@crashbash It's nice that they're available and everything, but yeah i imagine the majority of westerners aren't fluent enough in japanese to properly enjoy a game that has an abundance of written text in it

@Zeebor15 listen, if all the king's horses and all the king's men can't resuscitate a sentient egg, what chance have these guys got?

Yeah the "take item A to location B to achieve C" mechanic is timeless (just look at the Resident Evil series), but even back in the day Dizzy quickly descended into generic/derivative fairytale tropes, straight up lifting established characters and stories and mashing then together. If you're going to do that in the current gaming landscape you need a more compelling hook, and definitely can't coast by on nostalgia alone.

The slop thickens...

Gonna throw them a colossal, armourog-enticing bone here, but do you imagine it's the Oliver Twins themselves that are seeking out this kind of generative trash, or are slop-peddlers coming to them and trying to upsell it to them? That's the only rational explanation I can think of.

@EarthboundBenjy Take your pick. Without each "worst" period, we wouldn't have so many "oh no, THIS time it's really good / it's not as terrible as we expected" titles that people forget about six weeks after they're released.

@jygsaw when the Bloody Roar games boot up and the announcer says the game's title, I feel like I'm about to play a Gordon Ramsay cooking game.

@Thad There's certainly a time and a place for meta silliness, it just needs to be used sparingly; when it's too prevalent, or worse, the main focus, it can become wearisome very quickly — and grinds the momentum of a show to a halt.

@CookieByte There's a very prevalent percieved type of humour that that era of post Rick and Morty styles of animated shows bring to the table, and I think presenting a show as a "Lower Decks-style animated comedy" as IGN posit in the opening sentence of their review excerpt severly undercuts it right out of the gate.

I think whoever was in charge of putting the trailer together should have done better to steer clear of the eye-rollingly cliche "knowing" humour that we've seen done to death the past few years, but I would hope that the show is balanced out to keep that type of stuff to a minimum.

@dodgykebaab I remember Robocod getting some phenomenally positive reviews back in the day and it was... decent enough, I guess, but couldn't hold a candle to the majority of Japanese platformers from the era

But does it have OonNLiIiInNeE LeEaAdErboOArDs?

I can't get past the soulless, dead-eyed expression on that cow's face.

Also the bald guy on the right fails the finger-count test

That game Karnov been too difficult to port.

@Agent_P yeah, that was definitely a way to use it to their advantage. Or just simple dithering on character portraits in games like Street Fighter, even with a fairly limited palette you could get some fantastic subtle gradiations in the shading.

@Quick_Man Once upon a time I might have been somewhat interested in a James Pond anthology collection, but I would be embarrassed to put a game with that cover imagery on my shelf.

@Soupbones For all your never-ending Amico drama, look no further.

@Deway you got by on skill and determination 🙃

@Daniel36 his eponymous revenge will be utterly lost on you, yes. And then you shall be the one who is saying "D'oh"

My thoughts exactly. I'm surprised there isn't more of a movement to manufacture new CRT displays. Do the components that go into them simply not exist anymore? Or would it be too expensive to custom create them?

Yeah there are posts on insta I see daily showing exactly this kind of artistry. You could of course argue that there's an appeal to crisp, clean pixel art, but that's absolutely not what artists of the time were striving toward, given the ultimate way in which CRTs displayed it.

@Bot_Bot_69 also it's not "pixel perfect" either, the physics are completely wrong, it's like the most basic Flash game using Manic Miner sprite assets

@Bot_Bot_69 they could have gone for a macabre, body horror aesthetic that'd be more in keeping with the vibe of the Miner Willy games. That bland, AI anime, Flash Animation look is so at odds with the anarchic, graffiti style of the original

Globaaal leeeeaderbooooards!

Just blow on it.

@slider1983 yeah Sonic 1 (well, the version I had at least) was definitely affected by it, so much so that when Sonic 2 was released, one of the things I thought they'd improved, adding to the "2-ness" of it all, was upping the overall speed of things — little did I realise that that was the intended speed of the first game

@slider1983 Ah yeah, that's a good point — many publishers rectified it later in the MD's life, but some of those early games really suffered from the 5/6 reduction

@sdelfin I always found it fascinating hearing the Mega CD version of Streets of Rage use the full, uncompressed clips of the characters' various grunts and shouts

@PKDuckman Yeah, M2 are one of the best retro devs out there, and they apparently got to where they are out of sheer passion for what they do, which really shows in their work, and I think it's criminal that the Sega Ages line is as limited as it is.

