@EarthboundBenjy I didn't know that Halloween hack had crossovers with other franchises, let alone such a deep cut as Brandish! Cool bit of trivia, anyway. But then, I've never played it. Only knew that it was what Fox worked on before Undertale and Deltarune, and that he was apparently a bit of an angsty teenage edgelord at the time?
@zen-dev @Professor_Icepick You know it's tongue-in-cheek, right? Check out the description on the Indiegogo page, which is full of lines like:
"eliminate all remaining pockets of resistance and free-thinking that dare threatening our Workers' Paradise"
and
"Resistence is futile. The Sovietborgs are here to free you from your freedom."
I already hate soldering under normal conditions. The thought of trying to melt tiny bits of metal onto a small board with almost the same melting point is the stuff of nightmares!
Quite a spiffy end result, though! (As a side note, I miss that trend of transparent cases.)
Even for those of us who grew up with consoles and never saw an Amiga, Brimble did some great soundtracks on consoles/handhelds as well. The likes of Driver and Glover come to mind- the latter of which caught many by surprise, it seems, for being groovier than any 3D platformer soundtrack had a right to be!
@The_Nintend_Pedant Your thoughts on the 2- and 4-button layouts make a lot of sense. You know, I don't think I've really had much experience with a normal 6-button layout. Maybe I'd get lost in the endless matrix of buttons, unable to find a point of reference!
Obviously, N64 emulation would benefit from 6 buttons. Currently, I just make do with the right analogue stick to simulate the C buttons, and I'll sometimes add a secondary mapping for C-down onto B, or something (like for the knife in Castlevania 64). Works for 90% of games, easily, but some, like Jet Force Gemini , are still a problem.
I only have 3-button Genesis controllers. Always felt comfortable with B to attack and C to jump, as they're large and more or less laid out horizontally. (Side note: I hate when the secondary/attack button is diagonally down and left from primary/jump! Makes most modern Nintendo games a real chore to play, and now that I think of it, maybe that N64 layout wouldn't be so great for Genesis unless it got turned about 20 degrees clockwise.) Mapping 6 buttons onto a 4-button controller for emulation is awkward, and requires learning the functions, as memorizing the layout of the letters is unintuitive.
It's surprising that you find the 360 controller uncomfortable. When you say the top is cramped, do you mean your fingers are too big to fit on the shoulders and triggers, or are the face buttons also an issue?
Love both the Xbox Controller S and GameCube controller. Neither is perfect (mainly not having enough buttons for certain games), but I find them both really comfortable. And the GCN's 4-button layout is ingenious, though I've always felt like the original 3-bean prototype layout would've been a bit better.
That first image is channelling Baloo from The Jungle Book. Wonder if they would've gotten a Phil Harris soundalike as well!
The Adrian Barrios one has some '90s Nickelodeon energy. I hope Kazooie wasn't actually going to look like that, though, and this was just an exaggerated frame of her screaming!
@HammerGalladeBro I never watched the show, outside of seeing some commercials for it, but I do know it has the animals all talking and getting into various antics. The game, on the other hand, is a sim where you manage a garden, try to attract wild pinata animals, and even breed more. They don't talk, but they do mate, and they also kill each other. Somehow, I don't think much of the game made it into the show! Though I do recall the character models in the show practically looking like they were ripped right out of the game, plus the game's animated intro has the 4Kids cast, and is presumably the same intro used in the show.
Don't know a whole lot about Chaotic's development, but it aired on 4Kids TV, and it featured Jason Griffith (2000s Sonic the Hedgehog) in the lead role.
The owners claim that their games are mostly "between five and 30 years old", but that's stretching the definition of "retro" just a tiny bit. Modern stuff like Cruis'n Blast (2017, so 8 years old) easily counts as retro, by that definition.
On the other hand, maybe they're just forgetting what year it is, seeing as most of the examples listed are well outside that 5-30 range: Donkey Kong (44 years), Final Fight (36 years), Street Fighter II (34 years), Mario Kart DX (12 years), and the Neo-Geo (up to 35 years).
@The_Nintend_Pedant Throw in a second stick, and you pretty much have the ultimate layout, with unmatched versatility! Come to think of it, though, the "Duke" Xbox controller basically did this... it was just missing a few buttons compared to newer controllers. Plus, it was the Duke.
My thinking on the evenly-sized buttons was that it would work well for Sega systems as well as presumably having no negative effect on N64 gameplay. I am starting to wonder if I'm unusually controller-agnostic, though. Some people have mentioned that they really get thrown off when switching between different manufacturers and generations, or when playing a game on the "wrong" controller (e.g., using an Xbox controller for emulating anything that's not Xbox or Dreamcast), but I'm not bothered by it, as long as the buttons are still in the same order.
@h3s Oh, yeah, there's no way they can't somehow get this running on mid-range or even low-end PCs, seeing as it literally runs on a low-end PC already (as indicated by the arcade system specs you posted). I think Koshiro justified the arcade version's features not coming to the Genesis, but keeping them out of the Steam version is just an arbitrary decision for whichever reasons.
