While the announcement of the SNES mini is hardly a surprise, especially given the runaway success of its 8bit sibling, the inclusion of Star Fox 2 certainly is. The sequel to arguably one of the finest games of the 16bit era was cancelled late into its development and never saw the light of day (aside from a leaked prototype ROM).
I missed out on the NES mini, mainly because I assumed that Nintendo would keep on churning them out for a good while, so I'm much more tempted this time around. No word from Nintendo Aus/NZ so far about a release date for here [Update: NZ release is set for 30/09, which is the same day as elsewhere], but hopefully it'll be in line with the rest of the world.
The game line up is cracking, too:
- Contra III: The Alien Wars
- Donkey Kong Country
- EarthBound
- Final Fantasy III
- F-ZERO
- Kirby Super Star
- Kirby's Dream Course
- The Legend of Zelda™: A Link to the Past
- Mega Man X
- Secret of Mana
- Star Fox
- Star Fox 2
- Street Fighter 2 Turbo: Hyper Fighting
- Super Castlevania 4
- Super Ghouls 'n Ghosts
- Super Mario Kart
- Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars
- Super Mario World
- Super Metroid
- Super Punch-Out!!
- Yoshi's Island
Jeff Minter takes us through the first 7 levels of his upcoming PS4/PSVR shoot'em up, "Polyius", and it looks as crazy full on as you might expect. It's interesting that he says people have reported they find it quite meditative as it's all about the flow... but even as a spectactor I found it tricky to follow. Will be interesting to see how much difference playing it in VR makes.
Well, this is rather fascinating: an Amiga 3000+ prototype board was sold on eBay by none other than Dave Haynie. It fetched a decent $2,155 USD and included a couple of his notebooks from the period when he was working on it.
As if the fact that such a board still exists isn't interesting enough, he penned a long description of the board and what was going on at Commodore at the time. Unsurprisingly it is yet another exampe of Mehdi Ali and his crew destroying what chance Commodore had of actually making a success of the Amiga line.
Sadly the photos seem to be gone (not sure if that's how eBay works once an auction has ended), especially since it sounds like one of the notebook covers was rather amusing.
The site for the best retro gaming magazine out there (and, arguably, one of the finest gaming mags ever) has received a lick of fresh paint. It looks like they'll be updating it more frequently with new articles, and emphasis on profiles (be they a game, old software house, retro hero or community member) should be interesting.
I've been subscribing since around issue 15 (issue 123 has just been published!) and I can't recommend it enough.
