@GlamReaper

"It sounds like a ar-gu-ment, it sounds just like..."

After that comment, I'm going to imagine you sound like Koko B. Ware from this point forward.

I can see importing as one of those things that some people never did or never saw. Some people only ever had the mainstream systems too where there was little reason to consider importing. But it definitely wasn't non existent either and I remember seeing it grow. I mean play-asia certainly grew from what I recall it being.

As for me, I imported a lot. I started with a Super Famicom game. Once I imported that, the floodgates opened and at the perfect time because getting the most out of my trusty Sega Saturn required imports. I got a used PS1 in 1998 and got a few imports for that. I then moved on to importing a Dreamcast six or seven months early, which means all my Dreamcast games are imports.

I don't know how it went down, but I find the general notion here to be plausible. The PSP basically forced Nintendo's hand to wind down the GBA early, something I'm still a bit bitter about. And the PSP was very well designed, which was one of the main things reviews praised, despite the fingerprints. The original DS didn't look so good right next to the PSP. So on those two fronts, I could see a text exchange like that as real.

As for the Vita, I've said it before and I will say it again, I think the memory cards hurt it tremendously. They were such an obvious rip off that some people refused to buy the system as a result. I don't know how many, but I was one of those people. I actually was tempted to buy the Vita twice and I had to remind myself the second time that the cards were pure price gouging. The Vita had other issues too like games not really being tailored to a portable system, feature creep, and maybe a couple of others.

@-wc- You can look it up by searching the "Saori incident" in Japan. My understanding of it is that these PC games were not abiding by Japan's obscenity laws. They were basically showing too much. This instance of shoplifting was picked up on by media somehow. That led to public outrage. In the wake of it, producers of these games were investigated. Because they were distributing that game that didn't adhere to those obscenity laws, that apparently weren't being enforced for PC games until this happened, the charge was possession of such material with intent to sell. It was apparently a big deal at the time and led to some changes including some kind of age rating.

@Hexapus Yeah, I think there was a significant moment of generational change going on at the time. And video games were still fairly new as a market segment, and consumer tech was rapidly evolving. The marketing people were too old and out of touch having been born decades before, with the typical outdated assumptions. One of my favorites is the notion than the PC Engine was too small to be released in North America. I already had a preference for tech to be small, and I think that preference was widespread. The marketing people were applying a 50s, 60s, and 70s Cadillac and Lincoln mindset to consumer electronics. I think they applied outdated assumptions to the box art and print ads.

I got into anime several years later, but I remember doing the Suncoast thing. A generation of kids grew up seeing repackaged anime and western properties subcontracted to studios in Japan and South Korea. These were the same kids who were playing Sega and Nintendo systems. So I think you're spot on that they were out of touch in their assumptions of what would be acceptable. I know I already had a strong preference for the anime look in those days.

But it didn't have to be anime. As long as the style was strong and fit the game, it was fair game. Two non-anime covers I remember being among my favorites at the time were Captain America & The Avengers on Genesis with a western comic book-style cover, and Golden Axe 2 which was an excellent Boris Vallejo painting.

In a fun coincidence, I've just been playing some Master System and Game Gear lately. I hadn't done so in a while. I was looking into the Mega Drive game Dahna: Megami Tanjou and realized it was a Rastan clone. That gave me the urge to play.....Rastan! I grew up with a Master System and Rastan was one of my favorites. And I've had a good time revisiting things. The 8-bit era can be rough and the SMS could sometimes be more rough than the NES with game design and 8-bit brutality, but it was fun to own it when current and it's still fun.

@AshleyAshes I know you got the info on this already, but just to add on, this sounds very much like typical web-based router setups. The device is basically hosting its own web page. It's a good method for wide compatibility. But I can see how the language confuses people.

I think it looks quite good too. I prefer pixel-art backgrounds, but as far as 2D sprites over a 3D background, it looks well executed from what is shown here. It reminds me of Metal Slug 6, but better, so far. I have been wondering about this one, so good to hear some kind of update.

