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.
@EarthboundBenjy 2012 releases do qualify- look at La-Mulana and Ys: Origin. Though speaking of Ys, it makes it onto the list despite having a more-or-less contemporary English release, as the release dates (2006 Japanese, 2012 English) just happened to line up right.
I think relative delays would be a better metric (e.g., the English release has to come at least 10 years after the original), but no matter how you slice it, it's going to be somewhat arbitrary.
@BionicDodo When I saw the headline, I thought it was going to be about fan translations. This is cool, too, but a list of games with fan translations would also be great. (Or like you said, both on one site!)
I'm probably biased, but Gen 1 is my favourite to this day. I played Yellow a fair bit more than the other versions from that gen, though, so it feels a bit overly familiar, whereas Red and Blue (and especially the original Japanese Red and Green) have a special charm in their goofy monster designs.
Oh, and you only had to trade with one other version if you had Red or Blue, whereas Yellow had to trade with both if you wanted to catch 'em all! I don't own Blue, so I had to trade with Red, Gold, and Silver in order to complete my save!
@-wc- I don't know, I always felt like the two-character gimmick wasn't as game-changing as it was hyped up to be- and then when MK8 Deluxe retained the two-item mechanic (with only one character per kart!), I felt somewhat vindicated.
That said, Double Dash (along with maaaybe MKDS) is arguably peak Mario Kart to this day, as it blends the accessibility of the newer games with the technicality and higher skill ceiling of the old ones. I've only come to appreciate DD more over the years, as the later entries, while great, seem to be missing something. It's ironic that Damien says that DD lacks a certain "je ne sais quoi", as I think that's exactly what it has!
Little clarification/correction: this port is based on the original MSX game, but the article mentions the NES adaptation before saying "That version of the game is now being ported", seemingly implying that it's the NES version that's being brought to the Genesis.
TV, hands down. Old 2D games look so much better using real hardware on a CRT TV, and 3D games hold up surprisingly well on modern screens via emulation.
I find handheld systems in general to be really uncomfortable to play on, so I usually end up playing those games on a larger screen as well.
This is such a strange turn of events. For years, we've been wanting Sega to bring back their Model 3 games so we can buy them... and now they decide to make them freebies in their latest Yakuza game?
Great news either way, though! (I just need to catch up on the other what, 8, first?)
I like how they just briefly show that there's also an HD mode, as if it's a little bonus feature that was thrown in. The whole game essentially has to be built twice, for this to be possible.
@KingMike I think what's throwing you off is that this article is from 2018!
I know there's a little acknowledgement of the article's origin near the bottom when it's re-posted, but I wish it would be displayed more prominently at the top, as that would make these cases a lot less confusing. Maybe it could even replace or sit alongside the timestamp, if that's possible. (Admins, what do you think?)
@-wc- Thanks for clarifying! I may not agree 100%, but I think I see where you're coming from. And I did feel particularly apathetic towards gritty PS3-era games at the time, though sitting out that generation and falling behind has made it (and subsequent generations!) all feel a bit fresher to me now.
I guess there's only so much that can be done with (attempted) photorealism- and especially the brown '00s AAA look... I personally feel that both pixel art and full-on cartoonish 3D graphics are also pretty well played out by this point, but there's still plenty of potential in the broadly semi-realistic middle ground that was seemingly a lot more common in the 5th and 6th gens. That, and all kinds of overtly stylized graphics, of course, of which the possibilities are endless!
PS: Ah, styrofoam blocks... have we not moved beyond 2006 Havok physics yet?
@-wc- So you think all games with realistic graphics look ugly, then? Or just the ones from 5+ years ago?
I still think Crysis (16 years old!) looks good, though the humans are a little uncanny and CG-ish, of course... but then, don't the human characters in all games still look like CGI? The gap between game graphics and reality is closing ever so slowly now.
