"Long ago in an ancient and chaotic time period know as the 00's, Bethesda and Zenimax attained the rights to a game called Fallout: A Post-Apocalyptic Role-Playing Game from Interplay and Black Isle Studios. In 2008, they release their first installation into the franchise: Fallout 3.

Now, nearly 10 years later, we want to keep the first 3D entry alive and kicking by updating and bringing it into the current generation of gaming and graphics by rebuilding the entire Capital Wasteland complete with quests, dialog, and all locations into Fallout 4's Creation Engine."

This mod looks really cool and something i'm now following and anticipating the release of. I know these kinds of things are really hard to develop so i'm not expecting it to be done any time soon but the ability to play Fallout 3 with the Fallout 4 engine and updated graphics sounds awesome. I wonder if it's the base Fo3 game or includes the first DLC that brings you back to life to continue on after the game ends? Either way then this launches it should be a great way to relive the Capital Wasteland adventure.

https://capitalwasteland.com/

The Legend of Zelda The Minish Cap is a notoriously overlooked Zelda game and I recently watch a review by Mike Matei from Cinemassacre about it. Minish Cap is the Zelda title created specifically for the Gameboy Advance and one that, to date, I haven't played. As I pick up the backlog of retro games that I missed and want to complete, Minish Cap is one of the games that pop to the top of my list. Wondering if anyone has played this one and if so what you think of it?

if I had to pick between getting and XBox One or PS4 i'd buy the XBox One. Firstly the XBox One has 4k Blu-ray, something the PS4 doesn't and it also has backwards compatibility with original XBox and XBox 360 games where the PS4 does not. One area that Microsoft seems to be excelling at is backwards compatibility and in the DF Retro video linked above they go into detail about how it works. Another reason to get an XBox is, to date, i've never owned one so I haven't had the pleasure of playing the Halo franchise or the other exclusives to the system. Truth be told the chances I'll buy a PS4 or XBox One are quite low in general but I do appreciate Microsoft putting resources into making backwards compatibility work so well and think Sony could improve a lot here.

If you have a working knowledge of the Super Nintendo hardware and some of it's games you've heard of the FX chip. It's the chip featured in such games as Star Fox, Stunt Race FX and Super Mario World 2. What might not be obvious is that there were a bunch of other chips used in certain games to enable even more processing power than the Super Nintendo shipped with at launch. As stated in the video it's cool that games brought more hardware to bear to deliver the kinds of cutting edge graphics not possible otherwise. If you run a PC it's relatively easy to upgrade the hardware but on early game consoles the developers brought the upgrades directly to the game karts!

Awesome Games Done Quick wrapped this year breaking it's all time high for money raised in a single event to 2.2 million dollars for the Prevent Cancer Foundation. GDQ over time has become a twice yearly staple where I try and glue myself to the stream all week to soak in the amazing runs. It's actually something that my partner and I watch together and as a non gamer she actually finds many of the runs fun to watch. I find that the best runs to watch are games i've played before but occasionally there is a particularly amazing run of something i've never heard of.

Since GDQ's speedruns go day and night for an entire week I don't have the ability to watch them all. GDQ dropped all the runs on YouTube and I added the ones I missed to my watch later queue. I have certain runs I want to talk about today and then i'll drop about five or six posts over the upcoming months talking about everything else. There are way too many great runs for one post so piecing them out over a month or so makes the most sense.

The Legend of Zelda by JSR2gamers, BT and RandomEffekt in 37:43 The first run embedded above is the Legend of Zelda race I got up for on Saturday to watch at 5am. If you love Legend of Zelda this is a must watch and honestly one of the coolest runs of GDQ. It might have also been that I had a ton of strong coffee so I definitely had a pretty epic coffee buzz going but it's also just a kick ass run featuring some of the best Zelda runners around.