@TinPlanetRobot Yeah, it was one of those deals where if you blinked, you could miss it. There was basically the announcement and not much since then.

I really liked hearing how they operated back then. It sounds nice that it was so informal and there was a lot of freedom. Back then, I heard mixed things about the game, but decided to try it anyway. I actually got it around the same time I got Spider-Man for the Genesis, which I really enjoyed. A lot of people will say Spider-Man for the Game Boy is a bad game. And it is definitely a weird game to get used to at first as it has such an odd feel, but I ended up thinking it was pretty good once I figured things out. It's one of my answers to a "bad" game you think is good. I've played it many times since the early 1990s, and it still holds up for me. One of the things that impressed me about it was just how many Spidey elements they included in the game. It had a lot of the signature elements from the unrelated Genesis game, albeit done differently, but they did a nice job of including those things. I think if people can get past the strange feel of the game upon first impression, especially with the jumping, that it's a game from the era that would surprise people as being better than expected.

How fitting that there's an improved — such as it is — version of Strider II for the Lynx and it went unreleased. Perfect exclamation point to this story.

Good to get some insight into how Tiertex operated. Its reputation is not good, and well earned. But I have pointed out for years that there were some occasions where Tiertex managed something decent, which was always a conversion of an existing game so the design was out of their hands. I remember Star Wars on the Master System and Game Gear being good games that Tiertex converted. I actually prefer them to the NES original by Beam Software which has some punishing moments.

@Sketcz Yeah, Ranger X is a fantastic game. And it has some complexity that made it get better with each play through, though it's also a bit too complex for some upon first impression. For example, I've run into people who didn't know about the light sources in the cave stage, the tiny health-restoring fruits in the forest stage, or that there's a way to jump which is essential for beating the tower stage on the harder difficulties. Definitely one of the best on the Mega Drive/Genesis.

@WaveBoy I last played Prison City a few months ago and was drawn to it because of the Natsume vibe of it. And Shatterhand is one of my favorite games. Prison City takes most of its influence from the two Power Blade games. The Shatterhand aspect of it is mostly in the visual design and some of the stage elements like grabbing onto fences. Shatterhand plays very differently.

I highly recommend Shatterhand. It's one of my favorites on the NES and I've gotten good feedback from people to whom I have recommended it.

@notreallyhere Yeah, I don't know this writer's style well enough yet, so I was wondering if this was serious or not. Plus, I never got into Super Turbo, so I don't even know the game's reputation. Though the first red flag was "perfectly balanced" as I figured I'd have heard about it in that case. It's funny how, for you, the giveaway was MvC2 while, it was Fist of the North Star for me. That game is indeed perfectly balanced as long as everyone plays as Toki and knows his infinites. It's a great single-player fighting game, though!!

The controller is the gimmick, but it also makes no sense for a console that was originally conceived to be a low-cost, low-power box utilizing mobile hardware. Cramming a bunch of tech into the controllers was going to bring this affordable concept to Switch territory or beyond, and that was before component spikes. And families can play together on any of the consoles. Orbitals is a co-op game and is Switch exclusive. The Amico is a solution in search of a problem. As was pointed out above, it's beyond parody.

This is a great surprise for me because I love the old Natsume stuff and the new Tengo stuff. I will admit, I haven't played their shmups as much, but I need to catch up on some shmups, so this seems like a good catalyst for that. Tengo has not let me down, other than not putting Ninja Saviors on Steam for four years after the initial release. This looks really good and I love the new visuals and character designs.

I know there was some news regarding a Shatterhand trademark or something to that effect, so I was expecting that too. I wouldn't be shocked to find out it's already in development and next in the pipeline.

Of course Optimus Prime was his iconic role, and I certainly appreciated the voice he brought to the character, but the lines that stuck with me the most were when he was narrator for Voltron. Peter Cullen was one of several giants of the voice acting scene. The aforementioned Frank Welker is one of the others. And those two in particular were linked throughout their careers, and it looked like they had great fun reuniting in more recent years. The voice Cullen used for Mario is so different and it's interesting to hear that.

