KingMike

@gojiguy Glad I'm not the only one wondering where my Ray'Z Chronology physical went.

@sdelfin No pack-in game is ever going to please the entire audience. However, including a pack-in does allow the console maker to control what the audience first impression of the console is and ensure it is at least something representative of how they want the system seen.
If someone were to pick up Virtual Hydlide (or worse, I'm sure there is) as their first Saturn game, that is something only a small following would probably appreciate.

I can only imagine some British gamers' impression of the NES after getting the console with that first "Hero" Turtles game bundled.

Super Mario Bros. Special is a great choice for a gallery photo.
A deranged and impossible video game that will never be distributed officially by the IP rights holder is the ones most in need of preservation.

@Ganner I would hope that 38 years is a little late. I understand wanting credit, but that is a REAL long time they'd have to say they've NEVER heard of something.
Though things have happened. I'm guessing Capcom rebranding one of their games GAN SMOKU can only be because someone eventually noticed Gun Dot Smoke and complained.

The closest Sony had to prior game hardware experience was being of multiple MSX computer hardware manufacturers.
If this was in a trade magazine in November 1995, it was probably written JUST as the PlayStation had just launched in America, FAR too early to be talking about what the "preferred console" and having a superior library. They really should've taken a more humble approach, at that point it was basically "Virtua Fighter and Daytona USA vs. Tekken and Ridge Racer" (as I think was that the point when Namco was making PS-based arcade hardware?)

As much as we'd want to have seen Sega Saturn succeed, you know after the first couple points the rest of Sega's arguments are going to be hilariously biased.

"Sony is brand new to the videogame market". Sega, if you added the word "hardware" to that statement, you'd have a more plausible argument.
Sony DID publish video games prior to that. Few of them were games that gamers would want to bring up, but it's still the point. (I know, this is defending the company that published the USA version of NES Dragon's Lair. But I suppose we shouldn't judge a company for one shameful piece of software.)

Yes, only Sega Saturn has Sega games and ports of Sega arcade games.
Sega didn't want to mention one missing one third-party company though, the Nakamura Manufacturing Company.

Sadly it happens. It's got to be already like five years or so since western game preservationists lost out on an obscure undumped Famicom RPG when it was listed on Yahoo! Auctions because one rich Japanese seller felt the need to "protect" the game from bootlegs the only way they knew how: by ensuring nobody else can play the game, ever. Or even them, whenever the EEPROMs in the cart eventually fail. The equivalent of $15k to cockblock westerners who would've saved it. It was said that even other Japanese game fans didn't like that. Though with copyright laws there, it probably is the way to go.

@NinChocolate As much as a hot topic of $90 Mario Kart is, SNES games cost nearly twice as much after inflation, and while it's not that I like higher prices either but I feel like that when they charged more for a game, game companies had added pressure that they better make something that makes the player feel like they've gotten their money's worth out of it.

How I felt when I played Final Fantasy X the first time, after having played IV and VI as a child, was that FFX was a fantastic movie but the actual gameplay was comparatively meh (utilizing all the characters in battle was a great idea, but it quickly became a pattern).
What I had played of the PS1 games was still something I look forward to eventually completing, that PS2 opening feels like a dropping point towards video over game.

@Frmknst I'd have liked to play the Contra game on Switch, if I hadn't spent over half an hour on cutscenes (that opening had about the literary creativity of a typical YouTube comments section) and ENDLESS TUTORIALS.
It's CONTRA! Why does it need all 18 buttons (or whatever) on the Switch controller and tutorials telling me how to use them?!

We're certain we have the right Monolith here?
As I recall, there are multiple companies called Monolith.
Not the Xenosaga franchise, which was a different Monolith, a Japanese developer.

I do remember reading Walmart had refused to stock it during its commercial lifespan.
I suppose it is important to note that 1995 was the period when both Target and Walmart were beginning their rapid nationwide expansion across the US market. They had previously been secluded to regional markets.

Didn't the Crash games have tracked gameplay?
But maybe that isn't quite what he was talking about.

@Tasuki They absolutely had to have seen Mortal Kombat II and decided they really needed to up the joke factor.

@Scollurio This game was absolutely a s**tpost game.
For certain there was at least one Barney the dinosaur fatality, but I want to say there was more.
Also, one of the player characters was surely based on Tonya Harding (to say the least, an Olympic figure skating scandal). Can't get much more 1994 than that!

It's no Last Alert, but Final Zone II did have good cutscenes too, didn't it? I do recall one of the characters did at least have an anime idol theme song at least, so it surely had presentation.

