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@GravyThief And it was remade as Sword of Mana, and then remade again as Adventures of Mana!

Note/correction: Ys III was also released in English for North America.

Anyway, I hope these all get international releases now (preferably in English), as it would be either the first release in a very long time, or the first release ever! Of the games listed, only Ys I & II received more recent releases on Wii and the Turbografx Mini.

I liked Faxanadu and especially Ys I & II, so any opportunity to dig into Falcom's back catalogue is welcomed! I understand that most of the Dragon Slayer/Legend of Heroes/Xanadu games aren't that much like Faxanadu, but I'd still be interested. Dragon Slayer on Turbografx CD has a great soundtrack, as you'd expect.

@The_Nintendo_Pedant Nearly 30 years later, I still remember the headline: "US family installs Windows 95 from CD-ROM"!

@bring_on_branstons Ah, I never did make proper use of those weapons. Now that you mention it, I bet the three-way shuriken thing would be really helpful.

Cobra Triangle! That's a good one, but brutal- not that it comes as a surprise, being from Rare's Battletoads era! Even with a Game Genie for unlimited health, the final boss is still hard to finish off in the time limit. Snake Rattle 'n Roll isn't exactly a cake walk, either, though I haven't spent much time with that one.

@KingMike Yeah, it still struggles (flicker and slowdown), so it's not even totally stable at 30fps.
The weird thing is that Konami's other games were 60fps, like Contra, Castlevania, and Getsufuumaden itself! TMNT does sometimes throw more stuff on screen than any of those, but I'd say it wasn't worth the jank, if that's why.

I always thought of Konami as technically skilled (on top of simply making fun games), but going by your Dragon Scroll anecdote, they may have used a lot of duct tape to hold things together!

@Razieluigi Got to agree with you.
I liked the NES game for what it was, and I especially appreciate what it was trying to do, even if the execution was rough.
If this SNES port adds 60fps and unlimited continues, that'll go a long way. But I'd also love to see a game that expands on the concept, with larger maps, more exploration, and less difficulty.

Apparently, TMNT3 on Game Boy does some of the same things, with a Metroidvania-style structure, as well as turtles all having their own unique abilities? Just recently picked up the Cowabunga Collection, so I'm planning to dig into this one soon.

@bring_on_branstons Ugh, AVGN again. Nothing against the guy himself, but I wish people would form their own opinions. It seems like whenever there's an over-hated game, I find out that AVGN had done a popular episode ripping it apart.

Now, the dam in itself is a bit of a wake-up call, I guess. Sort of like the Turbo Tunnel in Battletoads, it's nowhere near the hardest part of the game, yet it is the part where I imagine a lot of players met their match after breezing through the first bit of the game.

I didn't really struggle with the dam when I played it (I was also 11 or 12), and those single-square gaps in stage 3 weren't an issue either, as I had discovered the correct way in that first building where you get the missiles. But the Technodrome- how did you beat that as a kid???
It just goes on and on, and then that final corridor is downright hellish, with those astronaut-looking guys that can destroy your run if RNG (or a slight mistake in your positioning?) puts them in the wrong spot.

@BausRifle I think the question these devs usually ask is "why not"!
But even besides that, this makes it a lot easier to add enhancements, like improved audio. In this specific case, I'm also hoping all that extra CPU headroom allows for 60fps, as this was one of the relative few NES games that only ran at 30.

@Guru_Larry I liked GA2 and 3. Great soundtracks in both of them, and 3 had those branching paths and a more expansive move set.

Though I have to agree that they didn't look nearly as good or play nearly as well as SoR2. (And GA3 does not look like a first-party 1993 game!)

@EarthboundBenjy I didn't know that Halloween hack had crossovers with other franchises, let alone such a deep cut as Brandish! Cool bit of trivia, anyway.
But then, I've never played it. Only knew that it was what Fox worked on before Undertale and Deltarune, and that he was apparently a bit of an angsty teenage edgelord at the time?

@zen-dev @Professor_Icepick You know it's tongue-in-cheek, right? Check out the description on the Indiegogo page, which is full of lines like:
"eliminate all remaining pockets of resistance and free-thinking that dare threatening our Workers' Paradise"
and
"Resistence is futile. The Sovietborgs are here to free you from your freedom."

I already hate soldering under normal conditions. The thought of trying to melt tiny bits of metal onto a small board with almost the same melting point is the stuff of nightmares!

Quite a spiffy end result, though!
(As a side note, I miss that trend of transparent cases.)

Even for those of us who grew up with consoles and never saw an Amiga, Brimble did some great soundtracks on consoles/handhelds as well. The likes of Driver and Glover come to mind- the latter of which caught many by surprise, it seems, for being groovier than any 3D platformer soundtrack had a right to be!

