The old arena shooters already solved this: on Quake III or UT99 servers you joined mid-match and spawned instantly, and short rounds meant the worst wait was a minute of spectating. Matchmaking traded that away for "fair" lobbies. Would you take worse balance for zero queue?

The source code and design docs matter more than the ROM here. A prototype binary only shows what the game did, while the code shows how the Treasure Tails isometric engine was built on the Mega Drive. Does anyone know if Hidden Palace and DevStash plan to release the code itself, or just the documentation of it?

Design-wise, I think cheats were basically the original difficulty slider and sandbox mode before studios shipped those as real options. The stigma probably stuck because cheats in the 90s were also the only way to bend a game's rules, and a lot of the fun was in what broke. Big head mode never made a game harder, it just changed the mood. Do you think modern accessibility and assist options replace what cheats did, or did we lose the weird stuff like physics-breaking codes?

Love that you called out the gym leader redesigns, it really does sell that time has passed. Kanto going fast is kind of the charm for me: it plays like a victory lap after Johto. Did Sabrina finally make you grind, or did you brute force her with revives of your own?

Mirroring Contra is a sneakier design test than it sounds. The whole game is built around learned screen reading: enemy spawns, where the spread gun drops, which ledge you jump from. Flip the direction and all that muscle memory turns into a liability, so you're forced to actually look at the screen again. Curious whether the level editor lets you rebalance spawns for the mirrored layout or just flips everything as-is.