BulkSlash

I’m hoping Arcade1Up can clarify if it’s the arcade or PS1 version of Time Crisis. The YouTube trailer shows the arcade version but the still photos show the PS1 version. The PS1 port is very good, but the arcade version is much more preferable.

Excellent news, Dark Forces is one of my favourite PC games so it will be great to finally have it easily playable on modern hardware. Plus it's Nightdive so (Blade Runner aside) this is likely to be a really solid remaster.

While most FPS games of the era were all about shooting everything that moved, I liked how DF would throw in the occasional puzzle. In one case I think it the first time a wall texture was used as a clue to the layout of the area. It certainly felt unique to me at the time for the walls to be more than just window dressing.

I they do DF II Jedi Knight next!

@KingMike That's quite ironic considering what Sega got up to in Revenge of Shinobi! 😂

@mjharper If you put that code in on player 1 it disables all special moves. It took me ages to work out why I couldn't pull off any moves when I played SF2 Turbo on the Wii U VC. My muscle memory of the code hadn't faded, but the fact you had to use port 2 had! 😅

This is really impressive, it runs full screen and at a very good frame rate on my 32X and there's loads of great options including different resolutions/detail levels. Even the highest resolution and detail runs very smoothly. Sadly it crashes after I beat level 1 so I think my ancient Everdrive doesn't support the bank switching it needs! 😅

@Babybahamut Yeah there were a lot of exclusives early in its life like Lost Planet, Bullet Witch, Dead Rising, Ace Combat 6, Ridge Racer 7, etc. Not all were classics (and I think some have been ported now) but I really enjoyed them all.

It's a shame how many of the best 360 games are no longer exclusive as without exclusives the uniqueness of each platform gets lost I think.

Will the previous model be getting the AyaSpace 2 update? The thing that worries me about most of these annually refreshed handheld PCs is how long they support them once the new model is out.

With the Steam Deck I never bother messing with the power output I just leave it at default. I think if a game is vsync'd it will just idle until the next frame needs to be started and if it's a heavier modern game then it needs full power anyway, so I try not to worry about the battery too much.

That said, I'm always playing a mixture of old and new stuff and the old stuff doesn't really drain the battery much!

It's kind of hilarious how well that runs in a browser. I think I've re-beaten the recent version about 5 or 6 times on the Steam Deck now, it's really good fun to revisit it. Now if we could just get 2097 too! 😆

@XiaoShao I'm getting GTA trilogy vibes from this too. That was also kept under wraps right until a week or so before release, so I'll be steering well clear of this until it's in players' hands. It didn't take long for people to discover GTA was a rushed mess and report it on forums/social media!

Very interesting, it sounds like this would work like a C64 cassette drive and be audio based rather than loading data digitally. I wonder how slow the loading times would be compared to cassettes and also "proper" CD-ROM drives?

I guess it would come with a RAM cartridge like the FDS and would need a cable coming out of the cartridge port so that the audio could be piped from the disc to the RAM cart.

What's an "approach-a-thon"? I've not heard that one before.

You've got to love the voice acting from that era. Scott McCulloch was Richter Belmont in SOTN but he was also Wild Dog in Time Crisis 1 & 2 and Chris in Resident Evil 1. It's a shame he passed before he could enjoy the fame from playing all those iconic characters.

IIRC there were some graphical glitches with the Switch port. They weren't game breaking or anything (at least not that I remember!) but were they ever fixed?

I'll probably end up re-buying it anyway, just like all the Ikaruga ports! 😅

@smoreon It's a good question, I'd have thought if a publisher were bankrolling the game they'd want a regular copy of the source and all the assets in case the developer unexpectedly goes bust or the relationship sours for some reason.

Of course once the game has shipped and the sales have run their course a publisher like Activision may well not care about the codebase and just delete it to save some server space.

Mine would be playing Astro Fighter in the arcades some time in the mid '80s.

It's a fairly unique take on the Space Invaders formula where each wave of enemies has a different design and movement pattern, there's also a fuel gauge that only refills if you kill the boss at the end of the waves. Then it loops back around to the start.

