sdelfin

@smoreon My understanding is that this is a further overclock over the prior Turbo core. The main CPU is also overclocked in those cores past the 94MHz. This new core overclocks the coprocessor even more than the 80MHz of the prior core and it's apparently 94MHz. That's where the confusion comes in.

I think there are a lot of factors in that shift. Japan was at the forefront during the 8-bit era through the PS2 era. Games were different then. I remember reading someone's thoughts on this topic. Back then, games were games. They were playthings designed for novelty and a high amount of entertainment value. As the technology improved, large 3D worlds were possible. This favored western developers who had already prioritized realism. As new kind of games emerged, or when 3D worlds increased in scope, some people gravitated towards those things, while others still preferred the more surreal stuff that Japan was so good at. One example of a great concept that came out of Japan in a time of changing tastes was Katamari Damacy. When I first saw that, my thought was that it was a genius concept. Western games seem to excel when the point is creating a large world with tons of stuff to do. Plus, over time, we've seen an influx of indie developer from all over the world. I think it's just an inevitable evolution of the industry. As there are more choices of different kinds, there's less of a concentration of the player base, even though some of these games with giant worlds do seem to have a wider appeal.

Of all the things one could do, they made Mandara a little bit harder? This is why we can't have nice things.....

Cool seeing a hack like this for Shinobi and the Master System in general. I don't think there are a ton of Master System hacks. The SMS port of Shinobi was also my introduction to the Shinobi series. I don't know when I learned about the arcade version being different. I enjoy both versions now. The changes to the SMS version work quite well and the game was one of my favorite games for the SMS. Back to the Mandara thing, I assume it's to maintain game balance if the firing rate is increased. Mandara used to be so irritating when I was a kid. I know in the arcade version that Mandara's statues will take more damage before destruction if you're playing well. The game has some variable difficulty going on.

I had Battletoads when it was new. The Turbo Tunnel was tough, but I memorized it and was able to reliably beat it. I beat it many times, so I agree with others who say it's not as hard as some say. But it is a big difficulty spike. However, later stages in the game really irritated me. There's the rat race, the snake level, and the hand bike part. The timing on some parts is just so obnoxious. I reached a point with that game where I said "never again" and never played the game ever since. That's not what you want a game to do.

A previous commenter said they don't like beat-em-ups much. I'm the opposite. I love beat-em-ups. Another thing I found irritating about Battletoads is that it had too much variety for me. From the platforming, to the different "bikes", the rat race, etc, I eventually just got annoyed that so much of the game wasn't a beat-em-up. As a result of it all, I was one and done with Battletoads. Never touched any game in the series after that.

This is probably a good call for now for a brand like this. I've never been sucked into Warhammer, but as an outsider, it looks like there's a lot of great art that goes along with it. A property like this seems to celebrate creativity and keeping that human touch seems like it would be important to the fans that they have. Embracing AI-generated visuals likely wouldn't be received well by the fan base that they have.

@Ristar24 The shoulder triggers on the DC controller are also much less durable than the Saturn 3D pad. I'm easy on my stuff, and I had one break on me. It's quite common. I've been inside both pads and the Saturn triggers are obviously better built.

@Deuteros Happy to recommend it and hear that you're interested. It's a long one, but I watched and enjoyed every minute, so I'll likely do the same for the ones you suggested. I will make a note shortly so I don't forget. I hope you enjoy the Sunsoft one as much as I did.

Sega's one of my favorites and was a big part of my life as I gravitated toward them more than Nintendo, so thanks, indeed, for "paving the way" as was said above. And 95 is a long life. I hope they were quality years. It was such a novel idea at its start at the right time and it took on a life of its own. I remember how surprised I was when I first learned of Sega's American roots.

@Deuteros Yeah, I think it's easy to forget the early connections such as Gulf + Western, though I've definitely heard that before. The Sega brand goes back a long way, but the company feels more like distinct incarnations.

I have not seen any of those documentaries, but I imagine they could be very good. I just watched the Digital Foundry retrospective on Sunsoft two days ago, and it was fantastic.

@gojiguy from what I've been seeing, people have reported getting shipping notifications and some people already seem to have received their units.

This is cool. I don't remember how I first heard of the game years ago, but I found it appealing and hoped that there would be a translation of the PC Engine version someday. I'll have to try it out soon.

