#oneaday Day 530: My way is always better

The review embargo for the "Analogue 3D" FPGA-based N64 clone system came up yesterday, and as is usually the case with such things, about a bazillion reviews all dropped at the same time. The machine looks like a nifty bit of kit — although calling your brand "Analogue" and then not actually having any analogue outputs on your device is a bit weird — and has been reviewing well. As an owner of a MiSTer Multisystem 2, I have no real need for one — just as well, since ordering Analogue stuff is an absolute fucking nightmare — but I'm glad this thing exists and, moreover, appears to be pretty cool.

What has been less cool are the inevitable arguments that have been breaking out in the comments of pretty much every single video and article I have seen on this thing. It's utterly ridiculous to see grown men (and I would place good money on it being all men) of a certain age all getting pissy over how different people choose to experience retro games.

Here's my feelings on the subject: I don't care. Really! I do not give the slightest shit, so long as you're having a good time and you aren't causing anyone else any trouble.

If you want to set yourself up with a MiSTer stack you built yourself, fab. If you want to buy a MiSTer Multisystem 2 to take the hard work out of building an FPGA device, great. If you want to buy a SuperStation One, I hope you love it. If you're running Batocera on a mini PC, more power to you. If you do all your retro gaming on an Anbernic handheld running its stock OS, have fun. If you've spent several weeks finding the perfect alternative operating system for an Anbernic handheld, I hope you've had a fulfilling time doing so. If you're an original hardware junkie with a massive physical collection, can I come and visit? If you have your childhood console and nothing but an Everdrive, amazing! And I'm probably contractually obliged to mention that if your experience with retro gaming begins and ends with an Evercade or Super Pocket handheld, that is 100% fine, too.

Y'see, the important thing with enjoying retro games, to me, is, funnily enough, the games themselves. So long as you're able to experience the games you want to play in the way you enjoy experiencing them, it absolutely does not matter how anyone else wants to do it.

And yet you just have to look through any of these comment threads to see the FPGA nuts arguing with passionate advocates for RetroArch; Windows vs Mac OS vs various flavours of Linux; "download for free!" types against "I prefer to buy official rereleases" people. Basically, if there are two opposing viewpoints possible in this area — and there are quite a few of those — you can count on representatives of those viewpoints all yelling at one another.

Why? Why does it matter to you that some people think the Analogue 3D is a cool device, and you don't? Why does it matter to you that you use software emulation on your Mac and some people prefer to use an FPGA solution?

It's just another example of the Internet being constantly, unnecessarily adversarial, and it's really rather tiresome. As I say, so far as I'm concerned, I have no personal pressing need for an Analogue 3D, as I already have a suitable solution for enjoying N64 games in place — but I absolutely, definitely do not begrudge anyone their desire to add one to their collection! So if you happen to be one of the people lucky enough to have one coming your way soon, I sincerely, absolutely hope you enjoy it. And that you play Beetle Adventure Racing if you haven't already.

Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.

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#oneaday Day 520: Roguing it up

After spending yesterday primarily playing Hyrule Warriors: Age of Imprisonment, I thought I'd make some time to do some recordings today, so I kicked off recording for my Space Rogue series on Atari ST.

I'm glad I did this. It was a lot of fun to record, as there's lots of nicely written text throughout, which makes for good things to say out loud, and I also maintain that this format, although long and cumbersome at times, is a great way of showing exactly why some games are worth sticking with in the long term.

One fun and/or slightly inconvenient thing that we've lost today is the fact that when you started playing a game like Space Rogue seriously back in the day, you had to make a commitment to it. And it was a physical commitment in the form of a save game disk — or, in the case of games like Space Rogue, which would save your position to the game disk itself, making a backup copy of said game disk to be the copy that you play from "just in case" something happens to the masters when saving.

These days, meanwhile, it's all too easy to pick up a game, play it for half an hour, then set it aside and never think about it ever again. This is all the more easy to do with services like Game Pass, which is one of several big reasons I find Game Pass in particular an absolutely odious development in the games industry. Once you'd made a save game disk, though, you were in. You'd set aside valuable magnetic media for the specific purpose of saving your progress through a video game. And you were damn well going to use it.

