Darknyht

They are apparently confusing the PSP with the Playstation TV, which was a failure trying to jump on the micro console craze. The PSP was not something I was interested in because I lost faith in Sony after their terrible record on keeping my personal information secure, but I didn't think either the PSP or Vita outright failed.

Nintendo's handhelds dominated because they generally had the right price, kept a mostly family-friendly image, and had the huge inertia boost of being the best know handheld gaming company since 1989. 80 million sales against that monster is not a failure unless they lost Sony money overall.

EDIT: Mistakenly called the Playstation TV the PSP Go. Apologies, I really didn't keep up with Sony much since the PS2.

At least they learned their lesson and let Majestco sell the Genesis 3. They managed to do better than they probably should have through smart marketing in the US, but their infighting with Sega of Japan really doomed them at the end.

The world might have turned out differently had they just went with the Saturn, sold a compatibility adapter for it; and supported it in the US properly. That would have delayed the Dreamcast longer and allowed them to maybe have a fighting chance. I am not sure the end would have been different, as Sony had an equally powerful BS machine with the PS2’s capabilities (and it had an affordable DVD drive for the time).

There is a part of me that looked hard at this many times, but I never purchased it and eventually got a Playstation the next summer.

@KingMike It was a lot of things together that doomed it. First, The Playstation released a few months later, and unlike Sega their CD games used the technology onboard to full effect. Sega CD games were generally more expensive than the cartridge versions and didn't really add much than redbook audio for the price increase.

Second, Sega themselves were pushing the 32x and rumors of the Saturn were right around the corner. Why invest in a pricey Sega CDX when you could get better later. Like most Sega releases, their timing was terrible and the marketing (or lack thereof) even worse.

I beat TMNT not too long ago and with save states. I could make it past the dam level, but never figured out the correct path as a kid through a later level before dying.

@timp29 Double Dragon 2 was hard. I originally was able to beat it with the NES Max turbo, then I had the timing down for he power knee. That last level had some meat grinder areas when you had to time jumps and the power knee was the only way to get to the next spot before being thrown off waiting to stand.

Battletoads was one I never made it past even with warps. I think Rare made a lot of memorable games, but the loved their brutal difficulty spikes.

@axelhander one takes what been done previously and grows it by adding new creativity to it. The other (AI) can only reproduce variations of what it has absorbed.

When it writes a sentence for you all it is doing is combining words together based on how the data it has absorbed looked. It has no ability to speak in your true voice or think for itself, only regurgitate sentences that sound like the most generic turns of phrases.

This is also not getting into the resource drain the server farms needed for this creates. I live in an area that has seen electric and water rates skyrocket due to server farms. Society pays for those billion dollar corporations to eliminate jobs from the market and rake in profits.

I tend to think the drain on society is not worth letting things like Musk’s AI generate Child Sexual Deepfakes, let Trump bomb feces on citizens he disagrees with, and assist in the spread of misinformation.

@axelhander Not baseless. AI cannot create new, it can only imitate and steal from the talent of others. Artists of all types have had to watch as tech middlemen have come in and crushed their take home pay, and now try to use their own creations to eliminate them through AI-stealing. At the same time, those tech middlemen do not give us a discount on the price, but have steadily increased the cost of their products. So creators suffer and customers suffer.

And before someone opens their mouth and states the BS argument of adjusted for inflation, please just don't. That is a lie created to hide reality. 25 years ago $15/hr could provide a good living with discreationary spending. Now people making $100k can barely manage to keep a roof over their head and groceries on the table, let alone have discreationary spending. This is why we are all "leasing" things through subscriptions or living on debt. There is more to the reality than just comparing how much something's price has inflated.

I cut my teeth on the free NES Dragon Warrior, but Shining in the Darkness was one of those Genesis games that made me jealous of Sega’s console. The art style always hit right and the gameplay reminds me of Western dungeon crawlers.

I just wish it had gotten a true sequel on the console instead of Shining Force. I am terrible at tactical RPGs and don’t enjoy them as much.

@sportymariosonicmixx I said most not all. Super Mario World does hold up somewhat, but don’t say the same for SNES SimCity (a game where saving breaks your city due to the processor not being able to calculate everything quick enough) or SNES Pilotwings (a glorified tech demo)? What about games where they intentionally made them more difficult to combat rentals? What about N64 games where everything looks like a Cybertruck?

My point is the market should decide and looking at Steam most settled below $10.

@sportymariosonicmixx perhaps because in every other product you purchase the value goes down with age because there is an acknowledgement that the quality does not meet modern standards.

Only Disney and certain gaming companies seem to refuse to understand this. Dragon Quest I was a great game when I played it on NES, but by no stretch of the imagination is it still worth $60. Even with its sequel included it is not worth that price. The game just is downright primative and short by modern standards.

It is like trying to charge full retail price for silent movies or black and white films. For the majority, age has removed them form cultural relevance and stripped their value.

@sportymariosonicmixx it’s that and it is manufacturers abandoning the product. Why sell you a cheap console you can afford when they can debt-finance a new one? Why sell old games at discount when you can either sell non-transferable digital copies that reduce the secondary market or release your game as a remaster and resell at full price? Why sell you a physical or even digital copy of a game you will own at all when they can sucker you into paying eternally for access?

The biggest problem is the majority has traded convenience over true ownership. This has reduced physical copies for everything to limited runs. This increases used prices. Yes, I hate that companies went down this path but the truth is we guided them there with our purchasing habits.

Just another reminder that I am old and hate that the internet has ruined everything. Once upon a time they continued to sell the last gen stuff as a bargain buy for those that couldn’t afford the latest consoles (The Atari 2600 sold and still was getting the occasional game until 1989). Then for a while you could go to a garage sale or thrift store and buy last gens stuff for pennies. Now, all these influencer and game-flippers had to come along and turn it into an “investment”.

It’s pretty much ruined every hobby out there at this point.

@KingMike I don't know who owns the IP, but it appears that AtGames! currently holds the right to produce products with it. Bump-N-Jump is available in a Coleco Vision Collection sold by AtGames, and Burgertime is all over their other products.

I have a lot of fond memories of playing both on intellivision, but it is those specific quirky versions I prefer over the actual arcade games. I forgot Lock-N-Chase, but it probably has just as messy rights behind it.

I was the odd kid that grew up in a house that owned both the Odyssey II (with Voice Module) and the Intellivision II (with Voice Module) before I got my first NES system. There wasn't a lot of the Odyssey II that I remember outside of Monkey Shines, Pickaxe Pete, and KC Munchkin; but I played a lot of Intellivision even after I had an NES.

I want this, but it's missing Minotaur, Tron Deadly Discs, Burgertime, Bump-n-Jump, Cloudy Mountain, and the Imagic games that made the system so much better. I get that licensing is at play, but I thought neo-Atari purchased both Intellivision and Imagic.

The sports games are nice, but let's be honest they have aged about as well as the 20+ Atari 2600 sports games on their collections.

@Exerion76 I am pretty sure that photo is the 7800 version. It's a shame they cannot use the homebrew version that imitates the vector graphics and had the deluxe version's additional features.

I just feel bad for the person that pays full price for the one that only has a single game (Space Invaders) on it.

I don't really remember commercials for the original Zelda (or NES), just the branded cereal and the cartoons. The first Legend of Zelda commercial I can recall was the one for the SNES game.

Sadly, it appears that they no longer have a working website.

Swapped mine out three years ago and the console still sees use by the kids. So it should be fine.

The majority of my gaming these days is retro games and older PC games that generally are considered old now. It's what I have time for and there is just something about the simplicity of their design and lack of online that appeals to me.

There are many factors at play in all of this, but the majority can be explained with the quote, “You can satisfy some of the people all the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you cannot satisfy all of the people all the time.”

Some of this is just cultural differences. Some of this is companies here in the US facing the tyranny of the minority, much how our politics are hijacked by the extreme minority. For them, there is no compromise and so they are trying to appease the ultra liberal left and the ultra conservative right at the same time (Type A and Type B, instead of Male and Female for the far left and modesty for the ultra right). In the end, we end up with a product so bland that doesn't really appeal to anyone.

