KingMike

Nintendo 500 I believe was going to be the localized title for F1 Race, the only first-party game available in the launch era to be withheld from international release without obvious reason.

Popeye's English was the only other released educational game in Japan, and I guess it wasn't something they could spin as something suitable for the US market. American children weren't being taught Japanese, so it couldn't work in the opposite direction, and $25 (judging by the price of the other launch games) for a Hangman game probably would've been asking much.
Nintendo also had a Donkey Kong Music game that was announced in Japan but never released anywhere.

@Deuteros After attempting the PS2 version, I'd say that removal of slowdown doesn't necessarily make the game better, just different.
Such a game of the pattern memorization era of game difficulty, you learn to adapt to the slowdown as much as anything else.

I do remember the initial advertising for the Genesis game being "a CD game for those who didn't get a Sega CD for Christmas".

I thought there was also a different Flashback 2 that was considered a "we don't talk about that Flashback 2" game among fans.

Hard to believe they'd even commercially release a game with only five copies, but yeah the insane collector value is probably how most have heard of this game.

@NintendoWife There had to be some kind of mutual agreement. From what I understand, legally you can't just leave a business partner "at the alter", as some put it, without the risk of being sued for contract breach.
Unless Sony had some consent to back out of the deal, if Nintendo's lawyers didn't do their work before signing the contract, they'd have to live with the consequences.

@bring_on_branstons Well, there were a whole lot of "next generation" consoles coming or already out (3DO, Jaguar, PS, Saturn, N64 and even obscurities like the Pippin).
Naturally a lot were going to flop, and it was hard to predict at the time that the company that put out games like Last Action Hero and Sega CD Wheel of Fortune as going to be not just one of the survivors of that console onslaught but the next industry leader.
I guess it was that desire to kick Nintendo down that drove them forward from their previous lineup with Nintendo being the dominant hardware in Japan in the 16-bit era and a strong competitor in the US (regardless of who was on top of the SNES and Genesis war, it was still close enough that either would've been great to own), I've heard it was much less so in other regions.

@Babybahamut Oh, I've seen what happens. It's pretty tough as you have to essentially "no-miss" the game to have that many. But I'll leave it as a surprise to you if you want.

I know many years ago Famicom bootleg coders Hummer Team made a Famicom port of this game that, while missing a few things, was quite well-done, at least by bootleg game standards.

Though I do wonder if this will go to the extent of restoring the passwords and unlimited continues of the Japanese version. Unlike other Konami games (and especially what I've heard of the sequel), I don't think they messed with the game too much for the English version beyond those changes (though child me would've been upset to know those).

@Zeebor15 I don't know about the IP ownership but I can only imagine the Ubisoft wouldn't care enough to renew the trademark, at least.

There was also a Game Gear version that was developed but never released. I don't know how far along it was.

@Sindayl Unfortunately, when Sony was a third-party in the 16-bit era, Sony largely published games using IP from its film/TV corporate siblings rather than creating its own identity. Sega turned down the chance to be a PlayStation partner (after Nintendo more famously rejected them) because of that lackluster resume.
(Sony published a lot of jank of the Famicom as well before that, but perhaps it was at least more interesting jank.)

It wasn't the only game Psygnosis made on the N64.
They also ported a FPS called O.D.T. Or Die Trying. Nintendo Power reviewed that port in 1999, but it never made it to commercial release. The ROM has been preserved online, though.

Was Ashe a Zainsoft game? I hope that games, I remember it seeming pretty good when I had seen it on stream.
It is the game that was ported to the PC-Engine as "Energy", often called one of the most broken games published on the console. Definitely something where seeing the functional version might be cool.

@Damo Power Console would've been canceled anyways, surely. That had to have been some designer's crazy dream they decided needed to be brought to reality.
More sensible devices, at much more sensible price points, have launched and failed at that.
(Like $600 in 1989 money is how much NEC wanted for that.)

@PKDuckman Everyone has ***** on their record you could complain about if you want to dwell on centuries old world history. We could just as easily point fingers at another developed country and condemn them for their past atrocities.

