I just read their site and they said that it is limited? Dang... I do like the fact that they are using FPGAs in it which makes my Engineering part of my brain happy. But yeah, in the end it probably would sit there with my existing GameBoys, GameGear, and 3DS.
The Analogue machines, so far, are all pretty rare things. If I had deep pockets in my bank and a carefree life, I'd own all of them (and a Switch). But aside from being a lovely piece of limited-production engineering, having it sit on a shelf picking up dust as a conversation piece is kind of a bad use for it. I could just ignore my RetroPie for the same effect.
The analogue pocket seems pretty badass, but my OG gameboy still runs perfectly (I suspect it will do so for longer than I will) and it's the only Gameboy I ever played, so I don't think I'd get any mileage out of this new machine.
Although that does remind me I need to hunt down some good cartridges. I recently rediscovered my Gameboy and have been playing it again, but the only games I have left are Pokemon Red and Wario Land 2.
I had a pretty killer (IMO, anyway) GBA collection once. Sadly, for reasons, I had to cut it down to one game, but I've still got that one. I kept Metroid: Zero Mission. It was the correct choice; it's in with a good shout of being the best game on the entire system and it might still be my overall favourite Nintendo game.
I really liked some of the more batshit ports the GBA saw. Doom and Doom II were surprisingly good on it, and Max Payne as an isometric game worked much better than you'd think.
SteevLWhat can I do for you?Registered Userregular
I still have my original Game Boy. Unfortunately, by the early 1990s it had developed so many dead vertical lines that games were unplayable. The last time I tried to put batteries in it (about 5 years ago), it would not turn on. If it did still turn on, I'd probably try to fix the vertical lines issue.
I managed to get the TMNT arcade cabinet box up the stairs and into the apartment. I am a little worried. The box was bigger and heavier than I thought.
It's not like 90% of his complaints/deaths didn't apply to the 16-bit versions equally. Genesis enhancements are like just some tasty whipped cream on a dung pie.
Well, yeah. I don't think it was ever regarded as a super great game. And it definitely has a reputation for extreme difficulty mixed with outright bullshit (even for the era).
SteevLWhat can I do for you?Registered Userregular
The Immortal was one of those games that I thought looked so cool from the previews in Nintendo Power or whatever. My brother and I pooled our resources and bought the game. And you know what? We liked it! Sure, it was goddamn hard and unfair. But it looked and sounded amazing. I managed to beat the game and it was a satisfying experience for me.
In hindsight, it's basically a Sierra point & click game with an action element to it. Maybe that's why the trial and error stuff didn't bother me at the time. I was already used to figuring out what to do through death thanks to King's Quest and Space Quest.
It is genuinely remarkable how charmless the thing is.
The UI is just jaw-droppingly bare bones, with what you might consider basic functionality missing; it's finicky about power (it will run from my TV, but must be connected with the TV off, otherwise it won't work); and the nightmarish sluggishness of how some PAL games were in the '90s is giving me flashbacks. Yet their aspect ratios are now fine, so they're like some messed-up hybrid of NTSC and PAL. And I'm pretty sure The machine is adding its own extra slowdown. The game line-up barely needs mentioning, of course. And image quality even seems to leave a lot to be desired.
The physical unit is nice enough - I was never fond of how the machine looked back in the day, it always seemed very workmanlike to me (although I knew a guy who affectionately referred to it as a bagel toaster!), but this is as faithful a miniature recreation as almost all the others - and the controllers feel spot-on for the original pre-analogue versions. And using the disc drive Open button to change virtual discs in multi-disc games is a really nice touch.
But I'm glad I didn't pay more for this thing. I can't imagine dropping £100 on it. Now I need to investigate hacking the thing. If only to try and make it better. But as the product is, out-of-the-box, put it next to the SNES or Mega Drive and it's really night and day.
It is genuinely remarkable how charmless the thing is.
