I would heartily recommend Super Adventures in Gaming - it's just one guy's blog so it's not a constant spigot of content, but it's real and it's entertaining and he's been doing it since 2011 so there is a lot there to read. His first couple of years are full of short looks with just a couple of screenshots, but before long the articles get really meaty with dozens upon dozens of screenshots, gifs, cross platform comparisons, little bottled histories of the developer or the platform or what the state of the art was at the time of release. I've discovered whole ecosystems of 80s-90s computers and niche/failed consoles which I'd have never been exposed to otherwise.
I don't really understand the DAP thing. Does that just mean that it plays MP3s and has a speaker? i.e. like every other device manufactured in the past 25 years?
Ah, everyone seems to hate everyone in the emulation scene! Personally I'm very pro-emulation, in all its shapes and forms, but sometimes I wonder whether the drama is a result of people pouring their passions into a niche which is all about ignoring or defeating the intentions of the programmers who came before you, at a fundamental level. No honour amongst thieves, and all that. Me I'm just forever grateful that these emulators exist at all.
I was entranced with arcades in the 90s, in Australia, although I didn't have enough money to actually play a lot of games in them. I made sure to become proficient in Street Fighter on Mega Drive and Playstation 1 though. Then in the early 2010s I moved to Hong Kong for a while, and visited Tokyo in 2015. Got to see what that style of arcade is really like. It was a bucket list experience, but honestly it was mostly intimidating and an eye opener to foreign tastes. A lot of horse race gambling games, strategy games, games that you play with decks of physical cards, games which looked like early smartphone autobattlers, etc. There were banks of 2D fighting game cabinets, most of which weren't Street Fighter, but I did plonk down for a few games of SF3 and got my ass completely handed to me by the guy across from me. Perfectly as expected, but it was a bit of a reality check. By that point I was playing stuff like GTA 5 and Final Fantasy 13 at home, arcades were just a nostalgic novelty that I didn't need anymore. Meanwhile the people in the actual arcades were "lifers" who were basically in Evo mode every day (well, them and groups of hip teens) so I settled into the role of the tourist that I was.
@BTS it's a nice thought but something tells me that these 2026 cartridges aren't going to torpedo the market for $20k 90's originals. Nobody is paying those prices to actually play the things; that's been trivial for anyone to do for a long time.
I came at the game from the perspective of someone who had been waiting for Dinosaur Planet for years, and wasn't expecting (or wishing for) anything much from the Star Fox license. I wanted a Rareware take on Zelda, with super fancy next-gen graphics, and that was 100% what I got. I loved it; in my opinion it's in the top 3 on the Gamecube, along with Wind Waker and Mario Sunshine (I waited until the Wii for Twilight Princess, assuming it would be better there).
Doom is too easy nowadays. Getting SM64 to run on everything is the next goal for humanity.
With all this hard-fought success on the GBA, I think the ultimate flex now would be to get it running on a SNES. That would be pure madness.
@Samoteph not wanting to be a jerk about it, but I did notice this: "Travel the expanses of Miracle Land, solve puzzles, play mini games, improve your equipment and meet colorful characters," says the game's download page. It's Miracle Boy in Dragon Land, maybe you can fix the typo.
I admit, I've never really played games on either of these computers. But I don't really understand how this feature is supposed to have been implemented: simplified controls to compensate for the lack of a keyboard So... How does this work then? Have they hacked the games themselves to control differently? Are they using hotkeys to switch the function of the face buttons between different sets of keyboard keys? This is the part which I was the most intrigued by.
That would be amazing, now that we have realtime CGI technology to perfectly represent anthropomorphic animals, thus making puppets obsolete, we use it to perfectly represent the puppets! I would 100% be all for this.
Despite my username, I absolutely love the PS1 era of pre-rendered CGI with blocky polygons over the top. There were so many of them on the PS1 that it was impossible to even be aware of them all, let alone buy them and play them. I'm not really one for card games (aside from Baten Kaitos) but the original Hard Edge here looks pretty sweet. Onto my list it goes!
@bobrocks95 you took the words right out of my mouth. Euro Platformer is a derogatory term and this is a shining example of one. I guess these days people get nostalgic for early 2000s Flash games so something like this going viral isn't too far of a stretch. Oh, for a simpler time when anything not made in Japan looked like total arse and we loved it!
