Sketcz

@xenobladexfan
You weren't born yet back then?

I was a teenager in the 90s, becoming a young adult.

I'm sorry you missed those decades. As someone who lived them, let me say: they were glorious eras. Better than you could have imagined, but only in hindsight. At the time no one thought things would regress. There was hope and optimism, and then... I want to say pretty much everything after 9/11 was a very slow descent into hell.

Some good moments still, coasting on the energy those decades brought, but a decline all the same. The PS3 era was fun, but I can recall back then yearning for the past - which is why magazines like Retro Gamer were able to start up and griw successful.

Even though you can't travel back to see that golden era, at least you can enjoy the rich and deep media portfolios those years created. Not just games, but films, comics, books, music, cars, etc.

I don't have SMB to check. But is that cart resting on the inner connector? Or did the studio set designer force it in, possibly destroying both?

@xenobladexfan
For whatever little it's worth I agree with you. I regard older games as coming from a purer time - authentic and untainted by modern societal shifts. Which is why I love old games. They reflect the zeitgeist, which I miss. I so badly wish I could go back and live in the 80s and 90s as an adult.

From chats with friends, a lot of them like older games for the same reasons. Not only the modern politics forced on newer games, but large day one patches, on disc DLC, censorship, season passes, online connections needed to run, etc. It all ruins the experience.

Older games are devoid of this.

I find it especially infuriating when an old game is re-released and they censor it. Why?

Not the first time I've heard recollections of higher ups ordering stuff to be deleted / destroyed. I wince every time I think about this.

Not even just games. The BBC and other TV channels (all over the world) would order things be wiped so they could re-use the broadcast tapes. Meaning there are certain things that are now likely lost forever. >_<

Aww. I liked Toad.

Hopefully they rig it so you can access Sonic from the character menu by pushing a special button or something.

@chucksneed
So firing staff and then importing cheaper foreign workers?

From the XBone onwards I've not been able to comprehend any of the decisions related to the Xbox brand or MS (the same applies to its weird dumb decisions regarding newer Windows OS).

At this point, whatever the brand was, has moved so far from where I am, I don't even have a reaction. It's been over a decade now of... Weird marketing repositions and... stuff?

The glory days of the Xbox 360 (I own four of them!) have been long gone for a long while now.

I got lucky and bought this gor £40 way back when. Finished it. Loved it. Sold it.

To this day I regret selling this masterpiece.

Sure, I can emulate. But that outer sleeve, the ectra artwork on the internal boxes. The whole package was wonderful.

I wish a company would do a licensed reprint that worked on original hardware. Alas, Sega did indeed lose the data. How feasible would such a thing be using data from retail discs?

Not LRG, I don't want CDRs. But a reliable physical manufacturer.

@Bakamoichigei
Duly noted! The only slight problem is I made the barcodes a little too big. I've come to find the system prefers smaller codes. So the success rate for these is not as high as they should be. And I'm too lazy to redesign them. I'm not on socmed, but I have an old Twitch account I might try pming you on (I assume it has PM).

@slider1983
Everyone who knows me for long enough has to endure it. Kind of like a rite of passage. I visited one editor's home and hid 5 tiny hand carved soapstone animal statues from Africa in various rooms. About the size of a Lego man. When I got home he texted saying he found an animal - did I leave it? I told him I'd hidden 6, and all weekend him and his family searched. Eventually I revealed there had only ever been 5! ROFLMAO!

@KainXavier
High-five fellow MQ enthusiast! o/

There's also a degree of "platforming" - I liked how you could bounce between platforms over lava or water, and in some instances had to navigate a mini platforming maze. It wasn't particularly challenging, but it made the world seem more robust and interactive.

And good call with regards to emotional depth. It's definitely more than Zelda. Reading the interviews with Ted Woolsey on its creation gave me a deeper appreciation for it. He explained how they were specifically trying to make it as a means of encouraging US console owners to take a chance on more complex RPGs. So it has a lot of the RPG staples, but in a bite-sized chocolate box sort of set up.

Here's an interview with Woolsey where he talks a bit about MQ:

https://web.archive.org/web/20090904042649/https://hg101.kontek.net/localization/localization2.htm

@Deuteros
The sad thing is the paper and inks are not even that expensive given the ratio of how much the overall game now costs.

Modern gaming has lost its way.

@The_Nintend_Pedant @jygsaw

I bought a boxed complete copy two years ago for £45. I wanted the experience of playing through a SNES RPG without dropping £500 for a popular one.

Honestly, I liked it a lot. (I've already finished most of the other big SNES RPGs.)

