@Gs69 That's interesting. Why would a white screen cause the TV to off-center it? I suspect you have a fairly unique hardware conflict.
What adapter are you using? I connect mine to an LG OLED using a Behar Bros Toro (and sometimes just a Pound HDMI cable when I'm feeling lazy) and I've never had this problem.
@Sketcz Disagree about the game being dull. It is weirdly brown for what eventually became such a colorful franchise, I'll give you that. But it's a classic for a reason. Absolutely nothing played like SMB in 1985. That kind of joy in movement was revolutionary for the time, and it's wild that the game still feels so good to play all these years later.
Everything else is exactly correct. It makes no sense for such a ubiquitous game to be worth that much, regardless of its condition. It is, indeed, a scam.
It's such an extreme scam that it doesn't even bother me, honestly. Anybody who has thousands, if not millions to spend on one of the most common video games on the planet is too rich to get my sympathy for being a sucker.
It's an interesting historical find, for sure. Apart from the label on the back, I wonder if there is any change to the ROM itself, even something minor like a different date on the title screen. The article doesn't say if the carts have been tested at all. That would be of interest to the preservation community and warrants a new addition to existing ROM sets.
@MontyMole I agree with the sentiment, and I generally find this overinflated collector's market absurd.
But in a case like this it doesn't actually matter. These particular games are ubiquitous. Physical cartridges are everywhere, and the data is extremely well-preserved across a massive public community.
Nobody is being denied the chance to SMB or Duck Hunt by a few wealthy collectors hoarding their treasure.
Yeah, this is one of those things that was pretty well publicized at the time but has gotten lost over the years. If I remember correctly, the shopkeeper's dialogue references the fact that you're playing on a GBA.
I haven't tested it out on the Analogue Pocket, but it probably works if you force it to run the game in GBA mode instead of letting it default to GBC.
I had (and still have, actually) the Missile Command vinyl album that tries to graft this insane story about invading aliens onto a game about cold war nuclear anxiety. And it's all done as a musical, so you're treated to crazy lyrics like (to the best of my memory):
Here on Zardon, we are peaceful We don't like to fight Here on Zardon, we work hard To try and do what's right
Calling all base commanders With nerves of steeeeeeel I hope that you've been practicing 'Cause this time it's for reeeeaal Missile Command!
These are fun historical artifacts, even if I can't imagine playing one for very long. But it does remind me of a childhood story.
I had gotten a Real Ghostbusters LCD game for my birthday as a kid. But it was very clear that the graphics and gameplay had absolutely nothing to do with Ghostbusters. It looked like some dude catching pies? Didn't stop me from playing it, but I never understood what the hell I was seeing.
Only years later was I able to figure it out with some internet sleuthing. Remco, the company that made the game, also made a few games based on the game show Double Dare. And one of them was called "Pie in the Pants" in which you tried to catch pies in, well... your pants.
They clearly mounted the game into the wrong shell, leaving a confused 10 year old busting pies instead of poltergeists.
I went through a few stages of this desire myself. I added a Game Boy Player to my Gamecube back when that was released, and was pretty happy wtih the result. I eventually experimented with the homebrew Game Boy Interface to improve the image quality. Nowadays, I just have a docked Analogue Pocket.
But regardless of how you make it worth, this is always a library well worth revisiting. It's hard to convey how magical the GBA felt when it was released, all while the home consoles were finally growing out of the ugly duckling stage of early 3D visuals. What a great era that was for gaming.
@WileyDragonfly I wouldn't say they're "garbage," nor would I criticize anyone for buying one. Overall, it's pretty cool that this is possible now, and a small, cheap, versatile handheld is a nice thing to have.
I just don't understand how this market operates when there's such a constant flood of these devices to the point that they're becoming indistinguishable from one another. It feels like we learn about another new one three times a week, and I'm not sure how the supply/demand situation hasn't completely collapsed under the wieght of it all.
This is such corporate brain nonsense. For all intents and purposes, the Vita was the PSP2.
It didn't fail because it had a touch panel on the back. It failed because Sony all but abandoned it, just as they did with PSVR and then again with the PSVR2.
@JackGYarwood Ha. Maybe? But I'm not sure the Tetris brand is enough to sell tickets to a children's movie that is straining to graft a narrative onto an abstract puzzle game.
