BulkSlash

I wonder how Sega would have handled this? In 1996 the Saturn was still their primary focus and the Dreamcast wouldn't launch until late '98. Would this have replaced the Saturn sooner? Or would it have been released instead of the Dreamcast (which seems unlikely given how old it would have been by then)?

Looking at the specs it wasn't as powerful as the Dreamcast so I'm curious what value Sega would have seen in the endeavour at all. Unless this was Sega of America making moves behind Japan's back again? 😂

It's definitely Christian Bale, it was the stare on that billboard that won him the part in American Psycho. 😉

Maybe we can finally get that Bubsy 3D re-release we’ve all been desperate for!

Hiding the image on the spine is hilarious. The on-going in-jokes you'd get in some magazines back then were always fun.

@KingMike Yeah that could be it. The previous X-Men Arcade1Up had it mixed with some Data East games but Data East aren’t really around to object like Capcom could!

I'm surprised they're not including the Konami game, especially as Arcade1Up already licensed that game. I know it's not based on the same X-Men cartoon but it feels like it belongs as part of this collection.

I've seen cabs in much worse condition than that saved, so all is not lost. It might not be economical for the owner (unless the insurance pays for the restoration) but they could live again.

@Blofse Oh to be able to go into an arcade like that today where I’ve got my own money to play on as many games as I like; instead of having to beg my parents for enough coins just for a single game on something! 😅

Oh man, Weird Dreams, I'd forgotten all about that game. I only bought it because it was on one of those Saturday morning shows where you'd ring in and play the game by barking commands down the phone line.

The controls were so laggy and slow it made it impossible to dodge things, so doing it down a phone line must have been doubly impossible! I might buy it to see if it's as terrible as I remember! 😅

No, but also don't censor them.

Love that Speccy rendition of the Knightmare theme. You can just imagine a port from that era having that tune permanently on loop as you play!

That’s a real shame, I often get pre-patched ROM hacks and translations from there as it’s often quicker than doing the patching myself (I usually find I’ve got the wrong dump of the ROM that the patch needs!)

Sometimes I find hacks there I’d not heard about too, so it was a really useful resource. Hopefully this “workaround” continues to be available.

It's a cool solution but I think doing a bit of regular pin maintenance is the better option, especially as it allows you to retain the iconic cartridge loading mechanism. Has there ever been a console with a more satisfying and legendary cartridge loading gimmick?

For ejecting cartridges maybe the SNES wins because you can hit the eject button and catch the cartridge as it pops up? The only other quirky loading mechanism I can think of is the PS3 Super Slim with the sliding door on the disc drive. 😅

I went with the OG GameBoy as really that started it all off and was something of a masterclass in good handheld design- it was affordable, had great battery life and was so tough it could withstand being blown up!

While I loved my GameGear, the battery life meant I never even put batteries in it and just used the power adapter! 😅

In terms of honourable mentions, I do enjoy playing on my Nomad, I think the chunkiness makes it quite comfortable to hold. I found the DS to be quite special as it had a lot of very unique and inventive games. The Switch is amazing and finally so is the Steam Deck, which is pretty much my main machine these days.

It’s always going to be GoldenEye for me, I was just playing it again last week and having a blast re-unlocking all the cheat codes.

@gwyntendo You’ll also need an adapter to connect an N64 controller to your PC as most controllers don’t have six face buttons. The compromise people often make is to map the right analogue stick to the c-buttons but it’s frankly horrid playing that way. The frog song mini-game in Ocarina of Time is basically unplayable when doing that. You can buy repro N64 controllers with a USB plug but I’d avoid those as the analogue stick is often rubbish on those.

@Scollurio So true! 😆 I was messing around in Retroarch the other day and found a filter that looks like you're watching a VHS recording. It looks very period accurate but when I actually play my Saturn on a TV it actually looks much sharper than that! 😂

I've honestly never got the love for the GC controller (but then I love the N64 and Dreamcast controllers which aren't well liked so I'm not exactly in tune with the majority)!

The left analogue stick has great accuracy and the face button layout was a good idea, but the d-pad is tiny, the z-button is hard to reach/press, there's no equivalent to the z-button on the other side, the right analogue nub is fiddly, there's no select button and the analogue triggers are just big mushy buttons rather than proper triggers. That said, it was good for games designed around the controller.

I think I was mostly just disappointed by it after expecting another revolution like the N64 controller... obviously the Revolution was yet to come. 😉

A strange list, I didn’t expect to see the original so near the top, it was great for its time but 2 & 3 totally left it in the dust. It seems a bit soon to be crowning Tekken 8 the best ever, but maybe it’s great, I haven’t played it yet! 😅

Sadly I haven’t really enjoyed the series since 3, I’m not even sure which ones I’ve played it’s been so long since I played them. The rosters just seemed to balloon in later entries and I miss the excellent CG ending sequences we’d get for each character in the original three.

