Martin_H

@axelhander I agree. I've been using AI to explore various concepts that I've struggled with in the past and it has been immensely helpful.

The tech around AI isn't bad, but the corporate interests might be. We need to claim it for the many, not the few.

So sad. That's no age at all.

RIP Nick.

Reminds me of that time Miyamoto-san came round my house for tea and brought all the Mario with him.

Sadly my mum had employed King Alfred to do the cakes. Fortunately everybody was too polite to mention how burnt they were.

Golden times.

"So we found one company in Taiwan — I don't remember the name — that had this product they were interested in selling."

I'd put money on that being the Watara Supervision (or one of its many aliases).

I've told this tale before, but a friend and I were into GTA 1 and 2 and I mentioned wouldn't it be great if they did a 3d version...

... He texted me some time later "they're doing a 3d version!"

I had to get a Playstation 2!

What always fascinates me about old secondhand manuals is the comments/user notes sections. Most of the time - well in my experience - these are never filled in. Once in a while you get some bits and pieces about puzzles, tactics, winning the game etc. And rarely you get some real gems...

For instance, one of my big box crpg manuals is filled with (some pretty awful) unrequited love poetry dedicated to the author's sixth form belle. I say unrequited, but it actually appears the author never seemed to pluck up the courage to speak to the young lady in question!

Poor chap. I hope he eventually found the love he was looking for.

@nocdaes Because what I'm relating are my exact experiences of attempting to do business with Analogue over many years.

The fact you're hearing similar from other people simply proves I'm not alone. Your experience might be completely different, but that doesn't negate the experiences that many other people have had.

The other big catch is that you'll be dealing with all the scalpers rushing to buy machines. If you really want one, I hope the gods of internet latency are on your side during the 45 second window you'll have to snag one.

This is one of those things that I'm glad exists, even if I can't justify the cost myself.

I'll be picking this up after Christmas. It looks like Nightdive have done another fantastic job

For those on a tighter budget, I bought a couple of DataFrog 360 wireless pads from AliExpress. At £8 each, shipped, the quality is amazing. The button, stick, and trigger feel is great. They feel well made, too.

@Honkshot yes! That's it!

I must still have it somewhere... I'll have to go rummaging.

This sounds very cool. I remember years ago (it must be 20+ years ago now) having a similar kit and book that led you through creating an 8/16bit video game system. My brother eventually ended up building it for me as I never seemed to find the time.

I think it was called the XGS.

Modern GTA London would be too easy. Nick bikes from train stations and the police won't investigate. Steal goods from shops and the police won't investigate. Sell drugs to youngsters and the police won't investigate. Steal cars, strip em and ship em and the police won't investigate. Rob people of their phones, wallets and watches and the police won't investigate.

Stay of Twitter, though. Because if you tweet something rude the fuzz'll be round to kick your door in at 5am.

/End scathing critique of modern Britain.

Very impressive, although I'm not sure about the farty music.

The correct title for this article: "Pedants take the fun out of everything, as per usual". As we all know, the real 'console war' was between Eniac and Colusus!

I thought this question had been answered back in 1995 with the Mega Drive release of Toy Story. Whether you like the game or not, it's a graphical showcase of technical wizardry.

Jon Burton, via his YouTube channel, did a couple of videos on how it was done. Very much worth a watch.

@brakeman90 I have an Odin 2, which has the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2. It runs Gamecube, Saturn, and PS2 superbly and with resolution bumps. The processor isn't actually the weak link when you get to this level of performance, but the emulators themselves.

I'm not sure what the Retroid Pocket G2 will be able to do, but the RP6 will almost certainly have the same performance as the Odin 2.

I'd wait for some reviews to come in before deciding. The high-end Android space is getting fairly crowded with options at the moment. It does appear that Retroid are going for the more budget conscious consumer, though.

Looks like my evening is sorted - been looking forward to this for months!

@romanista Yes, but only released in Japan. It is region free though.

@mjparker77 I have it for the XBox 360, courtesy of Play Asia a long time ago, but it's weird that so many Cave games never seem to get released in the West. Even the ones we do get never seem to get a premium treatment from publishers.

I'm also still bitter that the Android ports of DoDonPachi and Espgaluda 2 were released behind a downloader frontend, which eventually stopped working, and was finally delisted entirely.

This reminds me so much of a flight sim we had for the ZX81. I don't recall if it was set at night, but given the machine was only black and white and we only had a black and white TV back then, I don't suppose it mattered!

I had hours of fun attempting - and failing - to land the plane. When you crashed you got a cool screen breaking effect and a "crash report" would display telling you hit the ground at 200 knots!

I'll have to give this one a try.

What strikes me is how we're all connected these days, but are far more isolated. The days when you could talk to staff in shops to ask about games, books, films, albums etc were far superior to today's product reviews (5 Stars! All the wheels fell off, but it came quickly!)

If I had a time machine I'd go back to the 90s in an instant.

If this was $99 I'd be on it, but not at $180. You can forgive a lot of wonkiness at the sub ton price point, but when you're paying the same amount as an actually good handheld from China not so much.

Sounds exciting! I do love a good level editor, my favourite being Duke 3D's.

I wonder what chip they'll go for? Given the inclusion of the Anbernic button suggests this will be Android, it might need something more than an H700. But at less than $100, well who knows?

