Dcubed

M2 ran out of versions of Fantasy Zone to port, so they've had to resort to making a brand new port of Fantasy Zone to the MD. At this point, I think they need an intervention...

The announcement stream is still going on right now...

So… they’re basically turning it into The Last Of Us? As expected… A shame. Hopefully the gameplay is still fun though… and the inevitable content cuts aren’t too severe…

So… Street Fighter 6 is now a Yakuza game, Final Fantasy 16 is now a Devil May Cry game and Resident Evil 4 is The Last of Us? Am I living in bizzaro world?

So… this game is now Devil May Cry 6 with the serial numbers filed off? I’m ok with this

Wait what? This State of Play isn’t complete shite? Of all the ones I choose to not watch…

Fun games as always Here’s a few highlights from my night…

Wow! It finally happened! I remember them talking about getting the archive online years ago!! This is amazing! I actually found my old page! Check out my crappy flipnotes here!

Oh snap! Masuda has just stepped down as head of Game Freak! https://www.resetera.com/threads/junichi-masuda-steps-down-as-game-freak-managing-director-now-creative-fellow-at-tpc.589737/ So he has now taken on the same role as Miyamoto at Nintendo. Essentially a retirement role where he acts as a brand ambassador and general adviser. This shouldn’t be a massive surprise, as Masuda has been grooming the younger staff (like Ohmori) at Game Freak to take over from him for many years now. But it’s still certainly the end of an era for Game Freak.

Yup, they definitely hired this man.

Oh PLEASE bring Megas back Game Freak!! I BEG you!! I miss Beedrill and Kangaskhan actually being viable… Probably best give Mega Rayquasa a miss though…

If you want to stick with the official disc solution, might I recommend trying to get a Japanese GBP disc instead of the PAL one? Not only is it much cheaper, but it also supports 480p output, making it the superior product anyway; unlike the PAL version which is stuck with 576i/480i only. There's a JPN disc on ebay right now going for about £55. You can use any region GBP hardware with any region disc BTW, though obviously you can't run the JPN disc on a PAL gamecube without some sort of region free device, such as the Freeloader or Action Replay. Alternatively, you could always bypass the official disc altogether and just use the homebrew Game Boy Interface app; which offers superior image quality compared to the official disc anyway.

If it’s anything like the other Mario sports games, you won’t have to play every month to unlock all the new stuff; you’ll just be given permanent access to the characters & gear a month after it first appears. Does make buying a physical copy on day 1 a bit pointless though…

Sounds like a total mess… Let’s hope they fix things up and offer NTSC games when the service launches worldwide…

Very interesting interview that elucidates a lot of the design choices made with this game, like the COVID pandemic leading the team to take a more Online First approach to the game’s design. Also explains why it came out so late in the Switch’s lifecycle, as the game got rebooted and restarted development midway through! Some things still puzzle me though… the Sportsmates being born out of a desire to make a clean break away from the previous Wii Sports titles makes sense, but then why elect to bring back Golf, Tennis, Swordfighting and Bowling when you could’ve chosen different sports that are all new? Why not Rugby or Cricket for example?

As someone who actually owns a Virtual Boy? I can unequivocally confirm that no. It is not.

Funny you should mention the Atari Jaguar… because its crappy console design mould actually got sold and reused by a dental camera device company when Atari went bankrupt! A fitting end for a diseased company

Wow! A 1st party Nintendo release! Granted, it’s just Pinball, but it’s still hope for the likes of Startropics 2 that are still missing from NSO Japan is getting the original SNES Umihara Kawase instead of Congo’s Caper BTW. An excellent game that’s well worth checking out, and with no language barrier to speak of to boot!

Just hit me that we're just 20 days away from Microsoft's Not-E3 event... and still no sign of Nintendo coming out swinging with their own equivilent Not-E3 Direct... I get the feeling that Nintendo will be skipping this year along with Sony... Otherwise, they would've announced something by now.

