Category: Classic

Yippee ki yay! It looks like yet another cancelled Nintendo 64 game has been discovered – this time it’s the mythical Die Hard 64 from Bits Studios. Originally planned for a 1999 release by Fox Interactive, Die Hard 64 was never actually shown to the press or the public and the only hints that it ever existed (until now) were some mentions in magazine articles of the era. It appears that the same Assembler Games forum member who recently revealed the similarly cancelled Nintendo 64 game Riqa also has in his possession a very early (yet fully playable) version of Die Hard 64 – a first person shooter that is for all intents and purposes the blueprint for what went on to become Die hard Vendetta. RetroCollect reached out to forum member 10ahu – who incidentally worked for Bits Studios in the late 1990s –  for further details on Die Hard 64. Here’s what he told us about this incredible discovery:

“The game is far from complete, and is split into three roms. Each rom has got about 8 levels and around 3 of them are playable in each rom (the rest are test levels, or unfinished levels with no enemies at all). The levels playable include the prison riot, the hospital, LA street, the police department. The maps are quite big, and fairly impressive for the Nintendo 64; for instance in the LA street level you have few streets and you can go inside some buildings, but you dont have any pedestrians or cars running in the street. It feels a bit empty, but this is a very early game. All cutscenes are missing and beside the “yippee ki yay!” and “that must hurt” voiced by Bruce Willis, there is no dialogue at all. Even in the most completed level you have a lot of funny glitches. It was really a work in progress – and you can tell.

“Beside that you still have a lot here. You have few melee weapons – a knife, baseball bat, police stick, tazer, and your fist. Firearms I found include a hand gun, Uzi, M-16, a sort of automatic shotgun and a few other generic machine guns. What’s really cool is that you can dual wield weapons. In terms of gameplay, you can climb ladder, push buttons, jump, crouch, crawl on the ground, and you can also lean around corners. You have also some kind of unfinished ‘bullet time’ effect with the camera rotating around the bullet – a bit like Max Payne.

“The field of view is quite narrow but I guess thats standard in an N64 shooter, and the controls seem to be quite complicated to get used to. I guess I lost my skill with modern shooters’ auto aiming, but it was really hard to shoot the enemies!”

As mentioned earlier, Die Hard 64 appears to have been cancelled due to it’s projected release date being very late in the life cycle of the Nintendo 64, so work was halted and the game was moved to the Gamecube. Die Hard Vendetta did not garner stellar review scores upon release, but it’s very interesting to see the origins of that game in true Nintendo 64 blur-o-vision. 10ahu went on to explain how the Bits Studios team was split and worked on other well-known titles:

“When the N64 generation ended, the Riqa team was split into two teams – one half joined the Thieves World (another cancelled N64 game) team and they then produced Rogue Ops. The other half joined Die Hard 64 which then eventually became Die Hard Vendetta.”

According to 10ahu, the Die Hard 64 roms will not work using an emulator like Project64, and instead is running using an Everdrive with genuine Nintendo 64 hardware. Whether he releases Die Hard 64 to the wider community (or Riqa, for that matter) remains to be seen. But what we do know is that with every new discovery, the Nintendo 64’s library of cancelled games shows a tantalising glimpse of what could have been.

Die Hard 64 Gameplay

{youtube:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fhfShY0qpI}

Link: Die Hard 64 Assembler Games Thread

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The Nintendo Famicom or Nintendo Entertainment System (for those of us in the west) was the companies first step into the home console market following their success with arcade machines and the much loved Game & Watch. Although it wasn’t an over night success Nintendo’s perseverance and cleaver positioning in the market the NES became a huge success and ushered in a new era that saw Nintendo become a global brand in gaming.

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Unholy Night is a brand new 2D one-on-one fighting game for the Super Nintendo that was officially unveiled in late 2016. The game caused quite a stir once it was revealed, not only because of the format on which it was running, but also because of the credentials of the team behind it.

Unholy Night: The Darkness Hunter is the result of a colloboration between various creatives behind such classic fighting game series as Samurai Shodown, King of Fighters and Art of Fighting, so you know where you stand when it comes to quality. While the game has been complete for some time now, the ability of development team Blazepro to actually release Unholy Night on a Super Nintendo cartridge has been hampered by a lack of funding; and as such the collective has turned to Kickstarter to make a physical release a reality.

There’s no denying the rich heritage and SNK stylings that Unholy Night exudes, and those who have sampled the game have praised the fighting engine. That it is running on a Super Nintendo only adds to the allure of this title. With a funding goal of $52,500, and a production target of 1500 cartridges Blazepro have a way to go at present, but hopefully as news spreads of this new Super Nintendo game, the backers will come through.

