Wait, hold the front page! There's one more to consider... and, predictably, it's probably one of the best.
I don't know much about the Sharp X68000, but judging by this version of Final Fight, it certainly knows its onions. By which I mean "ports". Because this looks and feels pretty much identical to the arcade. Same everything. It almost doesn't feel like a port in the ZX Spectrum sense. It doesn't feel compromised in any way.
You know, it's somehow less fun playing ports like this. They're just effortlessly wonderful, so it's hard to find anything to write about them.
As such, I'm still giving the port of the week to the GBA ;)
Yeah, until about 1990... I'm not sure why, but I suspect it was because of the relative price of console games. It was a lot easier to swing 8 quid for a game than 30 quid for a NES game. Plus, there was an underlying delusion that parents were buying their kids a tool that could be used for learning if they bought a computer over a console.
Consoles were a niche thing that occupied a couple of pages in the multi-format magazines of the late 80s.
I'm always vaguely jealous that I missed out on NES culture first time around.
In the UK, consoles weren't really a big thing until the Megadrive and the SNES, and the NES seemed to be nowhere at all, at least where I grew up. A few people had Master Systems, but mostly it was Spectrums and C64s.
I'd see the NES in magazines occasionally, or in game ads in American comic books I got my hands on, and it always looked so cool.
Yeah, me too. From a consumer perspective, music streaming (not just Spotify) has managed to remain a worthwhile offering, the kind we all said we'd be happy to pay for if it just existed back in the piracy age...
Contrast with video streaming, where you now need to have five different subscriptions just to have a hope of watching half the things you want, where the content changes all the time and geo-limitations abound.
I just switched from Chrome today and I was wondering how to improve the scrolling (it felt heavy and slow). This setting seems to have worked wonders! Thanks!
I did this in 1997 on the day that Final Fantasy VII came out. Just straight up walked out and didn't come back for a few days. If I'm perfectly honest, nobody noticed. I'm not sure whether this means it was acceptable or not.
GBA Advance Wars... I missed it first time round, so I'm playing it through on my Miyoo Mini Plus. Absolutely perfect handheld game, ideal to grab for a quick half hour mission.
I mean, it's worth a try... what else could have possibly caused such a steep downturn in Twitter's fortunes since Musk took over and started enacting his policies?
A lot of it was also down to the interpretation of the individual devs... they often had limited access to original source code or assets, and ended up relying on simply playing the arcade game or even watching VHS footage of someone else playing the game.
This is why the early 8-bit ports often felt like they were inspired by, rather than ported from the original games. It sometimes amazes me they got as close as they did.
I don't think many people, even the doomiest doomsayers, reckon it'll lead to human extinction. But "food and water shortages, mass migration and small conflicts" is not nothing, and could lead to a situation where we think extinction might have been a preferable option.
I find that I'm always perfectly happy with my current monitor or phone screen, until I see something better. Ignorance is bliss. For this reason, I deliberately try to never see any better screens, this way I always seem to remain endlessly impressed by my 75 quid Philips 1080p panel!
They actually did a trial of such a sub in various Scandinavian countries, cost about five quid a month or so, which is entirely reasonable. Sadly, it doesn't seem to have gone anywhere.
That's cool. I'm not saying they should only offer it without YT music, just that they should offer an alternative way of supporting YouTubers without buying a service you don't need.
I really wish they'd drop the YouTube Music aspect of this and just do an ad-free YouTube sub. Happy to pay content creators for their work; less happy to give Google money for a music platform after what they did to Google Music.
I've been coding for 40 years, it's both my job and my hobby, and I still feel old and out of touch when reading or taking part in coding conversations outside of my sphere :)
This is not meant to be discouraging - even the smallest amount of coding you could learn will be immensely rewarding - more to say that coding is vast arena with a breadth of complexity that can often feel overwhelming. So don't be put off when you teach yourself some JavaScript and then still feel adrift in a conversation about C#.
I don't have any specifics to recommend, but I would say that you should start small. Don't aim to write the next Flappy Bird as your first project, or the next Mastodon. Just concentrate on making a web page say "Hello world!" or changing the colour of some text. Back in the 80s, most kids got their first taste of programming by having a computer shop C64 print "Dave is rad!" on an infinite loop! :)
Yeah, the Spectrum does put up a good show in static screenshots... but don't be fooled. It's a clunky old stinker when it gets in motion.