Algus

October 13, 2015

35,500

This game is delightful. I haven't played it before. Made it to the Mammoth Boss and almost beat him.

October 13, 2015

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h-ti2_KZr-Q

20 years later there's still something magical about this series

October 7, 2015

Well the Phantom was part of a pump and dump scheme so not surprising they just took off the shelf hardware and glued it together to run a few PC games

October 5, 2015

Toasters ~usually~ need a replacement or repair to the 72-pin connector. It isn't uncommon to find them now with the repair already done. You shouldn't pay more than $80 for a good unit (and at that price with stuff like games, etc.)

NES is popular to collect for so prices can be a bit higher but there are plenty of common carts that are also good that can be had for a few dollars each. This system is very sensitive to dirt on contacts and given its age, you'll definitely want some rubbing alcohol and q-tips on hand. You just dab the q-tip in the solution and run it through the contact to pull most of the dirt off.

Besides the 72-pin toasters are pretty indestructible and they have RCA jacks (mono sound only) so you can get a good image easily. Zappers are pretty unreliable and don't work right on newer TVs anyway so it can be dicey to get one that responds well.

For the 72 pin it is easy to find a replacement on eBay. Many people don't like these replacement pins because they have a very tight grip on the cartridge (I've never had issues). The original pin is very easy to repair. You just toss it in some boiling water for a few minutes to burn off the goo. Sometimes the pins need to be manually realigned if they were subject to a Game Genie (which could bend the pins) but I've never seen one that wasn't a fairly easy fix.

October 4, 2015

Wily Wars.. great game. Need to get a repro cart one day.

October 4, 2015

Yep. The best projects are labors of love that might make cost back but certainly dont pay for time and labor.

October 4, 2015

I need to do something like that. Gotta rearrange my desk and move some of my audio gear underneath. I really want to hook up at least my launch-era Powermac G3 next to my current system.

October 4, 2015

Oh god, Solar Striker is such a good game. A year or so ago there was a Game Boy High Score Club going on and that was one of the games we played. It was dynamite.

Life Force (NES) - An utter classic. I'll actually be surprised if you tell us you haven't played it. It's a classic staple of the genre

Sol-Feace on Sega CD. Here's a ringing endorsement from the Angry Video Game Nerd himself:

"Well I've gotta admit this one reminds me of Life Force on the Nintendo and that's pretty good" (paraphrased)

It has a cartridge port to the Genesis that was renamed Sol-Deace. It's excellent.

The (in)famous Zero Wing, which only got a Euro release is excellent but also quite easy.

October 4, 2015

Just stay away from the TI forum. Those guys are a little...off...

October 4, 2015

Another game to check out is Strafe for the PC. It's being made for people who loved the 90's FPS games on the PC. Not sure when it'll be released but you can download a work in progress for free.

This game looks totally sweet and is exactly the kind of Indie project I was interested in playing. I see they have a Mac demo. That is just delightful. +1 sir

October 3, 2015

More storage space for one, I don't think 8 MiB is quite going to cut it for a "new" system.

Something that uses flash memory or partial ROM partial flash to accept updates, game saves, etc. directly to the card

October 3, 2015

On a serious note, I really liked the HuCards on the TG-16, in fact one of my favorite aspects of the console. Something like that only updated with modern conveniences would be pretty cool. On a larger (non portable) console, I'd appreciate media that was a little bigger than ie what PS Vita and 3DS use because I'm a clumsy oaf and I'm less likely to drop and lose something the size of a credit card (and yes, I've dropped more than one my 3DS games down the floor vents in my house).

October 3, 2015

Alisia Dragoon is a favorite of mine. It was one of the first games recommended to me back when I first started collecting for Genesis and it is a great game. Kind of hard though. At least for me. I suck at platformers, heh.

It isn't exclusive to Genesis but one of my favorite 16-bit platformers is B.O.B. I don't see people talk about it very much but it is a fun game with some cool weapons. Not too hard so good for a perpetual noob like me.

October 3, 2015

So all I need to hack my games is a hole puncher?

Get this man a crowdfunding campaign

October 1, 2015

Excellent! I have not heard of a number of these. Corridor 7 looks fun.

I've played Heretic, Hexen, et al. but probably not since the 90s save for some multiplayer on N64 Hexen a few years ago (N64 version of that game did not hold up well lol). Heretic I mainly remember for trying to use the Doom cheat codes and then the game would kill you, heh.

Wiki says there is a freeware fan remake of Powerslave. That might be worth checking out!

One game I want to get back into is Jurassic Park on SNES. That one I haven't played since Jr. High or whenever it came out but I remember my brother and I played the shit out of it and eventually we got lost in the boat and couldn't get out. No save feature was bullshit but I have emulators with save states now...

October 1, 2015

If he answers to all of my complaints about the original campaign then I absolutely would consider crowdfunding the RVGS

1. Have a clear vision

2. Have a working prototype (with games!)

3. Have a realistic crowdfunding goal (I'm not funding your entire organization and paying a year salary to you)

He still has to sell it to me (why would I buy this over Kevtris's console?) but I am certainly interested in the concept of a new cartridge-based console.

