sdelfin

Coincidences really can be freaky sometimes. I was looking up a few(literally like 3 or 4) PS1 games the night before this was posted and one of the games I came across was Zeiramzone. It's based on the same property that the Iria anime is, which is how a lot of people would know it. It has one review on gamefaqs and that person seemed to like the game. Who knows? Maybe worth a closer look.

Takeru seemed to struggle to get any traction with their games. They're perhaps best known for Little Samson for the NES. It's an expensive one for a collector, but also a rather good game.

I was just thinking about the "Capcom Five"(which ended up being four) of which Killer 7 was a part. I didn't find the visual style appealing at the time, but more recently I thought it might be something I should try out.

All your merch are belong to us.

The designs look good on the shirts. The Zero Wing(pictured) and Dogyuun(on the website) look really good. My favorite is the unmarked Truxton/Tatsujin 2 design. A similar shirt for the bomb of the first game would be nice too. It's funny how that iconic bomb graphic from the first game is so fleetingly brief in the arcade version that you can barely see it. The skull bomb was done much better for the Genesis port and that's the one most people probably remember.

There's going to be a Truxton Extreme? Wasn't the second game already that? It's fun and has fantastic music, but is it ever brutal.

Shatterhand was not a Sunsoft game. It was developed by Natsume and published by Jaleco. I have long considered it similar to Batman and I suspect that was not an accident. Both games are very high on my list of favorite NES games.

This looks interesting. Robot punching is usually a good time, and they often need a good punching every now and then. The movement reminds me of Sunsoft's Journey to Silius as does the emphasis on quick evasion in between attacks.

Happy Console Gamer was one of the first gaming channels I've found and it always seemed to me to be prominent within the retro gaming space. It's funny how the algorithm works.

I don't always agree with John's takes. We have some overlap in taste, but he likes a lot of stuff I don't, which is fine. But I enjoy his style and attitude. His best stuff is sharing wonderful gaming memories. He has a knack for telling those stories, and for getting to the most important bits of those.

The internet has some major pros and cons, but one of my favorite things is how it connects people who otherwise would never have been able to. This is a very cool. It also reminded me of his previous interactions with the creator of Wonder Boy.

The sub heading of "Porkour!" is brilliant and deserves being mentioned, so I'm mentioning it. Fantastic. This is an interesting concept. While I wouldn't be interested in the IP as a video game, the game concept is a different thing and seems pretty cool. Same with Lilo & Stitch as a run-and-gun game. I'll have to look into both a bit. Sounds like being a developer in that context was probably a fun time.

Very nice. I wasn't sure how enthusiasts and developers would deal with keeping the Wii U going since the gamepad is one of the biggest issues the system has in terms on longevity. Nice to see there's a solution to that, though it looks like there's still more work to be done.

I wonder if that approach is how Dhalsim's fighting style and magical powers happens to be Yoga. Imagine if Pilates was a thing then. And I suspect some of the facial expressions upon taking a hit, sometimes with a bit of vomit to go with it, was also from this approach. I give them credit for understanding not to go too far with things.

Also, Guile's hair is pretty funny. That's probably why they made it so that the CPU could flash kick you without charging it. Also, to take your quarters.

I have accepted that I'm sensitive to certain kinds of motion in games so I know the feeling. I have noticed that camera speed has a lot to do with it and have observed that slower movement in 3D games, especially first-person games, is easier. I think that's a big reason I enjoyed Metroid Prime so much I suspect it has to do with how the brain resolves motion and what it expects versus what it sees. I've noticed this in myself in other contexts too. SNES Mode 7 games like Stanley Cup Hockey made me feel dizzy and uncomfortable, at least for a little while. I got used to it, but don't know if it was still fatiguing. I found the 3DS 3D effect uncomfortable. Racing games with the camera locked to the car instead of tracking with the road feel like you're spinning the background, not the car, and I can't play those. Also, I hate pronounced screen shake, which has become common in games and video. Video is worse when it's at 60fps as it exacerbates the tiniest movement of the camera and also just looks very strange. One thing I have noticed is that some modern games will use these things for effect more than games of the past, and I think that's because, for indie developers, they never learned of these issues because no one could pass that info down to them and, for big companies, they are so far removed from the old lessons that people stopped passing it down. There are times when I have to ignore a game I might otherwise find appealing because of no accessibility options of that nature. So I'm not surprised to hear that Naka ran into that issue. A game like Phantasy Star doesn't gain much from the extra speed, and the dungeon traversal wasn't especially slow to begin with.

