Have people deliberately lost the ability to read?

The games in this collection were created by our small team and us in 1993, without AI. Those original Mega Drive / Genesis games are now finally being released. For this release, we have used AI tools to help develop the game-selection menu and create packaging artwork faithful to the original games. We want backers to understand that distinction when deciding whether to support us.

The games are not being made with AI, the supporting bumpf is.

There needs to be some perspective here.

The Oliver Twins are not the games industry. The world-wide market for this Dizzy compilation can't be more than a couple of thousand people max. The entire project isn't even a hint of a drop in the ocean.

To their credit, the Oliver's have been clear and upfront about the use of AI, what they're using it for, and why. There's no deception here. Consumers can make fully informed decisions based on that information.

That "why" they're using AI is important one. The Olivers have said more than once that AI is what's allowing the project to happen at all. No AI, no Dizzy compilation. If there is no money to pay a "real artist" (as if earning some filthy lucre was the sine qua non of art), there is no money.

I, personally, am interested to see what happens. We're living through a rapid shift in the way software - and much else - is developed/created/accessed/delivered. Perhaps the market will reject it out of hand, perhaps not.

Scud Hammer is a very strange choice. The appeal of the arcade machine was the giant hammer you use to bash your opponent with. I don't think a joypad button press is going to have the same effect.

Mario doesn't actually fight Bowser... Normally, if there's a boss at the end, you have to fight him, right? Then I realised that since this is a game where you keep running to the right, how about making it so that the person who reaches the furthest right wins?

I'm struggling to think of platform games prior to SMB that had bosses and boss fights. Ghosts 'N' Goblins?

I also think Mr Miyamoto must have had a similar thought with Donkey Kong. You never fight him, but make the building collapse underneath him.

That probably says a lot more about his genius for game design than it first seems. To think about boss fights in a platform game, then to do something else completely.

Piracy? Well that's hardly the image we want for Long John Silver's!

"Where am I?"
"You're in a room with a gaping pit to your left. Take two sidesteps right... YOUR OTHER RIGHT!"

@Bot_Bot_69 Well I tend to think you have to read an article before forming an opinion on it.

I am not against articles on AI - this was a strawman used in the comments against me. There have been a number of very interesting pieces on the subject with regard to retro, despite the editorialization here on TE.

My complaint here is that this one is not retro related, is a pretty poor bit of journalism ("slop", one might say), and would have more appropriately published on Steam Hype.

@Quick_Man You are quite wrong. If you are going to criticise me, I am going to demand you justify yourself.

Oh, and if you don't like comments about the amount of irrelevant AI articles appearing on TE, "don't read them".

@Quick_Man That's the most specious reasoning I've read this week. Well done.

Never going to happen, and without Michel Ancel involved it should never happen.

It seems as if Atari is sunsetting the console the right way, but does the move mean users can backup previous purchases? Can you do that already on the VCS?

@Tankov Yeah, but now they have Steam Hype so they can shove them there.

@Quick_Man So what does this have to do with retro?

Ah, the reason I visit a retro gaming site: Sloppy articles about AI, indie games, and Steam - all of which could and should be published on the publisher's fancy new site dedicated to PC gaming and Steam.

That's odd. I always thought it said:

M. Khan is Bent.

OoT is one of those games I desperately want to like, but don't. I respect it for pushing boundaries, its technical wizardry, and its cultural significance. Playing it, however, is a different matter. I'll get to a certain point, get bored, switch off, and won't go back to it. Rinse and repeat every five years or so.

I know I'm in the minority.

Will you be picking them up? Let us know in the comments!

Nah, the world has moved on.

Seems to be official now - the pre-order page is live. However I would wait for the reviews to come in! Don't think of it as saving $15, but potentially saving $300 (or more) if it turns out to be a turkey.

Possibly means a Thor 2 is on the way...

I don't know the law, but 'superfake' suggests being tricked in to buying a knock-off product believing it to be genuine. I don't think that's the case with emulation handhelds. I, and I would guess most people, buy them precisely for what they are, not because they're pretending to be something else.

