BulkSlash

The Japanese really do love their crane games. 😆

Now if they could just fill the arcade with Time Crises, Ridge Racers and Tekkens it would be awesome.

I actually own it on all three platforms! 😅 It’s such a great game, it’s typical of EA to create something great and do nothing with it.

I’m a big fan of Yu Suzuki’s work, so I’m going to pretend I didn’t read this and hope it meets the same fate as Shenmue Online (i.e. quietly abandoned).

I remember that era loads of kids toys had some sort of gross or gruesome characters. Obviously TMNT fitted in to that, but then there were things like the Ghostbusters, Boglins, Super Naturals, etc. Plus of course slime! I remember both TMNT and Ghostbusters would sell you pots of ectoplasm/mutagen for the kids to stick to the carpet.

I really like the look of the graphics for this one, it actually looks faithful to the era and isn't using HD drawings or overly stylised designs. If it's like some of the Konami games from this era it should be a lot of fun.

I played the Atari Batman game recently, it was actually quite decent and beating the balloon level actually triggers a voice clip of Jack Nicholson’s iconic “He stole my balloons!” line, which somehow is even funnier in the game.

That said, I’d have loved to have seen what ‘90s Konami could have done with a Batman game!

For me it's the Dreamcast, but they've all got some great games that make them worth playing on, especially the MegaDrive, Saturn and GameGear.

Nintendo are normally pretty quick to shut down any fan game related to their IP, you'd think they'd also extend that to dealing with companies selling knock-offs that closely resemble their console.

Overall, I'd say it's on Amazon for allowing knock-off products containing unauthorised copies of games to be sold on their storefront. They know it's going on, they just turn a blind eye until the bad publicity starts. The same goes for eBay where lots of repros are being sold as originals.

I remember the Japanese games industry seemed to have a bit of a shared crisis of confidence around this time. Keiji Inafune said Japan was 5 years behind the West after seeing the difference in games being released.

I always thought it was a bit of a shame that they felt they couldn’t compete, as I just wanted them to keep making the sort of games they always did. Trying to force Ace Combat to be more like Call of Duty or Ridge Racer to be like Burnout for example just destroyed the soul of those games.

Even now I think Squeenix keeps trying to be like the big Western publishers when I just want them to keep making the stuff they used to make.

I can just picture a '90s era advert for this, with a picture of the console tucked into someone's back pocket with a tagline that says "Now Saturn is near Uranus".

I’m looking forward to Night Dive’s remaster of ROTT. I never had the full game back in the day, but I remember playing the demo with crazy bounce pads and enemies who’d beg for mercy if you didn’t immediately kill them.

It's either SNES or N64 for me, both hand ground breaking titles that are still excellent and playable today. I voted for N64 purely because I knew the SNES wouldn't need any help! 😄

My third choice would be the NES, purely for being the origin of pretty much everything that has come since.

I beat the game for the fourth time on my Steam Deck yesterday, it's really great, I actually like it more than Sonic Mania! 😅 I can't wait to see what extras are being added.

I modded a Japanese white Wii U recently (just for the fun of it) but I haven't booted my black launch Wii U in ages, so I'm going to do that in a bit. (EDIT: it's fine!)

I did back up the NAND for my white Wii U, but it's not a simple task to re-flash the NAND, you have to solder a NAND writer to the board in order to re-flash the chip, meaning most dead Wii Us will stay dead. 😢

@DestructoDisk I've had salted caramel chocolate and it's surprisingly nice. Let us know how they taste! 👍

I like this, rather than irreversibly modding an original board this is a very nice Super Gun meaning the MVS board can still be taken out and used in a JAMMA cab.

I think the changes made good sense in the context of sneaking through a jungle and while MGS1 had you OSP your weapons, MGS3 also had you OSP your food too!

The curing thing I can see as a bit odd I suppose, you could be in the heat of a battle and then jump into the menu and you can take as long as you want digging out arrows, treating burns, applying medication and putting on bandages.

In some ways I still think the 3DS version is the best version as it allows movement while crouched and aiming/shooting in third person. If only the frame rate wasn't so terrible! 😅

Sea salt flavour? Isn’t that just sea water? Eww. 😅

I wonder, did they add this because people thought the infamous intro was in the arcade version and they complained it had been “cut”?

It's cool to finally have another game with Simon Belmont in it, he was always my favourite vampire hunter in the series but for some reason the majority of the games keep featuring other Belmonts! 😅

That’s a great list. FFVII, Paper Mario TTYD, Grandia II and Panzer Dragoon Saga are my favourites (in no particular order).

