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@Tobunari Good catch. Seems I misremembered that one.

Another couple of files that are locked, however, are the Sonic Adventure 1 and 2 Chao Gardens, so again, some of the files that people might care most about backing up.
Fortunately, I didn't notice any others from this quick glance. And I backed up all of my saves via unofficial means a few years back, so I'm covered!

I don't think Wii U allows backing up in any form. IIRC, I looked into it years ago, and you can only move all of your save data to another console- no cloning.

It's cool to see these making a return, but man... if I stopped being a cheapskate and bought all of the re-releases like this that interested me, I'd be at least $1000 poorer by now.
Or more like $1500 in Canadian money.

El Viento is one of the most tempting ones, though, as I hear it's really quite good, plus it has an early Sakuraba soundtrack. And I've always had a strange curiosity/interest in the hilariously janky follow-up, Earnest Evans.

Very cool that they pulled this off!

...but on the other hand, I don't really see any reason to actually play this over the 2020 PC version.

@Tobunari My point is that Fire Emblem was a niche series (much more than F-Zero), but it was given more chances, and it eventually became a big success, starting with Awakening.

You do make an interesting point: Awakening appealed to a broad, casual audience by being easier and focusing more on stuff besides the actual strategy- and that was when FE's fortunes hit a turning point.

Would Nintendo have to dumb down a new F-Zero, or at least change how they market it, in order for it to succeed today? Maybe, looking at Fire Emblem's journey. On the other hand, it's not the '00s anymore. Nintendo has a huge install base this time around, and tons of passionate, hardcore fans. It's easily conceivable that there are plenty of potential buyers who are eager to either revisit the series, or to see what was so special about it- and who won't be put off by some challenge.
Not enough to generate Mario Kart sales numbers, obviously, but easily enough to be a success.

On that note... what sales figures would you consider a success, if a new F-Zero came to Switch? And what would GX have had to sell, to count as a success?

So Sega does have the rights to the HotD1 soundtrack?
I still don't know why they had to have it redone for the remake.

@NatiaAdamo Yeah, as far as actual record-keeping goes, I'd put this in a separate category, at best... though it can be hard to confirm whether any game was continuously in development, or if it had gaps in between.

Apparently, Duke Nukem Forever was actively in development for all of its 15 years? I assume Metroid Dread was shelved for a while, though, so it wouldn't count. What about Beyond Good and Evil 2?

@no_donatello Haha, I always hated that so many people flocked to the PS2 and left the GameCube struggling- it was even commonly believed back then that the PS2 was technically superior!

While the PS2's engineering had plenty of downsides (remember the failure rate?), the console had tons of great games that I've enjoyed catching up on- and in the hands of the right programmers and artists, even the hardware could really sing!

And I agree that the sixth gen was the peak of gaming, in most ways. (Back then, though, we didn't have $3 Steam deals, so there's that!)

This is a pretty obscure selection (only heard the occasional reference to Madoola, personally), but it's great to see Sunsoft making a comeback in general.

Here's hoping Journey to Silius is next!
(And Gremlins 2, Batman for Genesis, and Return of the Joker for NES, if anyone's taking wishes!)

I'd love to see the actual Goemon games from the '90s- especially the first N64 one- make it to modern platforms, as I missed out the first time around.

This also looks great, though! Hopefully it comes to PC/Xbox as well as Switch.

Is this a record for the longest game development, from inception to release?

Also, I wonder how much Brixius will be overhauling the game now, and if the final result will be a mix of old and new design sensibilities. (Seeing as there's voting involved, it's safe to say that he's not sticking to his original docs 100%.)

@AJB83 It's actually a free update. Guess you'll just have to buy another copy or something!

@FatPlumber Strange. I distinctly remember my friends running into problems when mixing JP and NA saves.
I looked it up to confirm just yesterday, and sure enough, that's the common knowledge- that the card needs to be dedicated to either Japan or other regions, but not both at once.

It might depend on the game, where some force a reformat, but others just have text glitches. (Do any of your save names have glitch characters where the kanji/kana should be?)

@JayJ Switching to hard drives brought a 5x speed increase, yet slow loading somehow still managed to be more of a problem than ever.
RAM and storage requirements outpaced media speeds from around 2005 to 2020 (at least on consoles), until SSDs turned the tide back... for now.

