KingMike

One thing that I've had to consider is the danmaku effect.

How does giving the player a larger field of view to look at affect their reactions? How does it change the gameplay that now you have more screen space for your eyeballs to scan and process?

@Damo "the upper section is reserved for the map" Have you been playing single-player games with the second player controller?

And if they're going to throw the WWF(E) cast in there without permission, why not Paul Schaffer and the entire CBS orchestra in reference to the gun guy in Renegade who can insta-kill Kunio (or whatever they called him).

Fan games are fine but I don't like it when they try to be mistaken for official games such as calling themselves "lost" sequels.

I'm surprised they didn't keep the English text from the original box.
"In 2363, secretly developed VECTOR replaced SEED, which has been a capital weapon. Now, they restart war to find the secret."

I had not heard of capital weapons before so I wondered if that was even a real thing. They are.

Just as I had finally bit and bought a loose original release Japanese cart last year, I had wondered where this went.

Well, Nintendo did partner with Mattel for whatever reason.
Mattel, the company that had abandoned their own console several years earlier and let their game development staff go in order to found their own company. That Intellivision company had actually tried making a relaunch of their own console around the same time as the NES in North America.

But as to the NES getting beaten in the UK... Nintendo/Mattel, it didn't really help when more or more I check dates, it looks like you were regularly releasing games three or four years behind the US, when they were published at all, did it?

@Teksette It's Space Invaders, but mistakes leaves gaps in the surface, eventually restricting you to a sitting duck.

I suppose at the least it shouldn't be a terribly difficult to port to make as it would be a fairly small game to disassemble and the GB and SMS used related CPUs with a similar memory map.
(though Nintendo did make numerous modifications to the GB variant of the Z80. Enough that a few developers back in the day did target both the GB and Game Gear with coding careful to use instructions common to both for much of the game logic, though the IO definitely needed to be console-exclusive).

Will they port the Mega Drive-exclusive intro into the game too?

That intro has become such a colossal meme that I've been told M2 had to retroactively put it into the arcade version when they rereleased it after enough complaints it was "missing".

@Martin_H AI isn't going to "unlock the potential" or however the AI Bros want to spin it every time these come up.
What AI gives is a quick answer for people who weren't going to spend the time to learn the skills or techniques to do the work themselves. Once they've gotten their instant gratification of the AI doing the work for them, they're not going to bother learning or thinking about how they can improve their work. They're going to be moving on to their next slop.

Surely, Jeremy Parish will save this at least.
If there's one thing to know about him, this and Heiankyo Alien are surely dear games to him.

I am kind of curious what Capcom was even considering for the NES version, but then again SonSon II for the PC Engine exists which resembles Black Tiger so much (other than its reskin to match its IP based on the same lineage as Dragon Ball) that it has to have some relation.

When I had previously looked, even searching for TH Strikes Back on YouTube immediately revealed what was explicit about the game.

I hope someone cut that clip into its own video lest it be deleted for surely accounting the events of the game without the expressed written consent of Major League Baseball.

@Damo But I want to know if it is going to be the Genesis or the Apple II of Madden's legacy.
@cdog555 But will we see Mad John represented? I still have to laugh about the Space Jam line that squeezed all of Jordan's endorsements into a single sentence, or at least paragraph.

@JackGYarwood I just realized, I believe "Super Pang" was the second arcade game (from 1990?) I believe (not the 1989 original game).
It was definitely popular enough, that Hudson ported it to the TurboGrafx and the Game Boy. Hudson also announced a licensed NES port which was never released (so we can only imagine it would've resembled the Game Boy version but with more screen resolution and color). Possibly because it was an EXTREMELY late release (1993/1994). Yet they also announced the NES version of Beauty and the Beast around the same time which did get a PAL release (though Nintendo Power did review presumably the unreleased NTSC version).
Yet Sachan released a surely unauthorized NES port of their own, and one of the few games they didn't bother hiding their IP infringement (that and their Gaiapolis NES port, a game Konami themselves has yet to port to anything).

