Comments 91

Re: Limited Run Games CEO Obtains Rights To Several FMV Games By Night Trap Dev Digital Pictures

Shaw_Brothers

I actually have a bit of a soft spot for these FMV games. I remember the demos of these types of games in comet (uk electronics shop) on Sega cd, cdi, 3do, and even the cd 32. It was quite exciting time even if at that point your could realise these sort of games were a bit rubbish. It was like developers were given cd as a format and everyone thought the best thing to do was fill the space with pre-rendered visuals or video. This was the time of video disk, clear see through phones, but the slow death of vinyl.
Early 90s games were either video games or really dark/grey to shield from the low render distance for 3d. Liberation and the robocop games that came out this time were examples. Megarace on the other hand was fmv and a racing game being bright and very noisy soundtrack. Glad games have moved on, but I have a weird vibe about this time that has never since been repeated that I like to tap into every now and again. A bit like brutilist architecture!

Re: The Making Of: Geoff Crammond's Formula One Grand Prix Series

Shaw_Brothers

Great article!

I loved to play GP2 on my PC and used to have the challenge of damage on, driving around Monaco backwards and see how long you could last…. I was 12 at the time! Fond memories of this game, didn’t realise GP4 was a thing so I’ll have to give that a go, was great simulation at the time so might be a bit rubbish now. But it was the only game as far as I know where the smashing physics were spot on!

Re: "I Can't Stand This Accumulation Of Toxicity Anymore" - Retro Musician Remute Quits Spotify Over "AI Military Tech" & "Bot Playlists"

Shaw_Brothers

Spotify has always had some shady stuff going on. Have they implemented 2FA yet? Basic security was last in their list and my account got hacked at least twice on the platform. It was shockingly simple to get back my account though - just a quick question to support and no proof required, so I can see how easy it was for people to do the same on my account. The final nail in the coffin was when loads of random music I didn’t listen too started appearing in my feed, turns out someone logged into my account somewhere else in the world and had been playing music 24/7 and I maintain that was some sort of bot used to inflate listening numbers. This was about 3 years ago. I made it a rule that I would only go to a secure service then and so that limited me to Amazon, google and Apple. Not sure why none of the other providers provide any level of security but something tells me these Spotify stories are the tip of the iceberg of what practices are actually going on, feels like you can fake a lot more

Re: CIBSunday: Panzer Dragoon Saga (Saturn)

Shaw_Brothers

I love the fact that time extension has all these games. Did you guys ever do a report as to the history of your collection of games and where they came from? What was the original intent for the collection - to preserve them all or was it just coincidence? Cool though!

Re: Oops, Square No Longer Has The Source Code For Final Fantasy Tactics

Shaw_Brothers

@smoreon in the 90s a hard drive that was bigger than 500mb was hugely expensive. I had a scsi drive in 1999 that was 500mb and that cost £1000 when new, so imagine your a studio with no funding early 90s or 80s and then you have to stump up £10000 just for a hard drive to store it? Nope! You would develop everything locally and no one had the ability to copy or put in a central server because there wasn’t one. The only servers which had that much space were sun systems which you used to wheel round and open the top of to get at the hard disk array inside. They were beasts but cost sooo much money!
Crazy to think no one has the source for this, makes it an ideal candidate for decompilation to get back to the original source

Re: The First Rule Of Street Fighter II's Moves? They Had To Make You Laugh

Shaw_Brothers

There is a bit more to this:

Nishitani noted that while many comparisons were made to the Indian character in the martial arts film Master of the Flying Guillotine, he had not heard of the movie prior to working on the game and instead the concept was based on a technique from manga series JoJo's Bizarre Adventure. Akiman elaborated in a later interview, calling the technique the Ripple Zoom Punch technique (from the manga series JoJo's Bizarre Adventure).[10] In reference to one used by JoJo character Zeppeli. He add that originally the attack was only supposed to travel a short distance, however as development progressed Hayashi increased the length of the limbs more and more. Nishitani noted this was due to each developer wanting to make their character different than the others, and while he originally intended to shorten the length he was happy to have made it work in a balanced manner. This is reconfirmed in the comment section of Dhalsim's biography in the Street Fighter X Tekken Artworks artbook.

