Nesseight

The idea that someone might have patched another FF game crossed my mind, but I never really checked into it. They seem to have done an awesome job on that NES port, though. They even got the music right. It's not the SNES version that I have in my head, but I do respect their attention to detail.

My favorite DOS games were Dark Forces and Scorched Earth. I don't really play them today, but I would if they were convenient to set up.

What are your opinions on applying a little patroleum jelly (vasoline) with a q-tip after a thorough cleaning to a cartridge to help prevent reoxidization?

For me, and this may change over time, but I consider "retro" games mostly 2D games starting with any classic arcade game like Pong or Pacman and probably ending during the SNES/Genesis days (MAYBE N64/PSX). After that, systems like the XBox, Gamecube, and PS2 I would consider "classic", maybe an exaggerated term, but doesn't feel quite as "old" as "retro" to me. The XB360, Wii, and PS3 are "previous generation", soon to become "classic", and whatever is on the market now is obviously "current generation", down-titled upon their release as when they were hype people referred to them as "nextgen" When it comes to computer gaming... it gets more complicated... I guess I consider anything Commodore or those old school Apple Macintoshes that you played Number Munchers and Oregon Trail on as retro, games pre Y2K for Windows a "classic", and anything newer as an older generation or current generation. But it gets really complicated. How would you describe an independent game like Xenonauts or Project Zomboid, which while developped recently, are designed in an old-school isometric fashion with graphics that are less than state-of-the-art?

I know they're remaking Final Fantasy 7 for the PS4, but oddly enough I wouldn't mind seeing it remade as a SNES game (true to the PS1 version in gameplay, but SNES graphics like FF6).

Virtual Console is nothing new, emulators have been around for years and have been perfected well beyond the limited capabilities of Virtual Console. It's just a way for Nintendo to charge you again for a game that you already owned years ago, and the selection isn't even that expansive. A lot of the better games aren't even available, but if you liked "Mario Bros." (not, not Super Mario Bros. which is a different and much superior game), you're in luck. Wii's greatest retro feature is the ability to play Gamecube games (Thank God, imagine playing VC with the "Craptassic Controller"). Other than that, it's cheaper just to go out to a used game shop, buy the old systems, and old games for a few bucks each, and have no limit on what games you can own, and if you get tired of them, you're not required to delete them, you can resell them and get your hard earned money back! O_O What a concept. I have a Wii, I actually like it even though it only has two or three games that I would be caught dead playing (no different from XBox or PS3, sorry fanboys). It's disappointing that third parties are too incompetent to make games at Nintendo's level of quality, and it's equally disappointing that Nintendo doesn't seem to notice that there's an Internet. Really, who wants to play Pokemon online when they could have made Metroid Prime 3 a direct competitor to Halo 3 just by giving it multi-player and hyping it up on TV. Oh well, flawless controls, Zelda-esque maps, complicated bosses. Still has excellent single-player, but it could have been much, much more then something that you pick up, play for twenty hours or less, then sell to a used games store.

Isn't the genre kind of dead? It might be interesting if it has online play. Ahh, the frustrations of lag in a game of skill and randomly mashing buttons. "Hado...do...do...do...do...do...do...do...do...do...do...do...do...do...do. ..do...do...do...do...ken...ken...ken"

Yeah, I read that on their forum when I went to download it. It seems a bit dodgy so I'll just be crossing that part out of my previous post...

I was curious about that myself. Turns out, it's the jars of toenail clippings.

That's cool. Haha, j/k. Wow, I forgot all about my earlier post. If I recall, I made it after witnessing some severe elitism on a forum that I've been a member of like forever, but rarely ever posted on. I think the plain-text in my signature was too big for a "regular", so when he complained, I made it all rainbow colored and the moderators made me delete it. Had it been anyone with a post-count higher than the moderator's IQ they would have surely let get by. (Notice that in the below screenshot that the guy who complained has a signature with "obnoxious colors"). I've witnessed their favoritism before under different, more severe circumstances (they allowed a regular to blatantly admit to and commit copyright infringement (ripping numerous sounds from a Star Wars DVD) without saying a word to him, which is strictly against their policies, yet when someone who doesn't post on their forum made a lesser infringement (ripping 1.9 seconds of voice from "The Matrix"), they picked it out with a fine-tooth comb and rejected his mod). If they freak out over slightly larger white text, I think they would have an aneurysm if I posted my 512 x 128 JPG signature... That forum's still around, and I bet it still sucks O_O Image hosted by Image Shack: So then I told my hacker friend about this incident, and he took offense and corrected them: Just kidding, that last one's a Photoshop edit. If Specific was actually offended by them, their forum wouldn't be there today. * Praise Specific *

I remember seeing that one on Youtube! Type in "speedrun" and you get video tutorials on proper quickies.

