Martin_H

I remember Ben the Boffin on the Big Breakfast describing the first game as "Hard even on easy"!

I beat all three in the late 90's when I was ~19-20, and they certainly were hard games. They were an enjoyable challenge, though. I may try these patches out, because I doubt I still have the reflexes to complete the originals!

So the no. 1 ranked game made NFL 2K [Sega Sports] dollars and shipped a whopping Sonic Adventure number of units!

I love the Dreamcast, but didn't get one until ~2004/5 - one with a multi region mod at that.

So far ahead of its time it really deserved to do better... and it didn't because of people like me who were waiting for the PS2 to release. Thinking back, I could have afforded both but must have had a mental block about owning two (or more) systems concurrently.

Still, them's the breaks and Sega did themselves no favours earlier in the decade. Who's up for some co-op Power Stone?

If you like this style of driving game I can highly recommend 1000 Miglia: Great 1000 Miles Rally by Kaneko.

I first encountered it at a caravan site on the Isle of Wight where I probably spent too many evenings in the game room trying to complete it (which I did!).

There's a lot more to come out of this story. I'm intrigued to know why City of London police were involved. It could be that the seller lives within the bounds of the City, but I think it's an odd location for somebody who buys and resells used electronics for a living - not least because of the price of property! - and that Sega's offices are nowhere near.

(For those who don't know, the City is a tiny district in the middle of London that has a lot of historic quirks, tax exemptions, unique governance, powers, Lord Mayor, and its own police force to name a few. The rest of London is covered by the MET Police)

Does anybody know if the Android versions of DoDonPachi and Espgaluda (2?) have been resurrected anywhere? I had them both, but the last time I looked they'd gone completely. The time before that, you could still install the "downloader" but it wouldn't download anything.

I wish I still had the phone they were originally installed on.

I thought the remake of the first game was decent, but I was expecting Backbone/Digital Eclipse levels of polish so it did disappoint a bit.

It just goes to show that updating and remastering classics takes a great deal of skill and talent and, crucially, enthusiasm and love for the thing being worked on.

I think the Gizmondo is a classic case of what could have been. The device itself was actually pretty good. Had it been cheaper, had the games come, and had the company not been run by crooks I think it could have been successful, at least in Europe.

When they dropped the price I almost bought one, but as it didn't have any games I wanted to play and it didn't look like there'd be any more games, I gave it a miss. I almost regret that now, but I bought a GP2X instead which suited me better (mostly emulation and its ability to play movies).

Pro tip: use a solvent like nail varnish remover or petrol to remove rubbery coatings. Works a treat.

Additional thought: I don't rate Game Trailers list of worst consoles. They include 3DO, Jaguar, Mega-CD and 32x. These weren't bad consoles, just unsuccessful.

Wow. Where does 30 years go? I remember it as if it were yesterday, to paraphrase RLS.

I didn't get my PS1 until '97, but I remember the magazines at the time, especially Edge, covering the machine in detail. But it wasn't until I loaded up T-Rex from the demo disc and saw it for myself on my PlayStation and on my TV that I realised we were in a completely new era of gaming.

I couldn't tell you the exact date, but I still recall - as if it were yesterday - the walk into town, withdrawing money from the building society, buying the machine from Woolworths, going to McD's for lunch, going to the bookshop to see if the latest Robin Hobb was out yet (it wasn't), and then going to Superdrug to buy shower gel and deodorant (99p each or 3 for 2!), before walking home tremendously excited. It lived up to that excitement!

Aviator had a massive effect on me as a kid. The game came with a fold out map. When I realised (as a 4 or 5 year old) that fields and other landmarks mapped exactly to the polygons shown on screen... my universe expanded!

@breach187 This is for the Christmas market, specifically the "what do we get dad/uncle bob/other unspecified male relative of a certain age" Christmas market. They'll sell pretty well, I'm sure.

@Futureshark Depends on what you want to emulate, how much you want to pay, how portable you want it to be, and how bothered you'd be if it got nicked, lost, or damaged.

My most used handheld is the TrimUI Smart Pro, which will pretty much do everything up to and including PS1. My most powerful device is the Odin 2 which will emulate pretty much everything including, Switch.

If you're mostly into Gameboy and other 1:1 screen resolutions, I recommend the Anbernic RG CubeXX.

I've got a bunch of other handhelds, which are all pretty good too.