@Whirlwound The high score screen is "gratuitous"? It's a British game from like 1990. I doubt that anyone at System 3 at the time felt that there was anything wrong with the game.

I mean Nintendo, the company most afraid of stepping on anyone's toes, made a Dr. Mario commercial I can remember seeing on TV as a child in 1992, using "The Witch Doctor" song and it would now be considered highly offensive of African tribal customs, I imagine.
There's context in what was socially acceptable at the time.

Rumble can be something so hard to get the feeling right.

I do remember one cutscene in FFX for the PS2 where the constant full-force shaking just felt overblown.
But when I played PS1 Bomberman Party, just a little shake when a bomb went off felt like was all it needed.

@N64-ROX Circle was in the position of the SNES A button and PS X button was in the position of SNES B. Triangle was in the spot of SNES X.
Most SNES RPGs used A for confirm, B for cancel. Those following the Final Fantasy standard of a dedicated menu button often used X (as opposed to the Dragon Quest standard of wanting all actions being initiated from the menu, including talking to NPCs and examining objects). So exactly matching FF7.
(yes, I know that the SNES DQs did introduce use one of the buttons as a context hotkey for Talk/Search, so you could think of the action and menu buttons as swapped, but I'm not sure how many of the numerous clones followed suit. I understand it was the USA PS2 version of DQ8 that forced the designers a little forward in modern design sensibilities.)

I cleared the first floor of Wizardry V when I rented it on the SNES as a kid.
By that point, I knew finishing one of those games is sure a time commitment I wasn't going to put forth. Characters aging sounds like a really rough mechanic.

Good job on the author being familiar enough with one of the games to take on the effort of filling in some of the gaps in this port.

@sdelfin "Select" and "Start" etymology is from the OG Famicom, where it's clear Nintendo didn't intend them to be used as gameplay buttons. They intended them to only be used to Select the game mode on the title screen and to Start the game, because the OG Famicom only put them on the player 1 controller.
Sega's consoles before the Genesis only had two buttons period, with a "pause" button put on the console itself.

How about NEC controllers, which decided to get classy and name the buttons with roman numerals, but then also rename the Start button "Run" which was even more bizarre?

@The_Nintendo_Pedant Well, the OG Xbox also had two additional face buttons that I think were just called the Black and White buttons. I don't think those were retained forward, were they?

@FR4M3 That is only because of Sony of America.
In Japan, O was the standard "accept" button (the symbol was even chosen for that) and X was the standard "cancel" button (again, chosen) but for whatever reason, Sony of America was absolutely insistent that X be the standard "accept" button.
(I mean, I cannot think of any reason other than Sony meddling that so many Japanese devs would want to reprogram the controls for western audiences on nearly every game.)

So Xbox copied Sony of America's layout.

@Damo Leaving out The Fairyland Story which predated Bubble Bobble.
Also, the real reason Jungle Hunt got changed wasn't the racial stereotypes (that yes, were far culturally accepted in the '80s) but that they used the Tarzen yell without permission for which Taito was sued and they lost so they had to change it.

Also, I watch the LordBBH channel who absolutely praises the Japanese version of Raimais. I forgot the extent to which he said regional changes affected it but I just know it was significant. Enough that some of its content (including the best ending which apparently was bugged even in the original release and only the ACA fixed it) became inaccessible in the process. Sadly, I'm guessing this collection will only include the Overseas version.

@Exerion76 Tiger was trying to push the LCD game tech too much. That was the only LCD game experience I had as a kid, so it wasn't until the Game Boy collections that I could see that where Tiger went wrong was designing games where you had to reach the instruction sheet. If you design that, you miss the appeal of an LCD game.
(I had the Sonic the Hedgehog 1 and 2 Tiger games, making those the first Sonic games I owned as a kid. I remember in the Sonic 1 game, I kept dying on level 4 and didn't know why. You'd only know it was the Labyrinth Zone, which was a water level, and you had to jump out of the water, if you had the instruction sheet. Since of course the LCD has no way of visually conveying that sort of information.)

@The_Nintendo_Pedant Those didn't even play the actual G&W Mario or Zelda games, I believe.

