@Daggot I like the idea of these kinds of books, but I guess I what I want is a few pages of real history on key games. Basically what you can find on youtube videos.
This is my replying personally, not as a book contributor. 🙈
This comment I find quite painful, since the majority of YT vids covering games history I've seen, they don't do original research.
They crib from articles in Retro Gamer, or interview books such as my own, and then don't even give credit. I posted examples in the Norm Carusso news article on here.
I've not seen Patman. I don't know who that is, but will look them up.
But it is very rare to find YT channels that do interview research.
MyLifeinGaming does interviews. They're fantastic. There was another channel interviewing Saturn devs (I forget the name).
But most of the time I'll stumble on a vid and realise whatever channel it is, was just reading the latest Retro Gamer interview, or Time Ext interview, and then didn't credit them.
And this is personally frustrating, because we do the work of finding developers, convince them to talk, transcribe and write out features, then some YT upstart plonks out a low effort monologue over game footage and they get 100k views.
This is just rust me venting as a private individual.
But please look for the sources used by these YTubers.
Regarding developer input, I'd like to highlight the inclusion of several long form interviews, based on specific roles. There's one with a Japanese producer Paul did, which I found fascinating. Plus interviews focused on programming, graphics, etc. It's very much interview led.
@Daggot I can't speak for other books, but I feel ours might be what you're looking for. Obviously I'm biased. But our goal was very strongly to avoid a basic nostalgic overview. A mantra we had was: "Readers don't want to read our memories of playing Spacies down the pub, they want the inside story behind these games!"
Which even influenced the long form title of the book.
So every single game entry is like a tiny Making Of feature. So a small paragraph from one of us explaining the game and its legacy, followed by several hundred words from a dev talking about the process.
As the photos show, several games also feature developer documents, design sketches, etc. Not every game has dev material, some are just quotes, but wherever possible we strived to source actual dev materials. As the write up mentions, Paul even licensed material from the Strong Museum.
@Arcadia_Official @Martin_H Regarding the curation, I believe Paul will be discussing the process at various outlets. So he is better poised to explain all the decisions. But we had a fairly detailed curation system, including the availability of developers, and several other factors.
@gmar I only contributed so don't know Sam's plans regarding wider marketing. But Paul has seen the thread, and I would guess Sam keeps tabs on internet feedback so will see this.
@Arcadia_Official
Paul was very keen to make sure each decade was balanced - also taking into account the number of games released in each decade when curating the list. There's quite a bit from the 80s and 90s.
Just to be clear: every game has a small author intro, followed by a quote from a developer who worked on it, describing its creation. The dev quote constituting the bulk of the text.
The full list of games in alphabetical order:
1942, 720°, After Burner, Altered Beast, Area 51, Arkanoid, Asteroid, Asteroids, Battle Garegga, Battlezone, Berzerk, Bomb Jack, Breakout, Bubble Bobble, Cannon Dancer, Canyon Bomber, CarnEvil, Centipede, Chiller, Circus, Computer Space, Cruis’n USA, Crystal Castles, Dance Dance Revolution, Darius, Daytona USA, Death Race, Defender, Die Hard Arcade, Dominos, Donkey Kong, Double Dragon, Dragon’s Lair, Fantasy Zone, Final Fight, Food Fight, Gain Ground, Galaga, Galaxian, Gauntlet, Ghouls ’n Ghosts, Gorf, Gotcha, Gradius, Gran Trak 10, Gun Fight, House of the Dead, Hunchback, I, Robot, Ikari Warriors, In the Hunt, Joust, Killer Instinct, Klax, Krull, Kung-Fu Master, Lunar Lander, Major Havoc, Marble Madness, Marvel vs. Capcom, Metal Slug, Missile Command, Monaco GP, Moon Patrol, Mortal Kombat, Ms. Pac-Man, NARC, NBA Jam, NHL Open Ice, Out Run, Pac-Land, Pac-Man, Paperboy, Pit-Fighter, Point Blank, Pole Position, Pong, Primal Rage, Puzzle Bobble, Q*bert, Quantum, Qwak!, R-Type, Raiden, Rainbow Islands, Rampage, Rampart, Return of the Jedi, RoadBlasters, Robotron: 2084, S.T.U.N. Runner, San Francisco Rush, Satan’s Hollow, Shinobi, Silent Scope, Sinistar, Smash T.V., Solomon’s Key, SoulCalibur, Space Harrier, Space Invaders, Spy Hunter, Star Wars, Street Fighter II, Strider, Super Bug, Tank, Tapper, Tekken, Tempest, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, Tetris, The Pit, The Tower of Druaga, Tron, Venture, Warrior, Wonder Boy, Xevious, Zaxxon.
@EarthboundBenjy I am officially, publicly apologising for that. I thought it was funny - but the fact it's preventing you from reading the words of Yoshitaka Murayama shows that I was way off, and I won't do anything similar in future.
I'm just a freelancer so don't have editing access.
But I have screenshotted your message, sent it to @damo, and asked that the FF7 spoiler be removed.
They say it's not a contact issue... But it might be. I had a Famicom cart which wouldn't run. Cleaned it repeatedly with isopro, scrubbing with a cotton bud. Assumed it was dead. Gifted it to a modder to mess about with, maybe re-use the shell. He used fine grit sandpaper to abrade the upper layer of the contacts and it worked fine. Which was a revelation to me. Sometimes isopro alcohol isn't strong enough, and you literally need to scrape the upper layer.
As for carts not working...
Yeah, that might happen.
But ROM burners are easy to come by and not too expensive, and you can get blank ROM chips to burn. The modder I mention makes personal repros.
So even if the ROM chips die, they can be revived again by burning new ones. For legacy hardware anyway.
I played it on a ferry a couple times, the proper thing, and then later finished it on MAME. Imagine if this had received an expanded home port for PS1 back in the day? I loved the world of it. Reminded me of Nausicaä and Panzer Dragoon a bit.
The year is 2030. Vibe coding is so realistic, literally anything could be AI. The uncertainty has gripped people in fear. You go to hug your wife. She is AI.
This game is still flawlessly designed even decades later. Please everyone, play the single player and savour the design.
Now, when I saw flawless or perfect, I don't mean the graphics or performance, I mean the layout, structure, versatility of weapons and tools, objectives, and general gameplay loop of the missions, along with how higher difficulties build on lower levels through increased objectives.
I recall a colleague once trashing Goldeneye, a few years back, not long ago, insisting it had aged terribly and was in fact trash, and people only liked it because of nostalgia.
I promptly decided never to listen to this person's views again.
Goldeneye has in fact improved with age!
Remember the remake of Goldeneye? Stupid tutorials, QTEs, long cut-scenes, absolute dumpster trash.
The N64 game drops you right into gameplay, and let's you learn the game through an easy, linear, and simple first level.
It is design perfection. And now everyone can play it.
Please, please go play it.
Play it now!
And ignore anyone who says its aged badly or is only fondly remembered due to nostalgia.
Why don't they just make more normal units to meet demand?
I've owned one for a couple years. It's excellent. But I pity those who can't get one, while the company is swanning around like a bunch of demented carnies, making increasingly daft and niche variations instead of just making more normal units.
A spokesperson for Analogue:oh but darling! Have you seen our new version made out of McVitties Biscuits! We've only made five of them! <squirts water from a flower on their shirt>
I recently played through Twinkle Knights (1995) on the 3DO, and seeing this... I now realise that TK was basically a clone / copy/ rip-off of Battle Skin Panic, albeit with live-action video footage, instead of anime style artwork. How bizarre - they are strikingly similar!
It was alright as a free download I stuck on my 3DO ODE, not sure I'd actually pay money for it though.
There are better eroge out there - notably Night Slave and Knights of Xentar.
@Oldretrogamer
I used to sell maybe a hundred or so items a year for like a tenner each. Not a lot - maybe £1000 minus postage. But it was good to clear out the little things that accumulate. So that 30 item limit ****s me completely regardless of the value limit. I just can't sell the little stuff any more.
And you're being terribly naive. "They won't take your money if it's just your personal stuff."
They are asking for your NI number.