I really need to try Skies of Arcadia, I’d heard it has a lot of random encounters, which I tend to not like when I’m trying to explore an area, so I’ve always avoided giving it a chance.

@BionicDodo It wouldn't surprise me, Sega love milking the MegaDrive nostalgia with endless re-releases of the same ROMs over and over.

If this book was about the Saturn or Dreamcast I doubt they'd have cared. 😥

@JackGYarwood Yeah, as soon as Dylan mentioned those tracks, I was thinking I really want to hear them! Good luck trying to get in touch with Hirasawa.

I didn't know that about Star Fox's original composer. The music in that game really was excellent, especially the end credits music so it's a real shame Hajime Hirasawa wasn't able to compose tracks for any of the sequels.

I really liked the idea behind Star Fox Command but I was never able to get past something like the third mission. It's been years since I've played it but no matter what I tried I couldn't beat it and ended up just not playing it again. It's a shame as I really liked that it brought back the Star Fox 2-style map screen where you could chose which mission to attempt next.

That's cool. I always thought the cartridge port would be the obvious place for an ODE-type device, yet pretty much everything so far hasn't used it! We've got the Fenrir which replaces the CD-ROM drive, the Satiator which works via the Video CD slot and the SDLoader which works through the controller port! 😂

I recently bought the big box version to go with my Japanese copy. Once I've finished Prime Remastered I'll definitely be replaying Super Metroid again. I think it was only a year ago or so that I finally got 100% items, so I like to keep replaying it every so often to make sure I don't forget where everything is! 😅

I think you're being a bit hard on Accelerated 😅, it's true you did need to pay to unlock the rest of the tracks, but Slipstream would make races artificially difficult until you spent real money on an upgrade (I worked out once it would take 24 hours of constant grinding to unlock just one upgrade towards the end of the game)!

Plus, Accelerated's tracks were from Ridge, Revolution, Rage and Type 4, rather than the less iconic tracks of RR6/7 that Slipstream had. That said, I'd rather play either of them over Unbounded. 😆

My personal favourite for gameplay is still the first RR. While Rage and R4 have some stunning tracks, you lose a lot of speed when power sliding, whereas the first one would let you maintain top speed round the whole track.

If only Namco would give us an HD collection...

No, Mario and Ocarina are better, but Prime is still very good.

That’s a great list. I’ve always had a soft spot for Final Fight Guy and Final Fight 2, even though they’re quite flawed.

Ninja Warriors Again on the SNES is superb and just recently I started playing Ghost Chaser Densei, which is a bit easy but a lot of fun. It also has an incredible soundtrack which for some reason includes Rocky’s Eye of the Tiger when fighting the final boss! 😂

@RadioHedgeFund I'd forgotten about that one! I don't know whether to be happy or sad that the big publishers have pretty much given up on releasing their major franchises on phones and ceded the market to endless pay-to-win cartoon puzzle games.

@gingerbeardman Dude, that’s awesome, thanks. 👍

It’s been years since I played Prime 1 on the GC so I was genuinely surprised to learn they’d improved the graphics, I thought this was how the original looked just running at 1080p! 😅

I’ve also forgotten where everything is, so I’m having to rediscover everything all over again!

It's great to see Ninja Gaiden on the list, it's short and some of the bosses have hilariously basic patterns but Ryu is so fun to control and there's some great variety in the levels and power-ups.

I really must give Shinobi II a try, I got really into the first one on the 3DS (sadly I never had it back in the day) so something that refines and improves on it must be good. I need to try Vampire at some point too.

I had no idea about that MegaMan game (or I've forgotten), if it's as hard as the GameBoy MegaMan games I'm probably not going to get very far! 😅

That's interesting, I'd always heard that Sega had basically run out of money rather than the attach rate being too low. I knew the hardware was selling quite well but was dogged with shortages early in its life, which meant they could potentially have sold a lot more consoles if they'd had the stock.

Now that I think about it, if people weren't buying many games then selling the hardware at a loss would have been what bled the company dry. That's probably why a lot of major publishers stayed away too leading to a death spiral of no games and therefore no game sales.

It seems like there wasn't a way for Sega to win. Delaying the DC to make it more powerful and including a DVD drive would have put it in direct competition with the PS2 (and GC and Xbox).

It's a shame, the DC (along with the Super Famicom) is my favourite console ever, so I do wish we'd had a few more years of the incredible games Sega were putting out on it.