See here:
https://streetfighter.fandom.com/wiki/Dhalsim

Re: Got A Spare $13,000? You Could Own This "One-Off Dream" Copy Of Harry Potter On PS1

Shaw_Brothers

Reading the sellers description:
“ Hi due to new eBay payment balance payment method I’m sorry for any inconvenience to you if purchasing but as a 100 percent seller for 16 years want a fair community on eBay for respected buyers and sellers so items want be sent out until cleared funds in bank thanks Tracey and thanks for understanding and if you require a quicker solution a lower rate for collection all items are best quality Tracey”

I’m guessing English isn’t their first language…

Oh wait there is more:
“ SORRY ON THE FEBRUARY 4 COLLECTION ONLY ON THIS SALE AS PAYMENT ON COLLECTION DUE TO EBAY RULES”

Wait, hasn’t it already been the 4th of February? So you buy this then not actually get anything?

When it smells wrong, it’s usually off!

Re: Your Next Retro Emulation Handheld Could Cost You 35% More Than Usual

Shaw_Brothers

So we had the same thing with tariffs in the UK (because of brexit) and it doesn’t do small companies any favours, in fact it wiped a lot of small businesses out because the extra cost to import goods. The only people it actually benefits are big corp companies (which have special deals to get around such tariffs) and the government (who absorb those tariffs without really piping that back into the economy). I do genuinely believe that we are all being screwed here somehow and the money is going somewhere just not into local councils. Instead I think it’s going into someone’s pocket, which then helps them remain in power for longer….

Re: Don't Forget The Sega 32X Turns 30 This Year, Too

Shaw_Brothers

To think this came out the same time as the psx is quite amazing, when the Saturn was incoming, not to mention the N64, CDI, jaguar and 3do. I wished I had more money at this point in gaming as it was great for a gamer, although you knew not all those consoles were going to last and you hedged your bets to which one you thought would succeed. My brother placed our console budget on the cd32... That basically meant no more consoles until I could buy them myself after that point!

The psx was a bit of an underdog that really grew with time, but also heavily helped by the second hand market and the release of less expensive versions of the system, not to mention chipping and all that brought. I sold my psx to buy a Dreamcast, that was brilliant until it wasn't! Psx I had so many games, some were duds though. Interesting time for gaming though, very saturated and that generally means when the bubble bursts there is a lot of debris after. Somehow, the N64 still carried on through too!

Re: Monster Hunter, Mortal Kombat And Resident Evil Director Paul W.S. Anderson Is Making A House Of The Dead Movie

Shaw_Brothers

Personally I would love a new HOTD which has many multiple routes and comes with a lightgun that works on OLEDs. But the days of physical games + physical devices seem over now, so the likelyhood of this happening is low. That is, unless the switch 2 has something like this up it's sleeve! Otherwise, emulation and the slindon is the way I've gone for now.

Re: Anniversary: 25 Years Ago, Sega Launched Dreamcast In Europe With One Of The Most Esoteric Campaigns Ever

Shaw_Brothers

I got mine on release day at HMV with an additional controller and ready 2 rumble boxing. Was great, but I needed more games quickly. I really enjoyed the summer of 2000, when I had all the time in the world and playing virtua tennis, crazy taxi, shemnue, and lots of brilliant ports of fighting games (marvel Vs capcom, sf3, snk Vs capcom, soul calibre 2, dead or alive) with my official arcade stick I picked up in blockbusters for £30 when they were selling it in a bargain bin. Was a brilliant year and enjoyed it very much.

I wish more games come out like this - high quality, short sharp plays and not requiring hours and hours of gameplay. Them were the days!

Re: Hotel Mario, One Of Mario's "Worst Games", Is Getting A Fan-Made Upgrade

Shaw_Brothers

This looks like a bad enough game for Nintendo not to shut this one down just as it releases, but who knows.

I love creativity and preservation like this, shame Nintendo is hell bent on killing things like this. I've never even seen this game and it looks quite fun, so unless Nintendo are planning something with it, it would be great to play this in the wild!

Re: SuperSega Team Doesn't Think Sega Will Have Any Issue With Its Branding

Shaw_Brothers

Maybe sega, like we are, are thinking this is vapourware. But if it does then exist, sega will lay the hammer down. While it's just hearsay, nothing to sue. When an actual product, their done for. So many red flags for this and brazen attitude, if they actually pull it off and don't get clamped down, I'll probably get one. But not for a good few months after release and there inlies the problem. No one wants to gamble, but that's exactly what they need to produce this damn thing. So surely it's going to be a flop. And this is coming from an ouya owner!

Re: WipEout Co-Creator Throws His Support Behind Fan-Made Lego Set

Shaw_Brothers

Be nice to have the original versions but with better textures and resolution, remastered and the full original music + new music tracks. I wasn't a fan of omega collection and for some reason it didn't capture the original feel of the game or look anything much like it. Something better than that would be nice

Re: 50 More PS1 Classics Coming To Antstream Arcade, PS2 And GameCube Games Could Be Next

Shaw_Brothers

Meh I'll stick with legal emulation of my stack of PS1 games. Thankfully I backed them up - I do wonder how long they will last, can't be long now. I'm privileged to own a lot of them from OG plus loads of second hand shops and trading before they were all obliterated by game and eBay. Them were the days, and they really were - now everyone knows the value of everything. But subscription services like this IMO can't last and also don't help, mainly because licensing will always disappear eventually. Like gfn, they are all too greedy!

Re: Soapbox: Electronic Arts Used To Empower Developers; Now It Looks To Replace Them With AI

Shaw_Brothers

Well it won't be long before AI replaces the game players for EA, at least it will replace me as I've not bought anything EA for a good long while.

Wonder how long it will be before we get made up customer sales numbers for products because a company faked the sales by using AI? Can't be far away from that.

The good thing is AI isn't actually that creative, it only creates based on the input given and therefore only combines ideas together rather than creating fresh new ideas. So think x factor music and not out there Avant-garde. This is perfect for EA who rehash games year on year, but when rewriting an entire engine based on new ideas and new graphics, that will surely have to be human.

Astro bot for example constantly makes me smile because there are so many new ideas in that along with a lot of tried and tested ones. Each level has something new however - I really don't think AI can do that.

But AI will be perfect for CoD, EA games and all the GTA6 online stuff coming when it does - rehashing the rehash until the cow is milked dry...
The good thing about that, is everything has a lifecycle in business and cash cows are usually end state until the product dies or people find a new market. AI will help kill companies like this implicitly and that's brilliant I say!

Re: Anniversary: It's Been 25 Years Since The Dreamcast's North American "9.9.99" Launch

Shaw_Brothers

I bought this day 1 UK, along with ready 2 rumble boxing and I think that was it. Wasn't long though before I had many more games, ending up with about 30 in the end. Summer 2000 was brilliant, I was at college and had loads of time off in the summer just to play all my Dreamcast games, particularly crazy taxi, virtua tennis and sonic adventure 1/2. I also got into listening to Japanese chillout electronic music while playing shemnue, which had a real spiritual and emotional connection for me. Personally I think because I was a late teenager and so few people own a Dreamcast, it felt like my console. No other console has had such a heavy line up of games for that brief period. There were too many to afford to buy! Amazing to think these were direct arcade ports but without the costs of a neo geo.

Shame that it died along with pretty much the whole arcade scene after that. It was definitely a golden couple of years that I will always remember - freedom of having disposable income, lots of time and lots of less commitments, even if I was ready to be in a relationship which came just after that period of time!

Re: Latest AmigaVision Update Adds Amiga CD32 Support For MiSTer

Shaw_Brothers

I loved our CD32 before giving away for some reason. Was a very "dark" time for gaming as literally the games were dark, liberation being one example. But also some amazing games like nick foldos, zool, diggers and such. Really wished we bought other consoles at the time however as it was an expensive console to buy at the time!

  • Page :
  • 1