Ketchup

I think in their eyes it wasn't a success. It came about in an awkward time where website adverts were pretty low and things like patreons, youtube ads, sponsorships and promotional spots were not as common as they are now. Really they should have kept at it but i think they were just a little too early.

Ugh who ever made tick tick clock needs a kick to the groin. I’m currently around 99 stars and have got 120 way back on the N64 but I totally forgot what a pain this level is. For a level that’s mostly open the camera really struggles to show you what you need to see, often locking itself away from the direction you want to face. But the bigger sin is putting most the platforms on the walls edges but some are not right up against the wall so you fall off. Doesn’t help Mario is way more slippery than he should be and the joy cons are not really the best sticks to play this game with. I was having a lot of fun until these last few levels where the slippery nature (or mario doing it a little bounce when you land) of the controls, as well as him either sticking to walls or running off an edge instead of just turning are making this a pain. Tick tick in particular has some horrible stars making you climb the huge level and one screw up and it’s back to the start for you. These levels with bottomless pits are really not suitable for this type of game and it’s clear that some things may have looked great when being made but are not great for having a character run on. Besides this though I like the sandbox nature of Mario 64 and do enjoy it kicking you out of levels when you got a star. You can call it artificial padding but it’s have made most the game way to easy and you wouldn’t have felt the need to explore as much. Will I go for the full 120? Well I’ve got rainbow ride left to do, 100 coins on most levels and a few secret stars. So maybe, but my patience is wearing a bit thin now just because the controls are not quite as good as they should be. Those early levels though are utterly fantastic however.

My daughter who is two and a half is very much into Sarah and Duck at the mo, so much so she says she wants to be like Sarah and is now picking up mannerisms such as going ‘ehhh!?’ And whispering words that Sarah uses. I did buy her this massive duck plush for £20 on amazon though. (not her obviously). Its a nice fairly laid back show although I think duggee is amazing, especially the stick song. Don’t know it? Search it and probably love and hate me in equal measure for ever after.

PC Zone felt very much like Sega Power and that type of less stuffy and more casual magazine compared to PC Format which was super informative but very dry. I loved it. Some of the best stuff was the prank telephone calls brooker I think did as well as the cover discs which always provided great demos as well as mods like the gore mod for carmageddon. I only bought it until the early 2000s as pc gaming started to become dull for me with every game being a shooter or brown in some way but I did pick up the very last issue as it was a great send off.

Yeah I love the first game but for some odd reason whilst it got an Aus release they decided Europe shouldn’t get the sequel. Although I’ve just bought a cart only copy on eBay for £30. Clearly a repro as they have rows of cart only games in their listing but worth a try at least. The ski lift mechanic is so fun and frustrating, the music is a joy and it all has a dream like quality to the visuals. It’s a game filled with content too, love the first game.

What’s the case with a blank side on it?

So will prices take a massive drop after covid? Once everyone realises their investments are just sitting there or they are bored of what they bought? Shenmue raised to about £80 pre shenmue 3 but now is back to £20 again after release, will the same happen here do you think?

That’s because they now make them to order. Before they’d actually make say 3000 copies and make them for sale but have realised that actually limiting their releases isn’t great for business especially when so many people were buying them as an investment. So now they make as many pre orders as they get. It also means they now release multiple titles a week compared to a lot fewer releases before. Not sure either way is a good or bad thing though.

To be honest im not sure if im actually look for recommendations. It was more me just thinking that actually a lot of games which scored average to well back in the day would now score rather poorly. Like for the time they were fine, maybe even good but going back to them now with all the QoL improvements we've had over the years means a lot of titles are just tough to play for the first time now. Going back to an xbox 360/PS3 era game i feel most will hold up fairly well to when they first launched. Dreamcast and PS2 as well. PSone and N64, maybe not as many titles hold up but i bet quite a lot still do. Just the further you go back in generations the more difficult the games are to play compared to what we are now used to. Like thinking of the NES, and all it's titles how many out of the thousands made can people say, yeah thats worth a play through today. In my mind the number will be tiny but thats what i wanted to explore and see if actually im wrong and there is tonnes of games worth playing but i either a) haven't given them the chance or b) didn't know to try them.

See I thought that and then wondered why anyone would buy a CD-R and also the centre of the disc has what looks like similar markings to a Saturn disc. But I take it that it is just a CD-R and not a pressed disc in any way?

I was gona say surely it’s just a CD-R but the disc looks authentic potentially so maybe it’s just the case and manual that’s a repo?

I guess you have to ask how much is Dom getting out of this? Firstly kickstarter fees are 10% of the total. Then the book has creation costs let along the costs of the team writing and formatting the book. And is the extra £20 going to Dom or being split? If you went to meet him at say comic con he’d charge for an autograph as all celebs do and if you follow the guy he isn’t some super wealthy celeb, he’s mostly like me and you with a family and just doing jobs to keep his family going. So I don’t begrudge it and of course the choice is there too.

Really looking forward to this. I hope someone does go for the 5k tier as I think that’d be a beautiful end to this. Dom has said in the past he regrets how he acted back then and that’s not who he is now so I think it’d be nice to end it on a happy note and a silly tattoo. I know a lot of people put down Dave here, especially with all the Games Animal stuff and the recent YouTube channel but from my limited online interactions with him he is a nice guy, knows he’s being a bit silly with all this and I guess from both him and Dom they both love their time on GM but they have moved on from it and have gone on to other things they both enjoy.

