Retro Gaming Australia

Namco Bandai has announced on Twitter that Soulcalibur II HD Online will be headed to PlayStation Network and Xbox Live Arcade on November 20. The game promises a tarted up version of one of the most popular fighting games of the PS2/Xbox/GameCube era, with online support and the first opportunity to fight guest characters Heihachi and Spawn against each other.

The price is set at $US20, €19 and about £15. No local price has been set, but it’s safe to assume that it’ll probably be $AU30.

With the high price and poor timing (the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 launching either side of the game locally and in most Western territories) of the release, one has to wonder how much faith Namco has in the release. Perhaps a WiiU eShop release with Link would have drummed up some more interest.

A handful of you might remember a game called Bravoman in the arcades and on the PC Engine. It was a bit of a parody of Japanese superhero shows and video games, featuring the titular character who had stretchy limbs.

Now 25 years later, Namco has revived the Hero of Unequaled Excellence in a new game – Bravoman: Binja Bash! for iOS and Android. It’s an endless runner with some action and shooting components with a look styled after the Shiftylook comic series. It’s available free of charge.

The game is jam-packed with obscure gaming references, which will likely fly over the heads of most of us not familiar with some of Namco’s more obscure games.

Via Siliconera

Cross another off the list of untranslated Famicom/NES games – the Tower of Druaga prologue Kai no Bouken has been translated into English.

Released four years after Tower of Druaga, but set beforehand, Kai no Bouken puts players in the role of Ki, a princess who is on a quest to take back the stolen Blue Crystal Rod from the demon Druaga. As you’d expect from a Druaga title, the game is ridiculously big with 100 levels of platforming action. It’s not particularly easy either, as Ki has no offensive attacks.

The translation project for this title stretches back to 2001, when the script was completed by Tomato, but abandoned by the group which started by the project. Another ROM hacker by the name of Zynk picked up the abandoned project in May 2013 and set about finishing it. In addition to an English translation, Zynk also released another patch which gives the game more detailed sprites.

You can get the patch here.

Namco Bandai has revealed that two of the three guest characters from Soulcalibur II will be returning for the upcoming HD re-release.

Heihachi (the PS2 guest character) and Spawn (the Xbox guest character) will be available in both the PS3 and Xbox 360 versions of the game – previously they were console exclusives.

Of course, the most popular guest character, Link, has yet to be announced – and given that this port is not gracing the WiiU, we’d say that’s rather unlikely.

I am a real sucker for crossovers, so it pleases me to hear that Tekken X Street Fighter is still in production.

Street Fighter X Tekken and Tekken X Street Fighter were announced together at Comic Con in 2010. The former has been released, but the latter, a crossover based on the Tekken style of gameplay and presentation has fallen off the radar.

Speaking with Siliconera, Namco’s Tekken producer Katsuhiro Harada confirmed that the game is indeed happening, but is under radio silence. The reason? They needed to give Street Fighter X Tekken room to breathe, since the game still had new content being released until recently, and had built a solid following.

We’ll hear more about Tekken X Street Fighter in the future.

Source: Siliconera

Air Combat is the first game in what came to be known as the Ace Combat series. It’s a bit rougher than its successors, and certainly more arcadey – given that it was an arcade game first!

Soulcalibur II was the most successful fighting game of the sixth generation era, by in large due to the amazing upgrade its predecessor received when it was released on the Dreamcast. It was the first game in the series to see “guest fighters” – Link for the GameCube version, Heihachi Mishima for the PlayStation 2 version and Spawn for the Xbox version. Funnily enough, the GameCube version was the best selling one.

Throwing your father off a cliff is a right of passage in the Mishima family.

Once upon a time, anyone could make a football game, and people would lap it up because they didn’t really give a rats ass about licenses and real players. 90 Minutes: European Prime Goal is one such example of a time when football games flooded the market.

I-Ninja is one of those B grade action-platformers that they just don’t make anymore. It was developed by Argonaut, who were arguably the kings of this sort of middling quality 3D platformer.