Ketchup

Banjo Tooie is an odd one, it’s price on eBay boxed varies between £60-£120.

I just want to know who’s buying these games at these prices. It’s a game you can play on Xbox easily enough, isn’t that great a game so how many people are buying this just for the collection shelf?

Or because some youtuber posts their haul of the week and says it’s rare.

I find it frustrating stuff like Pokemon Blue is over £100. It’s not a rare game, there are millions upon millions of them out there so why is it selling for so much?

I do think the WiiU will shoot up in value. It’s a great machine for emulation even without hacking. The controller is a key part of the system and the thing most likely to get damaged. Whilst lots of its games are on switch it has a lot of stuff still exclusive to it or versions that have unique aspects. Plus it’s Nintendo.

Daytona gets such a bad rap that it doesn't fully deserve. It has 40 cars on the track, even modern games don't do that many. It plays pretty much like the arcade version and it's just a shame the pop in is what ruins it. The frame rate, at least when it isn't pal isn't the worst either. In my mind it's not a bad port, just has some issues which are quite over blown. Whilst i like the look of CCE and thats how the original should have been, its handling is not the same for some reason and makes it a worse game.

On 28/12/2022 at 23:48, Skull Commander said:

Mario Party games need a "Hurry the Fuck up Mode" where the computer players take their turns quickly and all the cut scene type bits are skipable. 

The latest one actually does this and is pretty great because of it. Could still be faster and have a little less of the repeating tutorial text stuff but at least they finally listened.

Long may it continue! Still look forward to my copy arriving every month.

Outer Wild. I’d make it so the angler fish only moves if you are making light/noise. As soon as you stop your thrusters it should stop noticing you. Instead once it’s aware of you you’re instantly dead and it makes a tricky section actually just frustrating and time consuming.

Yeah i think most people do, the achievement for it is like 0.72%.

Replayed this again the past week and enjoyed it nearly as much as the first time. Half of it I’d forgotten and the other half helped fill in details I knew in the random order before.

The world felt smaller this time now I knew where everything was, especially the hanging city area which felt huge the first time. I finally managed to land on the sun station (pro tip, aim up by going horizontal around the sun to get into orbit than trying to aim forward at the station) and one thing I always wondered finally clicked, the canon explosion at the start is always different and for good reason.

The only under baked thing I noticed on this playthrough was the teleporters, a couple are must use whilst others don’t really have a need to use them and that could have been hammered home a little bit more.

Still it’s an amazing game and even better with the update, playing it at 30 fps on the ONEX really showed me how much the upgrade changes things. Oh and the slightly updated ending due to the dlc is nice too.

Maybe I’ll try the DLC again in a few years, it has a completely different feel I think to the main game and where as the main game is a 10/10 the dlc to me was maybe a 7/8 out of 10.

I kinda get the feeling this hasn't been worked on for 5 years but i really hope they just settle on evolving rather than the constant 'need a new gimmick or the game won't sell' mentality they've had for the past decade.

Ignoring FPGA stuff, can emulation be just as good as the real hardware?

Now before you answer, yes! I want to get into the details. Sure emulation can do 4k up res or better frame rates but has emulation got to the point where there are no issues?

It’s been a long time since I really

played with emulators, Snes era and earlier has  seemed perfect for a long time. But anything that has 3D graphics there always seems to be tiny glitches here and there.

Recently adding emulators to my Steam deck I tried the Dreamcast emulator. Put on Sonic Adventure for a quick test and everything looked great, except Sonics eyes. Polygons were clipping oddly.

I tried sone other emulators and either there was the odd stutter every so often or other minor graphical glitches.

So I guess what I’m asking is, is any emulator ever 100% perfect or do they all have these little imperfections people just live with?

Just finished reading about series six, it was brilliant. I don’t know if the full story of the Mario incident had been told before but I’m sure parts of it had. But ultimately I liked the closure of it from everyone as well as filling in the gaps.

Anyone remember when I actually got Dave ‘Games Animal’ Perry to come to this forum? It was great, I’m sure I messaged him on his forum he had at the time to come and check out here, that is till a mod banned him for ‘impersonating’ because they didn’t think it was really him. That still sucks even now because, even as the book goes into, Dave does/did take himself too seriously but ultimately he is a nice guy and isn’t mean spirited to anyone.

Really enjoying this. I wish there was a little more detail for series 1 and series 3 doesn’t quite go into all the terrible problems that hampered that series but the amount of names they got to feature in the book so far (I’m only about half way through) is very impressive!

I never knew how big Dom was either at the time, he was doing a lot of shows, radio etc and was far bigger than just GamesMaster.

Around 2006-2008 there was a website called gamesmasterlive.co.uk that tried hosting every single episode as well as featuring content about the show.

It’s somehow still up, even if most links are broken. But on the main page written in 2008 is thanks to Jack Templeton. Would love to know what he contributed to the site to years later be basically the creator of this book.

Starting to mess around with this and have come up with a couple of issues.

1. Not all games are appearing individually in the steam game manager. Dreamcast, Gamecube etc show each game individually, but stuff like Mega Drive, Neo Geo etc do not. I can access these games via emustation fine, but i dont get say a Mega Drive collection in my collections folder, but i do get Dreamcast and Gamecube.

2. PS2 wants a bios, i've got a bios but it tells me to click the tools menu and then the data drop down, clicking it does nothing however.

Does anyone else find the sticks either too tall or the position just not great? Using the deck for first person shooters is okay but just doesn’t feel as comfortable as a normal controller or even a Wii u game pad.

