Analogue Super Nt Review: A Blast From The Past
The resurgence of vintage video games is great for many reasons, not the least of which is the availability of new equipment to play old games on modern TVs. Seattle-based Analogue has traditionally stood ahead of the competition by releasing great looking consoles that offer best-in-class video processing and notably nuanced configuration settings, and its latest device, the Super Nt, is no different. It's a beautifully designed, compact console that, at the moment, is the best device for playing original Super Nintendo cartridges on HD and 4K TVs. It's a relatively expensive option at $189, but if you obsess over minute details and strive for authenticity, the Super Nt's price tag is easily justifiable.
In addition to Nintendo's own SNES Classic (which obviously doesn't support cartridges) there are multiple sub-$100, HD-enabled SNES consoles to choose from at present, from manufacturers like Hyperkin and Retro-Bit. While functional, the Retrons and Retro Trios of the world are consoles designed on a budget with constrained feature-sets and outdated tech. In theory, you can grow accustomed to shortcomings like input latency and improper video processing, but accepting these quirks doesn't diminish their existence. Analogue took a decidedly different approach for its console that eliminates these issues from the get-go.
The Super Nt offers highly configurable video output with resolutions up to 1080p through HDMI, and near-perfect performance thanks to the expertly configured FPGA under the hood. In simple terms, an FPGA chip can mimic components like RAM, video processors, and CPUs simultaneously. In the case of the Super Nt, developer Kevin Horton has created a seemingly complete and accurate Super Nintendo on an FPGA, a feat no one else can claim.
Generally speaking, games played on the Super Nt look and play exactly as they should when upscaled to resolutions beyond the original system's native 240p signal. The Super Nt will output video at 480p, 576p, 720p, or 1080p, with suitable options to cater to the peculiarities of games designed for both NTSC and PAL standards. However, the output resolution is only half of the story. Once that's settled, you can dive into other menus to configure the aspect ratio of the game screen, adjust its position, crop unwanted portions of the image, and manually scale width and height to achieve your desired look.
Simulated scanlines are also available, but rather than apply a static filter over the rendered image, the Super Nt's solution operates on the individual horizontal lines of resolution. So when you enable scanlines in conjunction with a resolution that is not a multiple of 240p--such as 1080p--they lack complete uniformity. Super Nt's scanline options can be adjusted and slightly improved from the default settings, but if you want to play with "proper" scanlines, the best solution is to stick to 480p or 720p.
With over 2,000 SNES games released across multiple territories, it's virtually impossible for anyone to say with absolute certainty that the Super Nt is 100% compatible with all games from start to finish. In testing dozens of cartridges, only two proved troublesome for us: Mortal Kombat 2, and a reproduction cartridge of the unreleased English version of Rendering Ranger R2, known as Targa. Analogue's answer for the Mortal Kombat 2 issue? To fix the bug in less than 48 hours after we brought it to their attention. A new firmware came quickly after Analogue reproduced the glitch on its end, and it's comforting to know that a precedent has been set for addressing and resolving incompatibility issues in short order.
Targa simply wouldn't get past the publisher's slashpage, despite working fine on other aftermarket consoles. This was also the case when trying to play the Japanese version using a flash cart on the Super Nt. Rendering Ranger is known to be a problematic game even for official SNES consoles, but Analogue promises a fix is on the way in the near future.
Of note is the potential (as hinted by Analogue) for an option down the road for users to switch the Super Nt's FPGA--on-the-fly--to match different Super Nintendo hardware revisions. Even among Nintendo's own consoles, these variations in processors and encoders would lead to rare instances of glitches in certain games (such as Rendering Ranger R2), so it's refreshing to know that the Super Nt may have a workaround for end-user troubleshooting at a later date.
While there are obviously a few quirks to keep in mind, the benefits of the Super Nt far outweigh its relatively minor issues.
