sdelfin

It's amazing what the mind can do, but it can sometimes work against us. Sheer force of will can lead to good results, but it can also override good sense and lead to injury. In this case, ignorance also played a part because, frankly, it wasn't especially well known that there was such a risk from drinking too much water. Of course, those who organized the contest should have done their due diligence, and then should have heeded the warning as it came in. What a sad situation for that young woman and her family.

That's a cool little novelty for what is one of my favorite game concepts ever. I remember when the game was new and just being wowed at the idea and the presentation in a time when you didn't see that kind of creativity very often and the trendy thing to do was to pad the length of games.

On a separate note, today's batch of stories and features on the site was probably my favorite combination as I had a strong interest in nearly everything that went up today, from this, to the Langrisser piece, the lag article, and the Grimace game to name a few. What a great day here on Time Extension.

A lot of the complaining about lag is terribly exaggerated. I've seen some people say that some games are unplayable on setups that are known to work very well. However, there are lots of variables with different setups. I think that's where a lot of misconceptions come from. I only have a problem with hyperbolic claims people make. I am always in favor of further lag reduction like with something like this. I do appreciate the testing done here as that list of controllers with their lag results is very handy to have available. It also shows that many controllers are rather good, though some are surprisingly bad, even wired. That list is definitely a good reference when looking for new controllers. Looks like I've chosen pretty well so far.

The line of USB PD cables is also a good idea. I know some such cables already exist, but more options for more systems is nice.

So nice to read this. I was drawn to Langrisser 4 from the art and managed to play a good bit of it on my Saturn with a partial translation that was available at the time which I printed out. I really enjoyed the way it played. It was my introduction to strategy games. While I'm not a huge fan of the genre as a whole, I do still look at the likes of Langrisser and Shining Force fondly. Fire Emblem came later to the GBA and I also liked what they did with those. I also managed to find Warsong in the late '90s which I enjoyed on my Nomad. I also remember when the Der Langrisser translation was in its early days and it sounded so cool. I have always really liked the series despite the language barrier making it difficult to enjoy much of it.

The visual style is very nice. Gameplay looks interesting. I want to offer what I hope is constructive criticism. I'm very sensitive to screen shake and I know plenty of others are. I prefer to be able to completely turn off screen shake, and many games now offer that as an option as it has been an issue for many. The screen shake looks to be excessive in this one. Without an option for that, I will not even be able to consider playing this. I might check the demo to see if such an option already exists.

Exact's games seem to be among the best on the system. Nice to see those games come back around. I would hope such games will see release on modern digital platforms eventually. But good to see some kind of release for those. I also wouldn't mind trying out Phalanx and Genocide on the X68000. I don't intend to get the system though.

Sega was a mess in terms of their operation for years. Their different regional divisions were notorious for not really getting along, and being antagonistic in some cases. From SoJ's perspective, I can understand why they might be particularly distrustful of SoA and Moore. Moore was hired by bernie stolar, who sowed that additional distrust. He made a huge PR blunder by undercutting the Saturn in 1997. Based on reporting and statements at the time, I think he did that as a ploy suspecting SoJ had next-gen hardware ready to go(they didn't), or to force them to fast track it. Saturn was already not a market success, but what stolar did caused further brand damage, to tie it into Moore's story. And then stolar went rogue and priced the Dreamcast $50 lower than what SoJ determined it should be(and still $50 lower than the PS1 launch price). This was at a time when Sega couldn't afford those extra losses for too long. I can only speculate, but I think the Dreamcast launch would have been a success with the system priced at $250. stolar was sacked pretty abruptly from that, which is how Moore got the spot.

A lot of Croc coverage this week. Perhaps 2023 is the year of Croc. I got the game for Saturn way back in 1997. Sad to say, I hated the camera so much. However, I decided to give the PS1 version a try a few years back after finding out it was considered better than the Saturn version, particularly with the camera being just a bit further back. That made a real difference and I had a really good time with it.

I didn't remember that this was on PS1. I picked it up for the Saturn back in the day on a whim. I already knew it got mixed reviews, but I thought it looked good. As I recall, the animated cutscenes taken from the film were pretty good for the Saturn. PS1 tended to have better video quality, though. And I enjoyed it. Cool to see this getting translated this way. As I said, the reviews are mixed, so it's not going to impress some people who might be interested.

