Metal Monday. It's Tuesday? Metal Tuesday then.

[1349- "Sculptor of Flesh"]

Hyper Light Drifter is melting my brain...

A nightmarish, futuristic, magnificently artistic, completely immersive dungeon crawl RPG/Platformer has made it through it's KickStarter phase and destroyed it's fund raising goal of $27,000 with a whopping $645,158.00. Fuck Yes.

Hyper Light Drifter is coming soon for PC/Mac/PS4/PS Vita/Wii U/Ouya and I am totally shitting my pants about it. Just watch this KickStarter trailer, WATCH IT:

"Drifters of this world are the collectors of forgotten knowledge, lost technologies and broken histories. Our Drifter is haunted by an insatiable illness, traveling further into the lands of Buried Time, steeped in blood and treasure hoping to discover a way to quiet the vicious disease. Echoes of a dark and violent past from the dead eras resonate throughout and he can't help but listen."

I am aghast.

From what I can surmise, HLD will be a pretty serious game changer. The gameplay promises to be something like Diablo and A link to the past combined, featuring super quick combat, massive worlds to explore, frightening bosses, and highly intelligent enemies and NPC's.

The setting is superbly eerie, as creator and Lead Designer Alex Preston puts it,

"Visions for this game have been fluttering in my skull for ages; something dark and fantastic, with giant forests to navigate, huge floating structures to explore, deep crumbling ruins to loot, massive throngs of enemies to rend, and behemoths both flesh and mechanical to overcome. I want it all to be as beautiful as possible, forging color with the dark and eerie wastes and intimidating landscapes."

Preston works alongside Lead Programer, Beau Blyth aka "TeknoPants"(the genius behind Samurai Gunn) and Chiptune mastermind, Disasterpeace to create his dark and fantastic vision.

Wicked Basement donated some $$$ to their paypal and will be getting an advance copy in 2014. We will be positively obsessed with playing and reviewing this game so stay tuned for more, visit HLD's KickStarter and even Pre-Order through the Heart Machine website.

This is going to be such a wonderful melding of genres, a huge step forward for indie gaming. We anxiously await pressing play (and then B, many many times) <3

Facebook plug!

We have a Facebook!

Yes, finally we got a fb and it is up and running for readers of the blog to post stuff too. Keeping it as more of a social project than the blog, most of WB's content will still be here but we wanted friends and fans to share their favorite Basement items along with us. 

"Like" us and post something!

That Feel.

<3

The wonderful music of Lifeformed.

Lifeformed, which is the musical project of Terrance Lee, is a very interesting take on chip. Ambient filters create a chip+ type of sound that landed Lifeformed a deal with the creators of Dustforce (Steam), who asked him to score the game. Check out the score here, preorder Dustforce before it is out fully this January. Cheers!

[Lifeformed]

RushJet1

Some of the most underrated chip is undoubtably the body of music composed by RushJet 1. He has redone/remastered Megaman scores BEAUTIFULLY, composed a host of his own original work and even hosts a Youtube channel for a look into his production methods.

Staying out of the spotlight has been RushJet's Modus Operandi for the most part but we hope to talk to him soon about his years watching chip explode. In the meantime, enjoy some of his great music.

[Link to original albums]

[Wicked Basement's favorite song :) ]

[Megaman III Remaster]

Doukutstu Monogatari! I mean, Cave Story.

What can be said about Cave Story that hasn't been said before? In 2004, a freeware game was released after 5 years of production by Studio Pixel (Daisuke Amaya) that would forever raise the bar for the retro indie game scene. Considered a masterpiece amongst gaming aficionados, Cave Story is a completely wonderful, immersive experience that tugs at your heartstrings and gives you that "new gameboy game on Xmas morning" feel. The. Whole. Way. Through.

A genius combination of games like Pokemon (Red and Blue), Zelda II, Contra, Megaman, and a touch of Castlevania, this game will hook you from the start. Filled with cute yet dangerous enemies, puzzle-like maps, and challenging bosses, Cave Story seems to take on that delightful middle ground between a casual everyman game and a Megaman style, "throw the controller across the room because the boss kicked your ass 3 times in a row" game. Luckily, save spots are frequent though, so if you ARE throwing a fit, deep down you know it's because YOU fucked up. This game is extremely fair to the player.