I used the map and manual to work out where some secret missable items were. I played casually, maybe an hour every day or two. It was fun looking over the map anticipating future areas.

I had forgotten how nice SNES manuals were. Lots of colour and nice design. You don't even get manuals anymore! Sega's Euro manuals sucked. My Sony manuals are mostly b&w. Just nice to flick through this one and browse the many items.

It had special damage graphics for enemies mid-battle, which I don't recall FF6 having.

Music was nice.

Dungeons weren't stressful.

It could get a bit difficult - status ailments could wreck you fast!

It moved at a breezy pace. Every couple hours you'd swap your secondary character.

There wasn't a great need to grind.

It felt like a really upmarket NES JRPG but on SNES. Cute simple graphics.

I am a Mystic Quest apologist. Not amazing but chilled out fun. Six months later sold it for £45. No regrets or complaints.

7 / 10

EDIT: I can see why others wouldn't like it, but it satisfied a very specific itch I had. I just wanted a simple RPG run.

Nothing like a little existential dread!

I knew this about SD cards, since they'll lose data you saved to them if they don't get power periodically. (One of my ODE cards died like this.)

But I assumed modern games were safe.

NOTHING is safe.

Except maybe ROM chip based cartridges?

I played this briefly and concluded it was better to wait for a patch that would likely never arrive.

I was wrong!

That day arrived!

That day is: TODAY!

I'd update my 3DO ODE right now, but it's getting repaired.

@Hexapus
Not be confrontational, but they're not trashing Twin Peaks. I don't think. The quote is from Swery, the creator of Deadly Premonition - a really good horror game which seems heavily inspired by Twin Peaks (the first Deadly Prem is highly recommended if you've not played it).

I interpreted this as Swery trying to deny he took inspiration (even though he quite obviously did).

If you're a fellow enthusiast of Twin Peaks, I feel you might just really enjoy Deadly Prem 1, and the quote would carry a diff meaning and context.

Full disclosure: I've got the series but not watched it yet. I'm making an assumption just on the screenshot you refer to.

I yearn for a crash.

Used to love visiting car boots, or private ads, or browsing eBay, and picking up cheap, loose oddities, or the odd controller.

There was joy simply in playing and enjoying the B-tier games that maybe never got any love. Sure, mint condition Link to the Past is pricey for the nostalgia, but all the other unheard of games and peripherals?

A controller for 3DO used to be less than a tenner. Now it's £80.

Absolute insanity.

I miss the days before speculators got in on the hobby. Old games were a cheap way to have some fun. I once bought Skyblazer for a fiver. Boxed. Turned out to be one of my favourite SNES games. Now? Costs a small fortune. The only way to discover stuff now is emulation.

A sad state of affairs.

As someone who also freelanced for Future Publishing, I am disgusted that my work might be used to train AI due to a partnership between Future and OpenAI. (I know my independently published books are used against my will, because there was a leak about various digital books harvested by OpenAI a while back.)

My contract with Future made no mention of AI because this was decades before AI was even a thing. Had I known this might come to pass, I have serious doubts I would have provided Future Publishing with any work.

I don't agree to this at all. Sickening.

The contract had vague wording about transmission of work via not yet invented technologies, but that vague wording said nothing about training Artificial Intelligence, or alluding to anything remotely similar. I wonder if there's a case to be made, demanding it not be used?

I was secretly hoping they'd name it Alan.

Anyone else kinda wish they'd also done Big Trouble in Little China?

A cinematic masterpiece and the only game for it, on 8-bit micros, was beyond trash.

Sadly I doubt design conventions in 2025 would make for a good game now. I'm thinking about the original Goldeneye versus the later X360 / PS3 / Wii remake, and how bogged down it was.

The era that gave us Tron 2.0 had less bloat than later years. Essentially, I kinda wish I could have seen certain games made back then, with earlier design sensibilities. I'm not sure you could organically do that today, given devs and publishers would inherently be aware of changes in creative philosophy.

Though there has been a resurgence in indies adopting older styles of design. So who knows?

@SlangWon
How is it I've not heard of this before?! Thank you, sincerely! Straight to the top of my wish list.

I also bought Hover Revolt of Gamers a long time ago, described as a spiritual successor, but I did not enjoy that. Played for a couple hours then just kinda gave up. No energy in it. Drab opening area. Just ugh.

@SlangWon @N00BiSH @retrogamer1
There was recently an update to one of the OG Xbox emulators, so JSRF runs near flawlessly. Xemu. You can mod JSRF to run widescreen and upscale the internal resolution.

