N64-ROX

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!

Engagement bait at its finest.

Man, Palmer Luckey was divisive when he released that game boy machine a year ago. Now I see not a single disparaging comment here and indeed a bunch of dog-whistling brown-nosers. What could possibly have happened in the intervening period I wonder...

Man the most powerful feature phone I ever had (before biting the bullet on an iPhone 4) could play "java games", and no that doesn't mean Minecraft.
It's always wild to think about how people in Japan were carrying polygon-pushers like these around in their pockets for so many years; they really were living in an alternate dimension.

That radish was coming right for us!

I was going to buy one of these back in the day, but I was afraid it was haunted. Every time I looked at it, the most ghoulish face I've ever seen stared straight back at me!

It would almost have been worth it to lose money on this thing just to have been involved in the drama, instead of only watching it from the sidelines. Almost.

@Ristar24 I never had a Saturn but the hauntingly beautiful screenshots and evocative name of Panzer Dragoon lived strongly in my consciousness for a long time. I picked up the Switch remake and ugh those graphics - it was like a shiny plastic toy version; a default-Unity-materials version.
I tend to write lots of comments like this, but the wobbly, low-poly-count aesthetic with crisp unfiltered textures and no antialiasing was what gave PS1 and Saturn games their charm and nostalgia value. When the console is working its hardest just to slap 200 polygons on the screen, that's when stunning art direction and clever texture tricks make you go "whoa". Taking something like that and rebuilding it with bland modern 3D models of bugs and dragons that we've all seen 1000 times before, only serves to rob it of its visual identity.

Very intriguing! But this line confuses me a little:
the full version of the title later being ported over to other Japanese feature phones, including Softbank and EZWeb handsets in 2007
Does "full version" mean that there are versions out there which aren't disparate single-episode server-dependent snippets of the full game?

If I were the developer of an emulator I'd be loathe to even consider issuing a DMCA for any reason. It's one of the worst legal inventions of our age, a scourge on our culture, and it's surely a hypocritical move to use such a thing which any other day you'd be rallying against.

And that first figure wouldn't include those people who play retro games through other means (e.g. emulation / retro re-releases and paid services such as NSO) but don't own an actual console. Retro is truly thriving right now - obviously driven mostly by the older crowd but it's a heartwarming story to think that it's not only us.

Looks fantastic, and going by this review it sounds fantastic. Personally I'm relieved that the branching paths are mostly insubstantial. I don't have time to finish the same game over and over again (it's a happy day when I find myself actually finishing a game at all) and it's a bitter pill to have to decide what content I'm going to turn my back on forever. Give me one good story, with maybe a couple of opportunities for minor self expression along the way, and I'm a happy gamer.

@Sketcz ha ha, what I meant was: I've not played this game so I wouldn't know what specific content is in either version. But someone out there had to be incredibly attached to something about the PS3 Japanese version which isn't in the PS4 English version, in order to put so much time and effort into this project. And usually when people are complaining about this kind of thing it's usually because the newer localised version covered up some skin somewhere or cut some risqué or problematic scenes.

So... What's so special about the original content of this game, compared to the readily-available 2023 version, that it would cause someone to go to such lengths?
My first guess would be titillation, to be honest.

4.7 inch screen? Man I wish this was an actual phone.

This sleazeball is just making things up now, for the sound bites. There's no way that ever happened.

Looks great, I'll be all over this. Hypnagogia was a fantastic experience: a longer, more interesting, and more creative game than the half-hour vibefest I was expecting (and would have been happy enough with already to be honest). Surely can't expect as much meat on the bones of a 48-hour game jam thing such as this one, but I'm confident that it will be a good time.

@Daggot I think in general we have a long way to go before games made mostlly by AI are the standard. Between indie passion projects and AAA tentpole fare, human authorship and creativity are still undeniably important.

But for stuff like this though, retro remaster #278? I would not be at all surprised if the people in charge truly are working their hardest to find a way to funnel the whole workflow through AI. Even Rockstar Games did it with the GTA trilogy: it was one thing for the character models to look weird and the modernised tech to ruin the carefully-crafted atmosphere, but when the new shop sign textures became gibberish it was clear that we were playing the result of of a clumsy machine job as opposed to the content-filled work of art that was the originals.

What a bunch of champions. I'd wager the rare and highly sought-after original was barely played, if at all. Now it's freely available for the people who'll probably enjoy it the most. A bit of good news in my week.