Dcubed

This Is Cool... A bit of a treasure trove for fans of old SEGA related history, someone has uploaded a ton of Sega of America internal documents from circa 1996; detailing marketing strategy, console manufacturing costs, internal emails and more!

A Nintendo branded Star Trek game!? Now there’s some good pub quiz trivia material Of course it’s a bloody LCD game

All the trailers they’ve done are great! Very well produced and well worth watching. They’re all pretty funny and they do some great character reveals so I’d recommend checking out their YouTube channel to see the rest, even if you don’t get round to playing the mod. But yeah, the mod itself is incredible. One of the most impressive and highly playable game mods I’ve ever played (and it runs perfectly on real N64 hardware!). All the characters and stages are just so incredibly well done, it all feels official! And it’s really great that they’ve (mostly) kept everything period appropriate too! I strongly recommend giving it a whirl

They keep throwing in Game Gear titles into these kinds of collections because they’re easy and cheap to re-release. That’s really all there is to it. It’s a shame that Knuckles Chaotix isn’t here. Even though it’s not a great game, it would’ve been great to see it released from 32x prison; as it could really do with some Retro Engine powered improvements to performance and controls. And then they could look at improving things like level design, which that game sorely needs.

The English version of the latest Nintendo Investors Q&A is out in English now... https://www.nintendo.co.jp/ir/pdf/2023/qa2306e.pdf Not a whole lotta revelaitons here, but it's interesting that Nintendo's investors are getting increasingly fed up of Nintendo dragging their feet on announcing Switch 2.

A brand new mainline game should not be getting outsold by a remake, end of. Also FF16 being unavailable on rival platforms is not FF15’s problem. Install base doesn’t scale linearly anyway; there’s like 45+ million PS5s out there now, plenty big to accommodate larger sales than what we’re seeing here (and indeed we’ve seen the likes of GOW Ragnarok pull off much bigger numbers on PS5). No matter how you slice it and how many excuses you make, this is decline and significant decline at that. And with dev costs only continuing to spiral higher? It’s an even more disappointing result. The genre shift did not do FF16 any sales favours.

I’m sorry to bring you down @Julius, but that’s actually a big decline for the mainline series… For reference… Worth noting that it took around 5 years for FF15 to sell another 5 million (and that was at bargain basement prices on multiple platforms), so don’t expect good legs for FF16 either. This is not a good result.

Crusader of Centy is a huge get! Amongst the rarest and most valuable Mega Drive titles in existence; and the first time it has been re-released outside of the Mega Drive Mini 2! Very nice!

I'm really tired of Switch 2 speculation. The system is ridiculously overdue at this point, to the extent that any info we did have regarding the upcoming "Drake" chipset is likely to have been long abandoned in favour of something newer by now. At this rate? Switch is going to end up having the longest lifecycle of any home console in existence, and that includes Xbox 360 (8 years!). It has already outlasted every single Nintendo home console except for the original Famicom (which it will surpass come July 2024), and every handheld except for the original Game Boy (which it won't come close to... I hope!). In terms of CPU/GPU, there's no reason why it shouldn't be able to pump out Xbox Series S level visuals at the minimum. The tech is there, and DLSS is a massive advantage in Nintendo's favour that they have exclusive access to that no other console manufacturer can replicate. That's the boring stuff. That all being said though? I'm more interested in seeing what they're gonna do in terms of controller input. I can't see them just putting out a straightforward graphically upgraded Switch without an interesting new gimmick. That window of opportunity has now sailed and I'd think that they really need a clean break from the current Joy-con design + standard display in order to really garner mass market interest, but I'm not sure what form that's going to take... Personally? I'd bet on them attempting to bring back their past hardware features that the current Switch can't support, such as Stylus touchscreen controls out of the box, the IR pointer and dual screen experiences... but using modern tech to replicate said experiences... I think that this kind of thing might be what Nintendo ends up going for. Bendable screen tech. Rather than have two seperated displays, you have one large display that can be folded to make a DS style dual screen display; or even folded over 180 degrees to give you a front and back display; perfect for local multiplayer VS games that give each player their own private screen! Augment this with bringing back all of the past hardware features that are missing from the current Switch and you've got yourself a compelling device that can offer experiences that the current Switch cannot. The Switch's greatest strength isn't necessarily its portability in of itself... but rather its versatility as a gaming device. Switch 2 needs to focus on expanding its versatility and gameplay possibilities as much as possible.

The additional hilarious Bestiary descriptions alone are worth the price of the DLC.

Supposedly the Switch version runs on the newer engine that powers the Xbox release and the mobile ports… so hopefully it should run better than the PC version on Steam Deck (because man! It can chug!). Game is mad fun though, even at 15FPS when crap gets real

Considering that almost every game now gets an English localisation (with Japanese exclusives more or less relegated to the occasional physical release that doesn’t come out elsewhere), I’m surprised that they’re still trucking along!

Lookit all those games that never got a European release!

OH GOD WHAT TIME IS IT!?!?

Pretty ironic considering that Pikmin 4 appears to be taking after Pikmin 2 more than 1 or 3.

Heads up, we've finally broken the 1TB micro SD card barrier! There is now a 1.5TB Micro SD card available to buy! Today! It finally exists! At last! https://www.mouser.co.uk/ProductDetail/Micron/MTSD1T5ANC8MS-1WT?qs=4ASt3YYao0UT9%2BJTyp%2BOrg%3D%3D ... I'll... err... wait for a price drop.

https://www.nintendolife.com/news/2023/06/metal-gear-solid-master-collection-vol-1-switch-physical-version-requires-downloads You might want to reconsider getting the physical version...

Agreed totally. Feels like the kind of game that Treasure would’ve made if they were still around

Yup. Comes out September 22nd.

Announced exclusively in the Japanese Nintendo Direct... Mameda Bakeru. A brand new game developed and self-published by Good Feel, the developers behind the original Goemon series while at Konami, a game that is totally not a brand new Goemon game! I'm praying for an English localisation for you @RedShell

Dual Joycon microgames are gonna be so sick! I just hope that we get the full voice acting back from Wario Ware Gold. That was amazing!

It's now coming out around the same time as Super Mario Bros Wonder... Poor Sonic just can't catch a break.

Looks like there's some sort of new Chain system where you get party buffs... Wonder what the percentage meter is there for... Either way there's clearly some major changes to the battle system with this remake.

Looks like the GCN/Wii NSO dream is dead. They're gonna be doing GCN/Wii emulated standalone releases instead.