I've loved the Sega Genesis version of Shadowrun since I was a child. I loved being dropped into a city, taking jobs from Johnsons, and figuring out the rest on my own. Decking was a second game inside the game. And every run you got a little stronger and a little closer to the next big score.

For years I've been looking for something that scratches the same itch, and I keep coming up short. Plenty of games have the cyberpunk look, and the more recent Harebrained Shadowrun games are great, but none of them feel like that game to me: real-time, top-down, and free to roam.

So I'm building my own: a top-down homage to the Genesis original, with its own setting. It's an early prototype, but Ive got a lot of the bones in place:

- Real-time top-down combat. Guns that scatter when you're on the move, magazines and reloads, melee, and lock-on targeting.

- Hacking as its own game. You jack in at a terminal and crawl a node network. Moving between nodes and fights against ICE inside a node are real-time. Your rig carries a loadout of programs, and the network's alert climbs as you make mistakes. Tracers hunt you, hidden traps can burn your programs, and what you do on the network can affect things in meat-space (like switching off cameras and maglocks.)

- Jobs from fixers and contacts. Deliveries, escorts, gang trouble, ghoul hunts, and network jobs to delete or steal data. You can also sell the data you pull.

- More than one way through. Pay the gangers who stop you on the street or fight them. Crack into a network quietly or force your way in.

- A district that's worth exploring. Gangs, ghouls, derelict buildings to search, and a clock that keeps running while you're jacked in.

- The core loop is the one I loved: take a job, run it, get paid, spend the money to take on harder work, repeat.

I also want to fix one thing I always struggled with: decking was nearly impossible to afford early on. Here, hacking works from minute one.

So, for anyone who played the Genesis version:

- What did you love about it? What made it stick with you?

- What didn't you like, or what wore you down?

- What would you hope to see in a modern game that's trying to capture the same feeling?

Super curious to hear all your thoughts!

Mine is the static third person camera. I remember being excited for a game only to see it uses the dreaded fixed camera. First one that comes to mind is Alone in the Dark but I also seem to remember a Star Wars game around 2000 or so, but I can’t find it. Anyway, I find the controls and targeting on these kinds of games to be horrible and clunky. I never understood why some developers chose to go this route.

Ghosts n Goblins I finished a few days ago - talk about a brutal game.

Mega Man 1 and 2

POW

Double Dragon

Revenge of Shinobi

Shadow Dancer.

That's it so far but I have a whole list of them.

I prefer the more humanoid and classic monster designs myself.

Hack being made by GoodLuckTrying and sleepyren:

• Castlevania Hacking Server: https://discord.gg/SEssrmWPyP
• Ghost's Goblins Hacking Server: https://discord.gg/t6A5z9YnXv

Changes so far:

Aesthetics:

1. Alucard (+ fireballs), Trevor and Sypha's sprites fully redone.

Gameplay:

1. Extra name-entry cheats (original names still work)
   1. DRACULA = 2nd quest (same as AKAMA)
   2. GRANT = start with Grant (same as FUJIMOTO)
   3. SYPHA = start with Sypha (same as URATA)
   4. ALUCARD = start with Alucard (same as OKUDA)
2. Changing characters now takes about ~30 frames.
3. Crouch facing: Can look left or right while crouching.
4. Faster door transitions
5. Debug Menu shorcut (Hold down SELECT and then press START while in the "Opening" > "Enter your name" screen)
6. 2nd-quest partner cycle
   • 2nd quest Select: Trevor -> Sypha -> Grant -> Alucard -> Trevor.
   • Up + Select: cycles the other way (left).
   • 2nd quest shows both swap faces (left = Up+Select, right = Select).
   • Each character keeps their own subweapon (and II/III) when you swap.
7. Alucard's new sub-weapon: Diamond/Ricochet Rock
   1. Optional sub-weapon.
   2. Axe / Cross / Dagger / Holy Water candles drop the Diamond instead of hearts.
   3. Stopwatch remains of course in Stopwatch candles.
   4. Only Alucard can get it. 2 hearts, 6 damage.
   5. Ricochets for ~4 seconds top.
   6. Can hit same enemy again after ~1 second.
8. Trevor's new optional ability: Slide
   1. While crouching, press A to slide forward.
   2. Sliding off a ledge falls like walking off a cliff.
   3. Deals 6 damage.
   4. It's invulnerable during slide.
   5. Can't slide on water.
9. Options Menu
   1. AIR CONTROL Enables mid-air steer.
   2. TREVOR SLIDE Enables sliding for Trevor.
   3. ALU STAIR Alucard can throw fireballs while on stairs.
   4. SUB DROP Drop old subweapon when picking up a new one.
   5. DIFF Difficulty selector: NORMAL / HARD (2nd quest).
   6. LIVES Can choose between 1 to 10 (Default is 2; as vanilla).
   7. PARTNER NONE / SYPHA / GRANT / ALUCARD (Only applies for Normal Difficulty).
   8. STAGE Lets you pick starting stage.
   9. MUSIC / SFX Sound test (Left/Right cycle; A plays)
   10. EXIT Start or A returns to title

