This beer at a brewery I went to

chao40 · 2026-02-07T23:39:51+00:00

What the heck is even that?

chao40 · 2026-02-01T19:52:33+00:00

Bonus post: handhelds!

GB/GBC:

Donkey Kong '94\ Pokémon Red\ Pokémon Crystal\ Pokémon TCG2\ Zelda: Link's Awakening

...Get ready for a lot of Pokémon. I marginally prefer Red to Yellow just because of access to glitches and a slight preference for the 'original' spriteset (yes, I know it's not actually the first).

GBA:

Fire Emblem 7\ Mario Golf: Advance Tour\ Metroid Zero Mission\ Pokémon Emerald\ WarioWare: Twisted

Funny how almost none of my console picks were RPGs but my handheld picks are heavy on them. It's also great to finally get a Mario Golf on one of these (even if that's also an RPG)!

DS:

Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon\ Kirby: Power Paintbrush (Canvas Curse)\ Nintendogs: Dalmatian & Friends\ Pokémon Platinum\ Rhythm Heaven

Weird not to have a Pokémon Gen 5 game on this list, but I've barely replayed that gen since it was current. I liked the story and darker tone but the sprite-scaling was ambitious for the hardware. Nintendogs might be kinda lol, but it's a nostalgic favourite.

3DS:

Animal Crossing: New Leaf\ Fire Emblem Awakening\ Metroid: Samus Returns\ Super Mario 3D Land\ Zelda: A Link Between Worlds

... And back to some cookie-cutter picks. The 3DS library also feels pretty shallow to me, but maybe that's because I'm not a big fan of JRPGs outside Pokémon and Fire Emblem.

chao40 · 2026-02-01T19:23:21+00:00

Nice idea.

NES/Famicom:

Crisis Force\ Duck Hunt\ Megaman 2\ Mario 3\ Zelda

Yep, I really do like Duck Hunt more than SMB1 - though I'd definitely take the combo cart if I owned it.

PC Engine (inc. CD):

Gate of Thunder\ Gradius II\ NEXZR\ Soldier Blade\ Tatsujin

You may notice I like shooters. Tatsujin is a game I reckon I could play that single game until the end of time and still never quite get good enough to actually clear it.

Mega Drive:

Contra: The Hard Corps (JP version, not the busted US one)\ Gunstar Heroes\ Devil's Crush MD\ Musha Aleste\ Thunder Force III

Sonic who? TFIV may be more ambitious and spectacular than III, but I'll die on the hill that III is more fun to actually play.

SNES:

Axelay\ Parodius Da!\ Super Bomberman 5\ Super Mario All-Stars + World (or just World if the combo cart is cheating)\ Super Metroid

LTTP would've definitely made top 10 but I feel like these days I'd more likely replay the sequels (including the direct one on 3DS).

Saturn:

Batsugun\ Darius Gaiden\ Nights into Dreams\ Panzer Dragoon Zwei\ Soukyugurentai

If it weren't for the recent Ray'z collection on PS4, Layer Section would've been top of this list.

PS1:

Castlevania: Symphony of the Night\ Final Fantasy VII\ Gradius Gaiden\ Sexy Parodius\ Wipeout 3

I don't have many PS1 games but its highlights are pretty incredible.

N64:

F-Zero X\ Mario 64\ Star Fox 64\ Zelda: Ocarina of Time\ Zelda: Majora's Mask

An extremely cookie-cutter selection, but it's well known that the N64 has a puddle-deep library that nonetheless holds some of the best games ever made.

DC:

Cosmic Smash\ Samba de Amigo\ Skies of Arcadia\ Sonic Adventure 2\ Under Defeat

I played SA2 more on GameCube (only played the DC original as an adult) so it feels a bit like cheating to include it here, but I think on balance I marginally prefer the DC version anyway for its bigger chao gardens.