There are a few things backers do need to be aware of. The first is that at present, there is only an NTSC version of Unholy Night planned, and furthermore the game will only work on either genuine NTSC Super Nintendo systems or with a Retro-Bit branded consoles such as the RetroDuo or RetroTrio. Support for other emulation systems such as the RetroN 5 has not been confirmed as yet. The team behind Unholy Night do seem to be very responsive to potential backers’ questions though, and are very open about what will and will not be included at each backer level. If you’d like to know more about Unholy Night, follow the link below.

Link: Unholy Night: The Darkness Hunter Kickstarter

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Primal Rage garnered a moderate level of success when it hit arcades in the early 1990s, and in subsequent years Atari’s prehistoric brawler was ported to pretty much every contemporary home console (and a coupe of handheld ones, too). The ports came with varying degrees of arcade accuracy, but for the most part were deemed to be worthy alternatives to other fighters of the era featuring digitised visuals. Primal Rage’s main draws were the level of gore that each fight was soaked in; and the source material of dinosaurs and other beasts of prehistory tearing massive chunks out of each others faces. What’s not to like?

It appears that a sequel, Primal Rage II was underway and intended for release in arcades in late 1996. However, due to Atari’s arcade division being consumed by Midway, Primal Rage II was quietly cancelled and the game was largely forgotten. According to one of Primal Rage’s lead developers Chris Tang, this was due to Midway seeing Primal Rage II as a direct competitor to its own Mortal Kombat games, and the plug was pulled – so to speak. Primal Rage II, and the whole franchise in general was one of Atari’s most profitable IPs, so the decision to cancel it wasn’t taken lightly, says Tang. He spoke exclusively to RetroCollect and told us: “the [Primal Rage] franchise up to that point was doing amazingly – we had comics, toys, clothing…and were developing a Saturday morning cartoon even. It was Atari Games’ most high profile franchise perhaps for their entire history, and other companies had things at stake – so it wasn’t something that was easy for them to just cancel.”

The quality of the models used in Primal Rage II appears to have improved substatially since the original game and Chris offered the following insight in the technical side of the game: 

“The characters in the game were all stop motion puppets, they were amazingly detailed foam models that were formed around metal articulating armatures. They were animated by Hollywood stop motion veterans Pete Kleinow and Jon Berg. Both great guys. Pete passed away not long after the project, unfortunately. I loved seeing what they did in the lab every day; making the moves come to life, frame by frame.”

Of the hardware used to power Primal Rage II and the reasons for the lack of emulation up until now, Chris explains:

“The game started on Co-Jag (Jaguar coin op) hardware – which was absolutely terrible, and honestly wasn’t capable of making something competitive with other arcade fighters.  We managed to find a great hardware to migrate to in the form of PSX-arcade hardware. It could do scaling and transparency, larger sprites, better effects, and many of the things that when you see the game now…still look kind of cool. In fact, Primal Rage II does things that no other arcade game did then or even now. There were so many frames of animation that we kept the first few frames in RAM, played those when a move was performed, then loaded the rest of the frames off the hard drive in realtime as it played. All the while, the hard drive was also streaming music and the backgrounds. It was a real technological marvel. There was custom hardware built for it to make that all work, which is why it took so long for emulation to happen.”

Indeed, Primal Rage II did remain little more than a footnote in the history of cancelled arcade games until some time after 2010, when a ROM of the unfinished game was dumped online. Unfortunatley, as described above the game could not be played as the software apparently required a bespoke piece of arcade hardware to run. All of this has recently changed though, with the development of a specialised build of MAME called MAME4RAGE2 being released. MAME4RAGE2 has been specifically created to run Primal Rage II and as you can see from the video below (from YouTuber Owlnonymous, complete with insightful commentary), the game does indeed look like an interesting prospect.

Rather than fight as the huge beasts from the original, this time the players fight as ‘avatars’ – humanoid characters that have the ability to momentarily morph into animalistic alter egos with increased power and approximatley 100% more claws with which to rip and tear. The creation of MAME4RAGE2 will undoubtedly come as a pleasant surprise for fans of the original Primal Rage, and it warms the cockles of our hearts that the sequel that never was is now available in fully playable, blood-soaked form.

