Crash Bandicoot has quite a few scrapped games with varying amounts of salvaged assets. There's Crash Twinsanity's scrapped predecessor Crash Bandicoot: Evolution, which was believed to be reworked into Twinsanity due to Evolution's similarities to the at-the-time upcoming Mario & Luigi Superstar Saga, there's Crash Tag Team Racing DS, which was scrapped due to Mario Kart DS being on the horizon (among other issues), and then there's Crash Landed, which seems to have been scrapped simply because Activision wanted more hands on an upcoming Call of Duty game.

It's a wildly unfortunate coincidence that two Crash games got shitcanned because the release would coincide with a Mario game that the devteam knew would blow it out of the water, and the cynic in me can only assume that if Activision let the developers continue to work on Crash Landed, that it would have just gotten mollywhopped by Super Mario Galaxy 2 instead.

Here ya go.

If you specifically want the classic design I can whip that up too. (I thought this collab was supposed to be for Pixel Day lmao)

It was the best way for Nintendo to re-release their legacy games, shy of releasing a bunch of Nintendo Classics collections (which still would've been awesome mind you).

They've built up such a great backlog on the NSO that I don't hate the subscription service tbh, but I still would've preferred the NSO apps to have just been frontends for each Virtual Console.

I'd say "the entire backlog of forgotten legacy playstation games" but the pessimist in me expects some internet comedian would respond "what games?", then I'd be forced to sacrifice them to the blood god and derail this thread. So instead of doing all that, I'll just list a few landlocked Playstation/PS-adjacent games by name:

• Folklore
• Bloodborne
• 3D Dot Game Heroes
• InFamous
• the LittleBigPlanet series; although I'd prefer one beefed up LittleBigPlanet: ReStitched that is actually the entire trilogy + PSP & Vita with all of the content that they have the licensing rights to bring back. I can give or take LBP Karting though
• Dreams. I don't care if the only thing people make are Mario & Sonic & Crash levels. That game deserved so much more.
• Knack, because sure why not
• ModNation Racers
• Crash Team Racing: Nitro Fueled
• Crash Team Rumble

The Xbox list is way smaller

• Blinx and Jet Set Radio Future. How come those never got re-releases but Voodoo Vince of all Xbox exclusives did?
• Rare Replay, but honestly I only want em for Banjo Kazooie & Tooie. Those quality of life updates are no joke.
• Blue Dragon
• Lost Odyssey

And for Nintendo... Maybe just pull a SEGA and give us some Nintendo Smash Packs of just random Virtual Console games. Nintendo doesn't have all that much that has me going "augh, this would be better on PC" to be honest. Pokemon Unite and Pokemon Champions whenever that comes out.

I am convinced that the lack of PC ports for the multiplayer Crash games was a deliberate act of sabotage from Activision out of fear that the silly little marsupial would overshadow Call of Duty. Low key hoping we get a fan decomp of Ratchet & Clank and Sly Cooper but at the same time I can live without em.

Oh yeah did that Sonic Dream Team game ever get a PC port? I think it was exclusive to AppleOS. Port that shit already dawg. Nobody wants to play video games on a Macbook.

Jet Set Radio. I've got too much Tony Hawk Pro Skater muscle memory for it to really vibe with me beyond the aesthetics of it.

You mean that Jay Eazy song from like 3 years ago? I saw you ranting about that earlier and I thought you were talking about a MegaRan song dropping this week. Wegra I know you're usually late to the party, but this is ridiculous.

Do you deliberately go out of your way to not find out about things online until everyone's almost completely forgotten about them?

Nah, I'm hard pressed to spend more than $20 on a video game. If I'm gonna spend ~$40 on it, it better come with a downloadable soundtrack and artbook.

Mind if I claim Drill Man.... Fully Charged?