@RenHope it depends what you mean when you say AI. If they're using AI to transcribe meeting notes or add summary paragraphs into specification documents then I don't care at all - some things are literally unavoidable. If they're using AI to tweak 3D models or even vibe code prototype functionality then this is still all internal stuff and how would I even know about it to care? AI becomes problematic when it either (a) results in crappy output or a slop avalanche, or (b) rips people off or encourages crappy corporate behavior (e.g. layoffs). When the GTA Trilogy Definitive Edition AI upscaled its textures into a garbled mess people noticed and complained. Likewise with that Mortal Kombat art book which ruined all of its pixel art with AI. The complaint there is people using AI instead of doing their job properly, as opposed to people using AI to do their job better. If the end result is good, I don't think most people will care at all. Now I admit that there was a debacle a few months ago when the universally praised Clair Obscur got taken to task for some AI placeholder art. But again here nobody would have noticed if it didn't "look like" AI art. And by that I mean, look like the kind of junk which nobody who truly cared about their output would release in their products. And that's because it wasn't supposed to be released in the product. If the AI placeholder had been replaced, or (god help us) if the AI gen was better, nobody would have noticed.
Perhaps this isn't the first time it's ever been done, but I gotta say, putting a wifi chip in the actual cart is a simple genius move. You can surely source them for peanuts, and with one fell swoop you bypass all technical complications around getting an old retro console online.
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.
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.
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.
@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.
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.
Comments 285
Re: It's Tough Out There, So Check Out These Amazing Websites
I would heartily recommend Super Adventures in Gaming - it's just one guy's blog so it's not a constant spigot of content, but it's real and it's entertaining and he's been doing it since 2011 so there is a lot there to read. His first couple of years are full of short looks with just a couple of screenshots, but before long the articles get really meaty with dozens upon dozens of screenshots, gifs, cross platform comparisons, little bottled histories of the developer or the platform or what the state of the art was at the time of release. I've discovered whole ecosystems of 80s-90s computers and niche/failed consoles which I'd have never been exposed to otherwise.
Re: Review: Anbernic RG Rotate - The Most Charming Handheld I've Seen In Years
I don't really understand the DAP thing. Does that just mean that it plays MP3s and has a speaker? i.e. like every other device manufactured in the past 25 years?
Re: A Handheld MiSTer Is Coming, But This Darius-Playing Widescreen Prototype Isn't It
Ha ha, Wide Boy sounds like what an aggressive Scotsman's mates call him at the club.
Re: This PS2 Emulator Unlocks A SoulCalibur II Mode "For The First Time Outside Of Real Arcade Hardware"
Ah, everyone seems to hate everyone in the emulation scene!
Personally I'm very pro-emulation, in all its shapes and forms, but sometimes I wonder whether the drama is a result of people pouring their passions into a niche which is all about ignoring or defeating the intentions of the programmers who came before you, at a fundamental level. No honour amongst thieves, and all that. Me I'm just forever grateful that these emulators exist at all.
Re: These Photos Of Old Japanese Arcades Remind Me Of What We've Lost
I was entranced with arcades in the 90s, in Australia, although I didn't have enough money to actually play a lot of games in them. I made sure to become proficient in Street Fighter on Mega Drive and Playstation 1 though. Then in the early 2010s I moved to Hong Kong for a while, and visited Tokyo in 2015. Got to see what that style of arcade is really like. It was a bucket list experience, but honestly it was mostly intimidating and an eye opener to foreign tastes. A lot of horse race gambling games, strategy games, games that you play with decks of physical cards, games which looked like early smartphone autobattlers, etc. There were banks of 2D fighting game cabinets, most of which weren't Street Fighter, but I did plonk down for a few games of SF3 and got my ass completely handed to me by the guy across from me. Perfectly as expected, but it was a bit of a reality check. By that point I was playing stuff like GTA 5 and Final Fantasy 13 at home, arcades were just a nostalgic novelty that I didn't need anymore. Meanwhile the people in the actual arcades were "lifers" who were basically in Evo mode every day (well, them and groups of hip teens) so I settled into the role of the tourist that I was.
Re: Plaion Answers Ten Of Your Burning Questions About The Neo Geo AES+
@BTS it's a nice thought but something tells me that these 2026 cartridges aren't going to torpedo the market for $20k 90's originals. Nobody is paying those prices to actually play the things; that's been trivial for anyone to do for a long time.
Re: The Making Of: Star Fox Adventures - "Nintendo Was Really Trusting Of Our Ability To Make A Great Game"
I came at the game from the perspective of someone who had been waiting for Dinosaur Planet for years, and wasn't expecting (or wishing for) anything much from the Star Fox license. I wanted a Rareware take on Zelda, with super fancy next-gen graphics, and that was 100% what I got. I loved it; in my opinion it's in the top 3 on the Gamecube, along with Wind Waker and Mario Sunshine (I waited until the Wii for Twilight Princess, assuming it would be better there).
