Aged Like Fine Milk: The Ten Most Future-PRONE Game Formats

Some game consoles have smart hardware designs that keep them relevant years and even decades past their expiration dates. The Atari 2600's life spanned three decades. The Neo-Geo only died because its manufacturer SNK did, some thirteen years after its introduction in 1990. Heck, they may still be selling Master Systems in Brazil, forty years later! Their longevity alone makes these machines legendary.

Like Squidward, these game systems
are not E.

Not every game console has that kind of endurance... in fact, an unlucky handful were obsolete on launch, held back from greatness by limited resources, bewildering architecture, and plain old-fashioned short-sighted design. They're not necessarily bad systems, but they're a whole lot harder to love than the machines in my last article...

MAGNAVOX ODYSSEY2

Back in 1981, most game-loving families had an Atari 2600. A lucky few had the Mattel Intellivision, while the less fortunate- myself included- had to slum with the Magnavox Odyssey2.

In the first console war, the Odyssey2 wasn’t a major player like Stalin or Churchill, but more akin to Colonel Klink from Hogan’s Heroes. At first glance, it looks like a genuine threat, with a membrane keyboard and neon-lined science-fiction box art. However, from its first stumbling step, the Odyssey2 demonstrates that it’s far from the Dutch uber-console Phillips would have you believe.

Every game system in the early 1980s had compromises in its design to keep it at a consumer-friendly price point. The 2600 had no video RAM, and the Intellivision had a sluggish clock speed... these were severe handicaps, but smart developers could work around them to deliver fun and distinct gaming experiences.

Pop-Aye-Aye-Aye!

Phillips’ compromise for the Odyssey2 was cutting the available RAM down to 64 bytes, while including a built-in character set with all the objects one would need to make a video game. That was fine in 1978, when the machine was first designed, but as the gaming industry evolved and video games developed as an artistic medium, the Odyssey2 couldn’t keep up. Ports of arcade hits like Frogger, Q*Bert, and Popeye were eventually released for the system, but they were more like abstractions, drained of visual identity and even basic play mechanics. 

Against all logic, the Odyssey2 has fans in the 21^st century, including a few programmers who’ve made their own games. Writing a video game for this machine must be like painting a detailed landscape on a grain of rice, but at least the Odyssey2 is still providing gamers with a challenge...

EMERSON ARCADIA 2001 

Shitty box art rounds out
the thoroughly shitty
Arcadia experience.

Powered by a Signetics 2650 processor (in the same way a potato might power an alarm clock), this early game console designed by Hong Kong’s Universal Appliances Limited was released in a whole lot of countries, under a whole lot of names. Here in America, we either called it the “Emerson Arcadia 2001,” or “the only game console my parents could afford.”

The problem with the Arcadia is that it was designed to compete with the Atari 2600... with budget Hong Kong parts... in 1982, on the cusp of the arrival of the ColecoVision. The Arcadia couldn’t compete with the massive library of titles on the Atari 2600, and certainly couldn’t go toe to toe with the next wave of game consoles, with their boosted specs. The ColecoVision promised an arcade-quality gaming experience, and sometimes hit that mark. With eight acrid colors and screechy sound, the Arcadia had no chance of reaching that target, let alone the bullseye. What else would you expect from a game system designed by Universal Appliances Limited? Maybe they should have stuck with toasters... 

ATARI JAGUAR

Oh, you want me to do the math? Here’s an equation for you! One leftover Atari ST, plus a handful of new chips that work about as well together as The Three Stooges, plus an obnoxious marketing campaign, equals one of the least popular game systems of all time, selling a miserable 250,000 units. The 3DO sold three million units, and that was at three times the price!

Cybermorph gets the lion's share of ridicule
from gamers, but for my money, it's Trevor
McFur that deserves all the contempt. It's
a game that thinks it's Star Fox on the Super
NES, but is actually more like Star Fox on
the Atari 2600.
(image from retrogamesreview.co.uk)

Atari pushed the notion that the Jaguar was 64-bit, which wasn’t really true... putting two 32-bit processors together in the same console doesn’t add up to 64 bits. However, you don’t have to be an IT expert to know that Jaguar games fall well short of expectations for a next generation console. Many of the Jaguar’s titles were holdovers from the Genesis and Super NES, a little shinier than before but not dramatically improved. It could handle 3D better than Sega and Nintendo’s 16-bit consoles, but was soundly thrashed as a polygon pusher by both its rival, the 3DO, and the 32-bit consoles that would arrive years later.

In spite of, well, everything, the Atari Jaguar has a small but dedicated fanbase, and homebrew software does exist for the system. It couldn’t have been easy to code with the Jaguar’s convoluted architecture, and it can’t be easy to run with so few physical units and a dearth of worthwhile Jaguar emulators, but it’s there.

NEC SUPERGRAFX 

From an American perspective, the entire Turbografx-16 brand was a fizzle, but Hudson’s almost 16-bit console was a hit in Japan, coming at just the right time to tempt players away from the Famicom. Nintendo’s first console was released much earlier in Japan than the United States, and players in the East had more time to get disillusioned with the Famicom’s limitations. The PC Engine was originally conceived as a sequel to the Famicom, with a similar processor but access to larger sprites and richer colors. Nintendo didn’t want the machine, but the players did, and the new and improved PC Engine sold millions of units. (The number is contested, but long-running Japanese magazine Famitsu seems to think it was five million.)

Hudson and manufacturer NEC picked the perfect time to release the PC Engine, at the peak of Japan’s Famicom fatigue. (You may recall that this tactic also worked pretty well for Sega, which released the Genesis at the peak of America’s own Nintendo burnout.) However, with the powerful Super Nintendo on the horizon, what would Hudson and NEC do for an encore? 

The choppy aerial combat game
Battle Ace illustrates how unprepared
the SuperGrafx was for the Mode 7
effects of the Super NES.
(image from StrategyWiki)

The unfortunate answer is the SuperGrafx, which took the momentum NEC built up with the PC Engine and slammed on the brakes. What did Japanese gamers get for their three hundred dollars? A PC Engine with double the RAM... and that’s it. While this opened the door to parallax scrolling and more sprites, as illustrated in its killer app Ghouls ‘n Ghosts, the measly five and a half games of the SuperGrafx library didn’t provide much of a value proposition for players. Even the Sega CD, widely considered a failure, introduced significant improvements to the core Genesis hardware, and had... let me crunch the numbers on this... thirty-four times the games.

