Dcubed

Yeah, Carrington Villa SA cheat is rough, dunno how the hell I managed to pull it off. Another rough one is the par time for the Air Base SA cheat… that is until I watched a speedrun and found out that there’s actually a secret shortcut that skips the laser section altogether! This one blew my mind. Had no idea that you could just go back into the lift and be taken straight to the Air Force One entrance! Also, that trick of using the DrugSpy to block the lift door is genius! You save a good 10-15 seconds from that little trick alone!

I don’t think Nintendo will ever drop the price of the console officially. Were so close to the end now that I think they will just ride it out until Switch 2 comes out; so that they can set the expectation that Switch 2 will also never receive a price drop (thus discouraging people from waiting until the price comes down). Thus Switch 1 will become the first console in all of human history to never receive any form of price drop throughout its lifecycle. That’s probably an even bigger accomplishment than beating the PS2’s hardware sales record.

Always felt so weird to me that the GBA got so few Pokemon spinoff games (just two, granted both of them are absolute bangers and both better than the actual original mainline R/S/E game that the console received; but still!). Such a huge missed opportunity… … but especially a massive missed opportunity that we never got a GBA Pokemon TCG RPG game with e-reader support… The damn real-life Pokémon TCG even got e-reader support! And it was squandered on Pokédex entries and a couple of minigames. Absolute lunacy of the highest order! A proper GBA PMKN TCG with e-reader support would’ve been an easy 10+ million seller; and the pieces were already there to make it happen! It just… never did. So stupid.

What can I say? Four Swords actively encourages you to be an idiot

Plenty more racers still to come and all. N64 is to racing games what NeoGeo and TG16 are to fighting games and shmups respectively.

It hit 32 degrees in London today… which may not sound that hot on paper, but we’re currently at around 80-85% humidity; which means that it feels like a bloody rainforest over here! Even my poor portable air conditioner is struggling to keep up! Speaking of which… DK Jungle probably would’ve fit the theme.

Small update. I have since replaced the nasty looking c-stick for a new one... Ahh! Much better. You might be wondering why I didn't replace the left stick... well, as it turns out; the left stick is the only part of this controller that is actually unique to this colour variant. While Gamecube controllers by and large all use the same buttons and sticks, regardless of controller shell colour, it turns out that Nintendo broke their rule in this one specific case; as the left stick actually comes in a slightly darker grey to fit the Platinum colour shell. Squint and you can see the difference Might not be so obvious in this photo, but I did try swapping out the sticks and the result just looked really weird and obviously not OEM, so I've decided to leave the left stick as-is. It looks better in person than these beauty ugly shots would suggest, and the minor blemishes don't really bother me. The left stick works perfectly and feel normal, and that's the most important thing. Edit: I've only just noticed this now... but it's not just the left stick, but all of the grey buttons (Y/X/Start/D-Pad/Wireless Switch/L/R) actually use a darker variant colour as well! No other Gamecube controller uses these particular parts AFAIK (though I'd imagine that the wired Platinum colour GCN controller also uses these buttons/sticks; the wireless switch would still be exclusive to this one particular variant). Interesting that Nintendo actually bothered to manufacture unique parts for this colour and this colour variant only!

I get that, but the Joycons are buggered anyway. It's either a matter of sending them back to be repaired, fixing them yourself (A PITA, but it can be done. I've fixed a bunch of mine and it's not a fun experience), or just having them sit there being useless. I know what option I'd pick.

NOE now offer free repairs on all Joy-Cons, regardless of their warrenty period. Send the Joy-Cons back to them rather than spend another £60 on another pair.

Damn that’s brutal… And they’re also not just losing staff from the layoffs, but are also getting 155 staff members taken away from them and absorbed into other parts of Playstation… and on top of that? They’re getting their other non-Destiny/Marathon project and an additional 40 staff members stripped away from them and spun off into a wholly new studio? Oh and if that’s not bad enough? Bungie is no longer being run independently as Herman Hulst has now reportedly taken over the running of the studio… This is a massacre. That’s more than 30% of the entire studio wiped out, just like that. Why did Sony even bother buying Bungie for such an exorbitant sum (an amount that I and almost everyone else unanimously agreed was a massive overspend for the company), if they were just planning on gutting them anyway? What a massive waste of money!

Banjo Kazooie is a 10-12 hour game your first time through, if that’s of any help @Jonnas

Reason why is because the data transfer rate is ridiculously slow (you’re talking about 15.6KB per second). The Stadium games only use the Transfer Pak for accessing and copying save data from the cartridges; the actual Game Boy ROM data resides on the Pokémon Stadium cartridge itself. So those lengthy loading times you see are just for accessing save data alone; just imagine how slow it’d be at loading the actual ROM! That being said? You’ve given me a nice segue to talk about a neat little piece of development hardware that was available to devs and media outlets at around this time in 1999, that just so happens to provide the functionality you’re looking for… Presenting.. the Wideboy 64! Ultra Gameboy! This little doohickey was basically the N64 equivalent of the Super Gameboy and was made by Intelligent Systems for use by game developers/publishers and by media outlets for video, screenshot and demo purposes. If you ever saw a trailer for a GBC game, or a screenshot in a mag? Chances are that it came from one of these devices. A revised version was later released called the Wideboy AGB which, surprise surprise, was the GBA equivalent of the original Wideboy 64. It too ran on the N64 and worked in much the same way (and since it was a GBA, could also play GB/GBC games). Up until all the way to 2003? These pieces of rare development hardware were the only way you could play GBC or GBA games on your telly.

