Redkey

When the Wii launched, a few pundits called it "two GameCubes taped together", which I thought was a bit rude and overly dismissive.

Years later, I started really looking into the technical side of things, and oh my goodness it really is almost two GameCubes taped together. I mean, it works wonderfully and I'm not knocking it, but IIRC the majority of what's under the hood is either an upgraded version of what was in the GCN, or a doubling of the capacity (in some cases literally two) of the same component.

It's not a really big thing, but it is a pet peeve of mine (and some others); the name of the series isn't "Dues Ex" but "Deus Ex" (day-us ex), as in "deus ex machina" (day-us ex mack-in-a).

"Deus ex machina" literally translates as "God from (the) machine", and originally referred to a type of stage prop used in ancient plays, then in more modern times the term came to refer more generally to the sort of plot device that used that prop, which is a previously unmentioned person or thing that suddenly appears to save the heroes from an otherwise inescapable threat. At some time in the 60s or 70s it started to become popular to use it in a more literal sense in sci-fi stories about machine intelligence or cyborgs.

Ah, that makes much more sense. Thanks!

For anyone like me who doesn't already know how this (apparently) works, the only place I eventually found the file was via a Mega link in the description of the matching video on the modder's YouTube channel. The thumbnail has the word "DOWNLOAD' written across it.

Maybe, but it's gonna be more like SkyNet with electrolytes; it's what terminators crave.

I have been emulating many different systems (including SNES) on lots of platforms, and have almost never been bothered by lag in the emulation itself.

But one day someone was harping on about lag in an SNES game, so I loaded it up (Android RA SNES9x core) just to double-check before arguing with them... and indeed found the lag quite noticeable. But I also found two ways to reduce the lag significantly.

The first thing is to try different cores. There are multiple versions of SNES9x available on most versions of Retroarch, and there's a reason for it. The different cores can give surprisingly different results for a single game.

The second thing (which had the greater impact for me) is to enable Retroarch's look-ahead emulation for one or two frames. Just as it sounds, this will cause the core to emulate the next n frames with every possible combination of inputs. It increases the processing requirements exponentially, but for something like the SNES, many platforms can handle it. I know it seems counterintuitive (if it can emulate hundreds or thousands of possible frames in realtime, why can't it do just one?) but it worked for me. It must be some kind of throughput vs. latency thing.

There's nothing wrong with wanting to stick to original hardware, if you already have it or can afford to buy it.

Setting up a Pi or other single-board system as a dedicated retro game emulator is also an absolutely valid choice IMO. It's a fun, generally affordable little project that you can tinker with forever, e.g. changing cases and controllers, UI tweaks, ROM file organization, per-game settings optimization. But I don't think that it's ever been the "best" emulation option for anyone who didn't already have their heart set on "doing something fun and interesting with a Pi".

The smartphone you already have, dedicated retro gaming handhelds, Android TV boxes or sticks, and cheap/secondhand/already-owned PCs (desktop, notebook, or kiosk) all arguably match or exceed the performance and value-for-money of any Pi-based system.

Yet in any thread where someone new to emulation is asking for advice, there's always a flock of folks who suggest getting a Pi like it's the only game in town. It honestly baffles me a little. Especially because almost all of them are just running a pretty frontend over Retroarch, and Retroarch is available for virtually every modern consumer computing platform (and so are a lot of pretty frontends, if that's a selling point).

For context, I've got a dozen or so retro systems, but I prefer to emulate as much as possible.

Some games are so perfectly built to suit their original hardware that they just can't benefit from a remaster. I'd argue that Killer7 is one of those games. Port it to modern systems and re-release it by all means, but I think that there's very little you could really do to it without changing some part of its core DNA.

It's a weird, janky game, but it was weird and janky back in the day, too, not just in the hindsight of hardware limitations and outdated design sensibilities.

The first time I played it (on PS2), a year or two after launch, I could not get into it at all, and even somehow got stuck quite early in the game. A few years later I gave it another try and everything just clicked for me, including passing that tricky part without breaking a sweat. I can't imagine what the issue was the first time around.

I don't think it's for everyone but it definitely has a charming kind of oddness, and a slight clumsiness that's more endearing than irritating for people in its target audience.

After watching some of a playthrough on YouTube, the PC Engine version looks fairly close to the original arcade game (also called Valkyrie no Densetsu/Legend of the Valkyrie). The Famicom game (called Valkyrie no Boken: Toki no Kagi no Densetsu/Valkyrie's Adventure: Legend of the Key of Time) is very different. The two games really only share the title (sort of) and a little backstory.

Legend of the Valkyrie is an on-rails multi-direction shooting game with light RPG elements. The most similar games I can think of are the D&D beat-em-up games Tower of Doom and Shadow Over Mystara, which were also originally arcade games.

But the Famicom's Valkyrie's Adventure is a ridiculously open world action RPG. The player is dropped in the middle of the wilderness with a sword and no idea of what to do first. You're free to walk in any direction, like most home 2D action RPGs. There's virtually no text, and many "puzzles" which involve using particular items in particular one-tile spaces (without any clues or hints). There's a guide in the original Famicom manual that will get you part-way through the game, but from there you're on your own.

This genie must've read or watched Brewster's Millions.

That sounds similar to the actual game that was released for 8-bit home computers at the time.

I saw it at the cinema and vaguely remember enjoying it well enough. It's not a great movie, but it's not awful, either. I didn't know that it was supposed to be terrible; it looks like reviewers gave it a slightly better than average score.

I don't expect ever to watch it a second time, if that helps.

Lara Croft and the Cradle of Life, though... All I can remember about it now is that afterwards, my friends and I agreed that we should've trusted our instincts and just walked out after about 30 minutes.