Codecademy

Lagwagon – May 16

Most of what I know about punk rock came from the Tony Hawk games. I’ve been listening to punk on SiriusXM and Spotify and I keep recognizing songs from Tony Hawk games. This one’s from THPS2. That one’s from Underground 2. That one’s from Downhill Jam. I didn’t realize that these songs were icons in the wider punk rock community, to the point that May 16 is now “Lagwagon Day“. Is it like 20, November for Bemani fans?

Source: Moshcam via YouTube search

Foothills Of Passage

Dead End Thrills brings out the best in video game environments. This community goes beyond simple screenshots by making modifications to the game engines to render super high resolution images so professional you'd think they're marketing assets. My dual-monitor desktop just got taken over by this one from the new Shadow Warrior.

The old WordPress blog had the 'large' 2221x945 version and a broken link to a ‘full’ 3755x1598 version. Never mind those, I found this 8192x3486 monster on Flickr. Enjoy!

Source: Flickr and foothillsofpassage.png via Dead End Thrills

Jake Kaufman – Mighty Milky Way Title

30-Day Video Game Music Challenge (Super Hard Mode) Day 1: Title screen music From Mighty Milky Way (DSi, 2011)

For the next month, I’ve planned an epic journey around the gaming universe. Hard Mode is too easy, so I added my own rule: No repeat consoles! Let’s go!

SSource: Jake Kaufman and YouTube, challenge by OverClocked ReMix I think?, via NintendoCapriSun

Retro Core Mega Drive Audio Showcase

I've been following Retro Core for 15 years from its original video game reviews to its recent videos about ports of games and the Chinese knock offs that play them. He's tired of people dissing the Sega Genesis/Mega Drive's sound chip, so he brought several examples of clean instruments and heavy bass. There's more Mega Drive music and a couple Super Nintendo ones where that came from.

Source: Retro Core via some search for video game reviews in 2005

Mortal Kombat Arcade With NBA Jam Sound

What happens if you swap out Mortal Kombat’s sound board for one from NBA Jam? YourMKArcadeSource had some extra Mortal Kombat and NBA Jam boards and gave it a shot. As it turns out, you get a totally playable Mortal Kombat with a confused announcer that loves to say “Nuggets!”

Source: YourMKArcadeSource via Nathan Phillips and Now You’re Playing With Podcast

TASBot Plays Brain Age

Awesome Games Done Quick is known for its highly skilled human players, but TASBot’s tool-assisted runs stole the show today. In Brain Age, TASBot draws pictures and text that are somehow interpreted as numbers. It’s like Ryuto’s famous Brain Age TAS, but with a live audience?

(The run starts at 15:22.)

Source: YouTube via Games Done Quick

QBillion

From my pile of forgotten Game Boy carts comes QBillion. You have a top-down view of stacks of boxes. The goal is to reduce these boxes to a single flat layer. Once you wrap your head around that, it’s intuitive, but the puzzles get downright fiendish. 15 years later, the developer is gone, the copyright has lapsed, and a young developer has made a free HTML5 remake.

Yup, this is the HD version. Everything is about double the resolution of the Game Boy game. Click here to play.

Source: http://qbillionhd.com and LTD Interactive via Wikipedia and Game Boy World. I saw the screenshots in this Rock Paper Shotgun article and thought it was about this game.

Spruce Creek Fly-In Community

It’s 2015; where are our flying cars? In his search for flying cars, James May visited Spruce Creek, Florida. This village treats airplanes like cars, parked in garages and taxied right down the street to the local runway. If every town was this well adapted to small planes, we’d all be flying from place to place, right?

By the way, my Friday night stream has moved to Hitbox! I’m attacking games like Super Back to the Future II, Panorama Cotton, and Sayonara Umihara Kawase, so stop by and chat!

Source: James May’s Big Ideas episode 1

Stéphane Picq – Fractalian Space

30-Day Video Game Music Challenge (Super Hard Mode) Day 28: Music that makes you nostalgic From MegaRace (DOS, 1993)

My first CD-ROM game. It came with our Windows 3.11 computer. MegaRace isn’t very good, but it gave us Lance Boyle and some early 90s CG videos that we get to drive on.

Source: YouTube, challenge by OverClocked ReMix I think?, via NintendoCapriSun

Artist Alley Arcade Stick

I’ve always wanted to put some one-of-a-kind hand-drawn art in my Qanba Q4RAF, so at last weekend’s Ohayocon, I brought a blank template and and asked a couple of the artists there to draw their original characters. The team of Iota Soul knocked it out of the park with Killer Bee on the left side. Kuroitenshi added her D&D fighter on the right side and gave me some crucial advice on how to complete the design from there. I drew some Vewlix lines at the top, put it in the stick, and changed all the buttons out to black and white to complete the hand-drawn sketch look.

This replaces my previous art on that stick, which is all about Kohaku from Melty Blood, a series of really nice doujin fighting games that never made it out of Japan.

(What follows is the mouseover text for all seven images, edited slightly because they’re plain text on Tumblr now.)

So many photos on this blog lately. Maybe I should have made a Tumblr instead. Problem is, hitstun.tumblr.com is already taken. Some jerk registered my name, posted once, and abandoned it. (Four years later, I checked and hitstun.tumblr.com was available again, so I snatched it up and moved this post there.)

For this post, I'm actually doing the Facebook cross-post as a photo upload instead of a link post. Since it's a photo, I get to tag Killer Bee and Fighter to include links to their creators. (Closest I can do on Tumblr is a link to Kuroitenshi’s fighter.)

Here's a scan of the finished design that is now in the arcade stick. Click the image for the full 300dpi version.

I retired the Melty Blood stick art last night at Fight Night at Donatos on OSU campus. I played Melty Blood for the first time in months.

For some reason, Wordpress is having trouble with my full size designs. Click the photo for the 300dpi version.

Also, here’s the template I printed out for Ohayocon. Click the template below for the 300dpi version, and it will print at just the right size for the Qanba Q4RAF.

You'll want to actually click this for the 300dpi version that fits the Qanba Q4RAF. If you’ve got an Eightarc Fusion, just remove the Start button. (Not sure if Tumblr corrupts the DPI settings on these images, but just make sure it’s 300dpi before you start working with it.)

Sources: A white and red Qanba Q4RAF, buttons, and bubble top from Video Games New York, replacement plexiglass from Focus Attack (out of production), Iota Soul, Kuroitenshi, Melty Blood Actress Again Current Code PC version, Zerochan, and the Qanba thread at Shoryuken