Razieluigi

This was the very tail end of an era in which every single movie and TV show got a video game tie-in, regardless of whether or not the IP lent itself to a video game at all.

One of the fun things about retro gaming is that it doesn't just trigger gaming nostalgia. Since they made games of anything and everything, you wind up being reminded of all these other facets of pop culture in the 80s, 90s, and early 00s.

Most of the games themselves were trash, but it's really cool how the complete unsuiability of something like Charlotte's Web as a video game gave the developer so much lattitude to do whatever they wanted with it.

@retrogamer1 Yes! I have TotD: Overkill on Steam and it's totally worth it.

Loved playing Overkill on Wii, though. It had a great vibe and was a fun, underappreciated update to the original games.

I love that they made this, and the price can't be beat. I'm not even a Warhammer guy, but I'm downloading this immediately.

Typing of the Dead was so emblematic of Sega's spirit during the Dreamcast era. Just off-the-wall experimental and willing to try anything. What a time.

I keep meaning to get a Saturn for my collection. I really haven't spent any time with its library and would love to fix that eventually.

But this is a fun flashback to when the gaming industry was always in upheaval. Even all this is against the backdrop of Nintendo jilting Sony at the altar, so both Sega and Nintendo really failed to grasp the scale of Sony's threat.

With the "big three" fairly stable for 20+ years now, it must be odd for younger gamers to think of a time when the console market was in constant flux like this.

I kind of agree that the genre has painted itself into a corner. It's good that there are crazy bullet-hell games for the people who love them, but the best way to ensure that a genre dies out is that it no longer allows new players to engage with it. Where's the next generation of shmup fans supposed to come from?

Who, exactly, are these critics reviewing unreleased games that haven't even started funding on Kickstarter yet that are calling the game "Zelda with guns"?

Sounds like RetroBro just wants to market it that way and is doing the "people are saying" shtick.

I'll add one more voice to the chorus in case anybody involved in publishing this is reading. I'd buy the ROM in a heartbeat, or one of the PC/console versions if it comes with the ROM as an extra.

@Tott I can't say for sure, but 8BitDo eventually added support for Nintendo's other NSO controllers, so I imagine they'll eventually support these as well.

@no_donatello I got one of these as well and really like it.

But once Nintendo releases the official new GCN controllers, I suspect those will become my new go-to.

At this point, the only thing I'll buy from LRG is books because I respect Jeremy Parish and want to support his excellent work.

But the constant drumbeat of problems like this just never seems to end, which suggests a company unable or unwilling to learn.

Crab 'n Grab?
Fiddler Robo?
Thrustacean?
Shmup Rangoon?

Anything — ANYTHING — but "Metal Cancer".

Ugh. Achievements were a fun idea until they metastasized into the "keep playing the game long after it stops being fun to satisfy your cumpulsive 100% tendencies" nightmare that it is today.

@sdelfin I did not know this until today, but according to Wikipedia Sydney Sweeney was a math and robotics nerd in HS and is a genuine car enthusiast.

I still don't understand why Outrun should be made into a movie, but she seems like she might be the right person to take a crack at it.

Just a shame about the Michael Bay part.

I always wondered what Outrun would be like with a billion quick cuts and an incoherent sense of spatial awareness.

Oh, and at least one piss joke.

@Crecca Are these products "garbage" for any reason other than casual racism?

Because last I checked, Anbernic products are very popular and often highly reviewed by the exact kind of tech-savvy crowd that would absolutely reject garbage products.

Weird how igniting a global trade war without any kind of plan or coherent reason can cause so many entirely predictable problems.

But at least some billionaires got even richer off the market manipulation. I hope they don't have any trouble getting a RetroTINK if they want one because it would be sad if they ever had to suffer even a moment of the slightest inconvenience.

@IceClimbersMain DC games on Switch 2 NSO would be killer.

Kind of wish I had one of these as a display piece and I always appreciate these kinds of efforts at hardware preservation.

But at this point, the best way to experience the Virtual Boy is by jailbreaking a 3DS.

This is a situation where the game itself is broken and not worth owning, but If they fixed it at all, it would ironically lose everything that made it noteworthy to begin with.

Either way, it's certainly not worth $6 just to briefly snicker at the novelty. Unlike movies, games don't really benefit from the "so bad it's good" effect.

This is a dangerous reaction.

It's easy to point and laugh about how wrong the AI got it, but just getting this close would still be inconceivable science fiction to anybody alive just a few years ago.

Scoffing at it minimizes the danger this poses. While we're laughing it's getting better and stronger, and at a rate we probably can't imagine.

There you go putting politics into our gaming news again just because it's relevant and accurate to do so.

Been 48 hours since "Liberation Day" and I see this comment thread is aging gracefully!

This is heartbreaking stuff. Human culture is about to get drowned out by the regurgitated hallucinations of a billion computers. And people will happily buy it, feed it, and let it grow larger until there's nothing left.

