Comments 4,027

Re: Random: The "Grail" Of Sonic Merch Pops Up On eBay With Insane Price Tag

KingMike

@MSaturn Until then people see this and start thinking their regular old commercially released Sonic 3 game is worth mega bucks.
(though it is worth more than the first two games since Sega didn't give away a ton of copies as pack-ins, and maybe a bit more because of music changes in rereleases such as the PC version, but I doubt it's crazy valuable)

Re: Nintendo Expands Switch Online's Game Boy Library With Two More Titles

KingMike

@Serpenterror Fully correct SGB emulation is incredibly difficult which is why Higan was the only emulator to do it (emulating both consoles simultaneously).
Fortunately VERY few games needed that level of accuracy so that half-assed emulation that I assume is what you've seen (only the borders and palettes) is "good enough" for the majority of games. And THAT is what Nintendo can't even manage!

Re: Nintendo Download: 6th March (North America)

KingMike

"The Legend of Heroes Saga" Did they just recanonize the original Dragon Slayer?
Or is that a different game?

The original Dragon Slayer was a brutal game. I remember some time ago watching Chuboh attempt to finish that game. He could take up to four hours on just one run. (or was not just "the game" but "one level"? I'm not sure.)

Re: Gex Trilogy Confirms Summer 2025 Switch Release, Here's The Official Trailer

KingMike

@NeonPizza It's easier to say in retrospect since the PlayStation model we're used to now, but I suspect part of the thing wrong with 3DO was its plan to license its hardware to manufacturers that didn't plan to support it with software. I recall Panasonic didn't originally plan to publish games, so therefore the skyhigh price was because they needed to turn a profit on the hardware (different than the MSX hardware Panasonic had sold before. That was a computer that people could make their own software and so would've surely had more value to the consumer than a game console that can only play authorized commercially-written software.)

Re: Opinion: Nintendo, Let Us Buy The Games Being Delisted From Switch Online

KingMike

@Ryu_Niiyama "(80’s/90’s) Games weren’t designed to be products that were sold 40 years later."
That is the very reason that licensing problems exist for video games and TV shows. They didn't think people would care enough more than immediate sales to spend more than cheap limited-time licenses. Problem is, there are people who do care.

Movies and music do get sold forever. Movies were made with a much higher budget compared to games through the '90s, so the producers paid to get forever licenses.
I mean, I've never heard of a movie being cut due to expired music licensing.

Re: Gex Trilogy Confirms Summer 2025 Switch Release, Here's The Official Trailer

KingMike

@NeonPizza The original Gex was a 3DO original. That was also a console with not a whole lot of headline titles.
Though it is interesting you mention Rayman, an original for the other troubled console at the time, the Jaguar. Though I'm not quite sure of the development plan for that. We do know and have seen a leak of a one-level demo for the SNES, but I'm not sure if Ubisoft planned to release it on multiple consoles when they moved it up to the 32-bit range.

Re: Gex Trilogy Confirms Summer 2025 Switch Release, Here's The Official Trailer

KingMike

@KoiTenchi In historical context, there wasn't really a whole lot out there when Enter the Gecko launched (1998).
Yes, there was Super Mario 64. But the PlayStation was still starved for even "the most just average 3D Platformer".
Crash 1 and 2 were out but those weren't quite full 3D, were they?
I know Spyro wasn't too far off but I think it was still after Enter the Gecko.

Re: Konami Adds Incredibly Rare Slice Of GBA Ninja History To The Switch eShop

KingMike

$24.99 is still less than half of what I could have paid for the game when it was considering the game when I got my GBA SP in 2003.

Anytime anything retro releases comes up NL, comments are going to be filled with entitlement to anything easily pirated. This has been going on for decades, I've seen that since Tactics Ogre. People didn't buy it on the PlayStation because they knew how to download the Super Famicom ROM and then whine and beg for a translation patch to just pop out of nowhere.

