We had to do something special for the 150th episode of our podcast, the DreamPod. Well, turns out that Tom is good friends with gaming industry veteran and design director of indie powerhouse Bitmap Bureau, Mike Tucker, and getting him on the pod was long overdue.
Joined by the foremost expert on Giant Killers in the Western World™, Kev, we look back at Mike's career in the games industry — from playtesting classics like Carmageddon at SCi Games, to his time at io Productions working on the cancelled Dreamcast sheep-herding title Stampede and spending many gruelling hours trying to break Giant Killers (spoiler: it broke him), right through to his present-day work at Bitmap Bureau creating critically acclaimed titles such as Terminator 2D: No Fate, and Xeno Crisis, the latter of which placed third in our 2024 Top 25 Dreamcast Indie Games community vote.
You can listen to this episode of the DreamPod and all of our previous episodes on Buzzsprout, along with all good podcast platforms.
It's been almost four years since The Dreamcast Junkyard last attended a live gaming event, and that is definitely four years too many. It was back in 2018 that we attended Play Expo Blackpool and hung out with those lovely chaps Adam Koralik and Dan 'DJ Slope' Ibbertson; and to be honest it seems like a lifetime ago. This is set to be rectified in December 2022 when The Dreamcast Junkyard attends Nottingham Video Games Expo in...erm...Nottingham, UK.
Adam was impressed with Kev's home made T-shirt.
Taking place over the weekend of 17th & 18th December (which is also the weekend of the 2022 World Cup final, footy fans) at the Richard Herrod Centre, NottsVGE is a fairly intimate event but one which is bristling with the cream of the UK gaming scene. Amongst the confirmed attendees are WAVE Game Studios, SEGA Powered, gamesreup_, It's Much More, SEGA Mags, Rare, and The Retro Hour and many others too; alongside a whole host of special guests and traders selling gaming gear. There's also a bar. Important detail, that.
Tried to make this lot look as sexy as possible.
Alas, this thing was a lost cause.
As mentioned, several of the Junkyard's podcast and editorial crew will be there manning our dedicated stand (where you can play some Dreamcast games or just generally loiter and chat if you so wish), and we've teamed up with those lovely folks at Bitmap Bureau to run a pretty cool little competition.
The rules are simple: play a game of the excellent Xeno Crisis and record your highest possible score using the Dreamcast Twin Stick controller. If you place among the top scorers on the day, you'll bag an awesome prize! We have Xeno Crisis T-shirts and 6 copies of the game to give away on several formats (Mega Drive, Dreamcast and Neo-Geo CD), as well as a copy of the Xeno Crisis OST and a wad of Xeno Crisis promotional postcards.
If you're not familiar with Xeno Crisis, we reviewed it here at the Junkyard upon release for the Dreamcast in 2020, and Mike Phelan was pretty impressed with what the sci-fi themed top-down shooter had to offer:
"I'll be playing Xeno Crisis for some time, and I look forward to each and every re-entry into that damned colony and it's ugly denizens...Because it's fun. Bloody, silly, exciting fun. And that, really, is the greatest compliment I can pay any game. Indie Dreamcast developers - a new challenger has arrived in the arena, and it's here to show you how it's done."
Big thanks to Mike Tucker at Bitmap Bureau for supplying these prizes. If you haven't got your tickets already, head over to the NottsVGE website or give the event a follow on Twitter.
We're only in attendance on Saturday 17th December so if you want to be in with a chance of either meeting Kev and seeing/touching/sniffing his glorious bootleg T-shirt, or bagging one of our Xeno Crisis prizes, then you know what to do. We look forward to seeing you there!