@The_Nintend_Pedant Your thoughts on the 2- and 4-button layouts make a lot of sense. You know, I don't think I've really had much experience with a normal 6-button layout. Maybe I'd get lost in the endless matrix of buttons, unable to find a point of reference!

• Obviously, N64 emulation would benefit from 6 buttons. Currently, I just make do with the right analogue stick to simulate the C buttons, and I'll sometimes add a secondary mapping for C-down onto B, or something (like for the knife in Castlevania 64). Works for 90% of games, easily, but some, like Jet Force Gemini , are still a problem.
• I only have 3-button Genesis controllers. Always felt comfortable with B to attack and C to jump, as they're large and more or less laid out horizontally. (Side note: I hate when the secondary/attack button is diagonally down and left from primary/jump! Makes most modern Nintendo games a real chore to play, and now that I think of it, maybe that N64 layout wouldn't be so great for Genesis unless it got turned about 20 degrees clockwise.) Mapping 6 buttons onto a 4-button controller for emulation is awkward, and requires learning the functions, as memorizing the layout of the letters is unintuitive.
• It's surprising that you find the 360 controller uncomfortable. When you say the top is cramped, do you mean your fingers are too big to fit on the shoulders and triggers, or are the face buttons also an issue?
• Love both the Xbox Controller S and GameCube controller. Neither is perfect (mainly not having enough buttons for certain games), but I find them both really comfortable. And the GCN's 4-button layout is ingenious, though I've always felt like the original 3-bean prototype layout would've been a bit better.

One good ramble deserves another, I guess.

That first image is channelling Baloo from The Jungle Book. Wonder if they would've gotten a Phil Harris soundalike as well!

The Adrian Barrios one has some '90s Nickelodeon energy. I hope Kazooie wasn't actually going to look like that, though, and this was just an exaggerated frame of her screaming!

@HammerGalladeBro I never watched the show, outside of seeing some commercials for it, but I do know it has the animals all talking and getting into various antics. The game, on the other hand, is a sim where you manage a garden, try to attract wild pinata animals, and even breed more. They don't talk, but they do mate, and they also kill each other. Somehow, I don't think much of the game made it into the show!
Though I do recall the character models in the show practically looking like they were ripped right out of the game, plus the game's animated intro has the 4Kids cast, and is presumably the same intro used in the show.

Don't know a whole lot about Chaotic's development, but it aired on 4Kids TV, and it featured Jason Griffith (2000s Sonic the Hedgehog) in the lead role.

The owners claim that their games are mostly "between five and 30 years old", but that's stretching the definition of "retro" just a tiny bit. Modern stuff like Cruis'n Blast (2017, so 8 years old) easily counts as retro, by that definition.

On the other hand, maybe they're just forgetting what year it is, seeing as most of the examples listed are well outside that 5-30 range: Donkey Kong (44 years), Final Fight (36 years), Street Fighter II (34 years), Mario Kart DX (12 years), and the Neo-Geo (up to 35 years).

@The_Nintend_Pedant Throw in a second stick, and you pretty much have the ultimate layout, with unmatched versatility! Come to think of it, though, the "Duke" Xbox controller basically did this... it was just missing a few buttons compared to newer controllers. Plus, it was the Duke.

My thinking on the evenly-sized buttons was that it would work well for Sega systems as well as presumably having no negative effect on N64 gameplay. I am starting to wonder if I'm unusually controller-agnostic, though. Some people have mentioned that they really get thrown off when switching between different manufacturers and generations, or when playing a game on the "wrong" controller (e.g., using an Xbox controller for emulating anything that's not Xbox or Dreamcast), but I'm not bothered by it, as long as the buttons are still in the same order.

That six-button layout with all of the buttons being the same size looks like a great addition in general- more controllers should use that!

@h3s Oh, yeah, there's no way they can't somehow get this running on mid-range or even low-end PCs, seeing as it literally runs on a low-end PC already (as indicated by the arcade system specs you posted). I think Koshiro justified the arcade version's features not coming to the Genesis, but keeping them out of the Steam version is just an arbitrary decision for whichever reasons.

@SlangWon I assume he means that this version is a native PC game, and isn't able to run on (or be ported to) old consoles like the Genesis.

@Chocoburger It's interesting and ironic how the PS2 struggled with games like this, Deus Ex, and even Half-Life, yet it had so many of its own games that looked much better than any of those, while also running at a consistent 60fps.

Even then, there were still meaningful differences between platforms, besides simply "this one is more powerful than that one" like it tends to be these days!

@Damo Thanks for bringing these up- they look like great stuff!

@WhiteUmbrella If only Polygon did more articles like these, instead of writing about, uh... being bored because you're too cool to play Rock Band.

