Announcing Towers II Enhanced Stargazer Edition

[Songbird]

Songbird is excited to announce the upcoming release of Towers II Enhanced Stargazer Edition for the Jaguar. The game was fully remastered by the original development team at JV Games, and includes numerous features such as improved frame rate, 16-bit CRY graphics with light-sourcing, in-game audio for NPC encounters, and more storage for game saves. A full list of improvements available at the Songbird information page. Can't wait to share this with Jag fans!

 

Coming to the Jaguar in August 2023. Pre-orders open June 28.

 

 

 

Pre-orders are open now! First 300 units will all have "1ST RUN" printed on the box and sticker.

 

Signature Edition ($129.95):

• August release target
• Limited to 50 units
• Clear shell (only way to get clear shell for Towers II Enhanced)
• "1st Run" printed on box and cart sticker
• JV Games 3" sticker
• Towers II Enhanced acrylic pin
• Full-color numbered postcard with special message from JV Games and hand-signed by them

 

 

Standard Edition ($99.95):

• September release target
• Limited to 250 units
• Black / dark gray shell
• "1st Run" printed on box and cart sticker

 

Edited June 28, 2023 by Songbird

[neo_rg]

Looks nice, any idea of a ball park price? 

[Songbird]

Not finalized yet, but not more than $125. Our costs have gone up a lot in just the past year or two, making this our highest-cost game to produce in the last 10 years.

[TrekMD]

Very cool.  Looking forward to this!

[Rick Dangerous]

Nice.  Price seems very steep.

 

It's kind of my bone to pick with Songbird as of late.  All the games are $10, $20 or more than the AA store.  WHY? 

[Machine]

1 hour ago, Songbird said:

Not finalized yet, but not more than $125. Our costs have gone up a lot in just the past year or two, making this our highest-cost game to produce in the last 10 years.

 

$125 for just the game? Are you including anything besides the cart, instructions, box?

 

 

 

Edited April 6, 2023 by Machine

[+CyranoJ]

2 hours ago, Machine said:

 

$125 for just the game? Are you including anything besides the cart, instructions, box?

 

 

 

 

Thoughts and prayers?

[omf]

3 hours ago, Rick Dangerous said:

Nice.  Price seems very steep.

 

It's kind of my bone to pick with Songbird as of late.  All the games are $10, $20 or more than the AA store.  WHY? 

Good job your not in the UK then isnt it, or you would have another £50+ on top of that to cough up in 'boris' tax

 

and what recompence do i see from the government with all the extra acquired cash?  FA, thats what!!!!

 

there have been muliple games that i havent purchased that i would have, but excessive costs / shipping / tax, leaves a rather bitter taste in the mouth when you get the final bill to get the item.

[+CyranoJ]

23 minutes ago, omf said:

Good job your not in the UK then isnt it, or you would have another £50+ on top of that to cough up in 'boris' tax

 

Nearly $200 AUD before you even add postage.  Ship it with inflated helium baloons inside the box to reduce the weight

 

125 United States Dollar equals

187.33 Australian Dollar

[+Saturn]

Awesome! Count me in.

Can't wait to re play through this now.

[+Sauron]

No disrespect meant towards Songbird, but a price of over $100 would have me hitting the brakes too. If it's really so expensive to manufacture complete Jag games w/ box & manual nowadays, I'm wondering if it would start to make more sense to look into focusing on digital distribution, especially with the JagGD now being a thing. Standalone carts will never go away as not everyone owns a GD and some people want the full boxed experience, but keeping that as the sole distribution method is really limiting things in what is already a pretty small market. I think it's high time that our existing publishers really start exploring this option. 

[Goochman]

Is this the same game/story as the original with enhanced visuals or are their gameplay changes?

[PMMS]

125!!!!!! sorry it's too expensive for me 😞

[+madman]

1 hour ago, Goochman said:

Is this the same game/story as the original with enhanced visuals or are their gameplay changes?

Did you try clicking the link in the first post?

[Songbird]

To be clear, everyone will be able to pre-order the game for less than $125. I expect the pre-order price to be $99.95. That was always my intended price point, but then in the past couple months I got hit with several quotes and invoices that were substantially higher than even just 1-2 years ago, which worried me a bit. I finally spent a few hours last night documenting all my costs for this release, and the $99.95 pre-order price looks doable. I hope people realize for any new Songbird Jaguar release, it takes somewhere around 75-100 units of sales before I make any profit, and that's with paying myself zero for any time spent on manufacturing, testing, proofreading, designing print files, shipping orders, and so on. Plus most recent Jaguar releases only sell 150-200 units for a popular game, and much less for an unpopular one.