The SuperGrafx was an evolutionary dead end for NEC, the definition of “too little, too late,” and its negligible performance enhancements would be left out of NEC’s later consoles. The company’s final misstep in the console wars, the anime-heavy, gameplay-light PC-fx, would face similar issues... it was much too expensive for what it offered players, and was instantly eclipsed by later 32-bit consoles.

GAME DOT COM

“Oh, come on! You can’t put a Tiger handheld in a list like this!”

Oh yes I can! Especially when the Game dot Com was specifically designed to challenge the Game Boy with its own library of cartridges. Tiger made a lot of tall promises about the system’s abilities to the gaming press of the time... it’s got digitized voice! It’s got big names like Sonic the Hedgehog and Duke Nukem! It’s got online capabilities! It’s got a touchscreen!

The Game Dot Com got a slimline model,
the Pocket Pro. It's a game system no pro
would ever put in their pockets.
(image from eBay)

What it’s really got is plenty of disappointment. Technically, you can play Duke Nukem on a game dot com... but don’t expect it to be much like the shareware hit on home computers. Same deal with other high-profile game dot com titles like Sonic Jam and Fighter’s Megamix. They exist, but with a blurry monochrome display and a processor so primitive it should have come with a wind-up key, you won’t be enjoying them much. As for the online features, wi-fi wasn’t a thing back in those days, so you’ll have to be plugged into a phone line to use them. So you can use your game dot com to surf the internet, but only twenty feet from your home computer, which does it better, and in color. Okay...?

The game dot com was soundly spanked by the black and white Game Boy, and didn’t stand a chance in hell when more powerful handhelds like the Wonderswan Crystal and Neo-Geo Pocket Color arrived. By the time the Game Boy Advance joined the fray, the game dot com was a distant, bitter memory. As they say, “and nothing of value was lost.”

PANASONIC 3DO

The 3DO was a victim of bad timing... too early to start a new console generation, but too dated in design to compete with the next generation consoles released two years later. With a bleeding-edge RISC processor, a dual-speed CD-ROM drive, and 3D visuals beyond the grasp of the Genesis and even the Super NES, the 3DO was pretty amazing. In 1993. If you could afford it. (At seven hundred dollars, you couldn’t.)

Immercenary for the 3DO. Hey, 3D gaming
had to start somewhere.
(image from MyAbandonware.com)

Two years later, the 3DO dropped in price. You know what else dropped? The Playstation and Saturn, two consoles from Japan which had two years to mature, improve, and streamline. Suddenly the 3DO, which was a hard sell at seven hundred dollars, was a hard sell with two cheaper, more powerful consoles bracketing it on store shelves. The token support the 3DO received from Capcom, Taito, and SNK quickly shifted to the Saturn and Playstation, and the system was finished. A sequel system, the M2, was planned but cancelled, with units being repurposed as video kiosks in car dealerships. (Hey, it beats the Atari Jaguar’s master mold being used to make dental equipment.)

As an orphaned game console, the 3DO doesn’t get much love from homebrew developers. It’s a little too slow to run emulators and a little too obscure for arcade ports, although there was a valiant attempt by a fan to port Mortal Kombat II to the system. It’s a bit cramped and the AI doesn’t perfectly match the arcade game’s, but it’s still better than any other digitized fighter on this system.

SEGA SATURN

Let me preface this by saying that I love the Sega Saturn. With its famously responsive six button controllers and a buttload of old-school arcade titles, it’s like Sega made a game console just for me. And Del the Funky Homosapien. And a handful of Japanese hipsters.

Shining Force III, one of the final releases
for the Saturn in the United States. If
you're underwhelmed by this, you should see
one of the Saturn's bad games.
(image from MobyGames)

The problem is that millions more did not want this system. As a 2D powerhouse that struggled mightily with first and third person action games, it stood in defiance of what gaming had become in the late 1990s. Rumor has it that support for polygons was added to the Saturn hardware at the last minute, and you can feel it in the way many of its 3D games look and play. Almost without exception, the Playstation versions of a major release, be it Resident Evil or Tomb Raider or Doom, look better than their Saturn counterparts, with more detail and better special effects. 3D is just not the Saturn’s forte, which was unfortunate for Sega, as it was what players wanted in 1998.

It should also be noted that the CPU that handles the 2D games in the Saturn and the CPU that handles the 3D games don’t play well together, resulting in headaches for both game designers in the 1990s, and emulator authors now. Ymir has made great strides in Sega Saturn emulation, but it’s taken twenty five years to get to that point. If you’re expecting a Saturn mini built with budget parts, you might have to wait another twenty five years.

ACTION MAX

Move over, "blast processing!" Worlds
of Wonder has given us the most
meaningless marketing catchphrase in
video game history!
(image from Parry Game Preserve)

When Nintendo first launched the Nintendo Entertainment System in America, they partnered with Worlds of Wonder, a toy company responsible for the runaway success of Teddy Ruxpin in the mid 1980s. When the popularity of the NES snowballed, Nintendo broke its ties with Worlds of Wonder... and WOW retaliated by releasing its own game system. If you want to call it that.

The reality is that the Action Max was about as much of a “video game system” as the animatronic bear they sold years earlier. The console includes a light gun, a siren light, and connections for your VCR. The “games” are video tapes; corny movies with targets on the screen. Firing at the targets lights up the siren and adds to a counter on the console, which goes all the way up to 99!

Even in the distant year of 1987, the Action Max looked like a low-tech, cobbled together relic. There were only five late night cable movies- er, games- and the best Worlds of Wonder could do to promote it was product placement in the woeful spy comedy Leonard Part VI. (There were not five previous Leonards. Be eternally grateful for this.) The Action Max couldn’t catch a break. As a VCR toy disguised as a video game system, it didn’t deserve one.

MATTEL HYPERSCAN

Slightly better than the Action Max (but just barely...) is the Mattel Hyperscan, the toy company’s not-so-triumphant return to the video game market in 2006. The Hyperscan, which looked like the unholy love child of a Sega Dreamcast and a George Foreman Grill, used trading cards to boost the stats of your character. When the trading cards actually scanned properly, which wasn’t often. Also, the library was comprised of throwaway licensed games, roughly on par with what you might find on a Jakks-Pacific Plug ‘n Play unit. Five titles are available for your playing, uh, pleasure, including a stiff rendered X-Men fighting game and an action title starring shape-shifting boy hero Ben 10.