While cartridges held back the consoles of the day in several ways (not denying their advantages!), it was always great when we switched to the next storage medium and got what seemed like unlimited space. There was no incentive- or option- for devs or publishers to skimp on storage media, cutting out content and compressing the heck out of everything to make it all fit.

@AJB83 Did the AI overhaul not really affect the game much?

I played the original version, and really liked it, even if I normally prefer fully 3D racing games. I haven't played in a few years, but it's impressive how much work ansdor has been putting into free, major updates since its release.

Apparently, Tukwila is in Washington state.
The article didn't specify, and it had me wondering which state- or country- this was!

@TheFatPlumber You can mix NA and EU saves on the same memory card, but you need to reformat or else use a separate card for Japanese games, for whatever reason.

Maybe it's a character encoding issue?
I don't see how region locking would have been difficult to implement, now or then (just check the card for any saves with a different region ID than the current game), but seeing as it's only a partial region lock, I'm thinking there's a real technical hurdle.

@Tobunari Yeah, I figured, but it's unfortunate.

Smash Bros. Melee was also locked, as I recall... so basically, all of the games that you'd most want to back up.

@Tobunari Neither the anime nor its two spin-off games on the GBA did especially well, as far as I know, but GX still sold well- just not Mario Kart numbers.

I fully expect that Nintendo will keep ignoring the series (or perhaps teasing it with cameos, etc., at best) for many more years to come, but I do believe that a new F-Zero could be very successful today. If nothing else, a lot more people have a Nintendo console now than they did in 2003.
Plus, things can change over time. It's not like Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance was flying off shelves by the millions, either, but look at the series now!

@Poodlestargenerica It was uncommon on the 360, but not unheard of. There were a few RPGs like Blue Dragon and Lost Odyssey, and then there was Rage, which came on 3 discs, thanks to its extravagant megatexture system.

I don't think there were any multi-disc games on PS3 at all. (Except maybe bonus discs, and stuff like that.)

EDIT: Wii had almost no multi-disc games either, despite its discs having the same capacity as the 360. Only one I've heard of is Dragon Quest X.

@Kienda I wouldn't be surprised if there were a few factors, but the number of discs seems like a valid enough issue (if not the sole cause).

MGS4 would need at least 6 DVDs as-is. Maybe 4 with enough compression, but there's bound to be a point where the video quality is unacceptable, or the sheer amount of content starts to be an issue.
Plus, publishers did seem somewhat averse to using multiple discs on DVD-based systems, for one reason or another.

Or maybe it just made for a convenient excuse to cover up Konami's/Kojima's bias?

@KingMike I never knew that!
No surprise that things went as they did, though- what do you think the profit margins were on selling just 512 KB of flash for $20 or more?
(Consider that the PS2 launched over a year earlier, and all its memory cards were 8 MB!)

What about locked files, like with F-Zero GX?
If this 8BitMods card uses the GameCube's own interface for copying from a real memory card, then some games' files most likely can't be copied to it.

Fortunately, there are other backup solutions involving SD cards and homebrew, and they can override the lock, but the MemCard Pro GC doesn't seem too good for backing up existing saves- only managing new ones, or those that were already ripped.

A co-op shooter RPG? Not what I expected, based on the art style, but I'm definitely going to watch this one.

Also liking what they're doing with the graphics! PS1 graphics have their own unique appeal, as do other old consoles like N64, SNES, or Genesis. I wouldn't say it's specifically because of the technical limitations (I don't even like pixelation), but because of the art styles associated with those times.

2013 was the year of Luigi. 2023 is the year of Wario!

This seemed underwhelming, based on the headline: okay, the collective power of the internet was able to find Shogo Sakai a few hundred new subscribers. So?
But no, it was more than that, and in a day!

I'll have to check these videos out. Sakai isn't talked about often, but he's done some epic compositions and arrangements, with Smash Bros. Melee setting the tone not just for early-2000s Hal, but arguably for the GameCube itself.
And much of Kirby Air Ride's music is up there as well!

Yes to the question, but there's more to it than that. As has been mentioned in some of the above comments, there's a mix of "Nintendocentrism" and Americentrism here, both in history and in general discussion. Lots of Americans in their 30s fondly remember the days of the NES being the definitive way to play video games; therefore, those are obviously the best, most important, and most influential games of the late '80s... though those who lived in Europe (Commodore Amiga), South America (Sega Master System), or East Asia (PC Engine/Turbografx-16) might not see things the same way- not to mention those who were able to experience cutting-edge tech in the arcade!

