Video Picks of the Week

Probably not updated every week.

This game is SOOOO Mario Galaxy. It's crazy. If it were to be finished and put out today it would probably be accused of being derivative despite being first worked on in 1995.

Reading a fellow blogger's post about saving sonic, finding mention of this game I'd never heard of*, reading the story surrounding the whole thing, and then watching this video added up to one of the most interesting days I've had on the internet in ages. Watching this video is kind of like listening to You Know You're Right by Nirvana, in that it is a somewhat depressing reminder of what might have been**: this could've been the Sonic everyone wanted after his 2D era; this could've been the game to stop Crash getting as big as he did; it could've of forever stopped people laughing at new Sonic games. But sadly it was never any of these things. The politics between the American and Japanese factions of Sega and the near-death work on the part of some developers, and the whole death of Sega thing I guess, would make a really interesting Tetris: From Russia with Love style documentary. You can read a fairly well written account of the sordid ordeal here.

This is developer Chris Senn's pitch video he showed to Sega for the original concept. Sega was quiet about the game for years but since all of the video footage and such came to light about halfway through last year all the nerdlingers are saying that he's a genius and he's the only person who should make the new 3D Sonic game. Maybe they're right, it has worked before, by that I mean handing a 2D to 3D transitional game to an American developer, a bunch of crazy yanks did make Metroid Prime. It is a bit different in this case though because many of Chris Senn's team had previously worked on Sonic 2 and 3 for the Megadrive. The only thing Retro did was play Super Metroid.

http://www.gamevideos.com/video/id/16333

I suggest downloading this video rather than streaming it, because it's a rather big file and watching stuff on Gamevideos is always a fucking bust because their servers are so shit. I never knew that the FX chip was being worked on so long before the actual release of the SNES. I look back, without the aid of Wikipedia and the like, and think of the FX chip actually being ulitised as quite a late addition to the SNES's lifespan. Once people had got over the power of Mode 7, Nintendo was all like "hey, look what else we can do." Well at least that's how I remember it going down in my head. If Argonaut were doing crazy 3D experiments with the Gameboy that would later become the FX chip, then why didn't we see Super Mario World launch the system with some of the crazy elements that made Yoshi's Island so awesome?

http://www.gamevideos.com/video/id/9143

Continuing the unofficial Vapourware theme of this week's Videos I continue with one of Nintendo's most famous cancelled titles: Starfox 2***. Elements and concepts from this game would later make their way into Vortex, Super Mario 64, Lylat Wars, and Starfox Command. Dylan Cuthbert says in the video that Miyamoto can be quite harsh with ideas and concepts at the time regardless of the time that went into them, but he never really forgets them. Starfox 2 was, at the time of cancellation, very close to being finished. So there have been rumours about a Virtual Console release since the service was launched. In my opinion that's the sort of thing the VC was made for. Bring it on.

I suppose I can't really do a Vapourware themed post without mentioning Duke Nukem: Forever. So that's all I'm going to do, mention it.

Danny

*I'm showing my ignorance here I know, all the Sega nerds are probably laughing right now. But I was pretty much a Nintendo Fanboy growing up. We sold our Master System to buy a SNES and never actually had a Megadrive.

**Although the two things do also both contain really awesome music.

***Also with fucking awesome music.