It Came With You

In this episode:

The News

• Sony has put a date on PS5 disc production, and Sega tells Famitsu it wants physical and digital at once. The real test is what is in the box: Sonic Racing CrossWorlds ships fully on the cartridge, Sonic Frontiers Definitive Edition is a Game-Key Card, which is a license in a box
• The Disgaea creator says if PlayStation abandons physical, why make hardware at all
• The Video Game History Foundation opens a free E3 archive: more than a thousand pages of ephemera from Carolyn Rauch’s collection and nearly twelve hours of raw tape from the first four shows, including the Saturn surprise launch and the $299 PlayStation moment
• MiSTer can now boot original discs from external USB drives on the PlayStation, Sega CD, TurboGrafx-CD, Saturn, and CD-i cores
• Quick hits: the Midway Wolf Unit FPGA core (Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 and NBA Hangtime playable now), two new FM Towns optical drive emulators in Japan, Dragon Slayer on Switch for $6.49, and Sega Rally Championship arcade on PC, Xbox 360 and Series X
• Xbox tests ad-supported cloud streaming, which is access, not ownership
• Anbernic shows the RG SP, and the RG35XX in my pocket has survived ladders

This Week in POCG History (1998 and 1999)

• July 30, 1999: the ELSA 3D Revelator shutter glasses reviewed at 3.5, and the ELSA Erazor III video card at 4.0, sent to us as a review set
• The last week of July 1998 was SiN week: the demo dropped on the 26th and we called it Sinday
• Buried in that same week, one line: Microsoft to publish Gas Powered Games. At the time SiN was the story and Gas Powered Games was a sentence

The Ten Game Boy Games That Play Like Summer (Top Loader #05)

• The full ranked ten is on the site: The Ten Game Boy Games That Play Like Summer
• The rule this time: not games that look like summer, the games that went WITH you. The cartridge that was actually in the bag
• #1 Tetris, #2 Link’s Awakening, #3 Pokemon Red and Blue, #10 Metroid II, plus the middle shelf: Super Mario Land, Wario Land, Kirby’s Dream Land, Super Mario Land 2, Donkey Kong, Final Fantasy Adventure
• The first real Pokemon summer was 1999, on a porch, across a Link Cable

This week’s question:

• What game lived in your Game Boy on road trips? Not your favorite in the abstract, the cartridge that actually went in the bag

That closes the summer run. August is two halves: PC and The Beige Years first, then 16-Bit August, because every American 16-bit console launched in that month.