KingMike

All these effort to put into a game you have to play so you can GAME OVER YEEEEEEEEEEEEEAHHH!

Also, LONG LEFT TURN MAYBE. @retrophilion

@YANDMAN There was an official cart version PLANNED and indeed SNK had the ROMs in their archive, which is how the VC release happened.
I am aware the official cart release didn't happen and that bootlegs came to fill in that market. In fact, I even said exactly that in my first post.

I know Neo fans would love it if SNK could find it in them to release anymore canceled games they have in their archive, lest the few unreleased games known to exist in collectors' hands remain only playable to those collectors who do not wish to share the ROMs.

I've read one reason Konami games were so good, and the reason some of the developers left Konami to form other studios, is much more disappointing.
TMNT games made Konami a ton of money, so Konami gave the TMNT team preferential treatment, so the other teams put in so much effort to show they were valuable too, that they could still put out good games even if they weren't given anthropomorphic reptiles to work with. But it sounds like it was lost on them.

"One of the most expensive Saturn games" is a frightening comment.
From the GameFAQs reviews, I see even in 2003 it was already called that. No doubt there are many contenders to that.

@Damo I'm not certainly exactly what the difference but I understand the Wii Virtual Console release of Ironclad was actually the first public release of a cartridge version of Ironclad which was developed but not released in the original hardware's lifespan. My guess is later reissues of the game have probably used that.

The same year EA had to recall their Tiger Woods game because a dev hid a South Park cartoon on the CD.

@GravyThief Someone will use MSU to insert the TV show theme and call it done.

@timp29 It did have the Wii Virtual Console but it was far too late for most people to notice.
I'm guessing licensing could have been an issue, with UBI Soft holding the IP license while Arsys programmed the game and originally Konami published the port outside Japan.

Konami made some amazing USA version SNES boxarts, so how'd they drop the ball so bad on the US version of Prince of Persia?
Trying to squish the oddly-shaped portrait-orientation PC boxart onto the landscape-oriented western SNES boxart should've been considered the first step of design no-nos.

@smoreon Whatever framerate the game ran at, it still had trouble. I don't think it really matters if the game is 60 FPS or 30 when it still has graphical jitters like crazy.
I understand this is a game that doesn't even properly manage the parts of the screen that were outside of the expecting viewing area on NTSC CRT TVs.
I know I've read some suggestion the game itself could be recycled from a Japanese game called Getsufuumaden. It could explain some wonkiness.

But I know from a fan translation of another Konami Famicom game called Dragon Scroll that Konami didn't have the most optimized code. For that patch, the routine to load tile data to the PPU had to optimized to fix the issue that literally extending the text window two text characters broke the image stability like a house of cards.

"A lot of fans in the West had only played I, IV, VI, VII, and VIII. II, III, and V had never been localized."
That would be slightly off. The PS1 version of V (in Anthologies) was released in North America the prior year. (I don't recall when the EU version of FFA was released but I imagine it was quite later, considering it was even explicitly called the "European Version" in the title, as I believe it swapped out VI for IV, for which the PS version wasn't localized until like 2001, I think.)
Then again, maybe it was better if they forgot the PS1 version of V given I hear the translation itself was kind of iffy (even outside of the obviously machine-translated enemies).

Not a single one of those ports listed in the article made it to North America officially, so here we were all equal in missing out on it.

@Zeebor15 You have Neugier and The Journey Home: Quest for the Throne on the list. Those are the same game (the former the released Japanese version, the latter the unreleased US version).
(also Earnest Evans alone and then below it the trilogy)

@iacobus_magnus Yes, Whirlo was the rare European-exclusive localization of the SNES spinoff game Xandra's Adventure.

@Zeebor15 I don't know what your "sheet" is but Hiouden is listed as such on GameFAQs.
I'm curious to see the name Journey Home: Quest for the Throne spread because that is the name of the canceled North American version, rather than the released Japanese version title Neugier. (unless people are only saying that because it is certainly less likely to be misheard as something else)

@JackGYarwood I believe the Super Famicom game is a different game.
I know it got the retro gaming scene attention in the early 2000s when someone posted on a fan translation forum suggesting this "Sweet Home-like" game and it instantly got attention from a couple people already famous in that scene.

Yes, that first translation patch was pretty bad, even by 2001 standards especially for a patch author that had some pretty good quality standards.

I do remember Macaw playing Pyramid Patrol, though having to play the 3DO port since that was the only version on an emulatable console.
Still, acquiring the games and playing them through emulation has got to be a difficult task. LaserDisc ISOs have some crazy huge sizes.

I'd imagine the real challenge in designing a GBC shmup is designing one to be played on the awful GBC LCD.

I have seen video of the Tyrian port and I can only say it looks like it'd be really hard to play on an OG LCD.

@mjparker77 I don't think the modern owners of the Coleco and Intellivision brands are exactly comparable to the owners of the Atari brand.
Has anything been done with Coleco since the scammer that jammed a SNES Jr. PCB into a Jaguar case and called it a new console?

"£8.99 will get you 50 minutes of unlimited play."
I've wondered how well it works to tell people they have a limited time to play. How well is it to police?
And 50 minutes... I don't think there are PAL-hours. Pretty sure it's still 60 minutes to an hour there.

Unfortunately the PC original has reportedly become one of the poster child for copyright ownership issues getting in the way of people being able to buy the game on modern digital stores.

@Daniel36 I understand there's a lot of people that would contest the original 2600 was "tie-in cash grab".
I'm not familiar enough with the 2600 library to properly rate but it sounds like it wasn't a bad effort for a 2600 game in 1982, but people didn't read the manual to understand how to play it. "How does a console with a joystick and one button have games complex enough to need instructions?" I hear that was quite the case on some games.

