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@Andee And the Omega Collection, while they're at it!

It's strange and unfortunate how limited/quiet the Wipeout series has been lately. Is there a tangled legal situation, or something? I'd love to see Wipeout come to more platforms. Not sure if Sony would have to give permission for the Omega Collection specifically, but some previous games have been on competing consoles like the Saturn and N64, so it's not like it's exclusively their series.

@Quick_Man I didn't say anything about this agenda or that.
Is it not objectively true that:
1. Many Japanese/anime-ish games have been blocked or censored* in the past decade or so.
2. Other games have gotten away with the same stuff on a T or M rating.

*Using "censored" in this context to mean something was provably toned down or removed, regardless of whether it was caused by governments, ratings boards, company standards, etc.

@Zedecks Video games themselves probably wouldn't be able to exist if companies had to fully appease both Californians and Texans!

@MSaturn It's a Japanese/anime game thing. Significantly stricter standards when games have "anime" looking characters, regardless of the characters' ages.

I thought Sony was the most zealous about anime character censorship, followed by Nintendo.
But now there's stuff that even they are okay with, that Xbox won't allow?

@SpaceChurro Thanks for this! It's what I had suspected, but it's good to finally have confirmation of the translation's status.

Wonder how long it'll take for modders to put the original script back in, so we can have our Tootsie Pop references and whatnot.

@slider1983 They go for deep discounts fairly often, at least!

@Daniel36 I assume "wizard" refers to those step-by-step setup/installation programs?
It sounds like there's a modern- and somewhat sketchy- Unity engine app which launches first, allowing you to change some settings or something, before it launches the actual game.

@KingMike All true! I noticed a mention of "puzzle shooter" on the box.
I have played it, and the connection to Tetris is pretty flimsy. (I was only being half-serious about counting it.)
Though it technically is a puzzle, and it involves falling blocks, so...

@-wc- Columns is older than Dr. Mario, at least. That's the only one I can think of, but there must be others. (Does Quarth count?)

Just want to point out that the second of the two embedded videos is using PiStorm, which is basically a modern CPU replacement for the Amiga, and this produces impossibly good performance.

The first video shows it running on real hardware at ~5fps.

@sdelfin This is a good point! There's overlap between the PC/console and US/UK/EU issues, but they're not synonymous.

I've come across '90s PC gamers- many of them American- who feel that console-only gamers overstate the importance of titles like Goldeneye. And of course, the console gamers can fire back with their own rebuttals. But anyway, it really is reminiscent of the regional debate, with two often isolated groups emphasizing the things they know, and downplaying anything outside that.

@dunk I was specifically thinking of games journalists saying that gamers are losers, but yeah, gamers themselves saying "gamers are losers" has also become more common since then!

@axelhander This games journalist was doing the whole "gamers are losers" take, some 20+ years before it became popular. Truly ahead of his time!

@JohnnyMind Yeah, even if there isn't a full decompilation to analyze yet, there would still be various ways of testing this, like using an emulator with save states (and maybe both "players" managed by a single controller). Not sure why no one did this, if this was such a longstanding mystery.

@-wc- Judging by the HUD's proportions, this game seems to already be optimized for 16:9 displays!
I don't remember seeing a widescreen mode in the options, but maybe it's a system-level setting. Plus, I haven't played GT3 in a while.

@-wc- Too true, unfortunately. Even the good ones arguably take more liberties with the source material than they need to.

That said, I find Anderson's Resident Evil movies to be cheesy fun, and some of them (particularly the second and... was it the fourth or fifth?) do make an effort to draw from and connect to the games. It is really weird that he's seemingly trying to make HotD legitimately scary, but I'm not going to completely write it off just yet.

"It’s going to be immersive and very, very scary."
"it reflects the experience of playing the video game"
These two lines are contradictory. Does he know what The House of the Dead is?

@Zenszulu How many games in 1998 or later were still in mono?
As far as I'm aware, almost everything was in stereo by then (even a majority of Game Boy and GBC games, if you plugged in external speakers), and many games also offered an option to choose.

@AJB83 I'm glad that Xbox 360 and Nintendo 64 were some of the first systems chosen for this recomp technique, as they both have so many potentially great games... and such poor technical performance holding those games back!