@h3s I had to google what that was — what a great roster of games were on that thing — where's THAT console collection release?

@AndyVGR or that the SNES version contained a super-bloody version of the game hidden behind an extremely complex set of criteria

@PKDuckman
Yeah it's a brilliant port, especially considering how early in the Mega Drive's life it came out, but I found that the arcade version played a little snappier, and the boss encounter music has a really cool seperate clavichord-sounding layer to it which they didn't replicate on the console port

I'm assuming this is why the arcade version never appears on any Sega compilations, or even as a standalone purchase, because the movie studios would presumably want a cut of the profits, or at least acknowledgment that those samples were nicked in the first place, which might land Sega in some murky legal water? Surely the statute of limitations has passed on a game from nearly 40 years ago?

I know it probably sounds a bit entitled, but i'd love them to be able to consolidate arcade/console versions of games like this and Ridge Racer, so that you can pick the version you want when launching the game

@Thad Clair Obscur was a breath of much-needed air because I was in and out of that game in a little over 30 hours. Unless you have a REALLY good reason for it, your game should not be pushing triple-digit amounts of hours.

Yeah Rebirth takes that design choice and cranks it up to 11. We're talking like 100+ hours to do the middle part of a story — and Sephiroth is the final boss, again. Kinda undercuts his enigmatic presence from the original to have him just be this recurring nuisance throughout the trilogy.

@Fighting_Game_Loser or re-release Out Run 2

Are these cabinets running real arcade hardware or are they just raspberry pi emulators with a steering wheel bolted on?

I have no idea what you would do with these. They weren't stories. The ideas behind them were incredibly thin. It's IP for the sake of IP & we keep seeing that fail.

A million percent; these were extremely primitive games, many of which would have had a plot bashed out at the eleventh hour just to have something compelling to put on the back of the box. You'd have just as much success adapting movies from random household objects or things found in the park.

I imagine they'll go back and forth over it.

Yeah, to echo a lot of the comments made already, i'm not at all thrilled about having the physical option removed entirely, but I'm not going to lose sleep over it. This generation has been kind of a damp squib for first party PlayStation titles, all told, and there's really nothing much else on the horizon that's doing it for me outside of the Tomb Raider and RE: Veronica remakes.

Almost all digital games I've purchased have been on sale — I was always consicous about long-time ownership, so getting them at a discount at least lessens the bitterness of swallowing that particular pill, should Sony decide to rescind the licence or whatever. I've never bought a first-party AAA digitally, but even if I did, I would certainly never pay full price for it.

It's also a bit unrealistic to make any rash decisions on boycotting Sony (and lets see how that pans out amongst the broader span of casual gamers who neither acnowledge nor care that discs are going away), until we actually see what the PS6 manifests as.

It's-a me, Soniccio!

Professional Sports Authenticator (PSA) 9.6 A++

What will prevent them from taking more "rare" items next month and asking for three pluses? One hundred pluses?

I hadn't heard about Wata (a name that still makes me cringe whenever I hear it) in a while — I thought they had quietly buggered off?

Which hand? The one he took from a human corpse or the disembodied two floating on his hips?

Good to see Ugly Sonic still getting work

Seamless collision on that climbing animation, there.

@Right_Said_Brett My brain went to the exact same place

@Hexapus Yeah, Strafefox puts out some awesome retrospective/behind the curtain videos. I do miss the old voiceover narrator Chase McCaskill though, he has this super crisp old school radio style voice that really went well with the visuals

Only the problems inherent to the isometric view, which can make precision jumps tricky to judge or obfuscate visibility of key platforms, feel a little unfair at times, but this is admittedly a problem with the original game, too.

Yeah you could haemorrhage lives by mistiming a jump over a particular trap (those little thatch-roof hay bale-looking things were a constant pain), which would make the game unwinnable if Head or Heels were to lose them all.

@woody-cool The Amstrad version had a really well-designed, atmospheric and subtle soundtrack — walking around and falling had their own weird little quirky sounds, and the short bursts of music between areas that would steadily change as you got further into the game really gave a feeling of progression

I'm starting to think the R in LRG stands for "Resources"

It's bad enough that gen-eh aye imagery exists at all, but can people with itchy-trigger pitchforks just calm their collective tits for five minutes before they start attacking hard working human artists?

Nice — now if they release a range of Um Jammer Lammy gear I would be all over that

I forgot Diane Youdale was in Games World — if they'd made a Streets of Rage movie back in 1995 she would have made a perfect Blaze Fielding