As an American, we have an extremely violent society that glorifies greed, individuality, fame and power over everything else. We allowed ourselves to be manipulated by those seeking those things into thinking being treated like crap is good because we have it slightly better than [Enter ethnic or societal group].

We let our poorest kids starve at school (or give them subpar food) and call it good. We allow companies and individuals rent seek and abuse the poorest and then claim it's their own fault for not working harder. However, showing a female warrior in a bikini is somehow horrible because some flesh is showing (Apparently, these censors have not played any western RPG in a long time with their sexy female armor vs practical male armor issues).

@Zenszulu Microsoft did purchase Activision for their IP, not for their licensed game content. IP Owned means they can make yearly games in the franchise and Activision owns more than CoD and Spyro/Crash. They also now own World of Warcraft, Diablo, Starcraft, Overwatch, all of the Sierra library (King's Quest, Police Quest, Space Quest, Quest for Glory), Prototype, Blur, Gun, Pitfall, and all of King's mobile games.

As for Deadpool, another article on a different site quotes an original developer laughing at the estimate. They were quoted saying that was a GTA sized budget not Deadpool's budget.

I don't think I ever played the arcade version, but the Intellivision port was a favorite (along with Bump-n-Jump) before I got an NES.

Nintendo has innovated a lot over the years, and while not always the first at a genre they seem to distill it down well more often than not. The Gameboy beat the Game Gear (and I owned both) not just because of the games, but because the Game Gear ate batteries (even the rechargable pack I owned) at an astonishing rate. My Game Gear spent most of its time plugged into a wall which doesn't make it very portable.

I owned a Playstation and they rightfully won by choosing the CD format, but no one beat Nintendo at 3D platforming that generation. Tomb Raider probably came the closest, but that was a Saturn port. It wasn't just the controls, but having the camera not actively fight your play. 3D Platforming was a mess before Mario 64 showed others the how. Playstation developers on the other hand, curb stomped them in many, many other ways.

What people forget is that what I started with: Nintendo innovates a lot. D-Pad was a Nintendo creation. They revitalized a dying industry in the 80's. They mapped the path for portable game systems. It was Nintendo that brought back the analog stick as we know it today in the 90's. They pushed portable gaming with dual screens and then 3D. They go in a different direction constantly when everyone else is happy just reiterating on what sold last year.

All that to say, Nintendo has earned the praise they get when it comes to history.

Yes, others have gotten things right and Nintendo has allowed their own hubris to mess themselves up. But no other company has had such a track record as Nintendo has in hardware and software.

Just remember that all the hatred towards this game should be directed at incompetent people at WB. Per the wikipedia page for this game:

"Only a few days after the deal was made, the Warner Bros. licensing team changed. Based on Caen's testimony, the new group instantly hated Titus and the project and tried to stop its development. The first demand was to make Superman "a Sim City-like game, where Superman would be like the mayor of Metropolis", instead of an action game. Warner Bros. only got more coercive after Titus rejected the idea, going against any decision of the French developer. Often, their reasoning for rejection was that Superman would never do the things Titus proposed. Elements that survived, such as Superman swimming underwater, were kept in after Titus staff members showed documentation of the original Superman comics.

Some changes were mandated for reasons of putting the fictional DC Comics hero in a positive light. In addition to the limiting of Superman's powers and removal of breakable architecture, the game was set in a virtual world in order for the titular hero to not harm "real" people. Although the ring stages were originally supposed to be tutorial stages, they became a part of regular gameplay due to the other changes. These conflicts resulted in a delayed production process where "it took [Titus] months to get every single character approved" and an inability to fix bugs and issues associated with the collision detection and controls that the final product would be criticized for. Near the end of its development, technical support was provided for Titus by Nintendo of America."

I'll always wonder what could have been had WB not inflicted it's usual stupidity on the team trying to make the game.

@cdog555 I agree they have a more invested interest and if they put out a quality release like Atari 50th I will be interested. I just worry they will also put out $1000 collector crap that is half-baked also. The Blue Rangers did what they could to preserve the memory, I just hope the new stewards show the same love for its legacy.

At the same time I weep that these games should be in the public domain, but by the time they reach it they will be about as useful as silent movies are to most modern audiences.

While I am happy that Amico no longer has the Intellivision rights, I am not sure that the holding company that is Atari 3.0 (or is it 4.0, can't keep track of all the different Atari's in the past 50 years) is going to be a much better steward. Given their track record of playing by Limited Run Games playbook (overpriced items made as cheaply as possible), I fear what they will produce.

Still Nightstalker, Lock N' Chase, Burgertime, Bump 'n Jump, Minotaur (formally AD&D Treasure of Tarmin), Beauty and the Beast, Dragonfire, Tron: Deadly Discs, and He-Man were my early childhood gaming along with a dozen other titles. The Intellivision II (and Odyssey II) made up my video game consoles until I got the NES with PowerPad for Christmas in 1988.

@KingMike If they own the PAC-Man VCS cart, why would Bandi-Namco (or Namco-Bandi, can’t keep track of their swapping) care? Granted it is a piece of crap version of the game, and while there are much better homebrew versions my understanding is they don’t work well with the 2600+.

All this new Atari has done is burn the goodwill of their superfans. They could have purchase those games for $5 - $10 each (or less) on eBay, but instead paid $1000. Atari should be overnighting them replacements and including a copy of E.T. The video game dug out of the landfill as an apology.

@Daggot the fan remake removes the ability to get stuck by misusing an item. That alone takes a lot of sting out of it. My first play through of KQ5 had one of those moments where I had to start over because I misused and item and didn’t have it when I needed it.

@RetroGames Dragon Quest I & II were on SNES, but only in Japan. I think only the fourth game never made it to SNES before they moved over to the Playstation. It was what the GBC versions that released here in the US was based on.

I might have to check this out, although the simplicity of the original is part of the appeal for me.

I never played the early ones (despite now owning them), but King's Quest V, VI, and VII were enjoyable. Sierra pushed a lot of concepts we take for granted, but they also could be punishingly brutal (and inventive) in their killing you. I would recommend the remakes that remove some of that sting if you want to play them (of course, buy the originals to support the creators).

I will always be thankful for King's Quest, Quest for Glory, Gabriel Knight, and other franchises that were part of my childhood.

I grew up in a house that eventually had an original C-64, two C-64C's and a C-128. I used the C-128 until the mid-90's when I inherited an old 8088 that was replaced. Q-Link and GEOS contributed to many book reports and I probably spent way too much time on there gaming and creating text adventures in BASIC.

My dad's GILM Football is still out there on the net that he wrote for a friend and it somehow survived all these years. He also ran a basic BBS on the C-128 for a few years using a speedy commodore branded modem.

I still am amazed at all the things programmers did back then with such limited resources. I cannot help but feel that most software these days are just bloated.

Mario, Donkey Kong, Pac-Man, and Sonic all should come before Lara Croft.

She might be in the running for most well known disproportionate female character, but Barbie is a strong competitor as is a lot of Japanese game characters.

I loved that game as a kid and hated it at the same time. I remember that mission and a few others that were brutal. At the same time, I also remember finishing a mission but instead of jumping away I would turn and take down a Star Destroyer once it ran out of fighters solo.

The true fun of the game was to play around with the editor someone made for it. Making your own levels that probably made the worse of the game look mild.

I had to replace the battery in the gamepad, but otherwise the console is still kicking. Kids still play it regularly for Minecraft and a few other games (Need for Speed, Batman, Monster Hunter, etc.)

@SonOfDracula If you want to play word games, then yes there are more means (medium, method, or instrument to acquire something) to purchase a game. But generally speaking most lack the means (resources or income) to make the purchase.

None of which changes the point. This is a stupid argument every time it brought up because still uses at a single factor (inflation adjusted price) to present an false argument while ignoring the economic realities of the eras they are comparing.

This has been and will always be a crap argument. Yes, games were priced $60 back then, but milk cost $2.50 a gallon, eggs were $0.92 a dozen, bread was $0.89, and ground beef was $1.49 a pound. The average home cost around $85k and gas was usually less than $2 a gallon. A fast food burger cost $0.91 and a Taco Bell taco was $0.49.