But I also grew up when Rubik, the Amazing Cube was a Saturday morning cartoon. So crazier things have been tried...
2.5D glass just refers to the edges of the screen being slightly beveled so that your fingers don't trip over a sharp edge when swiping. It has absolutely no bearing on the image quality.
And double shot buttons just means the lettering on the buttons is done with injection molded plastic rather than just printed on the surface. You'll see that done a lot in the key caps on nice keyboards. It means the lettering won't eventually wear off with use.
Seeing Sonic for the first time at a friend's house was definitely what convinced me to beg my parents for a Genesis.
It's hard to overrstate how dazzling that opening run through Green Hill Zone was after growing up with an NES. The colors just poured off the screen. Hell, I think the game still looks fantastic all these decades later. At the time? It all felt impossible.
Any clarification offered on when MOTU is actually coming out? The release date came and went. I figured that maybe they were trying to time the release with the movie, but that already came and went, too.
@crimcram How would they beneift from that? It's not like they're protecting some walled garden of software sales.
I think Analogue has taken a pretty major nosedive since the Mega SG and Super NT, and their customer service and communications are generally unacceptable. But this would be pretty weird.
He's right that old games remain unavailable in ways that movies and music aren't, but he's not really offering a viable solution to that problem. Evercade is cool, but the industry can't be tapping into that tremendous vein of lost media with physical cartridges that include a dozen games at a time and which eventually become, themselves, unavailable.
The reality is that most gamers — even older ones — don't really want to play most of those old games. The "lost gamers" he references will be content to play the curated offerings already available in countless retro collections or on services like Nintendo Switch Online.
And the enthusiasts who do want to play a broader selection of forgotten gems already have no shortage of ways to do exactly that via software and hardware emulation. I don't know that there's a single game made before 2000 that I couldn't play right now if I wanted to.
"considering the humble nature of the host system"
Kind of an odd assertion, no? The GBA was anything but humble at the time, and most Gradius games up to that point had been running on less powerful hardware.
@HammerKirby Yeah, by "off the grid" I just meant that they don't expose the kids to a lot of media. They have internet and TV. They just don't use it all that much, and the kids are pretty insulated from pop culture.
I have a friend who got this for their family. They're kind of off-the-grid parents and there are no other video game options in the house. They seem happy wtih it, but even by his own admission, the games feel pretty generic and the motion controls are dodgy.
I think this might fly with kids that are too young to know better, or older kids and adults that just don't have much exposure to better games for comparison. This is not a device for a discerning audience.
Even with those caveats, I still don't understand how or why this thing has had as much success as it has. If it were super cheap, maybe. But for $300 plus a subscription, it's a head-scratching purchase. Had my friend asked beforehand, I'd have told him to just buy a Switch 1. Even outdated as it is, it's going to provide far more value and an infinitely better experience.
@-wc- That would be really cool, and reminds me of playing around with a Gyro-Ball years ago.
Although I imagine it would need a pretty substantial mechanism with a powerful motor to create enough force. And it would also be slow to spin up and stop again, so rapid state changes probably wouldn't be possible. I could totally see it working well for force feedback in a driving game though.
I remember playing Mr. Do! on a friend's 2600 as a kid. Because of the indistinct visuals of that port, I thought it was about a dude mowing his lawn until seeing the actual cabinet in an arcade.
And Master of Monsters looks gorgeous! It'd be right up my alley if it were in my language. What a boneheaded decision to only release the unlocalized version. Oh well.
I love the bit around 2:30 where Estranged swells up and it just cuts to random images of happy people with a fake heatwave effect for no particular reason. They're just content to be living in his mad, mad world.
Actraiser is one of those games that shouldn't work as well as it does. The platforming sections, which are honestly kind of stiff and awkward, feel so graphically and tonally disconnected from the sim portions. It's like you're just going back and forth between two completely unrelated games.
But it's still hard not to love the experimental audacity of it all, and it remains well worth playing all these years later. It's a damn shame that the sequel missed the point so badly, because a more refined iteration could have been something really sublime.
This looks like an impressive piece of hardware for those who want a Neo Geo clone, but I still don't understand how this solution is preferable to using an FPGA.
