Here at flashback towers we are having a bit of a shake up of how the site works by adding a few new areas that may be quite fun.

Firstly we have being wanting to do this for a while and at last we have gone and gotten ourselves an advert the hallowed pages of retro gamer. Its only a little one but it is very nice! You can find it in the Classified section in issue 115.

Recently added was an area for some of the more collectable items that we have or have had in stock with a rareness star rating next to it. It's not until we started to look through at some of the items we have or have had that we realised that it would be a great idea to showcase some of these little gems.

You can find our new Rare Stuff area here:

Facebook is something I personally have been using for ages, but we now have a page for our shop too.

You can find us here:

Facebook and Twitter have been integrated into our site and can be found on every item page. So if you find something of interest you can now share it with the world.

I love modern retro themed games and I was kindly asked by a Mr Nick Ridgway to highlight a forthcoming indie game called "The Dream King". This is another excellent project hopefully to be funded via Kickstarter.

Although Nick describes it as a  metroid-vania indie game, it does have all the elements of some of the finest run and gun games available. I am thinking a medievallymedievally Quartet or Gunstar Heroes, but it would probably best to let you read his own synopsis.

It's a brand new indie game called "The Dream King", which features four player simultaneous cooperative and versus side scrolling game play! The game uses the same engine I used to create a very popular four player fan game called "Mega Man Perfect Harmony". It will very likely be released on multiple platforms including Ouya, Android, Iphone, and hopefully Steam! We are about to launch a Kickstarter Fundraiser later this month in order to receive funding. We are entering the final stages of this process and were hoping perhaps you would be so kind as to help spread the word about this game on your website via a post and a link. 

Thank you Nick for your hard work. All of us at flashback towers have our fingers crossed for you that you reach your target.

 Here are some links for more info on the project:

On April the 1st The Gadget Show will be airing a bank holiday special episode, where they will be discussing the past and future of games consoles and tech. We  were contacted a few weeks ago to supply some of the items that will be highlighted and we of course sent them some cool retro stuff which should be on telly… I love it when my babies grow up and go onto better things.

You can find out more about the bank holiday special here:  

http://gadgetshow.channel5.com/

Here at Flashback towers we recently received some mail regarding the a campaign to raise the profile and and funding for the Centre for Computing History. Interestingly they are trying the raise 128K, what could be more appropriate. 

You can catch the guys at Centre for Computing History as they will be at the retro gaming expo on May 18th-19th held at the Wolverhampton Racecourse.

It is the start of a new year (well a little past the start, but I have been busy) and we have quite a few bits n bobs to look forward to.

David Braben looks to have another busy year in front of him. In the last 12 months not only has he help to revolutionise  the computer market with the rinkie dink Raspberry Pi computer, but now his company Frontier has just secured the reddies via kick-starter to make another sequel the the amazing Elite, £1,578,316 and counting. Elite: Dangerous is the long awaited follow up to the spiffing, Atari ST Amiga and PC game Frontier: Elite and later Frontier: First Encounter. I never played the second sequel and I don't think David Braben did either as it was supposed to be absolutely gash and was riddled with bugs… Apparently he was pretty miffed with Game Tek and sued them, perhaps because of this? I really do hope this does gat made and a nice tablet version ported. 

At the moment it is being made for the PC and then later the MAC if it can raise, which with the popularity of the franchise it don't see it as a problem. With any luck an ios port or console port will be considered and  I can really imagine that genre could work really well on a iPad or Android iFob.

Here is a link to the Kickstarter. It has loads of info about the proposed game and hope you can support.

Another link this time to Frontiers site:

I read some really sad news earlier in the week. A smallish article in the brilliant mag Retro Gamer mentioned that just before going to press, news broke that the author of the ground breaking The Lords of Midnight Mike Singleton died at the age of 61 on 10th October 2012. He had suffered from cancer of the mouth over the previous 18 months.

Like a lot 8-bit owners I played The Lords of Midnight and Doomdarks Revenge, they were captivating and enthralling. Like great literature where you controlled character actions and objectives.

A remake of The lords of Midnight for iOS, OSX, Windows, and Playbook is underway and was being helmed by Mike Singleton himself. It looks like the production is still going ahead, now fronted with coding partner Christopher Jon Wild and graphics by Jure Rogelj. Christopher Jon Wild has a great blog site and there are a lot of kind words about Mike Singleton from himself and commenters.

Mike is probably best known for his genius Lords of Midnight series, but he constantly worked on multiple platforms 8-bit to the current generation of consoles and of course the iFobs. High profile companies such as Melbourne House, Firebird Software, Microprose, Mirage, Psygnosis, Midas Interactive Entertainment, Lucasarts, Midway Home Entertainment and Codemasters all litter his CV. Very recently he remade one of his very early works Snake Pit using the Unity Platform, it took him only a few hours.

