Apparently one of the big new buzzwords in the consumer tech space this year is the Non-fungible token:

https://www.investopedia.com/non-fungible-tokens-nft-5115211

Samsung’s using this technology on their upcoming smart TVs because they need to have some sort of strange competitive edge. One example they cite is that owners can buy one of Samsung’s upcoming Smart TVs and then spend more money to purchase digital artwork on their store that has one of these tokens on it. The artwork then disappears from the digital store forever once purchased and then is tied to that owner’s account. They then can transfer “ownership” by giving the token to another owner who also has the same smart TV to be used for on their TV. 

Knowing how this is going to fail while laughing at it all because all of it is inconsequential if this technology fails is a lot more entertaining when people aren’t getting coerced into using it because “someone else in power said so and you’ll lose your livelihood if you don’t,” but that’s just my train of thought. I mean, it’s going to be an uphill battle for them to eventually get to the point where people need to use this technology for more essential things in society like authorization for you to even set foot in a store to buy food or interact with the rest of civilization if where you’re starting from is by tying this technology to digital collectible items lol.

I kind of wanted to know what your take is on all of this. I have a feeling that Sony, Microsoft, and the PC space in general would want to implement this as well for their own platforms because that’s the current mindset in the Western World to make everything digital, while Japan in general prefers physical (heck, even western IPs use Japan a lot for their high end collectible items like figurines and statues), but backing that physical object with advanced technology.

I don’t see much point to talk about this since everyone already is. I would just be saying what others are saying. I’m trying to think of a historical metaphor for this though.

This site began talking about disruption and Blue Ocean Strategy. The point is that many businesses do not understand how to utilize ‘technology’. Those are business books on how to utilize technology in a value particular way. Certain things provide value to consumers, other things do not.

These companies are like kids who throw spaghetti against the wall to see what sticks. Due to investor pressure, these companies have to embrace the ‘latest technology’ which isn’t really technology but the ‘latest trend’. We need to stop saying they are ’embracing latest technology’ and really say ’embracing latest trends’. They remind me of a clothes store.

I think the big money is in the simpler ‘dumbed down’ approach to so-called ‘technology products’. I think cars without a gazillion microchips would fly off the shelves, but government regulations prevent them from being made (the same with appliances). But entertainment products do not have such regulations. So when a NES or Gameboy or Wii appears [simplistic compared to competition], they fly off the shelves.

If a product is too complicated to understand, it is going to be too complicated to sell. I don’t think the average consumer is going to care. No one has ever said, “NFTs? Someone open the door! I have to rush out and buy it RIGHT NOW!”

a New Year's letter from the Square Enix president talks about new tech/concepts including NFTs, the metaverse, and particularly how blockchain games "hold the potential to enable self-sustaining game growth" https://t.co/qtdFCvQdeB pic.twitter.com/FOG4S9Hpgb

— Wario64 (@Wario64) January 1, 2022

When my competitor beats himself up, I cheer him on!

“So you’re not putting NFTs in your game, Malstrom?”

No.

“What about the Metaverse?”

Fuck off.

“But what about the blockchain? OMG!”

People don’t buy games for those reasons.

The reasons why people bought video games in the twentieth century will be the same reasons why they buy video games in the twenty first century.

Square Enix must be telling investors what they want to hear. I can’t imagine anyone being this stupid.

Hello Mr. Malstrom,

When the trailer of BotW 2 came out, you talked about it here in your blog. You said that the floating islands stuff is lazy and how disappointed you were. I agree with that. I think that if they want to explore sky themes, an airship or sky castles would have been a much better choice. But I was happy. Why? The floating islands are the stars there. Which means that all Aonuma’s attention and influence would have been seen just there.

Why do I think that? Look at Zelda Botw. What catches the player’s attention at a first look? The Divine Beasts and the big dragons. And the Aonuma’s influence can be more easily seen in these places (which means they’re boring as hell). Aonuma wants to be the star, taking care of the big spots in the game. The rest of the world he just delegates to his minions. This, I believe, is why in Botw the game shines exactly in the overworld and not in the main quest.

