I bought a Miyoo Mini Plus a few years ago and was shocked when the SD card came preloaded full of ROMs. Even more shocked that they've all gotten away with it for so long.

Just ship them blank, they're absolute idiots for leaving themselves open like this.

I think running that poll here is going to have some pretty heavy selection bias. We're all enthusiasts here, pretty far removed from the average consumer.

Loved the first two games. I've been waiting two decades for this patch.

Rollback? Crossplay?

When I was in high school, the third game in my favorite series, Shin Bokura no Taiyou: Gyakushuu no Sabata, didn't get translated. This became my villain origin story.

I convinced my parents to sign me up for Japanese lessons on the weekend just so that I could one day play it... and then didn't get all that far because it turns out learning a foreign language is hard and I had too much actual schoolwork to keep up with.

But a while ago I started learning again just for fun since there are so many great resources online (Renshuu is the one that really helped me). And after all these years I just got my hands on my childhood holy grail, as well as a few random impulse buys I found for cheap.

The big caveat with retro games though is kanji. Either you're playing something so old as to have no kanji at all, which might sound easier but trust me you will struggle to even identify where words begin and end. Or you're looking at pixel fonts that you will fail to recognize yourself even if it's a kanji you should know, and OCR will often have a hard time with these too. (Doesn't help that my own choice of holy grail makes it even harder to OCR while engaging with the game's unique gimmick)

A lot of modern games have furigana now, so for purely learning purposes you'll have a much better time starting with those. Retro games are just a lot harder for a learner, but if there are specific games you have a strong attachment to that might help you with motivation.

I love Panel de Pon. I hate that it was repeatedly robbed of every opportunity to just be its own game. It deserves to be its own game.

Praying for the day they bring it back and keep Lip in it.

It seems like there are two schools of thought regarding where to draw the line.

One is to have a hard cutoff date set in stone forever. Retro is 2D pixels, or 480p CRT, or whatever was my childhood because I am obviously the center of everything. This is pretty obviously flawed for anyone who thinks about it for more than three seconds.

The other is to have a sliding "N years/generations ago". This is better, but I still think it's slightly imperfect because of how technological progress is slowing down. If we say retro is 20 years ago, consider if that holds up when we look backwards to what would've qualified as retro back then. When the Wii was new, the NES would've been retro but the SNES wouldn't have been. And I would argue that SNES->Wii is a much bigger jump than Wii->today. Looking to the future, will games 20 years from now look sufficiently different from games today, will it make sense to call the Switch 2 retro? I doubt it.

I'd like to propose a more dynamic cutoff where the rate it moves forward slows down. Something like "hardware that is older now than the NES was when said hardware came out". By this definition, Wii would become retro in 3 years from now, while Switch 2 won't be retro for another 40 years.

NES might not be the right anchor to define my scale around. It feels elegant, but I also feel like Wii should qualify by now. Maybe we bump it up to SNES, but that feels weirdly arbitrary (so was NES, any line is arbitrary, but when I say it feels moreso hopefully you get what I mean). I dunno, anyone who thinks I'm onto something wanna take this and refine it?

@PopetheRev28 So do you just want them to refuse to cover news like this? Is that where you draw the line, weapons manufacturers are cool but a documented case of bit rot observed in the wild is too far?

If you truly care about ownership and preservation, this is an opportunity to have a real conversation about what this means for the future. Dismissing real news as 'anti physical propaganda' is just sticking your head in the sand, which does the cause no favors.

The last main series game, Puyo Puyo Chronicle, released in 2016. Here we are a literal decade later and Sega has done nothing but rehashes, teasing fans with the expectation that a real game is right around the corner, any day now, this time it's totally gonna happen...

At this point I don't even want to hear Sega talk about the IP until they are ready to announce a main series game.

Sounds like we just can't agree on an objective definition of 'failure'.

The PSP certainly was profitable, especially in Japan. So by that metric it can be said to be a success.

But it did a lot worse overseas, and lost a lot of momentum in the latter half of its lifespan. Viewed next to its competition, it got absolutely clobbered by the DS.

I think when calling it a 'failure' today, they're really saying that it failed to leave behind a legacy. Sony's first entry into the handheld market did okay, but just okay wasn't good enough.

@Guru_Larry It's because the term originated to describe the post-SotN Castlevanias, splitting them into the Classicvania era and Metroidvania era. It wasn't until much later when the genre saw a resurgence that people started referring to other games in other series as Metroidvanias.

Even if affordability was how the Game Boy beat the Game Gear, it would've been kind of impossible for Sega to justify going backwards with new hardware that's worse than the preceding product. They already had the Game Gear and there was no going back from that.

AMOLED? Feel like that completely misses the point.

Just give me an SD slot and headphone jack.

@RupeeClock Funny thing about Oracle of Ages/Seasons is that they weren't actually using any kind of GBA features. The game just checks to see if it is running on a GBA, and if so, opens the door to the Advance Shop. So if devs wanted to do a similar sort of SGB bonus unlock, it could've been done in all sorts of ways that wouldn't have necessarily needed this or any other SGB feature.

I don't see shmups ever making their way back into mainstream popularity. Catering to their niche makes sense.

Better than anything Sega has done for the series in the past eight years.

There were a lot of problems with the Vita, but I think no matter what dedicated handhelds were always on their way out. Console games' development budgets spiraled out of control to the point where there was just no room for handheld side projects anymore. In fact I think Sony was correct to just keep prioritizing the PS4 and let the Vita die, rather than prolong the inevitable.

I knew this was bogus. Even if a few characters might not be good to bring back, there's a very easy solution to that: make new characters. That's what I want to see in a new game anyway! Disco Kid was fantastic and I want more where he came from!

I just wish TGM4 could see the light of day. It was developed, completed, and location tested, but then TTC decided they didn't want anything non-Guideline to exist.

@Poodlestargenerica It's a shame how many games tried and failed to meaningfully put their own spin on it (and Deroon DeroDero is honestly one of the absolute worst), but I must object to the assertion that Tsu is anything but the greatest competitive puzzle game ever made. Such a simple ruleset has led to enough depth to keep a tournament scene going for 30 years now.