Razieluigi

I can't tell how much of this is translational.

Of course it makes perfect sense that the games they played in their formative years would have reflected regional tendencies at the time. Nobody should be even slightly surprised (or upset) about that.

But it actually is hard to believe that all these years later, they wouldn't have sought out some of those missed experiences. Artists and creators tend to be interested in the work of other artists and creators. So when I read a wild sentence like "I've never had the opportunity to play with a Nintendo game console" I'm inclined to think this was translated incorrectly. They may not have had the opportunity before, but they've certainly had the opportunity by now.

I mean, I'm not even a game designer and I've happily availed myself of the opportunity to play old Master System and PC Engine games that weren't popular in the US when I was a kid.

Of course, none of this detracts from what a masterpiece Expedition 33 is, regardless of its influences.

@dodgykebaab Seems an entirely fair counterpoint to Elon good, buy his product, no?

@montrayjak I appreciate some good pedantry — no worry! You're right that I should have said DPI, although since the physical size of the screen is fixed, the denominator can't change so I'd argue that they ultimately convey the same thing.

That said, regardless of how pin-sharp the lines are, they still won't glow like the phosphors of a CRT. I'm not normally a purist for this — I'm a heathen that actually prefers retro games to have nice crisp pixels on a modern OLED. But vector lines painted by an electron gun have a particular glowy magic to them. Back in the 80s, they're kind of what we thought the future was going to look like.

I'll be curious to know the resolution on the built in AMOLED. It's gonna have to be pretty high to do justice to the original's vector graphics, and even then it won't have that phosphor glow unless they try to fake it somehow.

I know it's nearly impossible to manufature a miniature CRT in 2025 at any reasonable cost so I understand the decision, but I look forward to hearing some eyes-on reviews of how well the visual experience holds up.

@PKDuckman I'm sure it's playable, but "not that bad" isn't good enough. There's just no good reason for a 2D pixel-art platformer like NGRB to be running at anything but 60 fps, even on Switch 1. The optimization must be embarrasingly bad.

Lilkewise, games like SAOV should be the ones easily running in 4K on Switch 2, so it's frustrating that there's only a lower-res Switch 1 version available.

Really wanted to get Ninja Gaiden on Switch 2, but it's pretty inexcusable that they don't have it running at a locked 60fps. They should have been able to easily clear that bar on the Switch 1 with a game like this, much less on the improved hardware.

And neither one is available native for Switch 2 which is another disappointment, although that may be Nintendo's fault for not getting dev kits out there.

Ended up grabbing Shinobi on PS5 and I look forward to giving it a spin tonight!

@Gravyc It's not the quality or compatibility of the emulation that's the issue.

Android is specifically intended to run on handheld devices. That just makes it more portable and versatile than Windows, which needs a comparatively beefy PC to run. The recent boom in emulation hardware, with quality handheld devices in dozens of sizes and layouts couldn't have happened with Windows-based emulation.

And even if Windows could run on small handheld devices, the cost of needing a Windows license for each device would become a problem real fast.

Nothing wrong with emulators written to run on Windows, mind you. You can still do some things on PC that you can't do on Android, and it's obviously meeting your needs! But once you balance in all these factors, it's not a surprise that Android (and Linux) have pretty much run away with the modern emulation scene.

Boy, you can barely even see "Don't Be Evil" in the rearview mirror anymore.

I'll always have a soft spot for this game. Sure, it's stupid difficult and barely on brand. But it looked and sounded fantastic, I appreciate that it's the only TMNT game that offers legitimately meaningful differences between the four characters, and I like how lean and mean they look compared to their more cartoon-inspired selves.

It also came out in an era when kids would happily bang their heads against these ludicrously challenging games for months on end, perfecting the earlier stages and gradually getting better at the later ones. I'm not going to pretend this is good game design, but there's still something cool about that.

I was in grad school when I finally buckled down and beat the game and it felt like a very hard-earned victory after nearly a decade of training.