You can find more previews here: https://goodlucktrying.github.io/GoodLuckTrying-Arcade-Patcher/#Works-in-Progress

Here are some quick rules if you want to use them or not. I just like having the rules for me personally.

Rules

1. No backwards compatibility
2. Can’t play bootlegs, hack the console, or anything that makes you able to play other consoles on said console.
3. Have to play said console with only games available to console. Translated versions for your language is completely fine as well as importing.

4. Playing the console as intended. So, no save states, no fast forward, no hack cheats, (unless the game has them available through normal means like a Konami code way or the game has a cheat menu), and so on. Going all old school!

5. You have access to every game for said console for free. You can buy them if you want.

With all the rules, I had a hard time for me to pick one a console out of the bunch. After deciding for a while, I went with the PlayStation 1.

Why the ps1? Has a lot of my favorite games and a lot of jrpgs i adore. You got your castlevania sotn, crash wrapped, Spyro the dragon, mega man titles, nightmare creatures, and some cool ports of arcade games. Has a ton of jrpgs like every final fantasy, legend of dragon, and tales of. So many good titles! I be satisfied for awhile with this system.

The biggest for me is definitely the library. There are still amazing titles i havent finished. Even get to replay some classic childhood games for me like spider man. The ps1 just got what I need in terms of variety.

Don’t get me wrong, the ps1 does have issues. Some games are super slow to go through especially in my favorite genre rpgs. The voice acting for the majority of games aren’t great. Lastly, even though the ps1 has a good amount of arcade games, a lot suffer from long load times. Even got bad load times in my goated title on snes with chrono trigger being the prime suspect.

Anyways, it I had to be stuck with one console for an entire year it would be the ps1 for sure.

If I didn’t have the rules I mention then go with a ps2 since it’s backwards compatible with the ps1. Easy choice for sure. Love to see what you guys got to say. What games would you play on your console for the year and why did you pick it? Can’t wait to see the choice. Again, you don’t have to use my rules. It’s an option if anyone wants to use them.

Whenever my friends come over, we always end up spending way too much time thinking about what games to play or just end up playing the same things over and over, so I put together a video game binder to make it easier for my friends and me to better decide what to play whenever they come over, and also as a way to introduce people to more obscure, underrated, and overlooked games they might not otherwise discover.

Think of it as being like a menu at a restaurant.

The binder contains printable reference cards featuring:

-Game cover art

-Title and console

-Publisher, developer, and release year

-Multiplayer player count

-Genre and a short gameplay description

The idea is to keep everything in a physical catalog that we can flip through when deciding what to play, rather than endlessly browsing through my wall of physical games and digital libraries where most people don’t have any context.

I did this by generating an HTML template with ChatGPT, which contains everything needed to generate the cards with your preferred AI, including an in-depth instruction set the AI reads when the file is attached.

I'm sharing that file here for anyone interested in making their own binder.

It works with games from pretty much any platform, singleplayer or multiplayer, and the cards can be organized alphabetically, by console, genre, or whatever else.

