Andee

Love me some Katamari — has to be one of the best soundtracks I've ever heard in a videogame, and have listened
to it constantly. Plus I'm so chuffed they re-released the original as we never originally got it in the UK.

@somnambulance I only finally got around to playing Wattam a few months ago — it's such a fun little diversion isn't it?

Maligned schmaligned, Street Fighter is an absolute hoot

The good news is that the movie is currently free to view on YouTube's Movies & TV channel, but only in the US.

Quick! Change the channel!

Incredibly, the ants agreed and duly removed all of the larvae to the new location – effectively cleaning up the controller as they went.

Thanks, ants. Thants.

If it's offensively bad, like Bubsy 3D, then yes.

@BulkSlash Yeah, it's much better than the aural massacre from the original game

@RetroGames They apparently tried something in 2004, but it never got picked up — I think the technology wasn't really there yet

https://www.knightmare.com/series/knightmare-vr

Oof! Hope they fix that refresh rate.

Now please bring the series out on modern consoles!

@JayJ as well it should!

I'm a little column A/B

Videogames have been a constant ever since I was about 4, so like with any song/book/movie there are gonna be unavoidable emotional connections to a period of my life, but I can chart that feeling to as recently as last year.

With consoles I definitely have a fondness for games that were designed around their inherent limitations and have always found it fascinating. For actual nostalgia though I'd say I lean more into arcade games, as that's something I simply don't do as often as I used to.

OutRun 2: "Hold my beer"

Resident Evil 2? Heck yeah

"in fact, it's still going strong even today, with 2023 marking the 35th season of the show."

Well, it's still going; "strong" might be debatable, though...

@Ristar24 Yeah, I absolutely cleaned up in there with all the (then reasonably-priced) DS and GBA games that were absolutely flooding the basement level of Game Focus. They even had a modded Saturn on display near the counter that I really shouldn't have hesitated to pick up before they eventually shuttered...

So that's why we've never seen it pop up on many retro collections — kind of like Sonic 3 in that regard.

I really felt that the series hit a massive peak with Wip3out — Fusion felt (rather like Angel of Darkness, as mentioned above), that they were basically starting from scratch with a whole new engine that not everyone was familiar or comfortable working with, and it really suffered from that. The Omega collection felt like a fine return to form, but Fusion really dinged my love for the series for a good long while, especially after how sublime I felt 3 was.

I'm sure if her children were raking millions in from eSports or Twitch sponsorships she wouldn't be so flippant as to what constitutes "life goals" - prat.

@Daze_of_Reality in hindsight, Alpha 1 always felt like a glorified demo of what Alpha 2 ended up becoming, so it was good that they went straight to it without charging punters twice, but I'm still astonished they managed to get it on the SNES at all (plus i didn't even find out it existed until the late '00s)

@Zenszulu I distinctly remember him being introduced to Mean Machines way back when — it's bonkers how he's still a regular weekly fixture in my gaming journalism absorption with DF Direct.

@gojiguy The graphics on the first game I don't think actually look that bad — it always had a slightly quirky proto-HD-2D look to it (although saying that, HD-2D has never really sat quite right with me), but I think having it be portable, and the japanese language option, might just tip it for me.

@gojiguy I've been on the fence about picking up the HD remaster of this — I read it released with some pretty noticable porting flaws. I'm assuming they were never ironed out?

@ralphdibny What a rip!

Ooo I still have a Scramble in my parents' loft — and I also noticed an Amidar in the banner image (basically a Pac Man clone), which I also have!

Genuinely curious to see who would spill nearly half a grand on a PS1 game.

I'm an absolute sucker for that '90s anime style — very evocative of the Zelda LttP instruction manual art.

@Gerald Yeah, I remember passing in FIFA feeling really odd - you'd need to hold B, push the direction you wanted to pass, then release — whereas in EA Hockey it was more of a quick and snappy tapping motion

@Zenszulu That's an interesting observation — and now you mention it, Robocod and Zool did indeed have very floaty jumping in them.

I never actually owned an Amiga, but Flashback and Lemmings were two of my favourite Mega Drive games growing up

Speaking of lapsed licences, can Sega please pull their finger out and get OutRun 2 Coast to Coast back on modern consoles please? Love that game.