I want to give a little love to this smaller youtuber, a 3 hour video that goes over pretty much every Namco game made for the psone. Actually really interesting as it looks like every single game Namco brought to the console is worth a look. I certainly was expecting to see a few rubbish games in the mix, but no, even the baseball games look sorta fun and it's given me a few games to check out, even just for curiosity sake.

4 hours ago, makkuwata said:

Has there ever been confirmation that they were intending to launch the GameCube with some sort of proto-Wiimote?

 

 

Not launch the GameCube with it, but launch a wiimote on the GameCube, pretty late in it's life. Instead they held it back for the Wii which was the right, if scary move to make at the time. Same for the 3D stuff, they made a screen for the GameCube to play games in 3D but it was tiny and expensive, again held back for the 3DS.

This does have a good amount of good shines in it. The levels themselves are wonderful, the graphics, sounds and atmosphere top notch. But the rough edges are difficult to deal with, there is a bunch of shines that are just pure pain, the blue coins are not fun beyond the obvious ones and whilst we know it was clearly rushed to launch it still has a lot going for it.

I do find Mario a little tough to control at times, especially on void levels as he's sometimes a little too slippery in places and momentum plays against fludd in a lot of ways. Mario 64 is a game i can 100% and besides a tiny handful of stars, love every moment. Sunshine is closer to like 60% of the game is pure enjoyment and 40% painful.

What’s the best way to get started as I’ve seen there is emudeck and other options worth considering?

Psone and n64 on emulation sounds fine, but with Dreamcast you’ll be missing the *Beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeppppppppppppppppppppppp* on every start up and the disc drive scratching its way around the disc. Especially handy during skies of Arcadia as you know a random battle is about to appear.

It does, and that helps ebay out so it is interesting they’ve never tried it.

Yeah there will always be people fascinated with history or older versions of things. I guess this is where games are different though. That spoon is still a spoon at the end of the day. Where as a copy of Silent Hill or some random Nes game will just get worse and worse by age. Potentially they won't have any use either due to bit rot or machines dying. Where as that spoon will always look and work like a spoon.

I guess also with games if you want it to just play, there are many other options to purchase or gain access to where as actual antiques have that physical property you can't just replace without the object being different.

So i don't think in 40 years these games will be worthless again but perhaps less people will be wanting them on their shelves maybe.

A friend made an interesting point to me recently. Most retro games currently are going to certain age brackets, once those people either stop caring about gaming or pass away will younger generations want those games? Maybe, but certainly there is a lot of nostalgia for say Silent Hill which future generations won't have, or if there is remakes for example. So prices may start going down, look at Star Wars toys or nostalgia, it's a certain generation that loves the original trilogy, another that loves the prequels and so on, but the oldest generation still around who had access to original Star Wars stuff doesn't really care for it. Disney has done a fine job in keeping interest going for that franchise at least.

Also look at a lot of facebook groups or even youtubers, they collect for the sake of collecting. They don't enjoy the games, just the hunt or at the very least, the boxes. With a recession perhaps people will sell off their copies of Moho on Dreamcast because it's a crap game worth a fortune than sit in povity looking at the box on the shelf. Certainly some games like Pokemon are stupidly priced and they sold millions upon millions of copies, why is the price so high? Shenmue was worth nearly £100 a few years back, but has now fallen back down to around £20-£30. So i don't think games will always stay high or continue to grow, but it may take a lot of time for prices of certain games to drop back down.

Ordered Monday, arrived today, that was far quicker than expected! Excited to be able to play all those games i've been collecting that will be great in handheld and don't feel quite right sitting in front of a monitor for hours.

I’ve always really enjoyed Confidential Mission as something a little different. It’s certainly got virtua cop vibes but the spy angle and the equipment you have to use at key points make it fun. Virtua cop 3 would steal a lot of these things and I do wonder why CM came out instead of VC3.

Time crisis 1 and 2 are personal faves as well as the Deadstorm Pirates above.

Gun blade and LA Machine guns are also great but they’re a different style of light gun game.

Ghoul panic is a lot of fun, I much prefer it over Point Blank as I find that series very stressful where as I want my gun games to be fun and always moving to spectacle.

What I have realised from going through a huge list of light gun games is it’s the more modern games I enjoy. Sure, Duck hunt was amazing at the time but horribly basic. Most pre 32 but games were horribly basic in this genre either going after static shooting gallery gameplay or just flooding the screen with enemies. Virtua cop I believe set a new standard where you had to have quick reactions or figure out the best route to take down the bad guys and avoid the innocent.

Playing some of these older games they just lack any excitement or pacing, just stuff constantly popping up. I even tried Mad Dog Macree, a game I’ve always wanted to play as seeing bits of the FMV on tv as a kid it looked cool and suited the light gun genre. Playing it now. Well. Firstly how anyone played it on a mega cd I don’t know, it’s such a pixelated mess I can’t tell who’s a bad guy and who’s not. Let alone when they’re about to shoot you. That’s also totally ignoring the gameplay, you can only shoot during set windows, too early and nothing happens. Too late and you’re dead, back to the start. Half the time I thought I was watching a cut scene when out of knowhere I’m shot. I guess that’s what makes it an FMV game. It’s an interesting concept for sure but the execution is pretty poor. 3DO faired little better, guess you need to play the arcade laser disc versions if you want to try them.

Im really looking forward to finding more games, especially more modern light gun games but I think anything pre 32 bit is either going to be tough to go back to or just not for me.