Also, it doesn't 'work on a hardware level, eschewing the emulation basis of many "retro consoles" for native, circuitry-based operation.'
It emulates the hardware; it emulates the circuits. The whole text is pretty cringeworthy.
But hey, it's a bunch of normies saying that they like a gaming product. They're trying, bless their hearts.

I like this guy very much.

@lilock3 hey man where's the preservation effort on the old 250-in-1 brick game machine? It was a defining platform for a generation. Racing1, Racing2, Tetris1, Tetris2... maybe Tetris-with-bull$#!t-shapes if you can find it... So many nostalgic classics.

The real Secret of Monkey Island TM was the enemies we made along the way.

What's even the point, if they've stripped out the Lee Trevino's name so that you can't draw the Simpsons connection anymore?

When I was young I was barely able to afford local video games, let alone even dream of importing them from overseas. Then in the early 2000s when Naruto was an underground fansub hidden gem I tried to get my hands on the GameCube Naruto game + some kind of region lock workaround disc. I took the plunge and spent $150 Australian on a Western Union money transfer to some eBay guy in France. He completely ghosted me and I had to lodge a complaint with eBay... They did end up refunding me the purchase price but not the currency conversion or money transfer fees. From then on I was deeply skeptical of online commerce for a lot longer than my peers.
Time and life moved on though of course. In the PS3 days I was living in Hong Kong and had three PSN accounts for three different regions. And when the Switch came out region free, I was in the "I can afford to - and deserve to - indulge in what brings me joy" phase of my life. I was buying games from all over the world for one reason or another. The only slightly sad thing about it was that there actually wasn't all that much good stuff which was actually region exclusive. I bought this crazy Japanese motion drumming game, Gal Metal, which had all this storyline and social interaction stuff which I couldn't read but hey it was something cool and exotic. Then like 2 months later it popped up on the Australian eShop, translated to English and everything. It's not good enough to buy twice (turns out the Switch actually sucks at motion controls) so I ended up with just the inferior experience! But hey it's all a light hearted gamble anyway.

The whole indie game angle is a red herring. What we're seeing here is a textbook example of what everyone was afraid of. IP owners realising that they can now produce content without needing to hire anyone or do the work themselves. (And also, laughably, old people thinking that genAI artwork = higher quality as opposed to lower quality). They may not be cigar-chomping fatcat executives but it's the same general principle as if Activision were to do it in order to lay off half of their workforce.

That reminds me a lot of Antichamber. Looks really cool, despite the fact that it's not doing the impossible and running a fast fluid 3D FPS on 70s home computing power.

@KingMike back in my day we had an 11-inch TV split into 4 for Goldeneye and that's the way we liked it!

My first Castlevania was Castlevania 64. It didn't exactly spark a lifelong fondness for the franchise. But as time goes on it does occupy a tiny corner of my mind for its oddness. Maybe one day I'll revisit it, but perhaps it will be better for it to remain in that nostalgic corner.

"Hello, this is Namco. What's that, you're saying that we should send you a cease and desist order? Hokay."

Is this like those viral videos of literal boomers (i.e. 70+ year olds) trying to decide whether or not something is AI generated while the youngs look on in smug self satisfaction that they would have spotted it immediately? Because this James Pond material is so obviously AI it boggles the mind to think of anyone (let alone an industry professional) being "misled" by unclear terminology. Antstream could have said that it was hand modelled by CG artisans working exclusively in the medium of CG; all it should have taken is one look to know where it truly came from.

@Martin_H I think a sculpture of the PS1 Lara would end up putting somebody's eyes out.

The funny thing about the name is the fact that Landstalker itself is already misleading. That name conjures up images of Schwarzenegger or Stallone stalking the land, with 10,000 goons their prey. Instead it's a lighthearted adventure with a clueless protagonist who spends the introduction comically failing an isometric platform jump (foreshadowing!) and getting washed down the river. Now I highly doubt that this one will be about stalking ladies, but if my wife saw the box she would not be impressed.

Actually the Klobb is my favourite. In my friend group we always played one-hit-kills, so any lack of power with the Klobb was meaningless. It also meant that death by slap was an omnipresent danger.
So why do I like the Klobb? Well it might be related to its weird nailgun-like sound, and the fact that (IIRC) the only other machine gun in that ruleset was the boring and loud KF7. But mostly it's because it has a funny name. Nothing beats running around Bunker in the middle of an all-night session, Klobbin' people and constantly repeating Simpsons lines.
Can I see your Klobb? It's called a baton, son. What do you use it for? Oh, we Klobb people.

