BulkSlash

I'm not sure about 3D being mentioned in the trailer, I would prefer they do everything as pixel art like in Metal Slug. That said, as a small team having to do all the frames of animation would be very hard. Maybe they're going to use 3D models with a filter to create pixel art-like graphics?

Either way, I'm really keen to see what they come up with!

I've got the JAMMA board for this one, it's a great game and I love the variety of alien types that Konami were able to come up with. Interestingly Newt was taken out of the Japanese version and it also doesn't have the APC driving stages.

The trouble with that price tag is it’s a lot for something you don’t know if you’ll get on with. I got the Steam Deck for £350 and that felt like a fair price to dip my toe in (of course I ended up buying a 512GB Micro SD card, then a 265GB SSD and then a 1TB micro SD card because I got on with it so well 😂).

The whole Steam OS interface and control profiles really makes using the Steam Deck relatively pain free. It’s a pity there’s no way to try that Asus out to see if I like it. I wouldn’t mind seeing some benchmarks for things like Cyberpunk to see how well the hardware holds up too.

I also like that Valve have said they won’t be changing the hardware for a couple of years. You can bet Asus will have a new one on the market every year.

I do miss the days of all these crazy peripherals like the Power Glove, the Action Chair, the Hyperboy, etc.

Even though it usually ended in disappointment, there was always that special excitement when you got something that had labels on the box promising it would be totally rad and to take your skillz to the next level.

Even though I use a modded Wii for all my GC stuff, this is very tempting. If it can do animated images, it would be cool to have a SpaceWorld prototype image with a window showing the disc spinning.

I played a lot of this yesterday and it’s great fun (like all Sega’s DC games!) I do need to repatch the GDI image though, it seems to crash whenever I try to travel to another city via train.

That’s pretty crazy the way the lower screen scrolls. The backdrop with the narrow neck and wider lower area looks more suited to Dr. Mario than Tetris.

Heritage Auctions again. 😩 I read a fascinating forum thread detailing all the reasons an original Star Trek phaser prop they were selling was a fake (by the end it was blatantly obvious the prop was fake).

Despite bringing it to HA’s attention they sold it anyway to an undisclosed buyer. The speculation is that they sell things to themselves so they can establish a seemingly legitimate market price so they can make the same or more when they sell it for real. Apparently HA’s owner started doing it with collectible coins in the ‘80s and moves on to a new collectible market every so often.

@Hikingguy That's cool, I didn't know about that. 👍 You're right about the community, there's so many great utilities and mods out there for the Steam Deck.

I just recently got a transparent green Jsaux back panel, I bought it because I thought it looked neat, but it's also got a heat spreader and thermal pad so it offers better cooling than the stock back.

@Hikingguy I agree the 64GB version is great value, it was the one I bought! 😅 The reason I say it's not really viable is because while I had a 512GB Micro SD in it, the 64GB filled up within weeks with shader caches, Proton files and updates to the point that it couldn't fit any more in.

I had all the games installed on the Micro SD so there just wasn't anything else I could have done to free up space on the 64GB short of going into desktop mode, finding the Steam ID of games I'd deleted and manually deleting the shader caches. Maybe it was a bug and the Deck OS should have been doing that automatically?

I ended up replacing the SSD with a 512GB one and getting a 1TB Micro SD. I really should get better at deleting stuff instead of keeping stuff on there "just in case" I feel like playing it. 😂

I think they’ve missed that one of the Steam Deck’s big selling points is how competitive it is on price and battery life.

While I think the 64GB Steam Deck should be avoided, the £460 model is likely half the price of this and will probably have better battery life.

Plus all the custom control profiles from the Steam community means you don’t have to faff setting up controls in most games.

That's an interesting way of doing it, I wonder why SNK did it like that? Maybe they could use cheaper/slower cartridges and make up for that by using faster RAM in the device? Maybe Nintendo should have done that for the SNES and its SlowROM cartridges...

Tetris DS is still my favourite version. Tetris 99 came close, but I just like being able to open up my 3DS and have a quick round or two before closing the lid again.

All the NES sprites help to make it fun too, and the Vs CPU mode is great.

I like that the list is not ordered so there can’t be any complaints about what’s in first, second, etc.

The list is pretty much my teenage years summed up, all the classics I remember playing and enjoying are there. I’m actually replaying Dark Forces 2 on the Steam Deck at the moment, I think it could have made the list for being one of the earliest games to allow for a pacifist run (once you get Force Pull you can disarm all enemies and they just run around lost in a panic! 😅)

@farrgazer I’m just not very good at shmups. 😅 The only one I’ve ever really got good at is Axelay. Games like Gradius I really struggle with because once I die and lose all my power-ups I find it almost impossible to recover. That said I did really enjoy Drainus recently, the sandbox of upgrades and low difficulty meant I enjoyed it a lot.

From watching that long play I can say two things, 1) I’m amazed Irem didn’t sue them, those explosions look lifted directly from R-Type and 2) it looks so difficult there’s no chance I could even get past the first level! 😅

It's an interesting language, having gone through the tutorial the lack of opening and closing braces around blocks of code is kind of blowing my mental fuses. 😅

I'm not totally clear what's nested within a loop and what isn't. I also don't know what putting UU or U before a variable declaration does, best I can guess is it loads it into a register.

Overall it's pretty cool, but I think it would be better if the syntax was a little bit closer to C and less like Assembly.

@XMancs I don't think that would work unfortunately. There are components on the board that are paired with a piece of unique data on the NAND, so when they see a different value in the NAND it refuses to boot. This is why it's only a solution for people who already have a backup of their NAND. 😢

Depending on who you ask it's either an anti-piracy measure or a means to scupper independent repairers (or both).

Sega taking over the world? Isn't that the best timeline? 😉

@IonXploder I think it will solve it if you have a backup of your NAND, but I think if a console has already died without a backup of the NAND being taken then there’s nothing that can be done.

@andykara2003 Thanks! The Hantarexs look particularly good after a re-cap, I think the interlaced image of the Super System 22 boards helps to gives a nice crisp image.

@andykara2003 For my consoles, I don't sadly. I keep meaning to track down a CRT (and my preference would be a '90s Trinitron too) but normally the ones I see are hundred of miles away and collection only (which is understandable given their weight and delicateness)!

I do have Hantarexs and Nanaos in my arcade machines though. I refuse to compromise and put LCDs in there! 😅 In the case of Time Crisis and House of the Dead you literally can't switch them to LCD as the guns wouldn't work.

I'm on the hunt for a 4:3 52" rear projection CRT at the moment as well for a deluxe cab I'm trying to restore. At some point all the RP TVs seem to have dried up!

@andykara2003 That's cool, sadly I've never had the chance to see one in person. What's your favourite CRT model for retro gaming?

That KX-14 Trinitron monitor he's got is a nice model, it has an RGB scart input (although he'd need to mod his N64 to use it! 😅)

@Damo It might be the same machine, was it in Sunspot Amusements in Ilfracombe? They have a sister site in Woolacombe which is where I played it. Sadly I went back to both arcades last year and it's pretty much all fruit machines now with just one Sega Rally 3. 😢

I got to play this in Devon once, it was great fun. I loved games from this era like Super Chase, Rad Mobile, Rail Chase, etc that had you driving through all sorts of crazy locations like shopping malls, restaurants, volleyball courts, etc. They really did let their imaginations run wild when coming up with the settings.

I just realised the Controller S is the first time Microsoft gave something the “S” moniker, I always assumed it started with the One S.

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.