sdelfin

Tosaki has spoken extremely highly of Nintendo, so I don't think this is a case of trying to steal some of their thunder. I think this is plausible. Sega, with their arcade ties, were always trying new things. Their deluxe arcade games were practically rides. They worked with holographic visuals. Sega, Namco, and perhaps others saw the utility of polygons quite a few years before they had their 3D boards. Same thing with various companies and CDs.

@RoboJ1M I agree with you that DVD would have been a great feature, as it was for the PS2. The only issue is that Sega would have had to pay licensing fees for that, some of which would have gone to Sony. I'm not sure how much that would have been, but it might have seemed to be unnecessary at the time. The Dreamcast launched at a strange time with both the move to DVD drives and major advancements in 3D hardware happening after the hardware was finalized. That timing put them in a tough spot.

From a different interview with Tosaki that I saw recently "It was the game developers that didn’t want dual analog 3D sticks at all." What's not clear is whether they were looking into it and the developers were adamant about not wanting two, or if it's more along the lines of what he says here and that there was no demand at the time for it. It could be a translation thing. Also, dual analog was still fairly new at that point and perhaps it wasn't seen as particularly useful when they were designing the Dreamcast.

The Dreamcast controller is one of the worst aspects of the whole package. The cable coming out of the bottom was a minor annoyance, but still annoying. The reduction in face buttons from six to four wasn't great, especially for the Capcom fans. I was fully on board the SNK train by then, so four was good for the fighting games I wanted to play. The change to that stiff, cross-style D-pad was a huge step down and was probably the worst thing about the controller. That thing legitimately hurt my thumbs playing King of Fighters. It was the first system to do that to my hands since the NES when I first got one. On top of that, the novelty of the VMUs wore off for me pretty quickly, and the L and R triggers were not nearly as durable as the ones on the Saturn 3D pad and could break fairly easily. That happened to me and I was always really careful with my gaming stuff. I've opened both controllers and saw how much better built the triggers were for the Saturn 3D pad.

Happy anniversary King of Fighters. I have a soft spot for KOF as it really helped shape my tastes at a time when I was getting into a rut. A friend of mine brought me to a local shop to see Street Fighter 3 for the first time. He was impressed. I could see why, but I just didn't like Capcom's character designs in a lot of cases. Right next to it was King of Fighters '97. It was technically less impressive than SF3, but the animation was still excellent, along with the sprite work. The characters were more stylish and the gameplay looked great. I was mesmerized. I didn't play it there, but I did get it for the Saturn when it came out a few months later and I loved it. I had that experience a few times where I just knew I'd love a game almost immediately upon seeing it. It reignited my enjoyment for fighting games, and 2D games with nice pixel art. And it was a nice late addition to my Saturn library as the system reached its end thanks to the looming release of the Dreamcast later that year.

@KingMike I think I guessed Jaguar on that one too. I'm not familiar enough with it to know what its layout is by memory, other than that keypad.

I missed the Gamecube(been a while since I used one of those cotrollers), the Gamate, and the Euro Mega Drive six-button pad. I'm surprised the other ones I had to guess went my way.

I like the Prison City demo from a year ago. Finally picked the game up about a month back, when I was pretty sick and was catching up with my Steam and GOG games to pass the time. Fun game. It gets pretty tricky in spots that remind me of why I love save states so much, but I have been enjoying it. I have to jump back in and resume it. Hearing that this is by the same guy makes me more interested, though I already liked the creative title and some of the comedy elements with this one. It's a game I'll definitely read the review for when it's done. I like the claw machine in one of the screenshots above.

I had the game as well and enjoyed it for quite a while as I was looking for a change of pace from Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat. I got good enough to beat the game somewhat reliably. Those familiar with the final boss will know what that's like. As far as adapting this property, on the one hand, compared to most other fighting games there's more meat on the bone as far as story elements go due to the premise and different time periods. On the other hand, there's no audience for this, unless they think they can brute force it through the marketing.

I saw the headline and thought it was like a real-life Stonehenge moment from Spinal Tap. Even the expectation it would be larger is there. The fact that colossal is part of the game's name and it ended up in a tiny box is quite amusing.

Unfortunately, situations like this one are inevitable. There are so many of these things that some will remain in the hands of private collectors with no digital version available. Perhaps these collectors understand how precarious the situation is because of the nature of data that they have dumped the ROM, even if it's not made available.

