Rap Jam: Volume One

Look kids, another game designed by marketing departments

"Rap Jam: Volume 1" a household name no less for the Super Nintendo. Developed by our good friends at 64WD Corporation (..?) and published by Mandingo (...?!) exclusively in the US, it's a half-baked basketball game that nobody remembers. But wait, there's more - there's a selection of rappers and hip hop artists to play as. Yes, you heard that right - the music industry is in on this. What could possibly go wrong?

Duke Nukem Forever

Because I'm sure you want to read another opinion on this one!

I'm a long time fan of Duke Nukem, so even though this long awaited legend has been almost universally panned by critics for one reason or another, I figured at some point I'd be playing it. And that time is now.

SAGE 2011: Part 2

The smell of fear.

A second batch of Sonic fangames, to enrich our lives no less.

Crackdown

If the Conservatives had their way...

Crackdown, the 2007 Xbox 360 exclusive from Realtime Worlds and Microsoft Game Studios. A game for those who like their Grand Theft Autos served with more guns. It's a game enjoyed by many, though clearly not enough to cause them to post decent screenshots on the internet for me to borrow.

SAGE 2011: Part 1

It's Sonic Amateur Games Expo time! This year it all seems to be about taking an open source engine and slapping levels onto it, though Sonic fangaming is always a nice topic to follow as often the results top the official works of Sega.

And so, here's a first batch of mini-reviews in Blog Squirrel's limited coverage of the event.

SpriteHoe 2.0

SpriteHoe has been upgraded. Now it does "intelligent de-resizing", a term I've invented for marketing reasons. There's also been a few minor fixes and... well, that's it really. You can now feed it a sprite sheet that's been poorly resized and it will attempt to reverse the stupidity. It loosely fits in with the grand scheme of fixing the world's sprite sheet problems.

Note, of course, that it's difficult to get perfect results with simple games. Mario's limbs will be removed from Super Mario Bros. thanks to the lack of detail, but if you've got an image that's reasonably complicated there should be no troubles. Either way, I needed this feature once so someone else is bound to.

Cal.50

The Japanese are on top of world affairs.

Cal.50. Or Caliber Fifty. Or Caliber.50. Or Cal. Fifty... a 1989 arcade release by Seta. Massacre the Vietnamese enemy soldiers for kicks. Who needs politics?