If you keep pace with the latest releases in gaming this is an interesting week to be paying attention. Today saw the launch of Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus, Super Mario Odyssey and Assassins Creed Origins. If you count all the other not-quite-new-releases such as Destiny 2, the Super Nintendo Classic and the new South Park game how can anyone play all this stuff? Well if you're me you don't even try and just keep playing Mega Man 2 and Castlevania every night on your NES Classic. Which has honestly been a ton of fun and with a job how would I have time for a 60+ hour game anyway? That said, I absolutely loved Wolfenstein: The New Order so I bet that's something I might pickup if i'm feeling like I need to shooty shoot at some Nazi's.

What are all you playing right now? Is it all NES games or maybe you're playing something a little less 1986? I'd love to know.

This last weekend at Portland Retro Game Expo we had a Marble Madness High Roller Score Tournament. I decided to run with Marble Madness for the score tournament on NES because I think that's one of the best ports of Marble Madness and also because the game is really unique. Marble Madness is a game where you roll a marble around an obstacle course and it only has 6 levels. I'm a huge proponent of small games and Marble Madness is a really great example of that and is also a fun game to watch a speedrun of. That said, it has been sometime since I played Marble Madness and I forgot about the magic wand.... which actually is supposed to help you, unless you are speedrunning the game and the Troll Wand Compilation above describes why it doesn't help.

"Name: Magic Wand
Appearance: A wand appears from nowhere.
Effect: It gives you ten extra seconds except on Race 5.
First level: It appears random."

http://www.ign.com/faqs/2004/marble-madness-walkthrough-542789

Wait so the wand is supposed to be a good thing in that it gives you 10 seconds EXCEPT on level 5 for some reason? And yeah the wand is death for speedrunning but since it's random it does make the game more interesting to watch... sometimes.

I picked up the loose cart of NES Marble Madness at a local retro game store before Portland Retro Gaming Expo for $7 and if you were looking to get a version of the game that's the one I recommend. I've also heard really good things about the Gameboy version so I think i'll get that when I find a copy.

Special thanks to LeviathanMist for sharing the troll wand video!

Recently the Day of the Devs Bundle hit and it contains a game I wanted to add to my collection in Full Throttle Remastered. I loved the original LucasArts classic and I've been really happy with how Double Fine has remade a bunch of the old LucasArts games for the modern era. Originally I was going to pick this up SIMPLY because I wanted Full Throttle Remastered but after watching the trailer for Everything I am thinking i'll be playing that too. Actually, I watched the trailer for Everything had no idea what it was and watched the gameplay video linked above and was ABSOLUTELY floored by it. I've never been drawn to think about life in the way I did after watching a Gameplay trailer and i've included it above so you can watch it in it's entirety. My recommendation is that you set aside some time to watch it and consider what it's saying. It's actually not really a gameplay tailer, well I guess it is but it's more about life and how things are connected and I found it absolutely beautiful. In fact if I had to point a discussion that talked about "games as art" i'd point to this gameplay trailer. If the game is even a fraction of what's in that gameplay trailer then the game looks great.

For $9 you can pick up the entire Day of the Devs Bundle featuring: Tumble Seed, Grim Fandango Remastered, Loot Rascals, ABZU, Flint Hook, Day of the Tentacle Remastered, Full Throttle Remastered, Everything and access to the Day of the Devs Double Fine VIP ticket.

https://www.humblebundle.com/day-of-the-devs-2017

Kotaku reported that the upcoming Zelda Encyclopedia is getting a deluxe release that looks strikingly like the original NES cart. This looks like total "collectors bait" and as such I really want one. I might try to add this to my Christmas list but at $80 it's not really in the "stocking stuffer zone."

"Due out in April from Dark Horse, The Legend of Zelda Encyclopedia is a 320-page tome covering the characters, places and things from the first 30 years of Nintendo’s RPG series. The newly-revealed $80 deluxe edition looks very familiar. It even has an instruction booklet polypropylene sleeve that folds out.

