Next month, Brazil will witness the arrival of a new magazine, called Old Gamer. This magazine is aimed at some old computer platforms, including MSX, very famous in Brazil. Other platforms featured in the magazine are Arcade, Atari, Dreamcast, Master System, Mega Drive, Neo Geo, NES, SNES and various others. These make up for a very wide era of gaming. To have our MSX between these is of course something truly special!

This fresh bimonthly magazine will be targeting at collectors of old systems and games. The first issue features MSX right away: Marcelo Tini, of MSX History was interviewed. The launch of this magazine will be in the first fortnight of May.

Relevant link: Gamer.br

Today, Retroworks released a port of the classic Konami platformer King's Valley for Spectrum 48k and Spectrum 128k. This port was programmed by Manuel Pazos (Guillian) and Jaime Tejedor (Metalbrain), and it features the same gameplay, stages and music of the original. The graphics have been ported by Francisco Javier Velasco (Pagantipaco). The game can be found on the Retroworks website, including a complete map and a user manual. A video of this port can be seen on YouTube, right here.

Relevant link: Retroworks - King's Valley port

Overlooked for a while, yet still interesting for Apple Macintosh owners: there's a new version of the excellent MSX BGM player KSS-X available. This new version has a lot of stability improvements and full support not only for KSS files, but also for MGS, MBM, MPK and OPX files!

Relevant link: KSS-X

..is Carmen Sandiago? No! But we're still reasonably close, as SLotman is now seeking all of us, instead of just Carmen. Inspired by a similar forum thread from another community, SLotman decided open a forum thread inviting MSX users around the world to pinpoint them self onto a Google map. If all of us join this initiative we will get a perfect overview of where everyone lives. Perhaps someone's living nearby while you didn't even know about it!

Adding yourself to this map is quite easy. First you'll need to be logged in with a GMail account. Then click this link, click on Edit on the panel at the left, the icons will show up. Find your location on this planet and drag the pinpoint icon to your position. Click the icon to change its contents and click Done. If everything went well, you should now be on the map!

Relevant link: MSX'ers on Google Maps

Source: Wii's World

La Mulana, a platform game heavily inspired by Konami's MSX classics King's Valley and King's Valley 2, was released for Windows years ago. Now the game is coming to WiiWare! You can watch a video of La Mulana for Wii on YouTube. Time ago a discussion arose on our active forums about the possibility of porting La Mulana to MSX.

Relevant link: La Mulana

Source: IGN Wireless

Dotemu and D4 Enterprise have put their hands together and ported the Sega Master System version of Golvellius to the iPhone. Although the game has not been released as of yet, a small preview can already be seen over here. Previously, D4E released several MSX games on iPhone, being Aleste (English version), Chima Chima, Eggy (available for free!), Nyan Puzzle and Relics.

Relevant link: Golvellius for iPhone - preview on IGN

Source: ComputerAndVideoGames

Hideo Kojima, the creative mind behind the classic Metal Gear who has just released MGS4, has stated that 'the next level of gaming" isn't yet possible on the current-gen hardware. According to Hideo, sound and visuals could be far more interesting and dynamic in the future. For instance by having plants in the background grow after you've given them water, rather than having pre-programmed and static backgrounds.

While the article was referring to consoles, the idea is of course perfectly adaptable to MSX as well, be it with 2d graphics. Especially a Graphics9000 would be a good candidate for dynamic backgrounds with its thousands of available tiles.

Furthermore, according to the article, rumors say that Hideo is working on a new game based on the RPG The Snatcher!

Relevant link: CVG - Kojima: "Next level of gaming" not yet possible

A number of days ago, TouchArcade reported that Toki Tori will get an iPhone release. Toki Tori, by game studio TwoTribes, is otherwise known to us as Fony's Eggbert, an MSX2 game released in 1994. This platform-puzzle hybrid was released as Toki Tori in 2001 for the Gameboy Color and later on for Wii. This Wii version eventually got nominated for Best WiiWare Game and Best Puzzle Game at IGN’s 2008 game awards.

Relevant link: Touch Arcade (contains a video of the Wii version!)

Source: Insert Credit

Sadly, the financial crisis is also seriously affecting game publishers around the world. Last month, Jaleco Holding sold its game department to the online gaming company Game Yarou. According to wikipedia, Jaleco Holding will remain active in real estate and securities business. On MSX, Jaleco released such games as Exerion, Saint Runner, Snake Runner and Top Roller.

Relevant link: Jaleco Games website

All Metal Gear fans around the world hold their breath waiting for upcoming Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the patriots (planned release date is 12/06/2008), a new installment in the highly popular Metal Gear series, which originally took off on the MSX in 1987.

While waiting for the release, GameTrailers decided to heat up the interest by publishing the Metal Gear Restrospective trailer, made out of 2 parts. Part One covers the 8-bit era, and 2nd one (to be published soon) will talk about MGS on PlayStation and later installments of the game.

To many, it may come as a surprise that Hideo Kojima has had a troubled period in his developing career, but that's exactly what happened. The original Metal Gear was a last attempt to save Kojima's career. The idea of a "sneaking mission" game, where the player isn't encouraged to kill everything on sight was a daring move ... and the rest of this concept became MSX-history!

The trailer contains:

• story about Kojima's involvment in Penguin Adventure creation
• side-by-side comparison of MSX2 and NES versions of Metal Gear
  
• Snake's Revenge coverage
• Metal Gear 2 - Solid Snake coverage

Relevant link: Metal Gear Retrospective - Part One