When someone is so prolific as a voice actor as Cullen, it borders on frustration to actually search through imdb credits. But even just stopping and looking at a small section reveals a lot of surprises. As I said, one of the giants of the field of voice acting. The roles he played gave him so much, and he gave us so much in the process.

"wait, why are we seemingly doing more work than even gigantic companies are on this issue?"

That's the nature of being a small business. Being more connected to the customer also typically results in doing more for them, even when larger companies with the resources to do it easily don't bother. They're too big to care. This isn't a knock on the guy who made the statement, but just something that jumped out at me on the nature of business these days. Good for them.

@gojiguy If I had to guess, I'd suspect it's some kind of driver issue. This goes back to your original post and my first reply. While Android doesn't automatically add lag(at least with Retroarch), perhaps there's such inconsistency across devices due to how the software is implemented that you can end up with wildly different results, which does bolster your approach to avoid Android unless you need something specific like me. And I've run into devices with audio lag so I definitely agree Android isn't ideal for emulation. Good luck with your future testing on Flycast. I hope the games you care about work well with those settings.

@gojiguy after we went back and forth on this topic, I looked into Flycast latency a bit more and learned a couple of things you might find interesting and potentially useful. I used Third Strike to test, with a tiny bit of Gunbird 2. I tested in Retroarch on three different devices, a Linux laptop with a weak iGPU with plenty of headroom for Dreamcast, a Razer Edge Android tablet/handheld with the G3X gen 1 SoC which is still a good performer, and an Amazon Fire HD 10 2021(Android) which should be weaker than most emulation handhelds these days. On all three of them, the default settings gave me four frames of lag. I was informed there were a few settings I should try. Vsync was one of them, but I found it made no difference to latency. I like Vsync, so I turned it back on. Then I turned off "Delay Frame Swapping"(under core options > video) and "Threaded Rendering"(under core options > performance). This brought the latency down to two frames on all three devices(response on the third frame). On the Fire tablet, delay frame swapping made no difference on its own, but did account for one frame in conjunction with disabling threaded rendering, which was different from the other two. My understanding is that the added frame of lag from threaded rendering is a bug, but for now it is not addressed.

Threaded rendering being disabled means you'd want a CPU with more single-core power. That's why I tested on the Fire tablet since It is weaker than a lot of the handhelds now. Turning that off didn't cause any emulation issues in my testing. Third Strike is easier to handle than some other DC games, so it may struggle on those games, but it shows Third Strike doesn't need a ton of power even without threaded rendering to help balance the load. Delay frame swapping is supposed to prevent display irregularities, and I didn't see any issues from disabling it. I heard screen tearing is possible with that disabled, but since I had Vsync on, it was a non issue. So those are things to try in the future next time you mess with Flycast on whatever device you decide. It gives you something to work with for the games you know best.

Everyone can decide for themselves if they're interested in games made with generative AI. For me, I don't want the human element taken out of making the game assets, so I'm not interested. It's not like there's a shortage of good games from the time before AI. I'll be fine and I love re-playing old games. I think the only thing that can be done right now is for there to be disclosures, then people can make that decisions.

This particular one doesn't look as obviously AI generated as other games in screenshots. I think it looks like a mess in motion, though. Even if it wasn't made with heavy AI use, it's not what I'm looking for from a run-and-gun game.

I love the Micro. I admit there are issues that make it a bad choice for some people. I had the perfect combination of relatively small hands and eyes perfectly suited for reading small text close up, so I never had any of the issues. I got lucky in that I bought mine for a good price a few months after it came out when I came across someone selling it because it wasn't being used, so it was in fantastic condition. While the small size may have limited the appeal, I think the late release after the DS worked against it the most.

