@Coalescence Er, I played it like that as a kid without any problems? With the stand rested on my chest, it distributed the weight and helped hold it in place relatively comfortably.

I mean, the letters don't look anything like that? And if it is actually supposed to say something, why would they use English instead of Japanese? But some guy on Twitter used AI, so it must be true.

It’s baffling that anyone could operate a successful business based on owning the IP for these mediocre, forgotten retro games that weren't even popular when they first came out.

As a fan of both Excitebike and Plok, this is a must-buy, especially for $6.

As someone who was the target market for this in the early ‘90s, I would have preferred the Japanese art, and I would have had no idea whatsoever that it was in any way Japanese. As is usual, people with marketing degrees are generally clueless and attribute the success of a product to their efforts, rather than the quality of the product.

Unless the product fails, of course, in which case it is clearly the fault of the product designers, those fools.

I am surprised by how small those numbers are. Only a little over a million sold in a country with a population of about 60 million in 1990? That's about 2.2% of the population owning a Master System, compared to roughly 16% of the Japanese population owning a Famicom and 12% of the US population owning an NES. That's quick and dirty math, but still. People make it seem like the Master System was some kind of juggernaut in the UK, when it barely outsold the NES, and both of them were basically irrelevant.

@White1ce I don't think they were lying, the book was being printed, and then they were hit with the price increase. Yes, they should have been more communicative, but there's no need to assume the worst all the time.

I think Uniracers is a great game, but it probably would never have received another print run, regardless of any hypothetical lawsuit. Do we even know how many of that initial print run sold at full price? Pixar probably sent a C&D, and Nintendo decided it wasn’t worth the trouble for a game that wasn’t exactly lighting up the sales charts.

I don’t understand the screen on this thing, it looks too narrow to be 4:3? Or maybe 4:3 flipped on its side?

Gives that this website now seems devoted to this subject, maybe someone could calculate the collective actual minutes spent playing a gimped tech experiment that no one cares about. I’m sure that number at least approaches double digits.

@Ruka Unfortunately, there probably isn’t enough retro gaming news for a site like this to gain enough clicks to remain profitable, so it’s all slop about Chinese handhelds and ports made by shut-ins of random old games to random old systems. The internet was a mistake.

The whole “AI is already here and running everything, get on board or get left behind” take is so disingenuous. Who is getting “left behind”? Who is making money from actual customers clamoring for AI? Some companies are making money off of the promise (read: delusion) of profitable AI companies, and they’re the ones pushing this “AI is inevitable” narrative. It’s the equivalent of listening to the CEO of McDonald’s claiming that you need to eat a Big Mac every day to stay healthy.

They’re also making a deluxe version of Ms Pac-Man, which is all I’ve ever wanted from Arcade 1-Up. I want to hear more about their Supreme line as well, they finally seem to be offering exciting products after a long period of stagnation.

It seems like the design has gotten worse over the years.The original version of this that was released 15 years ago had a 4:3 sxreen. The speaker holes were also symmetrical. This needs a complete redesign, not just a different color shell. The controller ports seem pointless as well for a portable device.

I didn’t realize Nintendo made the decision to pull out of the arcade market before the Famicom was even developed. I wonder what caused them to make that decision only a couple years after the massive success of Donkey Kong? Donkey Kong Jr was also very successful, I think?

@Ruka Hi, that's me. Well, obviously things are going swimmingly for these people because...they say so? Again? With no proof? Also, I never said the company is going under, I said that they will go under, since they clearly have no products of value to offer. I give them two years, at best.

The reason for this is very simple, the owners of the Commodore brand have realized that releasing retro Commodore systems is only of interest to a very niche, very small user base and they’ve reached the end. The brand has no more value, there’s nothing left to release, there’s only garbage and grift until they’re insolvent.

@Ruka Lol, okay. You clearly don’t understand what a grifter is, which is fine. I’ll take your word for it that 7000 units is really good, and that the Commodore 64 Ultimate was a successful product. Commodore says so, so why would anyone question that? Also, it’s 2026, so a few million dollars in [claimed] revenue is absolutely something to sneeze at.

@Ruka Golly, a whole 7000 units? Everyone interested in this has already bought one, and I doubt there will be another 7000 in the next 24 hours. Also, I don’t believe anything these people say about sales figures or anything else, because why would you? They’re grifters.

It’s selling so well they’re offering another $50 off, which is exactly how things work.

Lol, this guy gives off major SuperSega vibes.

Yeah, "legend" and "legendary" are doing a lot of heavy lifting here.

It's ridiculous and yet, will absolutely sell out. The guy who thought of this idea will get a raise and promotion, or, just as likely, be replaced by AI. Welcome to late state capitalism!

