Damo

@metaphysician No, but it IS Nintendo's duty to refund money that doesn't belong to it.

@metaphysician The thing is, the US government doesn't have the money any more. It refunded it back to the manufacturers. So the onus is on them to refund the consumers, irrespective of where anger or blame should be attributed.

@Ruka MS also releases its games on PS5. By your logic, that means MS isn't in competition with Sony, correct?

@Ruka Microsoft and Nintendo are absolutely in competition with each other, I'm not sure why you would assume they aren't? A lot of the same games are even releasing on both their systems (CoD, Elden Ring, etc).

@Ruka You might not consider them to be, but they are. They both produce portable gaming devices.

@metaphysician The tariffs were insanely dumb, that goes without saying, hence them being overturned. How they were approved in the first place boggles my mind,

@Ruka Oh, absolutely. All of the companies which got refunds should be doing this. Nintendo has been singled out here because A) it makes a competitor device to the Play date and B) it is now actively involved in trying to prevent legal proceedings which we enable its customers to obtain a refund. But yes, all companies should be held accountable.

@Guru_Larry Dammit!

@-wc- Amen to that

@X68000 That's all the more reason to keep fighting back. Nothing is inevitable.

@X68000 I guess it will end when it becomes normalised for customers to pay good money for lazy, AI-generated slop.

I'm not at that stage yet, and Time Extension's duty is to inform people when this happens so they can make their own purchasing choice.

@Atariboy If I recall, pretty much every copy of Grind Stormer has that fault

@PopetheRev28 Pointing out that nothing lasts forever is anti-physical propaganda now?

If you saw how many games we have in the Hookshot Office, you might not have leapt to such an assumption 😅

@jygsaw Thanks for the save, fixed!

@romanista That would only work if companies were honest about when they use it, and, as this case attests, that's not always the case

@AussieMcBucket Ah, I wasn't sure if you were 😅

@Laukku Sorry, I wasn't being clear there - I meant localised. I've amended the text.

@AussieMcBucket This game is 31 years old.

@NoirConceit https://www.timeextension.com/news/2026/05/ayaneos-pocket-block-is-the-worlds-first-ai-powered-handheld-apparently

https://liliputing.com/anbernic-is-bringing-ai-to-handheld-game-consoles-and-it-kind-of-makes-sense/

At the upper end of the emulation handheld market, devices like the AYANEO 3 have an AMD app which uses AI to optimise performance.

There's another example I know we reported on a while back, but I can't arm to find it.

@Ruka You might not be aware of how CeX operates; they carry preowned stock. All they have in are items that have been traded in. They used to sell new imports back in the day, but all of their retro stuff has always been second hand.

@Ruka Why would anyone import games from Japan to trade them in at CeX at a loss? There are plenty of Japanese games kicking around in the UK already, we had a vibrant grey import market back in the 90s.

@Jimgamer8 We did a piece on the 90s import scene a few years back: https://www.timeextension.com/features/full-of-eastern-promise-the-rise-and-fall-of-grey-importing

@NoirConceit Automatic translation tools and performance optimisation are two examples.

@BionicDodo It was the most wonderful place once. The Birmingham branch was my 'local' (despite being a good 45-minute drive away), and every visit was jaw-dropping.

Shelf upon shelf of Japanese goodness - Saturn, PS1, N64, Dreamcast... I still have all my receipts, and leafing through them is a real trip down memory lane. I was a poor student, so I had to trade in stuff to buy new stuff, but I must have (including trades) spent thousands of pounds there.

My mate and I would drive down to London to visit the Rathbone Place store – we'd go to HMV round the corner, hit McDonald's and then drive home. Four hours of driving for three shops!

Those were the days!

@cawley1 Yes! It was £100 and was marked as a refurb. Well remembered!

They had a pile of them in one corner and it didn't seem to me that they were selling all that well... I wish I'd had the money to buy a few, I could have been sitting on a nice little nest egg there

@NoirConceit AI is being crammed into a lot of these emulation devices lately, which is why the question is being asked.

@WesCopeland Thanks for the feedback. While I certainly have my own opinion on GenAI – as do many, many others who are concerned about copyright theft, low-quality projects, environmental concerns and much more – I felt this particular story was fairly balanced. I'm only quoting what the developer said in the headline, and I link to another news article which points out the issues AI-coded projects are causing in the world of FPGA cores. The world of fan translations has also had issues. The main reason for posting this story was to make people aware that one of these projects uses AI.