This means you are then on their radar. You're being naive if you're thinking: "Oh, I only sold 35 items and it's only about £1500, so they're not interested in me." They use AI to monitor their database of eBay sellers, so you have no idea how being on their radar might bite you in the ass down the line.
That's waking the sleeping bear. Don't ever trust the government with anything.
@Kurokage
Click My Ebay, Account, Personal Information, scroll down.
It'll show: National Insurance Number Please provide this information.
Failure to provide it means eBay will withhold payments / withdrawals until you provide it. The UK government changed the rules so that all moneys made has to be reported to HMRC, so they can take their cut. They're forcing eBay to do it.
I've not sold anything for months.
I bought these items with money that had been taxed prior to my receiving it, and the items themselves had "value added tax" applied when I bought them, so when I sell my own things, my own games, which have already been "double taxed" in effect, the government can go **** itself if it thinks I'm paying a third layer of tax on any money scraped back by selling. They can **** right off.
@Slider2711
I was told, in no uncertain terms, that describing the events which led to my views on this, could result in legal action being taken against myself and possibly Hookshot Media.
So for the record: I love Songbird and regard Carl as a delightfully wonderful and upright human being.
Walked into a UK post office to send a copy of Retro Gamer and a comic to a friend in Japan. Under 500g.
Cheapest shipping option was £22.
For a mag and comic.
I asked is there nothing cheaper? Nothing the woman insisted. Post Office overhauled all prices in April. This was the CHEAPEST.
The whole world has gone insane with rising costs and it's only going to get worse.
If a flat magazine costs £22 from England to Japan, then a well packaged large joystick could be literally anything. A million dollars. It doesn't matter. We no longer live in a sane world. $89 is what, £60? I could post three magazines for that.
I tinkered with the Mario Artist series, and the rest, but my statement was mainly to address Cyxceven and anyone else who already dropped a large sum on an X7 (myself included). If you have an X7 it's not worth dropping €170 on a new cart just for the 64DD, especially given that they can be patched to run on an X7 anyway (most? all? I'm not even sure).
I nearly bought a 64DD years ago, but then looked into what was available. I was left unimpressed.
Yes, historically it's valuable. This was Nintendo attempting to the FDS again albeit for the N64. There were grand plans for it, including designing characters in Mario Artist and then seeing them walk around in games such as Sim City. I was so excited when reading the issue of N64 mag that broke the news. It looked so cool. But in the end it was abandoned before much could be done with it.
I'm glad the games are backed up. But for a general retro enthusiast, I would not recommend spending large sums just to try any of these. A well researched YouTube will have you covered.
I say this as someone who owns a Virtual Boy and other "failed" hardware. My interest, for myself, is always what can I play?
@sdelfin
Excellent points. And not just fun gameplay in a short time, but also immediately. Older games also had manuals, meaning you could pre-load the info needed to play without lengthy mandatory tutorials, which are now the norm since manuals stopped being made.
As a fan of the first Harvest Moon, which allowed you to jump right in, I decided to try one of the latest versions. I bailed during the tutorial because CBA wading through all that nonsense. I'd rather just go back to the old game, and the old design, which let me play immediately and trusted me to figure things.
Modern games treat players like idiots, while also trying to provide the same experience to everyone.
I genuinely hate most modern game design. And the few rare occasions a new game is released that's amazing, the critics don't understand it and hate on it. Case in point: Slitterhead. One of the best games of the last 10 years, and critics all whined about it, many complaining that its design is antiquated. WTF? This game is a straight up 10 / 10.
No, modern reviewers and modern game design do not align with what I regard as good.
The Hyperkin Mouse came out 2017, so pretty old at this point. I was about to buy one when a local CEX had a cheap Mario Paint with mouse for less, so got that instead. Has no one in the comments here used the Hyperkin? I'm curious as to how it compares.
@BaronRedWings It's not some random dev. He's the person who made the game. I heard his comment and concluded I don't like his attitude, which is obviously going to impact the game because the comment was about the game - the same game I now don't want to play because of what he said about his game that he made.
I dunno... It seems intensely logical to me.
It's like if a chef said he pooped in the soup, and I said I don't want the soup now, and then you said "writing off the soup because of something some chef said is childish".
This was on my list of games to get around to - now I have less than zero interest. I'm writing it off as trash without even playing it based on the dev's own narrow minded admission. He sounds like an absolute doofus.
The sad thing is Sega will see low sales and think: "Huh, I guess everyone just hates the property. No more Shinobi ever!"
They won't add two and two and realise it might be because people don't like where it went.
@ThisIsPete Astute points. Personally I am infuriated by how a large section of gamers demand "more value", by which they mean padding and excess length. It's ruining the hobby. I use HowLongtoBeat to help me gauge what to play next, by picking low time options. It shows a 60+ hour game? Nope! I'm an adult with adulting to be done, not some carefree teen on their summer holidays. I miss the days of 8~10 hour games. Vanquish was perfect in this regard.
@Razieluigi OK, you're right, to be fair, I was being cheeky. My contempt is less with the game and more with the cult surrounding it. I can no longer look at this artefact of my childhood without being irritated by the cult of scammers which now worship it, since their weird behaviour bleeds into everything else and skews history.
It's difficult for me to ignore because these conmen have caused huge negative ripples throughout the retro world.
I don't understand the obsession with this insufferably dull extremely brown game.
And I don't understand why copies of SMB will sell for millions of dollars at auction, and yet the rare, one of a kind Nintendo PlayStation prototype only sold for $360,000 at auction.
Can some please explain to me why SMB can sell for $3 million at auction, a game which was a pack-in title and probably the most produced cart for the NES, while a valuable historical artefact, the Nintendo PlayStation prototype, sells for 10% of that?
@GordonBennet
To be fair, I thought @Babybahamut comment was hilarious (proper laughed aloud). Was secretly hoping multiple people would copy their joke framework and post similar silliness.
Frankly I know very little about plumbing, but I was curious to see if piping raw sewage into the gutter would work and it seems to work just fine.
@Babybahamut Frankly I know very little about electricity, but I was curious to see if a cable clipped to an overhead line would work and it seems to work just fine.
@SuntannedDuck2 You know about the dedicated floors - hoho! I know about them too; I even braved a stroll around one once.
But otherwise no worries. Keep exploring the history of games, and if the opportunity presents you, have a look through an old magazine some time. My personal recommendation: anything by Dave Halverson is good - GameFan, Gamer's Republic, or the American PLAY (not to be confused with the British PlayStation mag also called PLAY).
I replayed FF6 a few months back in tandem with a friend. I was on SNES and he was on the Pixel Remaster version. I looked at some screens, and it looked pretty good; it still had the pixelated charm of the original.
Importantly: it was still wonderful to play all these years later. Not everything needs a remake - a remaster that retains the original charm, but with maybe a few small QOL options (to be toggled on or off as desired), and some bugfixes, and maybe some CRT filters, and the best classics will still play great.
Case in point: I still need to play Seiken Densetsu 3. They remade it, but I have zero interest. I still intend to play it on SNES as intended. Some day.
Got my 3DO back from the repair shop and playing this now - it is fantastic! Got strong Snatcher vibes at the start. The dungeon crawling is also fast and smooth - though I'm running my 3DO in B-Mode, which lowers the resolution for a performance boost. This is only available on certain Japanese models.
@YouGotPlayed I've been trawling YouTube and Google, and can't find anything remotely close. Though Google has turned to crap in recent years. I', going to try Yandex next, but can you recall any other details to help me find this? I need to know!
@YouGotPlayed "I genuinely can't say that of most 2D indie games that come out these days from mostly Western devs, where they either look like Flash cartoons, simpler 8-bit 2600/NES-style stuff (but way too fluid in animation and no sprite flickering to "sell" that 8-bit aesthetic IMO), or they've got this odd 2D pixel art style that's super-loaded with modern shaders and lighting so they lose the more classical look."
Absolutely!
