I was reminded that I have a copy of Control (2019) that I hadn’t touched, so a couple of weeks ago I started playing it. I was really enjoying it for a few hours, but it started to feel a bit repetitive and I haven’t been able to get back to it for a few days.
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.
I can’t imagine AI being able to code something efficiently enough to run on a C64!
I try to stay in touch with the Atari 2600 homebrew community, and this was the conventional thinking there, too. But between increases in LLM’s sampling of appropriate code and various automated tools, some people have started making games for the console with AI and very little knowledge of their own.
Are the games good? Not particularly. Are they as well-coded as a moderately talented human could achieve? Not even close. But they are functional. If AI can do that, I’m sorry to say that it should almost certainly be able to make a C64 “game” of some description.
Laughs in external USB 3.5" floppy drive
Yes, when I first realized that being published in Japan by D3 Publisher was a common denominator between these weird and wonderful budget games that I found, I became very interested in them. My friends actually went to TGS one year and got everything they could from the D3 booth for me.
However, since I’ve moved to Japan, I’ve continued researching and collecting vintage games, and I’ve found that while the majority of Simple Series games were published by D3 Publisher, especially the PS2 games, there are also some titles that were officially published by other companies. I guess it all leads back to D3 somehow, though. Also, D3 Publisher was still independent in the years these games came out.
My favorites include (Almost all PS2):
There are more that look very interesting but I haven’t played them yet, so I don’t feel I can recommend them. And there are also some real dogs, naturally, although I should say that even the ones I’ve listed can be something of an acquired taste. The Earth Defence Force series started as Simple Series games too, although I haven’t played any of them
While I was writing this I remembered a few more of my favorite budget games that weren’t Simple Series games:
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.
Quite a few of the various Simple series’ games on PS1 and PS2. Some of them were translated and released in Europe and the USA, but many more weren’t. Not too many lost gems there, though. Most of the games that stayed in Japan aren’t anything special.
The series started out as basic implementations of card and board games to be sold for a low price, then moved into fairly generic video games in established genres, but eventually the various developers started making somewhat original, low-budget games, and some of them are pretty good, especially considering their budgets.
I’m not sure how the games are connected as a series, although they definitely are, because they’re numbered in order of release on the original covers. But they’re made by many different developers, and even in Japan there seems to have been at least two publishers releasing them.
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.
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.
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.
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.