With its patented design, the HyperScam
drains the fun directly out of your fingertips!
(image from Kinguin.net)

Forget future-proof, the Hyperscan wasn’t even present-proof. It was released in 2006, when the Xbox 360 was already on store shelves and the Wii and PS3 weren’t far behind, yet would have been put to shame by consoles released ten years earlier. The Hyperscan processor is a system on a chip which runs at 100MHz. There’s 16 megabytes of RAM, a fraction of what you’d find in 1998’s Sega Dreamcast. It’s got no I/O beyond a couple of proprietary joystick ports, the CD-ROM, and a hardwired A/V cable. It runs five games, none good. The Hyperscan probably could be hacked, given enough time and a hacker with absolutely nothing better to do. However, considering its wimpy, obscure hardware, it’s not so much of a question of “how?” as “why?”

NINTENDO 64

Nintendo 64 games have a distinct look, as you
can see from this snapshot of Turok: 
Dinosaur Hunter. His greatest enemy?
Nearsightedness!
(image from MobyGames)

The Nintendo 64 feels weirdly out of step with Nintendo’s previous consoles, using hardware originally crafted for Silicon Graphics’ CGI workstations. You’d think this would give the system an advantage over its competitors in rendering 3D visuals, and indeed, the Nintendo 64’s best moments were presented in three dimensions. However, Nintendo 64 graphics weren’t necessarily better than those on the Playstation; just different. Instead of wobbly but sharp polygons, N64 games had blurred edges, smeary textures, and low frame rates, with thick curtains of fog to mask the short draw distances. This brings a hazy, dream-like quality to Nintendo 64 games. That ethereal vibe fit epics like Super Mario 64 and Ocarina of Time perfectly well, but in a lesser game like Superman 64, it just felt cheap. Apparently Superman now has super-cataracts.

The look and feel of Nintendo 64 games is subject to personal taste, but almost nobody was down with Nintendo’s decision to use cartridge-based media. While this meant instant loading for games and Tonka-tough media that could withstand a child’s wrath, it also significantly curtailed the scope of the N64’s games, and left third party publishers with high aspirations scrambling to Sony and its Playstation. Nintendo lost the support of Squaresoft for years because the company’s big ideas just wouldn’t fit on a cartridge. Other publishers continued to support Nintendo, but reluctantly... their N64 games often felt feeble next to their Playstation counterparts, due to the limitations of the cartridge format and general indifference.

After attempting to fill the void of a CD-ROM drive with the 64DD, an oversized floppy drive, Nintendo stopped trying to plug holes in the Nintendo 64 and abandoned the sinking ship, replacing it with the PowerPC-based GameCube in 2001. Time has not been kind to the Nintendo 64 in the years since... its complicated architecture makes it a bitch to emulate. And forget about homebrew games! Even the professionals at Treasure lamented the stubborn N64 hardware in an interview with Nintendo CEO Satoru Iwata. If even they can’t get a handle on this machine, the average coder doesn’t stand a chance.

Future Shockproof

What’s the best game console ever made? It’s an impossible question to answer definitively... personal preference and other factors means that nearly everyone you ask will have a different response, and no one answer will be more or less valid than the others. (Except the guy in the back who said the game dot com. Stop screwing around and take this seriously!)

Instead, let’s look at something that’s easier to objectively measure. Which of history’s game consoles and handhelds were best prepared to outlive their natural lifespans with smartly designed hardware that stands the test of time? Here now are my choices for the ten most future-proofed game systems, in no particular order. 

NEO-GEO

It may have been entirely too expensive for the average gamer, with a six hundred dollar price tag and two hundred dollar games, but the Neo-Geo was a lean, mean, (too much) fighting machine in arcades, with a lower price than competing arcade cabinets and the option to swap out cartridges for when players inevitably lost interest in launch titles like Ninja Combat and Cyber-Lip.

Designed by Alpha Denshi as a pumped up version of its earlier arcade hardware, the Neo-Geo had more than enough muscle to impress arcade goers when it was first launched in 1990. With its massive sprites, flashy scaling and rotation, and cartridges that tipped the scales at up to 330 megabits, the Neo-Geo remained a dominant force in arcades for thirteen years. It eventually succumbed to the decline of the arcade market and SNK’s own flagging fortunes in 2003, being discontinued that year.

Dramatic cut scenes like this one from Fatal
Fury 3 were the Neo-Geo's specialty. You
know what they say about big sprites with
big feet!

It may officially be dead, but like a bloodsucking Leslie Nielsen, the Neo-Geo is dead and loving it. Its once gigantic cartridge sizes are trivial in this gilded age of gigabytes and terabytes, and the system’s familiar 68000 and Z80 architecture has led to Neo-Geo emulators for dozens of formats. This one-time giant of the arcade scene can now be played on your smartphone, or even that twenty dollar handheld you bought from AliExpress. Couple that with the Neo-Geo’s extremely user-friendly interface and its dazzling, in-your-face visuals, and you’ve got a hardware standard that’s loved the whole world over, and for good reason. (Hell, the Saudis loved the Neo-Geo so much, they bought the company.)

ATARI 2600

With 128 bytes of RAM, absolutely no video RAM, and tone-deaf one channel sound, the Atari 2600 doesn’t seem like much in 2025. It wasn’t even all that impressive next to its archrival, the Intellivision, released a couple of years later. However, some of the programmers from Atari, and later Activision, found a way to grow flowers in that rocky soil. If you can stay one step ahead of the beam that draws Atari 2600 graphics line by line, you can layer the machine’s 128 colors, and get attractive if somewhat primitive results. All these years later, Atari 2600 graphics remain among the most iconic of any game system, looking like the video game equivalent of cave paintings. When you see those bars of color sandwiched together to create Pitfall Harry, or a flying saucer, or the frantic turkey from Eggomania, you know exactly which system you’re playing.

Solaris is the pinnacle of Atari 2600 game
design. Games just don't get any better 
than this on this hamstrung hardware.

