#ds/3ds based emulator box

[unidentifiedfuckingthing]

theres a modern still maintained fully independent browser (as in, not safari and or based on chromium or firefox) that by chance i found out that someone ~successfully* ported to the 3ds (custom os; single core and 64M (1/16 of a gb) of ram**) earlier this year. it cant do most(?) java and it cant do html5 and most of its documentation hasnt been updated since 2012 even though the mailing lists are atill active. and im in love with it

*it sucked but its impressive to do it at all

**technically both of these are lies but this is what programs are allowed to use. or up to 80 mb of ram if they ask reeeeeallly nicey. chromium wishes

[divinefeline28]

get in losers. i am embarking on a journey to play and review every mainline* sonic game, in order*, on as much original hardware as i can. as of right now, the only games ive ever actually played are the original three on genesis, and mania - i have never actually played a 3d sonic game. i am so excited! i am also so incredibly bad at video games!! therefore im not holding myself to 100%ing them, or even getting all the emeralds unless its plot relevant. im just looking to complete the "canon" or best story and hopefully have a good time.

*completely arbitrary distinction based on what i actually want to play, list and current collection image under readmore

(1991) sonic the hedgehog - genesis (1992) sonic the hedgehog 2 - game gear ($5.99) (1992) sonic the hedgehog 2 - genesis ($9.99 (manual)) (1993) sonic the hedgehog cd - sega cd (emulated 2012 vers) (1993) sonic chaos - game gear ($4.99) (1993) sonic the hedgehog 3 - genesis ($17.18 (case)) (1994) sonic & knuckles - genesis ($29.99 + $20 (manual) + $30 (recreation box)) ---(1994) sonic triple trouble - game gear (1995) ---knuckles' chaotix - 32x (emulated) ---(1995) tails adventure - game gear ---(1993) dr. robotnik's mean bean machine - game gear/genesis ---(1995) tails' skypatrol - game gear ---(1995) sonic labyrinth - game gear (1996) sonic 3d blast - genesis *(1999) sonic adventure - dreamcast (~$50) ---(2000) sonic shuffle - dreamcast †(2001) sonic advance - gba (~$16) *(2001) sonic adventure 2 - dreamcast (~$75) †(2002) sonic advance 2 - gba (~$16) (2004) sonic heroes - gamecube ($20 + $18 (manual)) ---(2004) sonic battle - gba †(2004) sonic advance 3 - gba (~$16) (2005) shadow the hedgehog - gamecube ($64) ---(2005) sonic rush - ds ---(2006) sonic rivals - psp ---(2006) sonic the hedgehog - ps3 ---(2007) sonic rush adventure - ds ---(2007) sonic and the secret rings - wii ---(2007) sonic rivals 2 - psp (2008) sonic unleashed - wii ($19.99) ---(2008) sonic chronicles: the dark brotherhood (ds) ---(2009) sonic and the black knight - wii ---(2010) sonic the hedgehog 4 (2010) sonic colors - wii ---(2013) sonic lost world - wii u ---(2014) sonic boom - wii u (2017) sonic mania - switch ($34.99) (2017) sonic forces - ps4 (playstation plus) (2022) sonic frontiers - ps5 ($24) (2024) sonic x shadow generations ($49.99) current total: ~$523.11 *SA and SA2 were purchased bundled with a dreamcast console, two controllers, and mvc2 for $350 so prices on the games alone are approximate. †sonic advance 1, 2, and 3 were sold bundled for $50 total. recapped/backlit game gear $124.99 (prices for consoles (dreamcast, game gear) are not included in the total cost.)

if a game has a console listed then i have it. also for as much as id love to play sonic cd on original hardware, sega cds go for over $200 and thats awfully steep for a console i want exactly one game for :(

[theexodvs]

Types of console backwards-compatibility

Console B is essentially an updated form of Console A. This usually guarantees close to 100% compatibility, but boxes in the capabilities of Console B.

ColecoVision with Atari 2600 (unauthorized)

Atari XEGS with Atari's previous 8-bit computers

Atari 7800 with Atari 2600

GameGear with Master System

SuperGrafx with PC Engine

GameBoy Color with GameBoy Classic

DS with GameBoy Advance

Wii with GameCube

Wii U with Wii

3DS with DS (i)

Console B is a completely different system than Console A but has Console A's hardware onboard, making it a sort of hybrid system. This generally gets the job done as far as backwards-compatibility is concerned, but requires more hardware, and may not be worth it if interest in Console A wanes or its own patrons are not interested in what Console B has to offer.

APF Imagination Machine with the APF MP-1000

Commodore 128 with Commodore 64

Genesis with Master System

Early PS2 units with PS1

GameBoy Advance with GameBoy (Color)

Early PS3 units with PS2

Console B has an emulation-based compatibility layer with Console A. This has the least reliable backwards compatibility and is done almost entirely in the name of brand synergy.

Early OS X with Classic Mac OS

Windows NT 3.1-XP with MS-DOS

Later PS2 units with PS1

Xbox 360 with original Xbox

PS3 with PS1 (and later models with PS2)

PS5 with PS4

Xbox One with Xbox 360 and original Xbox

Xbox Series X with previous Xbox consoles

[mercuriale]

Reclaiming hardware Pt. 1: Wii U

Been a while since i last sat down and wrote out a post.

In the last 12 or so months I have been installing custom firmware on some older gaming devices i own but have fallen out of use. I had experimented with CFW on my WIi U maybe about 2 years ago with Tiramisu. A year later i scored a second-hand Vita, and just this last week I've been giving the CFW treatment to my 3DS, as well as updating my Wii U to the Aroma environment, and reviving an old R4 DS flashcart.

I have a few core beliefs with this kind of practice.

If you own a piece of hardware you can do what you want with it.

If a game is not made available to purchase legally or easily, at a reasonable price, it is ethically fine to pirate it.

Nintendo in particular can absolutely take the hit. After all, they're barely being kept afloat by one guy they cruelly saddled with millions in damages.

This post is a brief recount of my experiences modding, and i hope that by describing the problems and solutions i found along the way, I can help others.

Here are my experiences so far, per hardware.

Pt. 1: Wii U

I have a mega soft spot for the Wii U. It walked so the Switch could run, and being able to play full console game on the gamepad while someone else can watch TV in the same room is a really great aspect. The library is also absolutely killer; Bayonetta 2, Super Mario 3D World, Wonderful 101, Xenoblade Chronicles X, on top of the entire Wii library make this a fantastic box to mod. Compared to the effort needed to put in, you can end up with a console that can play the entire Wii U, Wii, and Gamecube libraries, plus Retroarch and other emulators for most older consoles.

I originally had Tiramisu installed but have upgraded to Aroma. I followed the wiiu.hacks.guide guide but sometimes these guides tend to gloss over details in the process that i would say are important.

What the guide doesn't explain, conceptually, is the concept of an environment, and the difference between Tiramisu (old) and Aroma (new, beta). I'll try to do so in layman's terms here.

Tiramisu is the previous established CFW Environment, and all side-loaded homebrew apps need to be launched through the Homebrew Launcher, which gets launched in-place of the Mii Maker app, and installed by other homebrew apps like WUPInstaller.

Aroma is a new Environment, and it enables apps to be added to the native Wii U Menu rather than having to use the HB Launcher. It also simplifies sideloading apps by establishing a new filetype, the .wuhb file. These can be copied to the sd:\wiiu\apps folder on the SD card, rather than using an installer app.

Upgrading from Tiramisu to Aroma is actually very simple. If you already had Tiramisu, all that you need to do is download the Aroma files from the official site and unzip them to the root of the SD card, merging them together into one sd:\wiiu folder. Then perform the exploit as described in the guide. You only need the .zip files in the Base and Aroma headings on the page, the additional plugins and modules are optional and you can come back to those later.

When performing the browser exploit, you have to hold the B button. Yes, keep holding. it takes approximately 1 minute, and you'll be on a white screen if all is going correctly. keep holding until the screen changes to white text on black, and asks you to choose your payload. run nanddumper and do your due diligence.

When you run the browser exploit the second time you have to hold X instead of B this time, and it will start the environment loader. Pick Aroma. At this point you can press Y and it will highlight it yellow, making it your preferred. A bright yellow warning will get thrown up on the screen regarding blocking updates. It looks scary but if you read it carefully, youll see that you can block system updates by pressing X. Press it.

the step regarding the PayloadLoader app can be skipped in my instance, as i had already set it up to run on boot automatically.

If you want to change environments with the above config (i.e. to tiramisu instead to run Retroarch), you need to hold X on boot. I wish this could be displayed briefly on boot, like with a PC to access the BIOS. This is very easy to forget when you have over 12 months between boots! I should also add that by "boot" i mean when the Wii U Menu is loading. if you start the console with the GamePad and have quick start enabled, you need to hold X right after you choose Wii U Menu in the bottom right corner.