@KingMike and to think I bought Gunstar Super Heroes at full price when it was new. I didn't look at the bargain bins much because the stores in my area never seemed to have good stuff most of the time. But I do remember my one great "clearance" find, also at Best Buy. Beyond Good & Evil was a game I was planning to pick up anyway, but it was competing with a bunch of other games that I got first. BG&E was marked down to $10 within a month of its release, and I didn't hesitate to get it when I saw that price.

The funny part about me getting Gunstar Super Heroes right away was that I had never actually played the original up to that point.

I get the urge to poke fun here because of just how many of these things have come out, and it seems some companies have a new model every few weeks. The idea of taking a shot at them crossed my mind as well. And other people did that. Sadly, while these emulation handhelds are not that important in the grand scheme of things, this is a good symbol of the current mess with PC hardware, and the RAM pricing spike. I'd rather live in a world of way too many emulation handhelds than the one where AI data centers buy up all the hardware they can while giving the manufacturers an excuse to price gouge and even shutter consumer brands reducing competition further.

@Guru_Larry I remember finding the whole Roguelike/Roguelite thing so confusing. After looking into it, the way I look at it is: Rogue is Rogue. All games that use the same rules and setup as Rogue, but are not Rogue, are Roguelikes. Games that use some of the characteristics of Rogue, but not all, are Roguelites. So a side-scrolling game has to be a Roguelite because Rogue is not a side-scrolling game. Is my view of this whole situation right? I have no idea!!!

When the term was fresh, I saw it as describing Castlevania games done in the Metroid style of exploration. From the time SotN came out, all the way through Order of Ecclesia on DS, all those Castlevania games were the most prominent examples of the genre and were considered to be among the best games on their respective platforms. That's why the term stuck, and morphed into a catch-all term for games of the style. Say what you want about Metroid doing it earlier, but Castlevania snatched ownership of the genre away from Metroid, arguably doing it better, but definitely being more popular for a long time.

Language is a funny thing, and imperfect. Metroidvania as a term became a thing organically. There are people who don't like the term, and that's fine. There are those who want to push alternatives. One of the reasons why is because to understand what Metroidvania communicates requires prior knowledge of the games to a degree. Every suggestion I've heard falls short and communicates almost nothing. For those who know what Metroidvania is, even in passing as most people do now, it communicates so much more than any generic term people suggest.

I liked Pit Fighter in the arcade and I enjoyed the Genesis port which my friend had. This is an interesting find. It's functional because it's basically the first game's engine with some new stages and characters. I bet a lot was meant to change. The clock is not implemented which breaks the grudge match mirrod fights. I found it funny how you fight the Executioner three times in a row. Definitely placeholder stuff in the game. Good to see it regardless.

I just played this one again a few weeks back. I was in a weird Game Boy mood. I'm sure it will turn out great and I look forward to it.

Looks interesting enough from the trailer. Definitely worth checking out the Steam demo for the game, which I'll have to do over the weekend.

Quartet and SDI were never big games for Sega. That's what's good about larger game collections. More popular games will sell the product, and games like that will be there for fans, and other people can discover them. As a two-game package deal, it's not a strong pair from a marketing standpoint.

I remember reading about this back in the day. I've always liked the idea of demakes, even if they don't always work out well. This was a fascinating concept at the very least, and I'm surprised they were able to get this much out of the GBC in this style.

The start date in December 1995 appears to be wrong. And I thought that was late. I'm seeing that it started in 1994, which makes more sense. This is a very cool discovery. I heard about the extended version of Garfield, and I would definitely be interested in playing that as I like that game.

The action sections control well. They're just a bit simple in terms of the gameplay mechanics. They probably would need more if they were to carry an entire game. Even if it was a bit of an accident, the fact that the game combined action and sim sections helped it to stand out and probably helped to make the game enduring. I didn't play the game in its time, and I didn't enjoy it at first, but I ended up having a great time. The two gameplay styls were combined very well.

I knew there was a difference. Someone pointed it out somewhere, in a comment or message board post. I happened to see it, so I knew about it for quite a while.

Yeah, the trailer is impressive. The art direction, pixel art, and animation(both the gameplay and the opening sequence) are quite good. My least favorite thing in the trailer is that the character portraits move. It looks a little odd and the character art is so strong to not need the motion. But that is a very small thing. I also liked that there was minimal screen shake in the trailer. Just a tiny amount toward the end as an accent which doesn't seem like an issue. This is definitely something to add to the list.

