N64-ROX

I love it how some people still have such animosity towards Molyneux; like some truly personal, unforgivable betrayals have occurred. For me he's an amazing character to have in the history books of our great hobby - a walking talking parable (or fable, if you will) about promising too much... But also someone whose hubris never quite resulted in him disappearing completely from the public eye. His wild career spanned the entirety of gaming's most interesting era, and this Milo debacle was the craziest, most fascinating thing he ever did.
Ironically if he did manage to build it now, it would be a complete yawnfest; it was exciting from a pure tech perspective back then, and hilarious from a schadenfreude perspective now, but let's be honest, the only reason anyone in 2025 would play a game like that is if it was a waifu simulator.

The problem here isn't the "AI" part. The problem is the "lazy" part. This is an art book and somebody plugged these source images into an AI upscaler and didn't even bother to look at the result afterwards to check whether it made things better or worse.
It's like people used to say about CGI: if it's good CGI you don't even realise that it is CGI. The same can surely be true with AI - especially with AI upscaling. Show some care in your work and keep working on your weights and prompts until you've got something nice to share with the world, and nobody is going to know or care whether AI was involved. But something like this is such an obvious case of "just dump the whole folder into the magic make-things-better machine and publish; who gives a crap" that it validates every negative preconception of AI and the people who use it.

I found this to be a great read, especially in the context of the Box Art Brawl articles. I wonder what opinion this guy would have on those! A bunch of amateurs (myself included) 30 years after the fact telling him that his iconic designs which sold millions and established legacies were total junk and that he should have literally done nothing at all for the design localisation job except translate the text on the box.

Too bad it's not a bit more powerful under the hood. I would have loved to be able to somehow play Katamari Damacy with that trackball.

Now now, I hate AI at least as much as the next guy, but those closing comments are pretty hyperbolic.
On the other hand, it's given me a delightful new meme that I'm going to try to make happen.
"Assuming society still exists after all this."
You can add that to any talking point, no matter how mundane!
Honey, you forgot to bring in the laundry. Assuming society still exists after all this.

She ain't all that and a bag of silicon chips. Girlfriend. Mmm-hmm?

Something tells me that they won't be porting this Unreal Engine 5 game to the N64.
Still, it looks pretty cute.

@Xerox1919 Sony switched their buttons in the middle of the PS1 era, way before the Xbox came along. In the west, FF7 used O to confirm and X to cancel, and by the time FF8 came along it was the opposite. X was the standard confirm button for all PS1 games after the first couple of years. Pushing the "bottom button" to confirm just became standard muscle memory for a long time. Not to mention of course that that's how the N64 controller did it too.

I never owned a SNES so my first proper initiation into the 4-button controller world was the PS1. So it just became intuitive that the button on the bottom (X) is "confirm". Although there was some confusion with the fact that FF7 still used the Japanese approach of circle being "confirm" while FF8 and beyond used the western paradigm of X. And then in the PS3 days when I was living in Hong Kong and there was no region locking it just became a complete mess. In the OS, a HK machine would use circle and an Australian machine would use X. Some games would switch it up depending on which machine they were playing on, while others would stick strictly to the paradigm for their region. And then some other games would just get completely confused and do it one way in menus, another way in gameplay, and have on-screen prompts and tutorials which were incorrect, leading to much hilarity.
And then of course I went back to Nintendo with the Switch, and I use an Xbox gamepad for the PC, and muscle memory becomes something to fight against on either platform with ALL the buttons flipped...

It seems every day that my definition of "budget" is proven to be out of touch with reality.

I was just thinking similar thoughts yesterday about that Taki Udon PS1 FPGA machine, which will run N64 and Saturn cores.
Although I guess that's more a case of releasing current-gen FPGA tech with a beautiful package and a beautiful price, than advancing the state of the art. But yeah I don't see this Modretro box as being significantly better - if you already have perfect FPGA emulation then what good is a little more power, unless it enables you to start thinking about Dreamcast etc... And of course I've made my opinion on Modretro as a company well known already.

@GravyThief Those actors are an urban myth. The cutscenes in Resident Evil were actually 3D-rendered using the awesome power of the PS2 which Capcom has been given secret advance access to. Just wait until the year 2000, it's going to blow your mind!

Fascinating article. But I was hoping to read more about the actual games and see some in action.

Yeah there's no reason for this video not to be legit, but also no reason for it to inspire hype.
N64 emulation has been a thing for over 20 years, and FPGA N64 emulation on Mister for 1 or 2. Ooh wow a 1080 attract mode screen!

