Razieluigi

It's still just so hard to believe that face would lie.

The product overall isn't for me but this is a really cool idea and renews my long-standing saltiness that Nintendo never released a Joycon with a proper d-pad.

"there was one particular bug that bothered me, which was how the game played"

I feel like this is stretching the definition of "bug."

Just ran a few tests and I can confirm with my SNES. It's almost up to Mode 8.

@Right_Said_Brett Sure, I just don't understand why the game doesn't auto-select what I've already chosen in the console settings. That's the whole point of the console having those settings to begin with.

This is really cute, but it does make me wonder how many players routinely dig into the settings before starting a game to make sure they match their setup. Even with modern consoles letting you set master preferences, games often ignore them. I frequently have to make sure the sound settings are appropriate for my receiver and surround setup (developers seem convinced that literally everybody plays games wearing headphones now).

I'd guess the vast majority of people just connect stuff, leave everything at the default setting, and assume that's how it's supposed to be.

Unless their plans include finally releasing Pac-Man CE: DX on modern platforms, I don't really care what else they have in mind.

Get it together, Namco.

That ridiculously pristine Challenge Set box is making me feel things.

God, gaming was magical back then.

Resurrecting a brand and a logo is literally meaningless, but doing it with Acclaim is outright perplexing.

Acclaim wasn't even that great back in the day. They publshed solid ports of some popular arcade games like NBA Jam and Mortal Kombat, but it's not like they own those properties today. Otherwise, they were primarily in the business of mediocre licensed games — again, properties they don't own.

This is the weirdest kind of nostalgia play. What's next? LJN?

@JayJ Hate to break it to you, but these tariffs are going to make food more expensive too. We don't only import electronics.

The difference between this and recent inflation is that inflation was a worldwide phenomenon resulting from the complex results of a global pandemic and supply chain disruptions while these tarrifs are just a preposterous unforced error enacted by fiat.

It's "fear mongering" in the same sense that warning people of an impending hurricane is "fear mongering."

Of course, NOAA is getting gutted, so I guess we won't have to deal with that anymore either.

"Sega's legal approach resulted in "about 300" of the original SuperSega units being destroyed."

And by "about 300" we mean none. Because none were ever made. At all.

Please stop reporting anything this guy says as if it's even tangentially related to something happening in reality. In fact, please stop reporting on him at all.

@AngelFox

Cheap shot? Maybe.

Couldn't resist.

The new DX version adds numerous refinements over the original 2005 release, including [a special edition voltage-mismatched cartridge].

Talk is cheap.

Any company that has to spend time issuing simpering apologies for obviously bad business practices has already shown it doesn't care. Be better and then we'll believe you can be better, but understand that because of your own behavior, you're already fighting an uphill battle. This isn't rocket science.

@snk2d4life I was literally going to post this.

Another NES Works fan, I presume...

"I started copying a lot of the dialogue directly from the Switch, just to be done once and for all."

This is genuinely wild stuff, as if simply wanting to be done with the assignment is reason enough to commit fraud. He seems to genuinely believe that it's okay to do your job only up until the point that you don't want to do it anymore, while still deserving credit (and payment) for the part that you stole.

The lack of any contrition whatsoever is remarkable.

This is perplexing on two completely different levels.

For starters, this thing clearly isn't coming out.

But even if this was real and shipping today, I genuinely don't understand why anybody would want one.

Interesting that they aren't announcing Switch support. Even with the Switch 2 impending, there are still a gazillion Switches out there.

I'll be really curious to see if Nintendo releases a new Pro controller for Switch 2 or if they'll just continue to offer the current model. The Pro was a solid controller but "HD Rumble" never amounted to much, and to whatever extent it was noticeable it's been pretty thoroughly outclassed by the insane haptics on the Dual Sense.

Unless they're planning a substantial upgrade, I could definitely see using one of these as my daily driver on Switch 2 (assuming support in the future).

This can't last long. If their hardware is accessing some centralized ROM repository — which it must be, right? — that just means there is a centralized target for legal action.

Projects like this are cool, and to some extent this kind of thing was going on during the 16-bit era with advanced mappers and chips like FX and SVP. But even those enhancements were still limited by the technology at the time.

Once you're making use of an additional 30 years of technology to push this far "beyond the power of the console," I'm not sure I understand why you'd bother making your game for that console to begin with. Novelty? Programming challenge?

While it's definitely possible that Retro-Bit itself was unaware of this and thought their translator was doing a good job, it's unfortunate that they're denying the reality that has been very clearly (and thorougly!) laid out here.

