mariteaux

@PXAbstraction Can't imagine a whole lot, if I'm honest. Ironically this is the kind of thing generative AI is really good at making.

> Occasional face-to-face meetings in the Midlands or London.

So I assume this means limited to UK residents only? I think I have the writing experience with retrogaming and English skills required, but I'm US-based. If this is a UK-only position despite being remote, that would be good to clarify somewhere.

"Breaking news: guy has opinion." Stellar work as always.

Another home run from John Champeau, it looks. If anyone here doesn't know about his DOS arcade remakes as Champ Games, look into them. LGR had a video about them and they're still damn impressive. Cool that he's now turned to Atari homebrew with Galagon and now this.

@Guru_Larry For presentation, big agree. The games aren't emulations is my issue with them. Very very close, but if you try to play them at a high level (say, using Pac-Man's patterns), they often don't behave like you'd expect or how they should. I also think the game selection is usually pretty weird per volume, but of course that's a moot point in the age of just emulating all five, just play your favorites. I don't know if they're my favorite (Namco Museum DS edges them out for me, excellent game selection, proper emulations, historical stuff, and a "strategies" game trainer that helps you, say, find the citadels in Xevious or get the hidden items on each floor of Tower of Druaga, which is extremely useful for memorizing each game), but I can get why they're people's favorites.

More to the point of this article, I'm glad someone's trying to chronicle all the entries. There's so many and they're all a little bit quirky in their own way.

Smart for them to put "big tech" in quotation marks. I suppose it's a cute idea. I can't see myself wanting a $500 dumb phone that plays C64 games, but I guess props for being the change they want to see in the world.

Disappointed at the lack of actual Doug or mention of Doug in this 90s cartoon-inspired game called that. On a serious note, style is dead on. Looks super neat.

@climbingjudo I don't like generative AI to be clear. I actually agree with the things Damien says about it nuking the environment and producing nothing of value. I don't agree with randomly bringing it up in the context of retrogaming things. I think that's tacky. There's a time and a place for these things. I think Damien should go make an anti-generative AI news site (multiple of which I follow, since I don't like AI!) if he wants to write about those things rather than forcing his opinion into mention of someone's creative work. That is also tacky.

I really don't know how we got to the point online where if you don't immediately upfront state that you hate something, people assume you're boosting it. I think that's a poor showing on your part. I can dislike multiple things at once. I can have a more nuanced opinion than "them vs us" or "my """side""" can never do wrong".

@Damo I'm not sure if you've noticed, but we're talking about a Mega Man art book and not what social media, news outlets, retailers, and sports teams are up to. What this is is shameless and I think you cheapen this person's hard work and Time Extension as a resource by constantly being a grief merchant.

As someone who does art, I would find it hideous if I worked absurdly hard on something like this and then someone used "antidote to AI slop" to describe it. Actually, I think it's lovely without having to bring the thing that makes everyone upset all the time into it, but whatever gets ya clicks, Damien.

@slider1983 It really does seem like a way to target fan projects for daring to use tools. I agree there are massive ethical, environmental, and structural issues with generative AI tools, I think they suck, and I hate corpo stooges like Sam Altman and Dario Amodei as much as anyone. I literally pay for Ed Zitron's newsletter. I am the most sympathetic person in the world to anti-AI sentiment. This kinda stuff makes me side with the people using the AI tools though. My issue is not with the small fries who are using what they've got available to them; as long as they're doing good translations, is what it is, do your thing. My issues are with gigantic, money-backed bullies and bullies with platforms, and this feels like bullying after a fashion, just in a very "hey, we're just reporting on what's going on, man" wink wink sorta way. Shameful to see.

@LinktotheFuture It shows up on my feed several times a month. "Why click on it?" I often don't. I am still shown these things.

Can we get an RSS feed that excludes the constant "this project used generative AI" slop stories already? This is not news. I don't even like generative AI, but it's a tool that exists and people are going to use it. I don't really care all that much that people use it so long as the end result doesn't suck, certainly not enough to want to read about how [x] random project has stirred up randos on Twitter over it yet again. This has seriously put a damper on my enjoyment of an otherwise great site, one I was even thinking of giving money to, but this is tiresome and it's repetitive and I have zero interest in watching someone's personal vendetta fill my feed.

I like modern Atari just fine, but I'm sure I can get a watch I'd actually wanna get caught wearing for that price. I sure do love hi-vis green.

"z-plain"
Z-plane. It's a plane. Plain means there's nothing on it.

Otherwise, phenomenal work. Homebrew devs continue to be beasts, just like back when game devs actually built games and not just asset engine flips.

@BulkSlash Arguably, the open-source community is the one place where the mass training of generative AI would actually make sense. If it's already free for reuse, maybe within limits, but certainly open for reuse, then there's really no legs anyone has to complain about it other than Internet people love to complain.

I hope Time Extension knows, these articles are far more what I'd call slop than anything this project does. I'm tired of getting notifications about Twitter slapfights. This is not news. I don't care that a bunch of people on Twitter reply to a generative AI thing with kwirky reaction GIFs. I don't like it as much as the next person, but this is every day at this point. No, it's not important, no, this is not informative (what's the information? People don't like AI? we know), and no, it's not interesting. Write about something worth reading about.

@Martin_H I hate to tell you what site you're on, but...

@Kushan It is adorable watching millennials go through that "I'M NOT OLD" phase as everything they like gets old and they get old, and things spiral into increasingly unproductive Reddit-tier arguments about the actual definition of "old" or how we should be better segmenting "old" into more meaningful ways to describe "old". All it means is old. It's an objective thing. The 360 and PS3 are old. Nothing wrong with it! But people get really amusingly upset at being called old. Insert Abe Simpson "with it" clip here. (I was never with it even as a kid, so I'm just enjoying the ride.)

@MontyCircus There's always a choice whether or not you want to engage with literally anything. The idea that it will be so pervasive and so hard to detect that it is literally unavoidable sounds like something Sam Altman would say to sell me something. I suspect we're actually closer to the end of the "shove AI into everything" trend than the start, given how deeply unprofitable it is on every level and how desperate AI companies are starting to act.

@JohnnyMind I've started taking a pass reading about anything generative AI on here. Yes, it's an issue, yes, I don't like it, yes, I refuse to use anything with it, but the people who crusade against it are honestly just as unlikable as the AI bros sometimes. I really don't care if spicy autocomplete is used to generate some code for a thing as long as that thing works solidly and isn't full of security holes. Life is too short. I keep up with it from a few places just fine (Pivot to AI, Ed Zitron, etc), it's just this kind of stuff is just another flavor of Twitter argument and those are never worth reading.

I'm sure that's the only reason, Peter. Is it funny that EA topped BP and all these other companies? Yeah, it is a little silly. What the poll really measured is who has the worst PR, and people's entertainment tends to be what's right in front of their faces. EA's been doing shady stuff since at least the 2000s. Mass Effect might've been part of it, but c'mon. They were plenty underhanded even then and we knew it.

I mean, this was unfortunately inevitable. An ad-free ROM-sharing paradise with no speed limits was never going to last. Still awful news though.

What I'm curious about is what'll happen to hShop, which was the Erista service I knew about before I found Myrient through it. I haven't heard anything concrete, lots of people on Twitter saying it'll be fine, but I think it's just speculation at the moment.

So it's just N64s in different colors, then? And maybe the shape is different? A little bit of a gimmick, but I guess you're already paying premium for their stuff, so.

@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.