It's hard to know whether even the most optimistic of us would of believed that, more than 15 years after it's inception, the Dreamcast Junkyard would still be reviewing new titles for the console which we all share a passion for. Yet here we are, in a year many of us believed we'd be living on the moon and driving flying cars, still hungering after more releases, and our appetites being sated with a steady supply of some of the finest Indie releases we've ever had. Our childhood fantasies of space-age dwellings and hoverboards, neon lit utopias and colonisation of other planets may not have been met - the steady diet of science fiction fueled expectations of our youth replaced instead with social media, disappointing Sega announcements and a global pandemic - but our consolation prize seems to be an incredibly healthy independent development scene, far removed from the 'yet another Shmup' days of old.
I can only imagine Bitmap Bureau grew up with the same dizzying expectations of our future. For them, the future was clearly 'out there', rather than 'stay at home', and in this new release for the Dreamcast, it seems mankind has indeed ventured away from our terrestrial origins, and made a life for ourselves amongst the stars. Of course, for every Utopian prediction that science-fiction gave us, there was a darker, grimmer dystopia waiting around the corner. For every Star Trek, there's an Aliens, after all. It's safe to say, that the universe that Bitmap Bureau believes mankind will inhabit may have just a touch of the latter - even the title of this new release hints at that. Xeno Crisis - not 'Xeno family picnic' you'll notice, paints a universe in which the Earth's best and brightest must deal with a threat of the extra-terrestrial kind. A distress call is received, and our guys at a research station seem to be dropping like flies due to a serious bit of unwanted alien violence. Step forward Commander Darius and his elite marines, our best hope at beating this off-world menace, now tasked with taking on whatever nasties the galaxy throws at them.
It's a classic sci-fi scenario, one we've probably heard many times before, but there's a reason for it's popularity - we all want to be the saviour of the planet against a horde of ugly, puss-ridden, vomit belching aliens, whilst shooting a completely infeasible amount of ammunition and shouting out Arnie-like quotes in a terrible Austrian accent. It's violent, it's action packed, it's all shouty, sweary and loud, and most of all, it's bloody good fun.
Bitmap Bureau promised to deliver this with Xeno Crisis during a highly successful kickstarter back in 2017, with plans to release the game on various consoles, both current gen and classic, and as well as bringing us glorious 80's action flick silliness, it was going to take a not-inconsiderate amount of inspiration from classic twin stick shooters of old as well. It felt like it was ticking all the right boxes, and now it's the Dreamcast's turn to experience the games delights after various other versions had their time to shine. The important question though, as always, is, well... is it any good?
Bitmap Bureau have announced via a Kickstarter update that the long-awaited Dreamcast version of their 16-bit styled, Alien-inspired shooter has finally gone gold! This means that the game has been finished and production is due to start imminently; and means it will undoubtedly join the line up of Dreamcast games heading our way in 2020. For the uninitiated, Xeno Crisis was a funded on Kickstarter back in 2018 and the Dreamcast version was added as a stretch goal alongside the standard Mega Drive, Switch, PS4 and Xbox releases; with a NEO-Geo port also on the way.
We've kept an eye on Xeno Crisis ever since it was announced, and several members of the team here at the Junkyard have played the game to death on other formats...but the wait for the Dreamcast version is almost finally over.
Mike Tucker of Bitmap Bureau says in his May 2020 update:
"We’re sorry that this update has been delayed several times, but these updates often take a few days to put together and we thought we’d push on whilst the development of the Dreamcast version was going well, and the good news is that it has gone gold and has been sent for manufacturing! We’ve tested the gold build thoroughly on all of the Dreamcast variations we have, using a range of controllers and peripherals, and everything seems extremely solid - thanks in particular to Tom Charnock and Mike Phelan of The Dreamcast Junkyard for supplying us with various bits for testing."
- Mike Tucker, Bitmap Bureau
In the name of transparency, the various bits mentioned include an Ascii control pad and a Dreamcast Twin Stick controller, the latter of which can be seen in the video Mike posted on Kickstarter and YouTube:
Personally, I've only played the Switch version of Xeno Crisis so far, and it really is a corking retro style shooter. As alluded to earlier, it does lean heavily on the 'space marines kicking alien ass' tropes laid down in popular works of fiction we probably don't need to name check; and for that it should be applauded. It's a no-nonsense nostalgia trip, which takes you back to when games were hard as nails and there were no save points.
