The mystery is neat, but if it unlocked anything or hinted at anything in the game itself, it would have been datamined a long time ago with so many people looking.

I might go for the Sega version of this. I still have some Genesis/MegaDrive games in my collection, but my original console was a casualty of flooding.

I know next to nothing about the organizers, but I’m happy to celebrate more smaller retro-inspired projects over AAA cookie-cutter blockbusters.

@Glassneedles @pennybags
I’ve edited my original comments to reflect that I may have been wrong about that. Thanks for the correction.

@cupzealous if I could legally buy roms for like $1 - $5 for 1st-4th Gen (golden age), and like $5 - $15 for 5th-7th Gen (silver age, minus 8th Gen), I would happily spend a ton of money.

@deluxehpsocks Anbernic, who is named explicitly in this article, so far as I can tell or recall, doesn’t ship games on their consoles. The most they can be accused of (unless there is other evidence) is copying the look of the consoles they were made to mimic. However, they’re not trying to hide behind confusing names or similar packaging.

It sounds like the copyright holders club doesn’t like this competition and are trying to lump these consoles in the same group as those cheap 1000000000-games-included knockoffs so they can litigate them out of existence.

Edit: It appears I may have been mistaken about Anbernic not selling roms. Some people have reported that at least one of the purchase options came with roms.

Criminal Interference with a Business Model.

Correct me if I’m wrong here, but I’m pretty sure most, if not all, of the big players in the retro emulation hardware scene don’t sell devices with pre-loaded pirated software specifically for this reason.

Edit: It sounds to me like they’re trying to conflate the premium hardware-only devices with the cheap knockoffs that DO contain pirated software, so they can get them ruled the same, then start going after the others under a new precedent.

Edit 2: It appears I may have been mistaken about Anbernic not selling preloaded roms. Some people reported a purchase option with roms included.

@cylemmulo if it’s so easy that literally anyone can make it by typing in a prompt, then who is left to spend money on it?

Plus, you can’t copyright AI output, so convenience is the only cost, and they’ve already removed that barrier…

Went through a phase in my teenage years of importing a bunch of stuff.
Sega Saturn, PlayStation 2, Panasonic GameCube Q, and GamePark GP32 along with several games for each. Half my PS2 collection is imported JP region games.

Edit: Come to think of it, I’ve imported some more recent games as well. Usually when an Asian release is a better value than a U.S. release, such as the Bayonetta Switch releases.

@16bitGeneration never underestimate the appeal of a good looking (and quality feeling) shell.

While I believe uniquely creative artistic projects like this are still possible to create in today’s game factory landscape, it won’t come from any of the large publishers, save maybe Nintendo.

@Martin_H and it never will because it’s AI slop and the kind of people who take those shortcuts aren’t committed to completing them, let alone debugging them.

They got their 5 minutes of fame and this will probably be the last we hear of it again.

“DDownnloaddable nnow”

Brilliant. No notes.

I like how narrowly tailored this is for game saves and easy setup. I also see the benefit in a cloud system, though I’m becoming jaded to the idea of so much of my stuff being in the hands of other people.

I wish there was a local host option, but it sounds like they have no interest in that. I could maybe set up Syncthing but I don’t know how difficult it would be to get working on my multitude of retro devices.

@slider1983 there isn’t a single person in the world that’s jealous of AI. There are many different emotional responses that people do have towards AI, but jealousy is not one of them. It’s like being jealous of a car because it can go faster than you.

> "It opens the door for dreamers to make their projects a reality by tearing down the barriers to entry. We should be all for this."

My thoughts of AI aside, this line reads a lot like “we need to remove regulations so smaller businesses can thrive.” It’s so incredibly narrow minded and doesn’t even try to recognize that there are some barriers that are there for good reason. Like LEARNING A SKILL.

The reason why “AI” has become so ambiguous and negative is 100% entirely the fault of the grifters and scammers trying to position it as the world’s next silver bullet for everything and threatening to take down the entire economic system and ruin lives for the sake of greed.

So yeah. Complaining that it’s sooooo haaaard to use genAI to do your work for you so you can cash in on nostalgia and gullible customers isn’t going to garner the sympathy you’re fishing for.

This is a really great idea that almost makes you wonder why nobody had done it in the past. (If nobody has done it in the past)

Man, I loved the Nomad. I wish I hadn’t sold mine way back when.

@PopetheRev28 then you don’t know U.S. copyright law. There are no carveouts or exceptions for intellectual property infringement for use in non-profit fan works. This does not fall under fair use.

This is really cool, but costs more than I bought my original PSX for back in the day.

They’re retro, but perhaps a different tier of retro. Like they’re the Silver Age of retro gaming, whereas consoles like the SNES and Genesis/Megadrive would be Golden Age Retro.

@RupeeClock I was wondering how much of this could be attributed to physical damage such as contact corrosion, broken traces, or leaky capacitors, if that’s even a thing for this cartridge.

