Razieluigi

Cute story about one of my absolute favorte new artists in recent memory.

Chappell Roan is going to be an icon one day.

This whole article makes me sad. We need to stop being so eager to pave over gaming history by remaking everything.

Let's let these classics stand on their own merits and stop trying to replace them.

I'm not enough of a SF fan personally, but I have other ROM books (specifically the Genesis and Dreamcast Works) and can vouch for their quality. Their work is a genuine passion project for them, and it shows.

@Zeldafan79 Anything selling as many copies as Animal Crossing is, by definition, not "niche".

I see the old "ignore" button is gonna get a workout today.

@BenAV I actually find the d-pad/button controls superior. Each click of the d-pad helps you count and keep track of boxes as you work your way across the row.

It's a shame they don't include touch controls for those who would prefer them, but in general, I think this series gets it right.

@The_Pixel_King Patience...

@Mr_Muscle There was no edit. You were just wrong.

And it's not a matter of an $8 stylus being "expensive." It's just silly that people are all "I hope it comes here!" as if it's some rare piece of equipment that has no equivalent readily available for purchase today.

It's as if Nintendo Japan announced a pencil, and everybody started going on about importing one so they could finally take notes while playing Switch games.

@Mr_Muscle I never said anything about a $2 stylus, just that they're cheap and there's no need to spend extra money importing a Nintendo-branded one, nor is there any need to hope that it gets released here.

You can get an Amazon Basics "Executive" Stylus for $5.99 with free Prime shipping.

A stylus is a stylus. Why pay $8 (or more if you have to import it) rather than just get literally any other stylus for dirt cheap?

By and large, no. My original pea-green Gameboy has a partially defective screen with some lines missing, but it's thirty years old.

Otherwise, every bit of Nintendo hardware I own (which is basically all of it except the Virtual Boy) works perfectly. Even the often-broken NES springloader mechanism is as springy as it ever was with no pin contact issues to speak of.

That said, I feel like most of my game hardware has been pretty reliable. My first XBox 360 red ringed, and that's about it. Even my Atari 2600 will happily do its job (in the rare event that I ask it to).

Nice. Hope they'll communicate with 8BitDo adapters. I'd love the option to use first-party pads with my Super NT.

@FTL - Yeah, I don't see how any screen protector can be described as "flimsy". Unless you're taking a jackhammer to the screen, any layer of plastic or glass should be more than sufficient to prevent scratches. It's not really meant to provide any other kind of support or protection.

@carlos82 That's because you think BotW only had incidental music.

It did have incidental music (and very good incidental music at that). But it also had fantastic "main" tracks. The BotW theme is a stunner and still makes my hair stand up at the end. The Goron, Zora, and Rito music are all magnificently arranged for both day and night — easily some of the best versions we've ever gotten. Villages like Kakariko and Hatano have indelible new themes. And enough can't be said about the layered structure of the Tarrytown theme as it comes together.

The BotW score is one for the ages — a massive undertaking that impresses in ways big and small. I'll honestly never understand why so many people think it's just a bunch of piano tinkling.

@gcunit I just can't bring myself to think of games in such rigid mathematical terms. Art is about more than cost-per-hour.

Dinner and a drink can cost $20. Why can't a few hours of joy?

I'd throw in a shout-out for Ghostbusters: The Video Game on Wii. I know it's often regarded as the lame cousin of the "real" game on the 360/PS3, but I thought the cartoony graphics were a nice hybrid of the movies and the old animated series, and the Wii-mote controls were a ton of fun.

Definitely buyer beware until there are solid reviews to go on. Even without the supposed performance issues on Switch, this game hasn't earned the benefit of the doubt.

@Kochambra I'm not knocking motion controls. I love gyro aiming in games like Splatoon and BotW. And the Wii port of RE4 is probably the best version out there if you can get past the lower resolution.

To your point, they certainly could have used standard dual-analog controls with the Pro Controller and then added gyro aiming and it would have worked really nicely.

But the premise of this article is that the Wii controls could be "replicated quite easily thanks to the unique nature of the Joy-Con controllers", and that simply isn't true.

@BanjoPickles It's amazing how many people don't really understand this.

Including Nintendo, for that matter. While the motion controls in Skyward Sword were more precise in some respects than those in Twilight Princess, they required constant manual calibration because the "sensor bar" was no longer used to keep the pointer oriented in space. I still don't understand why Nintendo didn't combine Motion Plus with the sensor bar to get the best of both worlds.

It would be exactly the same problem in RE4, but more frustrating because of the high-tension nature of the game. Manually recalibrating in the middle of an intense zombie sequence would be awful.

