Just as long as I can still keep downloading standalone installers for both existing and future titles.

I’m playing through it now, on and off, for the first time. I love the lore, the plot, and the environments. I also like the slow but continuous progression and variation of enemies and powers. But the combat feels like a bag full of chocolate: it looks wonderful at first, but after a while I’ve started to get sick of it. I could use fewer (or even no) random encounters, if only they weren’t necessary to allow for grinding.

One thing that takes some of the shine off the whole thing for me is the way that lore pickups are handled. When other “timely” things occur, one of your menu buttons is temporarily repurposed as a “do exactly that right now” button, so why not lore pickups? Especially because the lore is often best consumed in the time and place where you find it. But because actually reviewing it requires me to go through mutiple levels of menus every time, I usually put it off until I have several waiting for me.

Almost as annoying is the fact that for things you can experience within the game world (movies, videos, and tapes), the item will still be marked as “unread” in the lore menu system until you review it there, even if you stood still in the game and waited for the whole thing to finish. Since they’re already in a separate lore category, I think it’s safe to risk using a simple algorithm (for example, the player stayed within X distance for 95% of the total runtime, without an enemy encounter) to mark an item as “read” in the lore list.

Landstalker is usually at the top of my list for these things, but I took OP’s list as already being definite plays, so I skipped it. 75% of OP’s list would be near the top of my list.

This is the first “What should I play on early Sega?” thread that already has almost all my favourites. In fact, many of them are in OP’s list. But to reiterate some added by other commenters:

• The “Strike” games (Jungle, Desert, and Urban)
• Flashback (I agree that the MegaCD version is the best single version, but the fan community has been building a Frankenstein’s monster from the best parts of every version; I forgot the name of the project)
• Wonder Boy III: The Dragon’s Trap (SMS)
• Wonderboy in Monster World (MD)
• Quackshot (MD)
• Rock ‘n’ Roll Racing (MD)
• Sunset Riders (MD)

I don’t think anyone’s yet mentioned:

• The Immortal (MD)
• Golden Axe Warrior (SMS)
• Arcus Odyssey (MD)
• The Lost Vikings (MD, although I played the PC version back in the day)
• Micro Machines (MD)
• Crack Down (MD)
• Gain Ground (MD)
• Alien 3 (MD)
• Addams Family Values (MD)
• Monster World IV (MD, although I haven’t actually played it yet)

And a few more that I’m fond of, but I either can’t remember them clearly (other than that I enjoyed them at the time), or I’m aware that I can’t separate fact from nostalgia, so YMMV:

• Sword of Vermilion (MD)
• Light Crusader (MD)
• Robocop vs Terminator (MD)
• Predator 2 (MD)
• Cosmic Spacehead (MD)
• D&D Warriors of the Eternal Sun (MD)
• Atomic Runner (MD)
• Techno Cop (MD)

An honourable mention to Cadash (MD), which is a solid attempt at a port but sadly can’t really hold a candle to the arcade original.

I’ll give you the same advice that I give myself whenever I feel this way: There are already more genuinely good video games in the world than you will be able to finish before you die. If there’s a “classic” that you feel the need to experience, but you give it a solid chance and it’s just not “clicking” for you, put it down and move on to something else. You’ve tried it, that’s enough. Between all the games that exist, and trying to live a somewhat rounded life that has more than only games in it, you simply can’t get around to all of them.

Australians absolutely have credit cards. The previous poster seems to be getting their information from a single Aussie.

I couldn’t find numbers specifically for the percentage of people who have at least one card, but the total number of CC accounts indicates that it’s likely that the majority of working adults have one. That being said, credit card usage is low compared to other countries, I suspect because the government made the banks get together and create a universal electronic payment network in the 1980s, and we’ve all been used to paying virtually anywhere with our regular ATM cards, direct from our normal bank accounts, for decades. Credit cards are primarily used for, y’know, credit, and not just everyday transactions.

And for all the talk of the credit card companies, my personal experience with online payment processors has been that they often won’t accept Cirrus or VISA Debit cards, or at least not cards issued outside their own country. So online shopping can be difficult without a credit card.

King’s Field Sword of Moonlight includes a full remake of King’s Field 1, and a fan has been working on a remake of King’s Field 2 for it.

Windows games for versions of Windows from Windows 95 to Windows 2000/NT.

For PC games before Win95, pretty much everything can be emulated properly with DOS PC emulators. And from Win7 on, the software and hardware standards had mostly restabilized and WINE/Proton usually works well. But in between, there was a real Wild West of third-party libraries and official patches that were constantly being updated with compatibility-breaking changes. You can go through the hassle of setting up a whole virtual machine that really taxes your computer and still not get some games to work.

Most recomps seem to be of popular console games that already run quite well through easy-to-use emulators. It’d be nice to see more recomp efforts for less-well-known games that are harder to play at all on modern hardware. I know it’s unlikely to happen, though; who wants to spend their efforts on niche games that most people haven’t heard of, much less care about? Only someone who has a personal interest in that game.

