Press The Buttons

Adventure Island Music Break

It's April Fool's Day which means that there's very little actual true news on which to comment and writing about the fake stuff doesn't really interest me unless the source material is especially clever.  What are we to do today instead?  Let's rise above the mess with the only tool available to us: Hudson's classic 1987 Nintendo Entertainment System release Adventure Island and its awesome music.  Enjoy this clip of one of the game's overworld themes and imagine yourself on a tropical island far away from false information and deadly eggplants.  Life-giving milk and time-extending fruit sold separately.

Beyond Beeps: Luigi's Mansion

Of all of the characters in Nintendo's stable to send into battle against a house full of angry ghosts in order to rescue the famous (and missing!) Mario, it seems that Luigi would be the least capable choice, but somehow it all works in 2001's Luigi's Mansion for the GameCube. In honor of the sequel, Luigi's Mansion: Dark Moon for the Nintendo 3DS, launching this week, it's only appropriate to look back at the original game and its fun soundtrack composed by Kazumi Totaka. Far from frightening, the music of Luigi's Mansion accompanies the green-capped plumber in his journey with some familiar tunes and a memorable, hummable recurring melody that appears in several forms from traditional instrumental theme to frightened whistle by the unlikely hero himself.

Scrooge McDuck: Then And Now

The talented developers on Capcom's original DuckTales team went out of their way to create 8-bit renditions of familiar and beloved characters such as Scrooge McDuck and Launchpad McQuack, but were limited by the technology of the day.  Simple sprites composed of a few basic colors were the upper bound of artistic expression, although the artists did a wonderful job with the tools available.  That was back in 1989.  Now, today in 2013, WayForward's art team has much more technological power with which to work when it comes to creating DuckTales Remastered which means that fans will be treated to much more accurate takes on McDuck and friends.  Over at NeoGAF, alr1ght has posted a few side by side comparisons of character sprites to show how the original DuckTales game for the Nintendo Entertainment System stacks up to DuckTales Remastered for the Sony PlayStation 3, Microsoft Xbox 360, and Nintendo Wii U.  Check out the impressive work.  There's a definite joy to these creations.

Now Scammers Are Calling Pirated Games "Refurbished"

I'm strangely fascinated by counterfeit video game cartridges.  I've never bought one, nor do I desire to do so, but I am intrigued by the workmanship and generally cutting of corners that goes into producing a shabby, fake copy of a major video game.  Today's example of being taken for a ride comes to us from The Games Shed in which a writer identified only as Jamie describes the experience of buying what turned out to be a counterfeit copy of Pokémon Ruby for the Game Boy Advance from an eBay seller.

A couple of days later and our Pokémon GBA pack arrives all the way from the midlands.  I instantly knew something was off with these games.  They rattled. They shouldn’t rattle.  Them being the Pokémon collection they are all different colour translucent carts, which, for the record, we do already own.  The colours were all slightly wrong. Rather odd, but there could be any reason for that right? Sunlight exposure… err… hmm, possibly exposure to gamma rays?

The first warning sign that something was wrong with this eBay auction is that the seller was shipping from China.  For cryin' out loud, never ever purchase media from China no matter how good a deal you think you'll get.  With the rare exception that might as well be a margin of error calculation, the item in question is fake.  Count on it. [Note: I inadvertantly mixed Jamie's experience which involved a shipment from the Midlands in England with a comment posted to Jamie's article which described a similar experience which did ship from China.  I apologize for the confusion.  Still, my point stands.]  What really struck me with this story is that the scammer came sort of clean when called on the poor quality of the fake and claimed that the Pokémon game was merely refurbished.  I like that.  That takes some chutzpah, as if one could refurbish a hunk of plastic the same way that one could restuff a cushion or replace the power supply on a television.