Re: "This Little Handheld Is Extremely Powerful" - Super Mario 64 Gets A Second Fan-Made GBA Port
Doom is too easy nowadays. Getting SM64 to run on everything is the next goal for humanity.
With all this hard-fought success on the GBA, I think the ultimate flex now would be to get it running on a SNES. That would be pure madness.
Re: Miracle Boy Is An Atari ST "Masterpiece" You Can Download Now
@Samoteph not wanting to be a jerk about it, but I did notice this:
"Travel the expanses of Miracle Land, solve puzzles, play mini games, improve your equipment and meet colorful characters," says the game's download page.
It's Miracle Boy in Dragon Land, maybe you can fix the typo.
Re: Almost 30 Years After Its Official Version Was Scrapped, Someone Is Porting Tomb Raider To The N64
Back in the day we didn't need Lara Croft on N64. Until Joanna Dark came along, we had... erm... Natalya? Gruntilda? The Gerudo?
Re: The C64 And ZX Spectrum Are Being Reimagined As Nintendo-Style Clamshell Handhelds
I admit, I've never really played games on either of these computers. But I don't really understand how this feature is supposed to have been implemented:
simplified controls to compensate for the lack of a keyboard
So... How does this work then? Have they hacked the games themselves to control differently? Are they using hotkeys to switch the function of the face buttons between different sets of keyboard keys? This is the part which I was the most intrigued by.
Re: Ever Wondered What Happened To Star Fox's Puppets? The Answer Isn't Good
That would be amazing, now that we have realtime CGI technology to perfectly represent anthropomorphic animals, thus making puppets obsolete, we use it to perfectly represent the puppets! I would 100% be all for this.
Re: "A Lottery" - Be Careful When Ordering Wii USB-C Power Adapters
@sixrings I'm with you, brother! #supersega #molyneux #scamcoins #kickstarter #ea
Re: Sunsoft Is Bringing Back PS1 Cult Classic 'Hard Edge' As A Real-Time Tactical Card Battler
Despite my username, I absolutely love the PS1 era of pre-rendered CGI with blocky polygons over the top. There were so many of them on the PS1 that it was impossible to even be aware of them all, let alone buy them and play them.
I'm not really one for card games (aside from Baten Kaitos) but the original Hard Edge here looks pretty sweet. Onto my list it goes!
Re: "I Almost Can't Express How Joyful It Is" - '90s Euro Platformer 'Moon Child' Goes Viral
@bobrocks95 you took the words right out of my mouth. Euro Platformer is a derogatory term and this is a shining example of one.
I guess these days people get nostalgic for early 2000s Flash games so something like this going viral isn't too far of a stretch. Oh, for a simpler time when anything not made in Japan looked like total arse and we loved it!
Re: AI Is Not "Of A High Enough Quality" For Use In Video Games Right Now, Says Peter Molyneux
@RenHope it depends what you mean when you say AI. If they're using AI to transcribe meeting notes or add summary paragraphs into specification documents then I don't care at all - some things are literally unavoidable. If they're using AI to tweak 3D models or even vibe code prototype functionality then this is still all internal stuff and how would I even know about it to care? AI becomes problematic when it either (a) results in crappy output or a slop avalanche, or (b) rips people off or encourages crappy corporate behavior (e.g. layoffs).
When the GTA Trilogy Definitive Edition AI upscaled its textures into a garbled mess people noticed and complained. Likewise with that Mortal Kombat art book which ruined all of its pixel art with AI. The complaint there is people using AI instead of doing their job properly, as opposed to people using AI to do their job better. If the end result is good, I don't think most people will care at all.
Now I admit that there was a debacle a few months ago when the universally praised Clair Obscur got taken to task for some AI placeholder art. But again here nobody would have noticed if it didn't "look like" AI art. And by that I mean, look like the kind of junk which nobody who truly cared about their output would release in their products. And that's because it wasn't supposed to be released in the product. If the AI placeholder had been replaced, or (god help us) if the AI gen was better, nobody would have noticed.
Re: Neo Geo-"First" Party Game Promises 8-Player Crossplay Across Sega Saturn, Nintendo Switch, & Other Consoles
Perhaps this isn't the first time it's ever been done, but I gotta say, putting a wifi chip in the actual cart is a simple genius move. You can surely source them for peanuts, and with one fell swoop you bypass all technical complications around getting an old retro console online.
