Asaki

@Sketcz Long time no scratch, but I was just gifted some complete scans of Series 2, so I think we have everything now :0

...I just have to put it all together, haven't touched it in a while...

https://www.mediafire.com/file/vjuhg594ykchqhx/NES_Cards_S2.zip/file

@Sketcz I've been playing the Wiimake a bit recently, and once you get past the hand-holding, it's really not so bad.
I mean it's not the original, but it has some good qualities. The motion controls are very nice, and there are some enjoyable sniping and stealth areas (although if an enemy catches you, you might as well reload a save, because there doesn't seem to be any way to go back to stealth after the alarms go off).
The mocap work and the graphics are quite impressive for a Wii title, and there are interesting updates to the story from the original screenwriter.
I think there's also a way to disable the CoD health recharge, but I haven't tried it yet.

I think my favorite thing about the game, though, is the eerie quality some of the missions have (like the nightclub and the airport)..."peaceful" areas where NPCs are standing around really have this unsettling feel, kind of like liminal spaces...
Like, the NPCs all feel like mechanical automatons...they stand and move a little bit, they might even speak a line or two, but they don't acknowledge the player or interact with their environment, and you can't interact with them either.
It's really quite spooky, and something I am tempted to recreate.

This game is bonkers, I love it.
Need to fix my N64 and get back to it soon.

"... the words "holiday special" will most likely strike fear into your heart."

Typo, you spelled "joy" wrong

@MontyMole Technically it is available to watch officially, albeit with RiffTrax commentary over it.
Even if there was an OFFICIAL official release, I'd still watch the bootlegs. I can't watch it without the commercials, it's just too painful. Gotta have some catchy '70s jingles to break up the Harvey Korman.

@Serpenterror While it -was- somewhat impressive, DOOM was on the GBA, not GBC.

Unless there was some POC that I've never heard of.
I know there's a Wolf3D port for GBC, but it uses special chips, it doesn't quite run on stock hardware (so you can't just download the ROM and play it).

Great interview!

Beyond is great so far, but I didn't manage to finish it before the new Zelda dropped, and the schedule's pretty busy right now...
Gotta find more time to squeeze it in!

Wasn't the Wiimote/Nunchuck-style Ready 2 Rumble prototype controller also developed on the Dreamcast?

@smoreon Some small portions made it into the TG16 and N64 games, yeah.

I was going to say, there are a few commercially released Genesis titles that use shadow/highlights for transparencies.
I don't know what kind of technological limitations prevented it from being used more frequently than it was. Maybe most developers considered color artifact dither alpha to be "good enough"?

@UK_Kev lol, that's not at all how game dev works.
GTA3 on the DC would've been built from the ground-up to work fully optimized for that platform, just as GTA3 for PS2 was built from the ground-up optimized to work on that platform. For the most part, provided you have decent documentation, you go in knowing the limitations of the hardware, and you plan accordingly, and/or you find clever workarounds. Compression is often necessary.
Sure, the DC version probably would've been a slightly different game, but to suggest that it would have been an -inferior- game is just nonsense. I mean look at Chinatown Wars on the DS: nowhere near the size or power of the DC...but one of the best, most polished games in the series.

Porting a game from one platform to another is a completely different beast entirely.

Same thing happened with some of the Zelda games...pretty sure Tri Force Heroes was one of them?
The US version was a completely different translation and had a bunch of dated references to meemees.

ROM hacking is a lot of fun, I've done a few.

I don't even remember Buster Busts Loose having passwords...that must be why.

I've played a bunch of Goemon games, and I love them all, but the first N64 game is just on a whole 'nother level. That game is crazy good.

@RetroGamer5491 Never used Github before, but the code is all right there, JS doesn't need to be compiled or anything like that.

@Twilite9 Whoops, that's funny. I wonder if they did that to any other cards.

@Twilite9 Awesome, thanks!
You must've added 1 and 4 together and thought 5?

Okay, my guesses were right on, but...seems like your card 4 is some kind of misprint, because there's no possible way to win :0
Did O-Pee-Chee make a goof? Or did they change it so you only need two hits to win instead of three?
From the Topps partials that I've seen, the second one up on the left side should be a sword hit, but on your card, it's another rock. Weird.

