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]

This video is “No Escape!” and in addition to its visual style, adds a nice story to make it eminently watchable. The music, self-described as electronic/pop/indie rock, is well-suited to such a 1980s throwback.

No Escape! – from the album “Bits” by Arman Bohn from Distropolis on Vimeo.

The visuals were “created in groundbreaking LD Video at a staggering 96×54 pixels and 256 colors!” Cute, but you can tell a lot of creativity went into it.

If you’re interested in the album, the site has links over to iTunes and other online stores.

Armanbohn.com [Site]

Even though it’s only 30 seconds, and you’ll probably make it all the way through, today’s punishment is having that obnoxious goddamn “NIN-TEN-DO!!!!” stuck in your head for the rest of the day.

That, plus watching a knockoff cast of “Head of the Class” dance their way through World 1-1 got me to bail at 13 seconds. Alright, time for you now.

1989 Nintendo Cereal System Commercial [YouTube]

You don’t technically even need colour, like these old-school pals. (There is a little bit of red, in the logos; and some colour elsewhere.)

Unfortunately, no papercraft game pads are included with thesetwo designs, put up by Cubeecraft.

Papercraft NES and Dreamcast Cost Less, Play Just as Many Cutting Edge Games [Engadget]