Coalescence

I have lifelong love for Nintendo consoles and games but I also have no delusions about this relationship I have with the giant old company. They want my money. They sell me things I find entertaining. They're not my buddy, they're not my pal. They have been around as long as they have because they are good at parting people from their cash at a high profit margin. I don't expect them to ever do anything to my benefit except when they're desperately on the ropes as during the Wii U times.

Cool on Playdate, but being a nice guy is a guaranteed way to never last as long as Nintendo in the world of business.

I used to balk at the tiny displays of the micro and similar units, but I've recently been playing with the Zelda Game and Watch, and after completing a run of Link's Awakening, I get it. It has been super nice just having that tiny weightless portable in my pocket for quick bursts of gameplay with only a few games to choose from.

A Micro is way too expensive these days to justify picking one up but I may look into modding one of the G&W units after I work through the other Zelda games.

Part of the motivation to get a home security system for me was having door/window alarms and a motion sensor over my home office where I have all my video games, albums, amiibo, laserdiscs, etc. You never know who might tell someone who tells someone who tells someone about the big game collection they saw.

I feel for him. I've always thought if I lose mine to fire or otherwise I would definitely never attempt to reacquire any of it.

Pleasantly surprised it doesn't look like trash as with the FF Pixel Remasters and doesn't look to have a bunch of unnecessary crap jammed in like voiceovers. It's just the game with gentle enhancements and that's all it ever needed.

SBC device consumers are a special breed of gluttonous. This company has pretty obviously always been scummy and is looking for ways to squeeze their whales. They got a little greedy this time around but in the long run it won't matter.

Like any shmup it takes learning the hit box and doing some memorization for the tricky areas through practice. But some people just aren't built for that type of gaming and it's less and less over time. The AVGN effect is interesting, it's kind of like when merlot sales were impacted by the movie Sideways when Paul Giamatti's character rants about never drinking it (and the reason why is left out of the movie adaptation). People are stupidly impressionable.

This is where the divide between people who just want to play all the games and those who notice every little inaccuracy comes to a head. I have Analogue consoles and a mister because it will drive me mad when the sfx for earthworm jim 2 is slightly off as it is in every software emulator I've ever used. That's why I paid a premium for the Super NT (along with enjoying the old plug & play setup).

So when these cores like the Pocket's Mega CD start showing up with issues but people celebrate anyway because it means more of all the games, I want no part of it. Regardless of how they are made, I'm in this for quality not quantity. What I've seen so far, people who have no idea how to properly develop and document a core are using AI to brute force a messy solution, and they're going to be folded in with the quality cores. Jog on with that.

And Jotego is absolutely right that it drives away talent. FPGA development is highly lucrative and in demand, and not an easy skill to learn by any stretch. Someone doing this for free or pocket change probably isn't going to bother when someone has already shat out an AI core which is pretty okay in the eyes of the 'just wanna play all the games' bros. But I don't expect typical gamers to be able to see five feet in front of them when they're too busy stuffing their face with the freebies they howl for.

The one way Squeenix will get my money again for Final Fantasy is the one thing they are entirely averse to: rerelease the original versions. I would have thrown my money at the Pixel remasters if they included the original versions and ports. Same with Dragon Quest for that matter, they port the horrendous mobile versions and release overcooked remakes at full price, never the original or GBC versions.

I'm sure a Final Fantasy VI remake would have six hours of bloated dialogue and mini games in Narshe before the esper vaporizes the soldiers. Cyan would scream to the heavens and pound his fists and cut down trees with his sword in a ten minute cutscene after seeing his family departing on the ghost train. Zozo will have some hamfisted political commentary explaining why it's a city of thieves. Kefka would show up every ten minutes in the world of ruin to taunt the party and there would probably be time travel or a multiverse of worlds of ruin or some other nonsense. And it'll probably happen, people are constantly frothing at the mouth for it and Squeenix likes money.

I'm sure you'll be interested to know this was AI coded through Claude and the guy who did it admits the code is a snaggled mess as a result. The guy doesn't know any Verilog and didn't develop anything himself. The GitHub has a disclaimer. https://github.com/neutralinsomniac/openfpga-megacd

Same with the Pico 8 core which was recently shown in the pocket subreddit, 100% ai coded.

I remember Daddyofive was super excited to show off his supaboy on a game room tour video, which probably says everything about who these were made for. These things were junk back then and it looks like nothing has changed including that embarrassing name.

Nice. I still prefer to play on the Super NT vs the Pocket docked but this could change that. Pretty wild to see lately how much these talented devs are squeezing into the Pocket's hardware. The ports of Hexen, Doom, Diablo, Heretic, and Duke Nukem 3D are really impressive, imperfect as they may be.

@WileyDragonfly glad to say I don't have a single one of these things. But there's people like some residents of r/sbcgaming who proudly make up for people like me ten times over.

Comments at the top nailed it. Those are the hard truths no one wants to face. Games are a nice distraction from this being an ugly world. GDQ is pretty lame these days anyway but at least archives exist for when the runs used to be interesting and entertaining.