Covered in gold foil paper with embossed, debossed and textured features, the deluxe hardcover edition of The Legend of Zelda Encyclopedia looks like it came straight out of a large-ish NES console. Rounding out the illusion is a black polypropylene sleeve lined with velvet flocking and a scale instruction booklet, in case you need to remember how to read a book."

https://kotaku.com/the-deluxe-edition-zelda-encyclopia-looks-like-an-nes-c-1819770990

Cheerful Ghost was at this years Portland Retro Game Expo and it was the best expo yet! I guess I say that every year but this is my favorite convention and this year everything came together really well. Everyone that came out to the booth to hang out with Adam, Wick and I were really great to talk to and I want to send a special shout out to the people that took part in our Tournaments and specifically:

Super Mario Brothers Speedrun to the end of World 1-4

1. Kevin - 2:06:00


2. Andres - 2:07:20


3. Aaron - 2:14:27

Bubble Bobble Score Tournament

1. Justin - 125,490


2. Eddy - 118,190


3. Kevin - 111,890

Marble Madness Highest Roller Score

1. Kevin - 75,070


2. Timothy - 26,820


3. Fritz - 20,420

Snake Rattle & Roll Highest Score at the End of World 2

1. Drevsen - 139,850


2. Jonathan - 98,350


3. Colby - 94,450

Retro Game Pickups

This year I decided to come prepared with a list of a bunch of retro games I wanted to get and I wasn't disappointed as apparently lots of vendors came prepared to sell some of the things I wanted! One item I didn't find was King Arthurs World on Super Nintendo (well I did but the copy wasn't working so I returned it) but beyond nearly everything I really wanted I found.

The highlights:

• Mario Paint SNES Cart+Mouse+Mouse Pad+Manual. This has been a set i've wanted for a long time and when I got it my collection felt nearly complete. I'm not a huge collector by any means, but Mario Paint has been something i've wanted for a while. It's not hard to find, I just had other stuff higher on my list. The game and mouse work great too and are in amazing condition. Initially I picked up a loose Mario Paint cart thinking finding the mouse would be easy but no vendor would sell me the mouse singly so I had to buy another set to get it. So I have two Mario Paint carts now, which I don't seem to mind and the loose cart was only $4.


• Metroid Fusion on Game Boy Advance. I am collecting all the old Metroids up to but not including Prime as I didn't really love that direction for the franchise. I know that's an unpopular opinion, but I prefer the old side-scrolling Metroid.


• Earthbound 1+2 on Game Boy Advance. Yeah, yeah this a fan repro cart of a fan translation of the Gameboy Advance release of those two games in Japan and it's not technically "legit" but it's damn cool and works amazingly on my GBA. Trying to decide if I should play through Earthbound on the SNES Classic or GBA now. Hard choice. What do you think?


• 2 three buttons Genesis controllers + Sonic. I have a small but growing Genesis library and wanted some original controllers. These things are way too big and might not work very well(broken?) but it's nice to finally have some.


• Cowlitz Gamers 2 Adventure is a rare NES homebrew released a bit before PRGE by Cowlitz Gamers that benefits Ark of Cowlitz a charity that helps kids with disabilities. So they had me at homebrew and charity but beyond that it's a really kick ass Nintendo game too.
  It's a big advancement from the first Cowlitz Gamers Adventure and if you want to hear more, the Immortal John Hancock has a video about it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sH2Fco5eEhY. They also released a demo of it in ROM form you can play download here:
  http://nintendoage.com/forum/messageview.cfm?catid=5&threadid=173401 The game sold out in 90 minutes and since I was a vendor I found the booth before the show opened and bought my copy before the rush happened. Which is really cool because I think this is going to be a very hard NES Cart to add to your collection. Good luck completionists!


• The Super Scope 6 in Box. Yeah ok so this was a pretty on the fly buy in the last few minutes of the expo but truth be told it was a great deal and it's FREAKING IN THE BOX! I have yet to test it so my fingers are crossed but I hope this works because we have some plans for it at next years PRGE that might be fun to see.


• A fold out official map of Final Fantasy II/IV dungeons that came with the game.


• The Super Gameboy because HOLY SHIT the Super Gameboy.

