@WhoderMan

That would require adding 3+ more emulators to the same collection. Probably more trouble than its worth for one product.

@FR4M3

Breath of Fire 2

@Jucksalbe

No, the games Edia are officially releasing are the first two 'Legend of Heroes' games. Not the same thing.

@PKDuckman

Is it possible that, somewhere along the way, Capcom ended up owning said manga?

Silly question: has anyone ported Civ 1 to the Neo Geo itself?

i actually find the idea that Nintendo "isn't using AI" to be 100% plausible. At least in the sense of their main game development. They probably don't do anything stupid like deliberately stripping out AI features in stuff like OSes and browsers, but meaningful incorporation into development? No. Nintendo is ultimately a very conservative company, creatively, and generative AI is exactly the kind of techbro toy that they'd logically be super skeptical about. Especially since its main sales pitches are largely about being able to do things they don't want to do in the first place ( reduce the cost of ultra production value photorealism ).

Now, are they experimenting with AI in some way? Probably. . . but its their own proprietary models ( because I don't believe for a second they'd trust their internal development data to some black box third party LLM ), and it'd be focused on experimentation in how AI tech could be applied to games, not to game development. Not trying to get lazy on the work of game development, but innovating in making an entire new gameplay concept facilitated by AI. Think "experimenting in LLMs as tool for actual game character behavior AI", to allow for computer opponents in ( say ) Smash Bros to actually learn and adjust. Stuff like that.

( And just because they are doing such experiments, doesn't mean we'd actually get a game as a result. There's no guarantee said experiments would produce positive results after all.)

@jygsaw

I think the key was that, between "TV-friendly edits" and nigh-nonexistent enforcement of age rules at movie theaters? During the 80s there was a nearly ubiquitous expectation of kids being exposed to even R rated movies. Family-friendly cartoon spinoffs were just part of the marketing plan.

@PinballBuzzbro

Its a relatively small community ( or rather, set of communities ), with a specific passionate interest, old enough to have some money, but also at least somewhat isolated from ( and held in poor repute by ) the larger general public. For the right type of predator, that's a formula that adds up to "vulnerable prey".

Basically, don't think of it as a matter of somehow inducing sociopathic behavior. Targeted communities don't create scammers out of thin air, they attract scammers who already exist.

@Thad

I suspect his "business plan" was always "bilking fans of obscure retro games", both on the customer and employee side.

@Shaw_Brothers

I think the issue is that people simply don't realize how much of a quantum leap the CD-ROM was over all prior media storage technologies. Usually improvements are more incremental, but the CD-ROM was anything but ( 600MB vs about 1.44MB for a 3.5 inch floppy ).

So, silly question: why would someone want to use ScummVM to run Dungeon Master? Is the underlying engine used by Dungeon Master similar enough to relevant adventure games to make it an efficient source port? Or did ScummVM at some point decide to morph into a general purpose emulator?

@PKDuckman

It would be a cool idea if it happened, but I really doubt it ever will. For one, Square-Enix is quite bad about maintaining their archives, so I highly doubt a development copy even exists anymore. For another, according to interviews I've read, various pieces of it got repurposed into other game projects, notably Chrono Trigger in this case. I'm iffy is S-E would want to allow that kind of a "behind the curtain" view.

Also, in the case of the better quality of roguelikes, the stages are still "designed", just in a more indirect way than conventional video games. If anything, I suspect the developer probably makes at least as many levels as in a normal game, they just then figure out how to get a procedural engine to put out levels "like" that.

Novelty is overrated. Its more important that a handheld be good, than that it be different.

@Sketcz

I think there are two overlapping answers, actually, and both are given away by the word "monetized" in the advertising spiel. Who is this targeted at?

1. The greedy and/or desperate, for whom it offers a way to make money via monetizing whatever games they 'create'. Which is to say, its a get rich quick scheme, not an entertainment product.

2. The investors, who are really eager for a new stream of user created content that they can rent seek upon.

Yes, technically, but only just. I bought a Japanese copy of Trails From Zero from a Japanese PC gaming website, to use with the Geofront patch. Digital yes, but it was definitely a Japanese game bought from a Japanese retailer, with currency conversion and all.

@Martin_H

I suspect similarly. . . though I'd also bet there is a corollary to this folktale: the corporate culture that ensured Sony didn't produce the Gameboy/iPod/etc.

I still contend that the PSP was a case of a console succeeding in spite of the intents of its creators. Which is to say, Sony barely knew what they were doing and definitely didn't expect it to sell nearly as well as it did. And it did so largely on the back of effort by developers who were not Sony. Which is why, when they developed the Vita, that time they made sure to kill it dead.