Bot account spotted spamming different websites in the reviews. Mobile browser NG is derping out on me for some reason. It just hangs on the loading icon. Whatever. As long as this guy gets nipped before he spams an annoying amount of submissions

https://kristoff20200512.newgrounds.com/reviews/movie

I used to play games on the hardest difficulty because kid me would swear up & down that the difficulties in the Pokemon Stadium minigames were flip-flopped and Hard was easier than Easy. There were a few other games like that I remember but Megaman Anniversary Collection was one of the first times I remember a game having a difficult mode that's actually harder than the lower difficulty settings and I eased into just going with Normal Difficulty. Maybe I was just cracked at video games as a little kid and got worse by my middle school years.

Back in the early/mid 00s when the most accessible walkthroughs were literal .txt files or forum posts with only a few gameplay screenshots, I'd open up multiple different ones because none of them were vetted enough so typically you could expect one walkthrough to be written by an aspiring internet comedian, one to have super out-of-date info, and one full of "[this space is reserved]" markers. And you're stuck cross-referencing each of them because there's still some nuggets of helpful info between each one.

Even with youtube walkthroughs nowadays, I'm inclined to queue up several walkthrough videos in case the first couple of walkthrough guys are understudies of ChuggaaConroy.

RPGs that have a late game dungeon where the theme is chorus chanting.

My overly sentimental ass will hear those ominous chants and think "We're nearing the end of the story. If we lose, everyone dies. If we win, the story ends; the world may be at peace, but also everyone will cease to exist as soon as I turn off the game once and for all, and even the characters in-universe are secretly aware of their hyper-mortality."

Here's a few that always get people raging.

Exclusives are the utmost necessity in any gaming console. Where's the incentive to buy one console over the other if their library is the exact same? Miss me with that nebulous "one has more power" crap. The games look near-identical when played in realtime. If every console's library is the same, then you're just buying out of brand loyalty.

People who try to remind you that gaming is technically cheaper now than it's ever been are being intentionally dishonest. 20+ years ago we had demo discs, we had video game rentals, during the 5th thru early 7th gen the big publishers would occasionally reprint some of their bestsellers at a massive price drop, and also there were fewer stopgaps that only existed to discourage someone from simply lending their game out to a friend.

You never truly owned your physical games even when the entire thing was on cartridge or disc. The manuals always had a disclaimer that nobody read, stating that you're not allowed to back up, dump, or modify your game in any way that wasn't authorized by the publisher or console manufacturer. The manufacturers all just banked on the average consumer handling their physical media like a barbarian.

I'd argue that graphics matter just as much as every other facet of gaming. But discussing graphics in gaming is exhausting because nobody wants to build up a vocabulary and go into detail as to what's actually wrong when criticizing a game's graphics.

For example, that new Pokemon game Legends ZA has a very cutesy playful anime artstyle that cleverly disguises the graphical jank much better than the previous Pokemon game did, but even still, there are certain areas in the game that will have a distracting amount of pop-in and LoD hiccups. Sometimes if you quickly enter and exit the centerpiece area of the hub, the surrounding chunks of the map will have their textures go super blurry to save on performance. And sometimes they'll just stay that way for a few seconds even when you return to the regular parts of the hub.

Now, with that context in mind, I'm not seeing that level of scrutiny when discussing the graphics. Instead the criticism rarely goes deeper than people exchanging clips and screenshots of normal gameplay with nothing as intense as the tower glitch happening, alongside an intense but ultimately meaningless caption like "This is unacceptable for a game in 2025".

Seeing people act as if you should just be able to infer what's wrong with a game's graphics is what I think leads to others insisting that graphics don't matter at all. It's like an endless war of extreme opposites.

Hellboy, The Maxx, and Scud: The Disposable Assassin. These are comics I always saw as de-facto Newgrounds-core media despite having no inherent connection to NG whatsoever.

I always look for three things in a comic: Bold lines, harsh blacks, and OW THE EDGE.