It looks gorgeous.

You still have the old camera system, but it's OK.

@KingMike
This is absolutely my kinda thing. Thanks for the link! I've long wondered about the GBC infrared, so look forward to going through their notes.

@Razieluigi Good points regarding the ROM thing. How mysterious.

How would one extract the SRAM from a real GB Camera? Can I do this with my Analogue Pocket? Is that a thing?

Barcode Battler Analogue Pocket Core presumably to follow soon after!

I just bought one. £27 mint condition. All 32 cards. If it was someone here, tah muchly.

The funny thing is, despite the simplicity of the screen, it has a stupidly obtuse abd complex set of mechanics beneath.

You can cast magic spells. They're not listed on screen, but in a manual, so you can look up F5 and see what it does and through a bewildering series of button presses activate one of the 10x function spells (they just augment numbers).

You can also get "passwords" from enemies. And inputting the 5 digits activates stat boosts.

And some cards have hidden strengths against others.

None of this is displayed. The reliance on the manual reminds me of Temple of Apshai on the TRS-80.

In 2025 it's archaic e-waste.

In 1992 it was outdated and crap.

In 1985 though...? If it had released much earlier, it would have been more interesting.

I do kinda love it.

Has anyone reverse engineered it? Because barcodes carry hidden parameters, based on how the official cards interact. (Hookshot item triples Link's damage against the Wart enemy card for example - how? Why?)

@HoyeBoye
It was. No one I knew liked it, yet they doubled down on pushing it.

Before it became a mandatory inclusion it sold like 6 mil I think?

What an intro! 🤣 (I think we all knew a dubious house like that...)

I've been wanting to drop the hammer on a Barcode Battler for ages now. They're about £25. But so many are missing cards.

Also... The idea is probably cooler than the reality.

I do want to play that Zelda game though.

I really like the idea behind the BCB. If it could have generated simple graphics it might have worked better.
The concept was better realised with:

1) Ultraman on N64, where GB carts and the transfer pak would generate characters

2) Monster Rancher (PS1), where CDs would generate monsters

3) Vib Ribbon (PS1), musics CDs generated levels

I'm just fascinated by the idea of other objects in the world creating the gameplay inside your game, depending on what you put in.

There was a PC game called Virus (I think?), which was supposed to create levels based on your HDD data, but it never really worked as advertised.

I guess I'm still salty about what they did to Steel Battalion.

I will never cease being amused by Kinect. I immediately thought it was a terrible idea and hated it. Everyone I interacted with online thought the same.

Wikipedia says 35 million units were sold. Why? How?! Who was buying this trash?

@slider1983
I feel the conditioning goes back much further (centuries), and is a deeply rooted part of the culture and national psyche.

Two interesting Japanese phrases are (meanings copied from online):

1) "Mono no aware"
Japanese term for the awareness of impermanence or transience of things, and both a transient gentle sadness or wistfulness at their passing as well as a longer, deeper gentle sadness about this state being the reality of life.

2) "Wabi-sabi"
Centers on the acceptance of transience and imperfection. It is often described as the appreciation of beauty that is "imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete". It is prevalent in many forms of Japanese art.

One example of the above is a famous haiku, about how Mt Fuji is permenant, but everything else is like the temporary clouds at its summit, coming and going.

The other English speaker at the GPS, Damien Rogers, gave a great example:

Nintendo set up a temporary online thing for the Mario anniversary. They made it clear it would shut down. At the end Japanese players were tweeting, saying they had fun and thank you for that. English speakers were horrified saying they can't shut it down, they need to preserve it. (He discusses this in one of the embedded videos above.)

So there's an acceptance of things not lasting. You saw it also with the SFC Satellaview. Games which were "broadcast" and only available for a short window.

I feel anxiety just thinking about it. In Japan players generally accept this and even see merit in it. Even their Kit Kats have one-off annual flavours that never come back.

Joseph also mentioned once needing to convince a collector that it was worth preserving his collection. He succeeded, and it was preserved, so it's worth trying to change the mindset.

I'm generalising here, and painting with broad strokes, but when you dig into the history you find that the "conditioning" isn't even a recent thing.

There's historical examples of ukiyo-e paintings being thrown out and foreigners saving them because they saw value in them.

I feel like it's less a deliberate attempt at conditioning, and simply how society's norms and values evolved over centuries, due to countless different historical events. At this point though you'd need an anthropologist to examine things. I'm just going on a few shallow readings from different essays.

But anyway. The GPS are getting there, and slowly things are changing.

@slider1983 @gingerbeardman

LOL - it sounds almost conspiracy theory-ish. The reality is, I think, more mundane. It's not like some maniac politician sat down and deliberately tried to create an Orwellian dystopia. It's more that these rules were maybe fit for purpose a long time ago, in a different age, and they're now extremely outdated, and without having been updated.

There's also a lot of complex interlinking factors.

So, firstly, here's something that may surprise you. Every screenshot of a game in a magazine needs permission from the copyright holder. I've googled a random issue of Famitsu on the Internet Archive:

https://archive.org/details/weekly-famitsu-no.-211-january-1st-1993/Weekly%20Famitsu%20-%20No.%20211%20January%201st%201993/page/n49/mode/2up?view=theater

Notice how every page has a little copyright disclaimer for the publisher of each game. You don't see that on UK or US magazines. Also the Internet Archive has special dispensation to host old materials, which are uploaded primarily by people in the US. If the GPS was caught doing this, they would be in big trouble in Japan.

So here's a fun game. Every time you come across a Japanese games magazine, take a look and see if the pages are giving the same copyright notice at the bottom.

There's genuinely no freedom of press in Japan.

Look up also Japanese conviction rates. It's rated at 99%. Just think about how crazy that statistic is.

So, Japanese copyright... It's very strictly enforced, and the end result is the law - by extension - allows companies to control what's published. So here's two examples:

1) Professor Kishimoto, the creator of Pac-Land and Famista baseball, was approached by journalists in Japan to be interviewed about Famista, which sold millions in Japan. Namco forbid the interview and any coverage of it. They control the narrative in Japan because they control the copyright regarding those games. He specifically asked me to interview him since I would be publishing outside Japan, thereby circumventing Namco's reach.

2) I had a Japanese agent talking with publishers to get my books translated and sold in Japan. Lots of interest! Every publisher though said the same thing: every time a game is mentioned, we would need written permission from the rights holder of that game, otherwise they could kick up a fuss and get the book pulled from shelves.

So it's not quite so much the government prohibits discussion, it's more like there's some really old copyright laws in place, and because those laws are strictly enforced, it allows companies to control any coverage of their material. And the government is slow to update the laws as technology and society progresses.

It results in some really weird loopholes. So you can't copy the files on a floppy disk to back it up, that's illegal, but you can make a high resolution magnetic scan of the surface, thus preserving all its data.

So the GPS has to deal with lots of antiquated rules, and antiquated wording of those rules, and part of their goal is lobbying to have the law updated.

I'm just scratching the surface here, but once you dig into the minutiae of it all, some of it's crazy.

The Saturn outsold the N64. In Japan anyway.

Still my favourite console of the 32-bit era. If only because it had games that to this day you cannot find anywhere else, not even a similar experience to those games.

I often wonder. With a time machine and suitcase with £10 million, could one do anything to change the Saturn's fate? A fun thought experiment.

I do not represent the GPS, I am just the author of this piece, but to add a small reply:

Firstly, thank you to everyone who signed up as a member or made a donation. The response from the community has been heart-warming.

A statement / update will be made in time, regarding all the points made here, on social media (Twitter, Bluesky), and forums such as ResetEra and Reddit, plus plenty of emails.

Every comment has been read and all the feedback is appreciated, and each of the points is being discussed by the GPS board. Your feedback has been heard and taken to heart, especially ways to reward supporters with something tangible.

Many of the questions require a detailed response, hence the brevity here. As an example, the point by @BBOOKK about Ritsumeikan - they are already part of a collaborative consortium, with a detailed back story.

The GPS looks forward to sharing more details with the community going forward.

So what? Keep developing for it. Just keep on trucking.

This sanctimonious virtue signalling is ridiculous.

Reminds me of the Dreamcast homebrew community. They would BAN anyone who even so much as mentioned the hacked katana SDK or anything using it, like the Mega Drive emu from the Smash Pack.

I was banned three times for mentioning it. Bunch of weak willed soft jawed weaklings. WEAKSAUCE!

Compare that to the Xbox hombrew community. Stolen SDK used for everything. Zero ***** given. Virile heroes all of them.

How about the Wii community grows up, stops caring about something completely irrelevant and unimportant, and carries on business as normal?

Be more Xbox and less Dreamcast.

Seriously though. Why do they care? If you're rocking the homebrew channel you're using it to play illegal ROMs anyway. Lol

EDIT:
what @-wc- said 🤣🤣🤣

I keep meaning to play this.

Which version is best?

There were countless reasons to import during the 16, 32, and 64 / 128 bit eras. Censorship, region exclusives, release dates, more content, 60hz speeds, etc.

It was pricey, and frustrating knowing the poor quality of PAL. But it was one heckuva time to be alive.

@jamess
"I’ve played the games on Saturn and it’s all pretty mild… The thought the we’ve regressed from then due to platform censorship standards is just depressing."

I agree completely - my thoughts exactly. Censorship is unacceptable, needs to be stamped out like the first burning embers of a forest fire, and the fact we have regressed to a more puritanical stance is extremely depressing.

I lived through the senate hearings, and the Jack Thompson years, and every media scandal trying to scapegoat games, and I'll be damned before I accept the madness of those who have infiltrated games companies.

Enough is enough with this puritanical crap.

Just to reiterate: the leaked Xbox 360 remaster of Goldeneye is amazing. I bought a modded X360 just to play it, and it was worth every penny.

The remaster shows how fantastic the original's level design is. It's a masterpiece.

An official NightDive remaster would have been incredible.

@jamesamong007
What real game? A game for a modern system I don't own, haven't followed, wasn't even aware existed until now, and was too lazy to look up and compare?

That real game?

Fair enough I guess.

I voted for Last Imperial Prince. It was programmed by Yoshio Kiya of Falcom, and resembles one of their pkatform RPGs.

Is that dialogue actually by Ford?

I might be wrong. Or crazy. Or paranoid.

But parts of this have the whiff of AI.

(And if I'm wrong, then this is exactly what I predicted - a form of AI psychosis where one can no longer tell what is real or not.)

@Amsteffydam
I agree completely. I was joking, btw. Though I appreciate this wasn't obvious. I'd watched The Big Short recently, and so the "assets" was sort of a riff on people who view art in that way. Not sarcasm, but a dry irony? As in, I was sardonically mimicking them.

I only own games I want to play and only buy to play or, for some rare stuff, to upload to Internet Archive. Dropped £200 on Dive Alert Matt's Vers to upload manual scans, for example.

I have a private GC collection, but it's so easy to run the ISOs from SD card, I might as well sell them if collectors are crazy enough to drop triple figures, and there might be a price crash. On the other hand I might hoover up some deals if people are "dumping stock".

I have less than zero interest in another SNK fighter. But even as someone with no (negative?) interest, this is incomprehensibly bad. Just random unrelated pet celebs the Saudis own? I don't even know who they are. (I don't watch football nor do I... Listen to DJs?)

I stand with SNK fans in support. FREE SNK. ✊

Glad I sold Chibi Robo recently. Should I dump my current GC assets? Or hold fast in case access to these titles drives a surge in people wanting to own the real thing?

I should probably just play and enjoy them.

@Lowdefal - of all the things that influenced this list, Baldur's Gate 3 is certainly one of them.

This entire list is nullified also by the inclusion of Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2, which is what... 2 months old? They even admit this in its entry.

Vox Pop fails again. I don't think the plebs, proles, gopniks, or rest of the peanut gallery actually understands what the word "influential" means, and so just voted for what they really, really, really, really happened to be enjoying when the poll went up.

I feel the curators should have put some effort into filtering stuff like that out. How can a game which is not even 100 days old have any influence on anything at all?

@NinChocolate
Beautifully said. I went online looking for comments and, sadly, found plenty supporting it. Unsure if they were AI or not.

Nothing feels real anymore, does it?

"If you're on pretty much any social media platform right now" - thankfully I am not, and now more so than before am I glad not to be. (My old FB account is still up for fam & friends to access, but I don't visit it unless someone sends an attachment needing downloading to desktop.)

The internet was fun, I dipped into it in the 1990s. And it was good for a while. But today the internet is dead: AI has flooded it with dog**** content, which is then crawled by countless AI bots to generate clicks, thus telling the AI algorithm that AI content is what's wanted.

It's dead. It's now made by robots for robots.

This website is about the only place still clean enough to step into. Everywhere else is turning into the worst toilet in Scotland.

I love the fact that bounties are starting to appear for the preservation of this rare stuff. Money talks, and it'll encourage people to dig and keep their eyes open.

I'm hoping this news encourages someone to fan-translate it. Segagaga is higher priority, but this is the sort of bizarre experimental title I loved on DC. (Alongside games like Seaman and Tokyo Bus Guide.)

We can but wait and hope.

@jygsaw
It had Rise of the Robots. Which is awful. But it shows the system could handle two large sprites attacking each other at least.

I mean, the monochrome GB had SFII, so if you're willing to sacrifice enough, you could squeeze it on I guess?