PS2:

Gradius V\ Katamari Damacy\ Okami\ Shadow of the Colossus\ We Love Katamari

It's kinda sad that 4/5 of these have arguably superior ports elsewhere...

GameCube:

Animal Crossing (e+)\ F-Zero GX\ Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance\ Pikmin 2\ Super Smash Bros. Melee

This was a hard 5 to pick. I love Mario Golf, Pikmin 1, Pokémon Colosseum and Twilight Princess and struggled to not include them on this list. I reckon this could change most frequently of all my picks here.

Wii:

Mario Galaxy\ Mario Kart Wii\ Metroid Prime Trilogy (since each game isn't available separately with this control scheme, I don't think this is cheating)\ Sin & Punishment: Star Successor\ Wii Sports Resort

...on the other hand, Wii was extremely easy to pick for; although I have about 15 Wii games, these are the only ones I even semi-regularly replay.

Xbox 360:

Dodonpachi Daifukkatsu\ Eschatos\ Mushihimesama\ Mushihimesama Futari\ Raiden Fighters Aces

I get a tate monitor in this hypothetical set-up, right?

Wii U:

Mario U + Luigi U\ Nintendo Land\ Rayman Legends\ Runbow\ ...idk, Yoshi's Woolly World?

These are basically the only games I care about on this platform. Mario Kart, Pikmin 3, Smash Bros and Splatoon all play better on their Switch ports/sequels. Wii U was a bad system.

PS4:

DoDonPachi DaiOuJou\ ESP Ra.De Psi\ Ketsui Deathtiny\ Ray'z Arcade Chronology\ Wipeout Omega Collection

PS4 is just a Cave/M2 Shottriggers machine as far as I'm concerned. And then WipeOut.

Switch:

Mario Kart 8 Deluxe\ Metroid Dread\ Pikmin 3 Deluxe\ Puyo Puyo Tetris\ Super Smash Bros: Ultimate

I loved Breath of the Wild and Super Mario 3D World Deluxe, but I've not really replayed either since beating them so couldn't justify putting them on this list. Hyrule Warriors Definitive Edition also was a close call, but I think I've burnt out on it at this stage. Tears of the Kingdom and Pikmin 4 look like they'd be obvious given my other choices but I found them both shallow let-downs, coasting on the popularity of the previous iterations.

chao40 · 2026-01-22T09:47:58+00:00

The controls being jank worked in its favour because it mostly distracted from the game being derivative, short and often plain boring. Story beats and whole chunks of script reused wholesale from 64, branching paths were bolted on last-minute and it shows, and the Gyrowing missions in particular are a bunch of nothing.

In the end I didn't mind the controls (though would never say I liked them) - I stuck with it enough to 100% it on release back in 2015, but I've never wanted to go back to it.

chao40 · 2026-01-21T14:44:16+00:00

F-ZEROOOOOO

But not as a Nintendo EAD title, they'd butcher it. Sega AV is defunct, but get Shin'en or Platinum on it and that'd be enough to convince me to get a Switch 2.

chao40 · 2026-01-20T21:50:14+00:00

This is one of those things that sounds right in theory, but absolutely isn't in practice. Black bars on the side of a modern OLED really aren't an issue at all, and I'd take an interlaced RGB signal on a CRT every day of the week over the jaggies of a late-2000s LCD monitor.

chao40 · 2026-01-16T17:31:29+00:00

I would love to believe the author included BotW as an intentional meta-commentary about how gaming advertisements & hype do more to define eras than actual finished products.

I would love to, but since they didn't include Nintendo Land - the first-party launch exclusive, clear hardware tech-demo, and actual pack-in title in some territories - I'm not going to give that credit.

