Never tought i would have to say it, but we have to talk about James Pond.
I guess since retro collections are in now, System 3 decided to resell its old series of Amiga borne platformers, the James Pond games, of which i played a bit of the second one, Operation Robocod, as a PS1 Classic release on the PS3, actually, with this collection including pretty much all versions of all 3 James Pond games, plus the sports spin-off The Aquabats.
They are rereleasing this also a physical release on Switch 2…. but even that being “exclusive” is most likely bullshit as a PEGI rating for a PS5 version has been spotted already.
Look, System 3 already were famous for being cheap since forever, heck remember when they put out on PS4 a SNES game they pretended was cancelled back in the day, for full price (and lied about upcoming free DLCs), with Putty Squad… which they also released basically on launch for the PS4.
These people wanted 40 bucks for Super Fruit Fall on the Wii during its launch, i do remember that, so it checks out, System 3 peddled crap like this for a living since forever, and given what i played of Operation Robocod, i can believe people commenting how this is kinda apt because the James Pond games were indeed trash even back then.
So it’s not that surprising, and i’m inclined to believe they knew if they just presented ther game as normal it would have been kinda ignored, so they decided to instead have a trailer where the only thing that wasn’t shit out of a GenAI program was the old sprites for James Pond itself, which appear in 3 seconds on screen, they knew they would get more people to talk about it this way…. which isn’t the gotcha you’d think, in my opinion.
I do wonder if they realized this will deter the already minuscule niche of people nostalgic for the series, maybe for the better since they are trying to have collectors preorder the Switch 2 release on cart via their website, and since it will cost less for “early birds”, this feels like an old fashion scam, especially since their also playing “for physical preservation” card.
What amuses me is them trying to gaslight people into believing that the obviously IA generated everything in the trailer (the characters, the spy parody music that interprets literally the IA generated lyrics, with shitty ),…. aren’t IA, showcasing an obvious fake image detailing the “process” of updating to 3D some of the old sprites, being called bullshit on that, going into the comments to fight the “haters” only to have to capitulate and erase the comments.
Why they enabled these back on is a mystery, because “wiping the slate” is just gonna make people dunk your shit much harder… and they did, so i made a little collage of ones i liked the best.
I would love for collection purposes a physical non-game key disc or cart, but i did have a look at the product page on their site for the preorder and the contents…. and it seems full of GenAI shit of the same ilk as the one used in the trailer, so i already know they didn’t even put effort into translating the games into other languages and just IA translated that too.
So, you know, System 3, up yours, but being the kusoge collector i am, i look forward to snatch an used PS5 version of this shit so to not give System 3 any money.
There are so much better retro collections available or coming up, heck, i’m gonna echo Gematsu user Kuronoa’s plea, don’t bother, or better, go import that Ninja Baseball Bat Man remaster/release coming this December.
Wise Cafe (International) 