The premise is a simple one - enter the infested base, shoot alien scum in the head, rescue civilians and escape with your life. Power-ups and additional weapons can be collected along the way, and the stats of your chosen marine can be boosted between stages to help level the playing field when taking the fight to the xenomorph hoards and their huge end of level overlords. It's rollicking good fun and is tough as old boots...and that's part of the appeal.
The Dreamcast version in particular looks to make great use of the unique features of the system, with VMU screen logos (above), support for VGA monitors and the aforementioned Twin Stick and Ascii pad compatibility. It looks like we won't have long to wait until Xeno Crisis starts landing in GD-ROM trays around the world, and we'll be sure to give it a thorough play test here at the Junkyard when it hits.
Excited for another new Dreamcast title? Have you played Xeno Crisis on other formats? Let us know in the comments or on Twitter.
Of all the aspects of being a Dreamcast fan, discovering lost and cancelled games is by far the most fascinating to me. Yes, the games we actually got are numerous; and a large proportion of them are pretty darn good, but the merest glimpse at titles that never made it give us a tiny peek into an alternative reality. A reality where the Dreamcast was the commercial success it could have been, and a reality in which all those titles that were unceremoniously shelved received full retail releases.
There are some cancelled games that are widely known about and that have even been released in some form or another. Half-Life, Propeller Arena, Hellgate, Geist Force and PBA Bowling are famous examples; and more recently titles such as Agartha, Deer Avenger and Millennium Racer: Y2K Fighters have shown us that there are still lost games waiting to be discovered. We can now add another to that ever growing list: Stampede.
You'd be forgiven for scratching your head at this point, as Stampede is likely a title you've never heard of. But there's a reason to be excited about this one - Stampede for Dreamcast was running well on Dreamcast hardware when it was cancelled, and now a playable build has found its way into the hands of Xeno Crisis developer Bitmap Bureau. What's even more interesting, is that the guys who make up Bitmap Bureau (developers of the upcoming Xeno Crisis) were part of the development studio that originally worked on Stampede all those years ago.
With this in mind, there's a very real chance that Stampede could finally see the light of day, nearly 20 years after it was canned. But what exactly is Stampede? And why should you care? Read on for the answers, and an exclusive interview with the game's creative director...
Xeno Crisis from Bitmap Bureau is a top down shooter planned for the Sega Mega Drive, and while we were aware of this intriguing campaign we didn't cover it as...well, it's a Mega Drive game. That looks like it's about to change though, as Xeno Crisis recently smashed through its Kickstarter goal of £20,000 and has had a Dreamcast port and a two-player mode added as stretch goals. Naturally, with this news we have backed the game (a standalone pledge of £30 secures a Dreamcast copy in NTSC-J style case), and hopefully the £35,000 total for this will be met.
"Xeno Crisis is a new, original title for the Sega Mega Drive / Genesis which will be released both as a physical cartridge and also as a downloadable ROM. At its core, it's an arena shooter that takes inspiration from the likes of Smash TV, Contra, Mercs, Granada, Alien Syndrome, Zombies Ate My Neighbours, Chaos Engine, and Shock Troopers. "A Dreamcast version of Xeno Crisis is something we discussed some time ago, and given both the phenomenal reception of the Kickstarter campaign and feedback from the community, we felt like now was the time to commit to it! "We’ve added a new pledge for those of you who just want the Dreamcast version. Backers of the physical editions of Xeno Crisis will be able to add £20 to their pledge to receive the Dreamcast version."
- Bitmap Bureau on Kickstarter
So, does the addition of a Dreamcast stretch goal interest you? Or are you totally burned out on Dreamcast Kickstarters by this point? Let us know in the comments, in our Facebook group or on Twitter. Oh, and you can find Xeno Crisis on Kickstarter here.
