BulkSlash

Wait, that's an AI thumbnail? But it's so photorealistic and I'm sure we all remember playing on CLAIIR in the arcades back in the '90s right? 😉

I know it's hard to always guarantee every game is up and running, but you'd think their website would list all the machines they have, but I can't find anything. If I know a place has a Time Crisis 1 I'm definitely going to visit!

The funny thing about that scene in The Wizard where Beau Bridges is playing the game is that he says he’s on level 3 and has the scroll weapon but on the TV it’s level 1! However, he is on the third sewer of level 1, which makes me wonder if someone on the production team thought that actually was level 3?

Anyway, I never finished this game back in the day but I did finally finish it recently. I cheated though and used the “Pizza Party” hack which makes pizza pickups apply to all the Turtles.

You’re basically into Steam Deck territory at that price, the LCD model is £350 and has double the storage. Admittedly it’s only an 1280x800 60Hz screen, but if you’re playing retro games you don’t really need more than 60Hz (unless you really want to play Doom at its native 75Hz! 😅)

Shame about the lack of analogue as this seems to be the first time one of these devices hasn’t been skimped on in the CPU area. While the button layout isn’t quite perfect it would have been decent for N64 games.

“Especially in a negligible degree under esoteric circumstances”

WTF kind of word salad is this?

I probably be buying this just for the Chris Huelsbeck music! 😅

(I doubt I'll get anywhere in the game as I couldn't beat it back in the day!)

Very cool! Does moving the handle up and down actually affect the gameplay? I’ve not been using it and seem to be able to win races without issue, so I’m not sure if it does anything other than cosmetically matching the player’s movements of the handlebar.

I Kickstarted this game back in the day, but I don’t think I was aware Vince DiCola was doing the music, which just makes the game never being finished even more sad. 😢

"Which System 22 game do you want next?"

Yes.

I want them all! My highest priority would probably be Rave Racer and Ridge Racer 2. Time Crisis would be top but without a lightgun and pedal it would sadly be too compromised an experience.

Despite have only two slightly different tracks, I've really enjoyed Aqua Jet a lot. I still can't work out how to do the penguin or mirror cheat codes though!

Stunning! You just can’t beat a transparent case on a console. 😍

The late release would explain why I never played it. This should give me a good reason to charge up the Switch 2 GameCube controller I bought and haven't used yet!

@Scollurio It's probably a capacitive touch screen so it won't respond to a stylus, unless it's one of those special rubber tipped ones and the ends of those aren't usually much smaller than a finger tip.

This seems like a fun idea for a device, but I can think of a couple of DS games where folding the DS shut was required to proceed in the game, which you can't do with this (at least not without breaking it 😉)

I'll definitely be getting this as I love all the System 22 stuff, although it's quite interesting Wave Race 64 also came out in '96 and had much more dynamic water with translucent choppy waves compared to the mostly flat and opaque water in this. That said, Wave Race's frame rate wasn't as smooth as this! 😅

Is the EXA arcade version a ground-up native code rebuild or just the Megadrive game running with some hacks to the emulator to allow improvements? It seems like a lot of work to re-implement an already finished game, so it would make sense for it to be the original game just with tweaks. In which case, releasing it shouldn't be hard, other than if they want to keep it as an arcade exclusive (which is fair enough).

@Daniel36 I had no choice! Kevin was filling the screen with footballs and I had to protect the llamas! 😂

Kevin’s the final boss in Jeff Minter’s excellent semi-lost game Minotron. I actually blew him up last week when I replayed it! 😅

I bought the game as soon as I got the email from Steam saying it was out. I have also downloaded the ROM though as I'd like play Earthion on my Megadrive. When the official cartridge is available I'll definitely be buying it as well. This is more of a stop-gap until I can officially get it.

I hope he doesn’t end support as I think it’s the Linux build running on the Steam Deck. That said, the Steam Deck is surprisingly good at running most Windows apps I’ve thrown at it so I could probably switch to that if needed.

Just finished it twice on the Steam Deck, the music is totally excellent, the difficulty is just right for me and I love the upgrade system where you can prioritise weapon variety of shield boosts. Can’t wait to play this on my actual Megadrive!