@Chocoburger It's interesting and ironic how the PS2 struggled with games like this, Deus Ex, and even Half-Life, yet it had so many of its own games that looked much better than any of those, while also running at a consistent 60fps.
Even then, there were still meaningful differences between platforms, besides simply "this one is more powerful than that one" like it tends to be these days!
So basically... everyone pronounces "Amiga" the same?
I'd describe it as "uh-mee-guh", like it's a schwa at both ends, but I think we're referring to the same thing. (Though maybe some Americans draw the last syllable owwt a bit to make it clearly "ah", as in "cahr" or "Mahrk"?)
Does "Ameeger" even count as a pronunciation, seeing as it's just a context-dependent quirk? As a similar example, I watch one English YouTuber who always says "Ocariner of Time" (and sometimes "Zelder" if it's followed by a vowel like it was just now!), but in isolation, he pronounces both "Ocarina" and "Zelda" the same way I would as a Canadian!
@bring_on_branstons People complain about modern reviews/reviewers, but '80s and '90s review scores could be every bit as insane, just with an extra dash of unpredictability!
On one hand, it's neat to see how reviews back then were raw and very much of the time. They weren't coloured by legendary reputations, built over the course of decades of praise. (You're shocked that someone would dare to give SMB3 a less than perfect score. And understandably so! But that goes to illustrate that there's now that pressure to give it the praise it deserves.)
On the other hand, people seemed to have some weird priorities back then. Just in broad strokes, games that seemed "cool" and novel seemed to rank higher than we'd think they deserved, even if the gameplay was unpolished, while something that seemed "lame" (too kiddy, bad graphics, too similar to an older game, etc.) would be dismissed.
It'll be fine. Nearly every game in existence is already floating around out there (with old console ROMs and DRM-free PC games being especially easy to get one's hands on), and a majority of people are still willing to go on Steam/NSO/GOG/etc. and pay money for those exact same games.
Always enjoy these fun little jabs and easter eggs (the DKC2 one immediately came to mind, as well)!
Though the one about Dave Mirra's grave lands a bit differently now, since he actually did die at a young age, about 10 years ago. That's still long after this game came out, of course.
Coming from mainly a console background (like most Canadians under 40), I've got to say that it must have been mind-blowing to see and experience 16-bit gaming in 1985, before even the 8-bit NES had launched in most regions!
@Guru_Larry Ouch. The SMS version also has Adol- er, I mean "Aron" (yes, they got his name wrong as well) walking pretty slowly, from what I remember. Guess I didn't miss out on much!
That PCE/TGX version is surprisingly accessible for a 1989 title. Arguably friendlier (and easier) than the 2001/2009 PC remake, at least in some ways.
EDIT: I should've said it's not very Y's to play the SMS version. Missed opportunity!
@KGRAMR @FR4M3 "Ys" rhymes with "geese". At least that's how it's always been pronounced in the games (English and Japanese alike).
Though the US Master System version unfortunately called it "Y's", with an unneeded apostrophe, implying that they read it as "wise"? Let's just forget about that one.
@Honkshot I assume that longtime fans of the genre have already played Doom/Quake/Blood/etc. to death by now, having been avid players for 20-30 years, and now they're more than ready to see more games in their favourite genre.
As a relative newcomer to certain genres (Boomer Shooters being one of them), I have to agree that it's hard to care about yet another throwback to (genre/game), when I haven't even played all of the essential titles from back in the day!
Though, come to think of it, it's getting to where I can't even keep up with (or necessarily care about) all of the games that are coming out, even in genres that I have played a lot! Beat-'em-ups, for instance.
I did hear about this before, probably around 2010.
There are even VGM logs now (compact chiptune music files) that include this as a variant, so you can have your right ear blasted with high-pitched bell sounds without waiting over 45 minutes!
EDIT: Sword of Vermilion also has a similar bug in one of its tracks, where the pitch increases on every loop. It eventually wraps back around, but little quirks will accumulate if you leave it running long enough to do this several times (e.g., a couple of hours).
Interesting to see that the Evercade standard has actually taken off- when's the last time we saw a unique game platform successfully join the fray? Everything else I can think of has been self-contained (NES Classic Mini), a flop (Ouya), or just vapour (Amico).
@Jol You joke, but there is already a ray tracing demo on SNES!
As with the Super FX 3, it's bottlenecked by the SNES's bandwidth: the console simply can't update its tiles fast enough to ever do full-screen high framerate video passthrough, but within that limitation, you really can basically use anything as a source.
@marsilies Oh, I'm very aware- even the same overall architecture can get varying results, due to a whole range of factors! (I remember getting a Core 2 Duo and discovering that even its single-core performance was twice as fast per cycle as a Pentium 4.)
I recall one SNES homebrew dev claiming that the Genesis had about 40% greater real-world performance, and I'd say that checks out, going by the actual games. SNES is noticeably more prone to slowdown, but then, a lot of that comes down to underclocking, with the SlowROM issue that has gained a lot of notoriety lately. The difference wasn't on an order of magnitude, but it was there (again, accentuated by SlowROM), and that's not flattering to a console that's two years newer (and otherwise a fair bit more advanced) than its rival.
