JJtheTexan

SNEG has my gratitude. I recently picked up Blade of Darkness, having never played it when it originally released. It's pretty solid, and the porting team did a nice job bringing it to modern platforms! I hope SNEG and other like-minded publishers continue to find success in reviving lost games.

I guess this is a little bit like how audiocassette drives worked for older microcomputers like the Commodore 64

I love the Silpheed games on SEGA CD and PS2, and I had no idea they started on something as "primitive" as the PC-88. I will definitely pick this one up!

I absolutely love Steel Empire, and I pre-ordered the Steel Empire Chronicles physical game for Nintendo Switch earlier this year. (It's through Strictly Limited, so who knows when I'll get it.) Legend of Steel Empire looks pretty sweet, too!

Heck yes! I played both Pole Position games a lot in arcades as a kid. I wish I could somehow replicate the classic steering wheel at home.

I remember this very well from when it happened. The Spirit of Christmas video had been making the rounds online for some time by that point, so it was kind of shocking to see it had made it into something as mainstream as a video game disc.

Nintendo's trademark on "Super Mario" for all video games and related products would easily have defeated this guy's misguided idea.

Reminds me of the situation on the opposite end of the legal spectrum, when Edge Games studio founder Tim Langdell forced Namco to rename Soul Edge as Soul Blade (later Soulcalibur). He claimed, dubiously, that he owned all gaming-related trademarks to the word "Edge."

Great article! Minor correction: the Nintendo 64 released in North America in 1996. I got mine for Christmas that year.

I will also recommend Pleasure Hearts, a jaw-dropping 1999 homebrew shmup from the designer who would go on to create cult favorites Eschatos and Judgment Silversword. I played Pleasure Hearts on an MSX-2 and I was astonished by by what they were able to do with that hardware. It's REALLY fun, too!

Treasure is one of my absolute favorite developers. It pains me that they don't make new things anymore, but most of their titles still have tremendous replayability.

"For the vast majority of retro gamers, we’d recommend going with the Starter pack."

For the vast majority of gamers, I would recommend spending your money on literally anything else.

This is really neat in concept, but an outrageously poor value proposition.

This is a wild coincidence, because I played through Rondo of Blood today on my TurboGrafx-16 Mini, oblivious to the anniversary. It is a stellar game and one of my favorites in the Castlevania series.

I have Dracula X on the Wii U Virtual Console, and started playing that as well, just to compare the two. It is definitely the lesser game, but still quite good.

I think what I like the most about the four 16-bit era Castlevania games is that they are all so very different from each other (except Rondo of Blood and Dracula X). Super Castlevania IV has giant setpieces and perfectly precise control. Bloodlines looks fantastic, has great bosses, and introduces new characters. Rondo of Blood has immense replay value and a perfect challenge. All four games have absolutely phenomenal soundtracks. It really was peak Konami.

This looks terriffic! Sunsoft is doing a fine job with revisiting their classic properties of late.

My favorite tabletop electronic game was this version of Defender, which I had as a kid:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wavaS-a0OBA

I still have my original Atomic Purple Game Boy Color, a Christmas gift in 1998. I was in college at the time.

I never got many GBC-exlcusive games, but it did really add new life to my existing Game Boy library.

My favorite GBC game isn't even exclusive to that platform — The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening DX. I still prefer it to the 2019 remake. (Tetris DX is pretty great, too.)

This is great. Another example of why the speedrunning community is so cool.

Ahh yes, Blandia, part of the series of fighting games that includes titles such as Dullia, Tedioustan, Banalia, Boringia, and Uninterestingy.

Seriously, I have to wonder if this was ever exported to international arcades in the 1990s. Imagine seeing a game with the word BLAND as the root of the title. I guess localization was still not perfected by then.

I used to get excited when a game was announced as getting a physical release through a boutique publisher like Limited Run, Strictly Limited, Super Rare, etc. Now, I just cringe and sigh heavily.

I have bought dozens of games from these publishers because I really love collecting physical editions. But I am completely fed up with the limited order windows, years-long waits for shipments, and even worse, seeing the same games go up for sale on Playasia or Best Buy or even Amazon at the same price, with no wait.

My #1 gripe with these companies is how horrible they are at communication. If they just posted regular shipment updates - even only once a month! - and perhaps made some videos or long-form posts explaining the production process and why it takes so long to fulfill orders, that would go a long way toward easing tensions and keeping customers happy.

I have three pending game orders affected by the Strictly Limited delays, nine with Limited Run, and two others with smaller companies, making 14 games I bought earlier this year that I won't get until next year. Idiots like me are part of the problem. I just wish there was an alternative, and unfortunately it has increasingly been "don't buy games, just accept the fact that you can't / won't be able to own them physically unless you support bad business practices."

Unpopular opinion: most of the rejected names aren't THAT bad, though "Xbox" is definitely superior to all of them. Regardless, it seems to have foreshadowed Microsoft's trend of giving each generation a worse name than the last: Xbox (not terrible), Xbox 360 (OK), Xbox One (what), Xbox One X (stop), Xbox Series X (PLEASE STOP)

My favorite rejected name is "P2 / Power Play." Nintendo and Sony fans would have had a field day with that one, mocking the Microsoft PP console.

@-wc- lol great minds!

I never thought I'd see a crossover between the website formerly known as Twitter and the most mid-tier fighting / beat-'em-up series on the SNES

I am a Virtual Boy collector with a mostly-complete North American library, minus the holy grails like Jack Bros. Even as a VB enthusiast, I would not be offended at all if this had been a joke post with zero games listed. xD

VB Wario Land and Mario's Tennis are perfectly serviceable and would play just fine in 2D. The rest, take 'em or leave 'em.

Teleroboxer feels like ARMS stripped down to its absolute most-basic parts. Missed opportunity there.

Shmupulations does fantastic work. This should be an excellent resource for gaming historians and curious fans alike

@-wc- adding to my other comment - I had to find this video. A ROM hacker explains how he was able to force the NES to play SNES games and other trickery. It sort of gets to the heart of what I was trying to explain

https://youtu.be/ar9WRwCiSr0?si=g4anrEc2pQk90IqF&t=222

@-wc- for the original release of Micro Mages, this developer got the game into just 40kb on cart, which was smaller than many contemporary NES games. Conversely, an Everdrive can hold an entire NES library on a single cart. So, as far as I know, there is no theoretical limit to the size of a game on a cartridge.

The trick is meeting NES hardware limitations when it comes to the size of the game it can load. Those limits can be exceeded, provided the cart manufacturer and game developer include memory mapper chips on the cart that can allow the NES to exceed its built-in limit.

This is mostly beyond my level of expertise but that's how I understand it.

I wonder how the notoriously engaged AtariAge user base is responding to this. (Checks comments) ...they are taking this surprisingly well! And somehow still using it as another opportunity to dunk on Tommy Tallarico xD

I, for one, will always be grateful for the amount of material Mr. Molyneux gave to Guru Larry's Fact Hunt series on YouTube. I have to admit I was a little disappointed when Larry finally ended the running gag of showing Peter slowly nodding in the intro to almost every episode.

Apparently they want NOTHING to do with Americans, as my attempts to visit their website display a jarring "YOU ARE BLOCKED" page.

One of the highlight attractions at the National Video Game Museum here in Texas (Frisco, near Dallas) is a complete RDI Halcyon, believed to be one of only five or six known sets in the world, if memory serves. The museum owner told me it's pretty much impossible to place a dollar value on it.

I have an Egret II Mini, and I am interested in several of these games... but I just can't justify that price point, especially with shipping from Japan. I'd rather wait until the better games are available on Nintendo Switch via Arcade Archives, if they're not there already.

This feels highly unnecessary - even more so than the recent Atari VCS - but I get the appeal. I personally feel like the vast majority of Atari 2600 and 7800 games have aged quite poorly, so it's not for me, I guess.

@Sketcz a magazine you could read on a TV set? Wonders never cease xD

American reader here - this is the first time I've heard of Teletext. I looked it up, and it seems to be superficially similar to the technology our pre-HDTV sets used to display closed captions, but as far as I know, we never had any color displays for news, weather, etc. like U.K. Teletext apparently did. Pretty interesting idea, and certainly all the more remarkable someone could make a video game out of it!

I LOVE the NES game and the 2013 remake. This is some neat programming trickery, but I just don't see the appeal (at least not for me). It only adds a few colors and doesn't seem to remedy any of the sprite flicker problems.

Hopefully the community will come up with some new sprites, backgrounds, parallax scrolling, and a 16-bit soundtrack (not an MSU fan personally) to make it worthwhile!

I love the look, but I really need a 10-key number pad...

I am curious about what switches it uses, though.

I was born in 1980, which I feel like was the perfect time: I missed the early, nascent days of the arcade and home console, which have mostly not aged too well, and I'm too young to recall the North American video game crash. However, I started playing games right around the time that the NES and Super Mario Bros. took off in the USA. Games have been on a mostly upward trajectory ever since!

The earliest game experience I can remember was playing Galaga on an arcade cabinet at a pizza parlor, sometime around 1984 or 1985. First home console experience was Super Mario Bros. on Christmas Day 1988.

Chase H.Q. or Rastan would be great

@Hydra_Spectre I had no idea FF1 was ported to MSX2! I need to check that out. I just started my Pixel Remaster playthrough last week (currently on FFII) and it would really be something to try the original game on that hardware.

This made me realize that Square and Enix, before their merger, never published any original games on any SEGA platform, ever. Enix published just four games for Saturn, none of them related to its original IPs. Not a single Square property ever made it to a SEGA console. Kind of odd, when I think about it, considering both companies were around when the Mark III / Master System launched!

@KGRAMR I noticed that -_- I like a lot of what Piko does, but their website leaves much to be desired.

I honestly know nothing about Super Bubble Pop. I assumed it was an obscure Neo Geo title getting a re-release. I didn't realize it was never officially released at all.

@Serpenterror that's a fair point. I hadn't thought about that, though I was under the impression Miyamoto-san's involvement was minimal.

@Poodlestargenerica it's the same people who will pay $300 US for Neo Super Bubble Pop on Neo Geo, also from Piko Interactive. Collectors and official physical media aficionados like me who like having something to put on the shelf, I guess. I've bought a couple of other SNES reprints from Piko and I enjoy them.

Granted, part of the cost is paying rights holders, since Piko is very good about that. But yeah, I can see why it's viewed as overpriced.

Similar story with the director of the original Super Mario RPG, who said on Twitter he learned about the remake the same way as everyone else: he saw it in the Nintendo Direct. He was happy to see it getting a remake, though.

I guess it's really par for the course in this industry. Unless you're still working for the company that is remaking your game, they're probably not going to bother contacting you about a remake.

(See also: Hideo Kojima / Metal Gear Solid Delta, for obvious reasons)

I believe it. It took literally 20 years for the community to crack the Saturn DRM - the big breakthrough was in 2016. Compare that to the Nintendo Switch, which was jailbroken in weeks and had emulators up and running within a year.

I still can't get past the fact ININ is breaking these Irem collections up into three volumes. The relative quality of the games and small file sizes does not justify this at all. Honestly, this is what I believe to be a poor value proposition.

At first glance, I thought this was an astonishingly fast 16-bit attempt at the Super Mario Bros. Wonder visual style. It's pretty neat the designers happened to be thinking along somewhat similar lines to Nintendo!

Finally, a use for AI we can all agree is a good thing! xD

No, Peter, people did not get annoyed and angry at you because you talked about an upcoming project's game design and why it was great. We got annoyed and angry at you because you made lofty promises and then completely, totally failed to deliver on them. Do you understand the difference?

@Guru_Larry I look forward to your inevitable video on the outcome of this game, "Five More Times Developers Did Something Incredibly Stupid"

That's pretty neat! It's truly a piece of art.

Considering the recent news that Microsoft reportedly considered buying Playtonic, they could very well have ended up making that Banjo-Kazooie sequel!