N64-ROX

Ha ha, yeah I too "almost" invented the Wii and the Oculus Rift back in high school, until I realised that I was too far ahead of the curve.

And the entertainment industry continues its push to one day never need to come up with new IP ever again.

In my opinion it's absurd to place this emphasis on the position of the 2. That's some "L is real 2401" meta madness for something which comes right near the beginning of the game and which physically blocks your progress.
Surely it's either
a) the heart thing
b) brute force (this is Master Quest we're talking about, and there are only 6 possible solutions anyway)
C
c) something else in the game that we've missed.

This guy is my new hero.

If the developer isn't in the wrong here, they are certainly not very good at working with publishers... Or perhaps at choosing good publishers...

I honestly believe that roguelikes are everywhere not because players love them but because indie developers love them. Randomisation and run-based mechanics means that you can actually play that game yourself, that you spent those years making. Otherwise if you know every bit of the game inside and out there's no joy in ever playing it.

@HoyeBoye for sure. I even keep one of those little SIM-card ejector pin dealies inside my cartridge case because I can't open the thing at all without it (on the OLED model at least). I'll put something like Zelda or Xenoblade in the Switch, and then that's where it stays until I've finished the game or officially moved on from it. Which could be months!

That's a super cool idea. I often buy physical Switch games but then regrettably play them very seldomly because the act of getting up and exchanging cartridges is just so much less convenient than selecting them from the menu.
But with an emulation box, everything is already there on the menu so you're not losing any functionality with these NFC cards, only gaining an additional way to launch your favourites if you're in a fun mood.
Definitely will look into one of these when I finally get a Mister (or equivalent).

@PZT Thanks for the info. Looks like I'll be putting off that purchase for a little longer after all!

@Sketcz I loved Mystical Ninja back in the day. But for me part of its charm was its low profile. Here was the "Japanesest" game on the system, which was also an incredibly solid and funny 3D adventure; and nobody knew about it. Back in the 90s that made me feel like part of something really special. I like to contrast it with Okami on the PS2 - another spectacular game but it received a load of hype, so whenever I was showing that off to my friends it was like "look what games can do now" as opposed to "look at this slice of pure gold which has been under your noses on the N64 the whole time!"

@PZT Do you mean that Taki Udon thing?
What's your feeling there - is that expected to be "like Mister but not quite as good" or "literally exactly as capable as the Mister but for one third of the price"?

@PZT thanks for the reminder! I've been following the news articles on this thing but still haven't taken the plunge. With PS1, Saturn, and of course N64 now the Mister is just too good to ignore anymore. Time to set things right and make a purchase.

Not that there's anything wrong with that. Us Europeans love our Opera, don't you dare besmirch it.

That doesn't answer anything! Why was there any English "localisation" at all if the original game was in English? If they were having trouble translating 1-1 to French or German, why would that mean they change the English version? There's no way this could have been anything less than "tone it down for the Europeans lads", let's be honest here.

This was a very fun article, I'd definitely like to see more like this.

That just looked like a regular soccer game with a reskin? Not sure how it's survival horror at all.
If he's looking for a name he can take a page out of the eShop spammers' playbook and call it Resident Football Kick: Evil Soccer Vampires International Sports Ghoulish Call Of Honor Haunted Hill Silent Simulator.

I'm definitely someone who can appreciate "so bad it's good". I even trawl the Switch eShop for cheap indie/shovelware stuff which might have redeeming qualities - even when they don't, the sheer audaciousness of releasing something so broken or wrong or even illegal gives me a bit of a kick.
But older console games - PSX or SNES era games - those are something else. Back then, to release a game meant physical distribution, relationships with publishers and even Sony / Nintendo themselves, hell even the craft itself of making games was so much harder (no Unity or Unreal etc) that the games industry mostly gatekept itself to a certain level of quality and respectability. To see something so broken make it through a system like that is really intriguing, and when it's amateur-hour stuff like this, really charming. At least in short bursts! But I can see someone developing an obsession with it.