@avcrypt In that it's mimicking the behaviour of the SFX, minus the performance cap, sure.
Can you elaborate on "static recomp on die"? If it's on die, then I'd expect that to be JIT (handled in real-time by the chip), not a static/ahead-of-time recomp.
@Martin_H Yeah, I'm not about to argue that Nintendo should have followed any of its competitors' strategies around hardware evolution!
But there's so much more to the console market than the hardware strategy. If we shuffled the game libraries around so NEC had Nintendo's library and Sega had SNK's, how would that turn out? Or if Nintendo had been the one with the edgy marketing, instead of Sega?
Had Nintendo gone with a high-end CPU, it could have killed their chances if it raised the price too much. But what about something in-between? If Sega could afford a CPU that was clocked twice as fast as Nintendo's (in 1988, at that!), then couldn't Nintendo have done the same? Put an 8 MHz CPU in the base SNES (and stop underclocking it to half speed!), and now we've eliminated one of the main sore spots: its reputation for slowdown and not keeping up with Sega's machine. It would still need a Super FX chip in order to run really fancy stuff like Doom, but at least Nintendo wouldn't have to put an enhancement chip in one of their launch games (Pilotwings) to make it run!
And yeah, I know it's really easy to talk about this stuff, 35+ years after it happened. But still, I'm not convinced that Nintendo's approach was optimal- unless you count that it was usually other companies that had to foot the bill for cartridge enhancements of any kind, so Nintendo didn't lose out financially. (Just maybe in reputation.)
@marsilies @BulkSlash From the description, it doesn't sound like it's doing actual emulation, per se. It is at least running the original Super FX code, recompiled for modern CPUs, so it should be faithful to the original game, but the potential capabilities of the chip are much higher than the SFX2.
Think of N64 recompilations running on PC: they're still the original games (until you mod them!), but they now have insanely powerful host hardware that can run them much faster than the N64 ever could.
So it is arguably "cheating", but they had the restraint to keep more or less within Super FX capabilities, and not just pump Doom 64 graphics straight into the SNES's display (albeit at 200p resolution and 20fps)!
@Martin_H Wouldn't it have been much more practical to just spend $10-20 more on the hardware itself, rather than having to spend potentially that same amount on every single enhanced cartridge? (Remember that games like Super Mario Kart, Pilotwings, and Mega Man X2 all had special chips as well. It wasn't just the Super FX.)
"Plus you can push all of the extra cost onto the consumer!"
...and there's the key point. Avoid making your system look overpriced, while tricking your consumers into paying for the upgrade several times over!
@GravyThief "I really don’t like transparent cases"
The late '90s must have been rough for you, then!
But seriously, the shell shown in the picture above is a little too transparent for my liking as well. A semi-transparent red, or maybe even black, would look a lot cooler. I like the aesthetic in general, but not this specific implementation.
EDIT: Damo listed the cut levels in the article. The original SNES version had levels and features that the other ports lacked, but it still missed out on a few levels itself.
Most localization prototypes aren't especially interesting, since they were made after the final Japanese build, but JSR is an unusual case: it has two new levels that were added for the North American version, which is why they can be seen in an incomplete form here.
I understand that full English translations would be costly, but it's a shame that they're not at least doing multi-platform releases. Not all of their potential audience is on Switch!
@845H The main draw so far is that this appears to properly support 60fps and widescreen. Both of those were possible on emulators, but 60fps had certain objects (like the penguins) moving too quickly, and the widescreen mode stretched the HUD instead of repositioning everything properly.
@marciolsf Oh, I'm aware that enterprise-grade stuff is expensive- and potentially a headache (having had some rather nightmarish experiences in the past, involving an aging server with a RAID 10 array).
In cases like this, though, anything is better than nothing. If someone had just gone around and stashed a bunch of stuff on consumer-grade media, companies like Square might have had an easier time now. (Obviously, that carries its own reliability risks, but we're talking about data that otherwise had a 0% chance of surviving.)
I know it does no good to go, "they should have done this and that" now, with the benefit of hindsight. But it's still a shame.
@Blofse I get that things were expensive back then, but I'm talking specifically about a major company (with a budget) developing a game in 1997 (1990 tech would be a whole other beast!), and about the possibility of using cheap storage.
SCSI drives have always been very expensive per GB, and the cost of that 500 MB drive could have bought a stack of consumer HDDs, which could affordably offer a couple of gigabytes each in 1997. Of course, the reliability isn't on the same level, but I'd personally take the redundancy any day. Plenty of consumer HDDs from over 20 years ago still work, too, so chances are good that the data would survive.
And then there are tapes. I never personally dealt with those, but I understand that they offered multiple GB each, even back then, and at a relatively cheap price for the time.
Or even burned CDs! They're not known for their longevity, but I still have burned CDs which are almost that old, and they still work flawlessly. I didn't even keep them stored in a cool environment or anything.
TL;DR: My point is that there were plenty of ways to store a couple gigabytes' worth of data in 1997 (besides high-end servers and SCSI disks), and not all of them were expensive, especially for a major company. Other companies pulled it off, but Square apparently didn't consider it important.
