newtmonkey

If you'd list some games or genres you like, then people could make some intelligent suggestions. As is, this is a list of consoles and then asking for more, and everyone's gonna just list their favorite consoles.

@jhd >>Previous comment about review deleted<< Woah, I didn't realize that was your review. Sorry for the harsh words. --- --- Most of the criticisms mentioned by jhd on his site apply to 99% of JRPGs, so I would caution anyone who likes JRPGs to take that into mind. I don't love Beyond the Beyond, and don't mean to defend it really, but instead of being awful it's just mediocre imo. I'd rate it slightly below Lunar on the Mega CD, but slightly above Cosmic Fantasy 2 on the PC Engine.

@TampaBay It's also certainly possible that the 8bitdo stick actually is an improvement, and like you mentioned, getting it from a place like Amazon that allow for easy returns is a good option.

@TampaBay I get what you're saying 100%! However, even though he's just casually playing arcade games, I think he's run into the limit of sub-$100 sticks. I was in the same exact boat, myself. It's certainly possible that the 8bitdo stick you use is better than his DC stick; I can't say for sure myself as I've only used the DC stick, and I have no reason to doubt your experience of course. He could also just try some sticks and return them to Amazon, but I just don't think he's going to get anything better than what he has without spending a decent chunk of change. It does feel "right" to play arcade games with a real joystick, of course... but I'd argue that, especially at the casual level, he's better off just going with a good gamepad. I think you'd have to spend a LOT to get a stick more accurate than, for example, the 8bitdo M30.

I finished all the 1994 issues of the magazines I'm reading. Instead of giving my thoughts on each mag, I'll list the winners and losers of '94 (all in my opinion of course): Winners: EGM 1994 was probably peak EGM. Massive issues, a wonderful layout, and combined with EGM2 you were sometimes getting nearly 800 pages a month of content (with a lot of ads, but still...). I still love flicking through this mag, even if there's actually not much worth reading besides the reviews, gossip, and the "good/bad/ugly" sidebars. GameFan This is the year the mag catapulted from what was basically a self-published fanzine of unbelievably high quality, to a legit competitor to EGM with national distribution. It's a great looking mag that looked better with each issue, and the passion for games was infectious. Their reviews, however, were pretty ridiculous, with some real garbage getting 80-90%+ reviews across the board. PC Gamer A new mag launched late in '94, this was actually my beloved PC Entertainment under a different name. It's still got the much of the same staff, the same focus on well-written previews and reviews, but a major upgrade in the layout! I recall this magazine getting very ridiculous later on (Coconut Monkey???), but in '94 it was a serious mag written for adults by editors who really knew their stuff. It blows the overrated Computer Gaming World out of the water. This magazine is really fascinating to me. You can trace its development straight from the multiformat Game Player's magazine, to their PC offshoot Game Player's PC Strategy Guide and their dedicated PC mag Game Players PC Entertainment, and finally to PC Gamer. Interestingly, they use a lot of same writers from mag to mag, so it's a pretty consistent read from 1989 to 1994 and onward! Losers: Electronic Games This was the follow-up to VideoGames & Computer Entertainment, and it suffers from the same faults as that mag. Most if not all of the editors are completely incapable of telling a good game apart from a bad one, regardless of having years of experience writing about games. Reviews of platformers, for example, seem to come down to how cute or funny they found the animations to be. A disaster like Ultima VIII (even in its original, frustrating incarnation) gets a sterling review. The wretched Way of the Warrior gets a higher review than the miracle port of Mortal Kombat II (SNES). It just goes on and on. You get the feeling reading these reviews that the writers have not even really played the games in any depth, because it's all stuff you'd see in the first few minutes of playing the game, supplemented by instruction manual summaries. The editors are also completely in love with "interactive" Hollywood games, and spend page after page going on and on about how cool it will be when all games become choose your own adventures movies. In fact, once the magazine folded in 1995, the follow-up was Fusion, a magazine devoted to this kind of garbage. Computer Gaming World This mag is highly praised, but I've been very disappointed with it. The reviews are two or three pages long, but only because 1/4th to 1/3rd of each review is just a plot summary... and then everything but that last paragraph is often a summary of the screen or the instruction manual. You get the actual review in the final paragraph. It often feels like the PC equivalent of GamePro! The exception is Charles Ardai, who instead spends all two or three pages complaining about how the plot and characters are not as good as in movies, or going into spoiler-level detail nitpicking puzzles. This guy completely savaged the beloved Under a Killing Moon because he reviewed it as some kind of serious Hollywood movie, seemed offended at the charming jokes, and cruelly criticized lead designer Chris Jones' lovable and fun portrayal of Tex Murphy. This guy doesn't review games as games, but as Hollywood scripts, so every single one of his reviews is completely worthless.

