2.5D glass just refers to the edges of the screen being slightly beveled so that your fingers don't trip over a sharp edge when swiping. It has absolutely no bearing on the image quality.
And double shot buttons just means the lettering on the buttons is done with injection molded plastic rather than just printed on the surface. You'll see that done a lot in the key caps on nice keyboards. It means the lettering won't eventually wear off with use.
Seeing Sonic for the first time at a friend's house was definitely what convinced me to beg my parents for a Genesis.
It's hard to overrstate how dazzling that opening run through Green Hill Zone was after growing up with an NES. The colors just poured off the screen. Hell, I think the game still looks fantastic all these decades later. At the time? It all felt impossible.
Any clarification offered on when MOTU is actually coming out? The release date came and went. I figured that maybe they were trying to time the release with the movie, but that already came and went, too.
@crimcram How would they beneift from that? It's not like they're protecting some walled garden of software sales.
I think Analogue has taken a pretty major nosedive since the Mega SG and Super NT, and their customer service and communications are generally unacceptable. But this would be pretty weird.
He's right that old games remain unavailable in ways that movies and music aren't, but he's not really offering a viable solution to that problem. Evercade is cool, but the industry can't be tapping into that tremendous vein of lost media with physical cartridges that include a dozen games at a time and which eventually become, themselves, unavailable.
The reality is that most gamers — even older ones — don't really want to play most of those old games. The "lost gamers" he references will be content to play the curated offerings already available in countless retro collections or on services like Nintendo Switch Online.
And the enthusiasts who do want to play a broader selection of forgotten gems already have no shortage of ways to do exactly that via software and hardware emulation. I don't know that there's a single game made before 2000 that I couldn't play right now if I wanted to.
"considering the humble nature of the host system"
Kind of an odd assertion, no? The GBA was anything but humble at the time, and most Gradius games up to that point had been running on less powerful hardware.
@HammerKirby Yeah, by "off the grid" I just meant that they don't expose the kids to a lot of media. They have internet and TV. They just don't use it all that much, and the kids are pretty insulated from pop culture.
I have a friend who got this for their family. They're kind of off-the-grid parents and there are no other video game options in the house. They seem happy wtih it, but even by his own admission, the games feel pretty generic and the motion controls are dodgy.
I think this might fly with kids that are too young to know better, or older kids and adults that just don't have much exposure to better games for comparison. This is not a device for a discerning audience.
Even with those caveats, I still don't understand how or why this thing has had as much success as it has. If it were super cheap, maybe. But for $300 plus a subscription, it's a head-scratching purchase. Had my friend asked beforehand, I'd have told him to just buy a Switch 1. Even outdated as it is, it's going to provide far more value and an infinitely better experience.
@-wc- That would be really cool, and reminds me of playing around with a Gyro-Ball years ago.
Although I imagine it would need a pretty substantial mechanism with a powerful motor to create enough force. And it would also be slow to spin up and stop again, so rapid state changes probably wouldn't be possible. I could totally see it working well for force feedback in a driving game though.
I remember playing Mr. Do! on a friend's 2600 as a kid. Because of the indistinct visuals of that port, I thought it was about a dude mowing his lawn until seeing the actual cabinet in an arcade.
And Master of Monsters looks gorgeous! It'd be right up my alley if it were in my language. What a boneheaded decision to only release the unlocalized version. Oh well.
I love the bit around 2:30 where Estranged swells up and it just cuts to random images of happy people with a fake heatwave effect for no particular reason. They're just content to be living in his mad, mad world.
Actraiser is one of those games that shouldn't work as well as it does. The platforming sections, which are honestly kind of stiff and awkward, feel so graphically and tonally disconnected from the sim portions. It's like you're just going back and forth between two completely unrelated games.
But it's still hard not to love the experimental audacity of it all, and it remains well worth playing all these years later. It's a damn shame that the sequel missed the point so badly, because a more refined iteration could have been something really sublime.
This looks like an impressive piece of hardware for those who want a Neo Geo clone, but I still don't understand how this solution is preferable to using an FPGA.
I'm not talking about the quality of hardware emulation. An ASIC has the potential to be equally accurate. But once that thing is manufactured, it's set in stone. If any issues are discovered later, they can't be addressed.
It kind of seems like showboating to me. "We're so good, we only need one crack at it." Cool, but it just seems like a better plan to use an FPGA that can be updated down the line if problems arise, no?
@N00BiSH The Zero puppets were on display at Nintendo World in NYC for a while. I saw them at one point, but I don't get there very often and I'm not sure if they still have them up.
Potentially cool, but I'd be prepared for disappointment.
