Two recent events - the upcoming Mega Archive episode and the news that more major emulation sites are getting shut down - has me thinking about the availability of older games. One of the "statistics" I include with every Mega Drive game featured in the Mega Archive series is a rundown of where someone might be able to pick up the game in question in this day and age. For most, if they're not Sega first- or second-party games that got tossed into the Sega Genesis Classics compilation, your only option is the original cart (or, often, only the the original Japanese Mega Drive cart, which is somewhat less accessible).

Out of curiosity, I took a handful of major franchises that I'm partial towards because I wanted to see what the current state of their availability might lie. One of the arguments for letting old games roam free across the internet is that they often work as free advertising for newer entries in same franchises, or at least new games from the same developer. No-one's really champing at the bit to play all of Arc System Works's old non-fighter licensed games from the 90s, but they might be a neat history lesson at least. Ditto for FromSoftware's spotty pre-Souls catalogue, a lot of which has become nigh unobtainable and leaves amateur historians (like myself) who want to track the DNA of Demon's Souls as far back as possible out of luck. I'm not one to advocate ROMs on these forums, especially as a moderator who is meant to crack down on that sort of beeswax, but a lot of the wiki editing I do - especially where screenshots are concerned - would be impossible without it.

At any rate, let's see how a random grab-bag of franchises I'm into fare in terms of current accessibility for their core entries:

(NB: I've italicized games that were released in English, and bolded those that have been released or rereleased within the current (PS4/XB1/Switch/3DS/Vita) and previous (PS3/X360/WiiU/DS/PSP) console generations, or on Steam or GOG. If a game is both italicized and bolded, I consider it "available".)

The Legend of Zelda

A safe one to start with. Though Nintendo is very much at the epicenter of this catastrophic emulation site shutdown, they are at least the most likely of all the big publishers to attend to their own back catalogue. Well, that was true until more recently when the various online Virtual Console stores dried up and the Switch intends to offer very little in the way of retro Nintendo gaming beyond some Wii U ports and a gaggle of old arcade games. Let's go down the list in brief:

• * = Rereleased on Wii U and/or 3DS eShop.
• # = Remade for Wii U and/or 3DS.
• @ = Presently the only Zelda game available for Nintendo Switch.

Ys

Falcom's action-RPG franchise Ys is more accessible than most, thanks largely to Falcom being a PC-savvy developer who has a tendency to remake the older games in the series. Yet even so, there's one that lacks an official localization or recent remake, making a full collection difficult.

• * = Remake available on Steam.

Castlevania

Castlevania is sort of the Ur example when I think of a once powerful franchise's current lack of accessibility and how its developer - Konami - has more or less dropped out of the game development business. Still, if we're getting a couple of Belmont Boys in the new Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, maybe Konami hasn't given up on them entirely. It'd be well within their spiteful nature to announce and release a big retro Castlevania compilation the same day Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night comes out.

• * = Rereleased on Wii U and/or 3DS eShop.
• # = Also available on Xbox One through backwards compatibility with the Xbox 360 XBLA port.
• @ = Rereleased on PS3/PSP.

Tales

Bandai Namco's Tales is a huge mess, though a lot of that is due to its sheer size. It might also be said that the games are very iterative, so maybe there's less call for previous games with lesser graphics and undeveloped mechanics that have since been polished to a sheen in the more recent titles. Personally, I'm always looking to figure out how to play some of the less available entries in its crowded past.

• * = Remaster available on Steam.
• # = Remake available on 3DS/Vita/PS3.
• @ = Remaster coming soon to PS4/XB1/Steam.

Shadow Hearts

Then there's the Shadow Hearts (sorta) trilogy. It's not the only case of a game series that has become almost completely unavailable in the years since its release, but due to its overall high quality it's one of the more depressing casualties of industry apathy and insufficient preservation. At least they were all available in English at one point.

