metaphysician

In addition, Mother is a 'concluded' series rather than an active one. The main time Nintendo gets particularly quick on the draw vs non-monetized fan games, is when those games are perceived as directly competing with Nintendo's own active products ( ex: AM2R, various Pokemon fangames ). No such risk here, unless Nintendo actually did decide to produce a Mother 3 official release or "Mother Anniversary Collection" or the like.

It really needs to be easier to have a plaintiff declared "tendentious", so that they cannot file future lawsuits without prior court oversight.

I'll be blunt, most of this anti-Hamster talk sounds to me like "I am angry Hamster charges more than I personally want to pay!"

@Deuteros

Sure, the issue is that I wouldn't be buying it as a PC, I'd be buying it as a mini-console. The other features add to the cost, but they wouldn't add usefulness for me.

Not a huge Amiga fan, but just looking at the selection of games. . . okay, its more expensive than I'd really want, but I am tempted.

I am legitimately excited by this. Thief is still one of the best stealth games to this day, and the main reason I don't replay it more is because of the effort needed to run it on modern PCs. Its the perfect candidate for a loving remaster.

@PinballBuzzbro

Yes, because Baldur's Gate 3 exists.

This certainly does sound like a really good one, though, which received a lot of love and care.

@Exerion76

Eh, this is true but not exclusive to the Master System. Look at some late NES games like Kirby's Adventure, they also look better than "8-bit". The Master System is certainly more powerful than the NES, but some of its apparent advantage is more about comparing late-gen games vs earlier games. Or probably also comparing "games from a company that emphasizes graphics" vs "games from a company that doesn't".

Paralysis of Choice is a thing, but my unprofessional observation is that people in the gaming community have gotten worse at making choices over the last few decades. I put at least a chunk of the blame on marketing and design that specifically encourages completionism- it basically teaches people to not make choices, but instead simply "go for everything".

@Bot_Bot_69

Online deathmatch FPS? ducks

( I don't really know much about Red Dwarf, but I imagine you could pick an incongruous match, and make it work by being parody of that incongruity. . . )

@HoyeBoye

Definitely a dream. There isn't really room for the three consoles we currently have, which is why Microsoft has been having such a hard time. Maybe if everyone abandoned the AAA overspending wars, but good luck that happening anytime soon.

@Sketcz

Don't forget Hudson, who actually did make a console ( the PC Engine ). All were probably inspired by the same common factor: seeing how successful Nintendo was with the Famicom, and wanting to get a piece of that market.

@AllieKitsune

I doubt he was The Singular Villain Responsible For All Evils, but based on his established personality? At the very least he certainly exacerbated the toxic internal culture.

Re: "What good is a product if no one can afford it?"

Some people like to attribute a conspiracy to end ownership. While there is something of a war against ownership, I don't think its an important factor with AI. Most of the products AI competes against are themselves services. The actual explanation is almost certainly both simpler and dumber: the entrepreneurs and investors pushing it simply don't care about the long term, intentionally or not. As long as they can make money off it now, it doesn't matter to them whether anybody can buy it 5 years from now. Which is why the AI Bubble has started to contract a bit against a backdrop of increased corporate skepticism: the businesses being sold on AI are starting to expect actual results, not just vague promises.

One youtube channel I don't see mentioned yet, but which should definitely be of interest to regulars of this site: Basement Brothers. PC-88/98 Paradise in particular is an excellent deep dive into the Japanese PC scene of the 80s and 90s. If you are a fan of Falcom, you definitely shouldn't miss it.

Sounds like they designed the prototypes purely to serve as showpieces for investor presentations and the like. They had to look good and superficially function in controlled environments, but that was it. Either they never got to the "make an actual product" stage, or they never meant to in the first place.

There is actually a valid reason behind "Why not delete it?": especially in older, more tightly-coded works it may not be possible to delete stuff without introducing unwanted side effects. Get rid of 50 lines of code for a feature you dropped, and bam, something else breaks. The missing code shifts the position of other lines of code, which causes some bit that references a location to point at the wrong memory; or the lack of code to run through changes the timing and exposes a race condition. That kind of thing.

@breach187

Sadly, I suspect that this is the point: the goal isn't to release a neat fanmade port. The goal is to get publicly martyred for reasons of reputation and personal gratification.

@DestructoDisk

Problem is, that would have just resulted in Sony eating their lunch anyway with their vastly superior system. The hypothetical "32X Genesis CD Combined Unit" might have been cheaper than a Saturn, but it would have also been way less powerful and probably still too kludgey to get strong support.

@sdelfin

I don't know if their arcade business hurt their hardware design, but I'd say it definitely hurt their software. At least, it seems a lot like Sega undervalued "franchises", and especially franchise continuity as a tool for driving sales. Look at the popular first party games on Genesis, and then look how few of them have any prominence on the Saturn. I suspect that Sega thought of games as a tool for showing off fancy new hardware, rather than the other way around. Which is a problem when the majority of customers absolutely are interested in hardware solely as a way to play games.

@WaveBoy

Its logical, though, given how the PS1 a CD drive and could thus stream a lot of content from said drive. The N64 meanwhile was designed around in-engine graphics much moreso. Less need for bulk memory, but more burden on the processor.

@WaveBoy

Unlikely, for two reasons:

1. Any game coded with a locked FPS cap, will still have that cap. No amount of hardware jiggery could change this, it would have to be patched in the software, game by game.

2. Even for games that could be run at 60 FPS, it might not actually be a good idea. Many games are coded around an expected frame rate, and exceeding that results in anything from cosmetic glitches to crashes.

The most I could see is a console using frame generation to interpolate fill-in frames to raise the measured FPS up to 60 when it falls short, but that would obviously only effect visuals and not game logic. I have no idea whether it would look good or feel good.

@h3s

Also, I don't recall hearing of any cases where Nintendo arbitrarily rejected crossplay. Its usually the other party that was the issue.

( "Not allowing Nintendo IP to be used on other platforms" is not the same thing. )

Sigh, you make me wish again that the legal tangles could be sorted so that a "Quintet Collection" could be released. . .

I'd be fine with a remaster, as long as its broadly available this time.

@Johnny_Arthur

I feel like the story of Retro has an additional message, though- when Nintendo found out they had purchased a mess, they didn't just go "Oh well" fire everyone and turn off the lights. They fixed things, at no small cost in effort.

@tektite_captain

I suspect its at least partly an artifact of the SoJ vs SoA feud. Retro games getting the cold shoulder in the present because they were made by the "wrong" faction, or popular in the "wrong" region. Conversely. . . well, I don't think its a coincidence that the Sega classics to get the most love and attention, are those that came out of AM2.

@NatiaAdamo

Would that actually be a problem? My understanding is that, while the CD-i disks are not CD-ROMs, they are part of the "rainbow book" of formats. Which, to the best of my knowledge, means they should be readable by standard CD drive hardware, at least if it has the right software.

@RaeDawnChonglingBay

Sadly, some people just like to watch the world burn. Destroying something that brings other people joy is the whole point.

I would be a little skeptical of claims like "80% complete". Those hinge entirely on how one measures "completeness", and its very easy to pick metrics which make a game look much more closer to launch than it actually is. For example, if you mean "80% of the levels of the game are playable", that sounds good. . . until you learn that most of the assets are still alpha assets, and nothing has gotten balancing or QA yet.

@Pak-Man

I suspect there would be nostaglic demand. . .but sadly, the fact that they were all(?) licensed probably means its impossible.

@Kushan

Also discrepencies between different models and revisions and production runs of the console, even when new. While people often simplify the matter as "consoles are one single fixed hardware" ( and compared to PC, this is substantially true ). . . iyd not quite technically the case. I'm comfortable with saying that "perfect emulation" is achieved when any imperfections between the emulator and real hardware, or the same or less than between real hardware and real hardware.

@Gs69

This was my thought, too. I did end up getting the Neo Geo Mini, once I ran across a copy for cheap enough. . . but I know I would have played it a lot more ( and more comfortably ) if it were a conventional mini console with controllers.

@PKDuckman

I suspect whoever has the final say is a believer in "Why should we encourage people to play old games, when they ought to be buying our newest greatest GAAS MTX delivery mechanisms instead!"

@Martin_H

I would keep optimism tempered, since even if the AI bubble burst is here, and real, and doesn't cause larger economic collateral damage. . .

Prices are always fast to rise and slow to fall. So, expect the manufacturers to cling to high prices and the hope of sales at that level, as long as possible and still further. Especially versus small scale buyers like these kind of boutique manufacturers, who have less negotiating power to call a bluff in a way Big Silicon would have to care about.

I know there have been games since with technically more advanced animations. . . but I'm not sure if any game has ever really matched Darkstalkers for the complexity and creativity of its spritework. Which is sadly why its probably doomed to never return, since Capcom doesn't want to go back to using old school sprite sheets, and the transformations that are ubiquitous in Darkstalkers would make a modern 3D engine melt.

@Azathoth

I think that's a broader issue with "scenes": the perceived sense of community and common bond acts as a lure to predators who wish to exploit that environment, unless there is someone actively monitoring for and enforcing good behavior. Which is difficult enough when you are dealing with something as structured as a fan convention, nevermind with much more amorphous communities that are only barely that. Sadly, it doesn't matter if 99% of everyone just wants to play fair out of shared love for a topic.

@KingMike

Silly question: is there a reason the MBC2 is poorly emulated? Normally I'd expect a common mapper chip to be one of the things emulated well, unless it had technical reasons to be challenging.

@McShifty1984

If so, that just circles back to the question "So why has Sony not made a new entry in a series, when they are literally producing a TV adaptation?"

If I had to make a WAG, its the "wide range of goods and services" part that sparked the hostility. The Bond IP holders might not overly care about James Pond, so long as they are a decades old mostly forgotten couple of video games ( even if they got the occasional rerelease ). The prospect of a whole lot of merch showing up, all based on a parody of the Bond IP, by contrast? Had them contemplating ways to technically-legally stop it.

Silly question: how is the story of the game? Because I don't actually see anything in the screenshots that makes me think "unbearably bad graphics".

@James-Bond

Eh, I think the Konami influence kind of goes both ways. On one hand, they are definitely the reason why Kojima got to make basically nothing but Metal Gear once MGS proved a smash hit. OTOH, without Metal Gear and the Konami money it brought, I am skeptical Kojima would have ever got the budget needed to pursue his cinematic dreams.

As for comparisons with Miyamoto, I'd only do so with some reservations. They have such difference in philosophy that its basically 100% apples vs oranges- Kojima being a cinematic storyteller first and foremost, while Miyamoto largely rejects the idea of 'narrative' being important in the first place. Miyamoto almost certainly is the more influential figure, but that doesn't mean Kojima's work isn't also important and influential- art forms need specialists as well as generalists.

@jygsaw

I have read some speculation that it might be due to bad blood at Sony with David Jaffe. Can't speak to accuracy, but based on his public behavior I find it at least plausible that he'd leave bad feelings in his wake.

@tameshiyaku @badbob001

So, basically, a game where one or more players are agents in the field, and one or more players are Mission Control. It sounds like a neat concept, though it would be tricky to make the coordination fun. Maybe have multiple different types of "person in the chair", which have their own sets of information. Like, one player gets the "Satellite View", having the broadest overwatch of the site, but the least detail and no direct ability to intervene. Another has the "Drone View", where they watch things from a drone hanging above: more details and possibly the ability to target strikes for support, but a smaller view subject to viewing angle and obstacles. A third player has "Hacker View", where they can see through subverted cameras and hear through comms, but they are limited to what can be perceived by the systems they subvert.

The main use for Galaxy is simple convenience for downloads and updates ( and also cloud saves, perhaps ). Lots of people ( waves ) like to support GOG and its no-DRM philosophy, but don't feel the need to entirely eschew convenient launchers on a regular day to day basis. It is, admittedly, nowhere near as good a launcher interface as Steam, in most ways.

This is an incredibly stupid waste of money and effort, akin to putting a fancy lock on a freestanding gate that doesn't actually have a fence attached to it. I have to assume its because of some zero-nuance internal policy at Capcom, where its part of the 'Official Procedures' that "All games released on Steam get Enigma".

An adventure game "run" by an LLM is an interesting idea, and one of the more worthwhile ways to apply AI tech to video games. You just would need to actually put more effort than "Connect yourself to an existing generic LLM", which is what these people are doing. If you want to actually work, you'd need to train your own LLM towards the task of "running an adventure", as opposed to "be a generic chatbot".

@-wc-

I think there's a fairly simple reason: Valve has both a theoretical source of secondary revenue ( increased sales on Steam ), and a large war chest they are willing to spend on experiments. Thus they are willing to sell a Steam Deck at a loss, and provide a lot of value for the dollar. None of the potential competitors have the same willingness to take the loss on hardware, and thus they can't provide a technically-better product without also a much higher price tag.

@-wc-

The bigger issue with labeling it a "Steam Deck Killer" is that there is no evidence it ever would even come close. Given that the entire handheld PC market is so far about 6M sales total. . . and the Steam Deck is 5M of those. It is highly unlikely that this Ayaneo device will ever come close to outselling the Steam Deck, even if Valve does discontinue it for some future product.

I think, if you could boil down Sega's problems to a single issue? It would be that Sega was fundamentally a hardware company, born of the arcades, and so they prioritized solving problems via hardware. In this context, the whole culture conflict between SoJ and SoA was at least exacerbated by SoA primarily dealing in software. . . and succeeding as a result.