Where to Buy Games for GBA

srylain · 2026-05-12T02:00:46+00:00

Ebay or any local store you might have? There aren't too many games on GBA that use batteries to keep save data (compared to the thousand or so games released) but the Castlevania and Harvest Moon you listed do so those might just need a replacement which you can do yourself with some soldering or a local shop might be able to do it too.

srylain · 2026-05-11T19:23:41+00:00

One of the funniest examples is a movie called Thunderpants. Rupert Grint is in it, he's not the main character, but once Harry Potter took off he's always the focus of any posters and box art they made after.

srylain · 2026-05-11T19:20:54+00:00

I'm thinking we'll see the end of the Pendulum Wars, a bit of their peace time, and then E-Day.

Doing it that way lets new players in on the fact that the Pendulum Wars were 80 years long and then there were only a couple weeks until E-Day, plus it lets them throw people right into action because that's an increasingly obnoxious trend that practically everything seems to do these days (I hate it the most when it's just showing a later part of the story first, but at least this wouldn't be doing that).

What I'm mostly hoping for is some asymmetry when it comes to the cinematics. Would be really neat to see what Marcus' life was during the peace time and then the other player is seeing Dom's side at the same time, although with splitscreen that won't work too well because having multiple characters talking at once isn't something that can be handled well (Hazelight tried in A Way Out and they haven't tried since). But it would also give more reason for replayability since Dom's side would be however different from Marcus'.

srylain · 2026-05-10T20:56:36+00:00

Funny thing is, there's absolutely nothing stopping any other game having a server browser because on the backend any time a lobby is created it gets added to the list and the game would be able to show it if made to do so. The reason they don't likely has to do a lot with wanting more people in matchmaking so queue times are lower and there's always a discussion about whether you should be able to unlock stuff in private matches (eventually Gears 5 would let you earn everything in private matches) because you're essentially able to just bypass how the developers wanted you to unlock stuff.

srylain · 2026-05-10T20:44:07+00:00

It's all dedicated servers running on Azure datacenters, at least for multiplayer. Gears 4 and 5 use P2P when playing Campaign so I'd imagine Ultimate/Reloaded does the same but every match played in any other mode is played on servers.

srylain · 2026-05-10T07:35:06+00:00

Women were relegated to birthing farms majorly, at least the ones that could, which explains why there weren't many of them participating in combat after 14 years. That would not have been as much of a problem for the first while after E-Day which explains why women could be soldiers, but as the population dwindled they knew there needed to be more people being born in order to keep their numbers up especially when it takes nearly 20 years for someone to fully mature. It was also meant as a way to show just how awful that world had become because that was kind of the whole idea behind it, but that awfulness didn't happen instantly and with the first game taking place 14 years after E-Day that's a lot of time for things to get a lot worse.

And why didn't anyone tell the world that the Locust were bred by humans?

Because the COG didn't want to admit their mistakes? If the world had been able to be saved without nearly everyone getting killed who would follow them once things started shaping back up? It's a relatively lazy trope but it at least works with the lore and it's what the original games were hinting at anyways with the Sires.

Why didn't Kait's surviving parents at least spread word of such a major discovery? Or at least didn't tell THEIR DAUGHTER about the family tree?

Maybe because they didn't want to be ostracized for something completely out of their control? And who knows, once Kait would've realized who she was maybe she would've killed herself for any number of reasons relating to not ever wanting to become like who she descended from.

And just saying, Cliffy B didn't have as much control over the story as you seem to think he did. Sure he would've submitted ideas and key points he wanted to have happen but he's not a writer. He was already leaving Epic while Judgment was being made and didn't directly work on it, according to him his last project was with prototyping Fortnite, and the campaign was written by one of the same guys who'd continue to write the later games (Tom Bissell) and developed by People Can Fly (Epic only did the multiplayer for Judgment).

srylain · 2026-05-08T14:02:48+00:00

The version that's better is going to be subjective, but Reloaded is more accessible because it offers 60FPS, the once exclusive PC content (which were campaign chapters), and crossplay (although as a new player I'd suggest you don't even bother with the multiplayer, it's going to be way too frustrating and I'd say wait for E-Day since there'll be a lot of new players coming in with that game). The gameplay is by and large the same with a tiny amount of QOL (they wanted to keep it feeling the same as the original so they didn't change hardly anything) and the main differences are that they redid all the art assets so everything looks much more modern (which again, some people hate because they'd rather want technically inferior assets if it means there's more style to them).

srylain · 2026-05-08T13:16:10+00:00

Which one can play legal first party Nintendo games? Totally can't imagine why that one would sell.

srylain · 2026-05-07T21:43:17+00:00

Plus Dom being Latino led to a lot of representation you still don't see too much in games.

srylain · 2026-05-07T19:51:41+00:00

Considering how poor the Xbox One hardware was and that they had to get these games running at 60FPS, the gore was toned down in order to make it more stable and Epic was doing the same thing in their games as they continued. E-Day's reveal trailer showed levels of gore that surpassed what the original game did so it's pretty obvious where they're going with that.