@N00BiSH Check out PCGamingWiki. Looks like Generations is known to have issues on Windows 11, on top of the other stutters we were talking about, but there are unofficial patches that can fix these things!

@N00BiSH Not surprised that the remaster changed something for the worse, however small it was (it's basically inevitable). Wonder if anyone has reverted things using mods.

I did experience a single, noticeable, inexplicable framerate drop in modern Chemical Plant, and this is a known issue, but it was otherwise perfect, as far as I recall. (This was with a GTX 960 on Win7.) I wasn't aware that some PCs/OSes had worse issues.

@N00BiSH When someone recompiles Generations?
That game has had a native PC version for a long time. It's a little harder to get in its original form now, as the remaster with Shadow's campaign has replaced it, but that should be an equally good experience if your computer isn't too old.

Or were you just hoping for easier mod support? I'd assume there's a decent selection of mods already, but haven't looked into it.

PS: Series X doesn't run Unleashed smoothly? I saw a video showing that it powers through even the infamous problem spots in the Adabat level... albeit at the original game's sub-HD resolution. Does it have issues elsewhere?

As much as I usually like Yuzo Koshiro's work, most of the good tracks in SoR3 were Motohiro Kawashima's!

Interesting to see that Kawashima worked on Amazing Island. I've tried the game briefly, but never looked into the soundtrack.

@RetroMasters I wouldn't say Nintendo in general is overlooked, but yeah, the SNES modding/homebrew scene is still maturing. It will be interesting to see if/how it grows, and what these talented homebrew devs come up with in the future.
The SNES is a pretty powerful piece of hardware in the right hands... especially when it's not being underclocked and running a game from a teensy 1 MB cartridge.
Give it 8 MB (64 Mb) or so of FastROM, and it'll really shine!

@RetroGames Not at all! My comment on the price was based on it being an emulated SNES ROM (contrast this to how much Ninja Five-O, an emulated GBA ROM, is going for!), and the bit about the box art was regarding any promotional art with the game, including the box art view on Steam.
I wouldn't expect a physical SNES game to go for less than $50-ish.

I'm not familiar with this game, though I will say it looks good- and the price is reasonable as well.

But with such an authentically '90s localization, they need to have some bad American box art to go with it!

@Zoinkity So basically, they're dynamically mapping 12 MB worth of addresses into 8 MB of physical RAM (which works fine because it's a simple game that never needs all of that memory at once)?

Interesting about the 4 MB of extra RAM... I assume the modders patched the game to reroute the higher addresses to the Expansion Pak? (The Pak adds 4 MB of memory to the N64, putting it on par with an Aleck64.)

It's one thing to take issue with violence in video games, but when you're the owner of an action movie franchise full of all kinds of violence, it comes across as hypocritical, or at least hilariously out-of-touch.

And the movies don't even come with a giant "16" age label on the front, the way the games do! How do we know they aren't falling into children's hands? (Think of the children!)

There are more people using audio cassettes and VHS tapes than playing on old consoles?

@PinballBuzzbro $60 each, or $140 for the two (go figure).
I hate to think of what this would cost in Canada, once you factor in taxes, shipping, and exchange rate. Well over $200 for sure. Probably around $250.
And these aren't even good games!
(I actually would be interested in playing these, partially as a curiosity, and partially because of the music. But that's more in $5-10 Steam release territory. There are much better things I could be spending my money on!)

From what I've read, the memory card slot maxes out around 3 MB/s, which is faster than reading the inner edge of a DVD, but slower than reading the outer edge (which is just over 5 MB/s). That sounds bad, but might not matter so much in reality.

The memory card doesn't have moving parts, which means no seek times- removing a major factor that caused some games to load slowly. Well-optimized games tend to load from the outer edge of the disc with minimal seeking, so that would probably perform worse from a memory card, but those games can probably afford a small increase in loading time without becoming unbearable.

The PS2's DVD drive is 4x speed, so it's several times faster than it needs to be in order to play DVD-quality video, and dozens of times faster than it would take to play audio, so that's no issue under normal circumstances.

@markran Thanks for the detailed response!

