RadioHedgeFund

Let’s be honest: if enough people can show interest in a bag of old balls like Croc then anything is possible.

The basis of nearly all modern games is the ability to break out from behind cover in a sideways motion and shoot your enemy.

Therefore the answer is Space Invaders.

The obvious answer is Soulcalibur

They didn't even need to keep supporting it with new software. Selling it as a portable PS2 and flooding it with ports would have been enough to sell another 20m units.

There is already a port of San Andreas available. Imagine a Devil May Cry trilogy, Gran Turismo 3, Ico or Colossus. They would have been brilliant.

Most consoles had some decent games, even trashy ones like the Ouya. Volume of games doesn’t equal quality either. Just look at the state of Android gaming.

The Saturn wasn’t the Dreamcast, a commercial failure that shone so bright before it died. It was a dismal console, being two Mega Drive’s duct-taped together made it horrendous for developers to work on.

We’ve seen the Dreamcast run GTA3 but the Saturn would never have ran MGS, Final Fantasy VIII or Wip3out.

Despite being a great console all I will ever remember about the PS2 is it never having a decent WipEout game to call its own.

I appreciate the Venn Diagram Sony was aiming for with the Vita, throwing the kitchen sink at the controls in an attempt to cater to mobile gamers as much as an enthusiast audience. But the PSP sold 70m units on the very basis that it /wasnt/ the DS. As the Switch proved: people just wanted a portable conventional console.

With this in mind WipEout 2048 went in the wrong direction. People buying a console at launch are not the curious but the enthusiasts, players looking for a more powerful PSP with an extra analog. For everything good about it the online wasn’t robust and it lacked any sort of racing options outside the campaign, no single race or time trial.

Based on that evidence alone I’m not shocked Sony shuttered Studio Liverpool. Wipeout Pure was the game that sold the PSP, a slice of the future on a slice of the future. Conversely 2048 looked too far backwards on a console designed to go forwards.

Thankfully the videogame publishers have done us a tremendous favour by reminding us that we never owned digital copies in the first place, only a shareware licence for them.

If buying something isn't ownership then downloading a copy of it isn't theft.

All sarcasm aside it's about time software copyright law is outdated anyway because it was never meant to deal with infinitely copiable data. The only reason these laws exist is the cause of an archaic court case involving Apple in 1983.

Just think of the craziness that owning a piece of software encoded in a plastic circle gives you more consumer rights than having a shareware version of it stashed on your console.

@profkross If you look at the oldest set of user reviews, the ones on Gamefaqs you'll see they skew better as time moves along. All the earliest ones from 2000-2004 paint a different picture.

I'm not trying to hate on anyone; if people enjoyed the game then good for them. All art deserves an audience! But the press surrounding the rerelease is a little skewed.

There seems to be a lot of rose tinted viewing going on here. Croc did not review favourably in the 1990's at all, mostly 5's and 6's. It's not a bad game per se but it's not a terribly good one either.
There are probably more than a few kids who played it aged 3-6 at the time that want to enjoy their childhood again (nothing wrong with that) and the game was obviously made with some love by the creators.

But these are all things we can also say about The Phantom Menace as well.

I used to love Transformers as a kid but the original cartoons were bloody awful!

@Gs69 I feel it is perhaps journalists in their late twenties or early thirties who played it and enjoyed it as a young child. This would heavily tilt their nostalgia towards a positive experience as they were too young to perhaps know any better at the time.

Many of the top 32bit titles were over the heads of the under-tens of the era; I can’t imagine many parents of the day letting their kids play Metal Gear Solid or Resident Evil. What did this leave them with but Croc, Spyro and Crash?

Given the misplaced hype for a Croc rerelease I'd say yes. That game was bloody awful.

Emulation is a fantastic tool to free your digital purchases from some licensing hell or play your physical backups. If you paid for it, it's yours.

An issue I have with the larger scene though is that, if you have pirated ROMs and have hundreds at your disposal it becomes almost crippling deciding what to actually play.