@ludotaku You've probably already played 2D pixel art games on 3D engines without even realizing it! Shovel Knight is an example of this.
There are also some indie games now that use polygons, but render in 240p by default (like a PlayStation or N64 game), which gives the impression of pixel art when played on a modern screen.
And of course, there are voxel games like 3D Dot Game Heroes, but this is a specific aesthetic, not a more efficient way to create pixel art.
@-wc- Are you talking about your friends, or the wide sentiment that you perceived outside of that? Because if we're talking about friend circles, I see where you're coming from. Based on the people I knew, I would've thought the GameCube was way more popular than it was, and that Xbox was in a distant third place.
When I say the Xbox was considered cool, I'm going more by the impression I got based on other factors besides my friends. It's been 20+ years, but the examples I remember are gaming magazines, bits of online chatter, pop culture cameos, and random acquaintances (some of whom were admittedly my age or younger, and I'm a bit younger than you are, still being in junior high when these consoles launched).
I always thought of the annoying FPS kid stereotype as something that started with CoD4: Modern Warfare, but now that I think of it, it had some roots in the very first Halo as well.
@Tobunari Rush, like the 3D "boostathons", can be fun when you get to know the levels well enough to blast through them. I'd forgotten about the enemies (I also finished it years ago, got the emeralds, etc., and never went back to it), but I did remember that it throws in a lot of pits and things to discourage you from going fast.
I don't like any of these boost-based games as much as most people seem to- Sonic Adventure is still the closest to getting 3D Sonic right, in my opinion.
@BulkSlash As a GameCube fan, I kind of get this (remember when Resident Evil 4 was one of the console's biggest exclusives?), but it's great to see games ported to more platforms, so more people can play them- sometimes with meaningful QoL and performance enhancements as well.
Far too many games are still stranded on "dead" platforms to this day, with no way to purchase them besides expensive used copies (assuming the game wasn't digital-only!). Being able to purchase and enjoy these games today easily beats out any sentiments around exclusivity. If you ask me, anyway.
@Darthmoogle Are you having trouble with a particular game? Let me know, as it's possible I've seen it before.
The latest versions of Dolphin are usually pretty good about just working, with no settings needing to be changed (aside from telling it where your games are, and mapping the controller buttons). But there are definitely exceptions, and the old laptop might add an issue or two of its own.
Nice! Sonic Advance 1 was about as close as anyone got to the classics (until Mania, of course), but Advance 2, Advance 3, and Rush all felt like a considerable step back: too often, they had just one path through the level, bottomless pits everywhere, and hard-to-anticipate obstacles to make sure you fall into said bottomless pits unless you know exactly what you're doing.
It's great to see 2's level design getting the attention and refinement it needed!
@BorkYeahGames Linking GBA and GCN emulators has been possible for a while, but now Dolphin has GBA emulators built in, allowing for easier setup- including straightforward netplay without using Parsec!
About the HyperCube, I'm impressed: both that you got this working in the first place, and that you somehow made it even more complicated than the original setup with all that it entailed!
Interestingly, these screenshots were taken in high resolution mode. Was Sonic X-Treme ever shown off running in 480i, or did Sega crank the resolution up for the purpose of taking pictures?
(Dinosaur Planet had a similar situation, with a bunch of early images being 640x480, but the leaked ROM only runs in low-res 240p mode.)
@dimi That's not bad, if it also unlocks a wide library of CD-based games as well. Other systems would have you spend 2-3 times as much for a CD-ROM drive, instead of just tapping into your existing CD player.
@N64-ROX Probably 5Mb, since bits were what almost everyone used in that context! 5 megabytes would be insanely huge (almost unheard-of, even on SNES). 5 megabits, on the other hand, would be in the same league as TMNT2 (512KB or 4Mb) and Kirby's Adventure (768KB or 6Mb).