Another handy file to have is sigpatches in the wiiu\environments\aroma\modules\setup folder.

There exists an app to download games directly. I already have a good physical Wii U Catalog, but you can install NUSspli to download games directly. Officially my advice is to only download games you already own. However, Wii U games are difficult to find for obvious reasons, especially niche cult games that aren't the usual Wii fodder for kids like Bayonetta 2 or Xenoblade Chronicles X. If you want to buy physical in any condition you'll pay an arm and a leg, if you can find anything decent at all. At time of writing neither of the above games are available on any other platform. By cross-referencing these facts with my beliefs mentioned above, you may be able to draw a conclusion for yourself. Forewarning, downloads are a bit on the slow side, and you have to have the app open the entire time. luckily for you, you can just switch over to your tv and watch something like i did, while keeping an eye on your gamepad.

Don't run the Health and Safety Information app once you've booted up your Wii U. if you've configured your PayloadLoader to automatically start on boot, its done. If you run it again, you'll be told off for running the EnvironmentLoader twice, and you'll need to hard power off your console and gamepad, which i've had to do more times than i'm wliling to admit.

I'll end this guide by confessing: I spent a lot of money in this era on this console. I don't regret it; I was living comfortably and could afford to at the time. It was fun to completely tune out what was happening for other consoles, and live in relative bliss with PC ports and the quality output for the Nintendo range at the time. It was fun to be hopeful and optimistic for the Wii U when so many others had already written it off completely.

Looking back now, the games lineup now that all is said and done is really quite fantastic; there looms an unfortunate shadow over it all though; many of the Wii U's best games have been rereleased for the Switch, having been expanded and improved even further, most notably Smash and Mario Kart 8, but the wii U versions are still great. It has the only Tekken game to appear on an Nintendo console. Bayonetta 2 and XCX are still wholly exclusive. Theres lots to like here. My hope and optimism were, to me, repaid in kind.

Thats about all I have so far for this thing. I plan to wade into the murky waters of gamecube games in the future, so i may yet write about my trials in that area. In the meantime, I'm having plenty of fun playing WarioLand 4 on a deliciously large screen.

[callmearcturus]

What made you choose the odin over other similar game boxes?

GREAT question because there are a LOT of options out there, I even did a big post about them a while ago when folks were curious.

I actually started out with a Retroid Pocket 2+ as my first device. I hugely enjoyed it, played a bunch of DS games on it as well as a lot of PSX games. I think the current iteration of it, the Retroid Pocket 3+, is an excellent pick if you want a midtier device. At this point, the RP3+ is like a Odin Lite Lite.

My issue with my RP2+ was that I really wanted the ability to stream games from my PC, because I am a pirate yo ho ho and I wanted access to that much more robust library. Also, my interest in the Dreamcast/Gamecube/PS2 console generation is at its peak right now and that's the library I want to play comfortably.

So when I got a bonus from work, I bit the fucking bullet and got the AYN Odin Lite, because it also happened to be like 50$ off at the time.

(Oooh, which it currently is right now too, go figure!)

For the curious, I loaded my RP2+ with literally as many games as I could stuff into the things and I gave it to a friend as a gift.

I was worried that I wouldn't use the Odin enough to justify the purchase..... but then I immediately put like 20 hours into Pokemon Unbound and I completed Persona 3 Portable. And then I used Parsec to play the entirety of Persona 4 Golden and I am now 80 hours into Persona 5 Royal. And now I might spin up a playthru of SMT4 or the PS2 version of SMT 3 Nocturne, unsure.

Here's the reasons I like the Odin, even though its one of the pricier devices you can get:

Yes, it costs 200USD for the Lite model. But the Lite model does pretty much everything the more expensive Base and Pro models do with minimal compromises. Also for 200USD, you get extremely good components, very comfortable professional feeling buttons and joysticks-- like, this thing feels slightly better than a Switch Lite, honest to god. Unless you wanna dual boot Windows, you don't need more than the Lite.

It has Wifi 6 so it streams like a fucking dream. If the Odin itself can't handle emulating a game but my computer can, I can play flawlessly from Parsec. As I mentioned before, a few weeks ago I was sitting in a cute coffee shop literally like 25 miles away but was playing Persona 5 via Parsec. It also works natively with Game Pass streaming perfectly.

Even without streaming, this fucker is BEEFY. I personally love it for PSP games. Playing at 4x or 5x resolution makes the games look stunning.

My biggest problem with my CFW 3DS is the battery. I tend to play games for 4ish hours at a time, and then put the thing aside for a few days. With my 3DS, the thing will HAVE to be left plugged in or it will be dead by the next time I wanna play. This also means I can't just drop it into my bag to wait around for time to play, it'll inevitably be dead. My Vita and Odin can live in my bag for over a week before I have to worry about the battery. That is HUGE for me.

The Retroid Pocket 2+ very comfortably and ably played up to the DS and most Dreamcast games, but PSP was a crapshoot and even some PSX games weirdly could only run at x1, which was disappointing to me. The Odin Lite can play everything I want to play and as a bonus it can do what seems like half the 3DS library and about 40% of the PS2 library, which I would like to revisit.

Cracked devices and emulation are becoming a hobby of mine as everyone sans Microsoft works around the clock to make their enormous back catalogs fucking inaccessible. The fact the 3DS shop is closing soon pisses me off so much I can barely express it, I think that shit should be illegal. There are so many games and frankly works of art that are going to be completely inaccessible legally! FUCK THE ESA!

Point is, this stuff is important to me. I back up games I never intend to actually play on my external hard drive just in case. But out of all the devices I have played with, my favorites are easily the Odin and my cracked Vita. Both are miraculous, and I feel like I'm literally defeating my "hmmmmm what do I wanna play" indecision thanks to them.

That said, depending on your needs, I still think the Miyoo Mini and the Retroid Pocket 3+ (current iteration of Retroid) are excellent choices. As is a Vita! My god I love my Vita! I've never been a fan of any of the Anbernic devices and would avoid them.

[kuiperblog]

DRPGs: function over form

I have an odd affection for DRPGs, or “Dungeon-crawling Role-Playing Games,” which are sometimes referred to as “Wizardly clones” in the same way that early FPS games were called “Doom Clones.”

Legend of Grimrock is an indie game that I’ve found is closest to actually emulating the feel of the original Wizardry games from an aesthetic perspective while updating them for modern graphics; most of the examples from recent history are Japanese and feature anime-style character designs, with Etrian Odyssey being perhaps the best-known (and best-selling).

I describe my affection for DRPGs as “odd,” because few other games have the ability to thoroughly captivate me for the time I’m playing, only for me to completely forget everything about them when I’m done playing them.

For example, I recently noticed that Demon Gaze 2 was on sale for 75% off in the Playstation store. I’m keen to try it out, since I enjoyed the first Demon Gaze game so much that I took the time to 100% (I earned the “platinum trophy” so that anyone on my Playstation Network friends list can see the evidence of my achievement). This is a task that reportedly takes around 50 hours. I say “reportedly” because it’s based on other people’s reports of how long it took for them to “platinum” the game; I can’t really recall from memory how much time I spent playing that game, or really anything else about it for that matter.

I cannot express how weird it is for me to not have a memory of have any specific memories of playing a video game, especially one that I spent that amount of time playing. I can still vividly remember a specific game of Dota 2 that I played over half a decade ago. I could talk for paragraphs about an indie puzzle game that I played for 2 hours in 2012. You could ask me to talk about any of the N64 games I played as a middle schooler and I could probably recall many specific memories from the time I spent with those games.

And yet, when it comes to Demon Gaze, I remember nothing. Not the characters, not the plot, not any of the specific milieus or setpieces. And, truthfully, it’s probably because caring about any of these things is never really something that the game asked of me in the first place. I earnestly tried to remember anything I could about Demon Gaze, and here is a full, comprehensive list of what I came up with:

There’s an NPC whose character trait is that she’s always sleepy. I think she lived in the basement of...something. I think your “home base” was an inn, and she lived in the inn’s basement, and you would sometimes have to talk to her to do certain things or something.

One of the levels had plants and was mostly green. Maybe multiple levels, actually. I want to assume this meant there was a hedge maze, but I’m not actually remembering a hedge maze; I’m just assuming that a dungeon-crawling game plus a green area must mean there was a hedge maze.

One of the levels involved climbing a tall tower, or maybe descending into a deep pit. There was definitely verticality involved, and the map was cylindrical.

I think the main character used swords. But maybe they didn’t. I’m pretty sure that you could dual-wield at a certain point in the game. (I think part of what made the main character so strong was the fact that they could equip an artifact that let them dual-wield?)

