Retro Gaming Australia

Dig Dug is one of the most influential arcade games from the early 1980s. Players control Dig Dug, who must drill his way through the ground and eliminate any enemies occupying the area by sticking them with his hose and filling them with air until they explode.

The team at Steelhouse Productions has been working on this short film about Pac-Man for a year. They call it “the greatest 80s movie that never happened”.

Basically the 10-minute or so film tries to make sense of how something like Pac-Man could exist in the real world. According to the film’s website, they wanted to know “What the heck is a Pac-Man? What are the ghosts? What and/or where is this blinking blue maze? And how exactly can a hungry yellow ball exit on the left side of the screen, and re-appear again on the right?”

It’s neat, if a bit silly.

Whether you think it was a neat tribute or a cruel joke, the “classic” interpretation of Mega Man featured in Street Fighter X Tekken happened.

A new book, Street Fighter X Tekken Artworks features a detailed breakdown of many of the different concepts that were devised during the creation of the game. The book is currently only available in Japanese, but there’s a remote chance that it might see an English release through Udon like many of Capcom’s other artbooks.

However, if you can’t wait until them, the Mega Man Network has posted a few scans from the book.

People are not kidding when they say that Pac-Man is on every system under the sun. The Game Boy version isn’t the best – the scrolling screen makes proceedings a little more annoying than they should be, but it could be a lot worse.

God bless the ring!

Ehgreiz is a 3D fighting game developed by Dream Factory and brought to arcades by Namco and Squaresoft. The game gained fame for featuring Final Fantasy VII’s Cloud Strife and Tifa Lockheart as playable characters – Squaresoft published the PlayStation port, where even more FFVII characters were added into the mix.

Somewhat unfairly maligned by a number of fans.

Tekken 4 is the fifth entry in the series, and arguably the most experimental thanks in large to a changed physics system and greater emphasis on environmental fighting. The home version also included another version of the awesome Tekken Force mode.

Another Namco/Midway/Atari partnership.

Galaxian is the first game in Namco’s Galaga series, evidently named after the far more popular second entry. Galaxian was developed with the intention of producing a superior, full color clone of Taito’s Space Invaders. Namco teamed up with Midway to bring it to arcades outside of Japan, and Midway teamed up with Atari to bring the game to homes, which is where this ad comes in.

I’ve always considered Dig Dug/Taizo Hori to be one sadistic individual.

Dig Dug is another of Namco’s early hits brought to home consoles by Atari. The company continues to reference the game in many other series like Ridge Racer and Mr Driller, and always includes it in the Namco Museum collections. This ad is for the Atari 2600 and 5200 versions.

With a CRT that big, the kid is probably being vapourised by radiation.

Pole Position was originally developed by Namco, but was brought home by Atari for the 2600 and 5200. There’s actually a cartoon spin-off with the same name that has very little to do with the game.

One of the cooler aspects of Tekken 3 were the bonus games that the development team included – Tekken Force, a side-scrolling beat em up and Tekken Ball, a take on volleyball with Tekken moves. The tradition continued into later games in the series, which brought us Tekken Bowl (recently released for free on iDevices).

In an interview with Siliconera, series producer Katsuhiro Harada discusses the origin of these mini games. “The starting point for Tekken Force is we wanted to have Tekken characters side-scroll through stages and pick up meat to replenish health,” he says.

Harada states that Tekken Ball’s origins are a little more complex. “Tekken Ball was first designed as a simulator to help people practice air juggles. The original idea was to hit the ball and juggle it to a basket, sort of like basketball. It didn’t go how I imagined and I was kind of frustrated. If it’s not going to be good, I thought I should make it into a versus game.”

On Tekken Bowl, Harada says “Since we used a ball in Tekken Ball, we thought about using one in other ways. At first, we thought about pinball, but we thought we would rather have two characters taking turns so bowling would be better suited. That’s how we settled on bowling. Now that you’re hearing this you can tell how much we listened to fans at that time. We pretty much made what we wanted. [Laughs.]”