The UI is just jaw-droppingly bare bones, with what you might consider basic functionality missing; it's finicky about power (it will run from my TV, but must be connected with the TV off, otherwise it won't work); and the nightmarish sluggishness of how some PAL games were in the '90s is giving me flashbacks. Yet their aspect ratios are now fine, so they're like some messed-up hybrid of NTSC and PAL. And I'm pretty sure The machine is adding its own extra slowdown. The game line-up barely needs mentioning, of course. And image quality even seems to leave a lot to be desired.
The physical unit is nice enough - I was never fond of how the machine looked back in the day, it always seemed very workmanlike to me (although I knew a guy who affectionately referred to it as a bagel toaster!), but this is as faithful a miniature recreation as almost all the others - and the controllers feel spot-on for the original pre-analogue versions. And using the disc drive Open button to change virtual discs in multi-disc games is a really nice touch.
But I'm glad I didn't pay more for this thing. I can't imagine dropping £100 on it. Now I need to investigate hacking the thing. If only to try and make it better. But as the product is, out-of-the-box, put it next to the SNES or Mega Drive and it's really night and day.
I still haven't taken mine out of the box, and I got it in May.
There are two major hacking options out there: BleemSync and AutoBleem. I couldn't tell you much about either, which is ironic considering I'm technically on the team that develops BleemSync, but all I actually do is troubleshoot NES/SNES Classic hacking stuff for people.
Mind you, it is hilarious popping on GTA1 and listening to the theme song. Hearing these lyrics:
Hotel, downtown, speeding all around
An AK-47 got the power in it's barrel
To move any mutha that gets in the way
Just another power machine on the freeway
Riding with me is my MC homeboy
Knowing the rules ain't part of his program
Finding the right way around this map
Might be pretty hard 'cause he's fucked on crack
...coming out of a "classic mini" console is laugh-out-loud funny enough, but remembering what it was like playing that game in 1997 and hearing it then is a really great memory.
Hell, I had so much fun with that game at the time that when GTA3 was announced, I was skeptical that the gameplay could really work in 3D. Not one of my more accurate predictions
I don't have original SNES or PS1 consoles kicking around to check that, unfortunately (they're buried deep in the attic, or at least I think they are...).
That is a damn good question, actually. I doubt Nintendo, Sega and Sony would have co-ordinated on something like that so they may well be fractionally off. But they're not a million miles out.
Edit: but I can do them to scale with a modern console...:
It is genuinely remarkable how charmless the thing is.
The UI is just jaw-droppingly bare bones, with what you might consider basic functionality missing; it's finicky about power (it will run from my TV, but must be connected with the TV off, otherwise it won't work); and the nightmarish sluggishness of how some PAL games were in the '90s is giving me flashbacks. Yet their aspect ratios are now fine, so they're like some messed-up hybrid of NTSC and PAL. And I'm pretty sure The machine is adding its own extra slowdown. The game line-up barely needs mentioning, of course. And image quality even seems to leave a lot to be desired.
The physical unit is nice enough - I was never fond of how the machine looked back in the day, it always seemed very workmanlike to me (although I knew a guy who affectionately referred to it as a bagel toaster!), but this is as faithful a miniature recreation as almost all the others - and the controllers feel spot-on for the original pre-analogue versions. And using the disc drive Open button to change virtual discs in multi-disc games is a really nice touch.
But I'm glad I didn't pay more for this thing. I can't imagine dropping £100 on it. Now I need to investigate hacking the thing. If only to try and make it better. But as the product is, out-of-the-box, put it next to the SNES or Mega Drive and it's really night and day.
Yeah, I got one for $20 a while back and I've played it maybe three times. I got it mainly for FFVII but all the other games on there are just kind of...meh. It just seems to have no soul.
Switch Friend Code: SW-4598-4278-8875
3DS Friend Code: 0404-6826-4588 PM if you add.
I don't have original SNES or PS1 consoles kicking around to check that, unfortunately (they're buried deep in the attic, or at least I think they are...).