That is truthfully and honestly the full extent of what I remembered about the game before I started writing this post and digging up screenshots which reminded me of the main character’s heterochromia. When grabbing screenshots for this post, I found one that showed a character’s class as being “Paladin,” and my reaction was not, “Oh yeah, Paladin was totally a character class in this game,” but “Oh yeah, Paladin totally sounds like a character class that could plausibly be in this game.”

Normally, I’d have memories of specific boss battles, or setpieces, or characters, or story moments. But in place of those, I have memories of looking at Google Sheets that people had made to list all of the items that dropped from certain areas, and ranked them to let you know which items were the best. I could more vividly tell you the decor of the room I was in when I unlocked the platinum trophy than the final boss I beat (or item I obtained) to unlock it. (Being a game for a portable system like the Vita, I actually have memories of many locations and “setpieces” associated with that game; just not locations in the game.)

DRPGs are, maybe more than any genre, a game that is experienced through a layer of abstraction, and I think this is best illustrated by the Etrian Odyssey, which lives in the DS family of systems, which are notable for having two screens (as is suggested by the name “Dual Screen”). Here’s a screenshot that shows what the game displays on both screens when you’re dungeon crawling:

On the top screen, you see the environment you’re exploring in all its 3D-rendered detail. On the bottom screen, you have a map of the area you’re navigating, with the arrow in the middle indicating your current position and orientation. And for the vast, vast majority of dungeon crawling, my attention is focused solely on the bottom screen.

This is, I gather, how most people play DRPGs. Etrian Odyssey puts even more of the focus on the bottom screen by forcing you to draw the map as you walk (hence the bevy of icons and paintbrushes it offers you when filling in the grid). If you try to play by looking at the environment, you’ll quickly realize how much of the area is just copy-pasted assets that are difficult to navigate by. The map isn’t just a “guide;” the game feels less like a first-person dungeon crawler and more like game with a top-down POV where your avatar is represented by that arrow on the map. If you watch gameplay videos and only pay attention to the top screen, you’ll be blown away by how fast it seems like people are moving, but it makes a lot more sense when you realize that people are only paying attention to the map: people will see, “okay, I want to walk north 5 tiles, turn 90 degrees left, then walk west 2 tiles,” and then just input that series of actions faster than the walking animation can actually play out on screen.

I’m half convinced that the reason Etrian Odyssey took off more than any other DRPG is that, due to being on the DS, it has an entire screen dedicated to the map, whereas in a game like Demon Gaze, your screen is mostly taken up with what amounts to decorative filler while the part of your brain that’s focused on gameplay has to focus on a mini-map in the corner of the screen:

So, perhaps you can understand how it is that I played this game for 50 hours, yet have no recollection of the scene/location depicted in this screenshot. It’s because close to 100% of my focus was on the mini-map. I experienced most of this game as an abstraction.

There’s a real sense in which DRPG players (I’m talking about myself here) want everything in the game to be an abstraction. The ideal length for a combat animation is “as long as it takes for me to read how much damage the attack did, so please just advance the battle as fast as I’m pressing the X button.”

Video games are inherently abstractions of real things, like the way that adding the pyramids to my build queue in Civilization V is an abstraction of what it’s actually like to build the pyramids in ancient Egypt, or left clicking in Counter-Strike is an abstraction of what it’s like to fire a gun, but they usually try to call back to the things that they’re abstractions of. Civilization gives you an inspiring quote from some historian describing the pyramids, and Counter-Strike tries to have animations and sounds that somewhat reflect the behavior of real guns. But in DRPGs, I don’t want the combat to be the simulation of my character swinging a sword on an enemy. All I care about is watching the numbers flash on screen, and the reward isn’t “you’ve triumphed over this vile forest-dwelling enemy,” it’s “the number on your exp meter went up.”

While games like World of Warcraft eventually become like this for a lot of people (a game with a hundred buttons that is all about managing cooldowns), you at least start from a place of walking your avatar around the world and performing actions that make your wizard look as though you’re casting a spell.  But most DRPGs start from the position of “all you care about is the numbers, right?” The game is an abstraction unto itself.  It is a game that is made for people who like looking at spreadsheets (and I most definitely spent a decent chunk of time looking at spreadsheets).

Maybe that’s why they can get away with having character designs often clash with the art style of the environment and enemies, and sometimes with the art style of other party members. Several of the character portraits in the above screenshot seem like they were drawn by different people, and there are some moments that, when you look at them in a screenshot gallery, make you think that the characters just don’t belong in the world they’re inhabiting. And while the game is sometimes visually non-cohesive in a way that becomes really obvious if you pay attention, the truth is that when you’re actually playing the game, you’re not really paying attention to all that.

For another example of this, I like to turn to Stranger of Sword City, which has a really cool aesthetic that hits you from the moment you pick up the box (or look at the title screen):

The original release of the game, on Xbox 360, was remarkably consistent with this specific style. But the Playstation Vita version of the game (which was later ported to PC)  gives you an updated character creator and your options include, well, a variety of options drawn in a variety of different styles.

I just looked at the screenshots on the Steam store page for the Stranger of Sword City and, well:

Yes, that is a Prinny in the bottom left corner. Yes, Nippon Ichi did publish this game, why do you ask?

I think one of the reasons I don’t tremendously mind the aesthetic choice (or is it a lack of choice?) in a lot of DRPGs like this to randomly have anime-style characters (even when they might be dissonant with the rest of what’s on screen) that I don’t necessarily need my paladin’s look to really communicate that they’re a holy warrior or whatever; I really just want them to be eye candy that I can appreciate in the moments when I’m distracted from the numbers. But in the end, it doesn’t actually matter that much, because, well...

DRPGs feel like they are all about function over form. (The “looking at the mini-map and not the 3D environment” is a microcosm of a playstyle that’s encouraged by a design philosophy that seems to apply to nearly everything in a “good” DRPG.) This puts them in stark contrast to, say, Persona, which involves a ton of dungeon crawling, but relies heavily on the style (which includes the battle music, the stylish combat animations, and the quips that your characters make in battle) to make that part of the game interesting.

When you down all of the enemies in Persona, part of the “reward” for that comes from getting to deal a bunch of damage to all of the enemies, but a huge part of the reward also comes from the feeling of visceral pleasure that comes in the moment when Akihiko senpai says “I’ve been waiting for this!” and you smile and agree and say, “Me too, Aki. Now give me that shot that’s so iconic it became a meme template.”

I probably would not have made it through dozens of hours of crawling through Tartarus in Persona 3 if Mass Destruction weren’t such a banger of a battle theme. But I spent just as much (if not more) time dungeon crawling in Demon Gaze despite not having Lotus Juice’s rap verses soothing my ears during those battles, which I guess maybe stands as a testament to how good Demon Gaze was at making the game fun?

Ultimately, the abstraction that every RPG leveling system gets toward is “your character gets stronger.” Maybe DRPGs are better than any other genre at removing any abstractions that would serve as a barrier between you and that goal.  And the best DRPGs also give you formidable challenges that give you ample reason to want to become stronger: games like Etrian Odyssey are notorious for their difficulty. I feel the difficulty is a bit overhyped; much like my feelings on Dark Souls, Etrian Odyssey only really feels “hard” when compared with other games where the player is never put plausibly close to a failure state whereas Dark Souls and EO actually punish the player for making mistakes, and EO also has the “X-factor” of having enough variance (due to things like random crits) that you actually do want to give yourself a decent margin for error. Which is to say, EO is one of the RPGs where you actually care a lot about having a team that’s strong enough to kill a boss in 8 turns instead of 10 turns, since that’s 20% fewer chances for an unfortunate event to send you back to home base. Powering up your team in EO feels important and significant way more than it does in a lot of other JRPGs.

There is a very real sense in which the entire point of the obligatory spreadsheet companion is to aid you in your quest to become the strongest you can be by breaking the game somehow. The thing I do remember about Demon Gaze (not concretely, but in the abstract) was that there were some item/class combinations that were wildly better than the alternatives. Some might deride this as poor balance, but in my eyes, “breaking” a game in that way is really more akin to “solving” it, in the same way that one might “solve” a puzzle. I did it: I found right combination of skills and items to trivialize the game’s difficulty! Huzzah! In a “well-balanced” game where all items and classes were all carefully tuned to be equally viable, such a thing would not be possible. Thus, what others might consider “poor balance” in some DRPGs is actually an essential and core part of what compels me to spend time with those games.