We definitely got shafted in the UK for RPGs until the PS1 era — and even then many of the games in this list never made it to this side of the pond.

@Axelay71 Do you remember Game Focus that used to be on Goodge Street? They had a similar treasure trove of import games in the basement as well.

@KingMike Ah yeah, i remember a similar mechanic in Mega Lo Mania — where your little people would carry over from island to island, so without a fair bit of pre-planning you could totally cripple your chances of victory in later levels.

@KingMike What, did they not break it up into Fun/Tricky/Taxing/Mayhem sections?

I had the quite the surprise earlier this year when I completed Nier Replicant and saw Gary Harrod's name crop up in the credits — he's now an art director for the Square Enix marketing department — not a bad career he's had!

@samuelvictor Fascinating and thorough — nice one!

I'm not sure where I read this, but when the Mega Drive was first conceived, weren't Sega originally going to essentially use the same tech as the arcade boards that were being used at the time for games like Afterburner, Golden Axe and Out Run, thus creating an arcade perfect, super-scaler console? But apparently the manufacturing costs would have had each console coming out at something like £300 a pop, so they chose to strip them down in order to save money? We got a near-perfect arcade experience, but ever so slightly out of reach...

I'm not saying I would have been able to convince my parents to shell out three big ones on a console at the time, but it would have been quite impressive!

@samuelvictor I was always curious about scaling on the Mega Drive — I was under the impression that the SNES could handle sprite scaling, but it wasn't until relatively recently that I realised that it was only the background layer (hence why the boss screens on Super Mario World had a black background).

Would developers essentially have to manually draw a new, unique frame for each layer of zoom? Despite its slightly choppy frame rate, I remember Road Rash having some incredibly smooth scaling (on top of the undulating road), which I found very impressive for the time.

That's interesting about the redrawn animation for the Mega CD version of Time Gal — looking back at clips of it now it's pretty clear that they went down that route, but back in the day of magazine screen shots, my memory of it was how it looked in its original cel format.

@UK_Kev I've got a little pigeonhole-style shelf unit with all my retro consoles and a 32-inch TV on top — which I feel is a good size, and not so big as to make pre-HD era games look like poop. Also it's got a component-out, which makes Wii/GC games look super crisp

@UK_Kev I had one of those! Great aren't they? I did end up selling it once I got my PS4 because I found the text in most games far too small to read on the diddly 22-inch screen.

I've always had a soft spot for this one — even the notoriously sluggish port for the CPC back in the day had a really decent 8-bit rendition of the soundtrack, although the game ran like an absolute shaggy dog and had no business being on such an underpowered machine. Going from that to the Mega Drive version was a mind-blowing experience at the time.

@BulkSlash I had the Steel Samurai theme as my ringtone for the longest time

They're both ace in their own way — the game should have opened with an Outrun-style radio station changer for you to pick your track before the intro kicks in.

I was a little late to the 32-bit party so Croc passed me by — by the time I got my PS1 it came bundled with Crash 3 and a demo of Spiro.

Yeah, to echo a lot of comments here, growing up in the UK, the NES felt like much less of of a prominent console than the Amstrads/Speccys/C64s of the time — it wasn't until the SNES came on the scene that there was a more even split in popularity between it and the Mega Drive.

Altogether now...

duckhunt_dog_laughing.gif

@no_donatello there, there are some really out of leftfield choice cuts on there. Did you get the handheld or the console? It's cool that carts play on both

Not trying to be a killjoy, I am genuinely curious --what exactly gives the Evercade the edge over something like say, a Switch that has a lot of these games available on the eShop?

Well apparently they are going to be using all the same voice assets from the original, which I guess saves them a hell of a job. Many of the original Japanese actors are no longer with us, which I imagine wouldn't go down to well if they were to recast.

@Poodlestargenerica well that's what I was thinking — why would they announce a port of the original version of 3 if Delta isn't going to be a complete ground-up redo in the style of the recent Resi games? Still, at least they're straight up offering a chance to play the original three (five if you count the MSX games) on modern consoles finally — best of both worlds

I'm intrigued to know to what extent they're taking the actual remaking of it — will they be using the same vocal clips from the original? That's a LOT of audio to re-record, if not. And will they manage to get David Hayter back to the series?