@Tasuki Makes sense- the best time to buy is when the games are "old" and "outdated", but not yet "vintage". For NES, that was around 2000, when games were going for $2-3 CAD. For PS2, it started around 2010 and continued for quite a while.
But I'm still a little surprised that NES (etc.) games have come down at all. Your reasoning is solid, but I had always just assumed that prices would only ever go in one direction, once a game/console passed into that "vintage" status and was in demand again. Oh, well, I'm not complaining!
@Tasuki I recently noticed a bit of that stabilization as well. All those $3 games on systems like the PS2 and Xbox 360 have had a bit of a price hike, but a lot of older games, which had been getting pricey, seem to have come down a bit.
Not sure the top-end ones like Chrono Trigger and Earthbound have come down, though, as I'm not looking at those!
@marciolsf A server would be expensive, sure, but what was stopping them from just buying a few 2 GB hard drives, stashing everything on there, and sticking them in a vault? Not sure that'd be enough to hold all of the raw asset files*, but it'd at least keep the source code safe.
*Obviously, the team's project files would be much, much bigger in total than the final game's 500 MB or so, but I don't have much of a reference point to go on. I seem to recall Factor 5 saying a Rogue Squadron game (2 or 3) on GameCube produced almost 1 TB of files, but that game was a massive leap in fidelity over FFT. Taking a wild guess, maybe FFT could have used 10-20 GB, depending on how things were managed?
EDIT: Also, fairly high-capacity tapes were an option, and may have made things more feasible.
Not personally interested in picking up another copy, but I'm glad more people can play this!
Though I should probably mention that the PC version has been available on GOG for quite some time, often goes on sale for about $2, and should run perfectly on even very old laptops.
Ouch, the irony of deciding to bring Duke Nukem Forever to the PS2, after a different Duke project ran into development troubles.
Anyway, the time-travelling premise sounds like it could have been fun (and probably just a tiny bit stupid!), assuming the story and game design really leaned into the absurdity of it all.
Comments 597
Re: EGGCONSOLE Versions Of 'Fray' And 'Brandish Renewal' Are Being Removed From The Switch eShop
@EarthboundBenjy I didn't know that Halloween hack had crossovers with other franchises, let alone such a deep cut as Brandish! Cool bit of trivia, anyway.
But then, I've never played it. Only knew that it was what Fox worked on before Undertale and Deltarune, and that he was apparently a bit of an angsty teenage edgelord at the time?
Re: "We Are Well Aware That It Is Hardly Possible At This Point" - You Still Have A Week To Make This Promising New Dreamcast Game A Reality
@zen-dev @Professor_Icepick You know it's tongue-in-cheek, right? Check out the description on the Indiegogo page, which is full of lines like:
"eliminate all remaining pockets of resistance and free-thinking that dare threatening our Workers' Paradise"
and
"Resistence is futile. The Sovietborgs are here to free you from your freedom."
Re: This Custom Game Boy Color Takes A Forgotten '90s Hardware Trend To The Next Logical Stage
I already hate soldering under normal conditions. The thought of trying to melt tiny bits of metal onto a small board with almost the same melting point is the stuff of nightmares!
Quite a spiffy end result, though!
(As a side note, I miss that trend of transparent cases.)
Re: "I Owe Much Of My Path To His Belief In What I Could Do" - Allister Brimble Pays Tribute To Martyn Brown With 'Amiga 40'
Even for those of us who grew up with consoles and never saw an Amiga, Brimble did some great soundtracks on consoles/handhelds as well. The likes of Driver and Glover come to mind- the latter of which caught many by surprise, it seems, for being groovier than any 3D platformer soundtrack had a right to be!
Re: After Tackling The Nintendo DS, MagicX's Next Handheld Seems Focused On N64 Emulation
@The_Nintend_Pedant Your thoughts on the 2- and 4-button layouts make a lot of sense. You know, I don't think I've really had much experience with a normal 6-button layout. Maybe I'd get lost in the endless matrix of buttons, unable to find a point of reference!
One good ramble deserves another, I guess.
Re: "The Higher-Ups Did Their Pitch & It All Just Stopped" - Banjo Kazooie Almost Got A TV Show, Here's Why It Didn't
That first image is channelling Baloo from The Jungle Book. Wonder if they would've gotten a Phil Harris soundalike as well!
The Adrian Barrios one has some '90s Nickelodeon energy. I hope Kazooie wasn't actually going to look like that, though, and this was just an exaggerated frame of her screaming!
Re: "The Higher-Ups Did Their Pitch & It All Just Stopped" - Banjo Kazooie Almost Got A TV Show, Here's Why It Didn't
@HammerGalladeBro I never watched the show, outside of seeing some commercials for it, but I do know it has the animals all talking and getting into various antics. The game, on the other hand, is a sim where you manage a garden, try to attract wild pinata animals, and even breed more. They don't talk, but they do mate, and they also kill each other. Somehow, I don't think much of the game made it into the show!
Though I do recall the character models in the show practically looking like they were ripped right out of the game, plus the game's animated intro has the 4Kids cast, and is presumably the same intro used in the show.
Don't know a whole lot about Chaotic's development, but it aired on 4Kids TV, and it featured Jason Griffith (2000s Sonic the Hedgehog) in the lead role.
Re: "We've Gone Retro" - New Arcade Bucks The Trend In An Otherwise Gloomy Sector
The owners claim that their games are mostly "between five and 30 years old", but that's stretching the definition of "retro" just a tiny bit. Modern stuff like Cruis'n Blast (2017, so 8 years old) easily counts as retro, by that definition.
On the other hand, maybe they're just forgetting what year it is, seeing as most of the examples listed are well outside that 5-30 range: Donkey Kong (44 years), Final Fight (36 years), Street Fighter II (34 years), Mario Kart DX (12 years), and the Neo-Geo (up to 35 years).
Re: After Tackling The Nintendo DS, MagicX's Next Handheld Seems Focused On N64 Emulation
@The_Nintend_Pedant Throw in a second stick, and you pretty much have the ultimate layout, with unmatched versatility! Come to think of it, though, the "Duke" Xbox controller basically did this... it was just missing a few buttons compared to newer controllers. Plus, it was the Duke.
My thinking on the evenly-sized buttons was that it would work well for Sega systems as well as presumably having no negative effect on N64 gameplay. I am starting to wonder if I'm unusually controller-agnostic, though. Some people have mentioned that they really get thrown off when switching between different manufacturers and generations, or when playing a game on the "wrong" controller (e.g., using an Xbox controller for emulating anything that's not Xbox or Dreamcast), but I'm not bothered by it, as long as the buttons are still in the same order.
Re: After Tackling The Nintendo DS, MagicX's Next Handheld Seems Focused On N64 Emulation
That six-button layout with all of the buttons being the same size looks like a great addition in general- more controllers should use that!
Re: The Making Of: Earthion - "Working On It Again Reminded Me Just How Incredible The Mega Drive Really Is"
@h3s Oh, yeah, there's no way they can't somehow get this running on mid-range or even low-end PCs, seeing as it literally runs on a low-end PC already (as indicated by the arcade system specs you posted). I think Koshiro justified the arcade version's features not coming to the Genesis, but keeping them out of the Steam version is just an arbitrary decision for whichever reasons.
Re: The Making Of: Earthion - "Working On It Again Reminded Me Just How Incredible The Mega Drive Really Is"
@SlangWon I assume he means that this version is a native PC game, and isn't able to run on (or be ported to) old consoles like the Genesis.
Re: "I Wouldn't Wish That Version On My Worst Enemies" - No One Lives Forever Dev Reflects On Challenging PS2 Port
@Chocoburger It's interesting and ironic how the PS2 struggled with games like this, Deus Ex, and even Half-Life, yet it had so many of its own games that looked much better than any of those, while also running at a consistent 60fps.
Even then, there were still meaningful differences between platforms, besides simply "this one is more powerful than that one" like it tends to be these days!
Re: Following Valnet's Purchase Of Polygon, There's A Battle To Keep Vital Pieces Of Games Journalism Online
@Damo Thanks for bringing these up- they look like great stuff!
@WhiteUmbrella If only Polygon did more articles like these, instead of writing about, uh... being bored because you're too cool to play Rock Band.
Re: Poll: How Do You Pronounce "Amiga"?
So basically... everyone pronounces "Amiga" the same?
I'd describe it as "uh-mee-guh", like it's a schwa at both ends, but I think we're referring to the same thing. (Though maybe some Americans draw the last syllable owwt a bit to make it clearly "ah", as in "cahr" or "Mahrk"?)
Does "Ameeger" even count as a pronunciation, seeing as it's just a context-dependent quirk? As a similar example, I watch one English YouTuber who always says "Ocariner of Time" (and sometimes "Zelder" if it's followed by a vowel like it was just now!), but in isolation, he pronounces both "Ocarina" and "Zelda" the same way I would as a Canadian!
Re: VGHF Acquires Rights To Historic Magazine That Covered The Rise Of The NES
It's such a weird thought that video game coverage could have been so sparse even circa 1987, when the NES was really taking off.
Great for VGHF in making this acquisition, and it sounds like fascinating stuff- definitely going to check this out!
Re: VGHF Acquires Rights To Historic Magazine That Covered The Rise Of The NES
@bring_on_branstons People complain about modern reviews/reviewers, but '80s and '90s review scores could be every bit as insane, just with an extra dash of unpredictability!
On one hand, it's neat to see how reviews back then were raw and very much of the time. They weren't coloured by legendary reputations, built over the course of decades of praise. (You're shocked that someone would dare to give SMB3 a less than perfect score. And understandably so! But that goes to illustrate that there's now that pressure to give it the praise it deserves.)
On the other hand, people seemed to have some weird priorities back then. Just in broad strokes, games that seemed "cool" and novel seemed to rank higher than we'd think they deserved, even if the gameplay was unpolished, while something that seemed "lame" (too kiddy, bad graphics, too similar to an older game, etc.) would be dismissed.
Re: Random: Is This $300 Fanmade Overhaul The Ultimate Game Gear?
