Krikzz is a straight-up MVP in the retro scene. I have so many of his flash carts, and they're of the highest quality every single time.

I recently got a SuperStation One to cover my PS1 needs, but ODE's are fantastic ways to keep old hardware running and to expand their capabilities. If anybody can be trusted to make a good one, it's Krikzz.

No. Just didn't have the resources back when I might have wanted to. And if I want to play an import nowadays, Everdrives, ODEs, and MiSTer make it pretty trivial.

I did have one friend as a kid whose entire family was really into video games and would import games frequently. I remember playing the Japenese import of Rockman 3 (Mega Man 3) at his house and being fascinated by the tiny Famicom cartridge and the adapter used to make it work on the NES.

I re-watched this last year and it was as gloriously awful as I remember.

In fairness, a lot of things trigger nostalgic feelings about the Dreamcast.

Very cool though!

This is such an unnecessary remake. The original game was gorgeous and still is.

There's nothing wrong with this new style, mind you. I think it's also gorgeous.

But it should have been applied to a new game.

This is going right on my Everdrive and Analogue Pocket. Love it.

What a cool little bit of history! I'll definitely sub this in on my Everdrive to take a look at it.

@-wc-

Yeah, same. I have a walk-in closet arranged as my personal video game museum and it's full of hardware and pretty solid libraries of cartridges and discs.

But I also have a fleet of clones and Everdrives and just recently added a Superstation One to the mix, finally giving me ready access to PS1 and Saturn titles. If teenage me were to see this effectively infinite supply of games, he'd faint.

@-wc- @obijuankanoobie

To each their own! For the sake of a portable console, though, it seems to me that portability is key.

I'm happy to use carts at home and often do. Was just playing Mega Man X off the OG cart earlier this week! But on the road? Just give me a portable console with ROMs installed. I don't want to lug around SNES carts that are almost as big as the device itself.

@-wc- I think the problem is I don't understand the allure of those features, either.

To be clear, I get wanting to use original cartridges and controllers. I have clone consoles including a Super NT.

But on a portable device? Where the cartridges are nearly as big as the device? I just don't get it.

@Vorador Completely disagree.

I don't undesrtand this compulsion to remake everything. Gamers love to go on about preserving the history of the media, then turn around and demand that history be rewritten.

Terranigma is brilliant and stands on its own. People should get to experience the genuine article.

@h3s FPGA is not inherently more accurate, as you say. But it is far more flexible — and fixable — than a pre-baked system on a chip.

I just don't understand the allure of products like this when the handheld space is overflowing with excellent options that can do so much more.

@Ruka I'm not sure what you're talking about. Ikari Warriors had one rotary joystick and 2 buttons for each player.

@Ruka Why two? It's a controller, not an Etch-a-Sketch.

@kirby2000 Apart from other SNK games that used a "loop lever" joystick, it could be useful for any game that uses rotary/dial controls like Pong or Arkanoid.

@Sketcz I thought that was crazy, too. Ranger-X is a flawed game, but it's a lot of fun and considerably better than Strider 2!

Although it's nice to be reminded of an era when 7s and 8s still suggested a game that might be worth playing. Nowadays, any review in the 80s is considered scathing.

On one hand, I don't need another arcade stick.

On the other, the paddle and trackball are really nice additions. If this plays nice with MiSTer arcade cores, I could see myself going in on one of these.

We've been hearing about this stupid thing for nearly a decade now. At least the Ouya had the decency to come and go quickly.

I had no idea, but this actually seems quite easy to pull off. Definitely gonna try it tonight!

@McGuildicuff Especially since there was a time when Disney games were often of pretty high quality.

Granted, that was during the 3rd and 4th gens — the heyday of licensed games. But titles like Duck Tales, Rescue Rangers, Castle of Illusion, Quackshot, Mickey Mania, and Aladdin (just to name a few) all stand out as some of the most memorable of the era.

@JJtheTexan I love it too. Some episodes are better than others, but it's totally enjoyable from beginning to end. As a huge fan of Castlevania III and of the series in general, I honestly don't understand the hate.

Except that the internet hates everything.

I'll be curious to see what this turns out to be, but it's literally a day late! Decided to order a Morph 2K when I saw they were back up for preorder yesterday. I've mostly been looking for a better way to connect my Dreamcast while still being versatile enough for occasional use with other consoles, and this really should fit the bill.

