I'll give you the same advice that I give myself whenever I feel this way: There are already more genuinely good video games in the world than you will be able to finish before you die. If there's a "classic" that you feel the need to experience, but you give it a solid chance and it's just not "clicking" for you, put it down and move on to something else. You've tried it, that's enough. Between all the games that exist, and trying to live a somewhat rounded life that has more than only games in it, you simply can't get around to all of them.

Windows games for versions of Windows from Windows 95 to Windows 2000/NT.

For PC games before Win95, pretty much everything can be emulated properly with DOS PC emulators. And from Win7 on, the software and hardware standards had mostly restabilized and WINE/Proton usually works well. But in between, there was a real Wild West of third-party libraries and official patches that were constantly being updated with compatibility-breaking changes. You can go through the hassle of setting up a whole virtual machine that really taxes your computer and still not get some games to work.

Most recomps seem to be of popular console games that already run quite well through easy-to-use emulators. It'd be nice to see more recomp efforts for less-well-known games that are harder to play at all on modern hardware. I know it's unlikely to happen, though; who wants to spend their efforts on niche games that most people haven't heard of, much less care about? Only someone who has a personal interest in that game.

King's Field Sword of Moonlight includes a full remake of King's Field 1, and a fan has been working on a remake of King's Field 2 for it.

Australians absolutely have credit cards. The previous poster seems to be getting their information from a single Aussie.

I couldn't find numbers specifically for the percentage of people who have at least one card, but the total number of CC accounts indicates that it's likely that the majority of working adults have one. That being said, credit card usage is low compared to other countries, I suspect because the government made the banks get together and create a universal electronic payment network in the 1980s, and we've all been used to paying virtually anywhere with our regular ATM cards, direct from our normal bank accounts, for decades. Credit cards are primarily used for, y'know, credit, and not just everyday transactions.

And for all the talk of the credit card companies, my personal experience with online payment processors has been that they often won't accept Cirrus or VISA Debit cards, or at least not cards issued outside their own country. So online shopping can be difficult without a credit card.

A few years ago I stumbled down a rabbit hole that led to the Shadow of the Colossus fan theory community.

If you play the game normally, you'll wander a deserted, forbidden land and defeat the 16 colossi, revealing a little more back story each time, see the finale, and finish the game.

If you explore every nook and cranny of the world, make careful charts, compare the PS2 original and the re-releases, and even hack the game to take the camera out of bounds, you'll find an astounding amount of detail that, at first, seems to be wasted. But over the years, fans have turned all of it into a surprisingly coherent possible expansion of the game's universe, including linking it more directly to the developer's previous game, Ico.

For a long time, many people were sure that some hidden secret remained buried in the game, to be revealed if only the right set of actions could be discovered. Most of the community seems to have given up on that now, but looking at what they assembled, it's hard to shake the feeling that there still may be something to it all.

It's a fuck load of work to make a game. It is kinda ridiculous to go to all that trouble then just stop after making 2 hours of gameplay, like 2 hours total without even a good sandbox.

Not that it's Steam's fault, but this is the same way of thinking that has led to big budget, story focused games getting padded with repetitive fetch quests and annoying collectibles that unlock progression.

Yes, it's a lot of work to make a game, but the only way to extend the play time of a story-focused single-player game without having to do even more work, is to water it down with low-effort filler content that reuses the expensive assets.

As I clicked on this thread I was literally thinking "Oh geez, are we still going to be able to get the older versions if we don't have freeon-cooled quantum processors and 32 teraquads of RAM?" I'm glad I'm not alone.

All of this just dilutes the real issue. Ask the majority of people who are complaining about a lack of physical media why they want physical media, and they'll tell you that it's so corporations can't take it away from them after a year or two.

This can still happen with physical media. Physical media on consoles these days is already closer to a download key than a complete, ready-to-play game. There are already examples of disc-based console games that are unplayable without some kind of online intervention. At the same time, it's been proven possible to run a profitable business with DRM-free downloads. I'd suggest that AAA publishers use DRM for 12-24 months, then switch to DRM-free, because they're concerned about the critical initial sales period. This sort of thing has happened in the past on PC.

Physical media are no guarantee against corporations stealing their goods back after sale. Offline DRM or no DRM are.

"To ensure the best possible player experience, this game will not run until the latest updates have been installed... Downloading... Error: Resource not found. Please try again later."