The save files I care about are the ones that have already died. The ones on my real cartridges whose batteries died so many years ago and took the saves with them.

@JackGYarwood I think there might have been one MSX game before it, but Akumajou Dracula on the Famicom Disk System was one of the first Konami games to use the "bacon strips" logo that is no doubt associated with some of the company's finest creations.

@JackGYarwood Well, given the mention of the defunct (Japanese) IGS, who I'm quite sure is not related to the Taiwanese company (as they have completely different meanings for the acronyms), I'm not too surprised. Japanese IGS couldn't have been around for too much longer than 1993. Mega Drive platformer Dahna: Megami Tanjou was probably the highlight of their output, but they also made the Famicom Mario-like platformer Armadillo (noted for being bootlegged as a Mario game) and the SNES port of the DOS Rocketeer game.

The million dollar question: are they going to fix the major bugs with the USA version or NTSC-patch the PAL version?

I have long suspected that to be a possible reason the game was never released on Virtual Console.
The game is playable, yes, and many of us pushed through it on original hardware in 1996 but I can only imagine a good deal of gamers not familiar with the original hardware experience or its reputation might think its corrupt.

My first time playing Crazy Climber as a kid was Bart's Nightmare for the SNES, long before I learned about Crazy Climber.

One of the only RPGs to be released on all three 16-bit era consoles (though only one of the games on one console got released in English).
In America, that distinction only went to Ys III (though in Japan it additionally got a Famicom version, so that was FOUR console platforms at the same time).

@AzzurraIrisLeaMonde My guess is that the Japanese developers didn't know what the English words meant together. "Landstalker, but you're a lady? Ladystalker, perfect nothing wrong with that."
It also featured a cook character named Cocks.

Maybe I didn't play far enough but Deaa Tonosama seemed okay, like a Far East Pocky & Rocky.
I do find it funny that even the EGM preview back in the day showed what we would later find out is a nice-looking copy-protection screen, when emulators would inconsistently be able to run the game or trap into that lock screen (I believe if it booted to the Sunsoft logo, it passed the check).

Though with how Sega was able to patent the pointer arrow in Crazy Taxt... I suppose it should be said the Crazy Taxi idea seems to be one that Data East had done in a game probably almost nobody has heard of called "Kamikaze Cabbie" or Yellow Cab... and it was made in 1984. Obviously a two-dimensional game but I do recall it a similar idea when I watched LordBBH set out years ago to play all the games nobody's heard of in MAME in chronological order.

@JackGYarwood @Martin_H I think the far more plausible reason for such a short availability was the two-player mode.
From what I heard, its programming was dependent on some "undocumented" behavior of the PPU (video chip). Meaning that the operation of their code was in no way assured reliable on different models of the SNES hardware. It's possible Nintendo found out and didn't want to put out more copies a game they could foresee complaints about not working.
(Short: the programmers did a thing they were likely advised not to do, and dependent on what their particular console in the office did when they did it anyways.)

I can't recall if the North American SNES version of Wizardry V did more changes than simply remove the Japanese language options from the Japanese release a year and a half earlier (yes, it originally had Japanese or English options for various parts of the text, like dialogue, menus or spells, I believe). With those removed "Select switch" sure sounds like an odd way to say "Options menu".
(Well, I know one change was the publisher change. ASCII did all the FC, SFC and GB Wizardry releases in Japan, while Capcom published this version of the game. I recall one magazine review complaining as they pulled both Wizardry V and Eye of the Beholder out of their mail in 1994 at how "ancient" the two games they had just received were. I think they said they would've been like three and four years at that point or something.)

Ah, that sort of HUD that is great is for streamers but surely far too busy to be of use to the person actually playing the game.