The relentlessly self-aware humor may get tired after an episode or two, but whatever... could be fun?

And anything that makes it even slightly more likely to finally get Revenge of Death Adder onto a modern console is fine by me.

Nothing lasts forever, but some things do tend to last a whole lot longer than others.

If I ever have a cartridge fail, well... that's what my Everdrives are for.

It's still feature-incomplete 5 years after release, but now it's covered in gold in case we have a few whales in the audience with more money then sense!

The Pocket is still a solid device, but Analogue should be embarrassesd that they're pulling stunts like this instead of supporting their hardware and fulfilling the promises they've already made.

Analogue has fallen a long way since the Super NT / Mega SG days. Such a shame.

The premise is just so satisfying even if Worms wasn't exactly unique. I remember having lots of fun with Scorched Earth years before Worms gave it a fun cartoon veneer.

Oh wow! This is a great game. Easily one of the best action platformers on the NES, and it kind of flew under the radar since attention was turning to the SNES by the time it released.

I'm surprised they aren't just putting it on NSO, but anything that helps introduce this unsung classic to a new audience is a good thing.

@gojiguy Yeah, to be clear, I'm not defending every aspect of modern game design. A lot of games are saddled with padding and repetitive slop for the sake of some deranged version of "value" measured in minutes. And part of me misses the days when "replay value" just meant that you kept playing it from the beginning until you were able to finish it. But part of me also knows that adult me would have a far lesser tolerance for that than 9-year-old me did.

But to your point, while games like Pac-Man and Tetris almost approach a degree of theoretical perfection, you also wouldn't be able to sell them for full price like you could in the 80s and 90s. Even modernized versions like Pac Man CE DX and Tetris Effect sold for what would have been clearance prices a few decades ago.

A game like Shinobi III was a major release at the time! it got straight 9s and a Platinum award from EGM. It's impossible to imagine that happening today. The same exact game that sold for $50-60 in 1993 would have to be $5-10 today. And if I'm a developer, I'd have to weigh that reality against the costs of making the game to begin wtih.

@-wc- Yeah, I debated adding things like studio technology to the discussion but left it out. But I agree — there certainly are changes. I just don't think they're as radical.

@-wc- I don't think the comparison is apt.

We weren't still learning how music worked in the 1970s. The fundamentals of melody and harmony are the same now as they were then. Changes in music have more to do with trends than anything else. A song from 1970 might feel dated culturally but is otherwise as musically sound as it was back then.

But 30 and 40 years ago, game design was still in its relative infancy. As an interactive medium that is wholly dependent on computer technology, games are still evolving in ways that music isn't.

It's not that games from that era "suck." I love retro games, have hundreds of carts for numerous consoles, and play them as often as I play new titles. I adore them. But they have problems and limitations that have since been solved.

Modern developers can't just memory-wipe the last few decades and pretend they didn't happen.

Seems like a bit of an overreaction? I love those classics as well and I play them regularly. Shinobi III is an absolute legend of a game and one of my favorites. I also agree that the new Shinobi was a great game that also wasn't really Shinobi (did it really need combo-based attacks? Sigh.).

But arcade-style game design was often very poor, with challenges intended to be overcome not with skill but with more quarters. When that kind of design was extended to home consoles, it often resulted in frustrating experiences — the "NES hard" phenomenon of games that seemed badly designed rather than legitimately challenging.

Acknowledging that we've learned a lot about game design in the last 3 or 4 decades and that some of our most beloved classics are pretty dated isn't "contempt." It's an entirely fair assessment.

@Gs69 That's interesting. Why would a white screen cause the TV to off-center it? I suspect you have a fairly unique hardware conflict.

What adapter are you using? I connect mine to an LG OLED using a Behar Bros Toro (and sometimes just a Pound HDMI cable when I'm feeling lazy) and I've never had this problem.

@Sketcz Disagree about the game being dull. It is weirdly brown for what eventually became such a colorful franchise, I'll give you that. But it's a classic for a reason. Absolutely nothing played like SMB in 1985. That kind of joy in movement was revolutionary for the time, and it's wild that the game still feels so good to play all these years later.

Everything else is exactly correct. It makes no sense for such a ubiquitous game to be worth that much, regardless of its condition. It is, indeed, a scam.