Re: Konami Adds Incredibly Rare Slice Of GBA Ninja History To The Switch eShop

KingMike

@LadyCharlie Yes, everything on older hardware can be played for "uh, a lower price."
In fact everything in the world can be found for "uh, a lower price".

Should movies and music and other forms of media be sold for "a lower price" because they're decades old too? (many of those even older than GBA games)
(yes, streaming exists and what I've seen of physical movies last time I went to Target was almost completely bundles. But many comments on here are like video game companies now are committing some kind of new crime against humanity by asking money for old media. I don't get how this different than when VHS and DVD were popular and old movies were continually rereleased and... people bought them and didn't throw these "it's old, gimme" fits.)

Re: "They Stole The Whole Game" - Horror Indie Dev Fights The eShop Scam Blatantly Ripping Their Work

KingMike

@MrE Are you talking about the Tengen NES lockout chip? That's not quite how it worked.
They figured out how the NES security chip detected if a cartridge was official. The chip was legal to make, not a "counterfeit". It was the process of HOW they engineered the chip. It was something much easier to do in those pre-DMCA days. Their chip was about as "counterfeit" as any PC not made by IBM. We wouldn't have those if there wasn't some legal means to do what Tengen wanted to do.

Re: Balatro's Ridiculous 18+ Age Rating Is Finally Lowered

KingMike

It's still stupid to have the principle of rating simulated gambling games for an adult audience while allowing lootbox games that ask players to spend REAL money to be rated appropriate for children.

I played casino games as a kid and I've never gambled at a real casino.

Re: Anniversary: HAL Laboratory Is 45 Years Old Today

KingMike

I'm sad that HAL's non-Kirby library is nearly forgotten.
Don't forget Arcana nor Air Fortress (As ridiculous of a difficulty spike stage 6 is! I can reach it but I couldn't even savestate my way out.). I bought HAL's Hole in One Golf just to see that Iwata was kind of technical flexing with that early SNES game. Or Eggerland/Lolo.
Likewise with Game Freak and Pokemon.

I was speaking in another discussion of the developer Quest, absorbed into Square solely for the Ogre franchise. I suppose the one thing the exorbitant pricetag for Magical Chase has done is made sure the game is one people have heard of.

Re: Not Even Squaresoft Could Convince Nintendo To Use Discs For The N64

KingMike

@gb_nes_gamer The storage medium isn't necessarily the culprit. You can't run programs directly off a disk anyways.
Disc-based consoles need sufficient RAM to store loaded program content and also be well-designed to reduce the amount of data that needs to be loaded.
Nintendo had experience with the FDS and games like Zelda and Metroid had to be designed to load as infrequently as necessary (during gameplay, Metroid only loaded between regions, and Zelda only going between the dungeons and the overworld). The opposite end was a Metroid-like game called Relics: The Dark Fortress which halted to load data every time you walked like five steps. Blame poor games like that on the devs rather than the medium.
Oh, I remember the worst example. The longest loading time I have seen in an RPG was a Super Famicom game (yes, a cartridge game) called Maka-maka which could take as long as TWELVE seconds I recall to load a battle/overworld transition because its graphics loading routine was astoundingly awfully programmed.

Re: Nintendo Sets Up New Subsidiary In Taiwan

KingMike

I'm guessing they wouldn't want to call themselves NTDEC!
(at least think that was Taiwanese but maybe it was Thai, in which case the joke would fall)

For those who hadn't heard, that was a Famicom bootleg manufacturer whose name meant "NinTenDo Electric Company" (using the exact same characters as Nintendo's kanji spelling). When NTDEC tried to establish a US subsidiary called Caltron, Nintendo took the opportunity to sue them HARD in America, knowing they probably wouldn't get justice trying to litigate them in Asia. (I know AVGN has probably increased awareness of the Caltron 6-in-1 NES cart, which while seemingly a legitimate product, they knew they had to stop them as soon as they could.)