I feel like these factors and more make DRPGs somewhat unique in a way that probably contributes to them reviewing poorly. For example, if you look among discussions on DRPG forums about recommended games, there seems to be universal consensus that Stranger of Sword City is a great game (with many praising it as the best DRPG they’ve ever played), but on OpenCritic, only 45% of critics recommend it, and I think all of this is perfectly encapsulated by a 6/10 review from TheSixthAxis:

Stranger of Sword City excels at one thing, and really flounders at the others. It’s a rewarding experience if you’re a fan of challenging RPGs and gameplay depth. If you’re a fan of well-written dialogue, engaging music or proper difficulty curves though…well….there are a lot of other video games out there that may suit you better.

And that’s the kind of thing that makes me want to locate a guide, crack open a spreadsheet, and start a new save file.

Anyway, the Stranger of Sword City is on sale for 80% on Steam right now. That’s $4, for a game that I paid $40 for when it first came out on Vita! I’m tempted to buy it again, just for the convenience of being able to play it on my monitor without having to dig around to locate my old Vita TV.

[puropoly]

I must confess a sin: I,surprisingly,NEVER watched Pokemon..i know little things like some pokenames(very basic ones) but idk what is the show about(aside from catching pokemons)im interested since detective pikachu and i want to give it a try but im not sure where to start,they have videogames,animes,movies,more anime and more videogames,i asked my friends and they told me i can start from the videogames but others told me i must start from the anime,since youre a big fan i need your help :"0

did you say you need my help with

POKEMON

I’M YA PERSON

Pokemon has left a deep impact in my mind due to it being my biggest interest when I was a kid and at times my only source of entertainment (sad childhood violin) so the reason I like it so much is biased by how much charged nostalgia it has for me. I’d like to recommend you start with the games, because they’re fairly entertaining, and because personally I don’t give a shit about the anime and had dropped it since I left elementary school so

I think it’s viable to start playing pokemon when you’ve grown up, specially if you’re into rpg sorta games and some sick monster designs.

I think the best games to start with are the fifth generation: Pokemon Black and Pokemon White. Every pokemon game has been launched in sets of two versions (red and blue (the first ones ever), gold and silver, ruby and sapphire, etc) and you can choose whichever you want to play depending on which legendary pokemon on the box you like more

Pokemon black:

ya girl Reshiram

Pokemon white:

Ya boy Zekrom

The reason I recommend these games specifically it’s because the region the story is set in is based in USA, therefore western culture we’re used to and the pokemon designs for this gen specifically are among my favourites. 

Pokemon games are mainly aimed at children and the couple last editions of them rely heavily on extremely easy and predictable gameplay, which as a teen/adult, gets boring pretty fast. I don’t consider it a defect, because it’s great that children can count with games as enthralling and personalized as pokemon, but if you’re looking for some medium level of difficulty in a game, pokemon BW I think it’s the best to start with.

And why do I say it’s personalized? CHECK THIS OUT: YOU CAN MAKE YOUR OWN POKEMON TEAM BASED ON WHICH ONES YOU LIKE THE MOST. AMAZING. FANTASTIC CONCEPT !!! you start by picking your starter pokemon, which are a set of three pokemon of each elemental type- these are the ones for pokemon black and white:

snake whose smug aura mocks me (grass type), luchador pig in black underwear (fire type), and sad clown otter (obvs…my favourite, water type)

You get to pick whichever you like the most at the beginning of the game and they’ll be your pokemon partner FOREVER (unless you find pokemon you like better in the future, in that case you can deposit these sad losers in a box and never see them again) You can catch almost any pokemon in the game, and some of them are extremely rare and difficult to find (as it is the case for legendaries) Finding rare pokemon and trying to catch them are one of the things I like the most for these games, it makes you feel you really are exploring a strange fauna in look of some mytologic animal. It’s so much fun

Another reason I recommend BW to you it’s because, out of all the main pokemon games released until now, it’s the one with the most decent story. As I said before, pokemon is aimed for children and the story as well as the gameplay aren’t….complicated, to be frank. They’re preeeeeetty dumb most of the time. But this one has a set of very interesting characters with different values and morals they speak about and play out in the story. So it may be more interesting than, say the disaster that XY was (sorry if you like these games in particular, it’s respectable, but ya gotta admit the characters where dumb as hell AUGH I JUST HATE THE COCONUT HEAD KID OKAY)

The worldbuilding is neat and the wildlife areas are super exciting to explore. I guess the cities are too, but they’re not my biggest interest in these games. The only second thing funnier than catching pokemon is to make THEM FIGHT!! you find other trainers with OTHER pokemon and you make them fight using their attacks and advantages if they have it (for example, water type pokemon have advantage against fire type pokemon, because water eliminates fire, and fire type pokemon are strong against grass types because they can burn their leaves, etc etc. Some type advantages are easy to learn like these, but some others are hard to remember because they have no possible explanation other than preventing nerfing a specific type)

There are a total of 18 types in pokemon 

(17 in pokemon black and white since fairy got introduced later)

No matter if you don’t like pokemon in general, you’ll have to like AT LEAST ONE, because there are pokemon for ALL TASTES. There are kickass, funny, cute, beautiful, HORRENDOUS styles for all types, pokemon designs are so varied and the universe is so diverse you have endless possibilities when creating your team and it’s super super fun

SO, getting into technical details: pokemon BW were released for the nintendo DS. If you own one, or a 3ds, these games should be easy to find at any store. If not, you can downlowad the game rom and play with an emulator (free, but you won’t have access to link battles or trades, which make it impossible to obtain certain pokemon ): that’s the only bad thing). I’d also say this method is illegal (as illegal as downloading music) but honestly? screw nintendo for NEVER benefiting south america in any way. We get the games and consoles with ridiculous taxes and prices, never have access to worldly events, and the nintendo eshop for latin america is A JOKE. Capitalism can eat my ass

If you read all of this you’re amazing, and persevering, and you’ll do well in your future. Or it means you’re trying to avoid pending work, which is also acceptable. But this is all for now, If you have any other doubts feel free to ask me!!!!!! have fun and GO CATCH SUM POKEBITCHES

[arabellaflynn]

Advent Calendar 05: Backwards Combat-ibility

Greetings, and welcome to Advent Calendar 2022! This year we're being self-indulgent and rambling about video games.

As usual, the Advent Calendar is also a pledge drive. Subscribe to my writing Patreon here by December 15th for at least $5/mo and get an e-card for Ratmas; subscribe for $20/mo (and drop me a mailing address) and you'll get a real paper one!

I hope you're all having a happy winter holiday season. Let the nerd rambling commence!

My parents broke down and bought a Super Nintendo the Christmas they wanted to play Final Fantasy II (IV in Japan) and were annoyed that the new machine was not backwards compatible with NES carts. It wasn't necessarily a silly thing to expect. Microcomputer games sometimes had a version for 8K and 16K machines on one disk or tape; I remember a lot of PC games had 5.25" and 3.5" diskettes in the same box, to account for whatever drive you had. And on the console end, a big selling point of the Atari 7800 was its ability to play your existing library of 2600 games.

They would not have run into the same problem if they'd gone with a Sega Genesis, where a reasonably inexpensive accessory called the Power Base Converter allowed you to play 8-bit Sega Master System games on your shiny new 16-bit console. It was an easy trick to pull off, because while the Genesis had a blazing fast 7.6MHz Motorola 6800 processor for all of your sick new graphics needs, it used the brain of a Master System, a Zilog Z80, as its sound controller. All the PBC did was short a couple of wires to direct the CPU requests to the sound chip and voilá! Your Master System games were communicating with a chip that spoke their language.

This technique has been used to great success in quite a number of consoles. Nintendo used a Gameboy Color CPU as the tone generator in its Gameboy Advance handhelds that doubled as a way to play GB/GBC games, and straight up built a DS into their 3DS consoles specifically for DS compatibility. Their Wii console was essentially an upgraded GameCube, and played GC discs, and the easily-forgotten WiiU was based on Wii architecture. Sony pulled a similar trick in its Playstation 2 consoles, where a stripped-down Playstation board was used to handle controller input.

A more interesting case is the Playstation 3. Moving from the original Playstation to the PS2 took Sony from a CPU compatible with a pretty widely-used instruction set to an entirely custom chip, the Emotion Engine, which was compatible with basically nothing else. The PS3's Cell processor and architecture not only strayed farther from industry standards, but was not particularly close to the Emotion Engine either. The ability to play PS1 games was a very popular feature of the PS2, so to maintain backwards compatibility on the PS3, early "fat" 60GB deluxe models contained actual PS2 hardware that handled discs from the previous generation. 