Are you reading my mind? Because this is exactly what I've been thinking. For all the praise the indie scene gets, for making games outside of the Triple-A sphere, none of them actually nail the quality level of 90s retro. I think a lot of it is to do with the fact quite a few are using game making utilities. For example there's a game dev utility for the monochrome Game Boy. And I've played several games made with it, and they all have the same "basic" feel to them. These games aren't a genius coder working up to the metal with raw assembly, like Chikyuu Kaihou Gun ZAS on Game Boy, it's someone who casually clicks a few boxes around a screen until they have a game.
90 devs took pride in trying to outdo each other by going against the limitations.
@YouGotPlayed Glad you mentioned doujin. With commercial / retail games on Japanese computers being re-released officially via things like EGG, and increasingly more fan-translations of them for us via emulation, that scene has been blown wide open for people to discover stuff. But doujin ?
That's sort of like the last / new great frontier.
Poorly documented in English. Thousands of games lost to the either. Many of them seemingly incredible. There are Comiket catalogues from the 1980s, showcasing hundreds of doujin games, many based on pre-existing properties, and we have no idea where they are. The fact companies turned a blind eye to copyright infringement is also interesting - but then when an infringing game was only selling around 300 copies at Comiket, I suppose they didn't care.
I fear that slop like this will poison the well and dissuade actually skilled people from attempting it. I'm glad to know someone else is working on this, but what about other games where the sole attempt will be AI slop, buggy, broken, and then forever more it will be untouched by others.
I hate these things because, while some people will say stuff like: "There's nothing stopping someone else from having a go."
We all know the sad truth: once a project limps out onto the internet, unless it's something mainstream and stupidly popular, nobody is going to work on it again. It's bad enough when humans call dibs on a fan-translation project which then dies (CJ Iwakura has sat on Shadowrun doing nothing for years now, and no one else will attempt it because CJ called dibs). But with AI it's worse.
I wish there was some way to stop these vibe coders from poisoning different material. Can't we, I dunno, ban them from the internet or something? They're running rampant with their nonchalant techbro attitudes and zero coding skill, and leaving a wake of destruction behind them.
Seriously? All these years I've had the wrong impression of it. I still have my save file on an old MC. I'm going to revisit this, today probably, to re-educate myself.
Thank you for correcting me!
I'm wondering why I made this error - if I had to guess, these extra elements were surprise twists? I don't think I even bothered finishing the harder levels, I just saw the same starting objectives and bailed.
@Martin_H
The origin of my surname is a good story. I should write my father's biographjy. Given your appreciation for nuance in telling history, you might enjoy this side tangent.
He was a deep sea fisherman. It's one reason I have a positive view of Communism. From a small forgotten peasant village on a collective farm (PGR if you want to do further reading and look up photos), his two sisters would end up as university professors teaching physics, and he'd become a fisherman, which is what he eagerly wanted. If you had the academic ability and the motivation to use that ability, the State would do everything in its power to elevate you to the vocation you desired. Normally fishing jobs were reserved for the children of fishermen, or people near the coast, but since he was top of his class they couldn't refuse him. He'd be out trawling for months at a time, and he'd earn dollars, which allowed him to shop at certain exclusive stores which accepted only foreign currency (ie: Pewex). Communism was good to my family, who were originally mountain people before moving to the PGR (my dad visited as a child once and hated it; they slept on straw and the milk was warm due to being freshly squeezed that morning).
He jumped ship in 1980 in SA. Well, he had shore leave and just never went back to the ship (he said he felt like an adventure, and SA seemed like paradise). SA granted political asylum to anyone from an East Bloc country. There was a ton of hyperlinks in the first part, but basically the US and SA were close up until things soured in 1985, and earlier the US encouraged SA to combat Communism. Partly this involved fighting a ground war with Angola (our Vietnam), and also it meant offering asylum to anyone from an East Bloc country.
My mother saved newspaper clippings, and my dad has an old photo showing himself and about a hundred other Polish people in SA, standing with the old SA flag and the Polish flag, side by side, in a show of solidarity. SA welcomed them with open arms, gave them new jobs, or training if they needed it, English classes, and helped them assimilate into the community. And not just Polish people, there were communities from all the East Bloc countries.
This is the sort of strange contradiction you don't often read about. On the one hand SA had segregation, which limited the freedom of certain people, but on the other hand it made a great performative show of wanting to promote freedom, by offering a new home to people escaping Communism.
@Martin_H @shanghailoz Thank you for the detailed reply - this is great, and dovetails nicely with my own memories. As stated, SA was very much an outdoor kind of culture. You'd have braais (bbq), and socialise or play outside, or just go for long drives for fun. Though I recall as crime increased, by the mid-90s parents were wary of letting their kids play unsupervised outside. You had to stay within your gated property, which also came with large guard dogs, and both my parents had guns with permits to carry anywhere.
I'd forgotten about how hardware used to be rented, not bought - as in renting a TV. My mother, in her annoyance at its late arrival, bought a TV and VCR, but we rented the M-NET decoder. It was a weird set-up, in that you paid a monthly subscription, and also had to rent the set-top box, though we later bought it. Great system though, with dual languages for everything, and a mute button for bad language if you knew kids would be watching.
Video rental stores were hugely popular. And the domestic TV (SABC) was not great. I don't recall us ever watching it, because that single M-NET channel was so much better. We had M-NET from launch in 1986, and the VCR before this (I have a couple old tapes with SABC stuff).
In the 90s we also used to get "BOP TV" from Bophuthatswana, which is a whole other topic to read. The signal was terrible, and snowy, since the Bophuthatswana homeland was hundreds of miles from Joburg, but if you held the ariel just right you could get it - and they had American localised Japanese anime for some reason.
@Martin_H Thanks for the kind words. There's actually two more entries: a spin-off with an interview from someone who participated in the Sonic TV / phone show. And something on bootleg Famicom games, though that's more generalised and global. The Sonic show piece is really interesting - I'm still trying to find archive footage of it.
TV didn't arrive until 1976, and I wasn't born until after that. But there were no TV sets at all before that. It simply wasn't a thing - according to my relatives. My mother described having visited Europe in the 1960s, knowing what TV was, being infuriated SA didn't have it, and then when it did arrive, it arrived in colour (no b&w TV phase), and she immediately invested in one with VCR. Went all in as it arrived. Meaning when I was born some time after, I was privileged to enjoy regular video rentals and lots of stuff recorded from TV - it was a new and exciting technology at the time. Ironically, my dad, from Communist Poland, had TV when he was a small child. Which really shows you how bizarre of a scenario it was. Prior to 1976 in SA the radio was popular, or newspapers for the news. Or the cinema for films - you could watch films, but only at the cinema. So it was extremely popular. My grandparents were avid cinema goers. So I've been told. The lack of TV was, in my opinion, a ridiculous attempt at controlling information.
As for computers, I don't really know. I was born after TV arrived, and offices and schools had computers (my school had DOS or old IBM compatibles, because we had a copy of Castle Adventure), and we had family friends who owned an IBM computer in the late 1980s. Also someone in the previous article posted in the comments about using old-style BBS while in SA. So computing (and early pre-WWW internet) was around - but I don't think in the same way it was in the UK?
Sadly my lack of personal experience means these articles are unfortunately lacking in this particular aspect.
@shanghailoz said previously: "We had BBS too, as Telkom had a decent call charge - you'd get charged for the single call, not for how much time you spent on the phone in the late 80s/early 90s. Mostly PC gaming, or Famicon clones (NES). Some imported stuff like Amiga, but rarer. I don't remember much 8-bit stuff, but age may have played a thing there."
Can you share anything more regarding computers back in the day?
Any word on how the difficulty levels affect mission objectives?
For me the biggest aspect of Goldeneye / Perfect Dark, which no one ever seems to appreciate, replicate, or understand, is that the difficulty levels increased gameplay the higher you went, encouraging you to play more.
The Dam on easy: run to the end
The Dam on hard: Neutralize all alarms, Install covert modem, Intercept data backup, Bungee jump from platform
With GE and PD, you effectively had 3 games in one, because each difficulty radically changed you how approached everything. You'd rinse easy like a tutorial, savour normal, and then you'd be ready for the proper game with all the objectives, on hard. Everything changes as the mission objectives change. Everything.
Does this replicate that?