This is sadly a case of you get what you pay for. Cheaper sticks use cheaper parts, which mean sticky buttons and sticks with too much travel. In my experience, a good d-pad is far more accurate than any stick you can find for <$100. I wouldn't know how much you need to spend to get quality, as I got annoyed with throwing money away and didn't want to start spending more than that just to find out. If you are serious about getting a good quality stick and are willing to spend some money on it, you should read up at specialist forums (shmups forum is an example) for recommendations. You'll find that it's basically split between people happy to pay $$$ for a good stick, people who have made their own sticks from arcade quality parts, and (somewhat surprisingly) people playing on (quality) gamepads. I would definitely NOT trust Amazon reviews or even "professional" reviewers (IGN, whatever) for any specialized product whatsoever, because people tend to be happy with stuff as long as it's not completely broken. I mean, look at all the praise, amateur and professional, for the various 8bitdo controllers with completely worthless dpads to see what I mean. [EDIT] I found this chart rating commercially available arcade sticks when I was searching for a decent joystick a while back. It's from 2014, but was posted on a reddit for serious fighting game players... so it might still be of reference. You can see that anything <$70 or so is not even worth considering, and you only start to get flawed but good sticks around $100 or so: (Click on the image to get the full-sized legible version) As for me, I just use an 8bitdo M30 to play arcade games on RetroArch, mostly shmups. I whined about 8bitdo above, but this gamepad is EXCELLENT with probably the best, most accurate dpad I've ever used, for action games and shmups (it's not great for fighting games, especially for those with charge moves). I reckon you'd have to get an A-Tier or S-Tier joystick in the chart above to match the quality and accuracy of the M30.

One quite nice thing about this game, actually, is that it's very generous with letting you run from battles. Also, if you talk to a demon you already have on your team, it will just walk away (sometimes even giving you stuff first), so if you want to 100% avoid certain annoying enemies, just add them to your team and you'll never have to fight them again. It's a pretty interesting system.

Shin Megami Tensei I've just about caught up to the point I reached in the PSX remake. I've heard that the SFC version is harder than the PSX remake's "Normal" difficulty level, and roughly the same as the PSX version's "Expert" difficulty level... but I'm not so sure after playing both for several hours. The SFC does this thing where, after killing the last enemy, there's a random chance for another encounter to spawn, and then a random chance after THAT for a third encounter. I really don't recall if the PSX version does this even on Expert; maybe it does, but not as frequently. This makes the SFC version much harder at first, but because you frequently get two or even three encounters on the same square, you level up REALLY fast. Once your human characters level up a few times and you start getting the machine gun weapons, your power ends up snowballing as you blast through a dozen enemies at a time and gain massive amounts of EXP points. I found the first few bosses much easier in the SFC version, but that might be because I know better how to play the game thanks to my time with the PSX version. I haven't been relying on demons at all outside of boss battles, though I do keep negotiating and fusing demons as I go. It's been enough so far to just get a couple demons to join from each new area, and then fuse them to get stronger demons with a good spread of offensive and defensive spells. It's actually a pretty chill experience, though the game does like to throw you into situations that seem much more difficult or stressful than they really are (taking away your human companions, for instance).

Thanks for starting this club! One of my projects during "lockdown" back in 2020 was to build a DOS gaming machine. I grew up with DOS, and while DOSBOX and PCEM are fine solutions, they aren't 100% accurate, and I thought it would be a lot of fun to set up a machine in the corner of my office when I feel like playing some good old DOS games. It's a bit of a pain to get good parts here in Japan, but I lucked out when searching on Yahoo Auctions and got a great deal on a tested motherboard complete with CPU (P133), video card, and RAM, so from there it was pretty easy to get a working system up and running. I even managed to find a nice little 13" CRT monitor for next to nothing. I already had a Roland MT-32 and Sound Canvas (I was using them with DOSBOX/PCEM), so it was just a matter of finding a case, floppy drive, CDROM drive, and decent sound card. After doing some research, I went and got an ESS Audio Drive on Ebay, and it's an excellent little card... no MIDI port glitch, excellent sound quality, and nice FM music. The most difficult part of the project was finding space! I ended up setting it all up on my printer stand in the corner, and it all just barely fits: I store the clipboard I use as a mouse tray under the stand when not in use, so it's very compact! Anyway, one nice thing about this system is that I can disable the caches to throttle the speed down to roughly 386/40 and 486/33 or so. This lets me play speed-dependent games like Wing Commander without having to fool around with mo'slo or whatever. It was a lot of fun putting it together, and even a lot of fun getting used to the quirks of DOS gaming again... but the most fun of course is playing DOS games! DOOM, Duke 3D, and Blood just feel so right on an actual DOS machine. However, I mostly use this machine to play RPGs, my favorite genre. I completed Ultima III and Lands of Lore, both for the first time, on this machine and had a blast playing them. Of course, it's not all wonderful. This hardware is getting old and difficult to maintain. The first CRT monitor I was using died, taking the video card out with it (or maybe the other way around). Most recently, my CDROM drive stopped reading discs, and finding a working replacement was actually pretty difficult; the one I got reads discs fine, but the tray is flaky.

Shin Megami Tensei I actually had got somewhat far into the PSX remake; it's a fine remake, but the fact that I was not playing the original version of the game kept bothering me, so here I am playing the SFC version. In comparison, the SFC version seems a bit harder at first, but I actually prefer how it looks and sounds compared with the PSX version. I only was able to play it for an hour or so, but I made some good progress into the game. I got through the intro, gathered the first two human companions, defeated a couple of bosses, and got a couple of demons to join. The human characters are actually quite powerful in combat, so I haven't even had to summon any demons so far. I'm enjoying it so far. Hopefully the negotiation/fusion stuff doesn't get too annoying, because I'd like to finally complete this one!

