Jellyscare

The one and only time I ever saw one was on Wakefield market in the late 90s. Always regretted not buying. It looked cool

@alexybubble The importance is that it’s Alien Breed! You might not know it in America but here in Europe it was huge! Alien Breed Special Edition, for example, spent 33 consecutive weeks at #1 in its charts for example.

If you’ve never played them, I highly recommend giving them a go. I am certain you will like them. It’s arcade quality run-n-gun action, Gauntlet-like mazes, survival horror-lite resource management, great 16-bit production values (especially the sound) and it’s even better in two-player co-op.

The collection modernises the games with twin-stick controls, so it will capture the fun of the originals without feeling old fashioned at all.

Kind of hoping they make this for the Neo Geo first and release a cart for the AES+

I considered Damo a peer around this time. We'd crossed paths on both the NTSC-uk and Next-Gen forums, and I loved the Mean Machines archive and, later, VC-Reviews. Was a pleasure to get to collaborate with him later on some gamesTM Retro pieces and a point of pride to count him as a friend all these years later.

Really fun to look back at this issue and think about those early years.

Oh hey, I'm in this issue. I wrote the Last Hope piece. Feels like a lifetime ago! This was a few weeks before I joined gamesTM as a staff writer.

Funny to see on the writers' bio page that I was playing SD Snatcher... I'll be playing that again very soon for something special I'm working on.

Absolutely impossible to tell what this really is from the PR and therefore hard to know how excited to be. If we get a bunch of new games in these series or some retro-remakes... Great!

If this is just a more corporate version of Sega Forever... I think they need to be clearer about that to manage expectation.

@saanaito Oh wow. I know a lot about Shining games but I either don’t know this or forgot. How interesting. Thanks for flagging it!

@Gravyc Shining Wisdom is probably the placement I agonised the most about. It felt kind of wrong to place it below the modern era games but I’ve tried to play it so many times and always bounced off its flaws. Ultimately, when judged as an action RPG, I think Shining Soul 2 beats it.

@Daggot The great thing about this article format is that it tells you which are worth playing and which aren’t.

If you’re keen to check out the series, I recommend starting with Shining Force 2. It’s very good, very accessible and widely available.

@fultonbot It used to be more widely available but Sega delisted a lot of their retro games. You can still find it in various Mega Drive compilation releases across various consoles and it's also on the Mega Drive 2 Mini.

@Damo I would love to see a Sega Ages release of SITD, with some QOL features, including an auto-map. I suggested it to Okunari many years ago on Twitter and received an encouraging response, but alas...

Great post! I'd love to see more personal accounts like this on the site.

English pre-order link is here, in case anyone needs it: https://vixen.shinyuden.com/english

For anyone who wasn't able to get tickets, the venue has now changed to allow more people: https://www.ticketsource.co.uk/whats-on/wakefield/wakefield-library/guest-talk-30-years-of-worms-with-team-17s-ashley-day/e-ergjbv

@Sn0w No plans to livestream it at the moment. There is a chance I will do the talk at other events in the future, so you never know

@Xerox1919 Do you expect outlets who make their living from creative, written works to be pro-generative AI?

I played the iOS version in 2014. It was localised by Jeremy Blaustein, who also penned the English scripts to Snatcher and Metal Gear Solid.

It was a fun story and is now sadly lost to time. Hopefully this collab means there’s a new global release on the way. It’s a very significant game in Japan that barely anyone here has played.

This is about double the upper limit I would be willing to pay, which is a shame. I would love an out-of-the-box Amiga that's powerful enough to run all (late era) classic software at its best.

At that price, I'd want them to throw in at least a disk drive and CD drive too for full compatibility.

Gimme Zoo Keeper please,Taito!

@AllieKitsune Maybe so but they're unique versions of the games (well, 2 and 3 are) and should be preserved for historical importance.

Besides which, the impact of the scrolling has been grossly exaggerated over the years. They're still very playable and fun.

The excellent MSX games aren't there either but I still think this looks like an excellent collection and the addition of Salamander III makes it a must buy.

There's enough missing that they could do a great volume 2.

@MARl0 Their Ninja Turtles game is also on Switch. It's not great though.

I really love the look of this game. Nice to see a review for it

@KitsuneNight I’m told the drink was called “Green dragon” and they were drinking in the food court of the Ridings shopping centre in Wakefield

I wouldn't call it begging. The headline comment was made in a very small Discord community of Nuon collectors - about 150 members - and was more updating them on the situation and encouraging them to help spread the word.

@Zenszulu I suspect these numbers are fairly standard for new releases on obscure platforms, and I doubt very much that Songbird have entered into this aiming to make piles of money.

They're really just fans who are offering a service to the community they're a part of and hoping to at least break even. That's no one's problem, of course, but I appreciate that companies out there do this kind of thing. If they don't, no one else will.

@_NetNomad I think this perfectly illustrates my point that there's no easy way to do it, and the ways that do exist will be too complicated for average users

Given the cost of translation, I suspect it makes more profit this way, but it does seem strange when they release what are essentially text adventures. I'm glad they're accessible on principle, but I probably won't buy this one.

@MysticX Good point! I should have noted that.

It breaks my heart to only pick one but had to go for the Wavebird in the end. It's just so nice to hold, looks great and was a technical revolution at the time.

Shame it splits the vote on GameCube. Otherwise it looks like that would be the clear leader right now.

@MetalGear_Yoshi Variety!

@Jimgamer8 Some great suggestions there! A couple aren’t Verified, so wouldn’t qualify for this list but if we’re also including Playable games I’d add in Jet Set Radio!.

I might have to buy Binary Domain. I never finished it but thought it was pretty neat.

I loved reading this. It's a great story with rare behind-the-scenes insights, and well written too!