[Both versions of "Quote" the robo-boy]

In the game, you play the character, "Quote"(above), who is a robot boy from the "surface world", flung into an underground cave-like world, filled with rabbits (called Mimigas) and more robots who have been either damaged, powered down, or just kinda depressed. 

Seriously.

[The mighty "Balrog"]

It becomes apparent over time that something called the Demon Crown was used along with hallucinogenic Red Flowers to take over the "above world" years before, that the Mimigas can be transformed into giant beasts with the flowers, and "Quote" has no recollection of this. Players uncover mysteries about Quote's past, make friends with various characters for item upgrades and attempt to stop the current antagonist from acquiring the Demon Crown again, taking over the world, etc. I am being a bit of a reductionist here but the story is actually very dense and interwoven with the NPC's that players meet along the way, good and bad. One of my favorite characters, Balrog (photo above) is that classic "Bad dude before, but has a heart of gold and ends up helping the ol' team o' good guys" character, who provides some fun learning-type boss battles and some comic relief throughout the game. A quick tip: Remember to talk to EVERYONE during your adventure. Certain bosses, stage changes and progressions are really contingent on having dialogue with the locals. Even if it is something as mundane as "Yeah, I'm sick so I can't help you out."

Doukutsu Monogatari, Cave story, Awesome game I cannot put down, whatever you would like to call it has since come out for WiiWare and the 3DS with positive reception. However, the original game itself is STILL free and STILL available with an English Plug in. How kick ass can it get, right? Realizing Wicked Basement is a litttttle bit late on the fandom, we still wanted to throw a review and a download up on the site because this game is WORTH the hate mail we will get for having JUST played it ourselves. This game is like a wonderful dream created by someone who truly understands WHY the golden age of gaming was so golden. The character design, the music, the story, all of it works perfectly together to create a really fun game that ends WAY too soon.

Available for Mac and PC!

[DOWNLOAD HERE//MAKE SURE TO DL ENGLISH PATCH TOO]

[Link to a nice walkthrough for those of you who like to investigate every nook]

I would say play this game YOUR way, then maybe the second time check out a walkthrough. The only time I needed any assistance is for those god damn puppies, which the one I was looking for was literally right in front of me. Enjoy the game!

NULLSLEEP - The King of Chip

If chiptunes was pop music, trying to write an introduction for NULLSLEEP  would be like trying to write an introduction for Michael Jackson. Impossible, everything that could be said about the King of Chip has been, but i'll try. Nullsleep is probably the reason chip carrys any relevance today in circles outside of only the most depraved basement dwelling geek maladroits.  Basically us lol. Anyway, Nullsleep's near endless volumes of auditory accomplishment, Blipfest championing, evolutionary progress cannot be constrained to one tiny blogpost. So i'll trickle it to you guys like a slow drip from an intravenous needle. 

Here is some of his earlier work that got me in the habit. Enjoy!

DIRTY ROM DANCE

BALLISTIC PICNIC

GALAXY TONIGHT

Live Chip-tune band  INFINITY SHRED on The Verge. I wrote about these guys in a previous post

under their now disassembled moniker Starscream. Despite it's name change, the band continues to deliver top shelf goods. I cannot get enough of this galaxy traversing, cosmos unfolding. fractal entity revealing sound. They have managed a kind of digital springboard into an auditory unknown. Enjoy the show.

Awe.Some.

Animated short, "Coin" just kicked my ass.

Not a game. Still unbelievably suhweet.

Cannot fucking wait for this. Super. Time. Force.

Kill mercilessly, plot maniacally, rewind, switch characters, team up, DESTROY.

Super Time Force is (supposedly) coming to Xbox Arcade before the new year and has gotten some serious bumps from reviewers world wide. Keep your eyes peeled.

Mario Adventure: Arguably the best Mario hack ever created.

Oh. My. Gahd.

So in 2004, a home-brewer/programmer/ITT-Tech student going by the name DahrkDiaz created a hack that would later go on to become what many know as the greatest Mario hack of all time: Mario Adventure.

This wasn't your average "changed up the levels and added some new colors, also some dicks" hack, DD added a whole new playing experience to the SMB3 engine with new power ups, bosses at each level's end, a fucking key system for unlocking worlds, and finally a REASON to collect all those god damn coins. It is ingenious, it is hard as nails.