Could they actually ban the sale of them in the US? I thought the vast majority of them are actually sold in China and Hong Kong and then shipped world wide.

Final thought: this is such a niche of a niche target. If you added up all the sales of emulation handhelds outside of China over the last decade, I doubt you'd get close to even 0.1% of Nintendo Switch sales.

I'd like to see a remake with controller support. I have the entire Wing Commander series in my GOG library, but I find going back to joystick and keyboard controls completely alien to me now, even if they were second nature in the 90s.

@h3s I only saw Landstalker once in the wild, which was a used copy at my local indy shop. It's the copy I still own to this day. It stank of cigarette smoke, but that whole shop did!

The only other place I saw it advertised was in one of my mum's shopping catalogues (Janet Frazer or Kays, I think) at a price well out of my range, even if you could pay weekly.

There's also a monkey. Because it's Monkey Island.

That's not just any monkey, it's Jojo!

But what is Murray the demonic skull doing here?

Retroid reverting to form here. Why produce one dual screen clamshell device when you can release three?

It's a shame. When Retroid get it right, they really get it right.

@Bot_Bot_69 I don't think you missed out. I only have the "new" 3DS XL, so I don't know what the original was like. I found that into-the-screen type games worked the best, but even with the few exceptions that worked for me I mostly preferred not to use the 3D.

Mind you my eyesight is a bit dodgy anyway, so I may not be the best judge of these things.

@Kumatz It's not out yet, so we don't know 😁

I haven't got a Thor, but Joey's Retro Handhelds on YouTube just did a 1+ year review and he's still raving about it. This RG DDS looks promising, but I always caution to wait until the reviews are in... and then wait a little longer for the real reviews come in.

@KingMike True, but even on the New 3DS XL the only games I felt really worked for me were the Sega Arcade 3D titles, and particularly Galaxy Force 2. I haven't played every 3DS game of course, so if anyone has recommendation please do give them a mention.

I'm interested, simply because 3DS hardware isn't going to last forever.

Not having the 3D effect is a bonus if you ask me. With the right game and the right setting it worked great on the 3DS, but those moments were few and far between, so I usually kept it off.

This being Anbernic, however, it's bound to be botched or bungled in at least one way. I'd also imagine this coming in around $250/£200 or more.

@GravyThief Yes, but I think Damo was trying to relate clearly which end of the device you end up holding.

I still think this needs to be in £100-£120 price range. I get it that component costs are through the roof, and that the two Banjo games are a real sweetener. But £170 is a lot for not much in the way of tech. I don't know why they don't just subcontract the manufacturing to an outfit like Anbernic.

I'll say this for Blaze and Evercade, though. What they're doing now is lightyears ahead of all that AtGames crap they used to pump out.

@slider1983 Wouldn't surprise me.

@slider1983 Probably one of those who owns what rights minefields.

22nd April 2027: Sorry everybody, but due to unforeseen circumstances we're having to delay release until 2028. I know this may come as a disappointment, but we'd rather release the 800XL in its intend... blah, blah, blah, learning experience, blah, blah, blah insert extra waffle here.

This company now has a reputation for failing to deliver. A man would have to be some sort of a fool not to see the trend and pre-order this.

I used Play Asia a few times to import the Japan-only Cave shooters for the 360.

Other than that, I had a couple of EA Genesis games (Syndicate and Desert Strike). I don't count this as importing, however, as I merely went to Cash Converters not really knowing that they were import versions.

Some of my big-box PC CRPGs (and some other games like Warcraft 2) are the American versions. Technically these were imports, it's just that it was me physically going to the states, buying them, and then bringing them back.

The only hardware I've ever "imported" is a Japanese Vita Lite in a nice turquoise colour, although this was via a UK based eBay seller*.

*Edit - how could I forget my GP2X and all the other Chinese/Far East handhelds, gadgets, widgets, wotsits and other "stuff" I've bought?

@Sketcz Ok, ordered!

One of my favourite anecdotes about the Game Boy (and one I sincerely hope is actually true) is that when a senior Sony executive spotted it, they berated their engineers and claimed it should have been a Sony product, given the company's success with the Walkman and Discman.

