RadioHedgeFund

I think it's pretty clear Nokia did the original model on the cheap using off the shelf phone parts and very little reengineering. It's how we ended up with side talking and having to remove the battery cover to change games. The launch lineup was dire and the layout was terrible.

But you know what? The QD hardware revision was excellent! It corrected the design flaws of the original and launched with the 2nd generation hardware exclusives like Ashen, Pocket Kingdom, Glimmerati, System Rush and Pathway to Glory were great titles and all exclusives.

Ashen was especially playable using the Goldeneye controls with strafe mapped to 7 and 5 and using 4 as fire.

You can tell it's been developed by an American company when every single alternate name is an acronym.

In fact why not call it the Action Centre for Reality Operations Now in Your Mind?

I won't deny their work is seminal with Wipeout but I live in Sheffield and I have a few friends who have worked with DR in the past and one who shared a studio with them.

To call the actual guys pretentious would be a bit of an understatement based on what I've heard. One story involved them charging a company a lot of money for a new logo and them spending 5 minutes on the idea.

@samuelvictor That looks great. We certainly had the riches of the console in the EEC, particularly the Asterix platformers.

I’m not N-tertained.

I really don’t think the NES has ages that well compared to the Master System. I can appreciate how groundbreaking it was at the time but, for example I don’t think Zelda is as good as Wonderboy 3, Metroid a patch on Zillion or Mario close to Alex Kidd in Miracle World.

If I was on a desert island and had some sort of solar charger for a GBA SP then Advance Wars skirmish mode is the only game I would need.

The SG1000 could never hold a candle to the NES.

The Master System though was the best 8-bit console.

Given the rereleases of games on both platforms I wonder what we would say is the best place to play classic JRPGs: iOS or PSP?

A good thing about ordering from Cex online is there is probably a store near you to return it to with a generous 14-day grace period for online purchases. They also put a 2 year warranty on all hardware which is more than you’ll get anywhere else.

I’d still call it my favourite console of all time. I was sold as soon as a sales assistant in Game handed me a demo unit to play WipEout Pure on. That screen was an instant jaw dropped but having the best edition of my favourite gaming franchise as a launch title was also a draw (and especially after the debacle of WipEout Fusion on PS2….)

It kind of went on to be a portable Dreamcast, home to some great genre titles and the only good online RPG since PSO (Phantasy Star Portable 2). The creative titles like Locoroco I still play to this day.

My favourite genre for portables is racing and has there ever been a better served console that the PSP for the genre? WipEout, Ridge Racer, Outrun 2006, Need for Speed Underground. I will still never begin to fathom how they managed to squeeze Test Drive Unlimited onto the thing. Like a portable Forza Horizon.

I’ll assume they cancelled it because, well it looks awful.

The timeless child was dumb because the Doctor never needed to be the messiah, just an idiot in a box.

I really hope RTD has the brains to retcon that out of existence as just another lie of the master.

I think it boils down to foreign folklore being wildly more fascinating and mysterious than domestic.

I know the medieval fantasy is more European in theme but it remains heavily romanticised by Arthurian myth. When we think of medieval castles immediately your thoughts drift towards the UK.

Consider how both countries, UK and Japan share a lot of cultural crossovers. Both are mysterious island nations, largely untouched by war. Both have a monarchy linking them to their past. You don’t have to walk far on either of them to find a thousand of years of history wherever you go. And both have cultural exports that are famous worldwide.

And yet here in the UK Japanese culture is the mysterious, foreign one.

Take the original Phantasy Star Online

Update the graphics and animations

Keep the original multiplayer model intact

Charge us a sub to play it.

And play we will.

What a console! Despite probably the worst launch lineup in gaming prior to the Series X launch, the first year of the PS2 was just incredible. MGS2, GTA3, GT3, Red Faction, FFX, Jak and Daxter, Ico, Devil May Cry, SSX; all incredible titles. Shame WipEout Fusion turned out to be one of the worst sequels in history.

Once the Xbox and GameCube hit the market though I kind of lost interest. Both of those consoles were brilliant for post-pub gaming sessions of Halo, Smash and Super Monkey Ball. When I went to Uni I sold my PS2 to my brother and kept my GameCube for travelling between Uni and home.

I’d dare anyone to name one game, released on both systems that looks anything other than marginally better on the PS3.

Whilst the likes of Flower and WipEout HD made the PS3 sing, we could say the same about Forza Horizon or Halo 4 on the 360.

And lest we forget both of these titles ran GTAV ok too.

Probably one of the most influential too. Straying from side-to-side, taking advantage of destructible cover, learning enemy movements: games like Halo and Fortnite may as well still be Space Invaders.