It's frustrating how the current system is stacked so heavily in favour of both the "big guy" as well as... let's say the "aggressor" in general, as- like you touched on- it's not necessarily the actual rights holder, but potentially an overzealous legal team or even an outright troll. If they so much as growl, it's often deemed safest to just give in, even if they really don't have much of a case on their hands.

And yeah, it's a fair point to distinguish between the actual rights holder and their lawyers who advocate for them (and who are incentivized to be aggressive). Though when a company like Nintendo (just as the most infamous example) is so widely known to have consistently overzealous lawyers, they should be able to rein them in a bit to save their reputation- and a bit of money as well!

About the fair use angle, I wonder if the focus on a single franchise weakens that a bit. Not that this explains every recent case of legal threats against these books, but a Final Fight book might be riskier than, say, a general look at '80s arcade games, or 2D beat-em-ups.

Not so sure that I'd find the gameplay itself all that interesting, but the art style is cute, and I do have a soft spot for the N64. Will check on this later and see how it turns out!

"Hupke did not specifically name who exactly sent him this message"
So it was Nintendo, then?

More seriously, is a book like this actually infringing on anyone's property? There are plenty of books about games, TV shows, etc., which mention the trademarked names and even show the occasional screenshot, and these have existed for decades without issue. But several of these books have just recently been stifled, censored, and/or threatened with legal action.
Is this kind of book a grey area without much legal precedent (or even technically illegal, but rarely seriously pursued by the rights holders until now), or are companies just throwing their weight around with no real backing or justification besides "I have more money and better lawyers than you"?

The parts were good enough to keep the systems running for what, 5-10 years? Not saying that it's justified, but I can easily see it being within the range that a company would consider acceptable.

@UtopiaNemo Not just kids- adults are always comparing the SNES and Genesis "chip tunes" against each other, as if they're two variations on the same thing!

And it's hard to blame them. Many SNES games used tiny, looped samples, effectively bringing them more in line with the technique used by the Turbografx, the Famicom Disk System, the N163 chip, and the Game Boy (small, repeating, custom waveforms). Sometimes these samples were taken from FM synthesizers as well, making them lo-fi copies of what the Genesis was doing natively!

So whether it was a guitar chord, a cymbal crashing, a seagull's cry, or a human laugh, it was usually made up of a tiny snippet of sound, looped to stretch it out, and then with pitch bends added on top of that. The SNES was absolutely capable of playing full recordings of these sounds, but ROM size limits (and audio not being given the space/priority it needed in that ROM) led to fake, "synthy" results.

There was a big difference between what the SNES's audio hardware was capable of, and what it actually did in the average game. Perhaps more than any other system!

@Sketcz So basically Ecco: Harmony of Despair?
I don't know how playable that would be, but it's a fun thought. Navigation would be a lot easier, at least!
(By the way, 4K is on the low end for an Ecco level! The larger ones are over 6000x4000, or about 3 screens worth.)

I never really delved into the world of Mugen, but this looks pretty insane- even by Mugen standards! Definitely looks like one to check out.

@NinChocolate Analogue video outputs are the best thing about using dedicated consoles instead of emulation! Or at least I think so; others seem to prefer getting as close to the emulation experience as they can without actually using emulation. Which is fine, I guess, but not my thing.

I agree that demand for this could increase as the original consoles break down... but on the other hand, as the consoles are dying, so are the CRT TVs. So maybe, maybe not?

@KitsuneNight You joke, but I'm pretty sure some of those (at least the NES mini) have been done already.

Knuckles is actually using English words there? I always assumed it was some nonsense yell: something along the lines of the "shaa" he sometimes says when launching off a ramp.

Also, while this was a bit questionable in itself, it's not as bad as Sonic Rush Adventure's boss music with its "beat kicks the rockin'" vocal bit, which 110% sounds like the f bomb when it's chopped up like that. I don't know how that slipped past the ratings boards.

@KitsuneNight Yeah, there's supposed to be a clear-cut divide between the "good" and "bad" versions, at least according to public opinion, but I just don't see it. Half of Vista's issues were resolved in a short time, and the other half remained in 7 onwards, so people got used to them. Regular 8 was pretty bad in some ways, but 8.1 was again basically just Vista/7. Then 10 had worse performance and way more bugs.