Nothing comes easily to the Atari 2600 programmer, but a good coder can pull some dazzling magic tricks out of this dusty old hat. Just look at Doug Neubauer’s Atari 2600 magnum opus Solaris, or the shockingly competent port of mid 1980s beat ‘em up Kung Fu Master, or the dozen arcade ports by Champ Games. Sure, the latter titles use ARM chips to do some of the heavy lifting for the ancient 6507 processor, which feels like strapping a jet engine to a Yugo. However, one could argue that this expandability is one of the Atari 2600’s strengths. If you don’t have enough storage and RAM for your games, add to it with a Supercharger (somehow foreward compatible with CD players and smartphones! Talk about future-proof!). Not getting enough mileage out of that crappy one channel sound processor? Throw another sound chip into the cartridge, like David Crane did with Pitfall 2! 

Look, the core technology is from 1977, and it cost fifty dollars in 1987. These days, the chips needed to boost the 2600’s capabilities might cost you three dollars plus shipping from Mouser. The Atari 2600 doesn’t strictly need that boost in performance to make an effective game, but with technology that primitive and prices that low, you can afford to splurge.

SEGA GENESIS

The Sega Genesis and the Super NES have a contentious relationship, sparking the bitter console wars of the 1990s. Truth is, both of these machines are excellent, but they take different approaches in their design. The Super NES is the show pony, loaded with all the bells and whistles afforded by early 1990s gaming technology. It’s got scaling and rotation, once only a feature in costly arcade games! It’s got a sound chip from Sony with startlingly realistic instruments and crisp digitized voice! It can display 256 colors! Like, all at the same time! 

(If you weren’t alive at the time, this was a big deal in 1991.)

Genesis does! Still!
(image from the Earthion web site)

Meanwhile, the Sega Genesis was the workhorse. It felt a little behind the industry curve with only 64 available onscreen colors and crusty FM sound that was a little digital-sounding in the best hands, and downright horrifying in the hands of whoever made Chakan: The Forever Man. However, with an industry leading clock speed of 7.58Mhz and a 16-bit 68000 processor (a favorite of arcade manufacturers), the Sega Genesis could do things it wasn’t really designed to do, like polygons (either slowly, like in Hard Drivin’, or with a co-processor, like in Virtua Racing), full-motion video (Sonic 3D Blast, Red Zone), and proto-boomer shooters (Zero Tolerance and a ballsy if flawed Brazilian adaptation of Duke Nukem 3D).

The Sega Genesis keeps on tugging at the plow to this day, thanks to SGDK and an enthusiastic base of dedicated coders. Dream arcade ports like Final Fight, R-Type, and Sunset Riders are in development, and don’t suffer from the limited cartridge sizes that had hobbled past Genesis arcade conversions. Most recently, Yuzo Koshiro’s Earthion, a Neo-Geo quality shooter that somehow found itself on the Genesis, proves that there’s still work left in this old horse. 

SUPER NINTENDO

Once upon a time, Nintendo was at the forefront of video game technology, rather than lagging a generation or two behind. Its long-awaited sequel to the Nintendo Entertainment System was dramatically improved in nearly every area, and even leapfrogged contemporary consoles like the Sega Genesis and Turbografx-16 with a warm, friendly color palette and features once limited to costly arcade cabinets and home computers. One headliner was Mode 7, which let programmers smoothly resize and rotate onscreen objects. Nearly every Super NES game used this in some capacity, and its racing and flying games were almost uniformly smoother and more pleasant to the eyes than their Sega Genesis counterparts. Barring extra hardware on the cartridge or a Sega CD attachment or divine intervention, the Sega Genesis was never, ever going to handle a game like Pilotwings.

Colors on the Super NES often have a radiant
glow, as seen in this screenshot from
Sony and Ukiyotei's Sky Blazer.

Even with its advanced special effects and a Sony-designed sound processor with stunningly realistic sampled instruments, the Super NES was not entirely superior to the Sega Genesis. At half the clock speed, slowdown was a common occurance on the machine. This has been addressed in recent times with FastROM and SA-1 hacks, but there’s still a nagging lack of homebrew software and comprehensive design utilities for the Super NES, suggesting the machine’s 65c816 processor isn’t as developer friendly as the Sega Genesis. Only one other device used it, after all... the Apple IIgs, the 16-bit fork of the Apple II line of computers. (For the record, that processor worked out much better for Nintendo than it did for Apple.) 

SEGA MASTER SYSTEM

The Texas Instruments TMS9918 was a dominant force in early consumer technology. It’s a very basic video chip, with sixteen preset colors and tiny, single colored sprites. It’s just good enough for an early 1980s game console or computer, but more importantly, it was cheap, which is why so many game consoles and computers from the early 1980s used it. You can find a TMS9918 in the MSX computer line, the ColecoVision, its Japanese cousin the Sega SG-1000, Texas Instruments’ own TI 99/4A... I could go on, but it’s a big list. If you know how to program games for any one of these machines, you know how to program games for all of them. 

Ubiquitous as it was, the TMS9918 had numerous shortcomings that wouldn’t stand up to the demands of late 1980s gaming. It had no hardware scrolling, an essential ingredient in action/adventure games. Its color output was limited to the point of distress, and the sprites were feeble and flickery, no match for the recently released Famicom (our own NES).

It's hard to overstate how impressive
Phantasy Star is when compared to the
average NES RPG. These dungeons fill the
screen, and the walls move smoothly
with every step.

Sega asked its hardware engineer Hideki Sato to design the gaming-focused sequel to the TMS9918, and he hit it out of the park with the video chip inside the Sega Master System. The SG-1000 couldn’t scroll backgrounds, while the Master System could scroll individual sections of the screen at different speeds, letting a clever programmer create parallax effects. The SG-1000 can’t handle more than two colors in an eight pixel line, an aggravating limitation to pixel artists. The Master System has no limitations in the use of its sixteen background colors and sixteen sprite colors. Feel free to use any color, anywhere you please, without risk of color clash. 

The improved graphics chip pays dividends in Master System games like Rampage, which is light years ahead of its NES counterpart visually, and R-Type, an ambitious conversion of the cutting edge arcade shooter that Nintendo didn’t dare attempt on the NES. The Master System was so ahead of the curve technologically that the hardware would be recycled in the handheld Game Gear five years later, and continued to receive support into the 21^st century thanks to Brazil’s TecToy and dozens of hobbyist programmers.

