So, we did exactly what we said we were going to do and made the switch. We went from Redream to Snes9x to relive the glory days. We were pretty disappointed in the action titles. Just to be clear, the emulators themselves are EXCELLENT. We don’t have anything to complain about when it comes to the software that we ran the games in. They have all of the options, they’re not ugly, and they’re really lightweight. More, they’re clean and they don’t even run in the background when we aren’t using them. These are ideal gaming applications. The games were pretty frustrating, however.
What's happening here???Part of the problem is that PC controller quality per dollar has decreased. Even five years ago, $20 would get quite a decent piece of equipment. Nowadays, they feel stiff, inaccurate, and slow. Well, that’s because they are. To have a good experience, you’ll have to shell out current gen prices. The next part of the problem is that we’re less tenacious and patient than we were as children. We simply can’t afford to invest the time into figuring out all of the cheats and exploits so that we’ll have an easier time in-game. Finally, the games weren’t as well made as we remember them being. Yup! Rose tinted goggles got us again!
So, they would recover right away while we had to just wait it out. They also did insane damage per hit – much more than we recall them ever doing. Outrageous! Apparently fake difficulty was present 30 years ago. Not only was pincer formation far more present than it should’ve been, there was a random selection mechanic. That means that the AI essentially played Rock, Paper, Scissors with your input. If it picked an attack with fewer frames than yours, it would steal priority and hit you when you should’ve hit them. This action is carried out when you press a button, and it relied on your predictive ability. If your prediction wasn’t accurate, you got whooped. Talk about discouraging. This was even present in Turtles In Time. Having no command grab made it even more anger inducing, as that’s an important part of crowd control. Super Double Dragon at least got that part somewhat right. But what was the point if only a punch could be caught when the enemies use punches the least? We cranked down the difficulty and we still got grabbed constantly, mobbed, and the damage was still severe. Meanwhile, they could take the beating of a lifetime and still get right back up. Knights of the Round was just as just as prejudiced. Awesome as they were for their time, technological limitations and less advanced programming languages didn’t do these games justice. We say all of that to say this: this generation of games should get the remakes. Recycle as many assets as possible, update the music, and fix the problems that couldn’t be fixed at the time. Don’t simply make new entries, bring these gems back and improve upon them.
Well, let’s do it! If we can’t successfully pressure them into remaking these games, let’s build projects to remake them ourselves. Like make them as great as they should be; give them the advancement and quality they deserve. We’ve got the technology now, so what’s the hold up?
What do you think? We know that we missed some. Leave your thoughts and suggestions in the comments below. Let’s make this a thing! Thanks for reading! Peace! We think one of the most toxic and deceptive things in the world to do is inject unnecessary politics into a piece of media that’s otherwise not associated with that perspective. Like how Disney changed Star Wars from a story about resisting imperialism and war culture, then instead made it about unstable romantic relationships and a poor portrayal of female empowerment – as if being given every bit of technique, power, and every magical solution automatically is in any way genuinely empowering. Or how Last of Us 2 went directly against the pre-established adoptive father / daughter relationship, exploring a familial dynamic that’s become quite rare these days, to instead pursue the muscle bound femme fatale angle and showcase a new female lead with an evil backstory. In the case of Disney's recent Star Wars series, wouldn’t that express how weak the character is, by demonstrating that its completely incapable of accomplishing these things on its own? And then telling this backwards love story that didn’t even need to happen because said character suddenly needs a personal problem to solve that wasn’t present before. Laughable. In the case of Last of Us 2, wouldn’t that also express how disgusting the character is, by sending it after the previous female lead who was going to be murdered by the doctor tasked with curing the disease – and the supporting staff also vehemently disagreed with? After all this time building a strong female lead character, why change to a villain’s perspective, and justify the violations against the character we know and love? Adopted or not, if someone targeted your child that way, wouldn’t you do what you had to do to protect them? It’s one thing to make a solid title about a well documented and important piece of political history like the Imjin War. It’s another to inject your disingenuous and personal politics into a new piece of media that ultimately has nothing to do with that. Star Wars itself is still about