When Sega carefully matches its IP to a talented developer, we get excellent titles like the recent Shinobi or Streets of Rage 4.
But more often, they just make vague teaser announcements and never follow up on them. Even the prospect of getting nice M2-quality ports of some of these titles seems unlikely given that they discontinued the most recent iteration of Sega Agess before it ever delivered any of the Saturn and Dreamcast titles that were promised.
@shiningpikablu252 Sort of, but this isn't designed to be played horizontally and vertically. The rotation mechanism is only for revealing the controls that are hidden underneath it when the unit is closed.
@mjparker77 I think that their focus on the word "rotate" is obscuring the point of the mechanism.
It's not like you can rotate it into TATE orientation (which, as you note, would be pointless with a square screen). It's just that the screen rotates into position from closed to open.
Ha. This is fun, and I appreciate the wink and nod from the person behind the project. Even at the time, we knew these games sucked. I'm not sure any of these things were played for more than 5 minutes by anyone who ever received one as a gift.
I do have fond memories of having one that was manufactured incorrectly. The case said it was The Real Ghostbusters, but the game was just some non-descript guy catching pies.
This is just a bad choice resulting from another bad choice.
If sourcing music was going to be a problem without resorting to generative AI, then maybe it wasn't the best decision to make a music-based video game.
This thing felt like magic when it came out. Kind of still does.
Despite the headline, it used very different technology than the SNES, and direct ports were generally inferior to the originals. Which is not to say those versions were awful. The GBA was my first time playing Super Mario World and Yoshi's Island, but there would be little reason to play those versions anymore today.
But direct SNES ports were actually fairly uncommon on the GBA. It had a massive and excellent library of its own — one that remains well worth revisiting all these years later.
My actual NES is mostly retired, although I do keep it connected to an old CRT for the occasional round of Duck Hunt. Otherwise I'm happy to keep using my trusty RetroUSB AVS until (or if) something better comes along.
I don't really need my Castlevania canon to be coherent if the game is good. (Please, please, please be good.)
That said, I've enjoyed the animated series quite a bit and would be fine if this game (and any future ones?) used it for narrative inspiration. If this is taking place in 1499, it would make sense to just have this version of Sonia be one of Trevor and Sypha's children. That gives them an easy way to combine the gameplay elements of both characters into one, and set this up as a direct sequel to Castlevania III.
It would be hard to argue with most of these, except that FIFA seems like a baffling inclusion to me. I get that it's popular, but is it really that innovative or deserving?
Personally, I'd pick Mega Man, Galaga, and Dragon Quest. All of them are tremendously influential. But as MSaturn pointed out above, there is no way to pluck 3 games from this list in a way that isn't grossly unfair to multiple other entries.
@The_Nintendo_Expat Yeah, "port" was more common back when every arcade cabinet and console had unique architecture and every single game was made from the ground up for each machine.
Once middleware engines became the norm, I feel like we started hearing the term less and less often.
@Porco He's just being pedantic about what a remaster is. Based on its original use for recorded media like movies and music, unless you have access to the original source material, it's not really possible to "remaster" something. Adding brand new textures to a game would be like adding brand new instrument tracks to a song.
But video games aren't the same as movies and music, so it's understandable that the word is going to shift in meaning as it gets applied to a medium it was never intended for. While I'd love to see some more consistency in the use of words like remaster and remake, the constant pedantic hand-wringing over it is tiresome.
They should show confidence in their concept by just swapping out all the joysticks and buttons for dedicated system-level controls.
The face buttons can be replaced with sliders for screen brightness and saturation. The triggers turn the Wi-Fi on and off. A volume knob would fit perfectly where the left stick goes. And the d-pad can be replaced with buttons for taking and posting screenshots, so you can show the world how you've precisely dialed in all of your settings.
@Sketcz Ha. Yeah, I remember the banter being kind of bizarre, but took it to be the game's weird sense of humor and not evidence of a bad translation.
I think my favorite thing about the game is the risk/reward mechanic where your retaliatory strikes launch more missiles in proportion to the incoming danger. It always felt good to wait until enemy fire was right up your ass to press the trigger and have 100 missiles burst across the screen.
Loved this on Dreamcast and didn't realize there was disappointment about the translation, although I also don't remember the story being its selling point.
One problem with the DC version is that it doesn't support VGA so it won't work with the most common HDMI solutions.
Very cool and fan translations are such a great thing to have, but the need for soldering means that they're really straining the definition of "reversible" here.
It's not to knock the project at all. It's an interesting solution. But I'd much rather invest in an Everdrive, load translated ROMs onto that, and avoid soldering anything to the PCBs of my precious OG carts.
