@KingMike it's easy to keep track if you hate the company!

Never buying another Playstation product. They're now on the list with Nestle, Ubisoft, EA, and others.

@tektite_captain you're aware that companies can get into serious trouble if they lie about their sales data, right? Commodore has investors, so falsely reporting on their sales data can result in large fines, lawsuits, and criminal charges for execs (Peri). It doesn't matter if they're not publicly traded, they have angel investors so falsifying this data would be a breach of fiduciary duties.

You're accusing them of a very serious crime because you refuse to accept that anyone in 2026 actually wanted to buy a flip phone or a C64.

Where's that guy from the last thread that claimed they were lying about the number sold and that the company was going to go under? 🤣

Defeats the purpose entirely

Why do every single one of your posts try to drum up drama where there is none? It's an ugly vest, if you don't like it then don't buy it.

@tektite_captain Sure, everything is exactly as you say. All of these sales are imaginary and the company isn't making any money at all. They will have to shut down next month. They also didn't make any money on their last product, it's a wonder they're still in business or had any money to fund R&D of their new product.

@tektite_captain they didn't say anything about sales figures, it's public info on their site (displays which batch you will be part of when ordering, and batch size).

7000 units is really good for a startup that has literally never shipped a phone before, and at this rate the phone will surpass the sales of the Commodore 64 Ultimate which was also a successful product. A few million dollars in revenue is nothing to sneeze at, and if you're going to pretend that's somehow a failure than that would make you the grifter.

@tektite_captain 7000 units sold and it hasn't even been 24 hours yet. That's a few million dollars in revenue.

Between the price being lowered, and the $100 launch discount on the website, this brings it down to $300 which is much more acceptable.

Unless it includes rumble, it's still not perfect

@SecretSeashell most people didn't spend a whole lot of time on the internet before it was in their pocket. You seem to be operating on the assumption that time not spent on a smartphone will instead be spent on another internet connected device, which seems to be the opposite of the point (and likely a sign of addiction).

@breach187 what does nostalgia have to do with anything? Commodore went bankrupt before I was even born and I bought the C64 Ultimate.

@OorWullie it's not that absurd. The price of components has gone up a lot in recent years. Had it released a few years back the price would have likely been around half. This is also running on custom hardware, it's not just some lazy repackaged Chinese junk, so engineering costs need to be considered and not simply the bill of materials.

@Quick_Man what in the hell are you talking about?

@mjparker77 the closest alternatives on the market are around the same price or more expensive.

@N64-ROX digital minimalism was a pretty popular trend just a few years ago, and many people did ditch their smartphones for old flip phones before the signals they rely on got shutdown. Some others decided to keep their smartphone but did various tricks to try and make it less addictive, like installing themes to lock it down to only the bare essentials, or making everything black and white.

Maybe it's not for you (it's not for me either), but to claim that there isn't a market for this is absurd asinine.

@breach187 it's pretty clear that the target audience for this device is people who hopped on the digital minimalism trend a few years back, and that was mostly a zoomer thing.

@gingerbeardman I never claimed to know the details of your life. What I do know is Japanese, and that it's very, extremely obvious when something has been machine translated (whether by AI or not). I responded to a claim you made about your (probably non-existent) friends pretending that they couldn't tell you were using a translator.

@gingerbeardman I'm not

It's not a bad idea as a product and there absolutely is market for it but the price is atrocious.

Personally, if I wanted to give up on smartphones I would probably just get a phone with an e-ink screen since it would still be able to use any apps if I absolutely needed them (which, sometimes you do in this modern world).

@gingerbeardman I'm fluent in Japanese and have been living in Japan for 1/3 of my life. You can absolutely (quite easily) tell if something is machine translated or not (whether by AI or something like DeepL or Google Translate). These tools are nowhere near as good as you believe they are, and as a beginner you have no basis for making any such claims.

And yes, your friends did lie to you. It's called 建前 (tatemae), you will probably learn the word in your Japanese textbook at some point.

There's nothing wrong with making a game inspired by another game, but you need to innovate on the idea enough to make it unique and to truly make it yours, rather than produce a straight 1:1 clone.

@gingerbeardman they're all terrible at translate and your friends lied to you to be nice. Learn a language and you'll quickly find out.

En/Jp bilingual person here:
AI translation is really bad. Like re, really, really, really bad. It's terrible. You shouldn't use it. It's bad.

Please don't ruin games like this.

I highly doubt Sega would outsource the development to a Western company. All of their recent devices (both Mega Drive minis, Game Gear minis, both Astro City minis) were outsourced to Japanese companies. More than likely they would probably outsource it to the same companies who did those.

I'll never forget those leaked internal Sega docs (slideshow from a 1997 company meeting with sales data) that contradicts the "very well documented" story that everyone believes. Sega of America didn't do as well during the 16bit era as Kalinske would like us to think.

