Hexapus

@RetroGames You're right, it is a pretty tame insult. You have always had well thought out arguments, whether I agree with them or not, I appreciate that kind of discourse. It's the repeated drive-by middle finger from some people that triggered me. That's on me though, I shouldn't read the comment section first thing.

I would like to see more cross platform ports and this is kind of a "what could have been" project. For example, the remake of Ghouls 'n Ghosts on the MD, it looks incredible so far.

I'm guessing Konami had their reasons like budget restraints, but SNES versions of their MD games would have been really great, not only for Nintendo but for the consumer as well. I'd love to see Castlevania Bloodlines on the SNES.

Capcom kind of went down that road with Strider, SF2, and Mega Man but I can understand why it might not have been in the company's best interest to make a version for every platform.

I'm not sure what the "waiting" is all about. Is he just waiting for payment? Waiting for other programmers?

It's not really clear why he would put everything on hold for someone else when he's the one in charge. Not saying he shouldn't be disappointed/angry with the situation but it's just kind of confusing.

People wait for permission to create something all too often it seems. Dude has come this far, just keep moving forward.

This looks really impressive. Hopefully the dev working on it sees it through to the end.

Can we get a ban on users calling people names like "Sega fanboys" on every Mega Drive post? Does this not violate this site's own rules?

That kind of immature behavior really lowers the rest of the retro gaming community who know they can play on multiple platforms without devolving into petty tribalism. All of the games are here for all to enjoy, no one is attacking Nintendo or saying the MD is better.

We get enough of that kind of name calling on Reddit and Youtube. It should be left on a '90s playground.

@PopetheRev28 That's interesting, Saturn is usually said to be better for Capcom games. I have the PS1 version and it was pretty sluggish. Not just long loading times but the game itself is slower. At least that's how I remember it. I haven't played it on disc in years tbh.

I usually go for MAME/FBA or back in the day Winkawaks, if anyone remembers that emulator.

My opinion on aesthetic preferences is not up for debate and neither are yours. What we find attractive or beautiful or unappealing are largely decided for us when we were born based on our environment.

These straw man arguments about beauty are ludicrous. "You don't like it because it's not your fantasy" BS.

Of the three images at the top, I find zero appealing. I've never cared for western character designs when it comes to video games. I almost always feel like they missed the mark or didn't have an artist that was skilled enough for the task(Mortal Kombat 1&2 for example).

On the left - her head is too big and her eyes, nose, and mouth are out of proportion to her big head.

Center- She looks like she had a cold and has been blowing her nose for days, probably needs some sleep.

On the right- Probably the most solid of the three, is just kind of meh to me. It's okay but it screams forgettable bargain bin title to me.

I've always had a bias in favor of Asian character art(they just have better sensibilities when it comes to blending realism and "cartoon" features imo) and no one is going to shame me into changing my tastes, which is kind of impossible to do anyway.

Power Metal does not improve old games. The original chiptunes are infinitely better. I say this as a metal head of 35 years and with all sincerity, please stop replacing beautiful chiptunes with forgettable power metal covers.

@honuk Anbernic tends to try this layout every couple of handhelds. The old RG350 had the same layout back when there were only a few of these emulator devices out there. I don't know why they keep trying it. It always looks wrong to me but I guess some people like it.

@Psykomatik If you go on reddit or youtube or this site even and look into FPGA, you'll find that the console wars never ended, the names just changed.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2qbCPBdRI_I

@delt75 Yeah N64 and Saturn are notorious when it comes to emulation. They're fine on a PC but if you want a stand alone console or handheld, they need a lot of power to run properly.

@delt75 It sounds like you need to do some tinkering on your Pi 4. Saying "games don't run well on it" is kind of like saying "My car doesn't run well but my neighbor's car runs fine." There's a thousand variables that could be the problem. If you just want something that's "set it and forget it" then you probably made the right choice with the Pocket.

Some of us have had to tinker with settings since '80s pc gaming, where you were lucky if a game ran perfectly out of the box. Most of the time it took a bit of time to get a game working properly.

I wouldn't say modern software emulation is that difficult but there are some settings that need to be addressed depending on the game/system you're trying to play.

@DanijoEX-the-Pierrot Unless I'm mistaken these recent ranked lists are all done by how users on this site rank the games they own/want. So if no one puts Saturn versions in their list and gives it a score, it won't show up. Maybe someone can correct me if I'm wrong.

It's also a safe bet that the Saturn had some great SNK ports. Capcom games are always said to be better on Saturn than PS1, at least from what I've heard/read online.

