Native 4k output instead of a crappy upscaler or a RetroTink which costs more alone than this Analogue product. N64’s native composite is laggy and hideous on a flatscreen TV, you need something like this or a retrotink or a CRT to make the games look good. Even if the Analogue couldn’t play ROMs off an SD card (it can, if Analogue’s previous products are any indication), you could just stick a Summercart in it.
I personally am a ride-or-die CRT player for my retro consoles, but big CRTs are getting rarer and living rooms less accommodating. And N64’s library has a ton of absolutely killer party games that are best experienced on a big TV with your friends, not a dark retro cave on a 20" CRT the way SNES RPGs are. If someone I knew wanted to go a “step past” emulation, I’d absolutely recommended this thing as the second shopping list priority. In order (imo):
Real N64, Real CRT, Summercart/ED64X7 (most authentic, and also cheapest if and only if you can source a CRT that fits your needs)
Analogue 3D, HDTV they already have
Real N64, RetroTink, Summercart/ED64X7 (more expensive than option 2 even if they already have the console and summercart lol)
Real N64, RetroTink or CRT, buying real copies of games at jacked-up collector prices
Balatro Mobile Maker works because the game’s engine (LOVE 2D) is designed from the ground up to be multiplatform. It’s trivial to “port” compared to other engines.
Work required for ROA1 level of “workshop characters” is exponentially higher in the new art style and engine. When/if this game gets Steam Workshop, it’ll probably end up with more “tweaked/cloned” characters than totally new wacky MUGEN stuff like ROA1.
Yeah, waiting on Hades 1’s full release was easy since it was EGS exclusive for the entire early access phase. This one’s gonna be harder to dodge until it’s done.
FighterZ is an actually good fighting game in the style of MvC or Street Fighter though, not the same 3d drivel with copy paste movesets and terrible game balance usually associated with anime tie-ins.
List’s not exhaustive yet. There’s absolutely room for 1-3 pre Z gokus. There’s also no way it won’t have GT Goku, Super Saiyan 4, and all the various Vegito/Gogetas.
Their plan for when Fortnite stopped pulling in money was for their Epic Games Store (that they propped up by paying devs lump sums just to not launch their games on Steam) to actually make Steam levels of money because surely exclusives and freebies will make people spend money on their store. Turns out there’s a lot of people that will never spend a dime on EGS, either because they won’t install it or only use it for the free games.
So all that Fortnite money they used to pay devs to not release their games on Steam ended up being a failed investment, and they’ve had to change their incentives from “we’ll give you a huge lump sum that’s about equal to what you’d have made with a successful Steam launch” to “well we’ll give you a better revenue split if you launch exclusively on our store that guarantees you get 10% of sales volume compared to Steam”. Turns out 60% of 1m sales is better than 80% of 100k sales.
Personally I’m hoping 1030 isn’t even a Deck. Putting the Deck internals in a set-top box with better cooling and lots of I/O would make an amazing competitor to PS5/XSX and a straight upgrade to XSS, and they could price it a lot cheaper than the Deck because they wouldn’t need to put a screen or battery in (and they could make it even cheaper by selling it without a controller since it works with Xbox/PS/Nintendo ones already).
Steam Machines failed the first time, but now that the Deck has gotten a lot of people comfortable with (a vastly improved) SteamOS there’s no reason to think they’d fail again, especially if Valve themselves were putting out the flagship “standard” unit that companies like ASUS could iterate on.