I'm not talking about the quality of hardware emulation. An ASIC has the potential to be equally accurate. But once that thing is manufactured, it's set in stone. If any issues are discovered later, they can't be addressed.
It kind of seems like showboating to me. "We're so good, we only need one crack at it." Cool, but it just seems like a better plan to use an FPGA that can be updated down the line if problems arise, no?
@N00BiSH The Zero puppets were on display at Nintendo World in NYC for a while. I saw them at one point, but I don't get there very often and I'm not sure if they still have them up.
Potentially cool, but I'd be prepared for disappointment.
When Sega carefully matches its IP to a talented developer, we get excellent titles like the recent Shinobi or Streets of Rage 4.
But more often, they just make vague teaser announcements and never follow up on them. Even the prospect of getting nice M2-quality ports of some of these titles seems unlikely given that they discontinued the most recent iteration of Sega Agess before it ever delivered any of the Saturn and Dreamcast titles that were promised.
@shiningpikablu252 Sort of, but this isn't designed to be played horizontally and vertically. The rotation mechanism is only for revealing the controls that are hidden underneath it when the unit is closed.
@mjparker77 I think that their focus on the word "rotate" is obscuring the point of the mechanism.
It's not like you can rotate it into TATE orientation (which, as you note, would be pointless with a square screen). It's just that the screen rotates into position from closed to open.
Ha. This is fun, and I appreciate the wink and nod from the person behind the project. Even at the time, we knew these games sucked. I'm not sure any of these things were played for more than 5 minutes by anyone who ever received one as a gift.
I do have fond memories of having one that was manufactured incorrectly. The case said it was The Real Ghostbusters, but the game was just some non-descript guy catching pies.
This is just a bad choice resulting from another bad choice.
If sourcing music was going to be a problem without resorting to generative AI, then maybe it wasn't the best decision to make a music-based video game.
This thing felt like magic when it came out. Kind of still does.
Despite the headline, it used very different technology than the SNES, and direct ports were generally inferior to the originals. Which is not to say those versions were awful. The GBA was my first time playing Super Mario World and Yoshi's Island, but there would be little reason to play those versions anymore today.
But direct SNES ports were actually fairly uncommon on the GBA. It had a massive and excellent library of its own — one that remains well worth revisiting all these years later.
My actual NES is mostly retired, although I do keep it connected to an old CRT for the occasional round of Duck Hunt. Otherwise I'm happy to keep using my trusty RetroUSB AVS until (or if) something better comes along.
I don't really need my Castlevania canon to be coherent if the game is good. (Please, please, please be good.)
That said, I've enjoyed the animated series quite a bit and would be fine if this game (and any future ones?) used it for narrative inspiration. If this is taking place in 1499, it would make sense to just have this version of Sonia be one of Trevor and Sypha's children. That gives them an easy way to combine the gameplay elements of both characters into one, and set this up as a direct sequel to Castlevania III.
It would be hard to argue with most of these, except that FIFA seems like a baffling inclusion to me. I get that it's popular, but is it really that innovative or deserving?
Personally, I'd pick Mega Man, Galaga, and Dragon Quest. All of them are tremendously influential. But as MSaturn pointed out above, there is no way to pluck 3 games from this list in a way that isn't grossly unfair to multiple other entries.
@The_Nintendo_Expat Yeah, "port" was more common back when every arcade cabinet and console had unique architecture and every single game was made from the ground up for each machine.
Once middleware engines became the norm, I feel like we started hearing the term less and less often.
@Porco He's just being pedantic about what a remaster is. Based on its original use for recorded media like movies and music, unless you have access to the original source material, it's not really possible to "remaster" something. Adding brand new textures to a game would be like adding brand new instrument tracks to a song.
But video games aren't the same as movies and music, so it's understandable that the word is going to shift in meaning as it gets applied to a medium it was never intended for. While I'd love to see some more consistency in the use of words like remaster and remake, the constant pedantic hand-wringing over it is tiresome.
They should show confidence in their concept by just swapping out all the joysticks and buttons for dedicated system-level controls.
The face buttons can be replaced with sliders for screen brightness and saturation. The triggers turn the Wi-Fi on and off. A volume knob would fit perfectly where the left stick goes. And the d-pad can be replaced with buttons for taking and posting screenshots, so you can show the world how you've precisely dialed in all of your settings.
