Interesting listen… As someone who worked on Rock Band 4, was glad to hear it brought up as the series entered the conversation, haha. I’m still listening so maybe this will get brought up later, but: It’s worth noting that a brand new guitar peripheral was released for Rock Band (and Fornite Festival) last year in collaboration with Harmonix/Epic Games. So while yes, the drums are still really hard to find … the “second hand” nature of it is a little lessened by that, as you can (relatively) easily now get a guitar again, and most USB microphones will just work. Hyperkin also just announced a new Wii guitar peripheral called the Hyper Strummer as well. I don’t think this drastically changes the tenor of the conversation or anything, but still felt worth highlighting.
I know nothing about Football, so I guess it makes sense I didn’t know about this.I tried to look up what it means, and I guess it’s about not playing to extend eligibility? I don’t really understand any of it. I’ll retract my comment.
The only usage I was aware of was this one:
The store closed to new purchases in 2021! Sony confirms PlayStation Store for PS3, PS Vita closing this summer | Polygon
Though I guess above someone mentions it’s not shut down fully, so I guess I am not immune from submitting a game that is sort-of-available, myself.
@LoBFCanti that’s totally possible but it was also in like… Supermarkets, my Spanish teacher played it during a rest for some reason, flipping through mtv, etc. It’s possibly I was less culturally insulated against it but I will point out that you are also in the 10 years younger category!
@chazumaru the primary selection category is supposed to be “best game of all time” - secondary category is “unavailable for purchase.”
Really nice Annual episode that one, the shorter form was great to allow for longer conversations on each title 
The honourable mentions could have been an episode on their own (hint for a gaiden there).
Speaking of episodes…
I could listen to a series of those episodes!!!
since it got brought up again just want to say that frank is right, the computer is one of the best video game systems of all time
What can play games from Atari, Sega, Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft, the Commodore, the PC-Engine, DOS, Windows, Mac, and other formats?
You can. Additional wordiage for the spoiler tag.
Fun listen. Ash misunderstanding the topic and powering through anyway was funny and so in the spirit of this.
Very happy to hear Virtua Cop 2 come up and representing light gun games. That is a genre that needed to be mentioned and VC2 is a great choice. (and shout outs to Area 51…love that game)
My pick would be Spider-Man: The Video Game. Sega’s Arcade beat em up. It’s pretty good and has never been ported to console or released in a collection. This choice also represents all the great licensed beat em ups that were never ported or are long delisted. Alien vs Predator, Cadillacs and Dinosaurs, ect
I think they backpaddled on the closing of the stores after they got a fair amount of pushback:
So the stores are still up but you can’t add your credit card to it and a lot of the store features are now broken
Super Mario Galaxy is currently not available to purchase.
(Unless it’s still available in China for the Nvidia Shield?)
It’s part of the Switch’s Super Mario 3D All Stars collection.
I think what’s more interesting is the lack of Super Mario Galaxy 2. It was amazing and Nintendo almost refuses to acknowledge it exists. I remember during the 35th anniversary presentation, they showed box art from all the games and Galaxy 2 was missing completely.
Also from what I’ve seen from inside the Nintendo Museum it’s also absent from there? Might be in an exhibit I haven’t been able to see yet in pictures/videos, but it’s always bugged me that it gets so little recognition even from Nintendo, despite selling over 6 million copies in a year.
which is no longer available !
This was a great episode! Loved the discussion about each game and related ones.
I think an interesting question to posit as well, similar to this, is what is the most popular game that is no longer available? Like, what sold a ton of copies but can’t be acquired? Wii Sports technically fits the bill, I think.
oh wow! i completely missed that this was a limited time deal. wowowowow. what the natural hell are they doing over there?
It’s not just 3D All Stars that was de-listed!! Nintendo also delisted Fire Emblem Shadow Dragon and the Blade of Light for no reason on the day mario died. To celebrate the franchise’s 30 year anniversary it was on the eshop for only 117 days (8 1/2 Concords). It was totally done to drive FOMO and get short-term sales during the pandemic. Nintendo wanted to have their cake and then throw it in the dumpster.
I can almost understand Nintendo’s perspective – Three Houses was a hit the year before, Byleth was added to Smash Bros, FE Heroes was a popular mobile game, and they just greenlit Three Hopes. It was probably the peak of fire emblem’s cultural relevance in the west*, and a good time (theoretically) to invite people to relive Marth’s story. I think they assumed FE1 wouldn’t hold up once people started playing it, so they wanted to sell it to panic buyers who wouldn’t actually play the game.
They went to the trouble of localizing it but instead of putting it on the online service like with Mother, Nintendo sold it for $5.99 for some reason. They also sold a physical glass NES cartridge that was covid-scalped to heck. The game has its own custom emulator that wasn’t very good. The save states and ‘turn rollback’ were poorly implemented and confusing. You could end up rolling back to before you made your savestate. The UI was very bad and the whole thing was rushed and unprofessional.
The original shows its age in a lot of ways (it was remade twice but never really done perfectly). I love the game, but it’s also victim to a bad inventory management UI and is very limited by the NES hardware. Nintendo probably figured it was a bad thing to sell to people were introduced to these characters by Tokyo Mirage Sessions #FE Encore.
*- until they launch Switch 2 with Geneaology of the Holy War Remake
I’ve just remembered this - We have had 2 console generations with Tatsunoko vs Capcom being LOCKED to the Wii.
We got an entire Marvel vs Capcom collection, meaning Disney of all ppl said 'You know what? Cool."
You can’t convince me that Tatsunoko need doesn’t the money and Capcom has been trying to show there is interest. They mentioned there is follow up desires twice, then did an exhibition and no dice.
and another 8ighting developed game that people sooner will have no recollection of - Bloody Roar. Basically everything Hudson is in the dirt now, but Konami isn’t against a bad collection port for some cash.
Pay somebody to implement some rollback as poorly as possible, I promise 40 ppl will buy it. Do it for us. I just wanna be able to play 4 with a human.
It needs the PS2 anthology/Ultra Street fighter 2/GGAC style approach. Put all the characters across the series in one game mode with all their different versions across the titles selectable.
Just chiming in to say, i think you guys have really hit your stride. Love the dynamic between the hosts. Ash brings a different point of view and it’s fantastic.
I like how she isn’t afraid to admit she sometimes has no knowledge of some old sicko game and the rest of the crew isn’t condescending about explaining the context. Her different perspective has been fun.
I enjoyed the NBA Jam discussion. If anyone hasn’t played it since the 90’s…they’re not exaggerating about the rubber banding. It is INSANE lol.
And consider the context that in the arcade version you need to insert coins for every quarter. This means you’re not playing blow outs, every quarter is close and leads to the “well we gotta keep playing!” feeling. Overtime is pretty common too. It’s truly clever yet insidious design work from Midway.
And it’s funny, one of the key selling points of Tournament Edition was the ability to turn off the rubber banding so people could play legit competitive matches.