This was an expensive feature in an already very expensive console. It was not a surprise to anyone when Sony opted to implement PS2 compatibility in software in later models instead. PS1 games were already handled via software emulation, and that worked reasonably well, but a PS1 was a bear of very little brain when compared to PS3, whereas the PS2... well, there were some issues. Most games worked mostly fine. A few games were a disaster. Behold:

Microsoft took an entirely different approach, where they effectively ported a lot of popular games to their new hardware and used your old discs as a "proof of purchase" that let you download the new versions. Which is great, until they decide to stop hosting the ports. Microsoft has historically been pretty pig-headed about their ideas (see: the 'always-on Kinect' controversy) so I doubt they'll ever provide first-party native support for previous generations of games. Sony has also ditched direct compatibility; the Playstation 4 has only a Blu-Ray drive, which can physically read DVDs but doesn't recognize the format of PS2/PS3 discs, and can't see PS1 CDs at all. PS4 and PS5 play previous games through a subscription service that gives access to some, but definitely not all, of the past library.

from Blogger https://ift.tt/6TczYsr via IFTTT -------------------- Enjoy my writing? Consider becoming a Patron, subscribing via Kindle, or just toss a little something in my tip jar. Thanks!

[mmorgbazaar]

What is the best nintendo ds emulator for windows

#What is the best nintendo ds emulator for windows for windows 10

#What is the best nintendo ds emulator for windows Pc

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#What is the best nintendo ds emulator for windows mac

#What is the best nintendo ds emulator for windows windows

Lastly, Shaders in RetroArch help improve the rendering of old games. Using RetroArch you can record your gaming session and even stream your gameplay on Twitch. The set-top box oriented menu of RetroArch makes the process of browsing games a breeze. RetroArch can be downloaded on Windows, macOS, and Linux. Some of the major highlights of RetroArch are shaders, netplay, rewinding, next-frame response times, run ahead, machine translation, blind accessibility features, and much more. The developers of RetroArch have stated that users will soon be able to run original game discs from RetroArch. Use Your Pokemon ROM to play Pokemon games using this popular DS emulator for PC. Unlike MelonDS & DeSmuME, RetroArch is an all-in-one emulator and it can be used to run games from all mainstream retro consoles like NES, SNES, DS, DSi, 3DS, 64, Atari, MAME, and many more.

#What is the best nintendo ds emulator for windows download

We advise our readers to download the DeSmuME DS emulator using the links provided in this article as downloading it from a third-party or an untrustworthy site can be unsafe.

#What is the best nintendo ds emulator for windows windows

You can either opt for high graphics quality coupled with mediocre performance or low graphics quality with flawless performance.ĭeSmuMe is presently available for Windows and macOS. Using DeSmuME you can scale your games as per your preference.ĭeSmuMe allows users to customize the graphics and emulation settings based on their system configurations. Similar to MelonDS, DeSmuME allows users to play exclusive DS titles at maximum graphics. This tool is one of the unique tools because it has a set of pre-loaded games as well.DeSmuME is another famous emulator for Nintendo DS and you can also consider it as an ideal alternative to MelonDS. The emulator options can be adjusted and altered at the wish of the user. This tool has everything a gamer should experience before investing in the actual Nintendo. Although after you get used to it, you can proceed with using it later on.

#What is the best nintendo ds emulator for windows Pc

If you are a non-tech-savvy person, this Nintendo DS emulator for PC will be a little challenging for you. There are numerous emulators together to give the users an outstanding experience. See also: 7 Best SNES Emulators for Windows 10/8.1/8/7/XP RetroArchĭo you want the best DS emulator for PC that has amazing old games as well? RetroArch will let you live the retro-lifestyle of game consoles. Get Citra on your device if you want to get things started. It will be difficult to find such an emulator somewhere else. You can enjoy playing games for a resolution of up to 4K. Citraįor the Pokemon lovers, you should know one amazing thing about this Nintendo DS Emulator PC. The major focus here is only Pokemon games, so if you are looking for a combination of games, you might want to skip to the next option directly. If you just want to get a Pokemon emulator PC, then Citra should be your top pick. Here are some ways to make it run faster. This gives you the benefit of enjoying this tool the way you want. Yes, you can choose to customize the graphics in the way you want. There is a bunch of customization you can enjoy if you are using this emulator. You can use this tool on both Windows and iOS. This Pokemon emulator for PC is something you should try if you have not. Although the pronounce is a little difficult, you should not judge a book by its cover. The multiplayer option does not always work and has been a disappointment as a feature.Īnother best DS emulator for PC is DeSmuME and is one tool that you can rely upon. NO$GBA fails to provide a variety of screen display options to its users. This is because it makes sure that too many resources are not wasted unnecessarily. However, this emulator is one of the fastest ones you will ever find. You might see that the graphic settings have minimal features. This emulator is one of the rarest emulators that supports not only Nintendo DS Lite but also GBA.

#What is the best nintendo ds emulator for windows for windows 10

See also: The Best NES Emulator for Windows 10 NO$GBAįor those using Windows, NO$GBA is the best emulator for PC. Also, this is only available on MAC, so, Windows users, you might have to skip to the subsequent parts of this article. The drawback is that there are not many options to choose from when it comes to the variety of games. You have the liberty to arrange the games in the way you desire to rearrange them.

#What is the best nintendo ds emulator for windows mac

This tool has a user interface similar to iTunes, so all the MAC users will fall in love with this tool. If you want an extremely user-friendly Pokemon Emulator for PC, OpenEmu is the one for you. Here are some of the best DS emulator for PC that you can pick from to get the best experience. However, they may not always be the best ones that are available in the market. Many emulators are available in the market and claim that they will give you the best service. 2 Conclusion Best DS Emulator for PC To Choose From.1 Best DS Emulator for PC To Choose From.

[bananacitizen]

Pre rnadomized pokemon sun rom

Pre rnadomized pokemon sun rom install#

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This game is a gift for you from DinoWrecks. Pokemon Fire Red Randomizer Version is a little hack of Fire Red, with the chance to obtain all 150 Kanto Pokemon, and their cross gen evolutions from Johto! For more details about author, time and language of this game, you can read the information box at the top.These ROM hacks add a ton of new features and experiences! All you will need to play is the Homebrew Launcher on your 3DS. Check out this 3DS Pokemon ROM Hacks Collection featuring ROM Hacks of Pokemon X/Y, Pokemon Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire, Sun/Moon, and Ultra Sun/Ultra Moon.

Pre rnadomized pokemon sun rom download#

Pokemon X And Y Randomizer Rom Download.The Wild Pokemon you encounter in grass, caves and other places. In the same vein as previously released randomizers, it provides a customized gameplay experience by allowing you to randomize many things: The Starter Pokemon choices.

Pre rnadomized pokemon sun rom full#

So, while Drayano has given us the chance to fill Pokedexes without downloading both hacks, it’s still worth playing through them both for the full experience. The Universal Pokemon Randomizer is a program which will give you a new experience playing Pokemon games.

Pre rnadomized pokemon sun rom install#

Then, install the Universal Randomizer application and follow the instructions for downloading. If you dont, you can download them from the LoveROMS website. All of the trainers from the original game have had their fighting teams mixed up and swapped around, making for a brand new challenge for those that are incredibly ofay with the classic DS title.īlaze Black 2 also looks dramatically different to Volt White 2. To randomize generations 1-5 of your Pokemon game, start by making sure that you have a Pokemon ROM and emulator installed. There are a whopping 649 Pokemon to capture and train in this hack. Pokemon BB2 is a sequel to Drayano’s Black and White hack ‘Blaze Black’. If anything, this game feels like more of a traditional RPG than the original titles. Using The Pokemon essentials engine, this fan made game takes place in the brand new region of Hawthorne. The game takes place in the new region of Rijon, it introduced ten new cities, one Johto city and over 20 new routes to explore. Pokemon Pheonix Rising is the first and possibly most well known game in our list of the best Pokemon Nintendo DS ROM hacks. It’s based off of the classic Gameboy game but with some minor changes to the storyline. Remember we mentioned Drayano’s ROM hacks above? Well, this is another example of their brilliant work. Pokemon Brown is known by many, as it’s one of the oldest Pokemon ROM hacks around. Pokemon Blaze Black jumps into 8th position in our best Pokemon Nintendo DS ROM hacks list. Pokemon: Black 2 ROM (NDS) is the file in NDS format that will allow us to run the Pokemon: Black 2 game in the Nintendo DS Emulator: DeSmuMe, WinDS Pro, MelonDS, DraStic DS, etc that we have at our disposal.So, once we have ready our emulator and the ROM of the game in question we will proceed to follow the download and installation instructions that we leave below. Oh, and all the original starter Pokemon from the original games can Mega-Evolve too, not just Charizard, giving your team even more fighting power! 8. Initially intended as an 'additional series' that wouldnt effect his usual uploads at all, it became a hugely popular mainstay of the channel, and paved the way for TyranitarTube content we see today.