Of course, the version of Space Rogue I have installed on the MiSTer Multisystem 2 is installed to a virtual hard drive, so there's no worrying about disk swapping, and the load times are much faster, which is nice. This would have been an absolute luxury option back in the day — I've been reading some old Atari User magazines recently, and it's always funny to read about a 20 megabyte hard drive being "more storage space than you will ever need" and costing as much as the computer itself.

Anyway, I've been giving the Space Rogue videos a bit of "deluxe" treatment in terms of editing. Because the game is so quiet, I've added some background audio in the form of the CD soundtrack from the FM Towns version, and some gratuitous Star Trek ambience that fits in nicely with the setting. I think the end result videos are going to be a lot of fun, so I'm looking forward to publishing the first of these sometime this week.

Now, of course, my head is spinning with all the possibilities of old games from back in the day that I might want to give the long playthrough treatment. I'm definitely going to do at least some of the Ultima games, I'd like to do Times of Lore (though which version, I haven't decided, as the ST, Amiga and C64 versions are all significantly different from one another) and there are, of course, still plenty of adventure games I haven't covered.

But recording Space Rogue was a lot of fun today, and I'm looking forward to doing more. Maybe I might even finish it this time around. Or indeed actually get anywhere in it at all. We shall see, but the first two episodes bode well for what comes next!

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#oneaday Day 518: '80s Activision had the juice

I frigging love '80s Activision games, particularly on the Atari 2600 and Atari 8-bit. I grew up with the ones on Atari 8-bit, of course, and since I never had a 2600 back in the day, those are a (relatively) more recent discovery. But I adore every one of them, and I'm beyond thrilled that I've been part of bringing them back to a new audience on Evercade.

The first of our Activision cartridges isn't out yet, but I, of course, have a copy. Perks of the job and all that. It's already becoming one of my most-played Evercade cartridges, and I don't see that changing any time soon.

We're actually doing three collections in total (this isn't Super Secret information, it was in our press release) and I've been largely responsible for the curation of said collections. All three of them are very strong indeed (you'll have to wait and see the lineup for the others, which are coming next year!) but this first collection comes out of the gate swinging with some of my absolute favourites.

My personal highlights are MegaMania, Enduro, Crackpots and River Raid, with honourable mentions to Beamrider and Demon Attack, games I've gotten to know a bit more recently.

MegaMania is one of the absolute best fixed shooters of the early '80s. Pitting you against waves of strange household objects, this "space nightmare" keeps things constantly interesting, as each wave has its own distinctive movement pattern — and then once you've cleared a complete loop of all of them, they go and change up their patterns a bit, just to keep you on your toes. It's a beautiful example of how utterly elegant some early games can be: it's simple to understand, has a brilliantly paced difficulty curve, a well-crafted scoring system and is endlessly replayable.

River Raid is, of course, a pioneering vertically scrolling shoot 'em up, whose noteworthy features include the ability to adjust your speed as you fly and the necessity to refuel your aircraft while negotiating obstacles and blasting enemies. The fact that this game was crammed into 4 kilobytes of ROM will never not be amazing to me. Carol Shaw was an actual wizard — not just for the game's technical accomplishments, but for the fact that, like MegaMania, it's an incredibly well-paced, considerately designed game that is likewise replayable until the end of time.

Enduro is the spiritual precursor to the home computer game The Great American Cross-Country Road Race, a game which I played as a child many years before I ever encountered Enduro for the first time. Enduro is, partly by necessity of the more primitive hardware it's running on, a simpler game, but I think its simplicity is also a core part of its appeal. All you have to do is overtake a set number of cars as a full day-night-and-weather cycle of a set duration proceeds: overtake 200 cars on the first day, then 300 each day thereafter. Your final score is how many "miles" you successfully drove before failing to qualify for the next day, and the score is presented using a lovely rolling analogue counter effect. I would have loved that as a kid — hell, I love it now.

Crackpots is a relatively recent discovery, and a game I feel I would have probably been terrified of as a kid. Again, the concept is simple: bugs are climbing your building, and you must drop flower pots on them. With each wave of bugs cleared, a new colour appears, and each colour of bug has a distinctive movement pattern. When you've cleared one loop of all the bug types (black, blue, red, green) the cycle repeats, but faster. The bugs chew through a layer of your building every time you let too many past you, and this affects the pace of the game from thereon. After too many layers of your building have been eaten, the game is over. It's pure high score fodder, and once again, beautifully paced and designed, with a dynamic difficulty level that raises and lowers according to how well you're doing.

