#shining force

The original came out in 1992, and the GBA remake arrived in 2004 with new characters, battles, plot additions, and gameplay changes.

It keeps the strategy RPG foundation intact while giving the game enough updates to feel fresh for players who already knew the original.

This review looks at why Shining Force still has such good shelf life.

I was thinking of replaying one of my favourite retro games, Shining Force. I was going to set up an emulator, but remembered I'd picked up the Sega Megadrive/Genesis Collection on steam some years ago.

For those that don't know this was a paid game, where you got access to 50 sega classics. There were small QOL updates (like quick saving/loading, fast forwarding, VR compatibility and multiplayer on some games). The game had you in a 90s style bedroom, and you played games on a CRT TV.

The concept is easy. You could emulate these 90s games easily, or spend a ton getting physical copies, or even find the old sega megadrive collections on physical PC disks. But we have em packed up for you, easily available on Steam and some achievements too, for a relatively cheap price per game.

Here's the horror though. Some years after coming out, Sega created the Sonic Origin collection, and apparently to help boost sales, they removed several of the sonic games from the collection.

Then, a few years later, they delisted the game and deleted about 40 of the 50 games from it.

People who had paid real money for the game, not a license or rental subscription, had games they had paid for taken away for no real reason, without being refunded.

This wasn't some MMO that was costing them tons of money to host. This was software on steam, already made and probably played by a few hundred people. They made the effort to go in, modify the code to remove games people had already paid for, and they are not even selling most of them elsewhere.

Stop killing videogames.