EDIT:
It would seem my memories of TimeSplitters 2 are not correct - I've removed them. I need to replay it and refresh my memory. But my points about GE/PD stand; those two really knew how to implement different difficulties.
@ShinobiNeon I had suspected as much! Thank you for the confirmation. This entire scenario is nothing but BS so they can kill second hand sales to force all future game purchases to be new, thus getting all the profit.
Remember when they told us digital games would be cheaper than physical? How long did that last? Now digital games are more expensive that physical. There are numerous examples where a game released both digitally and physically, can be bought new, on disc, for less than the digital.
People can't get angry enough about this whole fiasco.
@ilustrajulio This post was fantastic. Thank you for sharing it!
This is something which doesn't get mentioned enough. Physical games mean you can take that game, and trade or sell it, to reinvest again.
Sony et al are deluded into thinking that by removing the ability to sell old games (because digital), people are just going to now buy all their games new and still buy the same amount.
I am convinced Sony is lying when it says physical only accounts for 3% of current transactions.
How are they coming up with this figure? Are they including free demos with that? Are they massaging the numbers somehow?
Are we suddenly going to be allowed to sell our digital copies?
My rage at losing physical media is akin to a thousand burning suns. I will in every instance buy physical when I can, so that I can sell it later if I don't like it (ie: Metaphor Refantazio - imported the JP version, fully in English, I think the game sucks, it's going on eBay when I can be bothered).
But ultimately... I don't care about this. I now own more physical copies of PS3, X360, Switch, and PS4 games, plus retro games, than I could ever play in my life time, even if I live to be 70 and play for 30 hours every week. (Which is a ridiculous suggestion.)
I'm good.
Very, very little in the last 10 years has been even remotely unusual or interesting enough to really care about. Just slightly shinier versions of what I was reviewing in 2006 when the PS3 turned up at the office.
Slitterhead (2024) was the best game I've played in the last 10 years, but the critics all hated it (I was forced to buy digital on PS4, but I plan on getting a PS5 special edition just for my shelf; I will double dip I love it so much!).
From what I can see the future just means more of the same derivative slop as development gets more expensive and everyone wants a safe bet with maximum appeal.
I might miss out on the odd gem, the next Slitterhead that manages to get made, but again... More in backlog than I can play.
I hate this decision, and it's a dark day for collectors, and I feel sorry for the kids who will never get to experience their mother driving them to the store, buying a cool game in nice packaging, and reading the manual on the drive home, but I've also amassed enough to safeguard myself.
I'll just keep buying retro when I want a nice physical item. Heck, I even make my own retro repros these days!
"an adventure game with RPG elements (an overworld, stats, and turn-based battles), which features anime-inspired pixel art, voice acting, and an episodic structure (complete with opening and ending theme songs), similar to many of the anime shows that inspired it."
and...
"Silky Lip was not my first or even my second choice for a Mega CD project"
Did they mention A Rank Thunder anywhere online in connection with their first and second choices? Because it's the exact same sort of game (adventure, RPG, unique combat, anime intro and outro like a TV series), also on Sega Mega CD, except instead of being about cute girls, it's about you waking up in a lab with no memory and fighting mutant monsters reminiscent of Guyver! It's incredible.
I'll play this, but I'm secretly hoping that Supper was thinking of A Rank Thunder as a future project.
@derf Thank you! It was a pretty packed 2 weeks. Many of the shopping trips had to be squeezed in at the end of a day's excursion (ie: after visiting Kirstenbosch).
@Martin_H A valuable comment, thank you; that's a very common perspective I encountered after moving. One thing I learned having been born there and later emigrating, and I alluded to in the previous article regarding SA villains in films, is global media and especially news, always give a curated perspective based on their viewership. There is almost always more to a story than conveyed, thus I've always tried to read up on the background to anything which catches my eye, and it's worth looking at multiple sources. This isn't so much about SA but all news from the last 25 years.
Comments 1,002
Re: The Arcade 1971–1999 Is Aiming To Be "The Definitive Text On The First 30 Years Of The Arcade Industry"
@Daggot
I like the idea of these kinds of books, but I guess I what I want is a few pages of real history on key games. Basically what you can find on youtube videos.
This is my replying personally, not as a book contributor. 🙈
This comment I find quite painful, since the majority of YT vids covering games history I've seen, they don't do original research.
They crib from articles in Retro Gamer, or interview books such as my own, and then don't even give credit. I posted examples in the Norm Carusso news article on here.
I've not seen Patman. I don't know who that is, but will look them up.
But it is very rare to find YT channels that do interview research.
MyLifeinGaming does interviews. They're fantastic. There was another channel interviewing Saturn devs (I forget the name).
But most of the time I'll stumble on a vid and realise whatever channel it is, was just reading the latest Retro Gamer interview, or Time Ext interview, and then didn't credit them.
And this is personally frustrating, because we do the work of finding developers, convince them to talk, transcribe and write out features, then some YT upstart plonks out a low effort monologue over game footage and they get 100k views.
This is just rust me venting as a private individual.
But please look for the sources used by these YTubers.
Re: The Arcade 1971–1999 Is Aiming To Be "The Definitive Text On The First 30 Years Of The Arcade Industry"
Regarding developer input, I'd like to highlight the inclusion of several long form interviews, based on specific roles. There's one with a Japanese producer Paul did, which I found fascinating. Plus interviews focused on programming, graphics, etc. It's very much interview led.
@Daggot
I can't speak for other books, but I feel ours might be what you're looking for. Obviously I'm biased. But our goal was very strongly to avoid a basic nostalgic overview. A mantra we had was: "Readers don't want to read our memories of playing Spacies down the pub, they want the inside story behind these games!"
Which even influenced the long form title of the book.
So every single game entry is like a tiny Making Of feature. So a small paragraph from one of us explaining the game and its legacy, followed by several hundred words from a dev talking about the process.
As the photos show, several games also feature developer documents, design sketches, etc. Not every game has dev material, some are just quotes, but wherever possible we strived to source actual dev materials. As the write up mentions, Paul even licensed material from the Strong Museum.
@Arcadia_Official @Martin_H
Regarding the curation, I believe Paul will be discussing the process at various outlets. So he is better poised to explain all the decisions. But we had a fairly detailed curation system, including the availability of developers, and several other factors.
@gmar
I only contributed so don't know Sam's plans regarding wider marketing. But Paul has seen the thread, and I would guess Sam keeps tabs on internet feedback so will see this.
@waiwainl
"Arcade after 2000" 🤣
@Himitsu
Dynamite Deka is aka Die Hard Arcade.
Re: The Arcade 1971–1999 Is Aiming To Be "The Definitive Text On The First 30 Years Of The Arcade Industry"
@Arcadia_Official
Paul was very keen to make sure each decade was balanced - also taking into account the number of games released in each decade when curating the list. There's quite a bit from the 80s and 90s.
Just to be clear: every game has a small author intro, followed by a quote from a developer who worked on it, describing its creation. The dev quote constituting the bulk of the text.
The full list of games in alphabetical order:
1942, 720°, After Burner, Altered Beast, Area 51, Arkanoid, Asteroid, Asteroids, Battle Garegga, Battlezone, Berzerk, Bomb Jack, Breakout, Bubble Bobble, Cannon Dancer, Canyon Bomber, CarnEvil, Centipede, Chiller, Circus, Computer Space, Cruis’n USA, Crystal Castles, Dance Dance Revolution, Darius, Daytona USA, Death Race, Defender, Die Hard Arcade, Dominos, Donkey Kong, Double Dragon, Dragon’s Lair, Fantasy Zone, Final Fight, Food Fight, Gain Ground, Galaga, Galaxian, Gauntlet, Ghouls ’n Ghosts, Gorf, Gotcha, Gradius, Gran Trak 10, Gun Fight, House of the Dead, Hunchback, I, Robot, Ikari Warriors, In the Hunt, Joust, Killer Instinct, Klax, Krull, Kung-Fu Master, Lunar Lander, Major Havoc, Marble Madness, Marvel vs. Capcom, Metal Slug, Missile Command, Monaco GP, Moon Patrol, Mortal Kombat, Ms. Pac-Man, NARC, NBA Jam, NHL Open Ice, Out Run, Pac-Land, Pac-Man, Paperboy, Pit-Fighter, Point Blank, Pole Position, Pong, Primal Rage, Puzzle Bobble, Q*bert, Quantum, Qwak!, R-Type, Raiden, Rainbow Islands, Rampage, Rampart, Return of the Jedi, RoadBlasters, Robotron: 2084, S.T.U.N. Runner, San Francisco Rush, Satan’s Hollow, Shinobi, Silent Scope, Sinistar, Smash T.V., Solomon’s Key, SoulCalibur, Space Harrier, Space Invaders, Spy Hunter, Star Wars, Street Fighter II, Strider, Super Bug, Tank, Tapper, Tekken, Tempest, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, Tetris, The Pit, The Tower of Druaga, Tron, Venture, Warrior, Wonder Boy, Xevious, Zaxxon.
