Ketchup

I've set up my Raspberry Pi with a whole host of lightgun only games for my Sinden light gun covering everything from Nes to Arcade. At least what it can handle anyways and apparently it can sorta handle Model 3. But i'd love to hear your fave light gun games, theres far more out there than i imagined and some rather fun or interesting ones too. So what do you recommend checking out?

My only disappointment is a Pi really can't do PS2 or PS3 and there is a lot of interesting games on there from the remake of Virtua Cop, to Deadstorm Pirates which has to be one of my faves.

The thing that impressed me was the cheat codes on the hub world. Firstly, mega drive platformer never had hub worlds and then there was all these collectibles that if collected in the right order gave you cheats.

That impressed me so much as a kid and the game really felt different to typical console games. At the time I didn’t know why but look at early mega drive platformers, they all felt stilted and didn’t look great. But this was fast, playful and colourful. The whole robocod thing was a great gimmick and early 90s robocop and terminator style parody was pretty fresh too.

Yeah I guess 94/95 as a developer you’re making your game with a 1-2 year cycle. So Saturn got support between 95-96 but for your next game it was clear PlayStation was the way to go which is also why I think the first few years probably were fairly neck and neck and then the sudden collapse of Saturn.

2 hours ago, SMD said:

 

No RE2 or MGS, Gran Turismo came out and Sega's answer was STCC? And Playstation already had TOCA which was so much better and deeper. In 1995 you could make an argument that arcade games were enough to compete but trying to charge full price for a game that had 4 cars and 4 circuits and handled like dogshit is a complete farce.

 

And you're right, the Saturn had great games - when they could be arsed bringing them over or printing copies. Saturn Quake should've been promoted left right and centre as the most faithful way to play one of the best FPS games of all time on console. The less said about the releases in 1998... just a complete failure of management from start to finish.

I find this era fascinating, if only because of how the consoles launched and what happened during those years. Like Saturn came to the UK in 94, yet in my mind i was playing Sonic and Knuckles and the Mega Drive had basically reached it's peak at that point and still had a couple of years worth of games to come. 94, 95, 96 you sort of forget that Saturn and Playstation were out and 3 years old by that point. The N64 didn't even come to the UK till 97. By modern standards a consoles 1st year is often slow but the 2nd year is where it all kicks off and its fate is sort of decided. But i really feel that the Playstation didn't really hit it's stride until 98, by which time Saturn was Dead and Dreamcast was out in Japan. Console launches are so different to before where they would take years to get going, so we all look back and say the saturn failed right from the start, yet for those first two years at least Saturn and PSone got fairly similar games from the 3rd parties, im think stuff like Swagman and Cool Spot, those strange cross over games that felt like super charged 16 bit games rather than something that couldn't have been done previously. Beyond the odd Tekken 2 there wasn't too much from the PSone that made it a must have over the Saturn.

In 96 were people talking about Saturn and Playstation all that much? Maybe, this was the time of the original Tomb Raider coming to saturn but i guess in 96 those consoles and the N64 felt expensive and only for the hardcore gamers, where as 97 onwards is where those consoles started feeling more attinable. I do remember Cybernet talking about the Saturn having Virtua Fight 2, Sega Rally and Virtua Cop as it's big games against playstation. So for me because of the lack of internet and only magazines Saturn and Ps1 felt sort of equal for 3 years, before Sega just sort of gave up around 97 and especially 98 we all knew it was dead and buried. But it's only in 98/99 that PSone got its heavy hitters and that probably hurt the Dreamcast more than we realised at the time.

They’re expanding too, having just had a 2.5 mil injection of cash.

Is there any downsides to activating dev mode and side loading eg. Getting an account banned or losing access to the store etc?

1 hour ago, S0L said:

Interesting, I might charge up my original Quest and have a go

 

We did some tests in VR with All-Star Transformed and whilst you wouldn't think it would work letting you look around from a third person camera, it actually played and felt pretty good. Having the car as a reference point helps with motion sickness, sort of like those 3D cinema rides where you chase a spaceship through an asteroid field! It was deeply unpleasant when we tried it with a cockpit cam. Feel sick just thinking about it 

 

You always tell us these exciting things you tried out and it hurts so much that they won’t become reality 😂

I just want more Transformed honestly.

I used to enjoy the Sonic 3 maps where they’d basically screen shot every screen and join them together. That must have taken hours of work. Of course that meant sonic appeared a lot.