@Spoony_Tech I'm still waiting to see if it's worth buying any version at all.

@Spoony_Tech No need to make a first impression if you trick enough people into buying something before it exists.

It is genuinely insane that Baba is You is not on this list.

Seems like good customer service to me. Nintendo made the perfectly reasonable assumption that this player might have more than one controller and would be eager to have their console back as soon as possible while the Joycons were being repaired.

Kind of out there, but I've always thought that Vanillaware's art style could make for a killer Metroid.

@Kalmaro It wouldn't really be double-dipping. Everything we've seen suggests this is a completely new title.

Yeesh, those controls. It's nice from a purely visual standpoint, but would be completely unplayable.

OMG it also says Rating Pending — is that a hint that this will be the first Adult Only Zelda?

@MysticGengar Because it's a different version of the game.

That said, I'm not sure why anybody would buy any version of Ice Climber.

@BoilerBroJoe People are certainly welcome to their opinions of subscription models, but this is a bad analogy.

A magazine subscription is still a price-per-issue payment, and is advertised as such. You're still buying individual magazines, but at a bulk discount.

Netflix is all-you-can-watch, which is a fundamentally different idea. You aren't paying for individual movies — it's a set cost no matter how much you stream.

Comparing the two is apples-and-oranges.

@Euler If they can't reproduce the problem, they can't possibly know how to patch it.

@imgrowinglegs Yeah. I don't buy the developer's argument here. That's what demos are for, and they should be free.

This seems like they knew that $30 was too high a price for the game, and decided to try stringing buyers along rather than just lowering it.

I was pretty excited about Dragon Marked for Death until I saw that the full game was split into two purchases. Seems like a greedy move for an indie title.

@welshland I imagine you haven't put any time into it at all since it won't be released until tomorrow.

@robr It is worth noting that their d-pads vary in quality. I have some 8BitDo controllers where they work perfectly, and others that register phantom diagonals.

There are some easy DIY hacks that minimize the problem, but it's a little frustrating that I had to do that.

@King-K-Rool Having played through all of the Mega Man X collection and quite a bit of the Sega Genesis collection, I haven't noticed any lag, and I grew up playing most of these games on original hardware. To me, they seem to play exactly as I remember.

I respect that some people might be more sensitive to small amounts of lag, but I don't think reviewers are ignoring a "very serious issue." I think they're literally unaware of it because, just like me, they don't feel like anything is off at all.

This is good news — I was worried they were only releasing the 2.4Ghz model alongside the Analogue Mega SG. This makes the controller much more adaptable and useful.

That said, they're talking a big game about the d-pad, and I hope they can walk the walk. While I've been a fan of 8BitDo's SNES-style controllers, the d-pad has been a weak point, often registering diagonals while pressing cardinal directions. I had to modify mine a bit, and while it's an improvement, they still aren't perfect.

@Akira_1975 No worry — we're all in the same boat here.

Happy gaming

@Realnoize I appreciate your response, but think you've misunderstood much of what I wrote.

I'm not characterizing games as something you consume and that's it. Quite the opposite. I love playing old games, often for the first time many decades after their release. I just played Terranigma on the SNES for the first time a few months ago, and it was fantastic. It was also an expensive pain in the ass to get a copy of it.

My point is precisely that if you didn't get the chance to buy a game while it was "current" or "popular", you may permanently lose your chance, and that's a shame. Physical games are frequently available for only a year or so, and then literally never again. The world is left with a finite supply to be shared by everybody who might ever want to play it again, for the rest of human history.

Your final paragraph really spells out the problem. You're imagining that physical media lasts forever as long as you "take care of your stuff," but that's obviously not true. If it were, you'd have no trouble with digital purchases because I'm sure you're taking good care of the drives you keep them on, right?

Games have a unique problem that movies, music, and books don't. They run in real-time on very particular hardware. It's trivial to "port" a movie or a song to a new format, which is why you can still easily buy copies of Animal House and The White Album at retail. It is not trivial to do the same for games.

The problem, in the end, has nothing to do with the way games are sold, digital or physical. It's with the generational obsolescence of the machines that play them.

@Akira_1975 You're creating an argument where there is none. I have a working 2600 and tons of cartridges as well. More power to you. I love this stuff. I'm not anti-physical. I'm anti-pretending-that-physical-is-a-miracle-cure-for-the-problem-of-obsolescence.

All my digital purchases are on physical storage in my home — hard drives, SD cards, whatever. That makes them no different than any other physical game that I own. It's still just data stored in a thing.

