First New Dune Film Trailer

Anyone who’s been to my big Dune Games website or visited this blog or my youtube channel and see me cover Dune games and get excited over the awesome 3 hour HD fan cut of David Lynch’s 1984 cult classic Dune film then you would know I’m a big Dune fan haha!

I’m also a huge fan of Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049 sequel so I CAN’T WAIT to see what he does with the Dune universe (especially as once again he’s got a stunning cast of actors to work with). And after seeing those awesome Vanity Fair teaser photos the other day we finally now have our first trailer! Super exciting! Footage looks promising but need to see more to judge properly haha!

SEGA MegaZone Preservation Archive – Update 1

Figured it was time to post an update on my SEGA MegaZone Preservation Archive project as finally my efforts have netted a new addition.

Original Project Post (with tracking list of missing & found issues):
https://blakessanctum.wordpress.com/2019/12/29/sega-megazone-preservation-archive-needs-your-help/

An awesome fellow named Colin saw my posts, contacted me over email and informed me that he has two MegaComp issues (pre-MegaZone Issue 2 and 4) and the first MegaZone along with several more early issues from 1990 (Issue 5 and what we believe is Issue 7 and 9). He’s sent me pictures of all the covers however so far he’s only scanned one mag for me and I haven’t heard from him for a while since sadly 😦 so fingers crossed he does the others eventually. That one mag was MegaComp Issue 2 and sure enough it mentions the name change from MegaCom (Issue 1) which confirms the NLA records. I’ve added it to The MegaZone Archive !

Another fellow recently posted a comment in one of my help threads about this search claiming that Issue 56 was not really the last one and that a few months later another issue appeared and that a letter he wrote to them was in it. I find that hard to believe as Issue 56 clearly states that it’s the last plus I was a subscriber and the only thing I got sent to me from them after Issue 56 was a cheque in the mail refunding me the rest of my subscription lol!

On and yet another kind fellow sent me pictures of some sort of Sega bucket (called Mega Booster Pak) promotion that was associated with MegaZone. I can’t see the word MegaZone written on them anywhere so I’m not sure about adding them to the archive at this stage. Maybe they were more of a Sega Club thing?

And finally I also saw some more little supplementary ‘Mini Megazone’ fold out booklets (similar to my one pictured below) on ebay recently. However the seller wanted 80 bucks EACH for them though so no one bought them. In the end I just took his pictures from the sale, maybe I’ll fashion them into something for the archives.

Big thank you to everyone that has come forward over the months since my first post. Hopefully one day we’ll get those final issues backed up and preserved! Make sure you visit the The MegaZone Archive to see these latest additions.

Civilization 2: Command & Conquer Mod – Dev Diaries 1-2

Regular visitors to my blog may have seen on my What Is Blake Playing Right NOW? page that I’ve been quite busy with Cilization 2 modding as part of the HUGE new WIP Civilization section and youtube series I’ve been working on for ages.

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After months working on a huge Heroes of Might & Magic 2 Civ2 scenario I decided to turn my attention over to one of my other favourite franchises for some more fun Civ2 scenarios, the Command & Conquer and Red Alert universe! I started coming up with some pretty crazy ideas for huge Red Alert 2 Siege of New York scenario where you’ll be battling it out in city streets between huge sky scrapers however despite learning a lot from working on the HoMM2 scenario I wasn’t quite game enough to start that just yet. I’d also been thinking about a dark and moody scenario set in the C&C Tiberium universe and noticed that a fellow named Wonx2150 had already made a scenario in that universe but just hadn’t really done any proper graphics for it so I decided to take the easier route and remaster his scenario first to build up more experience before taking on the big Red Alert 2 scenario.

I’ve created a ModDB page for this project with dev diaries covering stages of development. Figured I’d post them here too so here’s the first two! Stay tuned for dev diaries for the Red Alert 2 scenario here in the future too! EDIT: Red Alert 2 scenario dev diaries now posted HERE

Dev Diary 01 – New terrain & units for the Civilization 2 – Command & Conquer Scenario:
In this first dev diary I look at changing Civ2’s terrain and cities to look like C&C2 as well as importing some cool new units.
https://www.moddb.com/mods/civilization-2-command-conquer-scenario/news/new-terrain-units

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Dev Diary 02 – Finishing all terrain & units for the Civilization 2 – Command & Conquer Scenario:
In the second dev diary I ask for some fan input and finish off importing all the new C&C unit graphics.
https://www.moddb.com/mods/civilization-2-command-conquer-scenario/news/finishing-all-terrain-units

