Mersey Remakes

Ich, it would seem time still isn’t on my side at the moment. Managing to cram a couple of hours a day into RR, about half an hour a night into development stuff and fiddling with another site so it’s pretty news free grimness around the ol’ Mersey Remakes parts right now.

To cut a long story short, I’ve got some blood tests on Friday where the only box not ticked on the form is for pregnancy stuff (I know I may be many things, but pregnant? Definitely not!) - so hopefully I’ll be able to get this sorted soon enough and crack back on as normal. Pretty bored of feeling under the weather, to be honest. I don’t do idle well.

Anyway, I’ve been amusing myself with a couple of things when time allows. Taking a short break from G-Force as I need to be in the right mindset to work on it, instead I’ve been toying with a little project called Mega Arcadian.

Way back in the midsts of the eighties, there was a game called Arcadia. There’s lots of remakes of Arcadia around, but I’ve always wanted to have a go myself (see also: Transversion), but I didn’t want to do a like for like remake. Ovine have already covered the Vic20 version perfectly, PeeJay and Dan of Dan’s Remakes have the Speccy corner taken. Time to put my own twist upon it, with a little idea from my compadre Mr Smila - I’ve been fuckmelding it with the Atari2600 game Megamania and a hefty dose of my own dark magicks.

You can see a video of it in action, as it currently stands here. It’s still a bit bare bones and rough around the edges, but I’m happy with how it’s coming together. It’s a pity there’s no GM for the Mac as of yet as I wouldn’t have to be sitting at the computer to tinker. Of course, it also remains to see just how well YYG will port it across and whether there’ll be cross compatibility. For some strange reason, I’m not entirely convinced there will be, but ever the hopeful.

As well as slowly tinkering with MA, I’ve been having a bit of fun. Prompted by Happy Monster/Rich posting an awful video review on the RR forums - we decided to see if we could possibly do worse. For my part in this charade, I adopted the most godawful of scouse accents, made some shit up and reviewed a couple of Speccy games badly. Every video I made is filled with blatant lies, untruths and incompetency. So no different to most video reviews! T’was fun though - and you can see all the results listed over on the RR mainsite.

And finally, I’ve heard rumours that there’s a split EP in the works that I may have contributed too… but I’m saying nowt about that until I’ve finished my third and final contribution to it.

Other than that, I’ve really got to get back to ever versatile and wonderous Gnome with some final answers to a Q&A (sorry mate!) and make sure Gary finishes off his top sekrit project (currently titled Pixxey) that rumour has it after receiving SFX for earlier this afternoon from an employee of a certain UK-centric game firm that may have made games that were brilliant(tm) in the Eighties, Gary found himself being mailed levels from members of their staff towards it. Don’t you people have coding to do?

Oh, and Rez is out on XBLA in the morning. 9am can’t come fast enough…