You’re right about the incompatibility between NTSC and PAL, but deliberate region locking was common, even in the 8-bit era. It was very much the norm rather than the exception. Also, on older consoles they simply slowed the main CPU speed down for PAL so that everything in the system matched up with the video framerate. If you’ve ever read about how PAL versions of 8-bit and 16-bit games run slower than the NTSC versions, that’s why. And it meant that you could plug out-of-region cartridges into your console, and if you could get around the region locking, they’d often work with minimal or no visual issues, just a little slower, because the video output was hardwired for PAL in the console. I played a few Japanese games on my PAL Mega Drive and SNES back in the day, on a PAL-only TV.

The PS1 and PS2 (both very much with region locking) had a weird thing going on where any console from any region could output both NTSC and PAL, depending on what the software asked for. I believe the GameCube and Dreamcast were similar; I ran original NTSC game discs on PAL versions of all of them.

In terms of what TVs would support, you’re right that it wasn’t until the late 1990s that fully dual-mode PAL/NTSC TVs started to become common, but that’s not the same thing as 50Hz vs 60Hz. CRT TVs were designed to work best at a certain frequency, but they were also designed to cope with variations in the signal and power supply. Most PAL CRT TVs are actually capable of synching at 60Hz, which is where “PAL-60” comes in. PAL-60 is an unofficial “standard” in which the video signal runs at the NTSC framerate and vertical resolution, but with a PAL colour subcarrier. I used PAL-60 on many TVs, some produced as far back as the early 1980s, and never found one that wouldn’t sync with it. I had a very inexpensive (Under AU$15 IIRC) NTSC-to-PAL-60 “converter” for the PS1/2 that I used to play NTSC games. You mentioned VCRs; there were VCRs that specifically played NTSC video cassettes as PAL-60. They weren’t common, but they existed.

I remember when Metroid Prime 2 came out (I still have my copy) and there was indeed a small controversy in the gaming press about the PAL version being 60Hz only, but it was PAL-60, not NTSC, and I played the whole game on a PAL TV that definitely did not support NTSC, without any trouble.

I was reminded that I have a copy of Control (2019) that I hadn’t touched, so a couple of weeks ago I started playing it. I was really enjoying it for a few hours, but it started to feel a bit repetitive and I haven’t been able to get back to it for a few days.

As I clicked on this thread I was literally thinking “Oh geez, are we still going to be able to get the older versions if we don’t have freeon-cooled quantum processors and 32 teraquads of RAM?” I’m glad I’m not alone.

This is only anecdotal, but I generally find that what I’ll call the “raw” information density difference between written Japanese and English is pretty small. There’s maybe a small advantage in Japanese.

In theory, Japanese should have a big advantage due to kanji, but once you account for having to display them at a larger size to keep them readable, plus all the other kana writing that’s still necessary, you lose almost all of it.

So why does there still seem to be so much more English text, and what do I mean by “raw” information density? Well, I’m talking about directly equivalent, often overly literal translations. To say virtually the exact same thing in both languages takes approximately the same amount of text. But Japanese in actual usage is highly contextual. You can leave out a substantial fraction of words that would be necessary in English for a grammatically correct sentence, and not only remain understandable in Japanese, but correct enough to pass muster on a written language test.

It’s entirely normal and common to omit not just subjects, but even verbs and entire clauses which the speaker assumes can be understood from context. Unfortunately a lot of this context is cultural rather than situational, and it was a real stumbling block for me for a few years. It still trips me up fairly frequently.

When someone translates this text from Japanese, it’s usually necessary to reintroduce multiple things that were left out, in order to write sentences that flow naturally in English.

I can’t imagine AI being able to code something efficiently enough to run on a C64!

I try to stay in touch with the Atari 2600 homebrew community, and this was the conventional thinking there, too. But between increases in LLM’s sampling of appropriate code and various automated tools, some people have started making games for the console with AI and very little knowledge of their own.

Are the games good? Not particularly. Are they as well-coded as a moderately talented human could achieve? Not even close. But they are functional. If AI can do that, I’m sorry to say that it should almost certainly be able to make a C64 “game” of some description.

Laughs in external USB 3.5" floppy drive

Yes, when I first realized that being published in Japan by D3 Publisher was a common denominator between these weird and wonderful budget games that I found, I became very interested in them. My friends actually went to TGS one year and got everything they could from the D3 booth for me.

However, since I’ve moved to Japan, I’ve continued researching and collecting vintage games, and I’ve found that while the majority of Simple Series games were published by D3 Publisher, especially the PS2 games, there are also some titles that were officially published by other companies. I guess it all leads back to D3 somehow, though. Also, D3 Publisher was still independent in the years these games came out.