The thought of having huge amounts of space on the NES is an interesting one, though. It should be possible to store a ton of audio data, and then flip through the banks 16KB at a time to stream music. Come to think of it, there was a demo ROM that did something like this on a small scale. It looped a segment of everyone's favourite Rick Astley song in impressively clear quality.
Though streaming proper PCM ties up the CPU for too long, and the NES's usual DPCM is always a bit muffled, so neither is ideal. And running actual Redbook CD audio (like the Turbografx or Sega CD did) might only be possible on the Japanese Famicom, as the other regions' NES models had no way to pass audio through the cartridge port.
These look really cool, and now I'm back to wanting Pokémon for SNES to be real! (I used to wish there was a console version, back in the day.)
It just seems a shame to sacrifice a Super Game Boy for each one of these. Hopefully, someone will be able to decompile and port the original games to SNES- maybe with audiovisual enhancements?
Comments 409
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.
Re: New Website Aims To Catalogue All The Newly Localized Games You May Have Missed
@EarthboundBenjy 2012 releases do qualify- look at La-Mulana and Ys: Origin. Though speaking of Ys, it makes it onto the list despite having a more-or-less contemporary English release, as the release dates (2006 Japanese, 2012 English) just happened to line up right.
I think relative delays would be a better metric (e.g., the English release has to come at least 10 years after the original), but no matter how you slice it, it's going to be somewhat arbitrary.
Re: New Website Aims To Catalogue All The Newly Localized Games You May Have Missed
@BionicDodo When I saw the headline, I thought it was going to be about fan translations. This is cool, too, but a list of games with fan translations would also be great. (Or like you said, both on one site!)
Re: Anniversary: Pokémon Yellow Turns 25 And Pokémon Platinum Is 15
I'm probably biased, but Gen 1 is my favourite to this day. I played Yellow a fair bit more than the other versions from that gen, though, so it feels a bit overly familiar, whereas Red and Blue (and especially the original Japanese Red and Green) have a special charm in their goofy monster designs.
Oh, and you only had to trade with one other version if you had Red or Blue, whereas Yellow had to trade with both if you wanted to catch 'em all! I don't own Blue, so I had to trade with Red, Gold, and Silver in order to complete my save!
Re: Best GameCube Games Of All Time
@-wc- I don't know, I always felt like the two-character gimmick wasn't as game-changing as it was hyped up to be- and then when MK8 Deluxe retained the two-item mechanic (with only one character per kart!), I felt somewhat vindicated.
That said, Double Dash (along with maaaybe MKDS) is arguably peak Mario Kart to this day, as it blends the accessibility of the newer games with the technicality and higher skill ceiling of the old ones. I've only come to appreciate DD more over the years, as the later entries, while great, seem to be missing something. It's ironic that Damien says that DD lacks a certain "je ne sais quoi", as I think that's exactly what it has!
Re: Fans Have Translated The Hotel Dusk Precursor 'Blue Chicago Blues' Into English
@no_donatello Guess it came out just a little too late for a Sega CD release... and once the 3D craze started, there was no going back.
Re: Unofficial Genesis / Mega Drive 'Metal Gear' Port Sneaks Out Of The Shadows
Little clarification/correction: this port is based on the original MSX game, but the article mentions the NES adaptation before saying "That version of the game is now being ported", seemingly implying that it's the NES version that's being brought to the Genesis.
Re: Poll: Handheld Or TV - How Do You Play Retro Games?
TV, hands down. Old 2D games look so much better using real hardware on a CRT TV, and 3D games hold up surprisingly well on modern screens via emulation.
I find handheld systems in general to be really uncomfortable to play on, so I usually end up playing those games on a larger screen as well.
Re: Daytona USA 2 Is Finally Getting A Home Port, Thanks To Like A Dragon Gaiden
This is such a strange turn of events. For years, we've been wanting Sega to bring back their Model 3 games so we can buy them... and now they decide to make them freebies in their latest Yakuza game?
Great news either way, though! (I just need to catch up on the other what, 8, first?)