For Maxx it's more the short-lived MTV cartoon that I think about than the comic, but don't let that downplay the comic at all. The cartoon was simply able to get away with certain mixed media animation techniques that wouldn't work as well in the comics. For example there's a scene in the cartoon where Maxx is in the back of a cop car and the cops are played by live actors, but only their silhouettes are visible. The backdrop is also just B-roll footage of driving down an NYC street. It's a throwaway scene in the comic but it's one of the more iconic scenes in the cartoon imo. They only had one season so they decided to make every scene count.

I also like Spawn, but I haven't put in an effort to actually read anything Spawn related since the early 2000s.

Oh yeah also shout outs to Bone. Another comic I absolutely loved but admittedly I haven't gone out of my way to read/finish it.

Pokemon Go probably counts as a gacha but I've never spent a cent on it fwiw.

in RPGs I like to max out their best stat and if possible, put any remaining stat points into a mediocre stat for coverage.

what the honk

dump link

You should actually be constantly looking for better ways to optimize and improve your code. Just because it isn't broken doesn't mean it can't be fixed. When programming you should just assume that one day a nitpicky software engineer is going to find your game and do the CinemaSins routine on your code.

"That if/else statement could've been a switch. DING. Too many unnecessary variables with unique names. You could've just made 'em an array. DING. Uh-oh. Magic number spotted!!! DINGDINGDINGDINGDI-- "

Making bosses in an action game is easy. They're essentially just regular enemies that have more health and hit harder. But if you're struggling with it, remember the boss triumvirate:

• The Wall: A large immobile boss who tanks lots of hits and fires a barrage of projectiles and weaker mobile enemies to whittle the player down. A fun subspecies of the Wall is the Invisible Sniper. Red dot appears on the player, and they need to duck and cover or be insta-killed!
• The Helicopter: An airborne boss who peppers the player with projectiles from a long range. In case the player brings the fight in close, this boss should be able to quickly zoom far enough away that they become unreachable for a period of time. If you like putting the player in a stressful situation, you can make the Helicopter completely invincible until the player finds a turret or rocket launcher at the end of a gauntlet of enemies and hazards to circumnavigate
• The Dancer: This boss is rotating on an axle in order to always be facing the player to give a convincing illusion that they're actually targeting them when they do their attacks. Have the bosses operate on a timer wherein they'll do their attacks regardless of player proximity, and simply make sure the arena is so small that the player won't be able to just camp in a corner when things get too heated.

One thing that players love is when a boss has a phase where they unload a string of attacks with rest periods that are juuuuust short enough that the only way for the player to make it out without at least taking a few scratches is if they have mastered the art of frame-perfect dodges. There... is a dodge in your game, right? C'mon now. Every action game needs a dodge. Invincibility frames on your dodge is optional though.

Got difficulty settings? No problem. All you gotta do is crank up those enemy stats. More health, more attack. Nothin' beats that! Oh, you're considering giving bosses more complex attack patterns at higher difficulties? You could do that if you want.... BUUUUUT I think you should hide those behind a special difficulty that can only be unlocked by beating the game. And if it's a level-based game (ie: DMC, not Kingdom Hearts), beating a level should only unlock the next level for that difficulty. This will ensure player retention and greatly extend the replay value and playtime.

All this difficulty needs a side-gig to calm the pacing, keep in mind. After an intense fight, just have the player walk slowly down a hallway. Maybe use this time to expound upon some plot.

After playing Pokemon Legends Arceus back in '21 I quickly came up with an idea for a fast-paced arcadey platformer where you're a legally distinguishable character whose goal is to throw round objects at creatures to add them to your collection. As you catch monsters, you gain a higher top-speed.

The goal is to frantically catch all the monsters in the level in the shortest amount of time. As you progress, you'll occasionally run into a rival who'll chase you around and bump into you so you drop your creature-collecting spherical objects.

I'd also come up with an even more frantic single-screen arcade type game where monsters fall from the sky and land on top of a sinking platform and you need to throw your spheres at them to ensnare them, then kick them off the stage before the platform completely sinks into molten hot lava and you die.