Beamrider is, in essence, another fixed shoot 'em up, but it probably has more in common with Atari's Tempest than anything else, in that rather than moving freely, you switch between distinct "lanes" that the enemies proceed down. Thus there's a much stronger element of precision and even strategy to Beamrider than some other games, and the presentation, considering the host platform, is very good indeed. It's another game I got to know quite recently — there is an Atari 8-bit version, I believe, but I never encountered it back in the day.

Demon Attack is a game that I became familiar with after watching Classic Game Room's Atari 2600 reviews many, many times. It's a very simple fixed shooter, in which all you have to do is blast demons in the sky above you. Only three demons appear at once, and only one of them fires at you. It should be primitive and stupid and dumb, but it's incredibly compelling, particularly once the pace of the game increases and the demons start splitting into smaller bits. This one actually wasn't an Activision game back in the day; it was by Imagic, but Activision got the rights to all the Imagic stuff at some indeterminate point in the past. So yes, the Evercade Activision cartridges will have some of the Imagic stuff, too.

I'm quite fond of Activision Anthology on the PlayStation 2, but the last time I played it, I spotted quite how poor the emulation is in that version. It's not altogether surprising — there have been 23 years of advancements in emulation since — but, given how accessible good quality emulation of these games is about to become with the Evercade cartridges (and, hell, how easy it is to get 2600 up and running on systems like MiSTer and cheapo Chinese handhelds) it's a little hard to go back to. The built-in "badge" challenges, weirdo visual effects and '80s soundtrack are fun, though. I feel like we'll never see a compilation quite like that ever again.

But anyway. I am banging on about this because I spent today making a video about the upcoming cartridge. Watch out for it on the Evercade YouTube channel soon!

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#oneaday Day 516: Longform playthroughs

I originally stopped doing longform playthroughs on my channel because it was taking forever to get through a single game (and I was getting bored with Final Fantasy III, probably my least favourite Final Fantasy — yes, I'm a sicko who likes Final Fantasy II), but with my recent playthrough of The Granstream Saga on PS1 proving to be quite enjoyable (if not exactly a viewer magnet, but I don't care about that) I think I'm going to do some more of these.

I've been hesitant to do so for the aforementioned reason, but at the same time I've also wanted to do some more, because I feel like that does better justice to longer games that perhaps can't be finished in a single sitting. And, given that it's easy for me to set aside some "retro time" to record this stuff of a weekend, particularly now I have the MiSTer Multisystem set up, I feel I can probably devote some proper time to a number of games I've been meaning to explore properly for ages.

I think the first one I'm going to do, and I'm going to kick this off alongside the ongoing The Granstream Saga playthrough, is Origin's Space Rogue. This is a game I have adored ever since I first played it on Atari ST back in the day, but I've never beaten it, at least partly because, as a kid, I always assumed it was so dauntingly massive it was impossible to ever beat. However, looking back at it as an adult, it definitely looks like it will be a manageable size, and with my big brave adult brain, I can probably "solve" anything it wants to throw my way. And if not, it'll be a fun experiment anyway.

The other reason I want to do this is because I'm conscious I've done a lot of "later retro" stuff recently with the PlayStation games, and I have no intention of stopping that, but I've been struggling to think of a way to kind of refresh my enthusiasm for older home computer (particularly Atari) stuff. And I think this might be a good means of doing that.

With two longform series on the go, I'm not intending on leaving the single-episode formats behind. There are some games where you only really need a single episode to see what makes a game tick, and from there you can decide whether or not you want to spend any more time with it. There are many arcade-style games that I've played for half an hour on a video as my first encounter with them, and now go back to frequently because I enjoyed that initial session so much.

There's no need to make additional videos on those games, though, because in most of those cases, the game is sort of "the same" each time — it's just my skill and knowledge of it developing over time. And while I don't doubt there's at least some value in demonstrating my own improvement in a series of videos, I feel if I'm going to spend multiple videos on one thing, it's more interesting to tackle a longer game that evolves over time with a narrative, character progression or simply a long overall playtime.

Stuff that I've casually earmarked to look at in this regard At Some Point™ include the aforementioned Space Rogue, Times of Lore, the Ultima games, Dungeon Master, the Eye of the Beholder series, the Gold Box Dungeons & Dragons games and Starflight. Some of these games I've covered before in a one-off format, and always felt like I probably should go back to them at some point.