In next months Retro Gamer Mike Singleton will be getting quite a large amount of pages devoted to his work…

It has been a long delay in updates, unfortunately I've been a tad busy over the last month or so. Anyhow October is gonna be a really exciting month. Not only is it nearly everyone I knows birthday including me and my little boy, but there is also an event coming up that you may have heard about and if you haven't then you should do a little googling (after you have read this of course). I'm talking about the The Play Expo organised by those very nice people from RE.PLAY. 

Last years event was really, really, really (going on for a bit longer) GREAT! This years event looks to be even better, with a larger venue and an emphasis on not only retro gaming, but current gen, professional tournaments and cosplay too. I'm also hoping for a street length of pinball machines like last year. There has been some great exhibitors announced, with the likes of Nintendo, Konami, Namco and EA showing off their latest warez. On the Retro front expect to see the Attic Bug, GT-Retro and Console Passion selling tonnes of games, consoles and nik-naks, plus a host of other exhibitors with something unique to share. 

Sadly Flashback Games will not be having a stand as hopefully I'll be too busy playing games, chatting and drinking some beers and generally having fun at the event. I will be working in some capacity via the medium of Twitter. I'll be posting all over the weekend with images and updating what is happening throughout the day. So expect to see tournament news, Cosplay entrants and any exciting hardware or games that may be on show.

The Play Expo is on at event City in Manchester on the 13th and 14th of October and with tickets from £13.20 for a single day or £22 for the weekend it is a bargain to boot. 

Here is a link to their home page. There is tonnes of info, so I suggest  you check it out…

With the Olympics half way through(ish), why not let us take a trip back in time and have a look at some of the games that have celebrated the games. When looking for when the first official Olympic computer or video game was made I was surprised to find that the first one did not arrive until the Barcelona 1992  Olympic Games. Created by U.S. Gold "Olympic Gold" was the first officially licensed by the IOC and was only released on the  sega range of machines the Game Gear, Master System and Mega Drive.

Most of you will remember games that were made and played before the money men started to license out the games to the video games industry and stoping butchers from hanging circles of sausages up in there shop window. 

Konami really hit the ground running when they released the seminal athletics game Track & Field and its sequel a year later (my personal favourite) Hyper Sports. Very much like the Olympics they featured many of the popular sports on the  Track and Field (does what is says on the tin). All the games in the series have been released and ported to almost every popular home computer and console the best of which being the humble specie port of Hyper sports by imagine (no arguments please, I'm right and you know it). Indeed this long running series of games are still going strong now with the release of iPhone versions of the first two landmark games only last year. 

Check out the You tube link for action of Track and field on the BBC Master in the 80's BBC childrens quiz show First Class

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z84rj6-glh4

Around the same time history was being made made by a young fella by the name of Francis Morgan Ayodélé "Daley" Thompson. It was not long before the canny folk at Ocean Software made him an offer he could not refuse. One horses head in a bed later and Mr Daily Thompsons signed his life away to have kids all around the UK waggling their joysticks at him. The Commodore 64version of the game was a massive success leading to ports on other home computers and a following 5 games to bear his name. All ports were fun to play and were a real success, unfortunately the speccy version had to have Mr Daley in white due to the colour limitation of the blumming thing (although I think the royalties may have soften the blow of having his ethnicity changed).

A great round up of all the Daley Thompson Games have been published in Retro Gamer issue 105.

For a good round up of official and unofficial Olympic games.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olympic_video_games

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daley_Thompson's_Decathlon

LOL or Life On-Line is new permanent exhibition that has opened at the Bradford Media Museum. Having opened on the 30th of March I thought it was high time I got my raggedy ass into gear and find out how all this internet stuff really started. 

I must admit that at first I was a little skeptical about how the exhibition could tackle such a subject. With so much information about the internet already on the internet and with it being a relatively new phenomenon what could it possibly offer that other online resources could not.

The Bradford Media Museum has done what museums do best and that is impart  knowledge in byte size chunks though the use of installations. If pictures say a thousand words then how tomes would this gallery holds. 

Not only is there a great chronology of how the internet was conceived through the use of images, charts and snippets of text, but the entire history of personal and not so personal computing is also documented with some amazing installations of the actual computers that were there at the time. 

Amazingly all the kids running around looked like they were having a ball and seemed genuinely interested in everything that was there. With touchy-feely screens and booths dotted around there is an awful lot to be wowed by.

I think I heard more than one dad saying "I had one of those when I was your age"…

For more information about the Bradford Media Musum see

or if you want to know what the internet used to be like take a look at the Way Back Machine at: