@Nahhhtendo Yeah, it's not like it's functioning as a battery or anything, but it does have to briefly hold a charge- which I'd imagine is to keep things running smoothly through the unpredictability of AC power?
Anyway, I'll be sure to wait those 15 minutes before licking the PSU's internals, so thanks!
@Nahhhtendo It's fairly common knowledge that PSUs can hold a charge for a short time, but it should be safe to start poking around after 15-20 minutes at most... well, at least in modern models, which this is definitely not!
Or is that figure outdated, such that the risk is practically zero now, even seconds after unplugging the PSU? I've never tried getting a reading on the components to actually verify this oft-circulated info; have you?
(I prefer to err on the side of caution in these situations!)
@Ristar24 Let's get sweaty! This easter egg is already ripping apart the timeline, though, and a direct appearance by Ryo would just destroy it. Would it be the original Ryo, now 55 years old? Or this young American(?) kid who was following in his predecessor's footsteps by looking for sailors in the present day? So many questions...
I don't miss the reliability issues, or having to keep track of which card had which saves, or working around the frustratingly small storage space.
That last one, especially, was the worst:
PS1 only had 128KB, or 15 blocks after formatting, and many games needed 2 blocks.
N64 had about 128 pages, IIRC, and a single game could use up ~100 in some cases.
GameCube started out with an insultingly tiny 512KB, which could also be eaten up by a single game. (Later on, Nintendo started offering 2MB and 8MB cards, at a higher price.)
PS2 had a respectable 8MB from the start, but those fancy 3D memory card icons wasted a lot of space (even if they looked cool)!
Memory cards weren't cheap, either. Good luck if you wanted to build up a collection of 50+ games!
I chose "No". It's not that I don't have nostalgia and fond memories linked to certain games, but just that I don't consider those to be major factors that drive my interest in retro gaming.
I missed out on all kinds of top-tier games back in the day (due to not having my own game systems as a kid, not to mention simply being too young to play certain games when they were new!), so I'm still catching up on lots of classics that I missed, as well as discovering gems that I never heard of at the time.
There are many older titles that I played for the first time as an adult, and I still loved them for what they were, not for my (non-existent) memories of them!
@larryisaman Keeping silent would obviously be the foolproof way of staying out of trouble, but I imagine that it would be really difficult to make such a huge project without any feedback. If people are trying out a demo version, then their feedback can help refine the game, plus any positive feedback acts as a major source of motivation.
Some devs may be able to pull this off, but I imagine that most would lose interest halfway through.
@Poodlestargenerica Yeah, I suspect that the intent was for Marge to have an '80s perm, considering when the show began, but the ludicrous height makes me (and many others, apparently) think of a cartoonish beehive.
They must've dropped this idea pretty quickly- Marge was shown with normal-height, straight hair (and no rabbit ears!) as a kid, and I thought the first flashback like this was in the second or maybe third season at the latest- right around the time the game came out, in other words.
@bahooney That specific image of Ness is from (or at least used in) the opening scene from Super Smash Bros., when the secret characters briefly pop up on the screen. (Note that they only appear as silhouettes, until you unlock them.)
Great to see Rendering Ranger making a much-needed return (assuming it's still coming out?). Even for others, like Jurassic Park, I'll consider picking them up someday, despite not having much nostalgia for them.
I'm glad for the work these guys (and anyone who uploads decently high-res scans) have put into bringing back this experience. Having the physical packaging and manual made it easier to really appreciate each game, and we've mostly lost those things in this modern era- though I suppose having more games than time hasn't helped either!
Not saying this mini PC doesn't have its perks (or that it's not cute!), but I do have to wonder: the 5700U model is expensive enough that a mid-range business laptop might be the more versatile and useful choice, despite going on sale in a similar price range.
And the 3200U model is weak enough that you could literally pull a 10-year-old desktop PC out of the garbage and get comparable CPU performance. (4th gen i5 and i7 CPUs from 2013/14 should easily match or exceed this.) Though the AM01's Ryzen will have much better graphics than any of those older PCs, so there's that.
While I vaguely remember hearing about this South Park incident before, the whole idea of using real, readable data as padding is mostly new to me. Just recently, the oldest existing build of Vexx for PS2 turned up as a result of this (the October build was hiding on the November disc), and so I wonder what other games have interesting dummy data that hasn't been analyzed yet.
@Azuris Interesting observation, and I feel like I've seen this before on some game, but I'm not sure. Let me know if you can confirm one of the games that's like this!
I'd imagine that its loading times aren't great, as putting the files on the outer edge can boost the transfer speed by more than double (or by 50%, on a mini DVD).
Some of these Evercade collections are really tempting: this one has two of my most wanted NES games on it, for instance. Hopefully, more of these will come to PC later, as it's hard to justify buying another dedicated gaming device!
@Zenszulu Yeah, something along those lines- sort of like the Mega Drive & Genesis Classics collection on Steam, but with a new batch of games? (You can buy each game for about $1 individually, or just get the whole batch for an affordable price. Plus, the ROMs can be used elsewhere, after purchase!)
Whether it's that, a larger collection, individual emulations/remasters, or maybe even a mini console, I am interested in buying a bunch of classics from their back catalogue. But not if it's just the same Genesis games that we saw in the Genesis Mini... and in the aforementioned collection... and in the old collection on PS3... and in the older one on PS2!
@Zenszulu It could be marketed as a "Genesis Mini: Deluxe/32X/Neptune Edition", with a mix of base console and 32X games. An all-32X compilation would be a hard sell for sure, but a mix of 32X games and other Genesis/Sega CD gems could have a much broader appeal.
And as usual, I'll mention that it doesn't have to be a mini console. Personally, I'd actually prefer a software compilation (for PC, Xbox, etc.), as I have plenty of computers and consoles to play on, and really don't need another plastic box by the TV. This goes for 32X, Master System, Game Gear, Saturn, or Dreamcast collections, all of which I'd be interested in! Get on it, Sega!
@MontyCircus For today's youth, who may have had little or no exposure to classic media, I can understand it: they're used to seeing fancy, flashy productions with little need for imagination. It's hard for us to convince them that such simplistic, quaint-looking games (or movies, or what have you) can actually be interesting or even thrilling. And I'm not sure that we can, unless we can first convince them to give these older media a real chance (more than just 5 minutes to fall off the cliff in Mario a few times)!
Admittedly, many of us geezers also have a limit, where games in certain genres before certain dates hold less appeal. I can get some enjoyment out of '70s action games, for instance, but struggle to appreciate them like someone who grew up with them would.
PS: Most of the numbers stuff like "8K" is shallow as anything, but I will say that 60fps is important, especially in older action games. Without it, you end up with the likes of Awesome Possum!
Fascinating to see this time capsule of a developer's opinions during the beginning of the 32-bit era.
In hindsight, some of Maegawa's ideas seem very wise and show a good sense of perspective: he saw the limitations of consumer-grade 3D hardware in 1995, and thought the 3D craze was overblown and a little premature. And I think his closing comments on just making interesting games, and not putting so much emphasis on the hardware, are timeless.
On the other hand, some of the things he said seem incredibly short-sighted, like: "I consider 3D games to be a single genre". Or how he apparently saw 3D as an extra flourish to tack onto an existing 2D game, rather than viewing it as literally a whole new dimension of gaming, which opened up all kinds of possibilities that simply wouldn't work well in 2D.
Nuts and Bolts is a really clever and fun game in its own right, but the Banjo-Kazooie brand was mutually harmful to it.
For anyone who hasn't played it, I do recommend giving it a good try, but note that it can take a bit of time for things to come together, as unfortunately, N&B keeps getting in its own way.
It restricts the parts you can build with during the early game, and it forces you to use pre-built vehicles in certain challenges.
For me, the moment that it "clicked" was when I first unlocked the medium engine and bolted it onto the back of a lightweight shopping cart, causing it to fly! The building system is meant for you to experiment with it, and you can "break" some of the challenges with the right vehicle designs.
Not as essential as the Ocarina of Time port(s), seeing as there's the 360 remaster- and even the original Perfect Dark already had 60fps (if you overclocked enough to eliminate the framerate dips) and widescreen support.
But proper mouselook sounds great, and it will be cool to see what kinds of mods people come up with!
@AllieKitsune Yeah, people bring up Gaussian interpolation and the 64KB RAM limit all the time- and I'm not denying that those are real issues- but ROM size is absolutely the main factor.
It's why the music is almost always made out of cheesy, aggressively looped snippets of instrument sounds, instead of with proper, realistic instrument recordings. It's why everything from seagulls to screams to explosions is made using simple tones or tiny blips of sound, looped and played at different pitches, when the SNES is perfectly capable of playing actual recorded sound effects.
The SNES's sound chip, advanced as it was for its time, was being treated more like a synthesizer- or more accurately, a Game Boy or Turbografx chip.
@-wc- A keyboard (sample-based) might make for a better analogy: A drum can only make drum sounds, but it's good at what it does. On the other hand, you can load any sound into a sampler, including drums, making it far more flexible. Of course, making it sound as good as a real drum is another matter! There are plenty of Genesis tunes that have been ported/remade for the SNES in recent years. And they come remarkably close! There are SNES to Genesis conversions as well, but these are covers, as the Genesis simply doesn't have the hardware to do SNES music (aside from streaming it as PCM). Admittedly, those Genesis covers often sound better than the SNES originals, but that's a matter of composition and ROM size, not the systems' capabilities.
By the way, that European Dreamcast joke is way underrated.
@Spider-Kev This one is a native PC port, so it won't work on the NES Mini or any other emulators, unfortunately. Though on the plus side, it outputs true widescreen in a higher res than the real NES could do, and may have other small technical enhancements.
@Serpenterror Neat to see that there was a side-view G&W Zelda- I'd only seen the top-down one before. I think you've got the timeline backwards, though: the earliest Zelda games for G&W are from 1989, whereas Adventure of Link came out in 1987 ('88 in most regions).
Oddly enough, the Japanese cover for the second NES game had "The Legend of Zelda 2" written in English, with "Adventure of Link" under it in Japanese... whereas the first game had "The Legend of Zelda" written in Japanese, and only its subtitle, "The Hyrule Fantasy", was written in English.
This looks seriously rad! Adventure of Link wasn't a bad game, but it wasn't the most accessible, either, and it had some questionable design decisions. With many of the rough edges sanded away here, I'm tempted to revisit AoL for the first time ever since completing it!
@-wc- Agreed that there should be an option for newcomers (or those who forgot the events of these 20-plus-year-old games!) to quickly catch up. But whether that's a quick video in the extras menu, or the occasional callback/flashback, it shouldn't spend too much (mandatory) game time on previous events.
As far as availability goes, though, Shenmue I and II are in pretty good shape: they can be purchased and run on a potato PC, as well as any console from the past decade... except Switch, of course. Still a bit expensive at full price, but at least they're not chained to a single platform!
@Uncharted2007 I think his intention is to weave smaller flashbacks into a mostly new story. But even that could be a problem, considering how little Shenmue III did to advance the plot* from where we saw it previously.
Expanding on previous events and locations is actually something I would be interested in, under different circumstances, but I've been waiting ~15 years (even as a latecomer to Shenmue II) to see what happens next! Treading the same ground over again, when I just want the story to advance, has little appeal right now.
*Allegedly. I still haven't gotten around to S3, but hearing that most of it is inessential (no doubt ending in another tease, like S2 did!) isn't really driving me to make it a priority.
I'm curious as to how these future collaborations will play out. Right now, I'm struggling to think of many cases where someone would need to reach out to Embracer for resources related to research. Maybe my mind is just too focused on the small picture and short term.
50+ years from now, original hardware and media will be all the more scarce, and I can better see the value of such an expansive archive or museum.
Started using Duckstation a little while ago, and it's the best one I've tried. It has been very accurate so far, and supports the whole range of optional enhancements (fast CD drive, overclocking, high resolutions, high precision polygons, texture filtering, widescreen hacks).
BeetlePSX is also quite good, though I used the Retroarch core, and that UI is a bit clunky overall. (Retroarch is great as a one-stop solution for your TV-connected emulation box, I'm sure, but a harder sell for a PC user.) Beetle itself had a few bugs, at least for me, but most games worked perfectly.
Mednafen is accurate and fairly easy to get online, but being limited to 240p is a bummer if you're on an HD screen.
ePSXe was my go-to PS1 emulator back in the day, but it's quite archaic now: there's no way to change settings without stopping the game, for one. And if you try to use full HD rendering, it warns you that this feature is very heavy and requires a high end graphics card with 256 MB of VRAM (that was high end about 20 years ago, but even a "potato" has gigabytes these days)!
@Banjo- It actually took three years to make, like most of their games! It was first revealed on the GameCube, then ported and refined on the Xbox. According to interviews, Rare still had to cut content to keep some semblance of a deadline. (Just porting to Xbox was apparently a big undertaking in itself, and ate up a lot of time.)
PS: The unsold copies of Ghoulies in the garbage may be a self-deprecating joke, but that joke is based on something, whether that's actual sales figures, or just public perception!
@BobaTheFett Do you mean about the gameplay being simplistic, or about the limited scope and short length of the game? If the former, you should know that the later challenges offer difficult conditions that force you to get creative with how you approach things, so the simple mechanics are more of a means to an end, rather than the point itself.
If it's the latter, then I get that. If you asked me to try to define the "Rare Magic" that graced their N64-era output, I would point to the ambition, and the feeling that they were always trying to make the best game ever.
A straightforward shooter campaign, kart racer, or collectathon platformer? Not good enough- they had to cram it full of features, details, extras, and modes.
Ghoulies was satisfied to be what it was- not that there's anything wrong with that, necessarily, but it's a step down from the extravagance of previous games.
Grabbed by the Ghoulies is a clever and fun little game (and I consider the remastered version from Rare Replay to be one of the compilation's highlights), but it suffered from all of the weight being placed on it as Rare's big Xbox debut, and the first new Rare game in a year.
There are all kinds of games like this, which are worthwhile on their own merits, but can be disappointing in their original context, due to being too small in scope, too unconventional, etc. Somewhat fittingly, Luigi's Mansion is another example, where many of us were hoping for a big, flagship Mario title for the GameCube (seeing as the last one was a full five years old at that time!), but the game's quality ultimately speaks for itself.
This disappointment due to failed expectations is understandable, but it starts to seem a bit pointless in hindsight, as we can appreciate what something is, not what it isn't.
@KingMike Could be a bit of both, for all I know. Japan, at least, is supposed to be a treasure trove for collectors, with much lower prices than you'd find in the west, but I thought Europe was a lot more in line with North America. The high prices on Pokemon, Castlevania, etc., as seen in this article, would seem to back that up!
@Andee Especially considering that the same game costs $10 CAD on Xbox (at full price)!
Similar deal with TMNT III on Game Boy: Considering the faded label and lack of any packaging, you're not getting much of a collector's experience for the £70. If you're just after the game itself, you might as well get the Cowabunga Collection for a fraction of that cost, and be able to play the dozen other games it includes.
Is there a market crash going on? As a Canadian, I'm amazed at some of those prices: £6 for a boxed copy of Sonic 1, £15 for Daytona on Saturn, and just £8 for Smash Bros. on Wii U?
I thought I noticed the prices on many games over here starting to balance out a bit, with older titles starting to come back within reach of us average peasants. But we still don't have prices like these, as far as I've seen!
@foodmetaphors I'd heard it said before that they didn't want to seem outdated with an "Xbox 2", but their choice of a "3" title, specifically, is kind of funny.
Somehow, that didn't stop them from pitting their Xbox One against the PlayStation 4, though!
"you could go and watch Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, and you don’t have to worry about someone having to remake it so you can watch it again"
I think this bit really highlights how the availability of older video games really isn't where it should be. It's kind of ridiculous how many games are simply not (legally!) available in any form- and as a lesser issue, I'd add that of those that are available, many have been altered or remade, which would be considered sacrilege in movie enthusiast circles. (Imagine if the only available release of Star Wars was a remaster, with alterations made to... oh, bad example. But imagine if the only way to watch episodes 4, 5, and 6 was through a full remake with modern VFX and a whole new cast!)
But things are in a much better state than they were 20 or so years ago, and we have many more old games listed than delisted each year, so that's progress!
@Razieluigi As far as the preservation itself is concerned, I'd agree that video games are in a pretty good spot: relatively few are "lost media". It's not perfect, but we've got exhaustive collections of ROMs for 40-year-old consoles, and there's a lot of awareness and effort around preservation now- in this regard, video games have caught up with TV and movies, despite their younger age.
Different people have different ideas of what "preservation" means, though, and it can possibly water things down when all these different definitions are being thrown around.
If we're talking about being able to purchase a legitimate copy of whatever game we want (not sure that counts as "preservation", but I support it regardless!), then video games are lagging way behind, based on the stats Gamecuber shared. Though even there, things are improving: look at how many older games are available on the likes of Steam, compared to where things were 20 years ago!
And then the more complete, contextual approach you mentioned... that's casting a wide net, but these things are definitely worth preserving as well!
Interesting idea, but between the potential legal issues and the fact that this doesn't actually make these games available to more people, it's probably not worth it. And don't some of these already work well on modern systems?
There are so many other PC and console games out there that could use a good remaster, with legal distribution included as part of the package!
I guess I could see an early-2000s console being called by a few of those names, like "Microsoft AMP". Most of those are just awful, though, and I don't know how an actual, professional branding company in that time could think that a console needs to have a cheesy '80s acronym as its name! At least offer some normal names as an option!
PS: Is there some significance to "TSO" or "Three Six Zero" that I'm missing? I always assumed the Xbox 360 was just inexplicably named after a full circle, and that was that, but this revelation only muddies the waters.
@Zenszulu That's the thing: this demo is already using multiple copies of textures with different lighting baked into each. Removing that would free up a fair bit of space- though again, the lighting would need to be faked another way.
Also, remember that each step down in resolution lets us quadruple the number of textures. 256x256 is still really high-res for the N64, but it allows for 16 times as many textures as we saw in this demo!
@Zenszulu This demo is overkill, though, with unique 1024x1024 textures on each surface. There's a lot of potential for a game that has huge textures without being quite so extravagant:
256x256 is still enough to fill the whole screen without any blur, and even 128x128 would hold up really well (being on par with a lot of GameCube-era textures)!
Plus, each texture here has lighting baked in. Generic versions of the textures without lighting would take up way less space (as they could be reused across different objects and surfaces), though it would mean someone would have to paint all of the vertices to simulate lighting.
Comments 383
Re: Building The Ultimate Sega Saturn
@Nahhhtendo Yeah, it's not like it's functioning as a battery or anything, but it does have to briefly hold a charge- which I'd imagine is to keep things running smoothly through the unpredictability of AC power?
Anyway, I'll be sure to wait those 15 minutes before licking the PSU's internals, so thanks!
Re: Building The Ultimate Sega Saturn
@Nahhhtendo It's fairly common knowledge that PSUs can hold a charge for a short time, but it should be safe to start poking around after 15-20 minutes at most... well, at least in modern models, which this is definitely not!
Or is that figure outdated, such that the risk is practically zero now, even seconds after unplugging the PSU? I've never tried getting a reading on the components to actually verify this oft-circulated info; have you?
(I prefer to err on the side of caution in these situations!)
Re: 'Shenmue' Earns Hilarious Reference In 'Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth'
@Ristar24 Let's get sweaty!
This easter egg is already ripping apart the timeline, though, and a direct appearance by Ryo would just destroy it. Would it be the original Ryo, now 55 years old? Or this young American(?) kid who was following in his predecessor's footsteps by looking for sailors in the present day? So many questions...
Re: Mega Man-Esque Platformer Berserk Boy Heading To Steam & Switch In March
I like how the character himself appears to be a fusion of Mega Man and Sonic.
Re: In Memory Of Memory Cards
I don't miss the reliability issues, or having to keep track of which card had which saves, or working around the frustratingly small storage space.
That last one, especially, was the worst:
Memory cards weren't cheap, either. Good luck if you wanted to build up a collection of 50+ games!
Re: Going Back In Time - Do You Play Retro Games To Reconnect With Your Past?
I chose "No". It's not that I don't have nostalgia and fond memories linked to certain games, but just that I don't consider those to be major factors that drive my interest in retro gaming.
I missed out on all kinds of top-tier games back in the day (due to not having my own game systems as a kid, not to mention simply being too young to play certain games when they were new!), so I'm still catching up on lots of classics that I missed, as well as discovering gems that I never heard of at the time.
There are many older titles that I played for the first time as an adult, and I still loved them for what they were, not for my (non-existent) memories of them!
Re: "Don't Be Mad At Valve" Says Dev Behind DMCA'd Portal 64 Project
@larryisaman Keeping silent would obviously be the foolproof way of staying out of trouble, but I imagine that it would be really difficult to make such a huge project without any feedback. If people are trying out a demo version, then their feedback can help refine the game, plus any positive feedback acts as a major source of motivation.
Some devs may be able to pull this off, but I imagine that most would lose interest halfway through.
Re: "Don't Be Mad At Valve" Says Dev Behind DMCA'd Portal 64 Project
@LordPieFace Portal 64 requires files from a PC copy of Portal in order to work, so it's not providing a loophole that lets people play it for free.
Of course, people could download a pre-patched ROM without owning Portal, but then, they could just as easily download Portal itself somewhere!
Re: "Don't Be Mad At Valve" Says Dev Behind DMCA'd Portal 64 Project
"Don't be mad at Valve"
So we should be mad at Nintendo, then?
Re: Did You Know That Konami's Simpsons Coin-Op References A Scrapped 'Rabbit Ears' Plotline?
@Poodlestargenerica Yeah, I suspect that the intent was for Marge to have an '80s perm, considering when the show began, but the ludicrous height makes me (and many others, apparently) think of a cartoonish beehive.
Re: Did You Know That Konami's Simpsons Coin-Op References A Scrapped 'Rabbit Ears' Plotline?
They must've dropped this idea pretty quickly- Marge was shown with normal-height, straight hair (and no rabbit ears!) as a kid, and I thought the first flashback like this was in the second or maybe third season at the latest- right around the time the game came out, in other words.
Re: Here's Tomb Raider Running On The Sega 32X
Impressive! All we need is for someone to get Tomb Raider running on a stock Genesis/Mega Drive, and then I really will have seen everything!
Re: Bitmap Books Is Launching 'N64: A Visual Compendium' This Year
@bahooney That specific image of Ness is from (or at least used in) the opening scene from Super Smash Bros., when the secret characters briefly pop up on the screen. (Note that they only appear as silhouettes, until you unlock them.)
Re: Interview: Ziggurat Interactive On Its Passion For Bringing Old Games Back From the Dead
Great to see Rendering Ranger making a much-needed return (assuming it's still coming out?). Even for others, like Jurassic Park, I'll consider picking them up someday, despite not having much nostalgia for them.
Re: Preserving Physical History: Meet The World's Biggest 'Big Box' Fans
I'm glad for the work these guys (and anyone who uploads decently high-res scans) have put into bringing back this experience. Having the physical packaging and manual made it easier to really appreciate each game, and we've mostly lost those things in this modern era- though I suppose having more games than time hasn't helped either!
Re: Review: AYANEO Retro Mini PC AM01 - The Cutest PC Ever? Quite Possibly
Not saying this mini PC doesn't have its perks (or that it's not cute!), but I do have to wonder: the 5700U model is expensive enough that a mid-range business laptop might be the more versatile and useful choice, despite going on sale in a similar price range.
And the 3200U model is weak enough that you could literally pull a 10-year-old desktop PC out of the garbage and get comparable CPU performance. (4th gen i5 and i7 CPUs from 2013/14 should easily match or exceed this.) Though the AM01's Ryzen will have much better graphics than any of those older PCs, so there's that.
Re: Flashback: How South Park Forced A Tiger Woods 99 Recall
While I vaguely remember hearing about this South Park incident before, the whole idea of using real, readable data as padding is mostly new to me. Just recently, the oldest existing build of Vexx for PS2 turned up as a result of this (the October build was hiding on the November disc), and so I wonder what other games have interesting dummy data that hasn't been analyzed yet.
Re: Flashback: How South Park Forced A Tiger Woods 99 Recall
@Azuris Interesting observation, and I feel like I've seen this before on some game, but I'm not sure. Let me know if you can confirm one of the games that's like this!
I'd imagine that its loading times aren't great, as putting the files on the outer edge can boost the transfer speed by more than double (or by 50%, on a mini DVD).
Re: Review: Sunsoft Collection 1 - It's Always Sunny With Blaster Master
Some of these Evercade collections are really tempting: this one has two of my most wanted NES games on it, for instance.
Hopefully, more of these will come to PC later, as it's hard to justify buying another dedicated gaming device!
Re: Sega's Cancelled Neptune Console Comes To Life Thanks To Fans
@Zenszulu Yeah, something along those lines- sort of like the Mega Drive & Genesis Classics collection on Steam, but with a new batch of games? (You can buy each game for about $1 individually, or just get the whole batch for an affordable price. Plus, the ROMs can be used elsewhere, after purchase!)
Whether it's that, a larger collection, individual emulations/remasters, or maybe even a mini console, I am interested in buying a bunch of classics from their back catalogue. But not if it's just the same Genesis games that we saw in the Genesis Mini... and in the aforementioned collection... and in the old collection on PS3... and in the older one on PS2!
Re: Sega's Cancelled Neptune Console Comes To Life Thanks To Fans
@Zenszulu It could be marketed as a "Genesis Mini: Deluxe/32X/Neptune Edition", with a mix of base console and 32X games. An all-32X compilation would be a hard sell for sure, but a mix of 32X games and other Genesis/Sega CD gems could have a much broader appeal.
And as usual, I'll mention that it doesn't have to be a mini console. Personally, I'd actually prefer a software compilation (for PC, Xbox, etc.), as I have plenty of computers and consoles to play on, and really don't need another plastic box by the TV. This goes for 32X, Master System, Game Gear, Saturn, or Dreamcast collections, all of which I'd be interested in! Get on it, Sega!
Re: Flashback: "No Hamburgers On The Ground" - How McDonald's Sabotaged Its Own Game
@RaeDawnChonglingBay I think you just answered your own question!
Re: Treasure's Masato Maegawa Talks Game Design In Newly-Translated 1995 Interview
@MontyCircus For today's youth, who may have had little or no exposure to classic media, I can understand it: they're used to seeing fancy, flashy productions with little need for imagination. It's hard for us to convince them that such simplistic, quaint-looking games (or movies, or what have you) can actually be interesting or even thrilling. And I'm not sure that we can, unless we can first convince them to give these older media a real chance (more than just 5 minutes to fall off the cliff in Mario a few times)!
Admittedly, many of us geezers also have a limit, where games in certain genres before certain dates hold less appeal. I can get some enjoyment out of '70s action games, for instance, but struggle to appreciate them like someone who grew up with them would.
PS: Most of the numbers stuff like "8K" is shallow as anything, but I will say that 60fps is important, especially in older action games. Without it, you end up with the likes of Awesome Possum!
Re: Treasure's Masato Maegawa Talks Game Design In Newly-Translated 1995 Interview
Fascinating to see this time capsule of a developer's opinions during the beginning of the 32-bit era.
In hindsight, some of Maegawa's ideas seem very wise and show a good sense of perspective: he saw the limitations of consumer-grade 3D hardware in 1995, and thought the 3D craze was overblown and a little premature. And I think his closing comments on just making interesting games, and not putting so much emphasis on the hardware, are timeless.
On the other hand, some of the things he said seem incredibly short-sighted, like: "I consider 3D games to be a single genre". Or how he apparently saw 3D as an extra flourish to tack onto an existing 2D game, rather than viewing it as literally a whole new dimension of gaming, which opened up all kinds of possibilities that simply wouldn't work well in 2D.
Re: Anniversary: Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts Is 15 Today
Nuts and Bolts is a really clever and fun game in its own right, but the Banjo-Kazooie brand was mutually harmful to it.
For anyone who hasn't played it, I do recommend giving it a good try, but note that it can take a bit of time for things to come together, as unfortunately, N&B keeps getting in its own way.
It restricts the parts you can build with during the early game, and it forces you to use pre-built vehicles in certain challenges.
For me, the moment that it "clicked" was when I first unlocked the medium engine and bolted it onto the back of a lightweight shopping cart, causing it to fly! The building system is meant for you to experiment with it, and you can "break" some of the challenges with the right vehicle designs.
Re: Perfect Dark Has Got A Fanmade PC Port Which Adds A Bunch Of Great QoL Features
Not as essential as the Ocarina of Time port(s), seeing as there's the 360 remaster- and even the original Perfect Dark already had 60fps (if you overclocked enough to eliminate the framerate dips) and widescreen support.
But proper mouselook sounds great, and it will be cool to see what kinds of mods people come up with!
Re: Gunstar Heroes Developer Treasure On Why Mega Drive Is Better Than SNES
@AllieKitsune Yeah, people bring up Gaussian interpolation and the 64KB RAM limit all the time- and I'm not denying that those are real issues- but ROM size is absolutely the main factor.
It's why the music is almost always made out of cheesy, aggressively looped snippets of instrument sounds, instead of with proper, realistic instrument recordings. It's why everything from seagulls to screams to explosions is made using simple tones or tiny blips of sound, looped and played at different pitches, when the SNES is perfectly capable of playing actual recorded sound effects.
The SNES's sound chip, advanced as it was for its time, was being treated more like a synthesizer- or more accurately, a Game Boy or Turbografx chip.
Re: Gunstar Heroes Developer Treasure On Why Mega Drive Is Better Than SNES
@-wc- A keyboard (sample-based) might make for a better analogy:
A drum can only make drum sounds, but it's good at what it does.
On the other hand, you can load any sound into a sampler, including drums, making it far more flexible. Of course, making it sound as good as a real drum is another matter!
There are plenty of Genesis tunes that have been ported/remade for the SNES in recent years. And they come remarkably close! There are SNES to Genesis conversions as well, but these are covers, as the Genesis simply doesn't have the hardware to do SNES music (aside from streaming it as PCM).
Admittedly, those Genesis covers often sound better than the SNES originals, but that's a matter of composition and ROM size, not the systems' capabilities.
By the way, that European Dreamcast joke is way underrated.
Re: This Amazing Zelda II Fan Remaster Adds New Secrets, Widescreen & More
@Spider-Kev This one is a native PC port, so it won't work on the NES Mini or any other emulators, unfortunately. Though on the plus side, it outputs true widescreen in a higher res than the real NES could do, and may have other small technical enhancements.
Re: This Amazing Zelda II Fan Remaster Adds New Secrets, Widescreen & More
@Serpenterror Neat to see that there was a side-view G&W Zelda- I'd only seen the top-down one before. I think you've got the timeline backwards, though: the earliest Zelda games for G&W are from 1989, whereas Adventure of Link came out in 1987 ('88 in most regions).
Oddly enough, the Japanese cover for the second NES game had "The Legend of Zelda 2" written in English, with "Adventure of Link" under it in Japanese... whereas the first game had "The Legend of Zelda" written in Japanese, and only its subtitle, "The Hyrule Fantasy", was written in English.
Re: This Amazing Zelda II Fan Remaster Adds New Secrets, Widescreen & More
This looks seriously rad!
Adventure of Link wasn't a bad game, but it wasn't the most accessible, either, and it had some questionable design decisions. With many of the rough edges sanded away here, I'm tempted to revisit AoL for the first time ever since completing it!
Re: Yu Suzuki Would Love To Make A Yakuza 0-Style Shenmue Prequel
@-wc- Agreed that there should be an option for newcomers (or those who forgot the events of these 20-plus-year-old games!) to quickly catch up. But whether that's a quick video in the extras menu, or the occasional callback/flashback, it shouldn't spend too much (mandatory) game time on previous events.
As far as availability goes, though, Shenmue I and II are in pretty good shape: they can be purchased and run on a potato PC, as well as any console from the past decade... except Switch, of course. Still a bit expensive at full price, but at least they're not chained to a single platform!
Re: Yu Suzuki Would Love To Make A Yakuza 0-Style Shenmue Prequel
@Uncharted2007 I think his intention is to weave smaller flashbacks into a mostly new story. But even that could be a problem, considering how little Shenmue III did to advance the plot* from where we saw it previously.
Expanding on previous events and locations is actually something I would be interested in, under different circumstances, but I've been waiting ~15 years (even as a latecomer to Shenmue II) to see what happens next! Treading the same ground over again, when I just want the story to advance, has little appeal right now.
*Allegedly. I still haven't gotten around to S3, but hearing that most of it is inessential (no doubt ending in another tease, like S2 did!) isn't really driving me to make it a priority.
Re: Embracer Games Archive Hits Significant New Milestone
I'm curious as to how these future collaborations will play out.
Right now, I'm struggling to think of many cases where someone would need to reach out to Embracer for resources related to research. Maybe my mind is just too focused on the small picture and short term.
50+ years from now, original hardware and media will be all the more scarce, and I can better see the value of such an expansive archive or museum.
Re: Best PS1 Emulators - PlayStation Emulation Made Easy
Started using Duckstation a little while ago, and it's the best one I've tried.
It has been very accurate so far, and supports the whole range of optional enhancements (fast CD drive, overclocking, high resolutions, high precision polygons, texture filtering, widescreen hacks).
BeetlePSX is also quite good, though I used the Retroarch core, and that UI is a bit clunky overall. (Retroarch is great as a one-stop solution for your TV-connected emulation box, I'm sure, but a harder sell for a PC user.) Beetle itself had a few bugs, at least for me, but most games worked perfectly.
Mednafen is accurate and fairly easy to get online, but being limited to 240p is a bummer if you're on an HD screen.
ePSXe was my go-to PS1 emulator back in the day, but it's quite archaic now: there's no way to change settings without stopping the game, for one. And if you try to use full HD rendering, it warns you that this feature is very heavy and requires a high end graphics card with 256 MB of VRAM (that was high end about 20 years ago, but even a "potato" has gigabytes these days)!
Re: Anniversary: Rare's Grabbed By The Ghoulies Is 20 Years Old
@Banjo- It actually took three years to make, like most of their games! It was first revealed on the GameCube, then ported and refined on the Xbox. According to interviews, Rare still had to cut content to keep some semblance of a deadline. (Just porting to Xbox was apparently a big undertaking in itself, and ate up a lot of time.)
PS: The unsold copies of Ghoulies in the garbage may be a self-deprecating joke, but that joke is based on something, whether that's actual sales figures, or just public perception!
Re: Anniversary: Rare's Grabbed By The Ghoulies Is 20 Years Old
@BobaTheFett Do you mean about the gameplay being simplistic, or about the limited scope and short length of the game? If the former, you should know that the later challenges offer difficult conditions that force you to get creative with how you approach things, so the simple mechanics are more of a means to an end, rather than the point itself.
If it's the latter, then I get that. If you asked me to try to define the "Rare Magic" that graced their N64-era output, I would point to the ambition, and the feeling that they were always trying to make the best game ever.
A straightforward shooter campaign, kart racer, or collectathon platformer? Not good enough- they had to cram it full of features, details, extras, and modes.
Ghoulies was satisfied to be what it was- not that there's anything wrong with that, necessarily, but it's a step down from the extravagance of previous games.
Re: Anniversary: Rare's Grabbed By The Ghoulies Is 20 Years Old
Grabbed by the Ghoulies is a clever and fun little game (and I consider the remastered version from Rare Replay to be one of the compilation's highlights), but it suffered from all of the weight being placed on it as Rare's big Xbox debut, and the first new Rare game in a year.
There are all kinds of games like this, which are worthwhile on their own merits, but can be disappointing in their original context, due to being too small in scope, too unconventional, etc. Somewhat fittingly, Luigi's Mansion is another example, where many of us were hoping for a big, flagship Mario title for the GameCube (seeing as the last one was a full five years old at that time!), but the game's quality ultimately speaks for itself.
This disappointment due to failed expectations is understandable, but it starts to seem a bit pointless in hindsight, as we can appreciate what something is, not what it isn't.
Re: CeX Retro Watch: October 2023
@KingMike Could be a bit of both, for all I know.
Japan, at least, is supposed to be a treasure trove for collectors, with much lower prices than you'd find in the west, but I thought Europe was a lot more in line with North America. The high prices on Pokemon, Castlevania, etc., as seen in this article, would seem to back that up!
