KingMike

Because it's not nearly as popular as the NES, SNES or Game Boy so much of the research and development has been propped up by a few super-fans.

"WonderSwan games also look great, too,"
But how do you PLAY them without proper controls?
WS had two diamond-shaped arrangements of face buttons in place of one direction pad. It was because they designed it for either landscape or portrait orientation.
I doubt this thing can do more than the technical definition of "playable" regarding controls.

@GhaleonUnlimited Yes, the early beta (early enough to still have the Japanese/European-style title screen, which was even printed in the instruction manual to the final US version) has some poor English, to my memory.

@Zeebor15 Unfortunately there's natural disaster risks everywhere.
I'd guess the most likely damage in Arizona is excessive heat. I've heard air conditioning there is essentially required to live, especially during the summers.
(I live in a cold climate where people would generally say heating is mandatory in the winter. In the cold, you can buy blankets and warm clothing to help, but I don't think you can do anything to help the other extreme.)

The newest change I spotted is that choosing to upload a video Unlisted will now make you choose a date to automatically make the video Public.
That is a deterrent to uploading at all. I like uploading videos I can share with just my own online communities or close friends. Without the Private of option of having to give people one by one access. Which I can't because I don't really "chat" or such on youtube itself, so I don't utilize Friends or whatever its equivalent is.

@PZT They didn't give it an NES color makeover as they did the NES edition of the GBA SP?

I wondered if any Atari consoles ever used X or Y buttons.
Then I forgot that the Jaguar did get a controller with six (proper) buttons, but pretty late I can only imagine few games used it.

Start and Select buttons as well... I don't think any Atari consoles used those labels? Didn't Lynx and Jaguar have "Pause" and "Option" buttons?
(well, I suppose Atari arcade machines would've used a "Start" button)

@CocktailCabinet In these days maybe, but had it actually released, CDs would have had a cheaper physical manufacturing cost to the publisher. That's about the extent of the benefit.
I mean, I do remember one reader asking a game magazine why CD games (I'd guess referring to Sega CD and/or TurboCD) retail prices didn't differ drastically from cartridge games, and their response was something like the higher cost of creating the content stored on the CD offset the cheaper cost of the CD itself. Though I know gamers would love to debate that in practice. I guess that depends on what exactly the extra content made possible by the CD was. FMVs, probably. Cartridge game ports with a new level and CD soundtrack? Maybe not as much.

@Fanboy_Destroyer As soon as the BIOS was dumped online and reverse-engineered (by an emulator developer calling himself nocash who has made his emulator development his primary job somehow), there was one homebrew game quickly developed for the format.
Sadly, higan/bsnes dev Near/byuu never worked on it, insisting he'd need at least one licensed developer game leaked before he'd have started work on it.

Well, the Master System port was a port of the arcade, so that version was technically playable on a Sega Genesis.
Kind of. From watching streams of the SMS version, I quickly gathered it was one of the few PAL games that doesn't work nicely on NTSC (has at least some graphics glitches as a result, can't remember if they were anything else. I suppose the unintended speedup might've been an issue.)

@Rudjohns I thought Tembo is a Game Freak game. I only remember hearing of that through watching Proton Jon first-play it on stream several years ago. Memorable because he got a (reportedly rare) bug where the game controller is severely mis-calibrated. Someone told him to just reboot the game but he wanted to see how crazy the game is with the flaw.

I thought there already was a Switch controller with detachable buttons/sticks.
Though an expensive specialty controller designed for disabled gamers, so it didn't get much widespread attention.

@avcrypt Doesn't help its legality situation that No One Lives Forever was an Austin Powers and/or James Bond spoof game.

Those American version boxed games, wow...

That is the US version of FF4 Advance. The one that people call "unplayable" (even though I still played it).
$327 for R-Type III on GBA?! I mean, it wouldn't be surprised if that was collectable value, but the reviews even when it was released said like "it's an amazing game. When played on a Super Nintendo."

@SteveFox The arcade gaming scene calls finishing games with the cost of one play "1CC". The list of Sega arcade games people have finished is certainly longer than those they have not.
Off the top of my head, Sega arcades games BBH has finished on stream (and on his youtube archive) include Golden Axe (it's reportedly considered one of the easier games to finish), Space Harrier, Altered Beast, OutRun and Gain Ground. Those are the ones I've seen him play the most.
He's even finished Gain Ground and Michael Jackson's Moonwalker 1CC in MAME (yes 1CC means he plays with no cheats) despite contesting MAME's default settings might be more difficult than the factory settings on real machines.
But there is absolutely a far longer list of Sega games he alone has finished. Not to mention there are other members in the retro gaming scene who have surely finished other games.
He's even finished Quartet on MAME, and other players have said that even the official Sega arcade mini console contains outdated emulation with a major bug preventing one level from being completed as intended.