Re: The Making Of: Suikoden II, A JRPG To Match 'Game Of Thrones' In Intrigue And Impact
@EarthboundBenjy
I am officially, publicly apologising for that. I thought it was funny - but the fact it's preventing you from reading the words of Yoshitaka Murayama shows that I was way off, and I won't do anything similar in future.
I'm just a freelancer so don't have editing access.
But I have screenshotted your message, sent it to @damo, and asked that the FF7 spoiler be removed.
Re: This Dying Street Fighter II Cart Is A Sobering Reminder That Physical Doesn't Mean Forever
They say it's not a contact issue... But it might be. I had a Famicom cart which wouldn't run. Cleaned it repeatedly with isopro, scrubbing with a cotton bud. Assumed it was dead. Gifted it to a modder to mess about with, maybe re-use the shell. He used fine grit sandpaper to abrade the upper layer of the contacts and it worked fine. Which was a revelation to me. Sometimes isopro alcohol isn't strong enough, and you literally need to scrape the upper layer.
As for carts not working...
Yeah, that might happen.
But ROM burners are easy to come by and not too expensive, and you can get blank ROM chips to burn. The modder I mention makes personal repros.
So even if the ROM chips die, they can be revived again by burning new ones. For legacy hardware anyway.
Re: Helmets At The Ready! Namco's Motorbike-Themed Arcade Racer 'Cyber Cycles' Is Making The Jump To Consoles
@bring_on_branstons
A second vote for PROP CYCLE!
I played it on a ferry a couple times, the proper thing, and then later finished it on MAME. Imagine if this had received an expanded home port for PS1 back in the day? I loved the world of it. Reminded me of Nausicaä and Panzer Dragoon a bit.
Re: Try To Act Surprised, But It Looks Like That Zelda: BotW 3DS 'Demake' Was Vibe-Coded
@Zeebor15
Monkey's paw curls a finger...
Re: Try To Act Surprised, But It Looks Like That Zelda: BotW 3DS 'Demake' Was Vibe-Coded
The year is 2030. Vibe coding is so realistic, literally anything could be AI. The uncertainty has gripped people in fear. You go to hug your wife. She is AI.
Re: After 9 Years Of Work, GoldenEye 007 N64 Is Now 100% Decompiled
This game is still flawlessly designed even decades later. Please everyone, play the single player and savour the design.
Now, when I saw flawless or perfect, I don't mean the graphics or performance, I mean the layout, structure, versatility of weapons and tools, objectives, and general gameplay loop of the missions, along with how higher difficulties build on lower levels through increased objectives.
I recall a colleague once trashing Goldeneye, a few years back, not long ago, insisting it had aged terribly and was in fact trash, and people only liked it because of nostalgia.
I promptly decided never to listen to this person's views again.
Goldeneye has in fact improved with age!
Remember the remake of Goldeneye? Stupid tutorials, QTEs, long cut-scenes, absolute dumpster trash.
The N64 game drops you right into gameplay, and let's you learn the game through an easy, linear, and simple first level.
It is design perfection. And now everyone can play it.
Please, please go play it.
Play it now!
And ignore anyone who says its aged badly or is only fondly remembered due to nostalgia.
Re: This New Analogue Pocket Variant Is Designed To Give You Serious FOMO
Why don't they just make more normal units to meet demand?
I've owned one for a couple years. It's excellent. But I pity those who can't get one, while the company is swanning around like a bunch of demented carnies, making increasingly daft and niche variations instead of just making more normal units.
A spokesperson for Analogue: oh but darling! Have you seen our new version made out of McVitties Biscuits! We've only made five of them! <squirts water from a flower on their shirt>
Absolute clownshoes.
Re: "The More You Take Off, The Stronger You Become" - Gainax's NSFW 'Battle Skin Panic' Gets Translated And Legally Re-Released
I recently played through Twinkle Knights (1995) on the 3DO, and seeing this... I now realise that TK was basically a clone / copy/ rip-off of Battle Skin Panic, albeit with live-action video footage, instead of anime style artwork. How bizarre - they are strikingly similar!
It was alright as a free download I stuck on my 3DO ODE, not sure I'd actually pay money for it though.
There are better eroge out there - notably Night Slave and Knights of Xentar.
Re: CeX Is Revisiting Its 'Retro-Only' Store Concept And Returning To The World Of Imports, According To New Rumour
@Oldretrogamer
I used to sell maybe a hundred or so items a year for like a tenner each. Not a lot - maybe £1000 minus postage. But it was good to clear out the little things that accumulate. So that 30 item limit ****s me completely regardless of the value limit. I just can't sell the little stuff any more.
And you're being terribly naive. "They won't take your money if it's just your personal stuff."
They are asking for your NI number.
This means you are then on their radar. You're being naive if you're thinking: "Oh, I only sold 35 items and it's only about £1500, so they're not interested in me." They use AI to monitor their database of eBay sellers, so you have no idea how being on their radar might bite you in the ass down the line.
That's waking the sleeping bear. Don't ever trust the government with anything.
@Kurokage - be very careful how you handle eBay.
Re: CeX Is Revisiting Its 'Retro-Only' Store Concept And Returning To The World Of Imports, According To New Rumour
@Kurokage
Click My Ebay, Account, Personal Information, scroll down.
It'll show:
National Insurance Number
Please provide this information.
Failure to provide it means eBay will withhold payments / withdrawals until you provide it. The UK government changed the rules so that all moneys made has to be reported to HMRC, so they can take their cut. They're forcing eBay to do it.
I've not sold anything for months.
I bought these items with money that had been taxed prior to my receiving it, and the items themselves had "value added tax" applied when I bought them, so when I sell my own things, my own games, which have already been "double taxed" in effect, the government can go **** itself if it thinks I'm paying a third layer of tax on any money scraped back by selling. They can **** right off.
Re: CeX Is Revisiting Its 'Retro-Only' Store Concept And Returning To The World Of Imports, According To New Rumour
eBay now demands your National Insurance number to sell stuff. So I think lots of people might shift to trading stuff in at ReX.
Re: "Are You Having A Laugh?" - Commodore Is Reviving An Iconic Joystick, But There's An Unfortunate Catch
@Mayhem
It was in a thick padded envelope. So I think it was thick enough to get classed as a package.
Re: The Atari Jaguar Is Set To Get A New 3D, Multi-Directional Shoot 'Em Up & A New Virtua Cop-Style Shooter Next Year
@Oldretrogamer
Did you change your username and delete your profile picture?
Re: The Atari Jaguar Is Set To Get A New 3D, Multi-Directional Shoot 'Em Up & A New Virtua Cop-Style Shooter Next Year
@Slider2711
I was told, in no uncertain terms, that describing the events which led to my views on this, could result in legal action being taken against myself and possibly Hookshot Media.
So for the record: I love Songbird and regard Carl as a delightfully wonderful and upright human being.
Re: "Are You Having A Laugh?" - Commodore Is Reviving An Iconic Joystick, But There's An Unfortunate Catch
The shipping doesn't surprise me.
Walked into a UK post office to send a copy of Retro Gamer and a comic to a friend in Japan. Under 500g.
Cheapest shipping option was £22.
For a mag and comic.
I asked is there nothing cheaper? Nothing the woman insisted. Post Office overhauled all prices in April. This was the CHEAPEST.
The whole world has gone insane with rising costs and it's only going to get worse.