Regarding the notion of making the ROM available affecting the value, I highly doubt that applies here. The sale prices of stuff like this are so high that it's purely collector value. People simply interested in playing this would not be willing to spend so much. Preservationist groups might be able to approach those numbers, but they have to pool their money each time to make offers and probably can't go back and forth with bidding. It doesn't appear as if those groups have any significant effect on sale prices. That just leaves the handful of collectors with large amounts of money to spend, and they're bidding against each other. If there's any effect on value from outside that bubble, it's likely tiny. It's not like when Radiant Silvergun was hard to come by and the Saturn version was several hundred dollars. It was still low enough that some gamers might go for it at those prices. That's where a digital version could hurt collector value. For this, it's a totally different situation.

Sakimoto was one of the best composers on the Sega Genesis. The Gauntlet 4 soundtrack is stunning. His music for Captain America & The Avengers is excellent as well. I recently became aware of Master of Monsters on the system, and he did at least some of the music there too, which was very good as well.

I was unaware of Jewel Master for a long time, but I recall a classmate in grade school with whom I did not usually talk gaming mention that she liked the game. I recognized the title many years later, but I also remember her talking about the rings. I might have seen it for rent, but I never did play it back in the day. The game came out before I got the system which explains that. I have played it in recent years. The game is not amazing, but it wasn't bad in my opinion. I think the main reason I finally tried it was because I heard the music was good. I'd definitely check out an improvement hack.

@Andee Yeah, it sounded like they prioritized samples for voices and some of the sound effects which left them with some strange limitations when it came to the music composition. I think they would have been better off starting with the audio setup from the prior game and just tweak it from there.

What's even worse about leaning on the PSG more is that some revisions of the system had issues with the sound levels of the PSG output which means the game would sound even worse on those systems.

@Diogmites I never did play either of the Bushido Blade games because they came out before I had a PS1(I was happy with my Saturn in those days), but I remember reading about them and thinking they were cool. I've helped people who enjoyed them back in the day but forgot what they were called remember the name, and it seemed to leave an impression on them. The concept is very interesting. It's definitely on my list of games to try at some point.

I recently was looking at video of the finished but unreleased SNES version of this. That one also looks like it's missing something compared to the NES version. If they can make either 16-bit version better, then more power to them. Sometimes, limitations can be helpful, and that's what happened with the NES version as it's much more stylish and memorable while managing some impressive visuals for the system on a technical level. It also helped that the NES version wasn't outsourced.

I've always appreciated demakes and ambitious, smartly-designed ports. I remember being impressed with Donkey Kong Land and the Zelda games on the Game Boy when they were new as impressive feats for the hardware. There's Metal Gear Solid on the GBC, which I don't like all that much due to the stage design, but it is technically impressive and well made. And this reminds me of the Daikatana demake for the GBC since it's the same concept of taking an FPS and making it a top-down action game.

Very cool seeing improvements like this. It was impressive how they improved Special Champion Edition, though I already thought that one was very good and is my favorite of the 16-bit console ports of the time(and the SNES games were the ones I had back in the day). The scratchy voices didn't bother me as much as they did others. With the benefit of hindsight, the PC Engine version handles the voice samples the best in my opinion.

Back to Super SF2. The SNES port is more to my taste than the previous titles because I think they handled the music better. I've said for a while that Capcom shouldn't have changed the music as much from Special Champion as that was pretty good. It would be cool to see the music improved from the actual sound hardware, but MD+ is cool and not a bad way to do it. I know I've enjoyed some of the MSU-1 stuff I've sampled on the SNES.

I'll have to see if I can get the demo running later. It looks pretty nice. The sprite work jumped out at me when I saw the thumbnail. I think the over-the-shoulder throw looks a bit off. I mean that as a constructive criticism. It's a work in progress so it could be on the list of things the developer intends to work on. I think that would improve the presentation. But it is looking good from the pictures and screen shots.

@AJB83 I've lag tested my own 8bitdo controllers in an emulation setup a couple of months ago. To my own surprise all the pads I tested, including some old ones, have so little added latency they are functionally identical to using them wired and other wired controllers I used for comparison. They added no additional frames of lag. That isn't to say 2.4GHz wouldn't be better, but as far as lag goes, their controllers are excellent, at least the handful of models I have. Perhaps there's more going on with regard to Bluetooth that is causing the lag such as particular Bluetooth hardware on the host device. Either way, I still vastly prefer wired, just for peace of mind.

@Azuris I think you're right that it's on the Switch's end. Even my oldest 8bitdo controllers, an early model of the Zero and the old 2015 FC30 have very good Bluetooth performance with minimal lag. That the Bluetooth audio is what triggers it pretty much confirms it.