All that to say that people's money went further back then and you had more disposable income after paying for necessities. So while a $70 technically costs less now, people had more means to purchase games back then. Wages have been stagnate since 1970 so every year inflation takes a increasing bite out of people's spending power.

So yeah, back in the Playstation era, I bought games every paycheck because $20 was nothing. Now, I purchase a game maybe once or twice a year because $60-70 is a major purchase. Hell, I remember my family (parents, plus three teenage kids) eating fast food for $20; now a trip to fast food for my family of 5 is almost cost of a video game unless we eat exclusively on the bargain menu.

I remember that I wanted this game as a kid. I loved Street Fighter but had moved to buying GB games over SNES ones because they were cheaper and also played on the Super Game Boy. I ended up buying MK2 instead and looking back it was probably a much better choice. MK2 on GB was at least playable.

Console power isn't something that necessarily bothers me. I have been primarily playing on Nintendo consoles which have been underpowered compared to the competition since the Wii. However, there are serious concerns and flaws in leaked documentation around this console. The constant chasing of marketing fads is a concern, as this console should be fairly nailed down at this point in development.

As I have said before, I love the original Intellivision. This thing sets off my danger sense on multiple levels. This is approaching the level of artificial hype of "The Devil's Third" by the producer just before release.

Can the Blue Sky Rangers please reclaim the Intellivision brand from these guys? They are single-handedly ruining all the good feelings I have for the Intellivision I grew up with. #FreeRunningMan

@Savino I wasn't the one that made the following statement:

"Any rom is illegal. If you read the fine prints on any cartridge/CD/DVD/BRD you will see that the software can´t be copied, reversed engineered or altered in any form."

Obviously that is a false statement. It ignores the US first-sale doctrine and "fair use" provisions for backup/archival purposes in case of the original being damaged/stolen.

In fact, this issue more than anything else is why content creators are pushing so hard to move everything to "Content as a Service" because people then rent/lease everything instead of owning content.

@Savino Really? Because I purchased 50+ ROM files (including various region releases of the same game) legally by purchasing Sega Genesis & Mega Drive Classics. I also got another dump of ROMs from Atari Collection. The SNES/NES Classic also have ROM files sitting there if you know how to access them. How dare Nintendo, Sega, and Atari distribute always illegal ROM files.
.

~$80 for 40+ actual games instead of the crap on the retrobit handhelds isn't that bad a deal. I figure this will do well with the first/second generation fans, hobbyists, and kids that end up with this as a gift from grandma with little other options.

If more developers come on board (Capcom, Sega, and maybe some indies) then this might be something, but I would imagine the firm price on carts limits this thing.

@ricardosteve Not really, the site works on advertising and clicks. Everyone that simply clicks on the article to announce their dislike is just sending a signal that they will get clicks (money) for continuing to behave that way. So if you stop clicking, they stop getting positive feedback. Likewise, if people actually did click on articles about switch accessories there would be no end of reviews of them.

@Folkloner the point was that you don’t have to read the article if the topic doesn’t interest you. Obviously enough people are interested that it is worth this site’s time to cover it. If your only comment on the article is to complain about the article, then why not do something else entirely?

I mean if you are that passionate about switch accessories, the start covering them in the forums (or your own YouTube page). But why is it NintendoLife’s responsibility to purchase 99 identical switch stands to tell you they work just like they advertise?

@MagnaRoader @EmirParkreiner @Folkloner No body forces you to click on the article. For those of us that have an interest in retro stuff, it is interesting to see how Atari, Namco, Interplay, and Data East are licensing their back-catalogue.

Plus, this is of note in that it is selling cheap and if it gets the right indie support can undercut Nintendo's console which gets mostly old games and Indies from third parties.

There are some legendary games in those collections but there are also a lot of duds, especially in the Atari stuff. I am intrigued by the idea, but unless they can get some heavier hitters onboard I don't see this doing anything but carving a niche market.

all the more reason that emulation and preservation is so vital.

I love the idea of a micro console, but I think the Nintendo Classics series and Neo Geo Mini are the closest we will get for now. I would have loved to see the Ouya succeed (or even the Atari VCS appear), but I don't think there is a chance for that.