Re: "The Wait Is Finally Over" - Japanese Visual Novel 'Kishin Hishou Demonbane' Has Been Translated Into English
Re: Random: The Guy Behind The Disasterous 'SuperSega' Is Back, And He Wants To Sell You A Wooden PC
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.
Re: New Analogue 3D Update Is Great News For People Who Use N64 Flash Carts
@slider1983 someone's fishing for some drama 🤣
Re: N64 Dev Spills The Secrets Of His "Skyrim-Sized" Open World Game
@Bot_Bot_69 that's cool, thanks for the response. I'll definitely have to check it out one day.
Re: N64 Dev Spills The Secrets Of His "Skyrim-Sized" Open World Game
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?
Re: "No Longer Sustainable" - AYANEO Suspends Pre-Orders For Its Steam Deck Killer To Avoid "Harm" To Consumers And Brand
@-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.
Re: "No Longer Sustainable" - AYANEO Suspends Pre-Orders For Its Steam Deck Killer To Avoid "Harm" To Consumers And Brand
@-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.
Re: Doom's John Romero Shares The Secrets of 'Project Redwood', His "Lost" MMO Inspired By Pokémon & WoW
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!
Re: "This Is A Regret In My Life" - Sonic X-treme Designer On The "Fork In The Road" That Killed Saturn's Most Famous Unreleased Game
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.
Re: Hands On: 8BitDo 64 Bluetooth Controller – Now With Extra N64 Energy
@-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.
Re: Hands On: 8BitDo 64 Bluetooth Controller – Now With Extra N64 Energy
@-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.
Re: Hands On: 8BitDo 64 Bluetooth Controller – Now With Extra N64 Energy
@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?!
Re: Hands On: 8BitDo 64 Bluetooth Controller – Now With Extra N64 Energy
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.
Re: "I Could Not Give Less Of A S**t If Anyone Else Plays Them" - Developers Behind 'Pointless' Homebrew Ports Defend Their Work
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.
Re: "Crystal Dynamics Should Issue A Partial Refund For Forcing This On Us" - Tomb Raider Remastered's New Outfits Aren't Going Down Well
Crystal Dynamics should have to pay me for even having to look at these screenshots! Literally gouging out my eyeballs right now!
Re: Anbernic's 'Rotating' Handheld Leaks, Reminds Us Of The Gloriously Crazy Phone Design Boom Of The 2000s
@mjparker77 it's a square screen because the rotating gimmick wouldn't work if it wasn't.
Re: "We Know Trust Is Something You Earn Over Time" - Limited Run Games Reveals "Renewed Fan-First Focus"
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?
Re: "The Sega Saturn Was Truly Ahead Of Its Time" - Here's Why Modern Games Use 'Dithering' Instead Of Transparency
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).
Re: Evercade Range Expands With Two New Carts And A Banjo-Kazooie-Packing Super Pocket
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.
Re: Pure FX Appeal - Unpicking The History Of The PC-FX, One Of Japan's Biggest '90s Console Flops
I really enjoyed reading this article.
Re: Jixa Lady Tiger Nails That C64 Vibe, And It Could Be Coming To GBA, Mega Drive And Modern-Day Systems
@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.
Re: Please, Don't Laugh At The Pocket Super Knob 5000
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.
Re: "Time To Expose Everything" - Fallout From Sega Dev Kit Raid Rumbles On
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...
Re: "Time To Expose Everything" - Fallout From Sega Dev Kit Raid Rumbles On
@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.
Re: "Time To Expose Everything" - Fallout From Sega Dev Kit Raid Rumbles On
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.
Re: Anti-Grav Racer AGX GP Is Giving Us What Sony Won't: A New WipEout
Lucky for me I am blessed with many Xtreme abilities.
Re: Review: Miyoo Mini Flip - Seriously Pocket-Friendly
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.
Re: This N64 Classic From The Developers Of GTA Has Gotten A Native PC Port
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!
Re: Washington Prime Is A New GZDoom Game Inspired By '90s Thrillers Like Heat, Cop Land, And Clear & Present Danger
@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.
Re: Apparently, The PSP Counts As A Failure To Some People Now
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.
Re: Square Enix's Next Final Fantasy IX Project Is A "Deep House" Album, Inspired By The Game's Iconic Soundtrack
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.
Re: The "Hot Coffee" That Never Was - Did Rockstar's Co-Founders Put A Lewd Secret In This PS1 Football Game?
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.
Re: Community Challenge: Can You Beat Battletoads' Most Notorious Level?
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.