I've heard the same thing, except about the iPod. I have the sneaking suspicion that variations of the anecdote emerge to suit the circumstances.

@-wc- High-Five!

I'm tempted, but I want a cast iron guarantee: If I buy this now, I don't want to see an extended/enhanced/definitive version released 12 months hence.

@GravyThief Ordered!

@Mr_Jan I'd like to know which game series you have developed.

Is it none?

So before you start giving advice out to people who made games and built careers out of them, try doing it yourself first.

Well I say well done to the Oliver Twins for experimenting with the tech and for refusing to kowtow to the braying mob.

It seems fairly clear to me that the people behind this are keen to keep hold of as much as that $1.8M as possible.

I don't blame them, to be honest.

This is a real shame. I was hoping for a quirky, eccentric, British design that, despite all the odds, managed to work.

But at that price, with those issues, and with Chinese companies pumping out emulation devices more regularly than an atomic clock ticks, I can't justify the purchase.

Still I hope this isn't the end of Grant Sinclair's tinkering. The GamerCard showed promise, it just needed more time in the oven.

When I think back to the 80s and early 90s, I knew only one person who owned an NES and another who owned a Master System. Given the sales and population size back then, it feels like I should have known more people who owned one or the other.

@Tankov

"Witch-hunt mentality". Now you are just over-exaggerating the situation. Some people here have very strong opinion about AI and like to ridicule the incompetent individuals who used it. I don't think I've seen anyone who had threaten to take any harmful action.

No, I think I've got it spot on. You've even fallen into the same trap - you've called them "AI bros". Once you start calling people names it's a slippery slope.

@Tankov

With that in mind, shouldn't the burden of responsibility falls onto Silicon Valley instead of whichever local official you blame for "bad city planning"?

I don't know what it's like where you live, but planning is very much a matter of local decision making where I am. My local council has the ultimate say on what gets built and where. So when you hear these stories coming out that people are protesting against data centers, well yes they are, but more to the point they're protesting against the local decision makers who greenlit the development.

Until the authors of these vibe-coded translations and recompilations can prove that they only used locally-run models trained solely on data that have been allowed by their owners, then people have the right to be suspicious and critical of these projects from the environmental and intellectual rights angle.

I wish it was limited to suspicion and criticism. But as we've seen in this thread, what we really have is a witch-hunt mentality.

@81632bit No, that wasn't the argument I was making at all. People can read me actual argument above, but to summarise:

If your concerns about AI are environmental or because they "steal" data, local LLMs provide an answer to that. Open source models are generally trained on publicly available data.

And yes, making things easier is a good thing.

@81632bit

Ah, the old environmental and theft retort. I'll come on to why those aren't arguments against AI in a moment, but if either of them were true local LLMs have you covered.

I run an open source model locally. No data center required, and trained only on publicly available data.

However to address the topics of:
a) The environment. This is really an argument for better Town & City planning regulations in the United States. Those problems don't exist elsewhere and could easily be ameliorated in the United States.
b) Theft. I don't think most of the people parroting this line believe it. If they did, I'd ask them how many roms, isos, bios files, ebooks/pdfs, mp3, films, applications they possess without the right to.

As for laziness - the printing press took over from the scribe, the word processor took over from the typing pool, AI is going to take over from programmers.

@Tankov Yes. You said you want to see "strict limits" and then went on to mention consumer rights. I wonder how you can do either without imposing tests of one form or another. I also wonder how anyone can definitively know what AI can or can't do (in order to "drum it in to people") without extensive experimentation.

@81632bit

I don't think you have to accept anything. If you don't like AI, LLM's, Machine Learning, or any of the associated technologies that's your preference.

But that doesn't give you or anybody else the right to attack people who do want to use the technology, who do want to experiment with it.

And unlike @Tankov who seems to think there needs to be some sort of test, although he's not sure what, before anyone can use the tech, I think people should be free to use it.

Wow, that's looking top notch!

@Damo Thanks!