Deats is right that this needs to be stopped now. It's just hard to imagine what can stop it. We'd need massive regulation implemented immediately. At least here in the United States, there's no prayer of seeing any kind of productive regulatory legislation in the forseeable future. If our shambolic joke of a government weighs in at all, it'll surely be on the side of the AI robots and the wealthy CEOs profitting off them.

@-wc- Ha — fair enough.

@profkross I just meant that it didn't have any impact on useability. Whether it had any appreciable impact on sales, I honestly don't know. Personally, I doubt the physical appearance of the thing really mattered all that much, but there's room for reasonable people to disagree.

In the end, I think the TG-16 failed because the NES was still going really strong in 1987 and it just didn't bring enough to the table to penetrate Ninendo's cultural dominance at the time. People didn't start getting tired of the NES until at least a year or so later, at which point Sega was ready and waiting to leap into the fray with a lot more firepower than NEC.

The change in form isn't surprising given American tendencies to prefer things big and overstated. At least in this case it didn't matter much since the device ultimately sat on a shelf. But this kind of logic revealed its flaws when it came to designing handheld products like the Lynx and the XBox "Duke" that were almost comically non-ergonomic.

The name change makes perfect sense, though. Despite its lack of success, I think they got the name right. TurboGrafx-16 still sounds kind of cool to me, and I would have found "PC Engine" confusing at the time as well.

The internet is frequently the worst possible combination of anonymity and entitlement.

The entire world needs a refresher on the golden rule. This shouldn't be so damn hard.

Man, this is just such a crowded space now.

Nice to have all the options, but I feel like this market is going to collapse in on itself in a few more years. I don't even understand how it supports the sheer number of devices coming from Ambernic alone, much less all of its competitors.

A comprehensive collection certainly would have been more exciting. There's enough here to be interested, but only in a "wait until it's on sale" kind of way.

I guess if your once legendary brand has been reduced to just releasing compliations of former glory, it's dangerous to release everything all at once and have nothing left to sell.

Funny this pops up today. I was just playing Star Successor this weekend!

I always wanted to like the original game but was never able to jive with it. The controls never felt natural to me and my thumbs keep tripping over each other. But the Wiimote and Nunchuck controls in the sequel are absolutely perfect for this kind of game.

This is wild.

The NES was such a forward-thinking console. The kinds of games this thing was playing at the end of its run would have been utterly unthinkable based on its initial "black box" launch.

I don't know exactly what mapper chips this cart would have been packing, but in an era of "pro" consoles, it's eye-opening to think back on a time when software was hardware, and that you could literally upgrade your console by just buying a different game.

Really looking forward to this, but it's a shame that the native Genesis/MD version is going to be delayed later than the emulated console versions.

Just seems like a fundamental misunderstanding of the audience for a game like this. Even if a physical cart takes time to manufacture, I'd happily buy a ROM on day one.

At the risk of opening a can of worms, it's a shame he starts the video by parroting the misinformation that FPGA consoles aren't employing emulation. But otherwise, this is an enjoyable ride.

Cute, I guess? But that's basically just a generic $10 digital clock/thermometer mounted in a miniature arcade cabinet.

It's the kind of thing you might see on one of those aisle tables in a department store (back when those still existed) around the holidays as a $20 stocking stuffer for desperate shoppers that have no idea what the hell to get their nephew this year.

But trying to crowdfund it at $80 a pop? You've got to be kidding.

They need to make the GBA ROM available for purchase.

It's going to be available one way or another, but I'd love a chance to actually pay them for it, so they'd be wise to make sure that's possible.

@user0 Honestly. While this is a nice update, I don't understand why they continue to ignore obvious and easy-to-implement feature requests like button mapping.

It still doesn't work with the DAC that they sold to people before quietly removing support from the list of planned Dock updates.

Analogue hit their peak with the MegaSG/SuperNT. It was still possible at that point to believe in them. The Dock is a nice piece of kit, but its strengths are mostly due to the high quality of external developer support.

At this point, they seem to be defined more by their complete disdain for their customers than anything else. I doubt I'll ever buy anything from them again. Such a shame.

This looks like if Soundwave turned into a portable video game console instead of a tape deck.

That's hysterical. Totally unnecessary, but hysterical.

Would that even fit in a front-loading NES? Or can it only be used with the top-loader?

Kind of a neat party trick? But I honestly don't see the point. If you have a Saturn modded with a Fenrir, you already have all your games loaded onto the SD card and it's not like it's a huge hassle to add more.

Am I missing something here?

@mjparker77 Yeah, I still have it downloaded on my 360 as well. I just don't haul that poor old thing out of the closet much these days.

It's just stupid that, regardless of whether or not it was delisted, I'm not able to download it onto my Series S.

TeknoParrot looks pretty cool though! I'll have a look...

I'll take this opportunity to note what a damn shame it is that Afterburner Climax was delisted and can't be played on any modern hardware.

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?