KingMike

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?

Oh good, there's still time for me to be the first to make the obvious joke asking if anyone knows how well this game is going to sell. Is it going to sell...?

@smoreon Quarth/Block Hole is very different. You don't actually move the blocks at all. I think the game even advertised itself as a "puzzle shooter". You have to strategically shoot the pieces to attach smaller blocks to them to turn pieces into square/rectangular objects to clear them. (being wasteful with shots will make a mess you may not be able to clear up in time)

@JackGYarwood I do like that photo up there of the "Nintendo Entertainment System NES VERSION". What an excellent console name Nintendo had there!
(I know it's because of license-sharing with Mattel.)

Has Fortified Zone 2 on Game Boy been localized before (though I hear there wasn't really much besides the title to need it)?

Banishing Racer on the Game Boy is probably the most exciting one I can think of.
With Bio Soldier Dan and the Jajamaru games having already been released digitally (they didn't say never released PHYSICALLY?), I'm not sure what is most exciting of the remaining Japanese-exclusive Jaleco Famicom games.
Maybe Esper Adventure, the Metroidvania spinoff of Psychic 5 (an arcade game that got a remake recent-ish)?

Not sure what's left beside some sports games. They wouldn't hype us up for that?

I think how Sega pushed Columns (a shareware game they found online and then bought the copyrights to to quickly have a competing game on the market).

They wouldn't find a more worthy competition until Puyo Puyo a couple years later. I can still enjoy playing that occasionally even if I suspect the CPU is probably a cheating butthole.

@Serpenterror They were falling block puzzle games. How many other falling block puzzle games existed at that point?
Probably only as many as other companies were quickly cramming out at that point just after GB Tetris pushed the game into the spotlight.
It wasn't quite a defined genre yet, so it's a little understandable he'd react to anything remotely similar.

Sadly MegaPanel is another game that got made in that time. Mixing falling blocks with slide puzzle mechanics, a combination not advisable to play for a long time.
Why Namco chose to dig it back out for the Mega Drive Mini II in Japan, I don't know.

How did he feel about Tetris Flash then (or Tetris 2 in the west), the game that was essentially Dr. Mario with Tetris blocks?

Or if he's furious about Dr. Mario, what about that SNES Hebereke spinoff that blatantly copied Dr. Mario? Should he be mad at Sunsoft for making it and Nintendo approving it? (like the entire franchise at that point, released in Japan and Europe only)

Alien Olympics? The same obscure sports game that got released in Game Boy in Europe only? Which only recently had an unreleased Game Gear version turn up?

@GhaleonUnlimited Indeed as the 1989 Mega Drive port credits Tengen, that explains why it was either never released or withdrawn from the market extremely quickly. It's hard to tell which. (though that version was often bootlegged with Tengen's copyright hacked to "Dr. Pepper Studio")

I've heard the 2019 Genesis Mini version was newly coded using only the assets of the 1989 version.

@Fragcula It must be a reference to saying that (the original) Atari Corporation was already essentially defunct as it was.

Reportedly it was released in 1996. Atari had already filed bankruptcy at that point. Not sure how much Sega could've even legally gotten at that point, but yes, suing a company that already declared bankruptcy would be embarrassing.

@JackGYarwood So you know that is the very same Brandon Cobb that went on to make aftermarket English localizations of Chinese Mega Drive games?
When he launched Beggar Prince in 2005, he was happy to announce it was the first new Genesis game sold to western gamers since 1998 (when the last Sega-endorsed physical game was released).

@Daggot I remember when my dad had to taken me to work and for lunch we'd go to the nearest shopping mall.
I remember even by that point in the mid '90s, the WaldenBooks there had already replaced its games section with a Software Etc. (or was it an EB Games? Well, both names that have been long gone. Still the days when GameStop wasn't the only game-centric retailer, and maybe not even the most famous name either.)

@JackGYarwood I'm fairly certain the Micronics in this context was Japanese, the company that comes up on Wikipedia is different.
The Micronics that developed NES games kind of has a reputation among retro gamers for being the Japanese analogy of Imagineering, an American developer of games most consistently awful.
(I can only remember Jeremy Parish reviewing some early GBC game when starting his chronological series on it, and I guess Eurocom wasn't his favorite European developer...)

I do remember after Wild Guns dropped on Wii VC, scalpers started flooding ebay with listings. 200 people on any given day asking $200 for the same game is a sign the game probably isn't rare enough to warrant a $200 price, yet people did it.

@Serpenterror Ridge Racer 64 was like 1999, nowhere near launch. There were like four of them on PlayStation, after that they were often launch games.
And I'm not aware of a GameCube Ridge Racer at all, let alone launch. GC had like Luigi's Mansion and Wave Race: Blue Storm. After checking GameFAQs... I found it and it was two years later.

@-wc- No controller/handheld size is ever going to be right for everyone.
My only time with a Duke was on a demo kiosk at Best Buy when it launched, and I recall I couldn't even properly hold the controller and comfortably reach all the buttons.
Yet, for GBA games only the OG DS had the right sized D-Pad for me. The GBA SP/GC/DSLite D-Pad was too small for me to operate it with the accuracy some of Metroid Fusion's bosses demanded.

@city952 But the mainboard isn't the faulty part. Playing with as much of the original console intact as possible is the point to playing on original hardware.

@Tom_Gamer Careful. If Billy Mitchell found your message, he could pursue legal action for that too.

That earlier prototype would be nearly a year before the film itself was released. I have to wonder how much would've changed.

@87th I imagine Sexy Parodius alone bumped the PSP collection rating from A to C. (though I'm not too familiar, the franchise didn't get that horny before?)

