PowerPandaMods

This interview was such a treat. All of the retro collections we have these days... so much of that is owed to ZSKnight making emulation possible on crappy computers. This brought emulation to the next level, and spawned the fan translation community, keeping systems alive and relevant long after the next console generation had been launched.

Knowing Kojima's flair, he'd have probably pushed for players needing a neural implant in order to play.

I have fond memories of the first one. I didn't know that BAT4 existed until today, but it seems a REALLY odd exclusion, particularly since it is also a PS1 game. Even if it's not a great game, a series that has 4 games shouldn't have only 3 in the collection (Looking at you, Mario 3D All-Stars).

As someone who creates US box art for games that were only released in Japan, I have been hands-on with this design aesthetic, and how strong it is. By the time you get to SNES/GB/GBA, you can slap almost anything on the box and it will look more or less official. But the other touches... what's allowed to break the frame... where the icons for things like Super FX go... it's such a strong design language that it just flows out of you.

Also, that Key Art was so good I thought was official!

As basic as these minigames seem to be, it's cool to get them in English.

it looks like the Captain N version of Mega Man. Also, Rush is a bulldog?

Red Viper on the 3DS feels like the perfect way to play the games, and I can't imagine any other way to play these, including original hardware, even coming close to the experience. My only hope for the Nintendo Switch Online version is that we'll finally get the games that were finished, but never printed.

I always thought the perfect followup to the Super Mario and Zelda Game & Watches would be a pair of Pokemon Minis, one with Red/Gold and one with Blue/Silver. Maybe both of them could have 1 or 2 actual Pokemini Games in place of "Ball".

I love Megaman, and I have an appreciation for oldschool Castlevania, but a game named "Spine Lasher" communicates to me 100% that the designer doesn't have an ounce of tastefulness in their body.

Wasn't the version of Nemesis/Gradius 2 included in Salamander Portable on the PSP the '90 Kai version? Or did it have some differences?

That's quite the collection of titles! I highly doubt we'll get a localized release, but I'm glad that some of these titles will be available for future generations.

Wow, that particular swatch of blue on the menu makes it look like a Wonderswan Color game. This is a great idea for a hack.

i think people don't realize how important these collections are. So many of the older games faces distribution issues, or issues where the price of the physical chips outweighed the perceived value of the game. Things may have come out for a console that nobody owned, or didn't have access to. Or their region may have skipped a game. These collections are a way to respond to all of that, and to offer official ways to play through history.

On that note, Panzer Dragoon Saga (plus its on-rails siblings) would be a great collection to have. The non-tactics entries of the Ogre Battle series are another. I am glad people are passionate about these.

To find this of all places at Pink Gorilla. Kelsey is one of the game store owners most likely to recognize this for what it is.

That last stretch before release is brutal for any mod, and I myself have been tempted to quit. The key is to get a community of people behind you. People don't want to pick up your project, but they ARE willing to find and fix one or two bugs for you.

Virtua Fighter games are fantastic. That would be a great collection.

I played through Azaran: The Demon Bottle, and it is a great bite-sized (or byte-sized) adventure. 3 Zelda-style dungeons, and about a 1-hour playthrough. Thanks for the recommendation.

@PKDuckman I was wondering if that was it. Thanks for confirming!

As a child of the 90s and a retro gaming enthusiast, I can assure you that the most I've ever heard about James Pond has been this news cycle. I don't think he's the classic character people think he is.

This is actually really cool. He nailed the vibe on both games.

Very cool! For a system that gave exactly 1 player a different controller, Wii U was always surprisingly good for couch co-op. This fits the library perfectly.

Yeah, I played this game a ton as a kid. Never got beyond level 3, so I never questioned it.

This is a surprisingly natural new game mode. It's almost like arcade racers, where each checkpoint adds x seconds to your timer.

This is great news. Thanks for your great work, Infidelity.

Both of them are legendary. It's been cool to see the reconciliation between Mistwalker and Square Enix in the past few years.

I actually don't find this line dumb at all. I recognized it as a fake from the beginning, simply because it had Weigraff's face, but it's so in-line with the other themes of the game that it's a convincing fake.

What it means is that if the same penalty is felt strongly by someone who is poor, but isn't even of notice to someone who is rich, then the penalty isn't a deterrent to the rich person. If that's the only punishment, then it won't stop them from doing it.