I'm going to get the silly guesses out of the way first. If it's Konami, it could be the long-awaited sequel to Double Dribble. They can call it Triple Dribble. And since they said "massive", perhaps they're working on Super Mario Bros. 3 Part II.

Okay, now to be more serious. Castlevania is an obvious one, and is of course the major focus of this piece. It seems to fit well with the Dead Cells style. Within Konami's catalog, there's also Contra. A lot of games were massive in their time or on their specific platform, so it's tough to say. One series that was massive for a lot of Sega players would be Shinobi, and Sega is willing to let outside studios update old IPs, so it's realistic from that perspective. Golden Axe is another game that some people seem to want to see revived and beat-em-ups have been getting some love in recent years. I'm sure there are plenty of other good ideas, but Konami and Sega seem more likely than other companies to reach out like that rather than doing it internally.

Interesting to read about this. I got Croc when it was new for the Saturn and I ended up not liking it after a little bit. The camera was always a struggle. Back in 2019 I wanted to try the game again, partly because I wanted to play a 3D game that didn't use an analog controller. That time I played the PS1 version. To get right to the point, I liked it and had a lot of fun with it. I didn't mind the tank controls as they were what I was looking for. The PS1 version didn't have the same major camera issues as the Saturn version as the PS1 game is a bit more zoomed out making it easier to see what's going on. There are still some camera issues, but so did every 3D game at the time. I found Mario 64's camera super annoying, for example. But revisiting Croc was a pleasant surprise for me and I'm glad I did that.

There could be a number of reasons that the Croc character didn't endure beyond the sequel. I wonder if one of them is that the character's name is quite generic for the sort of character it is.

@Hexapus that's a fair criticism, though that's probably how things are with puppets. I don't mind them hamming it up a bit for something like that. I did look into it, and I see those referred to as animatronic puppets. You may be right in the sense that they may be operated by a person inside, but what is visible seems to be a puppet of some sort. Still, it seems like a crazy amount of production for such a game.

I never got into Wing Commander, so I didn't really know what to expect there. It's a fairly impressive production considering it's a video game, and not one that was a big mainstream smash hit. There are several well-known actors involved and puppets!!! And not just puppets, but good puppets. It seems like a lot of work went into that game.

I instantly recognized this from the included image. I had one of these but did not remember what it was called. In some ways, it's even harder digitally. I had a slip of my trackpad while doing obstacle two and lost the ball. I wouldn't mind some save states or similar to practice without having to do the early obstacles over and over. Pro tip: close obstacle three before starting.

@-wc- I like your answer, "no". At least you may have some reference if you know whether your SNES was made before 1995. I got mine in 1994. It's worth mentioning, at least in my experience, that the SNES had pretty good picture quality regardless of the revisions and improvements. Even the blurry ones looked pretty good on a CRT. As much as I love the Mega Drive/Genesis, one of the worst things about that system was inconsistent picture quality and visual noise. There are differences in the revisions and even within the same revisions depending on the video encoder chip. The SNES was way more consistent in that regard and generally looked better over RF or composite.

I can understand why they would consider it. Since it came out in 1998, the 3D rendered look was likely still somewhat trendy when they started development on the game. The rendered look was fine for things like Donkey Kong Country, but many of the copycats couldn't get it to look right. I remember Killer Instinct did not look appealing to me when it came out. It reminds me of the trend of digitized human characters after Mortal Kombat. Mortal Kombat did it well, but so many of games that used the same technique didn't do it nearly as well. I think it's because of the level of animation required to make it look good. Same thing happened for the Street Fighter 2 HD update. In the end, I think it worked out perfectly. They still had their visual gimmick, which was higher resolution 2D than what Capcom and SNK offered, with very stylish 2D art. It still didn't require the same level of animation that I mentioned to look good and the whole look ended up being timeless.

Wow! First blast processing, and now everlasting freshness.

@-wc- yeah, it was always weird how people often default to extreme positions. If the Saturn is better at 2D, then the PS1 has to be bad at it. It's silly. PS1 could do some good 2D, especially good looking ports of arcade fighters and original stuff designed for it like SotN, which is a fantastic game. But as you point out, the big restriction was memory, especially for the CD-based systems. And memory was expensive back in the day. So it was quite an advantage for Sega to have some expandability. I suspect that the PS1 could have managed some respectable versions of tag fighters like X-Men vs. Street Fighter if it also had RAM expansions. I've often wondered what that would have been like. Those watered-down Capcom ports of their tag fighters didn't show the system in a good light. But for traditional one-on-one fighters like Street Fighter Alpha or Darkstalkers, the PS1 seemed to be able to do pretty well.