Take it from someone who’s actually made a game for this hardware... it’s pretty keen. Hideki Sato finished what Texas Instruments started when he designed the Master System video chip, and where visuals are concerned, it’s as good as 8-bit gaming gets. 

GAMECUBE AND KIN

It’s the game system so nice, Nintendo released it thrice! For sheer staying power, even the Master System (recycled into the portable Game Gear) can’t match the GameCube and its two successors, all using the same core PowerPC hardware. Originally appearing in late 1990s Macintosh computers, the PowerPC is the heart of the GameCube, and its successor the Wii, and ITS successor the Wii U.

Standout GameCube release Mario Kart:
Double Dash still looks sharp some twenty
years later.
(image from The Next Level)

Nintendo must have figured, “If it ain’t broke, why fix it?” And indeed, the GameCube and its progeny is capable hardware... perhaps not powerful enough to carry Nintendo through three consecutive console generations, but it comes admirably close. The Cube is a more capable machine than the Playstation 2 (discounting the smaller discs that resulted in irksome content cuts), and the hardware was familiar territory for programmers, unlike the highly proprietary and slightly quirky Playstation 2.

The GameCube hardware hit its lofty peak with the Nintendo Wii, a game console with much of the same hardware, but a faster clock speed, an emphasis on motion controls, and surprisingly handy online features. (I used the News and Weather channels regularly in 2007.) It was well behind the Xbox 360 and PS3 in raw horsepower, and couldn’t even output a high definition video signal, but its audience of casual and lapsed gamers didn’t care. These days, the Wii is easily hacked, is a fairly capable emulation station, and makes a great stand-in for the GameCube, since it effectively is one.

The Wii U was a fridge too far for the GameCube family of systems, a TV and social network focused boondoggle with an oversized touchscreen/gamepad hybrid, and performance barely on the level of the Xbox 360. However, as a multi-core machine, it is the most powerful system in the GameCube lineage, and hackers swear that it’s fantastic for emulation. Personally, I think the Wii is the sweet spot for this hardware... it’s embarrassingly cheap, has an avalanche of homebrew software, and gives you progressive scan in your GameCube games without forcing you to buy a three hundred dollar cable first. What’s not to like? 

(Aside from the waggle. That's something that hasn't aged well.)

SONY PLAYSTATION

The Playstation stomped Sega’s Saturn flat in America, and it’s not hard to understand why. It’s incredibly powerful hardware for late 1994, when polygons were reserved for CAD programs and costly VR simulations. Hey, now you can get triangles pushed in your face in the comfort of your own home for three hundred dollars! You paid a tenth of that just to play Dactyl Nightmare with a friend at the state fair, and that kind of sucked!

It’s not just that the Playstation was powerful. It’s also supremely user-friendly, to the point where a software package called Net Yaroze let amateur game designers create their own Playstation titles. It was such a comprehensive package that one of the games designed with Net Yaroze was eventually released in stores as Devil Dice (aka Xi). 

It’s important to stress that indie games on a video game console was unheard of in the mid 1990s. You just didn’t make an NES game or a Sega Genesis game... the resources and the knowledge weren’t available to ordinary people. You might as well have asked for a unicorn made of rainbows and cotton candy.

Early indie darling Devil Dice. I don't totally
understand how this game works, but
damned if I don't keep trying.
(image from John God Games)

However, you could make a Playstation game. Not just because Sony encouraged development for its premiere console, but because designing games from the programmer-friendly Playstation hardware won’t tie your brain in knots the way designing a game for the Sega Saturn or Nintendo 64 would. Lots of official games that were in development on the Saturn (or sequels to games already released for the system) were cancelled because of the immense effort it would have taken to make the ports. Why bother when the Playstation version will take half the development time and sell ten times the copies? 

All the good stuff seemed to come to the Playstation in the late 1990s, and it wasn’t just because it was powerful, or popular. Its future-focused, user-friendly hardware attracted developers; the Saturn, which was neither of these things, repelled them. The Saturn’s obstinate hardware, best described as dueling CPUs, didn’t lead to its doom outright, but it couldn’t have helped.

CLASSIC XBOX 

The Xbox brand isn’t doing so hot now, but it started off on the right foot with the original Xbox. With a built-in hard drive and the specs of a mid-grade home computer, the Xbox smoked the competition in overall performance. Even its lesser games like Kakuto Chojin at least looked amazing, while killer apps like Dead or Alive 3 played as good as they looked. Years later, with the benefit of the Xbox Series’ upscaling, this magnificent versus fighter somehow looks even better than it did a quarter of a century ago, when it was first released.

Dead or Alive creator Tomonobu Itagaki recently
died, but he gained video game immortality
with Dead or Alive 3, one of the high points
of the fighting game genre.

Fast forward to 2025. The original Xbox still has a faithful fan base, thanks to the relative ease of hacking the machine and its dated but still capable specs. With a larger hard drive, the OG Xbox becomes an all-purpose emulation station, with enough room left over for dozens of official games. Especially dedicated Xbox fans have taken the machine past its limits with overclocking and extra RAM, but it’s not necessary... the new hard drive is all you’ll need to keep yourself entertained for an extra, extra, Xbox long time. 

(Just be sure to snip the clock capacitor out of yours, if it has one.)

GAME BOY ADVANCE 

GAME BOY evolved into GAME BOY ADVANCE! It’s super effective!

I’m probably doing that wrong. Anyway, the Game Boy Advance is the final step in the evolution of the Game Boy line of handheld systems, backward compatible with the previous models, but with a 32-bit processor and state of the art graphics that turns this boy into a Game Man.

German developer Shin'En knew how to put
the "advance" in Game Boy Advance with
showy shooters like Iridion II, shown here. 

I respect you, Game Man! And I love that the Game Ma- er, Game Boy Advance is so much more powerful than its ancestors. Remember the high color output, the clear digitized voice, and the fancy Mode 7 effects on the Super NES? Now you’ve got all that in a handheld. By the way, there’s a 32-bit ARM processor under the hood, so now you can also have polygons and full-motion video and Super FX games without a Super FX chip. Holy crap, yes! Gimme gimme gimme! 