Pre rnadomized pokemon sun rom series#

Take advantage of Mega Charizard as a character in your team, and venture out to catch Mew, Suicine, Regirock, and many other classic legendary Pokemon. Pokémon Alpha Sapphire Extreme Randomizer was the first popular series on Thamill’s YouTube channel. Kanto’s original Pokemon have been redesigned for this new hack, with a new area of God’s Garden available to enter. In essence, it’s based on the old ROM hack Silver Blue but also has a strong Pokemon Yellow vibe about it. Updated February 8, Pokemon - Leaf Green Version. Pokemon Silver Yellow is a bit of an amalgamation of various other Pokemon games and ROM hacks. Download Pokemon Sun Moon FireRed, a GBA Rom Hack, Latest Version: Beta, pre-patched and ready to play.

[megatentious]

Ranking 23 Megami Tensei Games

There’s nothing the internet loves more than rankings, so here are some rankings of every Megaten game I’ve finished (for every Megaten game I own, stay tuned!!) This needs to be done in “tier” form though since trying to sort all of this is difficult enough as is. Let’s start with this ludicrous scale to get everyone on the same page.

★★★★★ C.L.A.S.S.I.C.S.

★★★★ Excellent games I love dearly, even the one you think doesn’t belong!

★★★ Good games, very enjoyable.

★★ #problematic, still okay though.

★ Not good.

Okay let’s get started.

★★★★★

Shin Megami Tensei 3; quietly, artfully, demolishes the moral complexity of all competing games, the greatest turn-based combat in RPG existence, the purest aesthetic vision of Kazuma Kaneko, the lonely grandness of the universe refracted through punk-rock demonology. Here is several thousand more words I wrote about it. Buy it on PSN or Amazon.

Revelations: Persona; there's no game that has matched its lurid dreamscape atmosphere, the most tasteful illustration of PSX-era philosophizing, choice (attention Gold Box fans) is the theme that pervades plotpoints, characters & battling, Mark danced crazy. Read my lengthy defense of it and buy it on eBay or through the PS Classic.

★★★★

Megami Tensei 2; begins with a mindblowingly meta intro that invokes nostalgia in the Famicom era, a Kaneko character sprite replaces blue-pointer-man on the (beautiful) world map!!, the LOSARM status occurs when you lose your arm. Buy it as the Super Famicom remake “Kyuuyaku Megami Tensei” on Wii Virtual Console and play the fan translation, Megami Tensei: Old Testament.

Shin Megami Tensei; the most elegantly plotted Shin Megami Tensei, a series of uncanny vignettes in everly increasing stakes, culminating in a final cathedral that reflects heavenly law and hellish chaos through both religious speechifying and floor map design. Read my Official Thread about it and buy it on iOS if you haven't updated your phone or tablet yet. Otherwise make do with the fan translation for SNES.

Soul Hackers; A vision of 1990s futurism and occultism, a showcase for multiple interesting interlocking subsystems for devil summoning, vision quests are true highlights: novel perspective switching through both game mechanics and aesthetics. Buy it on 3DS.

Persona 2: Innocent Sin; a manic wildly engrossing conspiracy-minded plot that never forgets to do kindly by its cast of characters, the best way to contextualize Persona 4. Buy it on PSN.

Persona 2: Eternal Punishment; playing this without its prequel probably helped build this game’s atmosphere in its own way, a swansong for the 1990s. Buy it on PSN.

Digital Devil Saga; a concise and brutal poem of an RPG, cyber-Buddhism, excellent dungeons. Buy it on PSN or Amazon if you don't want emulation issues.

Digital Devil Saga 2; a little weirder and less elegant than its predecessor, but Battle for Survival is unbelievable. PSN will probably give you emulation issues here as well.   Persona 3; A tarot journey with a "hip-hop" soundtrack, goth-animu becomes something greater than the sum of its parts, a mix of roguelike-like systems and simulation elements that manages to somehow work brilliantly. The original non-FES version is my favorite since no further cruft is added, but buy it on PSN. Raidou Kuzunoha vs. King Abaddon; the tone of Japanese detective shows and Megami Tensei, Raidou’s cape fluttering across 20th century cityscapes, Adventure. Buy it on PSN.

Raidou Kuzunoha vs. The Soulless Army; seriously, Raidou is the coolest protagonist in videogames and this subseries is incredible. Buy it on PSN. 

Shin Megami Tensei 4; for all its flaws, it still contains the Tokyo Moment. Buy it on 3DS.

★★★

Shin Megami Tensei 2; if only we had an official localization (and if only this game had its own unique final dungeon theme). Buy it on eBay.

Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey; Do not play Redux under any circumstances. Buy it on DS.

★★

Persona 4; think about that bit of sadness in the first 30 seconds of Heartbeat, Heartbreak and Your Affection. No matter how goofy or stupid the game gets elsewhere, it’s there where you can glimpse some of what grounds the game's tone, something that gets lost in everything that came after the PS2 original.

Persona 5; a year and a half later and still haven’t sorted out where the hell this mess ranks, just sticking it here for now. Those 3D Kaneko models though.

Megami Tensei; thinking about where dungeon crawlers were at in 1987, this one is actually super cool.

Shin Megami Tensei If; the whole point of tiers is to avoid ranking everything in detail, but this one is also very tough to place between ★★ and ★. Starts rather miserably but begins to reach its potential as it goes on, with the true final dungeon synthesizing map design and thematic concept in true SMT fashion. The lack of new music, choices, and general rom-hack atmosphere is unforgivable for an SMT though.

Devil Survivor; Still one of the sonic and aesthetic lows for this franchise, but Overclocked and its compendium turn this one around from initial impressions. Mission design can get poor and the characters remain awful, but there is undeniable satisfaction to be had here. 

★

Shin Megami Tensei Online; even Kaneko can’t get me to enjoy an MMO.

DemiKids Dark Version; completely unremarkable.

Shin Megami Tensei 4 Apocalypse; Everything about how I feel is here.

[penny-nichols]

OK I have like. A small complaint/idea/whatever ok Why aren’t the Professor Layton games on PC?  I’m being serious here, the first 3 ones (and mystery room) are on mobile, the newer ones were made for switch.... but none of them are on PC. And I feel like that’s kind of an untapped market????  Like I’ve enjoyed the story of the 2,5 layton games I’ve played (Curious village, Ace Attorney crossover and part of Diabolical Box) and I do want to be able to play them for myself as opposed to watching a playthrough (even though I am very bad at the puzzles) HOWEVER the original games are only on mobile. They’re like $10 which is money that I am willing to spend on a game. In fact I DID spend it on Curious village. but I eventually had to delete it for storage space and google is not letting me redownload it (which is, you know, the main reason I’m nervous about spending money on mobile games). I could get it on cartridge but  1. one of the puzzles in Diabolical box involves folding a ticket you get in the manual and a lot of places you can get the cartridge (ebay and stuff) come without it. (granted the solution is fairly easy to look up, which I did because I emulated the game) and  2. Cartridges at most resellers go for a lot more than digital games cost most of the time. Like, For example the Ace Attorney trilogy is $30 on steam, $15 if you get it on sale. on ebay the ds cartridges go for about $20 PER GAME. You could literally pay more for a single game than the entire trilogy. With the great ace attorney chronicles on sale for $25 too, you could literally get 5 ace attorney games for the price of 2 cartridges, and two of the games you get with that aren’t on 3DS cartridge/available in the us for the 3ds! ... okay that’s kinda a tangent but I just checked gamestop. They have the first 2 layton games (and some of the 3ds and switch ones) available in store. so you’ve gotta be lucky enough to find the game you want IN gamestop (which has a pitifully small ds and 3ds section these days) and you can’t get game 3 unless someone HAPPENS to sell it because only games 1 and 2 are in their system. now, at gamestop they ARE priced the same as the mobile games, but once again, unless you’re very lucky, they don’t come with a manual. I’m checking Ebay right now and for Curious Village it’s about $15-$20 for a cartridge (presumably used)  Now you could always emulate it. thing is, last time I tried the emulator ate my data.  PLEASE level 5, just give us Layton! Give us the entire ds quadrilogy (??? just found out there’s four, I think they might only have the first 3 available on mobile) you don’t even have to give us the 3ds or switch games I just want to play them. Literally though! I don’t even like the puzzles and I would still pay actual money to be able to have the layton games on my computer! I know there would be formatting issues but listen to me! Reformat it!!! Please!!!!! Ace attorney was able to do it, so you can too! I believe in you!  ...Honestly, there’s one game I made this post specifically about and that is the Mobile only (as far as I’m aware anyway) game Layton Brothers Mystery Room because it is EXACTLY the thing I want to play. It’s more ace attorney as opposed to puzzle based (using evidence and finding clues) and I’ve played the first two cases and I really enjoy them! Only problem is: mobile only. I genuinely want to play more, I just want to buy the whole game at once and have the game locked to my steam account, not my google account on my phone. because like. What if I get a non android phone? what then? I’ll have to buy it again.  Genuinely though, I want to think about the amount of people who got introduced to Ace Attorney via the app versions vs the computer or switch versions. I’ve known 2 people with the apps for the games. One of them was playing it with someone else and a bigger screen was probably better (and was also playing the 3ds games) and the other didn’t have a ds or switch. There was a flood of new fans when Ace Attorney released for the switch, and I bet something similar could happen if Layton was made more accessible to the average person with a decent ish computer. (not even a gaming computer, it’s a puzzle based visual novel it will not use that much cpu I promise)  Please Level 5. I know it would take some work.  But the 15th anniversary of Layton is this year (if what I looked up is correct of course) and wouldn’t it be amazing for new fans to be able to play it on their computers? Also, Level 5 literally will not get any money from a secondhand cartridge so if they want to actually make money off of the games then they should release them for PC  The only thing I could think of preventing this is an exclusivity contract with Nintendo or something????? But I don’t think that would be the case seeing as they are on phone too.