The issues he described, the palette limitations and tight VRAM are typical issues for a Genesis port of a game like this. People would be surprised how quickly a game like this can come up against the horizontal line limits for sprites and pixels. If the plan is to keep a two-player option, that creates a need to hold back on enemies even in a normal single-player mode. This is the sort of game where scaling the sprites down makes a lot of sense. If he thinks he can preserve the arcade visuals, good luck to him. I will be curious to see how it progresses.

@gojiguy To be clear, I'm not saying DC is particularly laggy. And it would vary by game. But the fact there are known laggy games shows that the system and games can have built-in lag to where being hooked up to a CRT isn't necessarily totally lag free. It's weird SF3 would even be laggy in the first place. I suspect DC is typically one or two frames normally. I only even brought up inherent lag because the additional lag is what matters when testing emulators.

I'm not saying you're wrong about the lag being there. On the contrary, I know you're right. I have had that experience you describe too. You say you got 6 frames on that handheld. I tested a fighting game and got 4 frames on a Linux computer. Both are not good. And I've seen variable results across devices with Saturn too. I'm just saying that it's the emulator that is responsible for most of that lag. I don't think Redream is any better. Hopefully the situation improves sooner rather than later.

@gojiguy original hardware has been shown to have some lag, especially after the transition to 3D framebuffer systems. The Gamecube is particularly interesting because it has been measured more solidly due to the Dolphin emulator and it has been reported that Dolphin achieves quicker input response than actual Gamecubes hooked up to CRTs.

@Thad Thanks for sharing that. The situation you describe is definitely possible. The concept might be one thing in tone, but the people making it could genuinely be enthusiastic about making it. And as you see, I only criticized the concept for Roar from a marketing standpoint since I can't address the actually quality beyond the art style. And that goes back to my point. You felt compelled to give it a chance. I didn't because it wasn't what I was looking for from a property I had a fondness for, and there are plenty of other things to do. I would assume that starting with an existing property means that they want to pull in the existing fans. That or it saves them the trouble of coming up with the lore and world building. Otherwise, why not just make something new? That's just how I see it, anyway. Maybe Golden Axe will succeed in finding an audience where Thundercats Roar failed, based on whatever expectations need to be met.

Genuinely interesting hearing how you view Roar. I've probably been in that situation a time or two where I liked something that maybe didn't land with an intended audience, though examples escape me right now. I've shared my thoughts on this and will move on to let people like what they like. If you think this looks fun, then I hope it is.

I loved what I saw of 2011 Thundercats.

I went back to my old comment. I didn't think it was a good idea, but I said I'd give the trailer a look. I think it looks horrible. I think it's visually ugly overall. I don't like the character designs. I don't like the voice casting. I was right about the comedic tone, but at least they were up front with that. It's not to my taste at all and feels like a mismatch for Golden Axe, but it's also basically what I expected. Here's the thing, and this goes back to Thundercats Roar, if you're going to revive an old property for built-in publicity to a degree, it's important to get the tone right. I think Thundercats Roar's tone was so far off that having it be Thundercats was basically pointless. I get the impression this one won't really find the intended audience. But then again, Golden Axe has never been a strong property, so maybe it never would find that audience, at least on a first go until word of mouth got around. It's just not for me.

@Atariboy @Damo from what I've heard, it's Grind Stormer and Gauntlet 4 that are notorious for this. Both of those are favorites of mine as well. Swapping them to compatible PCBs has long been a known remedy. Two years ago when I was looking into that again, I saw some forum posts where some people said they noticed corrosion at the PCB's vias and were able to revive their carts by cleaning there.

It's amazing the conclusions some people come to.

It's not the first time I've seen stuff like this, but it's impressive what could be done with 1bpp color, literally just black and white. I do enjoy seeing how resourceful developers were back in the day.

@Gamecuber And now for a useful reply to your question. Vibe coding is software development where a person will describe what they want and AI will handle the code based on that. To call this "vibe coded" might be a bit of an exaggeration as I think the scope of this would make that difficult. Here, the the term seems to be used as a catch-all for heavy use of AI coding and the demo being extremely rough in odd ways.

