Welcome to the latest edition of Newsbytes, a quick collection of arcade-related news items. Let’s get to it!
The 2019 Big Buck World Championships In Las Vegas
It’s time for Big Buck players to challenge each other for the top spot (and a nice pocket full of cash) as one of the few “eSports” style games in this business kicked off their World Championships event in Las Vegas last night. Here’s a YouTube stream; you can also catch it on Twitch. Yesterday’s stream can be found here if you are interested.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EJh10Q77CJE
And in case you missed it, Big Buck Hunter Reloaded is coming in 2020.
Unboxing And Playing An Elivra House of Horrors LE
Nick at Arcade Hunters has really been getting a lot of great stuff on pinball lately, here’s Stern’s latest getting unboxed and played:
Speaking of Stern, here’s an interview with artist Randy Martinez about his effort on Stern’s Star Wars Comic Art Edition pins:
Indie Arcade Goodness At The BumbleBash 4
If you find yourself anywhere near Chattanooga, TN this weekend, and enjoy arcade games, then you need to check out the BumbleBash 4 tournament. They’ve brought together Killer Queen Arcade, Cosmotrons, Galactic Battleground and other games, but the biggest part of the event has to be the fact that 10 KQA cabinets are together in one place. Read more about it here.
Interviews: Takashi Oda (House of the Dead series); Kenji Kaido & Yasuo Tsumori (Taito’s Night Striker)
If you like digging more into what made some of your favorite games tick, then there have been a couple of interesting interviews posted to Japanese websites that you would probably enjoy.
First is Sega interviewing one of their own, Takashi Oda. He discusses his personal history a little, what brought him into games, how he approaches game design, and of course talks about how the first House of the Dead came into being (thank Virtua Cop). The main piece of news that popped up out of this was that before he worked on House of the Dead Scarlet Dawn, he was doing House of the Dead 5 back in 2012. If I understand the translation correctly, an early prototype cabinet is collecting dust at a warehouse in Japan…unless he just means that they had a design document complete and that’s it. Since Oda-san did direct Scarlet Dawn, here’s a tweet from Sega this week that was celebrating World Zombie Day:
あらためまして…
10月10日は「世界ゾンビの日」(World Zombie Day)！
ハロウィンもそろそろですね。
ということで画像プレゼント！ご自由にお使いください！#ハウスオブザデッド#ハロウィン#hod#houseofthedead#halloween pic.twitter.com/0V1qaGxsKn— HOUSE OF THE DEAD公式 (@hod_sega) October 10, 2019
The second interview is in two parts and gets into development at Taito, with a particular focus on the game Night Striker. They really get into detail with this one across the two interviews, discussing the challenges with the hardware and their personal histories regarding video games and how they got into the business. Most of the personal stuff is in the first part, while more about the game’s development (including the location testing) is in the second. Part 1 is here; Part 2 is here.
Mixed Reality Pop-Up Platformer:
Frequent readers of the site know that I’m more interested in the possibilities of what can be done with projection mapping in games, than with headsets. Here’s a new example of something clever that turns a pop-up book into a Mixed Reality entertainment piece:
Showed of this game at a playparty that me and some students made. Popup book with projection mapping.#popupbooks #paper #prototype #gamejam #indiegamedev #projectionmapping pic.twitter.com/jNyOUn6Xl0
— Alastair Low (Lowtek Games) (@Wallmasterr) October 10, 2019
Well that’s all I have for now – busy, busy week has gone by, and today is no different. Be sure to hit up a local arcade this weekend if you can!