@Sketcz Ha. Yeah, I remember the banter being kind of bizarre, but took it to be the game's weird sense of humor and not evidence of a bad translation.
I think my favorite thing about the game is the risk/reward mechanic where your retaliatory strikes launch more missiles in proportion to the incoming danger. It always felt good to wait until enemy fire was right up your ass to press the trigger and have 100 missiles burst across the screen.
Comments 545
Re: Ever Wondered How The Dreamcast Boot Sequence Is Rendered? Well, Wonder No Longer
@Gs69 That's interesting. Why would a white screen cause the TV to off-center it? I suspect you have a fairly unique hardware conflict.
What adapter are you using? I connect mine to an LG OLED using a Behar Bros Toro (and sometimes just a Pound HDMI cable when I'm feeling lazy) and I've never had this problem.
Re: "The Blood Drained From My Face" - 97 Copies Of Never-Before-Seen Super Mario Bros. Variant Found In Wisconsin Retro Store
@Sketcz Disagree about the game being dull. It is weirdly brown for what eventually became such a colorful franchise, I'll give you that. But it's a classic for a reason. Absolutely nothing played like SMB in 1985. That kind of joy in movement was revolutionary for the time, and it's wild that the game still feels so good to play all these years later.
Everything else is exactly correct. It makes no sense for such a ubiquitous game to be worth that much, regardless of its condition. It is, indeed, a scam.
It's such an extreme scam that it doesn't even bother me, honestly. Anybody who has thousands, if not millions to spend on one of the most common video games on the planet is too rich to get my sympathy for being a sucker.
Re: Hands On: Taki Udon's Console Mode Finally Gives MiSTer FPGA the Accessibility I've Always Craved
I'm in batch 4 and still awaiting mine, but this makes me even more excited for its arrival...
Re: "The Blood Drained From My Face" - 97 Copies Of Never-Before-Seen Super Mario Bros. Variant Found In Wisconsin Retro Store
It's an interesting historical find, for sure. Apart from the label on the back, I wonder if there is any change to the ROM itself, even something minor like a different date on the title screen. The article doesn't say if the carts have been tested at all. That would be of interest to the preservation community and warrants a new addition to existing ROM sets.
Re: "The Blood Drained From My Face" - 97 Copies Of Never-Before-Seen Super Mario Bros. Variant Found In Wisconsin Retro Store
@MontyMole I agree with the sentiment, and I generally find this overinflated collector's market absurd.
But in a case like this it doesn't actually matter. These particular games are ubiquitous. Physical cartridges are everywhere, and the data is extremely well-preserved across a massive public community.
Nobody is being denied the chance to SMB or Duck Hunt by a few wealthy collectors hoarding their treasure.
Re: Poll: Did You Know About The Secret Shop In Zelda: Oracle Of Seasons / Ages?
Yeah, this is one of those things that was pretty well publicized at the time but has gotten lost over the years. If I remember correctly, the shopkeeper's dialogue references the fact that you're playing on a GBA.
I haven't tested it out on the Analogue Pocket, but it probably works if you force it to run the game in GBA mode instead of letting it default to GBC.
Re: Atari Signs Deal To Turn 10 Of Its Classic Games Into Movies, And It's Got Some People Scratching Their Heads
I had (and still have, actually) the Missile Command vinyl album that tries to graft this insane story about invading aliens onto a game about cold war nuclear anxiety. And it's all done as a musical, so you're treated to crazy lyrics like (to the best of my memory):
Here on Zardon, we are peaceful
We don't like to fight
Here on Zardon, we work hard
To try and do what's right
Calling all base commanders
With nerves of steeeeeeel
I hope that you've been practicing
'Cause this time it's for reeeeaal
Missile Command!
So... weirder things have been tried, I guess!
Re: Guide: Suit Up With Virtual-On, Sega's Mecha Masterpiece
I've dabbled in this franchise and never really got the hang of it, but man... that flat-shaded look aged so damn well.
Re: This Cool Project Allows You To Emulate Old LCD Games, Including A Possible Nintendo First
These are fun historical artifacts, even if I can't imagine playing one for very long. But it does remind me of a childhood story.