I've pointed out in the past that some games are licensing nightmares and the Ghostbusters situation is a good example of that. There can be a lot of paths to go down to bring a game out. It's probably trickier when there is a current exclusive console licensee, though that might not be as big of a problem for these arcade cabinet replicas.

The early versions of Revenge of Shinobi would be another licensing nightmare, though at least they basically did various sprite hacks so the game can live on.

@Sketcz Well this is a pleasant and unexpected development. No need to worry about getting it to me as I just checked romhacks.org out of curiosity and it's been uploaded there, so I'll be doing some testing myself later. I might still refer back to this article and see if I can replicate the results as it was cool to follow along and see how your hacking experience went and that you could get some good results without having to have a deep technical knowledge.

Edit: If my appreciation wasn't clear already, I just wanted to add a simple thank you for passing that request along. Never hurts to say so explicitly.

@BulkSlash congrats on that. Strider is a good one to 1CC because it's not easy, but it's more manageable than it looks. I used to be crap at the game, but it always looked like fun so I came back to it. I only 1CC games if I'm enjoying it, and that's one I went ahead and did. I had some no-death runs, but the randomness we discussed makes that hard to do repeatedly.

I have heard people mention glitches. I've encountered a glitch when restarting at the checkpoint in stage two before the airship part where the background doesn't load and the game can't proceed properly. I don't know if it's an emulation issue or if it happens on real hardware, but considering how robust CPS1 emulation is, I think it may be a real glitch. Those gravity machines can also send you off screen which is really annoying which has to be a glitch.

I read up on the game and it was really interesting how the music wasn't implemented correctly in early versions. I believe there was a bit more music that was never implemented in any of the arcade versions, some "hurry up" music and a unique ending tune. I'm not sure if you are aware, I recently saw that there's a hack(2022) for restoring all the music to an early US version of the game as well as cleaning up those garbage pixels. I haven't tried it yet, so I can't give any first-hand impressions. It flew under my radar as arcade hacks aren't very common.

@KingMike I'm not an FPGA guy, but my understanding is that the original guns already work just fine. Of course, that would require a CRT. This update would allow people to play gun games on modern displays as that is why the Sinden gun exists.

I remember seeing a video on light guns and I vaguely remember that Bandai gun, or at least I think so. I'll have to check and see if I'm correct in that.

@BulkSlash Thanks for answering. It's strange how Capcom games are broken in that way. I played Strider quite extensively last year. Frankly, I was a bit obsessed, but it was fun. As far as I could tell, there's some amount of randomness to the difficulty as I'll sometimes get one bad break after another just starting the game up, especially early in the game. The later stages seem to have less variation, perhaps because they're already hard enough. Maybe there are difficulty and scaling differences between the different ROM versions as there are a number of other differences and possible bug fixes.

@BulkSlash What do you mean when you say difficulty scaling on Street Fighter 2 Hyper Fighting? I ask because I have noticed some cases in Capcom games where the difficulty setting seems to do nothing at all. Super Street Fighter 2 arcade seems to be broken in that way. I haven't played much of the arcade Hyper Fighting so I don't know what it does. Also, much earlier than that, Strider has the same problem at least on some versions. I remember trying it on max difficulty and it was one of the easiest runs I ever had. Strider is buggy in various ways, but I still enjoy it. Funny how the NES version is a mess too.

@Bonggon5 If you want to dive right into it, it's already out on romhacks.org. It's romhacking.net where it's still pending.

This was definitely interesting and does seem easy enough to pick up a bit with some kind of guidance as starting point. I remember those days well. I think there was a divide between the parents buying the games and the kids playing them. Parents were so goofy back then. I know games were expensive then in relative terms, but it seemed to parents were more upset at short games. I had a number of games that ended up being easy enough where I beat them quickly. And then I played them some more and would have fond memories of them. And then others were so infuriating that I reached a point where I just said never again. Battletoads was one of those games, and I mastered the turbo tunnel. It just stopped being fun due to all the gimmicks getting in the way of the core gameplay. And it's not that I dislike all hard games. I always enjoyed Ninja Gaiden because the game is so fun to control on a basic level. A couple of years ago, I decided to try beating it without save states and I did that twice(once with the sword trick, and once without). I did that because it was fun. I remember Dynamite Headdy getting the rental difficulty spike back then. Same for Streets of Rage 3. I just think jacking up the difficulty like that might have had short-term benefits, but hurt things long term.

