Gamers have the option of turning on a frame for the games that turns the sides of the monitor into replicas of the old gaming guides that used to flank the sides of old arcade cabinet monitors. The view can also be tweaked to replicate the slightly outwardly distorted look of an old, cheap arcade monitor.

It’s heaps better than the chintzy, sometimes generic frames applied to other arcade titles that show up on the Playstation Network and Xbox Live Arcade.

Game play for both Final Fight and Magic Sword are spot on.

The classic brawler, made by Akira Nishitani and Akira Yasumda who went on to make Street Fighter II, is a straight-forward side-scrolling arcade title packed with endearing flaws. The depth of the game remains tricky to master, you can still accidentally take out your fellow gamer when attacking bad guys and the graphics featuring an overwhelming kaleidescope of colours. And that’s why I love the original and its painfully exact port.

Magic Sword has gamers work there way through a mystical tower, using found keys to free captives and recruit allies. It’s been a long time since I’ve played the original back in its 90s arcade heyday and I can’t wait to spend some time working through the game again.

What’s interesting here is that Capcom gets that it is the nostalgia factor that helps to sell these games so they go the extra length to amp that up, not only capturing the feel of the gameplay and in-game graphics, but allowing you to distort the screen and add surprisingly realistic frames to the game so you feel more like you’re at an arcade.

The next step needs to be sending people who download the game for the PlayStation 3 or Xbox 360 in April chewed up wads of gum to stick under their controllers when playing.

The book, which in recent years has trended strongly toward video game records (and, according to us apparently, is a “must-have”) found that more American consumers recognised Pac-Man, beating Mario by 1 percent, 94 to 93.

I’d say Mario hasn’t done so bad considering not only he has a humanoid form, but he also has changed repeatedly over the past 27 years, whereby Pac-Man has largely been the same yellow pie-shape (except for animated cartoons and other non- or semi-canonical appearances.)

Then again, I don’t see Pac-Man putting out a hugely selling title this year, or being the public face of a major console-maker and games publisher. So, take Guinness’s appraisal for what it is: The long memory of an entire nation, many of whom might not be gamers.

[via Go Nintendo]

You might know of Shiraz Malik – he’s the longtime commenter Spoony Bard here, and he was also our comment ombudsman last year. He’s currently pursuing his MBA at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business, and he and his wife are expecting a baby soon.

Although a committed gamer for life, Shiraz is facing some mature decisions on the road to fatherhood, a path that has less time for games, in a household with not much space for them, either. He’s written about his decision to sell his video game collection, the nostalgia he feels saying goodbye to those old friends, but knowing there will be new ones as soon, when his son arrives and embarks on his boyhood.

When I was four years old, my dad brought home an Atari 7800. In retrospect, that was his first mistake. I became hopelessly addicted to the wonderful world of video games. I made time for Mario, hung out with Alex Kidd in Miracle World, dreamed about Mega Man while doodling in class, and I soared through the sky with Starfox.

Twenty-six years later, I’m juggling graduate school, married life and a job search, and I still have managed to find the time to get my game on. Somehow I was even able to do some comment moderating for Kotaku in that time, too. Through it all, I’ve made sure to keep my love of video games alive in some way. But now, we have a new situation.

You see, the day my wife told me that she was pregnant, everything changed. All of a sudden, we’re spending our free time taking classes and picking out baby names. Try as I might, the wisdom of hanging on to all of my video games seems to make less sense as time goes by. And in this tough job market, with the mountain of debt school has forced us to carry, we have looked for ways to scrounge up a baby fund.

So after lengthy debate, we decided on my extensive video game collection. I was hoping to hold on to some of my vintage game systems for my future kids, but we simply don’t have the space anymore. My wife reminds me that I can play a lot of these games on a virtual console … but she doesn’t understand what game collecting is about. We hardcore gamers take pride in our amassed collections of gaming systems and games; there’s just something special about that bygone era when you stayed up all night playing Mega Man II with a friend while your parents were asleep.

Now I look around at the game systems I must sell … here’s my green Xbox Halo Edition along with all my Bioware RPGs … it has to go. Hey, there’s my old N64 … in college, we played it until the sun came up, and then we played some more. To date, I’ve never been as good at a single game since Goldeneye. And there goes my silver Gamecube that entertained me and my friends at parties.

I must console (no pun intended) myself with the fact that whatever I make will go towards making sure we can buy my son (yep, it’s a boy!) of what he will need, and I certainly hope that one day I can share my love of video games with him along with my other passions. In fact, I’ve already planned how we’re going to watch the Star Wars movies – starting with New Hope and ending with Revenge of the Sith, the only way they should be watched!

But most importantly, I hope he has fond memories of growing up like I did, and if that requires me to expunge some of the things that gave me joy, so be it. In a way, I’m cleaning out my past to make way for his future.

- Shiraz Malik (Spoony Bard)

The same folks who brought you Inglourious Plummers now bring you Dig Dug, a slasher-flick reimagining of the arcade classic that pumps you up with suspense, waiting for that moment when Pooka’s overinflated ego to finally go pop.

There’s a swell movie poster for this at the link, too. Go check it out.

