Blue Swirl wrote:

As far as I can tell, those are normal NGPCs in the video. I noticed the screens, too. A mod?

Possibly. I remember thinking it was a really nice handheld but the lack of a backlit screen put me off.  So collectable with the little clam shell cases for the games - used to turn them over in my hands in the shop lovingly. 

davyK wrote:

Possibly. I remember thinking it was a really nice handheld but the lack of a backlit screen put me off.  So collectable with the little clam shell cases for the games - used to turn them over in my hands in the shop lovingly. 

Yeah, the screen was an issue. I loved mine, and persuaded a few of my mates it was going to beat the GameBoy Color and they bought one. I wasn't super popular after that.

Talking about the cases, they are nice. One of the few systems were the non-Japanese games are worth more, because in their native land they had cardboard boxes. I've been attempting to collect them all for a while, as there's only 40 ish. I recently picked up Shanghai Mini in Taipei.

I think one or two (or three) Phantasy Star games are on the last gen Megadrive collection. I've seen that as low as £7.49 in digital sales (actually £12 might be the cheapest it's been on Switch). They have a fast forward option and some display settings to tinker with.

This month's Retro Gamer has a decent article on the making of Earthworm Jim. The extra MD stage was bodged together in about 48hrs apparently.

It can be a tough genre to revisit. I tried to give Sword of Vermillion another bash a few years ago and it was astonishing how unkind time had been to it (especially the side-on boss fights). Loved it at the time though.

I played Procession to the Calvary recently and there was a definite how the fuck am I supposed to know that you have to revisit that area? moment, but of course that was sort of the point - you weren't supposed to know at all; in those games you often had to narrow everything down after bumbling around all available areas for a bit. So in that respect Calvary was a perfect homage really.

I wonder how much I'd love Monkey Island if I played it for the first time today, for example. On the flipside games like that can be ruined by poorly implemented hint prompts, so it's a tough one to drag into modern times. Having said that it's one of the most popular genres on the digital stores, bizarrely (at least in terms of how often a new one appears) - so many point & clicks you've never heard of. Surely some of them must be good.

Saturn games that came on cart and CD. And when I say "cart and CD", emphasis on the and; you needed both or the game wouldn't run.



Seems like devs thought it was a bad idea, because only two games used the solution.

https://segaretro.org/Twin_Advanced_ROM_System

Yeah. It was a pre-RAM pack solution to the slowness of CDs. The frequently loaded data would be on the cart, and the bigger/less often needed stuff on the CD. I bet that was a ball ache to program.

If you had KoF 95, you had the only game in the UK that used the Twin ROM system.

My fully functional Evercade replacement has turned up, and nicely they upgraded me from a standard to a deluxe edition, so I've got three rather than one cart. Coincidentally, that means I've also been playing a bit of Earthworm Jim for the first time.

I bet you a curry I'm not. Be honest though.

I switched versions and I've cleared the junk yard, this feels much more at home on the Megadrive? As a kid I always claimed this was the case but I'd never played the SNES version so I was chatting bare breeze. There seems more room to avoid things for a start, and a more responsive whip, which makes a big difference.

Or maybe it's just because I know what I'm doing now that it seems more playable.

Okay so this still has the same slapdash design issues muddying the waters (hello enemies that swoop in from just off screen) but it definitely feels better to play on MD. Maybe it's an emulator issue. More than anything else I think it just helps that the Jim sprite doesn't take up 20% of the screen here*. Gonna have to finish this one now, was planning to start Returnal properly today.

*double check needed, will check side to side shots.

Last level of EWJ where you're button-mashing the helicopter move down a never-ending, twisty-turny pit full of spikes is 16-bit poison.

monkey wrote:

Last level of EWJ where you're button-mashing the helicopter move down a never-ending, twisty-turny pit full of spikes is 16-bit poison.

This. Bouncing helplessly from one spike to another while your energy bar runs down.

DKC2 it is not.

Just preordered that Amiga Mini.
Pure nostalgia over powering logic.

Gonna have to hack it though as it doesn't look like Lemmings is included.