@mjparker77 110%, N64 games just don’t feel right without the original controller.

I always used to unplug the Guncon when booting Time Crisis on the PS1 as it would skip the calibration screen. I always found the default calibration to be spot on and it would boot more quickly! 😂

Am I reading their tweet right? They're delaying the release because of issues with coordinating the physical production but it's still going to need a day 1 patch? Couldn't they just delay it enough so the whole game is on the card/disc?

I love the chunkiness of this, I find the Nomad very comfortable to hold and this is giving me similar vibes. If it weren’t for all the soldering needed I’d definitely want one of these!

It’s not making the whole game, but I found ChatGPT very helpful recently when doing some SNES ROM hacking. It was able to clearly explain several CPU quirks to me in a way the documentation didn’t make clear and it could also be fed the stack trace from BSNES to help spot where things were going wrong.

Well it’s not working exactly like a SuperFX chip as the new board doesn’t have the extra pins on the cartridge connector to talk to expansion chips so it must be working somewhat differently.

I don’t want to be lumped in with people criticising, but it would be nice to have some real clarity on how it works (it’s going to get pulled apart by hackers after it launches so they might as well spill the tea).

I don’t have a problem with them using a Pi to emulate a SuperFX chip, fabricating new chips would be far too expensive for such a niche product, I just want to know if they’ve gone way beyond the capabilities of the technology of the time or if this is more in line with the overclocked SuperFX carts modders make today just with the game adjusted to run at a normal speed.

@smoreon That’s true, but as it’s emulating a SuperFX it’s possible the emulation has been designed to keep within the limits of the ‘90s hardware and using a 150MHz chip is just what is needed to emulate it accurately. At least that’s what I’m hoping!

As long as it’s not like Doom on the Mega Everdrive where it’s basically running entirely on the flash cart and the Megadrive is just a glorified power supply! 😅

Great to hear this is still coming, things had gone quiet and I was worried they’d run into problems and had cancelled it.

I’d really like to know if there is any “cheating” going on, as in, is the Raspberry Pi software no different than an overclocked SuperFX2 with the game tweaked to not run too fast (like most overclocked SuperFX carts do), or is the Raspberry Pi doing more than would have been possible back in the day? I’m really hoping it’s the former!

Is it me or does “sometimes you have a chance to go bigger. So rather than having a huge target audience, we would rather target a narrow group, go deep” sound like live service? I know their original name was Service Games but they really shouldn’t add live to that.

An absolute classic, and despite being 4 discs, it doesn’t drag on (pun intended) for ages like many RPGs can. The combat system in particular is very intuitive and you quickly learn how to find the weak spots and safe zones with enemies and whether to target them with the dragon or your blaster. The ending is particularly novel and open to interpretation too.

Luckily I do have a copy of it, although I normally play it on an emulator so I can jump in and out easily without having to worry about getting to the next save point.

I had a play with this last night, it's quite funny seeing it on an ultra wide monitor and taking in the breadth of the desert track or seeing all of the waterfall on the Donkey Kong track as you zoom past.

The weird thing I'm finding is the steering seems too sensitive so I'm struggling to steer accurately, but then this is a problem I've always had playing N64 games on emulators, they just don't feel right without the N64's analogue stick.

@mjparker77 Indeed, I'd rather see Model 1/2/3 games emulated/ported than the Saturn ones as it's fairly easy to play Saturn games either on real hardware or via emulation.

In the grand tradition of Ridge Racer and console launches, I'll be playing this first on the Switch 2 (mainly because I'm still waiting for Mario Kart World to download 💀)

I had an ST, my father had bought one to program his synthesiser and he ended up having to buy me one so I wasn't using his all the time! 😂)

It was an alright system, Eliminator was pretty good, but I got a NES when the TMHT bundle launched and despite it being 8-bit the games were so much more playable (mainly due to the d-pad on the controller) that I never really looked back.

@Tasuki Same, I saw those crossovers years back and thought he was just another Eastman/Laird character! 😅

I can see it being annoying for people not willing to upgrade to the new console, but there’s a much bigger feature I’m happy to finally see- the ability to remap the controls!

