KingMike

@JackGYarwood As I recall reading, the build leaked online was dated the exact day of the tragedy.

@Sketcz Sounds about par with GamePro who gave Tecmo Secret of the Stars "good" ratings a page after giving EarthBound bad ratings (the EB review gives a strong impression the reviewer didn't even finish the Onett segment before rating it. You can't rate an RPG before it's even really gotten started.)

I enjoy Secret of the Stars for some reason but even I wouldn't rate it better than a firmly average game (it would've been passable for a 1991 16-bit game, but it came out in 1993 in Japan and the same month as Chrono Trigger in North America) and absolutely no way does it deserve better rating than EB.

@Babybahamut I mean, the console ports were released in North America where we've never heard of the actual candy it was promoting.

I've only learned recently that one of the more infamous Wii shovelware games (Ninjabread Man), or at least one more loudly criticized by certain journalists while it was still new, was not only made by a company that churned out a staggering number of shovelware games on the Wii and the PS2, but was one of a few games that were linked together as what started as a Zool remake but was broken up into several games by the end.

@RupeeClock I recall the Retrode (at least the firmware I've been using) is also unable to automatically detect the correct size of GBA games, and defaults to 8MB unless you edit its settings file to tell it the device is a GBA game and what the right size is.

How does the GB Operator tell if it's authentic? Is it just dumping the ROM and checking if it matches the known dumps.
Game Boy doesn't have copy-protection, so that's not really much to go by for "authenticating" a game.
If that label didn't give it away as a fake, you'd have to open the cart to further check it matches the real thing. (and of course, know what "the real thing" looks like)

Relying on an untrusted person or machine's work is a sign that, while they might care enough to get it done, they likely don't really care enough to invest the time and effort to get the job done completely (however many weeks, months, years that takes) by trusted sources.

@TonyHoro Oh, I was there for the Langfand00d translation of Der Langrisser in 2002 or 2003 or whichever. I know how machine translation (we didn't call it "AI" in those days) was.
I've seen what happens when tools (which we didn't have bots to write our programs for us in those days, so we could be sure at least that part was human-made) are written and spread to the masses to finish up. At least Langfand00d was a very obvious joke so we got all got a laugh about it then.

When Near/byuu released their serious translation for the game five years later, I've fairly certain they had remade their own tools anyways. I would imagine many experienced ROM hackers would rather work off their own stuff and a certain frame of reference (the original game code) than to try to figure out what another fan had already done to the game. I don't think I'd even want to reuse my own old work for that reason.

But if someone proves that wrong and is able to put a quality work through someone else's work, well then that's good for them.

It had the idea, but maybe not the execution.
The latter being held back by the fact that game console was made by a company with huge involvement in the film and music industries. They had to convince you that you didn't just want to watch movies on the device, but wanted to watch them on discs that cost $20 a pop and only worked on the device.

I've read the same thing is what allowed Apple to become dominant on the digital music player and distribution market. I've read Sony could've come up with a device but was too afraid people would stop buying music CDs such as from them.

I feel like I'm the only one to notice that the music in the Famicom port of Terra Cresta was messed up in the NES version. It's not just me that hears the NES music as a bit more "depressed".
Though I'm not sure how much the NES version got played, given that it didn't reach North America until 1990, which feels rather late. @JackGYarwood

@slider1983 I "What's worse is since history is written mostly by Americans the importance of the NES is overrated." sounds just as dismissive of an attitude.
Different regions will have different opinions on consoles and which are important.
Saying the NES wasn't important I am feeling like is an opinion based on its European market performance. I know the Master System had at least one factor in its favor in the UK that Mastertronic/Virgin/Sega put effort into its marketing and distribution there, including actually releasing games in a timely manner, and Nintendo put real dogs**t efforts outside Japan and North America, its primary marketing targets. When its games were regularly released three or four years after the US if ever at all, of course its going to look like a worse console.
Not to mention needing to split its territorial control with Mattel resulting in (a regional sub-lockout) that goofy-ass "PAL-B" "This Game Pak cannot be used with the NES or Mattel versions of the Nintendo Entertainment System." disclaimer on the box. (so you couldn't take a NES game bought in Mattel-claimed France and play it on a console in Nintendo-claimed UK, whereas with SMS you could)

Would the SMS have done better if it had fairer third-party support? Probably. It could have been interesting what the world would have been.
But while I know it is very fondly remembered among European and especially Brazilian gamers, its IPs haven't been as fondly revisited on modern hardware as NES IPs have.

