sdelfin

@BulkSlash As I recall, the original name was Mr. Pi. I get what they were going for. It's like the MiSTer(Mr.), but also similar to the Raspberry Pi in terms of size and form factor. It was clever, but perhaps too clever. However, I remember that there was supposed to be a name change with a twitter poll determining the winner. The winning name was "Retro FPGA" which was much worse in my opinion. I didn't see any stories about another name change back to a variation of the original. Perhaps that other name was too generic to be a usable product name they could trademark. I don't really know what's going on in that regard.

@JohnGuyJohn It would also be a throwback to the sports team in King of Fighters '94 and '98. The basketball guy used the ball as part of his fighting style, so it wouldn't even be unprecedented.

I wonder how many of these they can produce. It's probably not going to amount to much. I do wonder where they're getting the systems or parts at low enough cost to make this viable. They could be new-old stock, damaged stock, surplus boards, along with broken systems, perhaps otherwise meant for electronics recycling. I don't love the idea of good whole systems getting sacrificed for stuff like this, but that may not even be the case. This might actually be salvaging systems and keeping more out there, even if not in original form. Of course, there are far better ways to play Saturn than this. I know Saturn has a reputation for being hard to emulate, but that reputation is from almost a decade ago and is outdated. Saturn emulation took a big step forward around 2018 and a lot of modern hardware can run it easily now. It has only gotten easier since then as I assume further optimization has been made. Then there's the FPGA side which is also a good way to do it if the cores are in good shape.

Incidentally, I have two Saturns, my original from 1995 and a model 2 I got in 2015 because my original one stopped reading discs(could be a few things). That second one developed issues with the power supply a few years later. My original Saturn also needed two trips to the warranty department back in the day. I love the Saturn and I may just be an outlier as I haven't heard a lot of stories like that, but it was easily the most troublesome system for me.

As someone said, it's remarkable how far removed EA is now from how it was started. But that's how corporations are. People change, and different people are making decisions there. The modern EA has a long history of not being a great place to work and for making questionable decisions. In some ways, Steam got to be so successful because of the crazy DRM methods the big publishers were pursuing. EA doesn't have a lot that particularly interests me these days, but I made a conscious choice to not buy anything of theirs again. It did come into play once. I intended to get Mass Effect 3 when it came out, but by that point I was exasperated with EA. Part of that was withholding the game from Steam to push their own distribution. I seem to recall their own platform was a bit of a mess at the time too. Who could have imagined that?(me....many others) I'll just have to live with the Mass Effect sage uncompleted for me. Such a shame because I heard the saga's ending was very satisfying(sarcasm).

It is funny to hear they had that reaction. Perhaps some looked down on the Marvel characters for being from western comics. Perhaps it was just that they were not prominent in Japan compared to Street Fighter at that point and could make SF less popular. It worked out though and they did a nice job making it cohesive. The Marvel characters are the best sprites Capcom ever worked on in my opinion.

If anything tarnished Street Fighter from my perspective, it was the minor updates to SF2 as opposed to making a proper SF3 at the time. When they came out with Alpha instead of 3, it felt like a practical joke.

It's so strange that Gimmick got such a limited western release at all, in the Scandinavian region. I assume it was originally supposed to get at least a wider European release, especially since localizing required some arrangement to the music and those countries used PAL.

I almost posted a comment on the FPGA toxicity about how the retro-development scene is largely the same at its core, whether it's FPGA or software emulation. Sadly, toxicity is a part of this scene. I've never used Duckstation, though I have heard good things. Duckstation was the center of prior drama a little while back. The reason he's saying he knows how licenses work is because statements he made the last time indicated he didn't understand how they work and people have pointed that out. As I recall, he was claiming that Duckstation was only partly GPL which makes no sense as far as I can tell. I also don't think changing the license or going closed source applies retroactively. It has already been forked. Even if it is the best PS1 emulator, there are other PS1 emulators that work great. I'd rather not see development shut down this way, but PS1 emulation will be fine either way. Also, people can't "take issue" with license violations they don't know about. I don't know if the rest of his grievances are sound, but his prior statements seemed questionable and there's no detail here to go on. Regardless, it's his right to change the license, but, once again, the forks exist.