When the trailer came out, I was excited because I thought: “Nice, Aonuma will be taking care of the sky islands and with that, all the boring stuff will be there. Maybe this time we’re going to get a truly amazing overworld, with great bosses and all.” But the game is now in its 5th year of development. It does not make sense for a game that re-uses most of its material to take that time.

What I fear the most is that Aonuma is using this time to make sure his influence will be perceived in all the game, not just the main spots. He wants to control all aspects of it, because he knows the next Zelda will have an uncommon amount of attention on it (and he won’t waste the opportunity to show all these people the amazing story he wants to tell). I do not want to be right, but the Nintendo of nowadays has told me to not have great expectations.

My best regards,
The frightened reader.

Normally, we could write off your email as someone imagining things the Nintendo people are doing. But you have to consider that Aonuma literally pushed himself into the spotlight and said that the reason why Breath of the Wild was great was because…

…of Skyward Sword.

Yes, he said that.

Breath of Wild’s success is proof that the direction of the Zelda franchise was wrong for all of Aonuma’s career!

It’s a huge point this blog made. Zelda, according to Aonuma, is about ‘puzzles’ and ‘story’. I was like, “WTF!? That isn’t why people bought Zelda originally.” And each incarnation of Zelda just got weaker and stupider.

The reason why is that Aonuma is not a fan of the first three Zelda games. He says he liked Link to the Past because he could cut the grass (!).

All the strengths of Breath of the Wild are all anti-Aonuma. Open World is the OPPOSITE of linear story progression (i.e. ‘story’). Simulation of the environment and physics, which BOTW does, is the OPPOSITE of ‘puzzles’.

The reason why we got Breath of the Wild was because left to his own instincts, Aonuma made every wrong decision for Zelda. Due to declining sales and fading IP starlight (Skyward Sword, Phantom Hourglass, Spirit Tracks, etc), Nintendo was forced to do the OPPOSITE of Aonuma’s natural instincts. We went from Skyward Sword being ‘the world is a puzzle’ to Breath of the Wild being ‘explore wherever you want and use the environment your own way’.

Breath of the Wild is a complete repudiation of the Aonuma style.

Above: The recent comments to this video are hilarious.

From what I gather, Aonuma sees Link as someone constantly parachuting and hang-gliding.

Now is that what you see for Zelda? I thought it was a guy with a sword, but now it is about hang-gliding!

We really have to see what they’re doing for Breath of the Wild 2. I think they’ll lobotomize BOTW into a ‘formula’ (e.g. “Open World Concept”) and graft that onto what they really want to do.

Breath of the Wild 2 feels to me like Mario Galaxy. Link is going to be flying around, getting on all these little ‘spheroids’ (or islands in this case), and each island will have a shitty puzzle!

There are many ‘bad things’ with BOTW that I don’t think they will address (outside the breakable weapons). They won’t address the shitty anime style (that last fight with Ganon was stupid). They won’t address the lack of real dungeons (like Hyrule Castle) and instead put in more ‘Giant Walking Puzzles’ like the Divine Beasts. They’ll remove more simulation parts for favor of more ‘story beats’ and ‘puzzles’.

I shouldn’t waste time talking about BOTW2 since we haven’t been shown much. So much can go wrong.

I see BOTW2 as THE weathervane for Nintendo’s future. How does a First Party treat the sequel to the game that initially established their console?

Super Mario Brothers 3 told me to trust Nintendo going into 16-bit Era.

Yoshi’s Island told me not to trust Nintendo going into 64-bit Era (sorry to those who love Yoshi’s Island, but it’s not Super Mario Brothers 5).

Wii Music, the sequel to Wii Sports, Wii Play, and Wii Sports Resort, was the harbinger of Wii U and a clear tell not to trust Nintendo going forward. How in the world did Wii Music get to market? Because Nintendo thought they were geniuses. They thought the same thing about the Wii U when it was released.