@Sketcz I remember that even in the Resident Evil era, EGM or someone else saying that while getting many hours of entertainment out of a $60 game would sound like good value, is it really if the hours become repetitive?
Though the fact that many 8-bit-era games used punishing difficulty with very limited forgiveness for errors to keep you playing, when making a very long game wasn't really feasible, seems to be a design choice lost on younger audiences that I can imagine being raised on endless length games than arcade quarter-muncher mentality. I've heard so much "man, why these old games so brutal!" type comments.

@NoirConceit Feels like Putty Moon was maybe also a region variant title of the SNES game (maybe Japanese?).

I recall playing the SNES game only as far as watching the putty just swallow a baby for points or something and being like "LOL, what is this game about?"

@axelhander I don't know about that, reading your posts sounds like work so maybe there should be an AI solution for that too.

My only knowledge of the comic is from watching a streamer read through the comics on stream a few years ago, one issue per stream.

I'm kind of surprised they didn't attention from someone else over the Marxio Brothers villians.

Though streamer was certainly interested in their game reviews and scores that sometimes didn't make sense. Super Street Fighter II. "Don't waste your money on this game." 94%.
Or low graphics, sounds, and controls (or whichever criteria they rated) equals out to a high overall score. Somehow.

I do remember he eventually played Taz-Mania on the Master System after seeing that game on the Top 10 charts for a surprisingly long time. It... seemed decent... At least better than the Game Gear game which doesn't seem well-regarded, less than Genesis. I recall streamer finding SMS Taz having a few blind falls... but the impression of seeing ZX Spectrum and C64 games is they like that sort of game design over there in the UK?

I don't understand why reprint a game I recall being common to find an original cartridge.

What I've heard about "Super Turbot" and "fairness" depends on which version of the game you're playing.

I've heard tournaments regularly use the Japanese version because the US version is broken as ****. Reportedly it had issues besides that on single player, it reportedly only lets you play the first opponent at the actual machine difficulty then it jacks up to max (and the difficulty scale is reportedly even higher than the Japanese version).
Though unfortunate for tournament use, the Japanese version reportedly doesn't have a freeplay option, so admins would have to regularly recycle quarters in the machine.

@rob7979 Most of the chips Sega used were standardized and anyone could buy them, I recall.
Maybe the VDP might have been custom.

I remember learning about the Bandai relation when I had purchased a copy of Batman for the Game Boy online, and I was surprised to receive a UK copy of the game, which I had only known was because it included the manual and I had noticed the Bandai UK address on the back.

I think about the bug in Buster Busts Loose on the SNES where Buster dies near the end of level 2 if you remap the R button in the options menu.
Nintendo Power reported on it (though of course they avoided saying it was a bug).
That is the sort of thing I wonder if it only got found because of people calling the Nintendo hotline to complain. I'd guess the testers could've forgotten to test the entire game with remapped controls (presumably the defaults were chosen for a reason) but once you have the entire public playing the game, someone is going to hit it.
(in that game's case, when Konami programmed the cutscenes to replace the player input with scripted button presses, they correctly programmed the Jump and Drop Kick functions to press the corresponding mapped buttons but for Dash, they gave it an explicit R Button input. From what I see, there was a PAL Spanish version which did fix the bug. But it was present in the three expected international releases.)

I also wonder if all those calls is what prompted the DX version of Link's Awakening to add more hints than what was present in the original monochrome version. I remember some of those puzzles took me quite some time to figure out as a child, as the first Zelda game I had finished.
I think some might have been designed just assuming every player had already played all the prior games. Good thing designers since have hopefully been careful to avoid doing that.

What's most infamous about Atlantis no Nazo is that it is so unkind to the player that there is an empty room that if you enter, you can do nothing but watch as it kills off all your extra lives one by one.
Well, someone has posted a video of Bubsy doing that because of the possibility of an enemy spawning on top of a checkpoint spawn location but the difference is that Bubsy was surely an error (my guess is that is why many platformers would grant momentary invincibility after starting a new life) while Atlantis no Nazo was deliberate.