I get why he had the idea. When FPS games were fairly new, I wondered what else could be done in first-person. Of course, it turns out it's very difficult to do non-shooting action in first person. I don't think it would have turned out very well. Not that it matters all that much since Streets of Rage would go dormant for so long anyway.

I never liked that method and decided I would never use it. Just a personal choice. There were some people warning against its use back in the day. Luckily, I haven't been in a position to need it. My Dreamcast and SNES both still look new. But I decided that if they did yellow, and if I wanted to remedy that, then I would paint them. The SNES would look pretty snazzy in black with it's purple switches.

Quite often, I'd come across a great soundtrack on the Genesis and come to learn it was by Hitoshi Sakimoto. He was always one of my favorite composers of that era, once I learned who he was and how often his compositions landed well with me.

Always good when news of more translations comes out. I'm not familiar with this one, but Dimps tended to do good work, so that's a good start, and reviews seems pretty good.

@KingMike I guess that makes the game a timed exclusive, of sorts. I guess, by the time the Super Famicom was a thing, Capcom determined that Ghouls 'n Ghosts had been done enough(Mega Drive, SuperGrafx, X68000) and maybe was past the window they thought was right for a port, so they decided to make a new game instead. Funny how that works out. Surprising to think they didn't do a version for GBA or DS.

In a funny coincidence, I was looking up some GBA stuff a few days ago and learned about the added stuff for GBA Super Ghouls 'n Ghosts for the first time this week, and tried it out last night, as I write this.

If this is the future of gaming, then I might get through my backlog after all.

@The_Nintendo_Pedant "in all fairness I can't keep these titles straight"

I misread it at first and thought the mistake was that it was listed as Ghouls 'n Ghosts, so I can relate that it's hard to keep it straight, or that it's easy to make such a mistake. Good thing for me I went back to double check what it said.

The mistake has been fixed now.

The article may have been updated, but there's still a blunder(for shame.....just kidding). This is the blunder: "it clearly has a Ghouls 'n Goblins sticker on it" and the sticker is not wrong.

There's a Ghouls 'n Ghosts
There's a Ghosts 'n Goblins
But there's no Ghouls 'n Goblins

(edit: and it has been fixed. And there was much rejoicing. Yay.)

@RupeeClock I think your theory may be correct. I dug out my original GBA to test. It looked fine. I didn't notice any issues with the background scrolling on that original screen. I think the characteristics of the screen made it so that 30fps didn't look unusual or wrong on those original models, at least to my eyes. At the time Super Circuit came out, that was the only model GBA. Such a thing would only have become an issue on later models, perhaps just the very late backlit models of the SP and the Micro line. I didn't get a chance to grab my DS to test the game on that, assuming it still works, to see how different it looks there, but it did look just fine on my GBA. As you said, it may have looked better on that screen. But since it was also an early game, perhaps they also wanted to save CPU cycles either to reduce battery draw or to give themselves more to work with for everything else, including audio. It could be a combination of all of those.

Yeah, these voxel mods specifically allow the game to keep its original look to the point where it doesn't look like the mod does much. But that's to the credit of such modders. What it does is make the 3D world more cohesive. As others have said, static items that only had one sprite that always faced the player will be the most obvious things. Everything is now in full 3D and will be visible from different perspectives. It's subtle, but it goes a long way to make it feel like a proper 3D environment.

The trailer doesn't give a good sense of what the mod does, but the youtube channel shows more gameplay, but also videos that show the previously-2D elements now in 3D which gives a better idea of what the mod does. It still retains the look of the original game, but in full 3D, even for insignificant things.

I was listening to the Game Sack review of this when I came here. I'm not sure who else got the system to review, though I just checked and see that My Life in Gaming has a review too, so you know that's going to be quite in depth. It sounds like the machine is overall pretty good with some issues of differing magnitude. From the GameSack review, I saw issues with the Everdrive, including an unexpected workaround, and issues with interlaced games. People who might be interested in this should probably check out a bunch of reviews to see what issues people are running into. With the first batch sold out, it's not like they don't have plenty of time for that before they might be able to buy the thing.