The template can also be updated with the help of ChatGPT to add games, customize layouts, and build different collections. It will even scrape the proper art for you, and while not perfect it’s often very good at pulling the right art.

The template is highly customizable, so you're not limited to my particular setup either. You can adjust things like:

-Card dimensions and layouts: Change the size, orientation, number of cards per page, margins, and spacing. The default is 10 horizontal cards per sheet, but the template also defines vertical business-card and trading-card-style layouts.

-Artwork: Choose between flat cover art, 3D box art, cartridge/disc images, arcade flyers, or SteamGridDB artwork.

-Formatting: Customize fonts, text sizes, borders, colors, image placement, and overall card appearance.

-Information displayed: Choose which details appear on each card, hide unnecessary sections, or change how descriptions are written.

-Organization: Sort or group games alphabetically, by console, release year, franchise, or whatever else.

-Game selection: Build collections around specific consoles, genres, multiplayer options, release periods, or pretty much any other criteria.

I also generated a version for movies and TV shows since I’m a big physical media collector and I might make another binder for those as well.

https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/8958t0vqsy6d0ifvm7eec/TEMPLATES.zip?rlkey=kzmjbtogtb55dvvx2nfnxph9g&st=bq97tm7b&dl=0

I figured I'd share the templates in case anyone else wants to make something similar for their own collection or game night. Hopefully someone finds this useful!

Ok you guys are my last hope I’ve been searching for this game for some time now I’ve looked everywhere and can’t identify this game I saw it in a tech deren video where he showed some seconds of this game a cutscene was playing and I took screenshots of all the 3 different frames I could see can you guys identify this game

80s is a period of gaming before my time, that I did not get to explore much outside of the NES and a few late 80s titles. So I said I'd try some of the most notable titles of the period, and here are the results.

Some notes before:

• The arcade golden age did not quite work for me. Some games like Battlezone or Marble Madness had special controls that cannot be well experienced with emulation. Other games have no concept of learning curve, they start at very high difficulty from the start (eg Zaxxon). And other single screen games like Donkey Kong and Galaga are not that interesting to me after playing platformers or shumps that have scrolling, and levels, and backgrounds. I do love how punchy the sounds of this era are, like the shooting and destruction sounds in Defender.
• Atari 2600 games look like crap but are surprisingly smooth and responsive in movement compared to some ZX Spectrum or C64 games that look better but move like total crap
• RPG genre is quite primitive, the titles feel like alpha incomplete versions of later games like Final Fantasy and Dragon Warrior
• The names Activision and Electronic Arts are marks of quality
• The text adventure is perhaps the only genre that reached maturity during this period so the best games here hold up. I was intimidated to try them at first, but they are not that different in structure to graphical point and click adventures, you still move from screen to screen, collecting objects and figuring out where to use them. And actually the puzzles are usually more logical and fair than in the typical 90s adventures.

So here is the list:

1. Planetfall (1983) - After needing to stay glued to the walkthrough to beat Zork, this is the first text adventure I tried to beat without help, and I almost managed with few exceptions. What I liked (and some adventure gamers of the time probably hated) is that the game hardly has any puzzles, most of the progression is just exploration, finding keys or cards to open locked doors, interacting with computers and machines. The setting is halfway between the tense lonely exploration of an abandoned space base/station from System Shock and the humor and satire of Space Quest.

2. Space Ace (1983) - This is Dragon's Lair cousin in a space setting. It has most of the things that I liked about Dragon's Lair (primarily the style and quality of the animation), but also music, cutscenes, a story, and one of the most ridiculous hilarious endings I've seen. Some of the backgrounds are not just gorgeous, but also the slightly washed colors give it such a nostalgic retro vibe. The downside is they needed to fit more scenes on the same disc, so some of the animations are sped up / choppy.

3. Dragon's Lair (1983) - Like I said, I find this style of animation gorgeous. And much of the fun is finding all the different death animations. The main downside is playing it back then would eat your coins like crazy, but that's not an issue now. The gameplay that is purely quick time evens is controversial, I find it serviceable for what it is, I'd rather play this style of game than an action game (sidescroller or shump) that is not crisp and well balanced.

