I got MAME32 last night and I've been downloading some MAME titles today. Basically, MAME is arcade, like you didn't already know that, and there are a lot of really awesome MAME titles out there because, let's face it, arcades could run circles around the consoles at a similar time period.
Unfortunately, arcade emulation isn't really an exact thing. There are a lot of games that just don't work and some that do work but that have various issues, so it can be a bit frustrating at times when there's a game you really want to play but can't get to work properly.
Well, all that aside, here are some of the games I've been playing:
Asura Blade: Sword of Dynasty
Dangun Feveron
Darius Gaiden: Silver Hawk
Darkstalkers: The Night Warriors
Dimahoo
DonPachi
Dragon Blaze
Dragon Gun
Dungeons and Dragons: Shadow of Mystara and Tower of Doom
Final Fight
Gaia Crusaders
Giga Wing
Gunbird 2
Gunforce 2
In the Hunt
Knights of the Round
Marvel vs. Capcom: Clash of Super Heroes
Metal Slug X
Shock Troopers 2
Wild West C.O.W.-Boys of Moo Mesa
Cloud Mario is like the best powerup ever! It's like he 1-uped my entire childhood memory of SMB3 with an outfit even more totally fitting the mood of "Marioness".
A few observations: How do you kiss someone through a fish bowl helmet? Did Capcom just do a once-over of the intro to base the levels in the game on? Why can't Scrooge play a bigger part in future Kingdom Hearts games?
...I watched this all the time as a kid. Looking at it now... what's their appeal? Also, apparently the rest of the entire Earth is normal, except for these humanoid chipmunk creatures. What exactly is the origin story here? Is it like Stewart Little? Does the world just take it in stride without even flinching?
Okay so I gotta say, Darkwing Duck's got one of my favorite old cartoon rogue's galleries. Other than that, that Launchpad guy was in pretty much all the Disney Afternoon stuff wasn't he?
Whenever I'd tell "the grownups" about how much I liked this cartoon show, I got some laughs I never understood. (If only I'd known how very little any adult EVER cares about listening to a kid talk about their favorite cartoons.)
Wow it's painful to watch this one now. I let a lot slide, how odd all the SMB2 references tossed in there were (I guess you've got to explain the arabian look of Toad's outfit somehow, but what a way to do it). Also, the kid in me wants to scream out that super stars don't make you fire mario, they make you invincible. Funny enough, Nintendo would just sort of screw consistancy and now stars do whatever Miyamoto wants them to do. The rap... wow... To top it all off, to this DAY they still try to toss in rapping cartoons to make things seem "hip". It's like, how ancient are the reptiles who make these decisions?
This kid has some serious escapism and delusion issues. Do his parents beat him? I mean he does seem really concerned about "someone coming" as though they'll take away the only thing that still makes him happy.
I know others liked it, but playing Mario Kart Wii felt like it tried way too hard to give people who weren't in first a "fighting chance". The balance was fine in Mario Kart 64. Double Dash pushed things but a good player team could still be counted on to win most of the time. Mario Kart DS is about the same. Mario Kart Wii? I have to say it feels broken. That is, you can be awesome going against terrible players, and you have a 50/50 chance of winnning, and it'll just about always be by a hair's width at the finish line. I tried to like it, I liked the new vehicle type, but that combined with the art looking like a bunch of lifeless "phoned it in" toys made me just plain give up on this one.
This game seems to recognize that allowing people in last place a chance to play catch up shouldn't be so completely overpowered as to remove the effect of playing WELL from the equation. Read it, the mechanics of how to use powerups seem very well thought out. Someone in last can still catch up, but they'll need to play really well to do so instead of bullet billing into the lead instantly.
So, apparently my Gamecube memory card, the really big one I got, is corrupt now. I have no idea what happened. I was playing Ocarina of Time on it, had been for the past week. I actually had beaten the entire game, and had basically dusted it off completely. I reloaded the game file to take a look after "The End" to make sure I had everything, and suddenly the game starts glitchingly saying the data is corrupted.
Weird.
Now I think the whole thing is corrupt. The weird thing is HOW it's corrupt. My Zelda 1 and 2 saves seem to work, but OOT and MM don't at all. Neither does the Master Quest data. Wind Waker can LOAD it's saved games but can't save to them, it says the card is damaged. I don't recall any glitches, I didn't turn the power to my Wii off during a save or anything. It had worked fine all week while I played it. I can SEE all the saved files when I look through the memory card browser. The Wii (and the Gamecube I just tested it on) say it works fine. When I copy the saves to another memory card, they still show up as corrupted, except the Zelda 1 and 2 saves.
I'm at a loss here. I may need to format the whole thing, but I have no idea how.
I've got a lot of games to start from scratch if it's all gone... I had no idea that Nintendo's memory cards COULD get corrupted like this. It's first party. It's the large 1019 block size one. All I have other than this are two of the 251 sized ones and two of the smallest original sized ones. Those are older. I worry they could get corrupted too, since I have no idea how this happened.
If it's a problem with Gamecube memory cards failing with age, that worries me. It also means I really hope Nintendo eventually adds some Wii firmware support for "virtual" Gamecube cards in the internal memory. I don't even know if Nintendo still sells new Gamecube cards, and if they can fail like this, then buying them used is a shot in the dark I'd rather not take. It's nut, I mean my saved data on my original Zelda 1 cartridge is fully functional to this day. Heck, my PS1 memory cards still seem to work just fine. I used them to play Silent Hill 1 glitch-free a while ago.
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