Mobile bosses/antagonists that hunt you down where you’re at are something I think about a lot in general
SA-X
The assassin in Hero Core
L4D tank
Way more intimidating than an enemy that waits in its throne room until you’re fully geared up and confident you can tackle them
Airbrushed Christopher Reeve as Superman Tombstone Xbox 360 is going to be on my mind for a while.
spent last night and this morning thinking again about how if they’d put an 020 in the Sega CD in 1993 (and gotten all of the high profile 3DO and neo geo CD releases as a result) and shipped the VDP1 as a cartridge slot add-on instead of the 32X in 1995 as a pack-in with VF2 and that platform de facto became the Saturn (which could’ve been sold separately as a complete console like the CDX), how much better Sega’s 90s hardware would’ve turned out in the west. they also could’ve kept supporting the standalone megadrive with more releases for a couple years after the Nomad came out and competed with the Pokemon-era gameboy.
I think about this a lot, it’s an appealing counterfactual history.
like I was looking at a pinout of the genesis six button controller last night and trying to figure out how they could’ve cheated to get at least 16 inputs out of an analog stick if they needed to attach the Saturn 3D controller to that bus. it helps that the 3D controller already had a physical switch between analog and digital modes, that could toggle between whether the mode button is mapped to the triggers or whether you get a redundant C and Z mapping on the triggers instead with mode mapped internally to high/low analog degree
the 020 would’ve been a fair bit slower than the SH2 by 1995 but I think adoption would’ve been so much higher that it’d wash out.
not sure why I’m so attached to this
There were high profile 3DO releases!?
Shit, if my dopamine levels were good I wouldn’t crave Persona games and their ilk so much
there actually is an analogue controller for mega drive, and there are even a couple of mega cd and 32x games that support it
That thing looks like satire
all ports – Doom, Star Control 2, Super Turbo, Samurai Shodown, Myst
and the manufacturer of this went on to make the fucking Framemeister, Micomsoft are very strange
idk why but I find it funny that Musha is one of the few games compatible with that thing.
imagining a world where the companies whose game screenshots get plastered with copyright and big-name credits were extended to everyone involved in the assets within the frustum
sure tetsuya nomura designed cloud or whatever but tell me who painted and modeled that air condtioner please
does this level of metadata make submitting credits to MobyGames harder? yes
do us fools who try to submit credits to MobyGames deserve everything we get? also yes
Oh is this why I can’t play those games anymore.
huh.
Thinking about the Virtual Boy in the broader context of Nintendo’s portable gaming history and how everybody knows the Game Boy lasted for over a decade, which I strongly suspect is because of the VB’s failure.
Like, I feel like most of Nintendo’s decisions regarding portable gaming in the late 90s make more sense if we consider the VB not as an isolated blip in Nintendo’s history, but rather as a genuine attempt at making a successor to the original Game Boy — they were making a new home console, so of course they would make a new portable to pair with it (like how all their other portables came out a year or two before a new home console). Gunpei Yokoi had a pet project that could be manufactured at a reasonable price (because of course he would) —unlike Project Atlantis, which needed another 5 year before release — so they rushed it out the door in an attempt to prefigure their own Project Reality. After its immediate failure, they released the GB Pocket in '96 and GBC in '98 as stopgap measures to maintain the GB brand before the GBA was ready. However, the drain in software development manpower left a substantial dip in the GB’s library for the couple years after '95. [citations needed]
Anyhow, I’m just thinking about what history would be like if the VB were delayed a year or two so it could have color graphics (or at least greyscale), GB cross-compatibilty, and other sundry kinks ironed out. Like, the VB would have lived alongside the N64. The VB would have been the machine to introduce America to Pokemon. Gunpei Yokoi would still be alive, and 9/11 wouldn’t have happened because Osama bin Laden would have been busy playing Virtual Boy Wario Land 3: Waluigi World. [citation needed]
Just imagine.
a lot of big tech companies had a really hard time succeeding their successful late 80s platforms with modern platforms in the mid 90s and (sometimes over)learned lessons from them
really microsoft and sony were the only ones not to eat shit during this period and that legacy is visible today, virtually everything else is seen as somehow boutique
The Virtual Boy is a fantastic system with really lovely (but expensive) small-batch 3rd party accessories and mods. Someone made a flashcart with an e-ink screen for selecting and displaying the selected game. Someone made a consolized version of the system. Benj Edwards made a twin stick alternative controller using Sanwa parts.
It only had 22 games (and that’s Worldwide, only 14 North American releases) so the idea of collecting for it wouldn’t have been as crazy as it is for any other system. It has a surprising number of good games considering how small the overall lineup is!
I’ve played it, and I adore it, but I’ve never owned one.
It’s my number 1 ‘I should have bought one of those when they were cheap’ systems.