Dig Dug Trailer [GamerVision, thanks Rachel Marie!]

OK, I didn’t. Time was, copy protection didn’t inspire such anger in power consumers, probably because the schemes were too ridiculous to be taken seriously. Oh, they were a nag. But holding up a piece of coloured film to your screen to read off a secret code, Transformers tech-specs style, was kind of a novelty. My brother and I also repurposed a few codewheels for our own stabs at cryptography

Royal Pingdom took a look back at early forms of PC game copy protection. I’d have to guess that the reason none of these ever raised the kind of anger that DRM does today is because there’s no real big brother aspect to it. There were things like parameter codes and read-only copy protection, but nothing was ever put on your machine (although, without a hard drive, I guess it’s a moot point). Furthermore, some of these methods – such as the code books or history guides – were at least themed to the game, making them seem like real life extensions.

But it’s probably because we were dealing with PC gaming before the explosion of the Internet, and the copying and file sharing over it made publishers get tough, some to the point of heavy-handedness, with protecting their sales.

Wacky Copy Protection Methods from the Good Old Days [Royal Pingdom]

That’s right—that thing I’m always going on about is the main selling point of this game: steampunk. Normally, this would be an automatic plus for me if the Victorian corsets are frilly and the airships are spectacular. However, my steampunk standards are high and as some games have proved, genre alone is not enough to sell a game.

What Is It?
Nostalgia is a turn-based RPG that’s been out in Japan for the last year or so. Players follow young Eddie, a budding airship pilot/adventurer who goes on a quest to become more of a badass and find his missing father.

What We Saw
I played the demo level of the game twice on the noisy PAX expo floor.

How Far Along Is It?
The game ships October 20.

What Needs Improvement?
You Can’t Fast-Forward Text: None of Nostalgia is voiced and there is a lot of reading to do. Rather than let the game decide how fast I can read, I would really rather just mash the A button to bring up all of the text in a text box at once and then mash it again to get rid of it.

Bland Music and Scenery: With the exception of the air travel and most of the menus, the 3D visuals of the 19th Century steampunk world are little dull. London lacked anything resembling Jack the Ripper’s era and Cairo was cramped and yellow. The music in the demo level didn’t wow me, either – but do bear in mind the background noise of PAX might’ve had an impact on my auditory impressions.

What Should Stay The Same?
The Airships: Rather than just serving as a fancy mount, airships like Eddie’s Maverick make up about half of the gameplay. While in the air and navigating the globe from London to Cairo, random encounters will occur where Eddie and his crew man battle stations on the airship to fight. Each character brings their specific skills to their station, like the mage character can charge up a canon attack, Eddie the melee character can ram the Maverick into an enemy, etc. Enemies can attack in the air from the front, the back or the sides of the airship and according to an Ignition rep, the difficulty level of the encounters changes depending on which of the three levels of altitude your ship is travelling. Aside from that, the ship is fully customisable when you shell out for parts and stuff at stores.

The Overall Look: London and Cairo might’ve looked a little dull but the character models were so cute. Eddie almost looks like a baby Cloud from FFVII—and I don’t think that’s an accident. I’m told the dev team that worked on Nostalgia was responsible for bringing FF III and IV to the DS and I appreciate their sense of visual homage.

Final Thoughts
The word nostalgia seldom goes with the word passion. At best, it inspires lukewarm, fuzzy feelings of half-remembered happy things. And for me, that just about sums this game up: I was never passionate about random encounters, but I get a little misty-eyed at the mention of turn-based combat.

As anyone who’s ever tangled with an RF switcher knows, hooking up consoles in the old days was more plug and less play.

Helpfully the gang at Shamoozal have put together this step-by-step look at rigging up your Nintendo Entertainment System. It’s done in the style of the old Disney explainers with Goofy as the hapless, frustrated and frequently maimed subject. And it’s funny because, while caricatured to the extreme, we’ve all done everything depicted in it. Well, maybe not the shoe thing.

How to Hook Up the NES [Shamoozal, thanks Nate D.]

Roenick retired this past week, and Patrick Hruby (Hey! I know that guy!) writes an eloquent tribute to one of the last deities of sports gaming. Roenick had the fortune of being written into a game back when sports titles’ gameplay were still loosely based in reality. Of course, none can eclipse Tecmo Bowl Bo Jackson. But Roenick’s retirement leaves very few of these athletes still active, and blessed to be remembered for otherworldly talents within a video game.

By my count, only two remain: Ken Griffey, Jr., completely superhuman in his eponymous game for the Super Nintendo; and Michael Vick from Madden 2004 probably the only modern game player whose skills just turned everything into a cartoon, like Jackson, or Lawrence Taylor, or the run-and-shoot Houston Oilers of Tecmo.

As sports game developers perfect, incrementally, the realism of games, we will still be able to play as the greatest performers of our time. But their performances will not dominate the screen the way Roenick did in NHL ‘94. His talent was so pure, white-hot and lasting, it transcended a single sport, and put him and his game into one of the most memorable sequences of a cult classic.

Remembering Jeremy Roenick: The Video Game God [ESPN, via Wired]