KingMike

I've got a handful of Saturn RPGs to play at some point, including this one.
But they will be the Japanese versions, since as we know those are (and surely have been, for quite a long time) more affordable than the English versions.
(I do recall getting the JPN Shining Wisdom for a buck-fifty many years ago, while to get an American copy at that same time I'd have to remove the decimal. )

The LordBBH stream had made me familiar with Aerobics-chan and her friends. But how familiar is the question to remain...

@Stormkyleis The foolish humans who resurrected Dracula's soul have all been wiped out, leaving only the animals left.
Maybe the timing just seems appropriate, with I just watched one of my favorite streamers play through Pokopia. That being the basic theme, the humans have exiled themselves to space to leave the Pokemon to rebuild the ruined world with their materialistic remains.

I bet they don't have the same level of developer support as the Wii had.
That's kind of the most important obstacle to their quest to match the Wii sales.

@slider1983 I'm not sure if I'm missing something but the Retrode is designed to support both with cartridge slots and controller ports for both consoles included in the device.
Was the Retrode 1 different than the 2, which is the device I have?
I thought the differences between Retrode 1 and 2 were pretty small, such as the latter including a small adjustment needed to support Sonic & Knuckles.

@JJtheTexan I know Victor Ireland claims copyright to his existing localizations.
(such as the issues raised when the Lunar games were only included on the Japanese version of the Mega Drive Mini II)

@PKDuckman Yes, I was one of the beta testers on the GoH4 fan translation patch and if I had been playing that growing up with the RPGs I played (unfortunately just through rentals), it probably would have been one of my favorites.
There's supposed to be 100 characters to unlock but I found maybe like 80-some % before finishing the story. This was one of the only SNES RPGs I can name with a postgame mode, something I don't think was popularized until Pokemon.
That menu UI, though, I can only imagine the crazy amount of effort that ROM hacker Nightcrawler had to go through to make it work. Even then we surely gave him more trying out all the party member skills to find things that broke. That would not have been possible to localize nearly as well by most ROM hackers' skills (might ended up looking like the GBC Dragon Quest localizations ).

From what I recall of seeing it streamed online, Tag Team Wrestling is a very noisy game. Prepare for that, decide if you are a fan of games with GOOD NOISES.

The original Glory of Heracles. One thing to be aware of, anyone who wants to play an untranslated Japanese RPG, this game had equipment that can wear out and break, two years before even the original SaGa/Final Fantasy Legend. I think all of the sequels did away with that feature (though only the sixth game, for the DS, made it to the west. It was also the one made after Data East had gone defunct, so I don't know how different it was.)

Funny thing is there was some very early magazine screenshots showing that Data East wanted it to be even more like Dragon Quest (though it looked like the durability feature was still there) but changed stuff.

@Martin_H I do think Sega was probably a thinking a lot about their consoles with an "arcade at home" philosophy.
I'm sure it was a year or so ago we saw someone dig up an old Sega magazine ad promoting their arcade history as a point for buying the Saturn claiming that Sony doesn't have that (of course they wouldn't want to mention Namco as their surrogate rival in that situation. Namco themselves even touted in their earliest PS magazine ad "one side has gained an unfair advantage").

I've heard that with Genesis developer documentation, Sega even expressed expectation that developers would make games with an arcade features such as attract modes, limited lives and continues and ensuring every button on the controller does something (even if they have duplicate functionality).

@DestructoDisk I'd imagine the Xbox announcement was what did it. Sega would've had to have known that historically too many consoles competing in the same space isn't going to end well for someone and they probably wouldn't to make Bill's billions their third adversary.

I agree that a flash cart probably isn't going to affect much.

The NeoGeo is not a new platform. People who are going to buy a AES+ are going to buy it and the games are going to do that because that want official, physical products. People who want cheaper options to play the games, which may or may be means beneficial to SNK, are surely already doing that anyways.

Pu-Li-Ru-La is the one game I immediately recognize in that headline photo. I don't know if that's a good thing.

Now I think see a Final Fight back there but it's at a bid of an odd angle.

@gmar That's the Williams Electronics family for you. There's certainly much to appreciate of their creative spirit, very loud, very edgy.
But they were also probably one of the most forward about wanting to take your money. Many other sports games let you keep playing if you were winning (though the CPU would try its best to keep you from doing that) but Midway was like, nope, you're going to pay 50 cents a quarter for NBA Jam and like it.
I've heard the arcade version of Gauntlet Legends was a game people figured out how to last on skill, so they released one or more updates specifically to counter that.

