MSaturn

@Zeebor15

And you may ask yourself - where is my beautiful retro emulator console?

Letting the days go by, water flowing underground…

How can people tell that it’s AI? Is it because of the sloppy appearance? (I.e., circles aren’t round, edges don’t line up, perspective is skewed, etc.) I’m an artist and I can’t always tell. I’m fascinated by people who developed such a strong eye for this stuff so quickly.

@mariteaux that’s good to know, thanks for the info.

I mean I feel like it’s probably Super Mario bros. It’s tricky because it partly depends on how many “generations” of influence were allowed to consider. But with SMB I think we could argue that it popularized the entire structure and basic format of 2D side scrolling games, including of course running and jumping, a progression of distance levels, a variety of mechanically diverse enemies that interact with the level design, periodic climactic “boss” fights, secrets and power ups, and then the imperative of recreating the game in 3D caused Nintendo to basically repeat the whole performance fir 3D games.

I think it’s important to note that influence is not the same thing as inventing. Other games may have done these things first but it was SMB that was “influential” and turned them into the standard template for an enormous percentage of video games.

Looks great! Can’t wait to learn more.

The day I heard that EA had purchased BioWare I had a conversation with a friend of mine and I said that was the end for BioWare. He was more optimistic saying EA could provide bigger budgets, marketing, etc. Later when this guy left he told me we had all turned out to be right. Some things are just better off being smaller. Trying to make them too big forces you to file all the interesting bits off.

I’m not the hugest fan of gallery shooter type games. But, that said, I thought Steel Assault was excellent. So I’ll definitely be keeping an eye on this.

My immediate guess was that it was actually the ps1. I have a base model ps4 and I find unbelievably slow to boot up and actually get into a game. I never timed it but I find the time reported here to be faster than I expected. I would have guessed it takes a minute or so…

I assumed that the poor reaction to the first game killed the sequel. Which is a shame because after they did the patch it was pretty good I think. (And Limited Run included the patch on their physical release, which was cool). I personally would still like to play Zwei remake, but I’m not holding my breath.

How many of these have gotten western releases? I believe some of them have but have all of them?

I assume this impossible, for some reason or other, but a game that I would really like to play is Bulk Slash. Actually quite a few Saturn games really interest me, but most are owned by Sega, so…

Like others are saying I don’t understand the logic of this. It is possible for those inclined to rip console games to PC… this statement from the developer almost reads like a challenge. I’m not going to speculate on their motives but I don’t think this was a well thought out statement.

I admire anybody who puts in the effort to become truly exceptional at anything. True excellence is always inspirational. Good job Eddie!

I mean I’m relieved, I guess, that there are normal business reasons to not do Punch-Out!!, rather than silly politicized business reasons? Still no Punch-Out!! though. I don’t find the characters offensive, but then again maybe I wouldn’t. I do feel certain though that there is a big difference between affectionate teasing and mean spirited stereotyping, a difference that nearly every person readily perceives. It would be a mistake I think to give a hecklers veto to the minority of people who can’t see this.

@Razieluigi as another commenter says, raifhts for live performances work totally differently than rights for recordings. It is actually the venue that acquired the rights to allow cover versions, not the performers. The venues acquire these rights from something called PROs (google says it stands for Performance Rights Organizations). These are special companies that manage performance rights for big catalogues of songs. If you then recorded this performance you’d be on a whole other world since you’d be back with the recording rights.

I have never heard of anyone actually checking if a venue had the performance rights to a certain song. It’s just assumed. But anyway that’s how it’s supposed to work in theory.

And yes, it is insanely confusing.

I like the original PlayStation version, for sure. I would love remasters with the same localization. If they do a new localization… I might be open to that too, but we’ll see. I’m not trying to be controversial but I did recently play through Lunar 2 again and I thought there were a lot of saucy jokes I’m not sure would fly today. To me that’s part of the retro charm of these games so I’d be sorry to see that sanitized.

AI Art being used in this way is inevitable and cannot be stopped. The world is filled with aspiring creatives who do not the capitalization to hire artists, composers, writers or coders. More and more of them will turn to AI to help them fill in whatever gaps there are in their skill set. This is I think one of the more benign uses of AI. I’m worried personally about big companies going in this direction, and also AI shovelware flooding the market.