There were a few things I had to pass on because I couldn't buy everything. One thing was Spiritual Warfare in box in great condition. I might be one of the only people that loves these old Wisdom Tree games and Spiritual Warfare is the best of the bunch and it was... in box. I told myself i'd get the new Wisdom Tree NES repro collection cart instead but that didn't mean it still hurt to pass it up. There was also a copy of Nintendo Power issue #1 in mint condition with the original Nintendo letter attached to it. I passed it up on the price, it was a fair price but i'd rather buy a few things with my PRGE budget instead of just one thing.

I collected some of the best pictures I took of this years expo and our Cheerful Ghost booth so check that out below. I've also tried to caption each picture that made sense to in the Imgur album to bring a bit more context to the moment. If you are wonder who that cute kid is in the pictures, it's my son. This was his first Portland Retro Game Expo and I was so happy he came by for an hour or so. Taking him through the event and explaining to him what everything he was excitedly pointing to was one of my coolest moments of 2017.

https://imgur.com/a/vv3EP

To help celebrate this weekend’s Portland Retro Game Expo I absolutely had to run an interview with Wick, the creator of the upcoming Indie mega hit Crescent Loom. Wick is also the creator of Starship Rubicon, a game we published a time ago and he is also fortunate enough to be boothing with us at this years Retro Expo! If you are visiting the con and heard about Cheerful Ghost or Crescent Loom and are checking us out for the first time then Hello! If you are a long time reader then welcome back! I urge everyone to checkout the interview below and ALSO to head over and try the web version of Crescent Loom at the URL below. You know, for science.

http://wick.works/crescent-loom-demo/

jdodson: Could you tell people what Crescent Loom is?

Wick: Lemme tell ya, it's the next big thing. It's gonna change the way humanity sees themselves & the entire natural world. It's a paradigm shifter, the best thing to hit the educational game scene since Frog Fractions.

The premise is simple: you're a brainweaver who designs creatures from scratch in order to rebuild a planet's ecosystem. Now, build-a-bug games have been done before - Spore is the most famous - but any semblance of actual scientific rigor is usually sacrificed on the alter of "fun gameplay". They restrict your power "for your own good", ensuring your creations will always be able to happily dart around the screen -- but at the cost of any truly authentic creativity.

Crescent Loom doesn't mess around. It simulates ion channels opening and closing, neurotransmitters binding to their receptors, microcircuits of flashing neurons, muscles contracting and relaxing, the drag of water across the entire body, and the satisfying crunch of jaws on carapace. Your first creatures will be floppy, terrible creations with seizure-wracked brains, but you will try again. And you will learn.

And after you've put this all together to make a pulsing, living creature? Send it out into an online ecosystem where its performance is tracked and recorded. The most fit creatures will flourish, only to be toppled by the next biological strategy that you - normal players - invent and implement.

jdodson: How’s development on Crescent Loom evolving? Any recent discoveries or experiments that changed how you look at the game?

Wick: Crescent Loom is the most experimental game I've ever made, so its design has had to be flexible from the beginning. For example, the current main gameplay challenge - creature racing - is something that I threw together for the Kickstarter campaign and then discovered worked better than my original plan for environmental puzzles.

jdodson: At what point during the development have you thought “This is really turning into something special” or something you really set out to accomplish that is working well?

Wick: Simulation games have a certain magic where emergent properties will just pop out and surprise you. I remember my first creature after I really worked out the water physics just gliding through the water in this sublime way.

I was surprised to find that it could propel itself by wiggling, and for the first time was able to do laps around the cavern. I never wrote anything that specifically makes creatures go forward -- it's all an emergent property of the physics and neuroscience.

jdodson: What games are you playing right now?

Wick: Besides playing other create-stuff games for research? The roguelike structure of FTL and Crypt of the Necrodancer fit well into my "de-stress-for-an-hour" niche. For more substantial kicks, I just started playing Banner Saga 2 with a friend.

jdodson: I imagine there is a totally legit scenario where when I click the right things in Crescent Loom the game achieves an “AI Moment” and becomes sentient. After getting its bearings on being a living computer game I wonder if it had to pick its favorite song and movie, what would it be? This is important to know because when this happens you want to be ready for it.