@SteveFox Not all arcade games are PTW, and I'm not immediately thinking of many Sega games that would fit that (except the Jurassic Park lightgun game, I've heard people have only finished that without credit-feeding on the lowest difficulty). I've been watching streamer LordBBH who has spent the last few years trying to finish as many arcade games as he has shown CAN be finished (though some perhaps need the "finish" defined) with enough skill. He's so far finished over 650 of the 3,300+ arcade games in MAME.
It's looking like Midway was the major purveyor of games actually requiring PTW.

So Infidelity did what Tecmo already did, but hopefully better?

Though perhaps the one thing Tecmo did improve was to add a password feature to all games. (whereas only the Japanese version of III originally had that)
Still though, that button mapping is a big WHY?! (A jump, B attack, and ninja skill is still Up+B despite the SNES has four more buttons!)

LOL That is the fakest corporate email I've seen.

It's unfortunate for the people who have believed this and paid him money.
But I otherwise enjoy watching this guy's sham of a performance.

@hste Yeah, people have fought over less name-worthy titles.

Bio Force Ape on the NES cost much more to secure the real game in 2010, though perhaps much of the game's hype came from a memorable hoax/prank thread on a famous collecting forum in 2005.

The stories about his Final Fantasy development are crazy.

It's said he didn't like the idea of turn-based combat when developing the original game but Sakaguchi told him to just go with it.

Then the story of how he wanted the Ultima spell in Final Fantasy II to suck badly and came up with his lore reasons for it, then even obscured his code to prevent anyone else from changing it.
I also enjoy how FFII (on the Famicom original) has a globe perspective map that's impressive but also has a non-existent framerate that makes it practically useless.

Unfortunate it only had about 60 games, and it has a reputation like NEC's computer platform PC-98 of hosting a large amount of erotic content.

I do remember RetroPals were once looking for content for their "mascot platformer" series and could find just a single game on the console that fit their criteria (and it wasn't Vajra Fight, which they played and decided it didn't have enough platforms).

Sounds like about what already happened about two decades ago in America.
The number of arcades dwindled down to mostly enthusiasts businesses.

With how the PS5 has gone down, maybe Sony should stagger their console releases so the PS9 actually does come out in 2072.

@KitsuneNight What you'd probably get is PAL versions of the most random licensed games.
(I still remember after the PS1 mini launched, someone said something like the game selection was what Sony found left on ROM sites after Nintendo was done shutting them down. )

Sega of America stooped pretty low back in the day with their ads.

Though USA advertising in general was pretty spiteful back in the '90s, and Nintendo of America was pretty screwed up and couldn't even hold their marketing department to the same "quality standard" they did for game publishers.

The thing I wonder about the video output on PSPs. Was it the PSP or the video cable itself where, it could scale the OS fine to the TV but once you load an actual game, the game output will only be 1x? So you get a small window in the middle of the screen. Quite disappointing (and I grew up with the Super Game Boy! I recall the PSP was worse than that.)

Was that the event I had seen where they ask two professional wrestlers (WCW?) to compete in a video game and it's not too long before they've dropped the controllers and gone at in IRL?

@Chibi It's so easy to say "If these future talents are being creative, then they won’t incur the wrath of Nintendo or any other large company if their work is original.".
Human society is FILLED with copycat works.
In the '80s, game designers were far less afraid of being sued. Any of idea how many of them H.R. Giger and Fox could've gone after for copying the Alien film franchise?
How many unlicensed Arnold Schwarzeneggers and Sylvester Stalones have we played as over the years?
The classic Simpsons quote "If we can't steal ideas, where are they going to come from?" sums it up.

The music industry has so many remade works, doubtful they all got permission. How many artists have composed yet another Last Christmas rendition than come up with their own Christmas music?

Gone are the days when games like Super Mario Bros. Crossover and Super Mario Bros. X were allowed to exist.

When I heard "controller lottery" I thought it was going to refer to Nintendo's tactic of promoting a product and then clearly not making it in sufficient quantity to satisfy the demand (the NSO controllers).

The only game in this sub-franchise I believe which never got an English localization.
(the first game was localized on the TurboGrafx-CD while the following three games were remade on PSP, though out of order to my understanding)

I had not actually seen the Goonies movie until last year.

But I had spent some time playing Goonies II on NES, so Konami's chiptune rendition of the music is pretty memorable on its own (I believe they even used it in at least one of the many music games they've made).

The game with ANDORE the Giant's entire family to beat up. RIP "Andore"

@KitsuneNight I think PC-88 is only capable of like eight colors at once or something.
Also, Australian streamer Macaw45, who is a huge nut for retro Asian computer gaming (among other things) has ranted about Zainsoft before. He's reported the boss of Zainsoft was a rather mysterious and insane person.
I want to say it was when he played a PC-88 side-scroller action-RPG called Ashe a couple years ago or so. I think it was a Zainsoft game. Ashe looked like a good game but is better known for the unbelievably awful PC-Engine port called Energy.