So I'm going to, starting this weekend!

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#oneaday Day 514: Up to the Atic

For the last few days, I have not been playing any of the new games I have. I have, instead, been mildly hyperfixating on Atic Atac for Spectrum, which is part of the upcoming Rare Collection 1 cartridge that we're releasing for Evercade. I have ostensibly been doing this so I can better inform the Evercade community about how to get the best out of this game, but honestly I've just been having a lovely time, too.

Atic Atac is a game I have fond memories of, though not because I had it as a child — none of Rare predecessor Ultimate Play the Game's titles were on Atari computers. I don't actually remember where I played it for the first time, and it was only once I ever played it. I believe it was the BBC Micro version I played rather than the Spectrum version, which means I probably played it at my friend Matthew's house, but the details are hazy and unimportant.

What I do remember about Atic Atac is that I thought it was a really cool game for a few reasons: firstly, its top-down perspective, presented with bold, colourful, almost vector-esque lines; and secondly, its unusual health display, which was presented as a roast chicken gradually being stripped down to the bone. When all the "meat" was gone, you lost a life.

For years, I never actually knew what the point of Atic Atac was, though. When I played it as a child, neither I nor whoever it was who was proudly showing it off to me knew what you were supposed to do, so we just had a lovely time wandering back and forth through rooms, throwing axes at monsters. And, indeed, it is possible to enjoy Atic Atac like that if you so desire; there's even a score function based entirely on the enemies you defeat, so you can challenge yourself to get as high a score as possible before succumbing to inevitable death.

Spending some proper, protracted time with it now, though, I'm finding it very much my sort of game, in that it's something of a blend between the Atari 2600 classics Haunted House and Adventure, with a dash of early-format text adventures in there. Not in terms of how you interact with it — Atic Atac is out-and-out an action game — but rather in terms of its core structure of wandering a map, searching for specific "treasures" and your end goal being to return all of said treasures (three pieces of a key, in this case) to a specific location: the starting room.

What I often find with home computer games from this period — particularly those that originated on the Spectrum, for some reason — is that it's easy to assume they're a lot more complicated and confusing than they actually are. And such was the case with Atic Atac; at its core, it's a game about getting to know a map, unlocking doors and hunting for treasure, nothing more. Sure, there's a couple of additional wrinkles — most notably, a few special items counteracting a few "special" monsters that appear at various points — but the basics are simply explore maze, unlock doors, get treasure, escape.

One thing I have really enjoyed doing with Atic Atac is manually making a map, adventure game style. This is mostly fairly straightforward to do, though there are a couple of instances in the game where it defies its own laws of physics to squeeze rooms in where there "shouldn't" be any, which makes mapping those particular portions a little challenging, but for the most part it's easy enough to map. The tricky thing, then, is systematically searching all those rooms to find the keys and treasures that you need!

I haven't quite managed to beat the game just yet, but I've been really enjoying the attempts. And I think I know it well enough to be able to offer some solid advice to newcomers now, too — so watch out for that around the time of Rare Collection 1's release!

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#oneaday Day 493: The breakneck pace of Final Fantasy IV

As one of several games I have on the go right now — for a bit of variety, like — I decided to start up Final Fantasy IV Pixel Remaster. I've played Final Fantasy IV I think twice before — and one of those was on PlayStation, so your sympathies are gratefully received, though that version at least isn't quite as bad as PS1 Final Fantasy VI — and remembered it being quite short, though I had forgotten quite how fast it moves.

I'm two hours in and already — apologies in advance if any of this is a spoiler, but the game came out in 1991 — the main character has committed a war crime, adopted an orphan child that he was directly responsible for orphaning, become separated from his best friend (who inevitably turns traitor), rescued his loved one from a deadly bout of Desert Fever by retrieving a valuable gem from a slobbering Antlion, rescued a prince from the ruins of his devastated castle and his broken heart, and attempted (mostly unsuccessfully) to fend off an assault on another kingdom.

It moves so fast. I had forgotten how fast. I have played so many modern (relatively speaking) games that feature epic-length story sequences between the core "gameplay" sections that it almost feels rushed. I mean, hell, after two hours in a Persona game from 3 onwards, you're barely through the initial character introductions and you almost certainly haven't set foot in a dungeon yet.