toppling imperialism and war culture, and Last of Us is still about saving humanity from extinction. Ghosts of Tsushima takes a warrior from the era and tells a pretty true story about a real event. What’s the difference? The previous two mentions take some very complex non-issues, asserts that they're issues, then picks a side as if opponents don't have valid points. They do, and the data supports many of those points. The latter doesn’t. It doesn’t take a side. It’s a period piece that gives a rundown of what actually happened. We, the observers, are left to draw our own conclusions from the information provided by the work. It even motivated very many people to research the conflict to find out more about it. This is how to hold a very real conversation, not preaching. Regardless of the issues that plagued the Assassin’s Creed franchise for a few generations of the series, these games do this well. Is it a flawless and complete history? No. But it’s enough to spark mass interest. To be honest, some puzzling situations prompted us to do a vast amount of research in order to determine what action we should take. That’s fantastic. Mafia III made waves because of how good a job the team did at recreating that era, but the player got to decide which forward path to take. Saints Row showed millions that gangbangers are still human, and that those people also have colorful personalities and broad experiences. They also didn’t pick a side. They let players choose the way forward when appropriate. These good games that have politics in them aren’t pandering to the crowd and taking advantage of their sensitivities. They aren’t manipulating anyone into supporting corporate perspectives. That’s the point of this entry.
share and boosting share prices. That’s it. When investors sell, they have wider margins and the elites are all happy.
When you participate in this, you pick a side and hand over money to those companies in exchange for their approval and a moral reward. All you'll get is a pat on your head, they make more money, the politicians behind it get a cut, the laws change to hurt more people in favor of others who don’t even need those law changes, everyone gets angry, and other companies profit from the madness. Someone dies in a cultural dispute and a bunch of people get paid. This is all by design because everything is industrialized. Don’t fall for this anymore. Shame the corporate entities and the politicians helping them. Tell them to stop infecting our games with their dirty politics! Always remember: we’re all the ones who have to deal with the consequences, not them. So, let’s change that. It’s very easy to look back on a golden age of gaming to get a nostalgia kick and, nowadays, it’s just as easy to chase that feeling. One could simply install an emulator, plug in a compatible controller, and have a good time playing the games of yesteryear that were released on consoles that are no longer in production. That’s certainly a lot easier than finding them after market. There are many projects run by talented programmers with good intentions, hundreds of those games available, and no shortage of gaming accessories to tickle anyone’s fancy. We have great interest in gaming accessories, mobile tech, and computer components. We love watching deep dives and product reviews, we love the price alerts, and we even like to see some of the mods. All that being said, we finally broke down and gave an emulator a chance. Which one? Redream. Redream alone is a wonderful piece of software that allows gamers to relive the “glory days” of Sega. By itself, it’s a nostalgia heavy callback to the most innovative and powerful console of its generation: Dreamcast. Redream runs as an executable, and has a rather attractive dark theme with blue accents. It’s easy to get, launch, and load up with games – to an extent. Where you’ll find the games for safe download is rather mixed. Some use 7Zip, in which case you’ll have to install 7Zip, some have incredibly slow servers, not all of the games are available on every site, there are a lot of demos in place of full games, and not all of the games even work. You can see how this complicates things, can’t you? Despite this, Redream is a slim piece of efficient software that has some powerful features. It’s also got a free version and has a premium version that only costs $5 USD. That’s a STEAL for the Dreamcast experience. You get master audio, graphical, and control settings with that. The premium version will open up HD options and multiple save files per game. You legitimately WON’T need a Dreamcast to relive that era. However, there’s a major hitch, and that’s a problem caused by Sega, game developers, and the era themselves. Now we’re down to precisely why the Dreamcast failed. Sega let A LOT of games through that never should’ve been released – at least not in the condition that they were released in. Here’s the thing: that generation of gaming was about pushing out as much content as possible as quickly as possible. But because they used discs as a medium, software updates weren’t really a thing. What you bought it what you got. Truthfully speaking, Dreamcast had a ton of potential but didn’t have the games to back it up, and Sega should’ve had a more discerning eye.