@BernardMerguez Yes, I know. I was joking.

@RextheSheep That's hysterical.

In fairness, I was a massive Thundercats fan as a kid so their toy game was pretty solid.

Such a weird brand revival. Acclaim didn't really have a coherent brand identiy back in the day, they just... published stuff. Their two most common types of products were arcade ports and licensed tie-ins, neither of which is terribly relevant nowadays.

Curious to see what they announce, but I find it perplexing that anybody thought this brand carries any sway in 2025. What's next? LJN?

@Blankfrak I imagine they did this because those razor-sharp vector graphics wouldn't translate well to such a small low-resolution screen.

Although pixel-perfect arcade emulation is now easy to find, there's still some joy in seeing how hard developers worked to squeeze games into less powerful hardware. It was such a different era. There was no middleware. Everything was built from the ground up for each console. Sometimes games would even be improved in translation (does anybody prefer arcade Contra to the NES version?).

It was a time when consoles left their unique hardware fingerprints all over the software they ran. It gave consoles personality, and I'll always love that. Nowadays, we carry on about subtle differences between ports that no normal human would even detect if not for Digital Foundry slowing down the footage and pointing them out.

No shade for DF, mind you. Love their work. It's just evidence of radically different time and tech.

Oh wow. What incredible work!

Modern gamers will never know the childhood joy of just staring at video game manuals and absorbing every detail when you couldn't actually be playing them. Those old illustrations are seared into my memory and it's super cool to see them come to life like this.

It's a shame that the release of this game has been clouded a bit by the messy launch because it really does look like a fantastic passion project and I can't wait to buy it.

I know it's a convenient development tool, but it's hard to ignore the irony of Koshiro supplying a picture of the game running off an Everdrive despite announcing they don't intend to make the ROM available for purchase.

Oh wow. If this thing can do Saturn games, it'll be an easy purchase for me. That's one of the most unfortunate gaps in my hardware lineup.

@BausRifle I don't think anyone said it was. He's just setting the record straight that it wasn't used since people are saying otherwise.

@BausRifle What isn't an accomplishment?

@WileyDragonfly If only we had the technology for specialized cartridges with advanced mappers in 2025.

@HammyHavoc Maybe, maybe not.

They're trying to split the difference here with a game that runs natively on old hardware, but offering "value added" extra features on other platforms. And that's not a crazy strategy.

But there are only two possibilities here:

1. The "original hardware" crowd represents a small enough fraction of the audience that piracy won't cut appreciably into sales, in which case their pleas about piracy don't really matter all that much. If anything, they're just helping publicize the existence of ROM files.

-or-

2. The original hardware crowd is the primary audience for this product and they've really botched the launch by leaving that audience without their preferred option to play the game.

In this case, telling an already annoyed audience that they have no plans to release a ROM is only making things worse. It's a terrible failure to read their own audience — the retro-indie equivalent of "do you guys not have phones?"

This game looks fantastic and I intend to buy the cart once it's available. But this has all been handled very poorly. Everything happening right now could have been predicted.

This does suck and I feel for them. Piracy is bad when it directly hurts developers. But I think they could have gotten ahead of this by just selling the ROM, or at least not having such a long delay before selling carts.

This is a game specifically meant to appeal to retro enthusiasts. They want to play it on original hardware, not emulated on other consoles. And that's the one option they aren't being given right now.

Disappointed about the lack of an available cartridge (or ROM), but I'm willing to give a shout-out to password systems!

One nice thing about passwords is that they are the ultimate cross-platform saves! You can buy this game on any platform you want, and can pick up your "file" on a different platform at any time.

I get why people prefer the convenience of save files, but I appreciate the old-school charm of passwords and think they come with overlooked perks.

The "more mature" tone feels really jarring to me given the whimsical concept of a kid with a magical hat.

I understand tweaking the gameplay based on feedback, but the aesthetic changes are pretty baffling. Woodfrog should make whatever game they want to make, but this seems like splitting the baby.