Thanks to its robust feature set and a well documented ARM processor, the Game Boy Advance is as much fun to program for as it is to play. It provided more than enough power for a complete conversion of the arcade oldie GORF, including all five stages, several minutes of digitized speech, and even a bonus mode where the player could unlock images by completing challenges. The Game Boy Advance could do it all without breaking a sweat, in contrast with the original Game Boy from 1989, where everything seemed frustratingly out of reach. Now you’re playing with power... pocket power!

SONY PSP 

Many portable game systems were released to challenge Nintendo’s dominance in the handheld market. Nearly all of them were quickly eclipsed by the Game Boy and its successors, but Sony’s PSP is the first handheld to present a serious threat to Nintendo’s stranglehold on the portable gaming market. With a MIPS processor similar to those in Sony’s home consoles, the PSP was designed to take handheld gaming to a new plateau, vastly superior to the already powerful Game Boy Advance and the recently released Nintendo DS. Americans were put off by the high retail price, but the PSP was a smash hit with in its native Japan. Living space is at a premium in this cluster of islands, and Japanese players yearned for a game system with the best possible performance at the smallest possible size. 

The best PSP games approach a PS2 level
of visual fidelity, and look even better with
upscaling on emulators. Shown here:
Soul Calibur: Broken Destiny.

Hundreds upon hundreds of video games (and even a substantial library of movies) were released for the PSP over its lifespan. Eventually, the system would be hacked with an exploit, and the hundreds of official games would be joined by hundreds more homebrew games, emulators, and utilities. When Sony boastfully claimed that the PSP “only does everything” in advertisements, they weren’t far off base.

The only thing that held the system back was its sluggish UMD drive, and even that was addressed in later years, when the size of the PSP’s Memory Stick Pro was raised from 32 megabytes to 16 gigabytes and higher. When you can store your entire PSP library on a stick the size of a postage stamp and cut your load times in half as a bonus, the optical drive becomes a vestigial organ. You may have needed it once, but not anymore!

The PSP is remarkably future-proof, not just because of its solid state storage, but because the machine’s considerable power means that it can run every other console’s games through the magic of emulation. It only does everything... including some things Sony would prefer you didn’t do.

October catch-up

It's been a month since I last posted to this blog, and a whole lot has happened in the interim. Let's take a quick look at some of the highlights... and lowlights.

XBOX AND THE RISING COST OF FAILURE 

Things begin to feel a bit like Christmas in late October, but if you're an Xbox owner, it's beginning to look a lot more like 2001, weeks before Sega announced the end of the Dreamcast. It may even be worse than what happened to the Dreamcast, because while that system dropped its price to $99 to stave off the grim reaper, Microsoft seems to be inviting death by raising the cost of the Xbox Series. An Xbox Series X will now cost you $599.95, and that's the disc-less wonder that is the all-digital version. Not exactly the sale of the century, is it?

Remember Microsoft Game Room?
This is somehow worse.
(image from AllKeyShop)

The price of the Xbox Game Pass Ultimate service has also been bumped up, to thirty dollars a month. I subscribed for three months while I could get it for the original price, and frankly, it's not worth twenty bucks, let alone thirty. Retro Classics, the service-within-a-service that grants you access to Activision's Atari 2600 games, is chained to the cloud and completely worthless if you don't have a fast internet connection. I found myself crushing the D-pad of my controller to force the characters to creep across the screen, and that's no way to play forty year old titles like HERO and Pitfall, which NEED crisp, responsive control for them to be viable as games. You couldn't just let the player download the games directly to their Xboxes? The games in Atari 50 are directly on the system, and that direct access makes all the difference in how they look and feel. Poorly played, Microsoft... although that seems to be a habit of yours as of late.

INTELLIVISION SPRINT

Not long after purchasing the Intellivision brand name, Atari went right to work, making a mini console that better represents the original system than the failed Amico would have. This machine, the Sprint, features two wireless controllers, HDMI video, and about forty games from the Intellivision library. (Before you ask, no, not the Tron games. No, not the Data East arcade conversions, either. Yeah, I don't really see the point of this console without those games, either.)

Punching bag shaped like George
Plimpton sold separately.
(image from AtariAge)

The Sprint will debut at the end of the year for $150. At that price, I'm not biting, but last year's Atari 7800+ was quickly discounted, and it's reasonable to expect the same thing to happen to the Sprint. (Provided anyone can afford anything in 2026.)

XELAN FORCE

"You got your Star Force in my Zanac!"
"Hey, you got YOUR Zanac in my Star Force!"

There are even hints of Life Force, as
evidenced in this flame-filled stage.
(image from Nintendo)

 

It's two great NES games that taste great together, on the Switch! Xelan Force is exactly one part Star Force, with ground panels holding stars and other bonuses, and one part Zanac, with six distinct weapon types, five sub-weapons, and tiny power capsules delivered by fleets of blue drones. 

It's a smart hybrid, with the flaws of one game addressed by the strengths of the other. Star Force lacked variety... Zanac's diverse weaponry addresses this. Zanac lacked hidden bonuses to boost your score, while Star Force is full of them. Finally, the bosses, a weak point in both Star Force and Zanac, are more memorable and challenging in Xelan Force. (Maybe too challenging, considering their tiny weak points and resistance to your bullets.)

It's not clear if Xelan Force could literally run on a Nintendo Entertainment System, but it certainly looks and sounds like it would fit on the system. If it had been an NES game back in the day, it's fair to say that Xelan Force would have been one of the better shooters in the system's library.

OPERATION HIBERNATION PLUS

Buy my game! Buy my game! BUY MY GAME!

 

Yes, I'm promoting one of my games again. If I don't do it, who will? This time it's Operation Hibernation Plus, an expanded version of my old-school platformer with Byron feeding his face to prepare himself for the winter. Now there's an attract mode, and two new stages, and a friggin' ending, on a video game system released in 1983! The video game system in question is the SG-1000, Japan's answer to the ColecoVision, in the same way Junichiro Hill was Japan's answer to Hank.

You don't need the actual system to play Operation Hibernation Plus... a properly equipped emulator will do the job just as well. Personally, I use GearSystem. It might even work on a Sega Master System, although I've gotten conflicting reports on that. Any way you play it, you'll probably enjoy it, all the more so if you were less than satisfied with Donkey Kong Jr. and Donkey Kong 3 as sequels to the first game. 