Totally agree with you about Trek To Yomi @Cube. After about 5 mins of play, I instantly knew that I had already seen everything the game had to offer. There's zero depth to the game's combat, every single enemy fights in exactly the same fashion, and considering that it is entierly based around Prince of Persia (original) style combat? That's pretty devestating. I sleptwalked through about 30 mins to an hour of incredibly samey gameplay and promptly deleted it from my Xbox. Real shame and all. I totally dig the B&W 1930's Japanese cinema aesthetic, but the gameplay is about as shallow as a paddling pool; typical western video game design sadly.

The NES was designed to look like a VCR style machine instead of a contemporary 70s/early 80s game console (in order to avoid being associated with the past consoles that caused the US video game crash)... which it absolutely succeeded at doing. Perfectly contemporary for the time; the system DID launch in 1977 after all! Wood panelling was the in-thing in the 1970s. The Mega Drive was a DJ Turntable, complete with headphone jack and volume slider. It looked THE TITS in the late 1980s when it originally launched. These are all terrible examples! They're all excellent designs that all succeed at what they set out to do.

I think AVGN said it best when the Sega Mega Drive CD 32x combo looks like a life support machine... I think what's even more insane is just how the 32x actually works... The Mega Drive was never actually built to natively support expansion hardware like the SNES (or even the NES) was... indeed, the "expansion port" that the Mega CD uses is actually nothing but a second cartridge slot (and the Mega CD is just seen by the MD as a giant bank-switched cartridge). So how the hell do they manage to get the MD and 32x hardware to talk to each other? The answer is... they don't. At all. Instead, the 32x includes a Genlocker chip. What this does is that it superimposes the 32x video on top of the MD video, yes, just like a piece of video editing software. You can technically even unplug the 32x's video sync cable and you can continue to play the game with the 32x video layer removed! And the 32x hardware itself? It's literally just a couple of SH2 CPUs, that's it. No support for tile mapped graphics or background scrolling whatsoever, no in-built GPU/VDP and everything has to be written in software; which is why the 32x is mostly incapable of smooth 60FPS background scrolling without the MD being tagged to handle that part of the visuals. It's an incredibly inefficient and poorly designed piece of shit!

Uh oh... I'm hearing rumblings that the PS1 games are a mix of PAL and NTSC titles, seemingly with the versions chosen at random... God I really hope that we don't get lumbered with PAL versions again... That's a complete dealbreaker if I can't have the NTSC versions; even on my US account...

Oddly enough, I actually don't mind the OG Xbox design all that much in person. It actually manages to look better in person than in the official renders; especially the Crystal variant. You could absolutely kill a small child with its sheer bulk & weight, but it's not that bad to look at and use; certainly a damn sight better than the PS2! The disc tray is the cheapest and nastiest thing though; second only to the OG PS2 for how ridiculously flimsy the drive feels to use and for how bloody loud it is... Good thing you can install the games onto the HDD via homebrew though! Speaking of boxy though... How about the US SNES? A master class in how to take something beautiful and make it ugly instead

I know I'm gonna get flack for this, but I don't care. I absolutely HATE the design of the original fat model PS2... Fucking YUCK! There's an interesting story behind the system's design though that you might not know though... As it turns out, the PS2's physical shell was not actually designed by Sony... but by Atari! Yes! The PS2's iconic design was actually the shell from a cancelled Atari console called the Atari Falcon, originally due to release in 1993... This piece of hardware was ultimately shelved in favour of the Atari Jaguar, but somewhere along the way, Atari sold the rights to the console's chassis to Sony; and Sony used it almost unchanged for the original model PS2! The Atari Falcon is even referenced directly in the PS2's original patents! The resemblence is obvious and intentional So there you have it. A console so unfathomly ugly that not even Atari wanted it! I own a lot of gaming hardware and tat, but the original fat model PS2 is the only console I can think of where I actively feel dirty touching the thing! (Thankfully the PS2 slim is a much nicer looking machine; though it's still pretty unpleasant to use; especially on a HDTV). Of course, if we want to get into special edition consoles... oh boy! I can think of some fucking ghastly examples... especially from the Xbox camp...