3 hours ago, Keyboard Koala said:

Taiko Drum Master games used to be crazy popular on here, and now no-one seems to give two shits about them.

Considering they’re easy to get hold of on Switch, Xbox and PlayStation I feel as if these have broken into the mainstream now.

Remember when Bad Influence had the cheat codes for Sonic 2, except they were all wrong? So many children that day spent hours trying to enter them I bet, including me.

Yeah, although I didn’t order mine till last month so that’s why I’m at the back of the queue.

Well I was Q3 and later and have now become Q4. Was hoping for a little sooner but glad to have a more concrete date.

It’s such a fun game if frustrating because I just want to collect water with no leaks 😂

Is the PS2 version the definitive version?

That cover though, a game all about water and they still make the cover brown.

I love the show but really didn’t like the movie. I didn’t like the animation, it took a while to figure out but it’s because they’re 3D models and so they move oddly and the facial positions looked odd compared to the 2d drawings of the show where each pose is designed to look it’s best for that pose.

The story itself was alright, there’s been episodes with better stories and I don’t know it all kinda felt a bit flat compared to a typical episode. As someone else mentioned even the extras characters had seconds of screen time where as they’d normally get lots in a 20 minute episode.

The simpsons movie worked as it felt like the show but bigger and a fully featured story that needed the run time but this felt like a 20 minute episode reallllllyyyyyy stretched out. Disappointing.

The PS2, the most bought console in all of history. The power of the emotion engine, toy story like graphics and the ability to launch WMDs (supposedly) and yet it’s never a console I’ve really loved.

The launch period of the PS2 is an odd time for me. I was very much into the Dreamcast, the N64 was still hanging on and I’d never owned a PSone. Yet I loved the original PlayStation, it had great games and content I couldn’t experience elsewhere. Mostly down to money, being a Sega kid (and in some ways being fortunate not to be able to buy a Saturn) and all my friends owning a psone I could get away with not having one but still enjoying it. Incidentally I bought an N64 because Mario, Goldeneye and Star Fox just wowed me so much so I picked that over the PSone. Plus 64 is better than 32 right?

Anyways I’m enjoying Dreamcast and the PS2 launches and let’s be honest here it was a terrible launch. Games looked worse than Dreamcast games, Ridge Racer and Tekken 3 TT were similar to their PSone versions and the rest of the launch lineup wasn’t much better.

Besides the PS2 was expensive at launch, at £299 it was twice the price of most other main console launches. The PSone was also still pretty healthy at this point too. By the time GT3, MGS2, DMC etc launched I was working in game retail. I still was enjoy the final Dreamcast games but also around the corner was the Xbox and GameCube. Initially I waited for a GameCube, maybe something about underdog consoles is what I enjoy? Either way it had a great launch and the graphics were so much better than the PS2. Sadly not long after launch you can see the GameCube wouldn’t be the machine everyone bought. I initially avoided the Xbox and maybe this is a discussion for another topic as it was during the whole M$ era, them being a new comer like the 3DO and honestly I think everyone thought they’d disappear quickly.

But thanks to a massive price cut, and adding in JSRF and Sega GT into the box, along with a whole host of other Sega games, let alone PGR and I guess Halo. Besides it had a Hard Drive and the games were graphically better.

But because of owning an Xbox the PS2 never grabbed me the way it should have. GTA3 was amazing but I got the PC version. MGS 2 I picked up on Xbox a year later. Pretty much any PS2 game I’d want to play ended up on Xbox and the games I enjoyed on PSone got worse sequels. Parappa 2 was not as good. Tomb Raider was terrible. The smaller more quirky games either disappeared or got bigger and worse. I really should have loved the PS2 but it never did click with. The games were often the worse versions especially when it came to online multiplayer, the exclusives often didn’t appeal to me and it didn’t feel like and over powered PSone as the games were also changing in direction more.

As a small aside I picked up a PC Engine mini last year and realised most the games on it just don’t appeal to me. Same with the NeoGeo, I love the look and tech in the machine but besides a handful of games it’s full library (Game Sack did a video discussing every game released for it recently) just doesn’t have anything I’d enjoy. I love the tech and sprite scaling in all the fighters but fighting games have never really worked for me.

So after that long winded ramble, what consoles never clicked with you?

I’m not all in on digital. I like owning discs and having something physical to remind me to play it than a square on a store front.

