mariteaux

@MontyMole Harmonix did drums first for what it's worth. There's leftover drum gem models and localization text in Guitar Hero II's demos (so early 2006), RB1 launched in November 2007 with drums, and World Tour, the GH game that added drums, wouldn't be out until about a year later. If your point is more about them having the five lanes with two cymbals and also double kick through Expert+, RB3 would add all those things and support actual e-kits, not just controller facsimiles. Harmonix was interested in expanding the rhythm gaming thing to new instruments/new levels of realism long before Neversoft, and to a greater degree than them. None of that is to say Neversoft's games were bad, because they weren't, but just that I think Harmonix did more in the vein of actual musician mimicry.

As a big rhythm game person, this is the first I'm hearing about some panic at Harmonix about a Beatles Guitar Hero. Honestly, Harmonix's design philosophy just suited what Apple Corps wanted better, I imagine. Neversoft GH was flashy, filled with ads, filled with boobs, meant to be big and songs more difficult for the sake of being more fun, while Harmonix's games have always been more understated and more about properly fulfilling feeling like a musician. TBRB was notoriously labored over, with impressive results, but I can't see it having turned out well if Neversoft had helmed it. There's a reason Harmonix's two band games are artsy and Neversoft's three band games are all rock spectacles. Fundamentally different design philosophies.

I'm just aiming to get through every game I own, or at least play them until I'm sick of it. Last year was brilliant for PS1 and PS2 games I've owned for a solid like 20 years now, but there's still plenty to go. I also got on a kick of buying cheap PC games from CEX every time I flew out to see my girlfriend, so I have stuff ranging from Red Faction to the first Bioshock to all the 3D Universe GTA games (which I've already beaten San Andreas several times) to eventually play and a ton of others.

I also have a whole coffee maker box of NES games, plus some Genesis games, I gotta sell off. I legit don't care what I get for them, I haven't played them in almost 15 years. I just need the space.

I can complain about Microsoft plenty, but they've made a lot of historical computing and Windows bits open-source and I deeply respect that. Good story.

@FauxD There were definitely Atari games by 1982 that had a shelf life longer than two minutes.

@NatiaAdamo 128 bytes of RAM, but yeah. It's a constrained programming dream/nightmare machine, depending on how you look at it. In fairness, I don't know how big their ROM sizes are. You can make much more complex games by just having bigger ROMs and thus more space for sprites and code, but nevertheless, you still need to be pretty efficient with your render code to get the kinds of shots they showed off.

Hot. The visual fidelity and innovation they can squeak out of the Atari these days is absurd. I heard Circus Convoy was fun, hopefully this one is too.

Even the name seems to be a blatant attempt to confuse and trick people looking for PCSX2. Very classy stuff.

@Sketcz
> Something I've found is I dislike very recent modern sports games, because they're excessively complicated and just not fun for me.

That, I understand completely. I get the same feeling from racing games. I devoured Gran Turismo 2, but GT4 and onwards are just so detailed that they just bore me. Older sports games are definitely a lot simpler and less flashy as well, even towards the simulator end of the spectrum, so I gravitate towards them also.

@h3s Of course. 2004 was the last season that Madden had 2K and also Sony's own NFL GameDay series to compete with. On the arcade end of things, Midway was also releasing NFL Blitz entries into the early 2000s, so yeah, there was a lot of competition and no doubt that kept Madden actually caring about how well their game played compared to everyone else.

For what it's worth, I don't think it's that Madden wasn't competitive on the PS1, but that 2K stood out on the Dreamcast alongside games like Virtua Tennis for being so singular. Especially by the time the PS1 engine matured by 1999, Madden was getting 7 and 8/10s basically across the board, but yearly releases do create a "replaceable junk" impression in people's minds no doubt.

@Lanmanna And that's a damn shame.

@farrgazer Nah, fair question. For me, I want something that feels good to play and has a bunch of modes and unlockables regardless of what kind of player you are. I'm not a big sports fan, I don't follow specific teams, so games that can do that number nerd simulation thing but also have more arcade-y modes (like Madden with Mini Camp and Two Minute Drill) appeals to me. There's also obviously just "are the core mechanics of the sport satisfyingly simulated?". Is the rushing game in football useless? How's the kicking meter? Does running around feel good, or is it stiff? How are the tackles? You can apply that to games based on the sport of your choosing, of course.

I also appreciate detail work. I like how every team has a custom modeled stadium and that there's secret unlock stadiums, and secret unlock and historic teams. I like that there's a sense of goofy fun in the Madden Cards that you can play for cheats or to give yourself an advantage. The music in the 2000s Madden games are really good, and same goes for most of EA's 2000s sports games. Just signs someone cared and tried to make a game that would appeal to anyone in the mood for football go a long way.

@Lowdefal You can say that about literally any genre. Not adding a ton to the conversation.

I do hope people reappraise vintage sports games in time. People treat them as generally disposable Goodwill junk but I've been playing through Madden 03 lately and there's a lot of love and detail work put into the stadiums and unlockables. I get it if you're just not into that sport, but some of them are legitimately really good games.

@antdickens Working fine now, thank you.

I seem to be unable to submit answers. Normally I use Vivaldi with uBlock, but even on a new install of Firefox with no adblocker and no addons at all actually, the submit buttons just seem to get stuck on "please wait".

I think this is exactly what I want from Atari. Maybe the excessive merchandising is a little tacky, but I'd rather Atari be all in on the iconography of their heyday than try to be a serious console developer now. The 2600+ was such a smart move, hats off to them for it. And they do still make modern reimaginings of their old games, which I'm told are pretty damn good, so really, there's something for everyone.

@JackGYarwood I guess we have different definitions of fascinating.

@Damo It's not about it being niche, it's about it being substanceless. There's no actual news here other than some guy starting up a vanity publishing company and intending to make a game at some point in the future. This is fluff. Not every article has to be heavy-hitting or anything, but y'know, what's the actual story here? Not a hardware mod, a homebrew project, or a fan translation. A vanity company with his channel name on it and no product to sell. Cool for him I guess.

With all due respect, is a YouTuber with 13k subs launching a vanity game publishing company with basically no information about their first game out really newsworthy? Did he pay for this article?

You always love to see it. Release all the source code, especially stuff for consoles.

A YouTuber will do what benefits a YouTuber. "New Commodore" is a vanity thing marketing nostalgia and platitudes to a growing population of older people who feel more and more dread for the world every single year. I am not impressed with a single thing I've seen out of this "revival" and I don't trust the guy puppeting it.

My friends and I found Pac-Man World 3 really bizarrely amusing when we played it together on stream. I don't expect the level of sassy writing to be quite as high in this remake, I do hope for just a bit of that. Honestly, we loved Marvel character Pac-Man. It was just such a funny and strange juxtaposition and for a character that's normally a blank sheet of paper, that's kinda what we wanted.

@Lanmanna A NAS is a storage box. That's all it is. You can host backed up Web pages anywhere, both locally and on servers. wget is a functional, if kinda rudimentary, way to do it. Browsers can save pages, either just the HTML or as MHTML archives that include page assets like CSS (though usually not images). Archive Team has tools that are built for backing up sites in what's called WARC format, which is much more thorough in what it saves. You can use page archival sites like archive.today and its numerous other domain clones. The tools are numerous, but there's many people have a vested interest in making sure you don't know they exist.

Daily reminder that, while the Wayback Machine is invaluable, it is a single point of failure for millions of man hours of work on websites that people trust too much. Saving Web pages is dead simple in 2025. Always keep your own copies if you're concerned about stuff disappearing.

@Quick_Man "No no, see, it's only those people at fault, not me, despite the fact that I am also a party in every single piece of drama that surrounds me." Sure thing, Jan.

Look, stenzek is hugely talented and I don't wanna talk bad about the guy, but him getting into drama with people on the Internet and threatening to [x] with Duckstation? Must be a day ending in y.

@Damo Correct, a few specific runs of badly manufactured discs are aging badly. I never said disc rot "wasn't a thing", I said it's overblown. This is not affecting your average DVD, music CD, or console CD.

> The perils of 'disc rot' have been well documented, with poorly pressed CDs and DVDs eventually becoming unplayable over time.

And is extremely extremely exaggerated. Long term data loss from non-volatile memory is a thing, sure, and that's what the article is mostly about, but disc rot is basically exclusive to a handful of badly manufactured discs. Your average PS1 game is going to outlive you.

I think this is fair. As long as they do everything they can to remedy things with the people who gave them money, all is fine.

It doesn't get mentioned in the article, but CRKD is run by some of the same people who worked at RedOctane, manufacturing the original GH peripherals. It's nice to see that it's coming from the people who made the original ones so good.

@RetroGames This company put this person's stolen work out there, charging for it, with their name on it--that's not "oh hey what a simple mistake, we'll blame the guy who did it". That's a company being sketchy. Companies are not your friends and they are here to sell you products. Hold them to the standard they hold their own employees to.

I also find the "just give them credit" thing pretty laughable. Translations are not some trivial task, they're a lot of work. Being put out for free is nice until they're not being put out for free. If someone went and made money off my work and then went "well, we'll credit you ", I'd find that to be in poor taste, to put it politely. I'm the reason your game is playable by anyone who can't speak Japanese, and I get a thanks in the credits? Nah.

With all the stories I've read of LRG's quality control issues, I am amazed anyone trusts them with anything, devs or players.

@winlundn I expect a slightly less inaccurate headline. I've heard this from a few people now--you can't have it both ways. Either this is something noteworthy worth writing an article about or it's not that serious and we can let a tiny, insignificant, non-representative sample size slip. If it's one, I expect better data. If it's the other, it doesn't need to be an article, either from CR or from Time Extension.

I wouldn't go too crazy extrapolating anything out from these numbers. It's a sample size of about 2,000 people for two "interviews" each, but the results don't say how those interviews were actually conducted. I'd assume through phone, in which case you have a sampling bias towards people who would willingly do a phone interview right there.

I say this as someone who majority listens to CDs and majority plays PS2 these days. I really don't think that 14% number is accurate. 4,000 people versus the 335 million in the US as of the most recent survey.

Edit: methodology at the top of the PDF. Yeah, I don't think you can actually take anything from these numbers.

> The survey was administered by NORC at the University of Chicago through its AmeriSpeak Panel to a nationally representative sample. Interviews were administered both online and by phone.
>
> 51% female; median age of 47 years old; 61% white, non-Hispanic; 36% 4-year college graduates; and 60% have a household income of $50,000 or more.

Who said I owned one in the first place? lol

Bold idea that someone won't manage to make porn mods for one of the console versions.

@lordlad I don't expect anything--but the fact that they can shows you that it's not some out there idea. There's other examples of companies releasing patches for old games. The platform holder bit is irrelevant--this is a rerelease of the same game from the same codebase. It would take no effort at all to patch the game to include modern networking niceties, because it's already been done. It's been paywalled that's the issue.

I would be completely unsurprised if a gigantic company used cheap faulty parts because they thought it would make them more money.

> Given the time that has elapsed since its original launch, it might seem a little optimisitc to expect SNK to patch it in.

Valve is still patching their games to this day. Some of those are a lot older than 2013.

Greed, and pretty hilarious greed at that. Paying to get more functional multiplayer, we sure do live in 2025.

@Daniel36 Thanks for your contribution to the conversation by voicing your complete disinterest in the topic, I guess.

Cool article. Immediately sent it to my girlfriend, who is big into Okami.

Cool! I think it's worth mentioning somewhere that this is not a recent update. The article (and the hacky video) makes it sound like this is some recent update, but it's actually from April 2023, with a few more updates since then. I was wondering why this was being reported on like it's a new thing when it's actually something that slipped under everyone's radar, apparently.

Thank you Sega, very cool!

@RupeeClock And what about the millions of people who have played the game and have zero experience with SM64 speedrunning? It's absolutely good context to have in the article, explaining the three different completely unintentional run types along with the intended two and what makes them more or less challenging than each other.

@romanista The runs are very very different. Shorter categories mean you can use riskier and more optimized strategies for each star, because if you fail, the barrier to restart is much lower. Longer categories require more in the way of nerves management--if you're an hour into a 120 star run and you're on world record pace, the stakes are going to be a lot higher than if you're playing 0 star and you're only three minutes into the run on WR pace.