I'm sorry but I've been around since the beginning of fan translations and in my day we didn't do "hype" posts.
You just told people what you were working on and put it out when it was done.
(Though in those days, when people got "hype" they put out incomplete patches but I am very understanding why people stopped doing that. There are definitely good reasons to not do that.)

@Martin_H I thought I read an interview some years ago here where even the people who made the 32X thought it was superfluous by the time it was finished.
"Sega's internal politics" The supposed Japanese team's "do what it takes to make Tom Kalinske look foolish" agenda?

Majora's Mask demo kiosk cartridges reportedly were gray. So I'm told if you have one, it's a collectible.
I'm annoyed by one of those videos YouTube keeps recommending of a thumbnail claiming their cart is worth a lot of money when I can see it's not the valuable variant. Very clickbaity, I would expect the creator probably knows and wants "engagement" from people clicking to tell them otherwise.

@JackGYarwood "ASCII and Agetec" They're the same company. The North American branch of ASCII (the Japanese company whose game business has been known as Enterbrain! for pretty much this entire century) changed their name to Agetec in 1998. (I want to say it even stood for "ASCII Game Entertainment Technology") I think they might've shifted to more budget-priced releases after the name change, but I'm not certain.

As to Master of Monsters, I recall Game Informer saying it was a remake of a Genesis game but I'm not certain on that.

@PKDuckman I thought so for quite awhile but no, the American Universal (the film company) didn't have a game division until the early '90s. I think the 3DO fighting game Way of the Warrior was one of their first, and then Crash Bandicoot. It's been quite awhile since they were absorbed into Activision.

I do remember one of the pizza restaurants we went to as a kid had Mr. Do! and GunForce (what can be seen among the earliest of the Metal Slug development lineage. I heard the arcade game was pretty decent, the SNES port, not.) Quite a pair of games.

I'm sure I told the story that the first Mitchell game I played was renting the SNES port of Super Buster Bros. as a child and while disappointed it had nothing to do with Tiny Toon Adventures, it was a good game.

@Krambo42 Retrode 2, as I recall, doesn't support SA-1 (at least not by default, I thought I heard someone did a hardware addon to support it) nor SDD-1.
As to the two SDD-1 game, I'm not surprised Star Ocean doesn't read correctly since it is a 6MB game so it definitely used a memory mapper (I'd guess within the SDD-1) to support beyond the usual 4MB ROM limit on SNES games. But Street Fighter Alpha 2 is only a 4MB game so I wouldn't think it would need a memory mapper but apparently it does since the Retrode 2 could only read 2MB of the game correctly.

I know with the firmware updated to the last official version, I recall it could read Tales of Phantasia (6MB) and Daikaiju Monogatari II (5MB) correctly. Though unsurprisingly, I don't recall mention of it supporting the latter's real-time clock.

@AOClaus For such a common mapper, the MBC2 used in FFA may not have its SRAM emulated correctly. It is 512 nibbles built in to the mapper, with access locking protection. (I know 512 nibbles is technically 256 bytes, but what that means it is spread across 512 addresses with only half of the bits read from each address valid data. I know that the Japanese RPG Aretha breaks REALLY badly when the SRAM is not emulated correctly. I'm guessing one or both of those features aren't being emulated correctly.)
That and also the internal cartridge headers specify 0KB RAM on the MBC2 games. I'm guessing because those games don't use a discrete RAM chip inside the cartridge (there's only a ROM, the mapper and a battery because, again, that RAM is built-in to that mapper). It was not until later firmware updates that the Retrode was even aware it should detect and handle that situation for MBC2 games.
That's just MBC2. For MBC1 and other GB mappers, those will have a discrete RAM chip inside the cart for games supporting saves so the headers do indicate RAM existence.

From what I recall, there were something like 12 games released in total for the console.
I only paid attention when preservation was first announced, and we were able to get ROM dumps of something like nine of the games.

Two RPGs... those would really not work well for Piko unless they were translated (though perhaps getting them running in an emulator they can utilize would be a first priority. I'm really not sure how difficult it would be for Piko to license MAME.)

@Damo The huge question is: does it support expansion chip games?
The really big one in question is the SA-1. The SA-1 contains anti-piracy that prevents other devices, such as the Retrode, from even reading the game ROM.
I believe the Retrode also can't read the ROMs correctly from SDD-1 (Street Fighter Alpha 2 and Star Ocean) or SPC7110 (used by a few Japanese games from Hudson) games (it can only partially read them).
For the DSP series, the game ROMs are readable but they can only be emulated if the emulator has high-level support (or asks the user to supply a firmware ROM. Since VERY people would be capable of dumping the DSP firmware themselves.)
For Cx4, it is very strange. Rock/Mega Man X3 is readable entirely normally but on X2 there is protection from the Cx4 which makes part of the ROM read locked until programming run from the unlocked portion of the ROM unlocks it.

