KingMike

@gmar No, I meant, they do tricks to buy digital from other regions.
While Nintendo has allowed you to make accounts for different regions on the same Switch, the credit card and Paypal options available to buy eShop credit will only be accepted if they match the region (my US CC and PP accounts will be declined to pay for a JP Nintendo Account). So one would have to go through a trusted code reseller to get eShop credit for a different region.

@Damo The first Mana game (on the Game Boy) was the first FF-related game to get a European release, I believe.
Such that in an article in 1993 about video game titles, Nintendo Power told us that "Mystic Quest" was the European localized title for Final Fantasy, and then they joked asking what the SNES Mystic Quest was going to be called there. "Mystic Quest: Mystic Quest", they suggested. (I think it was actually Mystic Quest Legend.)

I think at least part of the issue with bringing RPGs over (and I suspect what dropped Final Fantasy VI, which I read was a contender for getting an official PAL release) was that if Nintendo of Europe wanted to commit to a release of a text-heavy game there, they wanted it in at least English, French and German (and with SNES games struggling to properly localize even a single-language localization, releasing multi-language cartridges was out of the question, so then it became an issue of how many would they make for each, I'd imagine.)

@-wc- I've wondered if patents could possibly be the reason neither the PSP nor the DS made such a button layout as friendly as the WonderSwan was to being played in either landscape or portrait orientation.
I tried playing Contra on the Konami Arcade Hits collection for the DS and it was not comfortable to hold the DS sideways and play the game while holding the D-pad and buttons on opposite ends of the screen. I think I tried button mapping to do something similar on the PSP with the PS Classics Sonic Wings Special (the PS1 port of Aero Fighters which one of such shooters on the console to support rotating the TV). It didn't work out so well (though of course, you can't fault the game itself since it's a port of a console game that wasn't designed for the display and the controller to be a single device).

@gmar Well, I'd take "selling as-is" over not selling them at all to the west (without the hoops some people will jump through to get them from the Japanese store anyways, probably the reason they do it).

@RenderSpotlight The early NES games also used standard Phillips screws, no special tool needed. I can't remember if Nintendo switched to the special screws before or after the switch to three-screw cases.
I want to say I have a game like Ice Climber or Kid Icarus that was a three-screw with Phillips screws but I'm not certain. Ice Climber is the one US launch game I know that was different from Japan so they couldn't just stick an extra Famicom PCB on it and call it done, so I don't know if they would've still used a Famicom PCB for that. I would say Kung-Fu but I know a Famicom Kung-Fu exists (apart from Spartan-X) and is a rare collector variant, so it would be hard to say which came first.

@Martin_H Yes, as demonstrated by the different between the OG and New 3DS hardware, the 3D is only good when it is well-implemented. I could only take a few minutes of 3D on the OG in Ocarina of Time 3D before I had to turn it off. You need to be able to have a firm focus on the screen for it to work, I'd imagine, and I can't, so it didn't. The New did indeed have some hardware to compensate for that.

@RenderSpotlight It wasn't just any copy of Gyromite, it had to be a very early print. I thought I could just buy a random copy of Golf from the nearest FuncoLand and be done, but no, not that easy.

I ended up buying the converter itself from an eBay seller (as much as it made me sad to think the game attached to it probably got junked), as well as a Game Genie so I could put it into the console without getting stuck.
But I'm sure I eventually damaged the NES pins with that.

I do have the Famicom Battletoads they put out years ago but what I've heard of these modern reprint cartridges is they may not healthy to put in vintage consoles.
I believe when this is put out next month, it will actually be 35 years since the original Famicom release (was that by Toaplan itself? Was it just internationally that Capcom published its NES counterpart?)

@Kotonete A good quality process doesn't need to be "accelerated". When they care about the project, they will care to work on it as they see fit.

I'm certain at least part of what allowed DS to take an early lead over the PSP was those early years of the PSP. When UMD Movies were more prevalent than games.
That and Nintendo knew they had the price advantage. (I know the media features are relevant for 2005, but I'm not sure how many were willing to pay the premium for such a pre-smartphone device. See UMD Movies.)

Unfortunately history repeated with the Vita and Sony was like "portables are for children anyways, adults use smartphones".
I bet there's an irony there that children are probably more accustomed to smartphones these days, and its probably adults with nostalgia for portable game devices that would have more interest.

I read so many years ago that Sony could've made the iPod before Apple did, as @Martin_H said.
Well, if you were the same corporate family operating one of the top CD printing labels, you'd probably also be too cowardly to think to the future.

I'm guessing Big Jumbo was related to Jumbo Ozaki, a real player who had a licensed Super Famicom golf game.

Though I can't remember which one it was, after localization. Was it HAL's Hole in One Golf (one of the only golf games I picked up after seeing it in a video and spotting how incredibly Iwata that game is ), or was it Mecarobot Golf by Toho, a game that doesn't seem like it did much if anything with the potential of its reskin?

The PCE-CD version (combining two games) was notable as the final licensed release, and by at least a couple years, maybe three.

Naturally the eBay sellers are going to ask a gajillion dollars for it these days.

@-wc- The only thing I can think of that could be investigated is "underage" characters. I have no familiarity with this company to know the validity of such a question.
(That's just something I've had pointed out in retro circles, you may want to take care to avoid questionable retro titles when importing as some could be legal in Japan but illegal in the US for that reason.)

@Hexapus The TurboGrafx, yeah, they really botched it in the west. It's know among fans, but just WHO was responsible is still a mystery. I've read it wasn't unusual for the American team to forward their Japanese wishlists to corporate, and out of like 20 games they'd like to see, get maybe two get licensing approval.

NEC wanted people to pay $400 for the CD add-on in 1990 (in 1990 money!) and yet buyers were treated to a grand total of under 40 games to play with their device (many requiring the further "Super CD System Card" upgrade, for which the US card is now itself an expensive purchase). I'm not sure the grand total of CD games released in Japan, but I feel like there has to be close to that many RPGs alone released in Japan, and that's not even the console's most famous genre.

Sure, as much as Konami has let us play Gradius II and Rondo of Blood these days as the current rights holder of the TurboGrafx IP, those would have been a risky (due to how late and shaky the platform was in the US) third-party license back in the day to bring to America when they were contemporary. (the SFIICE port as well, no way Capcom would've gone easy on the licensing terms in 1993)
I mean, PCE still had quite a number of titles released into 1994 and 1995, while in North America the final three CD games were released in all of 1994 and then it was closed.

Yes, the western covers are charming in their own way.

On the other hand, Konami's artist (I think his name was Tommy Dubois?) did great western art. Castlevania IV is one of those games that makes a good case for the localized art being better.

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.