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@metaphysician This makes sense, in that you already have the engine built, the R&D out of the way, and the whole game design concept established. But I would argue that you can only cut the budget so much without sacrificing quality, and some games were pretty blatant offenders here- see the New Super Mario Bros. series, for an extreme example.

One question that could be asked about a sequel is whether it really tries to be bigger, better, and more polished than the original, or whether it simply offers more of the same.

I'm not even sure this whole sequel complaint is a valid or fair generalization to make about Japanese games in the new millennium, but I do think I get where he's coming from, as a concept.

@retrogamer1 @Sindayl Yes, as this one supports high framerates!
The Xbox 360 version only runs at 30fps, even on Series X.

The big improvement in the 360 version was that you don't lose all of your notes when you die or exit the stage. This was brought over to Recompiled as well, but Recompiled lets you revert back to the original N64 behaviour if you prefer.

The 360 version also had new HD UI graphics, but it looks like a mod for Recompiled brings those over as well, making this the definitive edition.

For the Shredder battle, make sure to switch to the correct turtle before approaching the doorway- once you're in the battle, you can't switch! (EDIT: Possibly not true, depending on the version? See the last paragraph.)

As long as you're using either A. someone with lots of projectiles stored up, or B. Donatello, then you can easily take Shredder out at a distance without putting yourself in danger.

EDIT: I distinctly remember being locked out of being able to switch turtles (and this wasn't that long ago) during the Shredder battle, but that old video tape shows them switching mid-battle. If there are revision-related shenanigans involved here, I'd be curious to hear about them!

@JohnnyMind Hey, if using save states is what makes these challenges actually reasonably achievable and fun, then why not? It's technically cheating, but as long as you're doing it for fun, and not so you can boast about your "gamer cred" or whatever (who even does that?), then I don't see an issue.

States can also be a great way to practice- that's how I conquered the Technodrome myself, in fact: practice each segment over and over, without having to worry about losing an hour of progress, then switch over to the real NES in my case (or just choose not to use states), and do the whole thing legitimately in one go.

@101Force There are at least three of these in existence already, including Nintendo 64-capable ROM hacks and a much older editor from long before the decomp was done! Not sure if any of them are based on the decomp itself, though.

@Sketcz Carrington Villa comes to mind as causing frustration, in that a bunch of hackers would appear out of thin air at a certain point, and you'd get a limited amount of time to track them down. I don't think their computers were even visible outside of that event (or if they were, there was a large number of workstations that the game would pick from at random), so there was no option to explore in advance or on a lower difficulty.

You make a good point, though: I actually bothered to finish both Goldeneye and the remaster of PD on their highest difficulty, whereas I didn't do that with any in the TS series, so that speaks for itself. (Though there are other factors involved!)

It's true that there aren't enough Goldeneye-likes out there. Have you seen Agent 64 on Steam, though? It's not out yet, but it's obvious where it gets its inspiration! I also suspect that there are a lot of games that I missed during that era that might scratch that itch somewhat, like No One Lives Forever, Exhumed (as you mentioned), Hitman, or maybe even Rainbow Six.
I did play Dishonored and System Shock 2- they're both very different from Goldeneye, but again, they did partially scratch that itch and hit some of what I was looking for in a "thinking man's FPS", as you said.
Hopefully, you can also find something in the massive catalogue of existing games, or maybe more indie devs will step up to address the industry's Goldeneyelessness problem!

PS: Did you know that the North American release of Body Harvest lets you finish the whole story on Easy ("Zero", I think they call it)? It came as a relief to me, but you have my sympathy for playing on the PAL version. That game was no pushover, even on the easier setting!

@SlangWon Somehow, this guy is the same age as Sean Connery when he first played Bond- yet he seems so much younger somehow, even just looking at a single picture of him.

This is part of a wider phenomenon that has been talked about before, and that has several different components, but it all still seems strange to me.

Anyway, I'll wait to see how this game turns out, but I strongly suspect it's not aimed at old-timers.

