Start practicing your litany of fear; there’s sudden revival of the old platformer Earthworm Jim. First, later this year (the press release says “soon”) the Sega Genesis versions of Earthworm Jim and Earthworm Jim 2 will be available on the Wii’s Virtual Console (along with two other Interplay titles: Boogerman and Clayfighter). Second, plans are in motion at Interplay to do a sequel, with creator Douglas TenNapel as a consultant: Earthworm Jim 4. Finally, as part of the work on that sequel, Interplay will launch a new TV series and a feature film.
Now if they’d only bring back The Neverhood — that game was awesome. I still have the soundtrack that I picked up at E3 one year. Digging around, I see there are also plans to make it into a feature film, which would be interesting. Given Doug TenNapel’s connections, perhaps Frederator will be working on Earthworm Jim as well?
In case you haven’t heard the news, Valley Games is now working with Eagle Games to handle their pre-orders. Because of this, it looks like you’ll have to re-order Titan and other games you might have already pre-ordered, but other than that I think this is good news. Full press release follows:
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Over at Andy Baio’s Waxy.org blog, he reports on some archaeological work he did on an old backup drive from Infocom. As part of that, he found the history of a never-completed sequel to the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Universe game. Fascinating, and a great example of what can go wrong in the development of a game, or any large scale artistic effort. He also makes two prototypes available for download.
One of the downsides (besides there not being stuff for you guys to listen to) to not doing podcasts for a while is that I miss out on reviewing games that this show is actually qualified to do. Seems like Black Ops would be a natural. Oh well. I’ll see about covering the revamp when it finally comes out for the public.
As far as the next show, I’m working on it now. With the recent (as in the past few months) passing of Bobby Fischer it seems appropriate to finally cover chess. I’ll be talking about my personal history, ways to get into it for novices, and ways to make it more interesting for those who either are tired of it or didn’t think much of it in the first place. If you have thoughts along those lines, drop me a line. Hopefully I’ll be recording this weekend, though with my daughter’s play and my friend’s seder, it might be tight.
And don’t worry Gygax fans, I’ll be doing D&D at some point, too. Fischer’s just first in line.
The Vintage Gamer begins its triumphant return with a special interview episode with the Tic-Tac-Toe Champion of the World. If that’s not enough, we have a new sponsor! And the usual intro and outro music. So yes, it’s a chock-full episode.
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Vintage Gamer Special 03: Tic-Tac-Toe Champion [6:04m]:
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Up on Joystiq, they have this awesome movie from the latest Spy Hunter game….
Oh, it’s an ad for a car, you say? Too bad. I would have played it.
This is a bit out of the purview of vintage gaming, but there may be interest so I figured I’d post it. I’m trying to clear out a lot of games that I haven’t played much or probably will never play. Because my primary goal is “Clean up the house,” I’m selling them at the low end of their worth, so you might pick up some bargains.
You can find my half.com store here. Right now it’s mostly Xbox, PS2 and Xbox 360 games with one Wii title. I’ll be listing some PS3 games tonight, and I may have some PC games as well later.
I apologize for not posting this before — I started watching this last week and it didn’t occur to me to bring it up here. Discovery is doing a five-part documentary about the computer game industry. They began with the early days, then last week covered the rise of Nintendo. Looks like this week covers first person shooters. It’s currently showing at 8pm ET/PT on Wednesday nights. Hopefully they’ll repeat it for those who missed it.
The reason this came to mind is that because there is an interview up on Wired with Yoshiaki Koizumi, the director of Super Mario Galaxy. In it, he implies that he’s more involved in the story aspects of the Mario games than Miyazaki is — which is ironic given the focus on Miyazaki in the Discovery program as the father of story games…
According to a Geeklist on BGG.com, Z-Man games will be reprinting this classic game in 2008. If you recall, I discussed it back in Episode #28.
As far as other news: Yes, I’m still here, and the book I’m working on is almost through the worst of it. I’m hoping to be done with rewrites by the end of the month, and then it’s just copyediting and layout. Oh yeah, and coding for the CD — but that’s fun! In any case, there’s a good chance there will be an episode in December sometime.
Until then, thank you for all the cards and letters.
Apologies to those who downloaded those PDFs. I tried to update my copy of PodPress, and for whatever reason, that screwed up the feed. I’ve restored the old version and I’ll take another look at it when I have more time. Until then, let me know if you have any further problems.