Unless there's some new federal law, I think the only stores that even enforce ESRB ratings in the US by ID'ing customers are Walmart and Toys R Us (if they're even still around). The rest are businesses just trying to profit off of what games are popular. Ratings are for incompetent parents who are unable to teach their children the difference between right, wrong, fiction, and nonfiction, and expect a third party to set guidelines to shield their children from the inevitable. Everyone (at least in my generation and up) watched Terminator when they were somewhere between 8 and 12. It's MPAA rating recommends 18+. The world is still a perfectly fine place today. If you think about that article, the ESRB changed their rating from suggesting only people 18 and above should play, to suggesting that only people 17 and above should, and that somehow caused some big fuss in the eyes of some no-name group. I would rather have my kids playing games that are deemed "too violent" by random groups and be able to try to use it to help enforce their understanding of right and wrong than have them try out crystal meth or join a cult/gang when they decide that they are "too cool for kiddy video games". Okay, that last example is a bit extreme, if my kids ever did that and survived, I would suffocate them to death with a plastic bag.

Isn't the real problem when using online sites the shipping costs?

O_O is that at work, Sav?

I usually use Azureus... but I don't like the direction that is headed in so ?torrent seems like a promising alternative. I'm looking for something else...

FCEUltra for NES (it has a nice interface for playing around in cartridge memory). ZSNES for SNES (was initially hand-coded purely in ASM and works better than SNES9X on real old computers, but SNES9X is great, too). 1964 or Project64 for N64 (though this is about where I would try to get the actual control deck as to my knowledge, very few n64 games can be emulated, mostly just the popular ones and even those tend to be glitchy). What the hell is a Sega? Nintendo dominated the market and had the best games during that era. Sega's got nothing that Nintendon't Anyway, I'm just going by what a friend told me ;)

I've heard of it, it's really popular for getting around blocked ports and *ahem* other stuff. I've never heard of anyone using it for an emulator, though o_O

In 30 years or so, they'll probably be worth their weight in gold if you don't open them Odds are that if your cartridges still work at all, you'll have to replace the batteries in order to save. That isn't so bad as watch batteries of that era will use dilithium crystals and will hold your progress for quite a few centuries assuming that the rest of the cartridge doesn't completely biodegrade. Either that or we'll still have the same boring batteries that we do now.

Hmm, I hear that the NES will inevitably "die" because of corrosion on the replacable connector on the inside. I've been thinking about getting one of those as I have to fiddle with clean cartridges for about two hours before the game is in a playable state on screen. I suppose things would run smoother and with more options on an emulator... but it just doesn't feel the same as using an actual NES.

I don't get why Madden 08 is doing so well on any system. Isn't it the exact same thing as Madden 07, Madden 06, Madden 05, Madden 04, Madden 03, Madden 02, Madden 01, Madden 2000, Madden 99, etc all the way back to 1985? I can understand updating the game once in a while, but every single year? I guess I'm just not sports fan enough to see it. I don't even like announcers. Personally I can't wait until the old man croaks and hopefully kills that line of games. With my luck, they'll just replace him with someone else who's qualified to scribble all over a screen, probably someone with the same last name so they can continue making money off of it. Anyway, it's a good thing that it's selling better on XBox than Wii. * imagines dumb jock throwing Wii Remote through television set, then yelling at Nintendo for "breaking his big-screen" * The XBox may be dated, but it's still a good system. As I understand it, it's cheaper than Wii, modifyable (if anyone who buys Madden can grasp such a complicated concept), and almost as powerful, but... Nintendo FTW! Edit: Sorry if I sound grumpy over this, I know the game has its strong points, I just find sports games, especially football based, extremely boring, and this series just seems too repetitive to me.

What kind of halfass rating system are they using now? Metroid Prime games are FPS'es without any shape or form of multi-player! For that I revoke 9 points because there goes 99.9% of the replayability and because of that "perfection" claim. If Nintendo is giving it a perfect 10, it's only because they make it, and not because it deserves it, regardless of how grand the single player is. I get the feeling that they only talked it up for hype, which makes them less reputable as reviewers in my opinion because if they do that with their own games, what do they do when they release a Metroid and some other company releases a better FPS on the Nintendo system? Do they talk down the superior game and give it a lower rating so theirs can have the spotlight in their biased magazine? I'm disappointed, and I'm disappointed with Metroid Prime 3 for lack of any kind of multi-player on a NET CAPABLE system. Perfect 10's, PFFT. Whatever. Every game has it's flaws and Metroid Prime games are no exception. "Prime" being the key word, Nintendo Power is way past theirs. *SIGH* When will I be able to play a game on the Internet with my Wii that doesn't involve Mario or Pokemon? Here's a rating system for you, first rated M game, or even a rated T game that someone over the age of 12 can enjoy that has Internet play on Wii gets my 10 points, no bias, though I would prefer to be able to find games with hardly any lag, but the lack of these "cartoons" would be a significant impovement.