If a flat magazine costs £22 from England to Japan, then a well packaged large joystick could be literally anything. A million dollars. It doesn't matter. We no longer live in a sane world. $89 is what, £60? I could post three magazines for that.
Re: This New Suite Of Tools Aims To Make Developing NES & SNES Games Far "More Intuitive"
That trailer for his as yet unannounced SNES game, Flagrante Delicto: Cowgirl Rides Again, has me stoked. Look at her go!
Re: A New N64 EverDrive Flash Cart Has Been Released With A Dedicated 64DD Core
@mutenroshi
I absolutely AM a preservationist.
I tinkered with the Mario Artist series, and the rest, but my statement was mainly to address Cyxceven and anyone else who already dropped a large sum on an X7 (myself included). If you have an X7 it's not worth dropping €170 on a new cart just for the 64DD, especially given that they can be patched to run on an X7 anyway (most? all? I'm not even sure).
I nearly bought a 64DD years ago, but then looked into what was available. I was left unimpressed.
Yes, historically it's valuable. This was Nintendo attempting to the FDS again albeit for the N64. There were grand plans for it, including designing characters in Mario Artist and then seeing them walk around in games such as Sim City. I was so excited when reading the issue of N64 mag that broke the news. It looked so cool. But in the end it was abandoned before much could be done with it.
I'm glad the games are backed up. But for a general retro enthusiast, I would not recommend spending large sums just to try any of these. A well researched YouTube will have you covered.
I say this as someone who owns a Virtual Boy and other "failed" hardware. My interest, for myself, is always what can I play?
Re: A New N64 EverDrive Flash Cart Has Been Released With A Dedicated 64DD Core
Tempting, but then I look at the available games on Wikipedia and realise my X7 is fine:
Doshin the Giant
Doshin the Giant: Tinkling Toddler Liberation Front! Assemble!
Randnet Disk
Mario Artist: Talent Studio
Mario Artist: Communication Kit
Mario Artist: Polygon Studio
Mario Artist: Paint Studio
SimCity 64
F-Zero X Expansion Kit
Japan Pro Golf Tour 64
@cyxceven - you're fine with the X7.
Four lame art packages, a golf game, Doshin which is on GameCube, a Sim City game, and... I guess the F-Zero stuff is nice if you're a fan?
The 64DD is the most nothingburger imaginable.
Re: "I Don't Understand This Hate Towards Arcade Game Design" - Shinobi: Art Of Vengeance Dev Comments Trigger Fresh Debate
@sdelfin
Excellent points. And not just fun gameplay in a short time, but also immediately. Older games also had manuals, meaning you could pre-load the info needed to play without lengthy mandatory tutorials, which are now the norm since manuals stopped being made.
As a fan of the first Harvest Moon, which allowed you to jump right in, I decided to try one of the latest versions. I bailed during the tutorial because CBA wading through all that nonsense. I'd rather just go back to the old game, and the old design, which let me play immediately and trusted me to figure things.
Modern games treat players like idiots, while also trying to provide the same experience to everyone.
I genuinely hate most modern game design. And the few rare occasions a new game is released that's amazing, the critics don't understand it and hate on it. Case in point: Slitterhead. One of the best games of the last 10 years, and critics all whined about it, many complaining that its design is antiquated. WTF? This game is a straight up 10 / 10.
No, modern reviewers and modern game design do not align with what I regard as good.
Re: Exclusive: "It's Not About Putting An Old Game In A Nice Box For The Sake Of It" - Utopia Is Getting A New Physical Release On SNES
The Hyperkin Mouse came out 2017, so pretty old at this point. I was about to buy one when a local CEX had a cheap Mario Paint with mouse for less, so got that instead. Has no one in the comments here used the Hyperkin? I'm curious as to how it compares.
Re: "I Don't Understand This Hate Towards Arcade Game Design" - Shinobi: Art Of Vengeance Dev Comments Trigger Fresh Debate
@BaronRedWings
It's not some random dev. He's the person who made the game. I heard his comment and concluded I don't like his attitude, which is obviously going to impact the game because the comment was about the game - the same game I now don't want to play because of what he said about his game that he made.
I dunno... It seems intensely logical to me.
It's like if a chef said he pooped in the soup, and I said I don't want the soup now, and then you said "writing off the soup because of something some chef said is childish".
Re: "I Don't Understand This Hate Towards Arcade Game Design" - Shinobi: Art Of Vengeance Dev Comments Trigger Fresh Debate
This was on my list of games to get around to - now I have less than zero interest. I'm writing it off as trash without even playing it based on the dev's own narrow minded admission. He sounds like an absolute doofus.
The sad thing is Sega will see low sales and think: "Huh, I guess everyone just hates the property. No more Shinobi ever!"
They won't add two and two and realise it might be because people don't like where it went.
@ThisIsPete
Astute points. Personally I am infuriated by how a large section of gamers demand "more value", by which they mean padding and excess length. It's ruining the hobby. I use HowLongtoBeat to help me gauge what to play next, by picking low time options. It shows a 60+ hour game? Nope! I'm an adult with adulting to be done, not some carefree teen on their summer holidays. I miss the days of 8~10 hour games. Vanquish was perfect in this regard.
Re: "The Blood Drained From My Face" - 97 Copies Of Never-Before-Seen Super Mario Bros. Variant Found In Wisconsin Retro Store
@Razieluigi
OK, you're right, to be fair, I was being cheeky. My contempt is less with the game and more with the cult surrounding it. I can no longer look at this artefact of my childhood without being irritated by the cult of scammers which now worship it, since their weird behaviour bleeds into everything else and skews history.
It's difficult for me to ignore because these conmen have caused huge negative ripples throughout the retro world.
Re: "The Blood Drained From My Face" - 97 Copies Of Never-Before-Seen Super Mario Bros. Variant Found In Wisconsin Retro Store
I don't understand the obsession with this insufferably dull extremely brown game.
And I don't understand why copies of SMB will sell for millions of dollars at auction, and yet the rare, one of a kind Nintendo PlayStation prototype only sold for $360,000 at auction.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-51628836
Can some please explain to me why SMB can sell for $3 million at auction, a game which was a pack-in title and probably the most produced cart for the NES, while a valuable historical artefact, the Nintendo PlayStation prototype, sells for 10% of that?
Can anyone make this make sense? PLEASE.
This **** is all a big ******* scam.
Re: We're Finally Getting A Naomi Port For Dreamcast, But The Monkey's Paw Curls
@GordonBennet
To be fair, I thought @Babybahamut comment was hilarious (proper laughed aloud). Was secretly hoping multiple people would copy their joke framework and post similar silliness.
Frankly I know very little about plumbing, but I was curious to see if piping raw sewage into the gutter would work and it seems to work just fine.
Re: We're Finally Getting A Naomi Port For Dreamcast, But The Monkey's Paw Curls
@Babybahamut
Frankly I know very little about electricity, but I was curious to see if a cable clipped to an overhead line would work and it seems to work just fine.
Re: The Sega Dreamcast Is Getting A New Resident Evil & D2-Esque Survival Horror Game
@YouGotPlayed
This sounds incredible! I guess we will never know now.
Can you recall any other details, any at all, that might make it easier to search for?
A character's name? A background to a specific level? Anything, even small?
Re: Random: "This Isn't Real, Is It?" - These Annoying Gen AI Adverts For Retro Consoles Are Fooling A Lot Of People
@SuntannedDuck2
You know about the dedicated floors - hoho! I know about them too; I even braved a stroll around one once.
But otherwise no worries. Keep exploring the history of games, and if the opportunity presents you, have a look through an old magazine some time. My personal recommendation: anything by Dave Halverson is good - GameFan, Gamer's Republic, or the American PLAY (not to be confused with the British PlayStation mag also called PLAY).
Have fun!
Re: "We'd Probably Have To Release Them In 4 Or 5 Instalments" - Final Fantasy XIV's Director On Why More Remakes Haven't Materialised
I replayed FF6 a few months back in tandem with a friend. I was on SNES and he was on the Pixel Remaster version. I looked at some screens, and it looked pretty good; it still had the pixelated charm of the original.
