MysticX

Even as a Nintendo fan, i have to appreciate the irony of Nintendo sticking with cartridges because, supposedly, CD-ROMs were too slow (If i had to hazard a guess, i'd say it was more about fear of piracy), and then creating something even slower themselves with 64DD.

@KingMike I think eBay are going by the logic of "Counterfeit means a deliberate intent to deceive buyers", if items are labeled as "Reproduction" (And in some way marked as such on the item itself), you should know you're buying a fake, it's the same as repro-boxes with the barcode removed or in some other way marked as reproduction.

@LowDefAl I think Etsy doesn't want to get the pants sued off them by highly litigious gaming companies, and just bans anything even remotely suspicious instead of doing actual research.

Etsy started as a place to sell basic handycraft stuff like bead necklaces, i doubt they have anybody on staff with any knowledge about gaming (Retro or otherwise)

Hm, it's only rated "Mild violence", i'd expect more violence in a game with a title like "Violence fight", a case of over-promising if you ask me...

I find it interesting that back in my day (Geez, i feel old...) the differences between consoles were more profound than just "This one can shuffle a few more polygons around at once than that one" (Or sprites, at that time), it all passed me by at the time, i just was a Nintendo-fan, but reading about the technical differences now is quite interesting.

Cease & Desist from Nintendo in 3... 2... 1...

So the argument is... "We'll limit access to video games, because people might play them?" Bloody ridiculous.

Imagine the same thing with books, "We locked the doors to the library, people might read the books!", that's corporate dystopia material, right here...

I believe that licenses for specific games should expire at some point, if the game's not for sale anymore.

Having to first trace the trail of mergers, buyouts, studios going bust, and who owns the game rights now, coupled with "Who owns the rights to the original IP now?" for licensed games, which can get just as complicated, makes repacking/rereleasing older games based on TV/movies ludicrously complex.

Just draw a line, if a game hasn't been sold in some legit way for 10 years or so, that game becomes public domain, that might push companies to keep games accessible through ports themselves, too. (To "Reset the counter" on it)

I never knew that difficulty was tuned around the whole rental/return thing, for me it works the other way around though: If a game is too difficult/frustrating, i won't buy it.

I rented a lot of games in the NES/SNES times, and the frustrating games were one-time rental only (Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me)

The games with decent difficulty (SMB2, Double dragon 2, Ducktales, Final fight 2, aLttP, Mario kart) were ones i'd rent repeatedly (And when they were available second-hand, i bought them outright), in the case of DD2, i rented it so often it would've been cheaper to just buy the game!

@ThanosReXXX "Bottom" was very popular here in the Netherlands ("The young ones" too, but "Bottom" seems to be more popular on DVD), it got picked up by the "Alternative" broadcasting place (We have three public channels, and a whole bunch of broadcasting companies sharing time on them), and it was really popular.

Dutch comedies were all very tame and careful not to offend, and then you had Mayall and Edmondson playing a pair of violent oiks in their rancid apartment getting up to silly stuff, with all the slapstick violence and dirty jokes, it was a breath of fresh air.

Yeah, i'm seeing rights issues here, i see Jake from the Titus software "Blues brothers"-game on there, so there's movie rights involved in this mess too (Not to mention tracking down who has the rights to games by defunct studios)

It's my biggest retro regret that i didn't get my first Gameboy until Pokemon came out, so many fun games for it, and for years i was oblivious about them all...

I caught up quite nicely, but still, to have been paying attention when they were new would have been amazing.

It does indeed look a bit like somebody used an AI image creator with the prompt "The unholy lovechild of N64, Wii, and Gamecube", doesn't it?

@-wc- Oh please, it was a spin on "Oh darn, developers are walking out on us", sure, let's call it "Quality over quantity", at least that made it sound like a deliberate decision instead of a goof.

Sure, PSX had a lot of shovelware, but just like every other console in history, some real *****-tier games came out for N64 too.

It's interesting to read these things, over here in Europe we could see Nintendo biffed it, with their stubborn attachment to cartridges pushing developers to PSX instead, but news of any reaction by Nintendo never reached us here.

@GhaleonUnlimited I wouldn't say they messed up their entire future, but they definitely went through a... "rough patch" due to that decision, Gameboy/color/advance kept them going through the lackluster (Financially) N64/GameCube days.

Nintendo rebounded well with the surprise success of Wii, and then almost fumbled it all with Wii U, sure, Nintendo are rich now (As people will gleefully remind us), but they're not without their slip-ups.

It was a rather foolish decision of Nintendo to stick with cartridges TBH, the two big advancements in gaming at the time were 3D graphics and CD-ROM storage, and Nintendo just tossed aside one of them in favour of expensive cartridges.