I had gotten a Real Ghostbusters LCD game for my birthday as a kid. But it was very clear that the graphics and gameplay had absolutely nothing to do with Ghostbusters. It looked like some dude catching pies? Didn't stop me from playing it, but I never understood what the hell I was seeing.
Only years later was I able to figure it out with some internet sleuthing. Remco, the company that made the game, also made a few games based on the game show Double Dare. And one of them was called "Pie in the Pants" in which you tried to catch pies in, well... your pants.
They clearly mounted the game into the wrong shell, leaving a confused 10 year old busting pies instead of poltergeists.
Re: I Turned My GBA Into A Switch To Better Enjoy Its Unsung Japanese Gems
Very cool project!
I went through a few stages of this desire myself. I added a Game Boy Player to my Gamecube back when that was released, and was pretty happy wtih the result. I eventually experimented with the homebrew Game Boy Interface to improve the image quality. Nowadays, I just have a docked Analogue Pocket.
But regardless of how you make it worth, this is always a library well worth revisiting. It's hard to convey how magical the GBA felt when it was released, all while the home consoles were finally growing out of the ugly duckling stage of early 3D visuals. What a great era that was for gaming.
Re: AYANEO's Next KONKR Handheld Aims To Channel The Spirit Of The Game Boy Advance
@WileyDragonfly I wouldn't say they're "garbage," nor would I criticize anyone for buying one. Overall, it's pretty cool that this is possible now, and a small, cheap, versatile handheld is a nice thing to have.
I just don't understand how this market operates when there's such a constant flood of these devices to the point that they're becoming indistinguishable from one another. It feels like we learn about another new one three times a week, and I'm not sure how the supply/demand situation hasn't completely collapsed under the wieght of it all.
Re: "Instead Of The Vita, We Should've Made PSP 2" - Shawn Layden Sticks It To Sony's Last Handheld
This is such corporate brain nonsense. For all intents and purposes, the Vita was the PSP2.
It didn't fail because it had a touch panel on the back. It failed because Sony all but abandoned it, just as they did with PSVR and then again with the PSVR2.
Re: "The Return Of A Legend" - 3DO Might Be Returning As An Independent Game Company
They don't seem to understand that some things are legendary for the wrong reasons.
Sure, we've all heard of the Ford Edsel...
Re: "We Are Expanding The Tetris Universe" - A 'Tetris' CG-Animated Series Is In The Works
@JackGYarwood Ha. Maybe? But I'm not sure the Tetris brand is enough to sell tickets to a children's movie that is straining to graft a narrative onto an abstract puzzle game.
But I also grew up when Rubik, the Amazing Cube was a Saturday morning cartoon. So crazier things have been tried...
Re: "We Are Expanding The Tetris Universe" - A 'Tetris' CG-Animated Series Is In The Works
"There is something uniquely compelling about translating Tetris into a living, cinematic animated universe."
Yeah, but there really isn't.
Re: Anbernic's Next Handheld Does A Great Impression Of Nintendo's Switch Lite
@RupeeClock They're not very exciting.
2.5D glass just refers to the edges of the screen being slightly beveled so that your fingers don't trip over a sharp edge when swiping. It has absolutely no bearing on the image quality.
And double shot buttons just means the lettering on the buttons is done with injection molded plastic rather than just printed on the surface. You'll see that done a lot in the key caps on nice keyboards. It means the lettering won't eventually wear off with use.
Re: Game Changer: Sonic The Hedgehog - 35 Years Ago, A Short-But-Sweet Love Affair Was Born
Seeing Sonic for the first time at a friend's house was definitely what convinced me to beg my parents for a Genesis.
It's hard to overrstate how dazzling that opening run through Green Hill Zone was after growing up with an NES. The colors just poured off the screen. Hell, I think the game still looks fantastic all these decades later. At the time? It all felt impossible.
Re: Interview: "It's Been Quite A Ride" - Xeno Crisis, Terminator And He-Man Studio Bitmap Bureau On 10 Years At The Apex Of 2D Indie Gaming
Any clarification offered on when MOTU is actually coming out? The release date came and went. I figured that maybe they were trying to time the release with the movie, but that already came and went, too.
Re: Latest Hardware Run Of The Analogue Pocket Isn't Playing Nice With Everdrive Carts
@crimcram How would they beneift from that? It's not like they're protecting some walled garden of software sales.