Primal Rage II Gameplay

{youtube:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SoadscC_ySM}

Link: MAME4RAGE2 Reddit Thread 

Link: Primal Rage II Assembler Thread

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Before I actually delve into the main meat and potatoes of Cowardly Creations’ recent PS4 and Vita release, I want to discuss the title. Uncanny Valley is named after the notion that the more accurate simulations of human faces and expressions get, the more we (as in, us real humans) become aware that they might not be authentic. A great example of this are the characters seen in the Tom Hanks computer generated movie The Polar Express. The facial animations of the characters are eerily lifelike…but there’s something decidedly soulless about them and the human eye has an unnerving ability to detect the fabrication. The same can be said of the young Jeff Bridges in Tron Legacy or the recreation of Peter Cushing depicted in Star Wars Rogue One. Like The Thing from John Carpenter’s eponymous 1980s masterpiece, it looks like a human…but it isn’t. And so ends the pseudo-science lesson. I simply find the notion of the uncanny valley theory totally fascinating and this in part might be one of the reasons that I was drawn to this retro-inspired psychological horror in the first place.

Uncanny Valley is actually a fairly old game, having originally been released on Steam way back in 2015. I only discovered this after searching for information about the game prior to its release on the PlayStation Store earlier this week, and I unearthed a bunch of rather unfavourable reviews, too. Not wanting to be influenced by the actual reasons behind the various two-star ratings Google threw at me amongst the search results, I decided not to read them and instead wait for the game to arrive and play through it with no prior knowledge or information about the storyline or the gameplay mechanics. The only things I cared about at the point of purchase were that I was enamoured with the 2D, pixel art trappings and the promise of playing what looked like a retro-themed take on Silent Hill. Having experienced and enjoyed aesthetically similar games on my Vita, such as Lone Survivor and Slain (both of which have a definite horror theme), I wanted to give Uncanny Valley my full, undivided and uninfluenced attention.

The game starts with you playing as a guy called Tom (which was disconcerting at first, as I though the game somehow knew my actual name), who has just taken a job as a security guard at an isolated facility surrounded for miles around by nothing but snow-covered forests. The facility was once the home to an organisation called Melior, but now stands unused yet is eerily still full of office equipment and machinery. So far, so The Shining; and I think it’s important to reference Stanley Kubrick’s seminal horror flick at this point because Uncanny Valley draws much of its uneasy atmosphere from the 1980 movie. The feeling that everything appears to be normal, but there’s something not quite right. Where are all the workers from the facility? Why does the massive building stand empty apart from you and another security guard with who you share a shift pattern? Who is the mysterious house keeper you occasionally run into at the now deserted staff accommodation block? There are so many unnerving elements to the game’s story that you can’t help but be drawn in, driven by a desire to know more. It’s like The Shining mixed with the desolation of Pripyat and the mysterious, unnameable weirdness of HP Lovecraft’s novella Shadow Over Innsmouth.

Once you settle in, Uncanny Valley sets you the task of doing the rounds in the Melior building after dark, where Buck (the other security guard) gives you instructions on which floors to patrol and barks at you over the radio to fix the generator if the power goes down. During these shifts (which actually only last for 7 minutes each) you are generally free to roam around the deserted building and the limited outside areas by torchlight, picking up audio tapes and reading emails on the various computer terminals you find. Both of these activities will yield further information about what went down at Melior before the firm went to the wall, and also reveal the unease felt by staff at working in such a remote location, with the company dabbling in unethical and slightly disturbing research. It is once these night shifts end and Tom finds himself needing the warm embrace of sleep that Uncanny Valley truly takes a trip into the macabre and surreal.

The dream sequences place Tom in a host of unconnected scenes and locations – police stations full of corrupt cops, alleyways populated by mutilated corpses and tenements full of what can only be described massive green faces bursting through walls…because that’s what they are. The desolate reality merged with the horrific dream sequences, both in turn coupled with no real idea of what is going on (initially at least) do make Uncanny Valley a truly unique and genuinely unsettling experience. For this, I cannot fault it. The game does start a bit slowly, and is a little bit more of a walking simulator than you would expect, but after a while the creepiness ramps up and the action starts…and then it goes fully Silent Hill and you find yourself running down shadowy corridors, shooting zombies in the head and being chased by crowds of invincible silhouettes. What does it all mean? What was Melior doing out there in the place beyond the pines? Well…I won’t spoil it for you, but rest assured it’s pretty creepy and makes Uncanny Valley stand out on the Vita especially as a game well worth investigating.