@gojiguy Thanks for the reply. I tested Flycast within Retroarch on a Linux desktop a while back and I recall it having four or five frames of latency there as well. I think the lag is inherent to the emulator more so than it being an Android device. If it was Android, I think it would be consistent across cores. I typically see one frame in most cores.

It would also be helpful to know how much latency the actual Dreamcast has, and it almost certainly has some. Some of that 4-6 frames is probably what the system had. That seems to be the case for Saturn as well.

@gojiguy if you don't mind, could you share where you were getting six frames. Obviously, people could use Retroarch for many platforms on Android, and in my opinion people should. I have tested it and Retroarch adds no additional latency in my experience(and in documentation). But there is also good reason to use standalone emulators for Gamecude, PS2, and stuff like that. So I'm just curious where you found that six frames as I presume it's going to be highly variable by app. The biggest issue I've run into with Android is audio latency, but that affects some devices and not others.

@h3s I recall seeing a post somewhere explaining that Retroarch already handles inputs at a lower level than is typical on Android for lower input latency. I'll provide the link later if I can find it. But I can already tell you in my testing that input lag on Android is exactly the same as it is on Linux desktops for the same cores. So no special fork would be required for that purpose.

I've actually favored Android for handhelds, but I have an unusual use case. I am very sensitive to the typical color temperatures of screens. Stark whites bother me a lot, and it's usually independent of brightness. It's pretty bad. For a while, Android was the only way to adjust that for ARM handhelds. Plus overlays also helped. I'm seeing now that some of the Linux handhelds provide this option now. If those things were equal, I'd agree Linux handhelds would be preferable. But there was a time that only Android provided this remedy, and it might still be better for people like me. I do concede this is an unusual situation

I love the notion that they would have death row inmates make those sounds, like the "meow" of Tyris Flare's death sound. A lot of games of that time would simply use sounds made by the developers themselves. Of course, Golden Axe is well known for using samples from First Blood, Conan the Barbarian, and American Werewolf in London. This was amusing, though.

@PrinceFroggy The catch is/was the shipping cost. At the time of the article, there were reports of shipping and taxes pushing the price up to nearly double the price of the controller. Commodore released a statement that a technical problem caused shipping overcharges for early buyers and they clarified what the shipping costs are supposed to be. Some may still find it high, but the early reports of high shipping were apparently because of that glitch.

@h3s I think so. Dragon Spirit is a bit too rigid for me. It's very much a product of its time as an earlier shooter. On the other hand, I love Dragon Saber. It's more flexible and accessible than the original. I'd say a lot more fun. But it's definitely different enough to not have the same problems as the original.

I agree with the comment above. Missing out on certain colors is not high in severity as problems go. But offering a variety of colors is meant so that people can pick a favorite. Releasing or revealing new colors after taking orders is the kind of thing that rightfully upsets some customers. There's no good reason to do it that way.

Hermann is his last name. It's Steve Hermann. He's been known to punch people for getting his name wrong.

Shatterhand is a very special game to me and it stands shoulder to shoulder with a couple of others among my absolute NES favorites, and a favaorite game regardless of platform. I've beaten the game with every variable I can think of, including no power ups. The game is special to me because it immediately looked like it was made for me when I first saw it in a video. When I got the chance to play the game, it completely lived up to the hype in my mind. It's an experience I've only ever had a few times, with King of Fighters '97 being another game I was drawn to so strongly. Shatterhand is a fantastic game. The game feels great to control. There's a surprising amount of nuance between the power ups, robot companions, weak and strong punches, etc. Level design is great, and no pits to fall into. Bosses are perhaps a bit weaker than the rest of the game design. I've recommended the game to people and always get good feedback. But Shatterhand gets my highest recommendation for the NES. If you like classic action platformers, Shatterhand is a must-play game.

