Newsbag: Medieval Madness; Funk’d Up; Toki Proto; NTG#33 + More

Well, January is over already. That just flew by for me. I don’t mind too much though as it means we get closer to some warmer weather.

Medieval Madness Update – We’ve been patiently waiting on news for the Medieval Madness Pinball remake. When it was seen at IAAPA 2014, they were suggesting that it was going to be shipping by December but that came and went, then January has come and gone with no news. I reached out to Chicago Gaming yesterday and they did respond with an update – what they said was “in production right now and may ship in one to two weeks” which means  February should be the time. Here’s hoping nothing else keeps that from happening!

Pokkén Tournament Location Test  – It’s one of the most anticipated loctest’s the West has seen – for a game we’re not really sure will make it over here in an arcade form. I still don’t like the gamepad like controller they went for this but I suppose it is unfair of me to judge without having tried it. Still, I just can’t imagine that it would last very long in a US arcade situation – one part with the cord, the other part where people *love* to slam buttons in an arcade situation.   4Gamer/net has a nice rundown of the loctest with plenty of screenshots and on-site photos.

Funk’d Up – I received this email a little while ago but I forgot to include it in recent newsbag posts. According to Ricardo Cortez:

I am a grad student in art at SJSU. For a thesis show I hand built an interactive art arcade cabinet. You can see more of it on my website, I thought I’d reach out since you have a pretty active blog and users might be inspired into creating their own.

Thanks Ricardo! Check out his website here for more info

Toki Prototype Discovered for the Atari 7800 – It only gets played about a dozen times a week at my arcade but TOKI is one of my favorite arcade platformers from the 80s. I originally came across it on the Atari Lynx (which was an excellent spot-on port) and news came along this week that a near complete prototype of the game on the Atari 7800 has been found. It was only rumored to exist prior to this discovery and it was also surprising that it was labelled as being slated for a 1993 release, which is a year after official development had supposedly ended for the system. Beta Phase Games which has the proto is working to release it on cart; you can read more about it here. This pic of the game running on real hardware was shared on the Atariage.com discussion about the discovery:

Street Fighter II car bashing – I’m not sure what it is this week but I came across two “guy dressed as Ryu bashing a car” videos. Naturally, I have to share:

Name That Game #33 – Not many guesses for last week but I know that NTG#32 was a bit more on the obscure side. Here are the answers:

#1 – Top Hunter – Roddy & Cathy by SNK

#2 – Dark Edge by Sega

#3 – Sky Smasher by Nihon System

For this week, I’ll start with a really easy one and go from there: