N64-ROX

Oh man, and I just ran out of popcorn!
You'd think in today's tech climate that "a wooden box" would be a pretty safe thing to pivot to. It's not like the datacentres and the tariffs and the sanctions and the IP lawyers and the social media pearl clutchers are locking down trees which grow out of the freakin ground. A man promises a box, he will deliver a box; no way to get burned on that, right?
But our GOAT here will find a way.

@slider1983 someone's fishing for some drama 🤣

@Bot_Bot_69 that's cool, thanks for the response. I'll definitely have to check it out one day.

This looks insanely good; a real technical achievement.
@Bot_Bot_69 (or anyone else) if you've actually played it, what's the actual game like? The vibe that I got from the video was that it's more or less a tech demo for a game jam, and his real plan is to use the techniques he's learning now for his "real game" which is in the pipeline for later. What do you actually do in this game, and is it a satisfying full experience?

@-wc- I can't argue against your point regarding general enshottification (trying to dance around the language here). I just feel like the memory/storage crunch is a fundamentally poor decision from the perspective of the manufacturers themselves, not just to "us".
Maybe I'm completely wrong about this, but I see economics as a food chain, with us consumers at one end. If chip makers don't want to make their money by selling stuff we can actually buy, they are essentially betting on infinite growth from the AI datacentres, which aren't making money from us either - the only money in AI is a circle of speculative investments. It's probably working out swimmingly for them in the short term, but at some point the whole ecosystem needs to start actually getting money out of us directly. I don't think it's even possible that we as consumers could ever deliver a profit to the AI industry - everyone would need to pay them like 1000% of our salaries, it's just not going to happen. As soon as the angel investments dry up, the the chip makers will need to go back to selling stuff which we can actually buy.

@-wc- As far the Ayaneo situation goes, I'm sure that they are eyeing off the possibility of having to abandon the product entirely if things don't get better soon.
But regarding the overall memory/storage situation, call me an optimist but I simply can't imagine that this could be permanent. This crunch is absolutely crippling the enormous gaming and tech industries, and it's not due to some materials shortage or global pandemic but manufacturers just deciding to prioritise AI datacentres over the general public. Well the general public are the people who pay for stuff at the end of the day. Tech hardware makes money. AI loses money. If we stop buying hardware then sooner or later some manufacturers are going to start to see sense again.

Why does everyone keep trying to make maths fun? In my day, the teacher would smack you over the knuckles with a ruler if you made a mistake in your times tables. And we were grateful!

Fish-Eye Lens: The Game. Honestly it doesn't look much more fun to play than Sonic 3D Blast, in fact possibly less so. You can see about 2 metres in front of the character, the distortion is headache-inducing, movement still looks awkward and clunky. Sonic R looks more like a marquee Sonic Game than this. And I think the gaming press of the day would have said so, no matter how much everyone was wanting a new Sonic. In my opinion they ended up making the right choice.

@-wc- ha ha yeah it's not like I was a particular fan of The Duke but it had its moments. In general though I feel that if we have the technology to make tiny Joy Cons which aren't a complete nightmare to use (it's the sticks and the bluetooth which are the real problem there) then on a full sized modern controller surely it's not ergonomically impossible to add two face buttons for a Mega Drive / Saturn layout.

@-wc- the OG xbox controller had ABXY in the normal position, then black and white up above the B and the Y. This new Retro Fighters Hunter thing has the black and white down underneath the B and the A. With the OG xbox controller you could use the A and X like the N64's A and B, and the other 4 buttons perfectly like the C buttons. With this thing the whole group of 6 has been rotated 90 degrees so you couldn't do anything of the sort.

@Arcadia_Official Man, now I have to amend my request to the universe, after seeing that Retro Fighters Hunter controller. Two sticks and 6 face buttons in the correct orientation, please!

It boggles the mind why companies do stuff like that: create a 3rd party controller whose purpose is to replicate an existing controller, but then shuffle everything around so that it no longer replicates the existing controller! Surely Microsoft doesn't have a patent on laying out 3 buttons underneath 3 buttons?!

I don't understand why nobody ever makes a controller with 6 face buttons and a second analogue stick. One controller that's perfect for all scenarios. The original Xbox did it, it's not like it couldn't be done.

The way I see it, there are many people out there who have great technical talent (and plenty of free time) but not the creative inspiration to make a brand new game from scratch. And certainly not the resources to make a brand new GTA or Zelda - level game from scratch, even though it's big serious games like that which they have a passion for. So, they flex their technical muscles and enjoy themselves by doing things like this. The world isn't losing anything from some hypothetical indie gem which never came to be because Bob Dreamcastliker spent his time making a Dreamcast port instead of building something new. That was never going to happen anyway. It's just people doing what they enjoy doing, and sharing it with the world in case anyone else might be interested.

Crystal Dynamics should have to pay me for even having to look at these screenshots! Literally gouging out my eyeballs right now!

@mjparker77 it's a square screen because the rotating gimmick wouldn't work if it wasn't.

I have no personal beef with LRG but I'm always fascinated by the blanket hatred which bubbles up in every single article about them. I always have to wonder: do they read any of what gets written about them, at all? Are they aware that the entire vocal internet hates them to the core? If they actually do, and that is actually what is driving whatever this is now, surely they can come up with a press release which is something better than corporate platitudes and vague handwavey promises to "keep building" on a relationship with the public which is apparently a dumpster fire of their own making. If they're trying to repair their image, how about frankly admitting to the real problems and clearly articulating why they're not going to happen again?

Yeah it's obviously a joke; modern games have transparencies all over the place. Dithering is for stylistic purposes - really only used for the examples here where it's about working around a camera obstruction, where anything you do is going to break 100% immersion so you might as well make it obvious what you're doing. But for particles and fake lightbloom and colored glass/fabrics and all of that stuff which is supposed to be transparent, it's still transparent - otherwise it would all look cheap and Saturn-like (unless the game has a retro aesthetic to begin with).

Everyone's already said it but there's no way I can walk away from this: Banjo-Kazooie with only 4 face buttons and no analogue stick is a miserable joke. Reminds me of the very early days of N64 emulation on PC when you'd just use whatever you had at hand (usually some kind of Gravis SNES knockoff pad) and be amazed that it ran at all. People will buy these things for Banjo, but nobody's going to be playing it with a smile on their face.

I really enjoyed reading this article.

@GravyThief I never had a C64 but a while back I fell down a YouTube rabbit hole of demos and discovered that the C64 sound chip absolutely thumps. I was honestly shocked, the bass could crush a dancefloor.

Absolute marketing genius. I was trying to think of how the name could be made even funnier but I reckon it's pretty much peak.
Add more words in there like "turbo", "mega", etc? That would just be unwieldy.
Pocket Super Knob 69? That would be showing your hand.
Pocket Super Knob 5000.
Pocket Super Knob 5000.
I love reading it and I love writing it. If this really comes out at around $45 then I might have to finally get off the fence with all these retro handhelds and buy one for the name alone. Only need one analogue stick for N64 after all!
The last question will be whether I should change my name to PSK5000-ROX.

To get back on the original topic, I'd like to think that most people enthusiastic about video game preservation would disagree with Cifaldi's posts here anyway, painting the guy who bought the hardware as a criminal and siding with Sega (who are trying to prevent the videogames from being preserved) and the police (who deploy excessive force over nothing - it could happen to you!)
On the other hand, over on Nintendo Life I am regularly shocked at how much the punters side with Nintendo over regular joes on matters of emulation, preservation, and piracy. So perhaps my concept of "most people" is completely out of whack with reality...

@Sketcz @MontyMole How weird. Time Extension and the VGHF should be two sides of the same coin. Perhaps his love for retro video games is so deep that any article under 10,000 words on the topic is trash and the outlet publishing it is trash? Or more likely it's just a vendetta about the salary thing you mentioned. At least Time Extension seems to be doing OK (from my outsider's perspective) so hopefully the supporters of the VGHF are taking his vitriol with a grain of salt.

Man, I just clicked that link to Frank Cifaldi's Bluesky posts... Did you guys notice that he refers to Time Extension multiple times as a "British Tabloid"?
Now I don't really know what the literal definition of "tabloid" is, outside of actual physical newspapers, but it sure feels like a slur to me, the way he's using it. And this is coming from a guy who does so much good for this hobby of ours. Really sad to see.

Lucky for me I am blessed with many Xtreme abilities.

The smaller the better, in my opinion. The only retro handheld I own is the Funkey S, and its only problem (yet a catastrophic one) is the inability to use headphones. This thing is basically 2x the size of the Funkey in every dimension, and over 5x the weight, but it's still one of the smallest around and takes headphones... Will have to give it serious consideration.

Loved this game on the N64, but it was tricky enough that I never even knew about the 100% completion bug until decades later.
That mention of ray tracing gets my imagination going, though. I wonder what that will look like. I'm pretty sure that this is one of those games which has a fair few sprites posing as 3D objects, not sure how those might turn out. Excited to have a reason to dive back into this!

@Sketcz can you explain how that would be fun though? Maybe for some hardcore military simulator like Arma, but this is (somehow; I barely comprehend it) essentially Doom. Constant paranoia over throwing half your ammo down the drain doesn't sound like a good time to me.

Pretty much the whole point of YouTube video essays is to have a hot take with a spicy headline and get people clicking out of bemusement. Chances are that the creator doesn't even agree with it themselves.

Ah who cares, the game still exists and is timeless. I for one enjoy the PS1 presentation and have no need to replace it with a remake. In a perfect world Square Enix would be spending that effort and money making a new timeless single-player JRPG instead of re-writing history. But the FF7 remake was successful so what do I know!
As for the album being discussed, the idea of a deep house Final Fantasy album is very intriguing.

This is exactly the kind of thing which game magazines at the time would have fantasized about. The kind of thing they were literally putting out there in captions and fortuitously-captured screenshots. It was the 90s, man, it's what everyone wanted but only a select few developers were bold enough to actually publish.

I once saw a guy do the turbo tunnel blindfolded (perhaps on an old AGDQ) and he ended up saying something like: it's actually easier this way since the game gives you so little warning in advance of what's coming up, trying to use your eyes as opposed to just memorizing the timing is a fool's errand.

Does this mean that my junk drawer, with 20 years' worth of abandoned phones and gadgets and cables and whatnot, is going to erupt one day in a massive fireball which takes out my house and everyone I hold dear? Or do they just mean exploding in the sense that it will leak a bit and damage the pristine graded device within? In which case the sturdy plastic shell will probably help to contain the leakage and prevent it from damaging other nearby treasures!

That King card is amazing! LINK M'BOY, LET'S HAVE DINNER

@Xarathion yeah that's fair enough! I don't have anyone that I'm trying to teach values to so I hadn't considered that angle.

I can kind of understand the appeal of plugging cartridges into an emulation box - if you've already got a big collection of these things sitting around, they're pretty much "gaming" distilled into a physical object. But for me, CDs are such a generic commodity; they represent simply "media" or even just "storage". And they're slow, and fragile! The entire point of an emulation box would be to rid myself of the need for them. I certainly wouldn't buy an add-on device for them. Or indeed wait to buy one. Or use it as a reason to buy more CDs.

Not sure how this can be inspired by Sega Rally Championship if the camera is up in the sky away from all the action.

@truth_will_set_u_3 yes it's a clickbait title, both for the video and the article, but Kaze says clearly in the video that it's an excellent machine and the best way to play for 99% of people.
But it's been obvious from the very beginning that the Analogue 3D isn't 100% accurate, since every single reviewer mentioned the problem with flash carts. These work in real N64s but not this, so it's clearly not a 1-1 accurate device.
And Kaze is not a hacker in the "leaker" or "script kiddie" sense - he's a developer who is devoting pretty much his entire life to understanding how to squeeze the absolute best results out of the N64's hardware. Then he puts his game into the Analogue 3D and (once he is able to get it to run at all) most of his meticulous optimization work just disappears since, contrary to marketing claims, the machine is not accurate to the original hardware. Just like with normal software emulation (which again is perfectly fine for most purposes) it is good enough to run the games it's been tested against. The only real problem being reported is overzealous marketing.

Well I for one really enjoyed Virtua Racing, Alex Kidd, Wonder Boy, Outrun, and G-LOC on Sega Ages, which complement the Mega Drive Collection well. They certainly have a lot more arcade greats that they could have blessed us with (and yes quite a few useless releases in my opinion) but we can't have everything in life; on the whole I think the series has been very cool.

Ha ha, Space Invaders! What a waste of time.

@Neotext I'm not sure about the technology behind it (compared to this Wavedash thing) but itch.io also has a lot of games that you can play in the browser and it seems to be a relatively popular way of doing things. Especially for short and sharp games (and especially free indie games) where you're pretty much expecting to surf a sea of content, pick something and just dabble in it for a while and possibly never see it again. I'm a pretty oldschool guy as far as game ownership is concerned but sometimes downloading, unzipping and/or installing dozens of games in an evening that I'm done with in 10 minutes apiece just feels silly.

As for this particular game, I've already bought it and enjoy it but it's clear that it's a "snack" game which literally came from a game jam whose topic was restrictions.

Oh it looks like the LEDs on the drones are changing colour to represent the pixels, as opposed to literally moving around in formation as the tetronimos. Bit of a rip off!

@h3s I'm not a shmup guy, and I was always too tight with my meager allowance to spend much of it in arcades, with the exception of TMNT, The Simpsons, Street Fighter, Daytona, House of the Dead and Time Crisis - none of which will ever be on AA. So Arcade Archives is fascinating to me from a novelty perspective. They have some fantastic SNK fighters but I have nobody to play them with. I've invested in Metal Slug 1 and Into The Hunt, in order to appreciate their glorious pixel art, but after about an hour of giving it my best I've had enough. And that's fine! These are 5-minute-time-killer arcade games after all. But at more than $10 a pop there's only so many times I'm willing to do that. And yet there is so much in the AA catalogue which I would like to try. Make them a $3 impulse purchase and I'd have spent a fortune on them by now.

What I want from Arcade Archives is a proper sale. Or a kickass bundle... or dare I dream of a gigantic collection on physical. I've got about 20 of their games on my Switch wishlist and I just can never pull the trigger. For what they truly are (an hour or so of nostalgic tinkering apiece) they're priced about 4x what they're worth; they rarely ever go on sale and the good ones never go on sale. And that's not even getting into the mid-90s 3D ones which are twice that price again. These arcade games are all designed to be "a good time not a long time" and that just doesn't fly when it's priced the same as for example Portal 1+2, Burnout Paradise, etc. I want to experiment with weird old stuff like Mr Goemon but not for $10.50 AUD.

@shiningpikablu252 I thought the true tower of power also included a Game Genie and a Sonic & Knuckles cartridge.

"This is as bad as it will ever be" - indeed. This is not just a catchphrase of Gen AI advocates, it's a warning from Gen AI opponents such as myself.
The headline of this very article is saying "we have nothing to worry about" because this particular game, now, is trash. The last thing we should be doing is dismissing the threat of Gen AI because it's not yet good enough to truly replace good quality human-made entertainment. A year ago AI couldn't do fingers. Right now all Gen AI seems to look like exactly the same Dreamworks knockoffs as each other. We're not worried about this crap overtaking our great hobby: nobody except for toddlers and the most tasteless cretins will ever be interested in this stuff. It's 2-5 years down the line, when executive XYZ can type in "hey GPT make me a hit indie game with an eye catching art style and it actually does that we're going to see some rral problems.

Now this is a really heartwarming story. Honestly if I ever get cancer and beat it, opening a pizza shop and making a mega drive game sounds like the exact things I'd want to do with my life.

Every time a punk with a yellow mohawk and fishnet pants tries to kick my ass, I always say "don't mess with me, I know karate" and he knows the score.

Definitely an amazing soundtrack and a real highlight in retrospect. But if you consider what Kondo eventually gave us with the Dire Dire Docks theme, it's not too hard to follow Wise's train of thought here.