@Polley001 I basically agree, I don’t really understand this. Nintendo goes after people who use their IP or who plagiarize so blatantly that a reasonable person would confuse them. Thousands of games take the basic template of Mario, Metroid or Zelda without any problems. Just how derivative are these students planning to be?

@Daniel36 wait immortals fenix rising, right? I have that on physical too. I played it a little and was meaning to get back to it. It doesn’t work anymore??? This is an actual outrage.

@avcrypt well I definitely see what you’re saying. I think private endeavors like what you’re describing are very important too. Most of all I’m just glad someone is trying to do something!

There should be a similar program or something like this for each console and publisher. That is, they should take it on themselves to do this, in the same way than film studios now see the need to preserve their films. They don’t even have to do the work themselves, they could partner with a company to do it. But so far there’s not much interest it seems like.

I think the algorithm changes are the real culprit. I personally never see this kind of silly/comedic content recommended to me anymore. That’s obviously partly down to my own viewing habits but it used to be that YouTube actually pushed it more, or so it seemed. I honestly forgot about this channel entirely.

Now if only the game would get a rerelease!

I haven’t backed a kickstarter for years, but I may have to change that for this one. You can’t overstate how important EGM was to the US gaming scene. It was the most prominent magazine that covered all platforms (other popular magazines like Nintendo Power and PSM were platform specific). Until, that is Game Informer took off. EGM’s E3 issues were legendary, a treat to look forward to every year. I still have hundreds of old magazine issues in storage. At my peak consumption in high school I was subscribed to four simultaneously and still bought one off issues of others off the news stand. I was spending hundreds of dollars a year (1990’s dollars!) on game journalism. Now I just go to websites for free. That’s how the internet changed things, mostly for ill in my opinion. I’d rather have the magazines!

@Sketcz I too loved gameFAN. Play magazine was also excellent. I was subscribed for years. You can tell him there are still fans of Play out there!

Astalon was great, I’ll keep an eye on this.

I don’t think I totally understand the question? What is bad nostalgia? There is, I think, excessive or harmful nostalgia. There’s also nostalgia that’s cheap or shallow, as in the constant usage of nostalgic references in modern films. Then there’s nostalgia for things that are bad, as the article mentions. What are we talking about here?

@Deuteros you are right, I wasn’t reading closely. Yeah that stuff is a great breakthrough. We are tantalizingly close to just a whole bunch of new treatments and “cures” for a range of conditions. It can’t come soon enough!

I wonder how all these Nobels and other awards for AI will age? If AI turns out to be a great invention that ushers in a new era of prosperity, then these prizes will seem richly deserved. But if one of the several doomsday scenarios comes about then all the awards that were given out this year will be pretty darkly ironic.

PS I am not an AI doomer.

Looks really really promising. If they can make a game that makes you feel when you play it the way you feel when you watch, say, a dogfight in Macross, that would be fantastic.

I’m a fan of this movie and I gotta say this game looks like it has some potential. I’ll probably get this, if only for the novelty.

@PinballBuzzbro one case of tampering with the game balance that I can agree with is Silhouette Mirage. They all but ruined that game, apparently on the belief that the original version would be too “short”. But for me personally I thought the Lunar games were okay as far as difficulty.

Well I like the working designs localization. It’s light hearted and funny. I hope they keep it. If they don’t this will be like a third version of the games.

Time crisis, point blank, maybe a few other classics… if somebody wanted to do something like a mini-console that really made it possible to play these games on a modern tv I would be extremely interested. Something that only had Time Crisis 1? Maybe, depends on the price.

@Andee I was going to make a comment but I can’t improve on this.

I had my eye on this one for quite a while. It’s a super cool concept. I hope it comes to switch or switch 2 at some point.

I love this game. I remember renting it and be so in love with it after one night that I could not stop talking about it the next day. My Mom said “sounds like it might be worth owning” and she took me to Toys ‘R’ Us and bought it. This was so rare and surprising, as I usually only got games for Birthday and Christmas presents.

The game is a little rough around the edges for sure, but it has so much personality it’s impossible not to love it. I hope we get a rerelease some day.

I was a subscriber to GI for a number of years. I can’t recall when I let it lapse but a pretty long time ago. I was in a GameStop a few weeks ago and I saw that they were still making Game Informer, and I felt kind of glad even though I haven’t read an issue in probably over a decade. It is a bummer.