@KingMike I think you just put down the beloved open-world classic Virtual Hydlide(lol).

Yeah, there's definitely value to a pack-in game too and you basically summed up the positive aspects of that. Sonic the Hedgehog in 1991 was a great example of that and it succeeded in helping to market Sega's system. I think enough had changed in those few years that the pack-in concept lost some of its value. I guess tastes had shifted since then and it was harder to pick the right game to be a pack-in for 1995. Mario 64 a year later would be the one obvious game to make that first impression if they felt a pack-in was necessary. In the case of the Saturn, I don't think Virtua Fighter was right for that role in North America.

The real launch price of the PS1 based on the prices I saw in my area was $370. That's the system, a game, and a memory card. The problem with a pack-in game, Virtua Fighter in the case of the Saturn, is that if you're not into that game, then it's not a great value, so Sony's approach was still better even if the real price difference was only $30.

That ad is pretty sad, but is also typical of the '80s and '90s marketing thought process. My favorite one is the part about Sony and third-party support. In fact, as this ad is listed as being from November 1995(the ad may have actually run much sooner depending on how things were dated), that claim would already be outdated as Sony's third-party support would already be better than Sega's. As I said, this seems like typical of the worst kind of marketing from the time period, and what it reminds me of is when Nintendo released their own embarrassing comparison of the specs of the SNES vs. the Genesis. And in the end, both Nintendo and Sega dropped the ball that generation and made things very easy for Sony.

@slider1983 My recollection is that they are mostly the same, though with one big difference being the number of players. The arcade allows four players, but the Saturn only two.

@Aiodensghost I'm afraid my PC is not good enough to run it(just kidding....looks like it will run on almost anything)

Friendly recommendations are always welcome and I appreciate the suggestion. I've made a note of it and will have a look and will likely give it a shot. I see it was well received in general.

The perception of bullet-hell is that they're super difficult. And I understand that just from looking at the crazy patterns. It can be intimidating to people, more intimidating than classic games. Still, when I learned about bullet-hell, I was impressed with the ways they mitigated the difficulty of the patterns in other ways like instant respawn and the smaller hitbox. It's actually the hitbox being smaller than the ship that gives me trouble. I've never been good at keeping track of that. I also prefer older shmups due to feeling like I have more freedom of movement. Bullet-hell feels like it has a rhythm component to it as well because of how limited the movement is and how to navigate tight patterns. But as others have said, many classic shmups can be harder.

I totally get what he is saying. But going in directions that are dead ends gives us sub genres, but also may be inevitable. If you go the other way and make more technical shmups, that will likely eventually get complicated too. We have seen that with fighting games. They have a reputation for being less accessible, but also super serve their audience which is apparently big enough. And then you have the indie scene which may try to be more accessible with such games. I just don't see how this evolution of such a difficult and technical genre wasn't inevitable.

I intend to revisit some bullet-hell games to see if maybe I can wrap my mind around the concept a bit better this time. Either way, I was impressed with the compensations such games made in the player's favor since the bullet patterns are so crazy.

I agree with Kanetaka-san. It was easy for 3D games to have too much freedom to the point where it was easy to lose sight of what to do or where to go. I was always the type of gamer that sees games as fun tasks. I like to know what the purpose is and get right to it. I've always been drawn to and most happy with arcade games and console games heavy on action. When the shift to 3D was happening, I found more games were not to my taste and that 3D games were frustrating in new ways, especially back then when the low resolution made things hard to see. Of course, 3D game design evolved, and there are many good ones. But even 3D when done well takes a lot more time to feel like I've accomplished something due to the scale of things.

@Tom_Gamer I think you are right. I think Japanese games tended to have more defined purpose, as a whole. Of course there are exceptions, but I think you can see that in RPGs. Even in the early days, many western RPGs had more freedom. For some that is a good thing, but I think Japanese RPGs were more about purpose, and that probably made it easier to tell a story.

I really enjoyed my Saturn and the library was very much my style, limited as it was. I eventually got a PS1 when the Saturn releases dried up and enjoyed my time with it as well. It's interesting to think about how the system could have done under different circumstances. When these articles come up, I point out that, all marketing aside, Sony's "$299" was more like $370. PS1 would need at least one game to go with it, so that was about $50. Most people would need and want a memory card which was another $20 as I recall. To be fair, while Saturn had a pack-in game, it was only a good value if you liked Virtua Fighter. Also, while Saturn had built-in save RAM, Sony's cards were better overall.