I remember the Wii was revealed in five different colors.
It took quite a long time but Nintendo eventually released THREE of them.
Unfortunate for anyone who ever wanted a lime or silver Wii.

Even Strong Museum doesn't want to spend the money to acquire an English copy of Harvest Moon.

Glad they went with some of the stranger controllers in that art.
I see the PlayStation 2 Dragon Quest controller.
I have one of those and it is definitely a decoration because as I recall it got really sticky from the aging plastic alone.
You sure can play a video game by grabbing a Slime by its behind.

@PKDuckman I've been watching LordBBH play the arcade games nobody remembers in chronological order and yes, Kjonami's (sorry, Konami's) '80s arcade flyers sure had female models in very 1980s fashion.

I think we've had one official Sega and Capcom crossover game: Project X-Zone 2, yes? (Sega being the addition to a tactical RPG series that had already been a two game crossover between Namco and Capcom)

For Bases Loaded being the headline franchise in this collection, it's missing a few games. There was yet another sequel each on NES and SNES. (also Game Boy, but then I remembered this is Polymega, not Evercade. That may not be a supported console.)

@Peteykins I know there are people online that will boast about paying for bootlegs ("repros") from fans who do the same thing.
I can even recall getting flamed from one such bootleg defender who thinks they're better paying for unauthorized copies than playing downloaded ROMs, and made some pretty nasty and off-topic comparisons that that forum really should've nuked the thread at that point and I'm amazed they didn't.

Would be interested but those prices are WAY too high for me, so I'll have to give it a pass.

@-wc- It's not English, but the hardest to read title screen where I know what it's supposed to say is a MSX2 RPG called Crimson (and I didn't know it had a PC-88 version as well until it showed up from EggConsole).
I think there was a Tecmo soccer game on NeoGeo that also had a pretty funny bad logo.

@-wc- I've yet to actually take apart my SP to fix the intermittent power problems it's had for years. Somehow I hadn't been able to get a right screwdriver (oddly enough for the one screw Nintendo DID intend people to open, I do have one for the screws they didn't). I bought a few spare SP/OGDS batteries from Nintendo but I wonder if those are old enough to have also expired.
What I've read online is that it's likely the inside of the switch has just gotten gunked up, if the power had been cutting out even while the system was connected to the wall plug.
(Both of mine had the same trouble, the purple 001 I received as a birthday gift and a 101 I picked up while they could still be found at GameStop, who thankfully hadn't yet been upcharging for the latter. Mine is a silver-blue I picked because I thought it was an exclusive color, which made it easy to tell from under the GameStop glass case. But maybe pink was too, as I remember that seemed to be the color people looking for one were quickest to go after back then?)

Rowdy Princess? GameFAQs doesn't credit Alfa System but I do see them listed on the boxart.
But MARS Corp. Certainly not the same Mars Corp. credited for creating the kusoge classic A Week of Garfield for the NES.

So Namco followed Sega's example Super Zaxxon. Did that go well for them either?

@Damo I thought there was an Altered Beast sequel on the PS2. Or at least a remaster on the Sega Ages line that added something to the game that might qualified as such.

@-wc- My guess is maybe it would have required a specialized machinery to produce the discs with the correct "wobble" as it's called.
I'm guessing that Sony had their own disc-mastering facilities and the capability to set up PS-specific lines.

@Lowdefal My OG DS hinge only cracked after several years of use.
My GBA SP and 3DS hinges have remained fine.

@-wc- To run on original, unmodified PlayStation hardware, discs would need specific "errors" in the disc mastering which the BIOS reads as copy-protection as well as region identification.

I do have the soundtracks to the BoF games I downloaded when they were made available on Steam years ago.
However, the games themselves I don't believe are.

I think, was BoF4 the only version to get an actual PC release originally (though I think it was in Japanese?).
Though certainly these days it would've been feasible to port the others? I mean, if they can do Mega Man X. I guess they just didn't consider BoF worth the same effort as Mega Man before that as far as porting the games over?

Though, at the least, those BoF OSTs were taken from a higher quality master than what was heard in the SNES games. So you can't say there wasn't some care taken in that regard.

@Lowdefal Did the SNK 40th collection (which I thought had it) do better than the MAME emulation most people probably saw the game with, where as I recall that vocal song was nearly inaudible unless you really cranked the volume settings of MAME and/or your computer?

I'm not sure how well the original arcade version of Athena was but I know the NES version at least sure had a kusoge reputation, probably at least since the late '90s when one of the earliest famous "angry gamers" Seanbaby wrote about it as one of his least famous NES games (I guess it was enough for him to get a job at EGM when he again reviewed the BOX to Karnaaj Rally for the GBA and disliked it so much he refused to review the actual game inside).