That's really impressive, it's like a hybrid of the Megadrive levels and the SMS bonus levels. They've even nicked the level title tiles from the MD version. I'll definitely have to give this a go after work.

Kind of crazy that they released a more powerful console and them hamstrung themselves by only releasing smaller My Card games for the first 8 months, but then Sega were always very good at sabotaging their own hardware launches! 😩

This is excellent news, there are tons of old iOS games that are actually very inventive and worth playing that won't run on modern versions of iOS. If they can make more games compatible I'd definitely enjoy being able to play Crayon Physics, Ridge Racer Accelerated or Minotron again (to name just a few).

I know they’ve lost the source code, but I’d love to have Minotron recreated for consoles and PC. The original only runs on old versions of iOS but it’s so much fun it’s a shame it can’t be easily played any more.

@Damo That's good to know. In fairness even the Steam Deck isn't perfect, things like Heroic Games Launcher are needed to get the old Star Trek games from GOG running.

That's impressive. I really love my Steam Deck but more power is always cool.

Does the Aya Neo have any kind of custom front end for launching games? The Steam Deck's custom interface for launching games is a big plus point, also loads of games have been tuned for the hardware and there are loads of community created settings and control layouts out there.

If the Aya Neo doesn't have that, then there's probably going to be quite a lot of faffing with game settings while with the Steam Deck you can usually just get straight into the game.

I bought a PAL version a few years back in pretty decent condition (the corners of the cardboard slipcase are a bit worn). It's such an awesome game, I love the combat system, the "radar" showing danger areas and the depth in evolving your dragon and picking the correct dragon form for each battle really make it unique.

I honestly don't know if I'd want a remake. It's got such a unique look you'd need people really dedicated to replicating the visual style of the game otherwise it wouldn't feel right. The final area of The Last Guardian reminds me of this game.

I didn't even know there were button codes! I've always unlocked them the hard way by playing the levels. 😂

I never actually use them, I just do it for the extra challenge. 😉

Sega moves in mysterious ways.

Ironically, the US version of Actraiser was easier than the Japanese version, so it’s quite funny to hear the sequel went the other way.

I can sort of understand why they wanted the sim parts removed. Before I actually played Actraiser I thought the sim bits would be boring, then I actually played it and realised they made the game awesome. I can certainly see it putting people off buying the game back in the day.

Wip3out definitely has some of the best box art. The Japanese Saturn version of Wipeout XL is pretty awesome too.

I remember the producer of Wip3out saying they actually took features out of the game in order to make it as minimal as possible. I think it ran in one of the PS1’s high-res modes too as it looked really sharp.

My favourite to play is still probably 2097, I don’t like the XL name, but the NTSC versions are definitely smoother and faster than the PAL release. I’m hoping one day there will be a patch to change the NTSC title screen to display the 2097 logo. 😅

@sdelfin Yeah I absolutely love Ninja Warriors Again, I actually like it more than the recent remake even. I can't put my finger on why, I just like the way it plays more.

I recently played Ghost Chaser Densei as well, and that's a fun little beat 'em up. Prices for that are sky high too! 😩😅

I own most of the games I play on Flashcarts/ODEs. It's mainly the convenience of not having to switch games, being able to play patched versions of games with QoL improvements and in some cases save states for games with no built-in saving facility

I still like to own the original cart/disc if I like the game enough and if I can afford it. Stuff like Vampire Killer and Ninja Warriors Again are getting crazy expensive now sadly. 😢

Great list, Photoboy is a particular favourite of mine, there’s never really been anything else much like it (as far I know). I didn’t realise it was ported to PS1, I’ll have to see if I can track that one down. I do have the PS2 sequel though!

I also really love the PC Engine version of SFII as the AI feels a lot less cheap compared to other versions. Plus it gives you the full ending on all difficulties!

Release it on a JAMMA board! 😅

Fascinating how messing around with an LED/LCD calculator inspired both Mattel and Gunpei Yokoi to make handheld games.

It’s surprising to hear Katz say they didn’t have the hot arcade games. I’d be interested to know what games he was thinking of (maybe Konami’s TMNT game?) because the Mega Drive had great versions of Ghouls ‘n’ Ghosts and Strider as well as Sega’s arcade games.

@Zenszulu I think it's the only third party memory card I've used that hasn't trashed my data! 😂 I was quite pleased when I discovered all my data still on it when I plugged it in a few years back.

I once entrusted my Dreamcast saves to an Action Replay memory card (or was it Game Shark around then? I can't remember anymore 😅). Anyway it lost my best Crazy Taxi score of 88K or thereabouts. That took me ages to get too!