Razieluigi

@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!

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.

Sometimes I forget how crazy the 90s were.

This kind of seizure-inducing editing just seemed totally normal at the time.

"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- I'd contribute to the Kickstarter!

@-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.

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.

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.

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.

Glad to see the "theft is just a creative tool" crowd chiming in, as usual.

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.

It only has one playable position.

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.

Boy, that's pretty niche for a device this size.

I just want a Switch 2 update for the Flip Grip.