Of course, once some ideas start circulating on the internet, you can expect them to be cited, quoted, misquoted, and otherwise regurgitated ad infinitum.
I'm under 40, so I didn't see firsthand whether the game industry was obliterated in 1983 and then single-handedly resurrected by Nintendo in 1985. But the internet says so, and a lot of people seem to think so, so it must be true!

I suppose the lesson here is to keep an open mind, and to question what we think and hear: is it actually true, or are they all wrong? Are we wrong?

PS: tons of people played Tony Hawk on the PlayStation in its time, but how many of them are the hardcore gaming enthusiasts who still talk about games and game history to this day? Just a thought.

@Damo In that case, I can think of several Wii U games which deserve to be listed as the most influential games of all time!

Cute, but not exactly cuddly.
Too bad the Raspberry Pi didn't exist back then!

@tektite_captain That would be an interesting topic to look into. Sega had their games on other companies' systems within a year of the announcement, with Sonic Adventure 2 Battle coming to the GameCube just 6 months after its Dreamcast release, for example.

Did they start asking around for dev kits before announcing that they were going third-party, or was it a scramble to get things going after January?

@RupeeClock Okay, if we're talking about the big picture, I can see where you're coming from. Between used games, piracy of all kinds, and whatever we already have in our collections, there are a lot of ways to enjoy Nintendo games without forking over the full price for a Switch and the latest installment of whatever series.

But even with all of these elements in play, the Switch and its games have flown off the shelves for years now. So what is the actual benefit of specifically closing off 3DS hacking, arguably one of the more niche and challenging ways to get and play games?

@RupeeClock You think that the existence of older installments is a significant threat to sales of the newer ones? Considering how well Tears of the Kingdom is doing (despite looking a lot like BotW), I'm thinking that any series that's had a generational leap recently (3DS to Switch) should be especially safe!

Between that and the obvious fact that there are tons of ways to... "acquire" old 3DS or Virtual Console games without hacking a 3DS, Nintendo would have to be hopelessly delusional and paranoid to actually think this update helps their business in any meaningful way.

Oh...

@LunarFlame17 One final middle finger to the fans, apparently.

@RetroGames By default, solutions like this will just give you a crisp 480p, upscaled to a higher res for your TV (as opposed to the smeared mess that you'd likely get if you plugged the composite cables in directly).
However, many games have been modded to natively run in HD, and I hear that the performance hit is minimal in some of them. This adapter would be a great way to take advantage of that.

EDIT: Also, some OG Xbox games already support HD natively (no mods needed), but Halo isn't one of them.

@Serpenterror That still wouldn't make it legal, strictly speaking...

And Nintendo would still see this stuff as a threat, somehow. Like people aren't going to pay for an NSO sub to play Zelda, if they have access to the Spaceworld build? Or maybe it's that seeing WIP builds will undermine people's perception of Nintendo quality (not as if anything they made in the Wii era could already do that)!

While I expect that Stamper has already dumped these carts privately, I do wish he'd release them- though he's kind of blocked that option off by revealing that he has all of these.

@N64-ROX I know this isn't Digital Foundry, but it would have been nice to see a few examples of games that worked well, and a few that were too slow. As it is, performance is barely mentioned.

@-wc- You know what they say: "It takes money to find money!"
...er, something like that, anyway.

Always glad to see classic games being brought to more platforms!

Still frustrating to see so many games do Switch/PS4 only (I can understand skipping Xbox, but PC?), but at least there will be two options now, instead of just one.

Isn't the price a bargain for this level of performance? Hard to say without knowing which games do or don't run well, but it's pretty impressive if this can handle a typical GC, Wii, or PS2 game at full speed. (I wouldn't expect a locked 60fps in the Rogue Squadron games, of course.)

I find BotW attractive (technical issues aside), but does anyone else wish the in-game graphics were as vibrant as the box art? The colours and contrast are kind of muted in-game, whereas the box has a lot more punch. Not sure if TotK makes any changes here.

Mistake, retcon, or simply shoving the icon up north to make room for the other NYC-based level (which I assume is what that nearby purple dot stands for)?

The icon for Metro City isn't even placed on Toronto- rather, some tiny northern town that no one's heard of, like New Liskeard (400km straight north of Toronto).

To be fair, I've only been up there once, and it wasn't in 199X, so maybe there was a giant, crumbling metropolis that got bulldozed in the new millennium?