I didn't know they showed off transparent GBAs back then, I always remembered the silver ones with orange/blue buttons. I think there are repro case parts available now to make a GBA that looks like the prototypes.

That's looking pretty Ridge Racer-y. I think it needs some fake game adverts dotted around the track, a jumbotron showing gameplay from a Galaxian clone and a stretch of the track needs to go past a beach.

This sounds good, I loved the levelling up in Area 88 so I’m going to give this a try.

I too had no idea there were so many (terrible) Ghostbusters games.

I had the C64 game back in the day (I sometimes loaded it just to play Invade-a-load!) It was pretty decent but I was never able to beat it. In fact the only time I reached Mr Stay Puft was by accident, I’d left the game running and came back to somehow find myself on that screen. 😅

Ghostbusters The Videogame is definitely my favourite, and I still consider it to be the real Ghostbusters III. I played it on 360 back in the day as the PS3 version was made during the period where devs just hadn’t got the hang of the PS3 hardware. I bought the remaster on Steam but I haven’t played it yet.

Being charitable I could believe that he subconsciously copied it without realising, but there are just too many similarities for it to be a coincidence. The hexagonal shape above the sign and the TV hanging from the ceiling on the left are just too specific for it to be a random fluke.

I’d say I’m somewhere in the middle. I never stopped playing many of the games from my childhood like Mario World so it’s more of a constant in my life than a reminder of the good old days.

On the flip side, playing something like the arcade version of Time Crisis or Sega Rally (particularly on a sunny day) reminds me very heavily of summer holidays in Devon playing at the arcade and being blown away by the amazing 3D graphics.

I loved the inventiveness of the games on the DS, some of the early stuff like Pac-Pix where you could draw (often hilariously misshapen) Pac-Men and release them into the level was incredibly fresh. Kirby Canvas Curse was great too.

Mario Kart DS also deserves a special mention for being (I think) the only MK game that allowed you to dodge the blue shell. It was tricky to do, but at one point I could dodge that thing almost 100% of the time.

I have to hide the Tetris DS cartridge because when that’s in my 3DS nothing else ever gets played it’s so addictive.

I love that '90s-era FMV filter! 😂 It looks just like something you'd get on the Mega CD back then.

I wish more remakes would allow the use of the original character models (I'm mostly thinking of the RE2 and RE4 remakes).

@Soupbones I've got the board as well (it's a pain to play as it's a vertical game!) and you're right it does have limited continues. Being able to turn that off would make for a nice feature in this release.

@Sketcz Thanks, yeah BulkSlash is one of my all-time faves. It's got so many cool ideas and the combo points system had me hooked trying to top my high score. They just don't make games like it anymore!

@Sketcz I got them from SteelSticks64.com. I got an email saying they had some in stock just before Christmas. They rarely have them (to the point that I've seen controllers being listed for hundreds of pounds on eBay with one fitted) but if you put your name on the notification list you should hopefully get an email when they've got more ready.

My brother had a 32X back in the day and he had Star Wars and Virtua Racing. They both blew us away graphically and we had lots of fun playing the 2 player modes, so even though the 32X was a failure, we still enjoyed it a lot.

I bought a used 32X a few years ago to play those games again, they’re both stupidly hard, probably to hide how short they were! 😅

Excellent news. You just can’t beat an original N64 stick, all the repros just feel wrong and are often way out in terms of response/accuracy.

Thankfully I’ve got steel bowls for all my controllers now so they feel pretty much perfect, but being able to get replacement sticks and gears could be very useful in the future.

I always rather enjoyed the movie, I should rewatch it at some point as it has been a while since I last saw it. Elliot Goldenthal’s score was good, although I think the lack of any references to recognisable themes from the games like the Crystal theme was perhaps a mistake.

I remember a lot of fan complaints about lack of elements from the games like magic and Chocobos. Maybe it would have been better to have used a different name rather than imply a link to the games?

Speaking of the actors, I remember one review wondering how Alec Baldwin felt playing a younger character that looked like Ben Affleck!

For best Sega arcade game I would perhaps say something like G-Loc 360 or Outrun deluxe (or OutRun 2 deluxe) as they not only married impressive graphics but also delivered an experience impossible to replicate at home with big hydraulic cabs.

In terms of Daytona vs Sega Rally, I think I slightly prefer Daytona but there’s very little in it and I often change my mind. I would personally say they’re Sega’s best two racing games. I like the power sliding using the gears of Daytona and graphically I think it’s actually a bit more impressive even though it’s on the base Model 2 board. Sega Rally is a bit glitchier in places and isn’t quite as vibrant as Daytona (which is probably one of the reasons it’s more popular in the arcades).

I think Galaxy Force II, Rad Mobile, Rail Chase and House of the Dead 1 are all pretty great too. If only Sega would give us decent home ports of all these games…

@Damo I can already see it uncritically doling out tips for unlocking Sheng Long and nude Lara Croft.

