Most students who finish up their degree at a University won’t say that they made an arcade game for their final project but Enrique Alcor and some of his classmates certainly can. When he was faced with his final project to earn his Masters degree in Video Game Development from the Madrid Universidad Complutens, that’s exactly what they did and the result is Mashup Basterds. According to Enrique:
It's a beat 'em up based
on the classics as "Cadillac and Dinosaurs" or "Final Fight" but with
3D graphics ("Die Hard Arcade"), completely oriented to show it on an
arcade cabinet (it has the typical system check screen, the FBI drug
warning, the credit counter...). It was in development for about 9
months, and in october we managed to show it to the public running it
inside a real arcade cabinet in the biggest spanish videogame show,
called "Gamefest" with more than 40.000 visitors. The cabinet was
situated with 5 additional video cabinets (including an original
Asteroids and a Space Invaders) and 7 pinballs, in the AUMAP
association area, all of them in free to play mode. I was so happy
during and after the event as hundreds of people enjoyed the game,
some of them even wondering which was the name of that classic that
they said they played before
AUMAP is a trade association for home arcade owners in Spain and here’s a couple of brief videos showing the game at that recent show. You can also download the game for free here as it will run on any modern Windows PC. It also makes use of DirectX9 and nVidia PhysX, which are included as downloads in the package although you will need a graphics card that runs those. I’ve only had a chance to play it briefly before writing this post and I loved all of the little touches it has from beat ’em ups of the past, a few of which are mentioned above. I also like how it is in 3D but sticks to the path like the 2D beat ’em ups of old. Keep in mind that as something made for a project of this kind it does lack polish you might expect to see from a modern beat ’em up, although there really aren’t many of those around in the coin-op sector these days anyways. I’d suggest checking out the attract screens too as that’s part of the fun.
Thanks Enrique!
