GravyThief

So did the engineer get the sack? It doesn’t specify. I need to know if some guy I’ve never met got fired back in 1999.

British website calls a game made by a British company with music from British music acts by its American name. Shame on you.

Does this feature have anything to do with the Facebook Group that’s also called CEX Retro Watch that’s been around for a few years? Was wondering if they’re branching out 🤣

I always thought the best music from Wipeout were his tracks from the first game. Better than all the licensed music. I think the Wipeout game disc spent just as much time in my CD player as it did in my PlayStation! I just had to rush to skip past track 1 so the awful data noise didn’t blast through the speakers 🤣

I don’t think it’s right to say the PAL issue isn’t their fault and give them a free pass. If they are selling this in PAL regions, advertising that it can be used with original cartridges, it’s on them to make sure those cartridges work. Will they be putting a warning on the box that PAL carts won’t work properly? I doubt it.

At least you can say it’s authentic. They’re giving PAL regions substandard hardware just like videogame manufacturers did back in the 80s and 90s 🤣

Interesting read. I don’t recall anything about this game at the time, and I was actively into the GameCube at the time. To be honest I would have had no idea who Jeff Minter was back then. I was too young to have played his 80s games and this music light stuff doesn’t appeal to me as a game at all. So can’t say I’m bothered it never released! 🤣

Interesting article all the same though.

Coincidentally I’ve been reading old White Dwarf magazines, starting from around issue 90, so I recognise this album cover as it was advertised in quite a few issues around that time and is fresh in my mind. I wouldn’t recognise the music though, not my cup of tea at all!

Kudos for owning the album. You really are a true retro head! The best I can do is owning the Dungeonquest board game and its expansions from that era of Games Workshop. It’s the best board game of all time in my opinion and still fun to play today.

I have no nostalgia for Atari, and no desire to play the games either. The NES and Master System are as basic as I can go for retro gaming.

However this does look a good proposition on the face of it. The price seems reasonable, it plays original cartridges AND they are re-releasing some of the old game cartridges too. If I had nostalgia for this system, I’m sure I’d jump on the band wagon.

Still never tried an Eye Toy or Kinect. Seen as I have a PS2 I probably should give it a go.

Bastian Schweinsteiger is the best name ever given to a human being

Great read, thank you.

Come on guys. He played Klonoa. Most hardcore gamers don’t even play Klonoa. He was clearly one of us, with great taste I might add.

Did you nip into CEX in York after your visit to Sore Thumb Games? 😀

(I saw you on their Facebook page. I’m not a stalker, honest!).

“but we're willing to overlook this, thanks mainly to the wonderfully electric selection on offer here.”

Electric or eclectic? I guess both works!

This Evercade seems to be going from strength to strength. Good to see it still going strong, it could just as easily have died after the initial releases but the company really seems to be on it and hopefully it’s paying off for them.

The pad certainly looks foxy.

Although I thought it was part of the Liz MacDonald collection.

I already have something that lets me use my SNES pad with my GameCube. It’s a cable adapter, no need for any soldering nonsense. I think it’s from Raphnet if I’ve remembered it correctly. Not sure how this is any different or better?

This article was about a game I’d never heard of before (Devil Dice), a system I have heard of but have no interest in (Net Yaroze), and misinformation I never knew existed (confusing it with Game Yaroze).

Despite all this, I still found this article really interesting 🤣

@Foxhound it depends how you look at it. No individual could send a Tracked parcel that cheaply via Royal Mail, and until recently they were only charging £1.95 per item. On the other hand, they charge the same price for Large Letters which are usually cheaper (for DVD cases, DS games etc) and as you say you don’t get any discount when items come from the same store, which they always try and prioritise doing if some or all of the games in your order are available in the same store.

I’m surprised you received reprinted covers from an online order. I believe they’re only supposed to sell those in store (so you know what you’re getting) and they cancel online orders if they don’t have another copy available.

It’s also worth mentioning that they typically have these reprinted covers because they get the original boxes stolen from their stores. So they only do them for games they’ve taken in as boxed but no longer have the box for them.

Their franchised stores can be a lot more picky with the condition of games they take in compared with corporate stores. I tried trading in some boxed games without manuals that I’d purchased as boxed from their website, but the franchised store would only take them as unboxed 🤣 obviously I just went to another store who took them as boxed no problem.

All in all I like CEX, but as you say they really need to split the boxed grade into with and without a manual.

Where there is demand, there will be supply

Hopefully they release it for the N64 like they did 40 Winks. No need to get Limited Run involved, they release their own games.

I have a handful of US region 3DS games that I have never played as I assumed getting hold of a US region 3DS console would be much easier than it turned out to be. So the last thing I want to be doing is buying Japanese region games too!

I looked into hacking one of my 3DSes but it’s not exactly straightforward and it’s irreversible from what I can tell. All my current consoles are too sentimental for me to do that to.

Maybe his Uncle secretly worked at Nintendo. That’s why he wanted it shut down.

I had MDs in the late 90s, early 2000s. They were really useful for recording my bedroom DJ mixes (I was so cool). Not only could you re-record if you messed up, but it was CD quality sound (to my ears anyway) and you could create the tracks to break up the mix into each individual tune. You could insert the track breaks quite precisely if I recall, I remember going forward and backward until I got the track break in exactly the right spot where it sounded just right when you skipped to each track.

Julian Sands is always the Warlock to me. I loved that film as a child. I remember him from Arachnophobia too, and he was a bad guy in one of the series of 24.

I should try and watch Warlock 2, I don’t think I’ve ever seen that.

Makes me glad all my collection is stored away and has never been on display. Although at the same time in recent months I’ve stopped caring about my retro games collection.

I reached a point where I realised a lot of my time outside of work was spent on activities linked to collecting. And I’d become a hoarder. I always originally bought the games with the intention of playing them, but the reality is that’s never going to happen. Life’s too short.

So I’m now selling most of it, and I’m much happier for it. And with what I will have left at the end of it, I won’t be thinking about how the sun shines on it.

Great read. I knew a lot of the early part thanks to having recently read the book ‘Dice Men’ from Ian Livingstone. Which is a great book. But then much of the latter part was entirely new for me and very interesting. Thanks!

I’d love for Time Extension to do an article covering the early Fighting Fantasy and Games Workshop videogames. There must be some good stories there? HeroQuest, Soace Hulk, Space Crusade, the first two Warhammer games on PC and PS1.

That was an excellent read, thank you.

I’ll take a look at this. I’m already due to receive Jonathan Green’s FF 40th Anniversary book from his most recent Kickstarter, but I wasn’t aware of this.

The artwork is an iconic part of FF books, and that list of names at the end of the article define Fantasy art for me.

I’ll have to check this out.

Never heard of this before, and mention of Fighting Fantasy and Warhammer Quest 1995 has piqued my interest. I’ll check it out.

As long as CoLD SToRAGE did the soundtrack. Not interested in any music from ‘real’ artists. Tim Wright’s music is the only true Wipeout music.

Does anybody know why the PAL version of this game has the thickest, most horrendous borders ever seen in a PAL SNES game?

PAL SNES games in general are bad enough, with thick borders and skewed aspect ratios (much worse than PAL Mega Drive games), but this game takes the biscuit.

It’s strange, because the NTSC version doesn’t have any borders at all. I thought it might be like Street Fighter II on the SNES where even the NTSC version has borders, so the PAL version has even thicker borders because of it. But nope, the NTSC version is fine. It even has thicker borders than the PAL versions of the Street Fighter II games.

Anyway, I think I’ve used up my allowance of the word ‘borders’ in a single comment, so I’ll stop!

I was pretty underwhelmed with PIKO’s 4O Winks’ release. I remember playing the prototype rom on my Everdrive and thinking the sound was off (too quiet I think?). I assumed it would be fixed with PIKO’s release but it wasn’t, it sounded just the same as the prototype.

@-wc- thanks, I have that game so I’ll be sure to play that one if/when I come to play a PS2 GT game

Boo for not including the original. Still my favourite. All games after that just have too many cars for my liking.

I wonder which games company E.T. will destroy next?!

I really do like these articles on Time Extension from Jack and John. All the time and effort you put in to investigating, researching, interviewing etc really pays off.

From the article: Atari filed a lawsuit against Sega for infringement of one of its patents, taken out in 1984, which covered "horizontal scrolling on a video display."

Doesn’t that cover like a billion videogames? Atari could have been rich!

Wata ridiculous price for a magazine

That Lego is from my era. I had those 3 sets as a child. I used to love it! I’ll always remember Rampart on the SNES for being a game that was always in the ‘crate’ at an electronics store (maybe Dixons, can’t quite remember). My brother and I would always rush to it to look through the games, and got fed up of always seeing Rampart!

I’ve never come across this story before. It was really interesting, thanks!

I remember really enjoying Mario’s Time Machine back in the day as a kid. I think I also played this one, and enjoyed it too. They both kind of merge together in my memory

I do specifically remember Mario’s Time Machine highlighting to me that America used to be a British colony. It’s not something I remember being taught at school, probably because it was just one of hundreds colonies Britain had and lost over the centuries. But it stuck with me as an example of a videogame teaching me something, and I’m sure I used it numerous times as ammunition against people who thought videogames were a waste of time! 🤣

I should give this a try at some point. Thankfully I have an Everdrive, so I don’t have to worry how much the original cartridge costs. Even the Mega Drive mini 2 is stupidly expense now.

Soldering in new save batteries in each of these will be fun

That’s nuts. They probably wanted to squirrel them away in the hope their value would increase even more.

I’m glad hardware like this, and the Evercade, seem to be doing well. Hopefully we get more hardware in the future from similar ‘niche’ projects.

Speaking of the Evercade, that business model is how I wish Sega and Nintendo would have approached their Classic Mini consoles. They could still be selling mini cartridges that contain multiple games from different publishers (including themselves), and be making money from it. If Evercade can do it, then they definitely could.

I don’t recall anything about this game at the time. But having played, and thoroughly enjoyed, Alien Isolation, I can’t say I missed out.

This was a fascinating read, thank you. I’d never heard of this before, but it helps explain the jump in quality (from a technical standpoint at least) of the later PS1 games.

I always like it when complex and technical subject matter can be distilled into something a layman can understand.

I’ve been wanting to hack one of my 3DSes for a while. Not to download games for free, but to be able to play genuine US exclusive copies of 3DS games on my UK console. I cannot believe they region locked the 3DS, and this idiotic move of theirs has directly resulted in me wanting to hack their console. I was hoping they would release a software update to make it region free, but alas that doesn’t seem to be happening.

@RetroGames I was… joking.

Want to watch this, but won’t be subscribing to Apple TV+ for it. Hopefully it becomes available elsewhere at some point.