So basically... everyone pronounces "Amiga" the same?

I'd describe it as "uh-mee-guh", like it's a schwa at both ends, but I think we're referring to the same thing. (Though maybe some Americans draw the last syllable owwt a bit to make it clearly "ah", as in "cahr" or "Mahrk"?)

Does "Ameeger" even count as a pronunciation, seeing as it's just a context-dependent quirk? As a similar example, I watch one English YouTuber who always says "Ocariner of Time" (and sometimes "Zelder" if it's followed by a vowel like it was just now!), but in isolation, he pronounces both "Ocarina" and "Zelda" the same way I would as a Canadian!

It's such a weird thought that video game coverage could have been so sparse even circa 1987, when the NES was really taking off.

Great for VGHF in making this acquisition, and it sounds like fascinating stuff- definitely going to check this out!

@bring_on_branstons People complain about modern reviews/reviewers, but '80s and '90s review scores could be every bit as insane, just with an extra dash of unpredictability!

On one hand, it's neat to see how reviews back then were raw and very much of the time. They weren't coloured by legendary reputations, built over the course of decades of praise. (You're shocked that someone would dare to give SMB3 a less than perfect score. And understandably so! But that goes to illustrate that there's now that pressure to give it the praise it deserves.)

On the other hand, people seemed to have some weird priorities back then. Just in broad strokes, games that seemed "cool" and novel seemed to rank higher than we'd think they deserved, even if the gameplay was unpolished, while something that seemed "lame" (too kiddy, bad graphics, too similar to an older game, etc.) would be dismissed.

A 640x480 screen? Is the image scaled exactly 3x on each axis, then?
(That'd fill the height pretty well, mainly leaving it pillarboxed.)

It'll be fine. Nearly every game in existence is already floating around out there (with old console ROMs and DRM-free PC games being especially easy to get one's hands on), and a majority of people are still willing to go on Steam/NSO/GOG/etc. and pay money for those exact same games.

Always enjoy these fun little jabs and easter eggs (the DKC2 one immediately came to mind, as well)!

Though the one about Dave Mirra's grave lands a bit differently now, since he actually did die at a young age, about 10 years ago. That's still long after this game came out, of course.

Coming from mainly a console background (like most Canadians under 40), I've got to say that it must have been mind-blowing to see and experience 16-bit gaming in 1985, before even the 8-bit NES had launched in most regions!

@Guru_Larry Ouch. The SMS version also has Adol- er, I mean "Aron" (yes, they got his name wrong as well) walking pretty slowly, from what I remember. Guess I didn't miss out on much!

That PCE/TGX version is surprisingly accessible for a 1989 title. Arguably friendlier (and easier) than the 2001/2009 PC remake, at least in some ways.

EDIT: I should've said it's not very Y's to play the SMS version. Missed opportunity!

@KGRAMR @FR4M3 "Ys" rhymes with "geese".
At least that's how it's always been pronounced in the games (English and Japanese alike).

Though the US Master System version unfortunately called it "Y's", with an unneeded apostrophe, implying that they read it as "wise"? Let's just forget about that one.

@Honkshot I assume that longtime fans of the genre have already played Doom/Quake/Blood/etc. to death by now, having been avid players for 20-30 years, and now they're more than ready to see more games in their favourite genre.

As a relative newcomer to certain genres (Boomer Shooters being one of them), I have to agree that it's hard to care about yet another throwback to (genre/game), when I haven't even played all of the essential titles from back in the day!

Though, come to think of it, it's getting to where I can't even keep up with (or necessarily care about) all of the games that are coming out, even in genres that I have played a lot! Beat-'em-ups, for instance.

Why are they "repressing" such great music? Stop holding it back!

I did hear about this before, probably around 2010.
There are even VGM logs now (compact chiptune music files) that include this as a variant, so you can have your right ear blasted with high-pitched bell sounds without waiting over 45 minutes!

EDIT: Sword of Vermilion also has a similar bug in one of its tracks, where the pitch increases on every loop. It eventually wraps back around, but little quirks will accumulate if you leave it running long enough to do this several times (e.g., a couple of hours).

Interesting to see that the Evercade standard has actually taken off- when's the last time we saw a unique game platform successfully join the fray? Everything else I can think of has been self-contained (NES Classic Mini), a flop (Ouya), or just vapour (Amico).

@Jol You joke, but there is already a ray tracing demo on SNES!

As with the Super FX 3, it's bottlenecked by the SNES's bandwidth: the console simply can't update its tiles fast enough to ever do full-screen high framerate video passthrough, but within that limitation, you really can basically use anything as a source.

@marsilies Oh, I'm very aware- even the same overall architecture can get varying results, due to a whole range of factors! (I remember getting a Core 2 Duo and discovering that even its single-core performance was twice as fast per cycle as a Pentium 4.)

