GameCube Generation

Remember the good old days of gaming, when there were only 5 pixels in the protagonist and your imagination could turn them into a heroic figure of Schwarzenegger proportions? When the enemies and the heroes were distinguished by colour and you only needed one button on the joystick? Well times have changed and technology has moved on. Pulling my old Commodore 64 or Atari out of the back of the cupboard and setting them up often takes more time than the nostalgic pang lasts. I’ve also noticed that some of my old disks are starting to age and become corrupted. Enter the Internet.

The wonderfully technologically gifted and giving Internet populace is out in force in their attempts to preserve the older side of gaming. Remakes and Emulators for almost any old machine can be found around the Internet. Emulators act as a layer between old software and new hardware allowing modern PCs to run programs that such hardware was never meant to see. Commodore 64, Amiga, NES, Master System, Arcade Machines and more have all been emulated and the necessary programs placed online for download, usually for free.

Emulation is not a new idea. I had a hardware emulator for the VIC20 that plugged into the back of my Commodore 64 and allowed the use of the older VIC20 cartridges with the new hardware (I never actually owned a VIC20 or any programs for it but that’s another issue). Emulator popularity has been fading in and out for many years, only coming into many people’s attention with the release of Bleem!, a Playstation emulator for PC that was released while the PSOne still held a dominant share of the video game market. Bleemcast (a Playstation emulator for the Sega Dreamcast) soon followed causing one of the more interesting video game legal battles as Sony fought to have the emulator shut down. However, the emulators have a strong following and very active user base.

Emulators are easy to find and download. Simply search for the system you want and add the word emulator to the end (e.g. “SNES Emulator”) and you’ll probably come up with a lot of hits. Be slightly wary as some emulator sites will either be false links or may contain pornographic ads. Setting the emulators up to run is usually fairly straightforward and there’s a fair chance that you’ll be able to find some documentation and help. Some of the newer systems require a BIOS image to be installed with the emulator. This is to get around the legal issues raised by Sony in the Bleem! legal battles by requiring you to be in possession of a Playstation BIOS (and hence, presumably, a Playstation) in order to play the games on your computer. Making a BIOS image to load into your computer will most likely be beyond your technical expertise, but a quick check of your console’s case will reveal the file you need to get and then it’s as simple as searching the internet for a BIOS image that matches the BIOS you already own.

Of interest are the PC emulators now available. Windows no longer has very good support for older DOS-based games so there are a few emulators out there now to emulate the DOS environment. DOSBox (http://dosbox.sourceforge.net/) is probably the best known of the crop. There are also game-specific emulators such as ScummVM (www.scummvm.org) or DOOM Legacy (http://legacy.newdoom.com/) that focus specifically on certain games and hence are able to improve the experience for those particular titles.

Once you have yourself an emulator you’ll need to get yourself some programs to run with it. These programs are called ‘ROMs’ and are images of the original storage device that the program came on (be it a cartridge, tape, floppy or other). The process of creating a ROM is probably far too technical for the vast majority of computer users so you’re probably going to have to find a ‘backup’ from somewhere to download. This is where the venture gets slightly foggy. Basically the deal is that you can only have a program ROM if you own the original program. So if you have boxes of old Amiga disks, NES cartridges, or other old gaming programs stored away somewhere, you’re in luck, otherwise you’re treading on legally shifty ground. While it can easily be argued that the downloading of a 1987 computer game is of no real consequence to the company that has in all likelihood closed down, copyright doesn’t actually expire for 50 years and computer games just haven’t been around that long.

Online ‘emulation’ is a new area now being explored. The idea is that you simply play the game in your browser through a Java applet or Flash application. These might not always strictly be emulated programs but many remakes are feature perfect with the originals. The graphics, sounds, and game play remain intact. One excellent place to look for online games is Every Video Game (http://www.everyvideogame.com). While the site does not in fact contain ‘every video game’ it does have a very large list of old games from the arcades, GameBoy, NES, and Master System all playable through your browser. Many remakes can also be found at Shockwave’s site (http://www.shockwave.com/sw/actiongames/arcade_classics/).