Nintendo’s obsession with making everything use B/A instead of Y/B makes a lot of games annoying to me, especially N64 games where B/A is in totally the wrong orientation on the Joy-Cons to how they are on the N64 controller. I pretty much have my Switch 1’s controls permanently remapped to rotate all the buttons clockwise by one place to fix this for a lot of games.

The battery in my hacked white Japanese Wii U was fine but the official expanded battery I had installed in my original black gamepad has expanded. 😢 So I'll need to see if I can get a replacement.

Could be a nice alternative for getting this game in your JAMMA cab as the original boards are uber expensive now. It definitely feels like a game that should be on the Neo Geo too!

Maybe they could add a health bar or something to offset the punishing difficulty?

I didn’t know the reader could be finicky. I remember we got one in the ‘90s and absolutely none of the bar codes of products we tried would work. I reckon it would have been much more successful if it had a dot matrix screen like the GameBoy so it could display graphics.

Is the new CEO DJ Salvatore Ganacci?

I love the Saturn, PS1 and N64 equally, they all have games I still regularly replay. That said, it is fascinating to wonder how things would have gone if Sega hadn't been so tragically adept at shooting themselves in the foot back then.

I'd say the early launch hurt the Saturn, but I think it was probably Ridge Racer vs Daytona that cemented the myth that the Saturn was much less powerful than the PS1 and the edgy club culture marketing made the PS1 seem cooler (much like how the Megadrive was marketed as cooler than the NES).

Ugh, LRG. Perhaps I should get a Krikzz FlashKit cart MD and flash it to that. That way I won’t have to worry about no voltage adjustment or the use of reclaimed chips. 😩

"Please rest assured that the cartridges are all built to spec and durable."

Translation: OK, yeah we did it, but since we never said you'd get brand new chips we think we can get away with it.

@Cooluser99 This is running on real hardware. Admittedly, it's not a locked 60fps, but it's way smoother than the original.

@smoreon I didn’t realise that was all it changed to make DKR run better. There’s a fix for Final Fight 2 SNES that puts 5 enemies on-screen at once and that’s just a single number change too.

Do you know why the game wasn’t originally released with this turned on? You’d think the dev team could have fixed any bugs it could cause.

I came across the 60fps version a while back and was amazed to see the game running so well that I got back into playing it again. The only bug I found was the game would lock up during the ending sequence. 😢

I was waiting for a US machine until I saw a picture of it. I went straight for a beautiful Super Famicom after that. I didn’t really play RPGs back then, so the Japanese text in Mario World was more of an exciting mystery than a hindrance to playing (it was actually quite mundane and disappointing when I finally played it in English! 😂)

On the topic of 100/110v differences. I did find my Nomad had weird screen rolling when plugged into my 100v Japanese transformer that went away as soon as I connected it to a 110v one. An outlier I’m sure, but it’s not impossible for issues to happen.

No joke, this is more of a reason for me to buy a Switch 2 than anything else they announced! 😂 Hopefully we’ll get Ridge Racer 1 (just for comparison) and also Rave Racer. In fact, give me all the System 22 games!

I can't play NES Gradius 1 now without having the arcade improvement patch installed. It even ups the number of options you can have (I think this is another game nerfed to stymie rentals). So unless they include that, it's not much of an omission.

That said, I do prefer SNES Gradius III to the arcade as it's much easier (and I've patched the ROM to give the best ending on all difficulties 😂).

I'd probably still get the collection just for Salamander 3, although it is a shame they didn't include ReBirth now that it's completely unavailable.

I've seen quite a few retro products trying to bring back beige, but I just don't have any nostalgia for beige, it was horrible then and horrible now! 😅

For a brief moment I thought "Interactive Edition" meant it was going to be an FMV game! 😂

I guess if I was in the market for a desktop clock that also told me the temperature and humidity I’d definitely go for one shaped like a Neo Geo. That said, my smart phone’s weather app tells me the approximate temperature and humidity where I am and it has a clock, so 🤷‍♂️.