I grabbed this and Wave Race at launch. Both titles were technically a step above anything on competing consoles but man, they were both tough too.

As my friend Robert put it at school in 1997: Croc is a crock of *****.

4 words:

Flaming

Hot

Monster

Munch

I can understand it if people are resorting to piracy instead of paying the creators for their work.

But you cannot give Nintendo any money for 3DS software anymore. There isno eshop and only 2nd hand boxed titles.

So where is the beef?

Sega, you pay Toho as much as you can to make a Skies of Arcadia movie!

When Nintendo leans towards 'lifestyle' software the results are often brilliant. I used to read the Wii News channel every day before work, flicking around the globe and seeing what was going off overseas. Streetpass was the best feature of the 3DS, cleverly encouraging you to carry a portable console in an age of smartphones.

I often wonder why they don't build more of these ideas for smartphones themselves. Miitomo was a great continuation of ideas taken from the Everybody Votes Channel and would have worked well as the Switch's Mii editor. Why not rebuild Streetpass for phones using the Covid bluetooth tagging feature?

If this was at retail for £150 or less I think I'd bite. It looks like it could emulate the GBA without issue but I wonder about the PSP...

Wonderboy 3 was the best platformer of the 8-bit generation.

@RetroGames I'd heartily disagree and go as far as to call it the best ARPG of the 16bit era.

@Tasuki Not so. I only mentioned software, not physical items.

The reason emulation is so popular is because many of those physical retro releases have either degraded or are so overly priced most people cannot get their hands on them. A memory card full of downloads is no substitute for having a physical item on your shelf but it does enable those of us without thousands of pounds in spare cash to actually experience these games.

I fully support retro stores and indeed do try to buy as many titles as I can from them to keep them open.

I still have a track I made using MTV 2 on the PS2 sat in my iTunes library! I still listen to it from time to time and am surprised at how not rubbish it sounds.

Music 2000 had a facility to swap the disc for a music CD to sample from before putting the game back in. This frequently crashed the console but it was an incredible idea.

@Tasuki I disagree. For one thing a person might be too young to have even been able to buy games for an older console. Nobody under 30 had a chance to buy any new Super Nintendo titles at the time.

Secondly software piracy is only theft if the thing you are stealing is losing somebody money. Would I grab a Switch emulator and download titles to avoid paying for them? Nope. Never. Do I regularly play Gamecube titles on my Android phone? Absolutely. Would I pay for them if Nintendo sold them on that platform? Yes.

Mr arguments exactly. It’s not piracy if the original creators are not losing out on any money. If Nintendo released some sort of premium version of Dolphin that required a sub or just worked as a storefront I’d give them a lot of money. As it stands I can’t.

I would argue if there is no legitimate way to reimburse the original creators then it’s not piracy because nobody has lost any money (well, maybe scalpers on eBay)

We need some fundamental changes to software copyright laws that grant consumers rights to use software as they like as and when it becomes delisted.

I disagree about the ‘fresh’ part. I’ll take an Okami or Vanquish any day of the week over another crime simulator or military FPS from the same era.

Based on software alone I would have to say the Switch but it is let down by having the shoddiest controllers ever designed for any console. I still can't figure out why Nintendo have never redesigned them to correct their flaws like they did with every other portable console.

My inner gamer says the GameCube. It had an incredible software library and great hardware. The controller is probably the most comfortable ever devised.

However I think it has to be the Wii. The focus might have changed a bit in the middle of its life but this was a console that had no less than 2 great Zelda, Metroid and Mario titles for it as well as late releases like Last Story and Xenoblade.

The controller was ingenious and I had a lot of fun post-Uni having friends around for 4-player games. The VC was 2nd to none for its retro catalog.

Whenever I play WipEout it always reminds me of a bar in town that when the PSP launched was the only place around that had WiFi. I’d sit in there and grab a beer or 2 and download the DLC packs whilst i waited. How quaint it seems now everywhere has it!

@riceNpea Bar the odd exception (Diablo and Witcher mostly) I find most western RPGs to be highly derivative whereas JRPGs have more imagination.

@Smokeys36shop Between attacks in Secret of Mana you have to wait for your 3-second timer to count back up before you can attack at full power.

You have full manoeuvrability control during this time but the gauge is in effect the ATB bar or the GCD from FFXIV.

Secret of Mana is in fact turn based but lacks the menu battle system found in other games and is closer to XIV or Xenoblade.

Secret of Mana is actually a stealth turn-based title where you have full control whilst you wait for the ATB gauge to refill. You can mash attacks but they do very little damage whilst you wait for the 100% to rack back up.

