It’s a Duck Blur!

I have a lot of favorite titles on the NES. As a boy I spent much of my free time scouring Hyrule for pieces of the triforce, eating mushrooms and fireflowers, and even amassing riches beyond my wildest dreams. I was a pretty awesome kid. Now I’m willing to bet that the first two games I alluded to are easy for most people to pick out, but I’d venture that the last one would not stand out to anyone other that serious NES fanboys. I am of course talking about DuckTales.

If you were born in the 80′s then you must have seen the cartoon series of the same name at least once. And if you saw it once chances are you were hooked as it was one of the best cartoons of it’s time. It was bright, colorful, silly, and even a bit informative; it was everything right with after school cartoons. You can imagine how excited I was when i found out there was an NES game based on it.

I played this game so much that I still have the boss fight patterns (not that they were terribly difficult) memorized to this day. I had been burned by bad licensed games before so I made sure to rent it from this place called Movie Show Video down the street from my mom’s apartment before wasting valuable begging power on it.

The first thing that stood out to me about the game was the music. It has such a memorable soundtrack that there are actually Facebook fan pages dedicated to specific tunes from levels of the game! The music really is that good. Of course as a boy I didn’t know much about how video games were made and had no idea who the composer of the game’s soundtrack was. Fast forward to adulthood and Yoshihiro Sakaguchi is now one of my favorite game composer’s of all time.

I did know the name Capcom though! Those were the guys that made those amazing Mega Man games! I would later learn that the man responsible for the character design in Mega Man, Keiji Inafune was also the lead developer on this game. As you might have guessed I have a soft spot in my heart for that man’s work as well.

Here was a game that had it all; stunning art, amazing music, deceptively simple gameplay, boss battles, hidden treasures, and even alternate endings! It’s no wonder that the game is beloved by video game fanboys the world over. There are even quite a few giants in the industry today who cite DuckTales as their inspirations for becoming developers.

So… I had to explain all this to my wife the other night when, to my astonishment, Capcom announced they would be releasing a “remastered” version. She was understandably perplexed when her husband actually laughed like a little kid when he watched the trailer, and of course I sang along to the theme song. I am currently re-watching the entire series. Episode 10 is playing as I type this.

But enough about my temporary rejection of adulthood, on to the details about the new game!

It will be releasing on XBox 360, PS3, and WiiU sometime in the summer of 2013. As you can tell by the trailer below it features gorgeous new hand-drawn art along with 2.5D environments. Perhaps even better than that? Way Forward (the developer working on ths game) actually managed to get the entire surviving voice cast from the show to do original voice overs! I don’t think that they could be taking this more seriously.

I’ve gathered a few videos below showing gameplay and commentary from the developers.

NVIDIA cripples firmware on their Video Cards

NVIDIA has some explaining to do here. They sell two separate video cards, the consumer level GTX690 and the professional level K5000. Both of these cards utilize the same GPUs but the GTX690 is simply a crippled K5000. It’s very frustrating to see NVIDIA treat customers this way. Moreover, they know the sort of people that they market to, they couldn’t have expected that their hardware would not be probed at some point.

They accomplish this by changing the analog values that determine what model the card represents itself as.

A user named Gnif on the EEVBlog forums has found a way to unlock the hidden power of his GTX690 by desoldering one resistor and soldering on a 15k and 20k on specific pads of the board.

So why am I irritated by this? Because the difference in cost for the cards is about $800!

You can read all about Gnif’s hard work HERE.

“Hacking the Xbox” by Andrew Huang is free!

When I was in Iraq one of the ways I liked to spend my spare time (when I had it) time was hacking around on an original Xbox. I did the usual stuff, installed a custom dashboard, a bigger hard drive, modded the firmware on the disc driver, etc. But I really wanted to know more. At the time there was a definitive book on the subject of reverse engineering the XBox written by a hacker named ‘Bunnie’. I ordered the book on Amazon and spent a long time pouring through it. It taught me a lot about how the Xbox functioned but more importantly it taught me a lot about reverse engineering. I still refer to it pretty regularly when tinkering in my lab.

In response to the tragic death of Aaron Swartz, Bunnie has made his book completely free via the No Starch Press website. If you’ve never read it you really should. You can download a copy here and donate to DemandPress, GiveWell, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation while you’re there!.

Ultra-realistic Super Mario speed painting

An artist for 8-bit Ego named Josh Summana just shared a pretty epic speed painting on the site’s PixelVision YouTube channel. It’s a real joy to watch things like this get made layer by layer and I highly recommend you check out the rest of the videos on their channel. I wasted half of my lunch break watching these.

I have to say, this rendition of Mario is a bit creppy but I kinda dig that. It looks like he might seriously fuck Goomba up.

Hit this link to see more of Josh’s work.