sdelfin

Being able to play demo versions is a fascinating inclusion and not a bad idea for extras. This sounds great. I didn't realize this one was coming out on the 31st. It's been a busy day with the full release of Ninja Gaiden Ragebound(the demo was quite good), and the demo release of Shinobi Art of Vengeance(full game to be out in a month). Shinobi is what had my attention today, as it came out of nowhere and I stumbled upon it by chance. But Earthion sounds great from the review. Looks great too, but that was obvious for a while. Glad to see it's complete. Digital version on PC was always going to be the version for me. What a cool day to be a retro gamer.

@MontyMole well it looks like my guess was a bit off. I didn't expect the term would be used in that context so early on. Thanks for providing that interesting information.

@The_Nintend_Pedant Yeah, I've heard people say that before. I was alluding to that when I said "what is called "AI" now" but that's not something I wanted to get into any deeper than that. I'm not the best person to make such distinction. Whatever that distinction is, the label of AI for them is not going away.

I wonder when the label of AI applied to game logic started. I wouldn't be surprised if that came to be due to the culture at the time, with the concept of AI being a topic in movies, shows, and books that were popular. That's my best guess.

AI as a term applied to old video games was always more of a colloquial thing. I can't speak for anyone else, but I never took it as literal, and I doubt many people did either. Certainly, it's a far cry from what is called "AI" now. The ghosts in Pac-Man were following their programmed routines, programmed by people. Their routines having a bit more complexity to them in how they act and react was a decision made during the design process, not decisions the CPU makes on the fly. It's a silly comparison to make in the article.

I don't know at what point it was, but I started to get away from using the term "AI" to talk about how the CPU characters behave in a game. I remember seeing in an old game with character creation that there was a section for determining "CPU logic", so I started using that or "game logic" in place of the colloquial use of AI with regard to games.

@jamess thanks for the additional info. It sounds quite nice, and I've heard similar positive accounts about it. At first I wasn't too keen on the idea of IR, but that was some years ago and maybe was an inferior product as well. Plus, a friend of mine has the Sinden so I got to play with it for a while. I like that gun, but the software situation makes that annoying for me since I don't run Windows. I realized recently that the IR guns may suit my situation more, so I'll have to look at what options are out there.

@The_Nintend_Pedant There is the Gun4IR and maybe one or two other guns for modern screens that rely on IR that compete with the Sinden camera-based tech. I've heard the IR guns do work very well. Jamess posted about it above, which you probably saw. They come with their own quirks, but people do seem to like them. I haven't gotten to try one of them yet, but it does sound like their IR tech is better than the the Wii.

@FR4M3 It's originally a Pentium 4 PC with Geforce 4 GPU and an embedded Windows XP.

@Razieluigi Yeah, that's terrible formatting. I looked several times and didn't see that until you specifically mentioned it being below the video. I suppose since it's Bitmap Bureau, it makes sense they would at least consider making versions for consoles, even if it had to be changed in more significant ways than Xenocrisis.

How interesting. I was not aware of this one, which is odd because I think I was still keeping up with game news then. The fact that it's a serialized thing makes me think of the .hack series, which I believe was an attempt to do something similar. I guess that was a trend at the time to try to create a serialized RPG series or just a series that would be more frequent and was announced to be that way. I thought the idea was interesting at the time.

@gojiguy WayForward states they are not receiving any revenue from this release.

@jamess That may not have been the intention, but there is a strong implication there to that conclusion. What other reason is there to bring up that other companies will have figures with whom people who have an issue with palmer would also disagree? It essentially is an argument for not applying standards at all because you can't apply them across the board for any number of reasons. Or it's an argument that this site should not acknowledge it with palmer because then they'd have to investigate the corporate structures of other companies for the sake of fairness. In the end, it's the same argument. Plus, if you meant the latter, that's just wishful thinking because leaving that out of the reporting would reflect worse on the site than at least acknowledging it in passing. People would still bring it up in the comments and it would be worse for the site. He has also made himself more visible.

You also referred to someone's stance of drawing a line here is an "extreme position". Is it an extreme position to have any moral standard here? Is it only extreme if it is literally a "single person"? If so, who said they don't apply their standards to other people or corporations where and how they can? Whether you agree with that moral standard is largely irrelevant to the point because, one, it seems at least a reasonable standard, and, two, bringing up the application of "that approach to everything you buy" because someone "up the chain" will have different political views changes it from a simple disagreement of where the standard should be to an argument in favor of having no moral standard at all. What other reason is there to bring that part up? You may not have meant it that way, but that's where it leads.

