New design added: Sonic Boom!

Posted by: Lawrence Wong

We've been playing a lot of Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo HD Remix recently and it's gotten us even more excited about the arrival of Street Fighter IV, coming to console in February. Due to much Hadoken-ing, old gaming injuries have started to resurface. We stopped playing Street Fighter just long enough for the aches to vanish, albeit temporarily, and used that time to create this new design. It's the SONIC BOOM!! We've created black or white versions to give you more choice.

Check it out, or "Go home and be a family man.."

 

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Win t-shirts with the Ready-Up.net 2008 game awards

Posted by: Gary Stanton

We're giving away 10 free t-shirts in association with those lovely people over at Ready-UP.net, and all you have to do to enter is vote for your favorite games of 2008!

A lot has happened in the world of gaming in 2008, with some of the most eagerly  anticipated sequels of all time, as well as some surprise new innovations and a few instant classics.

Our friends at Ready-Up are interested to know what you think, and have set up the 2008 Game Awards to celebrate such an awesome year in gaming.

The nominees are in and voting has already begun, with winners announced in two weeks - So get on over to the site and VOTE NOW! You'll help to pick out the best titles of 2008, and 10 lucky winners will receive a free RetroGT t-shirt too.

Over here at RetroGT, we like to keep things pretty old skool, and we weren't disappointed this year with the truly awesome Street Fighter IV, and of course the beautiful update of 'Super Street Fighter 2 HD Remix' - a mouthful to say and a joy to play

We've also been knocked out this year by some of the new downloadable titles that put the emphasis back on gameplay over graphics - just like it was in the old days.

Video games have come a long way since Spacewar and Pong, and with the current generation of consoles offering online gameplay, downloadable content and faithful updates of the old classics, there's really never been a better time to be a gamer.

All in all things are good. We feel.

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Mind Your Wing Mirrors! It's Asteroids!

Posted by: Paul Smith

Imagine the scary music from Jaws, but played on a cardiac monitoring machine in a hospital corridor.   That is the enigmatic sound of all round minimalist Asteroids, track five on our journey through Buckner and Garcia's Pac Man Fever album.   The track - Hyperspace - is so bad that we are better off promising never to mention it again, but no fag-smoke and Lilt-can infested early 80s arcade would be complete without the game itself.   The stark and distinctive line drawing graphics look they way they do because Asteroids is a 'vector' game.   Vectoring is a method that games programmers at the time used as a clever way to make their graphics look really, really bad.   In this instance, however, it works very well, and, combined with the medical equipment audio set up, gives a fair representation of the bleakness of fighting a lonely battle you will inevitably lose in the bleak and chilly depths of space.

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Have A Banana! It's Donkey Kong!

Posted by: Paul Smith

Frank Krmel, of Atlanta, Georgia and Shigeru Miyamoto of Kyoto, Japan are unlikely to find themselves mentioned together in any sentence other than this one.  Miyamoto spent his childhood exploring the lakes and caves with which the land around his family home was amply blessed, endlessly drawing and sketching local wildlife.   Krmel spent his childhood hunting catfish in a swamp.  Both men, however, chased an ape-themed dream which would elevate them to the top of their respective professions: this dream would manifest itself as Donkey Kong, which is also the fourth track on our Pac Man Fever odyssey.  For Miyamoto, Donkey Kong was the beginning of an incredible journey that would see him hailed as 'the Father of Modern Videogames' by the New York Times, and 'the Walt Disney of electronic gaming' by the Wall Street Journal.  He invented the Wii gaming system, and his sheepdog, Pikku, was the inspiration for the Nintendogs franchise.  For his part, Krmel drove a monster truck called Donkey Kong into the ninth Monster Jam World Finals in 2007.  The truck is designed to look like a big monkey wearing a tie.  Two men, one shared destiny: an angry gorllla throwing barrels at an Italian.

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New hoodie colours

Posted by: Gary Stanton

Due to popular demand, we've added two new colours to our range of lovely hooded tops.
All our designs are now available in bright red and dark grey.

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Retro Review: Crazy Taxi

Posted by: Danny Morgan

It was quite hard picking the next retro review. I've been buying some retro games from the internet, but I finally decided.

I was going to review Crazy Taxi 2 actually. I'm not sure why, but it may be because I thought it would be better than the original. How wrong was I! Crazy Taxi 2 sucks like you would never believe. On appearance it looks the same as the first installment (which is a good thing) and it has the same modes (which is a bad thing).

In short, Crazy Taxi 2 keeps most of the recipe which made the first so great, but doesn't add enough to the mix. You now drive around New York, but all the fares seem to go to the same places and you barely see much of the city in any case. They just didn't make enough progress to warrant a crappy sequel.

Thankfully the original Crazy Taxi doesn't have any of these problems - in fact it would make a better sequel to the...er...sequel.

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New Design added: Mega Drive joypad

Posted by: Lawrence Wong

Here's one for you Sega fans. The Mega Drive pad has been given the pixel makeover with much chunky love. Hopefully, this will prove that we aren't biased towards Nintendo.

