A Deluge of News

Whoo. Lots of gaming news has piled up in the five-ish finkel days since I've posted, so let's get right to that. The first is that video game box cover artist Mick McGinty (not to be confused with the man who broke Steve Martin's hand in The Jerk) recently passed away. Thousands of gamers on the internet have expressed their disappointment, but Street Fighter II's resident kickboxer Sagat is taking the news especially hard.

Next on the menu is an unexpected but nevertheless welcome Playstation Vita port of Space Cadet Pinball. This was the app included with early versions of Windows, that kept kids entertained on their parents' computers before the widespread adoption of home internet. Hey, it was either that or Minesweeper... for kids who wanted to lessen their boredom rather than increase it, the choice was obvious. 

Twenty five years later, Space Cadet still plays a mean pinball, and is well adapted to the Playstation Vita. Pressing X launches the ball, and the shoulder buttons swing the flippers. However, it's important to note that the game won't work at all unless you pluck some files from the original Windows version of Space Cadet and drop them in the appropriate folder on your Vita. Later versions of Windows don't include the game, but Groovy Post's Brian Burgess has a solution for that irritating omission. PINBALL.DAT is the bare minimum required for getting the game to work, but you're going to want all the WAV files too, so you can hear every funky noise as the ball slams into targets and slips past your flippers.

There was something else, I'm sure... oh yes, the long awaited and excessively hyped indie game Skatebirds sucks eggs. Look, I wanted this to be good. I'm a casual fan of the Tony Hawk series, and saw merit in a tongue-in-cheek parody with avian skaters. The whole affair feels soft boiled, though, from the camera that points everywhere you don't want to the samey characters who roll around on the floor like they never hatched after a wipeout to the ollie play mechanics that force you to hammer buttons like you're playing Joust to get any lift. After waiting so long for its release, Skatebirds was a nasty surprise, like when my cockatiel shifts the papers in his cage at night so he can crap on the bare floor the next morning.

Okay, okay, this is the news you really wanted to hear. There's been a massive leak of Dreamcast and Xbox prototypes... we're talking nearly 150 of the former and 350 of the latter. Most of these games ultimately found their way to store shelves, but a small handful were never released in the United States, particularly Shanghai Dynasty for the Dreamcast and Dinosaur Hunting for the Xbox. Special thanks to Hidden Palace for finding this deluge of software and sharing it with the world.