KingMike

"it would have made more sense with a TATE setup"
If only NeoGeo cabs had rotating monitors but that would probably be a maintenance nightmare today, let alone in 1990.

@RossoftheRobots I've been told it's one of the few NeoGeo games to get a dedicated cabinet.
At the least, said cabinet got a rather memorably silly magazine ad, with a bunch of nerds bowing to the machine "We are not worthy!"
At least I've heard that cabinet got released, not just an ad prop.

(Well, the Irritating Maze was also a dedicated cabinet, but that was an exception to SNK's rule that a NG must be playable with a horizontal monitor, joystick and four buttons.)

It is sad about the cost of US healthcare. But without those costs, how on Earth will the companies be able to afford blasting us with commercials nonstop on radio, TV and now every two minutes on YouTube, only to tell us to see our doctor, something one shouldn't need a commercial to tell them if the product is right for them.

It is very sad to see such a pioneering person in the industry almost defeated by cancer. Even though I'm not as familiar with their work as others, I can respect their great contributions.

@Guru_Larry That sounds like something that would have consumed a lot of ROM space on the cartridge and it's hard to imagine publishers would be okay with wasting that in those days.

@JJtheTexan I'm not sure but if I want to find out I could play one of the Game Boy games I have sitting around.
One of those games that was so ubiquitous that if you bought a reasonably sized lot of loose Japanese Game Boy cartridges, you were likely to get one.

It sure looks like the Japanese title is "Medarot" which is a far less appealing name.
I do remember reading once of someone who registered the River City Ransom for giggles while it was lapsed, but also reading they were a smart enough person to not try to mess with the copyright owner and be nice when they surely asked for it.

@h3s I think just that, Lufia II and Breath of Fire II.
As to turn-based RPGs, I easily forget about the dungeon crawler Might & Magic II. The only one I think that was PAL-exclusive (I've read Japan got a completely different port by a different developer and North America didn't get the game at all on Nintendo hardware. We got its predecessor on NES and its sequel on SNES.)

@Azuris One issue that became much more apparent on the Wii VC is that the game had one significant bug. When a new team member joins up, their magic/status resistances won't be updated until the save file is refreshed (the status screen will show the intended effects, but they won't actually apply in battle until a reboot). You probably wouldn't notice since you'd maybe reset the console often enough on real hardware, but it becomes apparent on the Wii since it runs as if you never turned it off (you'd have to click the Reset button on the Wii Home button menu after making an in-game save if you want to play the game as it was meant).
The low-Level guide on GameFAQs I read recommended exploiting that bug, so I guess it was known a lot longer than I did.

@The_Nintendo_Pedant I do remember some years ago someone made their own HD remake of Mystic Quest and then dared to sell it on Steam.
The Square-Enix police (for once) rightfully shut it down but then the seller put it back up just with a different title.

I do enjoy MQ and even after I had already played FF4. Sometimes I want a RPG that is dumb, short and simple. I think even Nintendo Power praised its brevity when re-reviewing it briefly some years after release.

@Damo Conker's Pocket Tales was released BEFORE the transition from Twelve Tales (the original version that was condemned by critics for being too child-friendly) to Conker's Bad Fur Day.
Pocket Tales was released in 1999, the foul-mouthed Conker was announced in 2000 (as a good but wrong guess for EGM's annual April Fools prank).

Though as to why Namco wouldn't release this.
You can probably guess how interested Namco was in Famicom releases in 1993 by the fact the only FC game they did release that year was a Famista (their baseball franchise) update.

@Damo "an obscure Namco mapper" That was par for Namco, there's multiple "mappers" which were used only by a single game.
There's entire articles on NESDev just to sort out the cluster**** that is Namco's Famicom mappers. (different chips, some have extra RAM, some have expanded sound, etc.)
I suppose the only thing separating this from emulating Namco's released games is the lack of a physical cartridge to crack open and study.

Konami's mappers are probably equally of a mess though Konami was more known for swapping address lines around to make things harder for pirates to crack (and sometimes harder for their own programmers, such as how I heard Ganbare Goemon Gaiden treats you to a game crash where an ending should've been because some poor programmer surely got a little confused themselves. There seems to be a Rev 1 which has a functional ending but I don't know how commonly that was compared to the broken Rev 0.)

When I first used ZSNES in the very late '90s, I was still on our family 486 PC.
The only way to get full speed on that was to disable sound and maximum frameskip.
On ZSNES, disabling sound would disable the sound CPU emulation entirely, and very notably a lot of SNES games don't like that and will freeze up. I remember SNES9x though would still emulate the sound even when disabled, so games would run but the emulator would be slower.

ZSNES was great in its time but it unfortunately achieved the same effect as Nesticle in that it got so popular that people continued to use it and praise it as a perfectly fine working emulator even after newer emulators has surpassed it in critical accuracy improvements.

@RaeDawnChonglingBay Slap Fight MD is perhaps an even more hilariously misleading name.
Why have the medical practitioners suddenly wished blunt aggression?

Did the Bully guy always look so much like Bobby Hill grown up?