I read an article last year about the Mark III's 40th anniversary and while it was written by a UK site, I had a laugh when how they described the NES as a far technically worse console. I respect their opinion but as an American I can laugh at it being just as UK-centric of an opinion as mine would be criticized for being American. I have considered the reasons stated previously for how those writers' opinions were likely formed.
But it's a really apples-to-oranges comparison between the hardware, and I've heard SMS fans who will say that any random NES game could be converted to SMS and would always be done better. Architectural differences. They've shown up when I've seen attempts to homebrew port games.

@TonyHoro We've waited decades for Tokimeki Memorial and many Super Robot Wars games because of "too much text" and the human race has still lived on.
People need to have patience.
And if they really, really, felt their life would be incomplete without playing Segagaga on the Sega Dreamcast, they could've learned Japanese in the many years it's been out and play it and many other games.

@jesse_dylan Yes, "J2E" was a fan translation group. They made a fan translation of the original FF4 (before Square(-Enix) themselves had ported the game to any other platforms).
Particularly because at the time, the only available version of the game was the official SNES localization which notably made unavailable ("dummied out") a number of items, character skills and magic to simplify the gameplay (including inventory management, as I believe FF5 was the first to include a modern inventory that makes management nonessential).
They claimed they were going to deliver an uncensored and such translation, but while the original pass of the J2E translation might've been fairly decent, it went through some editors who inserted a whole lot of jokes and over dramatized writing (those editors were likely teenagers at the time, who probably felt it needed a bunch of "punching up").

They released a few other translations but the FF4 patch was their real big one to get finished.
I know a couple other biggies they announced were FE4 and another Square RPG Treasure of the Rudras, but the FE4 patch got taken over by other community members and Rudra was left to being canceled by a lack of willing translators (even Gideon Zhi, who cracked the formatting of the game's unique "Mantra" magic system which required localization, had to resort to borrowing a Japanese-French fan script as a base because that French group was the fan group successful at finding someone able to translate from Japanese to any of the well-known European languages.)

I remember when some fans tried to make "CAPCPOM" a thing (after what was surely neither the first nor last typo the company had made).
We had almost forgot, until I remember on a forum someone was asked why they had an angry signature, what had Capcom done to ire them? I don't recall them doing worse than breaking a few Mega Man fans' hearts.
If only what Peter Moore said was true and upsetting game development choices was enough for an entertainment company to get rated worse than multiple providers of more vitally important goods and services.

@mariteaux EA was buying out developers in the '90s. Bullfrog, Maxis and Origin were some of their earliest victims.
Kind of a shame, from what I read '80s EA was pretty cool and their packaging suggested they cared about their developers. Was it the '90s when they started down their current path?

I'm not familiar with to what extent EA's early Genesis games were affected by the "TMSS" anti-unlicensed boot ROM on Genesis consoles, but it sounds pretty greedy of what they did when they released Populous on the Genesis, EA was aware enough of it to slap a sticker on the box to say it was incompatible with some consoles (their estimate was consoles bundled with Sonic). Not, print a compatible revision (something Sega was able to do when they published the Japanese version). Especially since EA had pulled some stuff to get a favorable license and the right to make their own carts, presumably on the cheaper than buying prints from Sega like most licensed third-parties were expected to. And that was in 1991.

I remember those years.
I don't think Mass Effect was the reason they were ranked that low.

I think microtransactions are a more likely reason. If lootboxes weren't yet a thing, virtual sports trading cards probably were.

@sdelfin Releasing their translation script isn't really that great for an end project. If you get multiple working on the same script, you're going to end up with an inconsistent mess of writing styles. Like the J2E FF4 translation: it seems at one point they had a decent translation but then an editor came along and decided to make it "better" with overdramatic writing that was never there in the first place. Especially when Golbez came into the picture, it looks then is when someone really Working Designsed his text.
If all you care about is having SOMETHING to read, you might as well ask for an AI slop script.
Or just play the game in Japanese with whatever phone translation app.
That's about what I think of with "something released is better than nothing" suggestions.

I think the thing stopping other translations of this during much of that time was that one of the authors of this patch was one of the few that understood the Saturn hardware (they were also a Saturn emulator developer IIRC).

@Sketcz We've seen multiple games with patches from multiple authors.
The fan translations should be worked on as long as the fans working on them enjoy making them.
I commend Near for releasing their Bahamut Lagoon patch (before their passing), even if was like 20 years after the other one.
I have decades worth of patches I still want to finish at some point, even if others have already made their own efforts on some of them. If someone else enjoys mine, it would be nice, but I wouldn't stress myself over it. Tomato's recent FF4 streams have shown that even a popular game with multiple translations can end different in quality, they all slip up in different places.
I have spent a quarter century waiting for someone to translate the script for SD Knight Gundam Story: The Great Prophecy for SNES. Now I will just wait until my Japanese skills improve to finish it myself.
I had a decade ago or so someone email me like "You take too long, tell us how to do it." I sure won't help someone that isn't offering complementary forms of assistance, and certainly not with that attitude. They just get ignored.