If we can't preserve all these games, we can at least preserve their memory by writing about them. That's the excuse I'm giving for writing even more retro-themed blogs this week:

• The Indie Game of the Week is Endless Legend, the latest stop on my whirlwind tour of the modern Master of Magic-alikes. Endless Legend might be my favorite of the bunch so far, offering a great deal of variety with its factions - all of which offer very different campaign goals and strengths to focus on - and a moderately steep learning curve that I'm discovering is on the right side of manageable. It'll probably be another week before I'm done with just my first campaign (provided it doesn't get ended early by some jerkass AI empire with a huge army) but it might be one of those keepers to hop into from time to time. Between Starbound, Infinifactory, and Smash for Wii U, I've gathered a fair number of "occasional session" games now.
• The SNES Classic Mk. II: Episode XVI: Too Easy is - true to its name - a look at two of the three Ys games released on the SNES, chiefly 1995's Ys V: Kefin, The Lost City of Sand and 1991's Ys III: Wanderers from Ys. I've still got Ys on the brain from Ys VIII: Lacrimosa of Dana from earlier this year, and I had a hankering for Ys V in particular for being the elusive beauty that it is (see above). The fine if unremarkable Ys V feels like a bridge between the 16-bit Ys trilogy (3-5) and what followed after (6-8), focusing on a particular variant of top-down active combat that future games would follow for a while. Ys III is a little more unorthodox with its side-scrolling perspective and early grinding challenges, but it served me well as an Ys introduction back in the day and was warranted some dues.

Addenda

TV: The Tick: Season One (2016)

It's been a long while since I last watched anything The Tick-related. For the record, that would be the excellent Fox Kids 90s cartoon, which worked as a sillier tonic to their equally excellent X-Men animated series. I managed to miss the Patrick Warburton live-action series from the early 00s, but I was curious enough about the new one from last year - which now stars Peter Serafinowicz as the big blue bloviating bruiser - that I pencilled it in for this year's TV watching.

The new reboot makes a few significant changes to the overall direction of the show, while retaining its parodic edge. For one, The Tick is no longer the protagonist; that would be Arthur Everest, his constantly worrying sidekick in the moth suit. Arthur is depicted as an unhappy man living under the fear that the nation's worst supervillain - The Terror, played with excellent Mr. Burns-style petty evil by Jackie Earle Haley under a lot of make-up - survived his publicized battle with stalwart #1 hero Superian, the truth of which he pieces together through an unhealthy amount of newspaper clippings and other finds collected taped up on his apartment wall over several years. To everyone else, including his supportive sister Dot, he's a mild-mannered accountant who has occasional delusional episodes whenever he's off his meds.

The Tick, who introduces himself at an inopportune time during Arthur's first infiltration mission, is played up as part of Arthur's delusions for a few episodes. As with the comics and cartoon version, this The Tick is nigh-invulnerable and possessed of incredible strength, though he himself admits he's lacking in the brains department. Serafinowicz nails the character's various bizarre metaphor-laden speeches about heroism and destiny, finding the right level of self-confident bravado even while he might be completely lost or faced with a resistant Arthur. Comedian Griffin Newman injects Arthur with a similarly appropriate amount of apprehension and cowardice, turning him into a sadsack everyman protagonist trying to unveil the threat that a still-alive The Terror poses while also adamant that he let the more qualified authorities and superheroes handle it. The supporting cast is great too: the conflicted Ms. Lint, an electric supervillain whose static charge attracts dust particles wherever she goes, goes through her routine life as a heavy bereft of purpose after her mentor The Terror supposedly died; Overkill, a parody of the more typical Liefeld anti-hero creations of the 90s who'd rather stab everyone and growl about revenge than take a moment to empathize; Arthur's sister Dot, a paramedic who slowly finds herself more involved with Arthur's second life as a superhero (played by Valorie Curry, who looked so familiar but I couldn't place where I'd seen her until a few episodes in - she plays Kara in Detroit: Become Human, her character model being a very close likeness); and the often incredulous neighbors like easily agitated bodega shopkeep Goat or the surprisingly handy local homeless guy Tinfoil Kevin. I particularly liked Arthur's loquacious and feet-obsessed stepfather Walter, played by Francois Chau - he also played a major antagonist in The Expanse and a minor one as the face of the Dharma Intiative in Lost, so it was fun to see a more doddering, guileless side of him (though the show's hinting there might be more to Walter than meets the eye).

One downside to the The Tick's deliberately scaled-down nature as a streaming service original show means there's fewer opportunities for a fun rogue's gallery of one-off villains that the cartoon show relied upon for its best jokes. I hope subsequent seasons of this show find more room for a villain of the week structure, now that The Terror arc has ended to an extent, because like One Punch Man or Freakazoid the show benefits from a whole world of colorful and stupid superheroes and villains to bounce off. Either way, it's a solid first season to work from.