SotN is the game that got me into Castlevania. I think I got very lucky and managed to pick it up on sale when it was new, when most people weren't interested in 2D games on their 3D powerhouse machines. I actually managed to buy it twice, having completely forgotten I'd already bought it and not played it.

Managed to sell one copy, new and sealed, several years later for a surprisingly (to me at any rate) tidy sum. I still have my first copy, however, and that's never leaving what passes for my collection.

I think this is actually more powerful than my PC!

Here's hoping they get the ergonomics right and you won't need some sort of grip to use it comfortably for extended periods.

I was going to get Shinobi, being a huge fan of the Mega Drive games, but having watched some reviews AoV doesn't look (or seem to play) like a Shinobi game. I think it's been modernized too much for my taste.

I don't know that I'd call Ironclad almost worth the price of admission when it's less than £1.50 on GoG.

Still my main beef with a number of Evercade releases is the seeming lack of curation and total lack of value added content. When retro compilations are done well they're worth the extra outlay.

I'd love this, even though I'm mostly terrible at fighting games due to age. I can still beat CPU opponents, but online is out of the question... Unless the put in a 45+ league 😀

Good for Peter. I've enjoyed his channel over the years.

I wish Nightdive would just announce that they're doing NOLF. If nobody claims the rights, they're good to go and if they do it opens the door to negotiation.

Exhumed was an absolute classic ! I remember picking it up for £20 for the PS1 and playing it to all the way through twice. It particularly sticks in my mind because it was at that time Princess Diana died.

NOLF is my second favourite FPS, after Red Faction. I don't remember the PS2 version as being bad.

West Country folk and pirates say A-meeg -aaaaaaaaaaaaaar! Me hearties.

@Amm Just like Victor Kiam!

Spent the last hour with the Steam version... It's awesome!

I remember some of the comments when Barcadia was announced. I've never seen so much anger towards a community based project, almost as if some people were determined it should fail.

Was it just because Nostalgia Nerd was behind it? Or because it involved Kickstarter?

Now it has failed, are the same people pleased?

Do you remember a few years back people were losing jobs in industry and the refrain from the Twitterati was "learn to code!"? Well it appears they did.

I'm interested in this, depending on price. There's only so long the DS family of hardware is going to last .

I've been into the emulation handheld scene a lot longer than most. To see what's available now Vs back in the late 2000s is incredible. There's an option for everyone.

This is why we can't have nice things. VGE is a decent guy, has done a lot more than most to preserve rare arcade boards and consoles, and god bless him he's mad enough to pay serious money to do so.

That he got a load of abuse for trying to sell something makes me ashamed of the retro "community".

This story gets stranger with every passing week.

Unless there was suspicion of theft, why a police raid?

Why would Sega (Europe) give a monkies about a bunch of ancient beta carts?

Who is this mysterious seller?

Once the price went spiralling out of control, why didn't the preservation society just walk away?

I'm detecting shenanigans.

@The_Nintend_Pedant Only those who can't fight back.

Italian law is a bit overzealous in respect of "piracy". I suspect due to the fact that for many years there were no laws preventing it at all. Dudley of Yesterzine had a video about it a few months back.

However, to claim such devices are illegal seems a bit of a stretch. Admittedly they only really exist to put roms on (which I'm 100% ok with), but you can buy them without the SD card, put your own roms on, play ports and lots of other games.

Plus, these things are sold on Amazon, but curiously the authorities don't seem to be interested in that.

Once upon a time the BBC was at the forefront of the home computer revolution, now look at it!

I absolutely hate what has happened to the BBC. What used to be a trustworthy, authoritative source of information and a producer of quality entertainment is no more. Imagine a news story about something you're not familiar with and now imagine there's a blooper like this in it. Then imagine that every news story has a blooper like this. Couple that with New Beeb's mission to destroy culture, history, and all the other trappings of Britishness ("Welsh Choir Boys", anyone?) and the whole stinking edifice needs to be taken down.

What I hate even more is that I have to pay for it despite not consuming any BBC content.

Smash the BBC!

There's an arcade local to me that opened last year. I've been once and probably won't go again. The problem is there's no real draw other than the nostalgia factor, which for me at any rate was satisfied by the one visit. The coffee shop 20 yards up the road, however, I probably visit at least three times a week.

How many monkey-asses were dusted in the making of this production?

We gots to know!