[emeraldbabygirl]

Just found my Pokémon cards and looked through my lil booklets that come in the cases when you buy the Pokémon games and the nostalgia hitting so good like the memories of my childhood. I grew up with Pokémon buying the games and cards and watching it on tv and I remember when we recorded The Legend of Darkrai with a vhs tape ahhhh it makes me happy but sad. I remember I was so happy when I bought Firered at cdgame exchange and it came in it’s original boxed packaging and ugh. I have posters I used to hang on my wall of the Pokémon maps from different regions and the Pokédex stuff.

Man I wish the old things didn’t go out of style like my Emerald and Firered games the battery is borked and so time based events don’t work in the game anymore and it makes me sad cause the game is getting too old. I wish some old things never went bad like video games and game consoles and music listening devices like I remember I saw a Gameboy Advance system at one of them cute gaming shops with all kinds of old video games and like DS games and OG gameboy games and gba games and Wii and Xbox games and I wanted to buy a Gameboy Advance. I still wanna get one like yeah my DS Lite can play GBA games but to play a game on it’s own system is a game changer and I used to play on my brother’s Gameboy color, I remember poppin in one of them chonkie boys. He had yellow and red and gold and silver and crystal. Man I wish they could like restore that stuff not like remake it but make it so people can still play the OG stuff on their systems like I know the whole “out with the old in with the new” and a lot of people prolly don’t care and I know you can get emulators for all kinds of games but nothin beats the old games and I grew up on Pokémon and would love to play them OG Pokémon games. Eventually my DS games ain’t gonna work no more and that sucks ass. I have only Pokémon games for the DS like. Man all these memories it makes me really sad. There was nothing better than the feelings or playing my Pokémon games for hours and hours. I have Firered, Emerald, Diamond, Heartgold, Black 2, X, two ranger games and Conquest which is a fun game. I wish there was a way that they could remake the old Pokémon games so that you could play on the original systems again. Not like remake it like Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire but like restore them? Like time sucks cause it can ruin great things. Makes me sad. And Pokémon Yellow has such a cute intro. I went to the store the other day cause I wanted to see if they had OR or AS or the Sun and Moon games and they got not DS or 3DS games it’s all Switch now. Like yeah I watch Jeup play Sword and Shield but it’s not the same and it just doesn’t look fun. Jeup playing Sword and Shield is a story for another time tho. Anyway :( ALSO I FOUND MY POKEWALKER I THOUGHT IT WAS LOST it’s just dead and I can’t replace the battery :(

[tumblunni]

AAAAAAAAAA and also that reminds me PRINCESS DEBUT

princes debuuuuuuuut

I feel like this was a similar timeframe to that!! it was something i found in the first year after i escaped my dad, and my computer couldnt run it, so i bookmarked it and just assumed i’d never lose my files ever so i forgot all the details Princess Debut tho was actually translated, it was just that i couldnt emulate DS games very well back then. I could sorta manage text-only stuff like Phoenix Wright but even then I was battling thru super slow framerate and OH MAN I was so mad at the klavier song cutscene that plays three damn times cos it would lag those sections out to half an hour of frame-by-frame nonsense Princess Debut was a visual novel so I thought it would work, but it turns out its a visual novel with Funky Minigames so it crashed at that. And that just made me even more curious cos i got so see 15 minutes of intro and then AAAA I WANNA PLAY DEM MINIGAMES!! it was some sort of rhythm thing! and you could customise your dance outfit and everything would suddenly turn 3d to show you it. and i think the plot was like ‘you fall into the mirror world and get mistaken for the princess, youve gotta buck up and learn princess entiquette before some sort of big political congress in X days’ and it was kinda like wonderland but more beaurecratic? and you could romance a bunch of princes who were the mirror selves of your classmates in the real world, and then you’d get together with them in the other world too if you finished your princessly challenges and successfully woke up again. I guess maybe its meant to be that your mirror self the princess was also hitting on the same guy while she stole your place in the real world? or that everyone’s just meant to be like dark selves of who you really are inside, rather than opposite clones, so you’re still ending up with the same guy, really. And probably the princess would keep whatever stat gains you got while you were taking her place, so you’d kinda be fixing her problems? but still isnt she kind of a jerk for stealing your place and not even telling you what to do to survive as her?? i cant remember if she was a villain or the player character agreed to it. also why am i doing all this metaphysics theorizing based on a 15 minute introduction and the back of the box, it’s probably explained later once i actually play the damn thing oh but MAN all I remember is that i really wanted to ignore all the princes and date the grumpy butler bishie childhood friend I HOPE THATS AN OPTION!! I think the butler from 7KPP reminded me of him, I kinda hope he’s an option too when that game gets finished. I wonder if its still being updated? MAN IM REMEMBER ALL THEM GAMES

[hellosaltysaladcollectionstuff]

Video game hardware often serves as a hurdle for developers to overcome. Whether it's running out of memory or figuring out how to translate a player's interactions with a controller into a dynamic 3D world meant to emulate real life, just getting things to work smoothly is an accomplishment in and of itself. But with some games, developers take things further, and the end result can be better off for it.

There have been countless memorable moments in games, whether it's a well-designed boss fight, an unexpected character death, or an awe-inspiring view. But many of the best moments stem from the way games use hardware in unique ways to deliver something unforgettable. In other cases, special hardware or accessories are used to deliver an experience that otherwise wouldn't be possible with a typical controller or keyboard and mouse.

We've rounded up some of our favorite examples of the best uses of gaming hardware, one that saw fans use technology to turn an existing game into something very different, and a few others that were certainly original, if not very good. Be sure to share those that stick out in your memory with us in the comments below.

Metal Gear Solid

For a series chock-full of noteworthy bosses, it's a testament to the creativity of the original Metal Gear Solid that Psycho Mantis remains so memorable. That comes down in large part to the way the sequence utilized the PS1 in ways I had never seen before. The psychic FOXHOUND villain screws with Solid Snake--and the player--by manipulating the PS1. For instance, the screen goes black, which caused me a brief moment of panic where I thought something had gone wrong with my system.

In an even more brilliant moment, Psycho Mantis looks at the save files stored on your memory card and comments on them. He remarks on the number of times progress has been saved in MGS and points out certain games that you have save progress in. (Years later, this led to one of my favorite parts of Metal Gear Solid 4, where Mantis can't pull off the same tricks due to the PS3's hard drive and vibration-less Sixaxis controller.) At one point, you deal with with his powers by switching the port that your controller is plugged into, which I still find an astoundingly bold choice for a game.

Sadly, some of these things were specifically tailored to the PS1 and GameCube versions, and have thus been lost to time if you don't play them on the original hardware. Still, there was nothing quite like getting to experience all of this in the moment without any warning about what to expect. | Chris Pereira

Boktai

Famed designer Hideo Kojima could do no wrong during the late '90s and early 2000s. He won my young heart with the cinematic stylings of Metal Gear Solid and the fast-paced robot action of Z.O.E: Zone of the Enders. So when I found out that his next non-Metal Gear game would be a GBA game that utilized a solar sensor on its cartridge to fuel an in-game mechanic, I was instantly intrigued.

Titled Boktai, the game stars Django, a young vampire hunter on a quest to avenge his father's death. Equipped with his trusty solar powered gun, the Gun Del Sol, Django takes on all sorts of undead foes. This is where the game cartridge's solar sensor comes in; your gun only holds a limited amount of energy, and once depleted, you need to charge it by holding the gun up to the sun. But in order to do this, you literally need to hold the game up towards the actual sun, so the solar sensor can detect its warming rays. Of course, this means you actually have to play the game outside.

Boktai is a strange yet entertaining action-RPG made all the stranger by its solar sensor functionality. I recall spending hours playing the game outside--or occasionally cheating by opening my window to briefly charge Django's gun before retreating indoors to play until I needed another charge. In my experience, the only real drawback to the game is that you couldn't effectively play the game during the colder seasons--for obvious reasons.