September 30, 2015

We probably won't really know what went on behind closed doors. My gut tells me Carlsen was the issue from the beginning as he constantly seemed to have a different opinion than Mike and Steve and would get frustrated when they talked about things he wasn't doing. His blog post or whatever was very odd when he was saying things like, "well I don't tell Mike everything I'm doing!" My guess is he had an idea of what he wanted to build and it was much different from the machine Mike wanted to build. I wonder what came first: cancelling the indiegogo or John leaving the team. I'm also pretty curious as to whether all the corporate crap like "well we need salaries, and offices, and patents!" all came from Carlsen. It'll be very interesting if RVGS is able to secure another hardware guy and things actually develop from that.

I don't know John Carlsen and I'm not particularly familiar with his work but overall I was really unimpressed with how he handled himself in this matter.

September 30, 2015

I've just played a quick game of Blake Stone: Aliens of Gold (thanks GoG!) and it's made me realize how much I like these old maze shooters. The genre was much more interesting to me when it was about crawling through dank hallways, wondering when your next batch of supplies was going to come up and hoping you didn't run into any of the nastier enemies.

Wolfenstein

Blake Stone

Doom

Rise of the Triad

These were some great games. They haven't really managed to pull this off since the late 90s I don't think. I remember when Prey came out, it had a sort of old time feel to it (mainly with the weapons) but it was still a straightforward game. Doom 3 and Quake 4 might have been the last two that tried to capture this style of game play but I miss the episodes thing. I guess that kind of died with Apogee/3D Realms as a relevant game maker?

Has there be an indie outfit that has tried a throwback FPS? Something where you've got to pop that map open and explore every inch of a level?

September 30, 2015

The problem with covering your ears and screaming is that you miss what was actually going on. The wrote us (and Neogaf, and others) off as "haters." some of that was certainly going on but for the most part people were sharing their ideas on what could improve the project or make it better. It led to some pretty interesting discussions about the type of tech we might like to have for playing older games as well.

September 29, 2015

Alright. Ball's in their court now. They said everything we wanted them to say with their closing announcement. I'll vow here and now to look at it with fresh eyes if they come back in 6-12 months with a working proto running one of their games. I'm still not keen on funding their entire corporation through crowdfunding but if they have a working product, I might be somewhat moved.

September 29, 2015

Well it is like I was theorizing in a previous post. You make your Colecovision game or whatever and put it out on CV but then you call up Mike and say, "hey can I put my CV game on RVGS as well?" then the RVGS team puts it on an RVGS cartridge and sells it on their store.

After they instruct you to deliver them a bug free version of your CV game.

September 29, 2015

One problem, though, that it likely means less and less new homebrew games, maybe occasional quality stuff by hardcore enthusiasts, but certainly small scale. Projects like Gunlord or Pier Solar just won't be created, unfortunately they're not possible without money involved.

Well, you're on AA lol most of us are used to small scale. Space Rocks is a brilliant game but its an Atari 2600 game, it won't be getting any mainstream exposure soonish.

Pier Solar is certainly remarkable and good on Watermelon for being able to monetize it the way they have. They still had to kickstart their efforts to get it on a "modern" system even after the blinding success of the Genesis runs they did though. Doing runs of games on old systems just isn't really much of a money-making endeavor. Unless you're NG:DEV and are marketing to crazy ass Neo Geo fans that don't mind dropping $400 on a game, heh.

September 29, 2015

I agree with you on the Perfect Shot. The light gun games they were experimenting with on Wii was one of the highlights of that console for me and probably 1/2 my Wii collection is "light gun" games. The Perfect Shot was a great shell and I've got three or four of them lying around. The one issue I found - the connector was really tight and it was easy to pull out when I took the Wiimote out. I ended up buying a pair of Wiimotes and just leaving them in the Perfect Shots since I broke a couple shells.

September 29, 2015

Forgetting the critical bit here tho... that you will not find a developer for older consoles who would rather not put the game out on the target console instead of this bastardisation with a smaller target audience than the already small target audience of the original system.

I feel like this is one of the better ideas in the RVGS "project" So I'm Mike and I have the moldings for the Jaguar so I can easily produce new console cases and cartridges. Now I put an FPGA like what kevtris is designing in my Jaguar cases. At this point I can take any homebrew out there and put it in my cartridges to run on my system. This could be a valuable tool for homebrewers on more obscure systems (say TG-16) to get their games to more people.

So if I'm a developer, I go to Mike and say, "hey, here's my game. Can we get it on your system too" then I can push my game out not just to the hobbyists on my preferred platform but to the retrogaming community at large. Pretty neat!

The downfall, of course, is that if you're a retrogamer you're probably emulating the systems you don't have and not really caring about paying a premium to collect physical copies of homebrews for platforms you don't own (I'm not going to go out and buy an Intellivision homebrew...no matter how good the game and packaging are). If I have an RVGS on the other hand, maybe I buy this game if its good since I dont need to buy new hardware to play it.

When Mike talks about this aspect of RVGS, he seems to imagine his console as being the central node for all things retro gaming. It could work but it doesn't change the fact that we're still talking about a niche market. The funny thing is, when kevtris is done this is basically what we will end up with, sans Jaguar cartridges, so we'll be able to use the Kevtris VGS to play all our homebrews off SD card, which makes a lot more sense than buying expensive cartridges.