I'm not going to buy one because whispers I don't actually like Doom very much, but this is a very cool project! It's the sort of thing I'd like to do, if I had the skills an knowhow.

@bring_on_branstons thought you'd like that one 👍

This has been a great thread - made me feel 35 years younger and talking about this stuff in school!

I found this, which might be of interest. Sadly there are no citations, but I'll leave a link to the full article:
"Nintendo CEO Hiroshi Yamauchi had warned his company that they needed to be poised to seize the 16-bit console market by 1990; however, his statement did not have the binding edge of command that his pronouncements usually carried. Nintendo was still reaping huge profits from the NES, so there was no hurry to come up with a successor system. There was also another reason for the delay - Nintendo was having development problems with this newest box. It was little more than a design concept and a few barely working prototypes at this point, but already certain issues had surfaced that demanded attention. The system as originally designed was way too expensive to be produced in a version affordable for the average consumer, let alone cost-effective for Nintendo. On top of that, project leader Masayuki Uemura was unable to meet Yamauchi's demand that the new box be back-compatible with the NES. The back-compatability feature was eventually abandoned; however, that only saved about US$75 on the anticipated end-user price tag. The chief culprit of the cost was, of course, the all-new graphics and sound processing suite upon which Yamauchi insisted. Designed in anticipation of the coming multimedia boom, it drove up the cost of the system so much that Nintendo was again forced to cut costs elsewhere or scrap it and risk being left behind. The problem was eventually solved by installing a slower CPU - a Motorola-based WDC65816 CPU - instead of the faster 10 Mhz MC68000 that Uemura originally intended. This meant that the new box would not be that much faster than the NES itself, so a math coprocessor (as cheap as Nintendo could cobble together) was thrown in to ease the processing strain a bit."

http://web.archive.org/web/20080505070423/http://www.eidolons-inn.net/tiki-index.php?page=SegaBase+Genesis

@bring_on_branstons You make it sound as if the SNES was some sort of dismal failure due to CPU choice. In reality it was a phenomenal success with a library of games that sits up there with the best of the best. And that's coming from a Mega Drive fanboy like me!

There's that phrase "Neccisty is the mother of invention", perhaps if Nintendo had thrown a 68k, a 386, a DEC Alpha, an Arm2 or something else in we'd never have got that library.

@smoreon it's interesting, especially if we look at what other companies were doing.

SNK went with the Rolls Royce approach, and spent the next few years trying to make things more affordable.

NEC went with the limited add-on route, but went too early with it's next gen hardware.

Sega went with the max add-on route and met limited commercial success with them. This probably also hindered the Saturn and Sega as a company.

Nintendo went with a capable but cheap base system, enhanced by the carts themselves.

I'm a Mega Drive fanboy who bought into the Mega-Cd and 32x, but if you ask me which strategy was most successful I'd point to who is still making hardware today.

Mass consumer electronics is a cutthroat business. You have to design to a cost and make the most of it!

@bring_on_branstons Nintendo's philosophy does make a lot of sense, though. Instead of having an expensive system that will quickly become obsolete, build a cheaper system that is user upgradable in a transparent way via game carts. Each cart has the potential to add features/performance and, better yet, in ways that suits the game being made rather than in some generic way. Plus you can push all of the extra cost onto the consumer!

@obijuankanoobie no problem! 👍

@obijuankanoobie my Anbernic RG XX Cube is my current Pico-8 device of choice. Its 1:1 screen is a perfect match.

@Damo Well the rather delicious irony is that if people hadn't "preserved" these roms in the first place, then Blaze, SNK, Taito, Capcom, Sega and all the rest would have nothing to sell!

At 2.8" that screen is far too small for my knackered old eyes. At £50 this competes with umpteen Chinese emulation handhelds that beat it in every respect, unless you're determined to hand over money to whichever shell company now owns SNK.

That takes me back - dusted monkey asses all round!

I want to propose a toast to refraction who has worked on PCSX2 for over 20 years!

$8 for that? What a rip off!

I'm going to resist, like I did the last two times. I'd love to have one, but I know I'd set it up, play with it for a couple of hours, and then box it back up and put it in the cupboard never to be thought of again.

Yes indeed, get well soon Mr Lida!

@JJtheTexan it was an era of unbounded creativity that, thanks to the speccy's low price, was available to a far wider audience than any other system or console at the time.

@mjparker77 Golden days