@Deuteros the previous reply by jygsaw sounds about right to me, but I thought it was worth adding a bit to it. In addition to just being less powerful, to be expected since it is a portable machine for which battery life would matter more than the PS1, it also doesn't have the dedicated 3D hardware of those home consoles. In some ways, the GBA is a good bit more powerful than the SNES on paper, but it also doesn't have dedicated audio processing, so the CPU has to handle that as well. Plus, the pixel resolution is lower. That also puts it behind the Neo Geo, but it's somewhere in between the two in terms of sprite capabilities. But the GBA has better graphical effects like scaling and rotation of sprites and backgrounds so it can seem more advanced at certain things. Neo Geo can shrink sprites which effectively means it has sprite scaling, but they have to start with big sprites which was not an issue for the Neo Geo since the carts were so big.

@Andee @Gerald Final Fight is not especially colorful to the point where it's not within the capability of the Genesis. Many games of that period, even arcade games, didn't put a crazy number of colors on screen. For example, Sega's System 16 ports and ports of Capcom's other early CPS1 games don't really have major color issues. The hard part is choosing good colors due to the palette limitations. But the important thing to remember, and this is my main point, is that since Final Fight CD already exists, that may have served as a starting point for experimentation and improvements. And other people already did color enhancements for it years ago as well, providing even better references. Final Fight CD looking somewhat drab simply came down to poor palette choices.

I guess some people can't resist cheats and other helpful things. I know some people dislike arcade games where they can just credit feed. But if a game is good, then I try to play it well and finish it with as few credits as possible, even mastering some games. Same with cheats. I've played some games I've enjoyed more because of cheats. It depends on the game. But I do appreciate this approach from this dev, that it should be up to the player. I had a great time back in the day with a bunch of early first-person shooter games while using cheats, but I always tried to play well, but also god mode didn't help when it came to finding stage exits, so the games were still not always easy.

Is this port "necessary"? No. Is it very cool? Absolutely. It's clear just from reading about this that the developer truly cared about this project and making it the very best it could be. The extra modes pushing the system to its limit, and the inclusion of Maki are excellent touches. It sounds like there's a good bit of optimization here too, as the Sega CD port has its issues with the sprite limits. That one also benefits from extra CPU speed, but also feels a bit slower in terms of combo speed, which I think was done to compensate for fewer enemies on screen. And this version looks to have better color selection than the CD version. It looks like really great work here, especially since the dev had to basically recreate the game based on observation. This is very impressive. Also, cool to see how far the Genesis could be pushed this way. The sequels on the SNES showed that system could also be pushed much father than that first game's early port. Though I assume the Genesis is using the high-resolution mode in this.

@delt75 They did make that controller, the Avenue Pad 6, but it was only in Japan because the PC Engine in Japan did get a version of Street Fighter 2. It would have been necessary for a US version too. The way you worded your comment, I wasn't sure you were aware of it. And I believe there were a couple of others, including one from Hori that people seem to like. Seems like a safe bet they would have had a six-button pad for North America if it was necessary.

I remember him saying the same about Mortal Kombat a few times. At first, I was very sketpical. I did look into it as much as I could. My speculation in the case of MK is that, due to the popularity of Street Fighter 2, they were actively looking for the next big thing in advance and, perhaps, predicted MK's success early in its run, or perhaps at some trade show before it was distributed. That is, of course, if there's some truth to what he is saying. With as popular as MK got, it just didn't make a lot of sense to lock it down to the TG16/PCE due to the user bases of the Genesis and SNES, unless such an agreement involved a ludicrous amount of money. The situation might be similar for Street Fighter 2. There are several possibilities already mentioned above, but once it got super popular in arcades, it just didn't make sense for Capcom to do that kind of a deal with NEC as opposed to Nintendo.

I'll have to try to read the full piece later, but it makes sense with the way power ups are provided by objects you have to jump and hit, and the way sub-weapons are used. From there, Ninja Gaiden did things differently with more frequent sub-weapon changes, perhaps more importance placed on them, and more mobility and speed for the character, though that is then compensated for by faster enemies and respawns. I was just playing the Ninja Gaiden games on the NES a couple of weeks back, so I'm eager to hear more about it from this interview. The second installment has always been my least favorite, and revisiting it recently only confirmed that for me once again.

The comparison is a bit apples and oranges due to the different time periods. Do I believe the PS2 is still likely ahead despite the weird numbers from Sony? Yes I do. Even is the Switch passed the PS2, the overall video game market was smaller back in the PS2 era, so the PS2's overall number would be a larger percentage which is impressive. But as others have pointed out, some people used the PS2 primarily as a DVD player. And the game attach rate for the Switch looks to be much higher, and that's more important from a business standpoint than the record of overall unit sales. It's also impressive in its own way. And also something brought up already is how the Switch not only never had a price drop, but has since been increased. While some of the increase comes due to market conditions, there's still plenty of room for them to drop the price since it's old tech that should be much less expensive to manufacture than it was in 2017. A price drop would likely boost sales momentum of the original Switch.

