Coalescence

In other news, the secret to endless engagement is to just say something wrong about gaming history. Who cares if some wrestling woman is completely wrong about everything ever in the gaming world.

I am forever glad I nailed down pretty much every cart I'd ever want to own physically well before reproductions became a common thing. It just seems like an absolute nightmare to deal with, carting around a piece of hardware or having to crack open carts for inspection and then going back at someone who is either knowingly scamming or even worse stubbornly believes their stuff is legit. No thanks.

Pretty cool little game. Control gets a little clunky around islands but it otherwise really gets the thrill of sailing the Wind Waker ocean down. But yeah, this is swimming in C&D bait.

I'll never use them and more power to people who enjoy that kind of thing. Disabling any and all notifications is what I do when setting up a console, I already have a device that won't ever shut up. At least they're fittingly called something so absolutely stupid as cheevios.

I'm pretty well insulated to this sort of thing with my collection of devices, but this sure sucks for anyone who hasn't been in the hobby for a good while. Same with people wanting to get into physical media collecting and finding out how much of drag it is to buy overseas right now.

LRG exists because there was money to be had. The quality issues and all that is just icing on the crap cake. Their business model was rotten to the core from day one.

GameStop acting like they're an authority on anything is cute. But to their credit, if there's any way to bait engagement with gaming, it is to make statements about what is retro and therefore old which will always rustle people up.

There's way worse video game movies. The first Resident Evil is the high watermark of crap for me, completely manhandling every aspect of the source material while being an absolute trash movie on top of it lacking even the courtesy to be awesomely bad like Street Fighter or Mortal Kombat. Doom at least had the stupid violent fun I expected from the game, and at the very least had a home run few minutes with the fps segment.

Definitely worked if they're trying to get a rise out of people. Apparently that tweet turned one user into a pearl clutching old fogey. The funny bit is them thinking they can whip Nintendo into some disavowing frenzy with this. We all know NOA will at most release some corporate talk about not authorizing this usage and Nintendo Switch Sports is currently available for the Nintendo Switch and Nintendo Switch 2.

@Bod2019 Reportedly the wifi will be for updates, but it hasn't been implemented yet. The hardware is in there, the system even has the wifi icon on it. Knowing Analogue they're probably working up some heavy duty solution to keep people from using the wifi do something other than updates and may just let that feature rot if they can't do that.

Can someone please put zombie Destructoid out of its misery next?

I mean, they're right that this is normal. Doesn't make it okay though. Most people would be absolutely shocked if they did an audit for how many of their various devices are constantly phoning home and doing other crap. Good reason to keep a separate network to quarantine things from any devices with personal info, and have a pihole to stop unknown outbound communications.

Both my G&W units are definitely not collecting dust. They are great desk clocks. My work team is spread on three time zones so it's an easy way to remember where everyone is at a glance, with cute little animations all day.

It's a cool idea, I'd love to do something like that for Seiken Densetsu 3. But holy god would I never ever risk messing up my copy of Chrono Trigger.

More power to you if that's your thing. Me, I play old games on old/offline devices particularly so I'm not ever bothered with things like profiles or communities or especially notifications.

Castlevania 64 is definitely overhated. The game is oozing with atmosphere and the combat is a great adaptation of the 2D games where you have to fight efficiently instead of just knocking out every enemy like Zelda. The magic nitro/magdragora is a cool challenge but everyone just remembers it from the AVGN episode. And the Villa sequence, so damn good. Anyway, this game looks pretty sweet and far better than what usually passes for Castlevania-likes these days.

That's really interesting, because I always thought the Dreadful Fight sounded very ActRaiser-y. Crazy to think this guy who was a young upstart freelancing came up with a mad technique to get around memory limitations so early in the console's lifespan, and he ended up influencing both Nobuo Uematsu and Hiroki Kikuta, and probably many others. And the guy is so damn humble about it. Instead of seeking fame, he's gone and made a killer Genesis game.

It was kind of a split strategy back then for sure. They rolled back on the 2DS but kept chasing the edge with the Wii U. Nowadays they seem to be working on a hybrid thought. They're using slightly dated off the shelf tech to keep from making hardware a loss leader while not lagging so far behind the curve. The Switch works on one basic, previously seen, but never mastered innovation. And they're gently iterating rather than radically redesigning while keeping the first party investment high instead of relying solely on the third party. The numbers speak for themselves. People can make their f Nintendo subreddits and doom all they want but the Switch's lineage is pretty much solidified at this point. They probably won't have another lightning in a bottle success like the Wii but also probably won't ever have another disaster like the Wii U or 3DS launch. This is going to be the age of success through moderate stability for this company.