@MikeP "but who am I to tell them how to run their business?"
I've heard they even made a game about that.

"there aren't many titles released for arcade boards compatible with the Sega Saturn"
Yes, there's only a few games.
https://segaretro.org/Sega_Titan_Video
True that's there's probably some third-party licenses with some of the more desirable games.

When companies don't "copy" ideas from others, you have to wonder if it's a legal issue.

When the DS and PSP came out and (I know especially the former) was designed to play games in landscape or portrait mode, why didn't they copy the WonderSwan's setup of having two diamond-shaped button clusters on the left? (I know people complain exactly about the Switch not having a proper D-pad but it did allow them to have directions and buttons accessible in either console orientation. Says the person who can remember playing Contra arcade on the DS in the arcade compilation Konami released, in the offered portrait mode.)

Why did none of the Pokemon clones that I tried replicate the Type mechanic? (admittedly only on Game Boy, but as one of its standout mechanics, you know they'd want to try)
At this point, there's not really a doubt that Game Freak or Nintendo probably patented it.
I mean, if Nintendo wants to claim they invented "subcharacters"...

"Everyone's favorite" I'm not aware there even is another PSP emulator.

Still remember a year or two one game convention (MAGFest?) posted they had the game set up to play.

If that troll wanted to stop the game from that event, they'd have to show up in person and be seen in a convention hall or wherever that was. Genius!

@slider1983 Frank does more work than the NES, it's just clearly a favorite of his.
Even fairly recently, he did a stream where he dumped a lot of random EEPROMs and there was a handful of other console games in the set.
He mentioned he spent, I can't remember how long... six months? A year? camped out at the Game Informer office scanning all their promotional material they have saved. I want to say it was at least an entire wall of filing cabinets filled with flyers and such from the magazine's entire life, since 1991, just before GameStop unceremoniously shuttered what was left of them.
I do recall he said he did something similar with GamePro's archive, gaining higher quality images of old game art than had been previously available.

@GravyThief Frank Cifaldi could be the most famous game preservationist. Though he has always especially had a fascination with the NES. First known online as TheRedEye, he's been around since the days when the scene was still getting just the licensed, commercially released NES library dumped, let alone how ever many prototypes he's generously contributed towards getting made publicly available in the decades since.
(in 2003, he boasted about spending, when the asking price was only about a grand, to ensure that Stadium Events was properly dumped. Then later he heavily sponsored the scene's ability to secure the meme game Bio Force Ape (it was already a meme by that point, but without him, we wouldn't have seen the reality end of that game), and really had to negotiate with a dedicated collector to let him save the only known copies of NES SimCity from being lost media.)

He created a website Lost Levels to cover prototype games and most recently the Video Game History Foundation.
But I suppose that yes, he would be the most famous to NES fans.

@James-Bond I only remember walking into GameStop one day in like 2002 and finding like a dozen NFR copies of this game on the shelf.
How did so many copies of the game, surely that were supposed to be returned to Nintendo, all end up in a single GameStop at once?

Why remaster at all when the point is its (even at the time of release) retro aesthetic?

I do wonder if such a localization will be "good" or a "bad on purpose" dub (though of course, the latter can be particularly subjective, especially to do tastefully).

"...Sony blocked it..."

On paper, yes... but wasn't late 1997 the point where the Saturn's short lifepsan was already looking pretty dismal for the west?
I can't imagine Eidos was planning to sell that many copies on Saturn compared to PlayStation anyways, so why not take Sony's money?

I think the same when Enix had announced a Dragon Quest VI localization (among a few other games) for the SNES. Even if Enix America hadn't closed, I'd imagine the market demand for such a SNES in late 1996 or 1997 when they'd have gotten to releasing it at the rate they were going in those days wouldn't still stopped it.

@DreadfulDragon You say you're glad that someone who paid for something got their property they paid for destroyed?
I assume that it wasn't a small amount of money, either. So the buyer probably lost their money.

Maybe consider the appropriateness of such smart-ass "jokes".

@GodlessPreservation Thanks for telling stuff we already know. We're all humans capable of our own moral judgment.

@N64-ROX Assuming the digital pad wasn't used, then technically the device has enough buttons (including the four on the back) but I imagine that yes, it will only be fun to those who enjoy playing their games with the worst available control methods (the "Castlevania on a dance pad" crowd).

I think it's silly-sounding to refer to Banjo-Kazooie as a "64-bit console" game but I know they legally have to do it that way.

@StyrofoamCup Not sure if it was the same episode he reviewed a Bart Simpson joystick that looked pretty beat up over time.
Though I'm sure he must've commented how unsettling it was to twist Bart's head around. Really, one of those "what in the world were they thinking when they designed that thing?" and then we remember "oh yeah, they were thinking about money!"