@KitsuneNight As mentioned, it was probably to capitalize on the 20th anniversary of the film (I don't remember if it got a theatrical re-release but you can sure bet there was a DVD release).

Good thing that this before "Hot Coffee" otherwise this screen alone would've forced the game to be re-rated "T" for this (I'm pretty sure E-10 didn't exist in 2002, which I'd guess now is about the minimum for games with "mild language".)

@Cronodoug Because she is EVIL, as I understand. Of course also censored in the English SNES version, because no way was '90s NoA going to let that fly.

Looks like Argus but it isn't, since that was released many years ago.

@HoyeBoye There could be some intended usage of that. I do recall from playing the games released on 3DS (which had an option to emulate the blur) that for example in the Shinobi games, you'd only be able to see the flicker that indicates you're damaging an opponent with the blur feature enabled.

Though I am more familiar with Game Boy games, a platform for which I know a few games used the blur as a technical display effect.

Not supporting flashcarts nor CDs really limits the market potential of this.
There's probably far fewer people with libraries of HuCards (let alone TurboChips) sitting around to use with this, compared to the other consoles of the era.

@FPGAguru Watching an old documentary video some months ago realizes just how much of a hastily slapped together product, the IBM PC with Microsoft OSes, we as a human society have allowed to become a dominant force in the industry and our lives.

Unfortunately, the time to stop them was 40 years ago, we must accept we have to live with Windows and the rest of Microsoft's PC slop.

But which version of NES Battletoads? I'm guessing they won't give the option of the famous ball-busting English version or the more sensible Japanese version.

This is far from the first game in history to be found tracing art.

As long as there has been games, there has been, yes, even professionals, who have done this.

@Damo Is this article suggesting it's time to blast off and strike the evil Bydo empire?

I was first thinking Battle Master, but it is actually Battle Tycoon that has the distinction of being probably the only SNES fighting game to utilize a RAM save-capable cartridge. For something. I'm not familiar enough with that one to say what but it's in the number of SNES fighting games I have sitting around waiting to play at some point.

@smoreon You'd have to pay a real high price for that power, though.

Indeed, retro shops have been using ebay as a price gauge for like two decades now.

@JackGYarwood Hearing complaints about using an old character name of questionable authenticity, for game on a console that 30 years later people still call "PSX", sounds like a bit of irony to me.

"Romford" sounds like a good place for video games.

@Wezlypipz That is why I said "actual selling value" meaning to find the "Sold items" checkbox and refer to that.
Though to be fair, it only sort of gives a record of what people actually paid when the buyer accepted the seller's asking price as it only reports "Best Offer Accepted" when that option is used and doesn't disclose what the accepted offer was.

@Wezlypipz I can only imagine this isn't the sort of item you'd see sell frequently enough on ebay to get an estimate of actual selling value (not just whatever wishful amount sellers ask).
That is, items sold within the last three months.

@Sketcz I'm not familiar with the game but that sounds like "why even have a save feature if it's going to quickly delete itself?"
Even more of a bizarre decision than games like Bionic Commando 1992 which had limited continues and a password save (which among the data saved the number of Continues).

I suppose it's more notorious for the SNES and Genesis games which were developed but not commercially released, but have since been leaked by the developers.

Particularly, there's a long story about the development of the SNES game. Apparently they went through three separate versions of the game after the publisher Viacom insisted on what they'd see as a sure-selling game rather than a particularly thoughtfully developed game, so the dev was increasingly pressured to push out something that'd get them paid, and then the game still got withheld after the film bombed.

Indeed by the mid 2000s, if there was a pizza place in America that still had arcade machines, you could be sure one of the hunting games would be there.

Given that prototype ownership is a very gray area legally, it probably was a bad idea to bring public attention to this since so many of the items are Sega games, there is a chance Sega could claim the lot is legally still their property since they were used for development purposes of Sega IP and not sold to consumers.

@RextheSheep I wasn't too surprised when I learned the SNES game was a port from MS-DOS (which explains why they called the game "Volume 1" even the SNES game never did well enough to get a Volume 2. Indeed, as I remember renting it and it was sure no Secret of Mana, a game that was released the better part of a year earlier despite Interplay's LotR marketing claiming they had made "The First Action Adventure RPG with Multiplayer Real Time Combat".

That Edward Randy game isn't just called that now? It would be nice if they did but oh well.

DE liked to reuse names and the first "Cliffhanger" game they made was a FMV game which used footage from a Lupin the Third movie, so it'll get DMCA struck if you stream or upload videos about the game.

Does WayForward not have any ownership stake in the game in order to object?
The IP isn't theirs of course but what about the programming and other elements not directly the property of the IP holder?

@jamess How about Nintendo spend their efforts against Anbernic and whoever else? They won't because it's notoriously hard to sue Chinese companies.
Though I read Italy has historically been tolerant of piracy as well, I guess they still thought it was an easier avenue to feel like they've "done something" and still easier to confront that individual since being an EU member I've read made Italian authorities more obligated to investigate such issues. Still, that's putting great effort into suing a customer rather than the actual offender.

Nintendo lawyers have reached a pathetic low.
They can't go after the manufacturer that made the device and committed the infringement, so they go after someone who bought the device and made a video about it.

This is the game where we are presumably adults and start out by dunking on a middle school team.

@Andee I haven't tried doing but there's no doubt Nintendo thought that someone would try many years ago.

I don't see the problem. I absolutely enjoyed playing Super Mario Bros./Duck Hunt on my SNES as a child.