I feel like Compute's Gazette deserves a spot on this list. It's a great magazine for anyone interested in retro computing and every month they publish type-in games and programs just like in the old days.

@-wc- are you trying to somehow say that these images of women in bikinis are somehow related to LGBT culture? What a bizarre comment if I've ever seen one.

@Sketcz over here in Japan, most towns have nude statues around town. The one in front of my local city government office features a nude child. I think you were probably right when you speculated that this squeamish mentality around nudity (both sexual and non-sexual) is probably an offshoot of puritanism because it mostly seems to be a Western (and especially American) thing.

@-wc- what does "woke" or "anti-woke" even mean? It's just a cute girl holding a Dreamcast, George. I don't see how this is at all relevant to American politics.

These specifics ads themselves might be fake, but at least it's not far removed from reality. Models dressed like this used to be common at trade shows, and magazine ads were never afraid to spice things up either. Especially here in Japan where gravure shots of various models were (and still are) included together in magazines with all of the latest gaming news or the latest chapter of your favorite manga. It wasn't too long ago that one of the Super Monkey Ball games had DLC levels themed around a certain gravure idols boobs as part of the advertising campaign for the game.

I certainly wouldn't mind gravure idols being used for advertising more consoles.

@damo are you going to buy the AES?

@alliekitsune you bought Nintendo games, how dare you accuse anyone else of being a horrible person when you literally funded the Saudi's!!

Somashekar Is an idiot. That's not a bait and switch, it's exactly what they promised. There's always people like him looking to stir up drama where there is none.

Do people actually buy this crap?

If I wanted to play a game that's like Ninja Gaiden or Shinobi than I would just play Ninja Gaiden or Shinobi. Indie devs should spend more time making original games and less time making knock-offs of popular games.

@Honkshot an ESP32, it's in the photos.

This (expensive) game will literally stop working if OpenAI ever updates their API (which is something that tech companies do often) or if the developer ever cancels his sub and loses his API key (highly likely given the price).

This already existed for several years though

News sites like this one posting about pirate sites is how they get taken down and sued into oblivion.

Stop labeling piracy sites as preservation efforts. It's headlines like that that make it so that preservation isn't taken seriously.

Jim (the designer of the keyboards) posted in the C64U Facebook group addressing the issue a few weeks ago and it was pretty clear from his statement that the problem is the workers in the factory aren't installing the keyboards correctly in the Starlight editions.

It's rather unfortunate. Commodore has done an amazing job with this product, and their customer support has also been fantastic. But unfortunately, the companies they hired in China have been absolutely awful and are the fully at fault for the problems affecting a small amount of customers (well, except for the ones caused by FedEx abusing packages). The manufacturing partner for the keycaps screwed them over and are the reason why the Founders Edition units were delayed, and the assembly partner is the source for the issues with the Starlight units and a few other random issues that affected a small number of people. And unfortunately this makes Commodore look bad in those instances.

Anyway, I thought the Starlight looked tacky and I picked up a Beige unit. It arrived a few weeks ago and I've been having an absolute blast with it. The C64 predates me so I've never had one until now, but I absolutely love the C64U and have gotten a lot of enjoyment out of it so far. It's found a home next to my MSX and is getting plenty of love. The quality of life features that Commodore added are VERY appreciated. Also I love the keyboard on this thing.

The whole thing stinks of a scam. The Japanese government is already archiving video games and related materials through the national diet library. All new game releases are required to be archived by law (this has been the case for around 25 years now), and in recent years they've gone back and started archiving games which released before that law was implemented. Printed materiels are also archived, and if you contact them they will even mail you photocopies of portions of any work (for example, if you want an article from an old issue of Famitsu or something).

If the GPS actually cared about archival than they would dump their roms online for the public and then donate their entire collection (including printed materiels) to the National Diet Library in Japan. This would at least make the print materials publicly accessible, and it would ensure that the software is properly archived.

Some politicians in Japan have been trying to find a suitable way to make the software library accessible to the public, but currently there is nothing. But still, currently nothing from the GPS collection is available publicly so this approach is better than nothing and it ensures that the collection would be cared for by professional archivists and funded by taxes, rather than whatever this private group is doing.

@bring_on_branstons @obijuankanoobie
Well, if you want to play it that badly you could always buy the one in the listing. With an inexpensive adapter you could plug it into a normal TV to play. You can order from Mercari by using a proxy shipping service, and the yen is really weak right now too so now is probably a good time.

@obijuankanoobie I doubt they will ever port it. Yuji Naka talked about including it in the Mega Collection but they cut it because they couldn't find a solution for the controls. You basically have to buy the hardware if you want to play it, even MAME has control issues with this game.