@jesse_dylan I'm still surprised RR1 was not available on the PSN store (at least not in the PS3/PSP era). You'd think the Kaz Hirai meme would've pushed it further.

@jesse_dylan No, the game I was thinking of was a Japanese-exclusive. Dai-something. I'll have to go look it up.
Dai Fuushinden.
Yes, Sega CD only had 8KB onboard and the RAM cartridge was 128KB. i had to reconfirm after I had previously thought they were 128KB and 2MB.
128KB feels like a more generous amount in its time for something that should've ideally lasted an entire library. But maybe I'm wrong in thinking that. I think even Saturn only had 32KB internal storage?

Looks like I was not wrong that this got a SNES port released in Japan and Europe.
As another game in the genre, Megalomania, did.
(though I have to wonder if any reason for the latter due to the Genesis version was released in the US as Tyrants: Battle Through Time. Maybe that one didn't sell well enough, and maybe partly due to a "funny" advertisement whose punchline included use of "girlie" as a diminutive term)

Final Fantasy X in third?
It's a pretty gripping movie, but I don't think its gameplay stacks up. (which isn't surprising since that was the same year of the Square Pictures disaster)

I thought the game was published by JVC (well as we know them, Victor in Japan).
It barely looked better than an average Famicom RPG.

Oddly enough they bookended the Mega CD by releasing another RPG that also looks graphicly barely an improvement in 1995. One that wanted almost the entirety of the console's backup RAM to itself. (though maybe that was on Sega for, inside this console that cost $300 at launch, only installing backup RAM equivalent to the average Famicom cartridge. )

Konami made a similar NES game but I guess that one wasn't considered nearly as good (considering that for Japan, Konami went as far as making a PV with a release date but it never made it out over there).

If you want to talk about having to figure stuff out, I have an example.
These days the Koei name is most synonymous with games about one dude fighting an entire army at a time.

But those were the days when if you saw the Koei name on a game, you'd know you had to be a brain genius adult to figure out how to play their game.

@Serpenterror He can legally make a device to emulate Sega consoles as long as it: does not use the Sega name, and doesn't include any code or games written/owned by Sega.
Whatever Sega decides to do with their own IP has no bearing on the legality of Martin's actions.

"what consumers paid"
HOW ON EARTH is Sega responsible for what people paid for a device they never agreed to in the first place?

I guess Sega's probably laughed at this charade long enough now.

@Damo Blasteroids probably isn't on there for licensing reasons.
It was 1987, so I believe that would be an "Atari Games" game so it would therefore be part of the Williams/Midway catalog which I think WB owns now?

That or our multi-galactic overlord Mukor has forbidden it.

@LunarFlame17 I'd probably agree that for a lot of games, lag is a small argument.
But I've heard from multiple people that Tyson WAS that merciless.

@KitsuneNight With the NES Classic series on GBA, they thought people would be willing to pay $20 for Ice Climber.
I'm guessing $5 for digital releases was the price they came up with when they saw how low stores had to drop the prices on those to clear them out.
As much as those of us in the retro gaming emulation and collection scene at the time thought $20 for SMB was crazy (given how cheap NES carts were), we can at least say in retrospective MAYBE that could've passed at the time for casual players who weren't interested in an NES console and upkeep. But Ice Climbers was less defensible.

We've seen a leak of a collection of prototypes from the official Chinese market (even including a Chinese localization of Advance Wars, which is crazy that we got that leaked before the canceled Japanese original!), but it also included what Nintendo would've done if they were any other company: a 10-in-1 compilation of those NES Classic games.

Since few of those NES games had, even by 2004, stood the test of time to be considered desirable as individual releases. Maybe SMB, the Zeldas, Metroid and Castlevania (though CV was one of those bargain bin games now I kind of wish I did grab a copy of).

@nebzila And no button remapping on the Wii. That is a VERY basic feature any significant fan emulator will include, and it's a shock they didn't have it since the beginning.
Even on the 3DS, they didn't. It was good that for GB (and NES?) games they allowed Y to be used as a duplicate of Select, but I really would've like an option to choose the X function at least. I could have it backwards, but I think it was VC Menu in the Ambassador versions and changed to a duplicate of the B button in eShop releases. But a Start duplicate would've been nice (particularly one of the Mega Man GBC games which used it as a dash button).

Not sure of the development time but Croc 2 was released on PlayStation in 1999, well beyond the Saturn's short lifespan.
Though with a September 1997 launch of the first game, I think a sequel would've been too far out.

Though when I hear a fan translator insisting they're going to make an "uncensored" translation, I have to immediately suspect they're going to translate things ultra verbose, as if every single word of the original text is a sacred object and that it is most respectful to have everything sound unnatural.
That and translating every instance of "kuso" as "s**t" or "f**k".