Mario Adventure takes players back to the frustration level of their 7 year old selves. Rife with surprises, new enemy functions and maps that hardly qualify as fair; this game picks up where the "beat SMB3 a bazillion times" veteran left off. 

But check your red hot irritation at the door. Mario Adventure has an unlimited life policy, so you can play and learn and laugh and let each stupidstupidstupid level grow on you over time. Plus, if you get truly desperate, there are cheats which one would think the game's developer WANTED you to use in order to find and unlock secret parts of certain levels(available at the bottom of the post). 

There are 8 Worlds in Mario Adventure, each one conquerable through typical means of wand gathering and boss whooping. However, in each world lies a key which players may use to unlock the "warp zone paths" and eventually beat the game in world 8 (don't worry, there is a cheat for that too...).

A specific love of mine for this game were the ever-changing weather patterns of the Mushroom Kingdom. Sometimes you start a game and it's night, or raining, or snowing, maybe sunny... The attributes of the level change, certain secrets become apparent, and suddenly you have found something in your run that was completely hidden before. Also, the coins aspect. Collecting coins used to be for points junkies, whereas Mario Adventure makes players use these coins in the "Mushroom Huts" to gain hidden power-ups like Magic Mario, Fire Mario, Das Boot, a Mushroom, and more... This is a brilliant step in the right direction for Mario games on this platform, honestly this could have been SMB4.

That said, some bugs/glitches are hard to ignore. Enemies getting stuck in "dead zones" is an occasional occurrence and power ups (like mushrooms) can sometimes drift away if you let them out of your sight. At crucial points in a boss battle, a player's golden mushroom(which completes the stage) can sometimes fall through the floor, sending you into a complete rage. This is rare, but it happens.

 Overall though, the bugs in this game are HARDLY present compared to the majority of hacks. 

I went into this game thinking it would be another crappy Mario hack, but I was very impressed by the smoothness, the innovation and the absolute re-playability of this game. Play it below and check out some of the cheats available. I honestly believe they are enhancements to the playing experience, not just an easy way out. Oh and did I mention the ROM auto-saves???

[Play it here]

[Download the ROM here!]

News: Mario Adventure 3 (After the sequel which was meh) should be coming out January 2014. Wicked Basement WILL have the new game up as soon as DahrkDiaz releases it.

A look at some of the concept:

Cheats

P-Wing!

LUBDADD

Left-Up-B-Down-A-Down-Down

Unlock World 8 (and all others)

DD LUBS ALL

Down-Down-Left-Up-B-Select-A-Left-Left

Frog Suit

BAD LAD

B-A-Down-Left-A-Down

Breaking: Game of Thrones 8bit game available for download!

[img not related to game, still cool tho]

Throwing this little gem down to the basement for peer review. 

Played it a bit and so far it has been pretty fun. Sort of a side-scrolling Arkistas ring, mixed with the many other platformers it aims to emulate. Play as Tyrion, Jon Snow, Daavos, or Daenerys; all with different movement and attack features. The game is totally retro/revisited classic and brought to us solely by Spanish comix artist Abel Alves. Enjoy and download for FREE right here in the Basement.

[FREE download HERE]
[You will need a PC Emulator to play this, unfortunately.]

---Starscream---

Before they became the chiptune band now known as Infinity Shred, they were Starscream.

A duo whose mix of live percussion and gameboy riffs would launch me into an invisible light saber

swinging frenzy in the solitude of my bedroom. My two favorite tracks titled "Years One-four" and the followup "Years Five-Eight" say something to me about immensity and eternity I can barely describe without crumpling at it's grandeur, and I would tho this isn't a Bawwww thread so I digress. Starscream's music is becoming increasingly hard to find now that they have moved on with their current moniker. 

Check out Starscream's "Future and it doesn't work", "Years 5-8*", and  "Gravity in terms of time and space". Just WICKED.

-Voyager 1

Future and it doesn't work

Years 5-8

Gravity in terms of time and space

Tower Fall looks delicious.

Introducing Towerfall!