I normally don't bother anymore with these stories involving modretro. Though I will say that I appreciate Damien acknowledging some of the political context instead of ignoring it completely as some might do. It's better that people have the opportunity to look into those things than simply not know if they were previously unaware. The reason why I bothered today is because I like WayForward and I wanted to see what this was all about.

It seems to me that those who want less politics in this space should have an issue with palmer. He's chosen his path so any project like this is inherently political. People get to have a say about why they don't like him or what he does. To expect people to not say anything is unrealistic. Some would say that it should all come down to the products offered and nothing more, but that's not how the world works, especially in charged times like these. And I've seen politically-motivated boycotts done from both sides of the political aisle. People get to vote with their wallets. In fact, we are often encouraged to collectively. So, again, the real source of politics in gaming in this case is palmer. Why is he even doing political interviews if he would rather keep a low profile? He's the issue here, not those who have issues with him.

Things in life are rarely black and white. Things exist on a spectrum. It is disingenuous to say that if you don't boycott everything you disagree with then you should boycott nothing. That's absurd. If the logical conclusion of your argument is to have no standards at all, then your thinking is flawed. Some products or companies are easier to avoid than others. Some disagreements are bigger than others. Some people have more options available to them than others. I guess the pendulum can go the other way and people could call for mass boycotts for tiny things, but I've yet to see anything of the sort gain any actual traction. And that still seems better than sticking your head in the sand and simply having no standards. In this case, palmer is a step too far for some to support, even indirectly. I am among them, though he also offers no products for me anyway. But glad to see WayForawrd is not directly involved, and I think they probably got the message that it's better to keep it that way.

Good to hear what Sakimoto shared here. He's one of my favorites and one of the best. His work in the 16-bit era, especially on the Mega Drive/Genesis is top tier for the time. The conversions of Midnight Resistance and Captain America & The Avengers brought updated soundtracks using the Terpsichorean driver and the music in both really lifted both titles. It's surprising how good the Gen/MD Captain America music is.

And then there's Gauntlet IV. Even among the best soundtracks of that generation, Gauntlet IV's music is stunning. I should add that credit for that also goes to co-composer Masaharu Iwata. Having looked into it, Iwata and Sakimoto worked together multiple times. It looks like the first time they did was way back on Revolter, so they were both getting their start in that team of enthusiasts looking to design a game.

@jesse_dylan Thank you. I know of other games that do that, but couldn't remember if CV2 did. But the NES does have an extra sound channel available so the Master System would have to make a bit more compromises.

They sound well done making good use of what the Master System offers. The Castlevania video shows the waveforms and channel usage. It's using all four channels, so some compromises would have to be made in game for sound effects, so I wonder what the best way to do that would be. We see similar situations with the Game Boy as it also has four channels available, though they are of a different type. The noise channel could probably drop out of providing music as needed to do a lot of the sound effects such as hitting enemies, while other sounds like item pick ups could probably be done on the third channel as it seems to not be doing quite as much as the other two square-wave channels.

@Missingno128 This is a product to sell. The whole point of this project is to create carts that work on the actual system. It wouldn't make much sense requiring a specific flash cart and just selling a ROM to that very limited audience.

"Why would you need to make a whole new chip"

They'd be making a whole new helper chip whether using this microcontroller on a cart, or FPGA on SD2SNES. If, by the new chip you mean the microcontroller, that goes back to them making carts so that's necessary.

"if he didn't know FPGA programming, he could just hire and pay someone to do it?"

Why do that if you're a software programmer and can just do it yourself with a cheap microcontroller? You talk about doing things that would be "far cheaper", but then would want him/them to pay a subcontractor to make an FPGA core for no good reason?

Pretty heavy stunt casting for this movie. We'll have to see how it turns out. Some wrestlers have turned out to be pretty decent and/or successful actors as well. One of them is Dave Bautista, and I want them to cast him as Dhalsim in this one. Dhalsim 2.0.

I didn't recognize him at first, so I was trying to remember if I was mixing up channels, but I was correct on which channel this was. Unfortunate news on multiple levels. Of course, there's the human factor, his family and friends. Then there's the channel. I didn't watch him regularly, but I would check back in every now and then. I discovered his channel two or three years back and did some binge watches. I really liked his style and enjoyed his videos. I was also impressed by his story, how he found a new way to channel his love of video games after losing his hands.