In this respect, we're seeing a lot of AI-assisted projects which end up being sloppy (not all of them, I should point out), and this has the negative effect of putting 'proper' coders off attempting the same project. These developers then move away from such sectors, which ultimately makes said sectors poorer.

Regarding the AI use in the platforms Time Extension is hosted on, that's a bit like the "yet you participate in society" meme. I'm fully aware that AI (or some form of algorithm) is involved with many things online – typing a search query into Google a decade ago would have leveraged an algorithm – and I realise that there's a danger of tarring everyone with the same brush when it comes to AI.

However, in this case, I can see the very real danger of these AI-assisted projects resulting in a flood of low-quality end results which only serve to dissuade human coders from contributing to the community, which is a negative in my book. Many other people feel the same way, as you can see from social media and comments left here.

I apologise for getting Claude and Codex mixed up, and have edited that part of the piece. Thanks for the heads up.

@h3s Marketing might have been rubbish back then, but at least it was human-made and not cookie-cutter slop based on stolen IP. And the fact that GenAI has been used here is unfortunately a reflection the project and the developer, even if the game doesn't feature any (which it might).

@Orioncle I've been told it will be back up very soon. Technical hiccup!

@occamyDG @Skipph AI is a massive, massive topic in the world of retro gaming (and gaming in general) right now, hence the coverage.

@Fanboy_Destroyer Jotego is getting paid for his time, which is spent cataloguing and preserving arcade games for future generations via accurate FPGA cores. He's not "gate keeping" anything. He's expressing a valid concern that lazy AI-generated cores based on MAME could put his (and others) work at risk, which would effectively cut off financial support and therefore be a huge negative for game preservation in the future.

@slider1983 It's been proven time and time again that no amount of programming can prevent LLMs from hallucinating, so why would you trust them over a human being, bias or no bias?

https://blogs.library.duke.edu/blog/2026/01/05/its-2026-why-are-llms-still-hallucinating/
https://stradslater.medium.com/why-llms-can-never-fully-stop-hallucinating-0c3fe59303e2
https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.05746
https://jurgengravestein.substack.com/p/why-hallucinations-will-never-be

@crimcram It's one of the most hilarious things I've ever read

@rob7979 Sounds like you're in a very similar place to me; I love collecting for systems I'm emotionally attached to, but I'm less fussed about modern-day platforms.

@Coalescence @Bot_Bot_69 I agree, slop fits this perfectly. And the reason people "bray and bleat" over GenAI as it's theft that is putting people out of the job. A real designer should have overseen this project, for example, but instead someone will have just fed images into a computer to spit out subpar results.

The moment people stop being frustrated at this is the moment it becomes acceptable.

@PetePumpkinEater23 We've only ever removed one post regarding LRG, and it was based on comments made by Douglas Bogart on Reddit which were later retracted and didn't seem to be based on fact. As you'll be aware, Bogart and Fairhurst don't get along, so I thought it best to take that offline and focus instead on factual pieces.

As for us "deleting your previous articles about his incompetence", that's completely false - all of the other previous LRG coverage remains in place, positive AND negative:

https://www.timeextension.com/tags/limited-run-games

@Zybex242 I agree 100%

@slider1983 It's the source link at the bottom of the page.

@Ristar24 Very much so! It's proper weapon

@breach187 Given that the entire remit of the Evercade range is physical gaming, I highly doubt it.

@GravyThief I'd have to ask Matt, as he ordered this in and did it for me as a favour - this isn't a service he offers any more, but I'm sure there are other places that do.

@SoundShower The LCD mod costs about £50, plus the cost of installation. The CleanJuice is £30, and the EverDrive is around £100.

@Penguinpengy "Cosy" is absolutely the right word to use. I get that feeling every time I pick up my DMG-01!

@RupeeClock Exactly. Spot on summary, there.

Now the video is out, I think it's worth reflecting on what a staggering achievement this is - and it also makes me pine for the days of the PS1 collections. Namco was really cooking with those.

@bring_on_branstons That's very kind of you to say, and it's absolutely the intention!

@Simon-Butler "The recent article hinting at some Amiga-related announcement was an obvious diversionary tactic designed to pull people's attentions away from this ridiculously over-priced nonsense."

While I think most of what you've said is probably bang on the money, that latter point was my fault. I didn't see the Amiga thing until a few weeks after he had posted it, and it was posted well before the Callback announcement.

That one is on me!

@AndyVGR The Falcon is a 'proper' Atari though.

@NoirConceit That's a day-one reduction in price which is removed after the 30th, and I already mentioned it right at the end of the piece

@Florp I'm not sure if you're being sarcastic, but: https://commodore.net/callback/