61 Frames Per Second

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• Our Emulation Habits

  A long, long time ago (actually, it was just this past Friday) fellow blogger and 61FPS boss-man pined over his inability to emulate.  I'm afraid that I'm a bit less romantic than John, even though my feelings about emulation have changed slightly over the years.  But when I first started emulating--man oh man--it was like some sort of amazing technology I dreamed about but never thought would exist.  As is the case with most people who caught onto emulation, I got hooked on NESticle back in 1997, and spent the copious amounts of free time I had (I was a dork in high school, after all) downloading all the games from my past I was dying to play again.  If I'm not mistaken, I think this was also the year that SNES emulators--a baffling proposition at the time--first started to support sound.  I remember downloading a .wav file of the Chrono Trigger opening song as played through the soon-to-be released SNES9X and sitting there completely awestruck.  Yes, even then I realized how nerdy I was. Read More... Posted Oct 29 2008, 06:30 PM by Bob Mackey with | with 4 comment(s) Filed under: snes, nes, chrono trigger, mother 3, translation, bob mackey, seiken densetsu 3, rom hacks, emulation

• Whatcha (Trying To) Play: Legend of Zelda: Parallel Worlds

  Blessed are the fan translators. Without them we would never be able to experience the wonder of games like Seiken Densetsu 3, Mother 3 (it's coming!) or Final Fantasy V years before it recieved an awful translation on the Playstation. Less blessed are the ROM hackers. I know we all went through our childhood tormented by questions like, "What if Mario had a gigantic penis to trip him up while he tried to rescue the Princess?" and, "Gee, Sonic the Hedgehog is great, but it would be really great if someone replaced Mobius' clouds with Swastikas!" but ultimately the answers to these questions turn out to be nothing but messy self-indulgence. But even my jaded heart can recognise a great piece of fan work when I see it. The Legend of Zelda: Parallel Worlds is a great piece of fanwork. It's also near unplayable for pussies who embody the type of girly gamer who should slink back to her copy of Barbie's Horse Adventures (hint: Me). Read More... Posted Sep 10 2008, 06:10 PM by Nadia Oxford with | with 5 comment(s) Filed under: mother 3, fan stuff, nadia oxford, seiken densetsu 3, rom hacks, fan translations, final fantasy v, the legend of zelda link to the past, fan hacks, the legend of zelda parallel worlds

• The Dividing RPG: Secret of Mana

  Squaresoft's Secret of Mana will be coming to Virtual Console this September, probably as Seiken Densetsu 2. It's probably a good thing Square-Enix didn't try to reshuffle the Mana titles when they came to America. Re-numbering Final Fantasy already requires more math than I want to do outside a school setting. (Yes, I was a dunce, and I still am according to expert testimony.) Secret of Mana's VC revival got people a-muttering on message boards and IRC. And I was shocked and appalled to learn that there are people out there who care not for Randi's pastel-coloured adventure to find a giant tree. They called it dated. They called it boring. They called it buggy, and "buggy" is actually being generous. By all programming logic, every copy of Secret of Mana should have imploded on the store shelves. I might be biased. Secret of Mana was my first RPG outside of the Dragon Warrior/DragonQuest series, so it wasn't too hard for me to be blown away by the harrowing story of an orphan who was fathered by a sword. Read More... Posted Sep 02 2008, 04:00 PM by Nadia Oxford with | with 8 comment(s) Filed under: snes, rpg, japan, square-enix, 16-bit, nostalgia, nadia oxford, virtual console, computer ai, seiken densetsu 3, seiken densetsu 2, secret of mana