Azathoth

"the somewhat unfortunately titled SlaveDriver engine"

@Bod2019 In no way is Final Vendetta worth $650 USD. Beat 'em ups are my favorite genre, it's a great entry and I have no regrets about paying the $30 price tag at release. I enjoy the game enough I'd even be willing to drop a few bucks more if they sold that NG-exclusive playable enemy character as DLC. Saying that, paying $650 just for the prestige of having this on an AES cart is just foolishness IMO.

I think people are vastly overestimating the number of physical MD carts this game will actually move. Couple that in with the amount of overhead required for manufacturing and all the middlemen getting a cut and IMO they'd probably make more in one day on the Switch eShop then the entire run of MD carts. If I'm wrong I'd love to see the numbers to prove it.

Also, I don't really understand the vitriol by people that only want a ROM file. "I'd gladly support them by buying just a ROM file, but I can't so to hell with them and I'm not giving them one red cent." Well, pay your $20 on Steam then play the ROM that's easily obtainable. At this point it's very easy to discern between people that feel entitled to everything for free and people that genuinely want to support a game.

I'm shocked they could actually manage to track down the licenses for all these characters. I thought for sure they'd have to edit a few of them out, especially with some of them appearing in other current or upcoming wrestling games.

Was renting GB games really a common thing? I saw a grand total of 1 store that ever rented GB games, and even then it was just a handful of early launch window titles.

@Lup The best version of Outrun available is on Switch

How can it be called "worst reviewed" if Halverson devoted 8 pages to it in GameFan?

This strikes me as much ado about nothing on both sides. If everything fell flat on its face right now, what would change? Hyperfocus loses the ability to use the dead AKI logo in game or advertising, and they change AKI-man's name to AK!-man and put an extra stripe in his outfit. Viola. There's no N64 assets and code being used, there's nothing skirting copyright in any way.

It's no different than AEW hoping the THQ name would have some retro appeal to look legit and sell more copies.

Hamster's YouTube video seems to show the English version of the game is included in this release, was it ever explained why the newest Taito collection only uses the Japanese version?

Anett Again/Returns is a genuinely horrible game. Don't be fooled by its exotic origins, it looks and plays like a dev team making a zero budget MD launch title.

I think the debate about it using software emulation versus FPGA is probably giving it a little too much credit. There's a very good possibility this thing is using the same globtop clone chips we've seen in a hundred other consoles and portables over the years.

War Machine was always a head scratcher. Why would Marvel not want Iron Man used, yet be ok with him before in MSH and after in MvC2?

A Switch but no PS4 release? I didn't really expect it on any Xbox platform but going straight to PS5 is a bit odd.

@Zeebor15 G-Mode or whoever the company is that owns the corpse of Data East isn't too discriminating on who they license their IP out to. They've had Karate Champ on a ton of those rubbish My Arcade minis/handhelds, and gave Fighter's History (and Night Slasher) to whoever the scheisters were at Flying Tiger. They also did a Fighter's History SNES multi-cart with Retrobit. They'd let you make Karate Champ dog turd baggies as long as you fork over that fee.

I have zero desire to own a Polymega and will never own one, but I gotta admit this is the way a collection should be put out. Every version on every platform that is feasible by the license. I'm a fan of Fighter's History, seeing them include both US & JP releases along with the NGCD and Saturn ports is not something I would have ever expected to see. That's the way a collection should be presented and I think they deserve some praise for that.

If they had any sense they'd format these collections in a way that it could play on a PC that way they're not limiting their buyers to such a tiny audience. I'd pay 40 bucks to buy that for PC if it was nicely packaged, even though emulating this stuff for free is one click away.

I know they're completely unrelated, but seeing this gives me hope for an AA release of Spinal Breakers. "Cabal clones" is a woefully underrepresented genre.

As a casual shmup fan who enjoys older, more forgiving titles and just can't get into bullet hell entries, the whole Aerofighters series is a treat. Short, bite sized levels combined with having a ton of different ships really scratches that fast paced arcade itch. IMO a great series for a more relaxed shooter experience.

@Sketcz I never quite understood why PS and PS2 bootleggers never made the jump to self-booting discs. They obviously have the tech as evidenced by all the grey-market bootable discs that are available, yet they never bothered to implement it when making copies of commercial games. Strange!

