Family Guy has skewered pop culture for two decades and I always laugh the most when the production team sets their sights on a classic video game.  In Season 17's "Griffin Winter Games", Peter Griffin and his daughter Meg are captured while trespassing in North Korea and must stage a thrilling escape in the style of a nostalgic video game.  Peter suggests they use Rare's famed GoldenEye 007 for the Nintendo 64 as their inspiration, and what follows is a loving tribute to the console's most beloved shooters.  From the ammo count in the lower left corner of the screen to the targeting reticule that appears when Meg needs to target bolts to shoot open a grate to the little cinematic cut scenes, Family Guy knows the source material and has fun with it.  Peter even offers fun observations about the gameplay and environment while they make their escape.  It's an unexpected moment that will make GoldenEye fans smile.

Nintendo's ongoing flirtatious partnership with the mobile gaming space continues with the upcoming Mario Kart Tour for iOS and Android in which the console Mario Kart experience is reformulated for a streamlined experience with microtransactions.  While the company's Super Mario Run released as a one-time purchase and failed to meet sales expectations, follow up titles based on Animal Crossing and Fire Emblem included microtransactional elements and have, so far, lit up sales charts, so I'm not surprised that Mario Kart Tour follows that mold.  The game is in beta for Android starting today and while players are bound by a restriction on posting screenshots of the game, you know that hardly anybody is honoring that.  Ethan Gach at Kotaku has a writeup on how the game plays and how much money it expects you to spend to have a fighting chance at winning.

To unlock additional circuits you collect Grand Stars by completing races and other challenges. Earning stars is also how you unlock gifts, some of which contain green gems, Mario Kart Tour’s premium currency. This is where things start to get weighed down with overlapping in-game currencies. For five gems you get to “pull” on a green pipe that shoots out a new driver, kart, or glider, each of a different rarity. My first pull got me Morton, one of the Bowser minions. Currently the in-game shop, which doesn’t allow you to buy gems yet, is advertising Metal Mario.

I'm interested in trying Mario Kart Tour once it releases, but I don't expect to put any money into it if it's just going to go to lootbox-style random pulls from a bank of items or characters.  I will spend money on mobile games provided that it's a single fee (such as the aforementioned Super Mario Run) and I realize that is a dying if not already dead business model in the mobile space that is increasingly built around monthly subscriptions or slot machine-style payouts of randomly generated items.  That said, I enjoy Star Trek Timelines and have paid a few dollars into its premium currency from time to time to support the development studio, but we're talking more along the lines of four dollars every few months as opposed to the $99 whale package that the game promotes every few days.  I'm sure that Mario Kart Tour's beta period will be used to gauge whether or not the current pricing model used in the game is fair and undoubtedly the marketplace in the release version will be balanced based on player input.  Whenever a mobile game goes into a public beta these days I naturally assume that's really what the developers are testing.  The gameplay is probably pretty well locked in by that point and its the engagement with the in-game store that really needs testing and input.  Mario Kart Tour's shop doesn't sell gems yet for real money, but it's only a matter of time before it does.

(Image via ResetEra)

Ghostbusters seems to be poised for another resurgence as a new film is in production, the 2009 video game is rumored for a current console generation re-release, and Dan Aykroyd has written a prequel script featuring the Ghostbusters characters in high school.  Now comes word that the amusement park simulation title Planet Coaster is crossing the streams with the supernatural spectacular featuring Aykroyd reprising his role as Ray Stantz who will mentor players throughout the campaign and William Atherton returning as Environmental Protection Agency antagonist Dickless Walter Peck.  New rides and other surprises await in this crossover add-on.

Ghostbusters fans will be steeped in nostalgia as other fan-favourite ghosts and characters make appearances as the story progresses, including Slimer, the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man and even the legendary ECTO-1 car. A new in-game interactive dark ride, The Ghostbusters Experience, allows Planet Coaster players to engage with the game in a whole new way as they take on the role of a Ghostbuster to bust ghosts with their particle throwers and log their high score.   

I've never played Planet Coaster, but if there's ever a reason for me to check it out, it would have to be this expansion.  The reveal trailer shows off just enough to pique interest.  No release date has been announced just yet.

I spent a lot of time and energy both writing about and playing Ghostbusters: The Video Game in 2009, so you know that my interest is piqued when I see that Taiwan's gaming rating agency (their version of the ESRB) has rated a Xbox One version of the game slated for release (one would hope a PlayStation 4 version is in the mix somewhere too).  Considering that the original developer, Terminal Reality, is long gone and the original publisher, Atari, isn't exactly a gaming powerhouse anymore, the listing credits the port job to Mad Dog Games who in recent years has worked on games such as NBA Playgrounds, World of Speed, and Shaq Fu: A Legend Reborn.  So... we will see.