Wick: Ah, see, this sort of popular conception of AI is one of the reasons I'm making Crescent Loom! I want to show people that a specific brain is a tool for moving a specific body. The idea of a body-less sentience contradicts itself; you can't divide the mind from its body. It wouldn't know what to do.

I digress. Whalesong and some kind of undersea nature documentary.

jdodson: The gaming landscape has changed a lot since it’s earliest roots in the Arcade. What do you think about the gaming industry in 2017?

Wick: It's awesome that the barrier to entry has gotten so low! Despite the occasional indiepocalypse.

jdodson: The other day I was at the store and it was an explosion of pumpkin spice items in that there were literally “pumpkin flavored dog treats” for sale amongst a sea of other things. We came away from the store having purchased 11 different pumpkin flavored foodstuffs. This isn’t a question I just think I might be part of the problem.

Wick: Ain't no problem with pumpkin.

jdodson: How has the experience of launching Starship Rubicon affected the development of Crescent Loom?

Wick: Oh heck yeah. I'm so glad I was able to go through the process of making and releasing a game with such a (relatively) simple design. It forced me to learn the basics of the industry and what my own strengths and weaknesses as a developer are.

jdodson: Have you learned anything that you’d like to bottle up and send back in time to tell yourself about approaching Starship Rubicon?

Wick: Spend more time on the art, make it more screen-shot-able. The marketing starts with the basic design of the game. The hustle is never going to end.

Honestly, I feel like past Wick also has a message for me: "Why are you working alone? Hubris! Jon is the only person keeping Starship Rubicon playable. Find a person who is good at the stuff you're bad at and work with them!"

jdodson: I just wanted to say to you, and also publicly, that being part of Starship Rubicon and publishing it was one of the highlights of my recent life. Thanks for working with me on that and I really hope you get something great out of the development of Crescent Loom. This isn’t a question, I just wanted you to know that. It’s also cool to be boothing with you at PRGE this year, can’t wait to see how people respond to the game!

Wick: Daw. I am so so so glad we were able to work together on Starship Rubicon. I'd probably be going to grad school or something way more conventional if we hadn't gotten that off the ground.

jdodson: What systems are you planning on releasing Crescent Loom on?

Wick: Windows/Mac/Linux. I think it'd be great on tablets, too, but that's a far-future thing.

jdodson: In our last interview back in December of 2015 we talked about Star Wars so I need to continue that tradition with a couple questions. HAD TO!

Episode VIII is coming up and now that Episode VII is out and Rogue One, what are you looking to Episode VIII to do?

Wick: Watching Rogue One was the biggest movie disappointment for me in a long time. There were some beautiful shots, but something didn't click for me. It felt like a movie of somebody's d20 campaign. Plus, a film whose entire final quarter that has nothing but the glory of dying in suicide attacks against a powerful enemy seems a little politically tone-deaf. Any excitement I had for VIII was quenched with that.

jdodson: Now that it seems we are getting a new Star Wars every year and maybe more than that at some point do you think that changes what Star Wars is? I’ve asked this to people before but i’m not sure we’ve really worked out an answer i’m comfortable with yet.

Wick: Look what they're doing with Marvel; a main storyline (Avengers) every few years punctuated with one-offs and spin-offs. Seems likely that's what they're gonna be doing with this property, too.

jdodson: What major things do you have to add to Crescent Loom before you think it’s ready to ship?

Wick: Shipping is a blurry line. I'm spending this last month of Kickstarter funds to fulfill all the rewards & polishing the game into an early-access thing. From there, it's a flexible to-do list based on where the next round of money comes from.

// MORE TUTORIALS

jdodson: If people are interested in helping you out with the game in some way, testing or otherwise what could they do?

Wick: For free, just play the online demo at crescentloom.com and save an online creature or two! I love seeing what people make. If you wanna support it / stay involved, there'll be links to purchase early access.

jdodson: Thanks for taking the time to talk with me today, anything you want to say before we wrap things up?

Wick: Making games with good mechanics is the easy part. The hard part is making something that speaks to the human heart.

http://crescentloom.com

The Humble Bundle folks are giving away Civilization III for free on Steam for the next 48 hours and if you don't have this in your collection now seems like a good time to pick it up.

