The UKFF Retro Gaming Thread

[Onyx2]

19 minutes ago, BigJag said:

https://www.facebook.com/share/p/18VTFU7n6P/

At £99.99 this is tempting. The games have been butchered. Missing characters, Chopped up cut scenes. The cabinet is nice. Very tempting.

I've read your post 8 times and I still can't understand whether you like it or not. You describe a load of bad things (though it looks identical from the screenshots (cutscenes?!)) and then say it's tempting. What gives, Jaggers?

[Merzbow]

I wouldn't touch it, personally. It's just not a well made little machine even compared to the Arcade 1-UP, and not really well moddable either.

[BigJag]

Merzbow summed it up quite well. This item even at £99.99 isn't great value.

The aesthetics are what initially attracted me . It'd look fantastic in a man cave setting.

The games had to be adjusted due to licensing issues. And therefore are not a strong selling point for me.

I'll be better off having something custom made utilising a MAME system.

[westlondonmist]

https://arcadegeeks.co.uk/products/2-player-bartop-arcade-machine-wrestlefest

That could be better, or just order something and decorate yourself. 

[Richie Freebird]

Not sure what the threshold is for retro, but this entry is approx. 14 years old at this point. 

Has anyone ever played Namco's Dark Escape 3D? Genuinely the most physically unsettling game I've ever tried. Its a sit-inside, twin mounted gun experience (with 3D glasses wired in to really make the horrific monsters pop out). Gusts of wind, vibrating seats and blood curdling screams definitely leave the player disorientated by the time you finish the game. The monsters are really creatively disgusting. Shades of HR Giger in some of the anatomical work. 100% reccomend.

[FLips]

Oh they had that at our Hollywood Bowl as recently as maybe 2021? 
Really great experience! My mates didn’t warn me about the gusts of wind so I didn’t warn them about the big puddle of piss I’d left in there.

[RedTwoster]

1 hour ago, Richie Freebird said:

Has anyone ever played Namco's Dark Escape 3D? Genuinely the most physically unsettling game I've ever tried. Its a sit-inside, twin mounted gun experience (with 3D glasses wired in to really make the horrific monsters pop out). Gusts of wind, vibrating seats and blood curdling screams definitely leave the player disorientated by the time you finish the game. The monsters are really creatively disgusting. Shades of HR Giger in some of the anatomical work. 100% reccomend.

That sounds really cool. VR Zone in Tokyo had something similar, and I was trying to find out exactly what the game was called but it just seems to have been a horror-themed VR escape room.

You played it in pairs and it culminated in one of you (in the virtual world) being kidnapped and strapped in a chair alongside loads of others, getting killed one by one by the killers, with a live map on the wall, as you tried to guide your partner to save you.

It was honestly the most stressful game experience I’ve ever had!

[Merzbow]

So I dug out my old dead Sega Saturn and it seems that only the disc drive is screwed, I really can't be bothered replacing it and would rather get a discless alternative. 

Has anyone here had luck with a SAROO/Fenrir etc? I know there are multiple choices in 2026, some costing more than others.

[Jazzy G]

I'm less excited about the new Dizzy game after discovering the Oliver Twins appear to be using generative AI in their promotional stuff. 

https://www.timeextension.com/news/2026/09/of-all-the-genai-slops-youve-ever-seen-this-is-the-sloppiest-of-them-all-the-oliver-twins-tarnish-their-legacy-further-with-wizard-of-oz-

They're also opened a Kickstarter for a compilation of the Megadrive Dizzy games. They should just let Digital Eclipse give them the Gold Master series treatment. If it works for Jeff Minter and Karateka it'd surely work for the Dizzy games?

[FLips]

It’s no surprise really with the likes of Dizzy and James Pond exactly how it’s happened. The developers are beyond irrelevent and are of the boomer age where they either don’t know about the negatives of AI because it’s just a fun thing to send to their Grandkids, or alternatively they do know and simply don’t care.

They’ve got next to sod all going on and nobody is hiring them to do the next Mario or Call of Duty so all they have is what made them famous years ago. Do another Dizzy but now instead of begging on Kickstarter to the only people who will buy it, you can pocket even more money for yourself by AI generating everything. The issue is your only fans are mostly all of the age that hate AI and don’t want anything to do with it, and the younger audience don’t even know what Dizzy is.

So you have long past-it developers taking an easy and cheap way out to try and make money off an ancient dead and buried franchise and they have an audience of none. A complete waste of everyone’s time.

[Jazzy G]

I do wonder whether half of this is people seeing how well the Gold Master stuff does and thinking "we can do this without Digital Eclipse" and then getting AI in to do all the donkeywork. I also wonder whether this Dizzy collection is limited because of the EA/Codemasters buyout and how difficult it could be to get all the rights etc in the right place. Mind you they've stuck some stuff out on Evercade. There are better ways of doing this. If Digital Eclipse thought there'd be money in it they'd have done a Gold Master series about Dizzy by now. I suspect we here in the UK of a certain age have, if you'll excuse the choice of words, overegged Dizzy's significance in gaming history.

[BomberPat]

I have a lot of nostalgia for Dizzy, but it's hard to argue with merritt k's description:

 

The thing with nostalgia reboots is that it's never enough to just make the same thing again, because gaming moves on so quickly - not talking in terms of graphics or new features, but just basic quality of life improvements. The secret is to try and find a way to capture the feeling of playing the original game, but with all the tweaks and fixes that modern gaming allows for, because if you make a game that plays and controls exactly like a game from the '80s in 2026 it's going to be a frustrating experience, and it doesn't have the excuse of actually being from the '80s to justify it, nor do people have warm memories of having played it before to make up for it.

I don't think there's much of a market at all for a new Dizzy game that doesn't at least try and modernise rather than rehash, I don't have any faith in the Oliver Twins to know how to modernise it without losing its charm, and the AI use only serves to prove that and reduce the size of the already small target demographic.

[westlondonmist]

2 hours ago, Jazzy G said:

I do wonder whether half of this is people seeing how well the Gold Master stuff does and thinking "we can do this without Digital Eclipse" and then getting AI in to do all the donkeywork. I also wonder whether this Dizzy collection is limited because of the EA/Codemasters buyout and how difficult it could be to get all the rights etc in the right place. Mind you they've stuck some stuff out on Evercade. There are better ways of doing this. If Digital Eclipse thought there'd be money in it they'd have done a Gold Master series about Dizzy by now. I suspect we here in the UK of a certain age have, if you'll excuse the choice of words, overegged Dizzy's significance in gaming history.

I played Dizzy on the Evercade but hadn't heard of it prior. I think it's a bit of a non entity. Most of the games were a bit shit tbh, a couple fairly good though (the best one was an unreleased game strangely) so can understand why nobody really pushed  for a resurgence. 

James Pond I had heard of though. Actually quite a fond memory of too. Such a small collection of games though, not sure how you can do an interesting compilation or documentary on it. Jeff Minter had loads of games and is an interesting character to boot. 

[Dr. Alan Grant]

I’m surprised I don’t have broken fingers from playing James Pond Aquatic Games and its’ aggressive button mashing for some of the events. Fuck James Pond.

[Jazzy G]

I do have a lot of nostalgia for Robocod, but even if there wasn't a stink of AI all over that collection I refuse to pay £70 for a game that it'd probably take me longer to reliably download and emulate that it does to finish. Whole thing can be done in 2 minutes.