@bring_on_branstons I've wondered the same thing. Had the SNES been a bit more powerful, it would have made it harder for the Genesis/Mega Drive to compete at all. Others have brought up important points such as the ROM speed being a factor. And then, on top of the CPU speed, there was also bus and memory speed. The SNES has a lot of design quirks, if you really look at it. Not that it really hurt the system in the marketplace. But you brought up something that I think is quite important. Nintendo started demonstrating the SNES/Super Fmaicom at the end of 1988. Typically, those old consoles took around two years to go from development to stores. If the SNES was finalized or nearly finalized in 1988, that means it likely had been in development for quite a while, and I think they started talking about it a year before, just to mess with the PC Engine launch. And it took another two years for it to go on sale in Japan. I think it may have been designed with a 1989 release in mind, and they held it back probably due to strong sales of the NES and Game Boy. That might partially explain the CPU speed not being clocked higher. I should also mention that one reason Nintendo may have chosen the route of helper chips is that it comes with the added bonus of being an anti-piracy measure.

@mjparker77 From the developer's perspective, it could be as simple as it being an enjoyable project and a learning experience, if nothing else. The fact that the NES and SNES have CPUs from the same family probably makes these somewhat easier, but the SNES does allow them to remove flicker and slowdown from NES games. Contra Force could really benefit from that. Some ports have nice added features as well, from MSU-1 support, to more accurate colors in Duck Tales, to a proper map for Metroid. There's also the chance they could serve as a basis for hacks that take more advantage of the extra capability of the SNES, especially the color.

I like these ports. At the end of the day, they're just another option for people.

And I thought I knew basically all the great soundtracks on the Mega Drive. This one sounded good the moment I heard the first notes. Great sound choices. It makes me laugh when I still hear that persistent myth that MD sound is bad with a couple of exceptions. This one joins the already-long list of great sounding MD titles. I'll have to check this out more in depth.

I was able to get a couple of the other late Saturn games in North America, but I never did see Panzer Dragoon Saga anywhere. I didn't know which stores were getting stock or how much. I don't remember much about the search, but I do remember looking for it. It was disappointing because I really loved the Panzer Dragoon games up to that point and thought taking it into a different direction was a cool idea. Even though I've never been the biggest RPG guy, I was intrigued. Plus, Sega put their twist on the RPG formula, so those ideas also appealed to me.

Saturn emulation has gotten much easier, both in terms of progress made on the software side, and because modern hardware has enough CPU power to where people don't need high-end desktop CPUs to do that now. I do hope that Sega is one day able to re-release Panzer Dragoon Saga within some kind of emulation solution.

I love the concept of these ports. I know some people wonder what the point is when they seem to simply be straight ports of NES games. Sometimes, they are mostly straight ports, but there is still potential for enhancements later through hacks. But many of the ports at least come with MSU support and multiple soundtrack options, which is a nice touch. Duck Tales has some minor color upgrades so that the various characters look like their TV versions, such as Scrooge having his blue coat. But even if they were just straight ports, I still think it's cool. Sometimes, "because you can" is a good reason to do something. But something like this demonstrates more good reasons for these ports, to take advantage of the increased sprite capabilities of the SNES. This is very cool to see.

First, it's nice of them to make these more widely available. Hopefully they sort out any issues these had. I do like the idea of paying to have the games properly, even if there would be better ways to play them. I have played most of these already. I find the whole thing fascinating, both IGS(Taiwan) as a developer and the PGM hardware. Many of the IGS PGM games are quality games that can stand up to other games in their genres. The Gladiator is a fantastic beat-em-up game. Demon Front is very similar to Metal Slug, but it is definitely its own game with different ideas and a more defensive play style. I've been wanting to spend more time with the Knights of Valour games. The Chinese cultural influence on the games differentiates them and makes them interesting to me.

I haven't played a ton of Martial Masters, but it's quite impressive in action with strong character designs and fantastic animation. I think they wanted a game of their own that looked like it could rival Street Fighter 3 in terms of production value, at least in terms of animation.

I wonder if they would ever consider another collection featuring other PGM games, along with PGM2 and perhaps their Atomiswave Knights of Valour. For the longest time, PGM2 emulation was quite unreliable, but it looks to be in good shape now. I've only tried Oriental Legend 2 out for a few minutes, but it feels a lot like the Gladiator, with some KoV mechanics thrown in. It feels like it could possibly be on the same level, or perhaps higher, as the Gladiator.

Cool to hear of his genuine enthusiasm for gaming and those old arcade games specifically, and that it's not just a tie in to his racing career. Also cool is Mr. OutRun's little arcade space. I don't know the full extent of it, but it looks like he's got at least four OutRun arcade cabinets including the small/budget one.

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.