@Twilite9 Perfect! Thank you!
Do you not have Zelda screens 1 or 4? We already have 5.

Oh, and BTW we already have the backs, so you don't need to take those.

@Twilite9 That would be super helpful.
From Series 1, we're missing:
Mario I: 1
D.D.: 4
Zelda: 1, 4

If you have anything from Series 2, we're missing:
Mario II: 1, 2, 4, 5, 7, 8
D.D.: 3-9
Link: 3, 7, 9
Metroid: 1, 2, 5, 8

When we were kids, the biggest draw for us was that these were Mario games, but WEIRD. Much like in the Carmen Sandiego games, we didn't quite know what we were doing, but we had fun until they had to be returned to Blockbuster.

It was also really cool that Luigi got to have his own game, and it was neat to see the NES version dressed up like SMW.

@Sketcz Can definitely add that kind of game logic. I do want to leave it as authentic "honor system, scratch what you want", but for the "story mode", I was thinking of awarding coins for wins, so you can buy more packs.

If you want to start it, that's fine. I was going to wait until I had something a bit more substantial.

Oops, I just bought a stack of Donkey Kong rub-off cards. Time to get my scanner out of storage.

@RetroGamer5491 lol, maybe. I was not aware there was a forum.

@Sketcz Okay, I stuffed everything into a div container and got scaling to work. First three cards are done.
https://www.mediafire.com/file/j3oqdpbqxhcda2w/GamePacksBeta2.zip/file

@Sketcz Oh nice. If they're willing to try to peek at the results, we're still missing Mario 1, Double Dragon 4, and Zelda 1 and 4. (I thought I had Zelda 4, but it was actually Link 4, I wrote it in the wrong spot)

(and missing a bunch from Series 2, of course)

Oh right, I forgot about "zoom text only". I'll have to see what I can do.

@Sketcz Ha ha, thanks.
I wouldn't give up on yours just yet, I'm pretty good at starting projects and never finishing them.

Yeah, I was thinking the high resolution might be a little overkill, but you can zoom out your web browser: just hold CTRL and either press +/- or just scroll your mouse wheel. CTRL + 0 (zero) will set it back to 100%.

This monitor is LCD, so I've got it at native res of 1920x1080. But I don't usually have my web browsers maximized.
I can make it scale to fit the window by using percentages instead of absolute pixel values, but I don't know if there's an easy way to do that that doesn't involve calculating every single value by hand. I suppose I could always write a function that does it...I'll try it out and see if it's simple enough.

$40-60 USD, probably. Game prices haven't changed much over the years.
I would like to do all 60 cards (plus Series 2), and the stickers would be fun to add too...but like I said...it would take a while to do them all.

Um, I wasn't really paying attention, I think it only took a few hours to program. It's really simple Javascript, it's basically just a website that shows images, and instead of the buttons hyperlinking you, they just change their image and play a sound. And there's random numbers.
It takes longer to prepare the art and measure all of the coordinates for the "button" locations, I think.

BTW, did you say you purchased a pack? If so, do you think you could make me a short audio recording of the sound of a pack being unwrapped?

@Sketcz I'll have to check out Itch, but I'm not sure if they'd be okay with copywritten content.

The randomizer works a little something like this: https://www.mediafire.com/file/ydkpecxwdh4s4j9/GamePacks.zip/file

Only Screen 1 is programmed so far. Might take a while to get all of them done, but I like it so far.
I kind of want to do something fun where you have to "purchase" more packs to randomly unlock new cards.

@Sketcz A mix of sources, I searched quite a few places. GIS helped find some, sites like WorthPoint are pretty good for finding eBay auctions that have ended. There was a guy on Imgur who ran an interactive scratch-off, where people voted in the comments (kind of like Twitch Plays Pokemon).

Link Screen 5 does seem like an odd duck, but there are a few other cards that are similar, so I don't think it's a misprint. Also, it seems like the screens are supposed to get slightly more difficult the higher they go.

I was (re-)familiarizing myself with some basic Javascript last night, and I've got a card randomizer partially implemented. I'm sure it'll get a bit messy as more cards are added, but so far so good. I just have to find somewhere to host it.