Here's the link to the game, as well as the other stuff I've been working on over the last couple of years. Itch.IO seems to be down at the moment, but that link will work eventually. 

In Through the Out Door

It's full steam ahead with my latest ColecoVision release, Operation Hibernation. Well, not full STEAM, exactly, but full Itch.IO and a full licensing contract with CollectorVision ahead. The hope is that Operation Hibernation becomes one of the headlining titles on the ColecoVision and its kin... machines like the SG-1000 (essentially a ColecoVision with the serial numbers filed off) and the MSX (which is the same thing as a ColecoVision, but a buttload more K and a different sound processor).

Yeah, K, as in kilobytes. Would you believe that used to be a significant amount? There was even a song from Doctor Demento called "I Just Need a Little More K," about the trials of a man from the early 1980s who went to a software store to buy a memory upgrade... a memory upgrade rated in kilobytes, which cost in excess of a hundred dollars.

Think about that. A kilobyte is just that, a thousand bytes. We've been measuring data in gigabytes and terabytes for years, which is exponentially larger, and this fantastic unit of measure seemingly pulled from science-fiction dystopia has become mundane to us. 

(Then again, we live in our own science-fiction dystopia in 2025... the dumb timeline from Back to the Future. How could the maker of Tattoo Assassins have been so prescient?)

Anyway! I was going for something with this, for serious. Oh yes! CVBasic, the frankly terrific BASIC compiler that's compatible with over a dozen different ancient computers and game systems (the very machines which measured their RAM in kilobytes), has trapped one more fly in its vast retro-tech web... the motherfucking NES.

Look, I'm entitled to a swear once in a while. This deserves it. NES support is a big deal. I can't count the number of kids in high school who wanted to make their own NES games. There was literally a contest held by Nintendo Power to find the Nintendo fan with their best video game design. One teenager at the time, J. Scott Campbell, knocked it out of the park with his submission, featuring page after page of gorgeous art and intimate details about its play mechanics.

Whatever I would have submitted for this contest,
this kid would have beaten it. Admit it, he would have
beaten your submission, too.
(image from Nintendo Power)

Mr. Campbell has gone on to become the celebrated author of the comic Danger Girl, but I'm sure deep down inside, his inner child still wants that game to be made, just as much as he did when he first crafted it on paper. I want to stress this: he is not the only kid to do this in the 1980s, nor are the kids who participated in that contest! "Game design but not really" was a passion of mine as a teenager, drafting dozens of game concepts on lined school paper that would never realistically find a home on a home console.

The advent of NES support for CVBasic changes everything. All those ideas I had bouncing around in my head for years can, after years of lonely captivity, be set free from their lined paper prisons and become digital reality on history's greatest consoles! It's exciting, in a way making games for the ColecoVision and even the Master System isn't. Holy shit. I made an NES game. I made an NES game. I could walk into a grocery store or a video rental outlet, be it all-consuming Blockbuster or just Frank's Video, the hole in the wall down the street, and rent my own video game, if it weren't for the laws of time and space.

There are two problems, actually: the first is ripping a hole in the fabric of time-space for the sake of your own ego. The second is actually learning how to make NES games. If you think you can jump into NES game design with a pair of waders because graduating from the ColecoVision to the Master System was such a cinch, brother are you in for some disappointment!

Here's what I understand about how the NES is designed. The tech nerds at Nintendo gave the ColecoVision the eyeball in 1982, recognized the (many, cough) flaws of the graphics chip, and resolved to fix them. In 1983, for a home console. This is like trying to complete all twelve trials of mighty Hercules in an afternoon. To Gumpei Yokoi's credit, the NES/Famicom is indeed better than the ColecoVision, with a wide array of selectable colors, rump-thumping sound in its best releases, and adaptability courtesy of memory mapper chips. But it's still very much a transitional game system, one constrained by the technology of the time. Colors are still dull, sprite flicker is still an aggravation, and standard cartridge sizes are barely larger at 40K than the ColecoVision's at 32K.

Beyond that, Yokoi used some quirky hardware design tricks to get a higher standard of performance from the NES. Nintendo graphics subscribe to the rule of fours... no tile can hold more than a palette of four colors, and there can be no more than four of these palettes available for the tiles. Likewise, a sprite can hold just four colors (three actual colors and a transparency), and it must be selected from four sprite palettes.

Here's Byron from Operation Hibernation, as he
would appear on ColecoVision (with sprite patches),
the Master System, and the NES. At first glance,
the latter two look similar, but there's more color
in the Master System version. Byron's orange
on the NES leans a bit hard on the yellow, but
as an NES owner that palid orange is very
familiar to me.

It's a lot of square thinking, in contrast to the relative simplicity of the ColecoVision ("Okay, no more than two colors in a line, got it. Annoying, but got it.") and the jaw-dropping freedom of the Master System ("Here, have some colors! Have all the colors, anywhere you want them! It's Mardi Gras over here at the Master System house!"). It also throws back the curtain on how the NES worked... gee, no wonder so many of these games were so brown and orange heavy. What else did the designers have to USE?

I wanted to launch out the starting gate and make an NES port of Operation Hibernation as soon as possible, but honestly, I don't think "as soon as possible" is going to be very soon at all. There's a lot of book learnin' ahead of me before I try to tackle this... it won't be the straight port to a superior system that Whack 'Em Smack 'Em Byrons Remarked was.

However, feel free to check out the box art I made for the Nintendo version of Operation Hibernation, which may never exist... 

It's just like something you'd see
hanging from a Velcro wall on
Video Power!

 

 

Hungry Wolf and (Bear) Cub

Oh yeah, I have a blog. I should probably update it, since it's been two months since my last update, and much has happened in gaming during two months.

First off, I bought City of the Wolves. After a pretty weak showing during the Xbox 360 era, SNK is finally back to "bigger, better, badder" status, with fighting games that are as exciting now as their Neo-Geo counterparts were in the 1990s. King of Fighters 14? Oh, hey, this is a lot of fun! Can't see where this series goes next! Samurai Shodown 2019? Hey hey, this is a short thrill, but a visceral one, and the sumi-e art flourishes really work in the context of a series of feudal sword battles. 