I think Analogue has taken a pretty major nosedive since the Mega SG and Super NT, and their customer service and communications are generally unacceptable. But this would be pretty weird.
Re: "The Single Largest Upgrade The Game Has Ever Had" - Sega's Ghostbusters Is Getting A Massive Overhaul
He's really done an incredible job with this project. Can't wait to give 3.0 a spin!
Re: "I Think They Are Missing A Trick" - Evercade Boss Says The Games Industry Is Failing Older Players
He's right that old games remain unavailable in ways that movies and music aren't, but he's not really offering a viable solution to that problem. Evercade is cool, but the industry can't be tapping into that tremendous vein of lost media with physical cartridges that include a dozen games at a time and which eventually become, themselves, unavailable.
The reality is that most gamers — even older ones — don't really want to play most of those old games. The "lost gamers" he references will be content to play the curated offerings already available in countless retro collections or on services like Nintendo Switch Online.
And the enthusiasts who do want to play a broader selection of forgotten gems already have no shortage of ways to do exactly that via software and hardware emulation. I don't know that there's a single game made before 2000 that I couldn't play right now if I wanted to.
Re: The Making Of: Sega's Cyber Razor Cut - "I Spent The Entire Shoot Expecting It To Explode"
Sometimes I forget how crazy the 90s were.
This kind of seizure-inducing editing just seemed totally normal at the time.
Re: "The GBA Is So Back" - Gradius Advance Gets A Comprehensive Fan-Made Upgrade
"considering the humble nature of the host system"
Kind of an odd assertion, no? The GBA was anything but humble at the time, and most Gradius games up to that point had been running on less powerful hardware.
Re: The Team Behind This Motion-Sensing Box Think It Can Match The Sales Of The Nintendo Wii
@HammerKirby Yeah, by "off the grid" I just meant that they don't expose the kids to a lot of media. They have internet and TV. They just don't use it all that much, and the kids are pretty insulated from pop culture.
Re: The Team Behind This Motion-Sensing Box Think It Can Match The Sales Of The Nintendo Wii
I have a friend who got this for their family. They're kind of off-the-grid parents and there are no other video game options in the house. They seem happy wtih it, but even by his own admission, the games feel pretty generic and the motion controls are dodgy.
I think this might fly with kids that are too young to know better, or older kids and adults that just don't have much exposure to better games for comparison. This is not a device for a discerning audience.
Even with those caveats, I still don't understand how or why this thing has had as much success as it has. If it were super cheap, maybe. But for $300 plus a subscription, it's a head-scratching purchase. Had my friend asked beforehand, I'd have told him to just buy a Switch 1. Even outdated as it is, it's going to provide far more value and an infinitely better experience.
Re: "The Word 'Madness' Defines Me" - This Fan-Made Controller Lets You Feel Sonic's Spin Dash
@-wc- I'd contribute to the Kickstarter!
Re: "The Word 'Madness' Defines Me" - This Fan-Made Controller Lets You Feel Sonic's Spin Dash
@-wc- That would be really cool, and reminds me of playing around with a Gyro-Ball years ago.
Although I imagine it would need a pretty substantial mechanism with a powerful motor to create enough force. And it would also be slow to spin up and stop again, so rapid state changes probably wouldn't be possible. I could totally see it working well for force feedback in a driving game though.
Re: "The Word 'Madness' Defines Me" - This Fan-Made Controller Lets You Feel Sonic's Spin Dash
Cute project!
I do, however, question the decision to have a thumbstick instead of a d-pad on a controller specifically intended to play Sonic the Hedgehog 2.
Re: This Week's 'Archives' Releases Are Universal's 1982 Dig Dug Clone 'Mr. Do!' & A PS1 Strategy Game From 1997
I remember playing Mr. Do! on a friend's 2600 as a kid. Because of the indistinct visuals of that port, I thought it was about a dude mowing his lawn until seeing the actual cabinet in an arcade.
And Master of Monsters looks gorgeous! It'd be right up my alley if it were in my language. What a boneheaded decision to only release the unlocalized version. Oh well.
Re: "An Unparalleled Experience No FPGA Console Could Come Close To" - SuperSega Is Back, And It's Even Crazier Than Last Time
That video is amazing, though.
