Sketcz

Unknown bidder? I'm sure that wasn't an inside job at all.

These graded games ruin the hobby. Sellers of loose cartridges now see them, and the alleged value, and suddenly something which cost a fiver a couple years back now sits with a triple figure starting price and zero bids on eBay.

BioTetris. I'm not just saying this to justify the price tag. Or am I? Actually, as part of that group, there's Giga Tetris, which is interesting since it allows combos.

I also have a weird phantom memory of a fan game on PC, from around 2003, using NES sprite rips of Contra and other characters, battling Tetris pieces? Maybe. Googling yields nothing, so I'm no longer sure anymore.

EDIT:
This is not what I was thinking of, but here is a gameplay mash up of Mario and Tetris. have you played Tuper Tario Tros.?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CIFhxCMPKgg

Thanks for the explanations all.

I've just seen Hook on the SNES has a FastROM patch. I'm going to try that one first. It's pretend sequel Skyblazer ran fast, and is a favourite, so I went to try Hook, but that game is painfully slow compared to Skyblazer - like being stuck in treacle. I'm wondering if this improves it at all.

When people say they like The Duke, I always assumed they were being ironic. Like when you say you like Tommy Wiseau's The Room. No one really "likes" it, but it's kinda funny for everyone to pretend. You know, like you're momentarily living in opposite land.

Before I break out my flashcart and laboriously update the folders... Can anyone comment on how much of a difference these actually make? Because controls always seemed fine to me...

@Siambretta Sorry, it was not @gingerbeardman who backed this, it was Siambretta. I tagged the wrong poster. My apologies.

It was the most uncomfortable interview of my career.

Anyway, had a look at the KS page, and a Brandon E posted a comment with a link here, stating that if they had read this interview back then they would not have backed it.

Just to reiterate, the Project Phoenix Kickstarter ran from 12 August until 11 September, and my interview with Yura was on 13th November. Roughly 2 months after the campaign ended.

So he already had all of the backer's money by the time I sat down to chat with him. And the project seemed quite buoyant for at least a year afterwards.

I am deeply sorry for anyone who backed - but I could not have saved you. And more significantly, at that time, it was still possible that with the assistance of the rest of the team, it may have somehow reached fruition.

I'm not a backer, but @gingerbeardman is - I'm not sure how the comments page on the KS is going to go down, but if it gets heated, please copy and paste my statement there?

@-wc- Given that I had no idea producers did that for music, YES! It is fascinating. I sort of just assumed that radio and TV broadcast whatever was the best or highest quality gold standard recordings they had. Though thinking about it, I suppose it makes sense to adjust media based on the distribution method.

I say this as someone who mostly listens to music via YouTube and a mono speaker, so I suspect the higher quality versions are lost on me, lol

@Hexapus Earlier in the article I mentioned "the scrolling is jerky and the colour dithering an eyesore on modern LCD monitors" - in fairness to the game, I also played it on an old CRT monitor, on my legacy computer for DOS stuff, and a CRT monitor at the native resolution does look OK (much like 16-bit consoles on CRT as opposed to LCD). The dithered pixels and scanlines produce a better look. So I agree with you, the EGA graphics ARE actually nice, but only if you're rocking old hardware - emulating on a modern HD LCD screen it's going to look ugly. I figure only a few people are going to have an old PC to run it.

Here's a fun video on CGA which kinda explains the theory (yeah, I know it's CGA not EGA, but same idea):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=niKblgZupOc

As for clunky, I just prefer the smooth scrolling on the later console ports and PC sequels.

EDIT: As an aside, Towers II: Stargazer on DOS has an even more noticeable problem with colours. On LCD screens everything is tinged green, but run it on a CRT monitor and there's a subtle blending of colours so it looks very nice. Old computer games suffer from the same problem as old console games, in that newer screens (higher res, LCD, etc.) harm the original graphics output. I couldn't find any options for smoothing or blending in D-Fend / DOSbox. Though I didn't look especially hard given I had the CRT monitor.

I was at this! I think I was like #7 in the queue. See the guy with brown hair and glasses, just peaking through at the bottom right of one of the photos - that's me! We slept on the street that night, in the cold, having laid out cardboard boxes. A random Dutch woman bought us all burgers and coffee in the middle of the night. The Red Cross handed out space blankets. When the nightclubs emptied in the small hours we watched a guy get kicked in the head. The whole night was pretty crazy, trying to keep warm from the light of our GBAs. All in all, good times, would be homeless again for the night, 9/10.

Crystal Warriors - turn-based strategy RPG which is basically a precursor to Shining Force, but with Pokemon mechanics (defeat a monster and you can send it into future battles for you).

@KingMike It probably doesn't come across in the photo and caption, but he was embarrassed not about the quality of the games (his portfolio is mostly great), rather he expressed embarrassment - and surprise! - that anyone remembered or cared about these old games, or would want to interview him. The majority of the devs I spoke with did not realise anyone outside of Japan even liked their games, and they had kind of forgotten about them - not all, but most I would say. Many of them also ended up being promoted into managerial roles, so it probably felt a bit weird discussing stuff from their earliest days, 20+ years ago.

