BulkSlash

This has prompted me to check my old Shock Wave in my N64, which is a combo of 1MB memory and rumble pak.

I just opened it up and it's got a CR2032 soldered in it, so I'm going to order some replacement batteries and holders. I've got two, so I'm going to transfer data to the other one so it doesn't lose anything when the battery is disconnected!

It's either the Dog Bone NES controller, the SNES controller or the N64 controller for me. They're all excellent to use and represent most of the key DNA in all modern controllers. I voted for the N64 expecting it to be the lowest but actually it's doing quite well! 😂

I'd also say the Saturn Analogue pad and the Dreamcast controller are very important for introducing analogue triggers (which so many companies seem to struggle to do well, with Nintendo having just given up on them entirely it seems).

I wonder why that Orange staffer thought the device looked unprofessional? I mean folded up it looks like any other smartphone from that era (unless it was unreasonably chunky because of the folding controls?)

I think what killed it for me was the lack of games outside of the PS1. If it had two proper analogue sticks and supported PSP games too I think they would have been onto more of a winner. Really all Sony needed to do was make the PSP Go a phone and they’d have been done. 😅

@Bunkerneath I often report the obvious Vampire Killer repros on eBay being sold for £300 as loose cartridges. I never hear anything back, maybe TimeExtension could try asking eBay for an official comment as to why they never seem to take action when fakes are being sold as originals? Some bad publicity might make them pay attention.

I seem to remember rumours back in the day of building an SVP chip into a pass-through cart like Sonic & Knuckles with the idea that you’d only need to pay for the expensive chip once and then the games could be cheaper.

I wonder if the 32X killed that idea or if someone got their wires crossed and the 32X was the rumoured “pass-through cartridge”? It’s been so long now I can’t remember where I even heard that rumour (hopefully it wasn’t from someone whose uncle worked at Sega 😅).

As cool as it is to see Starfox on base MD hardware, I’d be really interested to see it running on the SVP and see how it could handle it.

That’s a good list. I never really got into Neo Geo back in the day as I rarely got to visit arcades and the times I did they usually didn’t have any Neo Geo games. That said, I’ve played quite a few now and my favourites are definitely Metal Slug 1, Puzzle Bobble and Neo Turf Masters (“on the green!”).

It still doesn’t feel like a new console launch to me without a Ridge Racer game! I must have blacked out Ridge Racer Draw & Drift. 🤮

The last mobile one I played was Slipstream (it’s still on my iPhone), it could have been fairly decent but was ruined by micro-transactions. It was really blatant about it too, the moment you paid for a single vehicle upgrade the AI cars would go from being impossible to being really easy.

I think the problem is Bamco kept trying to make Ridge Racer like it was Gran Turismo, so they’d spend huge amounts trying to make a AAA game with ever larger career modes, when really RR should be a short arcade experience and a budget price to match. Much like the recent Cruis‘n Blast.

I loved Games-X, they tended to break stories much earlier than the monthly mags (obviously) and I distinctly remember them having the first picture of the US “Super Famicom”. When I saw what they’d done to the design I stopped waiting for the US machine and bought an imported Super Famicom. 😅

I remember the SAPS adverts, I remember everyone said they were rubbish but I always thought they were pretty good! 😅

“we continue to maintain inventory and fulfill new orders”

Sounds to me like they’ve stopped making them and are just running down the mountain of systems they’ve got sat in a warehouse somewhere. Hopefully they don’t end up like all those E.T. cartridges.

Coupled with “We have several hardware and software projects in development, under licensed contracts” I think they plan to just licence out the rights to make Atari mini consoles and let someone else take the financial risk of building hardware.

I can’t get more than a few minutes into level 1. I really do suck at shmups! 😩😅

On the topic of the game having a sense of humour, I assume that’s why the gates at the end of Statue say BJ instead of JB…

I love Dark Forces and its sequel. I’m replaying Jedi Knight at the moment on the Steam Deck, but this will definitely be what I’m playing next!

I love how DOLLS stands for Detachment of Limited Line Service. Reminds me of how the girl co-pilots in Bulk Slash were called MISS which stood for Manageable Intelligent Support System. 😂

I’ve always found Carmack to be a deeply insightful and intelligent guy. I remember years ago reading his change logs on porting Wolfenstein to the iPhone and every decision he made was well considered and made perfect sense. It’s definitely to Meta’s detriment that they’ve lost him.

I didn't know there were devices for this back in the day for consoles, but thinking about all the crazy stuff that came out back then I really shouldn't be surprised! 😅

I've got something like this for JAMMA boards, but I was never able to get it to work properly.

I never saw Robotech but in the UK we had Battle of the Planets, which was similarly heavily re-edited from the original Gatchaman series.