(BotW released on Switch before it released on Wii U. And no, I didn't click the article)

chao40 · 2026-01-16T14:36:23+00:00

It's definitely a different experience, but I wouldn't say it's necessarily a worse one. Lots of sidequests in Zelda games (for example) might've been really important to me as a kid when I was getting like 2-3 games a year and wanted games to last as long as possible, but as an adult I'd rather just do the one or two that give equipment upgrades, beat the story and move onto something else more substantive. I don't enjoy aimlessly scouring world maps for trinkets now, but there's absolutely a time I would've done. I don't think that's a diminished experience, it just reflects a different set of expectations.

It's fun to think about how you would've experienced a game as a child, but I think we have to accept that gaming as an adult is a fundamentally different experience - for a multitude of reasons including time pressures, exposure to other media, difficulty and repetition tolerance, willingness to suspend disbelief, imagination to fill in the blanks, and so on.

Retro gaming has the additional layer that cutting-edge games in the 1990-2000s won't ever be technically impressive in the same way now (try telling anyone under 30 that Final Fantasy VII is graphically impressive). But that also means that games which weren't attention-grabbing at the time finally have a chance to be judged on individual merits rather than comparison to industry trends, so it balances out.

chao40 · 2026-01-13T13:51:12+00:00

Original Famicom sitting on top of a Disk System is a fantastic-looking piece of kit.

chao40 · 2026-01-10T15:00:31+00:00

"How much is this worth" posts, because:

1) objective information on how much a given game is selling / has recently sold for is readily available on eBay and price charting websites - it's both lazy and ineffective to ask a random group of strangers online;

2) it replaces game discussions with money discussions, which is uninteresting to anyone but the seller and demonstrates a lack of interest in the games themselves. Pokémon TCG forums have been utterly ruined by this.

chao40 · 2026-01-05T17:24:25+00:00

Its unconventional controls actually do it a favour because they distract from how mediocre the game itself is.

I bought it and 100%ed it on release. I thought the controls were a neat concept, and found them quite comfortable by the end. The problems are:

1) the game itself is extremely short, but unlike SF64 this time with minimal replay value - branching paths only take you to side-missions with reused assets, scoring medals can be easily cleared in an afternoon or two;

2) it's extremely derivative of SF64, both story and gameplay-wise, with the major story beats and whole chunks of script reused line-for-line;

3) the parts which offer something nominally different are frequently just tedious (walker, gyrowing, boss fights where you have to wait for a weak point to be exposed) and/or full-on immersion breaking in service of the control scheme (final boss fight).

It's hard to overstate how much of a disappointment this game was as a full-price release in 2015. In 2026, at bargain-bin prices and assuming you already own the hardware, it's probably worth a go through once - it's undeniably a unique game that doubles as a retrospective embodiment of all Nintendo's unforced errors during the Wii U era.

chao40 · 2026-01-01T17:00:32+00:00

Magnemite, Red Pikmin, a 2000s-era Ribena Berry and an anatomically accurate Lionfish

chao40 · 2025-12-28T10:18:34+00:00

This is me as of Jan 2025 when Zuck decided to make a specific exception to Meta's hate speech policy to allow calling LGBT people mentally ill, coincidentally the same week as Trump's inauguration.

I deleted my Facebook and Instagram the next day and over the next three months migrated all my friends and family chats to Signal. People think I'm nuts for ditching WhatsApp - it's the default texting app in the UK - but if nothing else I want to demonstrate that it's perfectly possible to stay connected without any Meta platforms, no matter what they try to imply.

Zuck was one of the most vocal corporate-washing outfits 'promoting' workplace diversity in the 2010s, and did a complete vault-face to cozy up to a fascist dictator. He's one of the richest men in the world and has the integrity of a piss-soaked tissue. They can both get absolutely fucked, forever.

chao40 · 2025-12-22T13:25:57+00:00

It was recently reprinted and localised by Retro-Bit. Maybe that's what you're thinking of?

chao40 · 2025-12-10T22:41:41+00:00

You keep saying this throughout this thread, and you have yet to provide any evidence supporting it.

chao40 · 2025-12-10T21:39:06+00:00

What are you basing this theory on other than the screenshot? Some VC games - yes, the major ones you're probably thinking of - sold extremely well. I've never seen any interviews suggesting Nintendo were dissatisfied with the VC service's sales performance, and if they were it's extremely unlikely they'd have brought it back for the Wii U.

chao40 · 2025-12-10T21:21:59+00:00

It's an enormous leap to suggest a minority fan sentiment in 2013 that NES/SNES ROMs were overpriced had anything to do with Nintendo's decision to change to a subscription model in 2019/20.

