If you were like me and had a Sega Genesis when you were growing up, then chances are you’ve played ECCO The Dolphin and/or ECCO The Tides of Time. They’re great games, both in depth and graphics, right up there with classics like Super Metroid and Symphony of the Night. With that said, Ed Annunziata, the game designer of these Sega games is now making a new dolphin based game called The Big Blue. He’s also brought along various members of the Ecco team including the composer Spencer Nilsen. They’re calling The Big Blue “The next generation, underwater, action/adventure game by the original Ecco the Dolphin team.”
As is the way it goes these days, Big Blue needs funding. Especially if it hopes to be the AAA art game Ed Annunziata and his team want. They’re crowd funding the game via Kickstarter. Check out their pitch video below…
Big Blue has a few goals. First, they want to make this game to be beautiful, with the ocean “teaming with life“. This will be done with artificial life technologies that make the ocean life reactive and living virtually. The former Ecco devs are also promising perfect and super realistic animation for the sea life that will be featured in the game.
Then there’s the gameplay, which they break down as so…
The Big Blue is a massive adventure game. The basic game play involves the following:
Exploration
Quests
Collection and spawning of life forms
Action puzzle solving
The Big Blue will be a highly unique play experience and will include these unique game play features:
All Creatures are controllable
Control multiple creatures at the same time (like a swarm)
Aquascape and populate your own small sea
Breed and multiply creatures to be used for various purposes (like quest assistance)
While only concept work has been done, there is a playable Big Blue prototype which you can play for free. It’s very basic, but shows some of their ideas. You can play it here. (Click and hold on to a dolphin)
The Big Blue is being developed with the Unity engine and will run on will run on Mac, Windows PC, Linux, and iOS and Android platforms. After it’s initial release, they also want to release it on Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo game consoles.
Welcome to Cover Art! A section of the site where we look at a retro video game’s box cover art and briefly discuss it’s gameplay and legacy.
Awesome looking 80′s game cover art at it’s best. Space Harrier II was published by Sega for multiple systems, but most notably the Sega Genesis/Mega Drive. It was first released in 1988. Space Harrier II was developed by Sega’s internal development team, AM2, which was lead by game design luminary, Yu Suzuki.
Sure it may not be as noteworthy as Yu Suzuki’s other games like Virtua Fighter, Hang-On, Outrun and Shenmue, but it’s still a good bit of fun. If you’re a fan of rail shooters or 2D shootemups, then this is definitely a title to check out. It’s available on lot’s of systems these days as apps and on Sega Genesis Collection discs.
As fans of the classic Sega Genesis, one of our favorite games on the console was Sonic The Hedgehog 3. If you’ve played the game, you know there were multiple characters in the game including Sonic, Tails and Knuckles (if you got Sonic & Knuckles too). We missed the part where you could play as Rainbow Dash from My Little Pony.
Oh boy, we hope this site doesn’t get overrun with “bronies” talking about their MLP collections.
If you’re shopping for a retro gamer this holiday season you’re in luck. Although there are many classic video games that yield very high prices, there are still many available for a steal. We’ve selected just a few of our favorites for a few key interest groups.
If 8-bit & 16-bit is a way of life for your gamer then there are an abundant selection of games and systems to get him or her. NES, SNES, Genesis: these systems are from the greatest generation of gaming. Mega Man, Street Fighter, Castlevania, Mortal Kombat and more all got their start here. The consoles can be purchased complete with wires and controls usually for between $30 to $75. The game cartridges average between $1 to $10 dollars with only a select few games higher than that. Nintendo created games do tend to yield higher prices but usually still under 30 dollars.
Protip: If you buy a game cartridge that doesn’t work, cleaning the cartridge contacts with a q-tip and a tiny amount of rubbing alcohol will fix most problems. Make sure you let it dry before you test it again.
Pictured from left to right: Sega Genesis, Super Nintendo (SNES), Nintendo Entertainment System (NES)
If your gamer is all about a joystick and and quarter circles then you’ll probably make them happy with an early 2000s era console. For fighting game fans the Sony Playstation 2 and Sega Dreamcast are where it’s at. The Dreamcast is home to many high quality versions of both popular and obscure fighters. Another great thing about the Dreamcast is that playing Japanese games is easy with a simple boot disk (requiring no hardware modification). Also with a great library of 2D fighters is the Playstation 2. Between regular releases and collections, the PS2 is packed with options. Further enhancing it’s selection thanks to backwards compatibility is the massive selection of fighters on the original Playstation/PSOne (although for the most part these are inferior to their arcade counter parts).
Pictured from left to right: Sega Dreamcast, Sony Playstation 2
Maybe your gamer likes his or her games old… I mean really old. Atari and Commodore are the names to get familiar with here. Atari makes things a bit easy since they sell units loaded with games called Atari Flashback. Each Flashback unit comes with a console, a set of controllers, and several games preloaded onto the units memory. Since this is not a real Atari console, you can’t use any Atari carts. The alternative to this is of course to buy a used Atari, the most classic of all being the Atari 2600. Games can be picked up on the cheap. You can usually find a complete Atari 2600 with a few games for under $100. If your retro gamer is more hardcore, you can get them a Commodore 64. C64‘s can be picked up on Ebay with wires and controller for about $70 and the games/software can be purchased for a couple dollars each. While the Commodore 64 was popularized by gamers, it is also home to many softwares for various things including music, business and art. Both consoles are beloved by people who owned them. Be careful with Commodore 64 games as some of them might be on floppy disk, because then you need to make sure you buy a floppy drive if the one you buy doesn’t include it.
Pictured from left to right: Atari 2600, Commodore 64
While this list is not definitive, these are solid choices with some good games to get. The go to site for retro gaming is eBay, but sometimes you can find deals on Amazon too. If you are fortunate in your town, there may be a used video game store that sells this stuff at reasonable prices. Goodwill can also lead to some good finds, but rarely, and even more rarely are they working.