@romanista Agreed. I doubt it's complex for them. I think they've just made the decision that they don't want to do it.
Of course, if the company would ever communicate with anybody about anything, perhaps we'd know instead of speculating.
I wouldn't blame anyone for getting the A3D. Like most of their hardware, it's nicely made and well-reviewed. I'm not enough of an N64 fan myself, but that's just me. Agreed, though, that the complaints about 4K are completely missing the point of the thing. There are lots of things worth complaining about when it comes to Analogue. That is definitely not one of them.
I was one of the weirdos that really liked the 3D effect and kept that slider cranked up.
But with or without it, the 3DS was a gem. Mine is still going strong and will hopefully last the rest of my life, but it's nice to know there will be options to continue playing these games even if the hardware fails.
@Gryffin Not the Dock, although you'd need one to use the DAC. Analogue released a digital-to-analog converter that would have allowed you to connect the Pocket Dock directly to a CRT display. It works with some of their older consoles and support was promised for the Pocket. It was a natural assumption that this would be compatible with their future consoles as well.
But support for the Pocket was quietly scuttled, and then the Duo and 3D were released without the slightest mention of support.
So they baited their own customers into buying an $80 peripheral before making it functionally useless for the vast majority of them.
@Gryffin The big one is DAC support, which is especially egregious since Analogue sold people an expensive peripheral that is now useless if it was purchased with the expectation of this promise being fulfilled.
Gameboy Camera support — being able to save images directly to the SD card — was also promised in their roadmap years ago and never delivered (you can work around this with screenshots, but still not what they promised).
Once upon a time, they also promised Super Game Boy support and never delivered. External developers eventually stepped in with a separate FPGA core, but this doesn't work with actual cartridges.
The Pocket is still a great device at a hardware level, and the extra FPGA has allowed external developers to really make it shine. But first-party support has been a disgrace.
I love my Super NT and Mega SG. But as far as I'm concerned, those were made and sold by a completely different company than the one that exists today. Nowadays, Analogue seems to actively dislike it's own customers.
@JackGYarwood I honestly had no idea that movie had ever been in the works!
In general I'd rather seen new games than other media, but it's a shame that all these great characters have been put to pasture. Sega was a force to be reckoned with back in the day.
What a cool find! And a fun reminder of one of gaming's most joyous eras. Sega harnessed its own terminal delirium to power a wild creative engine, churning out a remarkably diverse and colorful parade of games at incredible speed.
Many of those gems were flawed, including Space Channel 5, but they were fun and energy was undeniable.
Like so much of Sega's languishing IP, Ulala and her Swingin' Report Show are long past due for a revival.
Hey, look at that. Maybe in a few more decades, they can fnish their own history and finally update the Pocket to include the features they promised 5 years ago and haven't yet delivered.
Or they can just spend all their time perfecting different colors of translucent plastic. That's just as good.
@Sketcz Especially as a mega-fan of FF VI, the hype was intense.
Still had a great experience despite the fumbles, and I've played it multiple times since. It's one of those games where I like the characters and world a little more than the game itself (I've never loved the Materia system, honestly), but it's a classic for a reason.
I'll always have a soft spot for VR on the Genesis. It's remarkable that it's as good as it is, and it's a cool bit of history being the only game to use the SVP chip.
That said, nowadays the Switch port is where its at. I love how well these simple, untextured polygonal graphics lend themselves to upscaling.
Not directly related to the current Steam version, but this brings back memories of trying to play this game when it was finally released on PC back in '98. I didn't have a PlayStation, so I was crazy excited about finally getting to play this.
Everything went fine until the Chocobo race, which would just crash my computer every single time. And there's one mandatory race, so this was game-breaking.
In those days, PC gaming generally meant spending 80% of your time troubleshooting and 20% of your time actually playing games, so I was used to this kind of nonsense. But I tried everything and just could not get it to work. Whatever conflict my hardware was creating was insurmountable.
In frustration, I finally took all the discs to one of the computer labs at school and quietly installed the game, hoping nobody would notice.
It ran, but these machines had no real graphics acceleration so it must have been at like 5 frames per second. Still, that was enough to let me muddle my way through the race and generate a new save file on the other side of it. I quickly made a copy of the file, uninstalled the game, and hightailed it out of there.
At the time, it felt like I was committing some kind of nefarious espionage. In retrospect, I don't remember why I didn't just use one of my housemates' computers to do the exact same thing. But the mission was a success, and I was finally able to move on with the game and finish it.