A SmashBrosesque, arrow fueled battle royal which has been getting rave reviews since it's debut. Play  as one of four main characters, collect power ups, and kill-kill-KILL. One of the coolest parts of this game, as I have seen, is the changing, warping stage structures. Like bomberman, explosives are available and work with the stage's already wild, seemingly random conversions. So sweet. UNFORTUNATELY TowerFall is only available for the ever-so-annoying OUYA console (I know, shoot me...) for now, but quite a few developers (including TF's) are getting it prepped for Mac/PC. Check out the Trailer!

Keiji Inafune is at it again!

So most people are familiar with Keiji Inafune as one of (if not THE) creator of Megaman's overall design. In Rockman's introduction, Capcom teamed up with Inafune to create the Blue Bomber's trademark aesthetic, blending a raw technological look with a style that reminded us of Tatsumi's Astro Boy on robo-steroids. The Villains, especially, are some of the most memorable Nintendo characters in the entertainment system's history and in my opinion, it is the artistic flair of these characters, not the actual gameplay that can be credited for most of the franchise's popularity (See "The Krion Conquest" lol) . Total win.

In recent years, however, Inafune left Capcom on the grounds of "creative differences", but many speculate that Capcom had been stifling Megaman's IRL Dr. Light for years. In multiple press talks, Inafune stated that he "Hated [his] job at Capcom" and had trouble growing with the company due to a glass ceiling within the company. The leave was shocking and depressing, especially considering Inafune's warning that classic Japanese gaming was becoming a dying industry. Plenty of neo-classical/revisited retro style games have come out since his quitting, but the MM universe seems to have been taken over by the fans (see MM vs. StreetFighter).

But fear ye not Rockman fans!...
Decades after MM 1 flew off the shelves, Keiji Inafune and his production company Comcept returns with a brand new game, untainted by "the biz" titled: "Mighty No. 9"!
Still in it's crowd-funding stage, MN9 aims to be a game which takes us all back to our roots while providing a visually modern landscape for gameplay. In his Kickstarter promo video, Inafune promises us some serious artistic innovation to the typical run-n-gun, action-platformer style that made MM games such a hit for so many years. As he says on his Kickstarter page, "While the beloved creations of my past are no longer at my disposal, the spirit they were born from still is. By tapping into that spirit we can create a new game--and new characters--that carry on the legacy of the past."
[^Look familiar?^]
--And from the concept art previews, the looks into screenshots and some of his interviews regarding the project, I can't help but feel excited for what Inafune and Comcept has in store. Yeah, it's sort of a kick-in-the-balls-concept aimed at showing Capcom what they are missing out on by letting him quit, but so far the ideas presented seem very original; especially considering that, the concepts some would say he is "copying" is actually his own work in the first place. Almost like if Alan Moore wrote a sequel to Watchman and called it the LOOKmen2 and.....Okay bad example.
  Check out his Kickstarter [HERE] and give a little bit to a growing project. They have reached their goal but the packages for insider news, betas, and more are still available for about a month.

Good luck Keiji!

Druden- "Druden" self titled.

[2012 Full release HERE]

Drude is the word for a mythological kind of witch out of German folklore who could create nightmares and demons. Drudes were said to be born 1 out of 7 daughters of a particular family and entered their victims house at night to cast their Drudenfluch (Drude's Curse) on a sleeping victim. Legends tell that they were shape-shifters and cast wind spells which could only be fought off by a magical item called the Drude knife. Their most reported form was a fat woman sitting on their victim's chest at night. 

I'm not sure if Druden named their band after all this, but it would be a shame if they didn't. Enjoy the music!

Alcest- "Ecailles De Lune"

[Click play for full album]

BBB: Cannot WAIT to see this and the others of Sportsfriends, out this Autumn...

BARABARIBALL

Somewhere between Smash Bros and a volleyball competition is local multiplayer Barabariball, a 2013 release by Noah Sasso. BBB will release in a 3 games-in-one package called Sportsfriends for PS3 this fall, then for PC/Mac right after. I watched all of the game's trailers and am most impressed with BBB. Not only are the game's aesthetics looking great, but gameplay looks really fun. Movement reminds me of the obvious, Smash Bros but with a hint of Super House of Dead Ninjas. Floaty and brutal.

I'll keep my eyes glued to Steam until it's release for betas or demos.

Check this gameplay!

Duh.