Another, not so positive aspect of Uncanny Valley, is just how full of glitches it is. At first, I wondered if what I was encountering was a play on Eternal Darkness’s way of messing with the player. Remember the ‘corrupt memory card’ prank and the other ways in which the Gamecube classic tried to freak you out by breaking the fourth wall? Well, Uncanny Valley has plenty of these moments…but they aren’t intentional. A major bug I found was that if you are in the middle of attempting a puzzle when the game forces Tom back to his bedroom to get some sleep (it’s a bit like the mechanic used in Shenmue where Ryo Hazuki has to keep popping off to bed when it gets late), then the game will not load the following screens. It’s hard to explain, but essentially you can still move around and interact with items and other characters…but you cannot see anything on the screen. Pressing pause will make the black mask flash for a split second, revealing the game as it should be before going back to a black screen. In this case, the game had auto saved and no matter how many times I reloaded my save, the black screen glitch was replicated. Annoyed, I restarted the adventure resigned to the fact that I’d just wasted two hours of my life.

Interestingly though – and as a testament to the message you get upon starting Uncanny Valley for the first time – on my second play through I got a slightly different experience. Different conversations with the same characters, different items in the game world to collect and slightly different dream sequences. Uncanny Valley boasts several different endings and you are encouraged to play through the whole adventure multiple times to see everything the adventure has to offer, and the fact that this annoying glitch forced me to restart after just two hours allowed me to get a look at what the developers intended. There are some other clever aspects to Uncanny Valley, such as the ability to heal certain parts of Tom’s body with bandages, and the damage model will hinder progress (such as making Tom walk slower or not allowing him to move boxes at all if his arms are injured). There are standard puzzle elements too, such as finding key codes and unlocking doors and there are also some nice little touches like being able to interact with the vast majority of background items. However, the muddled way in which the story is revealed to the player, and the general air of not knowing what to do next does detract from the overall experience.

In a nutshell, Uncanny Valley is an intriguing and refreshing experience – certainly on the Vita, anyway. It looks pretty great and the animation is brilliant, while the sound design perfectly builds suspense and a feeling of uncertain and otherworldly horror. Sadly, there is a distinct air of style over substance. The somewhat aimless wandering around and slow pacing of the opening sections will probably leave many gamers cold, and the occasional game-breaking glitch means that many will likely never get to see the further recesses of either the Melior facility or Tom’s subconscious. Indeed, if I hadn’t decided I was going to review Uncanny Valley here for RetroCollect, I probably wouldn’t have restarted the game at all. Ultimately though, if you’re hankering for a new approach to horror on your Vita (or PS4, as cross-buy is included in the price), then by all means give Uncanny Valley a few of hours of your time. It looks good and the general weirdness peaks the interest just enough to make you want to see just how bizarre the game can get, and with multiple endings there’s a decent level of replay value.

Since playing Uncanny Valley, I’ve been back and looked at those reviews I mentioned in the opening section of this review and for the most part I agree with the criticisms levelled at the original Steam release. Not much seems to have changed since the jump from PC to console, and even the same glitches appear to have been dragged along for the ride. That said, as a Vita game there’s not really a lot of competition for Uncanny Valley and it’s really quite an interesting take on survival/psychological horror. Head into this expecting a Super Nintendo version of Silent Hill and you’ll be disappointed. Head into it expecting an intriguing new slant on the genre and you’ll be pleasantly surprised. Just remember not to attempt any puzzles before Tom’s bedtime.

Link: Uncanny Valley at PlayStation Store

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Retro Gamer Magazine has bucked the trend in recent times, as many other print magazines close down or go fully digital the retro-themed monthly publication goes from strength to strength.

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What’s not to love about NBA Jam? Despite its age, the two on two match-up has stood the test of time with its fast paced action and hilarious multiplayer gameplay. Knowing how well regarded the game is it should come as no surprise that fans have unofficially updated the game to feature this year’s roster.

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Several months ago there was some impressive progress made in Game Boy modification circles after hardware hacker BennVenn managed to get the Game Boy Color running through a Game Boy Advance SP screen. While providing a much crisper image and an illuminated screen, the solution was slightly hindered by the bulky size of the wide LCD screen. Although looking promising, it would appear enthusiasts in China have already provided an impressive alternative with backlit Game Boy Colors readily available on TaoBao.

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In recent times some retro gamers have converted old iPods into ZX Spectrum tape emulators by converting tape images of games into audio files. By playing the high pitched noise through the headphone jack and back into the micro-computer, the ZX Spectrum is none the wiser that modern technology is feeding it data rather than a traditional cassette tape. While a similar solution has been available for the Commodore 64 too, it’s only as of now that the MSX is enjoying this modern advancement in game loading.

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While DRM today may been seen as overly aggressive and frustrating, copy protection methods of yesteryear actually brought along some charm whilst keeping the pirates at bay. One of the more notable examples of this was the code wheel – a collection of layered card held together by a split pin with windows revealing secret codes underneath. Although seeming to be something of a bygone era, several of these code wheels have now been recreated and digitised for future generations to come.

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