I loved the PSP. It's hard to overstate how much it felt like the future when it released, and it had a solid library to back it up. Obviously it sold well enough to warrant a follow up.
The Vita was a nice piece of kit at a hardware level, but just kind of flopped otherwise. The "bubble" UI looked cheap and amateurish compared to the PSP's elegant cross bar, and the software support just wasn't cultivated properly. Sony really let it whither on the vine, and unfortunately learned nothing from the experience, treating both of its VR headsets largely the same way.
The Vita is one of the only pieces of gaming hardware I own that I actually regret buying. But its failure shouldn't be pretense to rewrite the PSP's legacy.
I mean, he's wrong. But on the long list of this guy's dreadful opinions, this barely registers. I love that these right-wingers will spend their days freaking out about immigrants taking their jobs — something that literally doesn't happen — but will hold the door open for software algorithms to do exactly that.
Retronauts just posted an Earthworm Jim episode the other day so I've had the franchise on my mind. Loved those first two games on my Genesis back in the day and still love to break out those carts now and then. They were wild and creative. Something generative AI can't ever be.
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Re: Anbernic's Next Handheld Does A Great Impression Of Nintendo's Switch Lite
@RupeeClock They're not very exciting.
2.5D glass just refers to the edges of the screen being slightly beveled so that your fingers don't trip over a sharp edge when swiping. It has absolutely no bearing on the image quality.
And double shot buttons just means the lettering on the buttons is done with injection molded plastic rather than just printed on the surface. You'll see that done a lot in the key caps on nice keyboards. It means the lettering won't eventually wear off with use.
Re: Game Changer: Sonic The Hedgehog - 35 Years Ago, A Short-But-Sweet Love Affair Was Born
Seeing Sonic for the first time at a friend's house was definitely what convinced me to beg my parents for a Genesis.
It's hard to overrstate how dazzling that opening run through Green Hill Zone was after growing up with an NES. The colors just poured off the screen. Hell, I think the game still looks fantastic all these decades later. At the time? It all felt impossible.
Re: Interview: "It's Been Quite A Ride" - Xeno Crisis, Terminator And He-Man Studio Bitmap Bureau On 10 Years At The Apex Of 2D Indie Gaming
Any clarification offered on when MOTU is actually coming out? The release date came and went. I figured that maybe they were trying to time the release with the movie, but that already came and went, too.
Re: Latest Hardware Run Of The Analogue Pocket Isn't Playing Nice With Everdrive Carts
@crimcram How would they beneift from that? It's not like they're protecting some walled garden of software sales.
I think Analogue has taken a pretty major nosedive since the Mega SG and Super NT, and their customer service and communications are generally unacceptable. But this would be pretty weird.
Re: "The Single Largest Upgrade The Game Has Ever Had" - Sega's Ghostbusters Is Getting A Massive Overhaul
He's really done an incredible job with this project. Can't wait to give 3.0 a spin!
Re: "I Think They Are Missing A Trick" - Evercade Boss Says The Games Industry Is Failing Older Players
He's right that old games remain unavailable in ways that movies and music aren't, but he's not really offering a viable solution to that problem. Evercade is cool, but the industry can't be tapping into that tremendous vein of lost media with physical cartridges that include a dozen games at a time and which eventually become, themselves, unavailable.
The reality is that most gamers — even older ones — don't really want to play most of those old games. The "lost gamers" he references will be content to play the curated offerings already available in countless retro collections or on services like Nintendo Switch Online.
And the enthusiasts who do want to play a broader selection of forgotten gems already have no shortage of ways to do exactly that via software and hardware emulation. I don't know that there's a single game made before 2000 that I couldn't play right now if I wanted to.
Re: The Making Of: Sega's Cyber Razor Cut - "I Spent The Entire Shoot Expecting It To Explode"
Sometimes I forget how crazy the 90s were.
This kind of seizure-inducing editing just seemed totally normal at the time.
Re: "The GBA Is So Back" - Gradius Advance Gets A Comprehensive Fan-Made Upgrade
"considering the humble nature of the host system"
Kind of an odd assertion, no? The GBA was anything but humble at the time, and most Gradius games up to that point had been running on less powerful hardware.
Re: The Team Behind This Motion-Sensing Box Think It Can Match The Sales Of The Nintendo Wii
@HammerKirby Yeah, by "off the grid" I just meant that they don't expose the kids to a lot of media. They have internet and TV. They just don't use it all that much, and the kids are pretty insulated from pop culture.
Re: The Team Behind This Motion-Sensing Box Think It Can Match The Sales Of The Nintendo Wii
I have a friend who got this for their family. They're kind of off-the-grid parents and there are no other video game options in the house. They seem happy wtih it, but even by his own admission, the games feel pretty generic and the motion controls are dodgy.