And now we have City of the Wolves, the long, loooong awaited follow-up to the late Neo-Geo hit Mark of the Wolves. Mark of the Wolves, you see, was SNK's answer to Street Fighter 3, a turn of the century continuation of the 1990s games, with everyone in the cast a little older and shaggier (or saggier, in Mai's case) than they had been at their peak. It's a cool hook for a video game series, and gave SNK and Capcom an excuse to introduce new members to the cast, to carry on the legacy of the first generation of fighting game heroes. 

It's been twenty five years since Mark of the Wolves. You'd think the characters would be hobbling around with walkers at this point, but no, the South Town cast doesn't seem to have aged more than five years between the two games. More characters from Fatal Fury Special have joined the cast, including the always infuriating to fight Andy Bogard and a newly leather-clad Mai, and Krushnood Butt is back to being Marco Rodrigues/z, so he can show his driver's license in America without wincing at the reactions. Bratty ninja-in-training Hotokumaru has grown a few chest hairs and now thinks he's Damien Wayne. And somehow, Ken Masters from Street Fighter has wandered in from Street Fighter 6, looking for a scrap on the other side of the fighting game tracks. Capcom and SNK used to be bitter rivals, but the synergy between the two companies in 2025 has been a delight to watch. If we never get a Capcom vs. SNK 3, this will be just good enough.

Anyway, the game is polygonal, using one of those fancy artistic shaders that drops comic book-style crosshatching all over the fighters. It's... bold, I'll give it that. We've been doing this sort of thing in fighting games since Street Fighter 4, and I'm not totally in love with it. It's kind of like that whole cel-shading fad from the Playstation 2 era, where everyone was covered in thick outlines.

The game looks pretty good, in spite of the artistic excess. However, it plays way better than that, feeling tighter and more responsive than Street Fighter 6, but with some burly brawn that we didn't get from King of Fighters 15. Characters have weight, and impact to their punches and kicks. You feel it in their handling. It's not Tekken, all iron fists and leaden feet, but it's not the anemic pixies of BlazBlue flying through the air like Peter Pan, either. It finds a nice, meaty middle ground between "light as a feather" and "trapped on Jupiter." City of the Wolves is solid, rugged, and dependable, like a Jeep or a light truck.

It's also fun to play. There's a story mode that falls far short of Street Fighter 6's in both variety and content, but you won't care because beating down the dozens of Hypens, Mosbergs, and Buggz-es that live in South Town is hugely entertaining. The new rev system doesn't work anywhere near as well as Capcom's Drive Gauge (Capcom, make sure this remains in Street Fighter 7. Just sayin'), and the control feels just slightly off... good luck performing those Ignition Gears reliably! But despite all that, the fighting engine feels tight, restrained, but brutal in execution. Better than the previous Fatal Fury games for sure, especially the Real Bout games.

There's one other thing worth noting... this game is packed to overflowing with omake. If you're the type of nerd who geeks out over the mythology of video game franchises, City of the Wolves will satisfy like a sixteen foot long Snickers bar. Stages from past SNK games can be viewed in a menu, complete with conversations between the cast of characters and an exhaustively thorough description of the location. The writing in general is fantastic... luridly detailed and pulpy, a far cry from the silly SNK-glish of the Neo-Geo games.

I had my doubts in the 2000s thanks to Samurai Shodown Sen and King of Fighters 12, but now, it's clear SNK has finally nailed 21st century game design. City of the Wolves is how you make Fatal Fury relevant in a post-Neo-Geo world.

I've also got to give big props to Earthion. It's a Sega Genesis game that thinks it's a Neo-Geo game... and you'd be hard-pressed to convince yourself otherwise. Name a shoot 'em up on the Sega Genesis. I'll let you think about it for a moment... there were a whole lot of 'em. That shooter you were thinking of is not as pretty as Earthion. Nope, not Ranger-X. Not any of the Thunder Forces, and not the Toaplan shooters, either. In the crowded high school of Genesis shooters, Earthion is the valedictorian, using a huge cartridge size (7.5 megabytes!) to deliver big bosses, big explosions, and astonishing animation. You'll shout, "How did they do that on the GENESIS?!," as your ship rockets from home base and dances through space in a stylish introductory sequence. 

The gameplay ain't nothin' to sneeze at, either. Here's how that works... you're given a small health bar and two weapon slots. When a weapon comes along, you can grab it to add it to your arsenal. These range from the utilitarian three way shot to explosive rockets to a wicked looking laser beam that obliterates enemies directly ahead of you. Some weapons are better for some situations than others, but if all your weapon slots are full, you'll have to jettison one weapon to claim the other. Even worse, there are adaptation pods that will fill a weapon slot without offering any immediate benefit. Nope, you have to get the pod to the end of the level to crack it open and find the secret toy surprise inside. Adaptation pods can increase your ship's shield power, add weapon slots, and offer special weapons that pack more punch than the already impressive firearms you'll find in the middle of a stage. Every good shooter needs a "hook," a unique play mechanic that distinguishes it from the rest of the herd, and Earthion's hook is as good as any you'll find in this genre.

There are a few issues, mostly minor ones. Earthion is tough but not always fair, with lasers that take you by surprise and background objects that may or may not be safe to touch. Vocal effects are hoarse even by Sega Genesis standards, with the Laryngitis Barber Shop Quartet greeting you with "YKGGG" when the game first starts. Annnd that's about where the flaws end. Earthion looks spectacular, sounds nearly as good thanks to the Yuzo Koshiro soundtrack, has a satisfying assortment of weapons, and is hard to pull yourself away from once you've started playing it. "Welcome to the next level," indeed.

What else? Oh yeah, I'm still cranking out ColecoVision games. My latest is Solar Fox 2: Space Evaders, available for five dollars on Itch.IO. Whack 'Em Smack 'Em Byrons didn't set the world on fire, but this seems to have caught the attention of ColecoVision owners, and even the retro gaming press. Here's a review by Willie of ArcadeUSA, and a news post about the game on Indie Retro News. Basically, it's a sequel to the pared down Atari 2600 version of Solar Fox, a fast-paced dot gobbler set in the void of space. There are no weapons in the 2600 version of Solar Fox, and you won't find any here, either... only fast fingers and a nimble brain will get you to the end of this one! Coming soon after that is the next Byron game, Operation Hibernation, with the rambunctious bear cub stuffing his face with fruit to prepare for the winter. If you like platformers like Donkey Kong, and zany cartoon antics, you're going to want a front row seat for this.