You're right about the incompatibility between NTSC and PAL, but deliberate region locking was common, even in the 8-bit era. It was very much the norm rather than the exception. Also, on older consoles they simply slowed the main CPU speed down for PAL so that everything in the system matched up with the video framerate. If you've ever read about how PAL versions of 8-bit and 16-bit games run slower than the NTSC versions, that's why. And it meant that you could plug out-of-region cartridges into your console, and if you could get around the region locking, they'd often work with minimal or no visual issues, just a little slower, because the video output was hardwired for PAL in the console. I played a few Japanese games on my PAL Mega Drive and SNES back in the day, on a PAL-only TV.

The PS1 and PS2 (both very much with region locking) had a weird thing going on where any console from any region could output both NTSC and PAL, depending on what the software asked for. I believe the GameCube and Dreamcast were similar; I ran original NTSC game discs on PAL versions of all of them.

In terms of what TVs would support, you're right that it wasn't until the late 1990s that fully dual-mode PAL/NTSC TVs started to become common, but that's not the same thing as 50Hz vs 60Hz. CRT TVs were designed to work best at a certain frequency, but they were also designed to cope with variations in the signal and power supply. Most PAL CRT TVs are actually capable of synching at 60Hz, which is where "PAL-60" comes in. PAL-60 is an unofficial "standard" in which the video signal runs at the NTSC framerate and vertical resolution, but with a PAL colour subcarrier. I used PAL-60 on many TVs, some produced as far back as the early 1980s, and never found one that wouldn't sync with it. I had a very inexpensive (Under AU$15 IIRC) NTSC-to-PAL-60 "converter" for the PS1/2 that I used to play NTSC games. You mentioned VCRs; there were VCRs that specifically played NTSC video cassettes as PAL-60. They weren't common, but they existed.

I remember when Metroid Prime 2 came out (I still have my copy) and there was indeed a small controversy in the gaming press about the PAL version being 60Hz only, but it was PAL-60, not NTSC, and I played the whole game on a PAL TV that definitely did not support NTSC, without any trouble.

There are also orders of magnitude of difference in their staff levels and budgets. Both sides of the equation are relative. I don't know of any techniques for creating good content quickly and inexpensively that only work for small indies and not for large AAA studios.

As soon as I saw the title I thought "They must be talking about the critically panned 1990 U.S. Gold game for home computers, not the 1999 Capcom arcade sequel."

Yep.

I remember the Fallout 3 issue. The objection was that allowing the in-game use of drugs like morphine and amphetamines would encourage real-world use, so they changed the names to things like "Stim-X" or whatever which somehow made it OK.

What was particularly galling was that there was a WW2 game released around the same time in which the player character could use those same drugs. In Fallout 3, there were/are negative aspects such as addiction and withdrawal to deal with, while in the WW2 game they were just straight up health restorers and stat buffs. But the WW2 game got a pass because it was "historically accurate".

One more note to clarify what's already been said: While the CPU in older consoles can read data and execute instructions directly from the cartridge because it's connected to the CPU's memory map like all the other hardware and RAM in the system, most consoles still needed graphics and sound data to be copied into specific areas of onboard RAM, and couldn't use them straight from the cartridge. This is because those subsystems were hardwired to work only from certain addresses, or even their own, separate RAM.

(I'm aware that the Famicom/NES doesn't do graphics this way by default, but in terms of hardware design it's an outlier, and getting into the weeds explaining everything related to that would at least double the length of this comment.)

Because the CPU can read and write that data so fast, however, it's still orders of magnitude faster than reading from most external media like tapes, floppy disks, and optical discs.

At $250 for 10 games, that works out to $25 per game, which is already less than the usual going rate for physical releases of Atari 2600 homebrew games and licensed repros. That is, games for the system are already selling for more than this at a rate high enough to make it a viable business for some people.

On top of that, those current releases are typically a cartridge, box, and manual, and nothing more. This series of re-releases also come with fabric badges and enamel pins like the ones you could send away for back in the day.

Atari isn't trying to create a new market for these products. They're catering to an existing market, but it's a market of which mainstream gaming circles are mostly unaware.

Not advice on what to do exactly, but why do you say "long box"? I know many PAL and NTSC-U Saturn games came in special, long boxes, but I can't recall ever seeing a Japanese Saturn game in anything other than quite standard CD jewel cases (special edition carboard outer boxes aside). Particularly Kaze no Regret, which is a fairly common game here (a regular jewel case copy still usually goes for under 1,000 yen, even with obi and other ephemera).