I recall one SNES homebrew dev claiming that the Genesis had about 40% greater real-world performance, and I'd say that checks out, going by the actual games. SNES is noticeably more prone to slowdown, but then, a lot of that comes down to underclocking, with the SlowROM issue that has gained a lot of notoriety lately.
The difference wasn't on an order of magnitude, but it was there (again, accentuated by SlowROM), and that's not flattering to a console that's two years newer (and otherwise a fair bit more advanced) than its rival.

@avcrypt In that it's mimicking the behaviour of the SFX, minus the performance cap, sure.

Can you elaborate on "static recomp on die"? If it's on die, then I'd expect that to be JIT (handled in real-time by the chip), not a static/ahead-of-time recomp.

@Martin_H Yeah, I'm not about to argue that Nintendo should have followed any of its competitors' strategies around hardware evolution!

But there's so much more to the console market than the hardware strategy. If we shuffled the game libraries around so NEC had Nintendo's library and Sega had SNK's, how would that turn out? Or if Nintendo had been the one with the edgy marketing, instead of Sega?

Had Nintendo gone with a high-end CPU, it could have killed their chances if it raised the price too much. But what about something in-between? If Sega could afford a CPU that was clocked twice as fast as Nintendo's (in 1988, at that!), then couldn't Nintendo have done the same? Put an 8 MHz CPU in the base SNES (and stop underclocking it to half speed!), and now we've eliminated one of the main sore spots: its reputation for slowdown and not keeping up with Sega's machine. It would still need a Super FX chip in order to run really fancy stuff like Doom, but at least Nintendo wouldn't have to put an enhancement chip in one of their launch games (Pilotwings) to make it run!

And yeah, I know it's really easy to talk about this stuff, 35+ years after it happened. But still, I'm not convinced that Nintendo's approach was optimal- unless you count that it was usually other companies that had to foot the bill for cartridge enhancements of any kind, so Nintendo didn't lose out financially. (Just maybe in reputation.)

@marsilies @BulkSlash From the description, it doesn't sound like it's doing actual emulation, per se. It is at least running the original Super FX code, recompiled for modern CPUs, so it should be faithful to the original game, but the potential capabilities of the chip are much higher than the SFX2.

Think of N64 recompilations running on PC: they're still the original games (until you mod them!), but they now have insanely powerful host hardware that can run them much faster than the N64 ever could.

So it is arguably "cheating", but they had the restraint to keep more or less within Super FX capabilities, and not just pump Doom 64 graphics straight into the SNES's display (albeit at 200p resolution and 20fps)!

@Martin_H Wouldn't it have been much more practical to just spend $10-20 more on the hardware itself, rather than having to spend potentially that same amount on every single enhanced cartridge? (Remember that games like Super Mario Kart, Pilotwings, and Mega Man X2 all had special chips as well. It wasn't just the Super FX.)

"Plus you can push all of the extra cost onto the consumer!"

...and there's the key point. Avoid making your system look overpriced, while tricking your consumers into paying for the upgrade several times over!

@BulkSlash Considering that it runs at 150 MHz (whereas the actual Super FX was what, 20 MHz?), it's safe to say that it's cheating!

Chips as fast as this existed back then, but it would have been prohibitively expensive and impractical to include one in the cart.

@GravyThief "I really don’t like transparent cases"
The late '90s must have been rough for you, then!

But seriously, the shell shown in the picture above is a little too transparent for my liking as well. A semi-transparent red, or maybe even black, would look a lot cooler. I like the aesthetic in general, but not this specific implementation.

EDIT: Damo listed the cut levels in the article. The original SNES version had levels and features that the other ports lacked, but it still missed out on a few levels itself.

Super Contra already looks and runs great on the NES, but TMNT and Contra Force have unusually rough performance for NES games (especially by Konami)!

Does this mean we could eventually see TMNT running at 60fps? Contra Force with no slowdown seems like a given, at least.

Most localization prototypes aren't especially interesting, since they were made after the final Japanese build, but JSR is an unusual case: it has two new levels that were added for the North American version, which is why they can be seen in an incomplete form here.

"Non-textured 3D"... so it would have looked like Viewpoint or Silpheed, then?

I understand that full English translations would be costly, but it's a shame that they're not at least doing multi-platform releases. Not all of their potential audience is on Switch!

@845H The main draw so far is that this appears to properly support 60fps and widescreen. Both of those were possible on emulators, but 60fps had certain objects (like the penguins) moving too quickly, and the widescreen mode stretched the HUD instead of repositioning everything properly.

Why do I suspect that this show is mainly going to give the middle finger to Duke Nukem fans?