I'm curious how this could possibly work on modern systems. I can't imagine Sony or MS allowing an application to scan the memory of a game and look for the life counter or health bar to create infinite lives/energy/ammo cheats. It would be pretty disastrous for online gaming too.

Maybe it can be plugged into the console video out port so it can view the action and then send Bluetooth controller signals to play the game for you? That would be pretty cool.

That said, I can't believe it's anything that clever, instead I bet it's just some large language model trained on GameFAQs and it will regurgitate advice scraped from there rather than being an actual cheat device like the old GameSharks.

Valve have been strangely compliant towards Nintendo recently. I wonder if they've got some sort of unannounced deal in the works? Or maybe they're just trying to make amends for that Steam Deck advert that showed Yuzu installed on it? 😂

I like that automated copying of saves back and forth. I always have to do that manually with my Action Replay just to make sure I don't lose any saves if the battery dies.

@QuackFu I just looked that up, I'm afraid I'd never even heard of that show until now! 😂 I'll have to see if I can find a few episodes to watch!

I beat this over the weekend (it works on Steam Deck!) and it was a fun little game. It perhaps needs a bit of polish like recharging your health after each level and defaulting to the continue option if you get a game over (otherwise it's too easy to start a new game by accident).

There's so many '80s references in the cut scenes it's really quite amazing. I didn't recognise the little girl though, I'm not sure what she's a reference to. The music is pretty cool too and they do a great job of mixing the Robocop and Predator themes together.

I had a brief go with it this morning on my SD2SNES, but I can’t work out how to save. I seem to recall it’s start + select but it’s not working for me.

I wouldn't necessarily rely on something like the Super Nt for long term preservation, it may be just as prone to failure when it's 20+ years old. Given that it's made with modern components it might even have a shorter shelf life than a real SNES! 😩

If I had the money I'd actually approach some of the chip fabs out there to find out how feasible it is to reproduce old chips like these (especially the custom chips on a lot of '90s arcade hardware). Obviously you'd need to either get the original specs or reverse engineer from the die, but can anyone even make 45nm transistors these days?

I’ve often heard that E.T. isn’t as bad as it’s made out to be. I suspect it’s another victim of the AVGN (who I do enjoy), but on a few occasions now he’s picked games that don’t really deserve the treatment. I suspect he’s run out of games that legitimately were terrible and now has to magnify the failings of merely average games to fill out a video.

I loved Sonic 2sday, the hype and excitement for that was unreal. I had so much Sonic 2 merchandise from that event, the baseball jacket, the pin badges, the cuddly toys, etc.

I wonder, was that the first worldwide release of a game? I remember back then being permanently cheesed off about how long it would take for a game to release in the UK when it had been out in Japan over a year before.

Definitely A Link Between Worlds for me, it’s basically perfect. Linking all the weapons to the self-recharging magic meter was a brilliant idea. The only problem with ALBW is I’m replaying A Link to the Past at the moment and I keep getting confused about which game certain things are in! 😅

@Damo Unfortunately I don't think that would work very well for me. While I keep everything on the MicroSD I've got quite a few custom emulator builds outside of EmuDeck, plus the non-cloud save Steam games seem to keep all their saves on the SSD even though they're installed to the MicroSD! 😅 All the games I've got installed from GoG and installed via Heroic would likely have to be reinstalled too.

The last time I did something similar to this was replacing the 64GB SSD with a 512GB one and I had issues with all of the above. I wonder if it's possible to rsync the user directories over from one Steam Deck to another? That might move everything across.

UPDATE- Now I’ve got some time off work I’ve tried using Clonezilla to image my old Steam Deck drive to the new one and it has worked perfectly. Everything is there, all the games, all the saves, etc. The OS even recognises it’s got the 90Hz screen and offers that as a refresh rate option. It doesn’t seem like it needs a special version of SteamOS installed, it even shows the more colourful OLED version of the wake movie in the options.

I’ve got the OLED but it has hardly come out of its case because there doesn’t seem to be a good way to migrate from the old Steam Deck. 😞

Obviously most (all?) recent Steam games support cloud saving so they’re no problem, but all the emulators, non-Steam games and older Steam games with no cloud saves would all be wiped out. I’ve heard you can just swap the SSD but I’m hoping a better solution presents itself.

@Jamie64326 Oh right, I saw people reacting to it on Twitter a when the game released as if it was some new revelation. 😅

@KingMike I think it’s a recent thing. One of the loading screens in Mario Wonder says that they’re twins but Mario is the older one.

@Blofse Yeah ProtonTricks works with this, IIRC you just need to install dotnetdesktop6 and it will work.

The only problem I’ve found with the game so far is I can’t make the jump over a pit three spaces long in the third dungeon using the boots and feather. I remember it being fairly easy in the original so I think something is off with the speed of the boots or the height of the jump.