I love the bit around 2:30 where Estranged swells up and it just cuts to random images of happy people with a fake heatwave effect for no particular reason. They're just content to be living in his mad, mad world.
Re: "You Cannot Claim Ignorance" - Myst Co-Creator Under Fire For Using GenAI Art In Riven Soundtrack Release
Glad to see the "theft is just a creative tool" crowd chiming in, as usual.
Re: Game Changer: ActRaiser - The SNES Classic That Signalled The Dawn Of A New Generation
Actraiser is one of those games that shouldn't work as well as it does. The platforming sections, which are honestly kind of stiff and awkward, feel so graphically and tonally disconnected from the sim portions. It's like you're just going back and forth between two completely unrelated games.
But it's still hard not to love the experimental audacity of it all, and it remains well worth playing all these years later. It's a damn shame that the sequel missed the point so badly, because a more refined iteration could have been something really sublime.
Re: Sounds Like Plaion Has Another Console In The Works Following The Neo Geo AES+
This looks like an impressive piece of hardware for those who want a Neo Geo clone, but I still don't understand how this solution is preferable to using an FPGA.
I'm not talking about the quality of hardware emulation. An ASIC has the potential to be equally accurate. But once that thing is manufactured, it's set in stone. If any issues are discovered later, they can't be addressed.
It kind of seems like showboating to me. "We're so good, we only need one crack at it." Cool, but it just seems like a better plan to use an FPGA that can be updated down the line if problems arise, no?
Re: Ever Wondered What Happened To Star Fox's Puppets? The Answer Isn't Good
@N00BiSH The Zero puppets were on display at Nintendo World in NYC for a while. I saw them at one point, but I don't get there very often and I'm not sure if they still have them up.
Re: "No Old, Stay Gold" - It Looks Like Sega Is About To Revive More Of Its Classic Franchises
Potentially cool, but I'd be prepared for disappointment.
When Sega carefully matches its IP to a talented developer, we get excellent titles like the recent Shinobi or Streets of Rage 4.
But more often, they just make vague teaser announcements and never follow up on them. Even the prospect of getting nice M2-quality ports of some of these titles seems unlikely given that they discontinued the most recent iteration of Sega Agess before it ever delivered any of the Saturn and Dreamcast titles that were promised.
Re: Anbernic's 'RG Rotate' Reminds Us Of The Gloriously Crazy Phone Design Boom Of The 2000s
@shiningpikablu252 Sort of, but this isn't designed to be played horizontally and vertically. The rotation mechanism is only for revealing the controls that are hidden underneath it when the unit is closed.
Re: Anbernic's 'RG Rotate' Reminds Us Of The Gloriously Crazy Phone Design Boom Of The 2000s
@mjparker77 I think that their focus on the word "rotate" is obscuring the point of the mechanism.
It's not like you can rotate it into TATE orientation (which, as you note, would be pointless with a square screen). It's just that the screen rotates into position from closed to open.
It only has one playable position.
Re: Obscure Mega Man Game Given The Game Boy Remake "Nobody Asked For"
Ha. This is fun, and I appreciate the wink and nod from the person behind the project. Even at the time, we knew these games sucked. I'm not sure any of these things were played for more than 5 minutes by anyone who ever received one as a gift.
I do have fond memories of having one that was manufactured incorrectly. The case said it was The Real Ghostbusters, but the game was just some non-descript guy catching pies.
Re: This Modular Marvel Can Be A Controller, Horizontal Handheld And Tabletop 'TATE' Device
Boy, that's pretty niche for a device this size.
I just want a Switch 2 update for the Flip Grip.
Re: "I Know Some People Don't Like This" - Final Fight MD's Latest Project Uses GenAI
This is just a bad choice resulting from another bad choice.
If sourcing music was going to be a problem without resorting to generative AI, then maybe it wasn't the best decision to make a music-based video game.
Re: This Game Boy Cart Uses ChatGPT To Create "Personalised Scenarios Tailored To Each Player"
Step 1: Create one solitary creepy pixel art image.
Step 2: Offload everything else including the writing to Chat GPT and pretend you made a game.
Step 3: Collect money from the never-ending supply of suckers on Kickstarter.
