Dcubed

Wow… Ubisoft really don’t have anything to offer except endless reskins of Assassin’s Creed, huh? Well, at least Sparks of Hope looks decent… I’m sure it won’t be long until Nintendo headhunts Ubisoft Milan though

TiT is still tits isn’t it @Hero-of-Time? It’s a rather lovely collection, despite some minor niggles. Brilliant to finally have a (mostly) uncompromised home version of both TMNT arcade games! Also Radical Rescue is legit! It’s a proper metroidvania that I never even knew existed before! But yeah, Turtles in Time is still brill. I’m not the biggest beat ‘em up aficionado in the world, but I’ve always got time to give to that game

It’s not like predicting a September Direct is anything praiseworthy to begin with. I mean, we’ve literally had a September Direct every single year since 2016 (that’s 5 years and counting) without fail. Real Herlock Shlomes this guy is

https://www.gamesindustry.biz/playstation-xboxs-call-of-duty-offer-was-inadequate-on-many-levels Jim Ryan spills the beans on the Microsoft-Activision-Sony deal regarding COD! Sony airing dirty laundry in public? You love to see it!

Yeah, agreed. DYKG have really come into their own over the last year or so. They do still do a fair bit of lazy regurgitation content, but they’ve been doing a lot more independent investigative journalism as of late; I’ve been very impressed! Plus they host Liam Robertson’s Game History Secrets series too; which is always a must watch when it hits!

I'd love a return to form for the series, but I can't see it happening any time soon; what with Team Ninja working on Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty and all.

OH SHIT! Nintendo have been doing these interviews with various voice actors from the Fire Emblem series for some time now... that's not the important part. The important part is that this particular interview contains something very interesting... ENGLISH LANGUAGE FOOTAGE OF THE ORIGINAL SNES FE: GENOLOGY OF THE HOLY WAR!!!!!!!!!!!! Time stamped for your convinence Roll on the September Nintendo Direct!!!

There's some legit new details about Project X in there that have not been made public before... very interesting! And... A SECOND cancelled Retro Studios Zelda title!? Oh my! I'm very interested in hearing about Heroes of Hyrule! You have to remember that the studio went through a huge period of turmoil around this time; as Mark Pacini attempted a coup as he exited the company and founded Armature Studios. DKCR was the project that got the studio back on track, and it was a massive success; both critically and commercially. For all the trials the studio has gone through, their track record of released titles is second to none in terms of quality (though certainly not quantity). Indeed... Explains a lot about where EAD/EPD got their story ideas from

My Astro City V arrived today... now the collection is complete... Can you tell that I like arcade games? Speaking of which... Taito just announced a new batch of games coming to the Egret 2 Mini as an expansion SD Card set! One day I'll get a real, full-sized arcade cab... one day...

Reduces rendering load and RAM requirements. A smaller skybox is easier to render than a big one on such vintage hardware

I love stuff like this! As @Cube pointed out, Boundary Break is a great channel that focuses on out-of-bounds developer tricks like this; highly recommend a sub if you haven't already! This is one of my favourite little tricks that they pointed out, from Super Mario Galaxy... Why bother coding an all new actor when you can just shove an old one behind a door? This is a little different, but there's a Youtube channel that's run by Jasper, the guy who made noclip.website (A brilliant website that allows you to scroll around various 3D maps from a huge variety of Nintendo games in real-time through any web browser! Strongly recommend checking it out!). He's done some fantastic breakdowns of how various rendering techniques and tricks from a bunch of different Nintendo games work! Check out this vid below for a good example... His channel (and website!) are all brill! Well well worth checking out

Very comfortable. I thought the same thing at first, but the buttons and d-pad are surprisingly solid when you actually use them. The device is surprisingly ergonomic, despite the rather large weight. The fact that it's so large, and has those contour grips, helps a lot with the ergonomics of the device.

That is absolutely outrageous. That's one of the franchise's key signature features and was a big reason why people bought the game to begin with. To have the promise waved in your face like a dangling carrot, only to have it snatched away from you is outright insulting. Very very poor form, I'd be outraged if I were a Halo fan. Hopefully it acts as a valuable lesson. Never buy a game for the promise of what it'll eventually be, buy it only for what it is right now.

Yes… YES!!! Beautiful Chaos!! Thanks for the games guys! ‘Twas mad fun

A Nintendo Direct? In September!?!?

We got a newly updated WW sales list for all 1st party Switch titles that have sold more than 1 million… Notable highlights include Bayonetta 2 (which has now hit the 1 million mark!) and Link’s Awakening, which is now the 2nd best selling 2D Zelda title of all time (behind only the original NES LOZ).