One of my favorite ROM hacks, and I mention this here because it probably is not much more complex, is for Super Mario All Stars. Specifically, the hack fixes the weird behavior when breaking blocks. Breaking them kind of sucks Mario or Luigi up further a tiny bit and feels really odd. It definitely does not play correctly. From what I remember, the value was reversed vertically in the original game moving the character up instead of down upon hitting blocks, so it was just a matter of reversing that to restore it to the proper behavior. There have been times when I wondered is a specific hack existed. For example, just recently I was playing Assault Suits Valken/Cybernator and I would have liked being able to disable double-tap dashing since that function is also mapped to A by default and the double-tap control caused me a bunch of problems. It's already a good game, and that would improve it in my opinion.

Esper Genesis is such a perfect name to go along with this. It's a cool idea and sounds like there would be enough crossover between Phantasy Star fans and tabletop RPG players. Good luck to them.

That's a nice bit of promotional art too. I don't know if that's a new piece for this or an old one reused, though I don't recall seeing it before, but that's a nice rendition of Alis. I especially like the coloring and shading.

And yes to miniatures!

I remember coming across a video a while back where the creator made a pretty good case that Sega was considering making the SVP a separate lock-on cart. Obviously there has never been a lot of info about it, but I recall there may have been some excerpts that indicated it. If the SVP was going to make games that expensive, it made more sense to have it as a lock-on system so that consumers only needed to buy the SVP once. Of course, that makes it a lot more messy to market the games, much like how people find the PC Engine confusing with the CD systems and system cards. That was Nintendo's advantage, the simplicity, but then their customers were paying a premium on various chip-enhanced games each time they bought one, so there was a downside. It would be interesting to know more about how much the SVP cost versus the SuperFX chip.

@President_Leever That game is Nuclear Throne.

@Sketcz Yeah. I noticed it is shown as "Rev E" so I assumed there have been changes along the way. And I know in this one case, someone created a hack for this port changing the status screen.

Just so you know, the map is accessible from the status screen. It's not the mini map you've previously described, so that might still be better, but it's great to have a map of any sort.

@Sketcz I don't know if you have an earlier version of the Metroid port, but it has a map now, along with other improvements.

I actually like this porting project more than I expected. There are added options and improvements. There are often multiple soundtrack options, added saves(Metroid), some color improvements(Ducktales), and maybe some other things I'm overlooking.

@NinChocolate I've briefly tried Wolf Fang, but have not played it seriously, so I look forward to doing that. Always good to hear an endorsement of it. I have heard the Saturn version is very good so you should be in good shape there. I've heard that Skull Fang is not so great in either version, which is a shame.

I've been in a mood for mech games, so that's how I remembered I needed to come back to Wolf Fang.

@KingMike I was aware of the arcade version, but not aware of that particular detail. I went straight to TCRF(The Cutting Room Floor) and they have a bit of info on this under the entry for Top Gunner. In the case of the rotary version, it is suspected it was a version for location testing and may not have been officially released. It also mentions that the Japanese version of the game has the machine gun shoot the way the jeep is facing as opposed to upwards like the NA and World versions. I'm not sure if there are significant differences between those latter two to count them as two distinct versions of the game, but it looks like there are either three or four unique versions of the game, which is rather interesting.

Also interesting to see how significantly the NES version was changed from the FDS version. I never looked this one up before.

I love a good coincidence, and related to this, I was just looking up info and video on Wolf Fang over the last two days and it sounds like it's worth playing. I've been looking up mech games of that era in general, and that's how I remembered this one. Cool to see it getting a re-release.

@Spider-Kev as far as I can tell, that particular design came a good bit later than Voltron(Beast King GoLion). But it's probably no accident since Toei was behind both shows and both designs. It's a recycled design, which I'm totally cool with.

@Gamelore I always forget how close it looks to the yellow lion. Maybe it became a free agent and was signed by the super sentai team. The real answer is that Toei did both shows so they used an existing design.

@bryce951 okay. I didn't say anything about Yoshi's Island. This article is about Castlevania 4. The palette wouldn't be a issue there. As for the music, I can't think of any Japanese games that had that issue you describe, so generalizing like that is rather silly.

@Azathoth I don't know the reason for the removal of those ending pictures. It could be a content issue as I think many would assume. But it could also be that they are copyrighted photos used in the game either without permission, or they would need a new license for them. In that case, I can see why they would remove them.

It needs work, of course. The jump is definitely not right and is likely preliminary. It's not surprising that the Genesis can handle the basic look and feel of the game. It's nothing special in that regard. There are better looking games on both systems. As for the music, I like what they did with the stage two music. Simon's Theme from stage one is in Castlevania Bloodlines so we can compare. The version in Bloodlines is excellent.

