I can’t imagine AI being able to code something efficiently enough to run on a C64!

I try to stay in touch with the Atari 2600 homebrew community, and this was the conventional thinking there, too. But between increases in LLM’s sampling of appropriate code and various automated tools, some people have started making games for the console with AI and very little knowledge of their own.

Are the games good? Not particularly. Are they as well-coded as a moderately talented human could achieve? Not even close. But they are functional. If AI can do that, I’m sorry to say that it should almost certainly be able to make a C64 “game” of some description.

Laughs in external USB 3.5" floppy drive

Yes, when I first realized that being published in Japan by D3 Publisher was a common denominator between these weird and wonderful budget games that I found, I became very interested in them. My friends actually went to TGS one year and got everything they could from the D3 booth for me.

However, since I’ve moved to Japan, I’ve continued researching and collecting vintage games, and I’ve found that while the majority of Simple Series games were published by D3 Publisher, especially the PS2 games, there are also some titles that were officially published by other companies. I guess it all leads back to D3 somehow, though. Also, D3 Publisher was still independent in the years these games came out.

My favorites include (Almost all PS2):

• The Zombie vs Ambulance (aka Zombie Virus). Drive an ambulance around a zombie-infested city, rescuing survivors and upgrading your vehicle.
• The OneeChanbara series. Slay blood-gushing zombies as an inexplicably bikini-clad, cowboy-hat-wearing swordswoman with light adventure/Metroidvania elements. The earlier ones are better IMO; as time went on they focused more and more creepily on the sexy female characters which were initially mostly a gag, especially after the movie (Yes, a movie!) came out.
• RC de Go! (PS1) Race in a remote-control car league.
• The Sniper 2 (direct sequel to a PS1 game I own but haven’t played). Play a sniper blackmailed into doing missions for a crime syndicate while you try to find a way out.
• The Ninkyo (aka Yakuza Fury). It’s pretty fair to call this a very barebones Yakuza (Ryu ga Gotoku) knock-off, but it has its charms.
• The Nihon Tokushubutai (aka Special Forces). A strange hybrid of FPS and realtime strategy in which you control a SWAT team in various scenarios.
• The Helicopter (aka Radio Helicopter). Fly a radio helicopter around your neighborhood while completing arbitrary but fun challenges. There’s another game that was marketed as “Radio Helicopter 2” in PAL territories, but it seems to be completely unrelated and not even a Simple Series game. I have it and didn’t find it nearly as fun as the original.

There are more that look very interesting but I haven’t played them yet, so I don’t feel I can recommend them. And there are also some real dogs, naturally, although I should say that even the ones I’ve listed can be something of an acquired taste. The Earth Defence Force series started as Simple Series games too, although I haven’t played any of them

While I was writing this I remembered a few more of my favorite budget games that weren’t Simple Series games:

• Sanvein (aka Starfighter Sanvein) on PS1. I’m not normally one for overhead shooters but I was really taken with this one. There’s an interesting light strategy element to it.
• TheDog Island on PS2 and Wii. Inspired by a line of stationery and decorative items, it’s a collect-'em-up with light Metroidvania elements aimed at younger players, but quite fun and addictive.
• The Puppy/Kitty and the Magic Hat (aka Petz Dogz/Catz 2) on PS2 and Wii. A spiritual sequel to TheDog Island, they’re actually two games which appear to be identical except that one is populated by dogs and the other by cats (I have the cat version).
• Choro-Q High Grade 2 (aka Road Trip Adventure). Choro-Q is a line of kids’ toy cars that older Westerners may remember as Penny Racers. Naturally there is a whole slew of tie-in kids’ games in Japan, from the Famicom onward, but for me this particular game is a standout. There’s racing, sure, and it kind of sucks, yes, but the meat of the game is exploring a massive open world, solving mysteries, and figuring out how to get to various places and which special vehicle parts you’ll need. It includes a “soccer” minigame which feels like a possible inspiration for Rocket League, but in a game that came out many years earlier.

Quite a few of the various Simple series’ games on PS1 and PS2. Some of them were translated and released in Europe and the USA, but many more weren’t. Not too many lost gems there, though. Most of the games that stayed in Japan aren’t anything special.

The series started out as basic implementations of card and board games to be sold for a low price, then moved into fairly generic video games in established genres, but eventually the various developers started making somewhat original, low-budget games, and some of them are pretty good, especially considering their budgets.