@Sketcz Got to agree that nostalgia has nothing to do with it, speaking as a relative latecomer to Rare's FPSes!
GE and PD just have smart game design with enough open-endedness that you have to figure out how to tackle the challenges, and unfortunately, modern game design standards don't tend to trust players' intelligence very much, if at all. I don't remember Call of Duty: 007 Edition being particularly obnoxious in its tutorials (I've seen much worse!), but it is a less interesting gameplay experience that didn't hold my interest as long as the actual Goldeneye did!

Counterpoint about TimeSplitters, though: if you play on Easy, you're more or less getting the full experience, so 1. less mechanically-skilled players aren't being shortchanged, and 2. you can practice on lower levels to learn where everything is, before going and trying it on the highest difficulty.
I've always felt conflicted about the GE/PD approach: the changes on each difficulty level keep things fresh and surprising (especially in PD!), but I sometimes found it frustrating when I was trying to figure out where something was, and there was no way to look for it without having the highest-level enemies blasting at me constantly!

This kind of nickel-and-diming (or more like "dollar-and-fivering" these days) via DLC and MTX is all too common now, but it's interesting to see such an early example of it, not to mention its use of 1990-era cheat code hotlines!

@Sketcz You specifically used the phrase "Opens US Office" in the headline, so that might have fuelled some confusion.

That aside, thanks for the article and the detailed clarifications as well!

@Razieluigi Sounds like emulation issues. JSRF keeps a fairly solid 60fps on original hardware (most of the time), though it does really start to chug in the hub area as more characters are unlocked. No crashes that I can recall, either, across nearly 2 full playthroughs.

@Broosh Good to know- and unfortunate on both counts. It was fun to check out some videos of the PAL dub a while back, but I don't think I'd choose that one over Ash and Misty (Veronica Taylor and Rachael Lillis)!

@lordlad It has 2 SH4s and 2 PowerVR GPUs, on top of all that extra RAM, making it basically 2 Naomis or Dreamcasts stuck together.

Contra Force isn't exactly the peak of the series, but it's actually kind of fun when it isn't slowing down all the time (i.e., when playing on certain emulators). I assume the SNES port will fix this automatically, simply because of the faster CPU.

@KingMike The developer claims that it doesn't affect performance at all, as the calculations are already being done, even in 30fps mode.

Yeah, GBA only had two main audio channels, so using more than two sounds at a time meant either mixing everything down to 2 channels using the CPU (which could cause slowdown, or- as you mentioned- would at least increase battery drain slightly), or just relying on the built-in Game Boy hardware to generate some beeps and boops, a la Harmony of Dissonance.

@Eocene84 "Pretty much always" is a major generalization, which mostly just applies to overly aggressive companies like Nintendo, if even that.

However, the point does stand: it's a risk, and yet people take it. Why?

Speaking for myself, at least (having previously dabbled in some modding, etc.), I think it's down to the passion that people have for specific franchises and games. Sure, they could make a legally-distinct project, but they really, really want to work on a Mario game, or Pokémon, or whatever. Or maybe they even want to take a specific game and enhance it to deliver the absolute best experience. It's hard to explain, but there's almost an obsession that can drive you to work on a project, and that can't just be magically turned on and off, or even necessarily rerouted into something different.

If the creators of mods and fan games tried to make new games instead, then it might go amazingly well (as we've seen before), or the spark could just die out, and they'd make nothing at all.

This patch is 15 bytes, with a third of its content literally being the word "patch". I assume it's just changing a single address in the ROM.

Why didn't Intelligent Systems just do this themselves, if they're so Intelligent? Was it a bug? A misguided attempt to reduce blur on the OG horizontal GBA? I'd always assumed it was performance reasons.

In any case, great stuff- this'll definitely be my way to play Super Circuit from now on!

So this is an actual port, and not emulation? In that case, it should be possible to fix all of the timings to compensate for the higher framerate... though that will take effort and attention to detail.

@WileyDragonfly What happened with Headhunter? I hadn't heard of this. From my understanding, the first game had janky motorcycle sections, but the second removed them. Did reviewers complain about non-existent mechanics in the sequel? (Do you remember which sites/mags?)