@WileyDragonfly they’re toys for many people. Sometimes you want a new toy.

It’s so weird seeing someone get so defensive over work they didn’t even do.

I’m going to say I probably knew about it at the time, since I didn’t own a GameBoy Color, and went from the Pocket straight to the Advance, so I would have played the Oracle games on the GBA at the time. It likely wouldn’t have been a secret to me as it would have been the default experience. I just have never played the Oracle games all the way through since, so it’s been long enough time that I forgot pretty much everything about the games (other than the overall major plot points), including this secret.

@Shaw_Brothers their target demo has already filled up their free space with their earlier cabs. That’s partly why the company died. The cabinets are neat, but there’s a finite amount of space in a relatively tiny niche pool of buyers. They’ve -never- addressed that.

I am opposed because the news of Sony (and Microsoft) dropping physical media coming at a time just after they removed a bunch of digital content from people’s libraries reaffirms my distrust of the companies handling the transition. I’m not opposed to the medium, I’m opposed to the disregard for ownership, something that these companies have refused to address.

There’s something about the transparent colored plastic that reminds me of the old visors from the late 80s. It tickled my nostalgia a little bit, but nowhere near enough to spend money on any of these endeavors.

Funny, but I sure hope this doesn’t come back to bite them in 5-10 years.

“They have yet to… show a willingness on their part in a way that might be comforting to the owners of that IP.”

Translation: “Nothing short of permanently unusable data will be tolerated.”

@jygsaw it’s honestly for the best. This is the wrong time to make or sell hardware, and consoles have traditionally been a money loser that you made back on software sales. If this group’s being forced to focus on software instead of a hardware pipe dream, they’re going to have a far better chance of success.

Not “legendary”. Infamous.

This is kind of the wrong time to be launching a new console. They could probably get away with a Classic Edition console without it costing too much to manufacture, but a full-blown original new console? I don’t think that’s a good idea. They don’t exactly have the brand recognition that will help them here.

Maybe they go after the cheap Nex Playground sort of system. They might find success there.

@ItsAlwaysSunnyyy yes but snubbing him at the game awards was vindictive.

The audacity of Konami to care so much about this after their treatment of Kojima. They don’t deserve Metal Gear.

@Ruka Zoomers have no nostalgia for Commodore though. That’s the confusing part for me. It’s like they’re trying to use their brand recognition to fill the gap left by the extreme niche of this product, but the type of people who would buy this product don’t have any connection to Commodore.

@Quick_Man Defeat from the jaws of victory? Sounds like they should partner up with AMD.

“This ain’t your granny’s flip phone” they say, to their core demographic of grannies using flip phones that still remember what Commodore was.

Does it deserve to exist? Sure. All novelty items deserve to exist. I just hope they don’t expect to move a lot of product because there isn’t a huge market for novelty branded high-markup legacy phones. It would be one thing if there were a bunch of people nostalgic for a Commodore phone because they grew up with one, but that’s not the case here.

@Thad I perhaps phrased that poorly. What I meant was that there are hundreds…thousands of other stories to tell just in the gaming history space alone, yet everyone consistently focuses on the same handful of them. I want more of those stories to be told.

I’m not going to say this book doesn’t have worth, because it does, but I’m tired of the same story told slightly different. There have to be other stories to tell.

I can’t wait for their follow up statement regarding their tool for detecting copyright infringement detecting everything as copyright infringement because they use the same data set for reference.

I understand their reasoning, but I really wish they’d released a ROM file for purchase. I want to support the devs by buying a software license, but I want to add the game to my MVS emulator cabinet and $300+ for a cartridge I can’t use is a bit much.

Stop👏announcing👏your👏infringement👏before👏you👏release👏it.

This isn’t a prerelease hype cycle sort of situation. Once it’s out there it’s out there, but if it’s NOT out there and you announce it, Nintendo can stop you.

The cartridge color is one of the most inconsequential yet welcomed fixes they could have made.

My answer to which games I’d like to see get a physical release:
Every single Game Key Card title on the Switch 2.

More future content for Slope’s Game Room.

Can’t wait to see how this notorious scammer’s latest scam fails spectacularly.

@leogames there’s a difference between imagery, which is interpreted by the imagination to smooth out the errors and fill in the pieces, a code, which is precision by nature.
I’m not defending AI art, but having a finger in the wrong place, or a color going outside the line usually won’t break our imaginations, whereas a misplaced semicolon or function will break the whole code.
One is about presentation, one is about precision. LLMs are about presentation, not precision.

Zelda 2 wasn’t a failure, it was just released at the wrong time. If it had been released during the SNES era when development had more time and technology to mature, it would be a big hit. Sure it might face some of the same stigma for being different, but an action rpg version of Zelda on par with Super Metroid would have been excellent.

Honestly I think Zelda 2 is most deserving of a complete remake.