I look forward to seeing more devices like this. I always worry about maintaining long-term access to games that depended on non-standard hardware to run. It's nice to know that I may be able to still enjoy DS/3DS games even after my OG hardware gives up the ghost.

@GravyThief Oh geez... I didn't even see that one last sentence dangling below the video.

Interesting. If they do make those, I imagine they'll be substantially downgraded to run on older hardware — kind of novelty releases alongside the main event. I really can't imagine the SNES or Genesis pulling off what we're seeing/hearing in that video without a lot of sacrifices. Reduced palette, animation, sound quality...

Again, maybe I'm wrong and they're programming wizards. But that's looking like a mighty heavy lift for those old consoles.

@FR4M3 I don't recall ever hearing that this was going to run natively on Genesis or SNES. Eyeballing it, that color palette does not look possible on the Genesis.

I could be wrong, but I think this is just meant to evoke the style of 16-bit console/arcade games.

That's a real shame. Their products filled an admittedly niche role, but when you needed them they were the best around. I have a few stands of theirs, and I'll miss the ease of knowing exactly where to look when I wanted to put a piece of hardware on display.

I hope everyone involved lands on their feet and moves on to good things.

What an awful, awful idea. Distracting video content — interactive or otherwise — should never be displayed on that screen. This is exaxctly why apps like Spotify work with in-dash screens but apps like YouTube do not.

Not to mention that this is pointless in a world where everybody already has a phone, tablet, or portable gaming system available to scratch their gaming itch.

@Sketcz But literally nothing is stopping you from just enjoying games! You choose to be reading and responding to all this when you could just be playing them. You don't have to engage with this part of the culture at all if you don't want to.

The internet, if anything, has made it supremely easy for people to wall themselves off from news and opinions they do not want to hear. I'd argue that's been one of its most destructive features, but that's neither here nor there. You 100% have that opiton if that's what you want.

@jamess Sure. And everybody can decide where that line is. The more controversial the political stance, the more likely people are going to find themselves on the "nope" side of the line. It's not like he's being criticized for putting pineapple on pizza here. He's an ultra wealthy weapons manufacturer that has chosen to publicly taken sides in a war that has killed thousands of innocent people.

"Keep politics out of xxxx" is facile and tired (and tends to come only from those who disagree with the politics at hand, suggesting bias rather than principle). Politics isn't this nebulous thing where people are disagreeing about nonsense. Politics literally is people and their lives. It intrudes on everything. Our jobs. Our health. And, yes, our hobbies.

@Sketcz I mean, the obvious answer is that they don't just care about "some dude with a goatee".

Reducing an issue to its most absurd possible description isn't the same as making a valid point.

@BausRifle Apart from the first game in which they were still ironing out the concept, they really aren't that hard. Not saying they're easy, but they're forgiving with passwords and continues and, unlike a lot of games from that era, ultimately give players the tools they need to practice and get better at them.

Agreed, however, that he's an awesome character. One of my all-time faves, easily. I'd still love to find good matching poseable figures of both Mega Man and Rush for display.

@slider1983 Not only that, but they have a distinct habit of failing to even provide the support they promised.

DAC support for the Pocket and Duo, as others have mentioned above, has been casually abandoned. So has GameBoy Camera support. They're happy to sell gobs of these things, but apparently don't have the resources to turn it into the product they promised.

Analogue peaked with the Super NT and Mega SG. They were brilliant, single-purpose clone consoles that delivered the exact experience they promised. I absolutely love both and there was still a real sense that Analogue cared back then. The Pocket, nice as it is from a hardware perspective, still feels feature-incomplete nearly 4 years after release and has largely been propped up by external FPGA development.

I was once a huge fan of Analogue. But something has definitely changed, and they no longer deserve the beneift of the doubt from customers.

Have such fond memories of this game, even if it pretty much typifies the "NES hard" phenomenon. Those first few stages (including the not-as-hard-as-everyone-says Turbo Tunnel) are embedded permanently in my muscle memory, even after all these years.

But even having finished games like Batman and TMNT, this one remains uncleared. It's just too brutal.

It was common back then to see screenshots that were never actually in the game. In the pre-internet era when we were scrounging for what little information we could get about our favorite games, that kind of thing always contributed to a kind of intrigue that I remember liking.

I'm of two minds here.

The tech certainly is impressive and I do find this kind of work fascinating. It's no knock on the developer, and people need to calm down. It's wild that this stuff is possible.

But part of the fun of retro gaming is seeing what can be done within certain technological limits. And while you can argue that earlier tech like the FX and SA-1 were already stretching beyond those limits, they were still doing so with tech from that era. While this new FX-3 is still constrainted by many of the limits of the SNES, it's hard for it not to seem more like a cheat when it's beaming in technological advancementss from 30-something years in the future.

None of this negates how cool it is. But it's cool in the gee-whiz "who'd have thought this was possible?" sense and not in the "authentic SNES experience" sense that retro enthusiasts are more likely to be seeking.

I've been pretty happy with my RetroUSB AVS, but I'm looking forward to seeing what this is!

@sixrings I think Capcom is doing a reasonably good job on their own, although they've had so many arcade and fighting game collections that their names are starting to blur together.

Sega keeps reviving and then dropping their Ages line, and I wish I understood why. We got a nice burst of old arcade titles on 3DS and more on Switch, including M2's top-shelf port of Virtua Racing. But they have such a deep arcade heritage to mine, and it's mostly just languishing for no good reason. The lack of any official way to play Revenge of Death Adder remains criminal.

Definitely going to have a look at this!

And to honor the success of Blue Prince, I think this should finally see a full retail release but with its subtitle changed to Finger Prince.

The clean look of these early 3D arcade games is just timeless. It's too bad these Arcade Archives versions don't seem to include any options to run the games in HD because games of this vintage scale so beautifully to higher resolutions.

I feel like polygonal graphics started strong, and then had to go through an ugly phase before they started coming around to looking good again.

If history is any guide, all this hysteria about preserving physical media is irrelevant anyway.

Just as we've seen with cartridges and discs, by the time these things fail — likely decades after we're all dead anyway — the data once contained on them will be readily available to anybody that cares to look.

As ever, preservation isn't happening in the closets of a few physical media enthusiasts (which is not to disparage the hobby — I have my own personal "museum" as well). It's happening across an uncountable number of hard drives throughout the emulation community. In 20 years, that will be just as true for current gen games as it already is for prior generations.

But why though?

Setting aside that this doesn't look very good, it still took time, effort, talent, and presumably money to make. Why spend resources developing a product that will only be out in the wild for 14 days? And even sillier, Dig Dug is a nostalgia property that the target Gamisodes demographic likely has minimal interest in.

What's the strategy here?

@WileyDragonfly Words changing meanting over time is the natural progression and evolution of language, far from any kind of "devastation of the written word."

@WileyDragonfly The most common use of "decimate" is — far and away — to indicate general destruction, exactly as it was used in the article.

We don't live in ancient Rome. Here in 2025 it would only be confusing if anyone actually used it to mean "reduce by one tenth".

@Exerion76 That was my first thought.

Neither Aleste or Zanac were danmaku franchises, so I'm not sure how this is the result of crossing one with the other.

I'm glad the bullet hell crowd is spoiled for choice these days, but all these games kind of blur together and I miss more classic-style shmups. Definitely holding out hope for Earthion and Salamander 3...

"Unbound co-founder John Mitchinson, who also jumped ship to Boundless"

This is hardly "jumping ship". Same company. Same business model. Same grifters running it.

Same ship, different day.

God, I love GBA-era pixel art.

Can't play a proper game of chess without wood paneling.

What a lovely sentiment from a legendary talent.

His work has never really clicked with me for whatever reason, but no shortage of respect for the man.

Tron 2.0 was amazing, and it's a real shame that the story was jettisoned for Legacy because what was going on here was much more interesting.