I mean Croc had a very successful and memorable marketing campaign, so it initially sold pretty well. But the game was not that well liked. It had fans, but nobody felt it was better than Mario or Banjo. And this was reflected in the sequel sales which did not match the first game. Suggesting that Croc deserves to be discussed in game history more because of its sales numbers strikes me as misguided methodologically. But anyway, this example not withstanding, the overall thesis may still be correct, especially when you start thinking about regional differences in game markets.

I shop at HPB all the time - but not for games. The prices are too high, and yeah they stick their dumb sticker on everything. HPB also doesn’t seem to be aware of the concept of “condition” as a factor in pricing games (or music or movies, but in practice only the games have these crazy prices). However HPB can be a good place to find reasonably priced books.

This looks fantastic, love the vibe. I will buy this if it comes out on Switch (or whatever the next thing is).

I have no idea since I’ve never played the game, but it wouldn’t be the first time an FAQ had misinformation in it… and it also wouldn’t be the first time a subtle mechanic went unnoticed by most players. I think without knowing more the situation here could go either way.

But since it’s vaguely in topic can I raise a question that’s been bothering me? Am I the only person who finds video guides basically useless? They are too hard to use and too time consuming to use effectively. I would much rather read a traditional FAQ. But apparently this is another area where I’m in the minority.

OoT is a very valid and acceptable choice. I would also have accepted Tetris, Pac-Man, Super Mario World, Link to the Past, Final Fantasy VII (not a typo), Metal Gear Solid and Shadow of the Colossus (for the sheer artistry). No game made since 2005 has mattered at all. 😜

The whole story is the greatest “what-if” in gaming. What if Nintendo had gone forward with their original CD hardware plans? There would be no PlayStation, and Square’s games would have been on Nintendo hardware… so many ramifications flow from that that it’s literally unimaginable. Fun to speculate!

Whoa, I was a big fan of GameFan and Play magazine, and definitely remember this name. Disturbing that he turned out to be doing stuff like this!

@mariteaux As a parent of two small children I worry about the internet and how and when to introduce it. I think keeping a 13 year old completely off the internet is basically impossible. For one thing in the US at least the school system issues almost every student a Chromebook, so even if you didn’t let them use the internet at home they could be doing it at school.

Amazing, hilarious prank! I feel like this would not happen today. Not just because there are no magazines, but I feel like corporate types would put the kibosh on it.

@Razieluigi “We've long passed the point of diminishing returns on hardware specs, no matter what kind of "technological leap" XBox supposedly has in store.”

This is right. Many gamers seem to not understand that the bottle neck is man power, not technology. Tech will continue to improve but graphics will only make modest incremental improvements from here on out. It takes far too many man-hours to make a AAA game. Therefore, every game is a huge gamble. Often these don’t work out and the result is rounds of layoffs, like we are seeing recently. Microsoft doubling down on tech/graphics should chill gamers blood, because it shows that this industry is on an unsustainable path and some kind of crash must be coming.

Now, to be fair, maybe they don’t mean what I’m assuming they mean. Maybe they have something other than just graphics that will make this a major “leap”, in which case my comments are off base.

@Hydra_Spectre this is exactly my feeling. Personally I think a lot of people are a little too easily offended these days. That said, some things from old media really ARE offensive… and then of course there is a fair amount of subjectivity that is just inherent in questions like this. Ultimately if a content warning is the compromise that gets settled on I’m okay with that. I would really hate if all this old content was censored or bowdlerized to fit current attitudes, partly because that would be a never ending process that would have to go on forever.

@-wc- Hey - you are NOT lame! You’re <i>conscientious </i>.

But as for this… thing. I think if it was meant to be a castle, probably it would look much more clearly castle-like? I think the very fact that there’s this uncertainty suggests it is not meant to be something specific, which they could certainly have drawn more legibly (and did in other games). I stand by my rock interpretation. The apparent details are just surface textures suggesting roughness.

Y’all… it’s rocks. It’s part of the rocks, like a jagged rock sticking up. I could be wrong but that’s really how it looks to me. I’m surprised no one else has said that. If you look at the still image it even looks like it’s composed of the same tiles as the rocks to the left. I realize I’m about late to this article so probably no one will see this comment but anyway… my 2 cents on this “controversy”, lol.

Don’t forget about Tekken: The Motion Picture, an anime film from 1998! I had this on VHS but the only thing I remember about it is that it had a completely gratuitous shower scene that made an impression on me as a kid, lol. A quick google search confirms that it is widely hated. But if you’re interested in obscurities…