Tuesday 13 February 2018

Tanglewood an upcoming new Sega Megadrive/Genesis game


Ok so early last month I talked about. Paprium the hopefully upcoming new Megadrive/Genesis walk along beat em up. This is not the only new Megadrive game thats headed our way in fact there is a new platformer coming called TangleWood.



Matt Phillips the creator of  Tanglewood, has been working on this new Sega Mega Drive, for a few years now. It was a kickstarter and it has like a lot of kickstarters missed its initial target date but unlike in other cases plenty of information has kept coming forward and it looks like it should be out sometime this year. Here is a link to its Kickstarter page so anyone interested can have a look Tanglewood Kickstarter: 

Having a look through all the various Kickstarter options £20 will get you a downloadable rom of the game that you can play on your Megadrive via an everdrive or through an emulator ecetera. Then you can get a real cart for £50 or a boxed copy for £60 (there were cheaper early bird deals but they are no longer available). There are also more expensive options for limited carts and such.

Matt Philips claims to have taken inspiration from the art and movement of games like Another World and The Lion King, with his aim being to create something like them from the ground up. Having looked at concept art, screenshots, videos, and having even played the prototype rom I can say that from what I have seen it looks like this will be a pretty good game. Its also interesting to note that this game has been made with proper megadrive development hardware, he has been using an original Mega CD development kit alongside a computer running Windows 95 to program the game.

Its also nice to see that he has thought everything through and has answers for how things are going to be made, apparently he has an agreement with a factory in China who will produce plastic Sega style cartridges for him, he also has a contact in Canada who is the engineer and proprietor of a company called DB Electronics making the PCB game circuit boards to go inside the plastic. Apparently this guy is an expert and will be making sure this PCB works just like a real MegaDrive game from back in the day. He also tried to approach Sega to get the game officially licensed which would have been really cool. Unfortunately, Sega apparently no longer has the resources in place to test and do quality assurance on a project of this nature, apparently though they were supportive and friendly. Matt Philips also has some time working for well known studios on games which have been released under his belt as do all of the other people he has gotten involved in the project so its not like one of those projects where someone says they are going to do something they have no hope of doing, theyve all basically done this before just on different formats with different funding methods (basically paid by a studio to do it on there behalf).

I do like to see projects like this especially when they seem to be so well thought out. I never do tend to support Kickstarters though as well I guess I am just cynical after having seen so many fail or not measure up in one way or another. I don't like to pay for things I will get in the future, heck I don't even preorder games even if there like triple AAA titles from studios that have no chance of bankruptcy etc, I tend to like to hand real cash over and get a product straight away or at worst pay on card and it be shipped out the following day. There is also the issue that I personally wouldnt know what to go for, I own a Everdrive so could just get the rom but then part of me says well you have over 200 megadrive carts so your not usually a just a rom guy but then there different because there old classics and this is a new thing. This aside though I really do hope that the project is a roaring success as the maker seems to have seen this as a sort of childhood dream and seems to have really poured his heart and soul into it. As a kid I always wanted to write a novel and I know how much it meant to me to finally have done that, so I guess this is his novel and I wish him the utmost success with it.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Tales from the Crypt DEAD EASY aka Fat Tuesday the lost film

Ages and Ages ago I made blog posts about Tales from the Crypt Presents Fat Tuesday AKA Dead Easy and a few years ago I turned these into a...