That is a damn good question, actually. I doubt Nintendo, Sega and Sony would have co-ordinated on something like that so they may well be fractionally off. But they're not a million miles out.
Edit: but I can do them to scale with a modern console...:
I wouldn't be surprised if even the original PC Engine fit in there.
The Turbografx-16, on the other hand...
Yeah, the original PCE (and the Core Grafx) is crazy small. The Mini is barely any smaller!
The TG-16... yeah, not so much. If anything, the TG Mini is going to be huge compared to the other Minis just by virtue of keeping it to scale with the PCE Minis
If I still had my original PCE, I'd totally put it on there. Alas.
I believe this would belong here: Analogue, the makers of high-rated (and expensive) retro game machines have announced a handheld device that will play Game Boy (and Color, Advanced, etc.) games alongside Game Gear, Neo Geo Pocket, and other handheld game formats via an adapter, the Analogue Pocket.
To borrow a phrase from all the Southerners I live near, or at least how I imagine them talking, "Hot damn."
Oh man, LYNX support. I can get the chance to bust out Todd's Adventures in Slime World again.
SteevLWhat can I do for you?Registered Userregular
Somehow when I was a teenager, my friends and I got together for a Lynx gaming day. Between all of us, we had 5 systems and managed to have a few 5 player games of Slime World. So much fun!
That game got a port to the Genesis and even got a port to the PC Engine CD.
Man, you must have grown up in some video game affluent segment. I don't think I knew a single person who owned a Lynx. I think I had one friend with a Game Gear.
Also, looking it up just now, I didn't realize how close the Lynx came out after the Game Boy.
The Lynx was a spectacular machine for multiplayer. The daisy-chain-able link cable being standard in the box was a masterstroke, and so quite a lot of outstanding multiplayer games came out for it - Warbirds, Slime World, Xybots, Tournament Cyberball, Xenophobe, Gauntlet, obviously California Games, etc, etc.
The downside, of course, was needing to know other people with Lynxes - and since it was up against the juggernaut that was the Game Boy, and with some severe disadvantages (size, battery life, and initially at least, expense being the main ones), it couldn't hope to really gain critical mass.
I also had problems with reliability with the original shape Lynx. The Lynx II (as it was more-or-less unofficially known) solved that as well as improving on other aspects a bit, and it's definitely the model to go for.
But for me at least, I found more games that I liked on it than I ever did on the Game Boy, and it absolutely kicked the Game Gear's backside as far as I was concerned. The only other handheld of the era I liked anywhere near as much was the PC Engine GT (TurboExpress), literally nothing came close to it in terms of power for more than another decade after its launch (the GBA), and it would take until the GBA SP before another handheld came along that was anywhere close as an overall system.
I still have my model 2 Lynx and about 5 games. As far as I know, it’s one of the only systems that allow you to flip the screen and use the D pad with your right hand.
Wow that's cool. Did it flip the face buttons too?
It didn't need to. They were already doubled up, so on what was by default the right side there were A and B buttons both above and below the massive speaker. When you gripped it, your thumb was supposed to go to whichever set was on the top.
Lynx II:
You'd press Option 2 and Pause together to make it flip.
(Lynx I had everything except the Backlight button, that was added for the II, but since it was a backlit screen that was only really useful if you paused first since it made the whole screen go black.)
Something that just occurred to me and I just looked up - the Lynx had the widest screen aspect ratio of any handheld until the PSP came out fifteen years later with an actual 16:9 screen.
augustwhere you come from is goneRegistered Userregular
I had a Lynx I: it looked and sounded amazing but the games were bad. I also wanted RPGs to sink time into on long car rides, and the Lynx has literally zero RPGs.
I had a Lynx I: it looked and sounded amazing but the games were bad. I also wanted RPGs to sink time into on long car rides, and the Lynx has literally zero RPGs.
That is by far its biggest problem with its games line-up.