@Quick_Man I've only somewhat recently learned arcade Darius II and Sagaia are more localization than just a title change.
Arcade Sagaia might be even more brutal than Arcade Gradius III in what it asks out of the player the moment they start the game. Game Over being Sagaia can even finish its cheesy opening monologue is a very real possibility.
(they rearranged the level order between the versions, from what I've heard the Zone A in Sagaia was like Zone N or O in Darius II. In effect, dropping the player right into a Round 5 stage immediately, and it sure feeling like it.)

@Daniel36 Why not 3 spelled phonetically with nonsense kanji while they're at it?

@N64-ROX Depends on how much credibility you got. I suppose being practically the only person in the world who wanted a fully developed Atari Jaguar emulator enough to make one has to count for something.

@GhaleonUnlimited As long as none of Rare's programming is directly supplied with the emulator, it'd still be legal.

@Damo I have read the "home console" was originally envisioned as a rental console, to be effectively like renting an arcade machine in your own home.
It seems SNK had gotten JUST enough people who were willing to pay the price needed to own it themselves.

I guess that's why SNK was so willing to license out its IP to the more affordable mainstream consoles, there was probably little overlap.
I can't recall if their own advertisements even made the explicit references, but I believe it was marketed as the Ferrari of consoles, and its competition were the Fords. It's probably fair to say if you were buying the latter, you were probably never going to buy the former even though you might wish to.

@AllieKitsune The game is basically Bubble Bobble with hammer-wielding garden gnomes, so it fits.

This game had a nice anti-piracy screen. Seemed like every other version of ZSNES would activate it (and there are still some people in the 2020s who say it's the only emulator we need!).
But even the EGM preview back in the day showed it off among the handful of screenshots.

There's probably a few ports of the time that surely a dedicated fan could at least top.
Picking on ZX Spectrum or C64 seems a little low, but I don't imagine the MS-DOS version was especially great either?

I did some years ago manage to get a copy of Fire Mustang, and I can't imagine that game being too far off from this. (a similar theme, however Fire Mustang did get released in 1991)
(a Taito-published port of a UPL arcade game of similar theme. UPL and Jaleco probably are on about the same tier of development quality)

@Kushan I recall it happened because Sony upset the homebrew community. So there was some kind of retaliation. I assume that was when GeoHot cracked the master key, Sony filed (threatened?) a lawsuit and then hackers DDOSed PSN, shutting it down for a month.

@RupeeClock It ended up being a good idea anyways as more advanced NES games needed larger circuit boards.
Eventually Nintendo had to make some Famicom carts 50% taller to handle the extra stuff while NES carts still looked the same.

Apparently 1999 was when the PC version of The Legend of Heroes III was released.
It seems the PC98 original was 1994.

"stream animated graphics that were significantly more advanced than the other games on the market"
LaserDisc was a video disc player and this game hardware allowed the game logic to control it.
It also wore out the disc hardware pretty fast, since the disc hardware wasn't designed to be asked to skip around the disc as frequently as these games demanded it.

@slider1983 They'd need a Nintendo license to do that, and no way that is happening.

@JJtheTexan Certainly "Genesis Does" had the most pressure on Sega, to get successfully on the US market before whenever Nintendo finally releases the SNES.
Of course, we recall by the mid '90s, both companies were firmly in the mold of angry American advertising that was far too prevalent in those days. They could both stood to have calmed down just a little bit.

Not long after reading the headline I had already realized, it's not really Square-Enix, is it, but Eidos, or D()MARK?

@DanaTheElf I'm sure there is a difference between a translation made with the IP owner's consent and one made without.
I'm sure by international copyright law, Nintendo legally can take a translation you were never given permission to make (since it's a derivative of their work), though they won't because they don't want to be caught using fan works.

The first Game Gear port actually had a built-in English localization called Puzzlow Kids that could be seen by playing the Japanese cart on a western GG.
Unfortunately Sega scrapped it to release the Dr. Robotnik version as well.

The original is one of the many GBA games I bought when they were new but couldn't devote the time to play through. So many games to play on that and other consoles while still having real life stuff.

@MoriyaMug It's called the Berne Convention. Someone who has made a translation without the consent of the copyright owner does not legally own the rights to their work. The only thing the copyright owner has to worry about is bad PR, and possibly loss of employees paid to translate. A fan surely can try to sue a copyright owner, but they'd get shot down right away.
The first I heard of a company using a fan translation was some My Arcade thing which used a Don Doko Don 2 NES translation. Now Taito probably wasn't personally involved with the creation of the device but regardless they own the game and legally can take the work of the fan who never had Taito's permission in the first place. It's a shame the fan credit was (reportedly) deleted, but that's how laws work.

It's impolite to the work of fan translators, but honestly fan translators don't have a legal right to the work they made without permission of the game copyright owners.
Legally the game copyright owner can use a fan translators' work without owing them anything.

I am very aware of this and I have produced several translation patches.
I'm only upset that none of my work has been used by official work.

@Profchaos The majority of NES mappers merely increased the amount of ROM available to the CPU (something nearly all 8-bit consoles/computers needed. The 32-48 kilobyte ROM max size those CPUs could afford otherwise was pretty limiting even by 1985 standards.) Even the most "powerful" NES mapper, the MMC5, I think at most video-wise allowed every 8x8 pixel tile to have its own palette definition (the NES normally allowed palettes to only be assigned in 16x16 pixel, or 2 tile x 2 tile square, increments). Not a huge stretch.
Adding on a whole other mini-computer (which essentially what an FPGA is) that probably far outclasses the host console is another thing.

I do wonder it would have been like if that Hellraiser "Super Cartridge" for the NES would have been if it had been developed. Then again, Color Dreams didn't have the highest quality standards in the games they did release.