A 640x480 screen? Is the image scaled exactly 3x on each axis, then?
(That'd fill the height pretty well, mainly leaving it pillarboxed.)
Re: "Please Support Us" Pleads Yuzo Koshiro As Pirated Earthion ROM Appears Online
It'll be fine. Nearly every game in existence is already floating around out there (with old console ROMs and DRM-free PC games being especially easy to get one's hands on), and a majority of people are still willing to go on Steam/NSO/GOG/etc. and pay money for those exact same games.
Re: Random: Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3 Dev Reveals Cheeky Dave Mirra Digs Hidden Inside The GBA Port
Always enjoy these fun little jabs and easter eggs (the DKC2 one immediately came to mind, as well)!
Though the one about Dave Mirra's grave lands a bit differently now, since he actually did die at a young age, about 10 years ago. That's still long after this game came out, of course.
Re: Anniversary: Commodore Unveiled The First Amiga Computer 40 Years Ago Today
Coming from mainly a console background (like most Canadians under 40), I've got to say that it must have been mind-blowing to see and experience 16-bit gaming in 1985, before even the 8-bit NES had launched in most regions!
Re: The X68000 Z Is Getting Its Very Own Ys Collection This Winter
@Guru_Larry Ouch. The SMS version also has Adol- er, I mean "Aron" (yes, they got his name wrong as well) walking pretty slowly, from what I remember. Guess I didn't miss out on much!
That PCE/TGX version is surprisingly accessible for a 1989 title. Arguably friendlier (and easier) than the 2001/2009 PC remake, at least in some ways.
EDIT: I should've said it's not very Y's to play the SMS version. Missed opportunity!
Re: The X68000 Z Is Getting Its Very Own Ys Collection This Winter
@KGRAMR @FR4M3 "Ys" rhymes with "geese".
At least that's how it's always been pronounced in the games (English and Japanese alike).
Though the US Master System version unfortunately called it "Y's", with an unneeded apostrophe, implying that they read it as "wise"? Let's just forget about that one.
Re: Boomer Shooter 'Hellscreen' Cancels Upcoming Episodes Due To Game's "Severe Under Performance"
@Honkshot I assume that longtime fans of the genre have already played Doom/Quake/Blood/etc. to death by now, having been avid players for 20-30 years, and now they're more than ready to see more games in their favourite genre.
As a relative newcomer to certain genres (Boomer Shooters being one of them), I have to agree that it's hard to care about yet another throwback to (genre/game), when I haven't even played all of the essential titles from back in the day!
Though, come to think of it, it's getting to where I can't even keep up with (or necessarily care about) all of the games that are coming out, even in genres that I have played a lot! Beat-'em-ups, for instance.
Re: Data Discs Is Reissuing A Bunch Of Its Sega Soundtracks
Why are they "repressing" such great music? Stop holding it back!
Re: Random: Did You Know About This Strange Sonic 3 'File Select' Bug?
I did hear about this before, probably around 2010.
There are even VGM logs now (compact chiptune music files) that include this as a variant, so you can have your right ear blasted with high-pitched bell sounds without waiting over 45 minutes!
EDIT: Sword of Vermilion also has a similar bug in one of its tracks, where the pitch increases on every loop. It eventually wraps back around, but little quirks will accumulate if you leave it running long enough to do this several times (e.g., a couple of hours).
Re: Review: Super Pocket Data East Edition - A Solid Handheld, But One With Too Much Duplication
Interesting to see that the Evercade standard has actually taken off- when's the last time we saw a unique game platform successfully join the fray? Everything else I can think of has been self-contained (NES Classic Mini), a flop (Ouya), or just vapour (Amico).
Re: Hands On: 30 Years On, DOOM's "Super FX 3" Upgrade Gives SNES Players A More Polished Way To Rip And Tear
@Jol You joke, but there is already a ray tracing demo on SNES!
As with the Super FX 3, it's bottlenecked by the SNES's bandwidth: the console simply can't update its tiles fast enough to ever do full-screen high framerate video passthrough, but within that limitation, you really can basically use anything as a source.
Re: Hands On: 30 Years On, DOOM's "Super FX 3" Upgrade Gives SNES Players A More Polished Way To Rip And Tear
@marsilies Oh, I'm very aware- even the same overall architecture can get varying results, due to a whole range of factors! (I remember getting a Core 2 Duo and discovering that even its single-core performance was twice as fast per cycle as a Pentium 4.)
I recall one SNES homebrew dev claiming that the Genesis had about 40% greater real-world performance, and I'd say that checks out, going by the actual games. SNES is noticeably more prone to slowdown, but then, a lot of that comes down to underclocking, with the SlowROM issue that has gained a lot of notoriety lately.
The difference wasn't on an order of magnitude, but it was there (again, accentuated by SlowROM), and that's not flattering to a console that's two years newer (and otherwise a fair bit more advanced) than its rival.
Re: Hands On: 30 Years On, DOOM's "Super FX 3" Upgrade Gives SNES Players A More Polished Way To Rip And Tear
@avcrypt In that it's mimicking the behaviour of the SFX, minus the performance cap, sure.