I'd be interested in the ACA release of Dacholer. We can only presume that Hamster would take the effort to ensure whether or not the default dipswitch settings are correct.
Because MAME's defaults for Dacholer make for one of the meanest seen in any game. In Dacholer, you can game over in a single button press! So, except for asking 40 quarters, it is the Simpsons Waterworld joke!
(to explain, the Dacholer settings give you one life, and you can hurt yourself with your own soccer ball. Kick Boy settings give you three lives, and that version doesn't let you self-harm.)

I believe there was a Game Gear game of the same title (was it localized as George Foreman's KO Boxing? Or a different game?) that for some reason retained the 1976 copyright date on the title screen in Japan.
I know I saw that once and was like, what, "why does a Game Gear game (a console released in 1990) have a game with a 1976 date on it?"

I'm shocked when I see retro gaming things that have not yet learned the correct way to abbreviate Japan after all these years.

@slider1983 Was there not credits in the original games? If they had time to run voice samples through an AI, they probably had time to check who they were copying first. I don't know who this person is, but I see from this article and comments, they are quite a famous person.
Definitely sounds like something that, while fans may or may care enough to check, a professional company probably should've done legal diligence.

Character suspended from a helicopter?
Wasn't that Boogie Wings/The Great Ragtime Show? Funny if someone would for once take an idea from Data East (DECO had its charm but it wasn't so often known for originality.)

@jygsaw People were saying the same thing in 1995. Color was far more expensive than Yamauchi wanted to pay for.

From what I read, developers did have access to a TV output, though they had to use PAL TVs for some reason, from what I remember. An oddity as the hardware was developed and released only in two territories which used NTSC.

@WaveBoy The announced games sounds like more of the library than I'd have anticipated ever being rereleased due to licensing.
I mean, we can assume nobody's going to pay for the Waterworld license (then again, Piko exists so it wouldn't be above them to buy the rights to the game and then rebrand it).

@Sketcz Funny thing about the SFC Panic Bomber is that it was a SA-1 cartridge. Much as the Angry Video Game Nerd complained about Panic Bomber being on Virtual Boy rather than Game Boy being excessive, SFC PB needed an expansion chip sounds like it too. My only guess is that the chip was used for the multiplayer mode CPU AI (it's the only SFC puzzle game I know of with a four-player mode with a CPU opponent option.) It was also on NeoGeo and PCE-CD (for which I recall that had a tutorial mode with a really excited lady narrator ). Excessive hardware?

@w1p3out Even the 3D mode on the OG 3DS required good steady eye focus to not get painful after a few minutes (I remember having that issue when I got OoT3D when it launched.)

If Nintendo could've launched 3DS with the New 3DS screen tech, maybe 3D Mode could've taken off more.

Not releasing 3D Tetris in Japan could've been a rights issue.
Nintendo and BPS very much shared distribution rights on the Tetris license in those days, where BPS got Japanese distribution and Nintendo got the other territories.
BPS made multiple SFC games that only got released in Japan while Nintendo's NES/SNES Tetris wasn't released in Japan (to the point that SFC distribution of Dr. Mario was "Tetris & Dr. Mario" with the Tetris mode disabled.)

@JackGYarwood It looks like Earnest Evans' cartridge version was a North American release only. Only Genesis, no Mega Drive. To be pedantic.

@bring_on_branstons There was another ad for the Game Gear in the US which compared Sonic 1 to Tetris.
Funny thing is is that while Sonic sure had presentation value, Tetris certainly had more staying power and surely was more of a comparison piece than the ad creators might've been thinking.
(Unfortunately, the other things Sega wrote in that specific ad would definitely not go down well if they were said today. That was true of some of Sega's marketing from that period in the US and I'm sure the UK had its own ads that couldn't be reposted.)

Virtual Boy had the first "twin stick" controller Nintendo produced, I think.

I believe one questionable design choice of the VB controller is that it also houses the battery pack for the console.
Had the VB lasted long enough, that probably could've been an expense for Nintendo if they were to make replacement controllers, they'd have needed to include replacement battery packs with them.