My favorite thing here is the ending in the video when it shows the newspaper and in the upper right there is a reference to Sega buying Data East's pinball division and it shows both logos as well.

For a system like the PC Engine with so many shooters, middling can still be pretty good. I tried Kiaidan a while back because I liked the general theme of the game and I had a good time with it.

That's a pretty cool illustration. There are a lot of nice touches in there. The cowboy figure riding the Playstation Move stuck out for me, as did the PS1 JogCon. I haven't seen a JogCon in a while. Never used one, but heard it was good.

It is interesting and impressive in some ways. I think the track design, in the sense of it having gaps between the sprites so that you can see the background through the track is disorienting and might have been a problem for some people. Another issue is the idea of the cabinet being fully enclosed. I don't know how that would have worked for that particular cabinet, and maybe they had a way around this, but one of the points of arcade games was for those not playing to be able to see it played, letting the games sell themselves. Still, this is very cool to see and reminds me of Wipeout in some ways, and like the later F-Zero games in 3D.

Always good news when there's a new translation like this. In this case, Sakura Wars 2 was one of the more popular games for the Saturn in Japan and sold well as I understand it, which makes this more significant. I understand why they didn't translate the game at the time. I appreciate the effort of those who translate games like these.

@Digglerdig That's addressed in the article. This unit is already in stock at a US warehouse and I assume it was already here before that change in policy. But that also means US buyers can't buy direct from China if they want as they could before.

@Razieluigi Cool additional information there. Her inclusion seemed so random, so I assumed there had to be something about it that we didn't know. It's not like this is going to be a sure thing at the box office.

I misunderstood the headline and thought the question was about which Castlevania game would be next. Castlevania Legends may not have been the most well received game, but it has an interesting premise with a female Belmont, Sonia, who would eventually be the mother of Trevor, many people believe. There's enough there for a decent narrative that's different from other Castlevania stuff.

But as for other game properties altogether, Ninja Gaiden/Ninja Ryukenden seems like it would be fun. Shinobi as well. Other games I like that might be fun, but they're not popular enough, include Golden Axe, Shatterhand, Shadow of the Ninja, The Ninja Warriors(aka Saviors.....like a reverse terminator, but with ninjas), and Wild Guns(I find the characters and setting to be fascinating). Throw in Phantasy Star as well.

This is so weird. Does April Fool's Day extend to three weeks past April 1? And Sydney Sweeney is a producer? Is she some kind of OutRun super fan? So weird. Someone above said there are no characters, but if they draw from OutRun 2, there's Clarissa, who demands that you run into cars, dribble a giant beach ball, and avoid ghosts. Maybe they'll take other ideas from OutRun 2, like having to avoid alien spaceships(there's an angle for Michael Bay). I wonder if this means they'll reissue some games like the aforementioned OutRun 2 and its variations. I'm assuming they'll have the Ferrari license again.

@Klone I really hate the way slow motion is used and overused in modern movies. Old movies used slow-mo too, but it was occasional and it was typically to emphasize something important. Now, it's more like the director said "wouldn't it be cool..." and they just do it for no reason and with less restraint than in the past.

@mjparker77 The ports to Neo Geo are more of an exercise in game development for the guy doing it. There's not much point to them from the perspective of players other than people find it interesting.

I like the idea of doing a Wipeout port to 3DO. It will be interesting to see what it can do with it compared to the PS1, and perhaps see if there are any concessions. The 3DO was never pushed as far as I can tell, so something like this might do that a bit more.

@845H I have the Ultimate C and the Ultimate C 2, both wired. I'm assuming they use the same basic parts. I can tell you that they changed the D-pad for the C 2(and I assume all the 2s) and it was a change for the better. I find it excellent. I just wanted to share that they did make that change. I understand wanting to try something completely different, though. Good luck whichever way you go. D-pads are tricky these days.

@N64-ROX if it makes you feel any better, that guy competed in a very early UFC event, so early it had minimal rules, and is famous for taking a bunch of groin shots. That was before the movie, but you can think of it like karma.