I have another broken controller + working Wavebird Receiver on the way (Mainly wanted the Receiver, as one of mine got broken last week). Will be swapping out the sticks once the controller arrives.

So I found a Platinum Wavebird going on eBay for a song (about £15), which is well below the average market price. Sweet! Have always wanted one of these, and they're not easy to come by (I believe that they never got released in Europe, being US/JPN only), seeing as they're the only official colour variant of the Wavebird available (outside of the super rare JPN Club Nintendo exclusive models that I have never seen on eBay or IRL in any form. Only problem is... ... this shit don't work! Controller is knackered. Will not power on, no matter how many batteries you throw at it. Oh noes! What do I doez?!? Well... Profit Thankfully an easy fix. Had a spare busted up Wavebird lying around, so all I had to do was harvest a few parts from it (mainly the motherboard) and voila! Platinum Wavebird resurrected from the dead!

That actually looks really neat. If I had a PS5, I'd totally buy one of those. Fits the world of Astro Bot perfectly as well, given that it's a big celebration of Sony's hardware and Playstation accessory history

The art style for the horses looks strikingly similar to Pocket Card Jockey… I wonder PCJ was inspired by this game?

While I do agree with the premise somewhat that Nintendo is overrepresented by gaming historians; moreso than anything else, gaming historians are overly anglocentric. As far as the English speaking internet is concerned, there is America and Thar Be Dragons everywhere else. Take The Great Video Game Crash for example. It’s basically taken as universal worldwide gospel at this point, but it was actually an isolated US-only phenomenon, that didn’t even affect the arcade industry in the US at the time; but if you are to take the internet spiel as fact, you’d think that the entire video game industry just ground to a halt the moment that Atari’s ET and Pac-Man came out. Never mind the booming arcade industry’s golden and silver age, or the booming British and mainland European microcomputer revolution. Likewise, you’d think that Nintendo was the only game in town after the end of the Atari 2600, and the Master System was a tremendous failure, but SEGA actually wiped the floor with the NES here in the UK and throughout most of Europe in the late 80s/early 90s. You almost never hear that acknowledged by the internet history consensus, outside of a basic footnote. And countries outside of the US, Japan or (to a much lesser extent) Europe? They may as well not exist at all. And even Japanese video game history is often glossed over… if you were to only go by western accounts of gaming history, you might not even know that Virtua Fighter exists; despite it being one of the most important and influential games in all of gaming history (indeed, without VF, there would’ve been no PlayStation; never mind it being the first ever example of 3D motion captured human animation in a video game). An absolute travesty of historical documentation. That’s the biggest crime as far as video game historical documentation goes.

Great to see him get off that sinking ship. Wonder if he’s planning on joining Nintendo? It’s interesting how he primarily highlights his time working with Nintendo and then says he can’t say where he’s going… Would be pretty awesome to see Nintendo set up their own internal Milan-based studio!

Interesting, never heard of this one. Has some neat history to it too! Cheers for the neat story behind this one!

Good news, the Democrats would’ve been completely screwed if they stuck with Biden; he’s just too old at this point. That being said? I think it’s probably the wrong time to take a risk with a female presidential candidate. It didn’t exactly go well the last time they went up against Trump with one, and with America leaning more and more right wing? I feel that they’re taking this risk at the wrong time here… hopefully I’m wrong on this one.

@BowserBasher The Carrington Institute Agent par time is utterly insane, it’s only just barely possible using normal strats! (Though speed runners seem to make it look easy somehow )

We'll see. There's still time for things to change, but for a supposedly huge marketing push, it doesn't feel like it so far. Could well be that it's all gonna be concentrated in this last month, but considering that I had to google "Star Wars Outlaws release date" to find out when it's coming out? I'm not impressed thus far

Can't say that it shows so far. Have hardly seen or heard anything about the game myself, as someone who hasn't been following it.

Wrong Capcom/SNK crossover! I still think this one is neat at least. It’s so bizarre, everyone is so off model and out of character that it’s kind of endearing? How… honourable? But yeah, everyone wants Capcom VS SNK instead.

Something neat and something funny. Nintendo did an interview with a couple of the previous NWC winners on the Switch’s News channel thingy; which is neat! The funny part? It’s ok Nintendo. You don’t need to censor the word “Atari”, we’re all grown-ups now; we can handle it