Mind you, it had no way of saving, either. The carts were physically too thin for battery back-up, so it was a password system or nothing. Not ideal for RPGs.
I'd disagree with the blanket statement "the games were bad"; as I've said I think there was a surprising number of excellent games on it. Obviously there was crap too, like there is on every platform ever, but that certainly wasn't all of it. But yeah, if it didn't have what you wanted to play, that's a problem. (And it's why I've always answered the "which platform is best?" question, especially when I worked in video game stores, with "whichever one has the games you most want to play".)
Our family were day-one lynx adopters, while it came out of the gate with plenty of cool games, we ended up getting game gears eventually due to lack of new lynx games. Software dried up pretty fast once it was clear that the system flopped.
Also so much of the library is Atari arcade ports, which are minimal content super hard by nature, and hard to recommend now with so many better ways to play them. There's also barely any decent platformers which was an absolute staple of that era too.
Posts
The Analogue machines, so far, are all pretty rare things. If I had deep pockets in my bank and a carefree life, I'd own all of them (and a Switch). But aside from being a lovely piece of limited-production engineering, having it sit on a shelf picking up dust as a conversation piece is kind of a bad use for it. I could just ignore my RetroPie for the same effect.
Although that does remind me I need to hunt down some good cartridges. I recently rediscovered my Gameboy and have been playing it again, but the only games I have left are Pokemon Red and Wario Land 2.
Wario Land 2 is fantastic.
Steam: betsuni7
I really liked some of the more batshit ports the GBA saw. Doom and Doom II were surprisingly good on it, and Max Payne as an isometric game worked much better than you'd think.
Steam | XBL
My Backloggery
Yeah. He really hates NES Immortal. The Genesis version is better.
I remember Immortal as an Amiga/ST game first and foremost. Trying to port that to the NES was never going to end well. Play a 16-bit version.
(Per Wiki, apparently it was an Apple IIGS game originally, so yeah, 16-bit.)
Steam | XBL
Steam | XBL
Plus it had some absolutely bangin' tunes.
In hindsight, it's basically a Sierra point & click game with an action element to it. Maybe that's why the trial and error stuff didn't bother me at the time. I was already used to figuring out what to do through death thanks to King's Quest and Space Quest.
My Backloggery
It is genuinely remarkable how charmless the thing is.
The UI is just jaw-droppingly bare bones, with what you might consider basic functionality missing; it's finicky about power (it will run from my TV, but must be connected with the TV off, otherwise it won't work); and the nightmarish sluggishness of how some PAL games were in the '90s is giving me flashbacks. Yet their aspect ratios are now fine, so they're like some messed-up hybrid of NTSC and PAL. And I'm pretty sure The machine is adding its own extra slowdown. The game line-up barely needs mentioning, of course. And image quality even seems to leave a lot to be desired.
The physical unit is nice enough - I was never fond of how the machine looked back in the day, it always seemed very workmanlike to me (although I knew a guy who affectionately referred to it as a bagel toaster!), but this is as faithful a miniature recreation as almost all the others - and the controllers feel spot-on for the original pre-analogue versions. And using the disc drive Open button to change virtual discs in multi-disc games is a really nice touch.
But I'm glad I didn't pay more for this thing. I can't imagine dropping £100 on it. Now I need to investigate hacking the thing. If only to try and make it better. But as the product is, out-of-the-box, put it next to the SNES or Mega Drive and it's really night and day.
Steam | XBL
I still haven't taken mine out of the box, and I got it in May.
There are two major hacking options out there: BleemSync and AutoBleem. I couldn't tell you much about either, which is ironic considering I'm technically on the team that develops BleemSync, but all I actually do is troubleshoot NES/SNES Classic hacking stuff for people.
My Backloggery
An AK-47 got the power in it's barrel
To move any mutha that gets in the way
Just another power machine on the freeway
Riding with me is my MC homeboy
Knowing the rules ain't part of his program
Finding the right way around this map
Might be pretty hard 'cause he's fucked on crack
...coming out of a "classic mini" console is laugh-out-loud funny enough, but remembering what it was like playing that game in 1997 and hearing it then is a really great memory.