I really want a sequel to Devastation!

I would have thought Activision would have a central source code repository for their devs to push code to rather than games just knocking around on the HDD of one of the developers.

That’s a real plot twist at the end there! 😂

Doesn’t the AV Famicom support the Japanese Zapper that connects via the side port? I think it’s just Western Zappers that connect via the front controller port that won’t work.

This has been a useful refresher, at some point I'd conflated the M2 (3DO successor) with the Nuon, when in fact they were separate systems.

That's cool you can get an adapter to use N64 controllers if the alternative is $275 for a controller! And I thought the Dual Sense was expensive! 😅

That's such an incredible find. I makes you wander what other ultra rare stuff is out there in someone's garage or cupboard without them knowing the sentimental value it would have to some people.

Very cool. Is this the first patch for a 360 game? I don’t think I’ve seen one before.

Funnily enough I was just playing this on the Steam Deck. It runs really well, although the modern collision option does make the game too easy (I got first on every track on my first try! 😅) so probably the Wipeout 2097 collision option is the best choice.

@845H It extracts all the music from the PS1 disc image so it technically has all the music. The only downside is it currently only supports the US disc so it’s missing the extra tracks from Orbital/Chemical Brothers/Leftfield that the PAL version had.

I was playing that Mario Celeste mod the other day. It’s an incredible achievement, it’s hard to believe it’s running on a NES it’s so smooth and fast paced.

That said, it’s too hard for me! 😅 I might go back to it but I think it’s beyond me.

I would think Mario Odyssey is in the same sort of genre as Banjo Kazooie and that did really well. I think there's a market for the collect-a-thon, but the game has to be good.

I somewhat enjoyed Yooka Laylee, but it suffered from not having a map screen showing where each quest came from. Not being able to find things just made it a lot more annoying than it needed to be. If they fixed that in a sequel I'd be all over it.

A few years back I realised I barely knew this game. I only ever really played 1-1, 1-2, 4-1, 4-2 and most of world 8 once I’d found the warp zones. Since then I always try to play all of the levels as it’s such a great game, it’s like the most pure and distilled form of Super Mario Bros.

I love light gun games! I tend to like Time Crisis I more than II. While II is bigger and more bombastic, it dropped using time as your measure of success and used scoring instead. This means instead of racing to take down every enemy as quickly as possible, you have to hit each enemy as many times as possible to earn combo points.

This means the final boss fight against the satellite (and Diaz) is spent not shooting Diaz but instead trying to fire as many bullets as possible into the satellite to maximise your score.

Doing that while playing both sides of Time Crisis II at the same time is very hard work! 😂

That special stage is really impressive. It's good to see the GX4000 being stretched a bit, so many Amstrad games from that era were just lazy Speccy ports rather than taking advantage of the hardware.

I've got a lot of nostalgia for Sol Feace, I remember being blown away by the FMV and the music when I saw it on my brother's Mega CD. The soundtrack in particular is still really great. I don't think I'd want the cartridge version though as it's going to be missing all the stuff that made me like the game in the first place! 😅

I remember this and often think about it. The poor woman was just trying to win a Wii for her kids. The fact that someone phoned in to warn them and was ignored is damning, I'm not surprised they were hammered in court.

That basically is the ship sprite from Galaxy Force II, I wonder if it’s a placeholder or if they’re going to be a bit brazen? 😂

@carlos82 Are there people really claiming that? Crazy! 😂

We had a team quiz at work yesterday and I was able to answer the question about when Nintendo was founded and "impress" everyone with the trivia about them originally making hanafuda cards.

That’s such a cool idea. I can’t wait to hear the 8-bit renditions of the music.

Definitely Moon over the Castle for me. I had the Japanese import of Gran Turismo for the PS1 so I often forget they swapped out the soundtrack.

That seemed to happen quite often back then with things like Sega Rally 2, Sonic CD and Wipeout getting different music in different regions.