I think this might fly with kids that are too young to know better, or older kids and adults that just don't have much exposure to better games for comparison. This is not a device for a discerning audience.
Even with those caveats, I still don't understand how or why this thing has had as much success as it has. If it were super cheap, maybe. But for $300 plus a subscription, it's a head-scratching purchase. Had my friend asked beforehand, I'd have told him to just buy a Switch 1. Even outdated as it is, it's going to provide far more value and an infinitely better experience.
Re: "The Word 'Madness' Defines Me" - This Fan-Made Controller Lets You Feel Sonic's Spin Dash
@-wc- I'd contribute to the Kickstarter!
Re: "The Word 'Madness' Defines Me" - This Fan-Made Controller Lets You Feel Sonic's Spin Dash
@-wc- That would be really cool, and reminds me of playing around with a Gyro-Ball years ago.
Although I imagine it would need a pretty substantial mechanism with a powerful motor to create enough force. And it would also be slow to spin up and stop again, so rapid state changes probably wouldn't be possible. I could totally see it working well for force feedback in a driving game though.
Re: "The Word 'Madness' Defines Me" - This Fan-Made Controller Lets You Feel Sonic's Spin Dash
Cute project!
I do, however, question the decision to have a thumbstick instead of a d-pad on a controller specifically intended to play Sonic the Hedgehog 2.
Re: This Week's 'Archives' Releases Are Universal's 1982 Dig Dug Clone 'Mr. Do!' & A PS1 Strategy Game From 1997
I remember playing Mr. Do! on a friend's 2600 as a kid. Because of the indistinct visuals of that port, I thought it was about a dude mowing his lawn until seeing the actual cabinet in an arcade.
And Master of Monsters looks gorgeous! It'd be right up my alley if it were in my language. What a boneheaded decision to only release the unlocalized version. Oh well.
Re: "An Unparalleled Experience No FPGA Console Could Come Close To" - SuperSega Is Back, And It's Even Crazier Than Last Time
That video is amazing, though.
I love the bit around 2:30 where Estranged swells up and it just cuts to random images of happy people with a fake heatwave effect for no particular reason. They're just content to be living in his mad, mad world.
Re: "You Cannot Claim Ignorance" - Myst Co-Creator Under Fire For Using GenAI Art In Riven Soundtrack Release
Glad to see the "theft is just a creative tool" crowd chiming in, as usual.
Re: Game Changer: ActRaiser - The SNES Classic That Signalled The Dawn Of A New Generation
Actraiser is one of those games that shouldn't work as well as it does. The platforming sections, which are honestly kind of stiff and awkward, feel so graphically and tonally disconnected from the sim portions. It's like you're just going back and forth between two completely unrelated games.
But it's still hard not to love the experimental audacity of it all, and it remains well worth playing all these years later. It's a damn shame that the sequel missed the point so badly, because a more refined iteration could have been something really sublime.
Re: Sounds Like Plaion Has Another Console In The Works Following The Neo Geo AES+
This looks like an impressive piece of hardware for those who want a Neo Geo clone, but I still don't understand how this solution is preferable to using an FPGA.
I'm not talking about the quality of hardware emulation. An ASIC has the potential to be equally accurate. But once that thing is manufactured, it's set in stone. If any issues are discovered later, they can't be addressed.
It kind of seems like showboating to me. "We're so good, we only need one crack at it." Cool, but it just seems like a better plan to use an FPGA that can be updated down the line if problems arise, no?
Re: Ever Wondered What Happened To Star Fox's Puppets? The Answer Isn't Good
@N00BiSH The Zero puppets were on display at Nintendo World in NYC for a while. I saw them at one point, but I don't get there very often and I'm not sure if they still have them up.
Re: "No Old, Stay Gold" - It Looks Like Sega Is About To Revive More Of Its Classic Franchises
Potentially cool, but I'd be prepared for disappointment.
When Sega carefully matches its IP to a talented developer, we get excellent titles like the recent Shinobi or Streets of Rage 4.
But more often, they just make vague teaser announcements and never follow up on them. Even the prospect of getting nice M2-quality ports of some of these titles seems unlikely given that they discontinued the most recent iteration of Sega Agess before it ever delivered any of the Saturn and Dreamcast titles that were promised.
Re: Anbernic's 'RG Rotate' Reminds Us Of The Gloriously Crazy Phone Design Boom Of The 2000s
@shiningpikablu252 Sort of, but this isn't designed to be played horizontally and vertically. The rotation mechanism is only for revealing the controls that are hidden underneath it when the unit is closed.