Re: Nintendo "Establishing Ways To Respond" To U.S. Tariffs, Says Furukawa

KingMike

@HeadPirate 25% higher cost to the manufacturer doesn't equate to that it should cost 25% more to the consumer.
For a long time, product distributors have exploited the incredibly low wages and regulation of China to raise their profit margins.
Even when I was in school, they were teaching about how a $100 pair of Nike sneakers probably cost Nike about $5 to make. Something along that idea.
Though, asking the CEOs to eat some of that cost out of their huge salaries. No, that isn't happening.

Re: Best Wario Games Of All Time

KingMike

@PtM I'm not sure if there was other content changes besides just color in the GBC version of Wario Land II.

However, it wasn't a choice for Japan. Despite being a Japanese-made game, the game didn't get released over there until the latter version was released like three-quarters of a year later.
(though the fact it was such a late release for the original GB, many people probably weren't even aware it wasn't a color original game. Doesn't help that the NA boxart for both versions is pretty much identical, meaning you wouldn't even know the difference between two copies of the game unless you know what the GB cartridge plastic colors mean. I think at least the European region got a different background color between the two.)

Re: Nintendo Talks About Future Switch Support Ahead Of Switch 2 Launch

KingMike

@Serpenterror DVD player prices fell off pretty quickly. Certainly by 2005 you could get no-name brand DVD players a lot cheaper than buying a PS2 if that's all you wanted it for.
It was even Nintendo's stated reason for dropping planned support for a DVD app on the Wii. Even Nintendo was like "you have many other options for playing DVDs these days", in 2007.

Re: Random: Hideki Kamiya Would Rather You Not Play Okami On The Wii

KingMike

@Harmonie I remember that, such a bad idea that the Wii Menu couldn't be operated with button controls. If you were planning to boot the console and play a button-controlled game (with the GC or CC controller), it sucked you had to pick up the remote just to launch the game so you could then put it down and pick up the other controller.

Re: 'Operation Night Strikers' Brings Four Action-Packed Arcade Classics To Switch This Year

KingMike

The obvious question: will light gun emulation be included?
The SNES game did support the mouse as well, which was at least a step up from just the standard controller support.

Maybe the NES Operation Wolf could be more enjoyable with a light gun that isn't the physical NES Zapper? I know it was one of the very few games released in Japan, and maybe the Famicom pistol would've been comfortable to use but I wouldn't know since getting one these days (especially outside Japan) is a rather tall order (and has been for some time).

Re: Random: Shuhei Yoshida Reminisces About Playing Sony's First 'SNES PlayStation' Game

KingMike

@N64-ROX There probably were games developed for it, but since the console was never officially revealed by Sony nor Nintendo, they probably had to hush about it.
The Argonaut boss did slip out in a StarFox interview that they were working on a Wayne's World game (of all things! Wonder how different it would've been from the Chris Gray cartridge game that did release).

@Anti-Matter Odd you mention Punky Skunk when talking about "PlayStation" games. That was a SNES game that got canceled and brought back on PS1. Someone dumped a SNES demo copy that got found a few years and thankfully for preservationists the demo programming was very lazy and just simply stopped the player after like two levels but still had the full game data.

Re: Rumour: Switch 2 Game Cases Might Take Up More Space On Your Shelf

KingMike

@Thomystic $15 for a manual is very collector pricing!
Maybe $5 for a good manual.
But very early in the 3DS' life, they were reducing manuals to be just a fold out sheet with control information and nothing else.
(or one of the Monster Hunter games I got where the "instructional manual" was a lie and contained only legal info)

Re: Opinion: My Daughter Made Me Realise That Mario Wonder's Difficulty Options Need Work

KingMike

We all have to learn, you're just not to necessarily "win" the first time you play a video game. It takes practice.
I was eight when we our parents bought us a Super Nintendo with Super Mario World as our first game, and I don't think I was able to finish a single level myself when me and my sister played through it, taking probably like six months to finish. I still enjoyed it.
I remember being nine and still bawling when I lost on the final stage of Super Mario Land 2. Oh well, I just had to put the game down and try again later.