If you want to, it should be possible to pop the broken cover out of the hinge piece and replace it with the cover from almost any standard double-width CD jewel case. There are several videos on YouTube showing how to do this. Once you put in the paper insert, no-one would ever be able to tell.

This is only anecdotal, but I generally find that what I'll call the "raw" information density difference between written Japanese and English is pretty small. There's maybe a small advantage in Japanese.

In theory, Japanese should have a big advantage due to kanji, but once you account for having to display them at a larger size to keep them readable, plus all the other kana writing that's still necessary, you lose almost all of it.

So why does there still seem to be so much more English text, and what do I mean by "raw" information density? Well, I'm talking about directly equivalent, often overly literal translations. To say virtually the exact same thing in both languages takes approximately the same amount of text. But Japanese in actual usage is highly contextual. You can leave out a substantial fraction of words that would be necessary in English for a grammatically correct sentence, and not only remain understandable in Japanese, but correct enough to pass muster on a written language test.

It's entirely normal and common to omit not just subjects, but even verbs and entire clauses which the speaker assumes can be understood from context. Unfortunately a lot of this context is cultural rather than situational, and it was a real stumbling block for me for a few years. It still trips me up fairly frequently.

When someone translates this text from Japanese, it's usually necessary to reintroduce multiple things that were left out, in order to write sentences that flow naturally in English.

The original book of "Ready Player One" had a secret ARG, not unlike the one the main characters in the book take on. But as far as anyone can tell, no-one found it or even thought to look for it. Ten months after publication, the author Ernest Cline finally made an announcement about it.

The "trailhead" (starting clue/puzzle) was hidden in an almost identical way to the one in the story, and there was an empty leaderboard on his website just the same, too, but somehow no-one picked up on any of it. It must have been driving him and the publishers mad.

I don't know that it's usually naked greed for indies, as much as it's an effort to boost initial sales and get word-of-mouth going by preying on FOMO.

But yes, I'd be behind delayed special editions. More than once I've found out that some indie game had limited extra content for early buyers, and when people asked later if that content would ever be more widely available, the developers gave a slightly smug "Nope! I guess you should've backed it / bought it at launch, huh?"-style response.

I know that your life has probably been revolving around this game for months or years, but I only heard about it for the first time yesterday, and your backer campaign / launch sale ended 8 months ago. All you're doing with that attitude is souring potential customers.

I think it's better to offer the extras again at a later time, as part of a special edition and/or a separate bundle. Plenty of games do this, too.

TIL that cheap fanny packs can apparently now be called "cross-body packs" in a vain effort to make us forget how uncool they are.

Honestly, I think it would've been better if they'd leaned into it as a retro 80s/90s thing and just called it a fanny pack. It's already hideous, anyway.

Edit for clarification: There are things that I would happily and unironically call a "cross-body pack". But IMO the picture on that website is of a fanny pack.

It's almost completely subjective, of course, like all "Top N Media" lists. I doubt anyone's going to put, say, Action 52 on their best games list, but past a certain threshold of quality you can't really make a sound objective argument for any particular game to be included or excluded.

To echo Edges' comment, I also think that how highly different people rank different titles can be greatly affected by when they played them. I completely slept on the N64 when it was current, but I played Wind Waker at launch and enjoyed it thoroughly. I got the special edition, so when I finished WW I put in OoT but stopped almost immediately because it felt like a weak demake of the game I'd just spent weeks playing. I've tried it again in later years but I just can't stick with it. I understand why it's an Important Game, historically, and I can imagine how it would've made a deep impression on many people who played it when it came out (I'd probably be one of them), but all I see now is how rough it is around the edges.

And then there are variations in personal tastes. I don't think I'll ever play Stardew Valley. That's not the developer's fault, nor is it mine, any more than anyone's at fault if someone who doesn't like bananas doesn't want to eat a chef's award-winning banana cake.

The real meat of a "Top N" list, if any, is in what the author says about the games and why they chose them, not in the list of games itself. Unfortunately, this article doesn't say much beyond very nicely constructed review summaries that have been written dozens of times already.

It might be more interesting to identify a particular gaming "itch", and list a few popular games that scratch it, as well as some perhaps lesser-known games that do, games that seem like they should but don't, and games that seem like they wouldn't but do. And most importantly, for each game, why.