@Xerox1919 Original copies of Wild Guns went UP in value after the Wii Virtual Console release.
Though I doubt value change will happen in this case.

What... the Pokemon Mini was more powerful than the original Game Boy... enough to run a Game Boy emulator...?
The games sure didn't look like it, despite that Pokemon Mini came out 12 years after the original Game Boy (and the same year as Game Boy Advance).

Or is this much like running a SNES emulator on GBA (I recall one existed, even though the GBA had no technical chance of seriously running a properly functional SNES emu)? Like no way was FF6 running on that was going to challenge FF6 Advance for being a playable video game.

The name "Game Bub" though sounds too much like something Stuart Ashens would review.
(not the least that I recall he did make a movie about the Game Child, didn't he?)

My memory right be wrong, but even the arcade original didn't allow all three characters to be played at once, right?
You could still have only two humans controlling two of the three characters at once?

@Damo Rumors something about EA having some beef with Sega back in the day, possibly about being pushed to Dreamcast sooner than they would've wanted, so they said "no".

Then again, there was also the rumors about Yamauchi being so angry that Square wanted to make PS1 games that he banned him from their consoles, to the point that when Square applied for a GBA dev license (around the time they planned to remake the FC Final Fantasy trilogy on WSC and the SFC trilogy on GBA) it was rumored they had to send an apology letter with their application. I don't know if any of that was ever substantiated or just Internet fan theories.
Same situation.

@Tasuki Nester's Funky Bowling was the American-exclusive bowling game and Virtual Bowling was Japanese-exclusive.
Yes, it's weird that such a short lived console got two region-exclusive bowling games and two region-exclusive Tetris games.

In the case of Jack Bros., I've been told its specifically the English (North America) version that goes for crazy prices. I'm not certain of the Japanese value but I hear it's far less (enough that one of the AVGN's fans sent him a Japanese copy to do an updated version of his Virtual Boy showcase review).

I don't know if anyone has been trusting enough to send him a copy of Virtual Lab, another of the crazy expensive Japanese-exclusives but it would have to be seen, as it would be right up there for him to review in the way he was known (the box would absolutely add to his content, were someone kind enough to have lent him a copy).

I found that room once when I was playing A Link to the Past as a child in 1995, and wasn't until years later I got the reassurance that I hadn't made that up.
However, there's still a few other moments from my childhood gaming experiences that remain a mystery...

@Daniel36 No translation is better than AI garbage.
At least leaving it untranslated leaves the option that if you want a photo translation app and see if whatever it generates works, then good for you.
If I was set for it, I'd myself have sat with Google Translation and looked up words to figure it out myself. At least I'd have the option to put things together for myself.
I don't care if the original text "aren't exactly known for their literary prowess", I'm not trusting a bot.

Still though "worst console of all time" is always debatable.
Game.com is a high contender, not to mention the many low-end portables out of the Far East (like the Game King and its like).

@breach187 This article doesn't mention that, I think one of the things that really got the authorities' attention of the financial situation of this company was when one of the executives manage to crash their INCREDIBLY expensive car. I forget what it was precisely, but it was definitely something extremely valuable.

I absolutely wanted turn-based RPGs on my Game Boy as a kid.

Yet there was almost none released in America.
I can only think of the Final Fantasy Legend series and Great Greed otherwise. And I had only managed to obtain the former thanks to its rerelease before Pokemon launched.

Nice to see anything old get released, though given the list of games developed by that NES developer, I wouldn't get my expectations high of the game being good.
(Peter Pan doesn't look like a NES game from 1991.)

But as to Warrior of Rome III, it looks like it would've been a SNES-exclusive sequel to a Genesis-exclusive franchise.

Sounds like someone hasn't heard about gaming in Europe.

From what I've heard, in France at that time, home computers were the most popular devices for gaming, and of what was left for the console market, Sega was far more prevalent.
(It's not too much of a stretch then, that one of the most famous Master System fans in the world is French, yes? An extremely passionate fan who is quite generous with sharing his affection for the console.)

I've heard Scandinavia is the one part of Europe to have attracted a strong Nintendo crowd in the NES and SNES days.