And people say Analogue sells in too small of batches. Perfect device for people that always wanted to play games on an OG NES controller. Regardless of that it'll sell though, there's a whole collective of people who compulsively buy up every SBG device they can get their hands on.

I stopped buying physical on PlayStation and Xbox a while ago. The discs never have the full game and you have to wait for a long while to download and install it anyway, what's the point? Resell prices are so laughably low, I don't care about getting some pocket change for a mostly useless disc which absolutely is not a preserved copy of a game like the old days.

Switch games have the day one patch crap too (I recall PC Gamer saying way back in 1998 that release n patch would become the norm if people didn't complain enough), but at least it's almost plug & play. Nintendo could definitely expand their unique market if they stick with the carts, and play up their intent to offer that option. It would be hilarious if Sony handed up yet another win to the big N especially with how people are totally losing their minds over this.

As if the industry wasn't obviously moving in this direction for like 15 years. The fight needed to be back then, when digital first became a widespread option on all consoles for more than just small titles. A drop in the bucket boycotting GTA 6 will do absolutely nothing now.

As if the world needed yet another one of these devices anyway.

Preloaded devices baffle me. It's unbelievably easy in 2026 to get entire libraries of roms downloaded. Why even risk courting Nintendo's legal arm? But then people are selling loaded sd cards too, so maybe doing a quick search is just too much black magic for some.

Yeah it's a shame Romero is always dragged through the dirt over Daikatana and Ion Storm. Obviously he made some bad calls and should have been better about making promises & saying no to things, but his contributions to gaming far outweigh those blunders. Gaming will only continue to become more corporate and a proxy battleground for culture wars; we need people like him representing gamers on the bigger stages.

They're going to keep doing this because they know eventually most people will get tired of the complaining & won't care anymore and/or the tech will rapidly improve until most people can't tell the difference.

You probably should come up with a term other than slop. Constantly braying and bleating the same phrase drives fatigue.

This guy is such a clown. He and his crappy company have been salting that earth for years by putting out some shoddy products, doing overpriced rereleases of readily available mid tier (or even garbage tier) games, and in general driving the sentiment that these companies are grifty: monetizing fomo and encouraging the idea of physical games as an investment. Doing anything boutique is always a risk, but it's especially tough on this industry now specifically because of LRG. Dude needs to jog on.

The Analogue Pocket has been getting some interesting cores lately for PC games. Diablo, Heretic, Duke Nukem, Wolf3d, etc. which should be exciting. But they're all off with glitches (especially on automaps), subpar music, and in Diablo's case pretty much dogshit with an atrocious framerate. Makes me wonder how many of these are vibe coded. Perfect accuracy is the dream but the whole idea is to be as close to accurate as possible. There's a billion software emulation devices running these games under good enough conditions. If the quality becomes similarly inconsistent on the fpga cores, why even bother making them when they can be software emulated anywhere else

Glad they picked a good version to do this with and not the dogcrap psp/ps4 version. Buggy, boring new voice acting, and maybe most egregious a terrible sound to music balance which can't be adjusted. I can't believe they didn't get more flack for treating such a legendary game so poorly.

I've put so many hours into the oled vita. It's an absolute powerhouse of a handheld and I'm glad they didn't skip out on any components or bells & whistles. That's why it's still a joy to play today and is head and shoulders over the endless deluge of cheap emulation handhelds.

The cost of required expansive memory + no onboard memory on the original model coupled with lack of game support is what killed it. All that other stuff wouldn't even approach dealbreaking for gamers if they weren't forced to buy an expensive memory card for digital content and if they had plenty of choices for great games to make that purchase worth it

Haha. Options for digging up old companies and zombifying them must getting pretty slim if 3DO is on the block. Can't wait to see what crap they try to sling under the nostalgic banner.

People spend wild amounts of money to listen to music in the most inconvenient ways. People shell out for expensive hardware so they can play games on similarly pricey old dumb tvs. Said people would probably kneejerk at these assessments to explain why that's different and worth the investment. Point is, there's no shortage of enthusiasts for boutique/niche stuff like this. Just because it's not one person's jam doesn't mean it's pointless.

Can never get enough of this classic. Last year it was the Vita port, now doing the Analogue pocket version docked and portable. I'll have to load this up on the Pocket now too.

Hello you absolute legends guy unavailable to cry about this as he's too busy being demonlished by Billy Mitchell and Billy Mitchell's daughter.

And screw these companies. Obviously shady operations and trying to pass it off like of course this game would command that price.

If it doesn't even meet Hyperkin's standards it must have been a twisted melted pile of garbage in a box.

Already plays beautifully on the Analogue Pocket, definitely not interested in playing this with quarter snatching mechanics.

Rare show of respect to not push the project out anyway without him.

My kids were having a blast with the store unit. I might have considered it until I saw it's a subscription based console. I'm so sick of that being the norm on every kids entertainment source. They know what they're doing. So I pulled out the wii U and my kids are now having a blast with the vwii.

