MikeP

The world won't be the same without David Lynch. I would love to say what his films mean to me on a conscious and subconscious level, but I'd be wasting my breath. I just hope the next generation of indie filmmakers can strive to be that unique-- and perhaps more importantly, as genuine.

The commercial above is... fine. It's not pure Lynch, but what do you expect? It's an ad. But I did get a giggle out of the duck-headed man. I'll take Lynch's sense of weirdness, which usually merits feelings of introspection or dread, over Monkeypuppybaby any day of the week.

Tekken 3 on PS1. They're close technically, of course, but the extra modes and new music make it a defining moment for the series.
Oh, and Gon. 😁

I don't wanna say Saturn and Dreamcast minis would sell much. They wouldn't. Many of those systems' games are gold, especially for an arcade audience, but the public consciousness (especially in the West) hasn't come back around to that... much as I hate it.

But it's kind of rude of Sega to nurture our interest in retro content and never commit to releasing it legally.

The year I almost gave up on video games due to fatigue trudging through epic campaigns, I rekindled my love for the medium with Sonic Mega Collection, followed by Sonic Gems Collection, which featured Sonic the Fighters on it. As fighting games go, that one was a horrendous rush-job, but it was eye-popping and accessible enough that yours truly rapidly developed an interest in Model 2 and 3 games-- which were naturally being rereleased for PS2 in Japan, but nowhere else.

Nowadays, we have that lone, passionate RGG Studio programmer leading the initiative to include an increasing breadth of old-skool arcade games in the Like A Dragon series, which is going to create more curious fans, just like a lazy cash-in on Sonic made me a curious fan. Sorry Utsumi, Sega is a retro company whether you like it or not. And their legacy sure as hell doesn't end with the Genesis.

I can see there was a lot of love put into Iron Phoenix... it's truly a shame they couldn't get a bigger team behind it.
The cutscene grabs are classic LucasArts-- not too cartoony, but not too rigid. The seaplane fight/puzzle sounded fun.
And as much as I lament that Indiana Jones projects can't seem to stay away from Nazis (easy to demonize, but sadly, not extinct!), the immediate postwar backdrop provides a unique element of unease and suspicion to the story.
Even if the game was never completed, it makes me respect LucasArts' ambitious legacy all the more.

Look, I know appearances aren't everything... but the minute the guy behind this fiasco showed his greasy haircut and Lamborghini on camera, and especially when he and his staff pulled in a random blonde to "promote" the hardware, I honestly thought this was a product from a wannabe Tiktoker in the former Soviet bloc. It's like how a second-grader thinks marketing works. I mean yeah, the vaporware and failing hardware are the real crimes here, but that kind of marketing gets under my skin so hard. It's like watching a Troom Troom or "Frozen Elsa Gets Pregnant" video-- something made with utter contempt for human intellect. Gawd.
I hope these dumb sleazes get absolutely crushed.

Entitled, pathologically competitive a-holes running game companies? Damn, who knew? 😐
In all seriousness, that archived Medium article was pretty bone-chilling. Just because their releases are occasionally done right doesn't mean Josh Fairhurst should stay in charge. He sounds less capable of growth than the average Scorsese protagonist.
Besides which, it's that kind of arrogance that will destroy LRG (even if he gets off scot-free).

Nostalgia is bad when it blinds you to what's wrong with a work of art. You have to accept that there is such a thing as a guilty pleasure.

I have a handful of games that I would count as guilty pleasures, but that hold a sweet spot in my heart because of when I discovered them. Sonic the Fighters is hideously unbalanced and barely works as a multiplayer diversion-- but the animation is snappy, the aesthetic is cute, and it was my gateway drug to Tekken and Virtual-On and all the classic low-poly fighters I love now.

But that's a fairly innocent example. I think nostalgia gets much messier when the work in question has a point of view. I used to love Terry Gilliam's Brazil because of its style, its score, and the way it bounces between tones and entire genres while staying in the same story. Nowadays, my skin kind of crawls watching it, since the plot hinges so heavily on the 'stalking for love' trope. Anyone who doesn't admit what's wrong with that movie is probably engaged in a harmful lifestyle.

And to the point of what the other commenters have been saying: I am extremely sick of corporations weaponizing nostalgia. There is nothing inherently wrong with being a nostalgic audience member, but there is everything wrong with shoving a near-dead Bill Murray into your Ghostbusters sequel while original IPs and... everyone in the film industry, frankly, get shoved aside.

@PopetheRev28 Honestly, a loud freaking YES to this! Even without dedicated controls, I've been wanting to play so many racing games from my youth, and it's aggravating how they never get rereleased.
(Especially with couch multiplayer-- come tf on, Sega!)

For the most part, I disagree with Harada: Seeing where the series came from visually is fascinating. The old entries are beautiful because they're trying their dangdest on very limited hardware, and I would leap at the opportunity to see them in higher resolution.
Fans still cite Tekken 3 as a favorite entry-- the mechanics were tuned to satisfaction and the PS1 version was stacked with fun extras.
Where I almost feel a Tekken collection is unnecessary, by contrast, is that there are points in the chronology where the series doesn't change that much, at least to a casual observer. I would make the argument for Capcom's upcoming collection that they pulled 3D fighting in so many different directions, it demands further study.
If anything, Harada shutting down the idea of a Tekken collection is a blow to companies releasing more of the 3D classics we love. And we do love them.

"Type A" and "Type B" is a lame attempt at a solve, sure. They didn't have to do that at all if they weren't gonna commit-- especially if Horii was gonna act like a wounded Fox News anchor and whine about it.

A proper port of the System 22 Time Crisis is long overdue, and personally I'd trust something from a Japanese vendor over anything from Arcade1UP. I hope this is good.
Still... you hardly need AI to detect the corners of a TV. :/

I will never understand Sega's obsession with blockchain, let alone how Yu Suzuki and Seichi Ishii were struck with the same affliction. It's already run its course and everyone hates it.
You just know a company this tone-deaf is gonna try flexing with A.I. next (or catch up to the trend in two years when it's even worse).

I still wish I could play these games standalone. Split-screen multi would make them so much better-- I still play the classics on my couch with friends. If that were to happen at all, though, another publisher would likely have to license them from Sega.

Still, preserving and porting these games at all is a masterstroke. Kudos to Iizawa for keeping the faith alive!

Whoof... I always appreciated Avalanche's ambition as a studio, but I felt like they were never allowed to fully tap into it. This canned game is the quintessential example of that.

Also, I'd never say Eisner that was a supportive creative force-- depending how closely he watched a project, he could torpedo it-- but he wasn't the image-control maniac that Iger is. Under Iger, Disney only Disneys one kind of Disney, and that's Disney.

Power Stone deserves so much love and receives so little. It's tailor-made for fun battles, breathtaking supers, and shocking upsets. Plus, its controls are far more accessible than Smash Bros.-- its most comparable competition at the time, which, like so many franchises, has since turned into a newbie-unfriendly corporate institution.

The characters (though some, like Galuda, are dated) are all memorable and uniquely capable, which is where a lot of Power Stone clones, despite their eagerness, fail to stack up.

If Capcom would look beyond constantly crapping out the same five ROMs from their 2D catalog and exploiting the tunnelvisioned esports scene, we would have seen a proper rerelease of this (on something bigger than the PSP) a long time ago.

Oh well... 25 years on this classic is still a milestone in my book.

Konami owes Kojima better treatment than this. But that's been the situation for about 8 years now, hasn't it?