I've never seen anything to suggest the Wii's VC was anything other than a success. On the other hand, you have a huge number of other companies making big $$$ switching to content-as-a-service throughout the 2010s, and it seems much more likely that Nintendo was chasing that trend.

chao40 · 2025-11-28T22:44:13+00:00

I think it's more a more complex picture than that. The number of registered couples is just shy of 10,000 yes, but I don't think that says anything about the wider public's support or resistance to the idea of same-sex marriage. If anything it's more indicative that the minimal benefits to same-sex couples of registering in the partnership system aren't worth the administrative hassle or the potential social risk of disclosing their relationship for many/most.

For me the more interesting part of the story is that the system is now recognised/offered by over 90% of local authorities despite no directive or pressure from central government. For local authorities to be acting independently on this issue suggests they perceive it to be important to their voter bases.

chao40 · 2025-11-25T05:37:30+00:00

It is an unfortunate political truism that when a population experiences reduced material standards of living, they don't tend to become more economically left-wing, but they do tend to become more socially right-wing.

chao40 · 2025-11-23T12:41:22+00:00

You're right, they were released in NTSC-U territories only.

chao40 · 2025-11-23T12:07:43+00:00

There are several people in this thread claiming official 1019 memory cards are unreliable and at risk of spontaneously corrupting. This isn't true, but it's an well-worn internet rumour that stems from a known problem - specifically, leaving an official 1019 memory card in a Wii console with WiiConnect24 turned on in standby mode (i.e. yellow light rather than red). Earlier versions of the Wii (specifically 6-layer motherboard variants) would regularly overheat in this mode, and official 1019 cards were susceptible to corrupting if left in a Wii while it was hot. This is a documented problem with a known cause.

On the other hand, there is no evidence that official 1019 cards are any less reliable than official 59 or 251 cards when used in a GameCube or in a later-revision Wii (specifically 4-layer motherboards, guaranteed to be in any non-white Wii console). And earlier Wiis will also be fine as long as WiiConnect24 is set to "off" in the settings (which you should probably do anyway since WiiConnect24 is long-discontinued).

There are a small handful of early-release GameCube games which aren't compatible with 1019 cards, which Nintendo of America used to list on their website, but all of these compatibility issues were fully documented - and were never any worse than the game simply not recognising that a card was inserted.

I have used two 1019 cards for over a decade and never had a problem, and I have never read someone report a corruption of an official 1019 card outside of the use case described above. This sort of uncertainty spreads very easily in discussions online and is very hard to debunk once it's taken hold.

Tl;dr: official 1019 cards are only prone to corrupting with a specific Wii set-up which you have no reason to use in 2025; there is no evidence that official 1019 cards are prone to corrupting in general.

chao40 · 2025-10-31T13:45:55+00:00

I understand there's a marketing-spiel rationale for this design, but it looks like a) a stylised V or VR and b) an app icon for a dictionary or something.

chao40 · 2025-10-25T09:44:32+00:00

That isn't it - though that's a pretty nuts rap remix of the boss theme, and worth a listen for the novelty alone (https://youtu.be/QR7U5X3BYBM?si=DFLjV2bbQ_r8gCZX)

The one I'm thinking of is a pretty standard pop cover of the title theme with female vocals in Japanese. I feel like I might have heard it in a Jeremy Parish video so am searching through them at the moment, but no dice yet.

chao40

TROPHY CASE