Even now, there are still many complaints about the Sonic games that were released on Dreamcast. Well, that’s entirely Sega’s fault. They fully controlled the platform AND the franchise. However, other games, that we used to think were so much fun as kids, turned out to be turds that we only recently realized were turds. Yes, our desire to play these games again was due to us viewing the past through rose tinted goggles. Power Stone and Power Stone 2? There’s good reason why there’s no Power Stone 3, etc. They were no where near as robust, pretty, fluid, or flexible as we remember them being. The best and purest form of Marvel vs Capcom 2 wouldn’t let us past the refresh rate settings, and Rival Schools felt just as bad as the Power Stone games did. Understand that this isn’t exclusive to Sega and Capcom. Many developers did what they could, but the rate of production was unforgiving. After being spoiled by more modern games, it’s hard to harbor the same love for these older titles. Don’t get us wrong, there were games that were actually good back then. Marvel vs Capcom 2 was a classic, the Street Fighter games were pretty great, SoulCalibur evolved into a pretty successful franchise, Virtua Fighter held on for a few generations, Daytona USA is still strong enough to have arcade cabinets, and Crazy Taxi remains a historical favorite too. So, not all of the games were bad, it’s just that there weren’t very many good ones. We’re not taking anything away from the good folks delivering us this mega nostalgia kick. We greatly appreciate them. We just wish they had more to pick from. But what do you think? Are we tripping? Let us know in the comments. For now, we’re going to give Snes9X a try, and get our fill of Super Double Dragon, TMNT: Turtles In Time, a handful of Final Fantasy games [including Mystic Quest], and various others. Have fun gaming! Peace! So, we disappeared again. We’re deeply apologetic about that. We know that we promised not to, but life happened – what with the pandemic, hyper politicization of pretty much everything, and crumbling economy and all. But we’re back with news!
First thing’s first: We have lost several members of our team over the last half a year. It sucks, but we respect their reasons for leaving. It was necessary to dedicate themselves to finding new, more lucrative employment in order to wait out the quarantines. This sort of thing happens, and our budget just didn’t grow as we had initially intended. Full transparency: We didn’t refuse to pay them what they deserved, we simply couldn’t afford the required pay increases to suit their needs. They left on good terms and we’re more than happy to have them back when the company is in a better position. For now, we sincerely wish them the best and hope they’ll consider rejoining us in the near future. With these losses, we were forced to freeze some projects and our first official ad was postponed. Don’t worry! It will come! For now, we’ll need to dedicate our time on ventures that will yield more immediate revenue. We took the last few months to carefully plan our next series of moves.
We’ve got even more plans linked to all of that, but we’ll announce those later. For now, we all need to focus on these five steps. Once we get to the fifth step, we’ll start announcing the next items in the pipeline. It’s in this phase that we’ll start testing our LARP system and complete our ad run – and guess what! ALL of our patrons will be guaranteed free access to the grounds to beta test the game! To show our continued appreciation for your support, those testing the game will get to use the footage on their channels as official previews, predictions, discussion topics, AND they’ll get to keep half of their materials for use when the play area is open to the public! Those who can’t make it out will receive credit for bonus materials that can be used at ANY Gamers Pointe location. We’ve gamified the process. Each contribution you all make is treated as experience toward a level up reward for the entire community. Completing our first Gamers Pointe location is like beating the first game in the series. All who played get to be a part of the celebration, and the top players get to rollover some of their progress. None of the players are met with ads, there are no pay walls in-game, and the grind begins there, so there is no pay-to-win in the game. It’s a meritocracy. There are no starter packs that you can get with green backs, you get them by joining the project and testing the beta. That’s all we got! Be sure to follow us on InstaGram and Facebook! Peace! |
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