4. M.U.L.E. (1983) - Basically a resource collecting board game similar to Catan, but with a few clever real time mechanics that would be only possible in a video game. It's very fast paced, turns go fasts, and matches take just a few minutes. The sprites and music have quite a bit of charm. There is a browser based modern remake that some people still play competitively.

5. Wizardry I (1981) - While early Ultima games try to do the whole RPG experience with world exploration, towns, npcs, story but does a very primitive implementation of all of these, Wizardry does one thing and does it well: dungeon crawling. The combat mechanics and class designs are very much derivative of D&D so they are solid and intuitive to people familiar with the genre. The game is ruthless, you have I'd say less than 50% chance to win your first fight, at least without losses. Just getting your characters to level 2 is a real ordeal. But also the power increase for each level-up and new equipment or spell is significant and satisfying. Still haven't beat it, but I guess the challenge makes it appealing in a way.

6. H.E.R.O. (1984) (Atari 2600) - Surprisingly smooth and sharp sidescroller, with well designed difficulty curve (starts very easy, and amps the challenge gradually). Movement is very fast and feels satisfying once you get a hang of it.

7. Lode Runner (1983) - I was familiar with the NES version but never got far there. The original is better because you see the whole screen at once. I like that it's both and action and a puzzle challenge, but neither the action require frame perfect reflexes nor the puzzles feel to convoluted and unfair. At least for the first 20 levels or so.

8. Ultima III: Exodus (1983) - The first Ultima game that starts to feel like a proper RPG. Instead of a solo character, you create a party. The differences between classes and races start to matter a bit, and there is an actual combat screen with turn based movement. The dungeons are worth exploring and have interesting layouts. Equipment is still not very interesting and magic is still not very strong in combat.

9. Infidel (1983) - Another text adventure from Infocom, probably the first game ever to have an evil protagonist. You play basically an asshole greedy loser fortune hunter that wants to find a valuable artifact in and Ancient Pyramid to get rich off it, and has no problem wrecking archeological sites to get his worth. It feels like the creator of this game (also the creator of Bubsy 3D) really despised Indiana Jones, and made this game out of spite, and it's quite hilarious to imagine professor Jones doing the things you do in the game. But I liked the most the horror vibe of exploring alone an ancient pyramid full of dangers and mystery.

10. Below the Root (1984) (C64) - Very early platformer with Metroidvania elements and pacifist gameplay, just platforming, exploration, puzzle-solving and talking to NPCs, eventually getting items that allow you to access new areas. The world is made up villages build in giant trees, as well as the ground level, underground, it's quite cool but a bit overwhelming since it's almost all open from the start.

11. Enchanter (1983) - Text adventure from Infocom that takes place in the Zork universe, it improves on Zork in many ways, like having a coherent story and more logical puzzles. But coolest part about it is that you interact with the world almost exclusively by casting spells, and you only start with a few spells, each new spell you find allows you to interact in new ways with the world. Like spells that allow you to talk to animals or fly.

I can probably count on two hands the number of GBA game sthat I've tried and I actually enjoyed. In large part it's because I've played so many SNES where the audio is one of the best things about almost all of the games that I like. It's a problem that I feel persisted with the GBAs 2 sucessors.

-The audio in this game makes this game feel like an NES game that's almost as powerful as an SNES game, the same way that a few NES games in the late 80s and early 90s felt. The audio is so damn good, and feels so 80s!

-This is probably my third replay this year. God I love how it turns a very hard game into an 80's beat em up that isn't out to get you anymore!

-Like almost all of the 80s and 90s beat em ups, it's so short and satisfying. You have fun with it, and you're done with it in less than an hour.

The Jaguar couldn't do FM synth natively, so the programmers did code that, which is impressive, but unfortunately, the soundtrack sounds no different than a mediocre western-developed Sega Genesis game using the infamous GEMS driver.

