BulkSlash

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! 😂

I really wish Namco would do some sort of Time Crisis HD collection and a new GunCon for all modern platforms. I wish they’d do it for Ridge Racer and Ace Combat too… 😅

Excellent. I want to upgrade my Pi 3 JAMMA setup as it’s just not fast enough for many games, if this is twice as fast it should really do the trick.

@YANDMAN Definitely. I still use my trusty Hori Super Commander because of its great auto-fire options.

I’ve given up on Analogue and their “extremely limited quantities” nonsense. I’d really like one of these (I was keen on the glow in the dark one too) but with the tiny amounts they make it’s not worth the angst of trying to get one.

Just how many devices can AyaNeo release in one year? 😅

That said, I’m on holiday at the moment and spent some of the afternoon hacking the SF2 Turbo ROM on my Steam Deck and the lack of keyboard made it so much fiddlier, especially as the on-screen keyboard covers half the screen! 😩🤣

I think AyaNeo must be beating Sega now for being able to release so many new hardware variants in such a short time!

I was just playing a cheeky level of this while waiting for a process to finish. It's really good fun and feels very much like an old NES game in the way it plays. I like the permanent power-ups hidden in each level too as it gives you a good reason to explore. I'd love to see this actually ported to the NES!

What’s the betting it’s identical to retail? It doesn’t look like a dev cart so chances are it’s just final retail code.

You’d have to be mad to pay that much for a cart where they don’t show the board or verify the contents of the ROMs are different from the final game.

Of course this is Heritage Auctions, who sold a Star Trek phaser prop as genuine when all the evidence suggested it wasn’t and ignored all the people telling them about it.

I really like the 8BitDo DIY kit for the NES dogbone controller. It still feels like I’m playing on an original controller but with wireless added. It’s particularly handy as the cords on the AV Famicom controller are really short!

I’m hoping Arcade1Up can clarify if it’s the arcade or PS1 version of Time Crisis. The YouTube trailer shows the arcade version but the still photos show the PS1 version. The PS1 port is very good, but the arcade version is much more preferable.

Excellent news, Dark Forces is one of my favourite PC games so it will be great to finally have it easily playable on modern hardware. Plus it's Nightdive so (Blade Runner aside) this is likely to be a really solid remaster.

While most FPS games of the era were all about shooting everything that moved, I liked how DF would throw in the occasional puzzle. In one case I think it the first time a wall texture was used as a clue to the layout of the area. It certainly felt unique to me at the time for the walls to be more than just window dressing.

I they do DF II Jedi Knight next!

@KingMike That's quite ironic considering what Sega got up to in Revenge of Shinobi! 😂

@mjharper If you put that code in on player 1 it disables all special moves. It took me ages to work out why I couldn't pull off any moves when I played SF2 Turbo on the Wii U VC. My muscle memory of the code hadn't faded, but the fact you had to use port 2 had! 😅

This is really impressive, it runs full screen and at a very good frame rate on my 32X and there's loads of great options including different resolutions/detail levels. Even the highest resolution and detail runs very smoothly. Sadly it crashes after I beat level 1 so I think my ancient Everdrive doesn't support the bank switching it needs! 😅

@Babybahamut Yeah there were a lot of exclusives early in its life like Lost Planet, Bullet Witch, Dead Rising, Ace Combat 6, Ridge Racer 7, etc. Not all were classics (and I think some have been ported now) but I really enjoyed them all.

It's a shame how many of the best 360 games are no longer exclusive as without exclusives the uniqueness of each platform gets lost I think.

Will the previous model be getting the AyaSpace 2 update? The thing that worries me about most of these annually refreshed handheld PCs is how long they support them once the new model is out.

With the Steam Deck I never bother messing with the power output I just leave it at default. I think if a game is vsync'd it will just idle until the next frame needs to be started and if it's a heavier modern game then it needs full power anyway, so I try not to worry about the battery too much.

That said, I'm always playing a mixture of old and new stuff and the old stuff doesn't really drain the battery much!

It's kind of hilarious how well that runs in a browser. I think I've re-beaten the recent version about 5 or 6 times on the Steam Deck now, it's really good fun to revisit it. Now if we could just get 2097 too! 😆

@XiaoShao I'm getting GTA trilogy vibes from this too. That was also kept under wraps right until a week or so before release, so I'll be steering well clear of this until it's in players' hands. It didn't take long for people to discover GTA was a rushed mess and report it on forums/social media!

Very interesting, it sounds like this would work like a C64 cassette drive and be audio based rather than loading data digitally. I wonder how slow the loading times would be compared to cassettes and also "proper" CD-ROM drives?

I guess it would come with a RAM cartridge like the FDS and would need a cable coming out of the cartridge port so that the audio could be piped from the disc to the RAM cart.

What's an "approach-a-thon"? I've not heard that one before.

You've got to love the voice acting from that era. Scott McCulloch was Richter Belmont in SOTN but he was also Wild Dog in Time Crisis 1 & 2 and Chris in Resident Evil 1. It's a shame he passed before he could enjoy the fame from playing all those iconic characters.

IIRC there were some graphical glitches with the Switch port. They weren't game breaking or anything (at least not that I remember!) but were they ever fixed?

I'll probably end up re-buying it anyway, just like all the Ikaruga ports! 😅

@smoreon It's a good question, I'd have thought if a publisher were bankrolling the game they'd want a regular copy of the source and all the assets in case the developer unexpectedly goes bust or the relationship sours for some reason.

Of course once the game has shipped and the sales have run their course a publisher like Activision may well not care about the codebase and just delete it to save some server space.

Mine would be playing Astro Fighter in the arcades some time in the mid '80s.

It's a fairly unique take on the Space Invaders formula where each wave of enemies has a different design and movement pattern, there's also a fuel gauge that only refills if you kill the boss at the end of the waves. Then it loops back around to the start.

I really want a sequel to Devastation!

I would have thought Activision would have a central source code repository for their devs to push code to rather than games just knocking around on the HDD of one of the developers.

That’s a real plot twist at the end there! 😂

Doesn’t the AV Famicom support the Japanese Zapper that connects via the side port? I think it’s just Western Zappers that connect via the front controller port that won’t work.