Re: Anbernic's 'RG Rotate' Reminds Us Of The Gloriously Crazy Phone Design Boom Of The 2000s
@mjparker77 I think that their focus on the word "rotate" is obscuring the point of the mechanism.
It's not like you can rotate it into TATE orientation (which, as you note, would be pointless with a square screen). It's just that the screen rotates into position from closed to open.
It only has one playable position.
Re: Obscure Mega Man Game Given The Game Boy Remake "Nobody Asked For"
Ha. This is fun, and I appreciate the wink and nod from the person behind the project. Even at the time, we knew these games sucked. I'm not sure any of these things were played for more than 5 minutes by anyone who ever received one as a gift.
I do have fond memories of having one that was manufactured incorrectly. The case said it was The Real Ghostbusters, but the game was just some non-descript guy catching pies.
Re: This Modular Marvel Can Be A Controller, Horizontal Handheld And Tabletop 'TATE' Device
Boy, that's pretty niche for a device this size.
I just want a Switch 2 update for the Flip Grip.
Re: "I Know Some People Don't Like This" - Final Fight MD's Latest Project Uses GenAI
This is just a bad choice resulting from another bad choice.
If sourcing music was going to be a problem without resorting to generative AI, then maybe it wasn't the best decision to make a music-based video game.
Re: This Game Boy Cart Uses ChatGPT To Create "Personalised Scenarios Tailored To Each Player"
Step 1: Create one solitary creepy pixel art image.
Step 2: Offload everything else including the writing to Chat GPT and pretend you made a game.
Step 3: Collect money from the never-ending supply of suckers on Kickstarter.
Even the one creepy pixel art image was probably created by generative AI. This whole thing is yet another crowdfunding scam.
So no, I do not like/.
Re: Anniversary: 25 Years Ago, Nintendo Put SNES Games In The Palm Of Your Hand With The GBA
This thing felt like magic when it came out. Kind of still does.
Despite the headline, it used very different technology than the SNES, and direct ports were generally inferior to the originals. Which is not to say those versions were awful. The GBA was my first time playing Super Mario World and Yoshi's Island, but there would be little reason to play those versions anymore today.
But direct SNES ports were actually fairly uncommon on the GBA. It had a massive and excellent library of its own — one that remains well worth revisiting all these years later.
Re: "Is This My NES' Final Form?" - Retro Gamer Shows Off The Most Pimped-Out Nintendo Entertainment System You've Ever Seen
That's a gorgeous final result!
My actual NES is mostly retired, although I do keep it connected to an old CRT for the occasional round of Duck Hunt. Otherwise I'm happy to keep using my trusty RetroUSB AVS until (or if) something better comes along.
Re: "What A Terrible Waste Of Time All Of It Was" - Princess Crown's Original Translation Is Dead
It's only a waste of time because they insisted it become one.
They should have just thanked eadmaster for carrying on their work and requested being credited in the final project.
How incredibly stupid.
Re: Sony Confirms Exactly Who You'll Be Controlling In Castlevania: Belmont's Curse
I don't really need my Castlevania canon to be coherent if the game is good. (Please, please, please be good.)
That said, I've enjoyed the animated series quite a bit and would be fine if this game (and any future ones?) used it for narrative inspiration. If this is taking place in 1499, it would make sense to just have this version of Sonia be one of Trevor and Sypha's children. That gives them an easy way to combine the gameplay elements of both characters into one, and set this up as a direct sequel to Castlevania III.
Re: Tokimeki Memorial, FIFA And Dragon Quest Could Make It Into The World Video Game Hall Of Fame
It would be hard to argue with most of these, except that FIFA seems like a baffling inclusion to me. I get that it's popular, but is it really that innovative or deserving?
Personally, I'd pick Mega Man, Galaga, and Dragon Quest. All of them are tremendously influential. But as MSaturn pointed out above, there is no way to pluck 3 games from this list in a way that isn't grossly unfair to multiple other entries.
Except FIFA
Re: "I Call It 'Remaster' To Poke Fun At The PS3 Version" - ICO Gets An Unofficial Upgrade On PS2
@The_Nintendo_Expat Yeah, "port" was more common back when every arcade cabinet and console had unique architecture and every single game was made from the ground up for each machine.
Once middleware engines became the norm, I feel like we started hearing the term less and less often.
Re: "I Call It 'Remaster' To Poke Fun At The PS3 Version" - ICO Gets An Unofficial Upgrade On PS2
@Porco He's just being pedantic about what a remaster is. Based on its original use for recorded media like movies and music, unless you have access to the original source material, it's not really possible to "remaster" something. Adding brand new textures to a game would be like adding brand new instrument tracks to a song.