Breath of the Wild 2 will give us the glimpse of the Nintendo mindset going forward. If Nintendo builds on the strengths of Breath of the Wild 1, we will have another Super Mario Brothers 3 and the future looks promising for the next Nintendo generation. But if Nintendo doesn’t build on the strengths of Breath of the Wild 1 but puts in Aonuma shit instead, I wouldn’t trust the Switch successor. The mindset that is making the games for Switch’s successor is already formulated now. BOTW 2 is a preview of that.

Source is here:

https://www.famitsu.com/news/202112/27246207.html

You have to scroll to the bottom of the page in order to see the top ten.

Here’s a quick English digest of the top ten:

New Japanese Poll Reveals Japanese Top 100 Console Games Ever

Big key takeaways:

– Japan loves Splatoon
– They also like smash brothers surprisingly
– And animal crossing
– Breath of the Wild is number 1 in that entire list
– Metroid Dread is nowhere to be found. Actually, I don’t think I even see a single Metroid game on the list.
– Super Mario Brothers 3 is number 10
– There is no 3D Mario in the top 10
– Chrono Trigger is in the top ten and beats out Final Fantasy X
– Dragon quest V is right below breath of the wild
– Undertale is also pretty popular with the Japanese since it was 13th
– Apparently the Xeno games by preference are as follows: Xenoblade < Xenogears < Xenoblade 2 (Since KOS-MOS from Xenosaga makes a cameo so… that’s why it’s better than all of the other Xeno games…?) < Final Fantasy V < Final Fantasy VI. That was kinda odd
– Street Fighter II is #91. Actually, I get this one since people were burned out from all of the different versions of the game due to updates.
– OG Tetris (on the Gameboy) is number #25, Minecraft is #20
– OG Mario Kart is #12

And finally, Final Fantasy VII is number 3. I understand why that’s number 3, but you’re going to have to wait as to why I think that’s the case since that ties into my observations from playing Fantasian, which will be coming in a future email. Oh, the suspense!

Metroid and 3d Mario have only sold in the West.

Hello Malstrom!

I bought my 16-year old kid Metroid Dread for christmas, as this was
what he was wishing for. I have to say that I was positively surprised
by the game. My biggest gripes are the general lack of colour, general
lack of music and the Emmis. If we compare Dread to Metroid and Super
Metroid, they both had vibrant worlds that souded fabulous, but Dread is
like Fusion, but worse. Dread looks like it’s trying to copy the the
indie Metroid-knockoffs, but trying to best them by being an actual
Meroid. Emmis were fine if you did not have to find the damn omega-beam
to kill the bastard; Emmis would be great as minibosses. But is it a bad
game? No.

Me and my kids watched the Warcraft movie just the other night. The
movie is crap – except for what my 7 year old kid thought of the film,
he even wants to see the sequel “when it comes out”. If you call the
movie a cheap Shrek-knockoff, I don’t think it’s really that far away
from truth. It had funny-looking orcs fighting, the characters were such
stereotypes and “good magic” and “bad magic” that was even displayed
with different colours. It really was made small kids in mind.

I would say Metroid Dread is a bad game. I will not allow bad games out there to lower the bar for quality I expect in a Nintendo game.

Keep in mind that I’m not like most ‘gamers’ on the Internet. My quality threshold is higher than the norm. When the ‘classics’ came out, I was griping about them (but still loving them). Link to the Past? “Game is good, but where’s the Second Quest?” Super Mario World? “Good, but a step down from Super Mario Brothers 3.” Super Metroid? “Glorious, but it is way too easy.” Breath of the Wild? “Right direction for Zelda. Still some flaws such as breakable weapons and little enemy variety and crappy dungeons.”

From my quality threshold, most games are going to be bad. Those games that are not bad to me, they will be selling like wildfire. Hence, I see myself as a reliable weathervane for games’ market strength.

