The Wii Virtual Console has been dead lately, and well, Sunsoft has been pretty much dead forever. Seeing these two things revived thanks to this week’s release of Ufouria makes me pretty happy.

Ufouria is a late gen NES title that was due for release in the states but never made it outside of Japan and Europe. It was far along enough that magazines like Nintendo Power had write ups and advertisements for the game. Me personally, I always wanted to try it because I loved Sunsoft games. After nearly 20 years, the Virtual Console and Sunsoft have made that dream a reality. Yes, I know I could have just downloaded a ROM of it, but whatever. I’m legit.

Ufouria: The Saga revolves around four cute Pokemon-like characters (get it? You-Four-Of-Ya) in a quest to return home. The game is very much a Metroidvania title, so exploring, learning the map, and back tracking is the name of the game here. While one character, the Frosty the Snow Man looking Bop Louie, is selectable at first it doesn’t take long to track down the other selectable characters. Of course, each character has their own unique skills (the lizard is the only one that doesn’t fall on his face on ice, the frog can swim, ect) so there is plenty of swapping going on between the four during the game. Eventually though, I found myself almost using Bop Louie and the frog almost exclusively, only going back to the lizard and ghost when I had to.

Welp, finally made it to the moment where Volume 1 of Read Only Memory is complete. It’s hard to believe I’ve been working on ROM for half a year now!

So, Volume 1 is pretty self explanatory, but I’ll get into it one more time. Each month we’ve produced a Nintendo related short for GoNintendo.com, and this month we’re bundling them all together to create “Volume 1″ of the series. Included in this set is Turnips In Love, Simon’s Supper, The Return of Captain N, and Pizza Links.

Oh, you’ve watched the four ROM episodes already? It’s okay, watch them again, and see how I “seamlessly” blended them together! But really, if you’re a long time fan of our work, please let me know if you like this format!

Read Only Memory: Volume 1 is around the corner! So, what’s new for you loyal Shamoozal fans? Well, unfortunately, not much. That doesn’t make this release of ROM any less important though. Actually, it’s the most important one yet!

So here’s the rub. The idea was always to package 4 shorts together and then that would be the one I release around the interwebs outside of uploading it to YouTube and having GoNintendo link it. My original idea was to include some bonus stuff in between the shorts, but unfortunately, time has gotten the best of me and that won’t be happening. Instead I focused my efforts planning just how these shorts are going to interconnect to make it feel like one cohesive piece, which as you’d imagine is pretty tricky!

Today is actually the first day I’ve been able to work on putting them together since the birthday of my kids almost a month ago. I knew they were on the way so I put all my effort into finishing up Pizza Links before they were born. Good thing I did, because the kids came five days after Pizza Links debuted. Talk about timing!

Assuming you don’t hang out on our forums all day, my kids spent the first two weeks of their lives in an incubator since they were born early. As you’d guess, my wife and I spent our nights there while I worked during the day. I basically had to put Shamoozal on hold for a little while. Now I’m on two weeks parental leave from my office so I can figure out just exactly how to raise these little dudes. So with one week behind me and a grasp on their schedule and how to work around it, I’m finding time to fit in work on ROM Vol 1.

I recently sat down with Justin from the Radio Free Gamer podcast to talk about Read Only Memory. I’ve included a portion of the interview that goes into how the series came about, what old video game cartoons inspired me from the past and why I sort of still like the Zelda cartoon. If you click on over to the rest of the show, we dive more into how the NES era has affected an entire generation. My interview takes place around the 42 minute mark, but be sure to enjoy all the sweet game music that helps make Radio Free Gamer the show that it is!

Enjoy the interview and be sure to check out the show. I’m in the latest episode titled World 2 Level 20.

I’m a couple days later than I wanted to be, but the latest episode of Read Only Memory, Pizza Links, is here! So watch the above clip, then read the rest.

As many of you guys might know, this was actually the first episode of ROM I started working on before switching to Turnips In Love. I was tinkering around with this idea way back in February but didn’t really start to build all the assets until the middle of March. Once I had the big pieces in place I recorded my script and made the animatic for it. I absolutely hated it. I hated it so much I honestly didn’t think I could salvage it, and because I wanted to get something to Kevin over at GoNintendo, I came up with Turnips In Love. In Love was easy and cute enough that I felt it was a good replacement for what I was currently working on. Plus, it was perfect for nailing the “30″ second run time I was aiming for.