I do think games have changed too. They’ve either one and done, great big experiences never to play again or bite size games to play for an hour every night.

I bought the metal gear solid hd collection yesterday, on disc, because Konami removed it with zero notice and an hour after it went on sale not giving me a chance to get it. Whilst there’s more games than ever coming out now there seems to be more disposable games than ever, not bad games, good games, enjoyable but ultimately forgettable.

7 hours ago, T Pot said:

 

 

It looks like you have a UK 64GB reservation

You reserved your deck 104 days, 19 hours, 09 minutes and 22 seconds after pre-orders opened

04 days, 14 hours, 42 minutes and 56 seconds of orders have been processed

You have 100 days, 04 hours, 26 minutes and 26 seconds of orders to go until it is your turn

You're 4.4 % of the way there!

 

Guess I'll see you in 2024

It looks like you have a UK 64GB reservation

You reserved your deck 345 days, 04 hours, 15 minutes and 54 seconds after pre-orders opened

04 days, 14 hours, 42 minutes and 56 seconds of orders have been processed

You have 340 days, 13 hours, 32 minutes and 58 seconds of orders to go until it is your turn

You're 1.33 % of the way there!

As Fry mentioned, the site assumes the same amount of orders are placed each day, but this is interesting to see that despite ordering over 200 days later you're not that much further ahead so hopefully things should be moving a little quicker once those first few days of orders have been fulfilled.

So now the dust has settled a bit which version of the steam deck is best to buy? The basic one is at a great price point but is the tiny storage space a problem? I’m sure I read that even games on the micro SD card run just as well?

The middle one may be the best option but if it’s trivial to upgrade the storage later anyways is it worth the price bump?

Finally the most expensive, is the anti glare coating worth it?

On 24/06/2022 at 14:07, bradigor said:

 

 

Retro International Soccer

I re-imagining on the 90's based football games, but using the art style from Octopath Traveller / Triangle Strategy, no license or anything

 

 

?

We don’t get many games where you play the bad guys. Dungeon Keeper is an obvious one and so is Evil Genius but surely this genre is ripe for the picking where for once the bad guys can win?

8 hours ago, Smoothy said:

Hmmm... OK.  Well, this is a cockup:

 

 

I've had that happen in the mega drive original, Sonic 2 is a bit of a buggy mess even in it's original form.

1 hour ago, Quest said:

They seem like a talented bunch and should really just focus on their own stuff, rather than being shackled to this cursed thirty year old franchise. I thought this after Mania and it only seems more true now.

Except when they tried a kickstarter for this no one really supported them. Sadly unless you’re already rich, or have backing it’s going to be impossible for them to do what they’re clearly good at.

This Twitter thread is interesting though. Firstly I thought they made Sonic origins, not just sonic 3 and some other team actually put it all together. 
 

But we all know Sega has been tight with their ports, little in the way of money and time and yet expecting them to rake in millions. We saw it with the Shenmue port and many others and it’s such a shame as the teams really want to put in their all but are not given the money or time to make things perfect. It’s really is such a shame cos they’re always so close but little details spoil the packages. I don’t think he needed to make a thread, I haven’t seen anyone mention lots of bugs and whilst he clearly loves his work and wants it to be the best possible I think in this situation either not saying anything or being more positive around the potential issues would have been a better response.

I’ve got a pac man coin pusher, it’s a little different to an actual arcade game although it does feature its own mini game puzzle bobble type screen.

But it does have details of play. So it’ll detail how much money has gone in, out, how many specials happened, length of games, how many games and so on. Obviously it’s more tailored to the money side of things but I’d have thought many more modern arcade games would have similar details to allow the arcade owner judge how the machine is doing.

Of course you see some arcade owners just put everything on super difficult and call it a day. Typically places you’re unlikely to go back to so it doesn’t matter to them if you get out off at not being able to play for long as someone else will replace you. Where as a more local arcade knows you need to show people having fun and have some value for money so they do want to come back.

What about gamespress.co.uk ? They’re all press release stuff but may be suitable and definitely not emulator stuff.

Surely at that price point you just repurpose a plastic case and get a new cover printed. It’s hardly like these covers are impossible to match exactly now.

How much we talking?

For me it’s the timing of the original post, early to mid 2000s. That would be prime psone shovel ware where as I doubt anything, even low rent complications would have appeared on the Ps2 during that time as that was its prime time. It really sounds like it’d fit the psone better than the ps2 as well.