I don't want to make it sound like I am certain this developer is the problem. I know this is not their job and they don't owe anyone anything in this regard. There's plenty of toxicity in the development community directed at developers. I remember Dreamcast emulation being a bit of a roller coaster for a while. And more recently, the developer of PS2 emulator AetherSX2 stopped development due to apparent death threats and other nastiness, which is absurd behavior to direct at a software developer.

@PopetheRev28 I definitely enjoyed the Saturn more than the Dreamcast. Perhaps timing had something to do with that. There's no question the Dreamcast was more capable. Saturn had the better standard controller though. For me, it comes down to the kinds of games that were popular in the mid 1990s. When the Dreamcast came out, developers were looking to try new ideas and a lot of those weren't for me. I enjoyed the Dreamcast as well, but the library wasn't as much of what I wanted compared to the Saturn.

@KitsuneNight thanks for taking the time to make suggestions. I'll see if any of those fit my requirements.

I do believe that physical makes more sense for video and audio media. Films and albums don't need patches. Digital makes more sense for gaming. Luckily, we also have digital platforms for PC that seem to do things better than some of the big video streaming platforms and other competitors in the market. Some games just aren't suited to physical distribution. Even if major releases were held back to not need those major day-one patches, there is still a need for patching and updates. Some games are still very well suited to physical releases. Games like Shovel Knight and Cuphead are perfect for physical. The only downside there is that any DLC content, in Shovel Knight's case it was DLC that was planned and known from the beginning, often means physical releases have to be held back and players can wait years to get the full physical package. This is a good argument to use a mix of digital and physical as a player. Both of those games are excellent with DLC to match. In both cases, I bought the games through GOG so they are completely DRM-free so they are fully preserved for me as they are now.

I do understand the preference for physical for many and share the view for video and music. While I did find the idea of digital distribution intriguing early on, I've seen the downsides of that as well, so I have bought more DVDs and BDs in the last handful of years than I ever did when those formats were at their sales peaks.

It is a valid view, and it wouldn't be the only game or movie or show that depicted a bit of a rivalry between the two nations in fictional terms, but as previous posters said it may simply be coincidence as it may not be what the designers intended, or it could be viewed as a friendly rivalry. An explanation that is just as valid, if not even more plausible and compelling, is that Japan and the United States were the biggest arcade markets for Capcom so they wanted the two main guys to be representative of those two countries. There are probably a number of other plausible explanations, but never underestimate the idea they simply found the designs cool and fitting for the two countries.

@KitsuneNight I know what you mean about the technical stuff. And I prefer PC at this point, but as my tastes are far more retro, I've always been able to get by without really caring about GPUs as the integrated graphics have served me well in about 98 percent of cases. I've always found the GPU market confusing compared to everything else. Keeping track of CPUs I like. But I'm an enthusiast in a strange way, as I like used machines, and low-power stuff. But the reason I'm even replying is I have just been shopping over the last couple of days for my first actual GPU card in a very long time. I found it exhausting. I was looking for a good second-hand deal(anything above a certain number just made no sense for me) on something old. But what was the reason? I just wanted to finally be able to play Guilty Gear Xrd on it. I actually bought that on Steam early last year on a sale(four bucks!) with the expectation to get something to play it later. There will be other benefits, but that should cover most of my PC needs for a very long time because I find older stuff more fun for the reasons you say. And I'm also the type to enjoy the same games multiple times which makes me a bad consumer to those with something to sell.

It does seem to be an odd choice to not include the drive and stand for what will be their premium console. It is reminiscent of the Sony that was marketing the Vita when it was new. It seemed like a nice system, but they just couldn't resist gouging on the memory cards. It didn't turn out all that well. Maybe their calculation is to get some sales from the hardware enthusiasts(similar to whales for online games) and then drop it later, but the PR hit seems like a high price for them to pay to sell it at such a high price.