Re: 'Rugrats' Is Getting A NES Platformer That Reminds Us Of 'Bonk'
I like how they just briefly show that there's also an HD mode, as if it's a little bonus feature that was thrown in.
The whole game essentially has to be built twice, for this to be possible.
Re: It's Time to Celebrate the PSP, Sony's 21st Century Walkman
@KingMike I think what's throwing you off is that this article is from 2018!
I know there's a little acknowledgement of the article's origin near the bottom when it's re-posted, but I wish it would be displayed more prominently at the top, as that would make these cases a lot less confusing. Maybe it could even replace or sit alongside the timestamp, if that's possible. (Admins, what do you think?)
Re: Talking Point: Will Hand-Drawn Pixel Art Still Be Viable In Ten Years Time?
@-wc- Thanks for clarifying! I may not agree 100%, but I think I see where you're coming from. And I did feel particularly apathetic towards gritty PS3-era games at the time, though sitting out that generation and falling behind has made it (and subsequent generations!) all feel a bit fresher to me now.
I guess there's only so much that can be done with (attempted) photorealism- and especially the brown '00s AAA look... I personally feel that both pixel art and full-on cartoonish 3D graphics are also pretty well played out by this point, but there's still plenty of potential in the broadly semi-realistic middle ground that was seemingly a lot more common in the 5th and 6th gens. That, and all kinds of overtly stylized graphics, of course, of which the possibilities are endless!
PS: Ah, styrofoam blocks... have we not moved beyond 2006 Havok physics yet?
Re: Talking Point: Will Hand-Drawn Pixel Art Still Be Viable In Ten Years Time?
@-wc- So you think all games with realistic graphics look ugly, then? Or just the ones from 5+ years ago?
I still think Crysis (16 years old!) looks good, though the humans are a little uncanny and CG-ish, of course... but then, don't the human characters in all games still look like CGI? The gap between game graphics and reality is closing ever so slowly now.
Re: Talking Point: Will Hand-Drawn Pixel Art Still Be Viable In Ten Years Time?
@ludotaku You've probably already played 2D pixel art games on 3D engines without even realizing it! Shovel Knight is an example of this.
There are also some indie games now that use polygons, but render in 240p by default (like a PlayStation or N64 game), which gives the impression of pixel art when played on a modern screen.
And of course, there are voxel games like 3D Dot Game Heroes, but this is a specific aesthetic, not a more efficient way to create pixel art.
Re: Best Original Xbox Games Of All Time
@-wc- Are you talking about your friends, or the wide sentiment that you perceived outside of that? Because if we're talking about friend circles, I see where you're coming from. Based on the people I knew, I would've thought the GameCube was way more popular than it was, and that Xbox was in a distant third place.
When I say the Xbox was considered cool, I'm going more by the impression I got based on other factors besides my friends. It's been 20+ years, but the examples I remember are gaming magazines, bits of online chatter, pop culture cameos, and random acquaintances (some of whom were admittedly my age or younger, and I'm a bit younger than you are, still being in junior high when these consoles launched).
I always thought of the annoying FPS kid stereotype as something that started with CoD4: Modern Warfare, but now that I think of it, it had some roots in the very first Halo as well.
Re: This New ROM Hack Fixes Many Of Sonic Advance 2's Rough Edges
@Tobunari Rush, like the 3D "boostathons", can be fun when you get to know the levels well enough to blast through them. I'd forgotten about the enemies (I also finished it years ago, got the emeralds, etc., and never went back to it), but I did remember that it throws in a lot of pits and things to discourage you from going fast.
I don't like any of these boost-based games as much as most people seem to- Sonic Adventure is still the closest to getting 3D Sonic right, in my opinion.
Re: Best Xbox 360 Games Of All Time
@BulkSlash As a GameCube fan, I kind of get this (remember when Resident Evil 4 was one of the console's biggest exclusives?), but it's great to see games ported to more platforms, so more people can play them- sometimes with meaningful QoL and performance enhancements as well.