@MysticWangForce Yep, the North American release, at least, has two instruction manuals: one on how to play the game, and the other on driving techniques. It uses a double-sized case (the same format as 3- and 4-disc games), despite the game itself only having one disc!

PS: As a side note, I was looking at Ratchet and Clank Future: Tools of Destruction, and it's a bit surreal to see that this "modern" game came with a large, full-colour manual. I seem to remember physical manuals all but dying off during the PS360 generation, but this manual from 2007 is a blast from the past!

the trap of adding a lot of unnecessary details, based on what they like and what they've seen elsewhere

He basically just described Rare in their heyday. It was extravagant, but it was glorious! Though you could argue it came back to bite them- repeatedly- in this post-N64 era.

@Sindayl Good point about the accessibility: lots of great games like Lost Odyssey and Rare Replay are still available for a few bucks, and all it requires is an Xbox One: a system which was very cheap, even when it was brand-new: $235 CAD for an Xbone and Lost Odyssey is peanuts compared to dropping $480-580 on a Switch and either BotW or TotK. (I don't know what used Xbones go for now, but I bet the price gap compared to Nintendo's consoles has only widened.)

Still, LO is capped at 30fps, which is a bummer. From what little I've seen, the Xenia emulator's FPS Boost equivalent can run this beautifully, so I don't know why MS didn't do the same.

@Wakkawipeout

Are the games playing on a 3D a blurry mess?

You can disable anti-aliasing and enable de-blur, and that will turn it into a pixelated mess instead!

Personally, I don't care for the jagged pixel look, but a lot of people seem to love it, so your mileage may vary. Most N64 games run in roughly the same resolution as 16-bit games, as well as many indies like Shovel Knight.

@kirby2000 That's apparently coming from the GBA, not an added audio track. The dev mentioned in one YouTube comment that he got the audio running at 28 KHz.

@BLAZINOAH Perhaps being "this close" to making it a TG16 exclusive... wasn't quite as close as Garwood thought.

Could be that some discussions did take place, and it seemed like a real possibility at the time, but a small degree of misinterpretation and/or exaggeration on his part turned it into "We had it in our pocket."

@Blast16 Most games these days are designed to allow for most players to get through them, making actual cheats unnecessary. But goofy "cheats" like paintball mode or moon jumps? Bring them on! If they can be used to break the game and/or cause all sorts of chaos and hilarity, then that's all the better!

your money, you play how you want

I can appreciate that philosophy.

Of course, players could use cheats to finish the game too quickly, and then either find it unsatisfying, or feel that the game is too short, but that's on them.

@Martin_H Modern Britain sounds ripe for satire... the only problem being that a game poking fun at it would probably get banned.

But anyway, I find it funny and ironic that a Scottish studio made all of these games that take place in America. Then one game about the UK comes along, and... it's developed in Canada!

@gojiguy The thing is, we tend to get treated as an extension of the US, when it comes to video game releases, even if we are a distinct country otherwise. A racing game will be built overseas with metric in mind, but then the US localizers will remove all of the metric and send us an exact copy of their Americanized version that uses MPH!

But you're right that there are many differences when you look outside the narrow topic of the games themselves- and we're indeed a disproportionately huge player when it comes to game dev! I don't think most people realize how many games are/were made in Canada: major franchises (Assassin's Creed, Far Cry, and Need for Speed), all kinds of sports games (not just the obvious ones like NHL and SSX, but also FIFA and Mario Strikers), and even Japanese horror games (multiple Dead Risings and Luigi's Mansions) have been developed here.

@jojobar Valid concerns- it might be worth waiting to see if they have anything more substantial laid down... or if it's just hopes, dreams, and mock-up scenes.

The part about limiting the audience should be a non-issue, though, as lots of other SNES games have already been released on modern platforms using emulation.

