JJtheTexan

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!

Thank you for publishing this. Project Phoenix has become a cautionary tale for developers and backers alike, and this really pulls the curtain back.

What a nice surprise! I'll be checking this out for sure.

David Hayter is Snake. No disrespect intended to Mr. Sutherland; he's just one of those voices I will always link to the character.

Imagine replacing Jon St. John with Vin Diesel as Duke Nukem. Yeah, star power is great and all, but it wouldn't really be Duke Nukem anymore.

There are really only two possible correct answers here, and the poll results accurately reflect this.

I gave the Genesis / Mega Drive my vote, strictly based on the strength and variety of its library, but the Dreamcast is a really fantastic piece of hardware.

A shame that the controllers for both are pretty sub-par compared to most of their contemporaries.

If you'd like to try it yourself, the game comes on 735 casette tapes and takes approximately two years to load.

I own several of these and I'm very happy with the lot of them. They look great and they're mostly a lot of fun to break out and play every so often. It's too bad the mini console era is apparently over; I'd love to see more obscure systems lovingly recreated in this manner.

The pricing of the first volume is... not aligned with what I am willing to spend, shall we say. They'll have to do a lot better in terms of pricing and game quality for me to consider it.

Honestly, I feel like pretty much all of the decent to good Taito arcade games are already available... we're not missing much.

I absolutely love this. I really hope the Toaplan collection and this version of Zero Wing come to Nintendo Switch as well. It would nicely complement the Mega Drive version already available there.

It's probably NFTs, isn't it? Yeah, it's gotta be NFTs.

I find the term "JRPG" to be convenient yet somewhat overused, not unlike "metroidvania". Even though it is somewhat loaded and comes with the baggage of history attached to it, when a reviewer or publisher refers to a game as a JRPG, I instantly know what kind of experience I can expect.

Personally I love JRPGs and action / "Western" RPGs alike!

I'm not a lawyer, but it sounds to me like his defense is based partially on his belief that the plaintiff should have known better than to issue the loan to Intellivision and Tallarico?

What a piece of work this guy is.

Thank you Time Extension for giving Mr. Slopes' work the attention it deserves! I'm a longtime fan of the channel and I am looking forward to watching this in its entirety.

I have an Egret Mini II and I am very happy with it. Like others here, I balked at the price of the expansion, as I don't feel like it has any "must-have" titles on it that would even begin to justify the asking price.

You do have me intrigued about Riding Fight, though. I'd never heard of it, either, and now I want to try it! (Not for $60, though.)

It's pretty cool that the Nintendo Switch has become the best way to enjoy Neo Geo and Neo Geo Pocket games today. I have pretty much all of the NGPC games available for Switch, and the emulation is very nice. And, it's portable, too!

I really enjoyed the original game, especially its jaunty music. The color upgrade looks nice!

I have to admit, this is some pretty clever marketing by Zoom Platform. I had not heard of Zoom Platform before reading this post.

This is really astonishing! I would love to see the creator replace the Mario stuff with original characters, so he could offer a commercial release. It looks like a full game could be a fantastic homebrew game on a cartridge!

I'm a little disappointed this hasn't been announced for Nintendo Switch, but I'll still get it on PS5 anyway. I backed the R-Type Final 2 Kickstarter, and I'm glad Final 2 sold well enough to make Final 3 possible!

It's been reported Schwarzenegger asked developers of the video game adaptations of Last Action Hero to refrain from using guns in the game, because he didn't want gun violence being marketed to children.

I love stories like this, where Time Extension pours real journalistic effort into answering seemingly trivial questions. It's always a fascinating and satisfying glimpse into the little things that make our hobby so enjoyable!