@-wc- There are quite a few examples. Fire Pro Wrestling(PS1 had added features as it came later, but was downgraded in performance), Shienryu(Sat)/Gekoioh(PS1), Wolf Fang, Asuka 120%, and some others. Those are the ones I can remember or find right now. There are likely many more examples, but I'd have to refer to lists. I'm leaving out RAM cart games to keep it fair. I'm also not mentioning Capcom since you already mentioned Street Fighter. Typically, when there was a difference, it wasn't huge because the PS1 could do 2D well, and the differences came down to load times and performance.

On the flip side, PS1 could more easily pull off transparency effects and such, like in SotN which definitely was not optimized for the Saturn port. And I recall that DonPachi and In the Hunt also turned out better on the PS1.

@KingMike I think in this case, it mostly comes down to the conversion process and the fact the optimisation that was mentioned was likely not done beyond getting it running. It reminds me of the Bomberman games. Bomberman '94 got a port to the Genesis/Mega Drive as Mega Bomberman and it had slowdown. There's no question that the system runs much more complex games than that, so it's definitely an optimisation thing there, which is why I think that is the case here. It also reminds me of the PS1 vs. Saturn for 2D. There's no question the Saturn is better at 2D games(PS1 could do very well, though), but some 2D games ended up better on the PS1.

Sega Lord does good work and he said he plans a follow up soon with more games which I look forward to. What I'm most interested in are exclusives like Aquales and other games developed by Exact, and stuff like Mad Stalker which is not easily available elsewhere(I did buy the Mega Drive version in 2020....which was never released back in the day) and where the X68000 version is arguably the best, though all the ports of that game seem very good.

Speaking of Mad Stalker, the one version I have not played thoroughly is for the FM Towns, and I would love to see a modern mini version of that computer as well, even though most of its best games are also available elsewhere.

I never played any Rolling Thunder games until around 2015. They just passed me by and I only rarely heard about them. I've seen "best games" lists for the Genesis leave them off for vastly inferior games. Playing Rolling Thunder 2 on the Genesis was such a genuine surprise as the game was far better than I expected. I prefer the Genesis version to the arcade for changes made to the stage design, but the arcade version is good too. I'm not a game collector, but I did love this one so much that I did have to pick up a copy.

As I recall from the last time I played the whole lot of these, Harmony of Dissonance was generally the easiest in terms of gameplay and challenge while it seemed easier to get lost. I remember Aria changed some things for the better and I think it was a bit more challenging than Harmony with a more interesting castle design. I think Aria is compared to SOTN because it's just way more polished overall than Circle of the Moon and Harmony of Dissonance, with better visuals and animation, and reasonable music, which was a step down in Harmony as it used the built-in Game Boy sound chip for the music. I thought Aria was easily the best of the GBA games and holds up well compared to the generally excellent DS games. I thought the touch gimmicks got in the way for Dawn of Sorrow, but after that things got better.

I remember renting this one. I didn't hate it. I have since gone back to it and was enjoying myself until one of the flying parts which seemed overly difficult. There were other parts of the game that seemed to have some balance issues. I had the reworked Game Gear port/adaptation and I enjoyed that one quite a bit back in the day. And I have given the Master System version a go. That was ported by the dreaded Tiertex, but, amazingly, it turned out to be pretty good. I guess Tiertex was better at porting than planning. As I recall, the Master System version had some slowdown, but it played well and had a much better difficulty curve, at least from my perspective.

All that time spent by Russian kids trying to get a video that would never play on that screen could have been put to better use, like trying to figure out how to play as Shen Long in Street Fighter 2.

"We're gonna need another Timmy!"

I was not aware of this and it is surprising the company was all in on it. I assume the kid was already dead anyway if he's hanging out on the moon, which is spooky in the first place.

I love the conclusion with the model gift. It was another enjoyable feature to read. The Assault Suits games have a fascinating history. NCS/Masaya may not have had a huge reach outside of Japan, but they made some quality titles, so it's not surprising that they have fans outside of Japan. Though I can imagine that being surreal to the developers here. Cybernator is well made and fun to control, and there was little that was like it on the system at the time. My main complaint, and maybe this is the same issue for the developer from Metal Warriors, which is also good, is the narrative intrudes a bit too much into gameplay for me, which is a matter of taste. I can see why the developers of Metal Warriors would want to emulate the feel of Valken as that is so well done.