This is both a strength and a weakness of Final Fantasy IV, looking at it with a 2025 pair of eyes. It's a strength because it means that there's never particularly long to wait before you're doing stuff again — exploring the world, clearing dungeons, fighting monsters, levelling up, buying new equipment — and that is quite a refreshing change from today's narrative-centric games that, while undoubtedly considerably more ambitious in their storytelling, sometimes do feel like they're getting a little bogged down. Not only that, but Final Fantasy IV is done and dusted in less than 20 hours, which makes it a veritable light novel by RPG standards.

However, it's also a weakness, because there are some sequences that were clearly intended to be quite significant narrative moments, but the way the game just whizzes through them makes them feel almost laughable.

I'll give you an example. Rydia, the girl that the protagonist, Cecil, rescues from a war crime he inadvertently committed at the behest of his king, is a Summoner in Final Fantasy Job terms. This means that not only can she summon big things to deal heavy damage, but she can also cast both white and black magic spells. When you first get her, she's an inexperienced kid at level 1, so she barely knows any spells, but a bit of levelling in the field will net her a few initial, useful spells. Except you'll notice one black magic spell is prominently missing: Fire.

Think about it for a moment and it's obvious why: because she lost her entire village, including her mother, in a fiery explosion, she is, of course, going to be hesitant to call upon the power of fire. This little bit of characterisation is initially delivered without the game drawing any attention to it whatsoever, but you can notice it early from a simple browse of the menu. Very cool. Ambitious for the time, even!

What is less cool is when the party finds their path up a mountain blocked by a big chunk of ice, and the other members, eventually getting Rydia to admit that she "hates fire", pretty much tell her to stop snivelling and get over it because they jolly well have a quest to accomplish. It's almost certainly not intended to come across that way — the other members are all "yay, you did it, I always believed in you" after she does successfully cast her first Fire spell, presumably with tears streaming down her face and the knowledge that this is probably going to need years of therapy to truly deal with — but with at least a couple of decades' worth of games that handle sensitive topics rather more delicately behind us, it does feel rather… blunt.

But, again, you have to remember that this was 1991, just a year after the SNES had come on the market, and Final Fantasy IV was on a cartridge that contained less than a megabyte of data in total. In fact, during development, the script had to be cut considerably to fit on its cartridge; lengthy exposition was something that developers simply couldn't afford to do back in these days, because every byte mattered, and text can potentially take up a lot of space if there's enough of it. As such, it's not altogether surprising that some sequences feel like they move a tad fast by modern standards — short of shipping on a larger capacity cartridge, which was presumably a decision that needed to be made relatively early in development, there were very real constraints on what Final Fantasy IV would be able to do.

Of course, Final Fantasy IV has been expanded on quite a bit in later remakes such as the polygonal 3DS version, the Game Boy Advance version and the PSP version; each of these had their own additions to the basic Final Fantasy IV formula.

But the Pixel Remaster; that's based on Final Fantasy IV as it originally existed, graphics and music aside, and thus you have the plot that speeds off over the horizon as you just think you're getting caught up on proceedings.

All this is no shade on Final Fantasy IV, of course; it's a game I like very much (though it's far from my favourite Final Fantasy) — I just found it interesting to revisit this after so many years and be reminded that at one time, RPGs moved a lot more quickly than they do now!

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#oneaday Day 489: You've got Fun Factor

I've written about this before, but I write a lot of shit on this blog, so you may not have seen it, particularly since I last wrote about it in March of this year, when you may not have even been reading this blog. (The viewing figures would seem to suggest that quite a few more people are reading this blog now than there were in March. Although the other day I had approximately 900 bot visits from China, so I may take those figures with a pinch of salt or ten.)

Anyway, what I would like to talk about is the Fun Factor podcast, hosted by the experienced writers and video game enthusiasts, Ty Schalter and Aidan Moher. "Oh great," you might say. "Another video games podcast. Like we need any more of those!"

To that, dear reader, I say fie and pfaugh and other such expectorations! Fun Factor is different. Fun Factor isn't just a bunch of dudes sitting around talking about what they'd played that week, maybe coupled with the gaming news headlines they'd picked off their favourite website. Fun Factor is, as you might have determined from the name, about something which is very close to my heart and soul: magazines.

Each episode of Fun Factor takes a close look at an individual video game magazine. The present "season" is focusing specifically on the "Generation Gap", which covers the years between 1995 and 1997. This was a time when gaming underwent a quantum shift as we moved from 16-bit pixel mastery into the brave new frontier of (texture-mapped, Gouraud-shaded) polygonal 3D thanks to platforms like the Nintendo 64, PlayStation and Sega Saturn.

