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It's been over twenty years since the release of the Genesis roguelike Toejam & Earl. If you aren't familiar with it, it was a way-ahead-of-its-time 2 player co-op game where the goal was to explore 25 ascending levels, finding 10 ship pieces along the way in order to escape Earth. It featured split screen, allowing 2 players to explore different levels simultaneously, as well as randomly generated stages and items which came in randomly shuffled item boxes (presents). Every game is different, the mechanics are simple, it is just an extremely good thing. The original developers quickly began work on a sequel, which the notoriously lovely marketing department at Sega complained about being "too hard" to market, so they made them scrap it and work on yet another 2D sidescroller instead. Another decade or so later, the creators finally managed to pitch a follow-up to the original, which they began working on before the publisher again got nervous about having an old-fashioned game on a modern system. So, under pressure to make it more technically showy, Toejam & Earl 3 came out on the Xbox in the form of a slap-dash 3d about fetching keys in order to unlock underwhelming boss battles. And there was much gnashing of teeth. Fortunately, fate has conspired to give the original creators enough time (and copyright clearance) to pursue a new, true to the original sequel to Toejam & Earl, to be produced as an indie title and released digitally. Hopefully, if initial sales are good enough, they can get a port over to home consoles and handhelds, too. At the time of this writing, there is a Kickstarter for the project, which has attained about half of its $400,000 goal. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1578116861/toejam-and-earl-back-in-the-groove About goddamn time. It's looking good for the fundraiser, too- we may well be seeing this game start development by the end of the year. Lets all obsessively follow minute updates about the game and bask in stark realization of how terrible both James Rolfe and egoraptor are at playing it.
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Mar 3, 2015 01:56
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| # ? Apr 16, 2024 06:04 |
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