Diablo by Funkmastermp in 34:17 Stay awhile and watch this Diablo run where Funkmastermp tears up the game in 34 minutes! It's a well done run but I had a hard time understanding what was going on all the time. Since Speed Runners run the game a lot there are many inside jokes and sarcastic one liners I don't always get making it hard to understand what's happening with a run. That said, it's a great run but at times I had to mute the commentary.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2xh3Y60DM2E&list=WL&index=91

Baldur's Gate 2: Enhanced Edition by KowalLazy in 24:31 I didn't know you could beat a Baldur's in under and hour but KowalLazy does it in less than 30 minutes! The Baldur's series is something I missed the first time around but I really appreciate the games and how they impacted RPG gaming. This run is of the enhanced version of Baldur's 2 and it's very well done in how KowalLazy explains the techniques he uses to run the game in the fastest way possible.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gBcHJPZDicU&list=WL&index=92

Super Dram World 2 by grandPOObear in 49:34 If you're going to only watch one run, check out the Zelda speed race embedded at the top of the post. If you're gonna watch another one you need to watch Grandpoobear play Super Dram World 2. Dram World 2 is the sequel to Dram World which is a Super Mario World community ROM game that is extremely, extremely difficult. Grandpoobear currently holds the world record for speedrunning Dram World 2 and he completes the whole game in an impressive 49 minutes. But enough of reading, seriously just click the link below and treat yourself to the run, it's really that good.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AOFSMg5UjzM&list=WL&index=72

Batman: The Video Game by dxtr and EndySWE in 10:18 Wrapping things up with this super solid NES Batman race by dxtr and EndySWE. NES Batman was even positively reviewed by the Angry Video Game nerd but rightfully declared "a hard son of a bitch" but EndySWE and dxtr make it look easy. And clocking in at 10 minutes it's a short run well worth watching.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sMWizKtkJ14&list=WL&index=94

https://gamesdonequick.com/

Nintendo announced Nintendo Labo today which looks to be a game that merges hobbyist DiY crafting and the Nintendo Switch. It's a really interesting concept and the trailer shows off some of the fun things you can do with Labo. Many people are jumping into the maker communities creating mini computers that do certain tasks and it seems like Labo is on the edge of that with some of the silly peripherals of the Wii era. Want to make a remote controlled device with your joy-cons that uses the rumble to move? Check. Want to build a cardboard fishing pole to catch something? Check. Want to build a full robot suit to fight other robots? Check.

I could see Labo going pretty big with kids and parents that want to have some family crafting and gaming time together. I could see myself getting this when my son is older and I think we'd have quite a bit of fun with it. Then again, if many on Twitter are to be believed, this is just another failure of Nintendo recently(which is an odd claim considering Nintendo is doing very well at the moment). As I was reading the fan response to Labo on Twitter I really appreciated what @MikeDrucker had to say

"NINTENDO: Nintendo Labo is for kids and those that like kid stuff!
ADULT GAMER: Okay, but what if I don't want it?
NINTENDO: Totally fine. It's for kids.
ADULT GAMER: Yes, but cardboard? Really? Not in my game room!
NINTENDO: It's for kids.
ADULT GAMER: But how is it for me?"

https://twitter.com/MikeDrucker/status/953755810391384065

Yeah maybe Nintendo Labo isn't for everyone but it still looks like fun and isn't like anything Sony or Microsoft is doing at all.

Nintendo is continuing to support the 3DS by adding 3 games to the Nintendo Selects program. Nintendo Selects is cool system where Nintendo takes the most popular games and re-releases them in a new selects package for $20. The new games coming to selects are Super Mario 3D Land, The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds and Ultimate NES Remix. These are all really highly rated games and if you wanted to add a couple games to your 3DS library sticking to the existing selects releases and these new ones isn't a bad way to go.

Nintendo Selects is a program for the 3DS and Wii U and hopefully over time becomes something Nintendo brings to the Switch!

https://www.nintendo.com/whatsnew/detail/three-classic-nintendo-3ds-games-are-now-only-19-99-each

If you've ever had a dream to make a game that runs on the original Nintendo Entertainment System there is a new project on Kickstarter you need to check out! NESmaker looks to streamline the process of creating new Nintendo games by providing useful software tools to allow you to make NES games easier. NESmaker was born out of a project a couple friends had to make an NES game from scratch and grew into this Kickstarter project. Even if you're not interested in making NES games the Kickstarter video is worth watching featuring a fun 80's premise.