 

Even after 25 years, Songbird is still just a hobby business for me and not a significant source of income; if it was, I would have quit my day job years ago.  But I am happy to be a part of this community and will do my best to keep making great games available for Atari fans.

 

I also want to say how much I appreciate what Al, CJ, Anderlex, Will T, Phoboz, Krauser, and others have done for recent releases. It is fantastic to see passionate fans creating high-caliber games and packaging and graphics and music for the ol' cat. Keep up the good work!
 

[Songbird]

2 hours ago, Goochman said:

Is this the same game/story as the original with enhanced visuals or are their gameplay changes?

This is a remastered version of the original game, so it's the same core game/story as before. There have been changes to monster behaviors, NPC behaviors, and even some tweaks to puzzles and side quests, but it's essentially a remaster of the original.

[+jeremiahjt]

$125 seems steep, as does even $99.95. The biggest problem is the name of the game. It should be Towers II: Plight of the Stargazer-Enhanced Edition.

 

All that being said, I am a buyer still. If I miss out on the $99.95 pre-order then I will buy at the $125 full price.  I quite enjoy playing Towers II, and I want to give this one a try.

[7800JAGFAN]

I'm on board, the price is no issue.  There is a small amount of people making games for the Atari Jaguar and I imagine a lot to risk and money invested to make these things happen.  SongBirds stuff is great and has always had great customer service.  As a fan of "vintage" consoles and owner of a Gamedrive, I still prefer carts to roms for the experience of opening the box, reading the manual and actually having a cart.  Kind of like Vinyl vs Streaming.  So I'll gladly pre-order this and may buy a second for a friend just to support products like this.   Really, anybody who has been collecting for a while $125 is very reasonable I think.  Who would have thought we would get stuff like a excellent Metroid clone(Asteroite) for the Jaguar almost 30 years later,  this kind of dedication to a "dead" console is something we are lucky to have.  Just my opinion.  

Edited April 7, 2023 by 7800JAGFAN
Left something out.

[+Sauron]

$99.95 is a little more reasonable, but I think the point I made above still stands. It would probably make far more business sense for publishers to get into the digital distribution game, even if they're still making boxed copies. Not everyone has the kind of disposable income to drop $100+ on Jaguar releases. The hardware prices for the console are crazy enough as it is. Having a digital copy available for purchase at a reasonable price would be far more profitable and require less work than having to make 100+ copies of carts along with boxes and manuals and hope they all eventually sell.

 

 

[ZylonBane]

Hopefully there's been a relook of the game strings as as well, because I remember some really goofy typos in the original Jag version.

 

EDIT: Just took a look at the YouTube video, and that italic text at the bottom is barely legible. It looks like...

A-meornotion

B-Contmuetion

 

In the original this text was light-on-dark instead of beige-on-beige so it was a lot easier to figure out. Comparing to the original, I can see one of the aforementioned typos-- "incarnation" starts with a lowercase letter, but "Continuation" starts with an uppercase letter. You guys should probably fix that.

Edited April 7, 2023 by ZylonBane

[Kroll]

Exactly, the price of USD 99.95 is already more reasonable. It would also be a very good solution to be able to order games from Songbird also within Europe, shipping costs are very often the main obstacle. It would be great to be able to have the aforementioned Asteroite game to buy in Sweden, or GD in Germany. I would have liked in the past to order games from AtariAge as well as Songbird for example, for two shipments I would have easily bought another game for Jaguar.

[+af0l]

20 hours ago, Kroll said:

Exactly, the price of USD 99.95 is already more reasonable. It would also be a very good solution to be able to order games from Songbird also within Europe, shipping costs are very often the main obstacle. It would be great to be able to have the aforementioned Asteroite game to buy in Sweden, or GD in Germany. I would have liked in the past to order games from AtariAge as well as Songbird for example, for two shipments I would have easily bought another game for Jaguar.

Another vote for an EU source for these releases. The customs and shipping are starting to really annoy me...

[hutnutmen]

Living in Finland 😶 Not gonna be cheap..again, but i'm gonna purchase it anyway. Thanx Carl for doing this possible!

[hutnutmen]

By the way original Towers II was last release Atari Jaguar with Breakout 2000 in 1997 in Finland. Maybe Brain Dead 13 cd and Primal Rage too?

[Shaggy the Atarian]

I'd love to see some digital distribution or SD card options for the JagGD as Sauron mentioned above but I'm happy to support this one regardless the price (I guess running an arcade has made me a little bit of a snob in that regard). I still need to grab a few of the other more recent releases though.