No of course not. I used to think 16 bit games were perfectly fine to go back to, they may be simple or short but should be perfectly playable and certainly late gen games should be the most playable. Now I think that actually most 16 bit games are actually difficult to go back to and only the creme of the crop are worth playing and that can be the big hitters or the niche titles. Basically very few games are all time classics and most titles from this era might have been ok at the time but are terrible to go back to now. That was the point of this topic, are most these older games just difficult to go back to now just because they are missing QoL improvements or even just getting the basic mechanics perfect or is there actually loads of great games but you just need to know them.

Just random stuff I’d heard of but never played before. For example Batman Forever was just a curiosity to me because it’s a later game with fairly nice graphics and that era fascinates me in terms of inventiveness and what they tried to do with the hardware. I used to think most 16 bit titles were playable as by that point most stuff had been figured out but really there’s a lot of games that people worked hard on but just didn’t tweak enough to make the controls or level designs or what ever to be as enjoyable as they could be. It’s amazing how stilted some games feel compared to others that control so smoothly. Like comparing a flash platform game with something like super meat boy or Celeste.

I guess for me a lot of it comes down to quality of life stuff and for a lot of 8/16 bit titles they just don’t have it. Punishing difficulty is one thing if the game is fair and not just dodgy collision detection or crap controls. That’s maybe what my badly made point is that whilst some games do exist where they’ve had time and polish in them that makes them playable today it seems that perhaps more games in these generations don’t quite have this level of polish that I would have put up with at the time but now make it difficult to go back to a lot of these titles?

I installed a mega drive emulator on my wiiu and decided to add any game of interest to it. Obviously this included stuff like the sonics and games I had as a child but also lots of stuff I’d maybe wanted to play as a child but never did. But upon playing most of these games I can see how basic or unpolished they are. Playing a sonic game you realise how actually polished the movement is when compared to other platformer that just feel stilted. So it got me thinking, are most games from this generation just not playable now? I was really excited by the Nes Mini but upon booting it I realised most games just hadn’t aged well. Again Mario 3 was fine as it’s controls and everything around it felt polished where as every other game felt like it was just above functioning. Going back to the 16 bit era I think you can say a lot of Sega and Nintendo titles are still perfectly playable as I completed super metroid and Zelda lttp in recent years and loved them. But the 3rd parties are far more hit and miss. Wiz n Liz is not a game I loved as a child but it’s so fast and smooth I can see it’s enjoyment now, games like Desert Strike or Zombies are my neighbours do one thing and one thing we’ll. Where as many other games like Batman Forever or Chase HQ 2 now just seem so basic and just made to work that they are not fun to play. So after all that rambling are most games from these previous generations bad games and difficult to go back to and only the top games have the level of polish and thought put into them that make them still enjoyable today?

It’d have a picture of an attractive woman on the front, possibly in cosplay, possibly not, with the headline articles about how to game whilst at the club and 5 reasons why you’ll forever be a virgin if you don’t buy a ps2. Plus an article from random flavour of the month band. There will be no images of games.

I quite liked them being episodic although the wait between episodes before was too much. Tell me why got it mostly right although a new episode every week or two weeks would have been suitable. I’m glad to see powers are back as I found LiS2 a disappointment and a bit too tell tale like.

Yeah that’s what I’ve read, however when I go to any of the books on other islands I can’t access them, only the original shroudbreaker one. Upon starting the game I have no books or anything in my inventory and if I start the shroudbreaker one it only shows that original mission in the book despite doing at least 2/3 missions after this.

Yeah did that and just says. No checkpoints found.

This game is so frustrating to play casually and just enjoys wasting your time. A few months ago we started the tall tales, did the shroud breaker and a few others. Not it says I have no checkpoints and the only quest I can start is the shroud breaker one again. We just want to carry on from where we was before but can’t and even finding out if we can or can’t is an hour of sailing between islands to find the right book to see if we can start it. So am I doing something wrong or basically does it think we haven’t done any of the quests?

I think the problem is it isn’t quite as good as the original Sega Rally and the port being a let down on what was supposed to be this super powered console. Sega really rushed those initial Japanese launch games that could have done with an extra 6 months to be perfect. Although it’s amazing we got Sega rally 2 at all considering this was a quick rush job from the pc version because the original port wasn’t going so great. Would have been nice to see that to see how bad it really was.

It’s not too troublesome to set up, there are a lot of advanced options that could be hidden to most users though. On pc once the software is installed it is fairly plug and play except when it comes to what emulators want from you, same with raspberry pi. I’d say I got it up and running within about 30 minutes with one game but after that it required maybe an hour or two getting a pre made pi file, installing roms and setting up what each rom wants from you. Visit the support page on the official wiki and there’s links to a few very good YouTube videos that explain setup. But yes it could do with being more plug and play for sure.

oh the accuracy seems fine, certainly comparable to gun cons and the like. The issue comes with arcade games and their in built calibration. For example on Virtua cop 2 arcade You have to use the roms built in calibration but you’ll need a video guide someone put on YouTube to make sense of how the calibration works as it’s about setting values than pointing and shooting. Retro pi as per my posts in that thread also requires per game tinkering of the settings so it’s not quite plug and play. Ive got the one with the kick back and it’s loud and powerful. But I’d love an all in one image with all the gun games together pre made with this in mind, especially as the model 3 emu is command line only so is especially a pain to start each rom.