I still have Fall Sale games I need to actually play. But I'm considering purchasing these three before the sale ends.

Once in college some guy tried to challenge me to a game of Pokemon with his team of shiny legendary birds + Arceus. They all had mediocre competitive moves like Hyperbeam & Draco Meteor. Stuff you can easily work around if you've been playing since '98. I beat him and he accused me of using hacks. Don't worry about how he got all those shiny legendaries though.

Everyone's already explained it in length so I won't go on for too long. I like the nuance of a score system over a flat like/dislike. Art is too subjective to give a flat "this is good" or "this is bad". I think the culture surrounding scores and some peoples' obsession with making art that is seen as "objectively good" needs to change. Every once in a while I'll see a thread in which someone cries that their submissions are being zero-bombed, but then you look at their work and you can see that their work has an average score of above 3. I think it's a problem when people act like having submissions with a score below 4.5 is some kind of abject failure, but that's a topic for another time.

It's because she dresses and behaves like a highschool student in the original. I went to double-check that they didn't age her up in the remake and I spotted a few forum threads of people making the same mistake as me.

Cool that she's 20. Crowbcat still fell off with the RE4 comparison video.

You can just do it in MS Paint. But Aseprite (or Libresprite if you're broke) has an "export to sprite sheet" option. You'd just draw each sprite animation frame in its own cell then click the export button and it'll give you a ton of options on how to spread & space it out.

I WANTED A LITTLEBIGPLANET 4 AND PS VITA SUCCESSOR ANNOUNCEMENT!!

He's a youtuber who makes supercut edits of AAA gaming events. Even though he claims that his videos are honest/neutral and free of commentary, he likes to cherrypick footage and blow every little slip-up out of proportion.

The RE4 & Remake comparison video was infamous because he played on low graphical settings and intentionally botched the audio in the remake footage. He also felt the need to highlight the fact that you couldn't shift the camera to look up Ashley's skirt in the remake as a negative (she's 16 btw).

He made a similar video comparing Dead Rising & its remake, deliberately playing on low settings and whining that they don't reward you for snapping pervy shots anymore in photo mode.

Crowbcat lost all credibility way back when he did that hilariously dishonest REM4KE supercut then decided to come back to embarrass himself by crying over the gooner content being removed from the Dead Rising remake. With no Beel Cleenton moment, the TGA was so inoffensive this year I have no idea how he could make it seem anything other than forgettable.

I was one of the lucky bastards to be able to play Dreams during beta and even get my hands on the reduced price Early Access version. I still remember during its hayday (if you can even call it that) I was constantly seeing people crap on the game because they didn't wanna waste time learning how to use such a complex level editor if they couldn't turn a profit off it 🙄 it's one of the worst gaming takes I've ever heard, but at the same time I get it. Dreams was fun but you might as well just learn how to use Unity or Godot and be able to release your game to a wider audience. Also the lack of native keyboard and mouse support was annoying. Bizarrely, KB+M DID work exclusively in remote play mode on PC. I haven't touched Dreams in years so maybe they fixed that.

I don't think I ever released anything more than a little shooter demo for a game jam where you play as a cowboy monkey and a silly little 3D platformer homonculus of Vinny Vinesauce. Instead I spent more time playing random people's Sonic & Crash Bandicoot clones. I think somebody remade a bunch of Twinsanity levels and I just had a blast hopping around solving all the cool original challenges that they added.

Sony did a crap job at supporting Dreams. I feel like the lack of a good mascot to throw on the cover and bad marketing was what bogged it down. They showed it off so much during those Sony conferences without just going "this is basically a spiritual successor to LittleBigPlanet" and nobody had any idea what the hell it was. It felt at times like they were deliberately trying to sabotage the "Play, Create, Share" era of video games because the fans were making better content for free than the big guys were cranking out at hundred-million-dollar budgets.

Not sure if I wanna clean the dust out of my PS4 just to try a single stage, but hey, maybe one day curiosity will get the better of me...