I'm not normally a graphics monger, and don't get me wrong, I love the game, but FF7 could use a good remake. Characters are cartoonish and made up of about 20 polygons each and are tackily placed on realistic pre-rendered backgrounds, and the PC version doesn't really take advantage of a PC's capabilities, it's hard to get running, and it looks and feels like a direct port of the PSX version with no real graphical improvements like you would expect on PC, you can almost get better results using an emulator and those old PS1 discs that you set your beer/cola on, at least that way you can tweak the graphics somewhat, but the prerendered stuff will never look better because no matter what, you're upscaling. Also, the full motion video sequences aren't much better, even for the time, and could also stand a remake, perhaps using the models and CG team from that god-awful FF7 movie, but don't let them so much as touch the story because that movie was stupid. The story in FF7 is good, the materia system is great, but the graphics are an eye soar and in my opinion the SNES games are better in that respect because the sprites actually have detail. In fact, if FF7 was remade for the SNES Virtual Console today, and it had all the story and game-play elements of the original, but the graphics of the series' SNES predecessor(s), I wouldn't hesitate to shell out $20 for it (though I would rather have remake designed exclusively for the modern PC). I think the only thing I liked about FF7's graphics were summon spells, but even those would be awesome if they were remade and looked real. 2.5D, gotta hate it. Didn't Square make a spin-off game staring Vincent that everyone hated? I don't blame them if it was as bad as the movie.

I've heard a lot of arguments in the console wars for any given console, but that has to be the first time I've heard that anyone say that the PS3 cures cancer... but for $600, it had better I'm not 100% sure, but I think the Folding software only uses a lot of your machine's processing power when you are AFK. Don't quote me on that, I only think that I read that somewhere.

The paint-bucket tool is horrendous for that, If I was going to try to hack at it, I would use the magic wand tool, then alter the selection, perhaps contract and feather it, with the select menu. At least that way I could ensure that what I select is contiguous, as well as alter the selection with various tools including quick-mask which would allow me to brush out unwanted selections with a... brush. A word on rotating, my advice is to do it in conjunction with Photoshop's ruler tool. The following images are hosted by http://imageshack.us : Open up the crooked image of your choice, then select the ruler tool, which should be available by holding down the left mouse button over the eyedropper tool in the tool pallet, then selecting the ruler looking thing, or by pressing Shift+I until it magically appears: Find something on the page that should be perfectly straight. If this is a photo where you can see the horizon, you could use that, if it's a magazine, you can use the bottom of a photo that's on a page that's supposed to have a straight alignment, or you can use the baseline of text if need be (the bottom of letters that don't have tails, go across as many on one line as you can find), or you can use some weird box of text like I did. When you find what you think should be a perfectly straight line, but you realize that it isn't, click and hold the ruler tool from the bottom left of the object, and drag it across to the right, tracing the edge as best as you can (zoom in if you need to, I did). Here's where the magic comes in, once you have that line made with your ruler tracing the edge as well as possible, go to [image>Rotate Canvas>Arbitrary], leave the number and direction at what they are (the ruler tool filled them out for you), and press OK. The result is that everything on the page should now be quite straight, assuming no flaws in the scan: Then you would crop and resize. It is best to do this before any initial cropping, editing, or resize, if you have the raw image, that's the best time to do this as this trick will likely make it so you have to crop again. When resizing an image, always keep in mind that it's better to reduce the size than increase the size, this is important, don't increase the size unless you have no other choice. When reducing an image size, you're taking away already existing information, when increasing the size, you're forcing Photoshop to take a wild guess at what should be there, all it does is blur the hell out of pixels and make the image look fuzzy. That's not too much of a problem if you're only resizing a large image by 1%, but if you're resizing a small image, or if you're resizing a large image by a great amount, expect fuzz. Avoid up-sizing if at all possible (redundant enough?) If anyone wants to follow along on the page I used (I dunno why, any image/page will work so long as it's crooked) It's Nintendo Power March 1996 issue 82 page 32 [edit] Oops, someone already mentioned the ruler/rotate technique in another post :: bangs head :: [/edit]

Alright, this is about a week old and some of you have probably already seen this. For those who have not, James Rolfe does in-depth review videos of old-school retro games and related paraphernalia such as the infamous "Power Glove" and the classic "Nintendo Power Magazine" which most of you are familiar with. His home page can be found at http://angryvgnerd.com along with links to his various reviews. His Nintendo Power review video can be found at http://www.gametrailers.com/player/24502.html Be forewarned, his language can sometimes be explicit and is not recommended for youngsters or those sensitive to swearing, mild violence, or seeing the destruction of (potentially missing) Nintendo Power posters.