Can you elaborate on "static recomp on die"? If it's on die, then I'd expect that to be JIT (handled in real-time by the chip), not a static/ahead-of-time recomp.
Re: Hands On: 30 Years On, DOOM's "Super FX 3" Upgrade Gives SNES Players A More Polished Way To Rip And Tear
@Martin_H Yeah, I'm not about to argue that Nintendo should have followed any of its competitors' strategies around hardware evolution!
But there's so much more to the console market than the hardware strategy. If we shuffled the game libraries around so NEC had Nintendo's library and Sega had SNK's, how would that turn out? Or if Nintendo had been the one with the edgy marketing, instead of Sega?
Had Nintendo gone with a high-end CPU, it could have killed their chances if it raised the price too much. But what about something in-between? If Sega could afford a CPU that was clocked twice as fast as Nintendo's (in 1988, at that!), then couldn't Nintendo have done the same? Put an 8 MHz CPU in the base SNES (and stop underclocking it to half speed!), and now we've eliminated one of the main sore spots: its reputation for slowdown and not keeping up with Sega's machine. It would still need a Super FX chip in order to run really fancy stuff like Doom, but at least Nintendo wouldn't have to put an enhancement chip in one of their launch games (Pilotwings) to make it run!
And yeah, I know it's really easy to talk about this stuff, 35+ years after it happened. But still, I'm not convinced that Nintendo's approach was optimal- unless you count that it was usually other companies that had to foot the bill for cartridge enhancements of any kind, so Nintendo didn't lose out financially. (Just maybe in reputation.)
Re: Hands On: 30 Years On, DOOM's "Super FX 3" Upgrade Gives SNES Players A More Polished Way To Rip And Tear
@marsilies @BulkSlash From the description, it doesn't sound like it's doing actual emulation, per se. It is at least running the original Super FX code, recompiled for modern CPUs, so it should be faithful to the original game, but the potential capabilities of the chip are much higher than the SFX2.
Think of N64 recompilations running on PC: they're still the original games (until you mod them!), but they now have insanely powerful host hardware that can run them much faster than the N64 ever could.
So it is arguably "cheating", but they had the restraint to keep more or less within Super FX capabilities, and not just pump Doom 64 graphics straight into the SNES's display (albeit at 200p resolution and 20fps)!
Re: Hands On: 30 Years On, DOOM's "Super FX 3" Upgrade Gives SNES Players A More Polished Way To Rip And Tear
@Martin_H Wouldn't it have been much more practical to just spend $10-20 more on the hardware itself, rather than having to spend potentially that same amount on every single enhanced cartridge? (Remember that games like Super Mario Kart, Pilotwings, and Mega Man X2 all had special chips as well. It wasn't just the Super FX.)
"Plus you can push all of the extra cost onto the consumer!"
...and there's the key point. Avoid making your system look overpriced, while tricking your consumers into paying for the upgrade several times over!
Re: Hands On: 30 Years On, DOOM's "Super FX 3" Upgrade Gives SNES Players A More Polished Way To Rip And Tear
@BulkSlash Considering that it runs at 150 MHz (whereas the actual Super FX was what, 20 MHz?), it's safe to say that it's cheating!
Chips as fast as this existed back then, but it would have been prohibitively expensive and impractical to include one in the cart.
Re: Hands On: 30 Years On, DOOM's "Super FX 3" Upgrade Gives SNES Players A More Polished Way To Rip And Tear
@GravyThief "I really don’t like transparent cases"
The late '90s must have been rough for you, then!
But seriously, the shell shown in the picture above is a little too transparent for my liking as well. A semi-transparent red, or maybe even black, would look a lot cooler. I like the aesthetic in general, but not this specific implementation.
EDIT: Damo listed the cut levels in the article. The original SNES version had levels and features that the other ports lacked, but it still missed out on a few levels itself.
Re: Three More Konami NES Titles Are Getting Fanmade SNES Ports
Super Contra already looks and runs great on the NES, but TMNT and Contra Force have unusually rough performance for NES games (especially by Konami)!
Does this mean we could eventually see TMNT running at 60fps? Contra Force with no slowdown seems like a given, at least.
Re: Dreamcast Fan Preserves Early US Prototype Of Jet Set Radio To Mark The Game's 25th Birthday
Most localization prototypes aren't especially interesting, since they were made after the final Japanese build, but JSR is an unusual case: it has two new levels that were added for the North American version, which is why they can be seen in an incomplete form here.
Re: Before It Hit Saturn And PS1, Thunder Force V Was Almost A Mega Drive Marvel
"Non-textured 3D"... so it would have looked like Viewpoint or Silpheed, then?
Re: Xak's Action RPG Spin-Off 'Fray' Is Getting An EGGCONSOLE Release for Switch
I understand that full English translations would be costly, but it's a shame that they're not at least doing multi-platform releases. Not all of their potential audience is on Switch!
Re: Mario Kart 64 Has Been Ported To PC
@845H The main draw so far is that this appears to properly support 60fps and widescreen. Both of those were possible on emulators, but 60fps had certain objects (like the penguins) moving too quickly, and the widescreen mode stretched the HUD instead of repositioning everything properly.