The bigger thing however, is the long-awaited arrival of my MiSTer Multisystem! That's this thing This is a MiSTer in a console form factor. If you don't know what a MiSTer is, it's basically a magic FPGA system that can physically transform itself at the transistor level into various target hardware; with no software emulation (some might call it "hardware emulation" rather than the traditional "software emulation" approach). In short, it offers 100% hardware accuracy with zero input latency, but with the bells & whistles you'd want from an emulation solution; the holy grail. This is essentially what the Super NT and Mega SG are, only here, it is a community led project that is designed to simulate many different hardware platforms, instead of the single console targets that the Super NT & Mega SG represent. Normally, a MiSTer requires you to bolt all sorts of different hardware bits & bobs together to a DE10 nano FPGA, and generally looks something like this... Beautifully ugly The MiSTer Multisystem then is an all-in-one unit that contains all of the various bits of hardware you need onto a single PCB, that then goes inside a console form-factor case that's around the size of a SNES/N64. Much nicer! It also includes the analog IO board, meaning that it's capable of dual-video output over both HDMI and RGB Scart (the latter being something that is normally very hard to get working with a MiSTer system, as most analog IO boards prioritise other analog forms of output such as VGA or Composite). I also added a real-time-clock to it (for games that use RTC, such as the GBA Pokemon games) as well as a Gameboy Link Cable port via SNAC (don't worry if you don't know what a SNAC is) and four 8bit-do bluetooth wireless controller adapters (bet you'll never guess what these do!). Now, I've only just had the thing up and running for a day, so I'm still working out all the kinks, but this thing is pretty freaking amazing! Arcade games? NES games? SNES? GBA? PS1? Mega CD? TG16? Everything I've thrown at it is running flawlessly so far! Me and @Glen-i just did a full game runthrough of Kirby Nightmare in Dreamland in 2 player splitscreen (yes, this thing is capable of playing GBA games in multiplayer, either via splitscreen or having two seperate video outputs on two seperate TVs!) and we had a blast! And just for funzies, I tried hooking up my old Game Boy Color to the link cable port to try it out with Super Mario Bros Deluxe and yep! Sure enough, the link cable functionality does indeed work! (GB/GBC only right now, GBA games don't work with the physical link cable port yet). I'm well chuffed with this thing! But it isn't an immediate plug n' play experience. It takes a lot of tinkering to get everything up and running fully, and I'm not fully there with everything yet. But yeah, this thing is tits!

So... some impressions after getting my hands on some of the games for the Egret 2 Mini. Overall? It's a very nice piece of kit. The screen is a lot nicer than the Astro City Mini, and the extra screen real-estate (at a proper 4:3 no less) really makes a big difference when it comes to playing on the device itself. The controls are lovely, very clicky & responsive; and the trackball/paddle controller is brill! It has a very nice mechanical feel to it that just feels great! I'd love to be able to use this thing on other devices at some point... The TV experience is less ideal though. This thing has very limited controller compatibilty and the only thing that works on it outside of the official Egret 2 Mini controllers/arcade stick is, oddly enough, the 6 button Japanese Mega Drive Mini controller (no, not the western version; or the Retrobit one, it HAS to be the Japanese 6 button MD Mini controller; nothing else will do!). Luckily, I just so happen to have a couple of them and thankfully they work very well; with the Mode button acting as the Insert Coin button. Unfortunately, there's no menu button of any kind, so you have to physically get up and press the menu button on the device itself to go back to the menu and switch games. Not ideal. Also, you know, it's wired only... (Though the Brook Wingman SD adapter, which I happen to have, was apparantly updated to work with the Egret 2 Mini, I couldn't for the life of me get it working with any controller). The emulation quality seems solid, but it does suffer from annoying screen scrolling shimmer with some games, much like the Astro City Mini did; also, the bilinear filter setting is backwards for some bizzare reason, but thankfully it can be turned off for razer sharp pixels. The menu is kinda spartan and workman like, not much personality; though the menu music is nice enough. And as for the game selection itself? It's a real grab-bag from Taito's history that really runs the gamut of quality. You have some absolute A-grade classics, like the original arcade Bubble Bobble & all of its various sequels, as well as the absolutely stellar Elevator Action Returns, but then you have some absolute bottom of the barrel stinkers like Kaiser Knuckle; and also some real oddball games that defy convention like Puchi Carrot and Syvallion. It's a real eclectic mix of titles, but that's kind of what I like about it. You've got all sorts of weird & goofy games here, even though a good chunk of them aren't very good. While I've not played everything on it yet, it's a nice little system and I'm happy with the purchase

I dragged @Glen-i down to Freeplay City to play Theatrhythm All Star Carnival... ... you'll be seeing him back in this thread very soon now

That was mad fun! Who would've thought that we could turn Smash into a Prisoner's Dillema? @Ike Now you need to set up Miis for next time!

Nice to see that it's on brand

If EA Play becomes part of Amazon Prime, and if EA Play is part of Xbox Gamepass... Fuck?

So, err... The non-open world stages in this game are all just literal reskins of past levels taken from the other "Boost" Sonic games. So much for that being a selling point!

I think the most offensive thing is that everyone gets a price increase... except for the US. There's no way to spin that in a way to look good.

Well… err… this is a move alright. There’s a million jokes I could make, but I’ll refrain for now. Very interesting that Xbox Series X is now cheaper than PS5. I have a feeling that Microsoft won’t be joining Sony in this price hike, so they’re gonna have a nice advantage going into this Xmas season. Will be interesting to see what happens…