Hardest of passes for me. Playing a game this size is an investment and making that with a machine translation would be a poor one at best. Translating and localizing is an art and any form of brute force is pointless. The translator has a good deal of interpretation in bringing the meaning behind the words and tone across. That is especially lost when going from Japanese to English when using machine translations or poor quality fan translations.

@Sketcz the dam level's difficulty definitely does not deserve the notoriety. It's like the turbo tunnel. Not easy, but it just takes some practice and understanding of the mechanics. Most people just give up way to easy on these or just roll with popular opinion.

One of the most notoriously difficult to replicate consoles with the peddlers of the worst recreation units is surely a match made in gaming hell.

I stopped having problems with this after I learned how to work with hitboxes on shmups. Once you can get that wider vision of the playing field and awareness of your hitbox, navigating things like the Turbo Tunnel becomes much more manageable. Thinking it's about memorization is the wrong approach. You need the zen of spatial awareness, same as getting through the bit.trip games. I think the parallax scrolling messes people up too.

But yeah, agreed there's much harder things ahead. The snakes mess me up more than anything. And hard disagree to the old criticism that it's bad design. The turbo tunnel is a bear masterwork of tight challenge.

Good exercise for reminding people not to take these ratings so seriously. Whether metacritic, rateyourmusic, or whatever, people act like these things are the ruling supreme authority and not just the mushy averaging of purely subjective scores on obtuse individual rating systems.

Funny stuff. Reminds me of way back in 1999 when we pooled together on the Internet to vote a New Kids on the Block song into MTV's Total Request Live.

This is cool, but Yasunori really set the bar impossibly high with the Chrono Cross Radical Dreamers concert. That group of crazy talented musicians and vocalists performing passionately with the man himself on brilliant arrangements is easily the best video game music concert recording I've ever seen/heard. The blu Ray of that performance is solid gold. And they did a majority of the soundtrack. I was hoping he'd do something similar for Trigger.

Looks nice, but that's a steep cost for what looks to be a slight improvement.

I sure wish Karl hadn't screwed the pooch with that whole Billy Mitchell fiasco, because it's going to damage his credibility and he did some incredible work exposing WATA's scummy practices.

r/gradedgames is a good hate watch. The winners on that sub are something else, and they pretty much get off on posts like this decrying their silliness. But they'll show us when they someday buy a house with that sealed up spicy battery.

I learned about this game from Gareth in The Office, and it really makes others look way too small in breadth.

Their whole business model is rotten so it's probably not going to change much, maybe they'll have slightly better quality and less scummy practices at least.

Nostalgia from people who discarded their childhood units and the resellers taking advantage is certainly a factor. But it's more than that. The 3DS and Vita are the last of their kind: fully dedicated portables from the big console makers, and they are kind of ultimate ends of the line with great displays, solid hardware, and perfect form factors. And both are emulation powerhouses. The 3DS also has the two libraries of exclusives as mentioned with a visual effect you can't get anywhere else. It's currently the best place to play most Virtual Boy games without the real hardware (Teleroboxer is sadly a real pain on red viper). As time goes on more units are lost and the people who already have them, like myself, will never ever give them up. That price is only going one way and the more popular retro gaming becomes the more there will be spikes.

I'm super glad I obtained almost everything I wanted retro-wise long before this happened. I wanted some more TG16 games and the CD add on, but the ship on this being a niche hobby is long sailed.

Cool, but the Super NT being able to copy roms and saves from carts and play them via fpga wins out for me.

Well deserved. They're frequently late with terrible communication but Analogue ultimately always delivers. Remains to be seen if the M64 will match their pace (certainly promising the moon bolstered by the modretro bros), but despite a few rough edges the 3D is doing what it should and that's a plug and play modern N64 with some gentle upgrades keeping it as close to the original experience as possible.

@PopetheRev28 Only one crying about words on the Internet is you.