Gamers of my quality threshold do not make blogs and do not talk about their experiences. They simply see most games as boring and dumb, and they walk away entirely.

Hello again Master Malstrom, thanks for the advice!

I actually made a rather big Jrpg fangame in Rpgmaker a few years ago, and am making another (shorter) one for fun, most of the players are my friends and they are enjoying it, so I have some experience in this.

Recently bought all Ultima games on GoG, from the first up to Underworld 2 (missing Alkabeth now that I remember)
While I was more influenced by Jrpgs since I grew up with them (Phantasy Star being a favorite, especially the 4th one) later on I got into Rpgs like Fallout New Vegas and Mass Effect, so now I want to look as well to western RPGs like Ultima (mostly Ultima) for guidance, since I became very interested in it through blogs, and even more after your series of articles about the franchise (only played Ultima IV on the Master System before).

That is, I want to make games with shorter and to the point cutscenes, reasonable lengths of dialogue, good levels of interactivity with the game world and giving freedom to the players, influenced by both western and japanese games (Ultima, Phantasy Star, Metroid, Castlevania, Zelda 1 and 2…)

Well, in the future that is. For now I’ll follow your advice, smaller, simpler games for fun, at first maybe with 8-bit looks (since I’m still learning pixel art).

While I’m aware you won’t be disclosing your game’s title here (which is understandable) I do hope I manage to find and buy it once it’s out, especially if it’s out on GoG (I practically abandoned Steam, I want to really own what I buy after all).

Hope you have a good week, good luck with the engine transition of your game.

Wait, wait, wait. I never said smaller, simpler games for fun. You make whatever you want. I just say ‘play it for fun’. And have others play it for fun.

With today’s technology, I’d RECORD others playing your game. Then you can tell things they cannot articulate. They may be running around in circles, yet they won’t say “I am lost.” They’ll just begrudgingly not want to play. Why? Because they’re lost. Their actions tell you things they won’t or cannot say.

I bet Nintendo must test their games with live people with cameras on the players’ faces. The more there’s smiles on the players’ faces, the better off they know they are doing. Miyamoto even said that directly. “I want to put smiles on people’s faces.” How can he know this unless he is looking at the player while he or she plays? Add on that during the Wii Era, Nintendo adopted marketing showing the players having fun with the console.

You know, when I play the older 8-bit and 16-bit games, I think to myself, “Why did we leave these games behind?” I’d much rather play Super Mario Brothers 3 than anything else, for example.

Why does the gaming market transition to new consoles such as from 8-bit to 16-bit? I actually think the answer is beyond ‘novelty’. Every generation needs its own entertainment to call its own. Star Trek: The Next Generation was needed because Star Trek was their fathers’ generation. No generation wants to be using their parents’ entertainment (be it books, music, TV shows, etc.).

Big game successes came from games that didn’t utilize modern hardware. Pokemon, Minecraft, Tetris and arguably Super Mario Brothers and Wii Sports. But what do all those games have in common? They define a generation. People proudly tell me, “I grew up with Pokemon. That’s MY game.” Today we have “I grew up with Minecraft. That’s MY game.” NES kids will say the same about Super Mario Brothers and all.

Music never required ‘new technology’ for market demand for new music. Neither did movies until after Star Wars special effects came into play.

I guess the point is that life wants to be entertained in ITS current spot in time.

I think Sakamoto Metroids, Aonuma Zeldas, and 3d Marios are inferior games compared to the franchise forbearers. Why would anyone cling to them? But yet, these games mark generational periods for people. I find this to be a very powerful bond.

If you can create that bond with the market, you’ll be golden. (Don’t ask me, I have no idea how.)

That goes to show you how much I’m prioritizing it. Why am paying a monthly subscription to Apple Arcade and not really playing any of their games? Well, I’m playing Shantae 5 again since they did a big feature update not too long ago, and I left my switch about 4 states south of me, so I can’t play the game on that platform at the moment!