This is tough news to hear, but I honestly think that if preservation is the goal, losing their non-profit status is probably the best thing that could happen. It can't be on the US and EU to preserve Japan's history, while Japan is actively making that history inaccessible. This is the same set of moral quandaries that museums go through. Are artifacts in the British Museum stolen or preserved? Or both? Or is it really not that simple? Is something truly preserved if it's locked in a vault? I have many thoughts on this, and it's hard to summarize into a comment. Thanks to the GPS for the work that has been done so far, but it may be time to re-evaluate the way that work is being done.

Preservation helps everyone. I'm glad these companies are starting to take things seriously.

The series I'd most like to see as an anime is Mega Man Classic, played straight. The Archie Comics run showed that there is a good story to tell.

Stylistically though, I think Deats would do well with something like Metal Gear Solid or Vagrant Story. I wonder if he could pull off a good Contra?

@avcrypt I was treated the same way. I was told to keep politics out of gaming channels. I would always reply with, "It's not politics anymore; it's literally just the gaming landscape."

Keitai Wiki is making the daily news at this point.

As much as it hurts me to say this, since I once wrote a Lunar 3 fanfic, I do not think it would be wise to go any further with the series. It is so rooted in 90s shonen anime, that to do it right would feel impossibly dated (it would be a flop), and to do it with commercial success would require sacrificing the tone and feel of the originals. It's best to just stay where it is.

Trying to do a followup to a super-popular game is not trying to replace it. if you have fans of puzzle games who have bought into a console, you invest in puzzle games. Tetris and Dr. Mario are different games, and I enjoy both.

I love the work that keitai wiki is doing! Those 2 Gradius titles have been fairly sought-after by preservationists.

The hard part about Karl Jobst is that he uncovers legitimate things, and is able to prove them. However, his style is specifically tuned to drum people up into a firestorm of rage, and he's VERY good at it. Nobody wins with his style, and I can easily see how he would lose a defamation suit, even if what he said was true.

I was honored to be part of the preservation team for this. A couple of notes, to add more depth to the story. The rom was not found by a collector, but by an anonymous preservationist who has dedicated years to searching out old BSX memory packs. This was their 300th dump. The bounty didn't even fully offset the costs they've incurred over the years. In the 2 weeks that we had the file, preparing patches to make it playable, that person sent 17 more dumps. That person is the true hero of the story.

The work being done by the Ketai Wiki community is incredible.

And yet, an extremely successful early Kickstarter was "The Untold History of Japanese Game Developers", which is filled with hundreds of pages detailing non-Nintendo, non-American games. Hydelide and Druaga are both featured prominently, as are Yuji Horii's eroge. Perhaps what this author meant to say is that "Youtubers focus on the American side". That's because Youtube is entertainment. If you step outside of that sphere for a minute, there is a wealth of information.

@HylianFox good suggestions! My ideal would be Super Mario Bros + The Lost Levels, as there are repros of the cartridge conversion of the TLL available.

There were other combos I would do too, but it would break up too many trilogies. Like, Castlevania 1 & 3 would be a great combo, but it feels odd to not include 2.

I love this idea. I was always jealous of the Famicom Disk System users being able to create their own combo by writing to the opposite side of the disk. There are so many good NES duologies that this would fit with.

Chip n' Dale Rescue Rangers 1 & 2 would be a perfect companion to this, but there is also:
Contra & Super C
Star Tropics 1 & 2
TMNT Arcade & Manhattan Project
Among others

I remember when this came out. Video games were struggling to be taken seriously as an art form, and then this showed up. Nobody, and I mean nobody, wanted to touch it.

Those are 1bpp graphics. If I had photographs, I could recreate those in png format. I would probably be willing to too. I did the graphics restoration for BS F-Zero Deluxe, and could do something this simple in my sleep.

@Deuteros A lot of the people who participated in the community challenge got their start with the F-Zero Climax track edtior. My favorite game in the series is GP Legend.

So glad to see this finally getting off the ground. I wonder how VGHF got the legal rights for this. I know they wouldn't launch without answering that question.

I think the answer is even simpler: it cost way too much to develop a Vita game. You were essentially using a console-level budget to make handheld-level profit.

Makes me wonder if they just chose the wrong currency, because 350,000 Yen (about $2200) is still high, but a lot more reasonable.

@retrogamer1 @Twilite9 I tried this years ago. They never responded.

@poyo_pie there have been a lot of good video game Kickstarters. Shovel Knight, Hollow Knight, The Messenger, and Sea of Stars are standouts.

Maybe now the Kickstarter will allow me to change my pledge from 3DS to PC so I can finally get the copy of the game that I payed for? I mean, at this point, I purchased the game on clearance and already played it, but it's the principle.

This would have caused whichever system it released on to become a hit. 32X, Saturn, it wouldn't matter. A game like this could have saved Sega.