N64-ROX

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.

Back in the day we didn't need Lara Croft on N64. Until Joanna Dark came along, we had... erm... Natalya? Gruntilda? The Gerudo?

I admit, I've never really played games on either of these computers. But I don't really understand how this feature is supposed to have been implemented:
simplified controls to compensate for the lack of a keyboard
So... How does this work then? Have they hacked the games themselves to control differently? Are they using hotkeys to switch the function of the face buttons between different sets of keyboard keys? This is the part which I was the most intrigued by.

That would be amazing, now that we have realtime CGI technology to perfectly represent anthropomorphic animals, thus making puppets obsolete, we use it to perfectly represent the puppets! I would 100% be all for this.

@sixrings I'm with you, brother! #supersega #molyneux #scamcoins #kickstarter #ea

Despite my username, I absolutely love the PS1 era of pre-rendered CGI with blocky polygons over the top. There were so many of them on the PS1 that it was impossible to even be aware of them all, let alone buy them and play them.
I'm not really one for card games (aside from Baten Kaitos) but the original Hard Edge here looks pretty sweet. Onto my list it goes!

@bobrocks95 you took the words right out of my mouth. Euro Platformer is a derogatory term and this is a shining example of one.
I guess these days people get nostalgic for early 2000s Flash games so something like this going viral isn't too far of a stretch. Oh, for a simpler time when anything not made in Japan looked like total arse and we loved it!

@RenHope it depends what you mean when you say AI. If they're using AI to transcribe meeting notes or add summary paragraphs into specification documents then I don't care at all - some things are literally unavoidable. If they're using AI to tweak 3D models or even vibe code prototype functionality then this is still all internal stuff and how would I even know about it to care? AI becomes problematic when it either (a) results in crappy output or a slop avalanche, or (b) rips people off or encourages crappy corporate behavior (e.g. layoffs).
When the GTA Trilogy Definitive Edition AI upscaled its textures into a garbled mess people noticed and complained. Likewise with that Mortal Kombat art book which ruined all of its pixel art with AI. The complaint there is people using AI instead of doing their job properly, as opposed to people using AI to do their job better. If the end result is good, I don't think most people will care at all.
Now I admit that there was a debacle a few months ago when the universally praised Clair Obscur got taken to task for some AI placeholder art. But again here nobody would have noticed if it didn't "look like" AI art. And by that I mean, look like the kind of junk which nobody who truly cared about their output would release in their products. And that's because it wasn't supposed to be released in the product. If the AI placeholder had been replaced, or (god help us) if the AI gen was better, nobody would have noticed.

Perhaps this isn't the first time it's ever been done, but I gotta say, putting a wifi chip in the actual cart is a simple genius move. You can surely source them for peanuts, and with one fell swoop you bypass all technical complications around getting an old retro console online.

Oh man, and I just ran out of popcorn!
You'd think in today's tech climate that "a wooden box" would be a pretty safe thing to pivot to. It's not like the datacentres and the tariffs and the sanctions and the IP lawyers and the social media pearl clutchers are locking down trees which grow out of the freakin ground. A man promises a box, he will deliver a box; no way to get burned on that, right?
But our GOAT here will find a way.

@slider1983 someone's fishing for some drama 🤣

@Bot_Bot_69 that's cool, thanks for the response. I'll definitely have to check it out one day.

This looks insanely good; a real technical achievement.
@Bot_Bot_69 (or anyone else) if you've actually played it, what's the actual game like? The vibe that I got from the video was that it's more or less a tech demo for a game jam, and his real plan is to use the techniques he's learning now for his "real game" which is in the pipeline for later. What do you actually do in this game, and is it a satisfying full experience?

@-wc- I can't argue against your point regarding general enshottification (trying to dance around the language here). I just feel like the memory/storage crunch is a fundamentally poor decision from the perspective of the manufacturers themselves, not just to "us".
Maybe I'm completely wrong about this, but I see economics as a food chain, with us consumers at one end. If chip makers don't want to make their money by selling stuff we can actually buy, they are essentially betting on infinite growth from the AI datacentres, which aren't making money from us either - the only money in AI is a circle of speculative investments. It's probably working out swimmingly for them in the short term, but at some point the whole ecosystem needs to start actually getting money out of us directly. I don't think it's even possible that we as consumers could ever deliver a profit to the AI industry - everyone would need to pay them like 1000% of our salaries, it's just not going to happen. As soon as the angel investments dry up, the the chip makers will need to go back to selling stuff which we can actually buy.

@-wc- As far the Ayaneo situation goes, I'm sure that they are eyeing off the possibility of having to abandon the product entirely if things don't get better soon.
But regarding the overall memory/storage situation, call me an optimist but I simply can't imagine that this could be permanent. This crunch is absolutely crippling the enormous gaming and tech industries, and it's not due to some materials shortage or global pandemic but manufacturers just deciding to prioritise AI datacentres over the general public. Well the general public are the people who pay for stuff at the end of the day. Tech hardware makes money. AI loses money. If we stop buying hardware then sooner or later some manufacturers are going to start to see sense again.

Why does everyone keep trying to make maths fun? In my day, the teacher would smack you over the knuckles with a ruler if you made a mistake in your times tables. And we were grateful!

Fish-Eye Lens: The Game. Honestly it doesn't look much more fun to play than Sonic 3D Blast, in fact possibly less so. You can see about 2 metres in front of the character, the distortion is headache-inducing, movement still looks awkward and clunky. Sonic R looks more like a marquee Sonic Game than this. And I think the gaming press of the day would have said so, no matter how much everyone was wanting a new Sonic. In my opinion they ended up making the right choice.

@-wc- ha ha yeah it's not like I was a particular fan of The Duke but it had its moments. In general though I feel that if we have the technology to make tiny Joy Cons which aren't a complete nightmare to use (it's the sticks and the bluetooth which are the real problem there) then on a full sized modern controller surely it's not ergonomically impossible to add two face buttons for a Mega Drive / Saturn layout.

@-wc- the OG xbox controller had ABXY in the normal position, then black and white up above the B and the Y. This new Retro Fighters Hunter thing has the black and white down underneath the B and the A. With the OG xbox controller you could use the A and X like the N64's A and B, and the other 4 buttons perfectly like the C buttons. With this thing the whole group of 6 has been rotated 90 degrees so you couldn't do anything of the sort.

@Arcadia_Official Man, now I have to amend my request to the universe, after seeing that Retro Fighters Hunter controller. Two sticks and 6 face buttons in the correct orientation, please!

It boggles the mind why companies do stuff like that: create a 3rd party controller whose purpose is to replicate an existing controller, but then shuffle everything around so that it no longer replicates the existing controller! Surely Microsoft doesn't have a patent on laying out 3 buttons underneath 3 buttons?!

I don't understand why nobody ever makes a controller with 6 face buttons and a second analogue stick. One controller that's perfect for all scenarios. The original Xbox did it, it's not like it couldn't be done.

The way I see it, there are many people out there who have great technical talent (and plenty of free time) but not the creative inspiration to make a brand new game from scratch. And certainly not the resources to make a brand new GTA or Zelda - level game from scratch, even though it's big serious games like that which they have a passion for. So, they flex their technical muscles and enjoy themselves by doing things like this. The world isn't losing anything from some hypothetical indie gem which never came to be because Bob Dreamcastliker spent his time making a Dreamcast port instead of building something new. That was never going to happen anyway. It's just people doing what they enjoy doing, and sharing it with the world in case anyone else might be interested.

Crystal Dynamics should have to pay me for even having to look at these screenshots! Literally gouging out my eyeballs right now!