But video games aren't the same as movies and music, so it's understandable that the word is going to shift in meaning as it gets applied to a medium it was never intended for. While I'd love to see some more consistency in the use of words like remaster and remake, the constant pedantic hand-wringing over it is tiresome.
Re: Please, Don't Laugh At The Pocket Super Knob 5000
They should show confidence in their concept by just swapping out all the joysticks and buttons for dedicated system-level controls.
The face buttons can be replaced with sliders for screen brightness and saturation. The triggers turn the Wi-Fi on and off. A volume knob would fit perfectly where the left stick goes. And the d-pad can be replaced with buttons for taking and posting screenshots, so you can show the world how you've precisely dialed in all of your settings.
Re: "A Woefully Underrated N64 Underdog" - Treasure's Bangai-O Gets Not One But Two New English Translations
@Sketcz Ha. Yeah, I remember the banter being kind of bizarre, but took it to be the game's weird sense of humor and not evidence of a bad translation.
I think my favorite thing about the game is the risk/reward mechanic where your retaliatory strikes launch more missiles in proportion to the incoming danger. It always felt good to wait until enemy fire was right up your ass to press the trigger and have 100 missiles burst across the screen.
Re: "A Woefully Underrated N64 Underdog" - Treasure's Bangai-O Gets Not One But Two New English Translations
Loved this on Dreamcast and didn't realize there was disappointment about the translation, although I also don't remember the story being its selling point.
One problem with the DC version is that it doesn't support VGA so it won't work with the most common HDMI solutions.
Re: Not Feeling Castlevania: Belmont's Curse's Art Style? Then Check Out Silent Planet
I'm as much a fan of good ol' pixel art as much as anyone, but I can't imagine watching that trailer and not thinking the game looks gorgeous.
Re: This Is The Best Way To Play Fan Translations On Original Hardware We've Seen So Far
Very cool and fan translations are such a great thing to have, but the need for soldering means that they're really straining the definition of "reversible" here.
It's not to knock the project at all. It's an interesting solution. But I'd much rather invest in an Everdrive, load translated ROMs onto that, and avoid soldering anything to the PCBs of my precious OG carts.
Re: "We're Finishing History, Decades Later" - Analogue 3D's Latest Limited Editions Are Based On Unreleased N64 Prototypes
@romanista Agreed. I doubt it's complex for them. I think they've just made the decision that they don't want to do it.
Of course, if the company would ever communicate with anybody about anything, perhaps we'd know instead of speculating.
I wouldn't blame anyone for getting the A3D. Like most of their hardware, it's nicely made and well-reviewed. I'm not enough of an N64 fan myself, but that's just me. Agreed, though, that the complaints about 4K are completely missing the point of the thing. There are lots of things worth complaining about when it comes to Analogue. That is definitely not one of them.
Re: 3DS Emulation Just Keeps On Getting Better
I was one of the weirdos that really liked the 3D effect and kept that slider cranked up.
But with or without it, the 3DS was a gem. Mine is still going strong and will hopefully last the rest of my life, but it's nice to know there will be options to continue playing these games even if the hardware fails.
Re: "We're Finishing History, Decades Later" - Analogue 3D's Latest Limited Editions Are Based On Unreleased N64 Prototypes
@Gryffin Not the Dock, although you'd need one to use the DAC. Analogue released a digital-to-analog converter that would have allowed you to connect the Pocket Dock directly to a CRT display. It works with some of their older consoles and support was promised for the Pocket. It was a natural assumption that this would be compatible with their future consoles as well.
But support for the Pocket was quietly scuttled, and then the Duo and 3D were released without the slightest mention of support.
So they baited their own customers into buying an $80 peripheral before making it functionally useless for the vast majority of them.
Re: "We're Finishing History, Decades Later" - Analogue 3D's Latest Limited Editions Are Based On Unreleased N64 Prototypes
@Gryffin The big one is DAC support, which is especially egregious since Analogue sold people an expensive peripheral that is now useless if it was purchased with the expectation of this promise being fulfilled.
Gameboy Camera support — being able to save images directly to the SD card — was also promised in their roadmap years ago and never delivered (you can work around this with screenshots, but still not what they promised).
Once upon a time, they also promised Super Game Boy support and never delivered. External developers eventually stepped in with a separate FPGA core, but this doesn't work with actual cartridges.
The Pocket is still a great device at a hardware level, and the extra FPGA has allowed external developers to really make it shine. But first-party support has been a disgrace.
