’s a topic for another post (or series of posts!) entirely ๐Ÿ˜€

In the meantime, check out the Vincent Proce art blog.

Gaming sessions โ€“ 1 November 2009

Another belated image gallery post ๐Ÿ˜›

This time around I fired up the Sega Master System 2 for some retro gamage since it hadn’t had much love of late. There were a couple of games I wanted to have a quick play at, but ran out of time, so they’ll make it into a future session I’m sure!

Picks of this one are actually working out where to go in Shadow of the Beast (I’m going to have to track down the Mega Drive port of this one), playing more R-Type and discovering the awesomeness of Sega’s brill Gain Ground port. This last one if the game I was most surprised with given I didn’t think it would fare well on the little 8-bit system, but it held up extremely well.

Gaming sessions – 11 October 2009

Had a quick go at the C64 and some fresh tapes, along with my new tool in my arsenal, a stand-alone tape deck. Makes for speedy rewinding/fast-forwarding of tapes between sessions and save the motor some strain on the tape deck on the C64.