@Avol I use to have it as well and I can say that it does not do a good job of representing KoF or SNK/Neo Geo games. It's okay but nothing compared the arcade games. The pixel art on the Neo Geo is worth checking out even if you're not into the series.

@Sketcz I think you're probably in the majority. I only knew the PC versions of Doom 1 & 2 and was a bit surprised when I found out they changed the music. As a metal head I appreciate the original soundtrack but I also kinda like the ambient stuff. The title screen music is pretty badass imo...

https://youtu.be/atdyHvLhJXo?si=jZ7tfSmy3tA-Mv-W

...but not nearly as memorable as the Metallica and Slayer riffs that were in the PC version.

A Golden Axe anime series similar to 80s OVAs would be amazing but this is the USA, where all animation is "kid stuff" or adult comedy or comedy for kids. I'll be shocked if this doesn't have talking animals in some form or another.

It's a good episode for sure but "the plot heavily revolved around Virtua Fighter 2" is a bit of a stretch. It's about a rebellious young man that can somehow control electricity/lightning.

Also Sonic the Hedgehog music and ring sounds are really prominent in the opening scene.
I love the X-Files but I always found it odd that Sonic sounds were mixed in to the arcade noises.

I wasn't expecting this demo hit me with nostalgia but it did. Obviously playing with a keyboard is not ideal but damn they really got a lot right with this prequel so far. It's like a Saturn remake of Sonic 1. Really nice pixel art even if it doesn't really reach 32bit standards. I hope they finish the game.

@Daggot Revenge of Shinobi is head and shoulders above the rest in my opinion as well. While I do like Shadow Dancer and Shinobi 3, all the elements line up with Revenge. The intro, the music(!), the pixel art, the level design, the sound fx. The Ninja Master laughing at you when you have to continue.

As weird as it may sound I was disappointed when I rented Shinobi 3 and it didn't have the same look and feel as Revenge. Shinobi 3 is a great game though, the huge bosses are really something else.

Some of the best music on the Genesis/MD. The only thing that I don't like about this game is that some of the graphics are bland or use odd colors. The minotaurs look especially janky to me.

The gameplay is classic Castlevania style though and I would love to see someone make a sequel for the MD.

needs more randomly placed stickers

@OldManHermit Martin Landau was such a great actor. I especially liked his performances on The Outer Limits.

If you have the ability to recreate all the sprites, backgrounds, sounds, music, etc. and make it all playable, it might be time to just come up with your own designs and make your own IP.

I don't even really like this dev's sprite/pixel art style but they clearly have some skills. This could be the sign that they should take the leap from fan-game developer to original indie-game creators.

Master illustrator. Strider and ESWAT are so much better than what we got in the US. His rendering ability is insane. I always thought the Ex-Ranza cover was a 3D model.

@-wc- SSFIITurbo introduced the super combo and Akuma/Gouki.
My friends and I had to drive an hour outside of our relatively small midwestern town to play it. Not that we went looking for it, we just wanted to go to some different arcades. We walked into a pretty small place and there it was. I don't think it ever came to our local mall's "Tilt" arcade.

This looks really great.

@-wc- I didn't mean to come off hostile either. On the surface it looks like this guy is being altruistic with his creation but I suspect he was hoping it would be a brilliant marketing strategy. Artificial scarcity. It is pretty creative from a marketing stand point, I'll give him that. Maybe I'm too cynical. It seems like a more polite version of the Paprium situation to me.

Thanks for being civil. I apologize if I sounded angry, this story/release really got under my skin for some reason.

@-wc- In order for your DaVinci analogy to work, he would have had to come up with the rough idea for the painting, unprompted. Announce his project to the village/city/region. Show the people his work in progress. Give them rough copies and promise that all will have the opportunity to buy a copy for their wall. Then, after all this time and effort, show everyone his painting and announce to the hopeful buyers that they actually can't have it.
"Sorry, it turns out I copied some of the painting from another painter so I can only give out this one copy to one person on the down-low. The rest of you can ***** off."

But as you are probably aware the Mona Lisa was commissioned. It was always going into a private collection. It was not made with the intent of distribution and enjoyment.

"Made by Leonardo da Vinci, the most famous painter of his time, around 1503, the painting was commissioned by a rich Italian merchant, Francesco del Giocondo"

In the dev's own words on Reddit - [EDIT: I can't confirm that it is the dev "Goldlocke" making the Reddit posts but all announcements on r/SNES are from the one account. If I'm wrong then I apologize to Goldlocke.]
"Dottie Flowers - the full version is a very nice homebrew Run and Gun. Also it's the first new SNES game released in 2024, again by the master of SNES homebrew games, Goldlocke. A very limited physical release made by himself was and will be distributed. Great new addition to the SNES library."