I've got a few 3D games on my Playdate. It's so anachronistic in 1-bit black and white but the capable hardware and relatively high res screen let them run pretty sweet.

@cyxceven looking at the "is this game dead?" Steam forum the dev is still posting comments as of less than a month ago. That doesn't necessarily mean too much but at least the entire project isn't abandoned. It's a long time coming though.

That's some hardcore trolling putting Over Jump in the headline for no reason at all. When is Over Jump Rally going to bloody come out!

50 shades of gley

@MisterStu I believe you're right, it was originally Timet the Flying Squirrel.
Obligatory Super Adventures link:
https://superadventuresingaming.blogspot.com/2015/12/mr-nutz-hoppin-mad-amiga.html

@Babybahamut What's wrong with Lanky? He's a cool dude.

Today I learned that Japan made a "hot men" beach volleyball game well before they made a "hot girls" beach volleyball game. History is full of surprises!

The bit about the worn-out controllers was interesting to hear coming from them. They may have removed the need to hold up on the analogue stick to accelerate, but you still needed to lock it at 100% up for 5 seconds in order to use the boost. I was rocking a pair of Mario Party veteran controllers back then and really struggled with it. That was the first time I ever had to buy a replacement controller for anything. It was worth it though!

I had one or two LCD games. They were utter tripe. Those were the days when, as a kid, your options were limited and you had to make do with what you were given. But LCD games were like an insult. Oh you like video games, do you? Here, have this pretend video game and go and exercise that imagination of yours.
Different strokes and all that, but I find the idea of including those things under the umbrella of game preservation to be a silly joke. Might as well use MAME to emulate a pedestrian crossing traffic light, it's got about the same amount of interactivity.

One might say that he confused a tech demo with a real game. But at the time, the concept of freely & realistically exploring a 3D space was such an exciting frontier that everyone's imaginations went wild. Like that guy who leaves all the Steam reviews: graphics which make you you forget what reality is! And here's Nintendo at a trade show, showing us not only what's possible but what has already been built and you can actually play. Free form sandbox immersion with nobody telling you what to do. I can see how, at that time, that experience would stick in someone's memory like glue.

@mjparker77 how many hours would you say that you've put into actually playing those 150+ Arcade Archives though? I can't speak for anyone else, but if it were me, it would average out to about 1 hour each, max. And that's assuming that I was buying them one at a time and doing my level best to make the most of them.
Considering that each one costs as much as a good quality indie game (or pretty much any game on a good sale) the math just doesn't make sense. You're pretty much paying for the satisfaction of seeing them in your library more than anything else.

Looks pretty cool, I honestly don't know what I would have thought of such a JRPG if it had come to our shores back in the day. Menu-based gameplay was not exciting and the only reason I lasted long enough with FF7 to become a convert was because of the mind-blowing presentation.
Cut forward 30 years and a JRPG on the N64 sounds like two of my favorite things combined for the first time!

@PKDuckman I bought that, it's pretty good. Can recommend.

I think my life would finally be complete if, one day, a single-sentence burn that I wrote on social media were to be deemed so pithy, so perfect, that it would get picked up by a legitimate news outlet and used as the lead for the entire article.
I'm not even sure if I'm kidding.

As someone who has recently been through the process of my employer being acquired, it is this part of it which sticks out to me:
"I suspect that Id Software was a marginal business from Microsoft’s perspective"
The problem is that, for a giant company, almost all acquisitions will forever be marginal businesses which, despite any metrics of success, will always be expendable to suit whatever are the latest whims of the C-suite and/or investors. When you're (for example) a software company with 1 or 2 key projects per year which are successful and profitable then you're pretty much golden - the success bubbles directly to the people at the top and they want nothing more than to keep a good thing going. If you're that same company, acquired by a behemoth and representing like 1% of their portfolio, you're nothing. Unless you're bringing in billions in profit, you're always just a change in leadership away (or even just a change of mind or a bad mood) from having your whole livelihood discarded from one day to the next. There really isn't anything that could be done differently to avoid it, you're pretty much just living on the graces of fate.

That's nothing, I use my Playdate daily to spread butter on my bread!

For some reason this was my favorite part of the article:
The score was transcribed by ear. And that's why one part of the main background music has a mistake.
A completely unprompted admission from someone claiming fuzzy memories of a project they worked on 40 years ago. These are the words of a guy who truly takes pride in his work output. That one off-note has probably been eating him up inside for decades!