I have the NES and SNES visual compendiums, but i'll skip this one, i don't have as many fond memories of N64 as i do of NES and SNES, maybe it was my age, or that both 3D graphics and gameplay (Wrestling with the camera and stuff) were still pretty rough at the time, and some might even say "Aged like milk".

Now if they made a Gameboy or Gameboy advance visual compendium, i'd love those!

On one hand, it's good that they point out an outdated worldview and don't censor it (Or just leave the third game out of the compilation outright), but on the other hand, was anybody really offended?

Having a whole hissy fit about a single splash screen seems excessive though, 86 pages (And counting, no doubt) of people getting all worked up about this? Just roll your eyes and move on...

It's sad that people have to jump through so many hoops to preserve gaming history, imagine the sheer number of games that are lost forever because the last floppy disk with them on it died...

We really need an organized, legit way to preserve old games.

I would really like an article about Gameboy demakes, a lot of games got that treatment due to the Gameboy's lack of power compared to home consoles, and some of the demakes have aged better than the original games, i still play the "Battle arena Toshinden"-demake (An early PSX fighting game) quite often.

That's the sad part about retro gaming really, the top 5% of games get remembered (And remastered, repackaged, emulated, and so on), and the other games get forgotten by anybody who hasn't got fond personal memories of them.

These articles are very interesting, the difference in how consoles were handled differed a lot by continent back then, so much so that the US market was almost like another world (Which might explain the lengthy delays between JP/US/EU releases )

Here in the Netherlands, Sega was never really big (about half or 1/3 of what Nintendo had in store shelf-space, at its very peak), and the 32X/Saturn years pretty much buried them by the time Dreamcast came around (People burned by 32X weren't likely to risk buying Saturn), but as separated as the game offerings were between continents, so was the news from "across the pond".

@KingMike It's the only option they had, they hardly had any games!

That was the downfall of the whole company, sticking to what worked once (Low price), even when it failed every time since...

One slight thing you missed: There's a fan translation of "Metal gear 2: Solid Snake" out there, that's how i played (And finished) the game myself on an emulator.

Getting one of the re-releases is probably a simpler way to enjoy the game, though.

What i find interesting about that era is that the machines were different in more profound ways than nowadays, like the Megadrive having a better CPU, but lacking certain graphical features and a smaller palette.

Nowadays all machines pretty much do the same, but some consoles are more powerful than others, it's suppose it's better for porting games, and more practical, but it's less interesting to read about.

Man, the old times were pretty bad, all things considered...

Almost 3 years from JP release to EU release? That's ridiculous, at the time i didn't know any better, since write-ups in "Club Nintendo"-magazine (More of an advertisement leaflet than a magazine) and "Hey, there's a new game in the store!" were the only ways to know what games were coming out...

Glad we're in the age of internet and worldwide releases now, i love retro games, but the release delays were the worst.

@Poodlestargenerica That's pretty much Nintendo in a nutshell up to this day, really.

Biggest advantage was battery life, the Lynx was in colour, but ran on 6 AA batteries, and for only a few hours, the Gameboy wasn't spectacular, but could run for ages on fewer batteries.

Weird that those 8 card arrangements aren't hard-coded in, they were revealed quite early on (The Dutch "Club Nintendo" magazine had all 8 arrangements in their hint section shortly after SMB3 released), i imagine it takes a pretty specific set of coding errors to cause just having 8 layouts.

What i find interesting about the video game crash of the early 80s is that it seems to have been a fairly localized event, here in the Netherlands, Atari 2600 games were still being sold into the late 90s (When the NES was already the biggest player), it was a console transition like any that would follow, really, AFAIK Japan was just chugging along nicely as well.

Yet the video game history books i read all put the crash as this apocalyptic event where the industry narrowly avoided total annihilation, are the books about video game history that USA-centric, or were the Netherlands the outlier?

@NatiaAdamo Floppy disks could hold 1.44 Mb of data each, so it was mostly a storage space issue (And who'd want to sit out a 50+ floppy install?), installing windows 3.11 off 9 floppies was a chore already.

Eventually games came out that were good and used FMV ("Command & Conquer" being a notable one), but the first few CD-ROM games were at the core very basic games that wouldn't have caused so much as a ripple without the "OMG! Look at all the videos!"-effect.

Never really appealed to me, TBH. (To me, Myst seemed more like a novelty or tech demo than a full game)

A lot of early CD-ROM games suffered from "We've got all this space! Let's fill it with video!"-syndrome, with making the actual game being a secondary concern.