I think Time Extension has done it very well here. This is retrogaming news, and plenty of other sites will write about it, and most of those outlets won't bother to mention every time that the guy leading this is an arms dealer. By reading articles like this I get to make an informed purchase (or in this case, non-purchase) and stay abreast of what's happening from a reputable non-SEO-farm source.

I like seeing new game ideas like this. We rarely see them on retro consoles since devs usually favour either doing the genres which the console was best at, or challenging themselves with porting games (or game types) which worked better on other consoles. But this looks pretty fresh.

Don't forget mugen! No fan community is ever truly left hanging with nothing to play!

Looks sweet for its purpose. But no analog stick on a device which on paper can run PS2 & GameCube games pretty well, it would just be an eternal tease for me. Not to mention N64 which would benefit immeasurably from the 6 button layout.

It looks gorgeous; ZX Spectrum was an inspired choice in my opinion. The pixelly / attribute-clashy graphics really invite your mind to take you where you need to go, and seeing genuine anime art in that style brings to mind PC88 / PC98 stuff too.

Ok gang, what do you have to say now? It's not a Zelda game but a stressful roguelite game...
I enjoyed Cadence of Hyrule but I think personally I would have preferred a classic story-and-adventure here.

I'm completely on board with this article's discussion of AI. But I think framing it from the perspective of this Commodore endeavor is a bit rich.
For all of Simpson's talk about Commodore being a new computing platform which will need to "support children's curriculums" into the future, in reality the only tangible product being offered is an FPGA C64 emulator. This is absolutely a retro-focused endeavor, not a forward-looking one. Any dreams Simpson has of taking on Windows, Apple, Google, and Linux simply by buying the trademark to Commodore are at best pie-in-the-sky and more likely just cynical investor bait.

Also, I know that I'm just feeding the troll at this point, but anyone who says that the Playdate is low-tech garbage has obviously never used one and is (probably purposefully) missing the point.
The hook of the Playdate isn't its restrictions, or even its crank. It's the fact that dozens and dozens of the best indie developers have embraced it and created hundreds of creative games for it which you can't find anywhere else. You could go and buy one of this month's 100 new retro handhelds and in the end what are you actually doing with it? Just playing Super Mario World and Donkey Kong Country and Final Fantasy 7 again for the n'th time. Or you could fire up the Playdate and be treated to an utter smorgasbord of new and unique experiences.

How does the Playdate's 1-bit screen emulate the Game Boy's 2-bit screen?

@PKDuckman @HoyeBoye I think you're probably both right. Hexen 1 apparently has a lot of ETHEREAL TRAVEL but it's not the game I was thinking of.
https://superadventuresingaming.blogspot.com/2014/06/hexen-ms-dos.html
https://superadventuresingaming.blogspot.com/2020/07/amulets-armor-ms-dos-guest-post.html
https://superadventuresingaming.blogspot.com/2011/07/strife-ms-dos.html

Were these the games which were kind of RPGs in disguise, using the Doom engine? Or am I thinking of something else?

Hey there @Ferdinando_Martucci what can you tell us about this game and its path to being publicly shared like this?

Never played it in real life but the game looks like a total trip from that video. Lots of gigantic billboarding sprites everywhere, coupled with the texture warping on the real polygons, makes it look like the whole world is wobbling and contorting around and jumping out at you out of nowhere. Pretty funky in a retrojank way.

3D Spectrum game... What a time to be alive.

I don't know anything about this guy but those thumbnails give off a repulsive Mr Beast energy already, regardless of AI.
But yeah I have to agree with the doubters - unless his plan is to just slap the logo on some random cashgrab mini PC or raspberry pi, spending 7 figures on a nostalgic brandname is just the very beginning if he wants to actually bring some kind of new computer to market. And there's no way a single kid in the entire world will care about a Commodore - the C64 was laughably outdated even in my time and I'm pretty darn old. And then to hire back all of these OG commodore dudes - those guys would be in their 70s - 80s now, they're probably more interested in kicking the youth off of their lawns than inventing new paradigms of computing.

It's a solid gold concept on its own, but there's something about seeing Ganondorf the ultimate agent of evil standing across a courtroom arguing about semantics and trivial minutiae with Link that is just too ridiculous! I gotta get into this for sure!

Imagine they turned the site into gambling-centric SEO slop but didn't close down the adventure game forums! That would have been wild to behold. What kind of a community would have stuck around, I wonder?