I’m not sure how the games are connected as a series, although they definitely are, because they’re numbered in order of release on the original covers. But they’re made by many different developers, and even in Japan there seems to have been at least two publishers releasing them.

Not advice on what to do exactly, but why do you say “long box”? I know many PAL and NTSC-U Saturn games came in special, long boxes, but I can’t recall ever seeing a Japanese Saturn game in anything other than quite standard CD jewel cases (special edition carboard outer boxes aside). Particularly Kaze no Regret, which is a fairly common game here (a regular jewel case copy still usually goes for under 1,000 yen, even with obi and other ephemera).

If you want to, it should be possible to pop the broken cover out of the hinge piece and replace it with the cover from almost any standard double-width CD jewel case. There are several videos on YouTube showing how to do this. Once you put in the paper insert, no-one would ever be able to tell.

That’s a fairly eclectic selection of games for a collection that size, but I see that each has a personal meaning for you. Thanks for sharing!

I don’t see Nanatsu Kaze mentioned much in English. I bought a copy years ago because it looked so curious, but I still haven’t really played it.

As soon as I saw the title I thought “They must be talking about the critically panned 1990 U.S. Gold game for home computers, not the 1999 Capcom arcade sequel.”

Yep.

It’s almost completely subjective, of course, like all “Top N Media” lists. I doubt anyone’s going to put, say, Action 52 on their best games list, but past a certain threshold of quality you can’t really make a sound objective argument for any particular game to be included or excluded.

To echo Edges’ comment, I also think that how highly different people rank different titles can be greatly affected by when they played them. I completely slept on the N64 when it was current, but I played Wind Waker at launch and enjoyed it thoroughly. I got the special edition, so when I finished WW I put in OoT but stopped almost immediately because it felt like a weak demake of the game I’d just spent weeks playing. I’ve tried it again in later years but I just can’t stick with it. I understand why it’s an Important Game, historically, and I can imagine how it would’ve made a deep impression on many people who played it when it came out (I’d probably be one of them), but all I see now is how rough it is around the edges.

And then there are variations in personal tastes. I don’t think I’ll ever play Stardew Valley. That’s not the developer’s fault, nor is it mine, any more than anyone’s at fault if someone who doesn’t like bananas doesn’t want to eat a chef’s award-winning banana cake.

The real meat of a “Top N” list, if any, is in what the author says about the games and why they chose them, not in the list of games itself. Unfortunately, this article doesn’t say much beyond very nicely constructed review summaries that have been written dozens of times already.

It might be more interesting to identify a particular gaming “itch”, and list a few popular games that scratch it, as well as some perhaps lesser-known games that do, games that seem like they should but don’t, and games that seem like they wouldn’t but do. And most importantly, for each game, why.

At $250 for 10 games, that works out to $25 per game, which is already less than the usual going rate for physical releases of Atari 2600 homebrew games and licensed repros. That is, games for the system are already selling for more than this at a rate high enough to make it a viable business for some people.

On top of that, those current releases are typically a cartridge, box, and manual, and nothing more. This series of re-releases also come with fabric badges and enamel pins like the ones you could send away for back in the day.

Atari isn’t trying to create a new market for these products. They’re catering to an existing market, but it’s a market of which mainstream gaming circles are mostly unaware.

One more note to clarify what’s already been said: While the CPU in older consoles can read data and execute instructions directly from the cartridge because it’s connected to the CPU’s memory map like all the other hardware and RAM in the system, most consoles still needed graphics and sound data to be copied into specific areas of onboard RAM, and couldn’t use them straight from the cartridge. This is because those subsystems were hardwired to work only from certain addresses, or even their own, separate RAM.

(I’m aware that the Famicom/NES doesn’t do graphics this way by default, but in terms of hardware design it’s an outlier, and getting into the weeds explaining everything related to that would at least double the length of this comment.)

Because the CPU can read and write that data so fast, however, it’s still orders of magnitude faster than reading from most external media like tapes, floppy disks, and optical discs.

I had one of these in the late 90s, although mine was smaller, and folded up like an old clamshell flip-phone. It was surprisingly good for what it was. I used to fantasize about just how complex of a game one could make with it, especially if the centers and outlines of the individual blocks could be controlled independently.