This might be a contrarian view, but seldom has any game in the history of videogames disappointed me as much as Fusion.

Super Metroid for the longest period was my favourite game of all time. I loved the non-linearity and ability to sequence break and explore.

Fusion railroaded you with that stupid computer, and didn't allow backtracking. I entered a new area and wasn't allowed to go back because it locked the door. So I had to reset my game, start again, and fully explore that earlier area before moving onwards.

It induced paranoia about getting ahead, because I kept thinking: that damn computer is going to lock the door behind me again.

I finished it once, hated it, and never went back.

I keep hoping ROM hackers will make a patch that disables the computer, so I can just play the game. Super Metroid had precisely zero cut-scenes. New abilities (like Sparkshine and Wall Jump) were taught by watching indigenous creatures doing them.

Not gonna lie, I have a soft spot for Super Hydlide, and not just because I had lunch with its creator. It has that weird sort of old fashioned jank I find intriguing in games. Your money weighing you down is my favourite bit! Then again I also loved needing to shave in Deadly Premonition, so YMMV.

Now everyone will know of JAD THE TAFF!

Videogaming's first Welshman?

Also, is "taff" considered offensive?

I can think of more than one game which was recalled or modified suddenly through patches to correct or remove potentially offensive material, after someone complained.

There's probably a feature in this: the history of games recalled or modified due to causing or potentially causing offence.

There's been several interesting game competitions over the years.

There was that British kid who got to visit Nintendo Japan, who was interviewed online about it a few years back (I forget his name).

Plus that big Alien 3 compo, where you could win every version of Alien 3, plus an actual tank top by Ripley (the guy who won it posted on the Insert Credit forums many years back).

Mysteries like this are pretty cool to uncover.

I have, sadly, never won any of the game competitions I've entered.

Sounds like a classic case of pareidolia to me.

@bippity_bop Novelisations of films are a secret fascination of mine. They're usually based on very early script drafts and, I've found, contain scenes later cut from the movie. I've not read Last Starfighter, but the film was scripted by Jonathan Betuel, and I read the novel of his next film, My Science Project, which contained several scenes cut from the movie. I know they were filmed because the credits contain still out-takes, and some of the dialogue in the film references earlier scenes which never made it - so it wasn't just artistic license on the part of the author.

In a way, it's like peeking into an archive.

If you ever did watch the film, I wonder what differences you would find?

I saw the trailer. It did not excite me. But I genuinely, without irony, loved the 1993 movie. I actually only saw it last year, for the first time.

I avoided it back in the day due to bad reviews, and only in 2021 did I watch it. And you know what? I loved it. Everyone complains the film is confusing, when actually it's very coherent. The plot is easy to follow and makes sense. Just watch Rick & Morty to get a handle on multiple universes.

The brotherly love between the bros feels authentic - maybe the result of the actors bonding over how difficult the shoot was?

Also the female characters all have agency to them. Princess Daisy is the heroine of the film; the villainess Lena, played by Fiona Shaw, is also an agent of change.

The visual effects are great, with minimal CG and lots of practical, and again - the story made sense.

On a deeper level it's a criticism of populism and fascist governments, depicting a downtrodden and oppressed society. The film is more relevant today than ever before.

Finally, I love seeing cross-media adaptations of my favourite source material, reimagined through entirely different eyes. I would like to see more of my favourite things reimagined differently (the Virtua Fighter AI characters is a good example).

I regret listening to the critics back in the day - the 1993 movie is the perfect game to movie adaptation.

I had a Famicom as a kid, and my brother and I would spend hours on this, since it was one of the few simultaneous two player games we owned. One of us would play guard duty, shooting oncoming enemies, while the other player (usually my brother) would run to grab the items that cleared a level.

I must admit I have a strong fondness for Ikki. There weren't many levels, but each was full of weirdness. A random single instance power-up, strange collectibles which seemingly did nothing, mazes you could get stuck in, a bonus level that was impossible, just really baffling "secrets" you'd stumble upon.

And it's live!

https://www.romhacking.net/translations/6674/

Seriously guys. If you like Souls games, you gotta try this.

The shortlist for this feature was twice as long before we trimmed to a sensible length - please keep the recommendations coming! There's a lot to discover on the X68000 and it's through word of mouth that everyone will know which gems to home in on.

As for save states, XM6 Pro is a good emulator and easy to set up:
https://mijet.eludevisibility.org/

No roms there, just the legally available emulator.

I was literally reaching for my Krikzz SNES flashcart as I was reaching this and then... It's does not work on original hardware.

The side-scrolling Zelda games were remade not long ago, with improved framerate, smoother controls, better jumping mechanics, but the same excellent graphics, music, and level layout. The author released them for free on PC. A quick Google should yield results.

I'm not kidding - they really are fun games. The speedrun community was having a blast going through them.

Does the greatest PC game ever made, Brigand: Oaxaca, work on it?