I love my Super NT and Mega SG. But as far as I'm concerned, those were made and sold by a completely different company than the one that exists today. Nowadays, Analogue seems to actively dislike it's own customers.
Re: After 25 Years, Rare Footage Of Space Channel 5's MTV Crossover Has Finally Resurfaced Online
@JackGYarwood I honestly had no idea that movie had ever been in the works!
In general I'd rather seen new games than other media, but it's a shame that all these great characters have been put to pasture. Sega was a force to be reckoned with back in the day.
Re: After 25 Years, Rare Footage Of Space Channel 5's MTV Crossover Has Finally Resurfaced Online
What a cool find! And a fun reminder of one of gaming's most joyous eras. Sega harnessed its own terminal delirium to power a wild creative engine, churning out a remarkably diverse and colorful parade of games at incredible speed.
Many of those gems were flawed, including Space Channel 5, but they were fun and energy was undeniable.
Like so much of Sega's languishing IP, Ulala and her Swingin' Report Show are long past due for a revival.
Re: "We're Finishing History, Decades Later" - Analogue 3D's Latest Limited Editions Are Based On Unreleased N64 Prototypes
Hey, look at that. Maybe in a few more decades, they can fnish their own history and finally update the Pocket to include the features they promised 5 years ago and haven't yet delivered.
Or they can just spend all their time perfecting different colors of translucent plastic. That's just as good.
Re: Final Fantasy VII Is Getting A New Steam Version "To Provide An Improved Gameplay Experience"
@Sketcz Especially as a mega-fan of FF VI, the hype was intense.
Still had a great experience despite the fumbles, and I've played it multiple times since. It's one of those games where I like the characters and world a little more than the game itself (I've never loved the Materia system, honestly), but it's a classic for a reason.
Re: The 32X Version Of Virtual Racing Has Been Decompiled
I'll always have a soft spot for VR on the Genesis. It's remarkable that it's as good as it is, and it's a cool bit of history being the only game to use the SVP chip.
That said, nowadays the Switch port is where its at. I love how well these simple, untextured polygonal graphics lend themselves to upscaling.
Re: Final Fantasy VII Is Getting A New Steam Version "To Provide An Improved Gameplay Experience"
Not directly related to the current Steam version, but this brings back memories of trying to play this game when it was finally released on PC back in '98. I didn't have a PlayStation, so I was crazy excited about finally getting to play this.
Everything went fine until the Chocobo race, which would just crash my computer every single time. And there's one mandatory race, so this was game-breaking.
In those days, PC gaming generally meant spending 80% of your time troubleshooting and 20% of your time actually playing games, so I was used to this kind of nonsense. But I tried everything and just could not get it to work. Whatever conflict my hardware was creating was insurmountable.
In frustration, I finally took all the discs to one of the computer labs at school and quietly installed the game, hoping nobody would notice.
It ran, but these machines had no real graphics acceleration so it must have been at like 5 frames per second. Still, that was enough to let me muddle my way through the race and generate a new save file on the other side of it. I quickly made a copy of the file, uninstalled the game, and hightailed it out of there.
At the time, it felt like I was committing some kind of nefarious espionage. In retrospect, I don't remember why I didn't just use one of my housemates' computers to do the exact same thing. But the mission was a success, and I was finally able to move on with the game and finish it.
Happy times.
Re: Apparently, The PSP Counts As A Failure To Some People Now
I loved the PSP. It's hard to overstate how much it felt like the future when it released, and it had a solid library to back it up. Obviously it sold well enough to warrant a follow up.
The Vita was a nice piece of kit at a hardware level, but just kind of flopped otherwise. The "bubble" UI looked cheap and amateurish compared to the PSP's elegant cross bar, and the software support just wasn't cultivated properly. Sony really let it whither on the vine, and unfortunately learned nothing from the experience, treating both of its VR headsets largely the same way.
The Vita is one of the only pieces of gaming hardware I own that I actually regret buying. But its failure shouldn't be pretense to rewrite the PSP's legacy.
Re: "The Fine Arts Were Always A Massive Grift" - Controversial Earthworm Jim Creator Goes All-In On Generative AI
I mean, he's wrong. But on the long list of this guy's dreadful opinions, this barely registers. I love that these right-wingers will spend their days freaking out about immigrants taking their jobs — something that literally doesn't happen — but will hold the door open for software algorithms to do exactly that.
Retronauts just posted an Earthworm Jim episode the other day so I've had the franchise on my mind. Loved those first two games on my Genesis back in the day and still love to break out those carts now and then. They were wild and creative. Something generative AI can't ever be.