Now it's only eight times more expensive than it should be, great. Personally, I'm waiting for the Fairchild Channel F phone.

@Coalescence You’re missing a lot of nuance with the examples you’ve provided. This is completely pointless, and there is a complete shortage of enthusiasts willing to buy this crap.

Of course it’s just rebranded Chinese tat. Do people think that this holding company has a mobile phone R&D department? You’ve been able to get Android dumb phones through multiple manufacturers for years, for a lot less thsn $500.

AI dreck aside, it’s so obvious that this is going to fail. It’s like watching someone walking towards a cliff.

Lol, a toy company so poorly run that they “missed the entire holiday season” does not have long for this world. Even if you believe that they sold out for two years in a row. And that they’ve sold a million of these things. And that they outsold the PS5 over Black Friday. Have the company’s statements been fact checked in any way?

This is just a crackhead yelling things in the street, except he’s on YouTube.

I remember being disappointed with Zelda II as a kid, and I've tried to revisit it, but still can't get into it. I would love to see a remake of it that could fix some of its issues, but that's unlikely. I remember the play control being clunky, and I wonder what it be like if it had the smooth control of a 2D Castlevania.

Incidentally, I loved Castlevania II as a kid and still do, and I'm convinced the modern backlash is solely the result of the Angry Nintendo Nerd and nothing else. Yes, there were a couple of confusing sections, but everyone read Nintendo Power and knew how to get past them.

It does sound like it’s written by AI, but then again, so does most marketing gibberish written by actual humans. If you can call people with marketing degrees “humans”, that is.

@MyUsernameWasTaken It’s not that much of a stretch. Both Activision and Nintendo didn’t want thrm, and we all know the mediocrity of Rare’s Xbox output. There were clearly problems.

Sega’s relationship with their past is so confusing. They seem to want to distance themselves from their previous successes for some inexplicable reason, yet they periodically make noises about reviving past games that never actually happen. At the same time, they only seem to care about Sonic and Yakuza games, two franchises that started 35 and 21 years ago respectively. They need to take a page from Nintendo’s book and realize that there aren’t old games and new games, only games. If people want to buy a port of Jet Set Radio, sell it to them. It doesn’t stop you from making whatever new games you want.

That press release is a pointless word salad of PR gibberish.

What happened to the retro game revivals from 2023? Where is Crazy Taxi or Jet Set Radio?

I’m not even an SNK fan and I want that white arcade stick.

His previous work was stolen from creators with actual talent, so it makes sense that his new project would be as well.

This game was definitely...something? I played it when I was a kid, and remember getting lost and not knowing where to go a lot, but that kind of contributed to the sense of unease, along with Jason suddenly appearing out of nowhere.

I like the guy’s art, but what a weird bunch of characters for to choose for a Sega magazine’s cover.

“Literally crying” Lol, I hope so.

I will be astonished if this hotel actually opens.

Not really the observant sort, are we?

That’s too bad, they really improved their product line over the years. I just wish that they had released a proper deluxe Ms Pac Man cabinet (i.e. one that looked like the original cabinet).

Lol, “10-year study” is doing some heavy lifting. One rando on Youtube retrobrighted a Dreamcast that turned out bad, so now retrobrighting is harmful?

You understand that this is a joke and Miyamoto didn’t write that on a fax in what looks like MS Paint?

"This wasn't just some easy, light decision – 'Let's just get an old brand'. There was a lot of thought that went into it.'"

Insert skeptical Jennifer Lawrence gif

@MontyCircus The Sega Retro article makes it seem like the Master System name came about by accident after the system was launched, which I just don’t believe and haven’t seen a good source for. Early pre-launch marketing aside, by the time the system was going to manufacture, it was clearly called the Sega Master System, which is printed on the system. Sega (or Bruce Lowry in particular, who had just launched the NES) didn’t just forget to give the system a proper name, or give Sega Japan the wrong name to put on the system.

I’ve always been confused by the assertion that “Sega Master System” wasn’t originally the system’s US name. If it wasn’t “Master System” then what was it? Power Base was just the Sega equivalent of the NES’s Control Deck, right? If Master System was just the name of a bundle, what name was printed on consoles included in the other bundles?

This was the first video game secret I remember discovering. No internet, no Google, no way to find out what caused the room I had been to many times before to change into something different randomly. I imagined that Chris Houlihan must be the son of someone who worked at Nintendo.

Some good stuff in there, really interesting reading about the post-Atari crash as it happened. They seemed to be early supporters of the NES, or at least supporters of anything that could bring the US game industry back from the dead. Although the October 1985 issue mentioned the upcoming launch of the NES almost as an afterthought to the upcoming launch of the Intellivision System III, which was apparently an Intellivision with a new LED power light.