It's the same in the big charity stores here in the UK - they used to be amazing for deals, now they're just ebay price + a premium. Nothing gets put up for sale without it being run through the system to check against prices online.
Well, it'll be both - I can order stuff from Hard Off/Book Off shops online now, and those were the places I found the absolute best deals back when I was actually in Japan. It seemed like the staff back then just pulled prices out of the air.
At the very least, I'm seeing fewer absolute bargains from Japanese sellers than I used to. I think they're all just more aware of online prices (including foreign prices) than they used to be.
A lot of Famicom stuff is still pretty cheap though.
I think the rise of sites like Buyee and Zenmarket have been at least partially responsible. They're no longer all that awkward to use and a lot of brick and mortar shops now sell on YahooJP Auctions etc, which means that things that would've languished in a shop are getting sold via mail instead.
I'm told that Famitsu review scores are seen rather sceptically by the Japanese, too.
Well done, I remember this game being nails hard.
I always hated those tall steel flick switches for this kind of thing, even on the back. They make the console so much more fragile and prone to catching on things.
"Stop hiding scrollbars for crying out loud!"
Oh god, THIS. A thousand times this.
Love these relics, when MIDI music came on floppy disks, and particularly on multisession CDs with data/CDDA, so you can listen to it on your CD player, and then pop it in your PC and dive into the files that music was made from. It's like "open source music" and it's really sad this isn't standard.
I remember thinking that this one was a swing and a miss at the time. By December '05 it was pretty clear that Wikipedia worked surprisingly well.
I was betting against it at first too, though. It's just one of those ideas that seems hopelessly naive.
Looks like Japan got one with a HDD, just for good measure: Panasonic DMR-BR670V. And the bluray and VHS drives can record. With that many recording sources/targets, I imagine the interface might get a bit convoluted!
Most of the time these days I play a game demo and I'm done, very rare to come away thinking "definitely picking that up", kudos to the devs.
DLSS frame gen was busted on my PC but aside from that it also ran really well, which is impressive for a game as complex as this so early on in development.
I have sunk so many hours into this one. It's hands-down my favourite SFC game, and that's saying something.
Weirder thing is that we actually had support for higher refresh on PC early on - Doom being a notable standout at a 70hz cap, common in the PC world, due to not really having a predefined "standard game/monitor res" until HD came.
haha, good luck fixing your mains hum on headphones with older gear like this.
But yeah, CRT TVs continue to surprise me with sound quality. The big widescreen Sony flatron has had friends looking for hidden speakers - it sounds great and the bass on it is really substantial and well-defined.
Definitely the latter, though if I browsed on mobile I imagine my opinion would be the other way around most of the time, just from a size/distance perspective.
I loved Prime at release, one of my favourite GC games at the time, but I retried it recently and OH MY is that control scheme claw-cramp-inducing. I'd also completely forgotten that it wasn't just "standard" dual stick controls.
$$$
Genuinely some of the worst videogame art in existence. Early US Capcom is a close contender.
It's also terrifying, like that one last change could've fucked the whole game in some obscure manner, and nobody would've caught it until it was too late.
I don't remember when the title screen was finalised, but the changes they were making, literally days before the ROM went off to manufacturing, are wild. We're lucky enough to have a potted history of it with prototype dumps. I used to love going through them and seeing all the little changes.
Nice choice of CD :)
Oh man. That first playthrough, what a rush.
One of my all-time favourite soundtracks, too.
yeah, I'd be interested.
C-suite bonuses.
I've always really wanted to like Oni, but every time I play it the game feels empty in a way that sucks all the gameyness out of it. The ropey PS2 port doesn't help, but I don't think it breaks anything much that wasn't already broken on PC. It's just not a finished game. Shame.
Does look interesting, I've not seen it.
Someday Avalon will get the recognition it deserves too, I hope. Such an incredible movie, but I've never met anyone who's seen it. After Avalon, I was convinced the guy had the Midas touch.
Garm Wars disabused me of that notion. I don't think he's done anything of note since GitS2, tbh.
Only the highest grade Puke, please.
Are those filter cigarettes? I knew a Mancunian lad who used to call them "scruples".
Bombing feels like a personal failure.
And then I die, and lose all my bombs, and that feels like a personal failure too.
;_;