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Centipede

Posted by: Paul Smith

Dona Bailey was one of the only female programmers involved in gaming at the turn of the 1980s.   As a representative of a gender not traditionally at ease with insects, spiders, and creepy crawlies generally, it is perhaps remarkable that she threw her creative and technical know-how into a game about a giant centipede.    The subject of track three on our Pac Man Fever odyssey, Centipede itself is not one of the more immediately recognisable games featured on the album, but spawned a litany of similar games, including the pre-3G mobile phone standard.   Atari released Centipede in 1980, and it was one of the first games to become familiar to home console players.    It is fair to say that the album track is a less familiar landmark in popular culture, although artwork adorning the side of the arcade cabinet was used on the cover of the Strokes' 2004 single Reptillia.

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It's Not Easy Being Frogger.

Posted by: Paul Smith

As we have often observed, the first great rush of gaming technology was hallmarked by the drive for novelty.  While the rest of the industry tended to concentrate upon space battles and threats to the ever-luckless planet earth, and with a limitless blank canvas before them, Konami chose to develop a game involving a frog on a motorway.  Whether or not it would have gone on to become an instant classic under its original name of Highway Crossing Frog will never be known, however, a meeting of Sega executives charged with worldwide distribution of the game decided upon the far more zesty Frogger, and this instant classic became a must-have throughout the arcade world.    Also, considering that there are more ways to get killed in Frogger than any other arcade game, not only is it not easy being green, it's a positive bloodbath.

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Let's Not Dance! It's Pac Man Fever!

Posted by: Paul Smith

Ohio based songwriting duo Jerry Buckner and Gary Garcia have always resented the 'novelty' tag often attached to their work by the wider musical community.   They must, therefore, feel the odd twinge of we-have-kind-of-bought-this-upon-ourselves-ness when considering their back catalogue, which includes Merry Christmas In The NFL, E.T. I Love You, Pog Nation and Do The Donkey Kong.   But it is for their 1982 hit Pac Man Fever, taken from the album of the same name, for which they are best remembered.    On its initial release, it peaked at number 9 in the US Billboard charts, which, when you consider that it thereby outperformed The Beatles' She Loves You, is not bad going.

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MCM Expo photos are up

Posted by: Lawrence Wong

Photos from October's London MCM Expo are up, you can find them in the gallery section. It's mostly cosplay but at least we brought a decent camera this time. We had trouble naming the characters or what they come from.. it was mostly from anime and our anime knowledge is patchy at best. You can post a comment to help us name them.

Quick link: http://www.retrogt.com/gallery/London-MCM-expo-Oct-2008.cfm

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Download Red Alert for FREE!!

Posted by: Lawrence Wong

For those who aren't aware Command and Conquer: Red Alert 3, already available in the U.S, is being released in the UK today. This time around the Soviets travel back in time to screw with history and results in Japan becoming a third super power. The Empire of the Rising Sun brings transforming tanks, ninjas and giant robots to the battlefield. We expect the Soviet Tesla coils to make a reappearance. The hammy cutscenes are back, this time with a star studded cast including Tim Curry, Jonathan Pryce, George Takei and ex-Playboy model Jenny McCarthy in the role of Tanya, oh yeah. It all sounds rather sweet.

What's more, to celebrate 13 years of the franchise EA have offered the original Red Alert for free download. Follow this link to the official site: http://www.ea.com/redalert/news-detail.jsp?id=62

Don't forget to install the XP / Vista patch and run it in compatibility mode. Red Alert still works a treat on newer Windows.. we've tested it.. lots.

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New design added: C&C Red Alert

Posted by: Lawrence Wong

When Russia marched into Georgia earlier this year they changed the rules of global politics. With the U.S weakening on the world stage and Russia becoming bolder, could this be the start of a second cold war?

Uhm.. dunno but it reminds us of the times spent playing Red Alert, having a laugh with big Soviet tanks and frying people with Tesla coils. The world seemed so much safer back then. But let's face it, russian brutality stoicism has a certain cool factor, Red Alert showed us that much at least. Which brings us to our latest design based on that RTS classic, check it out.

Shake it baby:

      

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Retro GT @ London MCM Expo

Posted by: Lawrence Wong

Retro GT will be attending the London MCM Expo on the weekend of 25th - 26th October. The show is part of the London Games Festival and will have playable demos of upcoming releases such as the new Prince of Persia, Mortal Kombat vs DC, Far Cry 2 and more. There's also a Rock Band tournament run by DDR:uk and our friends at Neo Empire will be there with Capcom and Street Fighter 4, sweet.

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RetroGT @ Collectormania 14

Posted by: Lawrence Wong

Just a quicky to say we're going to be in Milton Keynes this weekend exhibiting at Collectormania 14. It's held in the large hall of Milton Keynes Shopping Centre so there's no entrance fee and it runs from Friday 26th to Sunday 28th September. It's the usual combination of guest signings and merchandise galore, check the site for more info http://www.collectormania.com. Lastly, we are continuing our stall offer of 2 t-shirts for £25.

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