While working on The Return of Captain N, I was trying to figure out exactly which idea I wanted to work on next. I decided that since I already put so much work into this short that maybe I should revisit it. I took a good look at everything I had script and audio wise and decided to throw away half of it. One of the problems with the original version is that it was much too long, going on for probably close to three minutes. You’re not missing anything as I managed to get to the point in a fraction of the time, though I didn’t quite hit my magical 30 second run time. Regardless, once I was able to really narrow down the key points, I felt much happier with what I was shooting for. It’s longer than your average ROM, but it is no where near the bloated beast it once was.

A friend of mine, Brian, is about to launch not only his first game ever, but his first Xbox Live Indie Games title. The game is VEXIS, and from the trailer above it’s a puzzle game of the rotating and sliding variety. I know Brian has an affinity for puzzle games, so I’m really looking forward to seeing the sorts of puzzles he’s come up with for this game. This is the same guy that totally rocked Tetris during our NES Marathon for Charity last year, so you know he understands his puzzle games.

I’m not totally clear on a release date (he’s hoping and thinking this week) or the pricing, but last I heard he was going to charge two or three dollars. I know he’s worked really hard on it, so check it out when it hits. I’ll update this post once I get the info on that stuff. For now, check out the trailer!

After work I downloaded the Hulu Plus Preview version for the PS3 and gave it a spin. I had read some less than stellar reports about it’s performance on other sites and decided to see for myself. I was pleasantly surprised to see that the video played nice and smooth in HD. So I grabbed my FlipCamHD, propped it up on an ottoman with a few books and ran through the app a bit.

The video is a little bit washed out because I’m shooting a bright screen in low light, but you’ll get the general idea of how this thing loads and how the framerate is on playback. It should be noted that my PS3 is hardwired to a gigabit network and I have Comcast Internet. I’ll post a speedtest after the jump.

All in all I’m impressed with the quality of the video and the speed in which it loaded. $10 a month for current TV series is pretty reasonable too. If more networks join the service I’m going to see if I can keep Comcast internet and dump their TV package!

If you hang around the message boards you’ll know that I kind of sorta hate first person shooter games these days. Well, it isn’t so much that I hate them, I’m just tired of them. I haven’t sat down with a FPS since Half Life Episode 2 because I’m just tired of the genre as a whole. I have never in my life touched a Call of Duty game. I always intended to try one of them out, but the yearly release schedule always put me off.

Then there is the fact that I hate the whole “bro” attitude around games like Call of Duty and Halo. I feel like I hate the gamer stigma attached to those types of games so much that it actually turns me off from playing them period. Is that wrong of me? Maybe I’m some sort of gaming snob, I don’t know. Then again, this is the guy who has been playing a shit ton of old Gameboy Advance games on a GBA Micro for the last four months and have been in my glory, so, yeah.

Anyway I had a small bet made on the smorgas board with long time member Dante369. It blows his mind that I have no interest in these games (especially Modern Warfare) and it blows my mind that he has no interest in Metroid games (especially since I know he’s made it through a personal let down of mine, Shadow Complex). We made a bet that if I played a Modern Warfare game, that he would in turn play a Metroid game.

Everyone has reviewed Mario Galaxy 2 by this point. Hell, I even had my own review all typed up and ready to go but realized I offered nothing you couldn’t find elsewhere, and it very much echoed my review from the original game.

Tonight I just about wrapped up the second half of Galaxy 2. If you’re a Galaxy 2 virgin, and know nothing about the game at this point and would like to keep certain things spoiler free, I highly suggest you stop reading right now.

There, I have given you a warning.

This short was a lot of fun to do, and one of those cases where it totally took a different turn in direction than originally planned. I have been wanting to make a short featuring Captain N for a really long time, but just never really got around to it. When I planned out a bunch of ROM episodes, this was one of the first ideas I came up with, because ROM finally gave me a reason to visit this character.

The joke was always that an old retired Captain N was desperate to return to Video Land, and as a result, a faulty NES would get the best of him. Originally I wanted the short to begin with a camera panning across a shelf with a bunch of pictures, showing Kevin growing older and having children. It would eventually settle on Kevin, complaining about how much he hated his married life, thus making him long to return to Video Land. When I started boarding this, I wasn’t quite happy with how things panned out for Kevin. I didn’t really like the idea of him hating his own children and his wife, so I rethought things.

I started this episode as the TV series Lost was wrapping up. With Lost on the brain, I started to relate Kevin’s longing to return to that of Lost’s hero Jack Sheppard. I thought it made for a really good parallel, and decided to model Kevin after Jack’s appearance in the pivotal episode ‘Through the Looking Glass’. As I took this path, things started to sort of spiral out of control and before I knew it I was in full on Lost parody. The intro of the short is almost shot for shot right out of Through the Looking Glass, and I essentially turned Kevin into Jack. It was a lot of fun putting more focus into Kevin’s obsession with returning to Video Land, instead of him just being tired of life.