Capcom Reviving DuckTales With Remastered Remake

Capcom achieved great things with the suite of licenses for the cartoons of the Disney Afternoon programming block in the late 1980s and early 1990s.  The most well-remembered product of that era has to be 1989's DuckTales which sent Scrooge McDuck on a worldwide treasure hunt through places such as the Amazon, Transylvania, the African Mines, and even the Moon.  It's a beloved game for many and presumed long lost due to all kinds of licensing issues, but today the company announced that it's bringing it back to the Sony PlayStation 3, Microsoft Xbox 360, and Nintendo Wii U as DuckTales Remastered.  Woo-ooh! Here's some of the press release:

DuckTales Remastered has seen the development team take the levels and layout from the original 1989 release as a foundation before expanding upon them to significantly enhance the gameplay experience but where this update truly impresses is its graphics and sound. All of the visuals from the 8-bit game have been beautifully re-created as hand-drawn and animated sprites, across a backdrop of luscious, re-envisioned level backgrounds. Furthermore, original Disney Character Voices talent, including some from the cartoon TV series, bring in-game characters to life with charm and wit, while the classic melodies of the original soundtrack are given a modern twist.

Further additions to the original include an all new tutorial level where players can get familiar with the iconic pogo jump and cane swing; while Scrooge McDuck’s Museum allows players to track all their stats and compare their progress with others via global leaderboards.

Short of Darkwing Duck, I can't think of any other Capcom production from the Nintendo Entertainment System years that I'd want to see revived in this format.  WayForward is handling the development with its usual hand-drawn animated flair.  This really is the best way to bring DuckTales back; suddenly a lack of a Virtual Console release doesn't seem so bad, eh?  The trailer is gorgeous and makes me feel like I'm just home from elementary school and eager to plop down in front of the television for another visit to Duckburg.  Nostalgia is a power force!  DuckTales Remastered is due out this summer and Capcom can have my money on day one for this.

Star Fox For Sega Genesis Needs No Super FX Chip

Nintendo and Sega were locked in something of a hardware enhancement arms race in the 1990s as each company worked to bolster their respective consoles against the competition.  One of the add-ons that Nintendo created was the Super FX chip used in popular games such as Star Fox, Stunt Race FX, and Yoshi's Island, and while Sega countered with its own version of the technology dubbed the SVP chip, the company never used it for anything approaching how the competition applied it.  Sega never knew the joys of Star Fox, but now a 16-bit enthusiast by the name of Stef has managed to bring a small piece of Fox McCloud's debut adventure for the Super NES to the Sega Genesis.  RetroCollect has the news.

Before you get too excited about taking down Andross with a Mega Drive control pad in hand, we'd like to bring you back down to Corneria earth with the fact that this is very much a proof of concept.While developer Stef - from the ROMHacking.net forums - has managed to convert a snippet of playable Star Fox code over to the Sega Mega Drive, at this point in time it is only running around 9 frames per second on stock hardware. To further burst your bubble, audio is currently missing, as are many other key elements to the game.

This Genesis demo of Star Fox is running on pure blast processing.  No SVP chip or other enhancements are in play here.  It's an impressive feat that shows yet another Super NES classic running in a stripped down format on the Genesis.  Given enough time and effort, I wonder just how much of the original game can be successfully ported to the Genesis.  There's really no reason for this project to happen other than "because we can", but speaking as someone who came of age during the 16-bit console wars, I have to admit that seeing this demo running makes me smile.  It's as if this were a small step towards cultural understanding and world peace if such things depended on a twenty-year-old video game being ported across competing platforms.

Power Button - Episode 96: Sly Cooper And Other Games From Older Times

Hopefully you've had a chance to play Sly Cooper: Thieves in Time for the Sony PlayStation 3 and PlayStation Vita from Sanzaru Games by now because this episode of Power Button digs into what Brad Hilderbrand and I most enjoyed about the game and explores how it could have been better.  All of that Sly talk leads into a larger conversation about other game franchises from the past ten years that have fallen into history in recent times and which of those favorite titles need a Sly-like revival.  Join us for an hour of fun from both recent days and memory lane.  Download this week's episode directly from PTB, listen with the player below, or subscribe via iTunes, toss this RSS feed into your podcast aggregation software of choice, and be sure to catch up on past episodes if you're joining us late. Remember that you can reach us via , you can leave a message on the Power Button hotline by calling (720) 722-2781, and you can even follow us on Twitter at @PressTheButtons and @aubradley84, or for just podcast updates, @ThePowerButton.