Nice to see a proper 2D game on N64. Not enough of those. I'll be interested to hear if they've made any changes to these new versions, especially within the options. I know they were planning some updates to the PC version including options for screen shake and flashing. It would be nice if such options were kept in the newer console versions.

An old friend picked up a couple of these but he can't stand tinkering so he let me have one for a while to sort out for him and I finally started checking into it this week. I just downloaded Batocera a couple of days ago and just need to find a spare SD card. But my goal is to get it working on a typical Linux installation as I'd prefer that over something like Batocera. Getting it to work that way is a bit tricky, which even the documentation admits. At least I got the buttons to be recognized. I'll need to find some more time this weekend. I will try Batocera just to see how it's all supposed to work. The actual light gun seems really nice though.

@Zenszulu as the article mentions Sega licensing some games, I assume Sega would not have been the ones actually working on them. That's much like how Capcom's were mostly licensed to Sega for the Genesis with Sega doing the actual development. Same situation with the PC Engine and NEC Avenue. In fact, several Sega games were ported to the PC Engine that way.

I have played a little bit of Image Fight 2. Back in 2014 I think, I bought a bunch of PC Engine HuCards and among them I got Image Fight with its case. I didn't really know much about it, but I took a chance and I ended up liking it a lot. I did manage to get through the game twice, once with a trip through the dreaded penalty zone. It was very difficult, but never felt R-Type hard for me.

Another fascinating story. I like hearing about the early days when people were basically inventing genres or concepts and able to make games on their own or in small groups. Plus, it's fun to hear how they dealt with limitations.

@Vacuumator I still have that Game Boy keychain clock which I always thought was pretty nicely done for what it was. I didn't get it from this, though, as I didn't have access to the magazine.

The final line in the piece, whether intended or not, is a nice bit of humor. No, 64MB probably wouldn't cut it these days. Very interesting to read about it. I don't remember ever hearing about this back in the day and I did follow news sites, though I was more focused on Saturn until releases dried up. But I was fairly well informed on PS1 and N64, so it's odd that I never heard of this. It does potentially explain a lot. There was a definite leap in quality and scope of 3D games from the early days of the system compared to later on when you saw more 3D platformers to compete with the likes of Mario 64. Credit to Sony for offering such support for PS1 development. It was a big factor in their success that generation.

"Do you have this one in your collection?" Wait! I do have this one, and because of those wonderful NGP game boxes, it's quite complete. I was actually a day-one adopter of the NGP platform as I pre-ordered the original monochrome system. A friend of mine and I ran a news and review site for the system for a few years. He even got to go to E3 as a journalist. Good times. Great little system.

Random indeed. It's been ages since I've seen an episode of Frasier, but they were renowned for their fighting prowess. Or maybe not. It's a funny concept for sure, plus the pixel art is nice. It makes me wonder how other old sitcoms could be adapted into video games. Cheers came to mind, and as it is largely in one main place it seems like that might be best suited to a single-screen puzzle game. Of course, Perfect Strangers would be a run-and-gun game(not really).

Fascinating to hear of this. I can't say I'd heard of this game or company before. There's no question that R-Type was a big deal, but I wonder if a clone really stood a chance in 1991, as so much progress had been made in the genre by then. Plus, shooters had a run of popularity and there was definite oversaturation at that point.

Despite an attempt to provide an answer or two, I am left with even more questions than before. Funny how that happens.

@Grail_Quest Glad I could help. Ukyo was my favorite character in Samurai Shodown so it was good for me to learn it as well. And just to be thorough, it looks like the game has six different starting characters which should lead to some story differences between each, so there's some replayability there.

I love old Sega. The thought of a twisted Sega makes me think of a world where they fully backed the 32x, then eventually released another add-on to go into the 32x slot, and so on until the end result is a tower of power 11 feet high and with a ton of power bricks.

@Grail_Quest while I don't know a lot about this game, footage I've seen show that Ukyo is in the game and playable.

I always appreciated the demake concept and still do. It was back in the days of the Game Boy and Neo Geo Pocket when I first developed that appreciation. In fact, Donkey Kong Land was one of the first real demakes, in a sense, I was interested in. And I was interested in Rainbow Six and Max Payne on GBA because they were demakes. I was recently reminded of the existence of Daikatana on GBC and that it was apparently good just recently, like a week or two ago, so the timing of this feature was good as I wanted to learn more about it. It sounds like they did some smart planning for the game.