@Sketcz I haven't read Wolf's book. It doesn't seem to be available now, at least at the link given in this article, but it does sound interesting.

I looked up The Adventures of Nyangi after you mentioned it, and yeah... it does look pretty rough. However, this is from 2007 (quite early, as far as indies go- especially 3D indies!), and the dev reportedly coded it himself from scratch, so that's still an accomplishment, I'd say!

There's tons of potential out there, for sure. Africa comes to mind, both for being so huge (containing more countries than Europe, plus 3x the population and 3x the landmass!), and for how little about its various countries and cultures most of us know.

Unfortunately, it's an uphill battle for smaller game dev scenes outside of the usual countries to make it on a worldwide level, and of course, a lot of writers and game designers from other countries end up making European- or American-inspired works anyway, as the article touched on.

And if a western studio tried their hand at it, they'd need to do a heck of a lot of research first- and then it would still cause controversy, even if they did it right.

But who knows, especially with indie devs around the world finding new opportunities these days? I wouldn't have guessed that one of the best beat-'em-ups of all time would come from two guys in Uruguay, for example!

@Utena-mobile Exactly!
No one took movie preservation seriously in its early days, but now we see the movies themselves and their pre-release materials as historically and culturally significant, after it's too late.

But apparently, we don't learn, because history repeats itself- source code, prototypes, and even some finished games are still being lost, even after we've been lamenting the loss of silent movies or The Wizard of Oz's Jitterbug scene (i.e., lost beta content!) for decades now.

For centuries, if not millennia, there has been simultaneously an appreciation for "culture" (old stuff) alongside an apathy or even disdain for "pop culture" (basically anything current), even though it's just a matter of time until what's new becomes historical...

Good article, and a big topic that definitely warrants discussion!

But why keep insisting that the closure definitely had nothing to do with pressure from Nintendo? FoI's official statement leaves a lot of room for interpretation ("a few reasons" could mean a lot of things!), and togemet2's less-official comments strongly imply there was something heavy and legal-related going on. I'm not seeing anything to rule out involvement by the dreaded "Nintendo Ninjas".

Unless there was another statement made later, which I'm not aware of!

@Damo Yeah, they're on the Anniversary Collection from 2023, but not the smaller collection from 2022. (I'll edit my previous comment for clarity.)

For anyone who's not a total completionist, your best bet is arguably to pick up the Sega Vintage series Wonder Boy collection on Xbox (around $10 at full price!), grab Monster Lair by itself on Steam ($1), and then get the remake of Dragon's Trap ($20). That covers all of the games from Anniversary except the original Wonder Boy.

@Pally356 Is that boss even possible to beat on 3 hearts? With the way Shion gets thrown around by everything (including a conveyor belt that moves as quickly as he can run), I would've thought it's impossible to avoid taking damage.

Heh, I bet the prince makes it clear that he's dying in the Japanese version. His English text is so hilariously casual that it must be censorship.

Just to clarify: the original version of MWIV was delisted on Wii, but it's still available in the Wonder Boy collections on all modern platforms.

On that topic, all of the games in this list are available one way or another, but it's an awkward patchwork unless you buy the Anniversary collection that released this year:
The previous Wonder Boy collection (from 2022) on PS4 and Switch lacks Monster Lair and Dragon's Trap, but it does have the original Wonder Boy, whereas the even older (and cheaper!) Sega Vintage one on Xbox systems doesn't have any of those three. Monster Lair wasn't in any actual Wonder Boy compilations prior to this year's Anniversary Collection, but can be purchased through "Sega Mega Drive and Genesis Classics".

@Mgalens Yeah, I could see the pyramid being a slog the second or third time around.

But I found the final boss in Monster World (North American version, specifically!) to be so bad that it soured my impression of the game in general.

Haven't played Dragon's Trap, so hopefully "that part" isn't like MW.

My memory is a bit fuzzy- is there anything preventing players from getting the ice arrows before entering the Water Temple at all? I remember using the Hookshot to cross the desert early- there's a spot where you can just barely latch onto one of the flagpoles and pull yourself across the quicksand.

Or am I misremembering, and it's only the Longshot that can do that trick?

@Diogmites Bets on how long it'll take before the next "Shining Rogue" article shows up?

I can't wait to find out that Wolf Team's Tales of Phantasia started as Shining Tales, or that Camelot's Mario Golf started as Shining Golf!