AND STILL NOBODY BUILDS A MASTER SYSTEM ONE

@Bu1ld0g Licencing terms be damned: I paid for it. It's mine. Why do I have more rights over a set of computer code if it's burned to a disc? Makes no sense.

I will continue to enjoy backups of all the digital games I have purchased for ever more thanks to common sense and UK copyright law allowing such things. I will never condone the idea of piracy and not providing creators recompense.

It does make me wonder if some sort of localised AI model will be the next big thing on the PS6/Xbox5.

Lest we forget an anticipated feature of the Switch 2 is DLSS upscaling allowing devs to build a 720p game that plays in 4K on your TV. This uses machine learning. What could they do with more power?

The Mario 64 one is awful and properly looks like an AI mess. The Shenmue one is more interesting as the game wanted realism to begin with. Imagine a tool that devs could rinse old titles through to remaster them without much effort.

I feel a tasty copyright war coming on. Good luck, Dong.

Popcorn.gif

I feel this is mostly nostalgia from people who were 5 when it came out. Croc is not a great game.

The reason nobody talks about Croc is the same reason we don’t talk about Bubsy 3D

@-wc- If you don’t have the purchases it’s fairly easy to jailbreak and find the .ipa files online. I remember some interesting early iOS ports of Resi 4, Alpine Racer and Time Crisis.

There was a brilliant title called Meteor Blitz that was for all intents and purposes Super Stardust on the iPhone.

I can still play I Love Katamari on a 32bit iOS device running v5 or less. If you have the legacy purchases a first gen iPod Touch (about a tenner from CEX) is a goldmine of old mobile titles.

I heard they’re reopening but as a Soccer store.

As a parent if you let your child play videogames and you yourself do it as a hobby then you have an obligation to raise them on the games of your youth first.

Let them play modern titles but equally show them the games of the 8 and 16 bit eras. Let them see where ideas and characters came from. Make them aware of their heritage.

This isn’t a shock. One is a cinematic gaming masterpiece and the other is kind of remembered for putting enemies higher up in corridors but corridors all the same.

@RetroGames I do. 3D Mario games are great. I’ve never played a 2D one I actually enjoyed. For pure platforming (not Metroidvanias and the like) Sonic 2 is still where it’s at.

If ever I just want to blast through a game I can put it on and have it done in an hour. It’s the purity and immediacy of it. No faffing around with items, abilities or map screens. For that hour I’m 9 years old again and nothing else matters. There aren’t many games you can just put on and almost autopilot for an hour. It’s like Outrun distilled into a platform game.

Sure there might be more advanced games and if we’re talking RPGs then Symphony of the Night is the pinnacle of 2D gaming, period. But sometimes you just want to forget about all that faff and go for a drive.

@PinballBuzzbro what?! Metropolis zone alone has the best soundtrack!

(But none of them would be Mario games)

But… I mean…. Sonic 2 surpassed Mario. There hasn’t been a better 2D platformer since 1992.

I tell ya, if they could somehow make a Square Enix one of these they’d be struggling to keep it in stock for years.

One thing it deserves some credit for is managing to shoehorn in every single character from SSF2. That most have taken some rewrites!

Well her head is a lot squarer

Ironically for the commercial tracks, Tim Wright’s ‘Body in Motion’ is actually the best music track on the whole game.

I would argue that 2097 has an inferior OST because it features a lot less of Wright’s music.

His track Onyx was the best one on Pure as well.

Glad I grabbed backups of all my old Wii VC purchases and PSP titles before they went then.

If a company like Sony just bought PPSSPP and created a storefront for old games people would buy them.

It would be brilliant if they could cajole more British developers/publishers to release things for it.

The music licensing would be a nightmare but could you imagine if Sony got someone to port the first three Wipeout titles to it?

@DestructoDisk The first gen model was awful. The QD 2nd gen though solved the cart swapping, got rid of side talking and had some great games. I used to really enjoy Ashen, Pocket Kingdom and Glimmerati.