I guess I have been shown once again that what makes sense (or doesn't) to me is the complete opposite for many, many other people.
Maybe it can be chalked up to a learning opportunity. But what is there really to learn, other than the fact that I'll never understand them?

At least the guy has been very forthcoming with Time Extension, and it only took him about a week or so to realise that he'd bought a white elephant and roll back the marketing hype. Not a Supersega saga by any stretch. I wish him good luck in his next challenge with EA over Simoria.

@Daric This is not an anti-ai blog.
That's like saying "this is not a unionization blog" when reporting on gaming industry layoffs, or "this is not an obituary blog" when reporting on the death of a famous person in the gaming industry.
#1: this is a gaming "blog" and Crazy Taxi is very much a gaming property, this piece of merchandise is directly linked to an upcoming videogame which is also exhibiting the very same AI issues.
#2: it's not just this site which is anti AI, pal. As a broad trend, I would say that the majority of all news and opinion which isn't directly drinking the AI kool-aid is against what is being done with AI - i.e. lazy, poor-quality slop. It's like the olden days when we would laugh at off-brand rip-off versions of popular IP, except now that slop is the official product coming from the IP holders themselves. And add to that all of the moral, ethical, and environmental concerns, plus the rampocalypse frustrations. AI (and especially AI slop) is just not cool, and I for one am very thankful that Time Extension is making their stance on this clear.

Let's do some maths. 7 chaos emeralds, 1-in-8 chance of getting them, that brings us to $5,600 and all I'd get is... World domination? Hmm, maybe this isn't such a bad deal after all.
Of course, there is still a chance that I'd have bad luck and not get them all, even with 56 purchases. But then it would just be a matter of tracking down the people who did get them and turn all their animals into robots for some reason.

@Ruka
Maybe it's not for you (it's not for me either), but to claim that there isn't a market for this is absurd asinine.
Fair point, I really should know better than to think that I understand the entire market for anything. But let's see what the future does bring...

I watched a video the other day about why consumers in Japan are so weird about IP. It pretty much boiled down to: the laws in Japan give 100% power to corporations; there's no concept of fair use or transformative application for fan work, no point even in trying to go to court because there's nothing you could even argue. Any fan work which is allowed to exist is essentially done so by grace of the gods, and the last thing the Japanese fan communities want is for anyone to go too far, disturb those gods and get the ban hammer swinging against the whole delicate ecosystem. And hence those fans will side with the corporations in every instance, and self-police in the court of public opinion like we're seeing here.
It was an interesting angle and an interesting watch, but in my opinion it doesn't change the fact that if you shill for, defend, and perpetuate an unfair corrupt system just because "it's the system" this only makes you part of that unfair and corrupt system. And thus, unfair and corrupt yourself.
All creators and content lovers should be on the side of creators over rightsholders. Just take a browse through the Switch eshop if you want to see an example of a million perfectly IP-legal games which truly degrade the medium and were produced by an utterly cynical revenue-to-effort-ratio maximization machine. Some Densha De Go fan making a fan version of Densha De Go is what this medium needs more of, not less.

I wouldn't buy such a phone even if it was $25. The whole concept is patently absurd. "Leave your iPhone at home" is a good soundbite: even they have to admit that normal humans need a smartphone in their life. It's like they completely misread the room: Hey all these countries and states are talking about banning social media, banning VPNs, enforcing age verification, identity verification, and just generally destroying all the freedoms and privacies which the internet was built on. This must be the zeitgeist, what everybody wants! Let's sell a phone which blocks all web browsers entirely, even from side loading!
Newsflash, brainiacs: nobody wants any of this, aside from a few insane Helen Lovejoys who somehow have gotten into power. Otherwise known as the enemy of actual people. I want to be able to do things on my phone, not not do things. If I want my phone to stop bugging me, I'll set it to silent. If I want to stop doomscrolling, I will exercise some self restraint. The good parts of the internet are being eroded more than enough already, from within and from without; the last thing that I or (surely) anyone wants to do is pay money for a device that nukes everything that's left.
I was originally cynical about the whole Commodore angle - remember they were saying from the beginning that Commodore would be a new computing platform for the next generation, or some silliness - but when they released a straightforward, well built, sensible C64 FPGA like they were supposed to, I figured that maybe they actually did know what they were doing. At least they are not sticking their heads in the sand regarding the poor public reception of this stupid phone; let's hope that they keep listening and eventually are smart enough to avoid making a very costly mistake.

