Comments 389

Re: This New Game Boy Camera Tool Will Make Managing Your Photos Significantly Easier

Razieluigi

@marc_max Those links both include information about modded hardware, though. The first is specifically about the "GB Mini Camera" and says "Note on assembly of the board. If you're using a new 3V0 regulator..." so that's not a software update. And the other has actual pictures of replacement PCBs.

I think you're mistaken. I've been searching, and I have yet to find any evidence anywhere that the original Gameboy Camera can be flashed.

Re: This New Game Boy Camera Tool Will Make Managing Your Photos Significantly Easier

Razieluigi

@Sketcz Yeah, I feel like this article is giving me more questions than answers. You'd need special hardware to get the SRAM off a Gameboy Camera.

But I'm especially confused by what this utility is doing with ROMs. No user pictures would be stored on a ROM. It says you can add frames to the ROM, basically a ROMhack, but then how do you get that hacked ROM onto a GB Camera to do anything with it? It's not like you can just run it off an Everdrive.

Maybe some GB Camera enthusiasts in the peanut gallery could explain this better.

As for Analogue, they've been promising GB Camera functionality for years and haven't delivered it, which is sadly about what I expect from them nowadays. Best you can do with a Pocket is take screenshots and recover those from the SD card.

Re: A Forgotten GBA & DS Gem Is Getting A Revival On Consoles & PC Later This Year

Razieluigi

@PZT It's a re-release, not a remaster. A ROM in a wrapper with some QOL features is more than enough for a relatively niche title like this as long as the emulation is solid.

Not everything needs to be "remastered" (whatever that even means half the time — we borrowed the word from other media without paying much attention to what it actually means).

Re: Random: Digital Eclipse's President Reflects On Adapting The Children's Classic Charlotte's Web Into "Pig Of Persia"

Razieluigi

This was the very tail end of an era in which every single movie and TV show got a video game tie-in, regardless of whether or not the IP lent itself to a video game at all.

One of the fun things about retro gaming is that it doesn't just trigger gaming nostalgia. Since they made games of anything and everything, you wind up being reminded of all these other facets of pop culture in the 80s, 90s, and early 00s.

Most of the games themselves were trash, but it's really cool how the complete unsuiability of something like Charlotte's Web as a video game gave the developer so much lattitude to do whatever they wanted with it.

Re: "Saturn Is A Lot More Fun" - 1995 Trade Ad Shows Just How Rattled Sega Was About PlayStation

Razieluigi

I keep meaning to get a Saturn for my collection. I really haven't spent any time with its library and would love to fix that eventually.

But this is a fun flashback to when the gaming industry was always in upheaval. Even all this is against the backdrop of Nintendo jilting Sony at the altar, so both Sega and Nintendo really failed to grasp the scale of Sony's threat.

With the "big three" fairly stable for 20+ years now, it must be odd for younger gamers to think of a time when the console market was in constant flux like this.

Re: Creator Of The Shmup Genre Sees "Bullet Hell" As A "Dead-End"

Razieluigi

I kind of agree that the genre has painted itself into a corner. It's good that there are crazy bullet-hell games for the people who love them, but the best way to ensure that a genre dies out is that it no longer allows new players to engage with it. Where's the next generation of shmup fans supposed to come from?

Re: US RetroTINK Shipments Are Being Temporarily Suspended

Razieluigi

Weird how igniting a global trade war without any kind of plan or coherent reason can cause so many entirely predictable problems.

But at least some billionaires got even richer off the market manipulation. I hope they don't have any trouble getting a RetroTINK if they want one because it would be sad if they ever had to suffer even a moment of the slightest inconvenience.

Re: "The Biggest Art Heist In History" - Castlevania Director Takes Aim At AI

Razieluigi

This is heartbreaking stuff. Human culture is about to get drowned out by the regurgitated hallucinations of a billion computers. And people will happily buy it, feed it, and let it grow larger until there's nothing left.

Deats is right that this needs to be stopped now. It's just hard to imagine what can stop it. We'd need massive regulation implemented immediately. At least here in the United States, there's no prayer of seeing any kind of productive regulatory legislation in the forseeable future. If our shambolic joke of a government weighs in at all, it'll surely be on the side of the AI robots and the wealthy CEOs profitting off them.

Re: Here's Why The TurboGrafx-16 Is So Much Bigger Than The PC Engine

Razieluigi

@profkross I just meant that it didn't have any impact on useability. Whether it had any appreciable impact on sales, I honestly don't know. Personally, I doubt the physical appearance of the thing really mattered all that much, but there's room for reasonable people to disagree.

In the end, I think the TG-16 failed because the NES was still going really strong in 1987 and it just didn't bring enough to the table to penetrate Ninendo's cultural dominance at the time. People didn't start getting tired of the NES until at least a year or so later, at which point Sega was ready and waiting to leap into the fray with a lot more firepower than NEC.

Re: Here's Why The TurboGrafx-16 Is So Much Bigger Than The PC Engine

Razieluigi

The change in form isn't surprising given American tendencies to prefer things big and overstated. At least in this case it didn't matter much since the device ultimately sat on a shelf. But this kind of logic revealed its flaws when it came to designing handheld products like the Lynx and the XBox "Duke" that were almost comically non-ergonomic.

The name change makes perfect sense, though. Despite its lack of success, I think they got the name right. TurboGrafx-16 still sounds kind of cool to me, and I would have found "PC Engine" confusing at the time as well.

Re: AYANEO's "Small, Yet Mighty" Pocket ACE Breaks Cover

Razieluigi

Man, this is just such a crowded space now.

Nice to have all the options, but I feel like this market is going to collapse in on itself in a few more years. I don't even understand how it supports the sheer number of devices coming from Ambernic alone, much less all of its competitors.

Re: Some Fans Have Issues With Gradius Origins, And They Have A Point

Razieluigi

A comprehensive collection certainly would have been more exciting. There's enough here to be interested, but only in a "wait until it's on sale" kind of way.

I guess if your once legendary brand has been reduced to just releasing compliations of former glory, it's dangerous to release everything all at once and have nothing left to sell.

Re: A Long-Lost NES Port Of Populous Has Just Been Discovered After 33 Years

Razieluigi

This is wild.

The NES was such a forward-thinking console. The kinds of games this thing was playing at the end of its run would have been utterly unthinkable based on its initial "black box" launch.

I don't know exactly what mapper chips this cart would have been packing, but in an era of "pro" consoles, it's eye-opening to think back on a time when software was hardware, and that you could literally upgrade your console by just buying a different game.

Re: I Love The Neo Geo, But This Tiny Arcade Cabinet Is A Hard Pass

Razieluigi

Cute, I guess? But that's basically just a generic $10 digital clock/thermometer mounted in a miniature arcade cabinet.

It's the kind of thing you might see on one of those aisle tables in a department store (back when those still existed) around the holidays as a $20 stocking stuffer for desperate shoppers that have no idea what the hell to get their nephew this year.

But trying to crowdfund it at $80 a pop? You've got to be kidding.

Re: Analogue Pocket Now Supports Every Nintendo Switch Online Controller

Razieluigi

@user0 Honestly. While this is a nice update, I don't understand why they continue to ignore obvious and easy-to-implement feature requests like button mapping.

It still doesn't work with the DAC that they sold to people before quietly removing support from the list of planned Dock updates.

Analogue hit their peak with the MegaSG/SuperNT. It was still possible at that point to believe in them. The Dock is a nice piece of kit, but its strengths are mostly due to the high quality of external developer support.

At this point, they seem to be defined more by their complete disdain for their customers than anything else. I doubt I'll ever buy anything from them again. Such a shame.