You don't remember this one back in the day because the game was released last year. Do you even read the stuff you post?

I like to think that the official title of this game outside of Japan is "Hey Punk! Are you Tuff E Nuff? Master the Moves to Master Me!"

Genre: Bubble Bobble clone Favorite in genre: Bubble Bobble

I completed reading through all the '93 issues of the mags I'm reading (Computer Game Review and Entertainment, Computer Gaming World, EGM, Electronic Games, PC Entertainment, GameFan, Nintendo Power, Gekkan PC Engine, and Super Play). Instead of providing my thoughts on all of these (most of them did not change much at all throughout '93, so my comments elsewhere in this thread stand), I'll just list my Top Three Gaming Mags of 1993 1. PC Entertainment This magazine really surprised me with its overall quality. The layout is very text heavy and could be described as dull (though they did end up jazzing it up a bit in a tasteful way), but the actual writing is far and away better than any other contemporary mag. The reviews are a pleasure to read, briefly and expertly summarizing the plot and overall mechanics before delving into what works and what doesn't. Reviews tended to be assigned to reviewers who actually like and understand games in that particular genre, and it's obvious that the reviewers all extensively played the game they reviewed. My only real complaint is that their "RPG" guy never really seemed to like RPGs, and really only seemed to get excited about the genre once the first-person action RPGs started coming out. Sadly, this mag only lasted until early '94... though it turns out there was some good news in mid '94! (See below) 2. EGM EGM peaked imo in 1994, but by mid-late '93 all the elements were in place: a great layout, nice screenshots, and massive holiday issues. I don't care for the review format, but I do think most of the review scores are quite honest; they had no problem ripping into a shitty game or praising a hidden gem. The writing improved a bit this year, though it doesn't matter much as this is not a mag you read for the commentary. It's still a ton of fun flipping through this mag today. 3. GameFan I knew going in that this magazine was much loved back in the day, but I was still pleasantly surprised. It's very amateurish but in a likeable way, and the page layouts and screens are even better than that of EGM! I love how these guys would just go bonkers over some random game no other magazine gave a shit about, like Dr. Robotnik's Mean Bean Machine on the Genesis or Cybermorph on the Jaguar. --- With that, I'm on to 1994, which sees the introduction of a new mag to read: PC Gamer This was my magazine of choice for PC gaming in the 90s, and I was looking forward to revisiting it. After reading the first '94 issue, I'm happy to report that the magazine has aged extremely well! It has great writing, and this is especially true of the excellent reviews written by critics who understand the genres they write about. It really reminded me of the excellent PC Entertainment and it even shares a lot of the staff from that mag... and I was not too surprised when the editor of the letters column mentioned that PC Gamer is in effect PC Entertainment under a different name. Now I'm really looking forward to reading more of this mag.

I've caught up on all the mags I'm reading and am nearing the end of 1993. It's been a lot of fun so far! Some thoughts: EGM The October '93 issue is basically the start of peak EGM. The layout is in place, the screenshots are awesome, and the writing is even decent at this point. This is the first issue where you get Major Mike reviewing games the main reviewers didn't bother to cover, and also the first issue where you get the awesome "Good/Bad/Ugly" box in the game previews. It's just such a fun magazine to read at this point. Computer Gaming World I'm getting increasingly annoyed with this mag! They expanded their reviews to two, sometimes three, pages, and it's all just a bunch of garbage. 90% of any given review just tells you the story and summarizes the screen (with lots of puns of "comedic" asides), so it just feels like a waste of space. The mag expanded in '93, but each issue has anywhere from 20-40 pages of wargame/sim coverage, so if you don't care about those genres, it's all a bunch of nonsense. As a fan of RPGs, I don't get the RPG reviews in this mag at all. Their adventure/RPG columnist, Scorpia, has several features each issue, including two different spoiler/hint columns... but even in her reviews she insists on outright spoiling the game out of nowhere. I'm not gonna get too upset about the ending of, I dunno, The Dark Queen of Krynn being spoiled, but why even do this in what is supposed to be a review? It's crazy. Why would the editors allow this? Electronic Games This mag has a great layout but is just awful. It's VG&CE part 2. The writing is excellent, but the reviews are absolutely awful. Every single game gets a review from 78% to 82%, regardless of quality, unless the game is major title, then it gets a score in the high 90s. The reviewers all write well, but have absolutely no taste at all, so some random garbage licensed platformer will get an 80% because the animation is cool and there's digitized voice. You simply cannot rely on these people for reviews. Nintendo Power An absolutely beautiful magazine with perfect screenshots all over the place and ridiculously thorough maps for whatever game they were pushing at the time, and fun comics too. Unfortunately, there's not much worth actually reading! Nintendo's own magazine was way behind the times when it came to future releases and import coverage, so it seems a bit quaint if you were reading EGM or whatever.