In my opinion there's a fair argument for both sides here.
On one hand, Arcade Archives is a feel good project due to their consistent regular releases of genuine vintage titles which surface classics and obscurities alike, bringing continued breadth and depth to the consoles' library.
On the other hand, it's a stone cold marketing and licensing exercise. They got their hands on a thousand roms and plugged them into a scheduling tool which each week compiles one into a barebones no-frills one-size-fits-all emulator and pushes it out onto the eShop for 15 - 25 dollars (Australian). Hell I could do that myself, the only impressive part is the fact that they got the licenses to do it legally.
I think it's wonderful that these games are made so accessible now, outside of piracy. But the reality is that (perhaps due to piracy, admittedly) these games just don't have that kind of value anymore. For the price they ask for one, I'd happily buy a compilation of 20. They're a fun thing to see in the store listing but it's mostly for decorative purposes. They won't sell many copies of Rack 'em Up, but they don't need to: aside from paying for the license (which would not have been a blue chip negotiation, let's be honest) it cost them essentially nothing to publish it.

@rob7979 the Master System II is just a Master System with cheaper parts, so I don't think that is an indicator of anything being amiss.
That said, my experience of Master System (II) is mainly Alex Kidd where the sprites are tiny and the backgrounds are just a single colour. The gameplay from the video doesn't look like Master System to me, but it's likely that there's a lot more capability hiding in the system than I was ever aware of.

I would heartily recommend Super Adventures in Gaming - it's just one guy's blog so it's not a constant spigot of content, but it's real and it's entertaining and he's been doing it since 2011 so there is a lot there to read. His first couple of years are full of short looks with just a couple of screenshots, but before long the articles get really meaty with dozens upon dozens of screenshots, gifs, cross platform comparisons, little bottled histories of the developer or the platform or what the state of the art was at the time of release. I've discovered whole ecosystems of 80s-90s computers and niche/failed consoles which I'd have never been exposed to otherwise.

I don't really understand the DAP thing. Does that just mean that it plays MP3s and has a speaker? i.e. like every other device manufactured in the past 25 years?

Ha ha, Wide Boy sounds like what an aggressive Scotsman's mates call him at the club.

Ah, everyone seems to hate everyone in the emulation scene!
Personally I'm very pro-emulation, in all its shapes and forms, but sometimes I wonder whether the drama is a result of people pouring their passions into a niche which is all about ignoring or defeating the intentions of the programmers who came before you, at a fundamental level. No honour amongst thieves, and all that. Me I'm just forever grateful that these emulators exist at all.

I was entranced with arcades in the 90s, in Australia, although I didn't have enough money to actually play a lot of games in them. I made sure to become proficient in Street Fighter on Mega Drive and Playstation 1 though. Then in the early 2010s I moved to Hong Kong for a while, and visited Tokyo in 2015. Got to see what that style of arcade is really like. It was a bucket list experience, but honestly it was mostly intimidating and an eye opener to foreign tastes. A lot of horse race gambling games, strategy games, games that you play with decks of physical cards, games which looked like early smartphone autobattlers, etc. There were banks of 2D fighting game cabinets, most of which weren't Street Fighter, but I did plonk down for a few games of SF3 and got my ass completely handed to me by the guy across from me. Perfectly as expected, but it was a bit of a reality check. By that point I was playing stuff like GTA 5 and Final Fantasy 13 at home, arcades were just a nostalgic novelty that I didn't need anymore. Meanwhile the people in the actual arcades were "lifers" who were basically in Evo mode every day (well, them and groups of hip teens) so I settled into the role of the tourist that I was.

@BTS it's a nice thought but something tells me that these 2026 cartridges aren't going to torpedo the market for $20k 90's originals. Nobody is paying those prices to actually play the things; that's been trivial for anyone to do for a long time.

I came at the game from the perspective of someone who had been waiting for Dinosaur Planet for years, and wasn't expecting (or wishing for) anything much from the Star Fox license. I wanted a Rareware take on Zelda, with super fancy next-gen graphics, and that was 100% what I got. I loved it; in my opinion it's in the top 3 on the Gamecube, along with Wind Waker and Mario Sunshine (I waited until the Wii for Twilight Princess, assuming it would be better there).

Doom is too easy nowadays. Getting SM64 to run on everything is the next goal for humanity.
With all this hard-fought success on the GBA, I think the ultimate flex now would be to get it running on a SNES. That would be pure madness.

@Samoteph not wanting to be a jerk about it, but I did notice this:
"Travel the expanses of Miracle Land, solve puzzles, play mini games, improve your equipment and meet colorful characters," says the game's download page.
It's Miracle Boy in Dragon Land, maybe you can fix the typo.