Still though, in North America in the '90s, Nintendo and Sega were absolutely doing as much mudslinging at each other than any political candidates.

As soon as I saw that, I knew "I bet there's 50-somethings who would like to sell us about Intellivision vs. Colecovision, something out of the '80s."

If this is about the history of the series and "celebrating the art", wouldn't it have made more sense to just leave the old portraits untouched?

Speedruns usually forbid cheat codes anyways, so this would probably just be classified as that.

And the Famicom RPG Metal Max allows you to jump to the ending at any point after only a couple minutes into the game.
(basically, your daddy calls you an idiot for your monster-hunting aspirations and kicks you out of the house in the opening cutscene, but you can anytime go crawling back to daddy and tell him you'll get "a real job" or whatever and it ends the game. Something along that line.)

Obviously the "win" condition would need to be redefined per game by speedrunners.

@Lowdefal Tommy Tallarico, maybe? So it's been said he was nowhere near a formal agreement with the Earthworm Jim IP holder before announcing the game as one of his Amiico headline games.

@Sketcz I see Pop 'n Magic is the single-screen platformer (a Bubble Bobble-like) pictured in the article.
That name is easily confused with Magical Pop'n, the absurdly expensive cute SFC platformer by Pack-in-Video (who eventually became the company currently known as Marvelous).

I thought Renovation was just Telenet's North American branding, on the Genesis before it was closed.

If my math is right, if they are now in their 50s, they must've created Hydlide in their teens (the original game was released in 1984).
Sadly, the influence of the series is probably not felt as much outside Japan given its belated release in the west.

@Darknyht BurgerTime and Bump 'n Jump (other names Burnin' Rubber and Buggy Popper) were Data East IP so who knows who those have been shuffled to these days.

I remember the RetroPals tried to stream BEE SEVENTEEN BOMMMBER! with original hardware and they struggled to get even one of the voice expansion modules to function properly (I recall they had a few).
Kind of a problem as after seeing the actual gameplay (from what I recall, when the AVGN created that meme, I don't think he demonstrated the actual game), the voices were a necessary thing, to my memory. Having the original device malfunction to just a few clicking sounds, to my memory, was a detriment.

@PinballBuzzbro At least one person out there owns a North American N64DD, a console (add-on) that can do nothing except be turned on since there is no software for it (knowing Nintendo they surely made it not accept the released Japanese software either).

Those European boxarts that were like "This Game Pak cannot be used with the Mattel or NES versions of the Nintendo Entertainment System." So I can't use this Nintendo Entertainment System game with my Nintendo Entertainment system version of the Nintendo Entertainment System? Then what can I use it for. Is that I would imagine I'd be thinking if I had lived in those countries.

Nintendo 500 I believe was going to be the localized title for F1 Race, the only first-party game available in the launch era to be withheld from international release without obvious reason.

Popeye's English was the only other released educational game in Japan, and I guess it wasn't something they could spin as something suitable for the US market. American children weren't being taught Japanese, so it couldn't work in the opposite direction, and $25 (judging by the price of the other launch games) for a Hangman game probably would've been asking much.
Nintendo also had a Donkey Kong Music game that was announced in Japan but never released anywhere.

@Deuteros After attempting the PS2 version, I'd say that removal of slowdown doesn't necessarily make the game better, just different.
Such a game of the pattern memorization era of game difficulty, you learn to adapt to the slowdown as much as anything else.

I do remember the initial advertising for the Genesis game being "a CD game for those who didn't get a Sega CD for Christmas".

I thought there was also a different Flashback 2 that was considered a "we don't talk about that Flashback 2" game among fans.

Hard to believe they'd even commercially release a game with only five copies, but yeah the insane collector value is probably how most have heard of this game.

@NintendoWife There had to be some kind of mutual agreement. From what I understand, legally you can't just leave a business partner "at the alter", as some put it, without the risk of being sued for contract breach.
Unless Sony had some consent to back out of the deal, if Nintendo's lawyers didn't do their work before signing the contract, they'd have to live with the consequences.

@bring_on_branstons Well, there were a whole lot of "next generation" consoles coming or already out (3DO, Jaguar, PS, Saturn, N64 and even obscurities like the Pippin).
Naturally a lot were going to flop, and it was hard to predict at the time that the company that put out games like Last Action Hero and Sega CD Wheel of Fortune as going to be not just one of the survivors of that console onslaught but the next industry leader.
I guess it was that desire to kick Nintendo down that drove them forward from their previous lineup with Nintendo being the dominant hardware in Japan in the 16-bit era and a strong competitor in the US (regardless of who was on top of the SNES and Genesis war, it was still close enough that either would've been great to own), I've heard it was much less so in other regions.

@Babybahamut Oh, I've seen what happens. It's pretty tough as you have to essentially "no-miss" the game to have that many. But I'll leave it as a surprise to you if you want.

I know many years ago Famicom bootleg coders Hummer Team made a Famicom port of this game that, while missing a few things, was quite well-done, at least by bootleg game standards.