@GlamReaper Atlantis no Nazo was once planned for a North American release by Activision under rebranding as Super Pitfall II.
That would be quite a thing to ponder how these two kusoge would stack up given an official relation.
(Activision also teased Zombie Master, a localization of Zombie Hunter that didn't come out. That's a good game but despite the short length, finishing it fairly without passwords or even continues supported is tough just because of how long it can trap you in RNG purgatory.)

A minor nitpick but Super Arabian on the Famicom was 1985. Hudson and Namco were the first third-party publishers on the console in 1984, and a ton first joined the console in 1985.

Sad I finally had to retire my old PC this last week.
I had to set up the new one. I was hoping I could transfer the Blu-Ray drive I had over but it looks like, despite what I thought when I bought it, I won't be able to swap the drive in. I'm sure I can probably get an enclosure to attach it as a USB device?
I probably need one anyways to attach my other old hard drive, after trying to puzzle for hours how I could attach it somewhere to the case without success. Just one designated (mechanical) HDD slot inside the case. At best I got them in the case but where the SATA cables couldn't coexist without obstruction or couldn't reach both.

I didn't know they made slot-loading drives on PCs, but I'm guessing that's what this case was designed for, not the tray drives that have been around since forever.

@Ristar24 Some earlier games actually used the region identification to provide localized game content based on the console rather the cartridge.
But of course, a few years in and it became more frequently used for lockout.
Though the most bizarre case is my Japanese copy of the 1991 game Rolling Thunder 2 (which has to be one of the earliest). So I read the "APPLICABLE TO JAPAN ONLY!!" region check is... applicable to Japan only. I've read the western releases are not region-locked.

@Zeebor15 So I read, Infogrames (aka modern Atari) had already bought out Ocean by the time Mission: Impossible for the N64 was finished (that game was famous back in the day for having a multi-year development) but they let them still put their name on it, as I think the last game they put out before the name was retired.

@WaveBoy I've been told that Johnny Turbo's emulator was fairly inaccurate, with one example being the lack of copy-protection emulation in Sly Spy (was that the name? The "not James Bond" game.) making the game easier than it's supposed to be (the idea with anti-piracy on console games was to make them harder, but in arcade games to make them easier, I guess to punish the arcade owners).

I do remember LordBBH getting a 1CC on the arcade version. Then naturally looking at both the Genesis and TurboGrafx versions, and I recall one of them was kind of BS difficult, somehow made even more difficult than the arcade game.

One must ask how much they are willing to go Megadriving down the Inter State Kaneko.

I had assumed the SNES game was a port of the DOS game since the same developer made it, but I know the NES game was a different game published by a different publisher (Bandai) than the SNES (the defunct Japanese IGS, though it surprises me the probably-unrelated Taiwanese IGS seems to be as known as it is).

This time the action in New York will not include actual New Yorker Sigourney Weaver, will it?
(I'm not surprised they took the player names out when they released the Wii VC version.)

I do find this amusing as one of my old translation scene pals (that I know wouldn't appreciate being named) had cited this game as a bottom of the barrel SNES RPG for which they wish the scene of those days would've started covering other platforms with as much enthusiasm.
That's certainly a valid point. I myself had wanted to but couldn't move off the NES and SNES since the tools and docs weren't as robust. Then I found myself not as able to commit to sitting down with another platform to learn it. I still won't accept GenAI translations as "necessary" alternatives to hard manual work.

@metaphysician I know that AG does have a separate site he runs a business for formally licensed jobs (that is, completely legitimizing his skills), so he's not unapproachable if someone wanted to.
Though in that game's case, I think he would need to be able to reach out to the person who originally translated the text.

@Damo The Game Boy port of Battle of Olympus was only released in Europe.
I don't know if there was anything particularly wrong with it, but in the past few years I recall VGHF releasing a document of Activision's license prospects for North America and Battle of Olympus was among them but someone thought it was boring or dull or something.
Especially with Link's Awakening coming out that same year, you'd think they'd want something in that direction.