It's such an extreme scam that it doesn't even bother me, honestly. Anybody who has thousands, if not millions to spend on one of the most common video games on the planet is too rich to get my sympathy for being a sucker.

I'm in batch 4 and still awaiting mine, but this makes me even more excited for its arrival...

It's an interesting historical find, for sure. Apart from the label on the back, I wonder if there is any change to the ROM itself, even something minor like a different date on the title screen. The article doesn't say if the carts have been tested at all. That would be of interest to the preservation community and warrants a new addition to existing ROM sets.

@MontyMole I agree with the sentiment, and I generally find this overinflated collector's market absurd.

But in a case like this it doesn't actually matter. These particular games are ubiquitous. Physical cartridges are everywhere, and the data is extremely well-preserved across a massive public community.

Nobody is being denied the chance to SMB or Duck Hunt by a few wealthy collectors hoarding their treasure.

Yeah, this is one of those things that was pretty well publicized at the time but has gotten lost over the years. If I remember correctly, the shopkeeper's dialogue references the fact that you're playing on a GBA.

I haven't tested it out on the Analogue Pocket, but it probably works if you force it to run the game in GBA mode instead of letting it default to GBC.

I had (and still have, actually) the Missile Command vinyl album that tries to graft this insane story about invading aliens onto a game about cold war nuclear anxiety. And it's all done as a musical, so you're treated to crazy lyrics like (to the best of my memory):

Here on Zardon, we are peaceful
We don't like to fight
Here on Zardon, we work hard
To try and do what's right

Calling all base commanders
With nerves of steeeeeeel
I hope that you've been practicing
'Cause this time it's for reeeeaal
Missile Command!

So... weirder things have been tried, I guess!

I've dabbled in this franchise and never really got the hang of it, but man... that flat-shaded look aged so damn well.

These are fun historical artifacts, even if I can't imagine playing one for very long. But it does remind me of a childhood story.

I had gotten a Real Ghostbusters LCD game for my birthday as a kid. But it was very clear that the graphics and gameplay had absolutely nothing to do with Ghostbusters. It looked like some dude catching pies? Didn't stop me from playing it, but I never understood what the hell I was seeing.

Only years later was I able to figure it out with some internet sleuthing. Remco, the company that made the game, also made a few games based on the game show Double Dare. And one of them was called "Pie in the Pants" in which you tried to catch pies in, well... your pants.

They clearly mounted the game into the wrong shell, leaving a confused 10 year old busting pies instead of poltergeists.

Very cool project!

I went through a few stages of this desire myself. I added a Game Boy Player to my Gamecube back when that was released, and was pretty happy wtih the result. I eventually experimented with the homebrew Game Boy Interface to improve the image quality. Nowadays, I just have a docked Analogue Pocket.

But regardless of how you make it worth, this is always a library well worth revisiting. It's hard to convey how magical the GBA felt when it was released, all while the home consoles were finally growing out of the ugly duckling stage of early 3D visuals. What a great era that was for gaming.

@WileyDragonfly I wouldn't say they're "garbage," nor would I criticize anyone for buying one. Overall, it's pretty cool that this is possible now, and a small, cheap, versatile handheld is a nice thing to have.

I just don't understand how this market operates when there's such a constant flood of these devices to the point that they're becoming indistinguishable from one another. It feels like we learn about another new one three times a week, and I'm not sure how the supply/demand situation hasn't completely collapsed under the wieght of it all.

This is such corporate brain nonsense. For all intents and purposes, the Vita was the PSP2.

It didn't fail because it had a touch panel on the back. It failed because Sony all but abandoned it, just as they did with PSVR and then again with the PSVR2.

They don't seem to understand that some things are legendary for the wrong reasons.

Sure, we've all heard of the Ford Edsel...

@JackGYarwood Ha. Maybe? But I'm not sure the Tetris brand is enough to sell tickets to a children's movie that is straining to graft a narrative onto an abstract puzzle game.

But I also grew up when Rubik, the Amazing Cube was a Saturday morning cartoon. So crazier things have been tried...

"There is something uniquely compelling about translating Tetris into a living, cinematic animated universe."

Yeah, but there really isn't.

@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.

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 really done an incredible job with this project. Can't wait to give 3.0 a spin!