Super Game Boy won't work because it contains actual (monochrome) GB chips inside. All a SNES cart reader would be able to see is the firmware/BIOS (whatever term you like) ROM. I don't think it would even be possible for it to see the Game Boy game. (if they wanted to be an emulator that could do both the SNES and GB hardware in parallel.)

Have we lost the origin of the Bio Force Ape meme? One of the greatest online hoaxes I've seen.

@h3s To be fair though, I've heard Mask ROMs are REALLY expensive unless you are placing a REALLY large order. Surely they aren't planning for each game to sell a number of copies on the level of a Nintendo product?
Perhaps also a question of the availability of Mask ROMs in the current day compared to modern chips?

@Sketcz I recall owning a couple first-year Japanese 3DS games that had real paper manuals inside (with PAGES of instructions, not this "one fold-out sheet with the controls is all you need" stuff they quickly shifted to, before nothing at all.)

I do remember my North American launch day copy of Steel Diver came with a paper manual. Sadly, for one part of the game, it just said to refer to the digital manual for more information. It was the beginning of the end.

I was surprised when I learned that European DS cases aren't just clear but are also thicker than the black cases in the other regions because of... the instruction manuals. I learned that when I bought one game because it seemed the EU version was cheaper and more available than the US version of the same game, at least at that moment.

At least Japanese players were spared GANNON laughing at them after every one of their many, many failures to finish the game.

I know that putting digitized voice was a technical flex in 1988, but you can only be amused by that so many times.

@sdelfin I think what really gets me about Zelda II's combat is Link's sword range is far too short and there are far too many of those enemies where it's a high-low guessing game to beat them.
Also, losing to Thunderbird's gimmick is a real kick in the nuts after such a slog of a dungeon. I just didn't want to try again after that.

@EarthboundBenjy I have yet to play the Peach game but I'm guessing it just hasn't been played by as many people. (I have a copy but I haven't played it yet. I'm a little salty as it was the last game I bought from GameStop after I noticed I think they're a bit deceptive about the new/used selection on their site design and want to make you really look carefully to buy a New copy.)
Like I knew the first Peach game for the DS got ignored because there were probably it was a still a time when a lot of guys didn't want there friends to know they were playing a Peach game, but also I recall it getting attacked in reviews for being "too easy".
So Nintendo didn't keep the game in "evergreen" print like their other DS platformers and it ended up a pricey scarce game until I think they eventually did another print run late in the DS' life (so the proportion of bootleg copies of the game on eBay was probably a little higher than the usual for DS games).

I am momentarily forgetting the guy's name, but he has been a meme in the retrogaming scene since the Retsupurae days, when they watched videos of some '90s public-access games review show called Flights of Fantasy, with vidoes called "Gaming in the Clinton Years".

The review that comes to mind was Donkey Kong Country. "If you don't buy this game, you're a moron!"
He also thought Symphony of the Night was unfortunately enjoyable (I now forget the exact word, but that was the idea, maybe it was "disappointly enjoyable" and was upset that Final Fantasy VII's cutscenes were interrupted with gameplay.

I can already imagine the same type of reactions for Arkanoid as when Space Invaders was #500 ,like "We already have this game on everything in existence, why not RANDOM OBSCURE GAME?"

Well, it is one of the most imitated games in existence, so it would be great to see the original available.

Although even then the USA is a very large place and so if they were going for a certain accent, it would depend on where in the country they were expecting voice actors from.

@NatiaAdamo My interpretation of that line was "American actors" to mean "USA actors".

Whose going to take their Xbox to the beach?

"PLAY IT LOUD" I'm sorry but you've got the wrong decade, wrong console, wrong console manufacturer, wrong hemisphere.

This has a killer instinct but I'm going to guess it doesn't have a power instinct.

They're still leaving Nintendo's name on it, two years later.

I do remember that after an early version of DuckTales for the NES was put online, it was seen the text was in quite poor English. Fans managed to interview the Disney software division director responsible for overseeing the work. She did speak about how they'd need to have the text revised significantly before Disney could approve the game.
I guess this now makes a little more sense if we are now seeing the other side of this situation, perhaps?
I do know that in the beta version of the time, the text would be printed inside one of the little windows in the HUD, whereas in the final game it was revised to temporarily remove the HUD when text was needed so they could print a larger text window in its place.
I know this is one of those cases where a Japanese-developed game saw its English localization released before the Japanese version, so I wonder if they had originally just planned around the Japanese text (where, like, 10 characters wide or whatever it was, would've been sufficient in Japanese but far too limited to display proper English text).