I thoroughly enjoyed Boktai's sunlight mechanic as a kid, and it remains a joy to play even now thanks to compelling dungeon crawling and a slew of clever puzzles that took advantage of the game's real-time clock and day-night cycle. To this day, the game remains one of the most memorable and innovative uses of GBA hardware. If you can track down a copy, I highly recommend it--if only to experience one of Kojima's quirkier and more adventurous game concepts. | Matt Espineli

Image credit: donpepe

Sega Activator

Anyone who played console games in the early '90s is well aware of how many gimmicky controllers made it to market. Of the wacky lot of plastic trinkets that cluttered our basements, you'd be hard-pressed to find one as over-the-top as Sega's Activator for the Genesis. The octagonal ring promised to let you punch and kick in the real world and have it translate to fighting games like Mortal Kombat or Street Fighter II.

Sounds amazing, right? Well, while not an outright lie, the advertisements for the Activator may have been stretching the truth a bit. In practice, you couldn't simply punch and kick as you would hope; to execute a specific action, you would have to send your hand or foot over a specific part of the octagon. Each section of the ring corresponded to a button on the Genesis controller and contained a light sensor that detected when you crossed its invisible threshold. Imagine waving your palms frantically around your body trying to move your on-screen character, throw a punch or two, or god forbid execute a complicated combo attack, and you can easily understand why the Activator was derided by early adopters (read: suckers) who fell for Sega's brief marketing blitz. It is, at best, an interesting footnote. | Peter Brown

Image credit: SegaRetro

Pokemon Go

People still debate Pokemon Go's quality as a video game, but there's no doubt that it uses smartphone technology in an inventive and powerful way. By utilizing your location and some fiddly but capable AR, the mobile game turns your local area into your very own Pokemon adventure. It means you can explore your own neighbourhood in the same way you explored Kanto all those years ago. It's immediately nostalgic and emotional for anyone who played the mainline games and wants to be the one catching Pokemon and venturing across the land.

To some people, Pokemon Go might just be a throwaway mobile fad, something that went viral overnight because The Internet and that's that. But to others, including myself, it allows us to finally achieve what we'd always wanted: To transport ourselves inside a Pokemon game and be the very best, like no one ever was. | Oscar Dayus

Let's Tap

Let's Tap is a game, but it deserves an entry here for the interesting way it made use of Nintendo's Wii Remote. At a time when every studio under the sun was working on the next great motion-controlled game (bless their naive hearts), former Sonic Team head Yuji Naka conceived a game that utilized the Wii Remote's accelerometer, but without the user having to hold the controller in their hand. Instead, you would lay your Wii Remote face down on a cardboard box, and tap the box with your fingers to interact with Let's Tap's collection of mini-games. These included a Jenga-like deconstruction game, a multiplayer sprint race, and a basic rhythm game, among a few other simple applications.

Let's Tap and Naka get bonus points for originality, but the game failed to make a splash despite its inventive spirit. As former GameSpot reviewer Luke Anderson pointed out, "Let's Tap certainly offers a different way to play, but the games don't completely mesh with the control scheme and, with the exception of Rhythm Tap, could have worked every bit as well with a more conventional control setup." | Peter Brown

Looney Tunes: Duck Amuck

As someone who likes to tease and bug my friends, it makes a lot of sense in retrospect that I had such a great time with Looney Tunes: Duck Amuck, a game all about annoying Daffy Duck. Based on the classic cartoon of the same name (pictured above), which sees an off-screen animator mess around with Daffy, Duck Amuck tasks you with generally tormenting the character. It's a creative idea for a game, but what makes it special is the way in which it leverages the DS hardware.

Some of the ways of interacting with Daffy are pretty straightforward--you use the touchscreen to poke and prod him or to pick him up and launch him off the screen. Where it really blows my mind is in the way that it allows you to physically close the system, something which would normally suspend what you're playing and put the handheld in sleep mode. Instead, the game keeps going, and Daffy shouts out at you, allowing you to continue playing a mini-game using the shoulder buttons. It's a feature that I'm still glad that Nintendo allowed, and it made for an experience I still remember vividly more than a decade later. | Chris Pereira

NeGcon

Namco's legacy took root in the arcade, a place where games and hardware often combined in surprising and unexpected ways. This innovative spirit stuck with Namco; in 1995, it fundamentally reinvented the standard PlayStation controller in hopes of improving the experience of playing racing games at home. The result was the unusual NeGcon controller, which was split down the middle from top to bottom, allowing users to twist the controller's two halves. Compared to the digital inputs of a d-pad or the short throw of an analog stick, this wide range of motion allowed for more finesse when turning the wheel of a virtual car. Despite its odd appearance, the NeGcon found wide support from other publishers and could be used with games like Gran Turismo, Rally Cross, and Wipeout (including Wipeout Fusion on PS2). It's an odd-looking controller to be sure, but it fulfilled Namco's promises. It was such a success, that Namco would follow-up with another racing-centric controller only a few short years later... | Peter Brown

Image credit: Wikipedia

Jogcon

Rather than iterate on the NeGcon, Namco went back to the drawing board for the development of the Jogcon, a controller with a force-feedback-enabled wheel crammed into the middle. It was marketed alongside Ridge Racer Type-4--the final entry in the series on the original PlayStation--but would also be compatible with PlayStation 2 games like Ridge Racer V. Not one to forget its past, Namco allowed you to trick the controller into a NeGcon mode, which allowed for wider support, albeit without the force-feedback feature. While it didn't enjoy widespread success like the NeGcon, the Jogcon still deserves respect for packing force-feedback into a standard controller, allowing players to experience the push and pull of the road without having to invest in expensive and bulky racing wheel setups. | Peter Brown

Image credit: videogameclipcollect

Twitch Plays Pokemon

Okay, Twitch Plays Pokemon wasn't technically a unique use of video game hardware, but it was still one of the most creative moments in recent video game history. It allowed those watching the stream to control the protagonist of a number of Pokemon games, starting with Pokemon Red and continuing with sequels such as Pokemon Crystal, Emerald, and Platinum, among many more. Viewers achieved this by typing in commands--"up," "down," "B"--to make the main character move and perform actions.

As you can imagine, that made actually playing the game very difficult. Trying to beat a Gym Leader, catch an elusive Legendary, or even walk in the right direction is tricky when dozens of thousands of people each have a controller.

However, as we all know, give enough typewriters to enough monkeys and they'll eventually beat the Elite Four, and that we did. And when the moment came that this cacophony of monkeys finally beat the first game, pure joy ensued. We'd done it! Twitch Plays Pokemon had made us the controller and we didn't mess it up. It merely took us a brief 16 days, 9 hours, 55 minutes, and 4 seconds. | Oscar Dayus

Plastic Instruments for Guitar Hero and Rock Band

The plastic instrument revolution led by the Guitar Hero and Rock Band franchises came and went, but its impact on rhythm games (and games in general) is unforgettable. GuitarFreaks in Japan preceded other instrument-based music games, but it never matched the reach and influence of Guitar Hero. In 2005, developer Harmonix nailed the feeling of shredding in Guitar Hero by simply pairing five notes as frets on the guitar neck with a small lever that acts as the strings in the packaged instrument. The other key ingredient was obtaining hit songs that captured a Western audience regardless of the diverse tastes in rock music, whether it be classic, punk, metal, or indie rock.

Seeing Guitar Hero in action for the first time with the plastic guitar immediately makes perfect sense: follow the pattern on screen and pluck the lever while holding down the correct note(s). In this regard, the game is accessible to those who have never picked up the instrument before but also challenges those actually knew how to play a guitar. The series provided an avenue to not just discover new songs but build a rhythmic connection with the melodies and harmonies of songs you already loved.

In 2007, Harmonix topped themselves with Rock Band, which cranked the concept up to 11. Not only did it retain the intuitive guitar gameplay, but the game included a microphone for vocals, a full drum set, and the option for a second guitar to cover basslines. The game really lived up to its name. It was the perfect blend of karaoke, Taiko Master, and Guitar Hero with the continued tracklist of diverse rock songs that satisfied nearly all tastes in music.

Unfortunately, the genre lost its appeal over time and the accumulation of plastic instruments became a burden for both retailers and consumers. The concept is still more than a novelty; dusting off those old guitars and drums can make a good party great. | Michael Higham

from GameSpot https://ift.tt/2GZ2WId

[trentonpssr171-blog]

Through the mid-nineteen nineties, individual desktops had progressed to The purpose in which it absolutely was technically feasible to replicate the actions of several of the earliest consoles completely by computer software, and the main unauthorized, non-professional console emulators commenced to appear.

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