Aside from those two exceptions, compatibility was otherwise rock-solid during our tests, including games like Star Fox, Mega Man X2, and Street Fighter Alpha 2, which are designed around traditionally troublesome special expansion chips that handle applications like 3D calculations and asset compression. There's also native support for peripheral carts like Game Genie and Super Game Boy--including streaming audio, which most SNES clone consoles struggle with. The only accessory you can count on not working is the Super Scope, a light gun designed for (and only compatible with) CRT TVs. Analogue is currently developing a digital-to-analog attachment for the Super Nt to support CRT TVs, though the performance, release date, and cost of the DAC remains to be seen.
On the hardware side, the Super Nt is straightforward: a Micro USB port for power, an HDMI port for A/V output, an SD card slot for firmware updates, and two SNES controller ports. Traditional SNES controllers work exactly as expected, and as Analogue suggests, you can also use wireless controllers made by 8Bitdo, which now come in colors designed to match the four color variants of the Super Nt.
The 8Bitdo SN30 Bluetooth controllers are convenient to connect and charge, are very responsive, and feel almost like a Nintendo-made controller. The one minor issue is the d-pad, which will occasionally move your character on screen left or right when pressing down, should you inadvertently tilt your thumb. Though not perfect, we like the 8Bitdo controllers a lot, and only wish that the Super Nt came bundled with one.
It should be noted that even though you won't normally have to tinker with the 8Bitdo wireless transmitter once you've started playing a game, removing or adding transmitters during gameplay can cause the Super Nt to crash, forcing you to power the console off and on. According to Analogue, this is due to related power demands coming from the transmitter, and the system detecting and protecting the FPGA from potential harm. Thankfully, wired controllers can be connected and disconnected during gameplay without risk of crashing the system.
While there are obviously a few quirks to keep in mind, the benefits of the Super Nt far outweigh its relatively minor issues. There is simply no other console that can play actual SNES cartridges at 1080p without relying on expensive video gear. And looking beyond resolution, the number of settings at your fingertips makes it easy to dial in the look you want for your SNES games in a matter of seconds. The Super Nt is impressive both inside and out, and a smart solution for anyone who strives to see their favorite 16-bit Nintendo games in their best light.
Jessica Jones Season 2: Watch The Intense New Trailer
The full trailer for the second season of Jessica Jones has been released. The Marvel Netflix show sees Kristen Ritter return as the troubled, hard-drinking private detective, who is forced to deal with consequences of her traumatic experiences in Season 1. Check it out below.
Jessica Jones Season 2 hits Netflix on March 8. The show also stars Rachael Taylor, Carrie-Anne Moss, Eka Darville, and Leah Gibson. David Tennant is set to make a return as the villainous Kilgrave too, although given his fate in Season 1, it's not yet clear how exactly.
Last year, Jessica Jones showrunner Melissa Rosenberg spoke about her plans for Season 2 and revealed that her time on the acclaimed serial killer drama Dexter was influencing her approach. "I learned from working on Dexter that you can advance the character, but you never want to cure the character," she said. "With Dexter, the moment he felt guilt or accepted that he was 'bad,' the show's over. He's no longer a sociopath.
"The equivalent for us would be if Jessica somehow recovered from the damage that had been done to her. People don't just heal, you don't go through that just to say, 'Oh, he got arrested, he's in jail, I'm OK now.' That trauma is a huge part of who she is now. She was kind of messed up even before Kilgrave came along, and so in Season 2 we can explore what's possible for her moving forward."
Civilization 6: Rise And Fall Review: A New Age
Civilization VI stands out as the deepest and richest base game in the series, with smart additions and changes that refine its already great strategy gameplay. With that, however, comes the challenge of adding new content to improve upon what's already there without bloating it. Civ VI's first expansion, Rise and Fall, strikes a remarkable balance between the two, with several key features that both complement and change up the base game.
The big-picture addition and namesake of Rise and Fall is the Ages system, which coincides with each of the existing technological eras--Ancient, Classical, etc.--but is based on a global average rather than individual progress through the tech tree. As the world collectively transitions from one era to the next, each civilization accumulates a score toward the next era's "Age." Depending on your progress during the previous era, you can enter a Normal Age, fall into a Dark Age, or rise into a Golden Age. While Golden Ages obviously carry the most benefits, Dark Ages have unique bonuses of their own, and if you pull yourself out of a Dark Age and into a Golden one, it'll be even stronger. These so-called Heroic Ages are a powerful weapon later in the game if you've fallen behind and are struggling to catch up.