Starflight: The Remaking of a Legend dev diaries 6-10

As a big Starflight series fan I’ve posted about this great project on my blog before but I thought I’d share some of the dev diaries I’ve been making for Marvin’s ‘Starflight: The Remaking of a Legend‘ project! This Starflight project is a new modern fan remake of the original 1987 PC space exploration game loved by many back in the day (although many fans like myself actually discovered Starflight in the 90s with the awesome Sega Genesis/Megadrive console remake). Marvin is a veteran professional software and game developer who has worked for multiple well known companies such as Bethesda Softworks and Rainbow Studios, on popular games such as ‘Elder Scrolls Redguard’ and ‘Cars: The Video Game’. As a fun side project, Marvin has decided to use his years of experience to remake his favorite childhood game with modern graphics via Unity. This game is open-source and freely available on GitHub, should anyone wish to help. Playable builds are being released on the project website and occasionally on IndieDB too.

While Marvin has been on an extended break from the Starflight Remake Project (due to his business, Covid-19 & other fun RL stuff) I’ve been helping him out and combining his old blog posts into Dev Diaries on IndieDB. If you want to reminisce or you didn’t see how it all begun then here’s another 5 dev diaries.

Previous dev diaries HERE.

Dev Diary 6: Completing the Arth Starport

Cyberpunk 2077 Night City Wire – Behind The Scenes Video Series

Even though this old retro gamer will need a new computer to play it lol, I’ve been very much looking forward to Cyberpunk 2077 being released and have been drooling over all the videos CD Projekt Red have been releasing on youtube. Eg just look at the amazing views of the huge city in this one!

UPDATE: Night City Wire 4 & 5 posted HERE.

Over the last few months they’ve been doing a really good behind the scenes series called ‘Night City Wire’ with heaps of amazing new gameplay footage. Here’s the first few episodes!

Immortal Realms: Vampire Wars (HoMM like game)

I just saw this new dark Transylvanian vampire HoMM like game called Immortal Realms: Vampire Wars for PC, PS4, Xbox, & Switch in one of my recent PC Gamer mags. In their preview they talked about it’s closeness in gameplay to Heroes of Might & Magic and gothic art style to Disciples. I also notice it has a Eador & AoW-Planetfall like territory/province system, a research system (called legacy), and it looks like most of the game’s mechanics (empire, heroes, spells etc) revolve around an interesting card deck system and all the cards have these cool animations. Looks like there’s no gorgeous HoMM style city screen where you build buildings but in the main map view you can develop provinces with some interesting building upgrades.

I just checked and the game got released a couple of weeks ago on Steam & GoG. Metacritic score looks pretty good at 71%, steam score is not as good although most of the negative reviews point to bugs and AI issues that will hopefully be sorted in patches (Kalypso shouldn’t pull the plug on them as there’s console releases coming so they’ll wanna iron out all the bugs). No multiplayer which doesn’t bother me but I know it might bother others so thought I’d mention it.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1024480/Immortal_Realms_Vampire_Wars/
https://www.gog.com/game/immortal_realms_vampire_wars

Here’s an old preview video of it.. I love that foggy night map shown around the 2min mark. I remember preview videos of HoMM5 had undead foggy dark night time maps that excited me but the final game just had the usual not so foggy day time or dusk undead maps. I can also see myself spending ages just gawking at all the card animations instead of playing the game haha.

Blake’s Sanctum passes 60,000 visitors!

Blake’s Sanctum just hit the big 60,000 visitors mark less than a year after I posted about hitting the 50,000 mark, which shows that despite not much growth of content on the site the visitors keep coming to enjoy my tributes to retro games and fan projects so thanks everyone. 🙂

Also this blog is about to hit the 35,000 hits mark which considering it was about to hit 25,000 in my last post a year ago then that’s a good sign it’s also doing well as well and pushing around 10,000 visitors a year like the main site.

Just like I said in that last post around a year ago sadly my big new WIP Civilization section that was meant to be a 6mth project has gone on another year (meaning we’re at the 2.5 year mark now) and STILL shows no signs of being done anytime soon lol. Has really been bothering me lately as I really got in over my head with this section. There’s just TOO much content out there and TOO many mod projects I wanted to personally make myself. However I refuse to give up and let all that work go to waste so I shall keep at it! Hopefully the first of the videos in the series will star to appear on my Youtube Channel and I can finalise their respective web page tributes too.