Some of the old games have even been remade and updated for this modern world we now live in. Try doing a search for remakes of a game title you particularly enjoyed and you may be surprised at what you find. There are games that have been updated to be 3D, such as some old favourites of mine: Pac man (http://www.caiman.us/scripts/fw/f1292.html) and Barbarian ([http://www.dgdevteam.tk/]), and while these might not always be brilliant games or remakes in their own right, the thought and effort put in often leads to an enjoyable diversion. There are also more traditional versions of games that have just updated the code as well as possibly the graphics so that they can still be run.

So if you’re feeling nostalgic or just can’t get the hang of these new-fangled games that require you to push fifty buttons in a precise configuration just to jump, you may like to check out the emulation and remake scene. It’s surprisingly entertaining to go back in time to when games were simple yet fun.

By: Daniel Punch

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Mario Party 7 is the latest version of the Mario Party series of video games from Nintendo, rated E for Everyone.

Mario and friends are back with another edition of Mario Party 7 GameCube version! With this version, up to eight people can play together in more than 80 mini-games. Dozens of Mushroom Kingdom characters compete in everything from speed-based games to memory challenges, with swimming, jumping, running, driving and much more. Knock your friends out of a water-bubble, fire yourself out of a cannon, and knock down a wobbly Pokey as fast as you can. Players can use the GameCube microphone for some of the games (but you can play the microphone games even if you don’t have a mic). Tons of fun in both minigames and multi-level play for all ages.

My eight year old had this to say about Mario Party 7: In Mario Party 7, there are three ways you can play: you can play the Solo Cruise by yourself, or the Party Cruise with other people, or the Mini Game Cruise which is either by yourself or with other people however you want. The mini games are a lot of fun but they are pretty easy, good for kids that are younger, like 5 years old and up. There are some hard games like the Bowser games which are harder though, and some games get a lot harder as you play them, but there are only a few of those. There is one really hard game called King of the River that you have to unlock to play.

Whenever you play you get coins, and then you trade the coins for other things like unlocking extra bonus games, or sounds and some kinds of little trinkets that do funny things. Even though it’s easy I think it’s still fun to play, and I would rate this an 8 on a scale of 1 to 10.

As a mom, I think Mario Party 7 is great. It is accessible for even really young kids. With all the mini games it includes, at different levels of difficulty, it can keep pretty much any child in single digits engaged. There is even a way for eight players to play together in some games. And it includes games that use a microphone so youngest players don’t have to be able to use a controller to join in.

Mario Party 7 is great for kids and adults to play together, with no violence at all, just good competitive fun.

By: Sue Calhoun

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The Nintendo Wii is the fifth home video game console released by Nintendo, as the direct successor to the Nintendo GameCube. The Nintendo with its new console targets Microsoft’s Xbox 360 and Sony’s PlayStation 3, as part of the seventh generation of gaming systems. The latest game console from Nintendo comes with attractive features like wireless controller, and the Wii Remote, that can be used as a handheld pointing device and can detect acceleration in three dimensions. Another feature is WiiConnect24 that enables it to receive messages and updates over the Internet while in standby mode. Nintendo put forward the idea of console at the 2004 E3 press conference and unveiled the system at the 2005 E3. The console was conceived in 2001, as a new form of player interaction.

The console was in the beginning known by the code name of “Revolution” until April 27, 2006, immediately prior to E3. Nintendo renamed Revolution to Wii by stating: “live with it, sleep with it, eat with it, and move along with it. When Microsoft and Sony had suffered losses with their consoles, Nintendo succeeded in reaping heavy profits with Wii.

Nintendo targeted a wider demographic with its game console Nintendo Wii than that of others in the seventh generation. The Nintendo Wii console is Nintendo’s smallest home unit to date measuring 44 mm (1.73 in) wide, 157 mm (6.18 in) tall and 215.4 mm (8.48 in) deep in its vertical orientation, the near-equivalent of three DVD cases stacked together. The system weighing 1.2 kg (2.7 lb) is the lightest of the three major seventh generation consoles. It is possible for the console to be placed either horizontally or vertically. The Nintendo Wii console features a recurring theme or design along with the console itself, SD cards, the power supply and all the sockets have one of their corners chipped off in a triangular fashion.

By: Samuel Herrick

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game Console reviews