'Where Are They Now' at 1UP

Today 1UP posted a fun (i.e. not very serious) new feature from yours truly: Where Are They Now, a roster of people who were in and around video games in the '90s, mostly, and where they went from there. Not all of the entries were my idea (the cover artists are kind of a stretch), and I imagine most people will just giggle at J.D. Roth on the first page and not read the rest -- totally valid -- but I did enjoy figuring out where people ended up, not the least of which being Mr. Yukawa from Sega. Turns out he was doing commercials for them way before Dreamcast, too:

Funnily enough, this feature was originally for the next issue of 1UP's own MagCloud-published magazine, which would have further extended my tentacles across that space, but it was shifted to the web. It probably works better here, anyway.

Covering Famicom Music on a Famicom

Musician Ken Matsuzaka -- who I know best from a series of piano covers -- updated his YouTube page with a new set of videos from a recent live performance. Together with a few friends, they put on a small concert of familiar Famicom chiptunes, except that it was all performed through an actual Famicom. Each member of "NES BAND" controlled a different sound channel with their own keyboard, and pulled off some near-perfect recitations of the music and sound from games like Super Mario, Binary Land, and more. Most chiptune acts are just one guy or gal, so seeing a full band come together to produce the music is extra cool. The above video is a short medley that serves as a nice sampler, but do click through and check out the other ones, particularly the lengthy Dragon Quest III medley.

Noobow

Noobow is deceptively great: it's a Game Boy game based on a license (the eponymous Noobow, mascot for a line of cute merchandise), but, ah, it's made by the masters at Irem, and it's a clever puzzle platformer. There are no HUD elements or any onscreen direction, but you're nevertheless encouraged to keep an eye on your surroundings when you come upon the next little roadblock. Various items are littered around the world, and it's your job to waddle Noobow over and use the item, either for obvious means, like creating a platform, or more trickier ones, all in the interests of completing a rather adorable goal at the end of a stage. The video shows all of this (and the nice music! Of course!), and you can see it's a prime example of unique design for the platform, and something rarely seen for years since.

3D Galaga's LD Callback

Namco recently revealed both halves of their upcoming Nintendo 3DS title Pac-Man & Galaga Dimensions. The Pac-Man game, Pac-Man Tilt, is a kooky platformer with gyro sensor gameplay, lots of wild colors (apparently every new Pac-Man game needs to look like a VHS-era CGI acid trip), but no 3D support, probably to lessen the motion sickness factor. 

I find the other game, Galaga 3D Impact, to be a bit more interesting. It's a first-person on-rails shooter in yet another interpretation of the Galaga universe, and thankfully does support 3D, because they gotta milk the full potential of that. Why they went with Galaga for this I don't know, but one look at screenshots has me thinking how cool a 3DS version of a similarly-themed Namco game like Starblade, Solvalou or Cyber Sled would be. It's inevitable... right? But besides that, Galaga 3D Impact is more immediately reminscent of a different Namco game, one more or less forgotten: Galaxian3.

Originally a theme park ride in 1990, Galaxian3 accepted six players who sat in front of a superwide display where two LaserDisc players/projectors played the on-rails shooter while the six players moved their blaster sights around and shot everything that moved. The theme park version -- an attraction at Namco's Wonder Eggs park -- was naturally huge, and had the rockin'-and-rollin' seats typical of such "theater games." Around 1994, Namco slightly shrunk it down into their "Theater 6" system, a smaller, relatively more portable setup for large-scale arcades that didn't have the moving seats (I don't think).

The look of the game these days is pretty cheesy, featuring low-poly CGI overlaid with low-poly enemy characters, but in the early '90s, it was impressive enough, and pretty illustrative of Namco's perfectionism. They really wanted this to be as much like a movie as possible, and they were already at the forefront with other polygonal arcade games. They knew this was the future. 

Oddly enough, Galaxian3 was ported to the PlayStation in 1996, more than half a decade after its original appearance. It's not a fantastic port, as it supports four players instead of six, and the video is cropped and compressed to the PS1 standard. Above all, it's just batty -- how many console versions of theme park rides can you think of?

If you haven't heard of Galaxian3 before, rest assured that LD arcade game enthusiasts have, and have been preparing the game for emulation, if not outright buying and assembling the theaters for their own use.