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Today it has been confirmed by the firm of Bandia Namco that founder of Namco, Masaya Nakamura, has died at the age of 91.
Often known as the “father” of Pac-Man, a game Namco released which went on to have massive commercial success in many countries, he started Namco as Nakamura Manufacturing which went on to become Nakamura Amusement Machine Manufacturing Company (Namco) in 1956. The first job completed was the installation of two electric horses on the roof of a department store in Japan as amusement rides.
Pac-Man came much later in 1980, developed by Toru Iwatani, and eventually became shipped to arcades across the world. Pac-Man named in 2016 as the highest-grossing arcade game of all time by website US Gamer.
Nakamura was awarded the Order of the Rising Sun, a Japanese government honour in 2007, inducted into the International Video Games Hall of Fame in 2010 and was an honorary advisor at Bandai Namco up until his death on the 22nd of Janaury.
Welcome to your weekly glance into some of the cool stuff going on down in the gaming campaigns section of Kickstarters’ website right now.
We start as always with a little update on important news from previously covered campaigns. There’s no bad news really, some campaigns aren’t doing too well but still have plenty of time to go to make up for it.
In the good news area this week UnDungeon reached and passed its goal with another 13 days still to go, so congrats to that team! LEGRAND LEGACY has made up a load of ground and is close to reaching it’s target as well, as is Pixel Princess Blitz, although the latter has only 8 more days to reach their target. Hopefully both will become crowdfunded success stories in the future.
With people working on this game coming from previous projects like Fallout New Vegas, Wasteland 2 and a whole heap of RPGs, that’s already a good start for this game. It will be a first-person survival and horror game with some strong RPG influences. Player decisions will affect the narrative and progression of the game. Your mission to to assassinate a man accused of forming his own personal army, but how you get there to carry out this task is up to you.
Apocalypse Now has a target goal of $900,000 and has made $114,780 so far. It has 24 days to go.
Next up we have a game that combines elements of tower defence and adventure games into one.
Pillow Zombies charges you with using turrets, traps and other things in a bid to keep yourself safe from waves of advancing plush zombie monsters, yet at the same time as you progress you will discover just how these beasts came to be and just what happened to make them this way. There will also be a card buff system to allow you to power up your turrets and traps as you progress through the game.
Pillow Zombies TD has 29 more days to run, and has made CA $300 of its CA $28,000 goal so far.
Next, we have the conclusion to Stoic’s viking epic.
Banner Saga 3 is a strategy driven game, and the last in Stoic’s trilogy of games. If you’ve not played the first two games, the campaign will also allow you to get hold of these games by adding $20 to your pledge tier – so you can catch up if need be. With around 40 unique characters each with their own styles of combat, you can pick and choose your party to help you make it through the game as you see fit. But each action has its consequences and they can be far reaching…
Banner Saga has a target of $200,000 and bypassed it just as this article was being written. Well done Stoic!
Ending this week with the board game/physical card, and as you might be able to guess – it’s pirate themed.
The game is for 4-9 players, and involves you playing as a crew of pirates who all want to take the gold from a Spanish galleon and are all secretly planning to take the gold for yourself. All ‘greedy pirates’ will be marooned on the isle of Tortuga. There are 9 different pirates you can play as, each based off a real-life pirate that existed in the year of 1667. Can you one-up your crew and make off with the gold, or will you be marooned on Tortuga?
Tortuga 1667 has a $10,000 goal, and at $180,000+ has far exceeded that goal.
One of the big game being released for the upcoming Nintendo Switch is the latest and much-awaited Zelda game – Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. The game will be releasing on the same day as the Switch, in early March but there’s still an entire month before then. What to do instead?
Well, if you haven’t tried out a few of the past Zelda games, Nintendo are currently holding a sale on all digital copies of the exisiting Legend of Zelda games that ends February 9th – so that could tide you over until the new game comes out.
Titles are for the Wii U and the Nintendo 3DS and are available in the eShops of both consoles at a 30% discount right now. This includes titles such as Wind Waker HD, Twilight Princess HS, Skyward Sword, Majora’s Mask or Ocarina of Time.
So yes, we have just over a month to go until Breath of the Wild is released for us all to play – but no one said we can’t make that time go a little faster by playing some of the games that led up to it.
Torment: Tides of Numenera was crowdfunded on Kickstarter a while back, and this included a number of stretch goals. However, time has gone on and updates on progress have been made. One user on the r/Games Reddit took to compiling a bunch of those posts together to show that actually a few of those stretch goals aren’t actually going to make it to the game’s final release.
SnakesPaw put together a list of posts from both the InXile and the RPG Codex forums that confirm what is being dropped. These include two of the companions, the crafting system and the game’s Italian localisation. There had previous calls from fans for InXile to release a list of stretch goals that wouldn’t be met, but were told simply that “seen many of our stretch goals so far” and that promised goals like “the Ascension, the Labyrinth and its added elements, expanded epilogues, deeper companions” would feature in the final game.
The game was meant to contain nine unique companions to recruit, but when a trophy list of the game was leaked online two of those promised companions seemed to be missing from the list. These two companions were a character called Riastrad, as well as a ‘living ball of goo’ companion known simply as the Toy – added at the $2 million mark of the campaign. After questions and multiple threads, line producer Eric Schwarz of InXile Entertainment eventually made a statement that confirmed that the companion roster had been “slightly reduced” from the team’s initial plans. This was apparently to ensure that they had the time and space to concentrate more on the other seven companions’ stories to allow them to feel fleshed out so no one felt “incomplete”.
The crafting system cut had certainly already been confirmed as cut, as Schwarz said that the system just wasn’t meshing with the design of the game, “everything ended up feeling like an MMO-style system, and that just didn’t fit Torment’s gameplay.” Assets from this have now been purposed into other areas of the game, like Cyphers, Artifacts and companion armour upgrades among other things.
As for the cut localisation, InXile have said that the “costs for Italian localization would be in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, and our stats and sales of prior RPGs showed the number of Italian backers and sales we could look forward to were too low to support those efforts.” Italian backers are now able to contact the InXile support team to request of refund of their money if they should so wish.
Just goes to show, even the most well-funded games sometimes run into troubles.
Arc System Works have announced that a new installment for the retro beat ’em up series Double Dragon is being worked on and in fact is due out very, very soon. Acting as a direct sequel to Double Dragon III: The Sacred Stones, Double Dragon IV is done in a more 8-bit style that harkens back to the old school pixel art of the original NES game.
There’s been a trailer released for it too:
The story is suitably 80s-esque. The brothers are attacked in the desert by a biker gang known as the Renegades and Billy’s girlfriend is kidnapped and held hostage by the shadowy and mysterious Okada clan. The game will see Billy and Jimmy travelling across the world and beating up all they come across with both fist and foot.
The game will come with the expected and traditional local co-op game mode in which you can tag team the levels with your friend; but will also come with a 2-player competitive mode that sees the brother fighting each other, a Challenge Tower mode that lets to battle your way through levels of enemies to try and reach as high as you possibly can. Also during the Challenge Tower, you can unlock certain bosses from the story mode after you pass a certain point – with a secret boss available if you reach the top.
Double Dragon IV will be releasing at the end of the month, on January 30th. Check out the Steam page for more information.