Far too many games are still stranded on "dead" platforms to this day, with no way to purchase them besides expensive used copies (assuming the game wasn't digital-only!). Being able to purchase and enjoy these games today easily beats out any sentiments around exclusivity.
If you ask me, anyway.
Re: The GameCube & Wii Emulator Dolphin Adds New WiiConnect24 Support & More
@Darthmoogle Are you having trouble with a particular game? Let me know, as it's possible I've seen it before.
The latest versions of Dolphin are usually pretty good about just working, with no settings needing to be changed (aside from telling it where your games are, and mapping the controller buttons). But there are definitely exceptions, and the old laptop might add an issue or two of its own.
Re: This New ROM Hack Fixes Many Of Sonic Advance 2's Rough Edges
Nice! Sonic Advance 1 was about as close as anyone got to the classics (until Mania, of course), but Advance 2, Advance 3, and Rush all felt like a considerable step back: too often, they had just one path through the level, bottomless pits everywhere, and hard-to-anticipate obstacles to make sure you fall into said bottomless pits unless you know exactly what you're doing.
It's great to see 2's level design getting the attention and refinement it needed!
Re: Sonic Fans Have Added 4-Person Multiplayer To Sonic Adventure DX
Aw, yeah! This is happening!
Definitely going to check this out, as Sonic Adventure is one of my favourite games of all time, rough edges and all.
Re: Fans Have Made The Original Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles Playable Remotely
@BorkYeahGames Linking GBA and GCN emulators has been possible for a while, but now Dolphin has GBA emulators built in, allowing for easier setup- including straightforward netplay without using Parsec!
About the HyperCube, I'm impressed: both that you got this working in the first place, and that you somehow made it even more complicated than the original setup with all that it entailed!
Re: Sega Digs Up Original Screenshots For The Cancelled Sonic X-Treme
Interestingly, these screenshots were taken in high resolution mode. Was Sonic X-Treme ever shown off running in 480i, or did Sega crank the resolution up for the purpose of taking pictures?
(Dinosaur Planet had a similar situation, with a bunch of early images being 640x480, but the leaked ROM only runs in low-res 240p mode.)
Re: Codemasters Was Supposed To Make A NES CD Drive, But It Never Happened
@dimi That's not bad, if it also unlocks a wide library of CD-based games as well. Other systems would have you spend 2-3 times as much for a CD-ROM drive, instead of just tapping into your existing CD player.
Re: Codemasters Was Supposed To Make A NES CD Drive, But It Never Happened
@N64-ROX Probably 5Mb, since bits were what almost everyone used in that context!
5 megabytes would be insanely huge (almost unheard-of, even on SNES). 5 megabits, on the other hand, would be in the same league as TMNT2 (512KB or 4Mb) and Kirby's Adventure (768KB or 6Mb).
The thought of having huge amounts of space on the NES is an interesting one, though. It should be possible to store a ton of audio data, and then flip through the banks 16KB at a time to stream music. Come to think of it, there was a demo ROM that did something like this on a small scale. It looped a segment of everyone's favourite Rick Astley song in impressively clear quality.
Though streaming proper PCM ties up the CPU for too long, and the NES's usual DPCM is always a bit muffled, so neither is ideal.
And running actual Redbook CD audio (like the Turbografx or Sega CD did) might only be possible on the Japanese Famicom, as the other regions' NES models had no way to pass audio through the cartridge port.
Re: Classic Pokémon Games Get 'Ported' To SNES By Industrious Fan
These look really cool, and now I'm back to wanting Pokémon for SNES to be real! (I used to wish there was a console version, back in the day.)
It just seems a shame to sacrifice a Super Game Boy for each one of these. Hopefully, someone will be able to decompile and port the original games to SNES- maybe with audiovisual enhancements?