Even the one creepy pixel art image was probably created by generative AI. This whole thing is yet another crowdfunding scam.
So no, I do not like/.
Re: Anniversary: 25 Years Ago, Nintendo Put SNES Games In The Palm Of Your Hand With The GBA
This thing felt like magic when it came out. Kind of still does.
Despite the headline, it used very different technology than the SNES, and direct ports were generally inferior to the originals. Which is not to say those versions were awful. The GBA was my first time playing Super Mario World and Yoshi's Island, but there would be little reason to play those versions anymore today.
But direct SNES ports were actually fairly uncommon on the GBA. It had a massive and excellent library of its own — one that remains well worth revisiting all these years later.
Re: "Is This My NES' Final Form?" - Retro Gamer Shows Off The Most Pimped-Out Nintendo Entertainment System You've Ever Seen
That's a gorgeous final result!
My actual NES is mostly retired, although I do keep it connected to an old CRT for the occasional round of Duck Hunt. Otherwise I'm happy to keep using my trusty RetroUSB AVS until (or if) something better comes along.
Re: "What A Terrible Waste Of Time All Of It Was" - Princess Crown's Original Translation Is Dead
It's only a waste of time because they insisted it become one.
They should have just thanked eadmaster for carrying on their work and requested being credited in the final project.
How incredibly stupid.
Re: Sony Confirms Exactly Who You'll Be Controlling In Castlevania: Belmont's Curse
I don't really need my Castlevania canon to be coherent if the game is good. (Please, please, please be good.)
That said, I've enjoyed the animated series quite a bit and would be fine if this game (and any future ones?) used it for narrative inspiration. If this is taking place in 1499, it would make sense to just have this version of Sonia be one of Trevor and Sypha's children. That gives them an easy way to combine the gameplay elements of both characters into one, and set this up as a direct sequel to Castlevania III.
Re: Tokimeki Memorial, FIFA And Dragon Quest Could Make It Into The World Video Game Hall Of Fame
It would be hard to argue with most of these, except that FIFA seems like a baffling inclusion to me. I get that it's popular, but is it really that innovative or deserving?
Personally, I'd pick Mega Man, Galaga, and Dragon Quest. All of them are tremendously influential. But as MSaturn pointed out above, there is no way to pluck 3 games from this list in a way that isn't grossly unfair to multiple other entries.
Except FIFA
Re: "I Call It 'Remaster' To Poke Fun At The PS3 Version" - ICO Gets An Unofficial Upgrade On PS2
@The_Nintendo_Expat Yeah, "port" was more common back when every arcade cabinet and console had unique architecture and every single game was made from the ground up for each machine.
Once middleware engines became the norm, I feel like we started hearing the term less and less often.
Re: "I Call It 'Remaster' To Poke Fun At The PS3 Version" - ICO Gets An Unofficial Upgrade On PS2
@Porco He's just being pedantic about what a remaster is. Based on its original use for recorded media like movies and music, unless you have access to the original source material, it's not really possible to "remaster" something. Adding brand new textures to a game would be like adding brand new instrument tracks to a song.
But video games aren't the same as movies and music, so it's understandable that the word is going to shift in meaning as it gets applied to a medium it was never intended for. While I'd love to see some more consistency in the use of words like remaster and remake, the constant pedantic hand-wringing over it is tiresome.
Re: Please, Don't Laugh At The Pocket Super Knob 5000
They should show confidence in their concept by just swapping out all the joysticks and buttons for dedicated system-level controls.
The face buttons can be replaced with sliders for screen brightness and saturation. The triggers turn the Wi-Fi on and off. A volume knob would fit perfectly where the left stick goes. And the d-pad can be replaced with buttons for taking and posting screenshots, so you can show the world how you've precisely dialed in all of your settings.
Re: "A Woefully Underrated N64 Underdog" - Treasure's Bangai-O Gets Not One But Two New English Translations
@Sketcz Ha. Yeah, I remember the banter being kind of bizarre, but took it to be the game's weird sense of humor and not evidence of a bad translation.
I think my favorite thing about the game is the risk/reward mechanic where your retaliatory strikes launch more missiles in proportion to the incoming danger. It always felt good to wait until enemy fire was right up your ass to press the trigger and have 100 missiles burst across the screen.