I haven’t played it myself. Was planning to use this Christmas vacation to play it, but keep getting distracted with other things, like buying the mobile version of Bloodstained because it’s a horribly unoptimized game (you need a quad-core CPU because apparently it uses two of those physical cores just to process the voices lol) only to realize that while Apple’s silicon can handle brute-forcing through the garbage code (I’ve heard… stories of people trying to play the game on switch, which game journalists say is how the port to iOS and Android was possible), the developer responsible for the port for some reason or another didn’t disable all touchscreen controls when the game detects you’re using a controller to play the game, which means that all of the on-screen action buttons are still there, and you still have to touch the screen in order to interact with any of the game’s menus.

Tangents aside, let’s get back to my observations about the game based on the few times I saw my friend playing it as well as the occasional chat about it:

• The game’s about the same file size as Octopath Traveler lol.
• One of the early feature articles on Apple’s own App Store for the game, ended somewhere along the lines of “This might be the resurgence of these legendary figures in the JRPG industry, or just a sendoff to them both.” Talk about sending one of your few titles that could actually make gamers care about your platform off to die like that. That article seems to have been memory-holed by Apple themselves since it won an award for the end of the year, so whatever. Guess they wanted to save face lol.
• Journalists are impressed with the photorealistic graphics. Literally; well, the backgrounds are, anyway. I was going to explain it, but that one Christmas video that Apple made a few years ago can explain it a lot better than I could with words since that’s basically what Mistwalker did, but tweaked the workflow to create 3D visual assets for a video game instead: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QOoKSjaKSDA

I’m not impressed. Seriously, Team Red from Arc Systems works spoiled me for the rest of my life, and due to the nature of their workflow for creating games like Guilty Gear Strive, you can feel craftsmanship power levels between these guys and Mistwalker is not even at the same level:

For those readers who don’t understand the magnitude of that video, that was all rendered in real-time using their custom tools built around Unreal Engine:

So yeah, my standards are pretty high in terms of visual fidelity innovation, especially on the craftsmanship front, and the stuff they did for the visuals on Fantasian is pathetic compared to this.

• Speaking of presentation, I heard the music, and it sounds so drab. The regular encounter music sounds very… boring and feels like a slog. Like, Nobuo Uematsu sounds like he’s really tired of making video game music or something. My friend agreed with me: after playing the octopath Traveler OST during one car ride, he’s like, “man, this music has so much more presence than Fantasian. Like, the Battle music for this game is at a whole other level compared to Fantasian’s.”
• Speaking of Octopath Traveler, I did read the toucharcade review of the game, and they mentioned that the game will wreck your face if you attempt to face roll through all of the content like any other JRPG. I asked my friend about it, and he said he feels like it’s getting to the point where you do have to constantly switch your character’s load outs before each major boss encounter since you’ll get wrecked otherwise. Seems like Sakaguchi saw how much of a splash Octopath traveler made in games industry and wanted to replicate that. Heck, they even have a turn system similar to Octopath Traveler’s (some might say he probably borrowed the idea from Final Fantasy X, and I’ll give them that one)
• Sakaguchi for the most part is creatively bankrupt; if your craftsmanship sucks in sound and art department, this part is going to be your final saving throw to make a video game worthwhile to go through (and I don’t mean the actual plot; Warcraft’s story wasn’t that “great,” but the world building that the player’s exposed to while going through the campaign was pretty darn awesome). So like, there’s a town that’s clearly a replica of Venice, but they call it Vence, for example. The main character has amnesia, just like the main character for his other game Lost Odyssey. Speaking of Lost Odyssey, there was a storytelling method that was implemented there where there were optional story vignettes told in almost a visual novel style way, but not in the typical visual novel style of way, which I caught my friend going through during one of his sessions with it:

The reason why there’s even these things in Lost Odyssey to begin with is because Sakaguchi used his Microsoft Money to hire some famous novelist (like how Origin started hiring professional writers to do the stories for the later Ultima games) to write this stuff, so he HAD to find a way to make it work. Some of the JRPGs released after Lost Odyssey would copy this style:

I find that narrating these segments make it a lot better. Then again, that could be my brain believing those scenes are better voiced because I was playing the CD versions of Alone in the Dark so many years ago. Jeez, nothing new is under the sun anymore:

I do know that just like every other Apple Arcade game released so far that hits close to AAA status, they tend to release the first half of the game “early,” then they release the rest of it later, which is setting a really dangerous precedent and is another checkbox for how much Apple doesn’t care about gaming. Fantasian was one of the faster ones, actually, since it came out in March and then they added the final main content about 4-5 months later. There were still a few updates here and there, but it seems to have stopped in October, so it’s finally “done” in regards to content. From what I heard from developer interviews, Sakaguchi said that he wanted to have the first half of the game (the content released at launch) feel like the first half of Final Fantasy VI in terms of pacing, which was totally linear, which the second half (the final main content patch) being more freeform in deciding how you want to tackle everything, just like in Final Fantasy VI.

So, uh, I guess I should start playing this game now since I kinda want to see how bad Fantasian actually is. It’ll help me get my mind off the terrible design choices the developers made with the Bloodstained port on mobile devices.

Sakaguchi said he wanted Fantasian to have the flow of the first half of Final Fantasy VI? No way.

He talks about it in this interview with IGN. Here’s another one where he says he likes classic play style of early Final Fantasy.

I’ll probably try out Fantasian soon.

Hello Malstrom,

Now hear me out on this one, I am not asking you to release the game itself
for free. You can release only  the source code for the game and keep the
actual game (assets) behind a paywall. It is what the Doom developers did, you
still have to pay for the game to this very day, but you can grab the source
code for the engine with no strings attached. Well, almost.

Doom is released under the GNU GPL license, which gives users the four
freedoms of Free (libre, not gratis) Software (see links below), but users
have to pass on those freedoms when they share the software themselves. So you
can make your own Doom clone, maybe add features like jumping and room-over-
room, even sell it, but you cannot deny your users the source code. And this
applies only to the engine, your Doom clone cannot use original Doom assets,
it has to be a game of your own. This is commonly called “Copyleft”, a pun on
“Copyright”. There are more permissive licenses like the MIT or BSD license
which allow you to keep the code of your fork under wraps, but I wouldn’t use
one of those, you are basically just working for free only to have a company
take your work and run with it, giving nothing back.

OK, so why would you listen to be? Software decays. Even the best written
software will eventually stop working because the operating system and
hardware beneath have changed. Proprietary software is fixed in time, you can
never adjust it. Even if you technically could, you are not legally allowed to
do so. For some old office software that might not be an issue, just upgrade to
a newer version. But games are unique, a game release twenty or thirty years
ago can still be worth playing.

It also allows the community to maintain and port the game beyond its end of
life. Don’t want to port the game to some insignifican niche OS running on a
toaster? That’s OK, if people really want it they can port it themselves. If
you have ever tried to get a PC game running on a modern OS you know how much
of a pain that can be, and if there is not some savant out there who can
reverse engineer the code you are plain out of luck.

So if there are no downsides, why don’t more game developers open source their
code? One reason is proprietary middleware; if your game runs on something
like the Unity engine you can release your own scripts, but not the engine
itself. Some people might be under the impression that releasing the source
code means that they might have to make the entire game free (gratis). And
some people are egomanicals so obsessed with “muh vision” that having anyone
making changes to their masterpiece is considered sacrilege.

Note that when I say “release” I don’t mean you have to perpetually maintain a
public server running. You can just bundle a ZIP of the code with the game or
make it available as an extra download (like how GOG has manuals and
wallpapers as extras). You could even just mail out ZIPs on demand if people
ask you. But the simplest solution is probably to just host the project on
some code hosting website like GitLab or Github.