@Tasuki I think that's the game known as Shodai Nekketsu Kouha Kunio-kun originally.''

@PKDuckman I'm guess the two games that aren't localized are that way because they are text-heavy games not related to Kunio, so they were probably a low priority to this compilation.
(Sugoro Quest++ is a board game and Dunquest is a Mystery Dungeon-type RPG)

I imagine the other release is why Kunio-tachi no Banka is not included.

@JackGYarwood This game is most famous for its crazy localization.
The localizers went overboard creating a story that is nearly a parody of the Japanese original. They used quite a lot of American slang to sound firmly out of 1991. One of my old online friends made an entire website to compare the two, and pointed out one period magazine review from its original release that pointed out the story was going to sound really silly within even a couple years.
Or the English version story could at least be comparable I guess to the '90s TV series Mystery Science Theater 3000, where a bunch of people watched '60s and '70s (I think) sci-fi movies and made jokes about them.

There have been huge Sega fans such as the people at SMS Power! and Hidden Palace who have probably archived more Sega history than Sega themselves.

@JackGYarwood "D4 Enterprise is sticking with titles either developed or published by the series creator Nihon Falcom for this collection, ruling out the potential inclusion of Hudson Soft's Ys IV: The Dawn of Ys for the PC Engine CD-ROM² and Tonkin House's Super Famicom title Ys IV: Mask of the Sun. It's unclear why this is, but if we had to guess it probably comes down to the difficulty with licensing."
I thought the SFC game was developed by Falcom? I don't think Tonkin House/Tokyo Shoseki was a developer, just a publisher.

I think the issue is that the PS Vita game Memories of Celcetta(?) was developed as the new "canon" fourth game, I've heard.

I thought the point of making a console with games on physical media was that old feeling of "you buy the games and you know they'll work forever".
When Nintendo made the New NES, they didn't need to ask for permission for the old third-party game carts to work on the console.

Rockstar created TWO Austin Powers games as a parody of Windows 95 (and wanted to create two more, we've since learned).
But I guess it's good to see someone create a "serious" interpretation.

@Damo Clarice's Wedding Bell isn't really a new game.
They have just Joe Hoops'd a previously licensed game. It was a Urusei Yatsura game originally on the Famicom, but City Connection was reportedly denied a reissue of the license, so they had to change it.

@retrogamer1 Yes, something like "long before online console gaming" would've been more appropriate.
It was a unique idea, but Satellaview had its limitations, in that it could only send out data. Players couldn't send data back to the server.
SoundLink games, which allowed them to add streaming audio (and video?) exceeding data limitations, was great, but then that also meant games utilizing it had to be careful structured around admitting progression at the appropriate times during the audio narrative.

That's a shame that someone would sink to doing that but certainly cash is one of the most replaceable things they have, yes?

@Gamecuber Region-lock on Genesis was only through a software-based check.
From what I've heard, it's mostly games from 1993 and later that use the Genesis' territorial ID for lockout purposes. Earlier games were sometimes designed to run a single international ROM which would apply regional differences based on the console rather than the cartridge (like Ghouls 'n Ghosts and Streets of Rage).
(Though there might be some oddities, Rolling Thunder 2, a 1991 game, does do it, but I've read it's only the Japanese version, the one I own, which does a region check.)
Most games' lockout can be defeated if you have a Game Genie and look up unlock codes online.

@RupeeClock Lik-Sang was selling things piracy-related, Sony was just looking for an excuse to shut them down.

Nintendo also committed a Streisand Effect by putting a warning about "illegal copying devices" in the back of later SNES game instruction manuals.
People who had bought and were using those devices knew what they were doing, and those using them for piracy probably weren't reading the instruction manuals!

I've heard tariffs are one reason the Master System has remained popular in Brazil for decades.

I'm sad I'm soon to be separated from my socks.

Oh, I thought this was Arcade Archives. I guess my socks are safe then.
Too bad, would've liked to play AIR GARRET.

They weren't the only developer on the franchise.

They previously worked on some Bonk and Power Instinct ports, Wrath of the Black Manta and Eon Man for NES, Blazeon the arcade and SNES shmup. To name some other games.

@Zenszulu It's not AS surprising once you know the guy who owns the copyright to that MS-DOS fighter was also one of the earliest to create a retro aftermarket publishing scene by localizing unlicensed Chinese Mega Drive RPGs (or at least those he could find that he felt confident didn't use assets copied from other and especially Japanese games, a common thing you'd see in mainland Asian unlicensed games).

What do they mean that Broken Sword was broken?