"Sid Meier's Civilization III: Complete, the latest offering in the Sid Meier's Civilization III franchise, provides gaming fans with Sid Meier's Civilization III, the highly-addictive journey of discovery, combined with the updated and enhanced multiplayer expansion pack Sid Meier's Civilization III: Play the World*, as well as all of the great new civilizations, scenarios, and features from Sid Meier's Civilization III: Conquests! Sid Meier's Civilization III: Complete provides more ways to explore, more strategies to employ, more modes of play, and more ways to win, all in one box!"

https://www.humblebundle.com/store/sid-meiers-civilization-iii-complete

In the latest update for the Switch Nintendo added the ability to natively record in game 30 second video clips. This is a nice feature to share brief moments of games you play with friends but doesn't seem like a full solution for people that do game streaming. Still, I bet this will cover most peoples usecases for sharing fun moments with friends on Twitter or Facebook!

"Nintendo Switch system version 4.0.0 or later allows you to capture and share up to 30 seconds of gameplay on select games to your Facebook page and Twitter feed with the push of a button!"

https://www.nintendo.com/switch/system-update/

After recently completing Metroid and Mega Man 2 I decided to start playing Castlevania. One big motivation for picking up the Nintendo Classic was to finally add a bunch of games to my collection to play and Castlevania was one of those games. Castlevania has been a game on my bucket list and it's good to finally get around to playing it.

"Nintendo hard" came to mind immediately as I started playing Castlevania. The first few levels aren't too difficult but once you move on the difficulty ramps up and it doesn't seem to stop. Like with Mega Man 2 or Metroid if you spend some time to learn the game, you can get better a bit at a time. If you look at how long these original Nintendo games are from start to finish(if you were practiced at them) they only contain a handful of hours of gameplay and because of this developers made them hard. So the average time that players beat Castlevania might be 3 hours but if you add up the amount of times you have to play the game to do that, it could take you upwards of 20 or more. So if you're not into playing the same levels over and over again then these old games might not seem like very much fun.

If I had one complaint of Castlevania it's that the platforming is often strange or a bit too unforgiving. For instance if you jump on a moving platform and you don't jump dead in the middle sometimes you can fall through it. This means that I am really careful jumping on moving platforms but it's something the original Super Mario Brothers could do well so i'm wondering what happened here? There are other instances that are just as odd but I have a few gameplay workarounds that seem to be fine they just took some figuring out.

One really nice feature of Castlevania is that the game doesn't penalize death as much as it could. Firstly you get unlimited continues which helps because Castlevania has no saved game feature and you die a lot. Castlevania is also fairly liberal with your whip upgrades often giving you them all in the very early parts of each stage making you get the most powerful main weapon rather quickly after you die. This is a huge improvement over other games like Altered Beast or Gradius that punish you way more for dying. One other fun aspect of Castlevania is the secondary items. Each one is pretty unique and useful in most situations. It's fun to consider how Castlevania influenced modern games such as Shovel Knight as many of the Castlevania items have direct Shovel Knight equals.

All that said, Castlevania is an incredible platformer and it's no wonder this kind of game spawned the incredibly popular Metroidvania genre. Even though Castlevania is difficult it never feels too punishing just that I have yet to figure something out or time a jump or attack properly. I'm looking forward to continuing my playthrough and I can't wait to take a crack at killing Dracula when his times comes!

Metal Jesus and John Riggs cover a ton of NES Homebrew carts in this pretty great video. As I enjoy dark humor I thought Super Russian Roulette looked fun.

Not covered in this video are other NES Cart repros and i'm really been wanting to pickup Wisdom Tree's new NES cart pressing of all thier original NES games such as Sunday Funday, Exodus, Joshua, King of Kings, Bible Buffet and Spiritual Warfare. As a kid my parents bought me these bible games and even though i'm not religious now I look at all Wisdom Tree games with affection. I mean, some of them aren't great but I stand by Spiritual Warfare as the best NES Zelda clone ever made on the actual NES.

http://www.wisdomtreegames.com/store.html#!/Wisdom-Tree-Collection-NES/p/72433164/category=0