Dcubed

Well Mario Golf has always had more single player depth than Mario Tennis. By its very nature, there's just more you can do with Golf from a gameplay standpoint than Tennis... Though Tennis has always been more popular amongst us when it comes to multiplayer, due to the much faster pace (golf, while always fun, does take a while to get through...)

Man the Gamecube was such a great party game console! (so was the Wii and the N64 for that matter ) We need MORE games like these, not less!

That's not the same thing and you know it. I'm referring to games like Infamous Second Son (which launched with a big chunk of the game not actually being on the disc, but rather it was released as a day 1 patch) and Resident Evil 6 (which had a ton of content on the disc that was hidden behind an arbitrary pay wall to unlock the content you already have on the disc you own). When those online servers go offline, that content is gone for good (unless you can otherwise hack the game/console - but that would be beyond the means of many and shouldn't have to be done to begin with). That's not right and there is no way on this planet that you can spin that otherwise! I still play locally on a regular basis and so do many others. Just because you don't, doesn't mean that nobody else does... Not to mention that it's not just about us, but it's also about the kids of the future. 10 years from now, they're still gonna be able to enjoy the likes of Super Mario 3D World or Smash Bros Melee just as much as we did when we first played them; Titanfall... not so much... People growing up now deserve to be able to enjoy the games that we play just as much as we do. It's not right to leave them with nothing but dead husks of games that used to be, or to leave the "flavour of the month" pap of the day (at that point in time in the future) being their only option when they grow up... Oh and as for your PS2 quib... tell that to the Burnout games... A great game now is still a great game decades from now

This is a tough one for me to answer... I'm torn between generation 4 and 5 really... In terms of how they compared to each other during their respective times... Gen 4 wins easily; what with the release schedules on the Saturn and N64 being so poor in comparison to the SNES and the Megadrive... In hindsight though, just looking at the libraries in their totality and without the issues of release delays and import only games (given that importing games for all consoles from both sets of generations is infinitely easier and more viable than back then) that's a much tougher question to answer now... The Saturn in particular really benefits from this... What with the fact that a large chunk of its best games were more or less completely inaccessible at the time... (and really, still are if you're not willing to pay the absurd prices on eBay - but that's another matter entirely); as does the PS1 - especially when around half of Square and Enix's games weren't even released in the UK back then to begin with... (The same also applies to the SNES though in regards to Square's games though...) Really, I'd say it's a tie between the two. A cop out answer perhaps, but I think that any differences between the two are a wash really. They're both very comparable on just about all fronts... They both had fantastic RPGs, racing games, action games, shooters etc. Name a game from each gen and you could probably find an equivilent match in each... The consoles themselves also serve very similar niches (although split up differently) SNES is covered by N64 (action, sports, shooters etc) and PS1 (RPGs, 2D Platformers, fighters) Megadrive is covered by the Saturn (SEGA games, arcade ports and arcade style action games, 2D shmups, Camelot's Shining Force RPGs) and N64 (sports games) Neogeo is covered by the Saturn (literally with arcade ports - quite often FROM Neogeo even! - and fighting games) TG16 is covered by the Saturn (2D shmups galore, weird quirky imports)

Agreed with all of the above. Online play is nowhere near as good as local play and never will be. It's so sad to see it get shoved to the confines of history, while online play (which won't last forever) takes its place

WOAH! Over My Dead Body 2 is actually getting a western release!? Wow! Didn't see that one coming! Always wanted to play the original, such an interesting concept Vita's lineup is looking pretty nice this year actually... Soul Sacrifice Delta, Oreshika: Tainted Bloodlines (Crap name BTW - should've just stuck with "Over My Dead Body") and Tales of Hearts R are pretty solid exclusives (TOH is a full blown remake, so it counts) and then there's a good amount of upcoming indie games and ports of games like the GOW and Sly Collections too... Not bad

Cheat Codes: Nowadays, we call those "On Disc DLC" or "Free 2 Play time saves"... Games that were complete and worked out of the box: Well, Nintendo still offers that, but they're the only ones still sounding the beat of that drum... Playground secrets sharing: Something that the advent of the internet has sort of ruined (what with how anyone can just jump straight onto Gamefaqs and be bombarded with guides for almost every game in existence) is how some games were designed around sharing secrets and discoveries amongst your friends. Zelda 1 is probably the best example of this... I guess Miiverse is an attempt to recapture some of that, but it'll never be the same...

No... ... It's the latter one that Grazza mentions. The sprite based one. That's the version getting released here on May 1st

OH MY GOD CAVE STORY 3DS EUROPE VERSION LIVES!!! :o It's coming out on May 1st for €7.25 (no £ price yet) HOW BLOODY LATE IS THIS!? Maybe there's still hope for an EU release of The 90's Arcade Racer and Ikachan 3DS after all!

So Japan is getting Castlevania Dracula X this week... It's only a matter of time now My CV Collection is nearing completion (After DCX gets released, then Bloodlines on the Megadrive will remain as the only console 2D Castlevania to not have gotten a re-release yet...)

They probably did end up kicking themselves a bit, but considering that Skylanders still ended up selling best on Wii by a significant margin; maybe not as much as some might think... I would imagine that they were more interested in the NFC concept than the actual Skylanders product itself though... (Hence why they put an NFC chip inside the Gamepad) Not to mention that Nintendo would have a very different philosophical slant in comparison to Activision and Toys for Bob. Look at how they approached KIU's AR Cards and Pokemon Rumble U's figurines (The way that they are optional and are not required to unlock ingame characters/idols). The way that they are required to unlock characters is one of the main factors as to why the Skylanders games rake in so much cash and I don't think that Nintendo would want to see themselves so closely associated with an exploitative game like that... If Skylanders was originally designed as a Wii exclusive, with Nintendo funding the project and dictating terms, it would've been a very different game, even when ignoring the possibility of Nintendo injecting their own IP into the project...