Worms 2 was my introduction to the series. It was so polished and perfect for the time, it felt like one of those games which couldn't possibly have been any better than it was. Eventually I realised that it was so good because it was building on such a strong foundation with worms 1, but man oh man the art style of Worms 1 is hideous if you're coming into it from Worms 2!

Analogue's stuff was always for people who want to pay more for their retrogaming, with its focus on original physical carts as opposed to roms. Add on the fact that you're getting a beautifully engineered consumer product and an "it just works" experience, it really is the Apple Mac of this hobby and I'm not surprised that they charge a premium and find plenty of happy buyers. And I say: good for them. Retrogaming is all about indulgence anyway; if I can get a literal box of boards and chips for $99 to flawlessly play my roms and someone else can pay three times as much to get an object of beauty which gives value to their $20k physical game collection then we're both happy.

Did... did I just watch someone finish the entire game in that trailer, in hyper-speed?

I always knew this day would come. And people called me a hoarder for meticulously backing up every ROM and MP3 that I downloaded!

You gotta be kidding; Nintendo is doing exactly what they're supposed to be doing: concentrating on new games and new hardware, while throwing us a bone with GB games on Switch. If you want a nice new machine to play game boy games there are 10 released each month from companies like Anerbic, Powkiddy, Analogue, et al. If you want a retro celebration of the original DMG then go buy one of those. If you want new game boy games there is a thriving indie scene and rom hacks galore. Not to mention GB-inspired options such as the Playdate. Retro enthusiasts are eating well.

@GravyThief yeah I'm ready for some PHAT SNACC

Surely this isn't a "magazine" in the sense of a reoccurring publication e.g. monthly, right? Even in today's era of content farming there just isn't enough Dreamcast news to keep such a thing going.

@NinChocolate not that I would ever want to use RF anymore now, but here are pictures of the first 2 consoles I ever owned, the Sega Master System and then the Sega Mega Drive. Neither had composite, they were RF only. Later when I got an N64 and PS1 with composite I had to run them through the VCR!

@Pillowpants I remember playing Maniac Mansion in DOTT. Had a blast, but then I couldn't figure out any way to exit out of it. I was too scared to save my game, worried that I'd be stuck in MM forever and lose all my DOTT progress! So I did my best to finish it in one sitting (never going to happen for 15-year-old me) and then restarted my computer at the switch. Finished DOTT and gave that in-game computer a wide berth from then on!

I read that the reason (that LRG gave) for sending out CD-R 3DO games was that they legitimately thought that pressed discs wouldn't work on many models of 3DO, whereas burned discs would work on all of them. And then it turned out that the opposite was the case.
Is it true that LRG said this? Is there any shred of truth to their claim? I don't know anything about 3DO but I'd think that yes or no it's an important thing to clarify in any discussion of the CD-R controversy.

I remember when I had my GBA and flash cart, I used to spend all day trawling the homebrew sites and trying out anything which put anything approaching "3D" in the palm of my hand. I would have eaten this up with a spoon! The amount of shonky wobbly racers and wolfenstein clones that I put up with, just trying to get my fix of that third dimension, I tell ya...

There's definitely a gameplay difference between the MISSes, and it's as follows:

These articles always make it sound like everyone at Rare in the 90s was just having the time of their life.

Ah Crash Bandicoot. Back in day he was the enemy! But later on I did enjoy reading about how the developers pioneered the process of streaming the level assets off the CD as you go, and as a result the CD was spinning non-stop and had Sony freaking out about potential mechanical damage. I wonder if that element would present unique challenges for a Saturn port?

Were people modifying these cartridges with their teeth?!

Wow that Godzilla Dreamcast game might as well be Blast Corps on the N64!
(replays Blast Corps on the N64)
Ok fine, this has 1/4 the resolution, 1/10 the polygons, and you never even get to see the sky!