I jumped straight from Windows 7 to Linux Mint. Dual-booted frequently at first, but did so less and less over time. It's great how, even out of the box, it has a lot of customization, modern features, and some of the stuff I liked about XP/7 as well! Things like gaming can still be a pain in those ~20% of cases, but I don't think I'll ever go back to Windows for general use.

PS: Nope, he's still rocking the boom box! He's in one of the Spider-Man movies, and I just learned that he recently returned to Star Trek as well.

@MARl0 It's not too bad on Normal difficulty (though I feel like it still goes on just a bit longer than it needs to), but it really is a slog on higher difficulties.
Still not as bad as the NA version of Streets of Rage 3, though!
I came decently close to finishing Expert mode in FF2 (I think I did okay in Sor3 on Hard as well), but it was just too monotonous and time-consuming for me to give it another try.

@KitsuneNight I see that pattern mentioned all the time, but I've got to disagree. 7 is almost identical to a patched version of Vista, and 8.1 isn't all that different from 7 either.
10 was where I really felt that things went downhill: slower performance, more spying, and no way to stop the updates from running at inopportune times (that pause button doesn't quite do the job).
11 just took what 10 was doing, and cranked it up to... well, 11.

More on topic, it's interesting that you mention Nvidia being more problematic on Linux, as I've had less success running my games (on an Nvidia GPU) than others seem to have. An impressive number of games "just work", which is great, but a considerable percentage (let's say 20%) have major issues or refuse to start at all. Some of them are listed in ProtonDB as working. It's great that I can keep gaming on my old PC without having to boot back into Win7, but ultimately, I'm still going to have to get Windows for my next build.

PS: Speaking of even-numbered Star Trek movies, did you hear that Punk on Bus has been making a comeback?

@nocdaes I think they've been tying their own hands with NSO, same as Xbox is doing with GamePass. When you're offering your whole catalogue for a flat rate, it means there's a lot less financial incentive to add content or improve the service. Obviously, the service as a whole has to be good enough to attract subscribers, but is better N64 emulation really going to help gain/retain NSO subs?

While their previous Virtual Console service had its downsides for sure, I found it a lot more appealing. If only they had ported it over instead of switching to subscriptions only... and then drip-feeding the whole library all over again!

@Greenmanalishi @gingerbeardman MVG's video does demonstrate that performance on Simple64 is poor, even on surprisingly decent hardware. But yeah, I've gotten great results on Project 64 (on a roughly equivalent CPU), so I think the issue is less that emulation is in a bad state, and more about there being many different options of varying speed and quality.

More thoughts:

• A reasonably recent build of PJ64 with the GlideN64 plugin gets accurate results with many trickier games and effects, though I admittedly haven't spent much time with the Factor 5 games yet.
• A Pentium 4 from over 20 years ago could run N64 emulation in HD at full speed (and even '90s PCs could run a few of the earlier games decently), but this is essentially cheating, as the accuracy wasn't there. As soon as you switch to an accurate configuration, you'll need something a lot beefier to run it.
• FPGA solutions, as well as some of the latest emulators, focus on accuracy above all else: you're getting the original resolution and FPS. But when it comes to N64, does that really make for a good gameplay experience?

@Captain_Retro YouTube also has a box you can tick to restrict your video to 18+, though this limits the ads (and therefore monetization) associated with that video.

As with video game ratings, the age-gating system is already in place, but censorship is still being applied, as if the gating isn't sufficient... or as if it's actually adults who need to be protected.

@BulkSlash @GravyThief I'm surprised that you guys aren't seeing the scanlines at all, but I do agree that the effect is often exaggerated these days.
On a 20" NTSC TV running 240p games over composite cables, the effect is there, but it's subtle. With 480i, the interlacing overwrites the gaps with a new picture so quickly that they aren't visible at all!
I do remember the lines/gaps being more visible on a bigger TV, though.

Personally, the biggest draw of a CRT has to be the smoothness, where pixel graphics (or low-res renders) somehow look smooth and rounded around the edges, often with a lot of detail packed in, and it's hard to believe I'm looking at such a low resolution output. Yet some CRT filters completely skip this, and instead present jagged pixels covered with a bunch of things I don't even care about, like scanlines, curvature, chromatic aberration, etc., so it would seem that not everyone agrees with my opinion on that!