I used to nostalgiafag a lot in retrogaming forums back in the day, really went into the "digital archeology" side of things even reaching to old devs from that era asking for questions about the games.
Eventually I realized I didn't miss the games as much as I missed that era of my life, and now I'm a 30something doing jokes on a flightless bird forum for humorous bovine watching.
I agree with most of the games here, except the RPGs that I found a pain in the ass to play.
Back then 16bit and 32bit hardware was basically worthless (PS2-X360 era) and I wish I had bought more of that if only to resell that shit now. Tho the current inflated prices are 100% speculation, few millennials have the pockets to pay out the ass for rare game like boomers who would drop $20k for an old spiderman comic book or some baseball card. My guess is that between FPGA gaming and cart reprints these prices are eventually gonna crash because its unsustainable.
The Sega Genesis is one reason I later fell out of love with Zelda. After Landstalker and Crusader of Centy, it was hard to put Zelda on a pedestal ever again. (SNES games Soulblazer, Illusion of Gaia, Secret of Mana etc. didn't help Zelda's chances either)
I said it before and I'll say it again: zelda is the most overrated series ever, its fanbase as insane if not more than harry potter's or starwars'.
But even in 1996 most people I knew were still playing the Genesis and SNES.
IIRC the Snes was still supported until 2001 or so, the hardware being produced up to 1998. Sega fucked up badly by dropping the Genesis in 1996 to focus on the Saturn, tons of extra revenue were lost that way.
Then again Sega were experts in fucking up during that era.
I have a colossal backlog of Genesis games. If I go to prison, I want a Genesis in my cell. Actually, if I get to have a Genesis in my cell, I want to go to prison.
You go to prison and get a Genesis, but its the shitty markIII model, your only games are awesome possum and a broken copy of S&K where you can only play the mind numbing fake 3D special stages over and over.
And this is your only controller:
I was the dumbass that bought the Sega CD and 32X at launch.
I bought a Saturn in chrismas '96, nuff said.
I've played the translated version of Headdy. The guy that made it is called M.I.J.E.T.
Dude has his own website where he has all of his rom translations including Battle Mania, Pulseman, and some other Japan-only stuff
Wasn't DH release in Europe too? was that version not translated either?
I remember Pulseman from the Sega Channel, and then the ROMs. Hard af to play, but whats funny is that the dev is gamefreak the same ones from Pokemon. Imagine if Sega got them to launch Pokemon on the GameGear instead of the Gameboy which was literally saved by that franchise.
That and passing on the PSX were Sega's 2 biggest mistakes.
Also it must be said.... anime-style art used to be attractive
I'm willing to say it: a lot of the reason anime art used to be attractive is you used to be able to find variations on it.
It more or less looks nearly the same now across franchises, unless I am imagining it and am just being jaded. I personally blame a similar kind of corporatization that zeroed in on what kind of cartoon women most Japanese consumers like. Pity it seems to be oddly childlike women on average.
There was the novelty effect, also 'rule of cool', but anime back then was wild, you don't see things like AKIRA anymore and it was a tour de force, western stuff didnt hold a candle to it.
But just like gaming the anime industry has also consolidated. Whats specially jarring is the androgynous character design. Some dude combined all male and female protagonists of 80's anime and you could see clear difference between male and female characters. Then he did the same for current anime and there was no difference between the genders besides hair length.
Red Zone. It's like Urban Strike but with better music (by Jesper Kyd) and worse perspective (top-down instead of isometric, severely limiting the view). It's more of a tech demo than anything because the devs are all Amiga demo scene people. They would later form IO Interactive and make the Hitman series.
I remember Zyrinx, they also made Subterrania and Scorcher. Danish lego-fueled autism code wizards, Sega should've hired them to make dev tools for the Genesis and Saturn instead, specially the latter which was awful to work with.
Heads up for SNESchads, if you want a FXPak without paying the reddit krikkz tax, go to Aliexpress and look for the newer SD2SNES clones labeled "Super SD2", they're 1:1 FXPak dupes and they're charging around $110 before shipping so it still costs way less than fucking $225 for the "official" one.
I wish someone made a cheap MegaSD copy, at the current price you're better off getting a MISTeR.
All around, I feel like 16 bit gaming was the most exciting time for gaming. I'm sure I'm biased because I'm an old fuck, but there were so many different game studios that were constantly trying to innovate. Sure, there were countless Sonic the Hedgehog clones such as Tiny Toon Adventures, Bubsy, etc, but there were a lot of cool things happening back then.
It was a time of innovation when no idea was too crazy, we had 16 consoles at the same time in late 1994.
Nowadays there's only 3-ish. The Xbox and PS5 are just repackaged PCs with AMD hardware, and the Switch its a souped-up tablet with a shitty 720p screen, an obsolete nVidia X1 and a library that's 90% downgraded ports of older games. Even PC its getting boring, only 3 companies and its clear there's a price fixing scheme for GPUs. VR is moving more into standalone normie-tier hardware like the Quest and the Pico which use modded mobile chips like the switch.
As for the games themselves what hits me is the how devs back in the day were able to do so much with so little, meanwhile current devs are the definition of wasted potential, they could be doing so much with current hardware and yet they dont.
However I don't miss being stuck with hardware that goes unsupported overnight because the company decided to drop it or went bankrupt.