Exhausting is right. Analogue should have tempered that marketing just a little so they didn't come across like the 3D would be absolutely bulletproof - especially when their previous consoles haven't been either. But this constant clickbait/outrage porn everyone is slinging is way too incendiary for the actual problems.

Analogue's products are great plug and play options for using original carts and controllers. They'll never be as robust or ever-evolving as a mister solution. They also aren't going to magically make decades old games look like modern ports, and the silly people who bought the 3D in a rush without understanding the product are a big part of the pile on.

stfuajpg moment

Kind of underscores why I like to stick with the Analogue Pocket for retro handheld games. Just plug and play. Fiddling with settings is for the birds.

I would really love to hear what the band thought of this considering how they are strictly against licensing their music. I could see Mike D just having a laugh at these guys who probably took Fight For Your Right at face value. Anyway, regular reminder to look up the original title for License To Ill.

Regardless of whether it's true or not I'm just going to live with the yellowing. Why even risk any potential damage to aged expensive hardware just for aesthetics.

Not a shocker. Fpga based retro consoles are crazy complicated and expensive to pull off, and the tiny audience of people willing to pay that premium have high expectations. There's good reason why Analogue has almost no competition outside of a crazy person like Palmer, and why they probably keep Kevtris locked down with a massive salary. I'll be pleasantly surprised if this thing gets finished. I have a Mega SG and love it, but I'd double dip for a unit with the 32X built in.

The salt is exploding from reddit. Fragile people shouldn't be early adopters.

As a Michigan resident I've always wanted to see this rereleased. Hopefully they keep the ultra cheesy acting. It will be interesting to see if those upskirt shots stay in a US version lol

Shame he biffed so badly. I didn't kickstart because it sounded pretty dubious from the start, but video games live was a fun show. I attended a few shows, my wife sang in one of them, and I did the Kickstarter for most of the CD releases which all came through with the promised bonuses. No doubt he screwed up bad and deserves the exodus, dude probably needed someone to reign in his out of control hypesmanship and keep him away from the big dollar decisions.

Wow. I hardly ever buy video game shirts but these are outstanding. That Ginkei especially is tempting.

Always with the misterbros. There's overlap but they are different products for difference audiences, not sure why that's always a struggle to understand.

Looking forward to playing around with this feature. Body Harvest is one of the first carts I want to play when my 3D arrives.

Great review. Analogue is always late, always lousy at communication, but always comes through in the end. Can't wait to add this to the collection. I'm way past the days of wanting to tinker with mods and other solutions. The plug and play setup of these consoles is second to none for playing old carts on a modern set.

@RupeeClock They've said from day one the 3D will not get openfpga, like the Duo.

Also worth noting that while the 3D probably will get a leaked official unofficial 'jailbreak' firmware (which isn't actually a jailbreak, just alternate official firmware with the load from sd feature), these have been coming later and later with each console and the Duo's is very far behind the official firmware release, so getting the option to play roms from the sd card comes at the cost of missing fixes and features. The Duo has save states, but the 'jailbreak' firmware doesn't have that update.

'Hamaguchi explains that the one thing he didn't want to do was "overwrite the original game with my own fan perspective version of it and create a new version of the game which is essentially a fan fiction of it."'

George Bush Mission Accomplished vibes lol

Nothing to do with ownership over a notoriously valuable NES game, riiiiight. That's totally not why they picked this otherwise very average game over any number of NES gems.

Finally, a streamlined solution to the terribly inconvenient task of recharging the battery.

But that is pretty cool and I love the color coordination.

Big pass on that. There's a world of difference between a brute force machine translation and a proper translation & localization. Just as there's a world of difference between Mato's Mother 3 translation or Neill Corlett's Seiken Densetsu 3 translation, and the J2E Final Fantasy IV translation. If I'm going to sink time into a big text heavy game, I want some quality behind the translation.

I'm actually thinking about buying a copy now. That is comedy gold. And fitting jank for Mortal Kombat.

He's spot on about the unstable aspect of live music. That's also why I can't jive with music made by 100% virtual instruments most of the time (Celeste's soundtrack being one big exception). There's a roughness to music and other art that I crave. People who have been fine with ultra glossed processed & homogenized music will probably be able to slide right into AI stuff and not even know the difference, but for me there's no substitute. The tech isn't going away when there's money to be had, it'll just take artists like Nobuo to have the discipline to keep original art alive.