Movie: Ant-Man & The Wasp (2018)

And talking of comedic superhero franchises, I also had the opportunity to check out Ant-Man and the Wasp this week, the newest entry from the Marvel Cinematic Universe's perhaps least essential heroes. That isn't to say that their movies aren't entertaining, however: even with the low stakes compared to something like Avengers: Infinity War from earlier this summer, the Ant-Man movies have embraced their MCU "outsider" status the same way the Guardians movies have, trucking along with their own kind of funny energy and distinct micro-sized aesthetic.

That smallness - in every sense of the term - is exemplified by the goal of the movie: Hank Pym and his daughter Hope Van Dyne, the prior Ant-Man and current Wasp respectively, think they've found a way to rescue Janet (Hank's wife, Hope's mother, and the previous Wasp) from the sub-atomic "quantum zone" that was set up as a particularly strange but deadly hazard from the previous movie. To enact the rescue they need to temporarily bust out Scott Lang (the current Ant-Man) from his FBI-mandated house arrest - the consequence of defying the government to help out the fugitive Captain America in Captain America: Civil War's big airport melee - as the only person to have left the quantum zone and lived to tell the tale. That's really it; they're not saving the world, just trying to accomplish a mostly selfless goal while dealing with a wide number of complications varying from Scott's sentence to a sympathetic antagonist who wants Pym's quantum technology to save herself to a secondary (and less sympathetic) antagonist who simply wants that same tech for financial gain.

Unusually for a superhero sequel, this Ant-Man and the Wasp feels a little more reined in than its predecessor. Michael Peña, who plays Scott's fellow ex-con associate, has fewer of his amusing rambling flashbacks in which everyone mouths his fast-talking, heavy dialect recaps Drunk History style. The fighting's played mostly straight, emphasizing the rapid shrink-regrow nature of Ant-Man's and the Wasp's abilities rather than constantly moving the battlefield to unlikely smaller venues. There's some fun with Ant-Man's new "giant" mode, as well as a few shrinking goofs at his expense with a "work in progress" suit, but the movie seems to keep things deliberately low-key, as if to better serve its role as a come-down from the far more hectic and momentous events of Infinity War Part 1. It occupies the same critical category in my mind that a lot of Marvel movies do, where I'll probably forget about it in another week or so but couldn't argue that it was a bad film, or one that missed the mark it was aiming for, by any stretch. Another fun if disposable summer blockbuster from the reliable Marvel movie machine.

Game: Starbound (2016)

I spoke about Starbound's extraterrestrial approach to a Terraria/Minecraft crafting/exploration sim, but I didn't quite cover how extracurricular it could be too. It's been in development so long that its devs probably couldn't help themselves adding new modes and concepts to the game in the midst of all the other tweaks and fixes that it required to stay functional (that isn't to say that I'm not still running into framerate issues on a regular basis, mind - I didn't think something that looked like a SNES game would run so poorly in spots, but Starbound evidently has a lot going on behind the scenes).

Now, I've always loved my sandbox sims with a lot of variety behind them. It's why I was glued to Stardew Valley for weeks, and even while Terraria has relatively little in the way of "side content" I found numerous ways to keep myself busy beyond digging for valuable ore and defeating bosses. Starbound seems custom built for the easily distracted, however, and I've encountered the following ways to play the game since I've started (and presumably more to come, either after I get a little further in or after a new major update drops):