Sounds a lot like he was going to distribute his self proclaimed master piece to the general public doesn't it? The retro game fans that are clamoring for new SNES games among all the new MD games.
"Great new addition to the SNES library" that you can't play.

Bollocks.

@-wc- You're DaVinci analogy makes no sense and you conveniently ignored all of Pinballbuzzbro's points. Don't know why you're being so combative while offering nothing to the conversation.

"This left the developer with one option..."
No, he had several options, one of which would have been to use his own ideas/characters instead of stealing someone's IP. There are plenty of ways to reference a popular character without straight up using that character. Just ask Sega about revisions to the Revenge of Shinobi.

Another would be to release the game to the world, just like thousands of other indie projects and deal with the fact that people are going to pirate everything, full stop.

He also could have legally secured the rights to use the characters. It's called licensing.

"...without my approval or consent." The irony that he didn't get the consent of the copyright holders to begin with and wants people to respect his IP.

Now he gets the satisfaction of watching his game sell for $1000 on eBay.
"Look everyone, I made a SNES game but you can't play it!"

I believe I'm using the UK phrase correctly when I say, bollocks to that.

The guy in the Neo-Geo ad looks like Patrick Bateman. "After this game I have to return some video tapes."

@DestructoDisk Yeah this "Japanese Repro" story sounds like pure conjecture or there's a lot of info left out. Why would the programmer stop making ROM patches, because of repro carts? There's at least one ROMhack website that gets updated daily so it's not like they couldn't just make them available for everyone.

This kind of thing is really cool and the price is decent. I like the idea that the general public can back-up their aging carts and memory cards.

I'm guessing he was advised to say it was a coincidence. It's a romantic notion that all artists draw everything from imagination but that's just not reality.

This guy clearly used the Sonic stage as a reference and there's nothing wrong with that as long as he owns up to it. He would have been wise to say, "Yeah I'm a huge Sonic/Sega fan." Fans would have gotten a kick out of it but now he sounds like he's being dishonest.
It's the same casino.

@Hydra_Spectre For gritty, edgy, and dark check out Kawajiri's films from the 80s and 90s such as - Wicked City, Demon City Shinjuku, Cyber City Oedo 808, Ninja Scroll, Goku Midnight Eye, Vampire Hunter D:Bloodlust, etc.. That's just Kawajiri films among many others.

While I do agree that the films you mentioned have good animation IMO they don't even hold a candle to what Japan produced in the 80s/90s in terms of "dark" content/story.

@Scarmucci I agree. It's the typical Hollywood model - take a well known franchise, ignore the source material, and produce a lifeless version of something that barely resembles what made the IP great. Design by committee - safe and all around bland. Then ask "What went wrong?"

They took Final Fantasy and tried to make a James Cameron film out of it. Shouldn't have even been called "Final Fantasy". It could have been it's own thing but movie execs and marketing teams don't want to take a risk on something without brand recognition.

@Razieluigi Some people want to play their original carts. I've seen people ask if there was a cheaper Nomad alternative. There is something to be said about taking a MD cart out of it's clamshell, popping into a console and playing only that game.
Perhaps it's the nostalgia factor but it is a slightly different experience. I think people that are into Evercade handhelds might agree.

I already have a Anbernic 351P that I use regularly as well as some cheaper handhelds, so I do get your point. However, I don't think there should be a limit to how many handhelds are available. I would bet that if this was Analogue brand handheld, no one would be complaining.

Edit: There are also hardliners that are dead set against emulation/roms(even though they probably emulate old games on modern hardware). To some emulation is not accurate(lag/stuttering), illegal, immoral, or all of the above. This would be a way for them to have a handheld without breaking copyright laws. I'm not saying I agree with them but there are a lot of people out there that are anti-emulation full stop.

When I first saw Last Resort in an arcade I was instantly entranced by the pixel art and even the title screen/logo is amazing. I'm also a big fan of Otomo and Akira so it's a game I return to from time to time, even though it's tough as nails.

A lot of negativity for what looks like a really cool handheld, especially for a Hyperkin product. Do people hate Hyperkin?

Not everyone wants to spend $500 on a Sega Nomad that eats batteries and will probably need a new screen or new internal components.

I really like the design of this device and the only other alternative(that plays carts) that I know of is that Columbus Circle MD Pocket which is questionable in terms of quality.

@Poodlestargenerica You're absolutely right, any game that isn't 1st person would be 3rd person and my initial explanation was pretty terrible.

I don't remember when I first heard it but the term "3rd person game" has become a catch all sub-genre for games that either view the player from behind or just over the shoulder like Gears of War, RE4, GTA3, etc.. If you do a search for "3rd person game" most of the results and best of lists are of the Dead Space variety. It's kind of a false category I guess.

