27th August 2015, 5:47 AM
27th August 2015, 8:26 PM
I guess that is sad, sure, but the song is pretty great! I like it. The game Rare is working on now could be good, too. We'll see.
28th August 2015, 6:38 AM
I do too, hence why I said "best".
I've enjoyed what's in the collection, but it's the absences that are really notable. Now, I knew that Goldeneye, Battletoads & Double Dragon, Star Fox Adventures, and any of Rare's Donkey Kong games weren't going to show up here for licensing reasons. I also had a pretty good suspicion that their portable games weren't going to make it in either. However, I do wish the XBox remake of Conker had made it in, as well as Battletoads in Battlemaniacs.
There's some neat features here for the older games (that is, anything that isn't a redownload of a 360 game through the interface, such as the 360 port of Banjo Kazooie). They've put some "Retro Remix" style challenges in for each of the older games, cashing in on Nintendo's "old but new" series. They've got a CRT screen filter in there. Blending the pixels in a "natural" way works great for certain older games (where the artwork was clearly designed with that blur in mind), though I don't really like the "curved screen" distortion effect, which is pretty severe. I wish I could activate one without the other. There's also a number of "cheats" for every game. What's left of Rare is basically admitting "yeah, those games were way too hard". All the older games have a "rewind" option now, which is exactly what it sounds like. Since a LOT of programming logic is not "reversible" (for example, 2 + 2 = 4, but so does 3 + 1, so if all you have in memory is the "4" there's no way to figure out from that alone how the 4 was made), the engine must be saving a history of memory states going back several seconds to fall back on during rewind. They've also included other cheats such as "infinite lives" for Battletoads. (Though, I kinda already had that since I own a Game Genie.) Basically, modern gamers will, by and large, be beating Battletoads on a regular basis.
Arcade Battletoads is a surprisingly fun game, and FAR easier than the console versions. In the arcade, I'm sure it would have been seen as super hard, but since you don't actually need to spend money to hit "continue" on this version, you basically have not only infinite lives, but you spawn right where you died, so you can (and I did) just brute force your way through the entire game. It's hard to really see this as cheating, because technically any kid who brought in $40 worth of tokens could have done the same thing, using the power of "being rich" to beat the game.
All in all, a pretty solid collection. The 360 redownloads are VERY well emulated. With the 360, the OS handled all the calls made by the game, which is a huge difference between this and older consoles where games directly addressed the hardware. As a result, emulation can be done in a very "Rosetta" way (those familiar with Apple's transition from PowerPC to x86 will recall that MS is now doing a very similar thing for their own transition). Basically, they just brought the 360 OS directly in, hardware handling layer and all, and just "tranlate" THOSE commands, since it's the OS that's ultimately making the hardware calls on modern consoles. That means not only MUCH faster emulation but far more accurate and "universal" emulation that applies to any game. To be clear, this isn't a "new" strategy (again, Apple did it when they did their hardware transition to make sure old PowerPC programs still worked), but it's a much better solution. Also, this solution won't work with anything older than last gen's consoles, because everything before that handed over direct control of hardware calls to the game code itself. It's just nice to see it working so effectively.
I've enjoyed what's in the collection, but it's the absences that are really notable. Now, I knew that Goldeneye, Battletoads & Double Dragon, Star Fox Adventures, and any of Rare's Donkey Kong games weren't going to show up here for licensing reasons. I also had a pretty good suspicion that their portable games weren't going to make it in either. However, I do wish the XBox remake of Conker had made it in, as well as Battletoads in Battlemaniacs.
There's some neat features here for the older games (that is, anything that isn't a redownload of a 360 game through the interface, such as the 360 port of Banjo Kazooie). They've put some "Retro Remix" style challenges in for each of the older games, cashing in on Nintendo's "old but new" series. They've got a CRT screen filter in there. Blending the pixels in a "natural" way works great for certain older games (where the artwork was clearly designed with that blur in mind), though I don't really like the "curved screen" distortion effect, which is pretty severe. I wish I could activate one without the other. There's also a number of "cheats" for every game. What's left of Rare is basically admitting "yeah, those games were way too hard". All the older games have a "rewind" option now, which is exactly what it sounds like. Since a LOT of programming logic is not "reversible" (for example, 2 + 2 = 4, but so does 3 + 1, so if all you have in memory is the "4" there's no way to figure out from that alone how the 4 was made), the engine must be saving a history of memory states going back several seconds to fall back on during rewind. They've also included other cheats such as "infinite lives" for Battletoads. (Though, I kinda already had that since I own a Game Genie.) Basically, modern gamers will, by and large, be beating Battletoads on a regular basis.
Arcade Battletoads is a surprisingly fun game, and FAR easier than the console versions. In the arcade, I'm sure it would have been seen as super hard, but since you don't actually need to spend money to hit "continue" on this version, you basically have not only infinite lives, but you spawn right where you died, so you can (and I did) just brute force your way through the entire game. It's hard to really see this as cheating, because technically any kid who brought in $40 worth of tokens could have done the same thing, using the power of "being rich" to beat the game.
All in all, a pretty solid collection. The 360 redownloads are VERY well emulated. With the 360, the OS handled all the calls made by the game, which is a huge difference between this and older consoles where games directly addressed the hardware. As a result, emulation can be done in a very "Rosetta" way (those familiar with Apple's transition from PowerPC to x86 will recall that MS is now doing a very similar thing for their own transition). Basically, they just brought the 360 OS directly in, hardware handling layer and all, and just "tranlate" THOSE commands, since it's the OS that's ultimately making the hardware calls on modern consoles. That means not only MUCH faster emulation but far more accurate and "universal" emulation that applies to any game. To be clear, this isn't a "new" strategy (again, Apple did it when they did their hardware transition to make sure old PowerPC programs still worked), but it's a much better solution. Also, this solution won't work with anything older than last gen's consoles, because everything before that handed over direct control of hardware calls to the game code itself. It's just nice to see it working so effectively.