Hell, I had so much fun with that game at the time that when GTA3 was announced, I was skeptical that the gameplay could really work in 3D. Not one of my more accurate predictions
Steam | XBL
Steam | XBL
That is a damn good question, actually. I doubt Nintendo, Sega and Sony would have co-ordinated on something like that so they may well be fractionally off. But they're not a million miles out.
Edit: but I can do them to scale with a modern console...:
Steam | XBL
Yeah, I got one for $20 a while back and I've played it maybe three times. I got it mainly for FFVII but all the other games on there are just kind of...meh. It just seems to have no soul.
3DS Friend Code: 0404-6826-4588 PM if you add.
I'm pretty sure I could never beat the first level. I remember a room with a dragon and a large pit.
I think Shadowgate also has something similar.
needs the mini pc engine when that htis
Steam | XBL
I wouldn't be surprised if even the original PC Engine fit in there.
The Turbografx-16, on the other hand...
My Backloggery
Yeah, the original PCE (and the Core Grafx) is crazy small. The Mini is barely any smaller!
The TG-16... yeah, not so much. If anything, the TG Mini is going to be huge compared to the other Minis just by virtue of keeping it to scale with the PCE Minis
If I still had my original PCE, I'd totally put it on there. Alas.
Steam | XBL
Oh man, LYNX support. I can get the chance to bust out Todd's Adventures in Slime World again.
Very underrated machine, the Lynx. Some really fantastic games on that weirdly powerful beast.
Steam | XBL
That game got a port to the Genesis and even got a port to the PC Engine CD.
My Backloggery
Also, looking it up just now, I didn't realize how close the Lynx came out after the Game Boy.
The downside, of course, was needing to know other people with Lynxes - and since it was up against the juggernaut that was the Game Boy, and with some severe disadvantages (size, battery life, and initially at least, expense being the main ones), it couldn't hope to really gain critical mass.
I also had problems with reliability with the original shape Lynx. The Lynx II (as it was more-or-less unofficially known) solved that as well as improving on other aspects a bit, and it's definitely the model to go for.
But for me at least, I found more games that I liked on it than I ever did on the Game Boy, and it absolutely kicked the Game Gear's backside as far as I was concerned. The only other handheld of the era I liked anywhere near as much was the PC Engine GT (TurboExpress), literally nothing came close to it in terms of power for more than another decade after its launch (the GBA), and it would take until the GBA SP before another handheld came along that was anywhere close as an overall system.
It's an unsung masterpiece, the Lynx.
Steam | XBL
Steam | XBL
It didn't need to. They were already doubled up, so on what was by default the right side there were A and B buttons both above and below the massive speaker. When you gripped it, your thumb was supposed to go to whichever set was on the top.
Lynx II:
You'd press Option 2 and Pause together to make it flip.
(Lynx I had everything except the Backlight button, that was added for the II, but since it was a backlit screen that was only really useful if you paused first since it made the whole screen go black.)
Steam | XBL
Steam | XBL
That is by far its biggest problem with its games line-up.
Mind you, it had no way of saving, either. The carts were physically too thin for battery back-up, so it was a password system or nothing. Not ideal for RPGs.
I'd disagree with the blanket statement "the games were bad"; as I've said I think there was a surprising number of excellent games on it. Obviously there was crap too, like there is on every platform ever, but that certainly wasn't all of it. But yeah, if it didn't have what you wanted to play, that's a problem. (And it's why I've always answered the "which platform is best?" question, especially when I worked in video game stores, with "whichever one has the games you most want to play".)
Steam | XBL
Also so much of the library is Atari arcade ports, which are minimal content super hard by nature, and hard to recommend now with so many better ways to play them. There's also barely any decent platformers which was an absolute staple of that era too.