Alexlotl

I'll nominate Outrun again, any old version of the original game. It's widely available, from Master System to Switch. If it has to be a shooter, then R-Type.

As long as that hand isn’t in an unnatural position.

Penalty takers are going to be worth their weight in gold in FPL this season.

Paddy Power have already paid out existing Newcastle Relegation bets, according to their Twitter account. I'd always heard Rafa was just sticking around in the North of England while his kids finished school (they all still live in the Liverpool area) - a quick Google suggests his youngest is 17 now, so this might factor into him finally having enough of this shit. Or maybe it was the rumoured Chelsea interest. Full credit to the guy for staying with the club on relegation, bringing them back up, then massively overachieving in the Prem. It's like someone beating Speedball 2 with the default team of cloggers called Barry and Dave.

Perhaps they should use the approach they take in cricket, and give each side 2 referrals per half. Although the lack of a guarantee of a dead ball in football makes it trickier.

PCM audio sounded pretty unpleasant - trebly, and that emphasised the noise. I hope they can fix that. CDDA audio clearly has different EQ, but it's not a disaster.

Now I look, it seems both Sega CD and Cartridge audio have bus noise on the Mega SG and are controlled by the same config switch, so it probably won't be any different. The noise isn't evident on real hardware as the output is naturally much noisier anyway. Looks like a plan with no drawbacks then. I'll watch batch 1 with interest, then probably jump on batch 2. In the meantime, need to get around to selling my Mega Everdrive X7...

Theoretically possible, but I think the FPGA space needed for a Mega Drive *and* Mega CD is beyond the consumer level chips being used in these devices. You’d either have to put two in there, or go for a massively higher specced FPGA - both options would cost a packet. Also, by making it a cart they can sell to both the Mega SG users and the original hardware users, and not have to dick around with stuff like HDMI certification.

Hmm, interesting. So they must be using cart slot audio rather than the Sega CD audio lines. Cart slot audio tends to be pretty noisy, but I guess avoiding the official expansion port means they don’t have to worry about what shape to make it for the various models out there, and means it can work with a Nomad too (although the Nomad needs a mod to enable cartridge audio, I think). Not a Day 1 for me, but definitely keeping an eye on it.

Had a great session on Secret of Mana last night. Finally got magic power, and the final Mana weapon, so the whole team is cooking now. The magic recharge period added in this romhack seems to work perfectly, as does the lowered threshold for magic levelling up. I just love the look of this game - nothing else has a palette quite like it, so vivid. The mode 7 for the cannon travel also has buckets of charm. The solid colour text window options the hack adds looks worlds better than the semi-translucent default, which together with the better font and casing options fix my only real aesthetic complaints with the game. You know a game has a good combat system when you think “Well, I could fast travel back to that location, but I think I’ll walk it and have fun levelling up these new weapons”.

Amazon aren’t silly - this means lots of people will get Prime for December, and then be more likely to then buy all their Christmas presents on Amazon too. Presumably they can shape your recommendations on Amazon based on your viewing habits, too. Two full sets of games should let them work out which team you support. As a neutral who is never realistically going to pay for Sky or BT Sport, I’m quite looking forward to it. Some decent fixtures there.

So, I briefly gave Trials of Mana a go on the Super NT last night. That didn’t take long, did it? Not sure what I make of the official translation. The font is a bit small and squinty, but then the fan translation’s font was a bit too big. The new text is clearly wordier and more detailed (they expanded the ROM by half again), but also feels very dry, like a translation instead of a localisation. Awso, they twanswated Chawwotte to say eweything in stupid fucking baby tawk, which is pwetty awfuw. Perhaps I’ll hold off and play the inevitable romhack patch that fixes Charlotte’s script! I still have the original SoM to finish first anyway (although I prefer Trials as a game, I think).

£54.99!? Those things were utterly shit, and you could kill one in minutes with a joystick waggler like Daley Thompson's Decathlon. £55 in 1990 is roughly equivalent to £130 now. I can't believe that's right. Sure it wasn't for the console too?

I always think of this as a Speccy game. There was an excellent homebrew VGA remake a decade or so ago too. Always liked the slow, methodical nature of the game.

Survive sounds interesting - drop me a PM with details of which version it is, and whatever other stuff’s on your trade pile. The Dominion box is huge, I’m dreading posting it!