1. Complete the main quest. I think I spoke to this last week, but I don't mind when my open-ended survival/crafting/exploration sim has a central through line to follow. It's never mandatory, but early on it works to corral you through many of the game's mechanics, unlocking important destinations and features along the way, and can then sit there as the final objective once you feel like you're ready to tap out. That's how I've always approached the main quest in Todd Howard's gargantuan RPGs, and it works well enough in Starbound too, giving you some direction in an otherwise rudderless galaxy.
2. Create a settlement. Unlike Terraria, where building a settlement of NPCs was almost essential for the range of helpful vendors and other benefits they could provide, the only reason to spend time and resources building houses for other characters is to attract future crew members. I've not reached the point where I can increase the size of my ship, so I'm not sure if this feature is applicable yet, but Starbound does expand on this concept with a sort of Animal Crossing Happy Home Designer twist where you can view via a computer the interested parties looking for a place to stay, and then decorating/constructing the habitation to their liking in order to entice them over. That can mean race-specific fixtures and building materials - the plant-like Florans like anything natural - to particular expensive furnishings.
3. Explore cosmic phenomena. After a certain point, the game allows you to build and customize a mech. While you can use the mech on planet surfaces instead of running around (there are also expensive hoverbike vehicles you can buy for added overworld movement too), they're best suited for missions set in the vacuum of space. These might include exploring odd phenomena in the current star system to visiting other spaceships, which can either be friendly and offer trading or hostile and offer booty to steal. Most of what you find on these missions are scrap used for building new mech parts, perputating an endless cycle of sorts, but the combat sections feel like Galak-Z or PixelJunk Shooter with its multidirectional movement and twin-stick shooter controls. Definitely fun in brief spurts between other activities.
4. Side-quests. Side-quests, the ones that don't require you to fetch items or kill monsters in the vicinity at least, usually involve these self-contained dungeons where you're not able to edit or deconstruct the surroundings. Instead, they work more like pure dungeoncrawlers, as you run around navigating a dungeon, defeating enemies and opening chests as you go, until you reach a boss at the end. Most of the main story missions involve dungeons like these too, and while not being able to steal everything is kind of a bummer, there's something to be said for the more traditional dungeon raiding gameplay it provides.
5. Become an palaeontologist. Occasionally, you'll find dinosaur bones buried in the sides of walls as you travel beneath a planet's surface. You can use your matter manipulator on them for a handful of bones, which have a few uses, or you can build a fossil excavation station back at HQ for a few archaeology brushes. Using one of these on a fossil takes you to this fun little puzzle mini-game where you have to use a limited set of digging tools, each with a specific area of effect, on a grid to uncover a randomly-shaped fossil. There's also random item chests buried in the same grid, which work as a nice little bonus if you have some leftover tools after excavating all the fossil tiles. I don't think the game has too many fossils - and displaying them is an expensive hobby, requiring a lot of gold bars to build display cases and the highest-level brush - but I've found myself addicted to the mini-game.
6. Mine for fuel on the moon. This one's sort of required, as you need fuel to move from one star system to another, but there are other more safer ways of procuring the special type of fuel called Erchius that all spaceships run on. Every moon in the game is essentially the same: there's barely any treasure, and instead these smaller locations are packed with Erchius crystals (and liquid Erchius, if you dig deep enough) that you can't get anywhere else. However, once you pick up your first piece, an eerie and unkillable Erchius ghost spawns somewhere on the moon and begins to chase you. The more ore you collect, it faster it gets. It's a neat twist on the Spelunky "hurry up" spectre, and another that forces you to consider the risk/reward factor as this entity will destroy immediately if it reaches you but the Erchius is too valuable to leave behind. In practice, this mode works as an efficient digging mini-game, where you have to figure out how to get the best yield and bug out before the ghost can get you.
7. Pick a planet and start digging. To some extent you need to do this with each new system, because there's certain high-value ores that only becomes available the further you get into the game, and you need it for equipment and workstation upgrades that'll help you survive the increased enemy ferocity. Yet, there are all sorts of benefits from random exploration and excavations, including valuable treasures, new materials, better gear in chests, different biomes with their own unique spoils, and the aforementioned fossils. Planet types cease to matter once you're a couple of screens down - there's an equal chance of finding subterranean cold or jungle or any number of biomes on any planet, despite what your ship's readout says about the surface - so there's no real reason to stick to one place for too long. All the same, sometimes you reach a new place and just want to find out what's lying beneath your feet.

Starbound's definitely invested in keeping your interest, splitting its time and energy across many diversions for the attention-deficit, and I have to commend the sort of gameplay design approach of throwing everything against a wall to see what sticks. Like Terraria and other crafting games, Starbound's constantly in flux also, with new systems constantly being introduced just as older ones are getting patched towards a more agreeable state. I dunno if it'll maintain my focus indefinitely, but I'm certainly not done with it yet (though as far as Saturday Summaries is concerned, I'm looking to give this section of Addenda to a different title next week. I have ideas!).