And as far as Japanese artwork in the US market. . . I feel like this concern from the execs was mostly mistaken but not completely misguided. There was definitely a strain of "Japanophobia" in the 80s, which was fading but still plausibly in memory. There was also the cartoon market, where there wasn't necessarily anti-Japanese sentiment so much as vast culture clash between the expectations of the art form and the market ( ie, the US cartoon market still expected them to be family friendly advertisements for young kids ). Combine those, and I can understand some execs getting cold feet.

@KingMike

Its been a while, but based on what I had read about the localization of the Turbo-Grafx 16? IMO it was mostly doomed from the start, by the very nature of the development contract linking Hudson and NEC. The way it unevenly shared risks and profits meant that, if anything ever went even slightly wrong, the product line would be trapped. Which is what happened: poor initial sales caught the system in a situation where NEC needed Hudson to pay to fix things, but Hudson didn't have an incentive to do so because they had already made their money.

I wouldn't get too excited just yet. The theorized selection of games would be a giant leap in emulation demand over the existing work by M2.

( Also, it would be an absolute crime if they rereleased Lament of Innocence before doing a generally available rerelease of Symphony of the Night. cough )

Huh, this definitely has my attention. Does anyone know what kind of a rep Neowiz has? Like, do they have any red flags for things like gacha MTX or bad AI-generated translations?

@Sketcz

I certainly also support the inverse, sure: just as more expensive games should be long or replayable, short games should be cheaper. Both are perfectly valid, its the "expensive but short" which I feel is seldom justified and largely an artifact of the perceived "single fixed price for all" market conditions. Though this is making me think of what I view as a separate but overlapping issue: the tendency of customers to apply inappropriately precise and inflexible rules for determining valuation. Wanting a game to be longer for the price is one thing, but deciding something like "A game must be at least 41 hours to justify a $70 price point, because its only 39 hours it only justifies a $60 price point and thus its cost is infinitely unacceptable!" is something else. Something else I see quite often, where value is treated as a hard binary rather than a gradation.

@Sketcz

I see absolutely nothing wrong with wanting the dollars spent on a game to translate into total hours of entertainment. To make an extreme example, a game can offer the most soul-blinding experience imaginable, but if it only lasts an hour with no prospect of replay value? That's a bad use of $80, if that is its price. You'll have one hour of fun, and then nothing until the next time you can afford an $80 entertainment purchase on your budget.

TLDR: Expensive games ought to offer either length or replayability or both.

@Terranauts

Yeah, I take complaints about BlueSky as a high probability dogwhistle.

@Willgraham

While its not a Final Fight collection per se, Final Fight did have a prominent part in the Beat Em Up Bundle. I suspect the issue is that, from Capcom's perspective, there's not a lot of "obviously worthwhile" entries in the franchise to build a bundle. By which I mean, they likely discount Final Fight 2 and 3 for being console-only, and Revenge and Streetwise for being crap.

( Which is a pity, I would absolutely buy a Final Fight collection even if most of the games are debatably inferior to the original title. Though the real gem would be if they included the beta version of Seventh Son. . . )

Also, "original" is an iffy term. Strictly speaking, almost no game is truly 'original', since there is nothing new under the sun. A better objective is to seek to do interesting things with inspiration one borrows from.

@Daniel36

Eh, I wouldn't be so sure about that. I've certainly heard of fan translators who were entirely on the "Stick it to the man" train. But even without that, the bigger issue is simply that a lot of translation projects aren't solo affairs. Absent a clear contract or license defining otherwise, its "owned" by all the people who worked on it. . . and doing anything with it would require all their contractual assent. Which is a problem if even one of them doesn't want to get on board, or is impossible to contact.

This is why it was so unthinkable that NISA bought out the Geofront translations for Trails from Zero and Trails of Azure, since it required a lot of work to make happen. And it probably only did even then because those were gigantic games where that effort was still far cheaper than a fresh translation. . . and Geofront was a professional enough organization that NISA wanted to headhunt, anyway.

@Daniel36

Short version- nope. Copyright is intrinsic with the creation of a work, and a translation is a derivative work. It may be a useless derivative work because of a conflicting copyright protection, but that doesn't transfer ownership. And you absolutely can own a translation, just like you can own the original work.

( Even beyond that, I believe under a lot of countries copyright laws, a translation may even be considered a transformative work. But that's a dicier issue and unnecessary for this matter. )

Based on some quick googling, the answer to "why not just make a CRT" actually is "the parts simply aren't available anymore". As near as I can tell, there's basically only one company that even makes the actual tubes anymore, and only custom orders for specialty equipment. I suspect that there simply isn't anywhere near enough demand to justify recreating the fairly specialized manufacturing needed to make CRT TVs.

@Daniel36

Because they can't just download a fan translation and add it to the game, since they don't own said translation? They would need to actually make a contract with the creator of said translation, so they could buy or license it. Which is multiple giant cans of worms, starting with "Who actually owns said translation and has the right to make a deal for its usage is likely unknown and unclear". Fan translation efforts aren't exactly professional organizations with clear assignation of ownership, after all.

@Grail_Quest

While that would be cool, I suspect its fairly unlikely. The issue being Faxanadu is not technically a random independent game, but a port/remake/reimagining of Xanadu for the NES ( hence the name, "Famicom Xanadu" ). If Falcom were to delve back into their 80s back catalog, they'd probably do a remake/remaster of the original Xanadu instead rather than greenlighting a remaster of what to their eyes is a port.

@Damo

The money does belong to them. They set a price, based on market factors, and the customer base chose to voluntarily pay that money. That said market factors included "an illegal tariff" is ultimately a side issue.

@Damo

That is ultimately irrelevant. It is not Nintendo's job to fix the problem of "American's voted the wrong person into office", whether they happen to have the money for refunds or not.

@farrgazer

This. I had to glance twice and reread it to reassure myself.

Just to be clear, Nintendo does not owe anyone any refunds, because they committed no wrong against any customers. The only party that committed any wrong here was the US government. That Nintendo raised prices to cover an unexpected new ( and it turns out illegal ) expense, does not mean their customers were in any way coerced.

So once again: if you are angry about having to pay higher prices due to an illegal tariff, send your complaints to the US government, and specifically the Trump administration. They were the ones who wronged you.

@Ruka

Or even better: throw shade at the government that enacted and collected the illegal tariffs in the first place. Which I am absolutely certain a sizable percentage of the "How dare ____ not offer refunds!" crowd are doing their best to distract from and apologize for. People who were perfectly fine with a badly-conceive and illegal tariff being initiated in the first place have zero grounds for demanding refunds when illegal activity turns out to be illegal.

@axelhander

. . . I mean, if someone did release a Jaguar Mini, I'd at least want to know the price and iibrary before deciding. . .

runs

@timp29

Eh, not really. Not when keeping in mind that microcomputers were super big in Europe ( and the C64 was the biggest IIRC ), and CDProjekt is indeed a part of the European game industry. Plus, so much of the aesthetics of Cyberpunk 20XX is retro 80s, anyway.

@Thomystic

Speculation: because the driving force behind getting this done isn't a S-E exec, thus it only got done because someone else was willing to foot the bill.

@Ruka

I mean, its not a million miles from Lodoss War, since Lodoss War was basically a play log of a group's D&D game. . .

( Yes, yes, it wasn't technically D&D, it was Sword World. Sword World, at least at that point, was D&D with the serial number scribbled over with pencil. )

@PowerPandaMods

There's Mega Man X Corruption, but while the material shown for it looks good? I call it a coin flip if it actually is finished before we all die.

@Grackler

And you can't even accuse him of being a one-hit wonder, as he's worked on many other interesting and successful games. Basically, he shouldn't doubt for a second that his career is one to be proud of.

@PKDuckman

I still hold to the theory that its a matter of internal turf wars. Different sets of back catalog are "owned" by different execs or divisions inside Sega, and thus are subject to different whims and plans.

@h3s

I think the issue is not advertising, per se, but rather the disconnection between "whose making content", "whose consuming content", and "whose paying for it". The earlier internet was generally healthier because either the creator or the consumer was paying the bills. The more those became three independent things, the more opportunity for toxic dynamics to arise.

Sadly, the one solution that would probably do the most good, is the one which almost no one wants to happen: a shift to a payment model, where the consumer directly pays for content and that is that.

My advice: never crowdfund a game as a preorder, because it isn't one. Only join a crowdfunding campaign if you are comfortable viewing it as patronage- encouraging the existence of a work you want to exist, with all the uncertainty about how that work will turn out. If you aren't comfortable with that money going up in smoke, because the creative process is never certain? Do not join in the first place.

( A potential exception is crowdfunding campaigns where the work itself is already verifiably complete, and the campaign is to pay for the manufacture. In my experience this is pretty rare in video games, though. Its more a thing amongst books and boardgames. )

@-wc-

I think some people suffer an outbreak of paranoid anxiety whenever hearing a foreign language. Sometimes this leads to xenophobia, other times to weird histrionic mishearings.

@AxioMaxiM

Might want to read some news articles. You apparently missed the component price spikes that make now an even worse time for a company like Sega to try and enter the hardware industry than it normally would be.

@RupeeClock

Doubly so since this was a "collaboration", which probably means the people at S-E valued its preservation even less.

@Sketcz

Two words: "Money laundering". ahem

Or possibly one of a couple of other sketchy to outright illegal activities. But the common factor is that they depend on having an actual supply of things whose price can be manipulated. A true unique item like the Nintendo Playstation prototype only has value for itself, whereas something like a 'rare' SMB can be used to impact the pricing of numerous other items.