Importantly: it was still wonderful to play all these years later. Not everything needs a remake - a remaster that retains the original charm, but with maybe a few small QOL options (to be toggled on or off as desired), and some bugfixes, and maybe some CRT filters, and the best classics will still play great.
Case in point: I still need to play Seiken Densetsu 3. They remade it, but I have zero interest. I still intend to play it on SNES as intended. Some day.
Re: This Mech-Based 3DO Adventure From The Studio Behind Clock Tower Is Now Available In English
Got my 3DO back from the repair shop and playing this now - it is fantastic! Got strong Snatcher vibes at the start. The dungeon crawling is also fast and smooth - though I'm running my 3DO in B-Mode, which lowers the resolution for a performance boost. This is only available on certain Japanese models.
Re: The Sega Dreamcast Is Getting A New Resident Evil & D2-Esque Survival Horror Game
@YouGotPlayed
It wasn't something by Kenta Cho, was it? I played one of his games that had Ikaruga style mechanics. Though that was not side-scrolling:
https://ricedigital.co.uk/doujin-classics-the-works-of-kenta-cho/
Re: The Sega Dreamcast Is Getting A New Resident Evil & D2-Esque Survival Horror Game
@YouGotPlayed
I've been trawling YouTube and Google, and can't find anything remotely close. Though Google has turned to crap in recent years. I', going to try Yandex next, but can you recall any other details to help me find this? I need to know!
Re: The Sega Dreamcast Is Getting A New Resident Evil & D2-Esque Survival Horror Game
@YouGotPlayed
"I genuinely can't say that of most 2D indie games that come out these days from mostly Western devs, where they either look like Flash cartoons, simpler 8-bit 2600/NES-style stuff (but way too fluid in animation and no sprite flickering to "sell" that 8-bit aesthetic IMO), or they've got this odd 2D pixel art style that's super-loaded with modern shaders and lighting so they lose the more classical look."
Absolutely!
Are you reading my mind? Because this is exactly what I've been thinking. For all the praise the indie scene gets, for making games outside of the Triple-A sphere, none of them actually nail the quality level of 90s retro. I think a lot of it is to do with the fact quite a few are using game making utilities. For example there's a game dev utility for the monochrome Game Boy. And I've played several games made with it, and they all have the same "basic" feel to them. These games aren't a genius coder working up to the metal with raw assembly, like Chikyuu Kaihou Gun ZAS on Game Boy, it's someone who casually clicks a few boxes around a screen until they have a game.
90 devs took pride in trying to outdo each other by going against the limitations.
There are exceptions, like this, where they're working on original hardware:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wElgW_1NzxM
But the majority of modern indie games on Steam claiming to be retro, I find insufferably dull and lacking.
I need to find this 2D side-scrolling action doujin game now!
Re: The Sega Dreamcast Is Getting A New Resident Evil & D2-Esque Survival Horror Game
@YouGotPlayed
Glad you mentioned doujin. With commercial / retail games on Japanese computers being re-released officially via things like EGG, and increasingly more fan-translations of them for us via emulation, that scene has been blown wide open for people to discover stuff. But doujin ?
That's sort of like the last / new great frontier.
Poorly documented in English. Thousands of games lost to the either. Many of them seemingly incredible. There are Comiket catalogues from the 1980s, showcasing hundreds of doujin games, many based on pre-existing properties, and we have no idea where they are. The fact companies turned a blind eye to copyright infringement is also interesting - but then when an infringing game was only selling around 300 copies at Comiket, I suppose they didn't care.
Have fun exploring!
Re: The Sega Dreamcast Is Getting A New Resident Evil & D2-Esque Survival Horror Game
@YouGotPlayed
I don't even pay attention anymore because the retro scene is satisfying all my needs.
Are you referring to Sony ending physical, and the Xbox layoffs?
Re: "Truly An Injustice" - Looks Like This Mischief Makers Recomp Is Another Vibe-Coded Disappointment
I fear that slop like this will poison the well and dissuade actually skilled people from attempting it. I'm glad to know someone else is working on this, but what about other games where the sole attempt will be AI slop, buggy, broken, and then forever more it will be untouched by others.
I hate these things because, while some people will say stuff like: "There's nothing stopping someone else from having a go."
We all know the sad truth: once a project limps out onto the internet, unless it's something mainstream and stupidly popular, nobody is going to work on it again. It's bad enough when humans call dibs on a fan-translation project which then dies (CJ Iwakura has sat on Shadowrun doing nothing for years now, and no one else will attempt it because CJ called dibs). But with AI it's worse.
I wish there was some way to stop these vibe coders from poisoning different material. Can't we, I dunno, ban them from the internet or something? They're running rampant with their nonchalant techbro attitudes and zero coding skill, and leaving a wake of destruction behind them.
Re: Agent 64 Is The Perfect Dark & GoldenEye 007 Successor We've Been Waiting For, And It Arrives Next Month
@notreallyhere
WHOA! O_O
Seriously? All these years I've had the wrong impression of it. I still have my save file on an old MC. I'm going to revisit this, today probably, to re-educate myself.
Thank you for correcting me!
I'm wondering why I made this error - if I had to guess, these extra elements were surprise twists? I don't think I even bothered finishing the harder levels, I just saw the same starting objectives and bailed.
Will go through and recheck everything.
Re: "Piracy Did Help The PlayStation Market" - How Bootlegs Allowed PlayStation To Take Over South Africa
@Martin_H
The origin of my surname is a good story. I should write my father's biographjy. Given your appreciation for nuance in telling history, you might enjoy this side tangent.
He was a deep sea fisherman. It's one reason I have a positive view of Communism. From a small forgotten peasant village on a collective farm (PGR if you want to do further reading and look up photos), his two sisters would end up as university professors teaching physics, and he'd become a fisherman, which is what he eagerly wanted. If you had the academic ability and the motivation to use that ability, the State would do everything in its power to elevate you to the vocation you desired. Normally fishing jobs were reserved for the children of fishermen, or people near the coast, but since he was top of his class they couldn't refuse him. He'd be out trawling for months at a time, and he'd earn dollars, which allowed him to shop at certain exclusive stores which accepted only foreign currency (ie: Pewex). Communism was good to my family, who were originally mountain people before moving to the PGR (my dad visited as a child once and hated it; they slept on straw and the milk was warm due to being freshly squeezed that morning).
He jumped ship in 1980 in SA. Well, he had shore leave and just never went back to the ship (he said he felt like an adventure, and SA seemed like paradise). SA granted political asylum to anyone from an East Bloc country. There was a ton of hyperlinks in the first part, but basically the US and SA were close up until things soured in 1985, and earlier the US encouraged SA to combat Communism. Partly this involved fighting a ground war with Angola (our Vietnam), and also it meant offering asylum to anyone from an East Bloc country.
My mother saved newspaper clippings, and my dad has an old photo showing himself and about a hundred other Polish people in SA, standing with the old SA flag and the Polish flag, side by side, in a show of solidarity. SA welcomed them with open arms, gave them new jobs, or training if they needed it, English classes, and helped them assimilate into the community. And not just Polish people, there were communities from all the East Bloc countries.
This is the sort of strange contradiction you don't often read about. On the one hand SA had segregation, which limited the freedom of certain people, but on the other hand it made a great performative show of wanting to promote freedom, by offering a new home to people escaping Communism.
The 1980s were a crazy, chaotic time!
Re: "Piracy Did Help The PlayStation Market" - How Bootlegs Allowed PlayStation To Take Over South Africa
@PinballAficionado
Part 1 had this hyperlink to a video which tracked down most of the K-TV cast and where they are today:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fBEiwJTYAIY
@Martin_H @shanghailoz
Thank you for the detailed reply - this is great, and dovetails nicely with my own memories. As stated, SA was very much an outdoor kind of culture. You'd have braais (bbq), and socialise or play outside, or just go for long drives for fun. Though I recall as crime increased, by the mid-90s parents were wary of letting their kids play unsupervised outside. You had to stay within your gated property, which also came with large guard dogs, and both my parents had guns with permits to carry anywhere.
