BulkSlash

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.

I’ll definitely be giving this a try, Noah’s Triple Trouble 16-bit was so good I like it more than Sonic Mania, so this could be something really special too.

That explains so much about early THQ games. Perhaps even more than LJN, I remember THQ games all tended to be badly made movie tie-ins like Home Alone. So the fact that the CEO was just out chasing any licence he could get to slap a game on makes a lot of sense.

That’s a shame. You’d think making something that heavily references the Saturn controller they’d ensure it could run those games well.

With better hardware and an analogue stick and having six face buttons it could be perfect for N64 games too.

As it turns out, Sega’s biggest problem wasn’t the excellent controller or lack of EA games it was running out of money that did for the Dreamcast.

Still, it does make sense for Microsoft to curry favour with EA considering how few well known IPs they had when the Xbox first launched. They needed as many big titles as they could get (and were lucky Sega had many great Dreamcast games that were in development that could be shifted over to the Xbox).

Very cool! I’m still using a PowerPak with my AV Famicom, flash carts are expensive these days. Krikkz does have a Black Friday sale coming up though….

Given that storage/cartridge size is no longer an issue, I’ve always wondered if it would be possible to replicate super scaler games like OutRun by pre-calculating the scaled sprites and storing them in the ROM. It would then just be a case of selecting the correctly scaled sprite for each frame (assuming there’s enough cartridge bandwidth to handle it!)

@Azuris Yeah I did think about its value for DS games. The trouble is the lower screen is a long way from the top screen and doesn’t seem to be scaled well to fit with it. Something like Contra 4 where you’re jumping between the two screens or trying to shoot things on the top screen might not work very well with that layout.

You’re right about 3DS pricing, it’s kind of crazy how expensive they are. Back in the day people would be practically giving away old systems once the next generation was out!

Bring back the Daiei Hawks special editions! 😅 The clear orange and smoke N64 and GameBoy Color looked fantastic in that colour scheme. An OLED Switch special edition would be cool.

I’ve never known a company to have such a bad case of hardware diarrhoea. How many different devices can they release in one year? I can only assume they’re trying to throw as many things out there as possible to see if they land on a winner.

I replayed Sands of Time recently and it’s still a wonderful story with excellent gameplay. Ubi have kind of missed the boat with the reboot given how long they’ve taken. They’d have been better off releasing an HD version of the original rather than trying to recreate it from scratch.

As everyone has already commented, it’s a shame the two sequels decided to try and be edgy and cool. The 2008 reboot was pretty decent, I’m still annoyed they ended it on a cliffhanger (that was a bad habit of Ubi in that era).

The aptly titled Forgotten Sands is actually very good too I think. The story is weak, but it has superb gameplay, the final climb at the end where you’re rapidly freezing and unfreezing water to make or dismiss platforms and obstacles is brilliant. With a better story it could have been an all-time classic.

Cool, it’s a shame the special edition is US-only, I’d be tempted to upgrade for that. I think I’ll probably stick with my current Steam Deck and wait for a more powerful model.

While I haven't been keeping it up to date for a while now, I've got 1,286 remixes I downloaded over the years from OC Remix on my hard drive.

There's so many great remixes from so many great games, but the Castlevania and Megaman ones in particular are ones I listen to a lot. There's so much variety with so many different genres of music represented.

Long live OC Remix!

I wish more companies doing retro devices would include six face buttons. I don't know if the CPU is up to it, but N64 emulation greatly benefits from six face buttons instead of mapping the c-buttons to an analogue stick. 🤢

Having done a bit of Assembly coding on both, I actually prefer the SNES' CPU. I think also many SNES games were hobbled by publishers being cheap and opting to use SlowROM carts, which shaves about 33% off the CPU clock speed.

All that said, I love both consoles so I'm happy playing on either of them!

@DexTepa Duckstation has a full debugger so you can see the disassembly as well as view and alter the RAM. There’s also a memory search to help find values.

I missed having Star Force so I bought a knackered one off eBay recently and fixed it up. The biggest problem was battery acid had destroyed the contacts, but after replacing all of those and cleaning everything inside and out it looks very good.

Especially for this sort of device it has quite catchy tunes that play before each wave of enemies. It's very loud though so I've added a volume pot! 😅

I’ve said this before, but we need to start calling these CEX window shots Cexies. 😉

@KayFiOS I would guess it will be native N64 resolution upscaled to 4K. Analogue are usually quite good with accuracy and trying to add options to render games at 4K would likely cause problems with things like frame buffer effects.

I think the 4K output will be used to make the aperture grille on their CRT filters look as accurate as possible.

I had to pre-order it. It's nothing like the game, but looking past that I find it an enjoyable '90s adventure movie with a lot of fun ideas and performances. Alan Silvestri's score is great too.

It feels a bit wrong commenting on such an old article, but I tried the N64 version recently after really enjoying the Nightdive port. Unfortunately I found it unplayable for one key reason- the game constantly tries to auto-centre the camera!

It’s really weird to try to look to the right only for the camera to return back to the left as soon as you release the stick. Hopefully one day someone can figure out a rom hack to remove it!

@Lup They really are! They all sound like something from the NES era, and why are they all acronyms? It's like they couldn't come up with any name that wasn't an abbreviation.

"TSO (Three, Six, Zero)" is interesting considering what they called their follow-up console...

@TeamBigRig Yeah it's a shame that we seem to get the same old games from both Namco and Sega, anything more recent than the 16-bit era just gets ignored.

I guess it's the complexity of the emulation (or porting the source code), but there are a lot of emulators capable of running those games now, you'd think a collaboration with some emulator authors could result in something really good.

I’m sure I’ve seen these on eBay in the past, I should have snapped them up! That said, I’m too much of a hoarder to sell things, so it wouldn’t be much of an investment! 😂