Looks pretty cool actually. I've been interested in Electrocop ever since reading about it on Super Adventures In Gaming; old school experiments in pseudo-3D are always fascinating.
https://superadventuresingaming.blogspot.com/2012/04/electrocop-lynx.html

The seller is Art Vandelay? Something seems suspicious here...

I guess to be fair, perhaps when he was 9 years old his mother took him down to Heritage Auctions and bought him a $90000 copy sealed in plastic and it's me who is being distasteful.

Yes yes the only way to remember your mother buying you Castlevania is to spend 90,000 on a collector's item which by definition will never ever get played. It's surely the only copy of Castlevania available anywhere; without this you might as well forget she ever existed.
Honestly I don't care too much about these speculators but dressing it up with such an obviously fake story for "scene cred" is just distasteful.

What a great, feel-good story for us N64 heads. Kudos to the Bitmap team for letting you reproduce it from the book. I'm definitely going to need to put that book on my wishlist.

@RetroGames what are you referring to? There's no mode 7 in the 32x game, no transparencies... Nothing at all in fact, except for those 3 sprites. The video at the bottom of the article is a homebrew game.

It's so beautiful!

That does look pretty nice for an N64 title. But also pretty dry - I think I would have abandoned it for something from the San Francisco Rush series pretty quickly.

I'm a fan of this art style, looks similar to Toree and Lunistice. Crisp crunchy textures look more like an up-rezzed PS1 game or a down-rezzed Dreamcast game than an N64 game. I'll keep this on my radar and hope that it comes to the Switch.

The only one of those mentioned games that I've heard of from a commercial re-release perspective is Grandia on Switch, and I thought the consensus was that it was a disaster?

Wow that looks spectacular, especially for a "bootleg" NES game as opposed to a "labour of love indie project" NES game. That extreme parallax depth effect would have broken my brain in the early 90s.

I'm not sure I understand the thesis here. I already play Super Mario 64 every day forever. I thought everyone did?!

@HoyeBoye more like Atari wants the internet to pull a Morshu.

I really hope that anyone rebuilding an N64 game from source code these days is paying attention to Kaze Emanuar on YouTube. That guy bends Mario 64 over his knee and really makes it clear what 25 years of coding techniques (as opposed to technology) can do for performance and quality.

Every time a review comes out, I wonder about the market for these handheld emulation devices. It feels as though, ever since the release of the Switch, about 20 of these have been released each year. From a practical perspective they all do exactly the same thing: emulate retro games up to around the PS1 / N64 / DC level. The only difference is varying levels of tech specs and physical layout.
So what I want to know is: are retro-heads buying and re-buying and re-buying these things? Does the typical consumer own a cupboard full of these things as if they were a professional tech reviewer? I'd think that having just one would be enough, if it did the job properly. And if it didn't do the job properly then surely it would sour people's enthusiasm to throw more money at the next moderately-tweaked spec version. Unless version 2 could all of a sudden solidly run all PS2 and Gamecube games, any upgrade would surely be almost pointless.
Unless of course the draw with these things is in the initial setup and experimentation, with few people actually sinking hours into them long term to actually play them...

I haven't watched the video, but I'd have thought that half of the challenge would be to get the game to crash in the first place. Do you need to come up with a custom solution for that for each individual game? Or is there some well known hardware-level trick which works for everything?

In my opinion you can't ignore popularity in a judgement like this. I grew up in a medium-sized city in Australia and I never saw Outrun 2 at all, but 4x or even 8x Daytona setups were all over the place. Sega Rally Championship was great but at most you'd see two of them side by side and right next to a great big flashy Daytona setup which dominated attention at the arcade. Years past their technical heyday people would still gravitate to Daytona whenever they saw it because that's obviously where the action was happening.
And add to that the fact that it wasn't just flashy marketing but a genuinely super fun and easy game... I'd definitely agree that Daytona USA was the best it ever got in arcades, in the last and most technically advanced period before arcades in general slid into irrelevance.