There was a remake of "SimCity" for instance, with advisors giving information with videos instead of just a text box, or re-releasing existing point-and-click adventure games as "Talkies" with voice-over added, at least the latter added something to the game.

So basically, like the release of most big technological improvements, it took a while for games to come out that made the most of it, and not just used it as a "Look, it's on CD-ROM!"-gimmick.

I don’t understand why they’re so protective of the IP, the original games landed with a “thud”, and their attempts to port or remake it all floundered (Presumably because there was no money in it).

So why hoard a second-string IP like a greedy dragon then?

@MarioBrickLayer Depends, lots of great games are lost to unavailability at the moment (Barring spending huge amounts of money on a used copy), you're making it seem like only bad games are stuck in limbo, and that's false.

Besides, for preservation, how fun a game (Or movie, or whatever) actually is doesn't really matter, it's about the media being lost.

Download it quickly, the Nintendo ninjas will come for it soon!

Can't have people copying a port of a 35-year-old game, now can we?

The NES "Metal gear"-games are still great fun, despite the lack of Kojima's involvement (He's a bit full of himself, isn't he?), they're well worth playing, even if "Snake's revenge" is a bit overly influenced by 80s action movies (Snake looks like Arnold Schwarzenegger, and the manual tried to be funny too much), it's still a great romp of sneaking around and bumping people off on the sly.

I personally blame the NES "Metal gear"-games for my love of filled-up inventory screens.

@RootsGenoa That was my thought too, that the text was slapped together by chatGPT, AI has a tendency to just start making stuff up when it can’t find the answers.

They discontinued the console, no new games are coming out, they shut down the one place where we could still give them money for legitimate 3DS games.

For all the “We’re all about fun!”-PR, when it comes to policies, Nintendo is just a bunch of control-obsessed old men.

They make great games, but as a company, Nintendo is one of the worst.

@RetroGames Bit of a low bar though, "Duck hunt" on NES.

I think the additional outlay for a VR headset will be hampering its prospects for the foreseeable future, at this point i'm not sure if VR is ever going to make it really big or just go the way of 3D television...

To think that "ET" still had significant relevance 20 years after its release was a... bold assumption, but to then stake the future of your entire company on it, sheer lunacy...

@DanijoEX If it was that, they'd have said so, but they're so vague about it, that i'm expecting legal trouble, despite what their official statement says...

"Some stuff has happened", "It's serious", "I won't say anything until it's safe to do so"... All seems a bit sketchy for "We don't have the time and/or energy anymore"

"That's a lot of money to spend for a free poster!", and you have to open up that box, blowing 99.99% of the value out the window too, that better be one heck of a good poster!

Seriously though, aren't those supposed values getting ridiculously out of hand lately?

The eternal question: Will it run “DOOM”?

Forget that! Let’s run “Quake” on it, instead!

@Guru_Larry They probably just had a limited number of codes to hand out.

There aren't many practical ways you can make a portable console without it looking like a Gameboy (Buttons on the sides of the screen would make it like a GBA), testament how Nintendo got the design right the first time.

I said yes, the "I guess, some more so than others"-option is a bit of a false argument, that most games were pretty bad isn't a retro-only thing, the old "90% of everything is rubbish" has been true throughout gaming history, and still is true now.

The inflation-argument is missing one important thing: Everything else has gotten quite a lot more expensive, too.

"Back in the day", i got almost all SNES games i had on sale, and later second-hand (Only way to get "A Link to the past" affordably), paying top dollar (Or guilder, in my case) was a tall order even then, and now with rampant inflation nipping at our heels, game companies need to be careful they don't overprice themselves out of people's reach.

And don't come up with the "Sales"-argument, the big titles, like the "Mario bros."- and "Legend of Zelda"-titles rarely (If ever) get noticeable discounts.

Hey, i have the Dutch version of that one!

The hints were rarely very helpful, a big part was stuff lifted wholesale from the game manuals (Like explaining the items from "Legend of Zelda"), but it was fun to read, and still is, in a "Document from a forlorn age"-sort of way.

I miss those times, games that came in a box, with a proper manual.

Sure, those boxes took up space, but it's better than "Read the PDF on the disc" or "The first three hours of this game is filled with tutorials, no need for a manual!"

Oof, i hate floppy disks, in the olden days (25 or so years ago), i'd copy games onto floppies (Well, the 3.5 inch ones) at a friend's house, and half the time, at least one file ended up corrupted and the whole game useless when i got home.

I still have a few floppies, more as mementos of a bygone age than out of any expectation that there's still any usable data on any of them.

"Good old days" my backside...