We also had Star Fleet which was a puppet show like Thunderbirds but the puppets looked like anime characters. It was similarly reworked from its original Japanese series X-Bomber.

Both were great and I wouldn’t have got into anime without them. There were a lot of bad dubs in the ‘80s and ‘90s, so I can understand why people tend to hate anything that has been dubbed or localised or altered, but it wasn’t all bad.

I was always on board with the look, at the time I considered it a visual successor to A Link to the Past and what that game would have looked like in 3D.

What I really didn’t like was the lack of dungeons and content in general and the fetch quest at the end to pad the game out disappointed me so much I didn’t even finish it.

Sadly both Mario and Zelda seemed to fall victim on the GC to Nintendo overcompensating for the way games would be delayed until they were perfect on the N64 and they released games before they were ready.

Someone actually voted for LJN! 🤣

I was lucky enough to have a go on a G-Loc 360 at the Trocadero back in the day. I remember they kept a stack of towels next to it so cleaning up accidents was obviously fairly common! 😆

I didn't really play the game, I just put the plane into a spin so I could get the cabinet to spin me round over and over! 😂

It was a truly unique gaming experience and really gave you something you would likely never get at home. Things like this and Ridge Racer Full Scale really were incredible in their day, it's a shame the days of huge statement cabs like that are over as it really was the golden age of arcade games to me.

@sdelfin Thanks, yes it was Console Wars! I’ve got so many books in my Kindle Library that without remembering the name I couldn’t even search for it! 😅

That’s a great point about the Saturn coming with a game and storage vs the PS1 with no game or memory card. I guess it came down to that all important optical price.

Speaking of pack-in games, IIRC Console Wars also recounted how SoJ were adamant that Kalinske shouldn’t pack the brand new Sonic 1 in with the Genesis. Iramajiri eventually relented and it lead to the sale of loads of consoles. I think that was the start of the problems between SoA and SoJ.

I remember reading about this in a book about Sega of America and Kalinske (annoyingly I can’t remember its name 😳).

Apparently when SoA prioritised certain retailers over others for the early Saturn stock they ended up black listed by the retailers who missed out. They refused to even stock the Saturn later on, which certainly wouldn’t have helped.

I’d be interested in hearing the perspective of people at SoJ at the time for fairness, but from everything I’ve read they really made some terrible decisions and sabotaged their own launch just because Kalinske succeeded where they hadn’t.

It's pretty much the only way to do it these days given the complexity of game development. Why re-invent the wheel when someone has already done it and done all the debugging and testing to make sure it works? It means you can focus on making the game and not the engine.

That's really impressive, I expected the downside to be a slideshow framerate but even that was smooth. I'm genuinely surprised they couldn't find a publisher. Maybe publishers were eyeing the upcoming PSP and DS at that time?

Sadly I don't think this would have saved the 32X. I did enjoy playing on my brother's 32X back in the day and I recently bought one for myself. Virtua Racing and Star Wars were both a lot of fun and visually very exciting (for their time) even though they were virtually impossible to beat.

I think if Sega had ported a lot more of their Super Scaler games to the 32X like Outrun, Galaxy Force II, Rail Chase, Alien 3, Rad Mobile, etc it would be a lot more fondly remembered. I remember Capcom's Alien vs Predator was rumoured to be in development for the 32X as well, which I think would have been very well received.

For me, the series peaked with Vice City. I think it’s a combination of the setting, music and story that makes it my favourite. I think IV and V are very impressive technical achievements but are just less fun.

For example, driving into a Pay ‘n’ Spray and having the cops suddenly wonder where you’ve gone might be unrealistic, but it’s more fun than having to park in an alley and stare at the screen for a minute or two while waiting for the cops to stop hunting for you.

I had a Japanese launch GC, so I can't remember if it said push or something in Japanese, but I do remember it felt quite satisfying to press and have the disc pop up! 😂

I was lucky enough to play RR Full Scale in the Trocadero back in the day, it really was an amazing experience. They had a G-Loc 360 too, which was incredible to play.

It's frustrating that the game was sold to someone who wasn't interested in properly preserving it, especially as proper preservationists had been trying to negotiate to buy it for some time.

Still, at least the ROMs are dumped and hopefully the parts that have been scrapped weren't too iconic to the overall structure.

The trouble with those old System 22 boards is they tend to burn themselves out. There's a dwindling supply of them and no spare chips any more so one day there won't be any left. 😢

I remember grey importers wanted £100 for Pit Fighter until the reviews hit. After that they couldn’t pay people to take a copy!

