Coalescence

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.

Celebrity worship is definitely not limited to Hollywood. People just can't bear the thought that their supposed good guy of video gaming might not be perfect.

Respectfully disagree on IGN, but the rest are solid places. Definitely feels like skipping between the shrinking count of islands anymore. I was relistening to the old Podtoid episodes and it's so bizarre to think back to when Destructoid was that rogue blog by scrappy gamers with brutally honest reviews instead of the useless vapid content factory it is today. And funny for how those episodes would set off every alarm bell today. The same story happened to so many places, so many zombie sites and dead zones.

Super eager to plug this into the Mega SG, hopefully things don't mess up the release for too long.

In other news, the secret to endless engagement is to just say something wrong about gaming history. Who cares if some wrestling woman is completely wrong about everything ever in the gaming world.

I am forever glad I nailed down pretty much every cart I'd ever want to own physically well before reproductions became a common thing. It just seems like an absolute nightmare to deal with, carting around a piece of hardware or having to crack open carts for inspection and then going back at someone who is either knowingly scamming or even worse stubbornly believes their stuff is legit. No thanks.

Pretty cool little game. Control gets a little clunky around islands but it otherwise really gets the thrill of sailing the Wind Waker ocean down. But yeah, this is swimming in C&D bait.

I'll never use them and more power to people who enjoy that kind of thing. Disabling any and all notifications is what I do when setting up a console, I already have a device that won't ever shut up. At least they're fittingly called something so absolutely stupid as cheevios.

I'm pretty well insulated to this sort of thing with my collection of devices, but this sure sucks for anyone who hasn't been in the hobby for a good while. Same with people wanting to get into physical media collecting and finding out how much of drag it is to buy overseas right now.

LRG exists because there was money to be had. The quality issues and all that is just icing on the crap cake. Their business model was rotten to the core from day one.

GameStop acting like they're an authority on anything is cute. But to their credit, if there's any way to bait engagement with gaming, it is to make statements about what is retro and therefore old which will always rustle people up.

There's way worse video game movies. The first Resident Evil is the high watermark of crap for me, completely manhandling every aspect of the source material while being an absolute trash movie on top of it lacking even the courtesy to be awesomely bad like Street Fighter or Mortal Kombat. Doom at least had the stupid violent fun I expected from the game, and at the very least had a home run few minutes with the fps segment.

Definitely worked if they're trying to get a rise out of people. Apparently that tweet turned one user into a pearl clutching old fogey. The funny bit is them thinking they can whip Nintendo into some disavowing frenzy with this. We all know NOA will at most release some corporate talk about not authorizing this usage and Nintendo Switch Sports is currently available for the Nintendo Switch and Nintendo Switch 2.

@Bod2019 Reportedly the wifi will be for updates, but it hasn't been implemented yet. The hardware is in there, the system even has the wifi icon on it. Knowing Analogue they're probably working up some heavy duty solution to keep people from using the wifi do something other than updates and may just let that feature rot if they can't do that.

Can someone please put zombie Destructoid out of its misery next?

I mean, they're right that this is normal. Doesn't make it okay though. Most people would be absolutely shocked if they did an audit for how many of their various devices are constantly phoning home and doing other crap. Good reason to keep a separate network to quarantine things from any devices with personal info, and have a pihole to stop unknown outbound communications.