@NinChocolate That's an old comment back when this article was first posted. They added the update to it and it appears the trailer is new as well, so it likely wasn't known at the time that those features would be included.

I really like seeing the pencil sketches. The lines are so relaxed and sweeping. It looks so effortless, but also a demonstration of great skill.

Add me to the rest. The similarities are that they're puzzle-style games, and they use "falling blocks". It was inevitable for Tetris alternatives to emerge. Perhaps his issue was that it was specifically Nintendo making one. Tetris wasn't going to sell forever on the NES and Game Boy. Nintendo was not necessarily trying to compete against Tetris. Perhaps they were looking to give the people who loved Tetris a new experience within the same genre to add to their library and keep them playing. I liked Dr. Mario more. I think it was the premise and having specific targets as opposed to just dealing with blocks. Sometimes people just look at superficial similarities and I think that may have been more common with video games back then.

I'm not surprised at the negative reaction here to the subscription approach. It sounds like it would be similar to Antstream. I wonder if the games would be streamed or emulated locally.

For something like this, the emulators used and the options available matter a lot. Of course, the library would be very important. And that's where I think this would be a tough sell as there are a lot of ways to play the arcade games that are typically licensed out or released in collections. If they could get games that are typically not available due to their own licensing issues, then that would make it stand out. Maybe the subscription model makes that easier, but that remains to be seen. In such a case, you now have the same old modern issue of streaming where licenses can run out and games pulled from availability. I mentioned various collections like Capcom's and that's going to be some of the competition for a curated box like this and may be a better approach as the value would be better and would work on hardware people already have. That's why being able to get licensed games on this thing would be a big deal, but even then it might not be enough.

Rohga/Wolf Fang is a good one that a lot of people probably still don't know very well. It's probably less known than the others here. Definitely one worth a try for those that haven't played it. It's a good collection of games here.

I remember when they showed an overclocked Genesis on the Screensavers as mentioned above. I remember Thunder Force 4 being a game that seemed popular among those interested in doing this. The game doesn't have bad slowdown, but it was a little bit and I guess the idea of eliminating that was appealing for some.

I just played it in browser. It's a clever "demake" somewhat of Prince of Persia with the Wolfenstein motif thrown in there for fun. The game mechanics are good and the level design matches it. A fun little exercise in game design that you'd expect from something so basic in terms of capabilities. It helps if you like Prince of Persia as I do. It's easy to play with a keyboard. I enjoyed it.

Very interesting interview. He gave thoughtful answers including the quote used in the headline. It's cool to hear about development stories on these games and a bit about Alien Soldier as well. Gunstar Super Heroes impressed me when I played it, which was quite a while after I got it. I couldn't get into Astro Boy on the GBA at first. I had to change my thought process with that game as approaching it like a beat-em-up just wasn't working for me, but I ended up enjoying it very much.

I had never actually played the original Gunstar Heroes before Super Heroes came out. And then I picked up the GBA game, and then didn't get around to it for a handful of years due to life things. When I finally did play it, it had a very strange feel compared to other games, though not in a bad way. The controls felt different. The presentation was different. Around the time I was playing it for the first time, I had just played Metal Slug 7 and the entire Mega Man Zero Collection on the DS. But I found Gunstar Super Heroes quite fun and compelling.

Regarding Astro Boy: Omega Factor, I always heard it was considered one of the GBA's best games by many. I tried it and didn't like it. I think I gave it four different chances, which I only did because of its reputation. I finally ended up liking it. I had to change my approach. I kept trying to play it like a beat-em-up game. While it has beat-em-up elements, it's really a straight action game. The beat-em-up mechanics are more of a way to build up the special attacks. Once I changed the priority of the elements and realized the special attacks were way more important, then I had a lot of fun with it.

There's also often a separation between console gaming and computer gaming when people talk about gaming history. For many, video game history means console(and arcade) games. I see much less coverage of DOS and early Windows gaming. Basically computer gaming seems to have its own separate history. Some probably prefer that it's separate from console gaming. Convergence in gaming happened later. Is there a US-centric approach? Sure. But some of that comes from that difference between console and computer gaming in addition to regional differences. It does take time to change the narrative. I know I've learned a lot about European computers over the years thanks to people online talking about them.