Further reading, because there is only so much I can put in one email (let me
know if you want more concrete information, I could talk about this topic all
day):
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
https://www.gnu.org/licenses/licenses.html
https://opensource.org/osd
https://www.fsf.org/

Note that Free Software and Open Source Software are not the same thing; there
is about 95% overlap in their goals and methods, but they differ in priorities.

I don’t own the (multiple) licenses for the source code of the engine I’m using.

If I make another game, I’d like an open source engine. I’m eyeing either a RTS game or a platformer (a true successor to Super Mario Brothers 3, you heard me Miyamoto!).

Hello Mr. Malstrom,
I’m messaging to tell you that the idea of new games competing against all the past ones, does not lie just in your head. When I was a child, my dad bought a Sega Saturn. It was my first console, and the first of him too. There were a few games, such as Mortal Kombat and Virtua Cop, but there was just one that everyone at home played: Saturn Bomberman.

I remember playing it with my dad, my sister and my mom. A few years later, my dad brought home a ps1, and then, my parents decide to give the Saturn to my cousins. There were Bomberman games on Playstation too, but no one at home played them as much as the Saturn one. After that, I’ve tried to play a lot of Bomberman games with my parents, hoping they like them. They already played the series’ games of the ps2, snes, x360, and even the recent Super Bomberman R, but they just didn’t enjoy them.

But a few years ago, I downloaded a Saturn emulator. Since it, my parents (and me) played Saturn Bomberman almost every night. It’s like the reason why my parents refuse to play the other games was that they’ve already experienced a better one. All the good things that the others have, this one have bigger and better.The story mode has co-op. There is 8 stages in the battle mode, but a code can unlock 4 variants of each stage, totalizing 40. There are mounts, and they can evolve and become more powerful. There’s a beautiful and original soundtrack, with the quality that only CDs had in 96. There’s beautiful and colorful sprites, that you can only find in a 2D game of the 32-bit era (not this crappy bomberman 3d models of nowadays). It’s even possible to play a 10 player battle (if exists someone that have so many controllers). 

I can only conclude that all the other series’ games have failed in beat this one (at least at my home). I don’t know if you already played it, but you should. The Sega Saturn is a bit hard to emulate, but this game worth. It’s like the ultimate Bomberman experience until now (and I’m sure my parents agree with me).

Graciously,
The Beautiful reader.

I didn’t know the Saturn COULD be emulated.

Of all the game consoles I missed, the Saturn is the one I wish I did buy. I didn’t buy it at the time because I knew it was a disaster. But what I’ve learned today that I wished I knew then was to buy all the good games then because ‘then’ will not come again. When this blog started, I bought ALL the Gamecube games for pennies. I knew. Today, those pennies have turned to hundreds.

I hear Saturn Bomberman is the best. The only thing that might compete with it are the Turbographx 16 or SNES Bomberman games (still can’t believe there are FIVE (!) Bomberman games on SNES).

32 bit ERA I was in PC Land playing (actually, beta testing) RTS games like Starcraft, Dark Reign, Age of Empires, and playing other games like Freespace, Descent, Alpha Centauri, Master of Orion, Master of Magic, etc.

I despise the Nintendo 64 and the PlayStation because of their anti-2d mentality. Sony wasn’t happy with Symphony of the Night being 2d and not ‘showing off the awesome 3d power of the hardware’. But I’d much rather play Symphony of the Night than any other game on the PlayStation. The so called ‘amazing 3d games’ like Final Fantasy VII look like shit today. But the 2d games age like wine.

I know Nintendo 64 is popular for many people, but I hated the anti-2d nature of the console. There was nothing for me to play!

If I had to re-live 32 bit era again, I’d buy a Saturn and have been a ‘Sega gamer’ despite the company literally destroying itself.

Too many RPGs and not enough time. Is Fantasian worth playing? I like the vibe of the game from what I’ve seen.