@UK_Kev Is this not an assumption based on the final version of the game? If they had worked on it in parallel it may well have been ok

What it needs is a company like Apple to leverage its market reach and present a compelling reason for legacy publishers to let them use Roms in an ‘iGames’ app letting you buy old games like you would mp3s in iTunes.

Emulator apps could then link directly to the store for their relevant console and it gives publishers a passive revenue stream on an otherwise unused part of their catalog.

Publishers make bank.
Piracy is eliminated.
Users can play old games with impunity.
No laws are broken.

Win/win.

Sadly for the dev who bothered it’s still a terrible game. This became a meme amongst my friends (with a gasp of STEROIDS ON!) whenever he powers up.

@Lanmanna Because I suck at videogames!

So:
Gex collection?
Pandemonium?
Legacy of Kain?

@-wc- It’s entirely realistic yet to my knowledge 3rd person games with swords had the character always carrying it at the time, eg Tenchu: Stealth Assassins or Excalibur 2555.

I think Ocarina was the first game where the protagonist sheaths their weapon to then interact with the world. Lara Croft may have got there first but she used firearms

It still is and always should be.

It set the design template for every 3D game that followed which is basically all of them. It’s not just the entire mechanics but the little things: Kratos carries his weapon on his back because Link did.

But unlike a lot of other highly influential games from the past Ocarina is also still very playable in the modern era as well. It has aged remarkably.

Yes there are lots of other really, really good games over the years but none of them have been as influential.

The only other game I would say is possibly close is Space Invaders. Take your favourite modern shooter and boil the mechanics down and what do you have? Moving from side to side, hiding behind destructible cover and fighting off waves of unrelenting enemies. Halo was just Space Invaders with an extra axis to worry about.

Timesplitters 1 was a bit naff
Things got better with the second game
The third one had a tighter multiplayer and an amusing campaign.

But none of them ever really set the world on fire like Goldeneye or Perfect Dark.

I would argue that the series is largely a little overrated and not really worthy of another instalment.

An article like this is incredibly useful to explain the methodical rollout of ps1 games on the PS5. As it turns out they can’t just press a button and publish them all at once!

Now if only they’d stop porting crappy Disney titles and get to the real meat and potatoes.

Oh come on! The N-Gage was a lot better than most of those bottom handhelds. Once the dorky taco design had made way for the QD revision it boasted some decent 2nd gen titles like Ashen, Glimmeratii and Pathway to Glory. Pocket Kingdom was a great attempt at a mobile MMO. It was also a half-decent phone with the landscape typing being fast for firing off texts. The QD design was as robust as any other Nokia handset.

It lacked the ubiquity of the GBA. It didn’t have the quality media playback of the PSP (headphone output was mono!) It didn’t have a very wide software library. And its usefulness as a phone was tempered somewhat by the lack of a camera.

Was it the best handheld ever? Not by a long shot. But it was a heck of a lot better than crappy things like the Game.com and Gizmondo. And it set the scene for the dominant handheld of modern times: the iPhone.

DOES THE DRUMMER EVER GET TIRED?

DES LITTLE, WASH THOSE SOCKS

WOOF

oh yes!

Hammer triangle to spring up the pitch and shoot from the corner of the box and you’ll score every time….

FIFA 97 on the other hand features the secret John Motson rap on the CD music.

Unlike the Saturn one the N64 ram cart always presented something of a quandary: what was it originally for? Did Nintendo want 8mb to start with and decided to split it to upsell? Were they waiting for prices to fall given it took 2 years to arrive? Or did it have another use such as internal ROM for saving games?

If you’re after something a little more laid back I thoroughly recommend ‘Without a Trace’ by pianist TPR.

The first gaming genre to surpass its Hollywood equivalent. Horror movies haven’t been scary since the 1970s; gaming had me at dogs through the window.

I would have said the PSP but the Vita plays all its games and more so we will go with that.