Re: CeX Retro Watch: October 2023
@Andee Especially considering that the same game costs $10 CAD on Xbox (at full price)!
Similar deal with TMNT III on Game Boy: Considering the faded label and lack of any packaging, you're not getting much of a collector's experience for the £70. If you're just after the game itself, you might as well get the Cowabunga Collection for a fraction of that cost, and be able to play the dozen other games it includes.
Re: CeX Retro Watch: October 2023
Is there a market crash going on? As a Canadian, I'm amazed at some of those prices: £6 for a boxed copy of Sonic 1, £15 for Daytona on Saturn, and just £8 for Smash Bros. on Wii U?
I thought I noticed the prices on many games over here starting to balance out a bit, with older titles starting to come back within reach of us average peasants. But we still don't have prices like these, as far as I've seen!
Re: Random: A Shiba Inu Is Going To Speedrun At AGDQ 2024
Such impressive! Very speedrun! Wow!
Re: Flashback: Xbox Got Its Name Because The Other Suggestions Were "F**cking Appalling"
@foodmetaphors I'd heard it said before that they didn't want to seem outdated with an "Xbox 2", but their choice of a "3" title, specifically, is kind of funny.
Somehow, that didn't stop them from pitting their Xbox One against the PlayStation 4, though!
Re: "Like A Book Or A Movie" - Star Fox Dev Dylan Cuthbert Shares His Vision Of Retro Gaming's Future
"you could go and watch Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, and you don’t have to worry about someone having to remake it so you can watch it again"
I think this bit really highlights how the availability of older video games really isn't where it should be. It's kind of ridiculous how many games are simply not (legally!) available in any form- and as a lesser issue, I'd add that of those that are available, many have been altered or remade, which would be considered sacrilege in movie enthusiast circles. (Imagine if the only available release of Star Wars was a remaster, with alterations made to... oh, bad example. But imagine if the only way to watch episodes 4, 5, and 6 was through a full remake with modern VFX and a whole new cast!)
But things are in a much better state than they were 20 or so years ago, and we have many more old games listed than delisted each year, so that's progress!
Re: Kelsey Lewin Is Leaving The Video Game History Foundation
@Razieluigi As far as the preservation itself is concerned, I'd agree that video games are in a pretty good spot: relatively few are "lost media". It's not perfect, but we've got exhaustive collections of ROMs for 40-year-old consoles, and there's a lot of awareness and effort around preservation now- in this regard, video games have caught up with TV and movies, despite their younger age.
Different people have different ideas of what "preservation" means, though, and it can possibly water things down when all these different definitions are being thrown around.
If we're talking about being able to purchase a legitimate copy of whatever game we want (not sure that counts as "preservation", but I support it regardless!), then video games are lagging way behind, based on the stats Gamecuber shared. Though even there, things are improving: look at how many older games are available on the likes of Steam, compared to where things were 20 years ago!
And then the more complete, contextual approach you mentioned... that's casting a wide net, but these things are definitely worth preserving as well!
Re: Nightdive CEO Pitches Potential Way To Remaster More Classic Titles
Interesting idea, but between the potential legal issues and the fact that this doesn't actually make these games available to more people, it's probably not worth it.
And don't some of these already work well on modern systems?
There are so many other PC and console games out there that could use a good remaster, with legal distribution included as part of the package!
Re: Flashback: Xbox Got Its Name Because The Other Suggestions Were "F**cking Appalling"
@JJtheTexan As I recall, it was hard for fanboys to come up with a proper insult for the Xbox- the PP would've been some welcome ammo for them!
PS: For those who don't remember, the nicknames "LameCube" and "GayStation" were thrown around at the time, but I don't think Xbox really had one.
PPS: I guess the modern equivalent would be how there's no Sony equivalent of "Xbot" and "Nintendrone", so people turned to... ponies.
PPPS: Hehe... the previous line starts with "PP".
Re: Flashback: Xbox Got Its Name Because The Other Suggestions Were "F**cking Appalling"
I guess I could see an early-2000s console being called by a few of those names, like "Microsoft AMP".
Most of those are just awful, though, and I don't know how an actual, professional branding company in that time could think that a console needs to have a cheesy '80s acronym as its name! At least offer some normal names as an option!
PS: Is there some significance to "TSO" or "Three Six Zero" that I'm missing? I always assumed the Xbox 360 was just inexplicably named after a full circle, and that was that, but this revelation only muddies the waters.
Re: Random: This New N64 Graphics Demo Looks Incredible & Runs On Real Hardware
@Zenszulu That's the thing: this demo is already using multiple copies of textures with different lighting baked into each. Removing that would free up a fair bit of space- though again, the lighting would need to be faked another way.
Also, remember that each step down in resolution lets us quadruple the number of textures. 256x256 is still really high-res for the N64, but it allows for 16 times as many textures as we saw in this demo!
Re: Random: This New N64 Graphics Demo Looks Incredible & Runs On Real Hardware
@Zenszulu This demo is overkill, though, with unique 1024x1024 textures on each surface. There's a lot of potential for a game that has huge textures without being quite so extravagant:
256x256 is still enough to fill the whole screen without any blur, and even 128x128 would hold up really well (being on par with a lot of GameCube-era textures)!
Plus, each texture here has lighting baked in. Generic versions of the textures without lighting would take up way less space (as they could be reused across different objects and surfaces), though it would mean someone would have to paint all of the vertices to simulate lighting.