Yep none of the major platforms will ever provide a single iota of customer service unless you can make their day complicated via social media. They built these darn auto-moderation algorithms in order to get out of providing a human contact center, and by gum they're going to use them that way until they have no other choice.

@truth_will_set_u_3 settle down mate, I was only agreeing that the PSX was cooler than the N64.

@OutRun22 the N64 could do things the PSX could only dream of! But at the same time, I'll forever have to agree with you here in a way. The PSX was doing things the N64 wished it was cool enough to do. While Nintendo and Rare were making all-time classics on the N64, every other creative force in the games industry was bringing the zeitgeist to the PSX. After a few years of holding my ground, I had to buy one in the end. And the Tony Hawks and Final Fantasy goodness did flow.

I'm not usually an arcade guy, or a shmup guy. But I bought this on Arcade Archives for the gorgeous pixel art alone. It is really a work of art.

Interesting to see real numbers thrown around. If the guy turned down £25,000 then I wonder what this third party is paying, and what their intentions are.

What happened in the background with this story? Last we heard, his funding got pulled and he seemed to be saying quite clearly that it wasn't a project that he would continue to work on for free. Did he just like start a patreon and that was enough?

Now that is absolutely spectacular. If only real polygons hadn't come along to make masterful fake 3D like this seem obsolete for a decade or so!
Just kidding of course, I'm all about the polygons. But that was amazing to witness.

@JackGYarwood that's really interesting, thanks!
It did seem strange to me that the article was updated like "whelp, turns out everything was the opposite of what we said, tune in next time folks" - there had to be some more nuance to it, if not a completely separate story of conflicting sources or something. It's good to read that additional detail.

Is there any plan to to follow up on this article to find out and question the person who spread the complete opposite of the truth to the world regarding this story? Now that would be good journalism.

BOF4 is a wonderful game and a highlight of the genre for me. It was tough for anything to compete with Final Fantasy on PSX as far as bombast and mind share, but this was the game that showed me that you can get a really charming and engrossing JRPG even if it's not chock full of dramatic angst and cutting edge CGI.

I will never not click a headline like this one.
They could discover like one modified texture somewhere and it would still be worth learning about if it's SM64.

@Guitario honestly, emulating the Playdate would be missing the point. It's a gorgeous device that just makes you happy to hold it in your hands. And while it has a solid library of clever exclusive indie games, they're usually bite-sized riffs on bigger "real" games where the interest lies in how the devs were able to make it work with a 1-bit black & white screen. Not to mention the fact that most of them are unplayable without that signature crank.

Erm, the whole point of Vampire Survivors is that you don't have to aim; just concentrate on movement and get into a flow state. This game seems to be all about aiming, which looks much more stressful and the complete opposite experience in my opinion.
That said, I love Into The Breach and I love my Playdate (finding a reason to keep regularly pulling it out of the drawer is the main problem really) so I'll definitely be investing in Season 2 and checking this out.

I could barely afford to buy any games in the 16 bit generation, so importing from overseas was something only the richest of the rich people would ever do. I even (regrettably) chose a mega drive over a snes because it came with a 6-in-one cartridge, forsaking the Donkey Kong Country that my heart so desired. I was moving up from my master system where I'd bought literally zero games, surviving only on the built-in Alex Kidd and the occasional rental.
Crazy times; I'm still salty about them to some extent. Now I have more games on my Switch than I know what to do with.

Those screenshots look like an early 2000s PC game, my mind is blown that people are able to do something like this on a console from the 80s with 64KB RAM. I'd have thought that just being able to keep track of all the individual harvested crops would be impossible!

@RZ-Atom yeah a little research and I'm starting to regret that comment of mine...

The interviewees not wanting to voice an opinion but then calling out "online toxicity" speaks volumes. Ah yes online toxicity exists, that's something that everyone can agree on, right? But what you're calling "toxicity" is conscientious people objecting to the fact that your publisher is owned by an arms dealer and general horrible human (let's call them, for simplicity's sake, the Left). The war hawks and bigots and celebrity apologists (let's call them the Right) aren't the ones calling to boycott your project. So it's pretty obvious whom you're calling "toxic" and where your loyalties lie. At least that one guy Lockwood seems to understand the issue.

I can't imagine what it would be like to work in the field of emulation.
"How about you pay me a full living wage for X months to develop something that you can already get now for free. It will have better performance, I promise!"

I want to see the Austin Powers "Random Task" shoe. I mean who throws a shoe? Honestly!