I think the Genesis got the better end of things when it came to Castlevania. I found CV4 to be very disappointing because I prefer the look and feel of the other games of that classic period. CV4 deviated too much for me, and I also didn't like about half the soundtrack. So my only interest in this port is seeing how they handle things. As far as potentially increased performance, there are speed hacks for the original.

It struck me recently that Legendary Axe would have been a great framework for a sequel to Rastan compared to what we got. Apparently, a lot of other people have noticed the similarity as well including some reviewers at the time. I just recently revisited Legendary Axe a week ago and had a good time. It's a shame Rastan 2 didn't turn out well. The original arcade game and the SMS port are very good. They strayed too far from what worked, unfortunately.

I like the distinction of JRPG compared to WRPG. I think it's has been helpful. While I'm not a big RPG guy, I've tended to favor the Japanese kind. The distinctions might mean less due to the RPG-ification of so many other games. But I agree, many people would see the term JRPG as a positive thing.

I always feel a bit of the uncanny valley effect in modern games that try to make the characters look as real as possible. But game models like that are quite common now. This one is fine. It's based on a real person who many would consider attractive. The character looks good in this image and in the trailer.

Regarding the removed comments. I know it's fun to jump to conclusions, but I saw them before they were removed. They were not removed for simply having a different opinion.

@amishpyrate I never heard that about the lost code, but it's plausible. It has happened in other cases. They would have needed the code to port them to the GBA properly so losing it would be a sticking point. For later systems like 3DS, they would not need the code since they could just emulate the games making it much easier to release them again.

Wow, RetroFPGA is sooooooooooo much better, and I'm saying that sarcastically. And as a bonus, there's an extra month of waiting now. Mr. Pi actually had some thought to it. Some would argue they tried to get too cute. The super-generic name isn't going to be any better. Might as well just name it the "FPGA Board". I think this was much ado about nothing in the first place. I wasn't planning to buy it either way to be clear. The most important thing is for it to deliver. Just a shame it has to be delayed for this silliness.

@Spider-Kev The "real" term is "adventure game". That's what I remember all games of this sort, whether top-down like Zelda or side-view like Metroid, being called back in the day. Originally Metroidvania just described a Castlevania game in the Metroid style. It just caught on after that because it was catchy. You may find it dumb. You wouldn't be the only one. But there's no undoing it. I've never heard the term re-explore before. I can't say I like it. It gets a point across, but still falls short in my opinion. Metroidvania might mean nothing to those unfamiliar with the genre, but for those that know it even in passing, it communicates a lot more. Language and labels are just imperfect. I saw someone on Nintendolife yesterday saying they should be called "search action" games. But there are a lot of action games where you search for things that are not at all like Metroid or Symphony of the Night. The funny thing is they used "action" and "exploration" in the same sentence, but somehow missed suggesting "ExplorAction". The main reason the term Metroidvania persists is because most people are familiar enough with the namesakes for it to easily convey more than any other term does. Nothing else will catch on, and those that wish something would can't agree on what it should be. Again, such is the reality of language.

PS - A friend of mine had Caveman Games. I thought it was fun.

Maybe it's a case of low expectations from the anticipation after reading the headline, but I think the name is fine. The Mr. part is clever. I get the Pi part. It's goofy, but I get it. The most important part is that it delivers in performance. If the name continues to be an issue and they need to change it, especially on the Mr. part, I suggest they call it the (FPGA) MaSTer(without the capitalization if needed) just to be extra snarky.

@Hexapus I tend to agree when it comes to MSU hacks, as some of the new music doesn't fit with the visuals. With that said, I've heard a lot worse than what's here. It feels like it's somewhat consistent with the kind of music you might hear on the PC Engine CD or Sega CD, such as Lords of Thunder. Perhaps it's a bit poorly matched to the NES visuals compared to PCE.

But, to my main point. The good thing about these versions is they provide options, so there's nothing stopping anyone from sticking to the original music. In the case of Mega Man 3, they also provide a third option(Metroid has four soundtracks) for the Sega versions of the music. I have found the MSU to be useful here and there myself. One of my favorite uses was putting the NES chip tunes back into Super Mario All Stars.

@Blister There must have been some kind of problem with the link or original page. There's a page for it that works via search and all the other ones are still there so it doesn't seem like a takedown issue.

@N64-ROX Yeah, it was definitely a matter of when this would happen. I knew this would happen too. It did take longer than I expected, but backing stuff up like that was the smart thing to do. And storage has been relatively affordable, all things considered.