It was an exciting time, and the press of the period reflected that — for many, this was a real golden age for games magazines, as the Internet was early enough in its mainstream adoption (i.e. a lot of us were still on dial-up, particularly outside the US) that it hadn't yet taken the place of traditional publishing.

Rather than attempting to summarise the entire magazine, an episode of Fun Factor instead primarily focuses on a single piece in that magazine: a "review of a review", as it were. Along the way, Aidan and Ty both take a bit of time to flip through the magazine as a whole and contextualise what they're about to do a deep-dive into, including commentary on what was going on in games at that time, what they were both up to in their own personal lives (and experience with gaming) — and even a look at some of the weird and wonderful adverts that cropped up in print.

What I particularly enjoy about Fun Factor is that it has a breezy, friendly tone that one iTunes reviewer quite correctly described as "being like reading old magazines with friends". It's unmistakably modern, as Ty and Aidan are not above pointing out how these magazines often demonstrate how social attitudes and conventions have changed over the years, but, crucially, this never becomes in any way overbearing or preachy. There is plenty to criticise and lessons to be learned in these old mags — but also plenty to celebrate, too, and the show always finds an excellent balance between reflecting on how we've grown (or not, in some cases!) and what a wonderful time it was to be interested in video games.

Both Aidan and Ty cite classic games magazines as being formative in their own decisions to get into professional writing, so it's all done out of love for the medium. I've seen all too many online discussions of '90s magazines and ads in particular descend into nothing but laughing at the terrible taste and attitudes we all had, but Fun Factor has never, to date, across 13 episodes at the time of writing, found anything completely irredeemable in the publications they've looked at.

Even in instances where both Ty and Aidan have disliked the review that was published — such as Edge's truly strange Final Fantasy VI review — there have been positives to pull out. And some of the best examples of reviews from that period have, so far, ended up coming from the most unexpected places — like, say, sports games.

I adore old magazines and have a small collection of them that I treasure — mostly from well before the era that Aidan and Ty are presently covering on Fun Factor — but I don't have many people that I feel I can talk and enthuse about them with, or who understand why they hold such meaning for me. One of the reasons I value Fun Factor so much is that it helps me feel like there are other people out there who get it, who understand why magazines, at one time, held such importance for us as video game enthusiasts — and why many of us miss those days greatly.

If you're after something new to listen to and the above sounds like fun, you can find more information about the Fun Factor podcast on their official website, funfactorpod.com. You can also subscribe to the podcast's channel on YouTube, and I'd encourage you to check out the video versions of the podcast, since each episode displays scans of the pages that Ty and Aidan are talking about, allowing you to "read along" with them to a certain extent.

Thanks for the entertainment, fellas, and I look forward to hearing more from you. Plus if you ever need to hear stories about old Atari magazines, Year 10 work experience on PC Zone or freelancing for the Official Nintendo Magazine here in the UK, you know where I am!

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#oneaday Day 488: Home ports deserve remembering too

I feel like I've talked about this before, but whatever. I feel like talking about it today, so talk about it I will.

In this age of being able to easily emulate the original arcade versions of games, I feel like one thing gets easily lost from the "preservation" aspect of retro rereleases on today's systems: home ports that are notably different from simple attempts to recreate the original arcade games.

I was reminded of this when watching the YouTuber Classic Gaming Quarterly playing Gauntlet for NES earlier. I legitimately had no idea that Gauntlet for NES is not, in fact, a straight port of the arcade game and is, instead, a completely different game. I did know that Gauntlet IV for the Mega Drive also pulls this stunt, but I did not know that this extended back to the NES version. And for my money, pretty much all the home ports of Gauntlet are much more fun than the quarter-munching arcade version — particularly if you're playing on emulation and thus have infinite credits and therefore infinite health.

There are others, too. The Mega Drive port of Toaplan's Slap Fight features an entirely new game mode. The NES versions of the Double Dragon games are completely different to their arcade counterparts. And I'm sure there are countless others — to say nothing of the "home-exclusive sequels" we saw to numerous arcade games, often put together by western developers who didn't quite get what made the Japanese originals so good. (That said, I will happily go to bat for OutRun 2019.)