@Sketcz https://www.mediafire.com/file/a7jnoll8tu48y4x/scratched.zip/file

@sdelfin Zelda 2 (Link) cards Series 1 are on Archive, Series 2 (a Canadian exclusive(?) with O-Pee-Chee) are not. The fronts are in the Flickr gallery, and several good scans of the fronts and backs can be found on eBay.

@Sketcz Post-scratched.

I found most of them last night, but still missing these ones:
Mario 1, Double Dragon 4, and Zelda 1.

Series 2 I'm missing most of the Mario 2 and DD ones.
Link I'm missing 3, 7, and 9
Metroid I'm missing 1, 2, 5, and 8.

@Itsacardgame Dang, beat me to it, I just found that listing.

@Sketcz Can try asking her if she has the backs, but it's Twitter, so who knows if we'll get a reply...

BTW, apparently there are 36 -total-, not 36 -additional-: https://twitter.com/HistoryofHyrule/status/1625370968439812098

I'm guessing they meant 36 new Nintendo scratches that are Zelda ones, since they had other Nintendo games before that.

Edit: They had Metroid as part of that series, too! :0 https://www.ebay.com/itm/364612614889

Seems like it would be pretty easy to program these in HTML or Java or something?
Would be pretty similar to the oldschool HTML method of making buttons light up when you hover/click on them.

@ValZ I think the Genesis 3 came with six buttons, but I never had one (just checked the boxes, it did). I'm not counting those AtGames things >__<

Nomad had six buttons.
CDX came with six, too. Wondermega 2 did.

Looks like there was a Megadrive 2 that came with six, but I don't see any Genesis 2 bundles that did. I'd be surprised if there weren't at least some kind of store bundles that came with them.

lol, SCE on the Genesis was superior to SNES's World Warrior in almost every way.
SCE versus Turbo is a different story, but I still kind of prefer SCE. The music is a lot closer to the arcade, and the 6-button Genny pad is just fantastic. (claims that SF2 -requires- it are quite moot when you consider that almost every Sega game benefits from it)

Only thing WW has going for it is it's the original, original SF2 graphics/colors/rules, and it has a unique arranged soundtrack.

They should add a cartridge slot to it, so you could plug in any Game Boy game that you wanted :0

That would be sick.

I can't believe so many people voted "no". Like others said, they must not've played the game very much. I couldn't stand the default controls, I always switch to 1.2 Honey (move with C-buttons, look with stick). I've tried the twin-stick, but never stuck with it for long.

Here's a much more useful tidbit: you can increase your velocity in GE and PD by holding forward and strafe at the same time (you just have to turn so you're at an angle). The X and Y velocities added together don't get clamped, so I'm not sure if my calculations are correct, but if they are, this will increase your speed by 41%. Either way, it's quite a speed boost.

@michellelynn0976 The Vectorman games had some pretty impressive pre-rendered graphics at the time. I've never been one to care much about graphics, however, as long as the game was fun. But Sega CD had this crappy Dracula movie tie-in game that blew me away as a kid...all the sprites looked like they were filmed from a movie, and the levels were all pseudo 3D! It still looks pretty impressive today, but that gameplay...not fantastic...

SNES vs. Genny/MD? Well it depends on what kind of games you like. Fantasy RPGs, Nintendo had a slight lead...Sega had a few classics though, like Lunar. Almost any other genre (especially if you like sports/racing), Sega had faster processors, 60 FPS, and a lot of games had higher resolution graphics. I grew up mostly with Nintendo, but in hindsight, it seems like most games that were on both consoles, Sega got the better version.

@TheFox Yes, Ninja Golf is great. I also really like Dark Chambers, and IIRC they had a really nice version of Asteroids with 2-player support...if this handheld even supports multiplayer...

7800 games!?!?

"Low cost of entry"? Which decade are we talking about, here?

Granted, I've only been looking at units that can play CD-ROMs, but I feel like if I was ever going to get one, it would've had to have been before scalpers and scrappers drove -everything- sky high. Now I just have to remain content with emulating that stuff on the Wii.