Posted on: July 3rd, 2009 Bleep, Bleep. Bloop, Bloop. Video Games.
For the week of June 28-July 4: Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood, Kudo, Donkey Kong Easter Eggs and Russian coin-ops. It’s summer time folks, give me a break.
RELEASES
What can I say. The summer months are slow for games, big for movies. All the kiddies are getting their titles ready for the holiday season so they can get buried by the hundreds of other releases happening at the same time. All except this weeks release Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood.
A new entry in the desperately lacking Western genre, Call of Juarez is a 6 hour first person shooter filled to the brim with variety and excellent pacing. The game gives you the choice of playing as one of two brothers each specializing in different styles of game play. One as a guns blazing, duel wielding, six shooter shooting wild man, and the other as a hide in the bushes from a far and take out enemies with you rifle. Whatever you decide, the brother you didn’t choose will be fighting right along with you, and fairly well at that. Even though it sounds like a short play through, the game has been given a lot of praise from the guys at Co-op and The Totally Rad Show and warrants a second run through as the brother you chose to neglect the first time around.
There has been a potentially exciting game released last wednesday under the Microsoft Community Games part of Xbox Live called Kudo. Kudo is a console based Game Creator Platform where that all you need to make a game is a controller, no coding required. Personally I haven’t heard a ton of people talking about it, (well nobody is talking about it), but the guys over at Joystick have a great video walk through explaining how it works. I don’t think I’d be up for it, but it looks strong enough to get me interested in what you people out there come up with.
NEWS
After 26 years of searching some guy you and I don’t know, Don Hodges has discovered the easter egg planted by Landon Dyer in the Atari 400/800 version of Donkey Kong.
I find it to be a fascinating read about how he went about discovering it but if you have a copy kicking around and you want to try it, according to Mr. Hodges this is how it’s done.
1. Play a game and get a score of 33,000 through 33,900. This score must become the new high score. [Some other scores will work as well, see below.]
2. Kill off all of your remaining lives. However, your last life must be killed off by falling too far – by walking or jumping off a girder that is too high to land safely. If the last life is killed any other way, the egg will not appear.
3. Set the game difficulty to 4 by pressing the Option button 3 times. The icon for this difficulty is a firefox.
4. Wait a few minutes, and the demo screen where Kong jumps across the screen will appear.
5. The title screen will then appear, and Landon Dyer’s initials [LMD] will be at the bottom center of the screen:
And to finish off this jam packed summer week, I will leave you with pictures of Russian coin-ops. I don’t know any Russian what so ever, so the text on the linked site is of no use but I do know these machines are very cool!
Dale can also be found over at www.8bitcyclops.com, looking at design, photography and old video game magazines.