Nuclear Pacman

Ok, I know I'm late to the party, but I had taken an extended break from the X360 in 2011, so I'm just now investing more money in the system again. Just bought Espgaluda 2 on Amazon today, and Mushihimesama Futari 1.5 last week. So, my shmup collection on 360 so far is:

• Mushihimesama Futari 1.5
  
• Espgaluda 2 Black Label
  
• Guwange
  
• Raiden Fighters Aces
  
• Raiden IV
  
• Deathsmiles LE
  
• R-Type Dimensions

All those games are awesome I think. I've probably only got half of the available titles that will play on a US 360 right? I was looking at Muchi Muchi Pork/Pink Sweets but that thing is already about $100 and out of print it looks like, so I don't know if I'll get that one. And Otomedius Excellent seems to get below average reviews, so I'm not sure that one is worth the money.

That HRAP stick I bought for SF4 years ago sure is paying off for me gameplay wise, I don't know if I'd be having as much fun with the standard pad. At least all these shooters have rapid fire nowadays. Thinking back to the days of Genesis and TG-16, rapid fire was rarely programmed in. Modern shooters are much more user friendly I think, but the scoring systems seem rather complex. All these cave games I have to search online to figure out the scoring system, because I never know what all the counters and sub-counters mean. Awesome, awesome games and really fun though.

http://news.yahoo.co...-061843906.html

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Yowza, I was being open minded for the future of PS4, but just how much resources are they going to be able to pump into it?

What do you think the next Playstation and the next Xbox will have as features, specs and services etc...?

My opinion, I work quite a bit right now and have not put one bit of effort into researching the upcoming machines, but given the secrecy I can't imagine I'd find much anyway, so all I'm going on is patterns and what I think game companies want as well as gamers. These are only my speculations, absolutely nothing official, just pure opinionated crap. I just want to see what people think is going to happen.

Playstation 4:

• BluRay disc system. I think Playstation will retain an optical disc game delivery system as their primary, with the games being required to be on BluRay discs. That 50gb bump from 9gb we have now for DVD is quite a boost. And Sony is not going to let BluRay fail as a movie format, not right now, they put the whole company on the line for that format, and they will continue to push it.
  
• Pay for online service. Sony can no longer afford to have free online after losing $3 Billion in 2011.

Next Xbox:

• No disc drive. From Microsofts perspective, I have to think they don't want another multi-billion dollar fix-it campaign for their new console, and I really believe that eliminating moving parts from their next system is going to be a primary design issue. That means we could be looking at the first console to only offer games by downloading them from Xbox Live. Could be a disaster, or a profit-making machine. All the overhead that disappears by releasing games as downloads is quite an enormous amount I would imagine, as you eliminate things like printing inserts, printing discs, plastic molds for the cases (which use Petroleum), no more paper instruction manuals, no shipping costs etc... We all know there are some game companies that want to eliminate second hand sales of games (Epic, EA), so that problem will also be taken care of. I'm sure it's nice to make billions after first losing billions, but it's gotta be even better to just start making billions right away.
  
• Kinect. Probably the central focus of game design. You think Microsoft looks at Nintendo blowing them away this generation with the Wii and not want to copy that success? They made Kinect in the first place didn't they? From what I can tell the Kinect is a pretty major success for the 360. If I'm wrong please correct me.
  
• Cloud. I'm not really sure what this means to be honest. It sounds like it has potential to be Sega Channel if download speeds and data storage capabilities keep increasing, which they constantly are year after year. What I don't want to see is this kind of storage taking the place of a hard drive, because then we could be in a situation where even our 'purchased' downloaded games are being stored on some game companies storage servers, which is just ...I don't know, Orwellian creepy?
  
• Mandatory subscription fee (Gold): I don't see a 'free' or Silver style subscription anymore. Not for all the things that MS wants their entertainment box to be, I mean they want it to be the 'everything box'.
  
• Proprietary HDMI cable. Why should MS allow us to use a $3 HDMI cable, when they can force us to pay a premium for their own? Also, maybe we'll see some kind of wireless audio/video option?

I really hope I'm wrong on all those things about the Next Xbox because I just described the worst gaming console of all time.

While shopping at a local place called Disc Replay (which appears to be a chain), I picked up Operation Thunderbolt for $12 loose. Man this game brings back memories, I hadn't even realized it was ever ported to a home console at all. So to my delight, I was kind of taken by surprise when I saw this sitting in the glass case, and they had 2 copies of it.

My initial reaction that I thought to myself was "is that seriously Operation Thunderbolt the arcade game?". I know some of you are probably like, 'yeah duh didn't you know this was on SNES?'. Anyway, I didn't know the rarity, but I took a flier on $12 what the heck. I'm not concerned with the price or rarity, I was just glad to have this treasure after what has been decades since I've played the arcade original. It is quite a nice port, after I've spent some time with it today. I'm equally surprised and delighted that it supports the SNES Mouse for controls! I don't have one, but now I have a reason to seek out that mouse, I can imagine this game is da bomb with that, as I'm already getting frustrated with the slow movement of the crosshairs using a control pad.

Man, what a great game, and a great feeling to play this again. I had thought of this game over the years and always lamented how I wish it were ported, and the whole time I was completely oblivious that it made its way to the SNES. I could swear that I searched it out at one point or another, but I must not have obviously.

Picked this up complete for $8 at a local shop this weekend. I've always only had lukewarm feelings towards this game, and only rarely played my 2600 and 5200 versions.

At first when I popped this in, I wasn't sure if the graphics were all that much of an improvement over the 5200 game. But I did go ahead and direct compare them yesterday and I can definitely see the improvements. This 7800 version certainly looks prettier than any other version I've played (I'm not saying its the best version out there). There are many little visual upgrades and sprites don't look semi-transparant like the 5200 game. Audio wise the 5200 kills it in comparison though, which seems to be the case with so many of the games shared between these two systems. I know it's the POKEY audio chip (which I know nothing about), and what bugs me about the 7800 audio on Dig Dug is how the game is programmed to play a tune only when little Dig Dug is walking around, and then a different sound will play when he's not in motion. I've noticed this on other games on 7800 as well, particularly Donkey Kong Jr. (another fantastic port).

I like the difficulty of this 7800 version. I think one of the reasons I didn't play this that much was because it was too easy on previous home console versions. But this one has fairly intelligent enemies that manage to avoid my rock drops more often than I hit them. I actually like playing Dig Dug now, which makes me happy because I'm finding a little bit of love in a game that I've always neglected. I'm glad I found this one in the wild because it's not something I ever actively pursued online. This is a good game on 7800.