And in all cases, if that thing stops working or goes missing-- whether it be a hard drive, a console, a disc, or a cartridge — the data on it is lost forever without any good option to replace it. This is no more true of digital games than of physical ones.

That's literally all I'm saying. I don't understand why you're having such a cow about it. It's like I've reminded you that you can still get wet while holding an umbrella, and you've launched into a screed about how great your umbrella is.

@manu0 Seriously? Reprints of classic games are incredibly rare, unless you're counting the dubious counterfeit knock-offs that are all over eBay.

@manu0 I can't believe I have to answer this question, but perhaps because you don't already own it?

This idea that video games can be preserved strictly via the small number of physical copies made available at the time of release is preposterous. Literally no other form of media works that way.

I think that gamers revel in their own sense of exclusivity. There's a sense — echoed strongly in these comments — that if you already have a copy of a game, then all is right with the world, and anybody who missed their chance (whether by choice or circumstance) deserves to go without it.

Point is, physical preservation has its benefits and uses. But it serves an inherently small pool of people, and one that can only grow smaller as existing physical copies fail or go missing. The idea that all of this was better before digital marketplaces is factually incorrect because it wasn't.

@1UP_MARIO No trouble!

Although a friendly warning from someone who once bought and sold games... be careful! When I was younger and needed money in school, I sold quite a few games. It made sense at the time, but all these years later, I regret every single one that's no longer in my collection.

@bluemujika And that's all fine. Those are good things about physical. As I said, both physical and digital have their pros and cons.

Despite Anti-Matter's weird ranting, I'm not trying to discourage anybody from having, or even preferring, physical games. I collect them myself — especially cartridges. I think there's something special about playing on the original cartridge.

But the physical era wasn't some magical past when games lasted forever and remained permanently available to anybody that wanted to try them. Games vanished and became broadly unplayable for literal decades at a time. The digital era is, to a large extent, a response to the fact of classic games becoming rare and increasingly difficult to play.

@Anti-Matter I've already addressed those things, and I'm not saying that physical games are a bad thing. I own lots of old cartridges, and I continue to seek out others for my collection. People are absolutely welcome to prefer physical to digital or vice-versa. What they are not welcome to do is imagine that physical games are the magic solution to the problem.

The ability to fight over a small, pre-existing selection of out-of-print games is not the same as being able to purchase them. Contrary to your take, lots of old games are extremely expensive. Anybody trying to amass a physical collection of classic games is already well aware that you are incorrect. Games like Sin and Punishment or Rondo of Blood would have been nearly impossible to play in the modern era without digital sales.

Add to that the fact that physical media don't last forever. Cartridges will probably outlast us, but they'll still fail eventually. Discs are fragile, and eventually suffer scratches and rot.

Physical and digital purchases each have their pros and cons. But anybody diagnosing the problem as "digital games suck and physical games are great" is not treating the issue with the nuance or consideration that it deserves.

@1UP_MARIO That's fine, but a completely separate issue.

Clearly, people who buy games online don't expect to trade them later. They know that going in.

This discussion is about the ridiculous idea that the closing of a digital marketplace represents a catastrophe for the industry.

@JackEatsSparrows Blows my mind.

Physical is (was?) great if you happened to be there when the game was released. But after that, it's just gone.

And for so many modern games, buying physical is an exercise in futility since the moment it's released, the game is blasted with day-one patches and DLC — all of which will similarly become unavailable when the servers dry up. At best, you're left with v1.0 in your collection forevermore.

Game preservation is a serious issue. But we're never going to fix it if people keep misunderstanding the problem.

@Akira_1975 People keep saying this, but it makes no sense.

Physical copies disappear from the market. If anything, they do so sooner, and those games become harder to find than they were before with inflated after-market prices.

If anything, digital marketplaces arose in order to fill the gap left by the difficulty in finding physical copies of older games.

It sucks that these marketplaces shut down, but it is no different than a physical game no longer being available at retail. You either have the copy you have, or you don't have it at all. At no point in gaming history — physical or digital — have your purchases come with any guarantee about future availability.

@JayJ Absolutely.

All the complaining about cost is crazy.

It's a small-batch enthusiast product for an obsolete console. It's amazing that stuff like this exists at all. There's no reason to expect it to be cheap.

@VinylCreep Lateral move.

My Life in Gaming actually did a really nice in-depth look at all this stuff and it's worth checking out.

If you have component cables for your GCN, the only reason you'd need this is if you switch to a TV or receiver that doesn't include those inputs.