MSaturn

The whole AAA business model is unsustainable. Xbox in so far as it is particularly associated with cutting edge tech, is particularly vulnerable. I do wonder how things might have gone under various counter factuals but anyway… as it is, Xbox will become basically a third party publisher soon (I’ve been predicting this for years), Sony will position itself as the grown up console and Nintendo will be the offbeat option, more oriented towards families and smaller/weirder experiences. That arrangement will be stable for a while, then it too will fade. In the long run consoles are on the way out. Sony will become something like a publisher too. Nintendo will hang on the longest because they don’t have an alternative business model ready. They’ll figure one out though once they have to. They do have extremely valuable IP. I give consoles as we think of them maybe 20 years?

One of my favorite games. It never gets old. They need to rerelease the 2006 game and then they need to make new one!

@Wezlypipz I almost forgot about that one! I did hear good things. I’ll check it out.

I’ve yet to find an indie rpg that really succeeds for me. (Caveat: I have not yet played Sea of Stars. It’s in my backlog though, so I’ll get to it soon). I did play Shadows of Adam and I thought it was pretty good, although not quite really up to the level of its inspirations. A similar game from the same developers has promise because Shadows of Adam came pretty close to greatness. I will definitely be keeping an eye on this one.

@Gryffin I think that’s what it’s trying to say. Fines are regressive; they land harder on the poor than the wealthy. Nevertheless I think this is another example of a pithy political meme that is actually simpleminded and dumb if you slow down at all to think about it (lots of these on all sides). So I guess my reaction is, I’m glad he didn’t write it! It speaks well of him that he was too smart to write this, lol.

One of my favorite games. A bonafide classic!

Good list. I’d buy it.

What on Earth…? If this is true it’s such a strange decision. I don’t see how this license brings anything to the table. There’s no story, there’s no characters… I don’t think it even brings much to the table in terms of brand awareness… very strange.

I don’t understand this, basically, is this an underage character thing? Because the platform holders do allow nudity, so it can’t just be that…

Personally I’m glad. The goofy jokes are part of the charm. Now I wonder if they cleaned up some of the stuff that uh… didn’t age so well? Is that what they mean by “in general, based on the Working Designs script”?

I guess this could be controversial but I don’t even see what’s bad about Anduril. As I understand it anyway they’re a defense contractor, they’re not selling weapons to terrorists or whatnot. Is the idea that there should be no defense contractors at all? Or just no US military or something? I thought people were upset that Trump was cutting off Ukraine but where do people think these kinds of weapons come from? It’s as though people only want to think one step ahead. But if you think two steps ahead it’s pretty obvious that a world without companies like Anduril would be a far worse place. I think what’s important is that these sorts of companies behave in a lawful manner, which as far as I’ve heard is the case with this company so I don’t see the problem.

I feel like Billy Mitchell has some definite bad PR, but at the same time the vitriol against him seems totally disproportionate to what he did. I think this is case of the internet deciding someone is a villain and then deciding everything is justified since we already know they’re a villain…

That being said this sounds like a pretty harsh judgement.

This is interesting to me, as it’s sort of a version of a problem that I’m familiar with from art history, and which I imagine is common to all cultural studies, namely the impossibility of disentangling all the conflicting goals and information of historical projects. You could always go to a higher level of resolution, and go another step backward in the causal chain, to find an even more fundamental and “important” origin for whatever is being discussed. Where you arrest this process is partly arbitrary and conventional. The result is that diametrically opposite accounts can be equally “true” at different levels of resolution. For example, in art, Picasso is by most accounts more important than Braques. A survey book might skip Braques entirely and present Picasso as the sole creator of cubism, at least for all intents and purposes. And somebody else could come along and say that that’s inaccurate and that Braques was the real inventor of cubism and a very important artist, etc, and that’s totally true in a sense. But also everything that matters about cubism has to do with what Picasso did with it and the effect he has on other artists throughout the twentieth century. So is Braques important or is he basically an irrelevant side story? He’s both and which you present depends on the level of detail in the account you’re developing.

Like, is Populous an important game? Yes it more or less birthed an entire genre and also launched the career of Peter Molyneux, who has a pretty big presence in gaming for many years. On the other hand I could imagine a survey text skipping Populous and the entire God-sim genre. At a certain level Populous is not very important, nor any God-sim game. They were a sub genre of the PC scene, difficult to port to console successfully, there were no movies or tie-in shows, they didn’t break through into popular culture the way mascot characters did, and the genre petered out in relatively short amount of time (by historical standards). Both of these accounts are “true” but they’re just operating at different levels of detail.

I have not heard of this game before but it does indeed sound bad. But there was a big rig arcade game that I recall being pretty fun… I would like to see THAT game get a rerelease.

@kkalata glad to hear this! I have bought a lot of the hg101 books and I hope to buy a lot more in the future. It would have been terrible to think you weren’t getting paid at all!

@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.