Though I do wonder if this will go to the extent of restoring the passwords and unlimited continues of the Japanese version. Unlike other Konami games (and especially what I've heard of the sequel), I don't think they messed with the game too much for the English version beyond those changes (though child me would've been upset to know those).

@Zeebor15 I don't know about the IP ownership but I can only imagine the Ubisoft wouldn't care enough to renew the trademark, at least.

There was also a Game Gear version that was developed but never released. I don't know how far along it was.

@Sindayl Unfortunately, when Sony was a third-party in the 16-bit era, Sony largely published games using IP from its film/TV corporate siblings rather than creating its own identity. Sega turned down the chance to be a PlayStation partner (after Nintendo more famously rejected them) because of that lackluster resume.
(Sony published a lot of jank of the Famicom as well before that, but perhaps it was at least more interesting jank.)

It wasn't the only game Psygnosis made on the N64.
They also ported a FPS called O.D.T. Or Die Trying. Nintendo Power reviewed that port in 1999, but it never made it to commercial release. The ROM has been preserved online, though.

Was Ashe a Zainsoft game? I hope that games, I remember it seeming pretty good when I had seen it on stream.
It is the game that was ported to the PC-Engine as "Energy", often called one of the most broken games published on the console. Definitely something where seeing the functional version might be cool.

@Damo Power Console would've been canceled anyways, surely. That had to have been some designer's crazy dream they decided needed to be brought to reality.
More sensible devices, at much more sensible price points, have launched and failed at that.
(Like $600 in 1989 money is how much NEC wanted for that.)

@PKDuckman Everyone has ***** on their record you could complain about if you want to dwell on centuries old world history. We could just as easily point fingers at another developed country and condemn them for their past atrocities.

@Whirlwound The high score screen is "gratuitous"? It's a British game from like 1990. I doubt that anyone at System 3 at the time felt that there was anything wrong with the game.

I mean Nintendo, the company most afraid of stepping on anyone's toes, made a Dr. Mario commercial I can remember seeing on TV as a child in 1992, using "The Witch Doctor" song and it would now be considered highly offensive of African tribal customs, I imagine.
There's context in what was socially acceptable at the time.

Rumble can be something so hard to get the feeling right.

I do remember one cutscene in FFX for the PS2 where the constant full-force shaking just felt overblown.
But when I played PS1 Bomberman Party, just a little shake when a bomb went off felt like was all it needed.

@N64-ROX Circle was in the position of the SNES A button and PS X button was in the position of SNES B. Triangle was in the spot of SNES X.
Most SNES RPGs used A for confirm, B for cancel. Those following the Final Fantasy standard of a dedicated menu button often used X (as opposed to the Dragon Quest standard of wanting all actions being initiated from the menu, including talking to NPCs and examining objects). So exactly matching FF7.
(yes, I know that the SNES DQs did introduce use one of the buttons as a context hotkey for Talk/Search, so you could think of the action and menu buttons as swapped, but I'm not sure how many of the numerous clones followed suit. I understand it was the USA PS2 version of DQ8 that forced the designers a little forward in modern design sensibilities.)

I cleared the first floor of Wizardry V when I rented it on the SNES as a kid.
By that point, I knew finishing one of those games is sure a time commitment I wasn't going to put forth. Characters aging sounds like a really rough mechanic.

Good job on the author being familiar enough with one of the games to take on the effort of filling in some of the gaps in this port.

@sdelfin "Select" and "Start" etymology is from the OG Famicom, where it's clear Nintendo didn't intend them to be used as gameplay buttons. They intended them to only be used to Select the game mode on the title screen and to Start the game, because the OG Famicom only put them on the player 1 controller.
Sega's consoles before the Genesis only had two buttons period, with a "pause" button put on the console itself.

How about NEC controllers, which decided to get classy and name the buttons with roman numerals, but then also rename the Start button "Run" which was even more bizarre?

@The_Nintendo_Pedant Well, the OG Xbox also had two additional face buttons that I think were just called the Black and White buttons. I don't think those were retained forward, were they?

@FR4M3 That is only because of Sony of America.
In Japan, O was the standard "accept" button (the symbol was even chosen for that) and X was the standard "cancel" button (again, chosen) but for whatever reason, Sony of America was absolutely insistent that X be the standard "accept" button.
(I mean, I cannot think of any reason other than Sony meddling that so many Japanese devs would want to reprogram the controls for western audiences on nearly every game.)

So Xbox copied Sony of America's layout.

@Damo Leaving out The Fairyland Story which predated Bubble Bobble.
Also, the real reason Jungle Hunt got changed wasn't the racial stereotypes (that yes, were far culturally accepted in the '80s) but that they used the Tarzen yell without permission for which Taito was sued and they lost so they had to change it.

Also, I watch the LordBBH channel who absolutely praises the Japanese version of Raimais. I forgot the extent to which he said regional changes affected it but I just know it was significant. Enough that some of its content (including the best ending which apparently was bugged even in the original release and only the ACA fixed it) became inaccessible in the process. Sadly, I'm guessing this collection will only include the Overseas version.