For this month's blog entry, I'm only going to report some news, some good,
some bad, some ugly. Here we go...
Several people fell for Eduardo's April Fool joke, at the beginning of this
month: With the help of Tempest, he presented a fake prototype of Wild Western,
a game that was advertized by Coleco but never released. Eduardo worked hard
for several weeks, with most of this work getting done at the last minute,
while Eduardo was on vacation in Brazil. You can see the AtariAge forum thread
devoted to this prank by clicking here.
The ROM file that you can download from there can be run under most
ColecoVision emulators, and it's a very well done demo, if I do say so myself.
In case you're wondering, Eduardo has no plans to ever finish Wild Western.
Not that he wouldn't like to, but there are a thousand other projects he would
rather spend his free time on.
On April 15th, Eduardo attended the "Too Many Games" event in Reading,
Pennsylvania. The pourring rain didn't help attendance, and Eduardo didn't
manage to sell any of the ColecoVision games he had brought with him, but
the early prototype of the Opgrade Module did attract a lot of attention.
So much in fact that Eduardo left the event with the certainty that the
Opgrade Module will likely be a very good seller once it's finally released,
hopefully sometime in 2008.
Note that I needed to emphasize the word "hopefully" above, and after reading
the next piece of news, you'll understand why: The release of Pac-Man
Collection has been pushed back to mid-August. The reason? As stated on the
recall notice on the "Home" section of this web site, Eduardo recently
discovered a minor glitch in Magical Tree, and that's all it took to hurt his
perfectionist ego. Don't cry Eduardo! Come here and let me give you a hug...
:-P
So anyway, for Pac-Man Collection and all our future games, Eduardo decided to
bring onboard some additional beta-testers in an effort to squash more bugs
before the final products are pushed out the door. (Don't bother contacting us
to be a beta-tester, by the way, we already have all the testers we need.)
Also, the software side of PMC is far from complete, so even if Eduardo hadn't
spotted the glitch in Magical Tree, there still would have been an additional
delay. So will Road Fighter and Konami Sports Collection be pushed back as
well? Probably, and I do find all this quite depressing myself... :-/
On a happier note, Eduardo offered to port two SG-1000 games for free, so that
I can start my own ColecoVision publishing label. After
asking for other people's opinions
and running an official poll
on the AtariAge forums, the two games will be Bank Panic and Pitfall II Arcade.
The way things are moving along right now, the ports will likely be done in
2008, but once they're done, I'll have to take care of everything else, namely
the packaging artwork, the manufacturing of carts, boxes and manuals, and
final product distribution too. I'm looking forward to tackling these
challenges, and I'll start by learning to use Adobe Illustrator within the
next couple of months. :-)
And that's all the news for this month.
Later, people!
