Newsbytes: Magician’s Dead Coming To Round1USA; BattleZoneVR; Golden Tee 2017; CPS2; NTG#95

Hey, this weekend has enough newsbytes for a post! Let’s get to it:

Magician’s Dead Coming The US via Round1USA: The Tokyo Game Show has been in full swing this week and from there we have been getting some arcade news. Perhaps the biggest surprise is the announcement that ByKing is looking into producing their new and unique arcade title Magician’s Dead for the US market via Round1USA stores. I had a hunch that they might be the ones to pick it up if it was going to show up here but the question now would be – can anyone else get their hands on the US localized version? News via Dengeki Online

BattleZone VR Footage – A little while ago, the current owners of Atari were beginning to sell the company off piece by piece as a part of their bankruptcy proceedings. While they ended up salvaging the company, a few IPs were sold, including BattleZone. It was picked up by game developer Rebellion who then proceeded to work up a BattleZone concept for VR headsets. While this isn’t coming back to arcades by the looks of it (that would be nice, VR headset or not), it is nice that someone seems to have finally figured out what to do with the concept.

Golden Tee 2017 Features Trailer – Golden Tee 2017 is almost here (releases last week of September) and in the run up to that release, Incredible Technologies is promoting the features that the new edition has. As a former arcade salesperson, this is quite handy as it can be fairly confusing to know everything that separates previous editions from each other. Not to mention differences between LIVE, Offline Coin, & Home.

Skycurser Gets Coverage At the Indy Star (AH gets a mention too) – The independently made Skycurser shoot ’em up arcade title has been finding its way to arcades around the world and now it is gaining some media attention. This article at the Indy Star gets into the background of the developers and how they came up with the concept while touching on why anyone would want to produce an arcade game in 2016. I was contacted by the reporter who wrote the article and we talked about the modern arcade business and why I got a Skycurser for my arcade so AH gets a mention there too. Check it out!

Jersey Jack Pinball Open House Held Today – If you found yourself near the JJP headquarters then today was a day of much pinball enjoyment as Jersey Jack held another open house with tons of games on free play. No new game announcements but it sounds like plenty of fun was to be had:

Getting ready for tomorrow's Open House at the JJP Factory! 10-5pm – 1645 Oak St. Lakewood, NJ 08701. #pinball #nj pic.twitter.com/rMiJ9EnXQg

— Jersey Jack Pinball (@JJPinball) September 16, 2016

How To Desuicide Your Capcom CPS2 Boards – The worst aspect about older arcade PCBs is how the security features or batteries for save state data could work to kill a board. This is commonly known as “suiciding” a board and for boards you’ve spent a bit of money on or are rare, you don’t want this to happen.

While solutions have existed for this for some time (Phoenixed boards for example), some collectors believe that hurts the value of the board as it isn’t original. Personally I think if the game is running off the original hardware but it was modified to save it then I’ll take that over a dead game any day.

Now there is a new solution to desuicide CPS2 boards without the aspect that should avoid the devaluation of the boards. Honestly I am not sure what makes this so different from phoenixed boards as I have not got this technical on the boards I own but it is great that such a solution exists. Hopefully this comes to the CPS3 soon as well.

Hadouken Dog:

Woman teaches her dog how to throw hadoukens. pic.twitter.com/EZ4g7aet6f

— blank (@TheLocalGod) September 13, 2016

Batman Day: So today is Batman Day. Don’t forget that the arcade scene has featured Batman a few times in both the video arcade and pinball. The latest release was Specular Interactive / Raw Thrills’ BATMAN. Here’s a link to my interview with Steve Ranck about the game and its development from 2013 and a game review.

Name That Game #95 – Here are the answers from two weeks ago:

#1 – Street Fighter Zero 2 Alpha by Capcom

#2 – Rod-Land by Jaelco

#3 – DCon by Success

Fer’ this week: