metaphysician

I beat Team Asano could make a remake of FF6 without needing to break it into 5 releases to hope to pay off its bloated budget! ahem

@Noone2025

1. A console expansion vs a prebuilt computer, released 30 years apart, is not an apples to apples comparison

2. Who said the Steam Machine is a success?

This is just a generally ill-conceived idea. There are basically two valid reasons to use a license:

1. To adapt the actual story of the license, as a thing with its own merit

2. To leverage the brand appeal and nostalgia to draw interest to an otherwise independent work

Neither makes any sense with these video games. They have no story worth speaking of to adapt, good or otherwise; and they are sold old and primitive that they have no recognizable brand imagery and any nostalgia cadre is way past the optimum marketing demographic.

Would that Sega would also release an actual Outrun Collection. Surely the existence of a conventional collection wouldn't hurt the ( tiny niche ) sales of an arcade mockup unit.

@Serpenterror

My assumption would be the Chernobyl answer: "Because its cheaper".

@bobrocks95

Probably because book translations tend to be professional efforts done to get paid, whereas game fan translations are done out of some kind of pursuit of 'glory'. Which can be a fair and legitimate thing, but easily gets twisted into toxic directions. . .

Doing a licensed tie-in between Virtual On and A Certain. . . feels weird. Like, yes the manga has robots in it at various points, so it technically can work. But still, how did this actually come to be a thing? Did Sega think "We want to do a licensed game to buff interest, lets find who we can reach out to"? Or did whoever managed A Certain. . . merchandising at the time just happen to be a big Virtual On fan?

Silly question: are any Sakura Wars games actually currently on sale? Or is this Sega pulling a Sega, and they're 'celebrating' a game that they won't actually make available to the public?

@KingMike

I'm not disagreeing with you at all, or at least not trying to. I'm offering my own viewpoint on why you see some of the odd, seemingly inexplicable behaviors you were noting, vis a vis "why people work on translations". Basically, that a chunk of the people working in the field are doing it for the "wrong" reasons, as opposed to a passion for the game they are working on. I am, perhaps, a little blunt in how I describe those reasons.

@BionicDodo

Which I think is a two-sided coin. On one hand, its perfectly fair to go "We're a big company, why should we make games that any indie developer could make?" Make something bigger, that a small studio couldn't do, and better take advantage of your resources.

On the other hand. . . prioritizing "big vs little" is not the same as "make only one single type of game ever". Nintendo demonstrates that you can make "big" games and not have them all possess a single indifferentiable style and genre. Versus the Sony stereotype of "not being able to tell any of their games apart, because they all have the same style and theme and often gameplay".

@KingMike

It kind of feels to me like there's a toxic dynamic rife in the fan translation community, where a lot of people seem motivated by 'Main Character Syndrome' more than anything else. Like, its perfectly fine to want to do something out of the pursuit of acclaim. However, when you act outraged that other people might also try to translate the game you are working on? Suggests you feel entitled that other people act in support of your pursuit of acclaim, rather than for their own entirely-legitimate ends.

@Sketcz

There are games I can think of which handle difficulty in a similar way. . . though they aren't FPSes in any real sense: Thief 1 and 2 ( and possibly others ). Higher difficulties don't alter enemies or gear or damage, they just add more objectives like "Acquire a minimum amount of loot" or "Acquire a key to unlock a particular door" or "Don't kill anyone".

I suspect the aversion to this kind of difficulty is because it does not apply to multiplayer in any conceivable way. Thus you can't transfer the work on single player difficulty to the inevitable "monopolizing all the dev attention" deathmatch mode that tends to afflict FPSes for decades.

@Daggot

The irony is, this "no one would think of this" problem solving is also something done by AI. This is actually why no one uses neural networks to design electronics: experiments in doing just that resulted in weird, incomprehensible "solutions" that had a habit of only working for the exact narrow problem defined. Think "the electronic layout relied on capacitance between different portions of the circuit board to function", or the like. Yeah, it technically worked, but when the results consistently required more effort to decipher and generalize, than just doing the solution yourself would. . .

@AdamGibson

I think the underlying issue, across many types of media, is that people have the popular impression of "Executive Meddling Ruining Art". Which is logical, since that's what people hear about. However, we don't hear about those cases because those are the only thing that happens. Rather, we hear about those because, in the cases where "executive meddling" is a neutral or positive influence? Nobody has an incentive to talk about it. A director isn't going to say in an interview "I wanted to put a really stupid scene in the movie, but the suits nixed it. . . and thank god for that, because that was a dumb idea on my part".

@Deuteros

This sounds to me like an argument that, for very large corporations that conceptually have a ton of individual businesses? They need structuring that accounts for this risk, so that at any given layer of the company, management only "sees" big pieces of the pie that are too large to treat as unimportant. Rather than one hundred business endeavors each bringing in a million books and thus irrelevant, they see one "Retail Gaming Division" that brings in 100M in revenue and thus does matter. Matched, presumably, by those divisions having heads who have a proprietary interest in advocating for their turf.

Granted, this likely is a solution that would lead to its own problems, like increased inter-division turf wars.

@Xerox1919

This. I think a major fallacy this is revealing is the number of people who confuse "Sony" with "the entirety of the video game medium". Which is all the sillier coming off a generation where Nintendo dominated the console industry.

@MARl0

OTOH, there is a difference between being six months late vs six years. Likewise, between running late, but with steady ongoing communication and clear evidence of progress, versus "dropping off the map". Neither of the latter cases necessarily involve fraud, either; they can simply be the result of poor management and excess ambition.

My top advice to people on crowdfunding remains: always treat payments to an unproven developer as a donation, never giving money you aren't happy to see vanish. And all developers are unproven until the actual organization they set up to do their first crowdfunded project has actually delivered.

@rastamadeus

I'm pretty sure the reason boils down to a combo of:

1. The most recent update of SOTN was paid for by Sony and thus can't be used

2. SOTN is available enough to be a lower sales priority than games which have never been rereleased

That logic shouldn't last forever, though, as the Switch ecosystem size expands, and "There's a BC version available digitally on PS4" stops feeling as contemporary. Its only a matter of time before Konami has M2 do a new version in some form ( most likely another collection ), and this one will obviously be full multi-plat like all their other collections.

@Zybex242

Something that strikes me as funny with the AI discourse: the "proximate vs larger scope" matter is backwards of how it typically runs. Usually people focus on the immediate at the expense of the long term ( ie, "I like cheap stuff" vs "all the jobs disappeared from my town ten years later" ). . . but with AI, it seems like people spend so much time focusing on Larger Scope Issues ( theoretically or very real ), that they completely overlook the more immediate and practical issues of "Its not very good at ____". Like, never mind high minded ethics: if you are trying to oppose rampant AI abuse, its really useful to be able to point out "Um, Amoral Corporation, did you notice that its not actually making you money?" That's a valuable strategic card that lots of people seem to completely ignore.

@Martin_H

Um, since when is 35 pounds supposed to be unrealistically expensive for a full color hardcover book? Big coffee table books like that often cost that much or more, and have for a long time. This isn't an airport potboiler with tiny print on cheap paper.

@Quick_Man

I mean. . .I wouldn't be quite so sure that GTA6 will actually turn out a good game. However, in the worst case scenario it will certainly at least be $80 worth of disappointing "we waited for this?"

@BellaGoth

I have a suspicion that Sega's ability to leverage their vast catalog of IP, is hamstrung by internal turf wars and grudges that never actually went away. Hence why their biggest successes in recent memory are almost all from Atlus. . . because Atlus was an entire separate and self-contained company that they bought.

@Yamanii

More importantly, its source code for a game that is 25 years old. There is no way this leak threatens their product or marketing plans in any meaningful way.

Yes, there is the fair desire to maintain proper security ( especially since this could theoretically be the result of a system breach, not an actual leak ), but the "sue everyone detectable" plan feels excessive. Barring potential non-public information anyway ( ie, they have actual evidence that this is an ongoing security risk and not just some staffer or former staffer anonymously releasing 20 year old files ).

@jygsaw

More retro-releases ( and "collectors editions" generally ) should focus on that kind of ancillary content. As opposed to either 'nothing' or 'tchotchkes'. Sadly, dives into the history of a game or series requires an actual interest in said history, and far too many publishers and developers are indifferent to even their own past.

I have mixed feelings on Work For Hire. On one hand, it does often feel wrong that a finite and typically small payment buys the creation of a semi-permanent rentable IP. On the other hand, I don't view abolishing WFH as a good thing if it just pays royalties to a designated "creator" at the expense of all the other people involved in creating a work.

( On the other other hand, there's cases like with Quintet, where creator rights leads to media becoming lost. . . )

@Daniel36

I would say the grand prize would be a quality remake of Ultima 4, that keeps the essential structure of learning and practicing virtues, but which has modernized QoL so its a little less archaic.

So, what was this studio doing in those 15 years between ending operations and actually declaring bankruptcy? Did "effectively wound down" mean there was still a rump doing a trickle of work ( or receive a trickle of royalties ), thus staving off the need to formalize things? Or was there a legal fight over the company that had to be resolved before anyone was allowed to officially shut off the lights?

@Tom_Gamer

In my case it reminds me of Raveloft: Iron and Blood, where you didn't steal moves but you did gain them. . . and lose them. Mind, I have to assume Polyfighter will have a faaaar better implementation than either.

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.