The animation in Do You Remember Love is fantastic, while it probably curtails too much of the story from the series it's worth seeing for the spectacle. I've not played this particular Macross game, so it will be fun to give it a try with the translation patch.

@Say_Yas Finally! 🙌

Love his reference to Isekai Ojisan!

“no new product announcements on this year's anniversary”

So there could be hardware announcements not on the anniversary? 😉

I Kickstarted this so long ago that I picked PS4 as the platform, and I haven't turned my PS4 on in years now!

I wish they'd given people a chance to change platform, especially as the PC version is out now and the console versions are still being developed.

The irony is they're most likely overweight because they're always at their desks coding non-stop. That's certainly how it works for me! 😅

Fascinating! Looking at the asm from the link the patch changes the ROM to load 1 into the accumulator and then store it at the memory address the game checks for debug mode. I recently did something similar messing with Street Fighter II Turbo on the SNES to always get the best ending regardless of difficulty or rounds lost. I’ve found writing assembly isn’t too tricky, but finding the right part of the ROM is really hard!

That AI image is horrid, it has absolutely none of the charm of BOTW/TOTK. It’s just so generic and boring.

"If we can match the timing of game launches to the release of movies"

No Sega, don't do it!!! I'm pretty sure the only good movie tie-in games were ones that launched ages after the movie (like GoldenEye). Trying to get games that usually take 3-4 years on the shelf at the same time as movies that normally take 2 years is a recipe for rushed rubbish.

I'm not sure about 3D being mentioned in the trailer, I would prefer they do everything as pixel art like in Metal Slug. That said, as a small team having to do all the frames of animation would be very hard. Maybe they're going to use 3D models with a filter to create pixel art-like graphics?

Either way, I'm really keen to see what they come up with!

I've got the JAMMA board for this one, it's a great game and I love the variety of alien types that Konami were able to come up with. Interestingly Newt was taken out of the Japanese version and it also doesn't have the APC driving stages.

The trouble with that price tag is it’s a lot for something you don’t know if you’ll get on with. I got the Steam Deck for £350 and that felt like a fair price to dip my toe in (of course I ended up buying a 512GB Micro SD card, then a 265GB SSD and then a 1TB micro SD card because I got on with it so well 😂).

The whole Steam OS interface and control profiles really makes using the Steam Deck relatively pain free. It’s a pity there’s no way to try that Asus out to see if I like it. I wouldn’t mind seeing some benchmarks for things like Cyberpunk to see how well the hardware holds up too.

I also like that Valve have said they won’t be changing the hardware for a couple of years. You can bet Asus will have a new one on the market every year.

I do miss the days of all these crazy peripherals like the Power Glove, the Action Chair, the Hyperboy, etc.

Even though it usually ended in disappointment, there was always that special excitement when you got something that had labels on the box promising it would be totally rad and to take your skillz to the next level.

Even though I use a modded Wii for all my GC stuff, this is very tempting. If it can do animated images, it would be cool to have a SpaceWorld prototype image with a window showing the disc spinning.

I played a lot of this yesterday and it’s great fun (like all Sega’s DC games!) I do need to repatch the GDI image though, it seems to crash whenever I try to travel to another city via train.

That’s pretty crazy the way the lower screen scrolls. The backdrop with the narrow neck and wider lower area looks more suited to Dr. Mario than Tetris.

Heritage Auctions again. 😩 I read a fascinating forum thread detailing all the reasons an original Star Trek phaser prop they were selling was a fake (by the end it was blatantly obvious the prop was fake).

Despite bringing it to HA’s attention they sold it anyway to an undisclosed buyer. The speculation is that they sell things to themselves so they can establish a seemingly legitimate market price so they can make the same or more when they sell it for real. Apparently HA’s owner started doing it with collectible coins in the ‘80s and moves on to a new collectible market every so often.

@Hikingguy That's cool, I didn't know about that. 👍 You're right about the community, there's so many great utilities and mods out there for the Steam Deck.

I just recently got a transparent green Jsaux back panel, I bought it because I thought it looked neat, but it's also got a heat spreader and thermal pad so it offers better cooling than the stock back.