87th

@smoreon Just a wild, fascinating time for the industry all around, with all the diverse technology and a rapidly expanding userbase. On the PC, from Quake to Half-Life to Deus Ex, there was a radical new FPS practically every year that shifted the genre on its head again and again. The Game Boy Color was still getting new releases well after the launch of the Xbox.

I love when stuff like this is uncovered. Really takes you out of how these games have been appreciated for decades, and the kind of trends and fields of study that fascinated the designers who were building them. There was so much rapidly developing technology at the turn of the millennium, and designers didn't know which of them had real utility. Makes you think about Majora's Mask in an entirely different light.

Yeah, I think this is more likely down to how much harder it was for artists to find good reference material in the 80s than an overt nod to Akira. I'm sure Capcom looked at a lot of manga when drawing their fighting game sprites.

If you're interested in buying this as a cool SNES controller, you should take caution regarding compatibility. Whereas I'm used to buying game controllers from any region, I had to mod my PAL SNES to support Japanese Super Famicom controllers. I wouldn't be surprised if one-off prototypes required entirely unique hardware. Of course, something like this would be better placed in a museum than a personal gaming set-up.

I don't know whether this is a nitpick, or if it's significant, but there are a handful of PS2 titles available on PS5 thanks to its PS4 backwards compatibility (Ape Escape 2, Star Wars: Bounty Hunter, The Mark of Kri, etc.), but none so far have been published as native PS5 software.

I don't think those who are just calling them RPGs with no J ought to be corrected, but I don't think it's an unuseful distinction for fans discussing different games.

It's splitting hairs over genre definitions, which has gone on since the birth of media, but because there's a cultural aspect to the grouping, there's a little more sensitivity in its use. Western fans are happy to talk about manga and anime, while few in Japan see their country's media as something completely different from comics and cartoons.

If something can stand entirely on its own merits and gain mainstream appeal, it doesn't really matter which label the audience puts on it afterwards. People used to call Zelda an RPG, and I don't think I've seen anyone call it that in 25 years.

That's great PR. I hope people will support their other projects to make up for what they've lost on this one.

It's a really expensive pack on its own, though bizarrely, if you don't have the Egret II Mini yet, buying the bundle brings down the price significantly from just buying the Egret II Mini by itself. Definitely worth considering if you're a Taito fan who's been holding out.

@-wc- No, that's fair. I was thinking more of early PS1 releases, like Street Fighter Alpha and Gradius Deluxe, which were derided at the time for not being showcases of the PS1's power. Even Tekken 3 could be considered an arcade port, even if the PlayStation version was massively expanded.

@-wc- Sure, but I doubt many would place as much value on a 3-track racer as an RPG. I remember some late-release SNES games being fairly expensive. I think Donkey Kong Country 3 was £60 over here. That had a lot more to offer to value-conscious consumers than an arcade port, though. Even on PlayStation and Saturn, where the prices were evened out, the arcade games didn't sell nearly as well as bespoke console titles.

@carlos82 The SVP is cool, but it wasn't a viable foundation for a bunch of new Mega Drive projects. Virtua Racing carts were absurdly expensive, both for manufacturing and customers, and basically an act of PR desperation to prop up a console that had only ever been designed to replicate Sega's 1988 arcade games. Sega were flailing in every direction in '94, supporting the Master System, Game Gear, Mega Drive, Pico, Mega CD, 32X, Saturn and cutting-edge arcade games for different territories and hypothetical demographics. There was no chance of keeping all those plates spinning at once, and the SVP was one of their least sustainable experiments.

I think it's a very online attitude. If I'm grouping consoles from a certain time, a different phrase will typically come to mind (i.e. 16-bit consoles, early 2000s consoles, CD-based consoles, etc.). There's plenty of examples that don't fit neatly into one generation or the other. The Dreamcast was marketed as a rival to the PS2, Gamecube and Xbox, but due to its short shelf-life, it was effectively competing against the PS1 and N64. There were a swathe of consoles that claimed to be next-generation systems in the early 90s (CD-i, Jaguar, CD32, 3DO, 32X, etc.) but none of them survived long enough to compete against the PS1 when it started to catch on.

Aw, man. I like Race Drivin'. The framerate does make it really difficult, but it's got a lot of charm. The big loop-de-loop, elevated section and the cow you can run into all work to give me a bit of a soft spot for it. Impressive to see a standard non-Super FX SNES cart do all that stuff.

@ChromaticDracula I watched the Digital Foundry and Wulff Den videos on it. Game Boy games will play with the GBC colours by default, but there's options that reproduce the look of the Game Boy, Game Boy Pocket and Game Boy Light too. There's even a red one, which I guess is an homage to the Virtual Boy.