Power Button - Episode 96: Sly Cooper And Other Games From Older Times

OverClocked ReMix Offers You Milky Way Wishes Album

When you need gloriously happy, ever-presently perky video game music, Nintendo's Kirby franchise is a great go-to choice for cheery songs.  Now OverClocked Remix has taken one of the most enduring selection from Dream Land, Kirby Super Star, and given it the album compilation project treatment that we all know and love so much.  Ten years in the making, Milky Way Wishes is a freely available set of twenty-three songs (two CDs worth of music) created by familiar names from the OC ReMix world including PrototypeRaptor, Sixto Sounds, Benjamin Briggs, and Halc from Kirby's greatest Super NES adventure.  Check out the trailer, then head over to the album's website to get your own copy.  It's great stuff and sure to be a find addition to your video game music remix library.

Luigi's Colors Come From Koopa Troopas

Just when you think you know all there is about a famous and long-running character like Luigi, Nintendo's Shigeru Miyamoto goes and throws us all a curveball.  Speaking with MTV Multiplayer about the company's Year Of Luigi initiative for 2013, the character's creator revealed that those green overalls are no coincidence.  Like every other design choice of the era, Luigi's colors are the way they are for an important system resources reason.  While Mario's design and colors are based on the hardware limitations of the day, so too is Luigi bound by the hardware from which he spawned.  For instance, he takes his colors from Mario Bros. shellcreeper turtle precursor to the Koopa Troopa.

Multiplayer: Do you think that the red and green colors, the two that were chosen for Mario and Luigi, are important, or were they just products of the technological limitations at the time?

Miyamoto: I think that the red and green choices were the right ones to make, especially where "Mario Bros." is a two-player game, and you needed to be able to tell which one you were controlling. But, in fact, as you note, the system at the time had severe limitations as to the number of different colors that could be used in the palette. What we ended up having to do was look at the green of the turtle characters in that game, the shells were green, and the color of their faces was essentially somewhat skin tone, so we were able to use the same color palette as the turtle on the Luigi character. So, because of the limitations, we had to make that decision, but looking back on it now, it appears to have been the right decision to make.

Of course, as those limitations have gone away, and we've had more colors to use, Luigi is not only green, but he also has his own blue shirt. In "Mario Bros.," he originally had a white shirt, but now he has a blue shirt, and we were able to make him a little bit taller and things like that to differentiate him.

It's always fascinating to see how our favorites characters not only began, but have grown and changed over the years.  So many of video gaming's most iconic characters have their designs rooted in practical needs to overcome problems.  I wonder what Mario and Luigi would look like if they were created today in a time when character design is much more open and free compared to thirty years ago.  Would they be realistic in style?  Would their wear different clothes?  Would they even have their trademark initial-marked hats?  All things considered, I think we're better off with the way things turned out.  I don't want to live in a world where everyone's favorite plumbers look like, say, Uncharted's Nathan Drake and Victor Sullivan.  It may be serendipity that Luigi looks as he does, but his design suits him well.

Complete F-Zero AX Discovered Inside F-Zero GX

The story of F-Zero GX and F-Zero AX should be a familiar one by now to PTB readers.  As you'll recall, owners of the GX home version can take their GameCube memory card with save game data to the arcade, plug it into an AX machine, and bring tracks, cars, and racers back home to the GX version of the game.  It can be an expensive proposition to collect all of the AX elements, and of course there's no guarantee that you'll be able to find an AX machine in your area.  Fans of Nintendo's F-Zero franchise have been searching for one of those mythical F-Zero AX arcade units for years, but now it turns out that the complete arcade game has been hiding inside the F-Zero GX home game all this time.  The Cutting Room Floor details how to bring the hard to find arcade game out of hiding with the aid an Action Replay.

Curiously enough, F-Zero GX contains all the code required to play F-Zero AX on the GameCube. Using the Action Replay code below, F-Zero GX will boot into F-Zero AX.

The video shows unlockable racers and widescreen mode, which shouldn't be possible without further codes, unless AX loads them from the GX save file.

It shouldn't be a surprise that GX contains all of those AX elements are in the GameCube version of the game since it's possible to unlock them a piece at a time, but finding the entire AX experience in there is fantastic.  It's a shame that an Action Replay is required to access it though.  Hey, Nintendo and Sega, is there some very secret code that'll open this up through regular means?  It's been ten years now since both of these games were released.  What's to be gained by keeping the secret any longer?  It's not like there's a glut of AX machines out there that could still be earning tokens.  Is the complete AX game included on the disc so that the data between AX and GX versions can be shared more efficiently?  TCRF has done great work digging this up, but I want to know why it's there at all.  This news just raises further questions!

(via RetroCollect)