The Game Boy library can be a bit tricky to wade through, but there are quality games that aren't Mario or Zelda. A year ago, I got to play Bionic Commando and that was really good and different enough from the NES game for both to be worth playing. Frankly, I preferred the GB version. There's also the game that grabbed my attention before I ever got a Game Boy, Gargoyle's Quest which I still think is rather good. Final Fantasy Adventure is another one I had a great time with.

This is a cool board to add to the MiSTer library as it brings some very good games. In the Hunt is so interesting and unique. I'm most familiar with Ninja Baseball Batman and Undercover Cops because I'm a beat-eum-up guy. I didn't love Undercover Cops at first because it was a bit overwhelming at first. Upon revisiting it, and changing the difficulty to the easiest setting which is still plenty tough, it felt just right and became a lot more fun. I've had that experience with some other games as well. But as for this board, Undercover Cops and Ninja Baseball Batman are both great examples of beat-em-ups and I recommend them.

I've always found the look and concept of this game intriguing. I know there have been efforts to translate this before. I believe the game was either fully translated, or largely, into French and maybe Spanish which may be helpful, though actually changing the text in game is probably quite the undertaking as well separate from actually having a translation. But good to hear of this.

I randomly stumbled upon these FastROM hacks a couple of days ago while looking for something else(improvements for the first Mega Man Zero). I saw on romhacking main page that Natsume's Ninja Warriors had a featured hack and had to check because that's a top-five game on the SNES for me. Absolutely love that game. I saw that it was a FastROM hack and that a whole bunch of games have been and are in the process of being converted. I'm quite excited to try these. Ninja Warriors doesn't really NEED it as it never had bad slowdown, but just the idea of it running even better sounds wonderful. One game in which I always wanted to see slowdown reduced is Pocky & Rocky, also by Natsume and it's also there. Might actually make the game harder, but whatever. Wild Guns also has a patch.

Every so often, I look around to see if any more FastROM and other speed patches have come along. Discovering these this week was a wonderful surprise. This is great!

@Sketcz best thing to do is try for yourself. I think it's worth knowing. It's possible that some games drop checking input during heavy slowdown. I recall that happening on Super Valis 4, which is not the best specimen, but I still kind of like it. On other games, inputs might not be dropped, but the unresponsive feel might be a problem.

I can tell you that FastROM made a huge difference to me for Super Ghouls & Ghosts, which is the first FastROM conversion I learned about some time ago. I absolutely hated the game specifically because of the slowdown. For others, the game was playable, but not for me. With the performance improvement, I started enjoying the game a lot more right away which persisted throughout the game. It was vastly improved and felt much more responsive in terms of control. These patches won't speed up a game that is designed to play slowly, which may apply to Hook, but games that suffer speed drops will see big improvement.

CPS2 is one of the better arcade platforms in terms of its library. Some would say the best, and that's understandable. That will definitely be a great addition to those who use the Analogue Pocket. I've been known to say that if every new 2D video game looked like it was meant to run on CPS2 or Neo Geo, I would be pretty happy.

@stevep On these, you typically can scale the image up to fill the screen, but there is usually an option to keep the actual pixel resolution as well, which looks to be the case in that particular image with Donkey Kong Land on the Game Boy.

Just a note that there's a typo on the screen resolution on the listed specs. As for the unit, it looks pretty good. So nice to see older big cores, A73, A75, etc make their way to mid and lower end chips in recent times.

I remember the cartoon and toys from back in the day, and frankly found them unappealing then, so I have no attachment whatsoever to the property. However, I really like what I'm seeing here. I love good beat-em-ups and this seems like a good fit. The presentation looks delightful and of a high quality. I'll need to see and learn a bit more, but I will definitely be keeping up with this one.

A couple of things I'm looking for are: the ability to turn off screen shake if the game uses it(the trailer seemed fine), what the music is like and whether it can be changed out(for example, Shredder's revenge has vocal tracks which I don't like, but the music can easily be changed on the Steam version so that's nice). Also, good retro/scanline filters would be good. I vastly prefer the look(once I saw the benefit, I could no longer unsee it) for 2D pixel games. To reference Shredder's Revenge again, they finally added such a filter in their December update and I was happy with it.