The game itself could use a little polish on the backend of things as the PlayStation 3 version had some nasty bugs on release including an issue with wiping out save data(!) and performance issues in the library level.  The game also included an online multiplayer mode that had problems of its own, so I don't know if anyone would shed any tears if that part of the game didn't make the cut this time.  Either way, Ghostbusters: The Video Game was a great use of the license, was true to the lore of the movies & the animated series, and definitely deserves your attention.  Let's hope this pans out as I will gladly play through it again on current generation hardware if it's a solid conversion. 

(via Resetera)

Since the dawn of time, humanity has had a single collective dream: to have a wall-mounted shelf that resembles a stage from Donkey Kong and to stock that shelf with little 8-bit stylized figurines of Nintendo characters.  Now I have achieved this dream.  Gaze upon the Donkey Kong shelf and the tableau it presents with Donkey Kong himself on the top level guarding both Princess Toadstool and a classic Donkey Kong arcade machine (it lights up and plays sound, too!).  Mario and Luigi are on their way to save the day and maybe earn a free game, plus Toad and Link are heading up the rear for backup.  A lone Goomba patrols the lower level; sadly, Link is the one hero on the scene who cannot jump, so maybe the Goomba has a fighting chance.  Also, Gizmo the mogwai from Gremlins has stumbled into the scene and is hanging from a ladder for no reason other than he looks cute doing it.  Hang on, Gizmo! 

Special thanks and appreciation to my girlfriend who spotted the basic shelves at IKEA and painted them to something more appropriate for a big gorilla.  Acquiring the figurines was a costly chore as several of them have been out of print for some time.  Amazon to the rescue, naturally, but it took patience and time to wait for a third-party seller who wasn't charging outrageous prices for essentially an $8 chunk of plastic.  Seriously, resellers, when it comes to pricing, how high can you get?

Today it's common for video game developers to speak up about their work either in unofficial forums such as social media or in proper interviews in publications, but thirty years ago nobody in a position of journalism power cared much about what a developer had to say.  We've gnawed modern games like Super Mario Odyssey to the bone, but so many older games never had a chance to shine in a development context.  One of those large voids in gaming history is the original Castlevania trilogy for the Nintendo Entertainment System as Konami isn't exactly known for keeping up with their own history until very recently, but thankfully for us there's a translated series of tweets at Shmuplations discussing the original creator of Castlevania, Hitoshi Akamatsu, that covers so much about how the game was conceived, balanced, and expanded upon in sequels.

Akamatsu’s sense of game design was very deep. In Castlevania, the knife appears first so the player can get used to the subweapons. He made the stopwatch so you could get used to enemy attacks. Then the strongest items are the Cross and the Holy Water. And that was how he determined the order in which the items would appear to the player.

I once asked him about the fight with Death, and how insanely hard it was. He told me, “The game design idea there was to get players to understand how to use the cross and axe subweapons. If you can defeat him with only the whip, that means you’re really good.” I can’t defeat him with the whip alone. But if you read the movements of the sickles, I understand it is possible (albeit very difficult) to beat him with just the whip. Apparently the test players were able to do it.

I'm reminded of how World 1-1 of Super Mario Bros. is designed in such a way with power-up and enemy placement to teach players what the game expects of them.  There's so much more in this article that reveals that those original NES games operated at a deeper level than many of us ever expected such as foreshadowing in the first Castlevania that leads into the sequel Simon's Quest, what Dracula's true form really means, and how the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles nearly hobbled the series.  Settle in and prepare to have all those little questions that you never knew you had answered.  While you're doing that, I think I'll go and play Castlevania yet again.

I know it's hard to believe now in an age where Street Fighter fans have been able to play as M. Bison and Balrog for decades, but there was once a time when the four Shadaloo bosses were restricted to CPU control only.  They were fruits you must not taste in the original release of Street Fighter II: The World Warrior in the arcades and that limitation carried over to the Super NES home version.  Still, that didn't stop eager players from being absolutely sure that there had to be some hidden code that would unlock Vega, Sagat, and the rest as playable characters.  Electronic Gaming Monthly used its reader mail column back in 1993 to try and convince players that there was no secret boss code no matter how many kids in the schoolyard said otherwise.  They did find Game Genie codes that could brute force access to the bosses, but that's not quite the same thing, and the "Champion Edition" mirror match Down R Up L Y B code certainly didn't get the job done either.

I remember playing Street Fighter II for the Super NES the summer it came out with a neighborhood friend and we spent too many afternoons just trying to get to the bosses at all, let alone trying to control them.  The challenge with the bosses was that unlike the regular World Warriors, we couldn't practice their moves to understand their strategies in a controlled two-player environment.  When Vega leaped up onto his fence and flipped down on us, we had no idea what was coming or what to do about it.  Sagat's endless "TIGER!  TIGER!  TIGER UPPERCUT!"?  Forget about it.  We were strangers in a strange land and no amount of jamming on the punch buttons to electrify Blanka could save us.

(via Reddit)