JJtheTexan

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!

Excellent news for us Neo Geo Mini owners! Hopefully broader console support can be added via a firmware update in the future.

I saw it both when it was originally featured in Nintendo Power magazine, and in person at the NYC store several years ago. I wonder if it returned to Washington State to be displayed at the Nintendo Live event this summer?

I own a few games that were sun-damaged by previous owners, but I manage to keep everything away from direct sunlight. I guess that's an advantage of living in a small apartment with windows only on the east side, and a neighboring building blocking virtually all sunshine.

THANK YOU for this article! I have bought far more Arcade Archives games than I am willing to admit (it's several dozen, at least), and I am really grateful they continue to bring us so many unique and essentially arcade-perfect games.

It's especially exciting they made Nintendo's major arcade games available - something Nintendo never did itself, not even once!

Regarding the idea that the PS2 sold so well because it was a DVD player, the reverse is probably more likely: DVDs became more popular because the PS2 was a DVD player. It was an entry-level DVD machine that also played games.

I was a university student when the PS2 launched, and at the time still a Nintendo die-hard with little PS1 experience. I held out hope the GameCube would be superior. When I learned it wouldn't play DVDs and that its big launch title was a Luigi ghost-hunting game, I ended up skipping the entire generation. (I regret that now of course, and I've rectified it by buying a GameCube, PS2, and Xbox, and many games for each, all these years later.)

I really love SuperScaler games. Hopefully this one is early in development, as that video looks promising but only if a lot more is coming in terms of content and presentation.

I picked this up on Switch and I'm very pleased with it! Lots of fun for this old-school OutRun fan.

@Poodlestargenerica I didn't have to look it up... that Scottie Pippen SEGA CD / Mega CD game was legit terrible lol

Another great behind-the-scenes story. Thanks for this, Damien!

I wouldn't mind seeing a feature rounding up the great junk food mascot games of the 1980s and 1990s, like M.C. Kids, Cool Spot, the Chester Cheetah games, the unreleased but finished California Raisins game, etc.

(I realize raisins aren't exactly junk food, but close enough)

Really interesting article, but I am left confused by Dan Schallock's claim that he recalls Rockstar employees "around that time" having the first iPhones. The game published in 2004; iPhone was first released in 2007. His memory must be fuzzy.

I would be delighted to try an HD remaster of Croc. As a N64 kid, I barely knew it existed in its time, and never got around to playing it in more recent years. That said, I did -not- like Banjo-Kazooie all that much, neither when it was new nor when I gave it another shot on the Nintendo Switch, so my results may vary. lol

It looks lovely and the fake CRT is a nice touch, but for the same price as a new PS5 and three or four PS5 games? Tough sell.

I've been waiting more than a decade now for Konami to finally outsource its beloved IPs to developers interested in making great games and not pachinko machines or crummy live service junk. I'm optimistic Evil Empire is making a new 2D Castlevania game, and it ought to be great!

I understand the desire for preservation, but good grief, are people unaware that Nintendo's lawyers have gone after folks for far less than dumping a 30-year-old ROM?

You can't please anybody, especially when it comes to the gaming community at large.

SEGA Lord X is one of my favorite YouTubers. Every single one of his videos is worth a watch. Thanks for featuring him!

That's definitely priced in "what the heck" impulse-buy territory, so I think I shall give it a go.

I appreciate Ratalaika for their recent efforts to republish semi-obscure and forgotten 16-bit era games on modern platforms. They're doing good work!

Please keep original stories like this coming! It's why Time Extension has become my other daily visit (alongside NintendoLife)

Excellent story here. It's such a shame how the hubris / stupidity of a single executive can take down multiple companies, especially devs-for-hire, as was so frequently the case back in those days.

Terrible day for game history, between this and Did You Know Gaming's YouTube channel being hijacked by crypto scammers who deleted all of their videos

@RetroGames respectfully, how much experience do you have developing or porting games to SNES?

There is very little homebrew software for the SNES (not including ROMhacks) because there is essentially no modern development kit for it. As I understand it - and I am NOT a developer or coder - the console's architecture is not friendly to amateur devs.

Conversely, the Genesis / Mega Drive has a robust homebrew community with literally hundreds of games produced over the last few years. Similar stories for the Dreamcast, NES, Game Boy, and even Jaguar. Games can be much more easily created to support all these platforms.

For the SNES, you literally need to learn how to code in assembly - a tedious and challenging task even for more experienced devs. If you're porting from Mega Drive / Genesis, most of the art assets will need to be modified or rebuilt from scratch, as the Genesis / MD has a completely different resolution from the SNES.

I used to love the boutique publishers for making games available physically. Now I just cringe.

Practices like this have driven me out of the collector's market. I simply cannot justify spending this kind of money on what amounts to ~25MB of 30-year-old ROMs spread out onto way too many carts to maximize profitability.

SEGA made the right call. The Lynx was a powerful and way-ahead-of-its-time piece of hardware, but the ability to quickly and cheaply port Master System games to a handheld made a ton of sense.

Good thing they didn't PANIC over sales expectations!

I have a Tetris Battle Gaiden SFC cart... it's alright, and playable enough without understanding Japanese.

My personal all-time favorite is Tetris DS for the Nintendo DS: packed to the brim with character and Nintendo charm.

These days I mostly play Tetris 99, though I do love me some Tetris Effect from time to time.

This is great! I absolutely adore Steel Empire. I played dozens of hours on the 3DS. I guess I was one of the few who got their money's worth, since I recall from the time it came out that there was much grousing about the original price. I think it was $30 or $40? Anyway, glad I took a chance because it became one of my all-time favorite horizontal scrolling shooters.

I will definitely be pre-ordering the Nintendo Switch version. I'm awfully tempted by the multi-cart collector's edition, though...

You mean to tell me that Don Mattrick, the genius who completely botched the Xbox One launch, then fled Microsoft to drive Zynga into the ground, also nearly ruined the ending of Def Jam: Vendetta?

I will never understand how some people in this industry continue to fail upward.

I got my physical copy of this game last month from Strictly Limited. How strange it's not yet available on the eShop. I haven't played it yet, and now I want to wait - perhaps there's some big performance issue that needs a patch, which seems odd for a decades-old arcade title.

Great article! I wonder who owns the Daikatana IP these days. Seems ripe for re-release, particularly the Game Boy Color version, since it was never released officially in North America.

I live a few miles away from this museum and visit at least once a year. Seems like a good reason to return!