Now you guys have done it. Say AI too many times in an article and you summon the Borg collective that is YouNeedToUnderstand.

The rom hacks are presumably still out there because one has to source their own copy of the rom.

This probably won't last. But it'll last a lot less if they're foolish enough to take money in any way with relation to the project.

I would be mildly interested to check this out. They're not bad games but I've always vastly preferred the tight fast pace of Kirby's Adventure over the majority of mainline Kirby games. 3 feels like pastel sludge by comparison.

I'm excited to get save states but I'm even more excited for people to stop whining about them. Now if they could get wifi updates out then it'll finally be mostly whine-free in the 3D discourse, except for those silly hearts who are convinced the wifi update feature will all of a sudden open the console up for freely loading additional cores or even more preposterously, will bring online multiplayer and retro achievements.

The Super NT with Copysnes on the alternate firmware covers me here, especially when the Pocket+Dock can play the special chip roms. But definitely a cool option here for anyone without those options.

@SuperRetro64 thank the maker someone else actually read the article and noticed this lack of clarity, probably intentional so to give the impression that the entire gatefold design was generated by AI.

Kind of weird to post articles which are mostly an aggregate of reddit comments. I can just go there if I want to read some overdramatic hysteria from useless tossers.

I don't know what's worse, these stupid AI ads and that annoying look what we lost pearl clutching, or people in here pretending there's no truth to it. My old stack of gaming magazines from the 90s absolutely have scantily clad ladies. Are we going to pretend booth babes didn't exist next and that it was just an Asmongold fever dream or something?

As usual both sides of this culture war are the worst. Gaming would be heaven if not for most gamers.

Of all games, this one has perfect visuals and has been emulated flawlessly for quite a while. Mgba runs on a potato, so there's really nothing to offer that couldn't be done with a romhack like removing Link's voice.

Bloodstained's soundtrack was alright, but it was a huge rehash of SOTN and Order of Ecclesia. I'd rather see someone else get a fresh stab at Castlevania at this point. There's more to Castlevania than the Iga stuff. Get Danny B or Ace+ on that. Or bring back Hidenori Maezawa since it's Trevor Belmont.

Big whiff to name it that and not deliver. I'll stick with the real deal.

I love Analogue's products but they really seem to have popularized this whole bragging of "no emulation" murkiness. This uses carts 'of some kind', not the original carts so presumably it's the roms loaded onto something other than the original boards. And they're interfacing with something that doesn't contain original chips from a Game Boy.

Moot philosophical discussion I suppose, especially when this can't really be played and doesn't have audio.

@slider1983 didn't say he did and I wasn't talking about cores.

I remember Game Informer covered the NGPC a lot. I wanted to get one, but when it came down to it, I could still play almost everything I wanted on the Game Boy Pocket. Nintendo was super smart by not locking out the previous generation fully when the Game Boy Color launched. I actually skipped over the Color entirely and went right to the Advance to enjoy all those libraries.

Very interesting point that the technically superior hardware couldn't do it, and neither could the similar hardware. That one-two punch of a cheap accessible entry point and an endless library of great games really was unbeatable by the mid to late 90s.

And that was what saved them with the 3DS. Better price point and good games. Amazing that Nintendo already provided the example of what works, and was at their weakest, and Sony still didn't pull off a win with the Vita.

No way in hell I'd ever plug some fly by night cable from BFE into any of my consoles. The brick is the slightest of inconveniences, but usb-c bros just gotta have their fix I guess.

People are definitely voting with their wallet with how much these units are selling already. I've no problem with broaching the conversation and I feel the same as buying a Peste Noire album or whatever. I work hard, have little free time, contribute to my local community with actual deeds of service, and won't live forever. I'm spending my money on the things I enjoy. More power to anyone who finds their time better spent not enjoying things and having a sense of satisfaction in the thought that they're improving the world with such a gesture.

Shame it all you want in the title, I'm still buying some new Metal Slug. Ethical consumption is an illusion and chasing it merely deprives one of fun things during their all too brief existence.

They should hire Kevtris if they want to keep that up. Every Analogue console that comes out has people saying for sure it'll get cracked open, and not one of them has been yet. The "jailbreaks" are alternate firmware someone at Analogue leaks out and the Pocket allows loading cores through an official feature, but none of their devices have been truly opened up.

@Sketcz good on you for saying it out loud and clear. We don't get much time to live much less enjoy, and I'm definitely not spending it scrutinizing the ethics of enjoying a damn video game nor suffering someone else's savior complex.

Weird that on Time Extension of all places people need an explanation of why this has appeal beyond just emulating the games.

Might as well head over to the vinyl subreddit and ask why they don't just stream music for free.

Hilarious to see misterbros suddenly flexible about that total accuracy, that's supposed to be the smug claim of superiority over pleb software emulation.

Time to hunker down with the Vita, N3DS, and Analogue Pocket until things get less crazy, if ever.