A few publishers are cottoning on to the fact that there is value in preserving multiple versions of classic games, including both the arcade originals and popular home ports, but it's by no means the norm. The reasons are likely due to licensing complications — in many cases, while the rights to the original arcade game remain with the original creators (or a company that has succeeded the original creators and/or bought the rights), home ports were developed by different teams, meaning that the rights would, I assume (IANAL), be split between the original creators of the arcade game and whoever made the port. This is not a problem when those are one and the same — like the Double Dragon games, for example — but there are plenty of situations where the home versions of a game were made by a completely different company, or even an individual at times.

The takeaway I have from all this is something that I've thought for a while: in many cases, I actually prefer playing the home conversions of games to the original arcade versions, even when the arcade version is obviously technologically superior. There are several reasons for this: firstly, those home conversions are often a good example of what their host platforms are (and are not) capable of. Secondly, since home ports are not obliged to keep people feeding coins into a machine, they are often balanced much better than their arcade counterparts. And this, in turn, makes them considerably more enjoyable to play.

Because there absolutely are arcade games out there that take "quarter-munching" way too far. I adore the beat 'em up genre, for example, but I'd much rather play Streets of Rage 2 than the arcade version of Final Fight, simply because Streets of Rage 2 is balanced much more fairly — and the beat 'em up genre appears particularly prone to this issue. The same is true for any sort of competitive game with a "1P vs COM" mode, be it a fighting game or a puzzle game. In their arcade incarnations, these tend to become absolutely impossible after just one or two levels, whereas in their home incarnations, they tend to save their biggest bullshit for their final challenges. Still annoying at times, yes — particularly in puzzle games, where final bosses tend to have superhuman capabilities as well as, more often than not, ways to "cheat" — but a little less galling than only being able to get through two or three stages before having to wipe your score and "Continue?"

Thankfully, while official licensors are seemingly hesitant to let those often flawed ports back out into the wild when one can just emulate the arcade version on a veritable toaster of a machine these days, one can make use of alternative means to enjoy them through software emulation or FPGA solutions. And I would encourage everyone to do so, because while everyone will inevitably have a preference as to which version of something is "best", it's worth exploring those versions rather than simply assuming the most technologically advanced version is automatically the most enjoyable.

Now, I think I might give Gauntlet on the NES a bit of a go for myself!

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#oneaday Day 486: Investing in retro the right way

I've talked about this once or twice before, but it doesn't hurt to say it again. I firmly believe that we've reached a point in time where collecting retro games is impractical, undesirable and inconvenient.

Don't get me wrong; there will always be an appeal to having original hardware and original media, and I don't begrudge anyone their choice to build up a substantial retro collection. I also think it's a bit sad that we've reached the stage we're at now. But with the absurd, exploitative prices that are being charged for both systems and media today — coupled with the fact that there's no real guarantee either of those things will actually work when you get them — I am very much a convert to the school of thought that says you're better off spending the money you would have spent on one copy of Rule of Rose for the PlayStation 2 on ways to get a "modern retro" setup up and running.

There are many ways you can do this. The absolute simplest way is to buy retro rereleases, either on modern platforms that you happen to own, or with specialist devices such as mini consoles or, of course, the Evercade. There are many benefits to these modern rereleases, such as bugfixes of games that shipped in a dodgy state back in the day, modern convenience features such as save states, rewind functions and in-game reference material, plus the fact they're generally a whole lot cheaper than buying the original releases and still fun to collect. If you were to buy all the games on the recently released NEOGEO Arcade 1 cartridge for Evercade in their original format, you'd be talking four figures. The cart is twenty quid. Do, as Atari once said, the math.

The only downside to officially licensed rereleases is that those licenses are sometimes hard to come by — or even completely impossible. Don't expect to see too many rereleases of racing games with licensed cars or licensed soundtracks, for example. Don't expect to see movie licenses making a return, either. But you might be surprised what licensors are still willing to play ball with, as the Evercade library to date shows.

Another relatively straightforward way is to devote a PC or similar device (like a Raspberry Pi, Steam Deck or Chinese gaming handheld) to it and install a suitable suite of emulators and organisation tools.

For Windows PCs that you also want to do other things, I would recommend Launchbox (even if they took to using odious AI images in their promotional emails of late), as this is not only a good means of organising all the games you might want to play, it also automatically retrieves additional information like box art, descriptions and even PDF copies of manuals where possible. The paid version also has a "Big Box" mode where the interface is designed to be used with a controller on a TV.