@JakeLindgren That's good additional information. I have a tendency to overlook the FMV aspect of MSU-1 and that's what I did here. I was thinking specifically about the replaced music, which gives an idea, though not exact, of what the CD-based games would have been like for the system. For example, I once played Castlevania 4 with much of the music replaced with Rondo of Blood's music which seems like a good approximation since it comes straight from another CD system. But again, I forgot about the FMV stuff, so thanks for pointing out that additional info.

Yeah, Wayforward has always been solid for me. Their stuff on GBA and DS tended to be very good. I'm not as caught up on their modern stuff for various reasons, but I do like things I've seen so I'm more willing to give their stuff a go.

@jygsaw If you're familiar in any way with SNES MSU-1 hacks, that gives a good idea of what the CD add on would have been like. The hack allows for high quality streaming audio to replace the original music. The CD add on would have allowed some other benefits due to the storage upgrade of CDs, but some benefits likely would have required RAM upgrades which could have been done with carts similar to the PC Engine system cards. The PC Engine CD also added no processing, but you can see what a big difference the extra memory made as the late games look much more advanced than the early games. The SNES CD likely would have been similar, though more advanced than PC Engine. Plus they could have included expansion chips in the same RAM carts for even more capability.

That was definitely a grandpa take, so at least he got that part right. I'll give him a small pass too since this predated the likes of King of Fighters 97 and 98, The Last Blade, and X-Men vs. Street Fighter. Some great improvements within the genre in those and others. 2D fighters were popular because they provided gamers with things they craved. They were complex and were always different each run

There was oversaturation and lack of variety after a while. I eventually got tired of it for a while, but I always liked the old games I played. I've been playing Last Blade a bit the last couple of nights. The complexity can be off putting at first, but I find the genre very satisfying. I find it funny he thinks Pac Man has value when 2D fighters require pattern recognition too, but also reaction time, precision, and improvisation because the player doesn't know what's coming.

He got one thing spot on. 2D fighters are literally two dimensional. That's kind of the point of 2D games of all kinds.

The video does a bit of a deep dive on this issue and there's more nuance here than it seems at face value. The guy in the video even says the issue is so small that he won't return his units. I know not everyone has the time. It appears GoRetroid was either lied to by their screen supplier or there was some miscommunication. I've seen this happen before with Odroid which is another small foreign company. They had a board with an SoC that was supposed to be a certain speed and it wasn't. This was on the chip supplier. It's fair to say Odroid and GoRetroid should have caught the issues respectively but things like that slip through sometimes, especially when there is overt deception, and shows how complicated things can get. While one of the selling points of this unit was a 960p screen and it's a tad shy of it, the units are not broken, and the issue is relatively minor. It's so minor that it's apparently not visible with some shaders compared to others. A limited return program is understandable here since this is not a recall. They should probably do more than this, but I understand their position in trying to limit their remedy to people most affected by this, those who bought specifically for the perfect scale. The video goes into all this quite a bit.

Funny how he said almost everyone got refunds and that he was working to ensure everyone got refunds. But then, when did any of this make any sense at all? But at least their non-existent product already had a printed manual and box!!

Perhaps it's not getting faster. Maybe we're getting slower.

Fascinating tech tidbit there. But the SNES doesn't need to be any faster to run Gundam W Endless Duel. What does that have to do with anything? Nothing really. It's just very impressive for the system and it seemed as good a time as any to mention it. It doesn't even use FastROM and I don't think it slows down all that much whenever that does happen. Natsume was amazing back then.

@GravyThief I just checked and found a video showing the Pro 2 has a micro USB port next to the card slot.

That SNES sales figure is impressive. I think Street Fighter 2 is probably the most important game/series of the whole 16-bit generation.

The SF2 boom became a general fighting game boom. I wonder if the boom itself lasted longer than two years but it got diluted among more companies and franchises. Fighting games remained popular well into the late 1990s, but there were just so many of them. I don't know the degree of it, but King of Fighters did enjoy a good bit of popularity in Japan and other Asian countries. Tekken and Virtua Fighter were popular.

@h3s Metal Slug 3 is well made and you can feel the enthusiasm the developers had, but the game has some enormous difficulty spikes compared to the previous games, and that final stage really hurts the pacing of the game because it's so long and not a run-and-gun for a significant portion of it. As a result, I prefer several other games in the series over 3.

I don't know if this really is well suited to DS, but sticking with the original consoles comes with plenty of concessions. The screens are not that good. Many people don't like the DS controls(I like them). And you won't get a lot of useful modern conveniences(I like those too).