Porting a game isn't just a line-by-line code rewrite as bots are able to do.
Surely you will hit performance bugs or otherwise without human analysis of what the code written is actually doing.
If there's one franchise where people will complain if the performance is even slightly off expectation, surely that would be Smash Bros.?

Not the least when game developers used unexpected operation of their code as a way to hide anti-piracy checks. I've sure seen a thing or two when working on fan translations of mostly 8- and 16-bit era games.

@breach187 Coincidentally also Sega-related, even though they weren't directly responsible, the boxart for Shining Force Resurrection of the Dark Dragon on the GBA has very different text for the North American and European versions.
The NA was version was published by Atlus and does what a box should and list features that would make you excited to play the game, while on the other hand the THQ-published European box instead lists games features like being able to equip your characters and issue commands.

@Thad Maybe it wasn't the greatest analogy but not buying SNK products will push the people working at actual SNK towards unemployment, which is bad for them, and maybe force the company to have to sell their IPs to simply whoever will give them money for them and may or may not about utilizing them with care, which is bad for the fans.

@Edd-O I get a feeling that it's one of those games that has some style but may not be the best to actually play.

I know King of Demons is a game that people rave about. I hadn't spent a good deal of time on it but I just know that it graphics probably weren't the most eye-popping game out of 1995. But surely it's got something.

@TonyHero Yes, as far as I'm concern AI is next level Babelfish.
I also LOL that you can't even express your disagreement with polite language. That's not going to help people agree with you.

@Thad I do have a real Klonoa but I remember getting that on eBay so many years ago. It was a "bid and then go to bed and hope I wake up a winner". Someone tried to outbid me but thankfully they tied my max bid so I guess since I was first the tie went to me.

If it's not emulation then what is it?

If it's not running on all the original chips (there's more than just a CPU), then I don't understand how it's not emulation.

Though surely Bandai and SNK had to have known that a color screen was inevitable.
I know at least that the WonderSwan Color was still a technical leap above Nintendo's, giving us GBA-level graphics before the GBA launched (which actually Nintendo had been working on all along, it was clear the GBC was something Nintendo threw together to bide time on the market until the GBA was ready. They didn't want to risk another rival taking their spot.)

@Peteykins I've heard WSC released in Hong Kong with localizations of two Digimon games, but back in the days, it was no doubt the one thing that drew western gamers' attention to the WonderSwan was a single notable third-party licensee named SquareSoft. The basis for all modern versions, the Final Fantasy remakes were quite a draw.

I do remember the R-Type DX cart was fairly common. I'm guessing that was one of the bigger titles at GBC launch?

A good thing since I don't think the GB version of R-Type II was even released in North America. I know the Japanese and European versions can be pricey these days.

@GravyThief It's possible some old power supplies could be going bad (I've heard original C64 bricks can be quite iffy these days, if they'll blow the whole system) but I didn't think the Wii was old enough we particularly needed replacements yet.

@sixrings Well, Nintendo did allow Hamster to publish arcade Donkey Kong and Donkey Kong Jr.
It's absolutely not on the same level as the SNK controversy, and only really means something to Nintendo but arcade DK's programming was contracted to a developer who had filed legal action to protect its legal claims on the game which are basically meaningless (without the rest of the game assets) except to make it Nintendo to pay.
But I bet Nintendo internally makes about as much of fit over such companies as its fans who will cry over $20 Pokemon rereleases over the more pressing matters other companies do.

I recall that both games were announced for North America back in the day and neither released, though both released in Japan.

Though Arcus Odyssey was leaked by the warez scene back in the day, the Psycho Dream (or Dream Probe, as it was planned to be called) localization was not.

So basically SNK is a hostage, and I don't see a way out of that situation than to let the hostage fail?

@Tasuki @AndyVGR Nintendo knew exactly what they were doing when they released the NES game on Wii U VC in October 2015. They couldn't say it but we know the significance of that date.

Tomb Raider did get at least one official side-scroller, on GBC, I think.

@Damo "former EGM writer David Siller". From what I read, he was the same person who previously worked at Sunsoft and created the Aero the Acrobat franchise.
I actually enjoyed the first Aero game on the SNES as a kid, as frustratingly difficult as it was. I think I only rented Aero 2 once and never got around to playing Zero.