To address what the developer said directly, while not taking it personally, I would push back and and say that there are plenty of people who would disagree that modern games are better than old games across the board. I often find old games to be designed in such a way to prioritize fun gameplay. Some games maximize fun gameplay in a short amount of time. In contrast, maybe modern games push length to some degree. Sometimes, an action platformer with short two-minute stages can be more enjoyable than a game with 20-minute individual stages. To be fair, a lot of old games have issues and it's nice when modern games do a good job merging retro gameplay with some modern sensibilities.

With Shinobi AOV, I don't know what the sales expectations were or if they were reasonable, but I think Denuvo had a decent amount to do with that on the PC side. I don't know how significant this is, but I didn't buy the game when it came out because it didn't have accessibility options, such as an option for screen shake. I know others who were in the same boat. We may be a small number, but then we might be big enough that many games now include such options. To their credit, I found out that they added accessibility option in the big patch that came months later, though it wasn't widely reported, so I didn't find out about it for quite a few months. I recently bought the game at a steep discount. So that gap for the patch was the difference between me being happy to pay the release-day price, and just waiting for a decent sale.

I think there's a certain balancing act when it comes to reviving an old franchise. There will be some people who expect it to be a modern iteration based heavily on some of the top games in the series. Others may be more open to new concepts. I think there's a certain amount of leeway to do some new things without straying too far from the established formula. I think it's harder to do new things when it's a dormant franchise. I remember when an old show I liked was rebooted as something very different. It obviously wasn't meant for me, but it also bothered me a bit because, if you're going to resurrect an old franchise, it would make sense to have it appeal to the original fans. Otherwise, why revive a franchise in the first place? They obviously wanted a built-in audience. Like I said, it's a balancing act, and sometimes producers get it wrong.

@Hexapus It's really funny because I love that kind of game design where you're stuck in a spot until you clear out the area. That seems most common in true beat-em-up games and led to the moniker of "belt action" or "belt scroller". I'm not sure if there's another name, especially beyond beat-em-up games. Incidentally, those are my favorite. I like that design because it allows the developer to craft a specific challenge based on enemy waves in a restricted area. I consider this effective in beat-em-ups, and run-and-guns(top-down and side view) I've played beat-em-ups and run-and-guns that don't restrict movement and I find that to be more likely to be detrimental. But it's not a hard rule and there are different ways to design for each approach. I'm just sharing my differing view because it's something I have noticed that is consistent in games I enjoy and it's interesting how you have identified it at something you strongly dislike. That's how it is sometimes.

I also wanted to reply for one other reason. You mentioned camera shake. I despise camera shake. It came to my attention that the dev eventually patched options into Shinobi AOV for screen shake and some other accessibility settings. Because the big patch was quite broad, that got buried and wasn't widely reported so people missed it.

I just knew this had to be a BillyTime hack. It felt like that kind of game and that kind of hack. Definitely a good development. I was interested in checking the game out just to see what it's like. This hack sounds like a legitimate improvement and I'll have to try it along with checking out what other hacks have been included in the blowout.

I always found this one interesting since I found out about it. It looks a lot like Phantasy Star 4 which is nice. It looks to have a very nice presentation with nicely drawn sprites and character portraits. I have a feeling it won't reach the same heights as Phantasy Star 4 in other ways, but it might still be fun and I look forward to trying it.

@smoreon there is a way to get a glimpse as to how the SNES would do in that regard. There's a way to hack the second game to increase the number or enemies. The biggest issue is flicker. I spoke with someone here who tried it. He reported you'd start seeing flicker with five enemies with a single player. I'm not sure how bad the flicker gets at that point. He also reported that slowdown wasn't an issue until you got to seven enemies with a single player character.

@CookieByte It looks like the Dreamcast was discontinued shortly before the arcade game was released. It's possible they were planning to since it would have been a simple port, but it looks like it was just a case of bad timing that prevented that from happening.

@Shaw_Brothers perhaps you had that impression because the project initially started as an FPGA box and then they changed the approach. If this is not a topic you actively followed, then you may have missed the change or possibly forgot about it.