@gojiguy Have you encountered enough differences to warrant coverage of Canada? I know we got some different packaging up here, like how Sonic the Hedgehog and Pikmin 2 used the PAL box art, but other than that, we basically just get all of the same stuff as the US, even localized with their funny spellings of "color" and such.

Mexicans probably have more to talk about, at least regarding the '80s, although I was under the impression that all three countries are pretty much in alignment now, with even the packaging for many games being identical (with trilingual text).

PS: I thought I heard some mention of the MSX having a limited run over here? If that's true, that'd be something! But still not really a relevant point if you're looking at the state of gaming in a typical Canadian household.

This effect is almost identical to the one used in the first stage of Gunstar Heroes: it looks like they're splitting the cloud layer on every line, and moving the odd rows at a different speed from the even rows.

Those pre-rendered graphics were converted really well, though. You'd think the Genesis's limited colour palette would be an issue, but it doesn't seem to be a problem here (maybe because most of the graphics are small enough to avoid colour banding?).

@KingMike Tokihiro Naito has been at M2 for at least 5 years, so he's probably in his sixties now. (Unless he was just 50 when he was hired, but that seems unlikely, considering when Hydlide was made)
But even if he is 60+, that still means that, like a lot of pioneering game devs, he still would've been quite young when developing these famous games!

This just seems crazy to me (whether it's in Japan or the west).
Why wouldn't you want a middle-aged guy with a lengthy resume, especially if that resume is full of esteemed studios and classic or groundbreaking titles?
It's not even like they're necessarily going, "who is this old dude, anyway", as the interviewers in Naito's case were thrilled to meet him... just not to actually work with him.

(As MARI0 mentioned, money is a likely factor, though even then, you'd think they could just offer the older guy whatever they're paying the younger kids, and if he wants to negotiate or turn it down, that's up to him.)

@h3s SSF was amazingly accurate, back when I used it (10-15 years ago), but the input lag was just awful. Has that been improved?

Mednafen is also accurate, but I didn't notice any lag.

Yabause has always lagged behind in compatibility/accuracy, but is more full-featured, with HD rendering, as I recall.

I think Kronos is similar to Mednafen, and then Beetle has enhancements like Yabause, but good accuracy as well?
I'm admittedly a little out of the loop with the current state of Saturn emulation.

Still amazed that this game even exists, and all the more so when considering the history touched on here, which sounds pretty tumultuous, with the changing genres and scope, publisher issues, etc.!

Even aside from all that, the mix of hack 'n slash combat, open-world driving, and RTS battles is about as strange and niche as it gets. But it actually got approved, and apparently received a decent budget. And EA (of all companies!) published it. And it has a ton of licensed music and big-name cameos. And it somehow hasn't even been delisted, over 15 years later!

Definitely worth checking out, for those who haven't yet, even if you're put off by the mention of RTS gameplay. (If I was able to fumble my way through the main story, then anyone can!)

Just want to point out that a form of this has been on Steam and GOG for years now. It just has the SNES and DOS versions, however.

@The_Nintendo_Pedant That was such a great time for gaming that it's hard to separate things: how much of it is EGM itself, versus gaming in general, versus being a kid in the late '90s?

I've recently been looking up some archived issues of EGM on the internet, to see if I can find any articles that I remembered from before. I found the one mocking Link for resembling a Keebler elf, but there are still more to track down. Even aside from that, though, just reading various articles (and yes, even the totally wicked ads full of 'tude!) has been a blast!

@jojobar Guess that's what happens when the original franchise goes 15+ years without a new game. You snooze, you lose!

@Martin_H Could you be thinking of Dave White, who used to co-host Game Sack? (That other balding, bearded guy talking about retro games!)

@Coalescence Yeah, that sounds a bit questionable. Does this have "improvements" that no one asked for, which make the game worse? Or maybe they're talking about Super Mario Bros. Special or something.

@HammerKirby It's weird to think that the little toy device was more powerful than the main handheld, but I guess it makes some sense, given that the Game Boy was 12 years old by then (and wasn't even cutting-edge back in 1989)!