I'd forgotten about how hardware used to be rented, not bought - as in renting a TV. My mother, in her annoyance at its late arrival, bought a TV and VCR, but we rented the M-NET decoder. It was a weird set-up, in that you paid a monthly subscription, and also had to rent the set-top box, though we later bought it. Great system though, with dual languages for everything, and a mute button for bad language if you knew kids would be watching.
Video rental stores were hugely popular. And the domestic TV (SABC) was not great. I don't recall us ever watching it, because that single M-NET channel was so much better. We had M-NET from launch in 1986, and the VCR before this (I have a couple old tapes with SABC stuff).
In the 90s we also used to get "BOP TV" from Bophuthatswana, which is a whole other topic to read. The signal was terrible, and snowy, since the Bophuthatswana homeland was hundreds of miles from Joburg, but if you held the ariel just right you could get it - and they had American localised Japanese anime for some reason.
Re: "Piracy Did Help The PlayStation Market" - How Bootlegs Allowed PlayStation To Take Over South Africa
@Martin_H
Thanks for the kind words. There's actually two more entries: a spin-off with an interview from someone who participated in the Sonic TV / phone show. And something on bootleg Famicom games, though that's more generalised and global. The Sonic show piece is really interesting - I'm still trying to find archive footage of it.
TV didn't arrive until 1976, and I wasn't born until after that. But there were no TV sets at all before that. It simply wasn't a thing - according to my relatives. My mother described having visited Europe in the 1960s, knowing what TV was, being infuriated SA didn't have it, and then when it did arrive, it arrived in colour (no b&w TV phase), and she immediately invested in one with VCR. Went all in as it arrived. Meaning when I was born some time after, I was privileged to enjoy regular video rentals and lots of stuff recorded from TV - it was a new and exciting technology at the time. Ironically, my dad, from Communist Poland, had TV when he was a small child. Which really shows you how bizarre of a scenario it was. Prior to 1976 in SA the radio was popular, or newspapers for the news. Or the cinema for films - you could watch films, but only at the cinema. So it was extremely popular. My grandparents were avid cinema goers. So I've been told. The lack of TV was, in my opinion, a ridiculous attempt at controlling information.
As for computers, I don't really know. I was born after TV arrived, and offices and schools had computers (my school had DOS or old IBM compatibles, because we had a copy of Castle Adventure), and we had family friends who owned an IBM computer in the late 1980s. Also someone in the previous article posted in the comments about using old-style BBS while in SA. So computing (and early pre-WWW internet) was around - but I don't think in the same way it was in the UK?
Sadly my lack of personal experience means these articles are unfortunately lacking in this particular aspect.
@shanghailoz said previously:
"We had BBS too, as Telkom had a decent call charge - you'd get charged for the single call, not for how much time you spent on the phone in the late 80s/early 90s. Mostly PC gaming, or Famicon clones (NES). Some imported stuff like Amiga, but rarer. I don't remember much 8-bit stuff, but age may have played a thing there."
Can you share anything more regarding computers back in the day?
Re: Agent 64 Is The Perfect Dark & GoldenEye 007 Successor We've Been Waiting For, And It Arrives Next Month
Any word on how the difficulty levels affect mission objectives?
For me the biggest aspect of Goldeneye / Perfect Dark, which no one ever seems to appreciate, replicate, or understand, is that the difficulty levels increased gameplay the higher you went, encouraging you to play more.
The Dam on easy: run to the end
The Dam on hard: Neutralize all alarms, Install covert modem, Intercept data backup, Bungee jump from platform
With GE and PD, you effectively had 3 games in one, because each difficulty radically changed you how approached everything. You'd rinse easy like a tutorial, savour normal, and then you'd be ready for the proper game with all the objectives, on hard. Everything changes as the mission objectives change. Everything.
Does this replicate that?
EDIT:
It would seem my memories of TimeSplitters 2 are not correct - I've removed them. I need to replay it and refresh my memory. But my points about GE/PD stand; those two really knew how to implement different difficulties.
Re: I'm Really Not Sure How I Feel About Sony Killing Physical Media
@ShinobiNeon I had suspected as much! Thank you for the confirmation. This entire scenario is nothing but BS so they can kill second hand sales to force all future game purchases to be new, thus getting all the profit.
Remember when they told us digital games would be cheaper than physical? How long did that last? Now digital games are more expensive that physical. There are numerous examples where a game released both digitally and physically, can be bought new, on disc, for less than the digital.
People can't get angry enough about this whole fiasco.
I hope PlayStation goes bankrupt.
Re: I'm Really Not Sure How I Feel About Sony Killing Physical Media
@ilustrajulio
This post was fantastic. Thank you for sharing it!
This is something which doesn't get mentioned enough. Physical games mean you can take that game, and trade or sell it, to reinvest again.
Sony et al are deluded into thinking that by removing the ability to sell old games (because digital), people are just going to now buy all their games new and still buy the same amount.
I am convinced Sony is lying when it says physical only accounts for 3% of current transactions.
How are they coming up with this figure? Are they including free demos with that? Are they massaging the numbers somehow?
Are we suddenly going to be allowed to sell our digital copies?
Re: I'm Really Not Sure How I Feel About Sony Killing Physical Media
My rage at losing physical media is akin to a thousand burning suns. I will in every instance buy physical when I can, so that I can sell it later if I don't like it (ie: Metaphor Refantazio - imported the JP version, fully in English, I think the game sucks, it's going on eBay when I can be bothered).
But ultimately... I don't care about this. I now own more physical copies of PS3, X360, Switch, and PS4 games, plus retro games, than I could ever play in my life time, even if I live to be 70 and play for 30 hours every week. (Which is a ridiculous suggestion.)
I'm good.
Very, very little in the last 10 years has been even remotely unusual or interesting enough to really care about. Just slightly shinier versions of what I was reviewing in 2006 when the PS3 turned up at the office.
Slitterhead (2024) was the best game I've played in the last 10 years, but the critics all hated it (I was forced to buy digital on PS4, but I plan on getting a PS5 special edition just for my shelf; I will double dip I love it so much!).
From what I can see the future just means more of the same derivative slop as development gets more expensive and everyone wants a safe bet with maximum appeal.
I might miss out on the odd gem, the next Slitterhead that manages to get made, but again... More in backlog than I can play.
I hate this decision, and it's a dark day for collectors, and I feel sorry for the kids who will never get to experience their mother driving them to the store, buying a cool game in nice packaging, and reading the manual on the drive home, but I've also amassed enough to safeguard myself.
I'll just keep buying retro when I want a nice physical item. Heck, I even make my own retro repros these days!
But still. **** Sony.
Re: This Magical Girl-Inspired Sega Mega CD Game Is Finally Available In English, With Some Handy Quality Of Life Fixes
"an adventure game with RPG elements (an overworld, stats, and turn-based battles), which features anime-inspired pixel art, voice acting, and an episodic structure (complete with opening and ending theme songs), similar to many of the anime shows that inspired it."
and...
"Silky Lip was not my first or even my second choice for a Mega CD project"
Did they mention A Rank Thunder anywhere online in connection with their first and second choices? Because it's the exact same sort of game (adventure, RPG, unique combat, anime intro and outro like a TV series), also on Sega Mega CD, except instead of being about cute girls, it's about you waking up in a lab with no memory and fighting mutant monsters reminiscent of Guyver! It's incredible.
I'll play this, but I'm secretly hoping that Supper was thinking of A Rank Thunder as a future project.
Re: Retail Therapy: Trawling South Africa's Retro Gaming Stores
@derf
Thank you! It was a pretty packed 2 weeks. Many of the shopping trips had to be squeezed in at the end of a day's excursion (ie: after visiting Kirstenbosch).
Re: Retail Therapy: Trawling South Africa's Retro Gaming Stores
@Martin_H
A valuable comment, thank you; that's a very common perspective I encountered after moving. One thing I learned having been born there and later emigrating, and I alluded to in the previous article regarding SA villains in films, is global media and especially news, always give a curated perspective based on their viewership. There is almost always more to a story than conveyed, thus I've always tried to read up on the background to anything which catches my eye, and it's worth looking at multiple sources. This isn't so much about SA but all news from the last 25 years.