@DestructoDisk Excellent post on this topic. You don't hear a lot about the pixel limit per line. That realization was very eye opening for me. It's why the SNES overall and per-line sprite limits didn't come across as significantly better, as you alluded to. Those higher numbers do give it some additional flexibility, but that pixel limit holds it back and I think a lot of people overlook that. I was just on another article right before reading your post talking about the SNES's pixel line limit, so it was a bit funny, since I never hear people bring it up, seeing you talk about it, and explaining the issues so well. Sprites for a theoretical DKC port would not be an issue for such a port, as you said. Getting it to look and sound right would be the tricky things.

@Guru_Larry Not on-screen sprites or sprites per line. SNES does win on those which gives a bit more flexibility. But it gets more interesting when you look at sprite pixels per line. At 256 pixel-wide resolution, the SNES has virtually the same amount of sprite pixels per line as the Mega Drive. There's a small advantage to the SNES of maybe 16 pixels as I recall, which acts as a buffer against flicker, I suspect, but that's barely anything. At 320 wide, Mega Drive gets a sprite bump across the board. Sprite pixels per line goes up as well, though in both modes the pixels per line is the same as the horizontal resolution, so 256 and 320 respectively. I suspect there are a number of reasons we didn't see more enemies on screen back then. Some of it may simply be game design. Slowdown would have been a concern, especially on the SNES. Keep in mind that many games also used SlowROM as well.

And then there's optimization. Many games were not well optimized. But there's an interesting case of this on the SNES. There is a hack for Final Fight 3 that improves performance through new optimizations, so we know optimized code wasn't a priority as it probably is on these projects. Final Fight 2 also demonstrates some interesting things. It's possible through hacking to increase the number of enemies on screen and I spoke with another commenter, BulkSlash, about it. He experimented with it and found it would run flicker free until you have five enemies on screen with a single player. The game also ran without slowdown until it reached seven enemies on screen.

I remember playing around with ZSNES back in the day. I think I had just moved on from my 486 so I didn't struggle with that as the King did. The secret save states are a great idea. I wonder what the process of coming up with that was like. Controller lag reduction methods like RunAhead do basically the same thing to solve that problem. It's a fantastic solution.

The article went in a direction I did not expect and ended up being a very interesting read. It sounds like this system isn't well known yet even to companies who would find it useful in cases like this. It sounds like a good method of doing things. I've been aware of these kinds of licensing dead ends before with things like games, but also anime. All the A-Ko movies have been released on DVD and blu ray, yet the two-part OVA hasn't had a US release in decades, and perhaps not even on DVD. And the reason is the licensing situation is murky, and I recall it being similar to this game, where no one really knows who owns it rather than multiple parties may have a claim of ownership. A shame things got this messy.

I'm not a fan of pushing things so close to the limit that you get that much flicker, but this sounds like an optional mode so that's a smart way to include this particular thing. The standard two-player mode sounds like it has six enemies plus the two playable characters which means the flicker will be there. That might make more sense to push to that limit for the sake of gameplay. It is impressive to see how far it can go.

This also shows how little most arcade boards were actually pushed back in the day. Optimization was not a priority for arcades. The CPS1 could have gone a lot farther.

Yeah, leaving the direct issue of AI aside, this is also about poor judgement to leave such terrible images in the book. Makes me wonder if they even had an editor in charge to approve things. It's embarrassingly bad, assuming those behind this can feel something even vaguely resembling shame. It reminds me of the many bad retro releases over the years, especially the GTA remasters.

Very interesting read, especially with his background before design. I also learned what kerning is and I'm sure I'll be able to work it into conversation once within the next several decades. Also cool how he wasn't a gamer, but sort of became one a little bit with the Game Boy, and not just Tetris. I also like his story of how he turned that Christmas card into a chance to pitch improvements to Nintendo's early designs. I would say his judgement overall on the changes to the US box art in terms of the philosophy — consistency for the hardware packaging and shelf appeal for everything — was correct. I don't love the actual art changes in a lot of cases, but don't know how much of that was on him because that aspect wasn't really addressed directly. As stated in the first comment up above, his Game Boy design aesthetic was excellent and probably his best stuff from his work for Nintendo.