Flashback on the MD was such a great game, with some completely broken collision detection! I'm sure I nerfed the last two levels without realising it!

Speaking of which, I bought the remaster and haven't played it yet. To the computer!

I'd love one of those. Would anyone like to buy one for me?

No?

😢

I think what Sony did better than its competitors, especially in the PS1 and PS2 eras, was to understand that a lot of people who grew up with games were now adults with their own disposable income and still interested in games.

Add in all the pop culture stuff, branding, and cool vibes they were off to a winning start.

@BionicDodo well technically the Saroo is a CD Block Emulator. Not only does it emulate the CD Rom interface, it emulates a whole lot of other things too.

@Deuteros yep, I'm with you on that!

I'm going to add this to my 'should I ever win the lottery' list.

I've been wondering for a while now what to do when my New 3DS XL eventually bites the dust. My current solution is an 8" gaming tablet paired with an Abxylute S8. It's not as convenient as a clamshell, but it's pretty good for the price I paid and will emulate just about everything I'm interested in. Plus I'm happier to take it with me than I would be a £400+ device. Oh, and Tate shmups are wonderful on it!

I'm definitely up for this!

Now I've completed SotT multiple times, so the reforge whilst excellent didn't surprise me too much. But I think I've only completed TSM once and that back in the day.

Hopefully, one day, Charles will announce that they're going to re-release In Cold Blood. I've been asking for about twenty years for a sequel, but I'd settle just for a revamp now.

@hisownsidekick 👍

@hisownsidekick It was a bit of a struggle to find, but I found this interview with the people at Orbital Media.

https://www.ign.com/articles/2006/08/24/ign-goes-orbital

Hope it helps!

What was it that Oscar Wilde said? We have everything in common with America nowadays, except, of course, language.

Never a truer word spoken!

Although I never had any of these at the time, I love the idea that Andrew's career is bookended - pun intended - by the release and re-release of these books!

I may put in for the 4 book deal, as that seems reasonable enough for the curiosity factor.

A bobby dazzler, and no mistake!

@hste if it's like the Doom mod, I found it most noticeable on things like item pickups and sprite based 'furniture' which always faced the player in the original but are much more solid and 3d as voxels.

I didn't need an excuse to replay Mole Mania, but this mod pushed it up the priority scale! Jimbe is about to get owned all over again!

I can understand why there might be cultural sensitivity to the flag in places like South Korea, given what the Japanese military got up to in the 30s and 40s. I once made the mistake of reading about Unit 731. It was like staring into the abyss.

South Korea also had some very strict rules about Japanese cultural imports until comparatively recently, so I'm not altogether surprised Nintendo are a bit leery of things like this.

I can't think of a reason that System 3 shouldn't provide reasonable localisation adjustments, if they want to sell into a particular market.

@The_Nintendo_Pedant At least you missed out on the satanic panic. That was something else, particularly if you were the child of newly converted born again types. Fortunately they saw sense, after a time.

Probably my favourite magazine of all time. Somehow or other it managed to be irreverent and serious at the same time. When they scored a game 90%+ you knew it was worth buying,
and you could bet your monkey-ass on it!

True story: my younger cousin struggled with reading. While we were on a family holiday I showed him my copy of Mean Machines. To start with I got him to read some of the smaller box-outs. Initially he was a bit resistant... but that soon changed when he started reading some of the ruder content! By the end of the two weeks he was happily reading entire articles by himself.

What's worrying me is that BallisticNG, Wipeout's spiritual successor and which I put many hours into during the recent global health unpleasantness, is already approaching its seventh birthday.

I honestly think that when I hit my mid-thirties someone decided to crank the time dial into fast-forward.

@Slider2711 well I stand corrected!

I reckon Nintendo Power made that answer up from whole cloth.

In CAD x, y and z are 3D coordinates. Also, it wouldn't make any sense to say that A and B are primary but X and Y are secondary, either from a CAD point of view or an implementation point of view.

Who is that Lance guy anyway? Probably somebody who had nothing to do with the design of the pad, if he exists at all!

@MartinPiper Wow! That's even more impressive!

If you're ever inclined to exhibit the machine at a retro/computer show, do let us know. I'd love to see it hands on!

I've always wanted to use the word flabbergasted in a real world context, and now I can. I'm flabbergasted!

Did Martin actually write his own version of After Burner to run on this?

Personally I think women should be discouraged from the corporate world... But so should men!

I don't know how we got into such a miserable state where people who make things are nothing but employees of these massive corporate entities, but it needs a rethink.

And in doing so there should be a rebalancing of talent rather than sex.

For me it was Space Invaders on the ZX81. Black and white, no sound, your bullets being nothing more than a capital letter I heading up the screen, that terrible keyboard... I was instantly hooked!! I can still picture the cassette inlay which was black and white, with dark pink highlights, and featured a cool looking alien on the front.

I find it difficult to express - particularly to people who grew up with mass computing - quite how transformative that experience was. This was something none of your neighbours or friends had, no one in your family had experienced anything like it before, and yet here it was plugged into the TV letting you control what was happening on screen.

Sadly the computer was only borrowed and had to be returned. It wasn't until a couple of years later we got a computer at home. Still, it was that moment that kicked everything off for me in terms of computing and video gaming.