You only get one chance to handle this correctly and they blew it.

@Sketcz Yeah, I didn't realize they were referring to non-GBA games. In it's primary function of running GBA games, I've had no trouble with my Everdrive GBA.

I have a separate Everdrive GBC for GB/GBC games and likewise haven't had any compatibility issues.

I'll admit, I don't understand the technical reasons why an Everdrive GBA can't present GB/GBC ROMS to the hardware without needing an extra layer of emulation. But I guess it can't.

Also, regarding your above post about loading Pocket cores, you're probably referring to PocketSync. Which is excellent.

@Sketcz That's news to me as well. I've never run into any incompatibility with Everdrive GBA X5 and I use it a lot.

Unless they're referring to games that employ special sensors like Boktai and Warioware: Twisted, but that hardly counts.

@PanicOnFunkatron Yeah. I actually modded a Dreamcast with a Terraonion MODE. It's a great piece of kit judged purely on its quality, but I got it before I knew all this and if I could go back in time I'd have picked a different option.

Ooooh - this looks pretty awesome and I hadn't heard of it before. Thanks for putting it on my radar!

The Mega Everdrive Pro edges out the MegaSD in all the ways noted above, and Terraonion's inexcusably consumer-unfriendly policies around downloading updates are also rightly called out.

But I think it's also worth noting here that, on a purely personal level, Terraonion has posted some really lousy and uncalled for things on social media, including about Krikzz himself. It's easy enough to Google so I won't recount it here. But for me it's another reason to avoid their products.

Seeing as AI works by plundering existing media and then hallucinating it back together again, it's not too surprising that it would incorporate existing stock photos like this.

Unless it's some kind of developer in-joke, it's honestly hard to imagine any other alternative here. No human being would so badly misunderstand the context of the scene.

I don't think anybody, including the writer, has anything against Othello. It's just... there are like a billion ways to play Othello. It's as close to commoditized as a game can possibly be. It's hard to imagine anybody choosing a very old (and unlocalized!) arcade version of it rather than, say, Nintendo Clubhouse Games or something.

That said, I think this does illustrate the challenge of preserving games that don't have much of an audience. Kudos to Hamster for including this despite knowing they probably aren't going to be making any money by putting it out there.

@Fragcula That's why I specified "on sheer fidelity" and went on to note "there are other factors at play than fidelity. Convenience, versatility, user options and quality of life features..."

This discussion is like trying to decide whether forks are better than spoons. And instead of acknowledging that some people are eating steak and others are eating soup, we keep getting mired in some conversation about how both are utensils.

Endlessly frustrating discussion that devolves into petty semantics every single time.

We should stop using the term "emulation" unadorned. It should always be specified as hardware or software emulation. Always. Full stop.

That said, while the claims of FPGA makers like Analogue of "zero emulation" are disingenuous, it's equally disingenuous to just define them both generically as emulation and assume the audience now sees them as equivalent.

Any emulator — hardware or software — is only as good as whoever programmed it. But if we were to put a hypothetically perfect software solution against a hypothetically perfect FPGA solution and judge them on sheer fidelity, the FPGA would come out ahead. The difference might be negligible, but you can't escape the reality that one option necessarily puts some layer of processing between the player and the game while the other does not. But there are other factors at play than fidelity. Convenience, versatility, user options and quality of life features...

These are different solutions to the same problem and both come with too many pros and cons to list here. In order to choose the best option for their needs consumers should be educated on the difference, but clearly not by any of the people trying to sell these products because they're all guilty of misrepresenting reality.

I'll always love that clean, early VR look.

I remember being disappointed when this gorgeous style eventually gave way to slapping textures across every single polygon. The 5th gen consoles just weren't powerful enough to pull off that level of detail, and it felt like 3D graphics needed to take a step backwards before moving forwards again.

Which they did, starting with the Dreamcast. But man, it was rough going for a while.

@dukestah Huh. They must have added that to later models. The NES one doesn't have anything like that at all.

A brilliant RPG and one of the absolute best games on SNES. It's a shame that it has flown under the radar for decades because it deserves far more attention than it ever received.

A Quintet collection would be fantastic, but at the very least this game should be available on NSO.

It's an especially bad decision since the target audience for this kind of thing is inherently savvy about retro gaming and emulation.

Not offering the option to purchase a ROM is an excellent way to guarantee that people just find one by other means.

What a shame. Game preservation depends on talented people giving their time and energy to projects like this.

Online toxicity is nothing new, but it feels like there's no end to its escalation.

@Azuris Wait... did you put the magnets on the side?