Re: "It's A Middle Finger To Everybody" - Producer Behind Netflix's Castlevania And Devil May Cry Series Is Working On Duke Nukem Next
Why do I suspect that this show is mainly going to give the middle finger to Duke Nukem fans?
Re: Oops, Square No Longer Has The Source Code For Final Fantasy Tactics
@marciolsf Oh, I'm aware that enterprise-grade stuff is expensive- and potentially a headache (having had some rather nightmarish experiences in the past, involving an aging server with a RAID 10 array).
In cases like this, though, anything is better than nothing. If someone had just gone around and stashed a bunch of stuff on consumer-grade media, companies like Square might have had an easier time now. (Obviously, that carries its own reliability risks, but we're talking about data that otherwise had a 0% chance of surviving.)
I know it does no good to go, "they should have done this and that" now, with the benefit of hindsight. But it's still a shame.
Re: Oops, Square No Longer Has The Source Code For Final Fantasy Tactics
@Blofse I get that things were expensive back then, but I'm talking specifically about a major company (with a budget) developing a game in 1997 (1990 tech would be a whole other beast!), and about the possibility of using cheap storage.
SCSI drives have always been very expensive per GB, and the cost of that 500 MB drive could have bought a stack of consumer HDDs, which could affordably offer a couple of gigabytes each in 1997.
Of course, the reliability isn't on the same level, but I'd personally take the redundancy any day. Plenty of consumer HDDs from over 20 years ago still work, too, so chances are good that the data would survive.
And then there are tapes. I never personally dealt with those, but I understand that they offered multiple GB each, even back then, and at a relatively cheap price for the time.
Or even burned CDs! They're not known for their longevity, but I still have burned CDs which are almost that old, and they still work flawlessly. I didn't even keep them stored in a cool environment or anything.
TL;DR: My point is that there were plenty of ways to store a couple gigabytes' worth of data in 1997 (besides high-end servers and SCSI disks), and not all of them were expensive, especially for a major company. Other companies pulled it off, but Square apparently didn't consider it important.
Re: "People Love This Stuff. It Just Means The Market Got Overheated" - How COVID Created A Retro Gaming Bubble
@Tasuki Makes sense- the best time to buy is when the games are "old" and "outdated", but not yet "vintage". For NES, that was around 2000, when games were going for $2-3 CAD. For PS2, it started around 2010 and continued for quite a while.
But I'm still a little surprised that NES (etc.) games have come down at all. Your reasoning is solid, but I had always just assumed that prices would only ever go in one direction, once a game/console passed into that "vintage" status and was in demand again. Oh, well, I'm not complaining!
Re: "People Love This Stuff. It Just Means The Market Got Overheated" - How COVID Created A Retro Gaming Bubble
@Tasuki I recently noticed a bit of that stabilization as well. All those $3 games on systems like the PS2 and Xbox 360 have had a bit of a price hike, but a lot of older games, which had been getting pricey, seem to have come down a bit.
Not sure the top-end ones like Chrono Trigger and Earthbound have come down, though, as I'm not looking at those!
Re: Digital Eclipse's Next Collection Focuses On The "Iconic" Golden Tee Arcade Series
@MARl0 Neo Turf Masters has been on modern platforms for years now, under its Japanese name: Big Tournament Golf.
Re: Oops, Square No Longer Has The Source Code For Final Fantasy Tactics
@marciolsf A server would be expensive, sure, but what was stopping them from just buying a few 2 GB hard drives, stashing everything on there, and sticking them in a vault? Not sure that'd be enough to hold all of the raw asset files*, but it'd at least keep the source code safe.
*Obviously, the team's project files would be much, much bigger in total than the final game's 500 MB or so, but I don't have much of a reference point to go on. I seem to recall Factor 5 saying a Rogue Squadron game (2 or 3) on GameCube produced almost 1 TB of files, but that game was a massive leap in fidelity over FFT. Taking a wild guess, maybe FFT could have used 10-20 GB, depending on how things were managed?
EDIT: Also, fairly high-capacity tapes were an option, and may have made things more feasible.
Re: It Looks Like Another Old Legacy Of Kain Title Is Being Reissued For PlayStation Consoles
Not personally interested in picking up another copy, but I'm glad more people can play this!
Though I should probably mention that the PC version has been available on GOG for quite some time, often goes on sale for about $2, and should run perfectly on even very old laptops.
Re: After Two-And-A-Half Years, GameCube Animal Crossing Is Almost Fully Decompiled - Let The Modding Commence
Nice! I still prefer this one over the N64, DS, and Wii versions. (Haven't played New Leaf or New Horizons.)
I wonder what kinds of enhancements people will cook up for this, whether for GameCube or any hypothetical ports.
Re: A Build Of A Cancelled PS2 Duke Nukem Game From Rockstar Has Just Emerged Online
Ouch, the irony of deciding to bring Duke Nukem Forever to the PS2, after a different Duke project ran into development troubles.
Anyway, the time-travelling premise sounds like it could have been fun (and probably just a tiny bit stupid!), assuming the story and game design really leaned into the absurdity of it all.