This was incredibly ahead of its time even in the face of Chrono Trigger. Its ‘cool-down’ between attacks is a direct influence on the system used in Final Fantasy XIV.

The original HORI controller had a secret weapon: it made REmake playable! The tiny d-pad on the original controller was just too small for tank controls and an analog stick confusing to use as such (because the character didn’t move in relation to the stick position)

The HORI pad made it an absolute breeze to play and was wonderful with the Gameboy Player.

RRT4 had a lot of cars to unlock (including some great Namco throwbacks) but it got pretty repetitive.

I would put the PSP original up there if only for the awesome menu music.

Neither. Both Ocarina and Prime, whilst being stone cold classics are their predecessors with an extra axis to navigate; they don’t do much to reinvent themselves.

Step forward Legacy of Kain. Blood Omen is a combat focused 2D RPG with few puzzles set in a Warhammer-lite world.

Soul Reaver is a gothic Zelda for sure but the streaming technology used to mask the loading means the whole game has an open world from one end to the other. The plane-shifting mechanics for puzzle solving are ingenious and the world build around them actually quite original.

There was 'Devil May Cry 4 Refrain for iOS from 6-7 years ago that was pretty good.

It depends on the title but on the most part yes. Tetris is the video game equivalent of Chess and infinitely replayable. Link’s Awakening is probably the most technically accomplished Zelda they’ll ever made.

But are you really going to play Metroid 2, Game n Watch or Gargoyle’s Quest more than once out of curiosity?

Well kept secret: The Master System is a better console than the NES.

@Bunkerneath @GeneJacket

For me it was a pile of bewildering design choices (and a bug that deleted my save 4 times)

It might just me me but the only WipEout game I can play with analog controls is the N64 version. The rest have to be played with the tap-tap adjustments only a d-pad can bring. The pressure-sensitive analog d-pad on the DS2 was a nightmare for Fusion so it got turned off straight away.

Then we have upgradeable ships: Everyone starts with low shield. The AI can use all the weapons to make the game seem more realistic. The weapons unlock as you gradually play the game.

On their own these are not bad design choices but the first weapon you unlock is the Quake. This means every 3rd weapon being fired at you is unavoidable. Couple this with the low shield stats and you're looking at repeated deaths.

Thus the only way to make Fusion playable is to turn off the analog controls and weapons altogether, at which point you may as well load up F-Zero GX.

This is why I love Pure so much. After the debacle of Fusion they made a portable Wip3out with incredible graphics and a massive screen. I brought a PSP just to play it and had no regrets.

Here’s hoping Omega gets a PSVR2 port because it’s incredible on the PS4 in VR. Heck, they could make a new one an exclusive and people would sink good money to play it.

As for Wip3out: easily my favourite in the series. I loved the pared back graphics that extended to the plain grey, ultra minimalist aesthetic for the front end. It was proper high-concept DR.

Whilst I was sad to see Tim Wright go the Sasha-composed OST was just perfect and kick started an obsession with Progressive Trance.

The tracks were the best in the series. The corkscrew of Mega Mall, the huge jumps of P-Mar project and the tight 90 degree jumps of Manor Top are all up there.

And it was the first PS1 game I remember having zero pop up.

It’s such a shame WipEout Fusion was such a pile of garbage.

Copyright law has been broken by software. It is no longer possible for example to give a company like Nintendo any money for GBA titles so using ROMs isn’t stealing because nobody is losing any money.

The law needs to reflect the rapid pace of software and abandoned hardware.

Were there a way to buy these games to give money right back to the original developers rather than some scalping collector or retro store with inflated prices I’d pay for them.

I thought the Xbox 360 controller was near perfect ar the time. You could easily nudge the bumpers with the inside of your finger whilst resting on the triggers without needing to support the controller beforehand. The little quarter lights letting you know which player you were was an inspired design choice. Plus it used AA batteries which is still a useful backup.

@Poodlestargenerica I have played and enjoyed every Zelda title; I just enjoyed those more.

I am curious as to what you think of Crusader of Centy though. I thought it had a highly original story (seeing things from the monsters POV), that the animal system allowed for some creative puzzles and solutions and that the 16-bit graphics were wonderful.

Its not that LttP or Link's Awakening are not brilliant games; I just find the dungeons on LttP to be a bit samey.

I’d love to see an article on where they went afterwards.

I would hold up genre examples of Okami, Story of Thor, Soleil, Soul Reaver and Alundra as being a lot better than their obvious influence.

Forza Horizon. Still the best in the series and probably the greatest car racing title ever made.