I also started reading the piece and suddenly realized, in the best way, that it was one of Ollie Barder's. If it wasn't already clear, the mention of Layzner made it obvious. I've been checking in on Barder's stuff on Forbes since 2017. Incidentally, my bluray of Heavy Metal L-Gaim was supposed to arrive today, but it has been delayed. So glad it finally got a release.

Anyway, so great to read about these. This series wasn't on my radar because I didn't have a PS2 when it was current and then didn't dig deeply into its massive library when I finally got one towards the end of its production run. The fact that these take some elements of Virtual On is a plus. I'll definitely have to take a further look at these games and check out some videos to see how they look in action.

I really enjoyed the demo. I had either missed the news of this game or had forgotten about it, but the demo put it on my radar. The game looks better in motion. I'm okay with vertical shmups that are wider than tall. It's not ideal, but it's not a deal breaker to me. I liked the gameplay and feel of the demo, and that's what mattered to me. The new white weapon is spectacular at full power, but also makes a mess of the screen.

What I enjoy about this is how they're all wearing silver, which means they're from the version of the future people imagined in the 1960s and 1970s.

Sounds like a great set of mods. I was quite unlucky with my DMG Game Boy. Mine was from the first year of the system and developed blank lines on the screen within a few years. And they were vertical and horizontal lines, and quite a few. I know the lines in one direction were thought to be fairly easy to fix, but not the others.

The number one complaint I've come across is the memory card. In fact, I considered getting a Vita two or three times and then would see that the memory cards were still obscenely expensive and would just move on. It's one thing for the cards to be proprietary. I think potential customers could have accepted that. But the pricing was so extreme that it was very obvious to consumers that it was a rip off. And I find it hard to believe they couldn't have gotten the cards down considerably while still making a profit.

The OLED screen may have been needlessly expensive, but it also was well regarded and brought positive attention to the product. So I think that was fine. The back touch pad was not a good idea. They definitely went overboard on features, but I don't think that was the deal breaker. I go back to the memory card. The price was high and the capacities small. It really was a non starter for a lot of people.

Good to hear he still uses a PSP with Everybody's Golf/Hot Shots Golf. Hot Shots Golf was one of my favorites on the PS1. I developed an appreciation for fun, stylized golf games with NES Open Tournament Golf and was open to the genre ever since. When Neo Turf Masters came to Neo Geo Pocket, I picked that up right away and it was one of the best on the system. Same for Mario Golf on GBA. And of course I got the PSP games. Such golf games often were among the best games on portable systems.

I get it that they make smaller batches of these things and unexpected demand can mess with distribution, but it's also reasonable to expect such devices to be available for sale for some time after launch. People may want to hear the reviews first to find out about performance, fan noise, D-pad and button quality. I get that they want to promote their products, but it's tone deaf to push the Pocket Block and Pocket Play since neither one is a direct substitute for this. The form factors are very different which matters. The Block has no analog stick at all. Specs aren't known. The pocket play is a slider device which may not be what people want. That means it has touchpads instead of analog sticks, and that's not going to fly with a lot of people. And it uses Mediatek which is a negative for a lot of people due to the GPU aspect, compared to the Snapdragon in the Micro 2.

The Retroid Pocket Nova looks to be the best alternative among new devices right now for those who were considering the Micro 2 as long as the larger size is not an issue.

@Zybex242 Probably. This says it's using a Snapdragon 865-class custom chip. I've heard a lot of recommendations for 865 and up for PS2 so it's largely considered capable of full speed, in cases when it's not an emulator issue. I would assume if they're doing something custom, it's likely for the purpose of getting more out of it. Gamecube is considered lighter than PS2, so I expect that to be fine. There might be some other options and tweaks to get more performance out of Snapdragon chips. Keep in mind that battery life while emulating PS2 and Gamecube will suffer. And, of course, seeing what reviewers have to say regarding PS2 and Gamecube performance is not a bad idea.

Just wanted to point out that, as of the time of this comment, you have the vertical resolution as 240 instead of the 640 shown on the spec sheet.

Edit: Now it's fixed. And there was much rejoicing. yay