KingMike

@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.

@JackGYarwood Funny thing that the NES and Game Boy versions made it to Japan somehow with a chocolate's bird mascot added on.

@h3s Yeah, Nintendo knew they could make Sony nervous about announcing the PSP's launch price.
But I suppose the UMD and music features of the PSP made more sense within the context of 2004, before the rise of smartphones.

@RZ-Atom Hard to call the PSP a failure in North America after having lived in the Game Gear era (probably the distant second in most successful portable rival Nintendo's ever had). But I at least saw them, can't see I remember ever seeing a Lynx or TurboExpress in person.
If Sony hadn't turned it around after those first couple years when UMD Movies were the most abundant software, we wouldn't have seen nearly as much third-party support as we did.

@Darknyht The X'eye was also released in America around that time. You could spend even more money on a hardware variant with a more ridiculous name.
(Its Japanese variant the Wondermega was two or three years old at that point and I suppose you could argue made more sense at the time of its original release)

@BulkSlash I can only wonder if that's what happened with some I can only imagine are scarcities now: Moo Mesa and Rabbit Punch probably didn't get spoken of much (the latter particularly since I've never seen anyone else mention its localized name, just Rabio-Lepus.)

@ghostwolves I recall the Genesis port of Galaxy Force somehow being more difficult to parse that Master System with what was going on without any knowledge of the arcade original.
Like I recall the Death Stars being just solid colors but maybe my memory is wrong.
It was only when I played the 3DS port I got an idea what the game was about.

@Damo That portability also cost like an extra hundred dollars over the retail price of the standard version of the hardware it was replacing, very likely another reason it didn't sell in the first place.

But did they add a button to simulate closing the system, for games like Phantom Hourglass where it was required for progression? Unless that was just the sleep button mention.

Was 6-player X-Men a rare cabinet? I know my arcade had one as a kid.
I don't imagine so, I've probably seen more than that one.

@Sketcz Nintendo of America's "Play It Loud!" marketing (1994-1996) is the first game-specific thing I can think of.
Some of the TV commercials I find videos of, someone reportedly they could identify the "grunge" music used in the ads and said it was very much not of the same child/family-friendly angle Nintendo wanted the game content itself presented. "Give the world a wedgie!" was a bizarre phrase I do recall printed in one of them.
The entire run of the ad campaign was filled with juvenile "humor" that was at its worst, a TV commercial with a large guy eating and then barfing to sell Yoshi's Island SNES. Magazine ads, both game ads in other magazines as well as Nintendo Power's own subscription ads had their own claims. Super Game Boy is "Game Boy on steroids", Stunt Race FX should be chosen because in "the other guy's game" (pretty clearly digging on Virtua Racing for the Genesis), it doesn't have nearly as many levels so "the only thing you get to pick is your nose".
That was the wild ideas Nintendo got after a few years of Sega having an attitude of their own with the Genesis and Game Gear marketing. We can't even say these days what SoA's marketing thought of you for choosing to play Game Boy (except that it was something of outdated sensibilities).
They were definitely near the level of political candidates in what those two former rival companies had to say of each other in their marketing.

I'm kind of burned out thinking about that to try to recall non-gaming "mad" marketing but I'm sure there was plenty.

@shiningpikablu252 It's splitting hairs to argue whether an MSX system was a computer or a game console.
As much as it is to stick to "'80s consoles" when talking about an unofficial part to console that was technically released in the 1980s in two major regions of the world but is mostly remembered as a '90s consoles. The game was ported to many other consoles then. You can also play it officially on, not the least, the PlayStation and all three evolutions of the Game Boy, and the DS.

Was the '90s UK mass media marketing as appalled by nice and cute things as the '90s US was?
Were they as angry and spiteful?

@Coalescence One of the earlier videos I remember watching on the Internet was a clip of a professional baseball game in like 2007 or so that asked for a fan vote for the music and Never Gonna Give You Up won.

I've only watched a bit of a gameplay video some years and it didn't look the worst game I've ever seen (something you can usually say about Disney's publishing standards).
Though the reason I even looked it up was after years of what that game perpetually sitting on the bargain shelf at Best Buy during the prime DS years was.
I'm too old to have watched those Disney Channel sitcoms (in my day, Disney Channel was one of those premium channels you had to pay an extra subscription for) but that guy on the cover (who I presume is Corey) just staring back at me every time I went to the store.

The same store that wanted 600,000 yen for a Rockman 4 Famicom cart (only eight copies made, given to the eight people who created the Robot Masters) and even Arino was told "no, it's not really for sale".

Though I've been told even a standard copy of Vampire Killer for the Mega Drive is a scarcity these days. (not like the western releases. Especially the US version, it's a pricey game despite that quite a number of copies were made.)

Sorry those Mega Drive games in the background distracted me. No way that's a real Tetris in the background.

@JackGYarwood "(without or without its MSU-1 audio)"

Was it this game or another Super Robot game on N64 that was supposedly one of the worst critically-reviewed game on the console?
Though against Superman, or I recall one of the Power Rangers games got rated in a UK magazine with a negative (lower than zero) score?

@Sketcz According to Google Translate, "saw".

So was that a country where they were introduced to Sega as "see-ga"?
I know really old AU/NZ marketing (like SC-3000-era from John Sands) pronounced it "see-ga" and Australian streamer Macaw45 still pronounces them that way.
(I just find it converse to some early '90s UK Sega promo I recall seeing which went to the effort to stress it's "say-ga")
Though being American, I definitely grew up in the '90s with the (someone or something always shouting) "SEGA!!!" marketing.