The Ages system works brilliantly with Civ VI's emphasis on careful planning and building a well-rounded civilization regardless of the victory condition you're working towards. A wide variety of accomplishments contribute to your score, from clearing Barbarian outposts and building Wonders to being the first civilization with a complex form of government. If you lean too heavily into one specialization, like science, you'll have trouble earning enough points in any given era to escape a Dark Age and its pitfalls. So even if you're two eras ahead of everyone else in your own tech tree, you're still susceptible to falling into a Dark Age if you fail to do anything else of note. As a result, a strong start isn't enough to carry you through Rise and Fall, even on lower difficulties--you need to work proactively and adapt your strategies at every step if you want to rule the world.
Building off the base game, monitoring each city's individual growth is paramount. In vanilla Civ VI, cities have individual happiness meters instead of civilization-wide ones, and greater depth to city development forces you pay close attention to each city and its unique contributions to your empire. Rise and Fall adds two big features that affect cities specifically: Loyalty and Governors, which work in tandem to add depth to city management without overcomplicating it.
Loyalty is a metric of each city's dedication to your leadership and is added on top of happiness to the list of city stats you need to care about. Loyalty suffers in Dark Ages and flourishes in Golden ones; if it falls too low, your city will be less productive and eventually revolt, becoming a "free city" open to the sway of other civs. You can affect Loyalty through proximity--a city on the edge of your borders will be vulnerable to the charms of a nearby foreign city and vice versa--city projects, espionage, and more. Colonizing a separate continent requires more of a cost-benefit analysis than ever, as the danger of low Loyalty can outweigh the advantages of settling new regions. But you can also disrupt an opponent's Loyalty for your own gain, including the city itself (without suffering a Warmonger penalty).
Keeping your Loyalty high is more passive than it sounds thanks to various Loyalty-boosting improvements as well as Governors, new characters that you can gradually unlock and station in your cities. In addition to increasing Loyalty, each of the seven Governors has a different specialization (commerce, war, science, and so on) and can be leveled up to provide various benefits to the city they govern. They can be reassigned at any time, too, so you're not locked into one city being all culture-focused until the end of time. Most importantly, Governors are a further incentive to invest in each of your cities and consequently develop a more balanced civilization--not just one that can crank out science points until you win the space race in the 1800s.
Rise and Fall brings with it a series of smaller tweaks to round out the big additions. You can now form different kinds of alliances with other civs, like economic or military ones, so you can trade comfortably without going to war; there are also "Emergencies," triggered by things like taking over city-states and dropping nukes, during which civs can band together to address the threats and reap the benefits if they succeed. On top of that, there are new policies and small changes to the highly customizable government system, which means more options to tailor your government to your playstyle as it develops.
Of course, there are also new civs and leaders, which range from the battle-ready Genghis Khan of Mongolia to the science-minded Seondeok of Korea. There are nine new leaders but eight new civilizations; Chandragupta has been added as an alternative to Gandhi in India. The new civs aren't so much groundbreaking as they are a nice change of pace for Civ VI veterans who are eager to try out something new.
Unfortunately, Rise and Fall doesn't appear to improve the AI inconsistencies present in vanilla Civ VI. Some AI-controlled civs still act almost randomly--Japan declared war on me twice in one game despite never sending its military my way--while others are a bit more clever, declaring preemptive wars or offering strategic trades at opportune times. And while the Loyalty and Governors systems enhance city management and encourage you to pursue a wider variety of specialties than just your intended victory condition, religion remains the least dynamic of the avenues without anything in Rise and Fall drastically changing it.
As Civ VI's first expansion, though, Rise and Fall works so well with the base game that lingering issues are minor. It enhances, rather than overcomplicates, systems that were already deep and layered to begin with, while introducing features that keep each game engaging from start to finish. Ages in particular provide room for struggling civs to climb the ranks in the late game and keep leading civs on their toes, and the Governor and Loyalty systems add to the city-specific strategies that helped make the base game great.
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