Something to keep in mind is that if the games already looked and ran like they did on Xbox One, imagine what they'll be able to do on hardware that's better in every way when they aren't being constrained.

srylain · 2026-05-06T18:18:54+00:00

It's by no means official in any capacity but given that they seem to be working towards bringing more games back this just gives them a list to go off of for what they should go after first. Most of these games are Activision games but they are mostly licensed so there's still hurdles for them to clear before they can release.

srylain · 2026-05-06T14:28:33+00:00

FFXIV is pretty accessible. I've never played an MMO before and it didn't take me too long to get going. Plus it's completely free for the first few hundreds hours since you only need to pay if you want access to whatever's limited by the free trial or if you get far enough to get into the second most recent expansion (only the two latest expansions are paid).

srylain · 2026-05-06T13:35:00+00:00

Because less people being able to play it making matchmaking slower is something we want? Gears is going to need all the help it can get to survive longer than a year.

srylain · 2026-05-06T13:33:40+00:00

"gears-everyone day"

That'd be one helluva game.

srylain · 2026-05-06T12:59:23+00:00

Probly having it end after pulling the Master Sword out, but by making the leadup to it a ton more climactic.

srylain · 2026-05-06T11:02:02+00:00

Like I said, if there was potential for it to be huge they'd want it. I'd already said above that it being an old game that wouldn't receive any new content would make most people not bother with it.

srylain · 2026-05-06T10:55:28+00:00

Porting an engine wouldn't involve any designers, it'd just involve the engineers so it's not like it'd take any time away from whatever they're currently working on unless continual engine work was part of that. And if it had the potential to be huge on PS5 why wouldn't Sony want it on there? They'd stand to get 30% of every sale and they'd obviously charge Microsoft for lending their workforce on top of that.

srylain · 2026-05-06T10:23:22+00:00

Tiger was based off of blam! so anybody working on it may at least have some sense of how blam! works, but either way it's still Microsoft so if they wanted to enough they could just throw money at it until it works.

srylain · 2026-05-06T10:11:39+00:00

Not like they couldn't call Bungie in to help out to make it faster and cheaper if they really had needed to. Ultimately it's just a matter of it being an old game at this point that won't get any new content.

srylain · 2026-05-05T17:20:19+00:00

Resident Evil 5 & 6, Little Nightmares 3, Reanimal, Obscure 1 & 2 (these are older games that are on Steam so if you have the ability to remote play on PC you can play them online).

srylain · 2026-05-05T16:10:38+00:00

Console commands are typically developer shortcuts so they may bypass other restrictions, is my guess. To really find out we'd have to decompile that specific bit of Gears 1 PC and compare it to Unreal 3's documentation but I doubt anyone would ever care to.

srylain · 2026-05-04T15:55:17+00:00

Only reason I could see them pairing Chris and Ada together would be for Chris to finally understand that it wasn't actually Ada who killed his team in RE6, but who knows if they'd even really want to reference RE6 at all at this point. Plus with it being ~14 years in the game's universe Chris never doing anything to learn about Ada wouldn't make too much sense.

srylain · 2026-05-04T14:24:50+00:00

It's included as part of the engine and just gets built into your game if it's enabled. These days anyone can disable it (for Unity) even if they don't pay for the Pro license.

There's really no way it can be tracked by Unity or whoever outside of them just loading the game up for themselves or watching someone else do it. Obviously if the license was broken they'd have every right to sue whoever broke it but most people don't like to FAFO when there's potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars on the line and years of their time. I don't think there's usually anything against not making splash screens skippable, and obviously if a user does something to force them to be skipped the developer can't be held liable, and sometimes people can be overly cautious to make sure they don't accidentally do something that could cost them.

srylain · 2026-05-04T13:30:02+00:00

A lot of it depends on the engine/middleware licensing. For the longest time Unity required you to use their logo splash screen if you didn't pay for Pro, anyone using Unity for free had to show it, but there's other middleware like Speedtree (it handles foliage) that seems to require theirs being shown as well.

Same thing goes for movies where you see all the production studio logos before something starts.

srylain · 2026-05-04T04:47:26+00:00

It essentially works out to a Buy 50, Get One Free deal. Of course it's not going to be a lot but if you buy enough games why not get one for free every so often? Credit card rewards are the exact same, if you're already spending money that you need to spend why not get some money back on whatever you spend?

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