@Razieluigi I had bought my copy of the game during the Windows 98 era, but I didn't actually play up to that part until getting my XP laptop.
I experienced that crash so I looked it up and at that point a fan had made a patch (supposedly a single CPU instruction fix was all it needed). I had assumed it was maybe a compatibility issue between 95 (which would have been current when the PC version released) and XP.

Though I have heard the port at least... wasn't the best programmed. I would laugh/cry if what I suspect is true that the thing stopping the original CD program from even launching on Windows 8, is an expectation for the CD to be drive D (for casual PC setups of the '90s that would have been typical, not so by even the mid 2000s).
Though even in the '90s, I suppose it wasn't too unusual for REALLY hardcore PC gamers to have multiple hard drives for that expected drive letter assignment to fail.

Well, the notorious unreleased Mortal Kombat knockoff Tattoo Assassins did include a character that, very timely to its development, was clearly based on a figure skater famous for a relevant cheating scandal.

@AndyVGR MSX games aren't that hard to find but PC-88 games might need a little more digging.
But the major thing I wonder about... have you considered that even some people who know where to find ROMs still prefer to do their gaming legally?

Sad to see graffiti is as much a thing in the UK as in the US.

@Daniel36 I've read that, yes, people have done things with the Jaguar. Probably helped since I was told that when Hasbro bought the Atari IP in the late '90s (before reselling to the current Atari holder, formerly known as Infogrames), they publicly released dev tools and documentation.

@JackGYarwood When Nintendo Power showcased a bunch of Japanese-exclusive games including this in a 1994 article, they referred to the game JUST as E.D.I.T.

I remember EGM's review of the Super Famicom sequel. I still laugh remembering when they suggested bad things to do with the power to edit the game's assets.

@Peteykins Obscure licensing issues make them a little less accessible in Japan than the west.

I could've sworn it already had offline multitap support but netplay sounds new.
I do remember playing only a little bit with ZSNES netplay in like 2001.

It's not a joke!

But this is the original version of the game that was ported as Super Hydlide on the Genesis, I believe.
(I know it also got a Famicom port but I don't think the second game was ported to any consoles.)

I do remember a decade ago an original cartridge was going for like $100.
I remember being shocked by how much less it was to get a Tsumi to Batsu cart at that time.

@JackGYarwood Unless DvD did additional programming work, "allowing players to experience the definitive version of the game with multitap devices like the NES Four Score and NES Satellite" may not be an accurate statement.
The NES devices actually used different and incompatible architecture than its Famicom counterparts to address the additional controllers. This required program modification.
EDIT: Interesting, the description on romhacking.net says DvD DID do the modification to make it work.
This stems from when Nintendo redesigned the Famicom into the NES, including reworking the controller ports into user-accessible connectors, they for some reason only connected the data lines used by the Zapper. They left one or two pins unconnected.
The Arkanoid "Vaus" controller was similar affected. Code had to be rewritten between the Japanese and US versions to make the region variants work.

I remember the many colors the Wii was originally revealed in.
For the longest time, we had only had white.
EVENTUALLY the black and red Wii got released in limited edition.
We never got silver or lime, to my knowledge.

The OG 3DS also had a number of colors that were never released, didn't it? Like purple.

I remember the MSX version was the first MSX game released on the Wii Virtual Console, and it felt like for some time, the only MSX game released on Wii.
Since we are now getting MSX games internationally on Switch... I should take another look, have we gotten Space Manbow (Mambo?) on EGGCONSOLE? Probably one of the most promising shooters, but kind of expected being it was a Konami game. I know that was one of the games on Wii that we could feel jealous not getting in the west. But then again, I don't think I recall Konami embracing their MSX games being on the EGGCONSOLE line, have they?

@Saki-Endo I had to look up again the Derby Stallion cover artist's name. Susumu Matsushita. They have a very distinct art style, that I know they used for Famitsu but also games by its original publisher ASCII.
I am just a little surprised Famitsu has kept its same name for decades, since it was derived from the Famicom. No legal trouble from Nintendo?

@JJtheTexan I distinctly remember always being beaten at the cheese mountain stage when I rented the game multiple times as a kid. Still, the music is what I remember.

I was about to ask about the SVP before remembering that was used in the Genesis version, not 32X.

However, now I'm recalling one thing I learned from a stream... WHICH version of the game does this equate to? The Japanese version had backup RAM support which was taken out from the western versions. That was particularly rude because the game had some unlockables you could thus only keep in the Japanese version but would lose when you turned the console off in the west.
Taking a look at the docs... it's the USA version which is expected to be used.