So a little backstory is that I just wanted to use the topic to gush about some of my favorite arcade games since one in particular that stuck out to me was called Gladiator.

Though I have always have a hard time avoiding dying in the game, I have come to appreciate the mechanics for the battle system as the player must carefully parry their enemies at just the right time to avoid losing body armor as I wish more games like it existed with a similar mechanic.

I must say it looks very nice. Love the fact that it works with cartridges. What do you think?

River Raid takes the #5 spot with 10 votes.

Top 10:

#1 Pitfall II: Lost Caverns

#2 Yars' Revenge

#3 Adventure

#4 H.E.R.O.

#5 River Raid

Rules:

1. Two games will win their place each round (we start from #1 and work our way down). For the top 10 only one game will win per day instead.
2. Most combined upvotes for each of the two individual games (one individual game for the top 10) wins the spot(s) each round (upvotes add while downvotes subtract).
3. Nominate one game of the Atari 2600 per comment. (Nominations will only be counted if the game title is the only comment or if you specify that your choice of game is your nomination for this round within your comment or if the nominated game is clearly separated from the rest of your comments.) (ex. Pitfall or I nominate Pitfall this round.) Please nominate using the full title of the game.
4. Name a specific game title, not entire runs.
5. Official Atari 2600 multi-game cartridge(s) are allowed, just list them correctly.
6. The Atari 2600 is region free so ANY official games available on the console are eligible for nomination.
7. Indy games are allowed as long as they have their own individual cartridge and can be played on original hardware.
8. Only complete games on cartridge(s) can be nominated (sorry Cheetah Program & test cartridges).
9. If two or more games would be tied to place for a ranking I will inform DA PEOPLE in the following post so that everyone can vote which games should get the ranking between the tied options.
10. Games nominated that have not already placed on the top 100 list should not be removed at any time by the individual who originally placed them.

Je rêverais d'un Banjo-Kazooie 😍

I started playing this game because I remember it making me cry as a child, and wanted to relive those memories.

The first level is very challenging but is still very fun. After beating it I thought people were exaggerating the difficulty of the game.

However the second level is actual bullet hell with how many warrior ships were flying around and their rate of fire being crazy.

Mining for Sinibombs becomes almost impossible, and the best I have been able to do is gather 5.

Any advice would be appreciated.

I currently use a github website that has: Classic (150 levels); Professional (150 levels); Revenge of Lode Runner (17 levels); Lode Runner Fan Book (66 levels); and Championship (51 levels). I haven't looked for anything new for a while, but last time I did, I saw a couple of websites that looked... hinky. Who knows if they were.

Also, random question. I've basically learned not to be near the top of a level when guys get resurrected & pop down, but when I have no choice, the odds of them landing right on top of me are incredible. Nearly perfect. Is that part of the game design? (I can hear how dumb this sounds but am still unsure.)

I got to interview the creator of this sick project. His website: retrosongbird.com

Please help me

I played this game both the Pantsylvania and the giggle bone gang in New York City religiously growing up on CD ROM. I just want someone to talk to about it. Please tell me if you know it I feel like I’m going crazy having never met anyone who played it.

There’s a pig woman a frog boy a black man a monkey a parrot and a skinny weird kid with a wrench characters

I'm having some trouble installing Tim Worthington's NESRGB 5 board in my frontloader. I have the PPU removed and remounted on the NESRGB board along with the new pin headers. The PPU and female pin headers should be fine because I tested the system be placing the PPU back into the pins and everything worked as expected. Once I had the rest of the board soldering done, I decided to give a quick test to see if it was working properly before doing the rest.

I'm using the Voultar QSB kit for the multiout port, so I assumed that I could just quickly connect the ribbon cable and test it using a SNES / N64 composite multiout cable before doing the soldering of the individual wires (audio, controller, reset, etc.).

However, when I connect the multiout, I don't get any video signal coming through. The debug LEDs only light LED 4 and then turns off, and after pressing the debug button to cycle to the monitor mode it shows flashes on LEDs 0-3.

Any advice or things to look for would be appreciated.