@Poodlestargenerica I was saying that Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain had a fixed overhead camera(not sure if it was 2D or prerendered 3D) and completely different gameplay and vibe than the 3rd person perspective of the sequels. Soul Reaver is more like Devil May Cry, Blood Omen is more like Diablo in presentation. Maybe not pure isometric but more akin to Diablo than Tomb Raider or DmC.
I think it would be really cool to see Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain remade with a similar look to modern Diablo games.

Blood Omen is still a great game with some really great voice acting for the time. The voice acting really elevated the game to something unique that could have otherwise been really average.
The 3D/FMV cut scenes however are incredibly primitive looking and clash with the gameplay graphics in my opinion.

@KingMike It's just a Gameboy shell mod. I remember this from 2021, thinking it was some kind of game gear/gb hybrid device but no, it just a Sega themed GB. An Analogue Pocket with that theme would make more sense these days.

Watching the CPS1 video of "chain combos" I feel like my friends and I would do this n the SNES as well. We just called them 3 hit combos or combos. Maybe I'm mixing my arcade memories with my home version memories but the only difference I see is that the CPS-1 combos are a bit faster. Maybe you could block it part way through on the SNES?

@sdelfin Check out Retro Gamer Boy's video on the Pyron Romhack. He's a hardcore MD fan and he even admits that SCE was better in his memory than it was in reality. He does some great comparisons between the original release and the Romhack(which can be patched again with an audio romhack).

Maybe I'm remembering the WW SNES audio with my own nostalgia bias but I do know that any shortcomings like low/muffled sound can be corrected depending on variables like TV settings, EQ, stereo tuner/speakers, headphones, etc. However crackling/compressed sounds cannot be fixed no matter how much home audio tech you might have. IMO arguing in favor it, out of brand loyalty in some cases, is kind of silly.

I was playing the romhack version a few months ago on my everdrive and I do think it's really solid. Definitely equal to the SNES counterparts but that's not what people got back in 93(94?). If it was we wouldn't even be talking about this. I do prefer the Genesis sound over SNES in general, I mean we got Revenge of Shinobi, Streets of Rage, and a ton of other great OSTs for the MD. I think that's part of my criticism of the MD versions, I know the Genesis could so much better.

You definitely make some good points and I respect your opinion. It's all very subjective and there's no wrong way to play SF2. It's also really impressive what Capcom was able to put out with the deadline and outsourcing problems.

@Asaki I love the Genesis but SF2 was king on the SNES IMO. It made me want a SNES after playing it in the arcades. It was possibly the best arcade port of the 16bit era in terms of graphics, sound, and gameplay compared to the original.

IIRC SCE was outsourced by Capcom to another company. All the sprites for all the home releases of SF2/SCE/Turbo' were taken from the vanilla SF2 on SNES.

The sound on Genesis SF2 was laughably bad and even worse somehow on SSF2. Graphics took a big hit too. It's has since been fixed by Romhackers but it took 30 years.

Not saying it shouldn't be your favorite, to each their own, but there are measurable differences in visual/audio quality.

@Azathoth It's becoming a running gag on this site. People showing everyone how much they do care about Sega VS Nintendo by telling all the "sega fanboys" how much they don't care. On every single MD post. Even the best games of the Mega Drive list.

This game is looking incredible. Beautiful pixel art. The music is really good too.

Apparently Yuzo Koshiro does not age.

This is just hearsay but apparently the devs are in Russia or Ukraine (or both) and the distributor is in Canada which causes all sorts of problems with the international sanctions that are in effect.

I got this info from the comment section of Retro Gamer Boy show on youtube so take it with a grain of salt.

@RetroGames Shinobi 3 on the SNES would probably be amazing.

@Zenszulu I agree. I'd much rather have a Metroid inspired game on the MD instead of a port of Super Metroid.

@AllieKitsune That's like saying the NES should be called the Famicom. It was renamed the Genesis for legal reasons here in the U.S.. I didn't even know the Genesis was called the Mega Drive in Japan/Europe until years later.

I admit I do like the name "Mega Drive" as it sounds very Japanese but the red/grey/black motif of the Genesis is superior imo. Also it's because of Sega of America that we got the legendary black/grey grid motif on the system/accessory boxes and the cart clamshell boxes. Japanese MD game boxes look like bootleg VHS tapes, seriously it's like "anything goes" with their covers.

It's one of the few times I feel like the west got something right when Japan dropped the ball. Sega never should have switched from the black/grey grid box to the red(US)blue(Eu) box theme imo. Sega Genesis forever.