@ArcadeRacingCENTRAL Yeah, this actually looks cool- like some kind of Sega-flavoured Kirby Air Ride or something. The possibility of TJ Davis and Shogo Sakai being on board sweetens the deal!

It's unfortunate that this was touted as a "standalone Chao Garden" before, at least in the previous article on this site. As much as I loved Sonic Adventure, I never especially liked the grindy Chao-raising side of things, and though I've heard others calling for a game built primarily around that, it really didn't sound very appealing to me.

Though admittedly, a big part of the problem was having to switch between the Chao Garden and the Action Stages over and over, with no option to just play the main game for a few hours, build up some resources, and then go chill in the Chao Garden for a couple more hours. Plus, I had neither a GBA nor an entirely empty VMU to play the mini-games on.

@wollywoo
And they could transform, and there were even secret ones?

Yep, I had the same experience reading a friend's copy of Pokemon Power, that little mini-magazine that was included in Nintendo Power for a while. (I later found it online- it was issue 6, the one which unveiled Mew.) Mesmerizing stuff for a kid in the late '90s, but perhaps that was not quite as obvious to an adult at the time.

@Lowdefal Yeah, I'm not saying Pokemon was such a shoo-in that anyone who approached it cautiously was stupid, or anything like that. There was some risk in launching a franchise of that size, all at once! (Though, speaking as someone who was a kid back then, the appeal was immediate and obvious!)

But in general, there was this constant internal pushback against anything anime/Japanese in the '80s and '90s: characters always had to be renamed/redesigned, box art had to be westernized, cultural references and text had to be scrubbed, etc. Look at basically any NES or Genesis game's box art for some easy examples!

Eventually, anime caught on in the west- Sailor Moon being the earliest show I actually remember as "anime"- but I have to question whether the limiting factor until then was audiences or just marketing.
Did anime succeed in the west because of, or in spite of, itself?
And could unapologetically Japanese media have succeeded earlier on, if marketing and localization had simply gotten out of the way? I mean, we westerners were more than happy to play the likes of "Ninja Geiden" featuring "Raiyu Heyabuusa", even if it had a funny name!

Like you touched on, dumb decisions kept happening even well after anime was popular in the west: the heavy-handed 4Kids censorship (which I always thought was really hypocritical, considering the stuff their own TMNT got away with!), for one. And like I mentioned, Nintendo was still putting angry eyebrows on Kirby in the mid-2000s. Even Pokemon itself was shoehorning "jelly donuts" and American money into the anime.

@Tom_Gamer What I wonder is how many actual potential customers were turned off by anime-looking character designs? It's obvious that the marketing teams in the west had a major phobia of anything too Japanese or cutesy (but I repeat myself) in the '80s and '90s, but then, they were not always in tune with their audience.

Was anime really poisonous to sales, and if so, for how long? We still saw questionable decisions happening well into the '00s, years after Pokemon had become a huge phenomenon: stuff like painting angry eyebrows on Kirby, or making Japanese games look like shovelware in an attempt to hide their origin.

But I wasn't (yet?) an angsty, edgy 12-year-old in 1990, so I can't say firsthand how anime stuff was perceived in the west at the time.

@Sketcz

I suppose there's an argument to be made that not knowing this in a way fostered a carefree creative attitude?

That's an interesting thought, and it leads to a slightly unsettling one:
Would the industry have gotten where it is now- risk-averse and full of rereleases and rehashes- a whole lot sooner if they had known that certain games would be so hugely successful and iconic?

On the other hand, some games that succeeded in spite of time and budget limitations could have been granted the resources they needed to really deliver on their true potential!

Does this mean there's going to be a karaoke scene? Or will there be a level where Joe and Yamato jump on the backs of racing stock cars (or run alongside them)?

@Coalescence I was going to say, "man, Sega's getting to be as bad as Nintendo", but then I got to the part where the hardware is technically Nintendo's property, so... yeah.

Of course, the British police were also involved- and doing what they do best, naturally- so it's not all about the game companies.

@JumpingJackson What about renaming King Koopa after their future CEO? Now that's foresight!