Bleem! was truly amazing at the time. 100% fullspeed emulation with amazing resolution upgrades on a competitor's console is something that's just mind melting, as was emulating a current-gen console on a low end PC of the day.

Plus it actually being a useable, legal, commercial release and not some homebrew effort is something just totally alien in todays market. Walking into Babbage's and plonking down $5 each for the 3 bleemcast discs, then finding out they not only work with my US versions but also the imports (or CD-Rs) was a good time.

The gameplay changes WD made for the Sega CD versions hasn't appeared in any of the half dozen rereleases of Lunar, right? Seems like a pretty extreme leap to assume that just because a song sounds similar that the entire magic system and Bill Clinton puns will be included.

This article only lists the Arcade Archives titles. Almost every KoF entry on all platforms are on sale. 13, 14, 15, 98UM, 02UM, DLC characters; there's a whole lot not listed here.

@KingMike That was my first thought also. Seems like if you purchased the rights to these console ports, it would be useless without a fee also to the original IP holder. You could technically purchase one without the other, but it would be completely useless.

This was publicly advertised on eBay, probably the biggest marketplace a regular Joe can access. First person with access to eBay and the cash could have walked away with it.

No successful crowd funding efforts. No "archival foundation or museum" rallied to the cause with cash in hand. Where the rubber meets the road nobody cared enough. The cries of preservation and free downloads far outweigh the offers to financially back such efforts.

This is the same release that had that trigger warning about it exhibiting "2003 standards" for fear of offending the public.

In today's hypercharged political environment I'd expect nothing less. Every game is one waterhead Twitter user or deranged Kotaku article away from being crucified and a small publisher can't afford a PR nightmare.

Apparently there's no cross play either, so I'm sure the online community will thrive for years to come.

Why the hell remove the two pics from the JP Punisher ending? Why not use the updated 360/PS3 port of MvC2 rather than straight Naomi emulation?

I always assumed Edward Randy was lost to license purgatory after G-Mode and the rest carved up the corpse of Data East. Awesome to actually see it get released in some format! Hopefully the Evercade hardware is able to emulate it correctly.

Not being able to remap buttons in a 6 button fighter is criminal, almost as bad as not being able to access dipswitch settings. I hope Fighter's History shows up somewhere else eventually.

Nice to see they put Warbirds back in after that last update that removed it

> This is nothing! This is crap, an inconsequential unintentional bug, just an excuse for Sega fanboys to use in outdated console wars arguments! Grow up!

> Proceed to write e-novel post about how SNES version is superior

When first announced Evercade said the two PlayStation games would have "modernized" control improvements as a selling point, and not straight 1:1 emulation.

So what's changed?

I adore the original. That being said, this looks like a 2008 Adobe Flash game you play in a web browser. Flat, cheap, boring.. all of that.

I think they should have left the player and enemy sprites the exact same and just changed up the background and wall visuals. You can update visuals without looking like a circa 2008 flash game.

Not sure exactly how this is gonna play either. Changing this to a dual stick shooter makes a huge difference, making it play vastly different from the original.

Man I absolutely can't wait till they crack this thing wide open, it's like my #1 first priority and every discussion about the 2600+ should involve it in some way.

I'll go wild and spend $200 and my entire evening installing CFW, load up the entire set and... emulate ROMs with Stella on a low-end chipset like I can right now a million other ways for free.

$500 deluxe faux-arcade cabinet full of 2600 games. That's a pretty niche audience to shoot for.

Back when Sega first announced they were bringing these out in the West on the eShop, that was what made me pick up a 3DS. These are such fantastic and unique ports of these games that we will never have in another form.

Fantastic article.

It can't be underestimated the amount of SNES Game Genies that were sold in the States after EGM printed it's infamous Street Fighter II "boss code".

One of the main things that stuck out about GF to me, during the 16-bit era at least, was they were not afraid to call a spade a spade. They were the first US-based print magazine I ever read that would trash a legitimately poor game. Gamepro, EGM, and Nintendo Power would write an entire single page review of a crappy game, glossing over or barely mentioning bad points, and leave only a lackluster final review score as an indication of low quality.

Gamefan didn't care to comedically trash a game, and was written how a normal game player would talk to another, not like a PR driven doublespeak robot to avoid losing advertising revenue.