WHAT!? Unbelievable! What were they thinking!? It is a bloody turn based game! How can this be the only Mario Golf game out there without a hot seat mode!? Ridiculous!

Sayonara Umihara Kawase has a price and date! April 24, €24.99 (no UK price yet, but it'll probably be £21.99 going by the standard eShop €-£ conversion) There are two EU trailers below... TBH I don't think that they're very well made though. They don't really show the really crazy moves you can do in the game and the trailer pacing isn't very good... Official site is up now as well http://agatsuma-games.com/umiharakawase/index.html Don't miss out on this one folks! (For those wondering, yes this was a retail game in Japan - but it's digital only in the west) Oh and yes, the Engrish in these trailers and on the site is hilarious (the game itself was localised by Natsume and was thankfully done well, so no issues there). Bless Agatsuma for trying here though

Boo! A damn shame that I don't suppose anyone knows if it's still gonna have a multiplayer mode where you take turns using the one 3DS? Every previous MG game has had something like that (using the one handheld/console controller), so I'd be shocked if it wasn't here...

Zero Mission is an entirely original game that re-tells the story of Metroid on NES and re-uses the same general setting & characters; but the entire game is completely different. Much like the difference between Castlevania and Super Castlevania 4; it uses the same general story and environments, but the level designs and general gameplay are completely original. It's not really a "remake" in the traditional sense, but a standalone game that re-tells the tale of Metroid 1.

God! All of the good games on Saturn are just sooooo expensive and hard to find I want Burning Rangers something fierce, but good lord! I need my Saturn Virtual Console on Wii U badly... It's probably THE singular console in existence that needs a Virtual Console revival the most...

Still waiting for part 3... As for hidden gems... Cosmic Smash is a firm favourite of mine also check out Bangai-O (It's a port of an N64 original, but that was Japanese only and also quite different to the Dreamcast version, with some substantial gameplay changes made when it was ported to the DC - it later got two sequels, one on the DS and one on the Xbox 360) Dynamite Cop is also an excellent 3D beat em' up. If you like ridiculous nonsense, a ham fisted story, great old school bro fisted gameplay and a good laugh, you'll love this game! And who could forget the insanity of Samba de Amigo!?

You guys haven't experienced MZM until you've done the 9% Hard Mode run... ... MOTHER OF GOD IS IT HARD!!! I don't think I could bring myself to do that ever again It actually makes the Metroid Fusion 1% run look tame by comparison!

Well if their N64 re-releases on GCN and Wii are anything to go by, we'll almost certainly get HD rendering for all non SNES/GBA 3D games that get VC releases. The big question for me though is, will we also get an option to play at the original resolution and quality as on the original consoles too... Metroid Prime Hunters is another one that gets just an unbelievable boost when rendered in high res! Before... and after... Before... ... And after! It's just amazing! Come to think of it... It would fit nicely in a nerdy edition of RBION actually :p

Yeah it makes a tremendous difference, arguably even more of a difference than what you would see with just about any other 3D game console! I mean, something like this... ... is just utterly staggering! I can hardly believe it's the same game! That being said... Rendering DS games in HD really does dramatically alter the look of the games away from their original intended looks in many cases (the Idolmaster shot above is actually a pretty good example of this). If they do offer HD rendering, I hope they also implement an option to render the games in their original resolution and without texture filtering... (Same goes for other future consoles that get added to the VC - would be nice to be able to re-experience playing N64 games in super bluro vision, in addition to playing them in HD )

That's what Nintendo HAVE been doing recently. It's their standard MO; and distant announcements of games that are a long way off are the exception (like what happened back in January last year...) They were experimenting with this back in the Wii/DS era, but they took it to a crazy extreme (RIP Excitebots, with your 4 odd week gap between unveiling and release ). Now they seem to have settled on a 2-6 month unveil-release timeframe on average; ignoring any potential delays of course (like what happened to Mario Golf World Tour and DKCTF - which were both originally due to follow the same pattern until their respective delays).

TBH Autumn is earlier than I was expecting... I get the feeling that nobody will care once the game gets released and is revealed to be a steaming pile of turd though

Component Cables work perfectly fine on a PAL GCN (I have that cable myself) and 480p works perfectly fine too (obviously when using a Freeloader to play imports on it ) As for those PS2 RGB SCARTS, they all have RCA ports on them - even the official ones (which I have - speaking of which; they work fine on US PS2s as well ), so that's not really indicative of whether or not a GCN SCART cable supports RGB or not. Really the only advice I can give is to take the plunge and find out... 3rd party cables are generally pretty cheap... but if they claim to also do RGB with a SNES or N64, then you know that the description is wrong. Official GCN RGB SCART cables do not work with a SNES or an N64 unless you force them to only output Composite (either through a SCART block adapter or through using a non-RGB SCART socket on your TV).

I'm sure that I've seen some that are proper RGB, but the majority are indeed Composite IIRC...

It was a lot easier to release 4 games a year when you were just making N64 and GBC games though... How many games do the Rare of today produce per year, despite being larger now? (yeah, exactly...) You shouldn't be judging based on quantity, because the production requirements of today are so much greater now. Rather, you should be looking at quality and Retro are easily a match for the Rareware of old in that regard (even if their style of games is very different - and no, they are no replacement for them in that respect... Nobody is... ) Oh and I wouldn't really say that they do nothing but the one franchise at a time. Don't forget that they also co-developed Mario Kart 7 while making DKCTF... (and they've only made two of those games anyway).