"NESmaker is a software tool for creating brand new, hardware playable, cartridge based games for the Nintendo Entertainment System...without having to write a single line of code.

A few years ago, while developing our NES game engine in the archaic 6502 Assembly language, our team (made up of mostly non-programmers) realized that we needed a much more efficient method for rapid prototyping and testing. Instead of digging into the assembly every time we needed to make changes, we conceptualized wysiwyg tools for common tasks that would output, reorganize, and manipulate the underlying code; developing screens, building animations, altering AI...things like that. We recruited Josh Fallon, tool developer extraordinaire, to help realize these tools."

NESmaker has been fully funded but if you want to try this out at launch $36 will get you the NESmaker software package and $88 gets you the software + NES flash cart you can try your prototype games on.

DF Retro is on the scene with a brand new video that runs benchmarks against PC's before and after the recent Sprectre & Meltdown CPU vulnerability patches. If your not familiar with the recent bugs effecting nearly every computer, I found some great PC World articles that explain the situation pretty well.

"A pair of nasty CPU flaws exposed this week have serious ramifications for home computer users. Meltdown and Spectre let attackers access protected information in your PC’s kernel memory, potentially revealing sensitive details like passwords, cryptographic keys, personal photos and email, or anything else you’ve used on your computer. These are serious flaws. Fortunately, CPU and operating system vendors pushed out patches fast, and you can protect your PC from Meltdown and Spectre to some degree."

Looks like Microsoft & Apple have released patches for computers and phones but you will need to apply firmware updates for your motherboard and CPU. With all of that said, it looks like that many games aren't negatively impacted by the security patches. It seems the biggest performance hits are to virtual machines or cloud computing but since none of that matters for games running on our computers that are single player much of gaming looks to be fine. The hit to cloud computing looks pretty incredible though the end run being that either virtualization needs to be optimized or people might need to run more hardware to cover current workloads.

https://www.pcworld.com/article/3245810/security/how-to-protect-your-pc-meltdown-spectre-cpu-flaws.html
https://www.pcworld.com/article/3245606/security/intel-x86-cpu-kernel-bug-faq-how-it-affects-pc-mac.html

Gizmodo is reporting from CES that Hyperkin is showing off prototype for an upcoming Gameboy it will be releasing. From the article:

"The Ultra Game Boy’s housing is made from aluminum, which has a wonderful heft when you pick it up. Your original Game Boy is probably covered in knicks and scratches, but it will take a lot of abuse for Hyperkin’s remake to start showing wear and tear. The Ultra Game Boy carries over the original’s volume and contrast dials, but the final version will include a third dial allowing you to adjust the portable console’s new backlit LCD display through the entire RGB spectrum. That backlight can also be turned off, if you want a truly authentic, squinty, Game Boy experience.

New features for the Ultra Game Boy will include a built-in six-hour battery, a USB-C port for charging, as well as a pair of stereo speakers, and left and right audio-out connections. Why the improvements to the Game Boy’s sound system when all of its classic games only generate mono sound? Aside from appealing to retro gamers, Hyperkin’s Ultra Game Boy is also being customized for chiptune musicians who use the classic console to create modern electronic tunes. Yes, it’s a thing, and a very popular thing."

There is a pretty large market for new hardware for people that love playing on their original game carts. I own a Retron 3 and it's a great way to play NES, SNES & Genesis games on one system. With a price point at under a hundred dollars this might be a must have for Gameboy lovers. Since Hyperkin can get the price under a hundred bucks and make it as nice as it is I wonder if we might be getting a Gameboy classic series from Nintendo at some point? I bet if Nintendo did that they'd be as popular as the other Nintendo Classics if not moreso.

Head over to Gizmodo for the whole article and more pictures of the new Hyperkin Gameboy.

https://gizmodo.com/game-boy-is-coming-back-thanks-to-hyperkin-1821898716