My favorites include (Almost all PS2):

• The Zombie vs Ambulance (aka Zombie Virus). Drive an ambulance around a zombie-infested city, rescuing survivors and upgrading your vehicle.
• The OneeChanbara series. Slay blood-gushing zombies as an inexplicably bikini-clad, cowboy-hat-wearing swordswoman with light adventure/Metroidvania elements. The earlier ones are better IMO; as time went on they focused more and more creepily on the sexy female characters which were initially mostly a gag, especially after the movie (Yes, a movie!) came out.
• RC de Go! (PS1) Race in a remote-control car league.
• The Sniper 2 (direct sequel to a PS1 game I own but haven’t played). Play a sniper blackmailed into doing missions for a crime syndicate while you try to find a way out.
• The Ninkyo (aka Yakuza Fury). It’s pretty fair to call this a very barebones Yakuza (Ryu ga Gotoku) knock-off, but it has its charms.
• The Nihon Tokushubutai (aka Special Forces). A strange hybrid of FPS and realtime strategy in which you control a SWAT team in various scenarios.
• The Helicopter (aka Radio Helicopter). Fly a radio helicopter around your neighborhood while completing arbitrary but fun challenges. There’s another game that was marketed as “Radio Helicopter 2” in PAL territories, but it seems to be completely unrelated and not even a Simple Series game. I have it and didn’t find it nearly as fun as the original.

There are more that look very interesting but I haven’t played them yet, so I don’t feel I can recommend them. And there are also some real dogs, naturally, although I should say that even the ones I’ve listed can be something of an acquired taste. The Earth Defence Force series started as Simple Series games too, although I haven’t played any of them

While I was writing this I remembered a few more of my favorite budget games that weren’t Simple Series games:

• Sanvein (aka Starfighter Sanvein) on PS1. I’m not normally one for overhead shooters but I was really taken with this one. There’s an interesting light strategy element to it.
• TheDog Island on PS2 and Wii. Inspired by a line of stationery and decorative items, it’s a collect-'em-up with light Metroidvania elements aimed at younger players, but quite fun and addictive.
• The Puppy/Kitty and the Magic Hat (aka Petz Dogz/Catz 2) on PS2 and Wii. A spiritual sequel to TheDog Island, they’re actually two games which appear to be identical except that one is populated by dogs and the other by cats (I have the cat version).
• Choro-Q High Grade 2 (aka Road Trip Adventure). Choro-Q is a line of kids’ toy cars that older Westerners may remember as Penny Racers. Naturally there is a whole slew of tie-in kids’ games in Japan, from the Famicom onward, but for me this particular game is a standout. There’s racing, sure, and it kind of sucks, yes, but the meat of the game is exploring a massive open world, solving mysteries, and figuring out how to get to various places and which special vehicle parts you’ll need. It includes a “soccer” minigame which feels like a possible inspiration for Rocket League, but in a game that came out many years earlier.

The original book of “Ready Player One” had a secret ARG, not unlike the one the main characters in the book take on. But as far as anyone can tell, no-one found it or even thought to look for it. Ten months after publication, the author Ernest Cline finally made an announcement about it.

The “trailhead” (starting clue/puzzle) was hidden in an almost identical way to the one in the story, and there was an empty leaderboard on his website just the same, too, but somehow no-one picked up on any of it. It must have been driving him and the publishers mad.

Quite a few of the various Simple series’ games on PS1 and PS2. Some of them were translated and released in Europe and the USA, but many more weren’t. Not too many lost gems there, though. Most of the games that stayed in Japan aren’t anything special.

The series started out as basic implementations of card and board games to be sold for a low price, then moved into fairly generic video games in established genres, but eventually the various developers started making somewhat original, low-budget games, and some of them are pretty good, especially considering their budgets.

I’m not sure how the games are connected as a series, although they definitely are, because they’re numbered in order of release on the original covers. But they’re made by many different developers, and even in Japan there seems to have been at least two publishers releasing them.

TIL that cheap fanny packs can apparently now be called “cross-body packs” in a vain effort to make us forget how uncool they are.

Honestly, I think it would’ve been better if they’d leaned into it as a retro 80s/90s thing and just called it a fanny pack. It’s already hideous, anyway.

Edit for clarification: There are things that I would happily and unironically call a “cross-body pack”. But IMO the picture on that website is of a fanny pack.

Not advice on what to do exactly, but why do you say “long box”? I know many PAL and NTSC-U Saturn games came in special, long boxes, but I can’t recall ever seeing a Japanese Saturn game in anything other than quite standard CD jewel cases (special edition carboard outer boxes aside). Particularly Kaze no Regret, which is a fairly common game here (a regular jewel case copy still usually goes for under 1,000 yen, even with obi and other ephemera).

If you want to, it should be possible to pop the broken cover out of the hinge piece and replace it with the cover from almost any standard double-width CD jewel case. There are several videos on YouTube showing how to do this. Once you put in the paper insert, no-one would ever be able to tell.

That’s a fairly eclectic selection of games for a collection that size, but I see that each has a personal meaning for you. Thanks for sharing!

I don’t see Nanatsu Kaze mentioned much in English. I bought a copy years ago because it looked so curious, but I still haven’t really played it.