I need to give this game another go. I couldn’t get it to work with my old EverDrive last time I tried it, every time I started a new game it would just spawn the main character falling into an infinite dark blue pit. 😅

The visuals in Dragon's Heaven are superb, it really looks amazing with its gritty look. I re-watched it recently but it never occurred to me it could have been the inspiration for Samus' Varia suit. The live action intro using models is really cool too.

That’s very sad news, and still pretty young too. 😥 I happen to be replaying Arkham City at the moment and Conroy’s Batman voice just feels like the definitive take on the character.

I must give the Wii Forgotten Sands a try. I’m nearly finished replaying Sands of Time (Ubisoft took too long with their remaster!) and I was planning to play the HD Forgotten Sands afterwards as I love it and think it’s a genuinely overlooked classic. If the Wii game is anything as good I will be sure to have a good time.

I'm still annoyed they messed with the Rad Mobile port the way they did. What could have been a perfect port on the Saturn ended up as some half-3D mish-mash with terrible performance. 😥

I really wish we could get Minotron 2112 back. It was an early iPhone game parodying Robotron with llamas, but apparently the source code was lost. I loved the random humour of that game and wish it could be preserved.

Do we know how Space Harrier 2 achieves the smoother scaling? I'm quite intrigued by that. In the original I assume they had something like small/medium/large versions of each object and they would cycle through them smallest to biggest to simulate something moving closer to the screen.

Is the new version doing actual scaling or have they just added in more intermediate object sizes to make the pseudo-scaling look smoother? If it's actual scaling, I'd be interested to know if it could run on original hardware or if they've "cheated" and overclocked the emulated 68000.

It runs on Steam Deck if anyone is wondering. I just got my first Chaos Emerald! 👍

@AJB83 It was the arcade version of Sega Rally, I have a few cabs in my garage. Unfortunately I suck at it, I can beat the three main tracks but never get first on Lake Side! 😅

I’ve played all sorts today. 😅 I played some Sega Rally, Daytona, Time Crisis, Resident Evil 4 (I finally worked out some decent gyro controls on the Steam Deck), Ninja Gaiden Black, Puzzle Bobble and Street Fighter 2 Turbo.

It’s still a great Mario game, the DX patch makes it look very vibrant and colourful on the GBC.

I’ve often wondered if the game was a bit rushed or unfinished. There are lots of secret levels, but many of them don’t seem to have much point, they aren’t shortcuts to anywhere and they don’t give you lots of extra lives or power-ups. Of course, there’s fun to be had in just finding these secret levels and beating them, but it just struck me as a bit odd in places.

I love Final Fight 2. I know it’s nothing special really, but I’ve always enjoyed playing it. I’ve even got the bootleg JAMMA board of it, which is pretty cool as it doesn’t send you back to the start of the level if you use a continue. 😁

It’s really cool to see those live action scenes, especially Maki as she was always my go-to character.

The good thing about those really early games is it’s relatively easy to source spare parts to repair them and they’re very well documented with schematics. Much of the arcade stuff from the ‘90s, especially the early 3D hardware in things like Model 2 and Super System 22 used custom chips that aren’t manufactured any more and all the spares are gone.

So when those boards die, they’re dead for good. So when you see a Daytona or a Time Crisis, make sure you take the chance to play them while they’re still around. 👍

I remember when Mario’s voice in Mario 64 sounded weird. Prior to that we’d had the deep and gruff voices of both Bob Hoskins and Cap’n Lou Albano voicing Mario, so Martinet’s high pitched voice was the one that sounded weird until I got used to it.

Chris Pratt’s take is much easier to handle compared to that change! 😅

Kujo-san is wrong, I am the worst at shooting games. 😉 The only one I’m good at is Axelay.

IIRC Asuka in Neon Genesis Evangelion monopolised her friend’s Saturn in one episode. Of course the Saturn had several NGE games too!

That’s a really ingenious solution, if my AV Famicom wasn’t already modded with the Hi-Def NES kit I’d definitely get one.

Reading the Twitter thread apparently you can write different colour palettes to the board, which is a really cool addition for people who prefer the arcade RGB palette.

@Damo @Axelay71 Exactly what I was thinking, a nice cost effective way to own one of these classics. I’d definitely like to get one. I wonder if the openings in the disk drive slots on the front are for SD cards?

It’s funny the names that pop up. James Follet wrote sci-fi radio dramas for the BBC and Jacqui Lyons was Bob Pape’s agent and helped him out of a sticky situation when he was porting R-Type to the Speccy (which is a fascinating story in itself).

@Damo I think you’re right, there must be some architectural restriction that makes it unusable. After all, it’s the obvious place for a flash cart over things like an ODE, a VCD port device or using a controller port! 😅

It’s funny how you can load games from pretty much every port of the Saturn except for the cartridge port! 😂