I'd rather have a disc drive than ray tracing. 3DO wins this round.

@KingMike Gauntlet 4 is also prone to the PCB issues. People have said there's some oxidation involved. Some have reported some success by cleaning the through-hole vias on the PCB. I had previously only heard of the transplanting, but was reading about this cleaning method earlier this year as I was curious about Gauntlet 4 carts. I've come across a couple of people saying they've acquired two or three Gauntlet 4 carts and someone told me, after I mentioned it, that they weren't getting a signal on all the pins. So I may have helped a guy salvage a couple of copies of it.

I bought the original series and it's on my list to watch sooner or later(I'm stockpiling). This looks pretty interesting and I'll keep an eye on it. But he's so tiny in most of it!

@PopetheRev28 There are many myths about lag. As others have said, this is not Bluetooth, so unless they screwed up their hardware, it should be essentially lag free. To put it in perspective, I tested out my two oldest Bluetooth controllers which are about a decade old on Android tablets(which are also claimed to add lag) with various cores on Retroarch. Straight to the point, the Bluetooth controllers had no additional lag compared to USB on the tablets or compared to PC USB. Things have only gotten better for controllers since then and the wireless hardware in these things is likely way faster than the Dreamcast processes inputs. If it somehow has measurable lag, they would just be a failure of implementation.

Day one? I was seven or eight months ahead of day one. Being a Saturn owner got me very comfortable with importing. Luckily, by the late 1990s, importing didn't carry a heavy premium, so I ended up ordering an Asian region(outside of Japan) Dreamcast because I just couldn't wait. It was a lot of fun, and very cool having it well before most people did. It arrived on the perfect day too. As I recall it was right as I was off from school for a week. It was a fun time.

Looks a lot like a Saturn controller. I definitely approve of that. In fact, the best controller I ever used on a Dreamcast was a Saturn controller, thanks to an adapter.

@IceClimbersMain Sadly, the worst examples of software emulation have been official collections. There's a long history of companies putting out shoddy emulation collections and products. I used to be able to rattle off about a dozen examples without thinking about it, but it was such a common occurrence I stopped keeping track. Software emulation can be done very well when the developers care about it. The same goes for FPGA, as the cores have to be well implemented. As far as I know, NGP emulates just fine in software, is trivial to do, and is likely better than those collections.

@Blast16 I'm glad my comment was helpful. If you're curious, you can see comparison videos. At first, the difference with the camera doesn't look like much, but because it's tighter to Croc on the Saturn, you start to see problems when enemies are behind you(harder to see them), and when there's platforming to do(harder to judge distance). The platforming issue is even worse in caves as platforms get in the way of the camera more often on Saturn. The PS1 is also likely superior in other ways due to it generally having better 3D graphics in most cases with multi-platform games. And if you're after a physical copy, I figure the PS1 version should be much more common as well. So the PS1 is definitely the way to go in every way, I'd say.

Back in 2019, I was in an odd mood to play a 3D platformer(I'm by far a 2D guy) from the early days of the genre which did not use analog controls. I did say it was odd. I remembered Croc and that's what I decided on. I originally had the Saturn version when it was new. I hated it due to the camera. But when I revisited it, I played the PS1 version.

The PS1 version has a better camera setup than the Saturn version. For the PS1, the viewpoint is a bit zoomed out by comparison, which helps a great deal with visibility. I enjoyed revisiting Croc and felt like I got my money's worth out of it finally. I ended up enjoying the game a lot more than some of its much higher profile competition when I revisited other stuff. I enjoyed the relatively small stages and sections. I liked rescuing those little creatures. So I like the idea of Croc getting spruced up with an HD update. I hope they do add analog controls, but I also hope they keep an option for digital controls, because they worked just fine.

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!