I also have the NES keyboard and separate numpad, and they definitely do not dock magnetically.

Three cheers for the calculator function, though. I had been wanting a calculator with an old-school red LED display for ages, and then this came along and fit the bill perfectly.

It makes sense given that this same feature had recently felt so revolutionary in Virtua Racing, but I think it was the right call to axe it. The game's character and sense of gleeful chaos is really enhanced by the behind-the-car perspective.

Crazy Taxi was such a breath of fresh air at the time. It's hard to express how extraordinary it was to have it running in nearly arcade-perfect form on a home console. I was in grad school during the Dreamcast era, and this game would frequently become the centerpiece of any party we were throwing. People just couldn't wait to grab the controller next.

Looking forward to digging through some of this, and already enjoying the reminder of how incredibly weird video game journalism was back in the day. It didn't seem so odd at the time, but it's a far cry from the long-form reviews and discussion we see today.

Just as a random example I already stumbled across... a preview for Silver Surver (NES) in Issue 9 of EGM reads "Good graphics and a lack of color round out the cart." What a bizarre and seemingly self-contradictory sentence.

I also recall a review of Castlevania Bloodlines that noted "I admit it. Konami is the king of Castlevania games." Like... yeah, they're the only publisher that makes them?

This will be a nostalgic kick for those of us who grew up in that era, but also an interesting adventure for younger players who are used to modern games journalism and want to see what the culture looked like a few decades ago.

@-wc- Totally agreed. To some degree, of course you can spend money to get better sound quality. But as you note, you rapidly reach a point of diminishing returns and so much of what is out there is utter nonsense. I'm thinking of overt crap like the LessLoss Blackbody — a literal $800+ paperweight that uses the power of pseudoscience to transform sound by placing one (or more if you can afford it!) in the general vicinity of your setup.

Of course, that's an extreme example compared to the parade of more mundane but equally scammy high-end speaker cables and power conditioners and whatnot.

I'll give these Marseilles devices a modicum of credit — they at least do something even if it seems mostly to make the picture worse. But that's damning with some pretty faint praise, indeed.

@Gs69 I'm not sure they're fake reviews. I think that people are just very good at convincing themselves that they see and hear improvement after they've spent money on a product that's supposed to improve their experience.

Audiophiles have been buying useless snake oil products for decades now and swearing up and down they hear the difference. As the gaming industry matures and spins off sub-markets of niche enthusiasts, it would be surprising if we didn't see the exact same thing happen.

Just to be clear, this was not a "bungled venture". That would imply a legitimate project that collapsed under mismanagement.

This product never existed nor were there plans to bring it into existence. This was a scam, top to bottom, intended to collect money from its marks. This "venture" proceeded exactly as intended.

This is just a developer creating a story out of thin air to get some pre-release publicity.

Nothing to see here.

Ahhhh... the 90s console wars will literally never die.

Neither one sounded "better" than the other. They just sounded different and could accomplish different things in different ways.

It's like trying to figure out if a guitar is better than a piano.

This remains the only console I've ever regretted buying. It's a decent piece of tech and the screen was great (if a bit splotchy) for the time. But the support was atrocious, the "wobbly bubble" UI felt lazy and cheap, and the library just never materialized. All said and done, I'm not sure if I spent more than 50 hours gaming on mine in total.

I also may be in the minority with this opinion, but I always thought the PSP was nicer looking and more comfortable to use. I still preferentially reach for my PSP-2000 when I want to play anything from that library.

That's an exciting pedigree, but "plunder battle" means absolutely nothing to me. Is this some sub-genre I'm not aware of?

I've really enjoyed all the Castlevania seasons. Looking forward to seeing how they pick up from last season's cliffhanger.

It's wild how many hardware options we have for retro emulation now. I still don't understand how Ambernic can flood the market with so many different designs on such a regular basis, but choice is good.

Yeah, I was skeptical of this story from the start. The game does lean into ethnic and cultural stereotypes, but it's entirely playful and affectionate about it.

It makes more sense to think that Punch Out! is dormant for the same reason that other Nintendo franchises go dormant — their reluctance to revive IP if they don't have anything new to do with it.

All that said, this was a magnificent game — possibly one of the best franchise revivals I've ever played. I wouldn't mind an HD port of it, just to let those fantastic animations really shine.

It's a shame that, for all intents and purposes, YouTube is the only reasonable option for any of these creators to get their content out there.

You could argue that this kind of journalism wouldn't exist at all without YouTube making it possible, but that only makes it sadder that its policies — and moreover the impersonal and literally robotic way that those policies are enforced — are getting in the way.