For other devices that are going to be dedicated to retro gaming, I highly recommend Batocera, which is a Linux distribution, but don't run away scared. It's all preconfigured to work in a similar fashion to something like Launchbox, and is pretty straightforward to get games up and running in. It's also highly customisable, so you can make the whole thing look and feel how you want it to.

The relative "luxury option", particularly if you still have a CRT knocking around that you want to use for the authentic look and feel, is MiSTer. As I've alluded to in a few posts recently, the absolute easiest way to get started with this is with a prebuilt device like the Multisystem 2 (my device of choice) or the upcoming SuperStation One. Alternatively, you can built your own — that's nowhere near as scary as it sounds, and it allows you a tad more customisability, though with the pricing of the Multisystem 2 and SuperStation One it's actually cheaper to buy one of those prebuilt options in a lot of cases — though note you will still need to provide accessories and storage.

If you're lucky enough to still have working classic hardware around, the first thing I recommend you do is investing in a modern power supply for them. My Mega Drive was prone to rolling noise on the screen with its original power supply, but replacing it gave a completely stable, flicker-free picture.

Once you've done that, invest in an EverDrive. Cheaper flashcart options exist, but EverDrives are premium products that support pretty much everything you might want to play on a piece of classic hardware. Not only that, in the case of systems that had add-ons, they can simulate the presence of the add-on, too — for example, the Mega EverDrive Pro can run Mega CD games.

For classic home computers, flashcarts are also available, or there are also plenty of media emulators you can use to "trick" the computer into believing it's using a real floppy drive or tape deck. For the Atari 8-bit, for example, I enjoyed using the SDrive-MAX device, which allows you to load executable files, disk images and tape images from an SD card. Similar devices are available for most classic computer platforms.

I won't lie; it's easy to spend a few hundred quid on this stuff — possibly even over a thousand. But once you're done, you have a great setup for what is, after all, the important bit of being interested in retro games: actually playing the games. And the kit you have will play pretty much anything without you having to pay some rando on eBay a three-figure sum just to play one game.

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#oneaday Day 485: Forgetful

Missed yesterday. I have no excuse, I just forgot. You can blame Final Fantasy Tactics or God. I did make some videos and write about Master Detective Archives: Rain Code, though. You can read that here.

Speaking of Final Fantasy Tactics, I'm really impressed with the new The Ivalice Chronicles version. I wasn't initially sold on the new look of the "remastered" mode, but seeing it in action makes it make a lot more sense than still screenshots might suggest. There's a nice almost "fabric"-like texture to everything, which makes the game sort of look like it's unfolding on a tapestry, which is entirely appropriate for the nature of the narrative it's telling.

The biggest upgrade by far is the full voice acting. I remember back in the PlayStation 1 era thinking that it was a bit sad, if understandable, that big games like RPGs didn't have full voice acting. The reality is that the voice data for a game as big as Final Fantasy Tactics probably wouldn't fit on a CD! We have no such constraints today, however, so a fully voiced Final Fantasy Tactics is a thing of wonder, and there's an incredible voice cast doing their thing with the excellent War of the Lions script from the PSP version — definitely an upgrade from the borderline nonsensical PS1 original.

The game is still just as hard as it ever was, though. It will absolutely kick your ass if you don't take a bit of time to buff up your characters — and you still need to use a solid strategy during the missions themselves, even if you've levelled up a bit and got good equipment. The computer-controlled "Guest" characters are still as dimwitted as ever, unfortunately, which can lead to some annoying situations, but you can just look at it as these characters being true to their personalities. I can't say I was sorry any time Argath got knocked out.

One of the little things I like the most is the fact that all your "cannon fodder" party members — i.e. the ones who aren't directly relevant to the story — have their own voices, too. And rather than having just one male voice and one female voice, there are actually several, so your individual, "unimportant" characters each have their own personality, which helps you become attached to them. And, given that Final Fantasy Tactics has permadeath (albeit a somewhat forgiving take on it, where you have a few turns to resurrect them before they're gone forever) that's an important part of the experience.

I'm not far into the game as yet, but I'm enjoying it a lot, and I suspect I will get a lot more out of it now than when I played it back in the day. It's a truly great game, and I'm thrilled that it's got a new release — and a release in Europe, which it never had back in the day!

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